nickwitha_k (he/him)

Is it blocking you? I pretty much exclusively use Gecko at this point and don’t have an issue yet.

Oh they’re pretty awesome and about 5 mins away. DVDs, music, academic journal access, seed exchange, and several streaming services, free to library patrons.

There are a number of reasons that the far-right and corpos hate libraries. The number of services that the provide to the community (in the US) is a major part of it. Libraries in bigger cities even tend to have social workers on staff to help patrons who are homeless or have other needs. They are one of the few places that anyone is allowed to exist during daylight hours without paying.

And it has to be as cheap as possible to make the line go up, not for actual rational or objective reasons.

They could cram in more ads than content (Amazon does this sometimes). Ads piss me off though, slightly irrationally (I don’t buy that there’s any rationality to liking them), so, I can’t use prime video anymore. Better to rent DVDs from my library than to deal with that garbage.

Supporting what was an active genocide for some vague possibility of fighting against genocide 4 years from now is an example of cooperating with evil.

If the only thing that you’re doing politically is voting and are only doing it in presidential elections, you are part of what you is into this situation in the first place. Local elections, initiatives, primary elections, non-profits, mutual aid orgs, etc also need attention. Voting in EVERY election is the lowest threshold for actually impacting anything in an electoral system. It’s why the far-Right was able to get nazis into school boards.

Dont deny her her agency. Is she a leader and an adult or is she not. Pick one.

False dichotomy and premise there. She was an elected official and party of a party that was subverted by neoliberals who put in the effort to do so. As a part of a party that represents capital and the status quo, she was never going to go against Israel. Withholding votes to “force” her in the general election was not based upon any logical strategy to reduce harms and try to end the beneficial. It was nothing more than a performative action to pretend to have moral high ground while giving implicit support to a Nazi that is now ramping up the genocide in Gaza, the West Bank, and starting new ones in the US with trans erasure from government documents already well underway.

Own your mess.

Take your own advice and accept responsibility for doing your part.

Yes, Democrats aren’t even close to the ideal, but putting pressure on the wound is still better than tearing it open so to speak.

This is exactly my thesis on strategic voting. Though, I’d put it as closer to a tourniquet. It stops the bleeding and is life-saving but does not prevent life-changing consequences, like potentially losing a limb in this metaphor. Non-voting/apathy is like just letting it bleed and hoping to survive or at least have an easy death. Anti-electoralism/accelerationism is like not just doing that but also trying to convince others to use up the tourniquet material so that noone has a choice but to bleed out and/or hope that the pile of corpses is placed in the right place to stop the fancy bus.

It fundamentally violates individual agency and uses people as involuntary human sacrifices on, at best, a gamble.

“It’s not about waiting for the bus that’ll take you straight to your destination, which will never come. It’s about taking different buses that take you closer to your destination.”

And that’s a problem. Voting is not the only necessary tool that has been needed. It can, with enough organization and engagement, be very powerful though. It’s also necessary for people to chat with and get positions as the “bus drivers” in order to coax the buses to more friendly destinations. But, that’s not possible without support and the organized far-Left in the West (I’d say that I’m part of the “disorganized” far-Left, both because of my anarchic ideals and AuADHD) has pretty much universally rejected any approach involving subverting the existing tools of power and instead taking the same approach as homeopathic “medicine”, using strategies without evidence of efficacy that rely ultimately on violence, suffering, and destruction, rather than building.

Part of that is understandable as there’s a long history of inflitration of intentional communities and other collaborative efforts, as well assassinations (ex. MLK Jr.). Revolution and positive societal change, however, takes a lot more than just burning things down to actually improve the human condition. A society built on a thirst for blood and vengeance will, as has been seen repeatedly in history, lend itself to instability, vulnerability to hostile influence, internal and external, as well as, you know, the whole mass murder of those that buy into the “correct” philosophy.

An aside: I do, in “conspiracy-theory mode”, suspect that polarizing the Left towards anti-electoralism/accelerationism, both removing them, voluntarily, from the reigns of power and making them unwitting allies is at least an idea that is amplified by the authoritarian Right but anything more than that runs into the wall of plausibility.

The only way we’ll get there is if we grind their coaches to a halt, no matter how many bodies it takes throwing at them to jam up the wheels

And that’s part of my problem with accelerationism (beyond the lack of evidence of efficacy in doing anything more than increase human suffering). It is ultimately engaging in exactly the same strategies that the existing bourgeoisie employ to maintain and expand their power. Namely, treating the poor and vulnerable as expendable tools to achieve their desired end. It’s like the widely memed quote from Shrek “Some of you are going to die but that is a sacrifice that I am willing to make.”

But relying on their blue coloured bus to be against the red coloured bus that both go nowhere is what a defense for Democrats look like. We’d really be better off figuring out how to stop the luxury coaches so we can start shuttling everyone bit by bit, most people don’t even acknowledge the luxury coaches even exist.

Yup. That’s why it’s necessary to invest the time, effort, and energy into turning the bus that doesn’t intend to just run over people for fun into one that actually benefits humanity. It sucks that it requires patience and long-term, multigenerational work but, that’s how making lasting change works and why the far-Right is constantly trying to destroy education and support systems to reduce the people’s ability to have the energy to think critically or affect positive change.

You don’t even want them!!!

You’re damn right. But neolib shitheads are still better than literal fascists and cause less harm in a given period of time.

Literally the only reason that we have been seeing regression for half a century is apathy and my fellow leftist fooling themselves into believing that which is not reflected in statistical data, with religious fervor. Refusing to use every tool available and instead going straight to “let’s try to force a violent revolution” is both self-sabotage and betrayal of the working class and vulnerable groups. No workers’ revolution has any chance without popular support and increasing the harm experienced by the working class and vulnerable groups in hopes of forcing it is using them as involuntary human sacrifices for something that has never been shown to work in recorded human history. Generally, it just leads to increased levels of oppression.

Who is defending the homeless, the imprisoned, the food insecure, the migrants, the minimum wage workers, the invisible victims of natural disasters, the people at the fucking mercy of the healthcare industry???

Not the people who chose inaction, that’s for sure.

Our planet?!?!

Also, not the people who enabled a fascist closely aligned with the UAE and Saudis, that was quoted before the election “Drill, baby, drill!”. And I’ve not heard a peep about monkeywrenching or other effective direct action since the 90s, which tells me that non-voting environmentalists are talking the talk but not walking the walk.

Not to mention the people our tax dollars are murdering on the other side of the planet!!

Who decides (under the US Constitution) where tax dollars get spent? The US Congress. No Leftist change in government fiscal policy is likely to occur without Leftists in government positions. As it is a FPTP system, the only way for Leftists to get into elected office is by taking over an established party by winning down ballot elections (something that the grifting Greens never try for).

I could go on!!!

You very much could. The Democratic party is a party of and for wealthy neolibs.

You let your party

Not my party, I’m ideologically an anarcho-syndicalist and no elected party in the history of this country has come close to representing me. They are, however, the only one not openly fascist/theofascist.

turn their backs on them for fucking identity politics, because you are privileged enough to avoid coming to terms with the fact we’ve already lost any sense of electoral democracy on the issues that actually stand to improve the human condition!!!

Fuck yeah, I’m privileged as fuck. I’m a cis-het white male that was raised in a middle-class family that practiced protestant Christianity and had early exposure to computers before they were a big deal. Sure, I’m fucked in other ways, like really childhood trauma, but the only way that I could have been more privileged in the birth lottery would have been to be born in a higher socioeconomic segment.

The reason, according to the data and statistics, that we have lost any sense of electoral democracy on the issues that actually stand to improve the human condition (I agree that that is, in fact, where we’ve been for at least a decade) is because of voter apathy and non-voting. In a system where the will of the populace is communicated through voting, not voting is accepting whatever the reliable voters (right-wing authoritarians) decide. It is offering no resistance or effort to defend those who are in precarious socioeconomic situations.

You only care about what personally affects and is visible to you.

Quite the contrary (and actually something that I have worked with my therapist on coping with as my neuro-spiciness amplifies my perception of and mental load taken by things that are unjust, and I have historically valued others’ well-being above my own). I care a lot, which has led to mental health issues and challenges in my life. Those that I care about most and owe my allegiance to are the underprivileged and regular working class people (those who suffer most in social infrastructure collapse and war - the deaths of starvation and preventable disease that are usually invisible to these championing violent revolution).

The Democrats are not a tool for the left, they are not a weapon against the right, they are the left wing of the very capitalist establishment that got us here in the first place and they are nothing but an obstacle to clear on the way to forming a legitimate populist left wing movement in this country.

You’re damn right about that to. But, there are more of us than there are of them. All it would have taken was engagement of leftists in the electoral process, taking over the party over time, and forcing it to represent the people. Instead, they have decided to mostly sit out every election in my lifetime, doing nothing to force lasting change in the established order and capitulating the vote again and again to the Right.

Hell, they couldn’t even be bothered to show up down ballot for things like banning forced labor in California. How can one claim to want to build a better world while implicitly supporting human slavery and hoping for people to suffer and die the unnecessary deaths caused to non-combatants in every war? Anti-electoralism/accelerationism as a tool for the Left is bunk, it’s only ever, by available data, helped the Right.

Not only this but, if those non-voters organized and taken action in the last half-century, they would have been able to move the Overton to the Left, instead of the unending Right-ward crawl that we’ve been seeing. That could have prevented the likes of Clinton and Thatcher and erosion of workers’ rights.

Thank you for also making this point. There’s a lot of with to do. In-person protests, education and outreach, mutual aid and are some of the necessary avenues. Not everyone is able to march but there are many other ways to contribute to the fight.

There absolutely is, whether privileged non-voters and anti-electoralists perceive it or not. Enabling fascists to take over literally is making life worse for everyone. Voting for non-fascists and putting in work outside of the general election to try to push the party left is how strategic voting works, or would work if those claiming to care about ending genocide and improving the human condition were actually serious about doing anything but circle-jerking about how morally superior they are for enabling expansion of the genocide in Palestine and the one against LGBTQ+ people in the US that’s now kicking off.

This right here.

Refusing to use one’s voice strategically to prevent increased suffering is an example of cooperating with evil.

Absolutely. Non-voters and “protest” voters chose not to oppose a known fascist. Their refusal to strategically use their voice has led to increased suffering of minorities, LGBTQ+, and likely an end to any semblance of US democracy.

I haven’t used Windows personally in about 15 years and professionally in about 10. I’m pretty useless on anything newer than XP. I even got my wife to switch over to a Mac Mini because at least that has a Unix-like OS and she can still do her audio work on it (in fact, better than a Windows system because their patch QA is light-years ahead of the MS “fuck it, it’ll break some systems but we’ll get that next patch Tuesday” approach).

That’s not to say that I like Apple. I just dislike their OS less than Windows.

Exactly.

Looks like we’re setting up an improvised KVM device! :D

I just tell them that I only deal with Linux and that is usually enough to dissuade.

I still have hope that we will have a democracy in 4 years.

This is what people, both libs and “teach the dems” non-voters don’t seem to be getting: that’s not how facism works. Even if it were the case, at minimum, the courts are captured for the rest of anyone currently living’s life. That’s done.

I surely will and there’s no shame in it or any other expression of sorrow by a man, woman, or enbie. I’m afraid, however, that I have neither the patience, nor ability to give you empathy for those that are currently are and will soon be suffering and dying because of people who care more about their own moral purity than other human beings. If you’re unable to reach that capacity on your own, maybe therapy would be a good option (many professionals offer sliding scales, so if you have a challenge with that, I’d be happy to try to help you find someone in your area that could help).

Are you going to walk the walk or just talk the talk like all of those that supported fascism with their non-voting to score “I’m a leftist, really” cred at the expense of all of the peoples that are now going to have genocide?