He / They

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • I agree with pretty much everything you said, and I also do not primarily blame Harris. If you look at my post and comment history, you’ll see that I was backing her since the second Biden dropped.

    She did make missteps wrt Gaza, but I think in retrospect it was probably too late for her by then anyways, given how long Biden stayed in, and how much damage he did.

    The uncommitted movement was during state primaries, it wasn’t supposed to be during the general as well. I think that it was coopted (or at least boosted) later on by right-wingers and Zionists to expressely hurt Dems, rather than just oppose their stance on Gaza.

    At an individual level, I don’t blame anyone who is Arab and could not bring themselves to vote for the party who was, even during the election, supplying weapons to kill their fellow countrymen and neighbors. I have a friend who is Palestinian, and he told me that he saw a clip in the background of a report on the “war” on CNN of a building being bombed, and it was an apartment building where one of his friends used to live. Just casually being demo’d on TV.

    Now, Arabs voting for Trump is another matter entirely, and there is and never was any excuse for that.



  • If the Green Party underperformed compared to past elections, absolutely. If you’re asking whether I think the Green Party getting 0% is solely a function of their policies, then obviously no, because that would require ignoring the entire way our 2-party, FPTP system works.

    I’m not a fan of the Green Party precisely because I do think they have bad candidate strategies, and often look down their noses at voters just like establishment Dems like Pelosi do, when people tell them they’re losing for more reasons than just the FPTP system and Super PACs.

    I’m all for people doing analysis of elections, and if you’ve seen some that indicate that GP actually functioned as a spoiler party this election, I’d be very interested to see it. I am, however, very wary of people throwing around “spoiler” as an accusation, because that’s the exact thing that establishment politicians say to excuse their ignoring 3rd party platforms rather than adapting their own platforms to capture those voters.

    If enough voters want something to tank your chances at winning, and you just ignore it, that is on you, not the voters.





  • The Democratic Party are neoliberal. The party doesn’t have an issue, by and large, with Capitalism. That’s why you don’t hear salient discussions of economic justice from them.

    Ground-level, Democratic voters are usually just as indoctrinated about Capitalism as Republicans, though that’s changed somewhat in the last 4-5 years. But Socialism is still a dirty word for many of them, because pro-Capitalist propaganda is completely pervasive in the US.

    Labour unions are made up of these exact ground-level voters (and obviously, not all or even a strong majority of union members are Democrats). It’s tough to convince them that economic system change is necessary, because so many of them staunchly believe that Capitalism is the Great Uplifter, and that their ticket would come in if these rich people would just stop being so damn greedy (without really asking what allows them to act on their greed successfully).

    Personally, I think unions and young voters will get on board with economic reform before the Democratic Party will, but that also leaves them no one at the Executive level to vote for, since the DNC will actively quash anyone who isn’t on board with neoliberal economics.

    Wrt economic vs social progressivism, I agree that we shouldn’t have purity tests for working to dismantle Capitalism, but solidarity has to be two-way. Economics aren’t unbiased, and it’s very possible to make gains/ changes that benefit some groups and not others, especially in a system like ours that is already stratified along e.g. racial lines, economically. You don’t want people who are going to abandon the movement the second they get what they want (having benefitted from the full force of the movement), and leave the rest to fend for themselves with a now diminished bargaining ability.





  • I don’t think that most progressive groups doing actual organizing are doing these kind of purity tests, I think that’s mostly online spaces or non-political-organizing spaces that are setting out their own boundaries for acceptable behavior.

    I’ve never once been asked to make a statement of e.g. trans support before being allowed to attend a protest or DSA meeting. It’s mostly assumed/ trusted that you’re showing up because you support the work.

    If, however, someone seeing a Pride flag in a coffee shop window or at a protest is enough to make them leave, then you don’t want them there, not because of the morality of their beliefs, but because they are creating an ultimatum that you must abandon or hide your beliefs in order to gain their support, and that’s not solidarity on their part.

    Solidarity is a two-way street.

    Bernie Sanders or AOC don’t mention support for e.g. LGBT+ people in every speech, but they will if you ask them. They won’t feign or adopt indifference to the issue to gain a false solidarity.

    We can help any grouping and gather support from any grouping, without needing to say we need to put the brakes on and help some other more virtuous-to-advocate-for grouping instead.

    I’m interested in what examples you are thinking of, for this.


  • Nah, they aren’t even right about organizing; in fact, they’re literally making contradictory claims.

    Were Leftists too lazy to be capable of organized political protest (“lol, organize”), or were they

    “march[ing] on every major american city, and [taking] control of university commons across the country”

    Because that sounds like organizing to me?

    They will just present anyone who isn’t pro-Israel as ineffectual, when the reality is that the DNC not being responsive to their base at any point along the route (and don’t cite Biden dropping out as that: Biden dropped out because DNC insiders were screaming, not because of the actual electorate) cost them the election.

    But they probably think that all the polls showing that the majority of Americans (even Republicans) wanted a ceasefire (which is what the protesters were demanding) were wrong, and the average American is actually secretly pro-Israel’s war on Gaza.



  • Man pages, help files, and commented configuration files galore

    Technical documentation != Tutorials. Not even remotely.

    Linux support forums might be hostile to entitled noobs looking for a handout and a quick fix

    “Oh so you use Linux? Name every distro (to prove you ‘put in the effort’ to my standards)”

    Sarcasm aside, Lime Buzz is completely correct; FOSS as an ecosystem has cultivated an air of ahem techno-elitism, and that severely undermines its actual usefulness as a tool of individual freedom or certainly resistance. If a tool requires a bunch of X (time, money, base knowledge, etc) in order to utilize, it’s not going to be useful to people who do not have that resource to spend on it. Which is going to be the majority of any given group. And that has really made it as an ecosystem much less important than many other concerns. Individual projects can still be important, but Linux is certainly not going to save us from Authoritarianism.

    Corporations pay for support services. The code is free (as in speech). No one ever claimed that the support was also (or even should be) free.

    Corporations may unfortunately be people, but people are certainly not corporations, and shouldn’t be expected to pay for everything corporations do.

    If you believe that Linux actually helps people- that it materially improves their lives over being trapped in a predatory tech world built by for-profit entities who are happy to sell their customers out to a fascist government- then you are conceptualizing the relationship between Linux evangelists and new users incorrectly. We’re not providing sales and tech support in that case, we’re providing them aid. And aid workers don’t ask people to show how much they’ve tried to help themselves before offering them help.

    And if you don’t think Linux actually aids peoples’ lives, then you just agree with Lime Buzz that

    There are far more important things to worry about and to do.