“What do you mean, I have to WORK to make progress in the world. Like, every single election? And then also OUTSIDE the election? Or else things will keep getting worse because some bad people have a lot of power? Fuck that. I think I’ll just let things get as bad as they get. What’s the worst that could happen? It’s not like anything bad could happen in the world, if I just refuse to participate.”

Okay, so explain it to me. What have I gotten wrong and what do I need to understand?

Somebody pointed out that when he does that weird jumping thing he’s started doing in stage appearances, he’s sticking his arms and legs all straight out spread apart, like he’s trying to make an X with his body.

I don’t know if that’s his goal, but a lot of people are saying it.

Fifty four THOUSAND dollars?

Are you high?

What?

You can send letters to people encouraging them to vote, you can text bank, you can knock on doors, you can have a protest against both sides’s awful Gaza policy, you can organize with one side or the other, you can join up with some kind of group which is getting ready if some shit goes down over the course of the next week or the next two months.

What do you even mean? I’m not being rude, I really don’t understand your point. There are a ton of things besides voting that are really good to do, and people have been doing them. I think we’ll have to do them in order for things to ever be good in this country. In what sense is all you can do to vote?

I don’t think they will disappear, although they may churn over time into new accounts or go dormant for a while.

I think the general background chatter from these accounts saying we can’t vote for Kamala Harris because (insert moon logic reason) will just turn into general background chatter saying there is no genocide in Xinjiang, or banning Tiktok is crazy because all the other social media is just as bad, or the US tried to coup Maduro who’s a good socialist who we should all be supporting. And so on.

Who was saying that all we need to do is vote one time?

The only people I have seen saying this are the people presenting it as a strawman while they are arguing that it is specifically good not to vote, which is of course insane.

Everyone knows that if less than 10% of the people vote, Peter Gelderloos all of a sudden becomes president. It’s the only way.

I’ll be sure to tell that person that, while they’re screaming for a medic, who the police are also shooting bullets at while they’re trying to get to them.

not voting

doing everything that actually matters

not voting

doing everything

…

everything

…

That’s not the discussion we’re having. I want to know: What’s your red line?

Climate catastrophe? Surely that one’s a red line, isn’t it?

I mean, I’m happy to answer your specific question. Again.

Is Gas Chambers vs Gas Chambers for everyone except white people OK?

It’s not. In that case, I wouldn’t be voting anymore. That’s not our situation. As I already explained.

I’ve noticed this about people who talk on the internet: It’s not enough for someone to explain what they’re saying. People have to keep asking the same question over and over again, pretending not to understand anything they don’t agree with.

It’s okay if, me having explained myself, you don’t agree with me. But pretending that I didn’t say anything about what I believe, making me explain it again so you can pretend not to understand and then ask again hoping to get a different answer or something, is just a way to make us both waste both of our time.

How much should I expand “white people” until the difference is enough?

I’ll take this at face value and answer. It’s hard to give a hard-and-fast response. Probably the most critical thing that makes Trump vs. Harris is a no-brainer is that Trump wants to destroy a lot of the mechanisms that would enable fixing the system in the future.

If you care about Gaza, then yes it’s incredibly bad that Harris isn’t willing to strongly condemn the genocide which, again, she is not doing. I can get wanting to take strong action on that. If your strong action is putting someone into office who is unequivocally worse on Gaza, that start to make less sense. But even more on the nose about it is that Trump wants to tear down a lot of the machineries of direct action that we can use against Harris, if she wins. He wants to ban newspapers that tell the truth about Gaza. He wants to imprison or kill protestors who favor Gaza. Anyone who’s trying to ignore voting, pretending that it doesn’t matter in favor of direct action, is all of a sudden going to find their direct action avenues to influence events ten times harder and more dangerous if Trump gets into office.

If you care about Gaza, but you’re okay with Trump getting into office, you don’t care about Gaza. You just care about your little performative stand.

So anyway: Climate change, not a red line for you? Emissions, destruction of NOAA, criminalization of the free press which might be able to even tell the truth about it? You’re cool with that, not a red line?

If someone’s going to show up to a climate protest, and because Trump isn’t in charge, they can be 99% confident that they won’t be shot and killed for it, their life is increased. Sustainably, and probably without externalities.

Not having Trump is by no means victory, but it’s an important prerequisite for a lot of progress.

You already asked this question, I already explained that since the difference in this case is large, the choice to vote is significant. You pretended not to hear me and now you’re circling back as if I had said the thing I already explained I didn’t say.

You were the one that added, “no matter how small.” Take that back away, and you’ll have my accurate argument, which you’ll then be free to argue against.

Mass deportations can’t be prevented by voting?

Nuking hurricanes can’t be prevented by voting?

Shutting down NOAA can’t be prevented by voting?

You are wrong here, and you know it. Having to invent a thing I didn’t say, and then argue against that, is the tell that you don’t have something that works against what I actually said.

If you were trying to say, “Voting isn’t enough, we need to do some additional things,” and that started talking about the additional things, I’d be completely on board, and I wouldn’t be writing you these hostile messages. You backed yourself into this corner you now have to try to defend. I didn’t do that to you.

I’ve answered your question very directly. I did it in my first sentence, and then spent a while explaining further what I meant.

Since you’ve attempted to prevent me saying things that don’t fit your favorite way of looking at it, let me take a moment to explicitly reject that way of conversing, and expand a little but more on some of the things that aren’t your favorite way of looking at it (“the discussion we’re having”):

What’s your red line? Climate destruction? Mass deportations? The collapse of even the fragile oligarch-friendly US “democracy” and the adoption of full-throated “enemies go into the camps, there is only one party” fascism, where hostile media gets shut down, protests get suppressed with deadly violence with no repercussions? Accelerated genocide in Gaza, new genocide in Ukraine? War in Europe? Shutting down NOAA and destroying climate science in the US? Destruction of universities that aren’t friendly to the allowed politics? Nuking hurricanes? A million people dying of a preventable disease? Are any of those red lines?

Because you could spend half a day trying to prevent those things from coming about, but you’re explicitly rejecting the idea of doing so. So if those kinds of things aren’t red lines for you, what in the loving fuck is? Or is this massive concern about bad things happening in the world limited to only one place and one issue, and something like billions of people dying because of climate change in the not-too-distant future excluded from the idea of being present within this invented concept of “red lines?”

Not at all. That’s not our situation, though. Is not deporting all the immigrants or accelerating the slaughter in Gaza, to you, a “cookie”?

I think my voting red line would be when voting doesn’t make a difference anymore.

For example if we had one participant in the election who wanted Bibi to finish the job in Gaza, deport all the illegal immigrants and any number of the legal ones, put his political opponents in prison, use the power of the presidency to make sure future elections were “fair,” undo any and all climate regulations, IDK do I really need to keep going? And then if their opponent also wanted to do that, then voting doesn’t matter. If instead of that, their opponent has literally any minor or major flaw whatsoever, but isn’t planning on ending democracy and shooting all the anarchists and Palestinians, then voting to choose that participant can be a good thing.

I really don’t get this logical framework where voting is doing some kind of favor for the politician class. They don’t give a shit. They mostly get paid either way. Someone wins, maybe it’s one person or the other, but in any case, voting is a way to influence the government to do thing A or thing B. If you don’t care which one it is, then you don’t need to vote. If thing B is objectively a murderous horror, then choosing thing A can be a good idea in terms of self-preservation, even if thing A is also not exactly what you want.

Kamala Harris isn’t shooting any Palestinians. She didn’t start the war, she’s not in charge of the government that’s aiding and supporting the war. She might or might not do enough to prevent if she wins. Probably she won’t. How does that make it irrelevant whether we get her, or we get the guy who wants to accelerate the war and kill more Palestinians and also a whole bunch of other people of all kinds of ethnicities worldwide?

What is this argument? That if enough people don’t vote, the government will say “Aww, you got me!” and fold and collapse and then it’ll finally be anarchist utopia? No, they love people not giving a shit about politics. It lets them do whatever they want without worrying about suffering at the ballot box for it. If all the young motivated caring-about-Palestinians type of people stopped voting, they’d be thrilled, and then they’d just keep doing whatever and every so often gun down a protest or put them all in prison whenever they got out of line.

They’re not allowed to be collaborating with people who work for certain Russian companies. It’s not a question of security, it’s a question of US law requiring US entities to punish through non-cooperation certain companies that are assisting in the war effort or whatever.

It might or might not be fair, but it isn’t up to the kernel developers, it’s a legal requirement for them.

Hey guys we’re going to blow up the maternity hospital and shell the nuclear plant: I sleep

You can’t work on your software project anymore: REAL SHIT

For as long as I can remember, open SSH endpoints have been subject to password scan attacks from random corners of the internet. It’s just how life is.

https://youtu.be/fVN_5xsMDdg