All of them.

Sure. America has its slimy tendrils in everyone else’s business, so it’s only fair that you have a say.

I also respect your freedom to like what you want, but also also

Upvoted because it’s unpopular.

Also: model trains. I was into model trains for a few years, but I realized that I didn’t really have the life experience to make a fulfilling model trainset. Like I did the thing, I made a (really childish) layout with some crappy blocks and streets, and I got the trains to move and stuff, but it didn’t…say much? It was “I’m a child and I like trains”, which is great! Probably wouldn’t have become interested in trains at all otherwise!

But I want more…I always want more. I need to go more hardcore into the few things I can actually tolerate doing…

And as a child, I saw some really cool trainsets built by adults that told stories, made me laugh, made my parents laugh, made me feel awe at the storytelling and creativity of the craft. Even my cousin, who built a trainset in his basement in his early twenties, had a much more inspired trainset than mine (when I was much younger, like 10 or 12). His trainset was cool. He studied how trains worked, how to make a realistic line with realistic scenery and infrastructure. His trainset reflected who he was, and ultimately forecasted what he became. He literally works for a rail company now designing the train tracks.

So I’m kinda “saving” that hobby for when I’m in my 60’s after I integrate enough life experience (and hopefully some capital) to build a trainset that really reflects the person I ultimately became.

My trainset is gonna have a sick, functioning roller coaster, some overly complicated automated control circuits, some heavy metal references, some intentionally goofy shit, serious shit, an anarcho-communist bent, a layout that at least is informed by modern infrastructure design, etc., because that’s at least partially the person I will have become.

Roller coasters. I’m too heavy to go on them, too poor to afford to ride them, too busy to simulate them.

I didn’t ask for your answer, I asked for your opinion. I already knew that you didn’t have the answer. Nether do I.

Amen.

I do, however, have a great love for game theory, and game theory tells me that there’s only one correct decision to make where voting in the USA in 2024 is concerned.

Any recommendations for game theory resources? I’ve been putting it off for a while.

I hope this doesn’t come across as condescending. I don’t mean it that way but people often tell me I’m being condescending.

Don’t you just hate it when that happens? I’ve been there so many times. I feel you.

I wish you all the best in life. Please let me know if there’s anything I can do to help you in any way, and don’t hesitate to reach out if you want a conversational partner or a sympathetic ear. I’m always open to discussing the world with intelligent people.

Will do. This honestly means the world because I don’t have a lot of players in my court.

If you’re interested in communal living or alternative lifestyles (at it pertains to anarchist communities), I’m happy to help there, as well. I think I still have some friends that know folx at Emma Goldman Finishing School in Seattle. Admittedly, I don’t know if they’re looking for any new members right now, but I’d be happy to put a word in for you.

Unfortunately, I’m kinda stuck on the “poor grad student” path. Got oodles of loans to pay off, but I also got tons of new tools and solutions to technical problems that I’ll likely never be allowed to work on. IMO I’d be more useful paying their bail funds as a successful engineer than living there and being a nuisance…because I am a nuisance to live with lol. I dormed for a few semesters and I can count on two hands the number of times I ever talked to my suitemates or neighbors, and one of them was a really nice dude.

The Answer.

From the song’s lyrics:

I don’t believe you have the answer

I’ve got ideas too

but if you’ve got enough naivete

and you’ve got conviction

then the answer is perfect for you

That’s kind of an obnoxious response when you yourself said:

I fear that you’re mistaking your own pessimism for absolute truth, but I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.

(emphasis mine) followed by:

What, in your view, needs to be done?

Like you basically asked for my answer after saying you’d be willing to be convinced. You asked “what needs to be done?”, and I replied with things that I think need to be done. If you didn’t ask, I would have kept my mouth shut because frankly I’m pathologically disinterested in telling people what to do, probably to a fault. If you weren’t convinced then that’s fine, but it’s just kind of obnoxious to ask for an answer and then chide me for giving you my answer.

When fascists take power it’s not unheard of for them to line up commies and anarchists against a wall and shoot them.

Yes, and that’s why we need to prepare ourselves for when they do, which they WILL do regardless of who gets elected as the figurehead.

I’m all for ideological utopianism

I’m not [2]! I have explained over and over again all throughout my responses in this post’s comment section that I have very practical motivations for why voting is a waste of time. I encourage you to go through my comment history and see what I have said to others in this thread.

but preserving your moral superiority…

Yo literally the first thing I posted in this comment section was a meme dunking on the delegates and their misery, which is bar none the most engagement I have received on any comment and almost all of it negative. No one here thinks I’m morally superior. And in case you were wondering, I don’t like me either.

So let’s explicitly do away with the moral superiority pretense [1].

… is little comfort when you and your family are staring down the barrel of a fascist’s gun.

Yes, exactly, that’s why we need to build our community defenses against these fascist pricks before they kill us, keeping in mind that we’re in a liberal dominated community on a “civility-at-all-costs” instance where we’re not allowed to talk seriously about revolution!

But as I have said to other users, particularly the comment you initially replied to:

I got no beef with people voting for Democrats in the general election, even though I disagree with their choice, because it doesn’t affect the outcome of anything. My beef is with these delegates, these people in a position of influence and power.

So go vote Democrat if that makes you feel safe, I’m not going to bring it up again because it doesn’t matter, but I’m not gonna pretend that it’s helpful.

But also keep in mind that these are the assholes who platformed a cop over a Palestinian in the middle of their genocide…

Again, I invite you to reread what I’ve commented to you so far, and to go through my comment history and see what I’ve said to others.

[1] Really, my position is, boiled down, that supposedly “practical” solutions that violate common morality (for example, letting people die to save money in *insert industry here*) are not really practical at all. This inextricably couples practicality to morality.

Frankly, as a human actor who fails to always act practically, I acknowledge that for similar reasons, sometimes I also fail to act morally, i.e. in laughing at the pain of other humans because they happen to collude with an evil institution. Hence why I reject the idea that I am morally superior, and that I have asserted as such anywhere in this comment section.

And in the sense that the means should reflect the ends, I admit that I haven’t lived up to my own ideals, out of anger and irritation at the constant stream of bullshit being foisted on me and everyone I know by these very Democrat ghouls.

But I don’t believe that I need to be a perfect moral actor to speak out about Palestine and the fascists at the DNC!

[2] For similar reasons as those in [1], ideology should be coupled to practicality, which itself should be coupled to morality. Hence why I’m not interested in anarchism as a utopian ideology where anything is prescribed, but as a practical solution for humanity to overcome capitalism.

Unpaywalled link: https://archive.ph/JeMpG

It’s called Today I Learned not Today We Learned. /s

I personally find Don’s posts pretty informative. It’s usually stuff I didn’t previously know, and there’s a good link to the source.

So yes actually, multiple good posts every hour is good IMO.

Block them if you aren’t into it.

What kind of monster posts TIL posts in a TIL community?

YES I hate phone calls SO MUCH. If I had a nickel for every opportunity I missed out on because I had to make a phone call and I just froze up … well I wouldn’t be a millionaire but I’d probably have like $69 extra.

L bozo

the earth could use about 6 billion less people. i can easily think of which ones should go first.

Least genocidal shitlib

i d o n ’ t c a r e a b o u t i s r a e l o r p a l e s t i n e

If you don’t care then shut the fuck up.

I fear that you’re mistaking your own pessimism for absolute truth, but I’m willing to be convinced otherwise.

Indigenous Action did a great write-up on this topic. Although to be completely honest, the point of this thread was really to condemn the DNC delegates specifically. Actually, I brought up voting at all in this thread in response to the suggestion that I am:

Willing to let lgbt, people of color, students, poor people and the working class be oppressed and possibly murdered.

As a poor grad student, and sibling to two lovely LGBT POC for whom I would literally kill to protect, this is a particularly offensive implication (from a different user!) that I often see bundled with pro-electoralism rhetoric, so I preemptively brought in Colin Ward’s article against voting.

What, in your view, needs to be done?

In the large, abolish all authority and hierarchy by popular revolution. If that is impossible, then approximate it as best as possible in the real world using a basis of popular liberatory actions emulating the end goal.

In the small, these delegates could use their power to physically and logistically disrupt the DNC until at least the US ending weapons transfers is secured. For everyone else, support protesters for Gaza in your life, show up to the protests if you can, do direct actions [1] if you can … do nothing if you have to, but most importantly, don’t cooperate with the war machine!

I hope this clarifies what I meant by saying:

Voting is orthogonal to what needs to be done.

Because while voting doesn’t necessarily hurt direct action efforts [2], it doesn’t help either. It’s just a completely independent class of activity. It’s like if, on a typical x-y plane (where the x and y axes are assumed to be orthogonal), we need to move in (let’s say) the positive x direction, and people keep spamming inputs in the y direction.

[1] Just the first part of section J.2, not including J.2.1 and onward. The rest is supplementary.

[2] There is an argument to be made (and I believe the article I cited makes it) that activism for voting takes time and energy that would otherwise be spent on direct action. Also, technically speaking, voting does literally take time away from direct action for the amount of time you’re waiting to vote and actually in the booth, but I’m an engineer so I’m willing to neglect small-valued terms 😆.

1. The entire sentence, with different emphasis, is:

It’s not literally everyone, it’s people with power and influence who use their energy to prop up the Democratic machine.

So clearly I’m not irritated at literally all people with power of any form.

Keep in mind, in this thread I am charitably replying to the dishonest suggestion that the average taxpayer has just as much culpability in the genocide in Gaza as someone who goes deep into the halls of power and participates in their process as a delegate.

The power and influence to which my previous comment alluded is that which these delegates fought hard to get, and are now using to prop up the war machine. Again, there is a huge difference in culpability between DNC delegates and the average liberal that’s just trying to get back.

Clearly that kind of nuance cannot be indicated by the meme that started this whole thread, as memes intentionally trade substance for brevity, but my other comments throughout the thread have sufficiently explained that my position is a lot more nuanced than “haha all Democrats all bad”.

2. The power and influence I have is basically entirely privilege that I didn’t choose to get and can’t fully reject even though I try my damnedest. I literally don’t even have a job, can’t find one if I tried, no influence on social media other than what you’re reading now, and look what good that’s doing.

Basically the only real power I took for myself in my entire adult life is my education, on which I defer to Bakunin:

Does it follow that I drive back every authority? The thought would never occur to me. When it is a question of boots, I refer the matter to the authority of the cobbler; when it is a question of houses, canals, or railroads, I consult that of the architect or engineer. For each special area of knowledge I speak to the appropriate expert. But I allow neither the cobbler nor the architect nor the scientist to impose upon me. I listen to them freely and with all the respect merited by their intelligence, their character, their knowledge, reserving always my incontestable right of criticism and verification.

I.e. I don’t think that all the power afforded to me by my education is unjust. I am most certainly not using the little power I have to prop up the war machine. (Much to my personal detriment! My line of work is extremely useful to the war machine.) That power which is unjust I take very seriously to reject as best as I can.

Again, it is a ludicrous suggestion that a poor grad student posting memes dunking on the misfortunes of people in power has a comparable power and influence to a delegate at the Democratic National Convention.

ITT: Liberals learn that leftists aren’t their friends

… yeah, obviously. Fuck the Republicans. Would love to see them squirm.