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The friend who radicalized me is now begging me to vote for Harris
  • The issue I have with this argument is that i feel like it is confusing voting for someone with endorsing them publicly. An argument I've heard from socialists online that has really resonated with me is that yes, voting for president in a liberal democray is a way that you can influence politics but it is literally the least powerful and least effective way to do so. Therefore if we, as people who call ourselves socialists and who want to change society for the better, if we spend a large percentage of our time online arguing with people about voting, we are being tricked into believing in this lie that voting between two bourgeoisie candidates is meaningful. The clearest way this manifests is in so-called socialists who demand that other socialists vote for Democrats. These people are obviously betraying their values and have become party hacks for the libs.

    But another way that I think this manifests, and that ties back to this thread, is when we go out of our way to spend time and effort demanding that people write in a third party candidate or abstain instead of voting tactically. Initially this was really counterintuitive for me because I hate Kamala and the Democrats so much for enabling genocide that I couldn't stomach the idea of anyone I cared about actually voting for them. But upon reflection, what I was really disgusted by was the idea of someone endorsing or supporting them. Because that is what makes a material difference. If someone is spending time and energy getting people to vote for Kamala, or any other liberal war criminal, then they are knowingly or not working to preserve the current system of oppression. But if all someone does is bubble in her name instead of trumps, they are not materially supporting genocide. While I personally don't buy into the idea of voting as harm-reduction on a presidential level, if someone else wants to I'm not going to argue with them about it. What matters so much more to me is what we do with the rest of our time. If we can make material differences in our communities during the other 364 days of the year, that makes 10,000x the difference than a harm-reduction vote. (Again this only applies to the vote itself, if someone is going around advocating for others to vote blue then that's a different story)

    For context on where I'm coming from, I voted for De La Cruz but I don't live in a swing state so my vote is purely symbolic anyway.

    Anyway for OP don't lie to your friend, that's kinda shitty. I'd say if he wants to vote kamala as a token 0.1% harm reduction then by all means, but maybe point out that all of this energy he is spending convicing others to vote blue could be better spent doing literally anything else.

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    Bulletins and News Discussion from October 7th to October 13th, 2024 - Happy International Paragliding Day!
  • You can maybe take some comfort in the resistance videos, showing that Palestinuans are not helpless victims but are fighting back and slowly winning. Doesn't remove the rage we all feel for the incomprehensible suffering and loss, but it gives me hope, reminds me that fascism won't win

  • President Joe Biden has tested positive for Covid-19
  • Folks, Biden can't even do a basic rocket jump! It's very sad. Unlike me, I'm the best soldier in RGL. Everyone knows it. I've got the best syncshots and surfs, the best anyone's ever seen! Froyotech was gonna play me but they got too scared and forfeited! True story

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    Bulletins and News Discussion from July 15th to July 21st, 2024 - It's Joever
  • Thanks for the response, the terf stuff I heard was about La Riva specifically and that the org had basically forced her to keep it quiet, but it's the kind of rumor that's basically impossible to verify and you're right there are a lot of trans people involved with the org (they were also at our local trans rights demonstration this year) so I guess even if those rumors are true they don't seem to be impacting party policy which is good

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    Bulletins and News Discussion from July 15th to July 21st, 2024 - It's Joever
  • Thanks for taking the time to write out that response heart-sickle I will try to keep that in mind going forward. The people who have had negative comments were not people who had tried to become part of the party, mostly just individuals who had interacted with local party members before. That being said I totally agree that American leftists can be super disorganized and it would not surprise me given some of the people I know locally if small disagreements got blown out of proportion. Also most of my friends lean more towards anarchism while I'm more of an ML person (no shade on anarchists or on my friends I love them) so that might also be coloring some of the stuff I hear. I think that since the PSL seems to be an active org in my area that is consistently taking good positions on things and seems to be actually organizing for local issues well I might try to get more involved and make my own opinions about them. I am finally getting to a place where I have enough stability in my living situation where I can spend energy getting involved and helping others while would be really nice to start doing

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    Bulletins and News Discussion from July 15th to July 21st, 2024 - It's Joever
  • That's a good statement from the PSL, found myself agreeing at all of the points they made. It's weird, a lot of leftists I know irl have said they had bad experiences with the PSL, but all of their messaging seems good. I wonder if my local branch sucks. (Also granted a lot of the negative stuff I've heard was about the upper leadership being bad, their leader being a terf etc). I haven't been able to find any confirmation of the terf allegations online but enough people have mentioned it irl that I believe it

  • America is investing in Ukrainian failure
  • Incredible to see this from the US media, it feels like the mood around Ukraine is souring really fast in Washington. Not even 6 months ago writing an article like this would have ended your career in the US media machine

  • DS Game Recs

    There was a thread here that I had saved a few months ago where people had recommended lots of cool lesser-known DS games. I finally got a flash cart a legal means of obtaining games but sadly all of the comments on that post have been hidden by the admins. Would be nice if we could start a new thread for recs

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    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)FE
    femboi [they/them, she/her] @hexbear.net
    Posts 1
    Comments 26