Each morning I wake up and think to myself, “what fresh new hell awaits me today?”
There are no caveats to this that can make me feel better about it. This is a normalization of what I already new to be true - that my phone has never actually been mine, and any controll I thought i had can and will be taken from me at any moment.
Does it really? I don’t find it to be a challenging distinction at all
private property, distinct from personal property.
The exploitation of private property is derived from the exclusion of labor from its product - maybe you have a different understanding of what ‘theft’ means, but it’s the principled exclusion of what labor produces from the labor producing it that is the basis of marx’s claim of ‘exploitation’
identical morally
I think you are reading a different comment.
AI is theft in the same way that all private property theft. It isnt the piracy of media, it’s the alienation of labor from its product, and withholding it for profit.
You know shit’s bad when US media starts using the ‘China bad’ classic “but at what cost?” byline toward US consumers
Im guessing there’s a sister article somewhere on Forbes reporting lower than anticipated earnings for US phone manufacturers
I consider it to be a function of when I grew up with video games and how my family restricted them broadly, but I have honestly never understood the appeal of competitive online games that require intense anti-cheat controls.
I grew up playing largely single player games, and the few online games I payed were limited to ones I played in private lobbies with friends i knew.
Any game that requires this level of policing for competitive play is an instant turn off for me. I realize I’m in the minority here, but I have no problem with a console that doesn’t support kernel level anticheat- to the contrary i find it to be a huge advantage
Mamdani is a fucking wizard. I heard some of this press conference - trump was actually defending mamdani against both liberal press and fox news questions
I want so badly to have been a fly on the wall for that meeting. But ultimately it does kind of make sense: they are both “anti-establishment” candidates in their own ways, and trump desperately needs a popularity boost.
Im not really talking about things like USAID, I’m talking about his consolidation of power broadly and the normalization of the abuse of presidential power
Frankly I think we missed the window for the good version of him dying - especially if he dies abruptly in a way that could be spun into suspicion
Nothing lost by protest voting then
This isnt accelerationism - the fascist boot is here already. The only silver lining to being where we are is that the problem and the dividing lines have never been more clear, and that makes organizing marginally more possible
There may be some liberals who still believe that compromise is still the only way forward when it was compromise with capital that got us here, and they’re the ones that must be brought into the resistance by force or be treated as collaborators.
When the fascist boot is coming down on people’s necks is possibly the best time to be building popular resistance
The people who turned up were the 20-somethings who are politically-minded
When voting turnout exceeds expected numbers, we call those additional voters ‘low-propensity’. It doesn’t matter if it’s a national election or a local one - when turnout blows out expectations, that’s a high-enthusiasm election. Trying to describe those low-propensity voters as ‘politically-minded’ seems intentionally misleading, since I can only assume that’s based on the fact that they turned out when they were expected not to (i.e. they turned out because they responded to a typically low-turnout election, thus they must be ‘politically-minded’).
Setting aside the circular definition - any time a candidate is able to turn out more voters than expected, that’s a definitionally good candidate by any electoral standard. The question isn’t really ‘who would non-voters have voted for if it were a national election?’, but, ‘does this election translate to a national voter base?’. And while that’s not something you can easily generalize, Mamdani did run on policies that are resoundingly popular in all 50 states. There’s very little reason he wouldn’t have performed better-than-average on a national stage given what we know for certain.
All this to say: anyone trying to downplay the significance of an Indian-American, Muslim, Democratic Socialist sweeping an election against one of the most famous political dynasty names in the US, where corporate media across the entire political spectrum were united against him, and where opposition spent tens (if not hundreds) of millions of dollar more than him - and in of all places the financial capital of the world and in a city that was the sight of the most famous terrorist attack conducted by Arab Muslims in the western world - is absolutely coping. That kind of candidate winning in a place like New York would have been inconceivable since at least 2001.
You can deny it as a significant moment of socialist achievement if you want, but you’d be fooling only yourself.
Unless a political change happens, and quickly, it’s coming
What is?.. Revolution? I mean way to be an optimist I guess…
to ignore the entirety of the voting system simply because it’s going to be overthrown anyway is dumb
I’m advocating that we roundly object to liberal democracy - e.g. democracy revolving around individual capitalist principles. Vote, but vote for working-class representation. I roundly reject the idea that 3rd party voting or uncommitted votes are pointless or ill-advised, so long as liberals refuse to acknowledge the popular momentum of their base. If an acceptable candidate from the left flank does emerge, vote for them, by all means. Participate in primaries, canvas for quality representation. In the end, vote however you want. But certainly don’t be running around whipping support for a milquetoast shitlib just because it’s a lesser-evil to a republican, and don’t be shaming others for sticking to their principles and holding democrats to a higher standard. *You cannot organize on lesser-evil electoral politics.
politically-minded people
You’re misunderstanding the turnout. The record number of voters that turned out are exactly those typical non-voters that you’re talking about.
Dems have been hemorrhaging their base because people don’t think they do anything for them, and a populist candidate like Mamdani is how democrats bring those disenfranchised voters back.
He is exactly the case in point i’m talking about. Calling those voters ‘politically-minded’ is the cope.
The message isn’t “Democrats cannot be trusted to represent our interests, they are our opposition to radical change……” it’s “Nobody within our government gives a shit about our interests.”
Even that message is confused by following it with “but we must vote for them anyway”. Either the system is broken and we must rebel, or the system can be mitigated by dutiful participation. There’s no middle ground where we can minimize the decent into enslavement by biding our time until the revolution comes.
So please, tell me who I should actually vote for for president in the coming years
Vote for whoever the fuck you want. You wont change anything by voting for liberals, because liberals will increasingly lose regardless because people are that much more apathetic about them every cycle. If you want to prevent republicans from tearing everything down, then don’t waste your time with lesser-evil bullshit. Spend that time agitating other liberals - make them see how complacently participating in a system that enslaves them only serves to ensure it will always enslave them. The only candidates worth voting for are those that the democratic establishment actively opposes.
By all means, vote for your favorite benevolent fascist. Just stop pretending like the strategy is to quietly comply with democratic obstruction until exactly the right moment when we all suddenly stand up and rebel against them, while simultaneously complaining about how leftist candidates just aren’t popular because none of these liberals ever vote for them (see how circular this bullshit is?). That isn’t how leftist organizing works. We gain momentum by showing how broken liberalism is, and we can’t do that if we’re sheep-dogging other leftists into committing themselves for the shitlib du jour 3 years in advance. Democrats get our vote only if the represent our interests. full-stop
You might think of yourself as a leftist, but from where i’m sitting you’re just a liberal in denial.
Lmao, this is just cope my man. Mamdani won against the exact establishment and system of billionaires you keep claiming as the mechanism that will never allow a leftist candidate from reaching popular support
An archiving feature that highlights a reality that many people arent already aware of - that encryption is meaningless if you dont have ultimate control of the device you are decrypting it on.