• 4 Posts
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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: March 3rd, 2025

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  • In theory, sure - it’s only a concern if you have a work-managed device.

    In concept, though, there are more parties with partial control/access to your device from whom you only have a tenuous protection at-best.

    Normalizing the practice of automatic archival of encrypted communication is bad. I don’t think that’s a particularly spicy take. “They say it won’t be used except in these specific circumstances” is no better than a fig-leaf, especially when those types of promises have been repeatedly broken.










  • 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






  • 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.



  • 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 not advocating we ignore the electoral system
    • I don’t want/think we will be overthrowing democracy

    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.