I am not understanding what you want from me

i think the basic confusion people are having is that, when you phrase it like “I use it/its in spaces where I do not plan on engaging with people as individuals” and “This space is not a chat room and there is no reason to treat it as such. It is a forum.”, how that comes off to some people is you are kind of treating this place like a dumping ground for what you want to talk about and then ignoring other people jumping off of your posts. that may or may not be what you intend to do; so that’s why people are trying to clarify the intent of your posts.

i’ve been a little busy and by the time i noticed i’d missed the date again i was like “it just makes more sense to wait until Monday to keep the thread on schedule and useful”–not much sense in having one up for three days tbh

yeah the difficulty here really is: even if we wanted to stick around (i think the consensus is not especially) and even if we did get the mod tools we think are needed (no reason to believe this will happen), the bridge here is burned pretty definitively. i don’t personally see the sense in sticking around on a place where the people stewarding the software have an actively adversarial relationship with us

whenever my dad gets to shopping (not for lack of pestering on my part), most likely the first solution will be chemical–but in the interim i’m just trapping them and drowning them as they appear, which has worked well enough because i only see one or two a day and they really stick out against our walls. helpfully they also don’t seem to have gotten into any furniture or other places it’d be hard to root them out from, and we vacuumed the area they originated in which i suspect got a lot of them early

Ugh, bedbugs. I hope that situation resolves quickly for you, preferably as a false alarm.

unfortunately not a false alarm but luckily it seems they’re contained to one area we don’t really use anyways for now, and i’ve been picking off the ones i encounter; they seem to be very few and far between right now so i’m cautiously optimistic that management of the affected area will keep them from taking root elsewhere. more than anything it’s just brought attention to areas of our living space that weren’t previously getting much attention which has been good

pretty quiet week so far, i think it’s supposed to snow later which will be moderately annoying because i’ll have to shut my window for awhile if so

for what it’s worth we have quite a few communities in dire need of some love and posters willing to give them some life–betterment and praxis was a good idea for example that’s unfortunately not been able to sustain itself recently

If the probability of success of those actions was not 0%, there may be an argument that the impact outweighs the unlikelihood of success. But you and I both know otherwise.

i mean i just don’t find this argument particularly convincing. i think biting this bullet would improperly impugn the vast majority of protests and forms of protest—because most of them are unsuccessful and will never be successful. likewise, i think “chance of influencing an outcome for the better” is just one variable you should consider in a moral act, because trying to weigh whether you should do something or not on that basis just invites a whole host of other problems.

If I attempt to destroy the government , I will be killed. If I don’t pay taxes, I will go to prison. If I don’t vote for Biden, I won’t.

i guess i’m sort of obliged to ask: why are these undesirable outcomes if your moral system is just? i find this a weird objection to make unless you fall into one of the following three camps:

• you don’t believe your moral system is just enough to actually live by for some reason (in which case i’m unsure why you’d confidently assert moral positions);
• you don’t actually and fully believe what you’re saying (self explanatory), or;
• you would sooner prioritize your personal comfort over the inconvenient outcomes that actually living your moral system invites (which i would consider immoral, especially in this case)

If we know, as we do, that Biden will continue to support Israel’s genocide, and still vote for him, how can we un-hypocritically fault anyone else who supports a genocidal leader so long as they can claim some other worse person waiting in the wings?

i think this is already addressed in my comment: even if you don’t vote for Biden, you are complicit by virtue of paying taxes. the Palestinian children we’re murdering probably don’t care very much if you do or don’t vote, given that your vote is largely meaningless in what we do–your taxes are another matter, and directly finance our shipments of aid and weapons to Israel. accordingly i consider taxes to be a far more active contribution than any vote can be in this space, and i think if everybody was truly principled on this matter they would also abstain from paying them. since they don’t, i think they’ve already made such a moral compromise that it would be very silly to impugn voting for Biden.

given the exceptional civility of pretty much everyone else here versus the civility of your two comments, i’m going to have to ask you to take it down a notch. it’s fine if you don’t find these arguments convincing at all but the idea that they’re being made by an “uninformed bad faith actor” is not credible. t3rmit3 has been pretty straightforward and honest in their convictions here.

What has me considering the deontological position on this specifically is that, for utilitarian purposes, I have voted to allow our entire federal government to continue to drift right. When choosing the lesser of the two evils every time I did, I think I failed to consider that my permissiveness would embolden the lesser of the two evils to become increasingly evil as they were aware I wasn’t voting for them but against their opponent.

i guess my problem is, if you acknowledge this possibility: does it not logically follow that, likewise, allowing someone running as an open fascist to win might have the same or worse impact as you’re trying to avoid? because i would personally consider the argument “if Trump wins, fascism will be given a greenlight” more likely than the argument “if Biden wins, genocide will be given a greenlight” for a variety of reasons, and i would consider it more harmful if it occurred too. that’s for a few reasons: the overall shift in the party has been to the left and i think that’s far more likely to continue than a shift to the right; there’s a flourishing left-critical tendency within the Democratic Party; the overall American left the strongest it’s been in a long time, etc.

but i think most immediately it’s because i would contest the logical validity of the second argument at all. the contemporary US is a post settler-colonial society and most of its land area was acquired through genocidal processes given sanctity by the legal system. to me Biden is neither establishing a new norm nor deviating from an old one—he’s just a part of a long-normalized string of presidents like this.^[1] in my mind trying to break the cycle by punishing him might be cathartic but will be politically fruitless and unlikely to produce the introspection you’re seeking. by contrast: i would argue we have not really had a fascist president—authoritarian, racist, white supremacist, truly evil? probably yes, but not fascist^[2]—and so Trump winning would be a catastrophic normalization of that political tendency which we’ve to this point avoided. it would have extreme ramifications both domestically and globally, especially for the left.

and i will reiterate that i believe it entirely likely that you’re going to get a larger, more sweeping genocide from Trump and his followers than is happening in Palestine if he is given the power to do that. (it’s also obvious he’s going to continue that one based on his positioning since October 7.) we’re already seeing efforts in places like Arizona to make it de facto legal to murder undesirables like undocumented immigrants–the dehumanization needed for widespread killing to begin is clearly high in some parts of the Republican Party. in all of this space, i just don’t see very many compelling arguments for why the utilitarian perspective of harm reduction should be discarded here.

in my mind voting in our current system is just pretty straightforward utilitarian calculus (and can’t be anything else): you should vote for the option which will do the least harm and has the highest probability of winning. even if you, say, accept that Biden and Trump are equal on I/P, that just means you should look to other issues on which they are distinct–and they are distinct on basically every other issue in a way that clearly suggests Biden to be the best choice you can make here.

take just the Autocracy Tracker, which makes it unambiguous that Trump, if he wins, is planning a sweeping authoritarian wave of deportations, purges, restrictions of civil rights, and repression of minority groups and ideological groups he disagrees with. much of this is, in a sense, already happening here and already a form of genocide against some groups (trans people most prominently–it is now de facto illegal to be trans and legal to bring harm to trans people in large portions of the US). a Trump win will probably ensure there is no safe place for such groups in this country anymore.

on a moral level: i am just not sympathetic to the idea that voting for Biden constitutes blood on your hands in a meaningful way. i think if you accept this line of argumentation, you would ultimately have to bite the bullet that this could also be said of paying taxes^[1]–and i certainly don’t begrudge people for paying their taxes even as this lines the pocket of the war machine, so then why should judge them for voting? in general: by virtue of existing within a state, you will always be complicit to some degree in the crimes of that state, regardless of what you do to extricate yourself from supporting them. so i just don’t think that abstention from voting or voting for a more morally defensible alternative actually cleans your hands of the blood being perceived here.

separately, and more pragmatically: there is no compelling third party with anywhere near a possibility of winning or even scoring a “symbolic victory.” a vote for a leftist third party right now is, in a real sense, a vote wasted–because these parties are incompetent, fractured, and full of people who are not serious candidates. even with the Green Party (by far the most electorally advanced of them) nobody has ever trembled at their influence and in practice they mostly seem to exist to waste a lot of the money given to them on quixotic presidential candidates. imo: any actual movement challenging the power–your DSAs, for example–is going to be built from the ground up and not imposed through the presidency, and is only going to use electoralism as one of its several political arms.

that’s great! way ahead of the goal, i see. what was this last book about?

it was Cuba and Its Neighbours: Democracy in Motion which, as the title might imply, is about Cuba and how it conducts elections (with a lot of context for how that system was arrived at, how it works, features of the system, etc).

i wrote about it fairly briefly as follows elsewhere:

i think this is a good book on the Cuban system as seen from Cuba, and a good book if you’re looking for a heterodox opinion on Cuba’s system. i’m sure you won’t agree with every assertion in the book, nor every prescription that Cuba’s system applies—i certainly don’t—but i have much more appreciation for the Cuban system than i did previously

a wonderful new year update: we are currently paying $1,600/mo for this shitty apartment. love landlords

now that i’ve read a bit more this week: The Great Transition by Nick Fuller Googins is an early contender for my book of the year and the first to get 5 stars this year from me (although i’m a generous reviewer)

Alyaza what have been your favorite/most interesting book among the four?

the majority of my reading list would not make for particularly comfortable reading so i’ll just point you to the fairly normal pick from last year, which is I’m Glad My Mom Died

As much as that writing style is rather unique and interesting, it is dreadfully difficult to follow.

that’s the Defector special

Is it a poly constellation

just a fairly straightforward arrangement where all three of us are dating each other

oh, i guess i have two partners now and i forgot to mention that