you may take the United Fruit Company's name, but you can't take its legacy of financing terrorism and violence in Latin America...

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.

[^1]: arguably, it's even more true of paying taxes than of voting: votes may make no difference in whether something happens or not, but taxes actively make them possible

this is clearly not true, Portal literally just got a huge fangame with a Steam release. the issue is entirely that it uses Nintendo stuff and the guy even says as much

the weirdest thing to me is these guys always ignore that banning the freaks worked on Reddit--which is stereotypically the most cringe techno-libertarian platform of the lot--without ruining the right to say goofy shit on the platform. they banned a bunch of the reactionary subs and, spoiler, issues with those communities have been much lessened since that happened while still allowing for people to say patently wild, unpopular shit

techno-libertarianism strikes again! it's every few years with these guys where they have to learn the same lesson over again that letting the worst scum in politics make use of your website will just ensure all the cool people evaporate off your website--and Substack really does not have that many cool people or that good of a reputation to begin with.

in general, there's a lack of media coverage of comments like this outside of the partisan blogs--which is absurd to me, since this is the most explicitly fascist Trump has been. the debate over whether he is one is basically over in my view.

Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped. (NPR declined an interview request but shared the memo and other information). While NPR’s main account had 8.7 million followers and the politics account had just under three million, “the platform’s algorithm updates made it increasingly challenging to reach active users; you often saw a near-immediate drop-off in engagement after tweeting and users rarely left the platform,” the memo says.

the primary reason Hamas has political power and the political support to attack Israel in this manner is because Israel:

• treats all Palestinians as second-class citizens and subjects them to a system of political, social, and economic apartheid
• holds millions of Palestinians in squalid and inhuman conditions, and seizes the territory of millions more in the name of a violent settler project
• subjects the vast majority of Palestinians to state-sponsored discrimination, terror, indiscriminate bombing, and political violence
• leaves Palestinians no feasible democratic path to the rights they should have in their current state or the state of Israel, making armed struggle inevitable

you can and should condemn Hamas, but it is inarguable that Israel routinely does worse—overwhelmingly to people just as innocent as the ones Hamas is murdering—which is what makes attacks like this inevitable. you cannot do what Israel does and not expect the outcome to be violence, and it is incumbent on Israel, who holds all the actual power in this dynamic, to break the cycle and stop using every terrorist attack perpetuated against it as an excuse to roll innocent heads.

a core issue for moving wikis is that Fandom refuses to delete the old wiki so you 1) have to fight an SEO war against them; and 2) have to contend with directing everyone to the right place or else you have two competing wikis (one of which will gradually lapse out of date). it's very irritating.

i can only presume the remaining 5% is owned by NFTs Georg, who lives on the blockchain and is an outlier who should not have been counted

this is the latest in a series of abrasive, unproductive, and generally uninteresting driveby comments from you--i think it's time for a week off.

this is only your third comment on our site and you are not making a good impression by immediately getting offended by a pretty banal ask.