Yeah it's not great, but like... coming across as coherent is important no matter the position. Biden kinda failed that basic competency test, probably just due to his age and not like, stupidity or a personal failing of any kind. I'm still voting for Biden, but yeah it's not exactly an enthusiastic vote.

So, speaking from a purely pragmatic perspective, voting for Biden is better than other US electoral choices for the purpose of trying to help Palestinians.

I understand your reticence and moral indignation, I largely feel the same.

But the biggest reason Trump won in 2016 is because voters were not particularly enthused with their choices, and a great many decided not voting at all (or voting for Trump as a protest against the establishment) was preferable to voting for HRC.

I have to imagine that we both believe that Trump is worse than Biden when it comes to the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Given that we're already in election year, it's down to Biden and Trump. One of them is going to be president come January next year.

Taking all that together, if we want things to get better for Palestine, we should vote for Biden because the alternatives are much worse.

Granted there is a lot you can do outside of elections to help, and I wouldn't recommend ignoring those. But given that voting for the US president takes a few hours out of one day every four years, it's not a good idea to ignore that either.

I hope this helps you understand those of us who don't really like Biden but will vote for him regardless.

If I had to guess, he'd try to find a business selling enterprise supported distributions of Linux, buy them, then try to expand/convert them to develop "consumer Linux". He'd advertise it as getting out from under the thumb of evil corps (ie his competitors), then as soon as it gains even a modicum of traction start implementing privacy violating shit, ads, whatever, to enshittify it as quickly as possible for a quick buck.

Cash has an identifier on it, but unlike a check that identifier doesn't identify you.

Yeah, but tax can always be figured into the presented price of things if businesses are required to do so.

That's pretty much the point of this type of legislation. Of course you need legislators who, y'know, vote to legislate in this way.

That's what I was thinking. Wasn't that the point?

What does a protest non-vote accomplish? There's moral satisfaction, of course, but that doesn't stop the genocide. If the goal of the protest non-vote is to ensure Biden loses to teach the Dems a lesson, and it works, Trump becomes president. That's almost certainly just a continuation of the genocide PLUS all the harm Project 2025 promises to deliver. MAYBE the Dems put up a more progressive candidate next time, but surely we could try to get that power between election cycles?

I guess I just don't think protest non-votes will accomplish any of the goals of that protest, but they will allow Trump to live his best fascist dictator life.

I dunno, is there something I'm missing from your strategic calculus here?

I left mumble, teamspeak, and Skype for Discord.

Discord is easily the better options among those choices.

I also can't think of much use for being in more than one call at once. I dunno seems like you're just looking for a different thing. And that's okay.

Unfortunately student loans are one of the few types of loans you cannot default on or get relief through bankruptcy. From what I understand, anyway.

It doesn't, but that isn't their point. They're simply pointing out that existing net neutrality laws in the US usually only apply to ISPs and telcos, not internet businesses.

Enshittification, also called chokepoint capitalism, is a term coined by Corey Doctorow (sp?) that lays out a common pattern with platforms in a capitalist system where:

1. Platform builds a product to entice users to it for little to no cost to the user (Google search, Facebook, Amazon shopping, etc)
2. Once users are locked in, make the experience worse in ways that increase profits for business partners (Google ads partners, etc)
3. Once business partners are locked in, screw them over to rake back as many profits for the platform owner.

I think their point is that the pilgrims set the cultural precedents for what would later become America, to which later immigrants would be beholden.

I don't know how true that is, but I think "protestant work ethic" is at least one example of that sort of thing.