LukeZaz Now • 100%
Much as I plan to hold my nose and vote for Harris, I can't help but feel simultaneously bemused and saddened how every time you talk about her actually trying to earn your vote, you receive comment after comment tearing you down as though her terrible policy is fine and that only YOU can stop Trump. As though Harris herself were powerless to change her own platform to appeal more.
Party loyalty is so strong these days entirely too many people forget that candidates have agency. They'd rather shame people or call them bots than consider if it might be more effective for the candidate to actually listen to their own constituency.
LukeZaz Now • 100%
I’ve always trusted games published by Annapurna to be something exciting, new, and high quality.
That didn't make them good either, though. Companies like them and Devolver Digital have had a bad habit of, for lack of a better term, using up developers and throwing them to the curb after. You'll notice that a lot of stuff they publish get marketed as though Annapurna made them, which ends up hiding the actual developers behind the curtain, thereby robbing them of fans and thus seriously hurting their long-term prospects.
LukeZaz Now • 100%
I'm assuming that "The Not So Tolerant Left" is a parody account of conservatives? Because if not this meme just looks like genuine right-wing garbage.
LukeZaz Now • 100%
You're coming out here arguing in favor of a megacorporation keeping even more money for itself instead of artists getting paid for their work. I feel like you should have expected to have upset people.
LukeZaz Now • 100%
I think the real answer isn’t DIY pharmaceuticals, but rather universal healthcare, informed consent, and a medical system (both physicians and pharmaceutical manufacturers) that puts patient care above any kind of profit motive
I think just about everyone here agrees. But the question is what to do until that becomes available. We need something in the interim; dangerous as this all is, I can't find it in me to shun it when the alternative is letting people suffer without access to anything as they desperately wait for a better society to emerge in some unknowable, possibly distant future.
LukeZaz Now • 100%
Did you read my comment? Here, I'll help you.
I do not want anyone to vote for Trump, vote third party, or abstain. What I want is for them to understand that voting is the minimum they can do, and that they can and should protest the current and future admin’s policies regarding Israel until they stop enabling genocide, regardless of the color of the tie they wear.
Read that paragraph, then try again. Maybe with less antagonism, yeah?
LukeZaz Now • 100%
You can absolutely pressure Harris, though. Join a protest.
LukeZaz Now • 100%
Trust me, I'm well aware of literally everything you've just said. I get told it on almost every comment I make here, and every time people make the same two big mistakes:
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Limiting their thinking to votes.
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Refusing to push Democrats left, because they're scared it might hurt Harris' election chances.[^1]
I am pushing against #2 in this thread first and foremost, and getting #1 out of your response as a result. Please, understand that I know that Democrats are better than Trump. Everybody knows that, and if you think I want people to vote against Harris you are misunderstanding me entirely.
I do not want anyone to vote for Trump, vote third party, or abstain. What I want is for them to understand that voting is the minimum they can do, and that they can and should protest the current and future admin's policies regarding Israel until they stop enabling genocide, regardless of the color of the tie they wear.
If we let Democrats scare us with Trump or someone like him every year, nothing will change.
[^1]: Worse yet, some folks actively put down people who do try to push the Dems left for this very reason, which is outright counterproductive.
LukeZaz Now • 100%
They'll get better at managing bugs. What we'll have to watch out for is other shit.
In particular, I'm not keen on the main menu ad for the DLC they slapped on, which stays even if you own the DLC.
LukeZaz Now • 100%
And why's that on us? Why is it our job to toe a party line when said line means killing people en masse?
It's supposed to be their job to represent us, not our job to kiss their asses. Stop letting the DNC use Trump as an excuse to do whatever they want; if they want to be more electable, maybe it's on them to adopt a better platform.
LukeZaz Now • 100%
Why is someone's reluctance to vote for your preferred candidate more upsetting to you than said candidate's choice to platform genocide?
LukeZaz Now • 100%
If you're so worried about Trump being elected, maybe you should push for Harris to adopt better policy so people are more comfortable voting for her, rather than shaming people for not wanting to vote for the lesser of two genocides.
[Archive.](https://archive.is/vaI0O) Noting that the title of the article is not terribly good, as the funds in question have already been appropriated for the purpose of the wall and are not new, and are in fact part of a "compromise" bill that also includes funding for asylum lawyers. Not that I want a compromise bill, or don't think she shouldn't push for better, but it's hardly big news. That said, the real problem lies at the end: > **Zoom in:** Beyond embracing the bipartisan bill, Harris' campaign has portrayed her as an immigration hardliner in ads. > * [One Harris TV ad frames her time as California's attorney general as that of a "border state prosecutor,"](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2F9qGxTKcU) and includes images of the border wall. > * In another, [Harris' team highlights her support of boosting the number of Border Patrol agents.](https://x.com/KamalaHQ/status/1818414386362409091) > * Most of Trump campaign ads have attacked Harris for the Biden administration's struggle to deal with waves of migrants crossing the border. > > **The bottom line:** Like the wall itself, Harris' changes on border policy reflect how Trump has shifted the political debate on immigration during the past decade. I am getting very, very sick of the trend of Democrats spending more time trying to appeal to bigoted conservatives than trying to actually represent their own constituents or help the people they ostensibly care about.
LukeZaz Now • 100%
I really don't think these are the same group of people. From the article:
The strike was ignored in some areas, reflecting deep political divisions in Israel after nearly 11 months of fighting.
Those are the people you're thinking of, and they aren't striking.
LukeZaz Now • 100%
Organization (protests, unions, joining a local political movement), education (yourself or others), pressuring candidates (call your reps, protests), mutual aid & voter enfranchisement (food banks, clothing donations, volunteering at polling stations, any effort to protect the homeless). All of these are options, and this is just what I can think of off the top of my head. If you'd like, here's a page with a gallery of 346 nonviolent protest tactics.
Much of America has become trained to think only in terms of a vote – a vote in a system that was deliberately unequal from its founding through to today – to the exclusion of all other action. To say this is suffocating to any effort to enact change is an understatement; it is self-defeating in the extreme, serves only to perpetuate the status quo or worse, and yet time and time again I see so many people who have spent next to no time thinking outside these terms.
LukeZaz Now • 100%
Monopolies depend on the government to exist.
I very much disagree but respect a desire to not get into a debate, so I'll leave it there.
I really don’t know what that means
"Your freedom ends at my face" is a saying used often here to contend with right-wing group's insistence on "freedom," often the kind that involves harming others; e.g. free speech absolutism and the "freedom" to spout neo-Nazi rhetoric that advocates for the murder of minorities, or the "freedom" to not get vaccinated and thus worsen a pandemic. A more full version might be "Your freedom to throw a punch ends where my face begins." The idea is that it is fair to restrict a freedom if it supports the freedom of others — you might not trust governments to determine where those lines lie, and that's fair, but that's a separate issue.
LukeZaz Now • 100%
I don't know if libertarianism courts a different audience in Brazil, but in the U.S. it has a very rabidly right-wing audience who effectively want to tear down as much government as possible, and who view "your freedom ends at my face" as an insult. It's the ideology of an extraordinarily unregulated market – a true "free market" – which is a monopolistic and wildly unethical disaster waiting to happen.
Anarcho-capitalism, which your username references, is all of that, only more. So you might understand why effectively everyone here is going to treat that with extreme suspicion.
LukeZaz Now • 100%
Why do you think voting is your only option?
LukeZaz Now • 100%
It goes to show how I can say something so patently and obviously untrue and sarcastic and yet it still doesn't register as such. America has developed such a hyper-focus on voting to the exclusion of all other possibilities that it's basically learned helplessness at this point.
LukeZaz Now • 100%
How would abstaining or voting for Trump help the situation in Gaza at all?
Why do you think these are the only options?
LukeZaz Now • 100%
As we all know, politics is a dichotomy!