I voted for Harris, but I feel like it’s pretty obvious why someone would vote third party instead.

One need only reject the premise that voting should be a strategic act of harm reduction. Mind you, I’m not saying “is” here. I’m saying “should be”.

We may not take their approach, but you have to admit that there’s value to it. They are embracing the world as it ought to be, whereas we are trying to work with the reality of the situation as we perceive it.

And we could be perceiving incorrectly. For all we know, Trump could loose-cannon his way into making Netanyahu’s whole party lose their next election. It may not be likely, but nothing in this world is certain.

For all we know, the Heritage Foundation could destroy so much of the government and economy so rapidly that it weakens all of the property rights and FBI operations aimed against self-sufficient mutual aid, and communes start springing up all over the place. It’s not likely without massive turmoil, starvation, and bloodshed. But however unlikely, we cannot predict the future!

Cyncism is costly in terms of mental health and well-being. In order to choose pragmatism over principles, we must accept a reality where no good choices exist. But that’s not something we can do everywhere. We can’t repeatedly choose the “least miserable option” and still be able to hold ourselves together and function. It’s just not possible.

Humans need hope to survive. They need a hill they can hang onto. They need to be able to say, “on this ground, I fight for what should be rather than what is.”

Some people’s hill is their ballot.

There is some quote about how free speech and military parades are, by necessity, inversely correlated.

Whenever this video crosses my feed, I’m reminded of what little I remember of that quote.

I realized in a reddit argument a while back that one huge difference between Trump supporters and the rest of us is: Trump supporters expect less from Trump. Hold him to a lower standard than they hold themselves or non-supporters to.

In the argument, I had a supporter tell me that “raking the leaves” was advocating wildfire management – including controlled burns. And the person followed it up with remarks along the lines of, “you should have been smart enough to know that’s what he was saying.”

Which was crazy to me because:

• they were measuring my intelligence by my ability to come up with numerous unique rephrasings and potential meanings to Trump’s words
• they were scoring higher than Trump by their own intelligence metric
  • Trump could only come up with “raking the leaves” and the commenter came up with “as a country, we should be putting more resources into wildfire management”, a much more coherent and intelligent phrasing
• in expecting me to be able to read multiple meanings into “raking the leaves”, this person was ALSO expecting me to score higher on this measure of intelligence than Trump. And calling me stupid for not outscoring Trump.

Basically told me that if I wasn’t smarter than Trump, I was stupid.

I pointed this out to them and never got a response.

Anyways, different standards. According to Trump supporters:

• if you’re no smarter than Trump, you are an idiot;
• if you’re no kinder than Trump, you are sadistic and malicious;
• if you are no more effective than Trump, you are useless,
• But Trump is the smartest, kindest, most valuable person there is.

I, on the other hand, will start a sentence, – something like, “but regardless, what really gets overlooked is…” – and realize that from word 1, I didn’t even have the concept of a point.

I realize, in that moment, that I was ENTIRELY reciting tokens.

You think you gave a narrow group. But my point is that “narrow groups” get very broad very quickly when heads start rolling.

How did that go for the objectively non-bourgeoisie who got caught up in Stalin’s / Lenin’s / Mao’s anti-bourgeois campaigns?

Even Mao acknowledged innocent people got executed during his “counter-revolutionary” and land reform campaigns. And the number of prisoners Kruschev released from the Gulags would have been impossible if most of them were actually as harmful to Russia as they were accused of being.

Once the guillotines come out, everyone is calling everyone else bourgeois.

Having been on reddit too much the past few weeks, this is very refreshing.

These days, all the Reddit moderation is performed by Russian and Chinese troll farms and alt-right recruiters. And anything goes as long as it erodes faith in western, multicultural democracy.

So it’s nice to see someone say, “Democrats are puppets, BUT ALSO! Republicans are the threat we must currently fight.”

A pile of sentient filth crawls out of a sewer somewhere, and first thing conservatives want to do is make it into a State Senator.

How surprising.

From his Idaho GOP page: his number one priority is to remove rape and incest exceptions.

Issue 1 . The top issue for Idaho is to abolish the unnecessary, harmful and wasteful curse of abortion. I will introduce legislation that eliminates the current affirmative defense for having an abortion in accordance with state guidelines. The only exception to the prohibition on abortion is to save the life of the mother.

And then proceed to fill these echo chambers with [insert local conservative] has betrayed Trump and (by extension) the country!

I see the question differently.

Tl;Dr:

I think OP is hoping to read the 21st century equivalent to Muck Rakers.

Long version:

A whole lot of improvement in American quality of life came about as a result of publications and journalists called Muck Rakers in the 19th and 20th centuries.

They didn’t cover false stories. They simply covered stories that newspapers owned by capitalists tried to cover up. Things like, “physical abuse inside of Factory A” or, “employees at factory B reject union contract.”

It’s similar with r/antiwork. Most of America never realized why PopTarts were shipped with serious defects for a few months in late 2021. To most people, the quality declined out of nowhere, with no explanation.

And I don’t think most people realized the real reason California’s ports got congested. (It was a bill designed to protect gig workers – it required shipping companies to pay truck drivers for the time they spent waiting for their trucks to be loaded (instead of just the time they spent driving)).

People didn’t know because, even if current events directly impact everyone’s lives, all it takes is a few corporations deciding, “you don’t need to know about that” and access to the information through mainstream channels is shut off.

Everyone using r/antiwork knew though. They knew why there was a shipping crisis, and they knew why the glue that was supposed to seal the outside of the box of Cheez-its was now instead gluing the individual Cheez-its together.

News that wasn’t considered, “newsworthy” outside of r/antiwork got intense coverage on that subreddit.

And yeah, the subreddit was certainly biased against those corporations. But biased or not, its users were more up-to-date on those events than anyone outside of the sub.

I don’t think OP is asking for a leftist perspective on the same current events everyone else is covering. I think OP is asking for true, well-investigated stories that capitalists simply won’t air on the major networks.

You know: Muck raking.

I actually found that part clever. Things do actually get declared “woke” and then become popular enough that the grifters declare it unwoke.

Could it be the case that the folks who told you Marxists were the postmodern, post-truth folks… were about as convinced of that claim as they are of conservatives’ other claims?

She’s a character from a comedy movie I saw as a kid! Kung Pow: Enter the Fist

Ah, the same way Linux was able to thwart hackers for as long as it did.

Women are not good for the press in England under martial law…

… and the hacker was just posting spam on the receiving end from neurodivergent overexplaining.

That’s a lot of lightning symbols

Dragged, kicking and screaming, to unprecedented wealth.

What a strange world we live in.

I feel like if I ran a company, I would have folded my hand after Kellogg’s and the Big Three automakers lost their respective labor disputes.

“Oh, these are your demands? Done. Better than selling my customers the media equivalent to glue-frosted pop tarts for the next two months because I can’t admit I need my own workers.”

I know there wouldn’t be any billionaires if people thought that way. It just seems so much more sane and well adjusted.

You’re welcome. I’m glad I was able to help.

A lot of people are offering explanations, but I think I’m going to give one too.

Think of recoil in a gun. If you don’t have a mental image of it, watch a few youtube videos of people firing handguns. Look for videos of big, high-recoil handguns, like the Desert Eagle or the Magnum (or the Super Ruger Redhawk according to chat-GPT).

You need to get a good look at handguns pushed backwards as they are fired.

Now think about this: those bullets aren’t pushing against an atmosphere. They are pushing only against the inside of a gun.

But when this tiny, tiny bullet pushes super-fast against the gun, using the gun to accelerate to incredibly high speeds very quickly… it pushes the gun really hard in the other direction.

Get that mental image into your head. Small object can push large object with a lot of force by kicking off of large object with insane speed.

Now: Take away the person holding the gun. Take away the planet. Take away the atmosphere. Put that gun in space and pull the trigger again. (Just make sure to use a gun that has modern ammunition that doesn’t require oxygen to fire).

What happens to all that recoil? What does the recoil do to the gun now? The bullet still goes flying out of the chamber. Still does this by pushing against the gun.

Hopefully it should now be easy to imagine that the gun will start moving.

Rocket fuel is basically a tank full of bullets.

The main function of rocket fuel is “heavy stuff that is shoved out of the spaceship to make it move.”

The reason we use highly explosive fuel is because “shoving heavy stuff away from you at the speed of a bullet” is going to move you more than “shoving heavy stuff away from you at normal speed.”

Does this make any sense?