bearboiblake

Is the powerful AI in the room with us right now?

Israel must be dissolved and de-nazified.

I don’t think people are saying you personally are a bot, but you’re falling for narratives pushed by bots.

People call me a bot quite a bit, sometimes a shill too, or a Russian troll. In reality, I'm a gay autistic over-educated furry from Scotland with hot takes firmly backed by strongly held values - that we should always work to minimize suffering and maximize happiness for ourselves and for all living things.

I am not falling for anyone's narratives. I arrive at all of my strongly held positions after a great deal of thought, consideration and evaluation. I am the person who speaks out against the popular narrative long before it becomes acceptable or even a matter of debate. I'm usually right years too early, sometimes decades. Maybe even centuries, on some topics, especially around youth liberation and anarchism. I have been an outspoken anti-zionist since 2010, for example.

I will never say that Trump winning was a good thing. It was a fucking tragedy. But if Kamala had won in 2024, she would have done nothing to prevent the material conditions which are responsible for the rise of fascism. Republicans, MAGA, and fascists would all see the continued failures of liberalism and the Democratic party to address massively growing inequality. They would become more and more reactionary, aggressive and extreme. What if, at that point, an intelligent, charismatic fascist leader appeared, and united that base? Someone who doesn't say the quiet part out loud, who did all the shit that Trump did, but was able to convince Americans that it was necessary, or even good?

absolutely zero harm has been prevented

The full outcome of Trump's premiership remains to be seen. Will the base of the Democratic party finally wake up and recognize that harm reduction narratives are a total and complete failure and demand more than the bare minimum from their electeds? Will an anti-zionist finally be elected in 2028? Or, dare I even dream it, an anti-imperialist? A socialist?

New York City got their first socialist muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, which one may argue was a leftist reaction to Trump.

We are also witnessing the collapse of the American Empire, massively accelerated by Trump.

We need to stop thinking in terms of harm reduction on an election-to-election basis, and start thinking in terms of the election after this one, at the very least. How can we use our vote not tactically, but strategically?

And remember, our vote is the weakest form of power we have. Our power comes from our connections and our labor.

Organize, protest and elect. Emphasis on organize and protest.

1. Get as involved as you can with activist efforts locally.
2. Organize, network, focus on building solidarity. Join or form a union. Join the IWW.
3. Vote at primaries and elections for the best candidate, even if you doubt they can win.
4. Don't punch down.
5. Don't punch left.
6. Educate yourself, politically.
7. Push for voting reform and for anything that breaks the two-party system

I've been warning people about what was coming as far back as 2010, when I was a teenager. I have been telling people that "vote blue no matter who" would lead here, and people just derided me, called me a troll, I have been told endlessly that I'm making a slippery slope argument.

When Bernie's would-be victory was transmuted into Hillary's defeat, that should have been a wake-up call for you. Your politicians are playing you like a fiddle. They would rather have fascism than even the mildest social democracy.

History has vindicated leftists, again and again and again and again. Liberals, centrists, democrats, they are either in denial, or they're fully onboard with fascism.

Please, for once, listen to us. You need to help us stop this shit. We can't just keep going on voting for the lesser evil forever.

Organize, protest and elect. Emphasis on organize and protest.

1. Get as involved as you can with activist efforts locally.
2. Organize, network, focus on building solidarity. Join or form a union. Join the IWW.
3. Vote at primaries and elections for the best candidate, even if you doubt they can win.
4. Don't punch down.
5. Don't punch left.
6. Educate yourself, politically.
7. Push for voting reform and for anything that breaks the two-party system.

what is the best way to get politicians who aren’t genocidal

I can tell you with great certainty that voting for genocidal politicians is the worst way of getting politicians who aren't genocidal.

My advice, as always, is to organize, protest, and elect, with a greater emphasis on organizing and protesting.

1. Get as involved as you can with activist efforts locally.
2. Organize, network, focus on building solidarity. Join or form a union. Join the IWW.
3. Vote at primaries and elections for the best candidate, even if you doubt they can win.
4. Don't punch down.
5. Don't punch left.
6. Educate yourself, politically.
7. Push for voting reform and for anything that breaks the two-party system.

Imagine there's an election with two candidates.

Both candidates have expressed that they will torture and kill you, specifically, r1veRRR.

One candidate will torture and kill you using environmentally friendly methods, the other will do so using fossil fuels.

Would you support the environmentalist candidate? Would you vote for them? Would you campaign for them?

People want to believe the Republicans are massively worse. They aren't. It's a 10-15% thing at most. Most mainstream Democrats still support Israel, and they support the war on Iran. Even JFK ordered terrorist attacks on Cuban civillians. Dems are just fascists wrapped in a rainbow flag. The base need to reckon with this and actually force the party to address it rather than just acting like it's not happening. Voting blue no matter who on the basis of harm reduction just enables it.

If every election is a decision between the lesser of two evils and both evils become more evil over time then harm isn't actually reduced in the long run. This is why harm reduction is a failing long term electoral strategy.

Or maybe we should demand politicians who aren't genocidal? I'm not a Russian bot, I just refuse to follow the same bullshit "vote blue no matter who" harm reduction narrative that just leads to infinitely more harm in the long run.

We (Europeans) have absolutely no moral high ground to stand on, we colonized half the world, America acting this way is just because they learned it from watching us. I doubt they'll be able to manage the decline of American empire with anywhere near the stability of the managed decline of the British empire, though...

At the end of the day, all states are shitty.

I don't think that's really fair to be honest, Mao is an entirely different breed from Stalin for example, and it seems to me from what I've read despite his flaws, he seemed to have the interests of the people at heart, and worked hard to strike a pragmatic balance between pure marxism as advocated by the 28 Bolsheviks and what would actually work best for the Chinese people.

A lot of the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution were because of how the Red Guards were given wayy too much latitude to crack down on "counter-revolutionary activity" which basically ended up as something a bit like the Purge, where people would take revenge over old grudges and pretend that they were doing so to fight for the revolution, and there was also a lot of anti-intellectual sentiment among the agrarian societies which formed the bulk of the revolution, which resulted in purges of academics, but Mao was incredibly popular among the working class and massively improved quality of life for an average Chinese person (e.g. farmers), at least until the Great Leap Forward.

When it comes to the Great Leap Forward, I think that's really more of a case of terrible mismanagement as a consequence of information-poor decision making, as a result of top-down management of resources, and likely forced industrialization of the Chinese society would have gone just as poorly, if not moreso, under the authority of the Kuomintang, for example, although the anti-intellectualism of the cultural revolution definitely didn't help

I think the lesson to take from this for leftists and revolutionaries is that violent crackdowns on counter-revolutionary activity should be the option of last resort, we should always guard against anti-intellectual sentiment, and that bottom-up organization of resources and management should be used rather than a top-down centrally managed economy.

Fun fact, the term "paper tiger" comes from the Chinese term zhǐlǎohǔ. The term was popularized by Mao Zedong, who used the term to describe the imperial powers.

Say what you want about the excesses of the cultural revolution, but Mao truly had some bangers. He also said that "women hold up half the sky", and that "it is right to rebel".

I'm sure if he saw a US president calling his own military alliance a paper tiger, he'd get a real kick out of it.