This thread somehow brought out some of the most misinformed, boomer-brain takes imaginable and comes dangerously close to anti-intellectualism. We can all agree that labels can be reductive and unhelpful, but as someone with a neurological disability, seeing people debate whether a disorder that makes it incredibly hard to enjoy my life is even real or not is fucking horrible.

The problem is, a lot of liberals think that criticising democrats for being pro-genocide is “fucked-up shit”. Like, refusing to support a genocidal politician is worse than actually supporting a genocide to some people.

Protest and elect. Emphasis on protest.

1. Get as involved as you can with activist efforts locally.
2. Organize, network, focus on building solidarity.
3. Vote at primaries for the most progressive candidate.
4. Don’t punch down
5. Don’t punch left.

Especially the MIT license lends itself super well to exploitation by big tech. I just don’t get why it’s become all the rage in the open source space the past couple decades.

There’s a few reasons I think, some cool new things have big corporate sponsorships to get them off the ground and those sponsors would want a permissive license, MIT license has also long been linked to BSD so BSD fanboys like it, and also the open source community is pretty split between libertarians and leftists, MIT is generally popular with the libertarians, and GPL is generally popular with the leftists. Just in my personal experience!

Fraud would be counted under Larceny, which is a pretty broad category - robbery is larceny with violence, burglary is larceny with breaking and entering.

And yet, within the span of 3 comments, I’ve learned enough…

It’s easy to say “no, I oppose genocide, actually”, but you’re so blinded by pure obedience to the democratic party line that you put team sports before humanity. it’s genuinely really sad.

and a modicum of nuance is when you support a genocide, I’m assuming?

…so you don’t even know? Or what?

It’s fucking unbelievable to me the way you write about this, like supporting a genocide is like some little understandable human foible or something. Supporting a genocide makes you completely nonviable. Full stop. Nothing more needs to be said. You would vote for Hitler himself if he ran on a Dem ticket against Mussolini.

You can just read the rest of my comments for the answer to your questions, I’ve already explained it at least half a dozen times and I’m getting a bit tired of doing so.

boiled down their argument so you could understand

Man, just fuck off. This comment is so overwhelmingly smarmy.

America isn’t a democracy for a whole number of reasons and they’re not pedantic. I would explain it to you but you probably wouldn’t understand so I’ll just not fucking bother.

People in this thread really do sure love telling me what my point is and getting it completely wrong somehow despite my having written literally thousands of words explaining my point today.

My point is that there are only marginal differences between the Republicans and the Democrats, and that a stance of “Vote Blue, No Matter Who” is a completely ineffective measure of harm reduction in the long run, and actually makes things worse.

Also, what “multiple genocides” are you referring to? I have some ideas but I don’t want to jump to conclusions.

Kamala literally supported the genocide in Gaza, and Obama and Biden killed a shitload of kids. They really aren’t that different. The differences are primarily aesthetic and procedural.

Carter was a neoliberal who paved the path towards fascism that we are now walking on. He undermined FDR’s New Deal style policies, weakened labor unions and normalized austerity and pro-market, anti-regulatory reforms that his successor, Reagan, milked the shit out of. But, yes, he performatively put solar panels on the roof of the White House. You make my point for me.

Re-read my comment, concentrate, and try again

Ehhhh, it’s not really so clear cut, especially with non-GPL licensed open source software - corporations love unpaid labor

Technically, it could be copyright infringement, depending on the work, a fair use exemption might apply - for example a screenshot from a game would be less likely to be infringing compared to, say, a painting due to less of the copyrighted work being reproduced and the avatar not being a replacement for the original work (i.e. seeing the screenshot wouldn’t give you the same experience as playing the game)

In practice, I doubt very much anyone would ever actually even go so far as to send a cease and desist unless you were impersonating some brand or causing reputational damage.

Morally speaking, I think it’s absolutely fine! People have been using copyrighted works in their avatars and signatures (remember those?!) since dial-up was fast enough to cope with it. If someone asks you not to then you should respect that but otherwise I’d say go ahead!

I don’t see how I’m talking past you, I directly addressed the argument. The differences between the democrats and the republicans are mainly aesthetic and procedural. The whole “no war without a vote in congress” is a great example, they’re not mad that kids are being blown up, they’re mad that the proper procedure to blow up kids was not followed.

I’m not using sweeping generalizations and I’m not doing nothing. I’m encouraging people to get involved with activism and it’s people like you throwing a tantrum about that because I am daring to question your world view.

If you have an argument, then make it. I’m done with the meta-argument.

I broadly agree with you, but I think this kind of debate is actually very productive, I don’t see it as wasteful fighting at all, if I can convince a single person who would have otherwise just voted and take no other action to realize that just voting isn’t enough and to get involved with activism efforts, then all of my efforts in this thread will have been worthwhile. That’s what I’m here to do, building solidarity across the working class, and raising awareness of the issues with electoralism.

I’m pretty sure taxes, company profit and land rent are much bigger numbers by many orders of magnitude.

No doubt about that, and you’ll get no arguments from me against that.

This wage theft narrative normalises capitalism while quibbling over a relatively small amount.

Yeah, I can see your point. The reason I present it is because there are lots of narratives in the mainstream press about shoplifting, “organized retail crime”, and how we need to fund the police to detect/prevent/reduce crime, whereas unpaid overtime is pretty much expected, especially in blue collar jobs. It exposes the media and the prevailing mainstream narratives as being biased in favor of the ruling class.