All of those are center-right policies, tinkering with the mechanics of a fundamentally neo-liberal system, when that system is slowly crushing us (57% of Americans living hand-to-mouth). Imagine why voters aren’t fired up to come out and support a boost to, say, semiconductor research spending to strengthen U.S. supply chain resilience.
That’s not even remotely the same vein of thinking, even though both Ernst and I used the word “die.”
Biden did very, very few “left” things. His policies were center-right. (For example, when the railroad workers threatened the economy with a strike, the left-wing response would be to temporarily nationalize the rails; the right-wing response would be to protect the railroad companies and remove the workers’ ability to strike.) Progressives showed up to vote for Harris, anyway, as the numbers show. The mythical “centrists” did not.
If “harm” and “less harm” are the only two options, then the only question is how quickly you die. There’s the argument that we have to do “harm reduction” in order to buy time to organize for something better, but we’ve been procrastinating for decades apparently. Since all of history informs us that humans act only when inaction is no longer tenable (and sometimes not even then), really the only material difference between “harm reduction” and accelerationism is, again, the timeline.
The Harris campaign tried to appeal to the centrists, and look how that turned out.
I appreciate the gamer aesthetic when scientists need to buy gear with the power to run scientific calculations for relatively cheap. The RGB lights under the case windows bring a bit of pizzazz to the laboratory.
What happened to his nose in the last panels?
TIL
That sounds right in line with the techbro mantra, “move fast and break things.” The results are a little different when applied to physical systems, rather than software, though.
That’s why electroconvulsive therapy uses pulses of about a millisecond. But, then, it’s not actually turning the power off, ECT is more of a warm reset of consciousness.
Huh. If traffic is more likely to kill me than violent crime, it’s a dishonest emotional reaction to fear traffic more than violent crime?
Yes, if your city has more homicides than traffic deaths, the bigger problem is—drum roll please—homicides.
But if your city has more traffic deaths than homicides, then traffic is a bigger problem than homicides. Which is the whole point of this post.
Unironically fascinated to learn that there’s a difference between pigments and dyes!
FDR said, “I welcome their hatred.” Look at how today’s Democratic establishment wring their hands over the Republican reaction to a democratic socialist winning a primary.
The big political news stories about the overt fascists taking over the United States rightly get all the attention, but stories like this indicate that American culture is rotten all the way down.
I mean… good? Why would we want a politician that’s acceptable to him?
The Democratic primary was RCV. The general election will be FPTP.
The fact that the Democratic Party cares more about internal politics than the good of the country is part of why we’re in the situation we’re in now.
Yes, mathematicians first encountered equations which could only be solved with complex numbers in the 16th century.
I’m having trouble believing that this is a good-faith comment, as the strawman bears so little resemblance to what I wrote. The vein of thinking is that reduced-harm is still harm—maybe Harm Lite—and that we can only sustain any level of harm for so long before it’s fatal. Without the metaphor: The harm-reduction argument of “vote blue no matter who” is utterly stupid, because it only works if “blue” wins every election forevermore. That’s highly unrealistic. The fascists were never just going to go away; they took over one of the only two viable political parties and were going to win an election sooner or later because U.S. elections routinely swing back and forth between the only two viable political parties.
Furthermore, the accelerationist concept is to shock the people into action with the contrast of how bad things got so quickly, while the harm-reduction concept seems to entail letting some people non-figuratively die along the way, as Sen. Ernst applauds, as long as it’s fewer people than it could have been. (No, I don’t think that the harm-reduction proponents want that, I’m just observing what appears to be the real-world implementation.) Personally, I have hoped against hope that we could change course, and fix the only-two-viable-political-parties problem before things got bad, before any metaphorical or non-figurative dying.