millie

I've had pretty decent luck with Notesnook. I wish they'd give it the capability to open multiple windows, but at least it hasn't lost me any writing like Notion and Obsidian did.

I literally mean political manipulation. Fully bad faith attempts to derail the Democratic party via arguments that the person in question doesn't actually believe. Again, this may not be that, but I think it's a mistake to pretend that Beehaw is somehow immune to this technique that the right is demonstrably using on other platforms.

We are in a notably leftist, anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian space with users who clearly speak their minds and bring the conversations had here into bigger spaces. It is ripe for being targeted by bad actors.

The Silent Hill series was pretty great. Also, the original Mario Bros movie.

Oh, and Advent Children!

To be fair, Beehaw has been clearly inundated with bad faith arguments about the election for weeks. Let's not pretend it hasn't. This may not be that, but it's not appropriate to scold users for calling out dead obvious political manipulation.

Okay, so if we take it as a given that Trump's supporters are largely, even mostly racists, how does that allow us to 'start moving forward'?

I'm honestly less and less sure that pointing fingers, even for good reason, is politically useful at all. To those who are already convinced, it seems heroic, sure. But for those who aren't? All it does is put them on the defensive and entrench their position.

I'm not saying we shouldn't call out racism when we see it, because we should. The left needs to call out injustice, because the right isn't about to do it. But like, that can't be the entirety of our political strategy. It doesn't work. It makes us look preachy and more importantly it puts the impetus for us getting our goals accomplished on racists.

When we're focusing all our political energy on decrying the wrongness of the right, our visible political identity becomes just that: criticism. That's not what wins elections. If anything, it signals to the racists on the right that this is a rallying point for them, and it gives them the opportunity to turn to others who tend to lean Republican and say, "See what monsters they think you are? We know what you're really like."

If we want to win the election, we need positive energy. We need to motivate our own base, and we need to give people on the fringes of our ideologies something that draws them in rather than something that makes them feel defensive. That doesn't mean we can't also call out injustice, but we have to do it with empowering language, not with language that shifts power to those we see as an obstacle.

This is why the Obama campaign's "Yes We Can" slogan was so effective. It allowed Obama to have a platform for addressing the obstacles he wanted to direct attention at, but it did it in a way that highlighted Democratic agency rather than simply saying "this is wrong". Each time one of these problems was touched on, he could again touch back on the positive energy of "Yes We Can" and it energized crowds and voters rather than making them feel bored and doomed.

"Or We're Fucked" isn't a very good campaign slogan, as we've seen with Biden. Harris has a chance to move away from that, and seems to be doing so. You can already feel the power shifting, because her campaign uses her personal confidence and magnetism to show voters that she can handle it. Yes, we have problems, but they're not going to crack her armor and make her stop expressing joy. Yes, the right is sinister, but we don't have to obsess over it. We can call them weird and move on with our actual work, while building confidence that we have the ability to get it done.

Dress for the job that you want.

If you want to get something done, you're a lot better off if you know that you can do it. We need to know that the injustices of the right are just some ill-tempered old fogies spouting off about a time that's passed as they slowly fade away. We need to know that their weirdness is ultimately going to lose.

Their threat is real, to be sure, but if we focus on the threat and give it power, we give ourselves nothing. We need to build that power inward, and for that we need energy that focuses on our own confidence in our ability to get things done.

Harris and Walz seem to know this, which is a great sign. Once they're in, we can put their feet to the fire on taking care of this stuff, but just pointing at the Republicans and identifying the reasons they're a large ideologically motivated threat just makes the optics seem more and more hopeless for us and more and more like the wild thrashing of a dying prey animal to the right.

If we focus on our goals regardless of any crazy bullshit they run up their flagpoles, we get to pick the focus. If we let ourselves be led about with patter and distracting hand-waving, we may well miss the plot.

Are a lot of Republicans racist? Obviously. Is laser focusing on it to the point of in-fighting going to give us the ability to render their racism irrelevant to public policy? I'm skeptical.

I kinda loved Miracle Girls when I was a teenager. In retrospect, I think it was mostly because identifying with the characters gave me gender euphoria. I don't remember a ton about the details, but it was fun and sort of slice-of-life wholesome. That was in the early 00s so there may be some shockingly outdated stuff in there that I just glossed over and don't remember, but I feel like that's probably just my reluctance to recommend anything 30 years old uncritically!

Too much hand wringing. We do better when we're not tiptoeing around our own words and actions terrified to sneeze.

Yeah, it very much depends on the person. I find that just my voice isn't as helpful as my voice and visible body and face, but only if I'm in a space where I feel confident and self-actualized.

A biiiig part of that though may be that I'm trans and my voice is the least passing part of me. Also my voice and text don't have dimples.

Agreed. The people on the internet are real, living their lives out somewhere else in the world. They are just as important as anyone else. I've had times in my life where I've socialized extensively offline and times where I've socialized extensively online. I don't see a fundamental difference to the relationships I make. The people I've become close with who I exclusively talk to online and haven't shared physical proximity with are some of the most important people in my life.

I do think it can sometimes be harder to build an initial rapport online. The lack of body language can make it tricky to convey meaning sometimes in the same way you would offline, and you don't get these other cues that tell you about what a person is thinking. That said, though, sometimes face-to-face interactions introduce a lot of noise that isn't necessarily helpful either. The body language of anxiety, to me, isn't typically super usefully communicative, and it can often become a component to offline interactions.

Also, like, some video games do have pretty compelling body language. DayZ, in particular, is incredibly good at being emotive. It does a great job of translating tiny movements that convey a lot of personality. Everything from moving your head around to different ways of gesticulating while talking and even the way people walk can have a huge impact on communication. A lot of the time I can spot my friends, even in totally different outfits, just based on the way they move around in-game. It kind of reminds me of the 'body language' of vehicles on the road, but with much greater articulation.

Personally, for me, I find a lot of comfort in online spaces and in the relationships I've developed with people I've become close to through those spaces. As someone who isn't always super comfortable with eyeballs on me, and as someone who mostly grew up in a place where people were pretty fucking hostile, I think it's enriched my life substantially.

Also, like, I get to have relationships with people all over the world. I feel like it gives some perspective that it's tough to have otherwise without extensive travel.

Honestly, my reading of Marxist theory makes me look to the inverse of this. The uprising Marx and Engels talk about is a reaction to the injustice and instability of capitalism. As resources are consolidated, as capitalists become more entrenched, the forces that create a change increase. More people see it for what it is until eventually we reach a critical mass spontaneously.

Authoritarian communism doesn't work because it's trying to jump the gun. It comes from people seeing changes down the road, but they're not changes that they can force to come too early. The fruit of the proletariat ownership of the means of production and the withering of the state literally isn't ripe yet.

Ironically, it's acts of suppression that ripen that fruit. From active attempts to keep it from ripening to socially destructive capitalist practices like elevating C-levels and chasing quarterly profits.

An authoritarian imposition, to my reading, not only won't work, but slows down the process by essentially letting off steam as well as creating a negative association between communist social structuring and authoritarianism.

At least reform has positive results in the short term, potentially building greater association between distributed resources and greater social benefit at large. But even then, it may literally be the reverse that brings us closer to the end state of universal proletariat throwing off of chains and the eventually withering of the state.

Next they'll call hiding in the woods ecoterrorism.

Presumably this will mostly affect Republicans. Nice own goal, Elon!