I don’t dismiss people for using malicious software products. I just struggle to understand how they can have their eyes so open about so many things but refuse to look at this particular issue.

My local PSL announces all their events exclusively on Instagram. I brought this up at one of their meetings and they were baffled. “But where else would we make announcements?”

Maddening

If you have a Soho router already and its compatible with openwrt, use that. Otherwise, build a cheap x86 PC with 2 or more nic ports and use OPNsense. pfSense is probably not a great option anymore for reasons already outlined in other comments.

These are young anticapitalist, chronically online queers I’m talking about too.

Right! They already are familiar with being on the fringes of “normal” society, and have a lot more to gain than a “normie” from protecting their privacy, and yet they just can’t be bothered because “Matrix is too clunky” or “I just really like playing Overwatch”. My eyes can’t roll hard enough.

Absolutely. And I don’t think it’s just an issue of individual choice. The market for most goods is flooded with cheap shit that is designed to break after a year or two, and that has driven up the cost of built-to-last goods, if they’re even available at all. It’s also killed the market for most used goods, even durable ones.

The problem, as always, is capitalism and capitalists, prioritizing “growth” (endlessly increasing profits quarter after quarter) instead of anything that would actually benefit society as a whole.

I don’t have anything more than life experience and anecdote to base this on, but I think the reason it feels that way is sooooo many more leftists refuse to vote than reactionaries.

BTW, thank you for having a discussion with me and not just a pissing match. I appreciate that.

Ty!

And yeah, I understand how I could have been misconstrued as advocating “blue-no-matter-who”. So to be absolutely clear: fuck Harris, Biden, Obama, both Clintons, and all the other neoliberal asshats who helped suppress actual progressives from having power within the Dem party and in The US more broadly.

Larger convo was about voting generally, not about the federal elections.

And my point was that voting can make an impact. To expand on that point, the impact is cumulative. If this year a bunch of leftists who normally didn’t vote decide to vote, we’ll get better local governments across the country. In the next cycle, the Overton Window will have shifted left and more elections, perhaps at the state or even congressional level will result in candidates who aren’t completely beholden to the bourgeoisie . The cycle after that, maybe we get a 3rd party candidate winning the electoral votes for a state. Or maybe enough states have shifted to the left that we get a critical mass on the National Popular Vote Pact and functionally do away with the electoral college.

It’s clear I’m not talking about you, since you actually vote. But I know for a fact that among the American left the idea of voting at all is considered cringe. And I believe these people are at best misguided and at worst finding a righteous-sounding excuse for not wanting to bother.

Also, my city is more like half a million than 14 thousand. And it’s got soooooooo many leftists. We would easily be the biggest voting block in the city if more of us actually bothered, because most of the rest of the population doesn’t.

Finally, this:

national is horseshit and voting there does “legitimize” the exploitation and capitalist system we’ll never vote our way out of

is nonsense. Not voting doesn’t register nationally as opposition or disapproval or dissatisfaction. It registers as apathy, and apathy legitimizes the status quo. If you want to make a statement in a national election, vote 3rd party. Write in a candidate. Do anything other than not vote.

Additional points that were irrelevant, because they didn’t counter any of my actual beliefs.

And as to your question… what I usually hear from the leftists in my town is that any participation in the electoral process makes you a sellout liberal NPC genocide supporter. Or it’s “validating the current system” or some other such nonsense.

The simple fact is that local elections in my city are usually won by a few hundred to few thousand votes. Voter turnout is extremely low, even by American standards, there is almost always an actual progressive (and often even socialists) on the ballot, and they almost always come in second place. If even half of the leftist nonvoters came out and voted, these people would win, and even the soulless corporate shills competing against them would have to shift to the left to stay relevant.

It wouldn’t be THE fix to ALL our problems, but it would fucking help a lot of desperate people.

You made so many incorrect assumptions in your reply I don’t even know where to start.

I never said to vote for corporate Dems, let alone stan for them.

I never said not to vote 3rd party. I do it all the time.

I never said that if leftists voted just in the 2024 presidential race that all would be fixed.

And you seem to have forgotten that we get to vote for more than just president.

If leftists voted en masse, my city would have a a very different local government from the one it has today - one that would create a base of power and solidarity to bring change to higher levels of government, and one that would actually take measure to protect us from federal goons.

So maybe engage with my actual point instead of the baseless image of me that you have in your head.

I’m sure they will. We shouldn’t vote for them. And if more leftists voted, they wouldn’t win as often.

I do it when I can, yes.

I never said anything about voting for Democrats. You made a lot of assumptions just to come here and argue with me.

And there are no thoughtful reasons not to vote. Just excuses that try to launder laziness into righteousness.

I don’t know what argument you’re responding to. Talk about projection.

Anyway, you probably just saw my username and assumed I’m “one of them”. So let me say this real clear for all the bigots on Lemmy: we don’t get to decide where we are born, and we are not inherently responsible for the actions of our governments. Get it through your thick dumb skulls.

If leftists didn’t refuse to vote “on principle” we would be in a much better situation.

Americans could afford to spend more on goods that are actually durable. And those who couldn’t would buy used items that actually are worthwhile because they were built to last.

Well to me that’s not being a tankie - it’s just being willing to deal in nuance. But I was responding to your comment, in which you seemed to conflate criticising China with supporting US unipolarity. If that’s not what you meant then we have no disagreement.

It is possible to oppose unipolarity and criticize China at the same time.

Its really my thing