Queer✨Anarchist Anti-fascist

  • 15 Posts
  • 93 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: November 14th, 2023

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  • To me, the only reason why you would want to mandate voting is if you want to increase civic participation (or, more cynically, you are a political party who has done some research and you have realized that such a law benefits you more than the opponent). I think a law like this would not make people engage, but make it look like they are engaged. Because of this, I think it is pointless, and if it is punitive, then it fails to accomplish what it sets out to do and just punishes people for no reason.

    I don’t like superficial policy. I want policy to actually attempt to fix problems rather than try and mask them. This doesn’t fix issues like people being unable to vote due to work, or people feeling abandoned by politicians and not wanting to give them a modicum of support, or people just feeling crushed by the system itself and seeing no point in it all. This doesn’t even attempt to look at root causes.

    This doesn’t address the inability for many people to run for office, be it because they can’t afford the money needed to get started, or because they can’t afford to live off the politician paycheck for one reason or another, much less afford to take time off work to campaign.

    I also think that not voting is fundamentally a vote. Sometimes the two choices are just so abhorrent that you can’t bring yourself to vote, and is that not a valid political stance? Is it not an intentional political choice? Isn’t that what voting is in the first place?

    Sure, you could have a system that lets you vote “nobody”, but if that’s allowed, then why are you mandating voting anyways? This subverts the point of that law, and it means the effective use of the law is to punish people who vote for no one in the wrong way. What is the benefit of a blank ballot or a “nobody” ballot over no ballot?





  • I work in Cybersecurity.

    I wish I got a pay bonus for late shifts…

    Since I work remote, the best bit about the late shifts (and weekend shifts) is I can just pop in wireless headphones, turn on an alarm for new alerts and just do chores until I get a phone call or an alert or two show up.

    Or, if I have completed all my tasks and it is an exceptionally slow (or over-manned) weekend, i can read a book or play a game I can easily pick up and put down.

    It almost makes up for the long day shifts that are non-stop work and occasionally chaotic





  • I love their fake wood.

    I was traveling sometime around 10 years ago when I waltzed into a music shop and looked around. I saw some neat instruments, and I remember seeing an upright bass that looked just a bit off.

    Turns out it was made out of Aluminum and it was made towards the end of WWII to put on ships as a set of big band instruments to entertain sailors. The wood pattern was pretty slick, though just a bit off from what I’d expect.





  • Thats great! I was raised christian, and in my younger years I remember doing stuff like that all the time, but by the time I left christianity and went to college, that volunteer group fell apart, and I don’t believe my old church does that stuff anymore.

    The city near me has some churches that let people use their land for community fridges and stuff, but that’s about as far as most christians go near me. That same city does have a radical pacifist christian group that I might reach out to if I start a FNB there, since they organize a ton of pro-Palestine protests.

    It’s just I’ve been in christian areas where the people genuinely don’t give a fuck about their neighbors (looking at you, midwestern us), and it’s weird to me that they claim to love jesus but do not engage with his teachings in their life, and only use the hierarchy established by religion for political reasons. Instead, I turned to non-christians for mutual aid


  • I find it real funny that a food not bombs I used to volunteer at a few years back had no christians in it. Just atheists, pagans, muslims, and jews.

    Like, the people who worship Jesus, a person who would love the idea of people making food for the needy, did not participate.

    I mean, I might have seen some radical catholics show up if I was living in an area with more catholics, but that wasn’t the case. For whatever reason the only radical (left wing/anti-war) christians I’ve ever met have been deeply catholic.



  • A few of these feel like they were said about conservatives but holy shit did you hit the nail on the head with property damage and corpo rep.

    Like “you have to accept the election result” is a liberal thing to say, but the “no matter the cost” bit is something a conservative would say when their dickbag is winning. Things like “protesters are just mad they lost the election” or “Antifa are the real fascists” or “Police repression is A-ok” are all things I’d more much more likely hear from a conservative than a liberal.

    Notably, it is missing the separation of protestors into “good protestors” and “bad protestors,” which is what I associate with liberals talking about protestors. Most liberals feel bad watching a young kid getting brutalized by the cops, but if they can abjectify them by separating them into good and bad protestor dichotomy, thats how they can say police repression is A-ok.

    Honestly, you should just draw parallels between the liberal response to the pro-palestine encampments, since they responded similarly

    • “those people are probably outside agitators, they knew what they were getting into, and therefore the police action was justified”
    • “those antifa kids are the bad protestors ruining our peaceful protests!”
    • “<parroting police report uncritically>”

    Also, the protests here were pretty violent in some cities and at at some points, but in practically every case the violence began with the police, as you’d probably expect if you paid attention to history.

    The nonviolent ones were only nonviolent if you ignored the police response to them, though a few token peaceful marches with minimal police presence happened here and there.

    And for full disclosure, I don’t consider property damage violent unless it was done solely for the purposes of threatening someone. Smashing a cop car up isn’t violent, but breaking a window and spraying hateful graffiti is violent.