lengau @ lengau @midwest.social

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936

Joined

1 yr. ago

What have I avoided?

Well immediately above I asked:

Why are you encouraging people to do things that will make it more likely for fascists to win and destroy what little leftist organizing there is in America?

You have asserted that the actions you advocate won't do that, but when I explain how they do exactly that, you simply make the assertion again. When that fails, you attempt to equivocate. But when I point out that more genocide is more harmful than less genocide, you simply ignore my statements and make your assertions again.

That's not helpful. It might convince some people, but only in the same way that repeating a lie enough makes some people believe it.

Once again avoiding the question and making personal attacks instead.

Your words imply that you think I believe having Harris as president will fix things. I don't. What I do believe is it will slow the decline, hopefully enough for us to create ways to escape capitalism without having fascists commit more genocides than they already are. This is known as "harm reduction." It's a complex theory by which one takes actions to reduce the harm done with immediate actions when there's no immediate action that one can take to improve things. The ballot box in 2024 is not the time for a revolution, for said revolution would fail miserably, leaving us worse off. The ballot box in 2024 is the time for harm reduction.

In the above comment, we see the following:

• Repetition of the same debunked talking points
• Equivocation of the two major parties (which, as I've already mentioned, only helps the more evil of the two)
• "no u"

It really insults the intelligence of those reading to think that they won't see through this.

What I'm going to have to explain to them is why I voted "don't care" in 2016. That's a mistake I will forever have to live with. But if I can convince a few people not to make that same mistake, I will at least be able to reduce the harm I did.

Words have definitions. Harris, for everything I don't like about her, is a liberal. Not a fascist. Trump, on the other hand, is a fascist.

The choices here are simple: fascism (Trump), not-fascism (Harris), or "I really don't care, do u?"

Why are you encouraging people to do things that will make it more likely for fascists to win and destroy what little leftist organizing there is in America? The only rational conclusion is that you want fascism. But you keep avoiding that question. Is it because you're taking a page out of the alt-right playbook?

You can vote for fascism if that’s what you want, I reject it.

You're literally making the choice to put fascism in power. I'm trying to stop you from making the same mistake I made in 2016.

You're talking in circles and fundamentally missing the point that neither voting third-party nor not voting isn't going to make things better. It's only going to make things worse.

The ballot box is for harm reduction, and equivocating the level of evil of two candidates only ever helps the more evil option.

If you want to make your first actual point, feel free to do so. If you want to keep repeating the very talking points that got us the situation that allowed for this genocide in the first place, don't bother.

So many reasons.

Just one of these is the people who seem to think making the insignificant gesture of voting third-party as a "fuck you" to the Dems is a good idea, when all it does is increase the chance of Republicans winning.

This goes for the presidential race and for most tight senate/house races, too. The ballot box isn't where a coalition starts. A coalition starts by providing candidates who are actually likely to win.

That's a lot of text to say "Yes, I want the fascist to win."

Making things worse isn't going to accelerate the revolution. It's going to make things worse and kill the most vulnerable in our society - the ones who would most benefit from a revolution. If you truly want a socialist revolution, you need to have enough people on your side. And having those people be dead is counterproductive.

you can vote Green or PSL

You sure can if you believe that making an insignificant point in a ballot box is worth more than the actual lives of people who would die because of a Trump administration but not under a Harris one. But if you want to make an actual difference. the ballot box is one of the very few times you need to hold your nose and do the uncomfortable thing of choosing liberalism over fascism.

But if you're okay with fascism, sure. Go and make your vote a spoiler that helps the fascists win. I'm sure the people who die because doctors who were scared to provide medically necessary abortions will be grateful that you did the morally superior, but entirely ineffective, thing.

"Building an alternative" doesn't happen in the ballot box. It happens everywhere else.

It happens by getting a better voting system rather than FPTP, for which I'm doing actual, active advocacy. (Are you?)

It happens by working at a grassroots level to get people with better opinions elected, all the way down to local judges, city council members and library boards, where I, once again, am active. (Are you?)

It happens by getting involved in politics at a local level and building a movement. I'm doing that. (Are you?) It doesn't happen by throwing a tantrum in the voting booth.

The fascists know this. The fascists use this to their advantage. And the fascists would absolutely love for there to be 10 competing leftist parties acting as a spoiler effect for liberals. Because as bad as liberals are, fascists are worse.

Throwing out a "no u" when I point out how the things you are doing are paving the way for fascists is not a good argument unless your goal is to actually get fascists into power. And I will choose liberalism over fascism, because that's the harm reduction path to leftism, whereas letting the fascists win is the harm maximisation path.

Yes yes, we all see the rhetorical trap you're trying to deploy. It's not exactly subtle.

Meanwhile in the real world, in most of the US there is no realistic alternative to the red/blue dichotomy, and so while we're actually building that alternative we have to choose between those two. At the national level and in most (possibly all) senate/house races, that's the reality of the situation. You either work with the coalition you think is less evil and try to convince them to be even less evil, or you admit that you're okay with the more evil option if it gives you a feeling of moral superiority.

That's a non-sequitur, because that's not what's happening by any means. But thanks for ceding the point that you're okay feeling morally superior by doing something that'll get more people killed.

Look, if you don't care about LGBT folks, women who need abortions, asylum seekers, etc. you can pull that "don't care" lever. But "I care about making a symbolic, but ultimately toothless, gesture about Palestine more than I care about the lives of thousands, possibly millions of others" is what voting third-party is telling the system right now. If that makes you feel morally superior, we're at an impasse because I don't know how to explain to someone that an action to save lives is more powerful than an unrealistic gesture about saving even more lives, but which will realistically increase the amount of death and suffering.

Then vote Greens or PSL.

Sorry, I'm not going to vote "don't care" on genocide no matter how many faux leftists pretend it's the morally superior option.

Yeah, the "you're voting for genocide" argument is also ridiculous, as the choices essentially boil down to:

🔲 One genocide (with a potential of partial mitigation)
🔲 2+ genocides (and the one being even worse)
🔲 Don't care (in green)
🔲 Don't care (in yellow)

etc.

Genocide is bad. That should not be a controversial statement. I will use my vote to choose the least genocide that it has the power to choose, and I will use my other energy to advocate for less (and hopefully zero) genocide.

You don't have to like that fact. I certainly don't like it. But this is exactly what harm reduction looks like.

The meme shows a reusable glass bottle (the same one I get my milk delivered in, actually). The study explicitly excludes reuse of the glass bottles and notes that they'll generally get reused 20-40 times, reducing their impact.

The 1:1 comparison, at least where I live, is of single-use "recyclable" plastic to reusable glass bottles, which this study does not do.

The straw man to which OP is referring is the specific assumption that one is replacing single use plastic with single use glass, which is a much weaker statement than what my interpretation of OP's meme was, which includes reusing the glass.

If OP had used a glass coke bottle (for which I can't find the same evidence of reuse, and which do have much longer logistics chains, increasing the impact of the Glass's weight), the interpretation of single use glass would be more reasonable.

I'm not sure this is a straw man, but I think it's reasonable to argue that it could be considered one, given that the study talks about single-use glass whereas the meme is specifically showing a glass bottle that gets reused.

From the study itself:

Glass bottles, both virgin and recycled had high impacts compared to all other product systems, however thisdoes not consider the potential of reusing the glass bottles.

Given that page 56 shows that a brand new glass milk bottle is about 4x as impactful as their suggested alternative (carton) and a recycled one is about twice as impactful we can say that even using the lower bound of 20 mentioned in the study of reuses, the extra transport and cleaning would need to have at least 80% the impact of manufacturing a carton before reusable glass bottles could be considered worse than single-use cartons. Taking more optimistic values for glass (40 reuses of recycled glass), it's more like 95%.

The study does mention how reuse of glass can reduce the impact:

The LCA by Mata and Costa, (2001) found that reused glass bottle schemes had far lower impacts in all tested impact categories scoped into that study, than non-re- turned glass systems. Whilst this study was undertaken under the former ISO standards, it still indicates that reuse of glass would be beneficial, especially when compared to single use glass bottles.

It talks about more complex logistics, but we have literally done this before and we still have communities that do this today. The logistics aren't complex enough to make them unfeasible - we simply need to put in incentives that make it more profitable for businesses to include reuse in their logistics. One example of that would be a packaging waste tax. When sold by the manufacturer, a tax gets included that covers the cost of disposal of packaging. The company then gets a credit for each reuse.

I've yet to see a reusable plastic milk bottle. The glass bottle pictured is literally one that you return to the store for a deposit and they return to the dairy, where it gets sterilised and reused. These are quite common where I live, and the plastic alternative is single-use "recyclable" plastic.

Depends what/when you mean.

Debian 12 was released in June and has some newer, and some older, packages than Ubuntu 24.04. For example Ubuntu has LibreOffice 24.2.2 while Debian has 7.4.5.

Debian testing currently has a similar distribution to Ubuntu 24.10, though over the next 6 months it'll pull ahead of that, but Ubuntu 25.04 will likely have on average newer packages than Debian testing until its beta freeze.

Debian unstable has always had newer packages than the others.