The purpose of my jellybean thought exercise was to show that “I don’t know” and “I don’t believe” are not mutually exclusive. Basically:

I do not believe [x] != I believe [not x]

I don’t believe in String Theory. String Theory may be correct for all I know: I am not a physicist, and my understanding of String Theory is cursory at best.

Because I do not have enough evidence to warrant belief, I cannot say I believe in String Theory. But that same lack of understanding means I must also say I don’t believe that String Theory is false.

Say you have a jar full of jellybeans. We know that the number of whole jellybeans in the jar must be either even or odd.

If someone asks you if you believe the number of jellybeans in the jar is even, you can and should say “no” if you haven’t counted them or otherwise gathered any evidence to support that conclusion. To believe something is to say you feel it is more likely true than false, and you can’t say that about the given proposition.

Importantly, this does not mean you do believe the number of jellybeans is odd. The fact that one of those two things must be true does not mean you have to pick one to believe and one to disbelieve. It is perfectly rational to reserve belief either way until you have evidence one way or the other. You do not believe it’s even, nor do you believe it’s odd.

So, if we define “atheist” as “someone who does not believe in any gods”, I think you meet the definition of atheist. Just like the person in the above example does not believe the jellybeans are even & also does not believe they are odd, you don’t need to believe “there are no gods anywhere” to not believe “there is at least one god”.

Abstaining does less than nothing for the actual victims of the genocide in question. You think the dems are going to change their stance on Palestine because a bunch of leftists are withholding their votes? Most of their corporate donors are most likely either pro-Israel or don’t care. They’re going to decide it’s a safer play for them to pivot right to try and scoop up lukewarm centrist dipshits, guaranteed. Things get worse for women, immigrants, LGBT people, and the working class in general but hey! At least your hands are clean!

The way to effect electoral change that may actually have a snowballs chance in hell of helping Palestinians is to support anti-genocide reps in primaries and local elections. Get your city to pass ordinances boycotting Israeli products, accepting Palestinian refugees, and supporting international aid organizations. Even if your good local reps can’t make any of that happen, you’re getting more anti-genocide policy makers in the system who may run for higher offices next cycle.

Leftist organizing has always been from the ground up. If you want an anti-genocide president (which I fucking do too!), then work on creating the infrastructure to produce one instead of stomping your feet and insisting the Overton Window move your way ex nihilo.

Didn’t know worms could vote!

I feel you in a big way, but to be totally fair: corporations becoming states has probably trended towards the better from a zoomed-out perspective, and political leaders lying all the time has probably only become more visible than ever.

The entities that were doing all the colonialism for the past several hundred years have been private companies, and they did huge amounts of slavery and genocide. Blackwater is bad, but the East India Company was worse. This is not to say that things are good now, only that they aren’t like worse than they’ve ever been.

And I think the present day has a greater expectation of political leaders being accountable to the people they govern than most of history. Back in the days of monarchs and oligarchs, there was no mass media to tell everyone they were lying and no likely consequences for the liars even if there were.

Again, I empathize a huge amount with what you’ve said & I am also disappointed that the world we’ve created isn’t better than it is. I just personally think that the above two are trending in a more optimistic direction, even if they’re still objectively pretty bad.

Maybe not the best decision in the world.

HOWEVER:

1. Many DSA folks (at least in my local branch) are not happy with many of national’s decisions lately.

2. Fuck you if you’re looking down your nose at the DSA while the extent of your political involvement is only just voting every once in a while.

This was a tactical misstep, sure. But my local DSA is still out there showing up for protests and strikes and unions. They’re getting bills passed in through the city council and getting open socialists elected. If the DSA is the only leftist group near you and you let this blunder stop you from doing any real activism, you’re guilty of the exact same purity testing bullshit.

1. Rape does not always involve physically overpowering someone. Someone may coerce someone else into sex with blackmail, lies, threats, or abuse of a position of power.

2. Erections are controlled by a person’s autonomic nervous system. A man can get hard even when he is not turned on or consenting to what is happening.

3. Not all rape involves a penis. A woman who sticks an object into a man without his consent is committing rape. Rape is about power and control over another person, and the rapist need not be directly stimulated for rape to occur.

Power stancing

Zweihander parries

Small white soapstone

Covenant of Champions

Bonfire Ascetics

Dark Souls 2 had a lot of cool things that didn’t get enough credit.

Hear, hear! Bigger problems nowadays, but more control over my life to compensate.

There’s also something that’s really calming about having more life experience? Like back in 2013 I was mortified at the prospect of getting bad grades. Missing assignments was the #1 source of stress in my life, and it was all-consuming at the time.

Now? I know not only did that not matter, but that any given thing that stresses me out that badly has a good chance of ultimately not mattering in the same way.

They are mortal. They do what they do because they do not fear consequences.

This has been two statements of fact, with no implied conclusions or sub-text.

As a heads up: I went looking for Black Hole on fdroid after seeing this comment, and couldn’t find it. Looks both the fdroid and github were nuked.

Octopuses have zero hands, but it only takes one gun to kill a cat so this works out.

Yeah! Kropotkin argues a couple points:

• People are generally pretty good at self-organizing to solve problems, and have done so effectively in small communities for thousands of years.

• We have the technology* and productive power to ensure everyone enjoys a decent standard of living.

• Much of the scarcity we face today* is artificially created and entirely avoidable if we produce to meet needs instead of maximize profits.

• Things like laziness, corruption, and greed can largely be addressed by ensuring that all of a person’s needs are guaranteed to be met. Many people we currently* call “lazy” are either stuck in a hyper-specialized job that they can’t leave because they need to sell their labor to survive, or unmotivated because much of the wealth they produce is absorbed by someone else. And people tend to take more than they need more often than not because they are stuck competing with their fellow man for resources instead of cooperating for the common good.

He also does some back-of-the-napkin math to show that it takes less than a year’s worth of labor to produce everything a household needs for a year, and that the remaining labor time of that year should be open for people to cultivate different skills and pursue their passions. He argues that the distinction between what we today call blue-collar and white-collar work is unhealthy, and that everyone should do a bit of both.

His central thesis IMO seems to be that in the event of a socialist revolution, people shouldn’t be afraid to immediately start doing socialism. Take inventory of the food & start giving it to the hungry, figure out how many empty houses the community has & start housing the homeless, stop growing cash crops / producing niche luxury goods and start growing food / manufacturing necessities until everyone’s needs are met. He sternly warns against half-measures: maintaining the state’s use of violence or keeping track of some kind of currency or propping up political leaders are all things he claims will spell the end of a revolution before it gets off the ground.

I really loved the book. I feel like it provided a great example of what communism could (and IMO should) look like without all the baggage of so-called communist states like China and the USSR.

*= The book was written in the late 1800s. I think a lot of it holds up really well and some points seemed like they really called events that would happen in the next hundred years. That being said, it’s probably not as airtight today as it may have been in 1894.

The Conquest of Bread was a breath of fresh air! I cannot believe I read a book about politics / economics that was actually optimistic and left me feeling good about fundamental human nature.

Motherfucker takes all your surplus value and doesn’t even enjoy it! It’s like someone robbing your house and taking your shit straight to the dump.

They’re a part of the rapidly expanding world of so-called less lethal weapons, named such as they are because they are ostensibly less likely to send you to the ancestors when used against you. These weapons come in many different varieties, ranging from “smaller” 9 mm rounds designed to be fired at a person’s legs or torso, to the much bigger, pop-can-sized 40 mm rounds that are designed to be “skip fired” by ricocheting off pavement or other hard surfaces towards their target (police historically do not do this, and simply fire at the target).

I do not for one second buy that they were “designed” to be bounced off the ground. It’s an idiotic concept from the get-go: it’s hard enough to aim a conventional firearm. Expecting any kind of accuracy from a ricochet fired by an untrained and easily frightened moron is a fever dream. Fucking no one expected rubber bullets to be bounced into people’s legs; it was always an excuse for pigs to shoot into crowds. The casualties are a feature, not a bug.

Least thorough leftist video essayist:

If you don’t lie on your resume, you should!

Or just laser death ray at least two transphobes before you get caught.

Stellaris! Very cool sci-fi strategy game.