The worst thing ever to happen to Nate silver was guessing a few elections. I suspect he wanders around his house in a wizard cloak making predictions

I don’t know, if Iceland were doing something that would impact me, I don’t know if I have a good enough grasp on Icelands political system to make good strategic decisions.

The idea that because someone is hurt by something they would automatically know the best course of action is sorta nonsense. If a bear attacks me and a biologist that studies bears shouts advice at me, going “you fucking chauvinist colonialist asshole, the bear isn’t even attacking you, stay in your lane!” is probably a bad course of action.

America, one of the most powerful nations on earth, has one of the weirdest compromise ass backwards electoral systems on earth. I imagine a lot of Palestinians trying to survive right now aren’t having a ton of free time to brush up on the mechanics of the electoral college and the nuances of electoral politics. When the people they trust to do that in their name tell them “adopt a strategy that means your voice will be completely silenced” it might be a good time to assess whether or not they got that one right.

Lucky for you the wikimedia foundation files annual reports https://wikimediafoundation.org/annualreports/2022-2023-annual-report/

I think this is the latest one available.

As to whether they need your money or not I’m a bit conflicted. They have raised and spent more and more money every year. They have a lot of money and some have argued they spend it poorly.

On the whole though, besides asking for donations, they have maintained their goal of being ad free. If you’ve ever used a fan wiki for a video game or hobby you have likely experienced how bad a wiki larded down with ads can be.

I think for myself as someone that has worked as a software engineer for my entire life building out massive infrastructure that is on a similar scale to Wikipedia, I don’t really know how they justify such high development spend when the tech isn’t really evolving very much. I’m sure it’s not cheap to host, so that spend is fine by me, but I’m not sure what all they are building. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile, I just have a hard time imagining it.

I would encourage you to look at numbers and decide if they make sense to you. Also people have written on the subject, so some googling will likely bring you to more opinionated pieces than my own.

At least what worked for me was a simple thought exercise.

If what I’m experiencing is so unbearable I’d rather be dead, what have I got to lose trying to get some help. If it doesn’t work I can still kill myself, it’s not like trying to get help and failing would make me immortal.

Silly as it sounds, when I thought about it this way the idea of getting help didn’t seem so scary anymore.

Read this next thing with the sincerity and care I intend it to be delivered with, seek mental health services.

For years I thought it was just normal to constantly be worried about things. To be worried about them to the point of finding solace in the idea that I could just kill myself if too many bad things happen.

Luckily the people around me cared about me enough to have me get some help. I have an anxiety disorder, now I have the support I need and am properly managing it and feel so much better.

It’s hard, when you are feeling this way it is hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel. I was told for years to do something about it, but that’s for crazy people, I only need help if there’s really a problem but I’m normal, I don’t have problems. All that time wasted because I didn’t want to admit I needed help.

Everyone’s path is different, everyone’s results are different, but there are helpers out there. You might get a lot of advice, well meaning and even helpful advice, but the best thing you can do is talk to a professional.

Take care

I don’t give a shit who you vote for, I didn’t say I don’t give a shit about this conversation. I’m done with this community. You can all go fuck yourselves

First off, I didn’t advocate for anyone to do anything. I asked a question about how not voting helps.

I don’t expect voting for the Dems to fix the problems we face. I do expect either the Dems or the republicans to win. I think the Dems will give me a slightly more favorable environment to do my organizing work in.

Voting for the PSL or ML parties doesn’t educate anyone about anything. If I sit down at my kitchen table and mark in PSL or Dem no one knows but me.

And voting for those parties means I don’t get any say in the environment I will exist in for the next 4 years in which I will do the work of organizing and educating others.

This is why I’m saying the people here are obsessed with a phony binary choice and are strawmanning the shit out of my position.

If I came in here and said “everyone vote kamala to bring about communism in America” your points would be valid. Go read what I wrote, I never said that.

I don’t give one solitary shit who you vote for, I was trying to understand the strategy I’ve heard advocated for in these forums.

Yea, so instead of embracing someone that is both doing the organizing and also voting, this community has been awful.

For a bunch of people so obsessed about organizing the people, maybe take a second to reflect on what a shit tier experience this has been for someone that would be your ally. I’m already doing a bunch of the organizing, and who simply believes that spending one minute to fill out a ballot for the least bad viable candidate is not a bad idea.

If this group of people are the ones convincing everyday Americans to band together for something better, it’s no mystery why there hasn’t been any traction.

And I’ll still be your ally because I believe in this cause, but I also believe that throwing my vote away on some fringe third party candidate doesn’t help organize jack shit. And because of that one point you all have just been assholes.

I don’t understand why everyone here thinks this is binary. You either vote in the election or do these organizing efforts.

I’m doing both.

I’ve worked to unionize my workplaces, successfully and unsuccessfully. I’ve read the theory. I am part of a local mutual aid group that I helped found where we are doing our best to build the awareness and understanding amongst others.

I’m also going to vote for the only viable candidate that is least likely to use state sanctioned violence to kill the people I’m organizing with.

What waste of energy? The 1 fucking minute it takes to fill out my ballot that they mail me? That’s the thing you are upset about?

I’ve found the core mistake you are all making.

I can do two things at once

I can both vote and do those things.

If someone thinks their only input is voting, fine go after them. I’ve unionized workplaces (both successfully and unsuccessfully), I’ve read the theory, and I’ve worked with my neighbors in building mutual aid and education about leftist ideas.

I’m still going to vote strategically for the party least likely to use the state sanctioned violence against my organizing efforts.

And if the reception I’ve received here as someone who would be sympathetic to your cause and who is actually working towards trying to achieve better results is any indication, this will never happen. I have been downvoted, belittled, and insulted.

Good fucking job on the solidarity everyone.

This might legitimately be the dumbest group of people ever assembled.

You said

If you vote for usa, you are complicit in genocide.

What the fuck does “vote for usa” mean? I’m making a joke that there’s no place on the ballot to vote for or against USA.

Good thing there’s no part of the ballot that says:

[ ] USA [ ] Not USA

So explain it.

I’m sure it feels great up on that high horse to look down on the unwashed masses and tell them “you just don’t understand”

I’ve read Marx, I would love the system to be better. I’m not the vote blue demographic. I’m a human being living in America who understands how the current system of government works and the deep and inherent flaws in this system.

What does not-voting do to change anything? No one seems to be able to answer that simple question.

I get that voting doesn’t fix it. Does not-voting fix it? If not then why do you care if people vote or not? What actually fixes it and why does that thing give a shit whether or not people vote?

I agree, there are much better systems of democracy. I’m not blind to that and I don’t think America is exceptional, far from it.

How does “not voting” bring about this better system? What’s the plan? Do I just not vote and keep not voting and then someone comes by and says “hey, we are the people with all the power, we noticed you guys stopped voting so now we’ve decided that we should have a more fair proportional allotment of representatives and we will draw districts with the shortest split line algorithm to prevent gerrymandering”

Is that what happens? Does my awareness that better systems exist somehow make them appear here? Does it somehow wrestle control from those with power who made this system to perpetuate this power and will defend it with violence? Do they just give up because enough of us don’t vote?

Ok so to use your turning around the bus analogy.

If the bus is headed off the cliff and the thing I need to do is overhaul the system that dispatches buses off cliffs. That’s a hard thing to do, it won’t happen overnight, it would require a lot of working class individuals to stand up and demand a better system in the face of incredible state violence, and I am ALL FOR THAT.

I would love to see the proletariat rise up and destroy the parasitic oligarch class that rules over us, I really really really would. If you’ve got a plan to organize the fucking idiots I’ve been gifted as countrymen into giving a single solitary fuck about how hard the wealthiest 4 people in the country are ramming them in the ass, fucking great I would love to hear it.

In the meanwhile, this broken down shitbucket of a democracy does give me the opportunity to make the bus go 1 mph instead of 2 mph giving us all more time to fix this fucking thing, why wouldn’t I do that?

Is the plan just accelerationism? I should do nothing, let the bus fly over the cliff and then hope that I survive and can also do a better job putting it back together after the crash?

I have marched against war, I have organized protests, I have tried my damnedest to organize the workers I work with while they worry that they don’t want to rock the boat. If this is a fight why should I leave a weapon sitting on the table? If the oligarchs are going to let me choose the puppets, why would I choose the ones that want me dead over the one that don’t?

My position isn’t vote blue no matter who, it’s that the republicans are objectively worse, they wrote a giant plan out and unlike many of my countrymen I took the time to read it. I don’t want that shit to happen, that’s what I’m voting against.

And if a bunch of cranks want to say I’m complicit in genocide, great. Neither the people doing the killing or the people being killed are going to give one wet shit about how many Americans were complicit by voting for the republicans or complicit by voting for the democrats. There is no turnout low enough that stops the genocide.

You want to stop the genocide, you tell me fucking how. You tell me how not voting helps. You explain to me how making it cheaper and easier for the people doing the genocide to continue the farce of democracy helps anyone one fucking bit and I’ll listen.

All I hear here is “voting makes you complicit and won’t fix things, you have to do …. To fix it”. What goes in there? A revolution? The armed uprising of the people against our oppressors? Great, are they fucking massed on a hill somewhere waiting to see the turnout numbers for the election? Is that what’s holding back the glorious overthrow of capital, that too many Americans vote?

I don’t really disagree with anything you wrote.

The thing I still can’t understand is that the consensus of Lemmygrad and other leftist Lemmy instances is that both of these things are somehow true at the same time

• electoralism can’t work, voting won’t fix this
• voting for the democrats is bad

And I can’t understand this logic. Voting simultaneously doesn’t matter but also matters and is a full throated endorsement of genocide.

I also agree that we don’t have a real democracy, but if the choice is between “fake democracy with project 2025” and “fake democracy with milquetoast corpos” I’m not sure why I would do anything to help the openly fascist fascists take power.

All six of his supporters await the news

This old video by thoughtslime perfectly explains this and when I saw it years ago it really opened my eyes to what bothered me about your average liberal.

https://youtu.be/dsasDeI0VRg

I’ve always thought it was so weird how Iran will only go to war after c/News approves, but they have a revenge flag so who am I to question their methods

It is interesting to consider that in the vastness of space that something like a single restaurant might be viewed similarly to a glass of water in the US.

Sure the government could come in and declare eminent domain on my glass of water, but it’s value is so low as to be effectively a nonissue.

In a future where there are tons of planets and tons of replicators, perhaps the idea of personal property has just been extended to include things like a restaurant or a vineyard.

If you use the definition that private property is the private ownership over the means of production, it could be reasoned that something like Sisko’s is not necessarily a means of production but more akin to personal property. If someone on earth wants some creole food they can use any number of replicators to produce and enjoy that. Sisko’s and Picard’s vineyard might be similar to how we would look upon historical preservation. Some people could choose to spend their lives making things the old fashioned way because they enjoy it and people enjoy experiencing it.

The economy of Star Trek is interesting, but I think there are plenty of times when the utility of storytelling ends up mucking with the clarity of the message. One example I was just thinking about the other day was the introduction of the borg queen.

I get why it’s nice for there to be a borg queen, she can embody a more nuanced thinking part of the borg collective and the audience can much more readily understand the idea of a queen ruling over her subjects (whether that be like the rulers of humanity or like the queen bee as they sometimes say). But it also kind of sucks. The borg are such a fascinating species, a collective hive mind acting to attain perfection, more a force of nature than any of the other species we encounter.

While the borg queen is a compelling character and is acted wonderfully, I can’t feel a bit sad that it’s so normal and pedestrian. It turns the borg from this almost incomprehensible force into something so regular, a bunch of drones carrying out the will of the queen. While expedient to the storytelling, I like the idea of what the borg are pre-borg-queen more than what they become post-borg-queen.

I think with the economy a similar thing happens in storylines. There are many scenes that make it clear that humanity doesn’t have money anymore, but when you are telling a story and you want to have some stakes and obstacles, money is soooooo useful. Money makes it trivial to have an obstacle, or shit we need some latinum. Money makes it trivial to introduce stakes.

Star Trek had to try to thread this needle of presenting a post scarcity society while also making a dramatic engaging show for people living in a capitalist society. Scarcity is at the heart of a lot of drama, if you can just replicate your way out of every problem it’s not a very interesting show. It also leads to a thing that once you spot it’s hard not to spot, so much of the tension is aided by the “oh no we can’t replicate that” McGuffin. It plays out in a lot of episodes because otherwise every episode would be 5 minutes of “there’s an outbreak of tallarian flu on Corso V, we emailed them the recipe for the medicine and told them to replicate it.” Then the credits roll.