The Trump or Biden decision is not democracy

You’re 100% correct there, unfortunately. It’s become the choice between a firing squad, or death by a thousand cuts.

I’m one of those people “privileged enough to not already be suffering”, as you put it; unfortunately I’m also terribly empathetic. Four years of Trump did a lot of damage to the social fabric here; emboldening the worst our society has to offer, appointing three conservative SC justices to overturn Roe, tax breaks for the owning class, and so forth. The country is becoming increasingly hostile to women, queer folks, and other minorities… Hell the MAGA crowd has even convinced a good chunk of the working class to hurt itself in it’s confusion.

I suppose I see any means of staving that progression off, even if I’m repulsed by the choice, as a net neutral. Perhaps I’m naive, maybe another Trump term is exactly what we need for people to wake the fuck up and take it to the streets; but I have a feeling it’s going to be a much more violent struggle fighting against bloodthirsty fascists over milquetoast liberals.

I’m rambling too now lol. Sorry for dragging the conversation out, I think I just enjoy talking about this stuff in a non-combative environment for once 😅

Yeah, kinda beating a dead horse here, but it’s giving “2024, Year of the Linux Desktop, inadvertently sponsored by Microsoft.”

Sure.

Then you get the occasional fun experience of a maintainer fucking up a package definition or two, and all of a sudden you can’t update your system or run a program because there’s a tangled mess of dependency conflicts and you get to spend the afternoon force reinstalling system libraries. Love ya’ Void :')

Been trying NixOS which is great for avoiding that kind of thing, but it comes with it’s own set of annoyances. I really ought to just settle on a more stable distro like Debian lol.

From the MS website:

Recall utilizes Windows Copilot Runtime to help you find anything you’ve seen on your PC. Search using any clues you remember or use the timeline to scroll through your past activity, including apps, documents, and websites.

A “feature” coming to Windows 11. Essentially a keylogger on steroids… Powered by AI of course, because what isn’t these days.

Apologies for the America-centric response, I know these ideas aren’t limited to the states, it’s just what I’m most familiar with.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m no fan of neo-liberals and I think they get a lot of justified flak for not doing enough, or what’s right, and I absolutely understand not “voting for people who are able to shrug off my very existence”. If I were in your shoes, I’d be in the “burn it all down” camp too.

In 2016, I wrote in Bernie Sanders out of principle, because he felt like the only candidate who genuinely cared about what was best for regular folks. I also thought the rhetoric around Trump was overstated, particularly, I thought the whole Antifa crowd was super cringe. I grew up in a conservative environment and none of the people I knew were actually fascists after all… Well, 8 years later… I have the hindsight to know that I was wrong. Fascism is alive and well, and it’s thriving in my backyard.

I don’t want to vote for Biden, his administration’s handling of Israel and it’s genocide is an affront to humanity and one more thing to add to the list of shit that makes me ashamed of this country; it’s just that, in my eyes, the only other viable option is so much worse…

I wish I had the answers, any policies that could bring meaningful change to a two-party system are in the hands of people who have everything to gain from keeping things the same. I’d like to think that enough overt acts of civil disobedience could change things, but I don’t think it’s bad enough for most people to gather the numbers necessary to bring it about. We’ve been given just enough luxury to keep us placid, but not enough to allow us the time, money, or energy to air our grievances. It’s a sorry state of affairs.

Anyway…

TL;DR, I respectfully dissent, but your experience is valid and I don’t blame ya, hopefully things start looking up in our lifetime :P

Edit: I missed a word

I get where you’re coming from… but when the alternative is mask-off clerical fascism, it ain’t a hard fuckin’ choice.

Voting democrat is just plain harm reduction at this point, as laughable as that feels to say given present circumstances… But this shit show is what we’re stuck with unless we can somehow convince the feckless bastards to implement a better system than first-past-the-post, so other parties actually stand a chance.

It won’t happen, but neither will convincing over half of the population to vote third-party; and abstaining, while principled, only yields more voting power to Y’all Qaeda.

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