I vote for ballot initiatives and then use the DSA’s voter guide for local elections. For president it’s always PSL. Voting for a DSA member isn’t getting an ML revolution, but it is sewer socialism at a local level. Sewer socialism is powerful in a country where the little infrastructure that does work still drives a 20th century society. Americans are radicalised into fascism twice a day on their commute.

Would you ever vote for someone like Trump just to make things intentionally worse in the hopes of sparking off a revolution?

Accelerationism falls into the same wishful thinking category as adventurism. Not wanting blood on my hands is why I don’t vote for democrats. If I throw a chaotic evil boomerang by voting for a fascist, that’s just voting for a democrat and hoping it blows back on enough people to do something before hitting me. The closest thing I’ve found to a good ML path is what the Black Panthers were doing in the 1960-70s. Electoralism and existing power structures might have been cynically engaged, like funding the mutual aid initiatives or electing a politician who might give them breathing room, but power came from organising in their communities and building up dual structures that linked intersectionally with other orgs. Revolution was putting up a stop sign where the city wouldn’t so that the residents watching learned that they had power. It was feeding hungry kids while their parents were engaged in discussions about their issues. Those things can’t be trusted to electoralism because politicians are temporary and usually replaced by their opposite.

It’s a shame the fediverse doesn’t have native support for them. They made web 1.0 forums fun in a way that 2.0 forums lacked.

I appreciate when an animal looks like god was having a bad day. I too rush things and forget to complete projects.

I’m not them. I’m just a Marxist calling it out as self-defeating Orthodox Marxism.

Marx was also writing based on observing specific conditions in specific places 150 years ago. The point of Marxism is that it’s a way to coherently frame the things you’re currently observing as intersectionally as possible and test them against prior studies while checking your own personal biases. Most of my organising as a Marxist is in anarchist or democratic socialist orgs because they’re easier to start in the surveillance state that developed after Marx said this. They just don’t scale up as easily as an ML org like PSL, which maintains the same message with discipline in cities across the US. That higher level of organisation is equally important to anarchism’s ease with local organisation, more secure and more able to centralise and use resources.

two paths to the same outcome, two distinct levels of organisation that complement each other where the other falls short

The only thing I learned from multiple physics classes was that I’m not a physicist. People would die if I had to do physics. It’s nonsense made up by nerds to feel smart when real geniuses just eat the apple that falls on their head. Free apple.

I think homeschooling is great. My resume isn’t particularly impressive and I have a mediocre GPA from a mediocre school. When I apply for jobs in today’s economy, there’s so much competition. It would be awesome if they could look at the next resume and see “education: school of life, professor mom, A+ and ten stickers for chores”. I would get that job easily.

It’d be neat if this eventually resulted in something like self-healing space habitat hulls that generate a useful byproduct.

It’s pathetic that they didn’t even bother to look at the measuring tape. This flagged as AI slop within a few seconds for me. Not even good AI slop.

I sold my soul to the devil and all I got was this stupid t-shirt

Hey gamers, I know where to find free top-tier RAM and GPUs. And you get to pretend you’re in a spy game.

It’d be neat if this could double as fall protection like those backpacks for kids. My great-grandmother died at 101 because a fall broke her hip and she didn’t have the wound healing ability to keep it from becoming infected. If that belt had an airbag it would really add a lot of quality of life to that population.

To me that’s a case of “Tragic: the worst person you know made a good point+that point hurt them”. Right-wing “antizionism” is bad because it’s rooted in antisemitism instead of antifascism, but Israeli funding is concentrated in the right wing of both parties. Heightening the contradictions benefits my goals more than maintaining continuity since it’s fewer votes for Israel’s interests that would otherwise be guaranteed. His assassination proved to be a rupture point for the right-wing grifter ecosystem that was previously uniformly supporting zionist politicians. If Israel killed him, it’s a big miscalculation that ended up limiting the cultural reach of the US right and its support for Israel.

Yes but you get Kitsap Bangor and galleys with a panini bar. Non-dolphins get slop on a ship.

I love that it’s actually a conspiracy. Hell yeah whoever did it, hell yeah for whatever reason.

I see it like submariners getting the best food and pay in a navy. The moment you pay attention to your environment or consider the hope of rescue, you’re the most vulnerable human alive. You’re in a bathtub at the top of a burning skyscraper and all the forces of nature want to kill you instantly if a single component fails. If I couldn’t distract myself with jokes, it’d be like emergency medicine or leftist politics where the reality is horrifying beyond comprehension. I’d last like a week in space before I’m kissing soil for being safe.

It’s what drove me out of emergency medicine. My inner Puzzle Demon was completely satisfied by an environment where the puzzle is doing creative, emotional, technical, moral, manual labour for a noble mission. Keeping track of a dozen metrics and half a dozen textbooks, a constant stream of new puzzles, I got to indulge my need to compulsively read and analyse. But I also felt like a vampire because the US medical system means I save a life only to saddle a profoundly disabled person with an unpayable debt. The only non-Puzzle Demon route I could find was being an MSF doctor right as the west decided that bombing MSF hospitals was okay.

It’s also what drove me into public sector horticulture. I get to spend all day in the sun solving puzzles. Every kind of labour involved except for emotional, but all of that Puzzle Demon energy goes into making meaningful public gardens. With those budgets shrinking and my pay freezing below subsistence level, the better-paying alternative is to be a private landscaper and poison my neighbours while stealing the water from their mouths. The richest assholes in the city get another trophy that I can’t even visit after work and it raises the surrounding property values. All roads lead to Puzzle Demonology without the disarmed public sector providing a sustainable alternative.

Human intuition about what STEM stuff is useful is very poor.

Funding streams are my big concern here. Government research is mostly toward non-profitable things. I like that NASA takes a decade to develop a robot and cancels the launch repeatedly to make it as safe as possible. Plenty of derived consumer tech will come out of that project and it has the least chance of exploding over my head. Corporate research is mostly toward profitable things. It further enshrines corporate power, limits more technology behind patents, and creates exploitative technologies to generate the most profit for their time. Our intuition goes so haywire with things like tech industry hope-ium, in the opposite direction of NASA considering lots of problems in its slower public research. The best version of an organisation like that is a slow trickle of good data for every field and products for consumer use without restrictions.

China is even more STEM-intensive than the US. I would love to study at a Chinese university, but I would be the worst student there. My parents didn’t demand I score well on puzzles as a child so my inner Puzzle Demon is satisfied by grand strategy games but intimidated by anything beyond basic algebra. China has utilised its Puzzle Demons to do so many good things in recent years. They’re supporting their Puzzle Demons in state institutions and as a result they’re the only country able to actually address climate change or field a domestic space station. The Soviets democratised Puzzle Demon science and made their farmers and factory workers participants in projects that weren’t building more lethal drones. They were collaborating with their neighbours to do the little spreadsheet and crunch the numbers and see the result that benefited their neighbours.

The US gives its Puzzle Demons hundreds of thousands of dollars in student debt and says the only way to actually pay that off is indentured corporate servitude doing something evil. They numb themselves in the moment to deal with it and find ways to justify it after. Their career history pushes them further into antisocial jobs where they can stomach the philosophical side because they weren’t required to take philosophy classes and were told to look down on humanities students.

Give 'em NASA and sure it’s expensive. Sure most of the results are just cool new space pictures I’ll look at a few times. Sure I’d benefit more from social spending. But I can’t enjoy those parks if the Puzzle Demons are building murder robots that anyone can fly. I want them building really complex rockets that only a handful of heavily screened PhD-tier astronauts can fly. I don’t want them going to SpaceX and making profitable things because that profit enables Elon Musk and restricts development to short-term goals and marketable products. I want them in a strictly regulated government lab using their little graphing calculators to crunch the numbers and be some other planet’s problem. Not the one I have to live on.

edit: And every satellite pointed outward is one that isn’t pointed inward. It’s the same job to build and control either. Fund the ones that point outward and make all the Science Kids want to grow up to look at cool space pictures instead of surveilling their neighbours.