The sides aren’t the same. Voting alone won’t fix things. Multiple things can be true at once and the folks who point out the truths that complicate your narrative aren’t all foreign provocateurs.
Re: voting, I think it’s helpful for radicals to look at voting not as a means of fixing the system, but as an opportunity to have a say in choosing the enemy they will face in the courts and in the streets.
You’ll note that I actively disclaimed a desire to go back to serfdom. My broader point is about the alienation of labor and the sole focus on product rather than process.
I think the older I get and the more I see all of us being alienated from the fruits of our labors, the more I realize that there is/was value in the reproductive labor of food production, clothing production, etc. I don’t mean that we should all go back to being serfs (though, there are studies that show they worked less than we do), but I think that there’s something lost when most people don’t have anything of value they can point to and say “I made that” or “I had a hand in that.” Most people have bullshit jobs that have very little to do with human thriving/surviving and at the same time, don’t see more people doing science or art or poetry. IDK what the solution is, but it sure feels like we’ve been collectively sold a bill of goods in a lot of ways.
Actual answer: steam provides the flexibility to rebind basically whatever you want to a controller input in order to make abstruse keyboard/mouse commands available via controller. It’s less that there’s a “shutdown computer” option in a dropdown menu and more that some ingenious prankster realized they could bind the windows shutdown keyboard shortcut.
Did the ones that weren’t matter? Did they keep the war from happening or keep millions from being killed in camps? So yeah, he doesn’t represent me or my beliefs, but he sure as shit has been able to order the deaths and deportations of thousands. To deny that influence because not everyone in the u.s. agrees is just silly.
I harbor a tiny sliver of hope that public execution will turn people against capital punishment. I doubt it will, but if we’re going to have the state murder someone in our names, it might be better to not sanitize it by keeping it behind closed doors.
There’s a species of fediverse denizen that loves to shit on Signal, probably the most heavily-audited privacy software around, with spurious and vague accusations. It is usually followed up with a recommendation for something with no audit, structural vulnerabilities, terrible UI, and infrequent updates that is mostly used by neo nazis (see, for example, Session or SimpleX). Best to ignore them. Signal is a non-profit and largely insulated from concerns of enshittification. There’s room for critique, of course, but the tinfoil conspiracies are kind of ridiculous.
I use a cheap racknerd vps via low end box. $12/yr.
Maybe we just care about different things, but I’ve been voting for progressives for decades and can’t point to much of anything I’ve seen fixed. If anything, I’ve watched the world at large and our politics get worse.
I still think there’s some value in voting (see the above re: choosing the enemy we will face), but I think it’s a mistake to expect or wait for politicians to save us. We have to build a better world for ourselves and take care of each other in the places and ways that we can without waiting for an invitation or asking permission.