happybadger [he/him]

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.

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

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.

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’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.

There’s a special kind of nerd that I call Puzzle Demons. They have big brains and they get satisfaction from solving puzzles without thinking about them. It doesn’t matter what the puzzle is so long as it’s a challenge to solve. They’ll look back on their work with satisfaction because they solved the puzzle, regardless of what that work is.

Puzzle Demons in the 1940s built V-2 rockets. We gave them space travel and the puzzle became making the rocket leave the atmosphere instead of hitting cities. That space travel made helpful consumer technologies to survive in extreme environments, things that were otherwise too expensive for commercial R&D.

Then we killed NASA in the 1980s. The Puzzle Demons had no socially positive puzzle. They built the tech industry instead. I dated a Puzzle Demon whose fun little puzzle to solve every day was designing the UI for smart locks that go on the bunkers of the wealthy. She was thrilled to make locking herself out of the bunker more user-friendly. There are Puzzle Demons at the social media websites whose entire job is making them more addictive for children. Puzzle Demons gave us crypto, guided missiles, murder robots, AI slop, and corporate efficiency consulting.

We need space exploration to pacify the Puzzle Demons. Without it, the population is still encouraged to go into STEM but most of the STEM jobs are profoundly evil. You stick them in a NASA office and they’re just building useful things. Otherwise the prestige jobs are with defense contractors, tech companies, and multinationals.

What kind of silly baby are you?

:bart-cowabunga-dude-sick-skateboard-trick-over-flag-draped-coffin:

I would hoot and holler. Absolute hoot and holler.

It’s one of those moments where the only thing I can do is take solace in the idea of JDPON Don. My life is about to get much worse and it’s already a pale imitation of 2019. Hopefully though, maybe just maybe, it will get so bad that the world becomes a little bit more Chinese. Then I can move there as a refugee and enjoy 𝒷𝒶𝓈𝒾𝒸 𝒾𝓃𝒻𝓇𝒶𝓈𝓉𝓇𝓊𝒸𝓉𝓊𝓇𝑒.

Yep. His latest post.

Truthsocial: /@realDonaldTrump/posts/116340751005894827

I even called this one “OneLastHeist.png”. This is our modern equivalent of FDR’s Fireside Chats to guide us through the horror.

Iran military defeated? In the Strait of Hormuz? At this stage of the war? May I see it?

I love when people plant them in outdoor seating areas and next to luxury apartments. It punishes people for bad horticulture.

Iranian missiles go brrrrrrrrrrrr

What a perfect recipe. I kept thinking of ways I’d insult Israel more than what he was currently doing and it was just the next thing he did, down to throwing the whole dish in the trash.