Clearly this just means that Silksong IS Half-life 3.

Only have a beginner perspective, but in school I did really well in intro CS class that used Python. 2nd class was in Java and it almost broke me I was so confused.

There’s a philosophical and a practical side to this:

Philosophically, the core of a democratic system is the peaceful transition of power. The idea that you won’t just try to force your will over people with violence and will respect the will of the populace. This is a fine principle in a proper democracy with a fair process and political outcomes that fall within acceptable ranges. If you wanted more money for the trains and someone else wanted more money for the busses, that’s a disagreement you can live with. And if the voting system is set up so you had equal chances both to introduce topics/candidates and vote on them, then great. By accepting the election and not trying to go outside the system to get your way, you keep the peace and allow for that process to be a viable vehicle for change.

If this is a requirement for democracy, then the converse is that if a system isn’t fair and produces unacceptable results (eg, Nazis and genocide), participating in it merely legitimizes it. Obviously nothing physically stops you from organizing, but symbolically you’ve shown that you view the system as the sole legitimate way to exert political power and garner authority. And people will then turn around and say you should vote instead of doing xyz actions. “I don’t agree with your methods.”

On the practical side of this: people put a lot of time, energy, and political capital into supporting candidates in these elections. It eats up the public bandwidth, crowding out other forms of political participation. In addition, once someone works hard to get their candidate elected, there is an impulse, an incentive, to defend them. The people who said to suck it up, vote for Biden, then push him to the left turned around and chastised leftists for protesting over things like the continued anti-immigration policies or the support for Israel’s genocide. US electoral politics is a team sport. People get psychologically invested in their team. They don’t like it when you criticize their team. This makes them resistant to change even on policies they nominally support. I think encouraging people to maintain that emotional investment in elections is harmful. It hinders organizing efforts. It hurts attempts to build class consciousness because it gets people to think about their fellow workers as the enemy and capitalists as potential allies. And the corresponding obsession with 24 hour news cycles turns politics into a TV show. Trying to talk to libs about any history older than like a week ago or maybe at most a presidential term is impossible. If it wasn’t on their favorite TV show it doesn’t exist.

We need to be drawing people’s attention to actual types of political participation. Elections don’t just distract from that, they make people think they’re doing the right thing. It’s a release.

All that said, that’s not to say there’s never value in any part of the electoral system, it’s just very limited. Bernie’s attempts at running were part of what got me more engaged in politics and shifted me from being a progressive-ish lib to being more of a socialist. Important to that though was not just the policy platform, but the structure and messaging of the campaign promoted the importance of mass political participation. I ended up meeting some local socialist groups in the process of going to campaign volunteering. However, most of the time and energy still went into the election only for the system to block us at the end and Bernie to give in. Tons of hours of volunteer time went into doing little more than getting people to sign ballot petitions. We weren’t getting those people into a union or a mutual aid group or anything. We basically just tossed our energy into the void.

For me: Voting represents support for both the process and the government that results from that process. By voting you are essentially expressing that you submit to the electoral process as the sole means for the exercise of political power. Even if you don’t like the results, you’ve agreed to accept it because the rules are more important than the results.

Some obvious problems with that: What if the process itself isn’t fair in the first place? We don’t really get to choose our leaders. We get presented with a set of options which are acceptable to capitalists and are asked our opinion on which we like more. You could write multiple books on the ways the US electoral process has been structured to disenfranchise people and reduce the impact they can have on their government, but fundamentally it comes down to the fact that the government doesn’t represent people and that’s a feature, not a bug.

So we end up with a pair of awful candidates who both have done and will do more awful shit. If the election randomly fell out of the sky without context, sure, you could argue about one being technically better than the other. But it didn’t. It’s this way for a reason. It’s this way because people are willing to cede their expression of political power to it despite the fact that it’s clearly unaccountable to them.

Voting is just supporting the system that’s deprived us of any real democracy while normalizing fascism to protect itself. Voting is a fairly low information form of political expression. You don’t get the choice to be like “Oh I’ll begrudgingly support this candidate, but this this and that are things I don’t like and want them to change.” You get two boxes. Each one represents EVERYTHING the candidate stands for plus the implicit choice of accepting the process in the first place.

If people want things to get better, they have to organize and take real, tangible actions rather than just begging capitalist politicians to do stuff for us every 2-4 years. People should be doing this regardless of who’s in office, but let’s put a fine point on it: People are worried that Trump is gonna be fascist, take away people’s rights, and end democracy. Are you just going to accept that because he won the election? Are the rules that bind the process more important to you than the results? If not, you should be willing to do what it takes to stop him instead of chastising that people didn’t show up to participate in a sham of an electoral system.

For what it’s worth, I actually did go to the polls to vote specifically on an equal rights ballot measure in NY. At least that has a semblance of direct democracy. There I’m explicitly saying “I support this policy specifically” instead of supporting a candidate who just says they support those things while also doing awful shit. It passed, so that’s nice. If anything I’m more pissed at Californians for voting against a measure to END SLAVERY than I am with people who didn’t want to vote for a person currently engaged in supporting a genocide.

50% of the time it happens 100% of the time.

Conservatives do well because their ideology is compatible with the interests of capital. No party that is a serious challenge to those interests can win any notable power through elections in the US.

As far as the idea of focusing on local races: If your main concern is immediate and substantial action on climate, what good would winning a local race do for you? Yeah maybe it would be easier to get a left wing candidate on a school board or whatever, but that’s because it holds no meaningful power.

Not that I think they have any particular chance of success at the national level. I’ve just found that “local races” argument… most charitably put, confusing, less charitably: bad faith or willfully missing the point.

It’s just what you do when your side doesn’t have a justifiable platform on it’s own merit: See: All the people who keep telling us to ignore all the bad stuff corporate dems do because Trump would be worse.

IF you could actually run on things people liked, you’d talk about that and perhaps only call out your opponent’s opposition to the things you support or show how they might be lying about claims that they want similar things.

But when your core platform is “let rich people keep doing what they want,” you have to find ways to deflect from that.

But aren’t people carbon based? We should just compost them instead.

Or, idk, maybe people shouldn’t be subscribed to a newspaper owned by the world’s richest capitalist. The owner of a company that brings in former intelligence officials to bust unions, sells facial recognition tech to police, does business with the Israeli military, dodges taxes, spends tens of millions of dollars on lobbying, and BOUGHT A FUCKING NEWSPAPER?

Seriously. You can debate the merits of boycotting a company that sells generic products. They may be doing bad stuff, but so are a lot of companies and you need, say, food, and their food is as good as any others. But in a case like this the very essence of the product is compromised by it’s ownership. Even if the moral argument isn’t persuasive to you, why would you consume news generated by a company owned by capitalists who have very direct, material interests in shaping narratives and influencing the government? This obviously goes beyond WaPo and Amazon, but it certainly seems like one of the more egregious examples of a “news” outlet just being another arm of a giant conglomerate.

I feel like at different times either the Klingon or Romulans kind of stand in for the Soviets. Certainly TNG onward the Klingons shift in their representation and the Romulans stay as that analogue to a secretive geopolitical rival that they maintain an uneasy peace with.

Yeah I guess. Although I guess the question is how much energy does warp drive use or how much energy does the engine output given some amount of dilithium or whatever? No real way to know since it’s sci-fi. As far as I know the only physics we have on this is that paper that showed you’d need negative energy to make warp happen. Which is obviously not super helpful for figuring out what it would be in the hypothetical world of Star Trek where they found some way to make it physically possible.

I just imagine that their energy production has to be absolutely insane for warp travel to not only be feasible, but a fairly common thing more akin to launching a boat than a NASA mission.

Yeah this feels like a critique from someone who’s never watched Star Trek.

The bit about the food is pretty funny. Like sure, a few times people have mentioned liking some non-replicated food better, but in general it seems like it’s about as good as the real thing and you can get ANYTHING you want anywhere you have a replicator without needing the skills of a chef.

Then there’s Voyager where the crew prefers to use their limited replicator rations rather than eat the slop Neelix makes lol. Actually, that’s something that never made sense to me: Why were they so limited on replicator usage? Doesn’t it just convert energy into matter from the reactor powerful enough to power a warp drive? In general I find it kind of silly when they turn off the lights and stuff to “conserve power” when there’s trouble. Like the lights are drawing any meaningful amount of power compared to warping the fabric of time and space.

Mine is that in Star Trek, at least all the computers advanced enough to be used on a starship are actually sentient. At some point you have enough self aware hologram programs and rogue AIs that you should start to wonder if they’re actually anomalous.

The problem is not seeing a problem with any of that before the bit about talking to spooky foreigners.

The rich and powerful having this much control over our government, communications, and our economic lives in general is THE problem. Full stop. What they decide to do with that power is beside the point. There’s no such thing as a good king.

Accidentally deleted comment, here it is again:

Enterprise (the last of the 90s era of trek shows) is a prequel which is set I think about 100 years after the Vulcans make first contact with humans. You get a little of that initial meeting, but mostly the show only talks about their relationship up until that point as historical context for their current situation. Basically, the Vulcans stuck around Earth to help out and keep an eye on humanity to try to make sure they were “ready” for warp travel. Although they don’t directly share any science behind their more developed warp technology.

I don’t get the sense that there was ever really a popular backlash to them being there, but there seemed to be a little resentment at least within the space program about how they felt that the Vulcans were being too paternalistic and holding them back. When they finally make the call to go on their first interstellar mission in the first episode, it’s against the recommendations of the cautious Vulcan delegation to Earth.

The series itself is kind of a mixed bag. This is sort of the start of TV Trek turning more towards action shlock, but there were still plenty of good episodes in there and it was interesting seeing the process of the federation coming together from disparate civilizations that had to work through their differences. It’s definitely a different feeling than showing up to a planet, meeting some weird aliens, then never talking to them again.

Enterprise (the last of the 90s era of trek shows) is a prequel which is set I think about 100 years after the Vulcans make first contact with humans. You get a little of that initial meeting, but mostly the show only talks about their relationship up until that point as historical context for their current situation. Basically, the Vulcans stuck around Earth to help out and keep an eye on humanity to try to make sure they were “ready” for warp travel. Although they don’t directly share any science behind their more developed warp technology.

I don’t get the sense that there was ever really a popular backlash to them being there, but there seemed to be a little resentment at least within the space program about how they felt that the Vulcans were being too paternalistic and holding them back. When they finally make the call to go on their first interstellar mission in the first episode, it’s against the recommendations of the cautious Vulcan delegation to Earth.

The series itself is kind of a mixed bag. This is sort of the start of TV Trek turning more towards action shlock, but there were still plenty of good episodes in there and it was interesting seeing the process of the federation coming together from disparate civilizations that had to work through their differences. It’s definitely a different feeling than showing up to a planet, meeting some weird aliens, then never talking to them again.

Does Star Trek count? I would be remiss for not bringing up Star Trek given the opportunity to insert it into a conversation. I bet the aliens will love that.

Did it really predict these things? We’ve had data surveillance and algorithmic targeting for a while before Watchdogs. A lot of “prescient” sci-fi is just writing about stuff that’s already happening but which people don’t pay much attention to.

I was thinking about this recently when I had to look at a website without an ad blocker. (Btw, does anyone know an Adblock option that works for iOS Lemmy? Memmy’s browser doesn’t block anything.)

The website was absolutely packed to the brim with ads. Animated, expanding, moving, etc. All competing for your attention. How can ANY of those ads be getting enough attention for it to be worth it?

It’s still crazy to me how much of the bad shit the government has done has been declassified and publicly available and people still just kind of ignore it. Who needs censorship when people are just willing to overlook reality? Or even worse, just make up nonsense.