We know voting in bourgeois USian democracy is only affected by people in swing states (and even that is "which ghoul do you want to administer the dictatorship of capital") but hear me out.
A comrade recently posted about ironically or unironically (I didn't read enough into the thread) voting for AfD in Germany and it reminded me of a WaPo article that read:
"Several U.S. military leaders have advised Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth that prolonging large-scale operations against Iran is unsustainable and risks weakening their ability to confront threats elsewhere, including the U.S. homeland, according to people familiar with a recent assessment prepared for the Pentagon chief."
So it got me thinking, by continuing to overextend the military, as empires do, are we actually seeing "two, three, many Vietnams"? Is the way to exhaust the empire's military into submission to vote for Trump? On one hand we have the King of Hubris (hubris being the guarantor of empire decline) and on the other hand things might have played out this way while wearing a Democrat mask, too, as we know the real driving force is capital accumulation and Epstein island retreats. The down side is the harm that comes to marginalized and oppressed people, which again also happens under Dems when it's their turn to protect capital accumulation and Epstein island retreats. I know in Germany it's different because there are several parties but in the US we're a one party state, but with typical American extravagance, we have two of them (shout out to Julius Nyerere). So would voting for Republicans be a net positive for the world and the demise of capitalism? Should we just abstain from voting? Vote blue for harm reduction?
A big piece of evidence for this theory comes from my personal experience- how many people I know afk that are now (recently) radicalized. People I wouldn't expect in a million years to actually be down with changing the system are now fervent revolutionaries. Comrade Trump is the greatest left wing organizer since Lenin. That's right I said it.
This all seems very reasonable and well considered to me. I probably should have come in with something more productive. I feel like I’ve just been seeing a lot more of this type of thing lately, most of the news I’ve seen (including but of course not limited to trans stuff) lately has got me feeling extra doomed, and also I have some shit going on IRL that’s got me more on edge than usual anyway, and I let the “this is rad, actually” of it all get to me more than I ought to have.
Come in with what you have the energy for: it's important to let yourself feel your feelings, you really don't have to blunt yourself in these sorts of situations just because being a little more polite or a little more verbose maybe has a slightly better chance of getting your point across. I think trans women are often deathly afraid of "taking up space" and end up becoming prone to being overly self-critical or self-flagellating, almost as if we're looking for reasons to say we're wrong or undeserving. I'm certainly not immune to that, either, but I try to be cognizant of it. In this case, just saying "very cis take" is a laconism that doesn't necessarily spell out the issue, but that sort of laconism is only unproductive if it doesn't inspire reflection on the part of OP — and whether OP responds to upset by thinking "damn, maybe this was a bad take" depends on how sage OP is, which is OP's responsibility, not yours. You have a right to be mad, and not volunteer your mental health for another's sake, "each according to ability".
I find that it's pretty rare that I get mad at people who are mad at me. There are some times when differences really are irreconcilable, yes, but in most cases, I will either listen and pretty quickly understand that I was wrong, or if I know to begin with that the anger is coming from a misunderstanding, then I don't actually feel like the anger is directed at me, and I can deescalate. Especially on a site like this where everyone is already going to be on edge. Never will I say that people don't have a right to be mad. If people insist upon you being polite at all times, that you must never show your upset, then that just creates a culture where the only people who can speak are those who can treat politics like a game, the privileged who don't have much to lose.
Another important idea: just culture. This is another point that a lot of Hexbears struggle with: you shouldn't be saying "who's to blame" but rather "what caused the problem", because "mistakes are generally a product of faulty organizational cultures, rather than solely brought about by the person or persons directly involved." I first started to think about this because I used to watch a lot of Mentour Pilot and just culture is the basis of plane crash reports, and I really do think that a lot of people's lives would be a lot better if they started thinking in those terms instead of blaming others or blaming themselves. A lot of the posts I see on !selfcrit@hexbear.net really feel like they boil down to "I did a bad thing and I'm sorry" instead of actually reflecting on what happened and what can be done going forward. You're saying that you "let it get to you more than you ought to have", but what does that actually mean? Setting aside that I think you're in your right to be laconically mad to begin with, but you didn't exactly print a permission slip and hand it to this post and say "OK, you can cause me to be mad now" and then the post said "very good, I will cause you to be mad now" and then you were mad. No, you saw something that made you feel despair about the world, and you responded as if you were feeling despair about the world, because you were.
Somewhat tangential, but I often find myself thinking about the whole Daoist parable of the river, where the water bends around the stone, and yet the stone is still eroded by the water, "action without action" or wu wei — that idea that by spontaneity and non-interference all things will be done in due time, to do things without forcing them. I dunno. The concept has been interpreted and misinterpreted in so many ways over the millennia, yet I still try to consider the idea in my daily life, and I have to wonder what the wu wei response to someone's accelerationism would've been for you. I'm pretty certain the response you actually had — a response that said all it really needed to without any extra effort — is closer than the response you think you should've made in hindsight.
I’m going to have to take some time and read through this a bit, but for a quick response, the main problem that I have with my response is that I shot the second arrow, so to speak. I also think that while it encapsulated what I was feeling fairly well, this is (or at least should be) a place where we help each other to be better, and taking some more time to explain why I felt that way may have been more helpful. So, it’s not so much that I feel wrong to have had that response as it is that I feel like I would like to have been more productive and less reactive, maybe. Which may not be required, but is how I’d like to be, at least in the face of naïveté. Outright, intentional malice is obviously a different situation, but I suspect that’s not what we have here.
Also, I appreciate your thoughtful responses. :)