Mastodawn

and let me say it with the chest,

🗣️ 📣 CARING FOR MYSELF IS NOT SELF-INDULGENCE, IT IS SELF-PRESERVATION AND THAT IS AN ACT OF POLITICAL WARFARE.

—Audré Lorde, "A Ray Of Light" (aka "The Cancer Diaries")

Aviva Gary Nov 8, 2023

@blogdiva yes!

Ryan The Red 🖥️🚲🍺🏳️‍🌈Nov 8, 2023

@blogdiva PREACH

nev Nov 8, 2023

@blogdiva as I saw someone say a long time ago, voting isn't "choose your player", it's "choose your opponent"

@nev ooof. truer words.

@nev @blogdiva that's a bad game, don't play it

@NoFlexZone @nev this isn't a game, it's my fucking life as black, puerto rican, a woman, queer and barely working class. it sucks, yes because it's HARM REDUCTION. pick the small battles at the city, county & state level because those do have a bigger impact DAILY. i'd be dying of cancer if i didn't live in nyc. the fascist running against my city council member literally sent mailers implying there were too many of us pesky black/latinos in the East & we needed to go. GTFOH with that nihilism.

@blogdiva @NoFlexZone @nev

I'm not going to crack on harm reduction or the need to kick wingnuts and bigots out of office.

However, we seriously need to get off this merry-go-round where the only two choices we're given for elections are two kinds of right-wing poop sandwiches, and the only slightly less poopy sandwich is coated in rainbow sugar produced through the broken backs of foreign Black laborers for the profit of "woke" millionaires.

@blogdiva @NoFlexZone @nev

When the side that promises us "harm protection" ends up doing only slightly less harm than the side doing the original harming; maybe it's time we went and built new and better political organizations for *HARM ELIMINATION* and *HARM PREVENTION* rather than just mere harm protection.

@blogdiva @NoFlexZone @nev

Certainly, we must celebrate and build upon the small victories that give us those cracks of life.

But...just remember that unless we take the global view as well and look outside our own enclaves, we'll be forever putting out our own little brushfires while the forest gets burnt from avoiding the big issues.

@AnthonyJK @NoFlexZone @nev

you can't fight back if you are hungry and sick and destitute and alienated.

the oligarchy knows this. that's why they pour money into sustaining fascism. to take our attention away from them.

Aunty Toni Morrison used to say the whole purpose of racists is to make us waste our time on survival and not getting ahead.

why?

it benefits the manufacturers of fascism: the oligarchy.

we need mitigation so we can focus on the real enemy: the oligarchy.

@blogdiva @nev this whole post was bait but w/e I responded to a metaphor in the language of the metraphor. Im sorry about your cancer. i hope your treatment goes well.

If you think Harm Reduction, consider climate change, wherr half measures, or "harm reduction" still means catastrophic warming.

You don't have to convince any communist, any socialist, or anarchist that this shit is for keeps. We're the ones up on kiw*farms and k*ywiki pages targeted even when there isn't massive uprisings...

@blogdiva @nev by the colonial state, colonizers themselves. The ones who've been organizing till we burn out and still going, gettjng purged from state and local D parties for being vocal in our support for things like - universal healthcare - for example.

So use that energy on someone/somewhere or blocc me. I don't live on the thin broth that is expecting electoral politics *only* to resolve the problems we face as colonized and oppressed peoples.

@blogdiva @nev the only thing I really resent is being called a nihilist. I never said it was a "game" the post you boosted implied that it was for the sake of the metaphor.

but life ain't just a metaphor.

harm-reduction is a form of self-care and self-preservation; themes very dear to the heart of a poet whose "Cancer Diaries" should be read as a political manifesto: Audre Lorde.

that's why i followed the original tweet with her quote. when you read a "A Ray of Light" (USA title for her diaries), you'll get why it's absolutely important to be MILITANT about minimizing the mundane, everyday harms in our communities to get to the big ones.

@NoFlexZone @nev

@blogdiva @nev I never claimed it was, indeed I asserted how deathly serious it is. I'm stepping away from this particular thread.✌🏾

Yes, rolling back GOP fascists is very good.

But, unless Democrats realize that self-care means more than just individual "harm prevention" but also shared communal action to ensure the root conditions that produce the harms are rooted out to begin with, we will simply be kicking the can forward until the next cycle of "harm prevention".

Still, good on the electorate for taking out some stank trash.

cinnarose Nov 8, 2023

@blogdiva I will celebrate but I am never, ever voting Democratic again. Also I live in Illinois and I'm pretty sure they would stuff the ballot boxes before letting the state go full red.

tlariv Nov 8, 2023

@cinnarose
I'm an election judge in Illinois. Even the mechanism to stuff the ballot box is long gone.
@blogdiva

cinnarose Nov 8, 2023

@tlariv @blogdiva good to hear! I was joking. Mostly.

Kevin Russell Nov 8, 2023

Yep, at the very least

troy_friz_zell Nov 8, 2023

Would that I had more than one boost to give...

Toot of the evening here.

COME ON my brothers and sisters. Let's celebrate. Tonight was victory.

Don't forget to talk about this in public tomorrow!

GuerillaGrue Nov 8, 2023

This, so much.

A lot of folks who are like "everything or nothing" keep forgetting that the way the right got where THEY are wasn't everything or nothing -- it was slowly chipping away at norms, at expectations, at the resolve of those they opposed.

Folks can claim it's just the lesser of two evils... but pushing those evils to be less and less over time is a worthy goal.

The Overton Window didn't get where it is overnight, and we can't swing it the other way overnight either.

TheMostReverendJim Nov 8, 2023

@GuerillaGrue @blogdiva The Overton Window got there with the aid and abbettance of the Lesser Evil.

@revjim1968 @GuerillaGrue

sure, but if you reckon politicians are just the proxies of the state, then the question is, WHO IS THE STATE.

USA is an oligarchy. they are the state.

then destroy the oligarchy.

because getting rid of politicians will just get new politicians.

get rid of the state paying them to manage state violence, and now we have identified the real enemy. and now you see why they pay the fascists: to divert our attention from them.

focus on the real state-violence.

TheMostReverendJim Nov 8, 2023

@blogdiva @GuerillaGrue

All the lesser evil has got us is Evil-Lite. I just do not see how that can ever be an agent of any real good. What's gained this election will be up for grabs next one and so on ...

Tappin Lisa Nov 8, 2023

@blogdiva
Yes! We have to celebrate whatever wins we get, to energize ourselves to fight for more wins.

@blogdiva this is interestin, I remember reading the completely opposite take from indigenous activists, about how voting isn't harm reduction cause whoever you vote for they're still gonna build pipelines through their land and no matter who wins they won't be given their land back

I'm not saying this to argue, just that I've seen opposing viewpoints concerning US electoralism

I'm really glad I don't live in the US I guess cause I wouldn't know what to do in this situation

@hazelnot @blogdiva Put briefly it’s a choice between “most of the same harms” vs “all of the same harms, but worse, plus new ones.”

No people is a monolith, but something I watch for:

There’s a (partly astroturfed, esp. Russia circa 2016, often with Black avatars) accelerationist notion that if we let the worst monsters democratize suffering, people will wake up & throw a revolution. The real goal, of course, is demotivated passivity until nothing can be resisted.

@hazelnot @blogdiva The illegitimacy of a state or government does not erase its power. Especially because we do not have access to ranked choice voting across much of the US, as stipulated elsewhere in this thread, to vote for someone isn’t to condone or support a candidate’s policies, it is to choose those policies as the ones you want to have to oppose and push past. All you get to choose at the ballot box here is the starting point - the progress is made outside.

hazelnot

@cwicseolfor @blogdiva I'm not talking about accelerationists though, the point of the people I'm talking about is that people should basically band up and directly fight capitalism and liberalism on the side of indigenous people with the goal of giving them their land back and abolishing the country basically

@hazelnot @blogdiva Sorry I didn’t get the second message out fast enough, but if you have any comment on the latter, it’s where I was going with the spectrum of extreme left accelerationism to (frankly right-wing) liberalism (in which people assume that just voting within a two party center-right and far-right system is somehow enough.) Land Back is well articulated but not broadly understood; to implement, we have to clear a path which the right is trying to block.

hazelnot

@cwicseolfor @blogdiva Nah I did see the second reply, I just didn't think it was relevant to this?

@hazelnot @blogdiva The relevance is that illegitimacy of a colonial state does not erase its power. Our police are militarized, the state formed to establish slavery atop genocide, the slaughter would be systematic. People have no clear picture of what is next. Immediately rejecting liberal capitalism would be just, but also requires whole new modes of thinking, which take time to foster both for acceptance & in order to have something to replace it with.

hazelnot

@cwicseolfor @blogdiva I mean that's IMO just the difference in opinion between incremental socialism vs revolutionary socialism and I'm not well-versed enough when it comes to political theory to really have a take about this 🤷

@hazelnot @blogdiva (Sorry, my thoughts don’t play well w/ 500 char limit.) You’re correct & also I appreciate the willingness to not have an opinion. Study of the PRC’s formation in primary sources left me admittedly very slanted against bloody revolution on almost any stated principles.

I see much more awareness in young people now of shared struggle - mobilizing that requires a clear plan for what to build instead, but most future visions in the US are dystopic.

@hazelnot @blogdiva The potential unity of shared *opposition* scared the hell out of power in 2020, hence push to normalcy, to derail formation of something to *promote*. But there’s a tightening political noose: extreme left & right both want a state collapse in assumption their “side” will be able to take over. Entrenched culture here gives no tools to build better, & no plans are laid to avert crisis. Harm reduction buys time to propagate livable alternatives.

NoctisEqui 🇺🇦🇵🇸🇪🇹🏳️‍🌈Nov 8, 2023

I saw the predicted numbers of the ‘abortion’ vote last night before I went to bed. It was a route for the Xto-Fascist Misogynists! That is very encouraging. Let’s flex our election muscles and wipe out GQP in ‘24! If we stand together, they will lose!

PedestrianError

@blogdiva I’m trying to temper my rage at the Democratic governor of Kentucky getting re-elected and launching straight into a speech about all the highway widening climate arson he’s going to do with thoughts of marginalized youth who will be a bit less oppressed in school because of yesterdays results. There will be suicides, dropouts, teen pregnancies, and other negative outcomes prevented by giving all those suburban fash the boot.

Incognitim Nov 8, 2023

@blogdiva
Every vote is a choice between mitigation and acceleration. 2000 and 2016 were stark reminders of that.

And although this isn't unique to America, it's definitely more pronounced here than in most other democracies.

Also- anyone who doesn't think it's possible to shift, or even take over, a major political party hasn't been paying attention to the one coup that trump and his maggats actually succeeded in.
The dnc *can* be reformed, it's just gonna take sustained, concerted effort. 💯

Cypherdelia Nov 8, 2023

@Incognitim @blogdiva Also compromise with more moderate leftists, political activism, and education campaigns. Authoritarians don't have to overcome or congregate as much diversity of thought because they simply don't have as much diversity of thought.