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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 8th, 2023

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  • Wow, those “progressive” (scare quotes to indicate that it’s your description, not that they’re not progressive, whatever that means) candidates must be really shifting the democrats left! Why I bet their presence on committees is causing the democrats to take very far left positions with regard to the genocide and the border!

    Oh, they’re not causing any such thing? The Harris campaign is shifting rightward to try and pick up trump voters?

    Must have been the wind and not over fifty years of party policy…

    If PSL or some other group needs people in Washington, how would you recommend they get them? Perhaps we could vote them in?

    Surely a vote towards getting those groups the people in Washington they need couldn’t be considered ineffective?

    But if my vote is so ineffective then why do the democrats need it? Surely they can get by without my weak, statistically insignificant, ineffective vote!

    I genuinely hope that there’s a huge third party turnout and the media does highlight it. How great would it be to have the democrats execute a real turn towards leftist policy because they know that they need those voters?

    If you really want to feel angry: I will personally probably never vote democrat again. That’s not a recent change, last time was ‘12 and even then I was avoiding specific figures like Biden. There’s still a chance that they could develop a little history of not baiting and switching on left policies and run a platform I’d be willing to support within my lifetime, but I don’t see it happening.


  • I think if psl were just running a presidential candidate and nothing else then you’d have a good point, but especially in California (the party started there?) they run a bunch of candidates for different positions.

    I think that’s different from dsa because psl purports to have party discipline whereas that was a big problem and point of contention in dsa over the past four years.

    I actually think that to the extent it matters, parties like dsa and greens take away more votes from the democrats because they’re basically places for spicy or heady democrats to go respectively.

    Of course, the onus falls on the political party plying their platform to pander to the populace and not the reverse, so basically if the democrats want psl, dsa or green votes it’s their responsibility to adopt those positions or enter into some coalition with those parties.

    As far as the nlrb goes, the next step is the same if we end up with an extension of the Biden nlrb, a trump nlrb (or the dissolution thereof) or some third party nlrb: build and express worker power that can actually successfully demand concessions from the ruling class as opposed to subsist on crumbs allowed to fall from the table.

    I don’t honestly think it would be significantly easier under Biden than trump and the rail strike is evidence. Rather than acquiesce to some pretty milquetoast demands, the Biden administration broke the strike.

    If you’re involved in dsa, how’s your local?


  • Wait, my vote for PSL won’t be counted for trump so how do I enable trump?

    I’m also literally talking about voting not staying home, so idk what you mean by showing up to vote.

    Pushing the democrats left has never worked in my lifetime and possibly ever. It’s especially dubious when the democrat candidate has carved out explicitly right wing dare I call them fascist positions on the border, Gaza and elsewhere.

    As I’ve said elsewhere, I’m a big hater of the greens. You don’t have to convince me that they’re a directionless triangulation meant to make money.


  • Well, PSL is a socialist party with a platform that explicitly promotes worker control over the means of production, but on a less theoretical level, they show up and provide material support to strikes and worker action.

    So if it was just a recruitment drive I think it would be good because a bigger psl means more support for workers.

    But I honestly don’t think it is just a recruitment drive. Psl seems to have an actual theory of power that is in opposition to the structures of power that support the democrats and republicans.

    In order to build that power psl needs to show people that their government doesn’t have to be trash which doesn’t represent them or help them. Participating in electoralism does that.

    Even if psl goes nowhere, a big showing would force other major parties to recognize that there is significant support and, critically now, stability to be gained by adopting the principles of a pro worker party.

    So pretty much I think it’s an unalloyed good for workers.







  • A lot of the tone of these anti green posts seems pointed at pushing people to vote for the democrats instead. I’m as anti Green Party as they come, but I want to make sure people know there are still good third parties to support.

    As a member of the lemmy instance for privacy and open source, I’m not gonna dox myself, but yeah, I’m absolutely politically active in the off years lol.

    You wouldn’t happen to be trying to badjacket people or gatekeep support for PSL, would you? Because first timers and those newly disillusioned with the democrats are welcome to vote for PSL. No experience required.



  • you really might not.

    before there were mobile phones there was analog dtmf wired telephones. they replaced pulse dialing and allowed for all kinds of additional signalling and triggering. ring a bell, operate a relay, kick people off so you could call the president, entire automated analog switching centers, you name it.

    when mobile networks came on the scene there were all sorts of additional triggers but because the (second gen? the ones that could do sms) signals were actually digital, there was a much wider array of possibilities. dtmf had a handful of frequencies it supported and if you wanted to do something more you had to basically make sure the entire network you were using could send, transport and receive those frequencies.

    now imagine instead of sixteen combinations of frequencies played at the same time you have access to thousands of possible triggers. once you have simple stuff like the basic receiving of text and lighting a led or playing one of several legally distinct jingles covered, you could do do much more. and people did. there were all kinds of things pagers could do through combinations of local interface and digital communication with a cell tower, all mediated through a handful of baseband chips on the pager pcb that could have the pins for stuff they wouldn’t be used for disconnected.

    but how would you make a pager set off an explosive?

    well, the same way you use a casio f91w wristwatch to. you use its built in functionality (the speaker when the alarm goes off) to trigger a battery that can deliver enough electricity into a resistor to heat it up enough to make your (primary) explosive detonate.

    in the case of a pager, those baseband chips have all kinds of on and off switching built in. it’s not hard to imagine that basic, out of the box functionality would include pulling a pin high when it gets “*97” or some such. now tie that pin to the base of a transistor across the positive and negative terminals of the battery and sitting against a little petn and you got yourself a remotely triggered explosive.

    you wouldn’t even need a pcb.

    there’s probably a lot of stuff thats incorrect in this reply. it’s late and this is off the dome.