It might not end the Gaza genocide. It will also not cure cancer, end climate change, or stop political violence in the United States. However, electing Harris will produce a hugely better outcome on all of those fronts than will electing Trump.

If you care about the Palestinian people, and you’re risking Trump getting into power again, you don’t actually care about the Palestinian people. You just enjoy grandstanding gestures, and while you’re making your gestures, you’re flirting with making their already horrifying situation absolutely infinitely worse.

You can use Creative Commons. You’ll still have the copyright to the work, so you can relicense it or do whatever you like with it, but they’ll have a particular and proscribed set of things they are guaranteed to be able to do with it into perpetuity.

Choose whichever license suits what you’d like to be able to grant them, in terms of whether they have to credit you for it, whether they’re allowed to modify it, and so on. CC BY lets them do whatever they want, as long as they credit you, which is a common permissive option.

It won’t be my fault.

Yes it will.

Come to !rcv@ponder.cat and make a better solution.

If you are waiting for either mainstream political party to suddenly become champions of the people on their own, and you’re refusing to take certain actions even in the face of catastrophic threat until they do, then yes, it will be your fault if the catastrophe comes true.

That outcome may be fine for you, and you may feel virtuous about your participation in that outcome for your reasons. It’s somewhat safe for you if you’re wealthy and white and born in the US and not active in left-wing politics, and confident that that all of that will keep you safe from a second Trump presidency. Of course there’s no way to be sure that it will. But regardless, a lot of people don’t have that luxury.

There is a very real possibility that a person will come to power in this election who will end elections in the United States, end the rule of law, end protest, end socialism, end third parties, end elections in the future, install his hand-picked generals into the military and then turn the inconceivable power of the United States military loose, not just on a handful of victims who have come into our crosshairs from time to time, but wholesale onto anyone and everyone anywhere in the world who it comes into his head to target.

Do you define sending weapons to Israel as “enthusiastically participate?” Wait until US troops are on the ground in Gaza and Lebanon. Wait until Putin gets a green light to invade anywhere in eastern Europe that strikes his fancy. Wait until the US military is directly attacking anyone inside the borders of the United States that dares oppose his rule, or the rule of the person who comes after him, in this or any future election.

Wait until millions of people of the wrong ethnicity inside the United States are dying in concentration camps. Wait until legal immigrants are being deported by federal troops.

Yes, the system in the United States is far from democracy. Making it ten times worse is not a good solution. Pursuing a solution is a good solution.

Like I say, I have no idea where this argument that it is okay if Trump wins the election came into the comments for this article, but it is wrong, wrong wrong. It is not okay if Trump wins this election. If you actually care about the values expressed in this article I posted, you hopefully can see that. Maybe not.

There were no WMD’s.

It’s why we’re helping Israel commit genocide.

It’s why we’re involved in Ukraine.

One of these sentences is not like the others.

If Harris wants my vote, tell me you’re going to cut the military budget, not increase it.

Why is this tying back to refusing to vote for Harris? Am I crazy, or did that come completely out of nowhere at all?

If you care about genocide, destroying millions of lives, and making the rich richer, you should be phonebanking for Harris every day of the week. She may or may not be ideal but it hardly matters. Her opponent is 1,000% worse by any conceivable measurement.

And then, after the election is done: !rcv@ponder.cat to lay a foundation for better candidates beyond that in the future.

I think that over the next few years Sam Altman is going to learn the same lessons that events have been trying to teach Elon Musk since circa 2021.

1. You didn’t build that. The people that work for you did.
2. Being a big hero is contingent on you and your behavior, and can change.
3. Those people who are giving you all this money aren’t your comrades. When your usefulness is at its end, they won’t give you a second thought.