Labour Party Landslide Imminent..

As the political landscape continues to shift and evolve, there's a growing sense of déjà vu reminiscent of the historic 1997 General Election. Back then, the Labour Party, under the leadership of Tony Blair, achieved a monumental landslide victory, ending 18 years of Conservative rule. Fast forward to the present day, and many political pundits are speculating whether we're on the brink of witnessing a similar political upheaval.

The current state of affairs certainly seems to be favouring the Labour Party. Which I am wholeheartedly against but let’s face simple facts with widespread dissatisfaction over the Conservative government's handling of various issues ranging from the economy to english channel migrant crossings, there's a palpable sense of disillusionment among voters. I mean they don’t even act like “proper” conservatives. In all truth I can’t tell them apart anymore. Cause let’s face it we obviously are locked in a two party system for the foreseeable future.

As I have gotten older I won’t lie I have grown extremely cynical about politics and yes I do have some very strong views by some. I have always quoted the great classical Greek philosopher Plato “One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors.” But here’s the sad blunt truth is my party the Conservative Party have been in power longer than any party since the war. We need to show that we are not stagnating, that we are capable of self-renewal sadly that isn’t happening at all. It’s making me question. “Why should I bother to vote anymore?”

Furthermore, the Conservative Party's internal divisions and scandals have further eroded confidence in their ability to govern effectively. From controversies surrounding leadership decisions to accusations of cronyism and corruption, the Tories are grappling with internal strife that threatens to undermine their electoral prospects. Against this backdrop, Labour appears as a beacon of stability and integrity, offering a viable alternative to the status quo. I feel no compunction at all they have well and truly brought all of this upon themselves.

Another crucial factor working in Labour's favour is the shifting demographics of the electorate. As younger, more diverse voters come of age, they bring with them a set of values and priorities that align closely with Labour's progressive platform. Issues such as climate change, social equality, and healthcare resonate strongly with this demographic, providing Labour with a natural advantage in winning their support. Younger voters most seem to be very naive about politics.

Of course, it's important to acknowledge that predicting election outcomes is always fraught with uncertainty. Political landscapes can change rapidly, and unforeseen events or developments could alter the trajectory of the race. Nevertheless, if current trends persist, it's not difficult to envision a scenario where Labour secures a landslide victory reminiscent of 1997. I mean I could be wrong and maybe just maybe the Conservatives will be reelected to power.

In conclusion, the parallels between the present moment and the historic 1997 General Election are striking. The writing is on the wall. With the Labour Party gaining momentum and the Conservative Party facing mounting challenges, the stage seems set for a seismic shift in British politics. While nothing is certain in politics, one thing is clear: the winds of change are blowing, and come election day, we may witness a decisive mandate for Labour that reshapes the course of the nation. As for myself when the time comes. I shall be voting for the Reform Party led by Richard Tice.

One more thing…

Never forget that exercising your right to vote are crucial steps toward making a difference. I firmly believe in that.

Shocking Revelation: 1 in 4 Voters Obsess Over Immigration!

A recent Ipsos Mori poll has highlighted a growing concern among the public regarding immigration, with one in four voters considering it to be among the top four most pressing issues. This places immigration on par with high inflation, the state of the economy, and the state of the National Health Service (NHS) in the minds of many voters.

For more visit: financeprozone.com -

You can also fix internet brainstorms/the Smith College problem by instead of touching grass just reading actual published articles by public intellectuals

"Political Pundits Predict: Lok Sabha Elections 2024 in India Set to Shake NDA's Majority"

As the anticipation builds for the upcoming Lok Sabha Elections in 2024, political analysts and pundits are scrutinizing every indicator, from public sentiment to the betting trends in places like Phalodi Satta Bazar. While the outcome remains uncertain, one prevailing sentiment emerges: the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) might face challenges in securing a resounding victory. Contrary to…

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Swing States in 2024 Presidential Election

Swing States in the 2024 Presidential Election Georgia and Arizona are predicted to be among the closest contenders in the power rankings in the 2024 presidential election. This state was once a Republican stronghold. Wisconsin, Nevada and Pennsylvania have flipped red and blue over the past few years, so it’s been difficult to figure out who enrolled voters there will choose in 2024. “The…

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The Great Senate Stalemate

The Great Senate Stalemate

The map of competitive Senate elections is shrinking—and not just for November. Though Republicans began the year expecting sweeping Senate gains, the party’s top-grade opportunities to capture seats now held by Democrats have dwindled to just two—Nevada and Georgia—and both are, at best, toss-ups for the GOP. And while Democrats, somewhat astoundingly, have emerged from the primaries with at…

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Note: I super don't like the framing of this headline. "Here's why it matters" idk it's almost like there's an entire country's worth of people who get to keep their democracy! Clearly! But there are few good articles on this in English, so we're going with this one anyway.

--

2024 is the biggest global election year in history and the future of democracy is on every ballot. But amid an international backsliding in democratic norms, including in countries with a longer history of democracy like India, Senegal’s election last week was a major win for democracy. It’s also an indication that a new political class is coming of age in Africa, exemplified by Senegal’s new 44-year-old president, Bassirou Diomaye Faye.

The West African nation managed to pull off a free and fair election on March 24 despite significant obstacles, including efforts by former President Macky Sall to delay the elections and imprison or disqualify opposition candidates. Add those challenges to the fact that many neighboring countries in West Africa — most prominently Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger, but other nations across the region too — have been repeatedly undermined by military coups since 2020.

Sall had been in power since 2012, serving two terms. He declined to seek a third term following years of speculation that he would do so despite a constitutional two-term limit. But he attempted to extend his term, announcing in February that elections (originally to be held that month) would be pushed off until the end of the year in defiance of the electoral schedule.

Sall’s allies in the National Assembly approved the measure, but only after security forces removed opposition politicians, who vociferously protested the delay. Senegalese society came out in droves to protest Sall’s attempted self-coup, and the Constitutional Council ruled in late February that Sall’s attempt to stay in power could not stand.

That itself was a win for democracy. Still, opposition candidates, including Faye, though legally able to run, remained imprisoned until just days before the election — while others were barred from running at all. The future of Senegal’s democracy seemed uncertain at best.

Cut to Tuesday [April 2, 2024], when Sall stepped down and handed power to Faye, a former tax examiner who won on a campaign of combating corruption, as well as greater sovereignty and economic opportunity for the Senegalese. And it was young voters who carried Faye to victory...

“This election showed the resilience of the democracy in Senegal that resisted the shock of an unexpected postponement,” Adele Ravidà, Senegal country director at the lnternational Foundation for Electoral Systems, told Vox via email. “... after a couple of years of unprecedented episodes of violence [the Senegalese people] turned the page smoothly, allowing a peaceful transfer of power.”

And though Faye’s aims won’t be easy to achieve, his win can tell us not only about how Senegal managed to establish its young democracy, but also about the positive trend of democratic entrenchment and international cooperation in African nations, and the power of young Africans...

Senegal and Democracy in Africa

Since it gained independence from France in 1960, Senegal has never had a coup — military or civilian. Increasingly strong and competitive democracy has been the norm for Senegal, and the country’s civil society went out in great force over the past three years of Sall’s term to enforce those norms.

“I think that it is really the victory of the democratic institutions — the government, but also civil society organization,” Sany said. “They were mobilized, from the unions, teacher unions, workers, NGOs. The civil society in Senegal is one of the most experienced, well-organized democratic institutions on the continent.” Senegalese civil society also pushed back against former President Abdoulaye Wade’s attempt to cling to power back in 2012, and the Senegalese people voted him out...

Faye will still have his work cut out for him accomplishing the goals he campaigned on, including economic prosperity, transparency, food security, increased sovereignty, and the strengthening of democratic institutions. This will be important, especially for Senegal’s young people, who are at the forefront of another major trend.

Young Africans will play an increasingly key role in the coming decades, both on the continent and on the global stage; Africa’s youth population (people aged 15 to 24) will make up approximately 35 percent of the world’s youth population by 2050, and Africa’s population is expected to grow from 1.5 billion to 2.5 billion during that time. In Senegal, people aged 10 to 24 make up 32 percent of the population, according to the UN.

“These young people have connected to the rest of the world,” Sany said. “They see what’s happening. They are interested. They are smart. They are more educated.” And they have high expectations not only for their economic future but also for their civil rights and autonomy.

The reality of government is always different from the promise of campaigning, but Faye’s election is part of a promising trend of democratic entrenchment in Africa, exemplified by successful transitions of power in Nigeria, Liberia, and Sierra Leone over the past year. To be sure, those elections were not without challenges, but on the whole, they provide an important counterweight to democratic backsliding.

Senegalese people, especially the younger generation, have high expectations for what democracy can and should deliver for them. It’s up to Faye and his government to follow."

-via Vox, April 4, 2024

This is maybe a stupid question but do you think there's any ties between like orientalist trends in western countries that glorify dharmic religions and Hindutva? Like I've heard 'Hinduism is the oldest religion on Earth' and 'Hinduism/Buddhism are just so much more enlightened than savage Abrahamic religions' and 'how could there be war and oppression in India? Hindus don't believe in violence' from white liberals and it certainly seems *convenient* for Hindutva propaganda, at least.

Not stupid at all! Historically, orientalism precedes modern Hindutva. The notion of a unified Hinduism is actually constructed in the echo of oriental constructions of India, with Savarkar clearly modelling One Nation, One Race, One Language on westphalian nationhood. He will often draw on Max Mueller type of indology orientalists in his writing in constructing the Hindu claim to a golden past and thus an ethnostate.

In terms of modern connections you can see the use and abuse of orientalism in South Asian postcolonial studies depts in the west that end up peddling Hindutva ideology –

The geographer Sanjoy Chakravorty recently promised that, in his new book, he would “show how the social categories of religion and caste as they are perceived in modern-day India were developed during the British colonial rule…” The air of originality amused me. This notion has been in vogue in South Asian postcolonial studies for at least two decades. The highest expression of the genre, Nicholas Dirks’s Castes of Mind, was published in 2001. I take no issue with claiming originality for warmed-over ideas: following the neoliberal mantra of “publish or perish,” we academics do it all the time. But reading Chakravorty’s essay, I was shocked at the longevity of this particular idea, that caste as we know it is an artefact of British colonialism. For any historian of pre-colonial India, the idea is absurd. Therefore, its persistence has less to do with empirical merit, than with the peculiar dynamics of the global South Asian academy.

[...] No wonder that Hindutvadis in both countries are now quoting their works to claim that caste was never a Hindu phenomenon. As Dalits are lynched across India and upper-caste South Asian-Americans lobby to erase the history of their lower-caste compatriots from US textbooks, to traffic in this self-serving theory is unconscionable.

You can see writer sociologists beloved of western academia like Ashish Nandy argue for the "inherent difference of indian civilization makes secularism impossible" and posit that the caste ridden gandhian hinduism is the answer as though the congress wasn't full of hindutva-lites and that the capture of dalit radicalism by electoralism and grift is actually a form of redistribution. Sorry if thats not necessarily relevant I like to hate on him.

Then most importantly is the deployment of "Islamic Colonization" that Hindu India must be rescued from, which is merely cover for the rebrahmanization of the country. This periodization and perspective of Indian history is obviously riven up in British colonial orientalism, see Romila Thapar's work on precolonial India. Good piece on what the former means if you've not engaged with it, fundamentally it posits an eternal Hindu innocence.

Look, I think most people outside of the Joe Rogan electorate aren’t happy that Musk has wrested control of Twitter. It is generally discouraging to consider how so many prominent social media companies now possess a distinct MAGA verve; Ben Shapiro operates one of the most popular pages on Facebook, YouTube has long played host to a variety of xenophobic content creators, and we have plenty of evidence about how platformed hate can ruin the lives of ordinary people. Elon Musk might not be a full-blooded MAGA creation, but he is representative of a certain type of grumpy, increasingly reactionary Silicon Valley curmudgeon, and if he wants, he can now serve as judge, jury, and executioner of everything that passes through the Trending page. That said, I do encourage my fellow concerned citizens to consider the implications of what they’re saying, as they eagerly sign up for an apocalyptic culture war for the purity of Twitter. Yes, you could flex your insubordination by (I guess?) continuing to tweet, indefinitely, in the exact same way we have been for the previous decade. Or you could recognize a much more sensible truth. Twitter is fundamentally transient and low-value. You can leave the platform, at any time, with your life completely unafflicted. There is no bravery in sticking around; that persistence won’t add anything in the aggregate. In fact, most people wouldn’t even notice you were gone.

Evidence is mounting that Europe’s far right will score better than ever before in the upcoming European Parliament elections on June 6 to June 9—and that the continent’s young voters will fuel its ascent. The young adults now gravitating to far right aren’t Nazis or xenophobic racists, but they may have a hand in an outcome that will, at the very least, shift the European Union’s priorities and accents to the right. A particularly solid right-wing finish—and cooperation across the hard-right spectrum—could rattle EU unity and throw a wrench into the bloc’s workings at a time when it is confronting acute crises on several fronts, not least the war in Ukraine.

Since new laws mean that even people under 18 will be eligible to vote in some countries—16-year-olds in Austria, Germany, Malta, and Belgium, and 17-year-olds in Greece—there had been hope that these new voters would put a brake on the populist surge engulfing Europe. The idea behind giving 16- and 17-year-olds the vote was partly based on their long-term investment in politics. The policies designed today will affect them for many decades, in contrast to their grandparents.

And in the 2019 European Parliament election, young voters showed great promise by turning out in record numbers, a hopeful sign that reflected their enthusiasm for the common European project. With the climate movement rocking the streets, their votes went disproportionately to green parties that championed strong climate protection and deeper EU integration—two sets of long-term interests. This landed green representatives from Portugal to Latvia in the Brussels parliament and prompted the EU administration to approve the European Green Deal in 2020.

But the democratic exuberance of voters in their late teens, 20s, and early 30s could boost a very different trend this June, as growing numbers of younger voters are siding with far-right populist parties—the very ones that want to scupper the Green Deal and rein in the EU. In recent national votes conducted in Portugal, Sweden, the Netherlands, Italy, Finland, and France, young people voted in unprecedented numbers for extreme nationalist and euroskeptic parties. (Though some observers have argued that reporting about these trends is incomplete or oversimplified.) And surveys in Germany show the youth vote becoming ever more sympathetic to the Alternative for Germany (AfD), a far-right party that has undergone a radicalization that makes it among Europe’s fiercest, hard-right electoral parties.

“There’s no doubt that these parties have been making inroads to younger voters,” said Catherine de Vries, a Dutch political scientist. “The parties don’t look so extreme anymore, as they’ve been around for a while now. And young people think that the mainstream parties have had their chance. The system still doesn’t work for them, so let the other guys have a try.”

A German study published this year by a team led by youth researcher Simon Schnetzer showed that a full 22 percent of the young people (in this case, ages 14 through 29) surveyed would vote for the AfD if German elections were held today—twice as many as just two years ago. The tally for the Green Party fell by a third during that time frame. A full quarter of those asked said they weren’t sure who’d they vote for—another all-time high result.

The grounds for the pronounced shift are vague: Researchers tend to cite a general unhappiness with the post-pandemic economic and political conditions. “It seems as if the coronavirus pandemic left [young people] irritated about our ability to cope with the future, which is reflected in deep insecurity,” wrote the study’s authors. The issues described by participants that most impact this insecurity included their personal finances, professional opportunities, the health sector, and social recognition. They expressed less concern about the climate crisis and more about inflation, the economy, and old-age poverty.

“We can speak of a clear shift to the right in the young population,” said Klaus Hurrelmann, one of the study’s authors and a professor at the Hertie School in Berlin. The AfD’s foremost campaign priority of stopping immigration and refugee relief plainly struck a chord: Compared to a separate study conducted five years ago, about half as many (26 percent) of the young participants (26 percent) in the 2024 study said they were not in favor of taking in refugees. But just as important as the content of immigration policies, the authors underlined, was the idea that young people feel unheard or involved in the political process.

The change in sympathy in many young Germans reflects survey results, elections, and the statements of other young people across Europe. In the Netherlands’ elections last year, the most popular party among people under 35 (at 17 percent) was the Party for Freedom, led by Geert Wilders, a far-right populist with a long record of EU-trashing.

The explanation provided by many Dutch experts: It’s all about bestaanszekerheid, a Dutch word translated as “livelihood security.” This refers to having a decent and regular income, a comfortable home, access to education and health care, and a buffer against unexpected problems, de Vries told the Guardian. Young peoples’ leading concerns in the Netherlands are housing, overcrowded classes, and struggling hospitals, she said, which Wilders addressed in his campaign.

In Portugal’s March legislative elections, the far-right Chega party, which prioritized courting young people, raked in more of their votes than any other party. The meaning of chega, which can be translated as “that’s enough,” accurately describes many young voters’ motive for supporting it. Their gripes: “a very low average wage and an economy that cannot absorb educated young people,” according to political scientist António Costa Pinto in an interview with Euronews

“In the past, right-wing sympathizers accused immigrants of taking their jobs,” said Eberhard Seidel, the managing director of a Berlin-based nongovernmental organization called Schools Without Racism. “Now there are enough jobs but not enough housing for people who work. They still have to live with their parents.”

Observers say that the far right has excelled at grabbing the youth’s attention, not least with the social media platform TikTok. The recent German study found that 57 percent of young people imbibe their news and politics through social media. More than 90 percent use messaging service WhatsApp, followed by Instagram (80 percent) and YouTube (77 percent). TikTok stands at 51 percent; more than half of all 14- to 29-year-olds now use the app regularly, compared to 44 percent last year. The epiphany prompted an immediate response from German Health Minister Karl Lauterbach, who on declared in his first video on the platform, posted on March 19: “Revolution on TikTok: It starts today.”

Other opinion surveys show that young voters are diverse, divided, and undecided. A YouGov poll conducted in August 2023 showed that young Europeans are overwhelmingly concerned about the climate crisis and its likely effects, and more willing than older people to change behavior to mitigate those effects. Another poll, conducted in Germany, showed human rights violations at the top of younger people’s lists, followed by climate change, sexual harassment, and child abuse.

Younger voters still aren’t the drivers of xenophobia in the way that their parents’ generation was, Seidel said. A vote for the AfD doesn’t necessarily mean that they favor expelling immigrants from Germany or exiting the EU. “They take the basics of democracy and the social system for granted,” he said. “And they’re not fully aware of the implications of a rightward lurch in their political systems.”

Neither were Brexit’s voters, Seidel noted. And they found out the hard way.

One of my more "radical" leftist friends admitted after the 2016 election that they voted for Jill Stein. I asked them why and they said, and I quote, "I don't really know."

Anyway, thank you for the thoughtful post about polling. I'm still terrified of another Biden-Trump match up, but I suspect you are right that many of these online leftists yelling about sending a message to "genocide Joe" were not likely voters to begin with.

Well I mean, in Online Leftist world, voting is an essentially meaningless act anyway, so if they do bother to do it, why not make some sort of "protest" against the Corrupt System, even though (as I said) Jill Stein is literally a Manchurian candidate sponsored and funded by Russia precisely in order to dupe gullible leftists who want to Send a Message to the Democrats. She has no platform and no policies. She just exists to hurt Democrats and she is another part of the reason HRC lost in 2016, but hey. That sure showed us, or something.

And the thing is, while I'm not discounting that there could be some slippage of the youth vote, it would be much more effective as a threat (much as I would still deeply disagree with it, since the stakes are far too high with Trumpian fascism to fuck around with this bullshit) if we had literally any shred of evidence that they were planning to vote at all, that they were planning to vote for Biden and this is somehow the one thing that made them decide otherwise, or that their arguments were at all widespread beyond their tiny hermetic internet echo chamber. As I have said, I have not thus far seen compelling evidence that any of this is true, and believe me, I am ALSO keeping a close eye on things because this year will probably kill me before it's over. But when the Online Leftists have already spent three years lying about and trashing everything Biden has actually done, it is difficult to believe that they were in fact intending to vote for him, that they should be priced into any election analysis, or that they are as impactful as they think.

I suspect they're mostly being used to try to convince other people (who may or may not have planned to vote) that it is morally reprehensible to vote for Biden solely because of Gaza, no matter how illogical that is and how many orders of magnitude worse Trump would be on literally everything. And while I'm not denying that they may well peel off a few of the wishy-washy leaners and that's why their rhetoric is dangerous, I deeply doubt that they themselves were ever any kind of electoral or voting participant at all, because they keep telling us loudly that they're not. The media is running hard with this angle because they desperately want more Biden in Trouble stories, but actual election results keep proving them wrong, over and over. For all our sakes, let's hope very much this trend continues.

As the war in Gaza has unfolded, many Israelis have argued that there can be no return to the status quo, by which they mean no cease-fire without the total “destruction” of Hamas. But the alternatives to Hamas rule that Israeli leaders have proposed are very much a continuation of the existing situation. Israel is not suddenly conquering Gaza: it never ceased controlling it, a reality that is all too present for Gazans who have suffered for 17 years under the Israeli blockade. It is more accurate to say that Israel, which has been the sovereign occupying power in Gaza for 56 years under a variety of political configurations, is once again attempting to rewrite the rules of its domination. And as the Israeli government has made clear, it has no intention of pursuing a renewed quest for a Palestinian state. Israelis had soured on a two-state solution long before October 7. Over the past decade, the Israeli peace camp, represented by the Meretz Party, had declined electorally to the point of near elimination; in 2022, it failed to cross the electoral threshold for Knesset representation. The current Israeli government had all but disavowed a two-state outcome and included right-wing members who openly aspired to full annexation of Gaza and the West Bank. October 7 accelerated the trend. The Israeli public has overwhelmingly lost what little faith remained in a two-state outcome, as a settler movement intent on dominating all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea has relentlessly risen to power.

Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami, The Two-State Mirage

April 25, 1974: Today marks the 50th anniversary of the Carnation Revolution in Portugal, the opening of an enormous class battle that was profoundly influenced by the anti-colonial liberation struggles in Africa. ----------------- Sam Marcy, writing in 1975:

“A Communist takeover of Portugal,” said the New York Times on February 17, “might encourage a similar trend in Italy and France, create problems in Greece and Turkey, affect the succession in Spain and Yugoslavia and send tremors throughout Western Europe.” The Soviet Union is then warned that “détente will be the first casualty.”

In the face of brutal frankness and open threats, can there be any doubt that the imperialist powers are preparing the ground for another Chile on the Iberian Peninsula? Do not the working class parties have the right – in fact the sacred duty – to prepare the mass of the people in advance for precisely this eventuality in the kind of manner which would put an end not merely to fascist threats, but to the ruling class and the system of exploitation upon which it rests?

The way Lenin and Trotsky prepared for the Constituent Assembly in 1917 offers an exceptionally instructive lesson. While utilizing all the legal and electoral opportunities offered, the Bolsheviks, knowing full well the counter-revolutionary nature of the bourgeoisie, armed the masses ideologically, politically, and physically for the insurrection. It was thus that they put an end to bourgeois rule and transferred the real power into the hands of the workers and peasants.

Free PDF pamphlet of "Portugal - Revolutionary Developments April 1974-July 1975" by Sam Marcy

I know i say "wear a mask and riot" and "fuck a peaceful protest" but I'd had a nice long post about how digital work and advocacy is praxis (or can be) on my old account. Right now, COVID is spreading and killing thousands of people in the US alone and nearly all """radicals""""" and """""leftists"""" are philosophically no different than the fascists they claim to oppose because they are so thoroughly wedded to eugenics that they refuse to wear and enforce masking. COVID causes long COVID in 10-30% of cases so the so-called US alone may well be a majority disabled nation now due to rampant eugenics forcing the spread of COVID. Long COVID is a rotting death and makes everything an order of magnitude more difficult if you still are able to do the things you were prior. Repeated COVID infections means you're guaranteed to be immunocompromised permanently and disabled in other ways you'll likely find out the hard way. With 40% of cases being asymptomatic and most only showing severe symptoms after 2-3 infections, and many starting to drop dead after 3 to 5 infections, many people accrue damage from and spread COVID without realizing it until it is far, far too late. As a result, it's guaranteed that the ableists have disabled and killed people. They've kept disabled people like me who are high risk out of radical spaces & communities. They've abandoned solidarity for everyone but the abled, ableist middle class while focusing most of their efforts on electoralism, despite the clear and constant failures of such actions. The BLM Rebellion of 2020-2021 had significant---albeit broadly temporary--impacts on electoral politics, society, and communities because it was a constant and ongoing rebellion that was also much more disability inclusive than prior leftist movement moments. For the first time, people recognized the need for remote actions & support because while masking was at the high water mark, more abled people understood that a lot of us disabled could not and would not risk COVID but we had had skills vital to the project. Things disabled people were absolutely critical for during the BLM Rebellion: police scanner observation and transcription, evacuation coordination, event & route planning, translation services, postering, graphics art & design, self defense seminars, radio nets, mutual aid fundraising, mutual aid distribution, bail fund coordination, zine writing, mask & test distributions, contact tracing (remember this??!??!), car brigades, organizing medical supplies, teaching first aid skills, and countless other roles often organized & performed remotely. For every fighter, there are at least a dozen support roles and with some thought and effort, those roles can be aided or done digitally. Posting on its own can be praxis in that it shares information, knowledge, tactics, demonstrates that there are other radicals out there willing to do what they can, normalizes radicalism, and in some cases, regimes pay close attention to internet support.

During the height of the Jina Amini rebellion in 2022, the Iranian regime tried to cut the internet repeatedly to stifle information out of and into Iran to hinder protest coordination and outrage. It also paid extremely close attention to when the rebellion was trending and refrained from reprisals until the mass attention of the internet citizenry turned away. Posting literally helped save lives by forcing the regime to wait, buying people time to organize, prepare, and act accordingly in Iran and internationally. Personally, I will always remember and be grateful for the Palestinians who turned out across the world, but especially in occupied Palestine, for Iranians. Iran is not the only regime that will wait until posts slacken and attention wanes before massacring people. If you are disabled, if you have arrest risks, if for any reasons you don't want to be involved in a radical riot, but you want to support those who can and do, there is so much you can do year round but especially things kick off!! Any skills, resources, knowledge, or support you can organize or contribute is valuable! eSims for Gaza right now are monumental in ensuring Gazans can coordinate information, requests, record Israeli occupation war crimes & apartheid cruelty, and many disabled graphics designers are offering their services in exchange for esim donations. It's been incredible to see.

The people who are against digital activism are ableist and racist and ignorant as hell beyond that. You can make an impact and even save and change lives while homebound. Begging genociders to stop profitable genocides has never and will never work. Riots & boycotts work because they directly confront and attack power and if those actions are supported by communities, they can continue for quite some time, as we saw with the BLM uprising. Regimes do not fall because people ask regime leaders to please stop committing atrocities; they fall when the people are able to bring to bear the sum of their hopes and wrath and bring the fight to those who have been oppressing them. That requires inclusive community & an outright rejection of the regime and its systems of cooptation & recuperation.

If a revolution or movement isn't inclusive, if it excludes the disabled, the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed, it's not a revolution or movement, it's just another genocidal regime change.

As someone who does think Biden's age is a political liability but considers all of this "open convention" stuff to be pipe dream silliness - the time for Biden to not run again was in early 2023 so a primary could happen, its too late now - replacing his VP is definitely a more interesting idea. Harris was always a weak pick, done for "interparty" versus electoral reasons. It was both a weird time in politics and in a certain sense Trump maybe seemed very vulnerable, so perhaps it was logical at the time to lean left.

But now we have had four years for Kamala Harris to build her brand, something she has completely failed to do (no blame being cast here, I don't know who is making what decisions in the White House), and she trails Biden handily in a Trump matchup on polls. She has never been a popular politician, and that trend seems set to continue. While proving causation is too difficult to even approach, I think that the "age" issue for Biden is probably in part a reflection of the fact that he has such a tepid replacement lined up.

And meanwhile a "new" VP definitely has energy the same VP doesn't; its a headline maker and a mind shifter. Choosing the right one can send a message about campaign tone and direction. Its not much, but Biden right now is on track to lose the election. A lot can happen ofc, its far from over, but the general signs aren't amazing.

So I think that if you want to do something *practical* about the Biden Age Problem, instead of weird outsized ways to make him not the candidate, you could find a solid alternate VP pick. Its the only big idea really worth considering IMO.

I worked at our national election today, and apparently the largest voter demographics in Russia are, in descending order:

- crowds of state workers spawning out of nowhere at 8 am just to disappear just as easily after voting (because you know, voter coercion and what not)

- elderly women with disabilities

- mothers with children (probably the least predictable group here)

- basically what I imagine tumblrinas to look like

- giant men with very serious expressions (probably the vestigial remains of the LDPR electorate)

That being said there was basically noone voting. There were like 5-minute periods when all the 4 electoral districts in our school had no people voting at all. I'm kinda confused and I'm wondering if this trend will continue tomorrow.

Write me if you want to hear more about this "2024 presidential election in Russia" thing, I'll be back near the ballot boxes tomorrow