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let me try a linguistic cleave:


-Bad accelerationism is making potholes so that the city (which typically ignores potholes) will finally notice & send out a team to fill em in.

-Good accelerationism is intensifying the existing potholes by spraypainting dicks around them.


https://www.ladbible.com/news/uk-potholes-gets-fixed-after-protestor-spray-paints-penises-around-them-20190427

okay but why this underlying assumption that only the city is capable of filling potholes?

I think I'm an accelerationist in the sense that I believe accelerationism describes what's happening right now -- as the roller coaster picks up speed, nuts and bolts begin to fall off. Systems fail when pushed to their limit.

With exceptions, I don't see it as desirable. Incremental change usually results in less suffering, although it does meander, and prolongs bad conditions. So not always.

The problem with incremental change in this case is the direction it's headed is definitely the wrong one. We are incrementally marching directly into full-blown fascism, not toward anything resembling sanity and openness. People say "vote blue because we need to take baby steps" but the only thing that accomplishes is increasingly slightly applying the brakes to this slide. We take baby steps toward something better during Democratic administrations, and then we take great big leaps in the other direction when the GOP takes over. The net result isn't progress, at all. The "incremental change" argument is moot af.

I'm trying to imagine living in the US during the 1850s... obviously the civil war was a terrible thing, but so was slavery. If you were editing a newspaper in that period, and your ultimate goal is to minimize human suffering throughout the union, would the "right" thing be to agitate, or dissipate the cultural tension? In the short term, dissipation may have been better, but in the long view, agitation was more helpful.

But we are not beings who exist in the long-term... we can't see if breaking the system actually leads to fixes. So we have to take care of each other right now.

Yes, we need to take care of each other. Like, directly, not via the convenient proxy of the state (which demonstrably does not take care of people, even under the most beneficent administrations).

The thing about accelerationist arguments is that bringing the shit to the surface has to be useful. If no mechanism exists to correct the problem once it's crested above the water, then all you've done is make things worse.

For example, a friend remarked to me that Trump's reelection is the only way for a progressive candidate to be president this decade..  because 4 years of Biden will basically hand the next election to a republican, who might get 2 terms, so the opportunity for a real reform president may not manifest until 2028 or 2032.... But yo, where the fuck is this mystery progressive candidate coming from? We haven't been able to generate an effective one in the last 4 years, what makes anybody think one will descend from socialist nirvana in 2024?

A more present example is the healthcare system... in a world of pandemics, linking health insurance to employment is patently a bad idea. "Good accelerationists" wouldn't cheer for the healthcare system to break, would not hope for economic devastation -- but would capitalize on its current insufficiency and seize the opportunity to make a case for something else.

On healthcare, the current system is already about as bad as it can get from the perspective of half or more of Americans. Obamacare definitely helped people (myself included, my daughter specifically), but a lot of what it accomplished was on paper only. Millions of people still left out, tens of millions of people "covered" in theory but still unable to afford care when it comes to actually getting care. The current state of affairs already requires specific expansions of coverage via Medicare/Medicaid because the system we have just doesn't cut it. Effectively this is no different from having no system at all. Biden specifically is still very much in favor of continuing to link healthcare to employment because he knows that's one of the biggest things forcing workers to accept substandard employment conditions, which he also supports.

As for whether or not reelecting Trump will or won't allow a real progressive candidate, again I think it's silly to ever hope for a genuinely progressive candidate in any year, in any scenario. Our system simply will not allow it. Sanders was hardly progressive by objective standards and he never really had a chance. That's why my "accelerationism" focuses on extracurricular action. We cannot afford to invest our energy in a system that has proven itself to be steadfastly against any actual progress.

Accelerationism is making things worse so that they can get better faster. 

This has never worked.

Depends on your perspective. WW2 made things pretty awful, but then Germany stopped being a Nazi trashfire. The American Revolution didn't make things better for most people but whoever it was that was mad about taxes on tea were probably ok with it.

There's a weird tendency to believe that living standards in the USA begin and end with federal policy, like the official state of our government is an unbreakable physical law within the context of which everything exists. Like a Supreme Court full of jackals is as immutable as gravity or something. I don't buy it. "The Government" is just a thing people do in cooperation with each other to achieve some result they want. There's no reason only one of those types of things can exist at a time.

Saying "welp, that's the best we can do, and insisting on anything better is tantamount to betrayal of the disadvantaged" is just an admission that America is fundamentally a racist, sexist pile of garbage full of irredeemable garbage people, so the best we can hope for is Corporatism over (outright) Fascism. I don't support blowing my vote (and again, I am voting for Biden) and leaving it at that. I support acting outside the bounds of this clearly broken system, developing direct support networks that do what our governments refuse to do, and making the whole political charade obsolete.

isn't human extinction just the Big Acceleration tho

Oh, and the GOP has apparently finally picked up on this.

It's all over now.

well, yeah. that was my whole point to begin with. it's all over. there is no functional point in trying to avoid it. except where you'd prefer voters who weren't so easily manipulated by these things, I'd prefer a party that didn't keep picking the sorts of people who are so susceptible to it. can't have the one without the other, really.

Alternatively we could stop scrambling for a "safe" position that's only "safe" compared to a catastrophic alternative but would itself be described as the catastrophic alternative 40 years ago, over and over again, forever chasing our tails and pretending we are accomplishing something but actually just delaying the inevitable. Harm reduction is fine and all but when that's your only plan, and the only plan you'll even entertain, it's sort of useless.

OH, AND ANOTHER THING:

Even if we DID vote for Social Program Jesus or whomever next time, it WON'T MATTER.  Because in the spring of 2024, someone will make an unsubstantiated claim about how Social Program Jesus raped someone in 1978 and we will dump them like hot rocks on the accusation alone, leaving Don Jr to be the next president.

Because we are fucking morons and we should just launch our entire nuclear inventory right now.  Like right fucking now.

I know the difference is evaporating to the point of hardly being worth mentioning but this isn't a Bernie Sanders Is My Savior situation, it's a "Bernie Sanders best represented (until a month ago or whatever) my last hope for salvaging this political system". I don't have a shrine to this guy in my bathroom. I don't actually even follow him beyond knowing his platform. It's too bad everyone thinks this is about some specific person because the Jesus jokes would land better if it were. If it turns out Sanders had a credible accusation of sexual assault, yeah I'd drop him as the avatar of whatever this idea is, but that doesn't mean the idea would die along with him. But what idea does Biden stand for? I mean, besides "Please I'll Do Whatever You Say Just Don't Shoot Another Hostage Oh God Where's The Cavalry"?

People act like the federal government is the only one with any moral obligation to help people. Why is the direct result of Trump kicking people off SNAP "so granny starved" and not "so I broke into a grocery store and stole Granny some food" or at least "so I voted in a state administration that managed that problem on their own"? We don't actually need this omnipotent proxy in Washington DC in order to look out for each other.

I get it, I too would rather have a consistent, national system of strong safety nets that look out for people who slip through the cracks. But even under 8 years of Obama, we didn't get that. We got marginally closer to it, but even St. Barry didn't actually fix much of the shit Dubya broke, just like Clinton didn't actually fix what Reagan broke, and Biden won't even come close to fixing what Trump has broken. These Democratic administrations are little retaining walls trying to stop an avalanche of bad faith and poor choices and general human idiocy.

Trump will definitely cement the Supreme Court into 40 years of backward thinking and economic predation. But if our last best hope for sanity is a few judges who might not toss out the weasely half-baked laws that only sort of cover the things we demand anyway, our hope is lost anyway. The Supreme Court wouldn't have any way to overturn a proper constitutional amendment that says "No Fuck You Abortion Is A Right", for example, but nobody wants to think about that because that's hard. We want the easy way, the quick fix, a kinda-sorta benevolent but very precarious balance between absolute terrifying fascist evil and "not quite absolute terrifying fascist evil". And we want someone else to be responsible for mitigating the misery we see around us.

I feel you're putting too much faith in our legal system when it comes to rape trials.

Okay, then, let's all not vote for Biden based on an exquisitely timed accusation.

This will work out well for everyone.  I mean, this is fucking awesome.  The left is permanently beaten, because whenever there is a candidate, they need only be accused of a crime in the distant past, and they are sunk at that very moment.

The right isn't stupid.  They know this.  We should just quit.  Hand the entire fucking place over to the pussy grabber and save ourselves some screaming and running around.

Fucking humans. 

Alternatively we could stop scrambling for a "safe" position that's only "safe" compared to a catastrophic alternative but would itself be described as the catastrophic alternative 40 years ago, over and over again, forever chasing our tails and pretending we are accomplishing something but actually just delaying the inevitable. Harm reduction is fine and all but when that's your only plan, and the only plan you'll even entertain, it's sort of useless.

I wasn't this kind of accelerationist asshole a few months ago, but this "believe the accuser unless it's my guy in the crosshairs" and "only incels and MRAs complain about false accusations, except in this case because it's my guy" business just isn't for me. Is this particular accuser a Russian asset or something? Who knows? But the fact that Biden can't just brush this off because everyone knows he is at least some level of sex-creepy is also the point. At what point do we just decide flat out that there are some lines we will not cross, regardless of the disaster we're threatened with? Trump gets elected despite his predatory ways, and it's outrageous. But I guess we have to stop complaining about him, too, if it's okay for our guy because Big Important Reasons Are Bigger and More Important.

People need to quit giving the presidential election the Popularity Contest treatment. A vote for president, no matter how it is cast (or not cast) isn't about the individual politician who occupies the space on the ballot you choose. I would have been happy to vote for Warren or Sanders and I'm going to vote for Biden just because I don't want to hear the asinine lectures about it after this election. But it isn't about Biden, or Sanders, or even Trump, it's about the philosophies and realities these candidates represent. Biden, whether anyone really wants to talk about it or not, represents the philosophy that says "sorry, sexual assault survivors, my political strategy is more important than your safety or your access to justice." Is that an ethical trade-off? Maybe, maybe not. But it is a trade off, and it's disingenuous to pretend that calculus isn't going into the decision.

So voting for, and even electing, Biden isn't just a simple matter of harm reduction. It's an endorsement of this "status quo" that everyone both hates and mysteriously feels the need to protect until some mythological point in the future where we can risk changing it (maybe, gods willing, as long as nobody gets hurt in the process, and even then only if the stars align just right).

For my part
I prefer
Mitigation
over some silly
Acceleration
of the oncoming
inevitable
calamity.
Why rush things?
There is no gain
in playing that game.

It's a character flaw. I also always read the last page of the book first.

I am also unconvinced that the accelerationists are any different than the MAGA freaks.  They both wish to cause harm to the very few humans I don't hate, and therefore I hate them and will cause them harm at any possible opportunity.  And I don't care why.

You're right insofaras harm would befall the wrong people either way, but whereas for the MAGA freaks, the harm is the ultimate goal and therefore will be encouraged and they will personally engage in worsening it and wielding the State as a weapon to enforce it, the accelerationists see the harm as both inevitable and already an extant reality and are likely to personally engage in mitigating it on a peer-to-peer level and disrupting the State's ability to enforce it.

You yourself are an accelerationist in that respect, judging by your stated position that what we're seeing now is "the rattle of pebbles preceding the landslide that we are smack in the path of." It isn't a matter of whether we can avoid catastrophe, but how long we can put it off. Whether the full force of the disaster befalls the people you know personally or their children is immaterial.

I think the real issue is that "fundamental change" is never on the ballot. It will never be certified for any election, ever. And there will never be an election that takes place in the absence of an apparently urgent need to postpone such change because of some immediate crisis. That's my frustration, and the frustration of "accelerationists". That in this minute by minute war against looming calamity, there will never be moment where there isn't a "good reason" to back down and choose the safer path, even though the safer path always, always leads right back here.

It isn't simply that people want to throw up their hands and push us all off the cliff. It's that we are perpetually in the state of having just fallen off the cliff anyway and the idea that we can narrowly avert disaster is no more than the illusion that if we grasp for a twig just out of reach we might arrest our plummet. The argument is that we have already fallen and the responsible thing would be to face that fact and experience its ramifications so we can begin picking ourselves up, not scramble for the illusion of safety in the increasingly inhospitable status quo.

yeah but there is a yuuge difference between Trump and Biden in terms of Supreme Court picks

not to mention dozens of other judicial appointees

middling environmental regulation is better than a fully captured EPA

Single Payer Heathcare for all > Obamacare > Trump fully dismantling and defunding Obamacare

etc etc etc

look, I'm not a fan of Biden, but I'm not buying the total equivalency between the two. A lot of this is letting the Perfect be the enemy of the Good.

Yes, Biden will probably lose, but can we recognize that's a self-fulfilling prophecy?

I need to address my inability to get this idea across, to be honest. I am not saying Biden is morally or even functionally equivalent to Trump. As individual politicians with their own separate styles of speaking, thinking, and governing, they are oceans apart - as are the results, at least in the short term, that they will achieve. But that isn't my point.

What I'm saying is that Biden is part and parcel of a stagnant, obsolete status quo which inevitably leads to Trumpism. If Biden wins in 2020, well, that's great and all, but it just kicks the can down the road. Mainstream centrist liberalism is incapable of achieving fundamentally meaningful changes in American culture. An America led by Biden will continue to be one where corporate profits are structurally more important than human life, where foreign policy is one of projected coercion and managed instability in potential rivals, where access to healthcare, housing, food, and other necessities is predicated upon subservience to an economic system where people are "human capital".

It is this status quo which so disempowers and discards human beings that inexorably engenders discontent, xenophobia, and disregard for one another, and so leads directly to a groundswell of popular support for fascism. Electing Joe Biden only adds one more cycle into the wheel of misery. It does nothing to change the nature of the society that produced Trumpism. In that regard, Biden is equal to Trump. Because Biden is just step one in a process where Trump is step two or three. And every time we have someone like Trump rise to power, we manage to lose much, much more in the way of civil liberties and basic human decency than we can hope to make up for with an interval of relative sanity before the next wave of Fascism.

What if I want bad things?

Then this is your year

When you live long enough to see history repeat itself

goddammit