SwingingTheLamp

Getting trapped in a building with a mass shooter is something very, very unlikely. On the other hand, I face the danger of death by automobile at least twice a day, on my ride to work, and my ride home. More, if I go other places. It may seem not that bad because it's so normalized. Dying in or under the wheels of a car is something that happens to people every single day, and it barely rates a mention in the local news. Sometimes the victim doesn't get even get a name. By contrast, the stochastic nature of mass shootings makes them scary, like plane crashes or terrorist attacks, the natural order of things is upended. Death is death, though, and I wouldn't be less dead if it were a texting driver rather than a gunman.

And the texting driver is a whole hell a of a lot more likely. So, yes, it's entirely logical that I'm afraid of that. Not being able to understand and denying that fear is exactly the kind of car-induced sociopathy that I'm talking about.

Throwing insults is not a discussion, by the way.

You're surprised that something that's not good enough is... not good enough?

You don't understand what fear is like?

Are we still pretending he's not experiencing severe cognitive decline, likely dementia? We are? Got it. Just checking.

They're not the same. This is privilege speaking, I know, but gun violence mostly occurs between people who know each other. I'm not in those circles or neighborhoods, so only the occasional mass shooting might affect me.

But cars? They're omnipresent. There's a steady stream of them in front of my home, so I can't avoid the danger. My life is threatened by cars every damn day, and my quality of life degraded by them. And you can't tell me that driving a car around a city is anything but sociopathic disregard for the well-being of others, because that's what it amounts to.

Cars as bad as guns? No, they're worse.

An automobile, at the end of the day, is a luxury item. A toy. Humanity existed for most of its history without cars, and even today, you can get to work or the grocery store without one. (Granted, often not easily, but that's only because we've made it difficult to get there any other way. But making it difficult was a deliberate policy choice designed to exclude poor people.) One could argue that the automobile is an anti-tool, as its use is making our lives materially worse (traffic violence, health impacts, pollution, ecosystem destruction, climate change, the burden on government and personal budgets), but that ignores a car's major function as a cultural identity marker, and for wealth signaling. We humans value that a lot. Consider, as but one common example, the enormous pickup truck used as a commuter vehicle, known as a pavement princess, bro-dozer, or gender-affirming vehicle.

In that way, they're exactly the same as firearms, which are most often today used as a cultural identity marker. (Often by the same people who drive a pavement princess, and in support of the same cultural identity.) Firearms are also also luxury toys in that people enjoy going to the firing range and blasting away hundreds of dollars for the enjoyment of it. But beyond that, the gun people have a pretty legit argument, too, that their firearms are tools used for hunting and self-defense. They are undeniably useful in certain contexts, and no substitute will do. One certainly wouldn't send mounted cavalry with sabers into war today.

I'm having trouble believing that this is a good-faith comment, as the strawman bears so little resemblance to what I wrote. The vein of thinking is that reduced-harm is still harm—maybe Harm Lite—and that we can only sustain any level of harm for so long before it's fatal. Without the metaphor: The harm-reduction argument of "vote blue no matter who" is utterly stupid, because it only works if "blue" wins every election forevermore. That's highly unrealistic. The fascists were never just going to go away; they took over one of the only two viable political parties and were going to win an election sooner or later because U.S. elections routinely swing back and forth between the only two viable political parties.

Furthermore, the accelerationist concept is to shock the people into action with the contrast of how bad things got so quickly, while the harm-reduction concept seems to entail letting some people non-figuratively die along the way, as Sen. Ernst applauds, as long as it's fewer people than it could have been. (No, I don't think that the harm-reduction proponents want that, I'm just observing what appears to be the real-world implementation.) Personally, I have hoped against hope that we could change course, and fix the only-two-viable-political-parties problem before things got bad, before any metaphorical or non-figurative dying.

All of those are center-right policies, tinkering with the mechanics of a fundamentally neo-liberal system, when that system is slowly crushing us (57% of Americans living hand-to-mouth). Imagine why voters aren't fired up to come out and support a boost to, say, semiconductor research spending to strengthen U.S. supply chain resilience.

That's not even remotely the same vein of thinking, even though both Ernst and I used the word "die."

Biden did very, very few "left" things. His policies were center-right. (For example, when the railroad workers threatened the economy with a strike, the left-wing response would be to temporarily nationalize the rails; the right-wing response would be to protect the railroad companies and remove the workers' ability to strike.) Progressives showed up to vote for Harris, anyway, as the numbers show. The mythical "centrists" did not.

If "harm" and "less harm" are the only two options, then the only question is how quickly you die. There's the argument that we have to do "harm reduction" in order to buy time to organize for something better, but we've been procrastinating for decades apparently. Since all of history informs us that humans act only when inaction is no longer tenable (and sometimes not even then), really the only material difference between "harm reduction" and accelerationism is, again, the timeline.

The Harris campaign tried to appeal to the centrists, and look how that turned out.