Notices by A.R. Moxon, Verified Duck ? (juliusgoat@mastodon.social), page 8

I think the counter to deliberate ignorance is witness. Witness isn't a debate, nor an argument. It’s simply paying the cost of awareness, observing with the benefit as much information as you can gather, and proclaiming things as you understand them to be.

OK, I tricked you. Those aren’t predictions.

They're witness about what is happening already and existing patterns of behavior, which allows them to masquerade as predictions, because they don't just happen; *they keep happening.*

10) People who would like to avoid awareness and the moral imperatives that attend awareness and conviction will accept and promote those simple narratives of false equivalence.

I could pretend that all of this will be solved by the election, and that nothing is needed but my vote, but I wouldn't be creating differentiators.

Or I could pretend the election doesn’t matter at all, and what I choose to do is immaterial, but I’d face the same problem.

I could pretend that the other party isn’t a hate group animated by every bigotry, intending to demolish any progress made over the centuries, but I wouldn’t be telling a true story. It wouldn't make me a fascist ... but it wouldn't differentiate me.

I could pretend that our status-quo party isn’t in the business of empire and capital and all the violence and entrenched supremacy that comes with it, but I wouldn’t be telling a true story. It wouldn't make me a fascist ... but it wouldn't differentiate me.

It's a focus on what *is* that leads to conviction to improve it.

I would observe that fascism feeds best on equivalencies. This leads me to believe that it is fought by creating differentiation.
Witness is one thing I try to do to differentiate myself from fascism.

Yes, I could choose to use the election as a tool for self-exoneration, and it wouldn't make me a fascist ... but it wouldn't differentiate me from fascists.

Again, what we want here is simple witness. A refusal to accept false equivalencies by creating a real differentiation.

Or I could pretend that by voting for the least-bad option, I am similarly exonerated from the same moral responsibility that attends belonging to a militarized empire.

Or I could choose from my relatively unthreatened position to not participate at all, as if non-participation in some way frees me from the moral burdens that attend belonging to this U.S. empire and all its crimes.

Or I could blame people with scant political representation for being disaffected toward elections, tell them that they their non-participation means they will deserve their suffering ... but blaming marginalized people for their own suffering doesn't differentiate from fascists.

Or I can lash myself to reality as tightly as possible, and observe with as much precision as I can what the stakes are, what the outcomes of each of two choices might be, and realize that no easy or self-exonerating outcomes exist, but some outcomes are better than others.

I can endlessly predict who will or will not support the right thing, and why things can't change because of the way things are. I can spend my time shouting at people for not making the same choice as me to establish not change but my own rightness.

I can do this, but it won't differentiate me.

Because we are all invited by the media environment to be pundits rather than participants in the democratic process, here are my 10 predictions for the election.

1) There will be an election. There will be, practically speaking, two choices at the top.

(This is my boldest prediction.)
🧵

It might be a political liability for Republicans that they can’t stop being creepy hateful bigoted weirdos who are afraid of good things and get angry about things like kindness and health and the existence of women.

I think it's time the media had a serious conversation about Don Trump's age.

Oh so now you smear people as "Nazi sympathizers" just because they sympathize with Nazis? and also with their policies, tactics, methods, strategies, and objectives? well so much for tolerance,

Oh you just call anyone “Nazi” who disagrees with you about enacting mass deportation of ethic minorities demonized as “vermin poisoning the blood of the nation” as part of a nationalist myth of purifying violence promulgated to a far right cult by an authoritarian demagogue.

Well I'm given to understand that today & for a VERY limited time, our nation's political violence party is shocked—shocked!—to learn that we currently live in a world of normalized political violence, and would like very much to know who is to blame.

Full Essay: https://www.the-reframe.com/gambling-in-casablanca/

Like yes he might very well win and we should all be aware of the extremely real dangerous possibility of that, but also he can be beaten and we should all be working toward that possibility I think, because him winning would be, to use a wonky technical political term, bad.