Holding people accountable for their actions that affect you is an entirely just and necessary thing to do.

Another contributor to low turnout was massive voter suppression. It’d be interesting to see that quantified. Hundreds of thousands of voters were being purged in each of several states. The single-issue Gaza vote was lost in the noise of those gross examples of electoral manipulation.

Gaza was also a big issue for Gen Z

It was a convenient excuse for their apathy.

asking the relatives of genocide victims to vote for someone

There are 160,000 Palestinian-Americans. Most of them originate in the West Bank (especially Ramallah) and Jerusalem. Almost none of them are in Michigan. Michigan’s Arab-Americans are mostly Lebanese-descended.

People with family ties to Gaza were a vanishingly small percentage of the electorate. They’re vastly outnumbered by the people who were suckered by the “Dems = Genocide” concern-trolling.

It’ll be a genocide soon enough.

An ancestor of mine wrote a memoir of growing up in an Old West mining town. He saw one gunfight. In the early morning, a man saw the front door of his house open and another man walk out. Not happy to find that another gentleman’s bacon had been in his grill, he demanded satisfaction. That led to an impromptu duel which the offended husband won. My ancestor was walking to school when it all went down.

That was probably an exceptional situation, since the town in question was notoriously violent and corrupt.

(Shot himself in the shin, so it wasn’t a suicide attempt)

Might have been, sounds like he’s a shin-for-brains.

Not all early Christians followed Paul. The church in Jerusalem under James was at odds with Paul on a number of subjects. There were also more radical groups outside Jerusalem that combined Christianity with Greek philosophy, having women preaching and leading congregations, and incorporating various mystical beliefs that didn’t originate in Judaism or the teachings of Jesus.

The Muslims have never had a big, convoluted End Times mythos like the Christians, at least not in the Qur’an. At some point in the indefinite future, there will be Judgement Day, and everybody living or dead will get hauled in front of Allah and the recording angel will play back your scorecard. Then it’s Jinnah (heaven) or Jehenna (hell).

There are quite a number of hadiths (extra-scriptural reports of things Muhammad said or did) that talk about the end times. Hadiths are assessed by Islamic scholars based on their provenance and general credibility. Those originating from people close to the Prophet are ranked higher; those that contradict the Qur’an are downgraded. Most of the non-Qur’anic end times narratives sound very similar to Christian eschatology, except that the Mahdi, the successor prophet to Muhammad, appears. Jesus (Issa) returns (and maybe he’s the same guy as the Mahdi?), there’s the Antichrist (the Dajjal) stirring up mischief, there are signs and portents, the giants Gog and Magog running amok, the stars fall from the sky as meteors, etc, etc.

It’s not as entertaining as Ragnarök, but it’s more coherent than the Christian fundies’ fanfic.

According to mainstream Christianity, that’s trying to force God to do something. And the Bible is clear that nobody, not even the faithful, will know when the end times will come.

Not that I care, being an atheist. But these people make shit up without even bothering to see if it’s consistent with the shit that’s already been made up.

And that, right there, is an example of the paradox of tolerance of intolerance.

There’s some theory and computer science behind parts. The value of peer review is evidence-backed. The idea that dev teams should self-organize is consistent with some varieties of management theory. Retros have been shown to have value, though the way they’re often done in Agile teams I’ve worked in has left much to be desired. Estimation with dimensionless points has zero evidential backing. The notion that the team should be able to set dates rather than having milestones imposed by management is, at best, woefully naive, since it presupposes a commitment by management that, in real life, few managers are willing to make. And in most cases where the shit has hit the fan, we later find that we needed more analysis, more planning and more design up front, rather than less. There are only certain application domains where you can get away with being as minimalist with those disciplines as Agile exponents claim you should be.

Anarchism isn’t zero organization. It’s organization for legitimate and accountable purposes.

he was wrong about it being necessary to destroy capitalism before this happened

I thought it was more that (using modern terminology) he viewed socialism as an emergent phenomenon that would arise due to the unresolved contradictions within capitalism. So socialism doesn’t require the destruction of capitalism in order to start, it’s more that once it emerges, it’ll supersede capitalism. The Leninist approach of destroying the old order, then building the new one at gunpoint didn’t work all that well (to vastly understate), leading to a long period of totalitarian state capitalism, where workers had no control over the means of production (which is the main attribute Marx ascribes to socialism) and degeneration into nationalism, imperialist nostalgia and cronyism.

But so far, along with failed revolutions hijacked by totalitarians, the main thing we’ve seen is that spontaneous emergence of working, non-coercive socialist organizations such as co-operatives has been met with strong and sometimes murderous opposition from the incumbent capitalists.