David Benfell, Ph.D. (he/him/his)

Ph.D. Human Science (Saybrook University, 2016), vegetarian ecofeminist (#vegan and #libertariansocialist) scholar, #anticapitalist.

blog: https://disunitedstates.org/
news: https://disunitedstates.com/
ORCID: https://orcid.org/ 0000-0003-2641-962X
Academia: https://saybrook.academia.edu/DavidBenfell

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Last Notes

2024-06-16 04:00:56

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come to think of it, I might have my terminology confused. I suspect what you call table spoons is what I was thinking of with soup spoons. And in that case, yeah, that’s exactly how I used them.

2024-06-16 03:50:15

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if you want to shovel it down, wouldn’t the larger spoon be advantageous?
I used to *always* use the soup spoons because I thought the regular spoons were just too dainty. (In answer to, “tell me you have a big mouth without telling me you have a big mouth.”)

2024-06-15 22:22:35

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As I peruse my pinned post and the additions to it, it appears something is missing.
It's 2024, an election year in the U.S., and this year we are treated to the choice between a war criminal (Joe Biden) and a fascist (Donald Trump).
I will be writing in LESSER EVIL.
Let’s be clear: Neither Trump nor Biden is even remotely acceptable. Both belong in prison for life. I will not vote for either.
And I will not tolerate being told “the other guy is worse” because the reason we face this terrible dilemma is that people have been acquiescing to “the lesser evil” for decades; the Democrats moved rightward to try to entice so-called “moderates” in response to landslide defeats in 1972 (George McGovern vs. Richard Nixon) and 1984 (Walter Mondale vs. Ronald Reagan), driving Republicans further rightward, yielding the white Christian nationalist madness we face today.
Democrats don’t even bother hiding that they take the progressive vote for granted, counting on progressives to be horrified by Republicans. The #VoteBlueNoMatterWho crowd are nothing more than apologists for neoliberalism.
You will be blocked if you argue “the other guy is worse” or advocate voting for “the lesser evil.” ‘Cause I’m not here for that.

2024-06-15 14:54:39

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It’s actually my plan to write in LESSER EVIL.
Because that’s precisely how we have wound up with these horrible choices: People kept voting for “the lesser evil,” and the parties responded accordingly. And while it might be “the lesser evil,” it is still evil. And the evil accumulates and intensifies.
The privilege of being able to tolerate the status quo is the privilege that tolerated Donald Trump and now tolerates Joe Biden. It underlies the garbage about “the economy being better than people think” (when I haven’t been able to get a real job in 23 years).

2024-06-15 14:39:53

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None of this excuses voting for either of them.

2024-06-15 14:38:47

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*and* to the war criminals.

2024-06-15 02:56:51

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it’s about saying no to both fascists and war criminals. Neither should be even remotely acceptable. And when the system leaves us with this kind of a choice, it’s past time for another system.

2024-06-14 03:31:50

Democrats are different from Republicans? On reproductive rights, be cynical, very cynical https://disunitedstates.com/2024/06/13/democrats-are-different-from-republicans-on-reproductive-rights-be-cynical-very-cynical/

2024-06-12 21:59:09

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with the Democrats, there is *always* an excuse. And on this, as on so many issues, it is ludicrously obvious that Democrats strongly prefer sitting in opposition where they can complain about Republicans and where no one will expect them to actually accomplish anything.

2024-06-10 04:04:30

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Kids (hint: you’re *all* kids) today have a particularly apt phrase for this: first world problems.
I’ve had some hard talks with my mother about this. I honestly doubt she quite wraps her head around the dilemma of a fascist versus a war criminal to prop up a constitutional oligarchy.
She finally understands that voting for either is, for me, completely morally unacceptable. But she’s weighing domestic issues—not least abortion. I simply can’t do that. Both these candidates are beyond the pale.

2024-06-08 04:21:59

So I’ve got an off-the-wall question that occurred to me as I was turning over, trying to sleep:
Does anyone still use adding machines?

2024-06-06 13:34:44

So I finally watched the series finale in #StarTrek #Discovery.
It was a tear-jerker, which is fine. But I have some questions. Why are they sending Discovery into deep space and abandoning her? How was Discovery able to use the spore drive if Michael Burnham was the only person on board and the spore drive requires a empathic sentient being for an interface?
It’s conceivable they solved the spore drive issue in the years while Michael Burnham married Cleveland Booker and raised a boy to adulthood. But there’s no explanation whatsoever for sending Discovery and Zara—the ship’s sentient computer—into exile.
The episode has the feel of, oh, we’ve just gotta wrap up the series now, who cares about continuity?
@npub17zn…z5e5 #allstartrek

2024-05-04 05:55:23

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It's striking me that I should add a note about boosts and stars.
Strictly speaking, a boost just means you think other folks should see it. Strictly speaking, this is not an endorsement. Often it is. Sometimes it will simply be to amplify a voice which I find interesting or important for some reason. I may be withholding comment out of respect or because I have not looked into the matter.
Stars, on the other hand, signify approval at least in some (indeterminate) form.

2024-04-30 04:26:31

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Oh, and the additions to my pinned post keep coming.
Zionists are committing genocide in Gaza and ethnically cleansing the West Bank. Israel has been an ethnic cleansing project from the beginning.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/03/colonial-history-britain-israel/
If you’re invoking a charge of anti-Semitism in response to this, your priorities are completely backwards. I believe the term for it is “red herring.” This is a blocking offense.
If you’re defending politicians who fund and arm this genocide, you are defending war criminals. This is a blocking offense.
War crimes are on par with fascism. If you vote for one to avoid the other, you will get both.
There are still a few people left who meant it when we said, “Never Again!” to the Holocaust. There are many more who will invoke the Holocaust, itself a genocide, to rationalize the genocide they commit against others.
The aggressor is pretty reliably wrong. Using aggression to rationalize aggression is still pretty reliably wrong. War is inherently a crime, indeed “collective punishment” against civilians, particularly where “economic targets” or any other targets in populated areas are involved.
I am not a lawyer, let alone one with expertise in international law. I interpret the term “war crimes” broadly. If you support war crimes or war criminals in any way, that’s a blocking offense.

2024-04-24 14:25:34

So I've been trying to figure out what to make of these “log cabin”-style homes and these houses built from rough-hewn timber with ludicrous amounts of mortar between each piece.
First, they’re butt ugly. I’m pretty sure no real log cabin ever looked anything quite like these modern imitations with perfectly even logs stained a very, very dark brown. And I’m sorry, but that mortar just ruins it for me with the rough-hewn timber. If there was ever anything for homeowners’ associations to get up in arms about, these houses should be it.
So, given that they’re butt ugly, who’d want to live in them and why?
My hypothesis follows:
Fairly obviously, they hearken to the 17th and 18th centuries and the colonization of North America. So who’d want to live in a pathetic imitation of something ancient, uncomfortable when authentic, and butt ugly? Who would want that perception?
I think this isn’t about patriotism, though the people who have these homes built probably rationalize them that way. I think it’s about “if I had built my own house, this is what it’d look like because I’m Paul Bunyan the lumber man.”
Which is to say, masculinity desperate to prove itself and therefore toxic rather than masculine.

2024-03-12 02:09:23

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Yet another addition to my pinned post: I do get very annoyed with atheists who have decided that the absence of evidence is evidence of absence. Sorry, no, doesn’t work that way.
That said, theodicy weighs heavily on me. For as long as I can remember, I have wondered why a supposedly good god would permit, let alone create, evil.
I have heard crappy explanations:
1) It’s “God’s plan.” Read the Old Testament and tell me there’s anything like a plan in that chaos. This is ad hoc as can be.
2) Evil exists so humans can have “free will.” First, it is not clear that humans actually have free will. The determinist argument is that social and environmental circumstances govern our choices, even without our being aware of them, and, as far as I know, the question is unresolved.
But second, “free will” depends not on evil but freedom of choice. The mapping of all choices as good or evil is flatly a false dichotomy. It projects a binary state in circumstances where the binary may not apply even one little bit. That particular dilemma should be familiar to a few folks around here.
My answer to the question of theodicy is that if a god or any superior beings exist, they are almost certainly not as portrayed. We do not know their motivations. We do not know their intentions. We, in fact, know nothing whatsoever about them.
But my speculation would be that such beings are unlikely to be “good” and it is awfully hard to excuse the Biblical account of the Judeo-Christian-Muslim god.

2024-01-05 02:07:22

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In addition, we need to be clear that the U.S. is *not* and never has been a democracy.
A democracy means everybody votes on everything. #OccupyWallStreet-style consensus-seeking is in line with this.
What we have is a constitutional oligarchy. By design: In Federalist No. 10, James Madison made clear that the minority rights he wanted to protect are not those of any subaltern group, but rather the property rights of wealthy white males (often slaveholders). And he specifically wanted to protect them from a confiscatory mob. An awful lot of money is the price of admission to politics and Madison rests easily in his grave, knowing that this part of his mission has been fully and irrevocably accomplished.
Within that constitutional oligarchy, we have enacted a two-party system, which serves to 1) constrain the acceptable range of political opinion (this is the Overton Window), and 2) compel voters to choose the lesser of evils. You vote for evil, you should not be even remotely surprised that this is what you get.
I will never forgive the Democratic Party for its embrace of #neoliberalism, which has been embraced as the bipartisan "Washington Consensus" since the fall of the Berlin Wall and casts workers as oppressors and the rich as oppressed. Neoliberalism has ruined my life and when you support either major political party in the U.S., you support the brutality to which I have been victim my entire life. I will block Vote Blue No Matter Who (VBNMW) folks and people who still succumb to elementary school propaganda about our political and economic systems.

2024-01-05 01:50:01

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This is an addition to my self-introduction which is now pinned to my profile..
As COVID-19 (notice the intentional omission of a hashtag) seems to be on yet another upswing, it's worth repeating that we had an opportunity to contain and defeat this virus. In our haste to resume #capitalism, we blew off that opportunity.
We have collectively decided that the great god #capitalism demands and should receive human sacrifice. We have also collectively decided that COVID-19 is "over." Those are not my decisions and not decisions I'd have made. But we made them.
People will die who didn't need to die. People will suffer who didn't need to suffer. Long COVID will affect more people.
I understand all that. And I have kept up on the vaccinations. But I am not going back to wearing a mask except in places that specifically require them. I am not participating in or tolerating the hype over the resurgence. Because we decided we were going back to "normal" despite ample evidence to the contrary. Evidence simply does not matter and, on COVID-19, this is nearly as true for the political left as it is the right.
Humanity's response to COVID-19 demonstrates our unfitness for survival, right along with our response to the #ClimateCrisis. And frankly, in view of how this society has treated me my entire life, I welcome human extinction.

2023-11-29 01:42:53

New instance, new #introduction. Edit: I have supplemented this introduction with replies to this post.
I see this instance has a *nice* *long* character limit for posts.
I have a Ph.D. in Human Science (2016, Saybrook University), which is about the experience of being human in social contexts. It is the mother of the social sciences but is now, at least in the English speaking world, and at least as far as I can tell, a dead field.
I studied #conservatism for my #dissertation. And yes, the #Democrats are far too #conservative for me.
Once upon a time, a very, very long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I was a computer programmer. It was the wrong career choice.
I am a #vegan #LibertarianSocialist (recovering #anarchist) mostly from the #SanFrancisco #BayArea in #California, presently residing in #Pittsburgh, #Pennsylvania, hoping to move to #erie
In #kyriarchy, I mostly focus on #classism and #ageism, but since arriving in Pittsburgh, have been confronted with blatant #racism (and yes, many white people here do see it). But #SocialJustice has to be for everybody; to focus on any one identity, to the exclusion of others, is nothing more than to elevate that identity over that of the predominantly wealthy white males who are now in charge.
I oppose all #imperialism and #SettlerColonialism, not just U.S. and NATO imperialism and settler-colonialism. Having lived on the underbelly of #capitalism most of my life, I am #anticapitalist and ferociously opposed to #neoliberalism. I oppose physical and structural violence.
Human beings have #HumanRights. These rights are not constrained by their governments' failures to ratify certain human rights treaties.
#Borders exist to mark off territory controlled by elites whose competition accounts for most if not all wars and to deny human beings on the "wrong" side of an arbitrary line rights and privileges available on the "right" side. This cannot be justified ethically. I am hostile to #xenophobia
Finally, I am pessimistic about the future of humanity. #COVID19 and the #ClimateCrisis demonstrate our unfitness for survival.