ibiyemi abiodun's blog

The difference is just how you feel

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I've spent a lot of time trying to pick apart what the difference between a "romantic" relationship and a "platonic" one is. I tried to come up with answers that were related to boundaries - friends can do this, but only lovers can do that. But these answers were never really satisfying.

It'd be easy to say, for example, that one doesn't kiss their friends, except that sometimes I do, and that doesn't automatically convert the relationship into a romantic one. Hugs, kisses, cuddles and tender touches are all just different ways of expressing affection and/or attraction. I can rest my head on my homeboy's shoulder. I can let my homegirl take a nap with her head in my lap. I can tease and flirt and play and touch and still be friends.

So if the difference isn't about what you do and don't do, then what is it about? The next answer I tested was the level of commitment and trust. Lovers often move together, build their whole lives together. They make huge compromises in order to be together. They learn how to communicate and work together tightly because for lovers, there's a minimum level of intimacy required for the relationship to function at all.

It's less common to see this in friendships ... but it's not unheard of. I think the main reason this is less common is because it's somewhat discouraged in our individualistic culture, our culture which views the nuclear family as the only sacred bond, but not because it's less valid. Does it really make sense to say that your bond with your best friend of 10 years isn't as strong as your bond with your partner of 2-3 years? Not always. Your best friend might actually understand you better, trust you more, and be more reliable, and if that's the case, you'd be wise to act like it!

So then what is "romance"? What makes a "lover" distinct from a "friend"?

I think it's the excitement that I feel, and the irrationality that it begets.

Being with my friends might make me feel at ease, or like I'm having fun, or like we can take over the world together.

Being with a lover might make me feel any of things, but it also makes me feel like I'm special. It makes me feel an attachment and an attraction that seems to come from nowhere. It makes me feel a rush, where my heartrate speeds up and my cheeks flush a bit. It makes me want to imagine a fanciful future with them by my side. Even if our relationship isn't old enough or deep enough to justify these thoughts and feelings, they still gush out. Over time, as I spend more time with this person and our relationship becomes battle-tested, these thoughts and emotions are retroactively justified. However, that doesn't change the fact that their origin is still a bit mysterious.

In contrast, friendships appear very logical. The strength of your friendship and the way you feel about each other depends only on what has happened between you and what has happened to each of you. The best friendships form out of proximity, shared experience, and shared values.

I think the irrational aspect of the lovers' relationship is why people make such big bets on their partners - the bet you make on your partner doesn't have to make sense, because sense wasn't what got you into that relationship in the first place. Obviously the relationship will eventually fail without compatibility and maturity, but those aren't the attributes that cause it to form.

In contrast, to make such a big bet on a friend, it either has to make sense, or you have to be a person who doesn't concern themselves with such things.

I reached this conclusion by thinking about someone I fell in love with earlier this year. We're now friends, but the path to get there felt distinctly different from how I've acquired most of my friends – it felt like if the attraction was mutual, we could've been lovers instead. I was obsessed with her in a way that doesn't happen to me very often. It was different from the attraction that I feel towards every pretty girl, and it was also different from the attraction that I feel towards a potential friend. I was thinking about her all the time when she wasn't around, and whenever she was around and she smiled at me, it completely arrested my nervous system. It was completely irrational.

I kept spending time with her because her attention felt like what I imagine stimulants are like, and ended up learning enough about her personality and meeting enough of her friends and showing her enough of myself and having enough tough conversations for a friendship to form.

Even though she still charms me when she smiles, I feel differently about her now. I used to overthink these things, but now I think that that difference in how I feel is all that's needed for bona-fide friendship.

"Failing fast"

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I did a startup accelerator where you are selected based mostly on your communication skills and your prior projects: you don't need a team, or even an idea. The program begins with several rounds of "speed dating" as you try to find a person who can become your cofounder. You talk to someone, if there's any potential at all, then you pair up, and then you run the relationship at maximum intensity to see whether it lasts or fails. If it fails under the load, that means you weren't compatible cofounders, so you break up and swap partners.

I think that startup founders are a peculiar bunch, and venture capitalists who would run a program like this even more so. In hindsight, there were a few aspects of that program that were psychologically poisonous. But I think this idea of running towards failure, instead of away from it, is actually quite useful.

I subscribe to the belief that if you are doing the wrong thing, or you have the wrong timing, or you've surrounded yourself with the wrong people, or your motivation is incorrect, failure will find you eventually. The only thing you can choose is whether this happens quickly or slowly.

I also believe that failure is easy to predict with confidence and impossible to predict with certainty, and it should never be assumed. You might be able to evaluate whether one option is more likely to work than another, but you don't know everything. If you want results, you have no choice but to pick the best option and try.

I also believe that failure is only embarrassing if you quit without producing any output. Otherwise, "failure" is indistinguishable from "learning".

If you believe these beliefs too, then it follows that you can't actually avoid failure, you can only plow through it over and over until you reach "success". You can make this easier on yourself by spending as little time and energy as possible to reach "failure" so that you can reset and try again.

That means you have to come up with ways to measure whether what you're doing is working or not (tech people call this "feedback"), and you can't bury your head in the sand.

That means that you have to divorce your self-worth from your results, because if you can't do this, each "failure" will take a huge emotional toll. Tie it to your character, your output, and your learning instead.

That means that there's no point in stopgap solutions. Don't delay the inevitable. Don't stay in relationships or environments that have already been revealed to be incompatible with you. Don't chase goals that you've already discovered aren't truly meaningful to you. Don't pursue paths that require compromises you know you won't make. Use what you've learned about yourself to bail yourself out early so you can try something else instead of burning yourself out.

Crucially, this is different from quitting before you've given something an honest chance to succeed. Quitting before you've experienced failure doesn't work because it prevents you from truly learning anything or producing anything.

Instead of bracing for impact, you have to strengthen yourself and weaken the impact so you can face it head-on.

The difficulty of the left

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

The vision of the future that the American left (at least, the part of it that I identify with) argues for is a high-trust society where we accept and rely on each other to achieve collective success in the form of safety, prosperity, opportunity, fulfillment, and health, and every person is afforded as many opportunities as possible to share the success.

It seems to be the "relying on each other" bit that creates a bit of a built-in footgun, because there's not much trust to go around. Leftists are exceedingly good at coming up with reasons not to trust anyone, because if you don't trust anyone, then you don't actually have to risk being disappointed. If you refuse to work with someone because you don't identify with them, or because they said something that you don't exactly agree with, then you often end up not being able to unify enough people to achieve any of your goals.

I'm not arguing that this behavior is unreasonable. The leftist mission is constantly undermined (by neoliberals, who will always say that our goals are too lofty and we should focus on maintaining the status quo instead) and opposed (by fascists, who want a social order that is extremely hierarchical and violent because they believe they will always be the perpetrators and never the victims). However, it is unhelpful, because our opponents don't have this problem.

Neoliberals have been able to unify because the prevailing alternative to doing nothing has been that things get worse rapidly – a no-brainer choice. Fascists have been able to unify because everyone in the movement believes that they won't be on the bottom when the dust settles. It turns out that fear, greed, and rage are much more useful emotions for organizing than trust and hope.

For this reason, I don't believe that the American left will achieve critical mass unity until fear, greed, and rage build up in this ideological space. Fear that we'll lose everything if we don't stop squabbling and help each other. Rage over the things, people, and opportunities taken from us. Greed for a future that is safer, wealthier, and contains more opportunity than the past and the present.

I think this is coming soon. But it's a shame that we have to lose so much before we can get our shit together.

What was that about centrists?

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

Here's why pandering to centrists doesn't work: centrists in this country are either conservatives who are in denial or liberals who are uninspired. You can't activate either one of these by watering down your messaging with moderate Democrat rhetoric about bipartisanship, because the former will ignore you (the conservative candidate is more appealing to them), and the latter will also ignore you (because you made yourself look too similar to your opponent).

<aside> <p>I'm using the word "liberal" here to refer to any person with a left-leaning political ideology. This word has become horribly overloaded, but bear with me.</p> </aside>

Also, there is a Third Type of Centrist: the smug "Both Sides are Bad" guy who refuses to vote at all. This guy is not worth a discussion because he draws a false equivalence between warmongers and moderate bureaucrats who want to increase taxes.

So how do you get the uninspired liberal to vote for you? You present them with a compelling alternative to the status quo. Something that will actually, materially change their lives. Things such as:

More money to spend: lower prices or higher wages
Better transportation: safer, cheaper, faster, and/or more convenient
Increased security: not only from violence and theft, but from homelessness, layoffs, and natural disasters
Better healthcare: cheap, accessible, private and effective

If there's one thing that we can learn from Trump, it's that you don't need precedent. In fact, precedent is a burden. As long as you're charismatic, promising to try something this nation has never tried is refreshing and inspiring. Learn from the solutions proposed by those who lost before you and punch harder than they did.

Why Can't We Be Friends If I Vote Against You?

Wed, 06 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

12:18, 06 November 2024. I'm starting to see and hear people who voted for Trump attempt to do damage control on their relationships with people who didn't. They say things like, "it's just politics. Can't mature people disagree with each other and still be friends?"

My reaction is this: by voting for Trump and his ilk, you are voting against the existence of someone like me, and you are acting in direct opposition to my goals and interests, and that is a cardinal disrespect. In this writing, I will explain how I arrived at such a strong conclusion.

"Can't mature people disagree with each other and still be friends?"

Yes, people can absolutely can disagree with each other and maintain a relationship. But there are some requirements for maintaining an amicable and stable relationship with someone:

You must agree (for the most part) on what it means to be friends/lovers/family/enemies/etc.
You must have either mutual respect for each other, or a mutual restriction that prevents one from destroying the other.

A disagreeement over what an ideal tax policy or transportation proposal looks like doesn't break these rules. Even a disagreement over what an ideal government structure looks like does not interfere with these requirements. Some people think they want monarchy, and others, direct democracy. Some people think they want capitalism, and others, want socialism. This isn't really a problem in and of itself.

So what's the big deal with our recent elections, then?

Trump's rhetoric and policies affect life in ways that many people will be unable to adapt to. Under Trump, many people will face death, poverty, or exile that they did little to deserve. Depending on who you are, you might be certain that you will never get the short end of the stick, or you might be dreading the possibility that you will.

For someone like me, Trump increases the likelihood of massive misfortune in my life. So by voting for him, you are saying that you care about "the economy", or "the border", or whatever it is you care about, more than my life. You cannot pretend to respect me while doing this.

<aside> If you voted for Trump because you think your life would be more at risk under Kamala, then there's your caveat. I'm not going to blame you for valuing your life more than mine. I will, however, tell you that you are incorrect about where the danger lies. </aside>

If you don't really care what happens to others as long as you believe it won't happen to you, then you may stop reading.

How I experience reality

Now, here are some things I believe as a straight cis Black male white-collar immigrant worker with USA citizenship living in New York City:

America is not a zero-sum game, and other people thriving does not always mean that I must suffer. Conversely, my own thriving should not be a threat to others unless they are wicked.
Black people are born with all of the same potential as any other people.
Black culture and Nigerian culture both have problems to work out, but they do not in general have more negative tendencies (ex.: theft, violence, laziness, greed) than other cultures. Instead, their negative tendencies are distributed differently and expressed in different ways. These differences do not mean that Black people should be treated poorly.
As a Black person, some White people (and to a lesser extent, some Asian and Latino people) will suspect me of being dangerous to society or to their person without evidence.
Many people who work in law enforcement have the bias described in point #4. The only thing that stops them from killing me or stealing from me with impunity is the threat of consequences to themselves.
- You might argue that I'm overstating the severity of this threat. I promise that I'm not.
- In addition to not killing black people extra, the police should kill much less in general. I've seen too many videos of cops emptying their clips for no reason.
Some people who work in positions where they control access to opportunities (ex.: recruiters, financiers, media execs) have the bias described in point #4, or they believe in a zero-sum game and will favor those similar to themselves at my expense. The only thing that stops them from denying me those opportunities is the threat of consequences to themselves.
Donald Trump says things that make the people described in points #5 and #6 believe that there will be no consequences if they decide to hurt me. This greatly increases the likelihood that they will try.
- For example, he has promised to increase the immunity that police officers have. I think their immunity should be reduced, because they are currently more likely to injure me than they should be.

Because these things are true, the choice to vote for Donald Trump has a direct negative impact on my success and survival. How can I not take it personally if you have chosen to do that to me?

Even if you don't care about me, the impact exists for women (abortion). It exists for Asians (affirmative action and DEI) and Latinos (deportation and discrimination) and Arabs (state violence and war). And that's only the stuff that he personally said he would do. Trump advocates for Americans to hurt each other, and I guarantee that unless every single person you care about is a wealthy straight cis white able-bodied Christian who is male or only has sex within marriage, there is at least one person you care about whose life is more perilous under Trump. And I guarantee that they trust you less today than they did yesterday.

Healing

Added on 08 November 2024.

If you supported Trump, that doesn't actually mean that you and I have to be mortal enemies. It depends, because you might have supported him because you didn't understand how it affects me. You might have supported him because you feel pain in your life, and the Democrats only ever promise small and abstract changes. Supporting him means that we can't be friends, because you're hurting me in a very real way. But if you want to be friends, you will have the chance to change.

FAQs

But what about the economy?

Money should never be valued above peace, life, and safety.

Even if you disagree, Trump's economy is going to be worse for you as an individual unless you are already making 95th percentile money. If you're making 95th percentile money, but you're not making 99.5th percentile money, then your life would have been about the same under either president (from a financial perspective). If you're making more money than 99.5% of Americans, send me an email because I guarantee I can think of more interesting ways to use it than you can.

Trump is going to cut taxes for corporations, which means that you are going to have to spend more of your own money to get things that the government could previously provide. He is going to attack labor laws, which means that you will get paid less. He is going to instate tariffs, which means that you will have to pay more for everything that comes from other countries (ex.: everything).

The only reason you might think the Trump economy would be better is if you expect to become a millionaire within the next four years. I'm not going to be a hater and tell you that you won't. But even if you did, Trump wouldn't make millionaire status taste much sweeter.

But what about diversity of thought?

Someone tried to argue with me by saying, "what would be the point of elections if everyone voted the same way?" This is such a preposterous argument for voting against my interests that I was speechless. I would love it if the stakes of these elections were low enough that an idea like this would kind of make sense, but for reasons outlined above, they are not.

A New System for Local News?

Sat, 04 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

There are a lot of problems with how we currently receive information and ideas. In the modern Internet where most information and ideas are exchanged on platforms optimized for entertainment and retention, we have a system that is not especially effective at delivering news that is trustworthy, authentic, relevant, and actionable. We need one that can, because a system would enhance our ability to bond with each other and protect each other. Such a system must optimize for trust, proximity, and accountability instead of attention, engagement, and advertiser penetration.

What I propose to meet this need is a mesh network paired with network-based reputation systems. I'll call it "mesh media" for short. Allow me to break down what this would actually look like.

Caveat emptor

Mesh media is not intended to compete with or supplant "social media". It is meant for delivering news that spurs people to take action in the real world: to meet with others, to avoid danger, to claim resources, to make plans. It can be used for fun, but it's not designed for entertainment.

How would "mesh media" work?

Let's start with an idealized version.

In mesh media, there is no centralized server. When someone publishes something, it is broadcast to their peers using long-range (1-10km, sub-GHz) radio. When your device receives the post, it decides how to handle it based on its score. There's a few things that go into the score.

Reputation of the author: If you've indicated that this account generally publishes info that is trustworthy, authentic, relevant, and actionable (so you've given the author a positive score), then the post will have a positive base score. The base score can also be negative if you dislike the author.
Reputations of the forwarders: If the post is reaching you by being forwarded via someone else, the reputation you've assigned to the forwarder will bias the score.
Endorsement from your peers: If your friends have scored either the author or the post itself, this will bias the score.

Once a post is in your inbox, you can reply to it with your own post and/or give it a reaction. Your reaction will bias the final score of the post, as well as the perceived score for your friends.

Examples of what this could look like

Your pastor has put out a post announcing a charity basketball game. Your fellow church-goers responded positively, and your pastor never spams the inbox. You get a push notification, and the post quickly spreads to everyone in your church and a few friends of the church.
An acquaintance you met in school has reposted a post about the dangers of a certain pharmaceutical. You've never heard of the original poster, and you don't know whether the acquaintance who reposted it is smart or not. One of your friends thinks this acquaintance is a moron, so the post appears hidden towards the bottom of your inbox. You downvote it because it's not even relevant to you.
There's a pop-up in your neighborhood where they're selling apple cider donuts for $1. You don't know any of the people running the pop-up, but the post was endorsed by an account that you do know that aggregates events in your area.
A car crash happened on I-405. You live in NYC and do not own a car, so posts from the California Department of Transportation are not relevant to you (even though there's nothing wrong with them). This post never makes it out of California because it's not relevant anywhere else.
Men in masks have appeared at the residence of a friend of a friend. You don't know this person personally, but they're really important to your friend, and if enough people show up, the men in the masks will back down. Nearly half of your mutual friends have endorsed the post and begun coordinating with each other. You get a push notification and the post quickly spreads through the community.

Side benefits

In addition to distributing news that is trustworthy, authentic, relevant, and actionable, mesh media would be very difficult to censor or surveil because it does not require any infrastructure and can be thoroughly encrypted. There is no choke point for the state to take hold of, and the trust-based nature of the medium means that it would be very expensive for external actors to insert themselves en masse.

Prior art and pushback

Aren't you just designing echo chambers?

I tried to articulate this idea to a buddy, and the first thing he said in response was that echo chambers would be a huge problem with this idea. My response is that mesh media is a system for distributing news that is expected to be actionable, not a system for distributing ideas or entertainment. Echo chambers are harder to form as a result of going out and dealing with real people in the real world.

I can't force people to use this tool the way I intend, but by designing a user interface that encourages actionability (ex.: are you posting an event, a notice, an SOS?), I can definitely nudge them in the right direction.

Aren't you just designing an event aggregator?

Even though I'm a big proponent of going out and gathering with people, not every actionable piece of local news requires that you do this. Other examples of relevant and actionable local news:

Information about where not to go (ex.: danger, too crowded)
Announcements of achievements made by your community members (ex.: getting married, receiving an award, completing a project)
Requests for general assistance (ex.: moving, building furniture, commissions)
Requests for urgent assistance (ex.: injury, men in masks)
Information about changes to rules or laws
Information related to long-running games (ex.: assassin, intramural sports tournaments)

These types of notices are things that are not super well served by existing platforms (ex.: Instagram) unless you play the engagement-farming game. You shouldn't need to be a "content creator" if you have information to share that is relevant to the people around you.

Aren't you just designing Facebook groups?

I must admit that I've never used a Facebook group. I think most people my age don't use them unless they're the only way to achieve their goal. This is for a few reasons:

Facebook isn't cool. Facebook is for old people, Facebook steals your data, Facebook is clunky.
Facebook groups don't have a mechanism for filtering based on relevance, except for subdividing the group into smaller and smaller ones.
Facebook groups exist on Facebook, which is designed for entertainment and engagement, not connection and utility.

What about Bluesky?

Bluesky's focus on control over the feed makes it easy to remove antisocial/irrelevant people from your feed. However, it doesn't make it especially easy to discover people that are relevant, and it has no emphasis on actionability. It is designed as a competitor to Twitter, which makes its use-case different from the use-case of mesh media.

What about Bitchat?

Bitchat does have an emphasis on geographic proximity in its chat system, and it even integrates mesh networking in its messaging transports. However, it is designed for anonymity and ephemerality, which contrasts with mesh media which is designed for trust and accountability. You would prefer Bitchat in situations where you don't need to know who you're dealing with, such as certain types of business transactions.

How are you going to beat the cold-start problem?

Mesh networking enables real-time IRL experiences that are fun and useful. For example, getting a notification when a friend happens to be nearby and you would've missed each other, or being able to track each other down in a huge crowd or a dense forest. Currently, my plan is to wrap this up like dog medicine wrapped in cheese. I pitch it based on the real-time experiences, which are engaging and which social media currently cannot compete with, and hope that people stay for the genuine utility and tranquility.

How is this going to make money?

Mesh media costs a lot less to operate than "social media" due to all of the computation and data transfer happening on end users' devices and not on my servers. This makes the pressure to make money a lot less.

That being said, it still needs to make some money to remain solvent in the long term. I'm thinking about simply charging small transaction fees (after a generous free trial) to exchange information on the network using my software/hardware. If you don't like it, you can switch to some other software/hardware that implements the protocol. But you probably won't.

What now?

Thu, 07 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMT

I think Democrats often lose because they spend too much time talking about what they don’t want and not what they do want ("I'm not the other guy" has been a losing message since the 1830s), and because they always lose their confidence and try to pander to centrists. People vote because they want change! Only people who are completely satisfied with their lives (or really dialed into electoral politics) will vote for someone who promises to keep everything the same.

So let me talk about what I do want and how we can get it:

A peaceful environment where most of the government’s decisions are low-stakes for most people
An environment where many people with different origins, backgrounds, and histories can live in community
An environment that inspires me to work hard and rewards me for that hard work
An environment that allows me to live a brilliant and unique life that I am in control of
An environment that forgives my mistakes
An environment where I am safe from people that would harm me unjustly
An environment that provides these same kindnesses to everyone

You may think that I’m not being realistic by wanting to have all of this at the same time. I assure you it is possible, because we are not playing a zero sum game: other people succeeding does not have to mean that you must fail.

There is plenty of competition in this life. There are situations where there can only be one winner. However, a lot of those situations are manufactured, and the only reason there’s only one winner is because the guy who set the rules said so. We live in a world with more than enough resources to satisfy every person (with more being created every day), so there’s no reason other than selfishness that we can’t all get a piece of the ever-expanding pie.

<aside> The main exception to this assertion is attention. The attention of a specific person/people is the one resource that is truly zero-sum. Fortunately, there is no person/people other than your parents whose attention you should need to survive. </aside>

The common argument against this vision is that you must be selfish to protect yourself against selfish people. This is actually true, but it's incomplete! <mark>You don't need to be a selfish individual, and instead you can be in a selfish group. You can keep expanding your group by absorbing people who have decided it is better to cooperate than to fight, until your group is so large that it is simply called "Americans".</mark> Within the group, you are selfless to each other, because it works better than the alternative.

I'm not saying you should be the same as everyone else. I'm just saying that if we all banded together and helped each other out, we'd all get better results. People who lean on their families have it easier than people who don't, and families that can lean on their friends are stronger than families who don't. We should keep expanding the size of the units that lean on each other until it gets as big as a country.

Cool ideas. Actions?

So how do you actually start? It's all about building relationships with people around you. Like relationships between family and families, some of these relationships will cut across class, age, race, and gender divides. Not every relationship can be deep and complicated, because attention is finite. But it needs to be clear on both sides that you're there to help each other.

Give your neighbor some extra muffins you have. Teach your friend's friend's brother how to change their engine oil. Hold the door open for an old person, or a young person. And if you can do it without being too awkward, talk to the person, even if it's only a sentence or two at a time!

We've learned to insulate ourselves because strangers can hurt us. They can reject us, harass us, assault us, decieve us, or trap us. I live in New York City, and I've experienced this, and I've learned the mission-focused forward stare that all New Yorkers have.

<aside> If you live in another large city, you probably have this too. But I live in New York, so it's totally different 😝 </aside>

The lovely thing about starting a relationship with the people around you (as opposed to a random person in a random place) is that as soon as you do, you both have an incentive to behave yourselves (so that you are not banished by the other people around you).

Being in community is not the same thing as making a whole bunch of new friends. You can do that if you want, and it'll probably be awesome, but building a community is more about making yourself accountable to the people that you coexist with and getting them to do the same. You guys don't have to hang out all the time.

What comes next?

What comes after community is organization. To be a "selfish group", you need to define what the group wants, which means you need leaders, advocates, and foot soldiers. Your group can decide that they want anything, like higher pay, lower rent, four-day work weeks, the abolition of non-Honeycrisp apples, or to go out and dance. Becoming good at prioritizing and achieving your group goals is critical to making people want to join and stay in your group.

Some goals will be attainable at your current size, and some won't. For the ones that aren't, you'll need to join forces with other organization(s) that share your goal. If you share a lot of goals, you can even merge your organizations. For this to work in the long term, you need to merge the communities, too.

Eventually, your organization will become so large, and your goals so lofty, that you will need to interface with The Government. The best way to do this is to place members of your organization in The Government by voting for them. Especially for local government positions, this could be absurdly easy (many local government officials are used to running unopposed).

<aside> This is how you would build a third party in the United States, by the way. You can't just throw a third party candidate at the President's office when that party (a.k.a. that organization) has no members and that candidate would have no support in the Senate or the House. People would rather have the devil that they know than the one that they don't. </aside>

How does this lead to utopia?

I have specific policy ideas for achieving my stated goals. I will write them down in a separate post.

The point of this post is that a bright future is possible, but it requires us to grab onto each other, hold tight, and move together.

What about my rights?

In the absence of government protection, we must tread carefully and protect each other.