volkris @volkris@qoto.org
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
No, turns out the justices on the Supreme Court have been behaving well enough that they have not been singled out for impeachment.
So there you go.
@Mjo321@mstdn.social
Congress is free to impeach any Supreme Court Justice who is misbehaving in office.
The idea of the legislative branch imposing on the judicial branch through a legal code of ethics violates the separation of government, and the independence of the judicial branch, for no good reason really.
If a Justice is misbehaving in office then impeach them. There's no reason to start interfering with the Supreme Court like this.
@Mjo321@mstdn.social
Honestly when people start posting in multi-part threading instead of just a single post to say whatever they want to say I kind of zone out.
Like really, if whatever you are typing is worthwhile, then make a single post about it. All of this 14/20 stuff is just annoying and hard to follow.
If what you have to say is worthwhile why in the world are you butchering it into threading like that? Make a composition, man! Make your best case! Don't let your perspective be kneecapped by arbitrary character limits!
@Bart@eu.mastodon.green
How does that square with the blue sky promise of the exact opposite?
You do realize that the Federalist Society doesn't appoint judges, right?
I mean you are really sort of begging the question here, buying into this conspiracy to ask what liberal/progressive judges the society has appointed when they don't appoint judges in the first place.
Oftentimes I point out when people are looking at the wrong branch of government, but in this case you are pretty much even looking at the wrong branch of society.
And that's not even getting into the tricky issue of, well maybe progressives are just plain wrong about the law. Which I would generally say is true, but a side issue.
If you want progressive policies implemented, well then work for the election of progressive congresspeople. It's counterproductive to point fingers at some ill-advised right-wing conspiracy involving the courts when really this is an issue of the legislative branch.
Yeah, power to the people.
If users want to block threads, more power to them!
But it's pretty disappointing to see so many demanding instance level blocks taking that power away from the users.
That's not at all what he said.
The Supreme Court does not and can not speak to what should be. It speaks to what our democratic process has settled on.
We absolutely should stop electing and reelecting congresspeople who make bad choices, who do not write good laws, who do not do what we want them to do.
But it's not for the Supreme Court to overrule the decisions that our elected representatives make.
All too often these days we have lawmakers trying to escape accountability by pointing fingers at the court for the laws they themselves have the power to fix, and they get away with it.
We keep reelecting the people who have failed us, and we really should stop.
If you actually sit down and listen to Federalist Society output, they don't have random lefty guests, they have full-throated criticisms of right-wing positions from serious people making serious points.
Again, this really comes across as gaslighting.
Obviously my years of hearing the Federalist Society giving megaphones to those who disassemble stupid right-wing positions, yeah I was mistaken the whole time.
It's more important to promote the conspiracy theory than to appreciate the organization that spends so much time countering right-wing nonsense.
It's funny because just today there is a post going around pointing out that, really, hardly anyone actually wants a town square.
Town square includes all of the hecklers and buskers and people yelling around about what they are selling and assholes and everything else. Town squares are kind of awful because of all the other people in the town.
In general, as the post points out, what people really want is a coffee shop with other folks that are behaving and maybe chatting a bit. Not a Town square with all the nonsense that that involves.
volkris
boosted
Well no that's not right. That's not how the US system works.
The majority of Supreme Court influence comes from the recognition of lower courts, since it is a court of appeals. It's when lower courts abide by Supreme Court precedent that most of their influence impacts the world.
And thank goodness that's the case! Because the general public has no idea what the Supreme Court actually says or does or rules. There is so much misinformation out there.
So long as the lower courts are paying attention and well informed and actually abiding by the Supreme Court rulings the system will keep working, regardless of the nonsense going around social media and network television.
Well no that's not right. That's not how the US system works.
The majority of Supreme Court influence comes from the recognition of lower courts, since it is a court of appeals. It's when lower courts abide by Supreme Court precedent that most of their influence impacts the world.
And thank goodness that's the case! Because the general public has no idea what the Supreme Court actually says or does or rules. There is so much misinformation out there.
So long as the lower courts are paying attention and well informed and actually abiding by the Supreme Court rulings the system will keep working, regardless of the nonsense going around social media and network television.
It's just so funny to hear people talking about the right-wing conspiracy from the Federalist Society when I've spent years listening to their left-wing content.
The organization gives voice to so many speakers that are adamantly critical of the right wing. That's in fact why I listen to them, because they call out the right-wing for being really off the rails.
So it comes across as gaslighting to someone like me.
Or more importantly, it comes across as taking advantage of people's lack of familiarity to sell a sensationalized narrative while avoiding what's really going on in the world.
The Supreme Court only applies the law as it must, though. It's not the ruling that deals that blow but rather the decisions of the representatives that we've elected (and reelected) that set the laws that came to play here.
The reason this is vital is because it focuses on the power voters have to actually demand change. We need to vote for better people.
By focusing on the Court, which isn't the real problem, we allow ourselves to be distracted from the power we actually have to kick out representatives who continue to fail us.
If we want race-based admission then great! Let's go elect the people who will put that in place and stop reelecting the ones who failed to address the problem.
All of these groups promoting conspiracy theories about the Federalist Society, as opposed to simply going through the reasoning in the opinions themselves, are really misleading the public, coming across as if they've never actually listened to any FedSoc content.
In reality, the Federalist Society is one of the most evenhanded outfits I know of, presenting both sides of debates, *including pro-affirmative action speakers*.
Seriously, go pull up their content and give their debates a listen. They are nothing like the evil right-wing monster so many are trying to frame them as.
@steffo@uno.starshard.studio
Well, one issue is that that's not only about ActivityPub but also how individual interfaces display ActivityPub inputs.
After all, what appears on a home timeline--and even the concept of a home timeline itself--is part of the UI separate from ActivityPub itself.
Meh, personally, I figure if someone is wearing a cape they're trying to compensate for not having much interesting to say :)
Yes, and everyone needs to keep in mind that given the design decisions behind ActivityPub, all privacy related issues are on a voluntary basis.
If you post content with a specific audience, that will probably get actively broadcast to a different instance whose operator has every ability to ignore the privacy settings, rebroadcast the content publicly, and ignore all requests for deletion.
This is an ax I grind around here because so many people don't realize how weak privacy protections are when they act on this platform.
Well that's easy: the decisions made by this Court have validity because they follow the prescribed procedures and have constitutional sanction.
You may not like the decisions or the people personally involved, but they check their boxes, and so they are valid.
volkris
boosted
To give a bit more context for people outside of San Francisco, in addition to being guinea pigs for self-driving cars, SF has also become a testbed for the future of the surveillance state. In SF it's now legal for the police to monitor private surveillance cameras in real time: https://www.theverge.com/2022/9/23/23368603/san-francisco-police-private-surveillance-cameras-vote
In addition to the well-known problem with Ring cameras, the SFPD have spun off and funded a "private" nonprofit to set up cameras: https://sfsafe.org/our-mission/.
The SFPD has a history of using these cameras to surveil totally legal protests despite claiming that department policy doesn't allow that:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/05/sfpd-obtained-live-access-business-camera-network-anticipation-tyre-nichols
Really, just look over all the EFF headlines for San Francisco, and then it'll be clear that we can't let the city be blanketed in surveillance bots.
Where in the world do you find 1 billion bots and Nazis?
I think the most pressing and fundamental problem of the day is that people lack a practically effective means of sorting out questions of fact in the larger world. We can hardly begin to discuss ways of addressing reality if we can't agree what reality even is, after all.
The institutions that have served this role in the past have dropped the ball, so the next best solution is talking to each other, particularly to those who disagree, to sort out conflicting claims.
Unfortunately, far too many actively oppose this, leaving all opposing claims untested. It's very regressive.
So that's my hobby, striving to understanding the arguments of all sides at least because it's interesting to see how mythologies are formed but also because maybe through that process we can all have our beliefs tested.
But if nothing else, social media platforms like this are chances to vent frustrations that on so many issues both sides are obviously wrong ;)
Joined Dec 2022
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