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
*shrug* I suggest we read Section 3 of the 14th Amendment if we want to know what it says.
If other sources reliably quote it great! If they don't that's a shame. But no matter whether they're reliable or not (and The Atlantic is hardly reliable), the amendment says what it says.
We can read it for ourselves, so let's go right to the source to see what it says.
If small minorities are able to conduct such sabotage then we're not talking about democracy in the first place.
The two statements are inconsistent.
It's an ActivityPub design issue.
AP specifies everything from a bloated signaling protocol through behaviors that suggest exponential processing and traffic as functions of instances involved in a post.
It doesn't matter how well an implementation is written; it will be subject to that design.
Hate speech is an integral part of Twitter?
You're saying the social media platform would just collapse without hate speech?
That's clearly wrong.
Also, I don't care about whatever ridiculous pronouncements the EU makes. They can deal with their own screwy system.
I mean, we all are.
We can all read the opinions ourselves and judge them based on their reasoning, though too few people bother to read opinions before adopting VERY STRONG OPINIONS about what those unread opinions actually say.
This is such an important point that so many, sadly, miss.
volkris
boosted
The justices often get pigeon-holed as "conservative" or "liberal", but political scientist John Tures says that's too simplistic.
Typically, over half of decisions each term (which may be the less controversial and publicized ones) are decided unanimously or 8-1.
#uspolitics #USPol #SCOTUS (2 of 3)
This take gets the story a bit wrong.
It's not that the legislature had gerrymandered black voters out of a fair map but the opposite: the Court ruled AL *must* gerrymander a map that takes race into account.
And now it's not that the Supreme Court quickly batted down the challenge but that it simply said it wasn't going to get involved.
@argv_minus_one@mstdn.party
Oh, an awful lot of conservatives do think Trump has/had honorable intentions.
Studies of the electorate showed otherwise: Trump managed to bring together a coalition of different groups--many who had huge disagreements with others--in a way that no other candidate could.
It wasn't a case of splitting of the vote. It was more that Trump managed to make himself into a Rorschach exam onto which those different groups could project their own notions of what they wanted.
Republicans voted FOR Trump. They didn't vote against other candidates in this case.
Really?
It seems like the opposition split would have just split the remaining 56% and not impacted the 43.9%.
If anything the fighting might have taken even more votes away as people tried to bolster their favorites.
I mean, RFKJ has made opposition to modern authoritarianism central to his political posture for the past few years.
I think you have that backwards.
That's not what Section 3 of the 14th Amendment says.
https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/amendments-11-27#xiv3
This concept that a vote for anyone else is a vote for Trump is clearly silly at best and undemocratic at worse.
No, a voter is entirely within their power to refuse to support #Biden without supporting #Trump either. To say otherwise is to disenfranchise the voter.
#Takei has never been a deep thinker, but we need to call out stuff like this in particular because of how undemocratic it is.
Folks should vote for the candidate they think best, all things considered, without having words put in their mouths like this.
What?
You say that Trump will face justice regardless of political advantage which seems to show that a civil union based on respect and the rule of law is indeed possible.
I think the key is right there at the end: "costing"
#ActivityPub is not a lightweight protocol or system. We've seen plenty of instance operators voicing concerns and surprise about how resource intensive it is at scale, how much it costs to operate as usage increases.
I wouldn't be surprised if Tumblr (and many other sites) looked into the costs of running giant instances and recoiled at the investment it would require to make it a reality.
And this is something we need to call out the platform over. We should vocally criticize the platform for making design choices that are so unscalable.
I always love those acknowledging the democratic process while saying the problem is that people don't vote the way they're supposed to.
No, the problem isn't that people voted one way or the other. The problem is that we have an environment where people can't get on the same page to discuss the way of the world and make informed votes.
It's not a problem that people voted for MAGA folks. The MAGA folks exist in the first place because of the deeper problem.
Well, the issue is that the enforcement mechanism has been ruled unconstitutional already, so they're asking the Supreme Court to settle on whether it should be an exception to the normal legal processes in US courts.
@watson@freeatlantis.com
I mean, the defense contractors only do what the people we elect tell them to do.
We keep electing officials that write checks to defense contractors. That's on us.
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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