volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@chiclet

The difference is that in this occasion the Democrats voted yes to the shutdown.

And it wasn't a poison pill sort of thing, it wasn't a complicated question on many different subjects with nuances or anything like that.

It was a simple question, do you want to declare the House to be without a speaker which shuts it down, and Republicans overwhelmingly voted no while Democrats unanimously voted yes, alongside the extremists.

There are absolutely cases where the voting record can be spun for rhetorical purposes, but this is not one of those cases.

Democratic representatives need to be held responsible for voting to shut down the House, whether that's giving them positive or negative regard.

Again, if your representative voted to shut down the legislature and you think that was a good thing, great! You think it's a bad thing, they should probably not be re-elected.

@dswidow @DemocracyMattersALot

@chiclet

And yet none of that changes what I pointed out, that Democrats voted unanimously with the Republican extremists to shut down the House

You might think that's good! In which case, excellent!

But we need to recognize this fact when we go decide whether to re-elect our representatives are not.

If you are happy with your representative voting with the Republican extremists to shut down the House, great!

Or maybe your representative was one of the overwhelming majority of Republicans who said no, the House needs to continue legislating.

Either way, judge your own representative for the way they voted and keep that in mind when you decide whether to send them back into power.

Whether your representative backed the Republican extremists or not should be a pretty big factor when you decide whether to re-elect that representative.

@dswidow @DemocracyMattersALot

@lauren I mean you're not saying anything different from what I said.

Yeah, it's possible that somebody would care about what the position came up with. But as made operational, plenty of organizations would just ignore it.

Like you said, the key is how the role is defined and made operational, and so often the role will be defined and made operational in an immediately nullified way.

@dswidow

You're absolutely right in saying this goes both ways, that either party membership could vote for the other party.

But.

I would say there is a little bit of a difference in that the Democrats voted unanimously for this moment, as they allied with the Republican extremists to shut down the House.

That's significant to me, and it sort of breaks the symmetry between the two parties.

It's one thing to say that both parties should work with the other to get things going, but it's another to point out that only one party voted overwhelmingly to shut down while the other voted overwhelmingly to keep going.

@chiclet @DemocracyMattersALot

@debrashannon

Yes, space junk is something to be worried about, but it's like landfill space down here on the ground: we have SO MUCH space here in terms of square miles that even though we should avoid turning the whole continent into a landfill, we are nowhere nowhere near seeing that happen.

But at the same time reporters are able to put out sensationalize clickbait misrepresenting the orbital space as a present danger.

Such reporters are misleading their readers. It's really a shame.

@arstechnica

@MaRY1Fem I think the real lesson to learn from all of what you said is that Trump really doesn't matter.

So many people are so obsessed with bashing the guy, when he really doesn't have anywhere near the impact they see. He's a boogie man, somebody that makes for a whole lot of clickbait, a whole lot of reporting and storytelling and angst, but it really puts the cart before the horse to build him up by saying he is so important.

Basically, none of this has anything to do with Trump at all unless we say it does in which case we are playing into Trump's hands.

We should knock that off.

Trump is a moron that would fade into the distance if we would just stop building him up as a pivotal figure.

He basically exists because we keep asserting that he does.

This has nothing to do with Trump. Let's not fluff. Trump's ego by saying it does.

@binaryhawk wow, no, you are falling for a conspiracy theory there. One that certain politicians really like to promote because it benefits them.

This has nothing to do with Trump.

Hundreds of Democrats voted to shut down the House, which I assure you has nothing to do with Trump, because they thought they could win some political points for doing so, and you are playing right into their hands.

@binaryhawk That's not really how it works though.

Each representative has been voted in by their own district. We keep re-electing these people.

If these representatives are putting their coveted seats above the well-being of the country, it's because we support their actions when we send them back to Congress based on what they have done.

It really comes down to the constituents who put them in power.

@drmike you seem to be really obsessed with Nazis here. That sounds like something you ought to take up with your therapist.

But it's not reality.

What you're describing is not at all what is happening over on the other platform. You're kind of going kind of nutso with your obsession there.

Again, have a chat with your therapist about that.

@dswidow

The rule is that it's a majority of people who have voted for any particular candidate.

So any representative is welcome to either vote present or not vote at all. It's up to them.

But part of the deal is whether you like any particular candidate or not, are you willing to keep the democratic process seized? Are you willing to keep the House shut down, the congress unable to pass or even debate legislation because you don't like the particular person serving as Speaker?

That's a pretty extreme position to take, but it is the position that the Democrats have taken at this point.

As far as I'm concerned all of these politicians are assholes, but we keep re-electing them. So whatever.

Let's just be clear that the assholes we are electing are shutting down Congress.

@chiclet @DemocracyMattersALot

@drmike Right, but that's my point, just because you know who the person is, that doesn't mean what they're saying is right.

Great, I know this line is being spouted by a politician! Doesn't mean the first thing about whether the politician is being honest or not. Or knows what they're talking about.

That sort of thinking descends into ad hominem judgment.

@aisa or a good reason to rethink EU law.

@drmike I mean this is how we should always have been treating verified accounts, with lots of skepticism, not believing them.

So really I see this as an improvement.

Verified accounts always have spread misinformation and they always will. Maybe it's worth listening to them or not, but it's never worth trusting them.

Verified accounts just means it looks like it's coming from a human. But humans lie, or humans get the story wrong. So the verification was never a reason to trust what was being posted.

So great! We are figuring out not to trust these people that we never should have been trusting in the first place!

@lauren meh, I figure most of the time such positions are symbolic only with little actual impact.

So either the occupant of the position realizes that and sets their expectations accordingly, or they get really really frustrated.

Neither does any good.

@pglpm@emacs.ch no, I'm talking about Fediverse, or more specifically, I'm thinking about the ActivityPub protocol that runs it.

AP is all about delivering streams of content left and right from content producers to the applications and websites that want it. But the streams themselves are a little ephemeral so it's up to the end use to decide what to do with them.

So Fediverse might deliver an answer to a question, and while a platform like Mastodon might just throw it up on the screen for an hour, it takes a more specialized website to actually display the answer that was provided and keep it around for future users to find.

@Nonilex it's not just culture wars, though.

The administration was caught promoting politicized messages particularly related to health care that have nothing to do with culture, messages that sought to sink scientific information that ran up against officials' public messaging.

That's such an important part of this story.

@lin11c

Yay! Authoritarian censorship! *sigh*

@KimPerales

@SteveThompson Well, it's not so much backing Biden as it is pushing back against the lower court.

I know that's being pedantic, but the details matter in legal procedings.

@marqle I'd say that so many mastodon users are requesting this feature that it's reasonable to say it needs to implement the feature.

Admittedly this is not objective, but it is a long-standing feature request. And I think I remember that the developers have agreed to it finally.

@JeremyMallin

@jaymcor

As if the pros don't want clicks? :)

FWIW, over the past year, particularly with regard to the Ukraine war, I've been struck by amateurs doing a much better job at assembling and presenting news than the professionals.

Professional journalism has simply really seemed to go downhill over the last decade or so.

@freemo@mastodon.acm.org