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
@erin Well what was it referencing?
The ruling has been widely talked about lately.
@o_simardcasanova so it'll fit right in with the Fediverse :)
Politics
@JeremyMallin it's always time for impeachment.
I wouldn't say database hacking is required as every instance admin is free to do anything he'd like with any content that his instance is involved with. No need to hack the db if you can just tell the software to do whatever before the content even touches the database.
You might say, well Mastodon puts it in the database! But firstly, I probably don't know if your instance is running Mastodon, and secondly, I don't know if that installation of Mastodon has been modified.
It's all up to the wants of the admins on this platform, and people need to realize that before they misunderstand those privacy implications.
@Aurefreepress that's not how the US government works, though.
Johnson is only the Speaker of the House, subject to the positions of the representatives that we elected. He can't block a bill that the rest of the chamber wants to pass.
If the House wants to pass a bill, they can override the Speaker and/or replace him, as we saw.
This whole conspiracy theory doesn't match basic civics.
@renzelen but the US system was designed to work with people who are for sale.
After all, we pay presidents :)
But really, the whole system is set up with checks and balances to not only tolerate bad acting politicians but to make it in their best interests to fly right.
Say Trump gets elected and gets a break from legal issues. Well, it would be a shame for him to be removed from office, right? So even more reason he needs to behave in office, to avoid being back in legal jeopardy.
@jeffjarvis they have no sense of meaning or fact, but they DO have a sense of summarizing average perceptions, which is still useful.
It's still useful to consider what the general public (or whatever source the corpus) expresses, even if that's not identical to fact.
**NO!** Not only public posts, and that's a huge problem on this platform. Many users don't realize that all posts are transmitted out for the vacuuming.
In other words, on this platform there effectively ARE no public posts. There are only tags to posts with suggestions as to whose timelines they appear in.
This is an ax I grind because I worry that so many users are mislead into making posts they wouldn't otherwise make because they don't realize this part of the platform.
If Bulgarian financial regulations are like they are so many other places in the world, Bulgaria has given banks restrictions that cannot be met with Bitcoin.
So it's by not accepting Bitcoin that banks are meeting those obligations, that IS how they're behaving, under the regulations in place.
It's something to think of a #Trump nomination as a team hiring a coach who doesn't know the rules of the game and so can't explain them to the team, leaving them at a self-inflicted disadvantage.
Trump failed so badly during his first term because he didn't know which procedures to use to really press forward with his agenda, and there's little reason to believe he's learned anything since then, and he certainly hasn't been informing his sadly ignorant listeners.
Unfortunately, so many on the other side don't know the rules either, but their coaches do, so they're able to play the game.
We'd all be better off if someone was out there actually explaining to the general public how government works, so we could elect better officials left and right, and fix the derailment.
@TheConversationUS I think it's often underappreciated that the connection between Trump and his supporters is a two way street.
When you watch Trump interact with supporters, they aren't just captive to them. He pivots his language based on their feedback, which is one reason he's so mealymouthed: he's trying to adapt in real time to the boos and cheers.
He's as captive to them as they are to him.
@joel no, for better or worse the design decisions of Fediverse/ActivityPub leaves it not only open but even welcoming to scraping.
And people need to realize how little control they have over anything they post here.
There is no real privacy here. It's a public square sort of situation. Do not post anything you don't want to air in public.
@blamellors yes, propaganda and misinformation does make its rounds in these viral days.
That's why it's so important to fact check, so we can call out those false claims.
The ruling is public for us all to see. We should not stand for the gaslighting telling us that we haven't read what we have.
@1dalm fine, but that's not the question on the table for the SCOTUS to consider.
That's for the elected representatives on the legislative branch to take up, not the judicial branch.
@erin No, the ruling didn't cause clinics to halt their operations, as it didn't impose any standards on them.
It's just not part of the ruling.
If clinics halted operations due to unwarranted fears sown by misreporting about what was in the actual rulings, well, that is in line with my perspective that misreporting is generally awful for society and needs to be called out.
@JeanPDeliet Aid to Ukraine isn't some new idea.
The House had been in session, naming its post offices, criticizing China, and all of that for plenty of time when they could have passed aid had there been interest among the representatives we elected.
It's for good reason that the Speaker still has to respect the wishes of the chamber, as we saw when the last one was outed.
@SaanichGuy honestly, the way the House rules are set up, they try not to allow there to be such conflict of interest issues in the first place.
Critically, in this context, the Speaker doesn't have the power to block legislation that the rest of the chamber wants to pass. If the Speaker tried that, the rest would just go around him or would vote him out and pick a new one.
The legislation isn't proceeding because there is a substantial proportion of the representatives that we elected who aren't convinced it would be well-spent, for better or worse.
There's little Johnson can do about that.
@JeanPDeliet Johnson isn't blocking US aid to Ukraine. That's not how the House of Representatives works.
Instead, we have elected representatives who aren't convinced that the aid would be put to good use, regardless of Johnson. Under House rules they'd just bypass the Speaker if he was standing in their way.
Call your representative and tell him to act. Don't let them scapegoat and point fingers at Johnson.
@TechBean false.
CU had nothing to do with foreign adversaries and explicitly preserved the ability of the FEC to conduct policing of election policies.
@blamellors but it sounds like you DIDN'T hear what they were ruling.
What you said they were ruling doesn't match the actual ruling, which I linked to.
The actual ruling had a different defendant, in different circumstances, facing a different legal process, relying on different legal concepts than the story that's going around.
Once again, we need to call out this propaganda, not promote it when we can so easily debunk it ourselves.
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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