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
@lillyfinch that makes for a nice conspiracy theory, but it doesn't match the record. And it doesn't even match how the US system of government works.
That's just wacko conspiracy theory stuff.
No, if you look at the legislative record that didn't happen. And why would it? We elect our own congresspeople, they get booted out of office if we don't like what they do.
This is just nonsense.
Language
@djghettoredneck you really don't understand what's going on.
You're really upset based on propaganda. They are manipulating you.
volkris
boosted
I've upgraded my instance to Mastodon v4.4 from v4.3...
I did not put in my any of my custom patches. It would have required work I did not wish to put in...
and I immediately regretted it...
Mastodon is a mess without my patches. Yep, I submitted them to their GitHub. They got no traction beyond the occasional "can you rebase this." Yes, sure, I'm going to rebase it, and again, and again, and again,.... because Mastodon is my 24/7 job. (Newsflash: it isn't.)
It does look like I'm going to have to rework them now because without them Mastodon is nigh unusable.
I love the fediverse. I hate Mastodon. I just hate it less than the alternatives. (Yes, I've tried them. They sucked, hard.)
No, that's not historically accurate.
Districting has always been up to the states, the state legislatures in particular. It wasn't some reckless decision of the Supreme Court, it's just how the United States is set up from the beginning.
And really it's up to Congress to change if they want to, but that comes down to the people that we elect to Congress. We have all of these congresspeople yelling about it when really it's up to them to change it if they want to. If they're not changing it and we want them to change it then we need to stop reelecting the same people who don't change it.
We keep reelecting the congresspeople that enable this. Stop reelecting the congresspeople that enable this.
Don't let them point fingers at the Supreme Court to escape accountability.
@twrling What in the world? Pulled the rug out from lower federal courts? No, that's not how the US system works at all.
The Supreme Court sets the rules. Lower courts are bound to follow those rules. There's no pulling the rug out, there's just the constitutional order, effectively a supervisor telling the underlying what to do.
If your boss tells you to go count the cans in the store room instead of sitting on your phone, that's not pulling the rug out, that's managing.
@bespacific I mean, it's legal. Where is Congress? Well the people that we elected to the legislature passed the laws that made this possible.
And governors that we elected approved of it.
We voted for this. If we want change we have to convince our fellow citizens to change their minds.
@Yehuda other people can certainly provide that access even better than fediverse would be able to respond to the same situation.
On this platform instances could block the state, but on BlueSky individuals could choose to posts into the state without relying on instances choosing to do so.
Bluesky is better in these sort of contacts than fediverse.
I mean, it's because a lot of people understand how the process works, and how the justice department is withholding a lot of information that it can release at any moment without any permission from any judge, but instead the justice department is making a show of trying to release this other information that is under judicial seal.
It's a smoke screen.
The justice department can release its information on its own but it's trying to distract us with this other stuff.
@Yehuda I don't think that's quite right. I don't think bluesky is federated but rather decentralized beyond federation.
Basically, Bluesky has the decentralization that fediverse likes to claim that it has, but it really doesn't.
Fediverse is centralized among instances. That's what it refers to as federation. Bluesky, on the other hand, decentralizes down to users.
I think it's worth getting the terminology right because Bluesky ends up fulfilling the mission of decentralization better than a lot of the people who try to criticize it appreciate it.
@BagOfNails All the people that you mention actually did things.
Bad things, yeah, that's why they're in the books.
Trump really didn't, though. He failed and didn't really do much of anything.
For better or worse the guy has a long history of just failing to do anything, and if more people pointed that out we might not be in this position.
@BagOfNails I would say it's arguably worse than that: history won't record it at all because it was a complete dud.
Trump wants attention, that's really all he has going for him, and the Alaska summit is going to be ignored in the history books because it was a complete failure and no one cares.
He's a convicted felon because he's an idiot.
I think is really clear that Trump broke a bunch of laws, because he's an idiot who doesn't know what the laws are and doesn't care, but setting that aside, in this particular case the performance before the jury wasn't particularly strong.
Word is that the defense wanted to take out the key witness holding the prosecution case together, but Trump the idiot told them not to, and so he got convicted.
Because he's an idiot.
@faraiwe Yeah contrarian like saying that the Earth is not actually flat to folks that keep spouting off insisting that it is.
Contortions? No it is what it is. Very much centralized? No it's the opposite as the protocol is founded on the exact opposite of that, as anybody can verify, but you can deny that all day long for some reason, but why?
Why insist on this falsehood? Are you just trying to gaslight?
What's your motivation here for insisting on things that aren't true? Again, we can look at the protocol and see that it's the opposite of what you're saying, so why are you saying the opposite?
Why is it so important for you to promote that false narrative?
@RonSupportsYou Oh no, not at all.
It's not that Biden and Harris underestimated Trump and therefore lost to him, is that they were shit candidates. It's that as bad as Trump was, Democratic establishment figures overestimated Biden and Harris.
Trump won by default because Democrats ran shit candidates that nobody wanted to vote for. Just about anybody else would have beaten Trump.
The moment Democrats settled on Harris as the replacement candidate I threw up my hands and said well we're just screwed.
Democrats should have run a better candidate than Harris, but they basically forfeited the race to Trump by running her. It was pretty obvious to me at the time at least.
@RonSupportsYou What? It absolutely explains it!
Trump wasn't feeling like his ego was being stroked enough so he lashed out. He requires stroking. He wasn't getting it to the extent that he thought he wanted it.
That's really the simplest explanation as to what happened there, he was getting bored at not getting stroked so he lashed out like a child.
Ego stroking, and the lack thereof, is a very clear explanation of that whole mess.
@RonSupportsYou were you having beers with Putin recently or something? Did he tell you that?
No this whole administration is a joke. Gabbard doesn't change that. She knows it too.
@faraiwe or... maybe it's simply true?
You can see for yourself that it's decentralized by looking at the engineering of the platform that has decentralization built into it from the ground up.
Simply asserting otherwise doesn't change what we can see for ourselves.
But you're right, it does mean that the platform is not and cannot be owned by a techbro billionaire.
I don't know why anyone would be so insistent on making such conspiratorial claims.
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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