volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@raquelvanisse

It's quite a feat for somebody to seriously suggest that America is indistinguishable from Russian and Saudi oligarchies.

That's a special kind of echo chamber.

@marathon Well the problem is that they pay attention to politics AS sport, treating serious questions of governance as if it was a mere football game with lineups to set among two teams before the two teams competed when that's not at all how the government is structured.

You know, when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail? And it's going to make it pretty ineffective trying to drive in that screw with that hammer.

That's a huge reason why the US government is so messed up right now, so many voters voting as if everything is two football teams going at each other when that's not how any of this actually works.

The commentators that shape significant swaths of American thought present current events as if they were football games, which is unsurprising because so many of those commentators come from that world, and it's really messing up American understanding of the world they're living in. And then they vote based on that misunderstanding.

@marathon

PS, It's also interesting to notice conservative speakers repeating the conclusion that Putin has gone crazy, literally.

So many conservatives conclude that his actions reflect mental illness because they don't make sense, when really that's a symptom of their understanding of the world being wrong. But instead of considering that Russia might be more complicated than Putin, they conclude that it is indeed all about Putin, but he's the crazy one when the news doesn't align with the Putin-centric worldview.

@mattjhayes careful about promoting a solution in search of a problem, though.

Don't overlook the possibility that Fediverse simply might not give users what they want, and that's why users aren't adopting it.

A lot of people get so focused on promoting the tool that they fail to notice that the tool really needs to be improved for it to be useful.

@tasket

@marathon I really don't think it's that puzzling. It's part of the cognitively lazy pattern of simplifying things down to a single icon instead of having to grapple with a complex world.

Keep in mind, also, that major figures in US media these days have backgrounds in sports reporting, for some reason, so they basically promote that sort of pattern, giving people permission to reduce a complex world into the personal icons.

People will be lazy if you allow them, and at this point the culture is actually pushing them to be lazy.

The Western obsession with Russia's president comes out of lazy people trying to make sense of a complex world.

@europesays That's just stupid.

The one does not imply the other.

Yeah Trump is a moron, that doesn't mean he's a king, or that people declaring him to be a king and then yelling about the declaration that they just made have any particular point... No that's just a mess, this is just stupid..

@Dhmspector We hired a reality TV shock jock to be president.

Well, it stinks, but we got what we elected.

Yay democracy I guess.

@nethenekhthon except that broad swaths of the federal government continue to operate.

@lillyfinch during oral arguments the justices tended to all Express support for section 2.

Further, the court doesn't have the authority to strike down section 2 because that's not the question before them.

It's very unlikely that they will, or else they would have accepted a case where that was actually being requested. AND they wouldn't have brought the arguments in the directions they went.

All of these stories about the Court striking down section 2 seem based in misunderstanding of what's actually happening in this case.

@lillyfinch no, that gets it exactly backwards.

The whole argument before the Court is about respecting the 14th Amendment and preventing states from engaging in racial gerrymander.

The challengers in the case also emphasize that they're not asking for Section 2 to be struck. They're merely asking that the 14th Amendment be applied to it.

@galad

That doesn't make sense.

Designating antifa doesn't grant ability to murder with impunity. If they were going there then why waste time with the designation?

No, go for Occam's Razor on this one: idiot politicians just posturing for their idiot base to score political points.

There's no deep scheme here. The politicians involved just aren't that smart.

@libraonfire.bsky.social how in the world do you see that conspiracy working?

It would require quite the alignment of conflicting interests, and shutting down the VRA isn't even before the Court.

@nedhamson1

I mean, great, this is how it was supposed to work the whole time. I don't know how much credit I give Newsom for being so late to act.

@light But that's my point: by and large whether they are evil or not, the folks I'm referring to are working with a separate set of facts.

Treating them as just evil misidentifies the problem and so will too often produce solutions that actually make the situation worse.

Often enough folks engaging them as evil ends up playing into their game, handing them successes that they wouldn't otherwise have.

I'd even say that kind of thing helped get Trump reelected.