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
I just really don't think people are as focused on news here as you think they are. Just different people looking for different things.
Heck, sometimes it sounds like people want to use these platforms to ESCAPE the news.
*hat
stupid typo
But just because something has been long recognized doesn't mean we know everything about it, or even enough about it to engage with it.
The two aren't mutually exclusive.
I think so many people miss that #Trump isn't simply a cause of socially bad things but is also the result of negative factors in the social environment, things that had been bubbling under the surface for years.
It's easy to hold Trump responsible for things in the same way that it's easy to promote all sorts of superstitious ideas: turning my had backwards simply makes my team do better!
But the reality is so much more complex.
Trump took advantage of complicated political and social undercurrents that we should have been addressing for years, but that we were dismissing.
To the extent that it doesn't matter what Trump does, that just reflects that this whole thing was never really about him in the first place. He was simply the suit onto which so much of the public projected their existing complaints.
Careful setting up negatives to prove, though.
Trump seemed to have primarily referred to statistical and political science analysis when claiming the election was stolen, with legal analysis being secondary, part of addressing the other reasoning.
Well part of it is that a lot of #journalism may not have those resources after all.
With budgets being squeezed and internal debate over future directions of the organizations, there might not be resources--money and attention--available for them to do the work to embrace #fediverse.
Forking #Mastodon for #QTs
and such, adding it to institutional workflows isn't a trivial thing as you make it out to be!
Well it's not quite so perfect.
Parts of moving instances, like the redirect from the old instance, still rely on the old instance.
And if you're leaving the old instance because of either technical issues or flat out abuse from its administrators, it's hard to rely on that good faith cooperation.
This is just part of the design of Fediverse, unfortunately.
Sure, and Congress has had a decade and multiple administrations to make that change, but they didn't, so this is where we are.
Right now social programs are funded by student loan debt. That's what our representatives have landed on.
They should have changed to better sources of funding before cutting out this source.
I mean, good for the portion of the population who are being relieved of their obligations.
Not so good news for the social programs that their debt was, through the democratic process, intended to fund, and for the rest of us for whom those programs were intended to serve.
volkris
boosted
I once owned a comedy shop. It was next to a hair salon.
I would often practice my pantomime skills by pretending to be a hair stylist.
But then I was told by the owner to mime my own business.
This article is fantastical in so many ways, from misreporting Court rulings through getting wrong the operation of the Court, but mainly...
This is how it was SUPPOSED to work.
That others can ignore Court rulings is part of the checks and balances that allowed us to offer political independence to lifetime appointed justices.
President after president has ignored the Court when they thought they could get away with it politically. That's just always how it's been.
There's no crisis here, just the normal functioning of the US government.
@BeAware@social.beaware.live
Defending? There's a vocal number of people here PROMOTING it!
I am specifically *not* talking about the US population who believes the election was stolen, as I said above.
Really so much of it comes down to something you put your finger on: the division between people who believe a candidate has one set of legal ways to contest an election and people who believe the candidate has a different set.
Setting aside the irrational extremists on all sides, it comes down to a matter of different sources making different claims about what the laws actually say.
That sort of factual matter can be discussed with citation to publicly available statute to help sort it out.
But a person can't sort out facts if they don't understand the others' perspective.
@dirkprimbs@me.dm
Oh believe me even with the screenshots it took me a long time to figure out what he was saying.
At one point I thought he was talking about THREE different things.
But in the end, it's all because of the really understandable confusion between instance name and user name, and that confusion even made it hard to figure out what he was seeing.
It's not that I believe in him. Honestly, I think he's all of those things but also such a god damn idiot that he wouldn't understand election law or statistics anyway.
But I do believe that when someone says something coherent (again, a mean feat for this guy), that it's best to at least consider that maybe he means what his own words say.
That's before ascribing new meanings to the words on the page.
You said you weren't sure how else one can interpret it, so here's an example of another interpretation: the simple meaning of the words he said.
@jackiegardina
I'm glad to help then. It's based on the simple reading of the words you quoted.
He didn't say to make or forge or fake votes. He said to *find* them, consistent with *we won the state*.
It's a consistent interpretation that's a simple reading of the quote, I'd say. No need to project contrary meaning onto it.
Maybe he **was** using code words, but that gets into making assumptions to get to more tenuous interpretations.
I know that's the caricature of that portion of the population that's so often promoted, but it doesn't really capture the mainstream of public sentiment pushing those actions forward.
It's the equivalent of certain conservatives who try to paint all liberals as atheist anarchists or whatever: yeah, there are those on the extreme, but it's not the bulk of those on that side of the table.
If the stolen election side was the entire half of the population there would have been SO many more riots, but there weren't, showing that those aren't quite so prevalent.
They're following the Supreme Court order, though.
In its ruling, linked below, the Court told Alabama that it couldn't be race-neutral, that it HAD to gerrymander based on race. So it did with its new map, just as the Court said it must to comply with the Voting Rights Act.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/22pdf/21-1086_1co6.pdf
Again, half the country has a different interpretation, and if you want to understand the situation you also have to at least recognize that.
Even better is to go a step farther and understand the other perspective, but the minimum is to recognize that it exists and shaped all of the events then and now.
Right, there is a process *outside of ActivityPub because ActivityPub can't do what you say.*
Nostr doesn't have this process, but neither does ActivityPub!
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
volkris's choices:
