volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@mark I know a few people personally.

Just one example was a friend who brought up statistical evidence that the vote counts didn't satisfy the expected distribution, but once you went through the stats with them, they were satisfied that the evidence was due to a misunderstanding of the statistical expectations.

And that's exactly how we (as a society) should have addressed those questions, not denying that they existed but answering them.

SO MANY reasonable people would have been assured of a fair vote who even to this day don't know.

@glowrocks sounds like you haven't spent much time listening to people outside of your echo chambers.

I'm not even saying that's a bad thing. Live the life you want.

But if you don't hear from others with contrary perspectives, even very wrong ones, then you don't really know what they're saying. It leaves a blind spot that becomes particularly relevant if you actually want to engage with them.

Again, if you're not interested in that, no problem. But I'd say it's important to acknowledge that choice as you make it.

The echo chamber is nice and warm. It's understandable why folks prefer to stay there.

@mattblaze

@mattblaze so again, What's your goal here?

Do you want to educate, influence, and maybe even bring others over to your perspective?

Or is your goal just to shout into the wind?

Or something else?

@mattblaze that might be, but AGAIN, if you want to convince someone then you have to meet them where they are.

If I'm a fervent believer that the earth is round and your first words to me are, "Seeing as the world is flat..." I'm going to start with the assumption that you don't know what you're talking about, and you're unlikely to convince me of your perspective.

Maybe a person does believe a bunch of made up bullshit about the election. Fine. If you want to reach them you have to engage with that.

Again, IF your goal goes beyond preaching to the choir.

@dangillmor no, it's not that that's where their peers are, but that it's where so much of their audience is.

So many folks who stopped using Twitter assume nearly everyone else did as well, but it's simply not the case.

It's a projection.

There are still a ton of people using Twitter, and the journalists want to reach them.

@flexghost siiiigh, these conspiracy theories don't really do anyone any good, just distracting from the substantial issues of performance in office.

@mattblaze who said anything about philosophy?

This is really about rhetoric and political science. This is 100% about real world choice of words.

Philosophy doesn't enter into it.

The moment a person feels gaslit they're going to shut down and your argument is not going to be convincing.

Again, maybe your goal is not to convince. That's fair. The choir will still eat it up.

But if you do want to reach some people with misguided beliefs, then you have to reach them where they are.

@MattFerrel the overwhelming majority of Republicans voted against the wackos in their party.

It wasn't Trump but congressional Democrats voting as a bloc that amplified the voices of those extremists, requiring Republicans to set aside their preferences and seek approval of those ideologues.

It's not good, but it was the predictable outcome of the Democratic voting strategy, given the rules of the House.

@graydon I mean... the authoritarian DID win.

@manton

"Since no other civilized country on the planet has massacres like this, Johnson is implicitly arguing that the problem isn’t the human heart, but the American heart."

I think that's actually the issue.

And it's why gun legislation won't help.

I take it the author put this out there as the gotcha, but no, it's the actual, reasonable conclusion.

We've already seen the failure of gun legislation. We already went through the process of seeing the impact of new laws for years. They didn't work.

The American heart just is really more prone to malfunctioning like this guy.

@gruber

@Aethelstan zero, since the Speaker has no authority to shut down government.

I know so many media outfits and politicians are spinning these wild tales, but they're counting on us not knowing rules and laws, sometimes really complicated ones, that make their tales into impossible conspiracy theories.

@NewsDesk

@jrm4 well, we can always go to the extreme: so many people think Musk is ruining Twitter, so what if his goal is to ruin Twitter?

What if that was his goal all along?

If people are right AND that was his goal, then it would mean he's experiencing wild success.

Personally, I don't think it's being so ruined, but it is being changed, and since I don't know his objective I can't say whether those changes are working toward that objective or not.

@Alan well that was my argument before, that your claim was clearly wrong, but now there's the addition that your argument of going back to ancient history to say something about what's being made today is pretty out there.

@jrm4 but we can't see into the conference rooms where engineers are making longterm plans or boardrooms where pitches for the future of the platform are being made to secure the financial side.

And we can't see into Musk's head to see what he's picturing for ten years down the road.

Yeah, we can make guesses, but they're only guesses since so much of that is actually invisible to us.

@jackiegardina I'd say folks asking that are falling into the pattern of begging the question, assuming the answer to the very question on the table and approaching it that way.

There were some really high stakes questions to be answered, so a lot people worked on them.

Unfortunately, the general public was told that the answer was one way, when it wasn't.

@DNPFred@mstdn.social well mainly the US needs to stop blocking cleaner electricity.

US regulations make it very difficult to make that change.

@darnell

@darnell can't say Musk is failing at X if we don't know what his goal was.

He might be very successfully heading toward something we're just not expecting.

@Twitter_expat@mastodon.world well, it stinks that Hamas propaganda gets so much attention, but the difference is that one is an ongoing campaign while the other is a one-off event.

@QueerInTheCountry@mas.to how about we stop building Trump up, playing into his hands, by acting like he's at the center of the universe, as if we give a crap about him when we eat cheesies/cheetohs?

I'll eat them because I want to. I'm not rebelling against the guy I really don't give a damn about.