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
@wjmaggos Well that's just a bad idea.
What you're describing is tearing down instead of building up, or more practically, it sets up cross purposes for the practice while supporting really unrealistic mythologies about how political power works.
If taxation is about political power then the country is generally going to reject it because most people aren't interested in social manipulation like that.
So when you inject such an idea it's very counterproductive. At least don't say it out loud even if you believe in such foolishness.
@mho IMO a problem is that Mastodon doesn't focus on empowering users to craft their own experiences but rather centralizes the user experience, or otherwise takes it out of users' hands, so that we all have to argue about what the user experience should be like instead of simply tailoring it for ourselves.
To put it a different way, Mastodon seems to have a one size fits all mentality, so we all have to argue about what size.
This is a gripe of mine.
@rameshgupta You're trying to make some sort of point by comparing apples and oranges.
It's not a valid argument, and it promotes this ignorance of how the US government is actually set up, ignorance of civics, that people really need to know if they want to engage with their government.
No, justices aren't treated the same as legislators because they are in a completely different branch of government that is specifically designed so that they won't be treated the same as legislators.
It gets us nowhere to discuss US government operations while ignoring the structure of the US government.
@TruthSandwich@toad.social
@DavidBruchmann but our trust and judges should be rooted in their opinions, not their personalities.
In the US judicial opinions are public so that we can look at the opinions themselves and judge their output.
Unfortunately we have all of these media outfits and special interests that are encouraging us to judge the messengers instead of the messages, judging the books by the covers, whatever idiom you'd like to use.
In dramatizing the judicial system like that It distracts us from actually judging the judges based on their actual jobs.
It's really unhealthy for society.
The best I've come up with is to analogize #fediverse to the web with cell phones and desktop computers:
Each individual program, like #mastodon and peertube and whatever else, all display the same fediverse in different ways that are optimized for their particular usages.
Think of your cell phone and your desktop computer displaying the same web but in ways that can look completely different because the interface through your phone and through your computer really need very different touches.
It's all the same fediverse, just with different interfaces optimized for microblogging or video sharing.
(I hope this makes sense, I feel like I'm having trouble with wording today :) )
@AnthonyFStevens That's probably a good sign for UK judges.
FAR too often, and you're committing this yourself here, people talk about judges' supposed politics instead of actually looking at the logic and reasoning in their opinions. It's a strawman tactic.
Judges' opinions are right or wrong regardless of their personal politics, and yet we have so many in the press and on social media politicizing that non-political core of the issue.
If the UK manages to escape that misdirection, well I'm jealous.
@DavidBruchmann You're confusing branches of government, though.
A criminal pardoning himself has nothing to do with democracy. It's a function of the executive branch, not the democratic legislative branch.
Pardoning is an executive function. It has nothing to do with democracy.
@rameshgupta You're confusing different branches of government, though.
The different branches operate differently because they have entirely different functions in the US government.
@TruthSandwich@toad.social
@lovelylovely Well the problem is that a lot of people voted for Biden taking a chance on him, and he has not done the job very well.
I don't think it's hard to understand why people saw that he screwed up and are deciding now that they don't want to vote for him again.
@PamelaBarroway so why not vote for anybody else in the primaries?
The choice is not just Biden versus Trump. Vote for somebody better.
@KarunaX but different people with different opinions of the UN don't necessarily start from the same approach of consulting the UN charter itself.
So again, regardless of the UN charter, this is still a point of contention that makes an enormous amount of difference.
@0xamit keep in mind that any instance is free to do this at any moment.
Threads would be no more free to monetize content than any other site in the federation. In fact, it'd probably be less free since it would have so much attention on it.
The point is that when you're putting content on here, be aware, that it is probably being monetized one way or another.
There is no built in safeguard against that.
@freemo I don't think most people in the US see it as celebrating indigenous people.
@MediaActivist I don't think that thesis lands, though.
Fediverse is engineered to focus not on users but on instances, if anything reinforcing authority in the hands of those operators.
It COULD have been anarchistic, but engineering choices were made, so that it's not.
Boy people let themselves get obsessed over the mythology surrounding Elon #Musk.
It's not good for them, and it's like, people taking an alternate reality game waaaaay too seriously.
Anything that doesn't fit their plotpoint is clearly part of the in-game conspiracy.
@_dm they weren't sued for their public speech.
I couldn't care less about Musk, and it really seems like people obsess over him.
It only makes it look more unhealthy that people get so obsessed over the troll that they accept easily debunkable stories like this.
@dangoodin
@_dm yep, so if we're talking about the lawsuit then we need to talk about what's actually in the suit, since that's what matters to the suit.
And it SHOULD matter to all of us if the allegations are true, that MM was misleading the public.
That's worth looking into for the general good.
@fraying if you read the complaint, no, that's not the root of the issue.
It says #MediaMatters specifically created accounts to follow only inflammatory content and companies, and the complaint also provided evidence that this is extremely rare.
So the root cause wouldn't be that there's a ton of Holocaust denial, but that Media Matters engaged measures to go out and find some, and even then had trouble finding enough to make the sensational story it wanted to tell.
Well, if you think Twitter is THAT influential, then for goodness sake let's keep good people on there to influence in positive directions!
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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