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
@touaregtweet I see that a lot of foreign reporting doesn't really capture the structure of courts in the US, and so don't realize how much control judges commonly have in such cases, don't realize how normal this kind of thing is.
It's all part of the US system's emphasis on checks and balances, preventing the executive branch from having as much ability to throw the book at people.
@oldrawgabbit this is one of those cases where the better criticism of #Trump is to point out that he generally has no idea what he's doing and is ineffective in following through on promises to his supporters.
That has been his track record, and it needs to be emphasized.
Criticizing him on the basis of a plan that some people would support serves to elevate him in the eyes of those potential voters. Better to point out that he fails to implement such plans in the first place so he'd lose with everyone.
@bob It's funny because the post above this in my timeline here is one that is bragging about how great this platform is because it sensors things so well.
The post is literally a guy bragging about how moderation here is so essential, about how much work moderators do, about how we don't appreciate the amount of work they do, to keep us from seeing the things we don't want to be seeing.
So technically you're right, the protocol itself delivers information uncensored, but censorship is definitely a norm around here, one that is celebrated by many.
And we need to acknowledge that.
@DeeGLloyd@mastodon.world okay so you're you're shooting the messenger here, but can you address his actual argument?
I mean, who cares who the guy is, is his argument wrong or right? You sound like you're dismissing it without even considering that even if you don't like the guy for some reason, he might have a point.
Or maybe he doesn't, but unless you actually address what he's saying, how do you know?
@Polynomial_C@mastodon.social
I'd say that is what I define as buy-in 🙂
Yeah, follow the flow, that is part of buying into the system, as I would describe it. You don't have to ideologically or philosophically agree with something to buy into the arrangement or trade-off.
I don't mean ideological by in. Or philosophical by in. I mean practical, going with the offer placed on the table because it's just the direction the person figures is the best way to go.
@Free_Press The thing is, the extremists don't actually have much power unless Democrats cooperate with them.
And we really need to call out the Democrats for cooperating with them.
If Democrats didn't vote alongside the Republican extremists then the whole chamber would easily vote them down and make them sit in the corner irrelevant.
It's only Democrats voting with the extremists that give them any significant power at all.
Who is going to set up that function? Who is going to dole out those rewards?
It's always crucial to consider the motivations behind the motivations, the incentives that bring the individuals on board with the plan.
Otherwise it comes down to magical thinking, that if we get this abstraction working everything will be grand.
No, in the real world you have to think about how individual humans are going to implement the real plan.
But when you say make, you run into the same issue.
Make? How do you make the group work together? How do you enforce it? How do you get enforcers to enforce?
Even in the making you have to have buy-in. You have to convince the makers to make.
An update on and description of #BlueSky distributed capabilities, including a long segment on distributed labeling and moderation, and how the way #Mastodon / #Fediverse handles it promotes contention on this platform.
I always say, there's a lack of focus on technology serving users here, with instances being the primary focus, and that's a shame.
@Free_Press she doesn't, though.
@ianRobinson Occam's razor would have us at least consider that maybe she is simply being honest with her opinions as expressed in orders, without any sort of conspiracy involved
@tntneedham she wasn't put there. That's not how that process worked.
@ianRobinson
@janettespeyer I think it's under appreciated that there are a TON of practical issues when it comes to how to be on fediverse, issues ranging from internal editorial processes through marketing matters through legal matters.
The hosting of one's own instance falls into those issues.
It's not as simple as a lot of people think.
@roknrol I don't actually understand your poll :)
What sort of labels are you talking about? Can you give an example?
I don't know if you are talking about anything from food labeling through pronouns through political labeling.
@ShingoMouse wow, It sounds like this outfit doesn't really even know how the Supreme Court works if it's asking questions like these.
Or, more likely, it probably knows how the Supreme Court works but it's trying to influence people towards its interests by promoting these nonsensical perspectives.
This outfit is taking advantage of you. You need to know that.
@antares The key is that if your state has given you a vote, well then that's your vote to use however you wish for whatever goal you wish to pursue, and one voter's goal can be entirely different from another voter's goal.
So the idea about throwing your vote away relies on the premise of what the goal is and whether the voting choice does or does not contribute to that goal.
Maybe one of your neighbors has a goal of using his vote to affirmatively promote the candidate of one of the major parties, while your other neighbor has a goal of using his vote to support one of the parties themselves regardless of the specific candidate, and another neighbor has a longer term goal of wanting to influence what future candidates may be on the ballot.
Those, and many others, are entirely reasonable goals, and they would advise completely different voting strategies, none of which would be throwing the vote away.
@wjmaggos I 100% agree that this issue is exactly where philosophy meets reality. The problem is that I think you're on the wrong side of it 🙂
You're doing an awful lot of speculating about what's in the jailer's head. In reality people have a ton of different motivations, that vary from person to person, but we don't have to make any assumptions about it, as we can simply say he's acting in his best interests to do it, using his personal power to do it based on whatever might be in his head, and we don't have to assume any more than that. We don't have to philosophize any farther than that reality.
The politician has asked him to use his power to jail a person, and for whatever reason he has agreed to use his power that way, with the end result being exactly what I'm trying to stress, that the politician himself isn't exerting any particularly significant political power in the jailing.
And so it is that politics has no power in itself, but rather, it invites us to use our own power in ways that we agree to use it.
The threat of being jailed is not an expression of political power but of the power of the jailer, even if the jailer decides to cooperate with a political decision.
The problem is that I think you guys are talking about philosophy when we are talking about application.
You can philosophize all you want about what might be or what could be or what should be, but at the end of the day, you might also be more concerned with what is as you may or may not be led into a jail cell.
And that is emphatically my point here. It doesn't matter what politicians might say, the power rests with the jailer leading the person into the cell.
The abstract is not so important when it comes to that sort of thing.
@selea The problem is that it's so leaky.
And again let me say that this is just part of the way this system was designed. It's not about bad administration or anything else, I think it is absolutely a flaw in the design of this system.
If you have a single instance that you haven't blocked that misbehaves, that's it. The content is liable to be out there.
Unless you're willing to lock down your instance so that you only allow other instances that you personally trust and can vouch for not running any sort of compromising software, even by accident, well then your users need to know what they are getting into here.
Yes, take steps to reduce it, but even if you reduce it, a lot of users are just not aware that the option exists here.
@wjmaggos No I would reverse that.
It's not that the society we take for granted requires that most people agree to go along, but the opposite: the society we see before us is required by what the people have agreed to go along WITH.
The society is what the people have come up with. It doesn't require the people, but the people created it. It doesn't exist separate from the people.
In the same vein, it's not true that otherwise we need totalitarianism to make it function at all, because it doesn't exist separate from us. We wouldn't need totalitarianism to enact society, rather we would require a different society based on what we agreed to create in a distributed way.
Because politics is not power. We each contribute power as we see fit, with politics being just one expression of how we are ourselves organize our own use of our own power.
We don't need this, we don't need totalitarianism, we don't need super bowl tickets, we don't need Yoko Ono albums 🙂
We decide what we want from society collectively and what society ends up being is the reflection of what we all decide to do with our power.
It's not the other way around.
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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