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
@faraiwe Yeah contrarian like saying that the Earth is not actually flat to folks that keep spouting off insisting that it is.
Contortions? No it is what it is. Very much centralized? No it's the opposite as the protocol is founded on the exact opposite of that, as anybody can verify, but you can deny that all day long for some reason, but why?
Why insist on this falsehood? Are you just trying to gaslight?
What's your motivation here for insisting on things that aren't true? Again, we can look at the protocol and see that it's the opposite of what you're saying, so why are you saying the opposite?
Why is it so important for you to promote that false narrative?
@RonSupportsYou Oh no, not at all.
It's not that Biden and Harris underestimated Trump and therefore lost to him, is that they were shit candidates. It's that as bad as Trump was, Democratic establishment figures overestimated Biden and Harris.
Trump won by default because Democrats ran shit candidates that nobody wanted to vote for. Just about anybody else would have beaten Trump.
The moment Democrats settled on Harris as the replacement candidate I threw up my hands and said well we're just screwed.
Democrats should have run a better candidate than Harris, but they basically forfeited the race to Trump by running her. It was pretty obvious to me at the time at least.
@RonSupportsYou What? It absolutely explains it!
Trump wasn't feeling like his ego was being stroked enough so he lashed out. He requires stroking. He wasn't getting it to the extent that he thought he wanted it.
That's really the simplest explanation as to what happened there, he was getting bored at not getting stroked so he lashed out like a child.
Ego stroking, and the lack thereof, is a very clear explanation of that whole mess.
@RonSupportsYou were you having beers with Putin recently or something? Did he tell you that?
No this whole administration is a joke. Gabbard doesn't change that. She knows it too.
@faraiwe or... maybe it's simply true?
You can see for yourself that it's decentralized by looking at the engineering of the platform that has decentralization built into it from the ground up.
Simply asserting otherwise doesn't change what we can see for ourselves.
But you're right, it does mean that the platform is not and cannot be owned by a techbro billionaire.
I don't know why anyone would be so insistent on making such conspiratorial claims.
BlueSky isn't just a different algorithm, though. It's fundamentally designed differently, so that there isn't reliance on any one algorithm, different or not.
And it's fundamentally engineered not to be a corporate owned walled garden.
No, BlueSky isn't fediverse. It's better, with opposition to walls built into it from the ground up in a way that doesn't exist here.
@chad coup d'etat? Trump's the incumbent!
He's not going to take out himself.
These stories are ridiculous.
@chad@mstdn.ca coup d'etat? Trump's the incumbent!
He's not going to take out himself.
These stories are ridiculous.
@HeliosPi honestly, it's been more like threats of control and domination have been used to control and dominate.
For example, claims that the census would be used to round up illegal aliens probably did more to impact communities than the census itself.
Sometimes fear of the boogeyman is more impactful than the boogeyman itself.
Answer: Magic.
Unfortunately the folks in charge of US policy at the moment have no idea how anything in the real world works, so they just openly engage in magical thinking, that the world will change on a dime because they deem it so.
The food will just be made by Americans now. That's the long and short of the answer. They don't worry about little things like how exactly that will happen, how an army of Americans will show up to the fields literally tomorrow.
Putin has exactly the same thing all other world leaders have on Trump: the ability to stroke the idiot's ego.
That's it.
That's all it takes to manipulate Trump, nobody needs dirt on him or anything like that. Heck, the guy seems too brain damaged to appreciate the threat of blackmail anyway, as indicated by his performance in courts.
The thing is, since Trump is surrounded by a hundred different people all manipulating him to their different ends, he's not a puppet of any particular master, but just whoever is sucking up to him hardest at any given moment.
I spend quite a lot of time listening to the folks who promoted and voted for Trump. His voters vastly overestimated him, and he has a LONG track record of failing to live up to their fantasies, from the deep state that he didn't fix through wars that he didn't end through felony convictions that he didn't overcome.
So no, he wasn't elected because people underestimated him. How would that even work?
He was elected specifically because his voters overestimated him.
@solicitor Trump will be impeached and removed if we elect congresspeople who will impeach and remove him.
It's up to us.
No, I think we voters are choosing this. So right, I don't think it's going to happen, I think we should do better, but I don't think we will.
But the point is, it's not up to Trump. We want this for some reason, so we are choosing it based on our congressional election choices.
I tend to agree with one caveat: IMO a charade is a conscious deception while I don't think Trump is sufficiently connected to reality to realize that he's participating in a fiction, once again he's going to be used and manipulated by the real adults in the room.
This has been the story of his entire political career, though.
And another part of what's going to happen is, when Putin doesn't do what he convinced Trump to say was going to happen, Trump's support base is once again going to say this is Putin disrespecting Trump, not that this was Trump falling for an obvious lie.
@RonSupportsYou I don't know what you think I was fooled by. I'm adamant that anything Trump says is probably not true.
volkris
boosted
Federal judges have started issuing more rulings on a per curiam (collective unsigned) basis for fear of Trump retaliation so maybe the remaining staff at the Bureau of Labor Statistics can start issuing monthly job numbers that way.
@AGT I emphasize that Trump may be pressuring Ukraine, but that's not the same as America pressuring.
In the US system the president only represents a single Branch of a single government, not the entire government, and not the entire country. Presidents say dumb things all the time that are absolutely rejected by America. It is no different here.
To represent America would require an act of Congress. And that is absolutely not what Trump is going for.
You're both missing it. Trump's major value proposition is that he has a personality disorder wherein he has zero shame. He wouldn't resign because that would require shame. It would require him to care about doing right things. He doesn't.
But he does stand for consequences in our system, because our system doesn't require people to have shame or to decide for themselves whether they care. We impose that on them.
And that's why Trump is now a convicted felon, and it's why he has lost so many court cases and has screwed up so many negotiating sessions, and at any point the people that we elect to Congress could impeach him with very legitimate grounds for doing it.
He is suffering consequences for his misbehavior, because it's not up to him whether or not he does. But we should probably stop reelecting representatives who don't care to really unload on him as he deserves.
That's up to us though, not him.
@HamonWry Right, because they're using him to promote their own priorities.
That's been the game all along.
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
