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
@light No it looks to me like he absolutely did!
That doesn't make him a king, though, because he's still subject to oversight from the people that we elect to Congress. We elected and reelected and reelected a bunch of congresspeople that backed his move.
That doesn't mean he's a king; that means we elected a bunch of people we should not have elected, and we need to stop reelecting those people.
A lot of these people going out to these stupid protests are going to go ahead and reelect the exact congresspeople who are supporting Trump's illegal actions.
So what's the point.
Meanwhile, Trump supporters are going to use optics from these protests in their campaigns to win over voters to their side.
Yeah, Trump is violating laws like so many presidents do. It's up to us to elect congresspeople that will will stand up to him, we don't, so we get what we voted for.
We need to change. These protests are if anything promoting this really bad status quo.
No I think you have that wrong. The right was able to use Ferguson protests and BLM as a talking point, and that helped get Trump reelected.
These protests are feeding into right-wing rhetoric. I know that's not the intention, but that's the reality. These protests don't look good to the general public, and politicians are able to use them in their campaigning against progressive causes.
That is just the reality of media.
Are you kidding? A whole lot of the blue politicians got us into this, and reelecting them only continues the mess that our government is.
Vote blue when blue gives us someone worth voting for.
Otherwise blue is only making things worse.
@cdarwin If the president thinks his rule is absolute then he wouldn't bother with the courts. But he is.
So all of the politicians trying to buy into that line, they're just lying and manipulating to public.
We need to stop reelecting these ineffective liars.
Listening to #C-SPAN covering the #NoKings rally in DC, #BernieSanders is giving his speech and completely misrepresenting what the legislation before the Senate includes.
Can somebody please poke Bernie and have him actually read the legislation that he is voting against? He's holding up funding for the federal workforce, holding up all of those paychecks, based on his misunderstanding of what the legislation actually says?
He is a very powerful person who is harming a lot of people and putting it on display right now. Maybe it's time for him to retire. Maybe other powerful people need to stop propping him up.
But mainly, we need to call out powerful people like Sanders who are really doing a lot of harm to a lot of people here.
If he's unable or uninterested in understanding the legislation that he is supposed to be working on as part of his job, then he needs to step down, not promote misinformation to his echo chamber at these silly protests.
I don't know why anybody takes #BernieSanders seriously. He's been completely out of touch with reality for years.
Right now he is complaining about the shutdown of government that he's been voting for. Has anybody told him how his votes work? Does he care what's happening in reality?
It's like his handlers just stand him up so he can spout rhetoric that they benefit from.
The state of #USPolitics...
Being opposed to kingship remains an easy test to pass.
The issue is not being opposed to kingship. The issue is that people can't agree about the facts of what is happening on a day-to-day basis, so they can't agree on whether there is a king.
Everybody is opposed to kingship. Arguing about that is pointless. Or worse, it's used to promote bad things.
The disagreement is in who is being a king, factually.
@cdarwin It's not up to Trump.
Senators are holding up progress on funding, not Trump.
Wrong branch of government.
More importantly, stop reelecting the same ineffective representatives to Congress.
The rest of this is just an act of going out and having a party. If you go and reelect the same folks who have failed us in Congress, none of this matters.
@everton137 other way around: it's relatively decentralized because it doesn't centralize around instances.
BlueSky decentralizes down to the users, and that fosters an attitude that makes it more attractive than having to rely on the dictates of the people running the instances.
No, Trump is not in utter panic. He doesn't even really know what's going on in the world, so why would he be?
The people surrounding Trump wouldn't tell him what's going on if it would put him into a panic.
That kind of report is just echo chamber talk. It is as divorced from reality as Trump is.
DC #NoKings speaker being broadcast on #C-SPAN:
They say we are living in an echo chamber, but [goes on to say a bunch of ignorant stuff proving that he is living in an echo chamber]
This is why the whole event is so silly. It is an expression of the echo chamber, really proving the point and buttressing the arguments of their opposition. They are playing into the hands of their opposition.
@chad What lies have you heard them spreading?
And what data do you have about how popular the movement is?
From what I've heard Republicans aren't so much lying as just ignoring it.
The answer is that people have completely different sets of beliefs of what is actually happening in the world as they believe whatever stories are circulating in their own echo chambers.
For example, in this case a whole lot of people believe that it's not still continuing. Their sources of news simply report that it's not continuing, so they believe it.
This is a common pattern these days. They (whoever "they" are) simply operate with a set of information that doesn't quite match with reality, but given that set of information, it makes sense.
It's quite a feat for somebody to seriously suggest that America is indistinguishable from Russian and Saudi oligarchies.
That's a special kind of echo chamber.
#NoKings protests are a tremendous example of strawman argument that will probably be counterproductive but take a tremendous amount of social resources to engage in.
A whole lot of people yelling no kings! while their opponents simply say, yeah, right, no kings... we agree, so what are you on about?
That pointless interaction has already been showing up in media, substantial messages being lost in the straw man.
It's a symptom of people being locked in their echo chambers. It's sad, it's pathetic.
@marathon Well the problem is that they pay attention to politics AS sport, treating serious questions of governance as if it was a mere football game with lineups to set among two teams before the two teams competed when that's not at all how the government is structured.
You know, when all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail? And it's going to make it pretty ineffective trying to drive in that screw with that hammer.
That's a huge reason why the US government is so messed up right now, so many voters voting as if everything is two football teams going at each other when that's not how any of this actually works.
The commentators that shape significant swaths of American thought present current events as if they were football games, which is unsurprising because so many of those commentators come from that world, and it's really messing up American understanding of the world they're living in. And then they vote based on that misunderstanding.
PS, It's also interesting to notice conservative speakers repeating the conclusion that Putin has gone crazy, literally.
So many conservatives conclude that his actions reflect mental illness because they don't make sense, when really that's a symptom of their understanding of the world being wrong. But instead of considering that Russia might be more complicated than Putin, they conclude that it is indeed all about Putin, but he's the crazy one when the news doesn't align with the Putin-centric worldview.
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:
