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
@AGT ARE they worth a read?
It's like fact-checking a kindergartner saying dumb things about dinosaurs or something.
We all know Trump is full of it and can barely put a coherent sentence together, so why is it worth fact checking that? It's just nonsense.
@faab64 No need to go into that kind of conspiracy theory.
You can just watch the Fox News folks say things on the air and Trump follows them a couple days later.
There's no evil Christian Zionist nonsense here. Just a bunch of people who don't know what they're talking about, and Trump following along.
@faab64 You're giving Trump too much credit.
A lie implies that he knows what's true in the first place, and his brain is mush at this point, so that's pretty unlikely.
Sure, because by applauding they soothe the idiot and he goes away.
Makes perfect sense.
@kingtor How, exactly?
What specifically are you referring to?
The courts have been hearing habeas corpus motions just fine.
@janef0421 no, his policies are not coherent. If they were coherent he would have more success, but we have seen that his policies are incoherent.
Day after day he shifts policies to undermine the policy the day before.
And that's the key, from there you would realize that his whole presidency unwinds. He doesn't know what he's doing, he's just getting in headlines.
To find strategy in Trump's BS is to give him more credit than he deserves because, well, if nothing else remember he is a convicted felon because he could not put up a coherent defense in court.
volkris
boosted
#ClayAndBuck (this one is a little interpretive): #Trump is so awesome that obviously the people of #Greenland are going to want to join the US and it's only the Europeans standing in their way! #USPolitics
To put it simply you should not be surprised because so many people just look for drama, they just look for things to rebel against, it counts to them as sticking it to the man somehow.
This childish attitude has been very very common on this platform for so long. It's rebelliousness without a cause.
You should not be surprised because this platform is just full of those people, and it always has been as long as I've been watching it.
volkris
boosted
@abesamma Blocking a whole network because we don't like one account seems a bit weird to me though. I don't want to be cynical but I get the feeling some people were itching for a reason to block Bluesky and ICE provided that.
I dislike ICE heavily (and this is an understatement), but if nothing else them being on a common network that is *not* X provides many of us an opportunity to tell them they should reconsider their alignment, rot in hell or whatever else we want to communicate.
US politics, ICE, Bluesky
@miaura which is to say... They would be welcomed on fediverse.
That's just how fediverse works. Yeah, anybody can dislike and want to silence anyone else and promote divisions in the network based on their ideologies, and the different segments will all be different segments of fediverse.
What you're saying doesn't really make sense.
Yeah, a lot of servers might cause ideological parts from other servers based on this stuff, that doesn't mean ICE isn't welcome, it just means that fediverse is built around servers blocking content from other servers that way.
Really, there's no more "Welcome to fediverse" statement than having them dive right into the normal drama around here.
Trump has a small but loud core base that are so deep in an echo chamber that they will sing his praises and vote for him no matter what. But it's relatively small.
Actual electoral success required a coalition that included a lot of people outside of that base, and a lot of people that were just giving the guy a chance. He could have brought them over to his side, but instead he alienated them. It was an unnecessary failure, just like his lost court cases.
Trump and his base cherry pick indicators just hand waving away all of the failures, but in the broader picture he's alienating more and more of the folks that he needed to actually hold on to power.
His activities of the last couple of weeks have only made him look even more unhinged in the eyes of those outside of the echo chamber who don't understand it at all.
@julian Fediverse has no meaning?
I see a whole lot of people that aren't admins, just run-of-the-mill users, who attach meaning to that term, using it easily.
@SouthBaySwingLeft More importantly, stop reelecting the same ineffective candidates that didn't reign in ICE when they could.
No, Bluesky is not a Nazi bar. That's the wrong analogy. It's a communication system.
It's more like the phone system or the internet, or heck the municipal water system. It provides a utility, not some bartender chatting up each patron.
And that's even more so for a distributed social media system. That's the trade-off, without a centralized authority there's nobody to enforce their set of rules on all.
It's important to realize that Trump's people blindly believe they are on the right side too winning bigly, no matter how many signs there are that they are pretty weak if not already underwater, and they will continue to act like a giant movement for as long as they are legally in power.
A group that realizes that it's failing will alter course. Trump's base is out of touch, though, so they are forging ahead.
As usual we should be emphasizing what losers they are to pierce their echo chambers. No easy task, to be sure, but can be done. Unfortunately, too many of us run around as if the opposite is true, though.
And so we feed their egos.
#PJMedia headline: Democrats Are So Screwed and a Former Obama Advisor Just Proved It(the headline itself is a message, of course)#USPolitics
Well yeah, that's how you deal with trolls. Don't feed them.
Gingrich is right, the #Greenland push IS just a bunch of noise, and the best way to sideline #Trump is to point out what a stupid and empty effort it is. He's trying to make waves, get a reaction with the noise, and if you react, THAT is what will have impact.
Unfortunately so far we have pushed the ball by reacting to his noise. It plays into his pattern.
Trump's an idiot who spouts noise. How we react to that noise is up to us. The more we call that out the last impact he will have on the world.
This really isn't hard: someone in #Greenland just needs to scribble on a napkin in crayon that #Trump's in charge now, congratulations big guy, you got it, have a little award show I guess, and then get back to normal business.
All of these meetings and diplomacy are lost on him. You just have to indulge him for a second and he'll wander off.
The nice thing about the US system is that we hold individuals accountable for their own actions. I think this is an advantage over parliamentary systems for example.
So not all in Congress are spineless? Well okay, but we can judge each one to see whether we should reelect them based on their performance. How does your particular representative act?
So I really don't care how they posture, I want to see whether they are voting to make Congress work. Democrats could have taken over the speakership already, they have the votes with just a couple of Republicans from the slim majority.
But they tend to be pretty spineless since they haven't.
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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