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
One of the biggest conservative megaphones, shaping US policy, rejects things like polling of public opinion and ignores losses in elections because the frat boys they see at football games cheer for #Trump.
With their biases confirmed, anyone they hear not supporting the guy's actions are clearly dishonestly playing politics.
So why should they change course?
#ClayAndBuck: Social media is a mirage! It doesn't represent the whole population! Don't believe it! Now, a group of people tailgating outside a f...
With geniuses like this setting US policy is there any surprise it's such a mess?
#BrianKilmeade: If you queue up Trump's remarks on #Iran you'll see the plan and goal are completely clear. Anyone who doesn't know that isn't pay...
It seems like folks looking at their traffic sources must have an interest in knowing if requests are originating from Fediverse
(or else they wouldn't look, or wouldn't care either way)
And given that interest, they'd want their tools on their end to reflect that aggregation.
I wonder how hard it would be to work with these analysis tools to integrate that aggregation of referrers, for the common good of both their users and ours.
Well, in this administration one also has to put quotes around "committed" given that so many don't follow thought once the Eye of #Trump has wandered elsewhere.
The argument is that it's against the federal Constitution to draw district lines based on race, period.
Doesn't matter WHY one is undertaking such racial gerrymandeing, it's unconstitutional no matter how righteous the motivation might be.
Everything else is pretty consistent considering that stance.
So you've gotten a few things backwards here. The Court is ordering a halt to, not preserving, racial discrimination, and it's ordering it to stop now so that there isn't interference closer to the election.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;"
A lot of quotations in the article get the SCOTUS ruling wrong, sometimes completely backwards.
The emergency order wasn't anti-trans (that issue wasn't on the table at all) but rather pro-freedom of speech. They were 1st Amendment concerns at issue in the argument.
And so, the article says schools can mandate the outing of trans students, but by the same argument schools would be prevented from exactly that.
Maybe advocates do fear SCOTUS is going after the trans community. If they do, then they don't understand the law. Or maybe they're just stunting for political points.
Well sure, because both cases seemed very likely to win on appeal and otherwise met longstanding requirements for emergency appeal.
This is just how the US legal system works, with the SCOTUS being a check on lower courts that get it wrong.
To be clear, this is in context of the Court finding that racial gerrymandering is unconstitutional.
The Court here found that the state court's efforts to tailor districts around race were likely in violation of that.
Yes, the topic of racial gerrymandering in the US is a mess. At the least we need to be clear about what judicial orders actually say.
It's because the US has a long history of presumption that any say matters, bristling at the idea that authorities get to determine what people can and can't say.
The argument before the Court here is about governmental restriction on speech. A lot of folks miss that.
More to the point, the Court focused on the speech restrictions those laws are based on.
This case is emphatically not about schools outing children. This case is about government restricting and compelling speech, which is always problematic.
The problem is NOT that the state law bans automatic notification. The problem is the opposite, that the law bans any notification.
The problem with the law is not about compulsion but about restriction.
@stevevladeck.bsky.social But Alito addresses your concern in his concurrence by emphasizing the timing aspect.
He says that effectively the state courts have run out of time, so to wait around for another appeal to process would have been no appeal at all.
Alito cites precedence based on such concerns for timing, so in his mind this is settled the other direction.
What does a quote post of a quote post do? Well, we'll see.
Well, this aged. Less than a week ago Kilmeade was yelling at an administration official who dared say that #Iran still had a nuclear program: "Everyone knows #Trump destroyed that!"
Now he's embracing the existance of the program as [one] justification for the attack on the country.
These idiots don't know what they're doing.
It’s just an example of how #Trump is not the leader that folks hold him up to be. His supporters pick and choose what they believed from him, and ...
I often find that it's important to go directly to the ruling instead of quoting some reporter writing about the ruling, because so often they get the story completely backwards.
In any case, what you wrote there gets it backwards🙂
The way the US system works is not about shielding from lawsuits but about actively providing access to federal courts. Access is provided through law. If you want to go to federal court then you have to cite a federal law that grants you that access.
To put it another way, the default is not permitted unless denied, it is denied unless permitted.
What the Court said here is that the law granting access was explicitly not available by the language of the law. It wasn't about shielding, again that's not how this works, it was about just not providing that remedy.
If we would like that remedy to be available then Congress can provide it any time they want to.
I repost these to really illustrate how incredibly stupid the people driving public policy in the US are these days.
People with such superficial, black and white thinking that they can't even imagine that there might be something in between all or nothing.
I honestly think these people with such influence on US policy don't have the intellectual resources to do any better.
No Grand conspiracies, no deep strategies, just really really dumb people at the helm.
#SeanHannity: How do you compromise with mandatory voter ID vs no ID?#USPolitics
@wjmaggos But that makes me as being like saying the point of screwdrivers is to replace hammers.
No, centralized and decentralized platforms both have strengths and weaknesses, offering fundamentally different functionality, just as Twitter and Facebook offered fundamentally different user experiences.
They absolutely can and should coexist, each being specialized to what they do well, and giving users access to both environments.
They compliment each other.
Well most importantly, right-wing commentators don't know how the legal system works or how to read SCOTUS opinions.
Lacking that knowledge, they couldn't stick to the ruling if they wanted to.
They stick to narratives about supposed hypocrisy because that's the level of intellectual development that they have, kind of a 5th grade level.
SCOTUS isn't protecting Republicans in power here. The law against suits was passed by Congress long ago. SCOTUS had nothing to do with it.
But yes, this is a great reason to be skeptical of the quasi-private nature as that makes quite a mess of things.
If USPS is at the point of conspiring to steal an election by refusing to deliver ballots then a lawsuit is hardly going to stop them.
Congress passed the law against such suits a long time ago...
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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