One debate tactic is to make your opponent’s case look as bad and dumb as possible, to look for every way and angle to cast shade on it and really make it look like trash. Even if that means you might exaggerate or misrepresent the opponent.
This is called making a “strawdoll” or “strawman”. The opposite, making your opponent’s case look as strong and solid as possible, reading it as charitably and generously as possible, but still showing why you’re still not onboard with it, that’s called “steelman” (or “steel figure”, “steeldoll”, or just “steel” if you wish, IDGAF).
Strawdolling is bad.
It’s a curious accident of human nature that strawdoll tactics are so popular rhetorically since they are really, really bad for convincing people. They’re good at preaching to the choir and riling up the base, which is what contributes to their popularity; “manufacturing outrage”, but when people see through the strawdoll claims, that can undermine the credibility of your entire case and send them running right into the waiting arms of the other side, and when that other side truly is so much worse than yours, that’s a disaster.
People on the fence are especially vulnerable to this. They’ve seen some of the other side’s argument and now they come to hear you out. They see you saying things about the other side that doesn’t mesh with what they’ve heard, with how the other side has originally presented itself, and they conclude that you’re exaggerating or even lying, especially if that other side isn’t presenting itself that honestly.
I’ve been saying that for years. Strawdolling is super counterproductive, never do it. Today I found a 2007 pamphlet from April Rosenblum that shows another reason why it’s bad.
Sometimes there aren’t two sides to a conflict, there are three. The people who think that you’re lying are at risk of running to one enemy camp but the people who swalling every line with hook and sinker might run even further astray.
April’s booklet:
We often fight campaigns by making our opponents look as bad as possible. The Left doesn’t have tons of money, or muscle on Capitol Hill. One of the strengths we do have is moral power to make the other side look bad enough that the world shames them into reversing their policy. In campaigns for AIDS funding, fair housing, prison rights, you name it, one of our main tactics is to make our opponents out to be cold, cruel and inhuman.
But when you use tactics like that on a group that’s historically been portrayed as evil and inhuman, where that image has been used for centuries as a tool to incite mass violence against them, you tap into a larger historical power. A power that’s bigger than the Left, and has its own momentum.
The nazis are making hay out of your straws.
And sometimes there are four camps. In addition to us who are speaking out for Palestine, and Netanyahu’s regime who are the oppressors, and the nazis who’re itching to send the world over the edge as long as it’s their foot in the boot, there’s also the evangelicals and neocons.
I like this from a few pages earlier in Rosenblum’s pamphlet:
We see the Right acting appalled at antisemitism, and think of it as a Right-wing issue. We don’t realize, the Right got to take it because the Left was silent.
We see the Left not taking on anti-Jewish oppression, and we assume that means it’s not a significant social justice issue. We forget that every oppressed group we talk about today—people of color, women, queers—got on the agenda only after they fought like hell against the established voices of the Left to show that their oppression mattered.
A while back, The “Guardian” published a misleading headline saying that 71% of global warming is caused by 100 companies, which then was leading a lot of people towards inaction and “enh not my problem”.
However, here was the problem: The study did not assess all sources of global emissions worldwide (which includes agriculture, transportation, buildings’ heating and cooling systems) but rather only analyzed the output of fossil-fuel producers, specifically.
In other words, that “71% of global warming is caused by 100 companies” claim that was going around is not true.
Here’s what’s going on: a study looked at companies (including state actors) producing oil, gas, coal and cement, and then calculated out that within this particular sector, 100 companies did 71% of the harm.
And those companies are indeed super bad and we need to stop them as soon as possible.
In addition, there are other causes of climate change like transport, housing and food. Here, the richest need to change the most! Storm the palace! But everyone’s life is gonna have to change.
We live in a world where wealth is unequally divided. What’s worse is a lot of the wealth is illusory, a lie built on fake numbers. The robber barons of the past stole from our future.
And even though we only see one-thousandth of that treasure hoard, a lot of what we’ve got is just as illusory and stolen and unsustainable.
When or if a real reckoning comes a lot of what we take for granted every day is not gonna be there for us.
It’s true that the fossil fuel companies have been driving a fake-ass “it’s all consumer’s fault” campaign (including inventing the term “carbon footprint”) in order to divert blame from themselves.
I was talking to a guy who sold cigarettes in his store even though he was so opposed to smoking. He was like “We’re giving the people what they want.” Now, he wasn’t 100% in control of what got put into the store, which might’ve been a better argument than that one, because when people are in a circle of blame, as consumers, corporations, and policy-makers are all blaming each other, then it’s hard to get out.
Part of the truth is that even after our li’l hep crowd here manage to stop consuming entirely and just live on breadcrumbs and ocean mist and zero-waste subsistence farming, the Earth would still be in danger because the bad guys could still keep on blasting just as much, and they’d figure out even more ways to spend or waste that energy. So we do need system-level change.
But that’s not the whole of the truth because I know we could be making it a lot worse. We could be driving around in cars and throwing plastic bottles in the lake or whatever. We could start blasting just as much as those scumhecks do. And if we can make it worse, that means our own behavior and choices do matter and that I want to choose to try to not make it worse. So we do need consumer-choices–level change.
We absolutely need policy-level change and regulation that can be enforced in a way that industry and billionaires have to obey.
And getting ready for such change is one thing we can start doing today, while we’re pushing for such change.
Alex links to more Guardian do-nothing propaganda:
By the same logic, says Hillman, national action is also irrelevant “because Britain’s contribution is minute. Even if the government were to go to zero carbon it would make almost no difference.”
I could not disagree more with that Mayor Hillman attitude. Straight outta the discourses of climate delay textbook. “What can we, poor li’l Britain do? We’re only restarting fracking, rejecting wind farms, and squeezing every last cubic inch of gas from the North Sea.”
Only the collapse will bring about the change in behaviour required.
That’s too late. Like the algae under the blood red soot-flaked sky or the dead snow sparrows in the frozen-over Northern wastes are gonna be like “hmm let’s factor in externalities next time we cook up some economics for our tribes”.
We need change now, not later.
Normally going online and into the li’l echo chamber created by my steady stream of blocks is cozy & comfy because everyone is sane about everything (climate, bodily autonomy, criticizing capitalism, eating plants, etc) and sometimes I even learn new things (like how bad cryptocurrencies are, and yes, they’re super bad).
One recent hot topic where I started out in full agreement because my initial take was also super negative is ML & generated art. But I’m a li’l scared that the steady stream of super bad arguments and outright misinfo will gradually push me into a more pro-ML-stance.
Sorta like how a really bad vegan argument (“we need to go into the jungle and stop all the spiders in there from eating flies! And the flies need voting rights!”) can make some people really crave a burger. Even though there are plenty of actual good arguments for sticking to plants on the plate.
That is such a fallacy. A formal propositional fallacy called denying the antecedent.
It goes like this:
If all those bad anti-ML arguments were legit, ML would would be bad.
Those arguments don’t seem very legit.
It’s fallacious to then conclude that that makes ML good & OK, because
there might be other arguments against it that are better.
For me the three main remaining problems with ML are:
Resource usage. Electricity and e-waste has unaccounted for externality costs. “ML wouldn’t be used if it weren’t the best tool for the job, that’s how market works” isn’t true because of these externalities. But this isn’t universally the case. There are cases where using a NN is way more efficient than any other algo, even when factoring in the training, but until energy is rationed it’s easy to accidentally get super wasteful.
Increasingly concentrated ownership of very powerful means of production. Spinning Jenny squared. This warps political and economic power away from the people and into the hands of the few. Now, models that are open source or runs or can be created or trained locally are counter-arguments to this but there still are some petabyte models out there that’s way beyond what we have in our garages. This is a disaster. We need to fix our economic system. We need to do that with or without ML.
Yes, it does feel a li’l bad that stuff that’s fun to do by hand now can be done by a machine. But painting was (and is) fun yet there still are practical uses for cameras also. Handwriting feels good yet sometimes we use typewriters or even digital text.
For bad arguments, I have an older post about that. The one bad argument I see all the time these days, “the machines can’t be original”, I didn’t originally have in there but I’ve added it now.
Taking some of those other bad arguments to their extreme, we would also have to oppose automatic typesetting like any TeX or word processor does. Even fonts that use automatic interpolation of edges using beziers (i.e. all vector fonts) would be not OK. Only handwritten documents from now on. And of course using a camera is right out.
Maybe that would be a fun world to live in, actually. I’m not making a very good case here. 😅
When I argue for degrowth the word I prefer to use is “sustainability” since that more clearly indicates that it’s not about mindless destruction; it’s about stewardship of limited resources.
I’m for degrowth if sustainability is what’s meant by it. [I’m glad that people are trying to go to space] but the flimsy house of nothingness that capitalism has built on the lie of fossil fuels is gonna collapse and the only cure is working with sustainability in mind.
I sometimes snipe & jab a li’l at degrowth, but only because I think it’s not enough. It’s necessary. I’m for it. I don’t think it can be the only solution; stopping the emissions is. A cottage by Walden Pond doesn’t stop a factory. Uh, I mean, sure, unbridled consumer frenzy can exacerbate the problem by creating more of a market for the fossil fuel economy which is why I’m also frustrated when the rhetoric is “you can still eat burgers, it’s only the corporations that need to change”, so not-buying is necessary, but not enough, because they can still jevons that burnt energy all the way to the bank. They’ll find ways to spend it. They inherently will since that’s an emergent property of exploitable environmental externalities.
Growth sounds great. It’s what plants crave.
“Growth” that’s based on pretending that existing limits don’t exist isn’t “life”. It’s reckless and deadly.
In grade school, a lot of the econ lessons were about not getting stuck in borrowing loops and to be careful with credit cards and “buy-now-pay-later” schemes and to only use loans for carefully considered investments. Don’t waste what you don’t have, is the takeaway there.
The under-accounted–for costs of fossil fuel leads to destructive behavior. We think it costs $4 per gallon but when the piper comes it’s gonna be our skies, our waters and our selves. Market capitalism has one job—set prices—and it’s not doing that job properly because of how unregulated these areas are.
It’s like if there was an illusory stairway to heaven. Walking onto those li’l steps might look like a great idea but if it’s only an illusion paved with good intentions you’ll tumble badly.
I had dinner last night with an economics phd. I was like “oh, I write a lot about economics too, although I don’t have a formal degree. I mostly write about how externalities are under-accounted for”. He laughed and said “uh, yeah, definitionally they are. That’s what makes them externalities.”
I’m writing this to people who are a little bit turned off by woke culture (or as it was called ten years ago, “SJW”, or in the eighties and nineties, “PC”) but who are curious enough to read a guide about it.
Back in the day, people were saying that science fiction was bad just because there was so much bad science fiction. Editor Theodore Sturgeon defended science fiction, saying that 90% of science fiction is bad, but that goes for everything, there’s bad stuff in every field, but there are also gems there.
I always got to keep this in mind when scrolling through the high-tempered social media postings of people who are just struggling to figure themselves out in an absurd world. There is a lot of un-thought-through, self-contradictory stuff out there being touted as absolutely shoe-hammering gospel. “How dare you say (or not say) such-and-such” admonishments that if followed to the letter would make some other just as vulnerable group just as messed up. It’s easy to get sick of the whole thing.
There is a saying: “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater”: don’t lose the good for the bad.
The pillars of modern woke ideology is the radical thought that people belong to more than one group. Everyone is different. The way some white hetero women were doing feminism in the seventies were pretty messed up to black women or lesbian women. As a nerd it’s easy to sometimes get the idea that “no-one has it worse than me” but there are people out there who are just as nerdy and alienated while simultaneously juggling other oppressive structures.
The bad take-away from this would be to create some sort of oppression olympics, a reverse ladder where being in as many of these groups as possible is seen as “better” or “nobler” or more “the good team”. Where “cishet” becomes the new punching bag.
Instead, a full and aware understanding of the world as a complex mess, a multi-variate vector space of so many different ways we’re hurting each other and we can do better.
One of the core ideas here is that there might be patterns to how people are hurting each other, patterns that go beyond individual instances. That’s not to say that it’s the only way things can go down, that a homeless man freezing to death under a bridge is oppressing the Queen of England or whatever. But the core idea is that since the world is such a tangled mess, maybe one way to start addressing some of the problems is to look for problems that are reoccurring and whether or not we can find reusable solutions to those problems.
This is a change that can be hard to wrap your head around for people growing up in the “colorblind 1980s”, a world that seemed great on the surface but where a lot of problems were being swept under the rug.
Woke means “awake” in some African-American grammars, waking up to some of the structures that folks might’ve been taken for granted like fish don’t have a word for water. (To the point that it’s sometimes been pointed out how it’s a li’l iffy for white people to call themselves woke (let alone claiming to have written a “guide” to it), and most don’t; I’m only using the word “woke” in this li’l guide for clarity for people on the fence. The word “woke” spread like wild-fire on the right-wing that opposed intersectional social justice similarly to how “SJW” and “PC” did earlier because saying “we oppose justice” was never gonna fly. Woke is one of those words that people don’t call themselves. I’m doing it here since I’m trying to talk across the aisle.)
The map is not the territory and it’s easy to get caught up in overapplying a shorthand explanation to situations where that shorthand doesn’t really apply well. This is not an exclusively “woke” problem; it’s a universal issue with the human mind. We need shorthands to be able to even live in the world. Every breath we take can’t be a deliberate decision. We need to be able to group things together and be like “OK this thing is kind of like this other thing. This apple is sort of similar to that other apple so I can eat it similarly.” But the challenge then becomes to stay aware enough to recognize when a shorthand doesn’t apply.
To think and make decisions using a variety of factors, and when we learn of a new concept like “cultural appropriation” we’re like “OK, I’m gonna try to factor that in to what I say and do” using that as one of several aspects when making a decision rather than throwing all thought and care out the window.
It’s easy to get overwhelmed and think that “woke culture” is asking too much of you, but small changes and gradual improvement will make a lot of difference. The first small steps are much more important and then there’s diminishing returns after that.
Stay humble, don’t try to set yourself up as a woke prophet, just try to be chill & kind. (I get that that’s ironic coming from someone trying to write a self-proclaimed “guide”.🤦🏻♀️)
If 90% of everything is bad, isn’t then anti-woke and woke equally viable options? 10% of anti-woke is good, right? Well, no. I’m not as impressed by anti-woke because it was founded as a antidote to people basically just trying for a kinder world, so the core of it is often founded on a granite marble of cruelty. Not my jam.
Edgy anti-woke and anti-SJW can be so much more embarrassing than even the most facepalm-worthy of wokeness.
A lot of anti-woke ideology is being pushed to drum up votes for the rich-gets-richer program. “Vote for our economic exploitation of the public good and in return we’ll protect you from those scary mexicans, muslims, gays and trans, and from all that pandering to women.”
Don’t get fooled by it.
And then in return the other party takes the other side and uses these groups as hostage, too. “Oh, we’ll protect you from those anti-woke reactionaries!” in a sick good-cop-bad-cop game while the people are starving and the climate is getting wrecked. It sucks. What can I say? Other than “political work goes beyond the ballot box”.
Maybe the “pandering” debate is a li’l bit oldmeme outside of the stodgiest of circles because most of the world by now has realized that the world didn’t end just because black guys and women got on TV and in video games.
Dislike of “pandering” was huge during gamergate, it was one of the main drivers. This fear was driven by an idea that this kind of representation is mostly counterfeit, disproportional, dishonest and malicious. I don’t think it is, but that was the narrative that was being pushed by the right-wing, anti-SJW pundits, as weird as that sounds.
Never was my jam since it makes sense to me that people wanna see people like themselves in media, it makes more sense than trying to deny other people that joy. Me and my sister, life-long Star Wars fans, it’s not that we didn’t like the older movies, we loved them, but we were so happy to see more women in the new movies (even though those movies might’ve had some other flaws). And it’s weird that Rey gets so much more “Mary Sue” flak than a character like Harry Potter who’s even more of a Mary Sue wish-fulfilment character.
Another thing I see sometimes which is pretty understandable is people who are part of some of the groups that they think that woke claims are oppressed and they see that claim as cementing their status as oppressed rather than as something liberating. Some people hate asking for help and are so proud of what they’ve done by their own bootstraps. I don’t have that “own bootstraps” background at all; I’ve gotten so much help from others to get to where I am. But I can still understand that perspective, I think. I don’t think that’s a strong enough reason to join anti-woke with all that that entails.
The history of sexual politics is a li’l weird.
Used to be we had a complex system of sexual morals that was hard to summarize easily and it was pretty bad for women who had a pretty limited role in life. Not good for guys, either, so don’t start putting on nostalgia glasses, fellas.
Then in the sixties we had the sexual revolution when all the rules where thrown out the window and that was a total shitshow. A pretty dangerous time to be alive; women were exploited and so were boys.
Then in the modern era we have one rule: Consenting adults. It’s a different system from the age-old traditions but it’s so much better.
All cultures have their ways of expressing how they feel about people they don’t get along with very well. It’s easy to get hypocritical quickly if we don’t watch ourselves.
Harassment and dogpiling is bad no matter where it’s coming from.
The left wants to protect democracy by protecting vulnerable groups.
A lot of the university protests were against speakers who would actually look up local students and try to doxx them from stage.
A lot of the anti-woke sentiment starts out as things that are reasonable concerns but then blooms into a hate parade that goes way beyond cruelty and into outright tyranny.
Yeah, yeah, there’s a similar problem on the left where, as stated, 90% of what’s being said is not always all thought-through. But that’s not a force driving rights-depriving legislation from the self-proclaimed “party of small-government”.
That said, the human mind and its biases and psychological complexities are beyond what just woke vs anti-woke can solve on its own. No one is asking anyone to stop thinking, just to be a li’l kinder.
I’m normally writing inside a pretty woke bubble and I’m happy about that because the left wing has been my political home for the past twenty-five years. I’m hoping they’ve had patience with me writing to a different kind of audience for one day given that it’s for a good cause. Also as per ushe I made plenty of mistakes. Every essay on this li’l site is in constant draft mode.
Yeah, but I’m scared of everyone. The internet is a scary place every day and not conducive to trying to think about things explorationally and not having all the correct answers. A dogpile with megaphones and pitchforks isn’t a good conversational partner.
I’m almost as scared of them I am as I am of anti-woke, which I’m even more scared of. When the nazis come I wanna be in the good graces of those who’ll try to oppose them because there’s no way in hell I’m strapping on the jackboots myself.
The core of intersectional justice and its worldview and epistemology does make a lot of sense to me. That’s where I wanna be: someone who’s decided that people should be helping each other and the planet rather than hurting each other.
Ultimately I feel that woke vs anti-woke can be a dangerous distraction from the real issue which is the climate catastrophe. I guess the number one take-away is: don’t get sucked into anti-woke rabbit holes and rhetoric. The real fight is climate change.
One problem we on the left have is that often we wanna solve things by wishful thinking whereas our enemies are causing our problems by practical means.
Moderation vs abuse materials is one example: the harassers and abusers are coming up with practical means to post their shit whereas we can’t really stop that in any real, practical sense, only (half-bakedly) shield ourselves from seeing it.
That’s just one example, I’m less interested in that particular example and more frustated with the general trend.
An example I’m even more concerned about is climate change; they can come up with practical ways to blast their CO2e fumes where we can only sit around in our degrown li’l green communities and wish that they didn’t blast as much over there because it’s killing all of us.
Using force leads to bad things, as we saw in 1956, and since they love bad things, they have no qualms of using force against us.
Not sure I have the answer here. Just me being self-critical.
I’ve sometimes inadvertently butted heads with people in the past where they’re greenhat & creative & trying desperately to think of practical solutions (like using copyright licenses to enforce good social behavior) and I’m like “I’m not sure that’d work practically and legally because such-and-such-and-such practical problem with that” and I get labeled the enemy.
On some Fediverse platforms you can use a subject line as a kind of “content warning” so people can optionally open the posts, sort of like a subject line in an email. I sometimes do that, although I’ve gotten a li’l more cautious against overusing them because they can sometimes be counterproductive to their main aim of being considerate to readers.
I found myself using them for three reasons, or four since the third, main reason has two sub-reasons.
Just like any subject line or file name sometimes a context can make a post much easier to understand. If I’m gonna post something that’s only built for Emacs Lisp hackers, that’s gonna be better for everyone if the subject says “Emacs” so people don’t go trying to pop the hood of their Selectric looking for an Edwardian Manifestation of All Colonial Sins.
I still do this all the time.
It was also subconciously a way for me to show that I’m surely above the bad thing I’m talking about. If I write “mh-“ or “ableism” or “racism” or what it might be, I show how aware and illuminated I surely am about the bad thing. A pretty selfish reason and I don’t do this so much (except sometimes a li’l self-deprecatingly) anymore.
I’m not saying other people do that, it was just something I found myself doing.
Now on to the big reason, which is respect for readers when the topics are sensitive.
This main reason comes in two parts, a lesser (compliance) & a greater (actually warning for the content).
I understand how a lack of CWs can in-and-of-itself bring a sense of loss-of-control that’s frustrating to trauma survivors; that the CW itself isn’t the consolation. The consolation is the compliance with the “please CW your post” request. This sounds shallow or dumb but I honestly do think it’s an OK argument for using CWs.
I switched out my link-posting app so that I could more easily put CWs and some of the CWs I use are primarily for this reason. That was a few days worth of hacking. Worth it to help you folks who need this.
But I only wanna do put CWs when it doesn’t interfere with the main reason for content warnings, which is:
Content warnings and it’s predecessor, trigger warnings, often get flak from annoying people who are opposed to caring. They have the mistaken impression that we wanna shield our li’l snowflake selves entirely from the thing even though the reason for a CW or TW can sometimes just be the textual equivalent of “OK, sit down, and take a deep breath before I tell you what happened”, giving people chance to steel themselves and collect themselves and choose a time and space before they open the post, or (rarely, but sometimes) whether they even open the post at all.
This is the most considerate and best reason but what I noticed was that it often had the opposite effect. Especially for text.
It’s one thing to put a scary video or image in a virtual “envelope” and not immediately blasting it, but the problem with using a text header as protection against a text post is that the header is itself also text. Logging into Fedi and seeing page after page of disturbing headlines taken out of context is pretty rough.
I’m gonna use a metaphor of the post being like a room, and the header being a sign on the door.
If we start with the premise that text really can hurt, and I think we all know that it can, no matter how much our right-wing foes believe it can’t, so let’s say that the headline in-and-of itself feels like a stab (metaphorically speaking). A stab that is lessened by the warm feeling of “oh, someone cares about me, is polite and respectful and want the best for me” but a stab none-the-less. To see headline after headline of “racism”, “sexual violence” and so on pretty quickly becomes a heart-burdening mess.
Going back to the metaphor: walking down a corridor and getting stabbed by door after door does not feel good.
When the stabbing doors are there to protect us from getting completly mauled by dangerous tigers, then it’s worth it. Readers who truly can’t handle the tiger inside can see the door, get stabbed by the door, refrain from opening, and try to patch themselves up to the best of their ability, and walk on by. If that’s what happens I think the content warning was worth it.
But if what’s behind the door is a lesser scratch, the stab from the door is not worth it. Not even if what’s behind the door is a deep cut it’s worth it because then you’ll get stabbed twice; one from the post itself, (the text post itself has the additional advantage of being able to use nuance and build things up in a context; the opposite of a “jump scare”, instead of the unexpected door-stab it’s an understandable, reality-based, and validated pain), in addition to the stab from the headline itself, in all its rawness and suddenness.
I don’t wanna completely give up these kinds of headlines. As I said, if it’s the worst clawtiger in the world behind the door, of course a warning makes sense. (Another idea might be to not even make the post, if it’s truly that brutal.) But what I’m thinking is that it takes a lot for the headline to be worth it.
Otherwise it’s as if every room has a clawtiger and we’re building up a fear and a worldview that’s even more gruesome than the world actually is, which is plenty gruesome already, thanks.
I still wanna use them! But I’m cutting down on some of the most “gratuitious” ones. Studies are coming in now saying they generally seem to do more harm than good, create anxiety rather than console it, worsen rather than improve. I think what’s going wrong in some of those studies are when people are “overusing” CWs, I think there is a lagom amount that hits the sweet spot. (As I tried to explain with my text here about “stabs” vs “clawtigers” but maybe I’m just making things even more confused.)
All that is also why I do favor CWs with cryptic abbreviations or that are otherwise on the euphemistic treadmill. They don’t have the benefit of context so how can the “stab” otherwise be “lessened”?
There’s another counter argument to CWs also but it’s an argument that I feel is a li’l bit weaker and not as well-meaning, it’s when you wanna write someothing political, like “Now it’s time to vote against fossil fuels” or similar. Then it’s pretty bad if people are missing that message because of a CW. This argument isn’t the strongest beacuse on Fedi, non-CW’d things don’t get boosted as much.
There’s also small affordances and annoyances here and there like clicking to open and such but that’s just peanuts compared to the importance of people’s well-being.
Now, what’s not good is some of the examples of knee-jerk pro-CW gatekeeping I’ve seen where people have been posting about their own personal political struggles and political work and gotten scolded & shushed because they didn’t put a “uspol CW”.
All of this is much less important now with current versions of Mastodon and Akkoma where people can “auto-CW” other people’s posts based on text in the entry. Like how I have “Advent of Code” filtered out, and posts autohidden, whether or not the post actually has a CW.
I know some people block me for thinking like this. (And of course people can block whomever they want; I block 40000 men and women every day.) Some even wanna defederate my entire instance.
But don’t worry. I’m not gonna revel in anti-CW:ing. I’m not gonna post a bunch of un-CW’d shock and gore just to be annoying. I’ll still use CW, but more sparingly is the idea.
For example, let’s say I mention a cat in a post. I’m not gonna then also put warning warning cat cat on top of that. That’s just adding injury to injury and more harm than good even for catphobic peeps. But if there’s a lot of cat in the post, or an unusually scary or detailed cat description, that’s when a CW might be warranted. That CW is gonna be harmful to all catphobes that log in and get subjected to it, but it’s protecting them from something even worse, the post itself. (And another option is, of course, to not even make the post. That’s always an option to consider when thinking about what CW to use.)
Warning: This example gets real. I stuck to “catphobia”, a pretty unusual phobia, in my examples above, in order to cause harm to the least amount of people, but here we’re about to talk about something real and dark that’s upsetting to me and to most other people.
I’ve been reading Jewish Currents for the past few years. Apparently half the staff quit after Oct 7, or I misunderstood their editorial where they implied that. I can understand why. That’s a hard thing to grapple with.
I’ve been posting a lot of their articles on Fedi, and I linked to this comic.
I didn’t use a CW, and the text of my post was:
This situation is so messed up. More than most people have the capability to psychologically handle without making it worse. Great comic:
Followed by the URL.
I can understand why people wouldn’t wanna boost it in if if their followers have a lot of people who have a very pro-CW culture. That’s understandable.
If the text of my post itself would’ve had sensitive stuff I would’ve put a CW (at least “ispol”) but I reasoned that the loaded topic was on the other side of the link, and I tried to give people some content-specific awareness, such as how messed up the situation was and that it was difficult to handle.
Someone kind suggested this as a CW for my post:
CW: compassionate analysis of Israel-Palestine-genocide-related confrontations in NYC
Wow, that’s half a dozen things that are in and of itself triggering. That CW would’ve needed its own couple of CWs. CWs are also text.
What that CW elides is also an issue:
I did think the comic was good and nuanced. I dunno. I’ve never been to NYC. I didn’t wanna put too much of my own takes on this. A lot of peeps give me flak online for being so confident and arrogant but I’m sometimes more scared of being slagged as a fence-sitter or a both-sides-do-it–er. Truth is, I come across as confident because I like writing in teach-and-learn mode. I write about stuff I think I’ve figured out or that I’ve been taught, sometimes hard-earnedly. And when I don’t have any more insight or info about a conflict that’s been well-reported on, I can’t do much more than pass links. I wanna write about the one-state solution another time, that’s a whole bag of bags, but that’s political philosophy, which is my jam, not reporting, which I don’t know how to properly do.
When I don’t have additional info or insight on a situation, I don’t wanna just make things up, that’d devalue all the things I do have something to add.
Even though I wanna abolish copyright and am in favor of commons culture and shared-world story-telling and open games, I have an appreciation for when pirated things are “clearly pirated”, when they aren’t being presented as the official thing. Like a shoddily xeroxed version of a game text, or a clearly home-burnt CD or mixtape, or a scanlation/fansub community clearly marking their stuff as “fan made”.
I think pirated stuff is good, but it still rubs me the wrong way when pirated DVDs are presented as if they were official released ones, or when people spread myths about “abandonware” or “No Copyright Intended”.
It’s wrong that Coca-Cola has a schtick of keeping their recipe secret, or even if it were public, keep a monopoly on production through some sorta patent or copyright or whatever (not that there could be a law that would cover beverages from the 19th century). Everyone should be able to brew and sell it. Also it’s kinda gross to drink something that is “secret”.
But.
I conversely don’t think it would right if anyone could sell any brown liquid and call it “Official Coca-Cola™︎︎”.
It’s just like Debian. Everyone can sell Debian. But not everyone can rightfully claim they are speaking for SPI or take donations for SPI.
I really appreciate the scanlation community for (for the most part) keeping it really clear that their releases are not “official” ones.
This is such a weird nuance to have a hang up against, especially since one thing I appreciate even more are games where you don’t have to do that because they truly are a commons resource, like the 5e creative commons SRD or free software video games like Wesnoth, and how I wouldn’t mind it if it became legally recognized that the D&D name has gotten kleenexed. Same goes for Magic cards, how most people think obvious proxies are OK but not counterfeit cards.
It’s hard to put your finger on, but if you think about it this way it becomes obvious: It’s one thing to stand up to Hasbro and Warner and Disney, and quite another to scam your fellow peers.
If it’s such a nuance and such a specific small li’l point it’s weird that I care about it but I do. It’s not the biggest deal in the world, it’s just the smallest of pet peeves, and when I argue for it I can tend to get misread as making a mountain out of this li’l molehill.
If you’re thinking about giving me any kind of grief over this, talk to the proverbial hand until you’ve read the long version.
Short version:
Yes, “how will artists get paid” is a question that we (the ones who wanna abolish copyright) haven’t fully answered. We’ve got a lot of partial answers and half-solutions, and arguably there are a lot of starving artists even in a world with copyright, yours truly included, but we don’t have the full on whole solution here.
The drawbacks of copyright are so big in how they create artificial scarcity where there could’ve been abundance that I still opposed it.
Trump put republican justices on the supreme court that are now going to seriously consider the idea that impeachment is the only recourse for a criminal president and all non-impeached crimes, even killing and shooting, is something that he has immunity from. This consideration is gonna delay the trials against him so he can run for office. But during the impeachment process, the GQP was like “enh he can be tried criminally later”.
Kinda absurd to me that he can just claim immunity and that’s enough to hold up the courts for months. If other people do that, they would be held in contempt of court and get worse punishments.
It’s also really unfair that the GOP (as they were known back then) blocked Obama’s supreme court nomination using the argument that it was so late in his term (although more than ten months) but then approved Trumps’ nominee that were much later (less than four months). It’s the senate’s job to approve nominees, that’s true, but it was a really dishonest argument.
… between 1790 and early 2010 there were only two decisions that the Guide to the U.S. Supreme Court designated as important and that had at least two dissenting votes in which the Justices divided along party lines, about one-half of one percent.
That sounds like science fiction to my ears living in an era where everyone has a take. The political cleave points have become fewer and wider thanks to the two-camp mathematics of FPTP and of algorithm-driven social media. We’re living in the infocalypse so people can’t get good honest facts.
Opinions these days come in “package deals”. Either you have a world view where things work one way, or you see everything completely differently. It makes it seem like the other side is deliberately lying, or is absolutely deluded. And that’s how they see us, too.
Den blåbruna tidökonstellationen fortsätter sin march för ökad segregation och anti all integration.
Dom vill ju sen länge införa språkkrav. Det tycker jag är koko, det är redan implicit sånt tryck på att lära sig världens dåligaste och minsta språk som dom flesta svenskar ändå inte använder för ju mer överklass dom är desto mer svengelska hasplar dom ur sig. (“Alla i Sverige kan engelska”; ja alla svenskar kan det för dom har inte redan en massa andra krav på sig att vara flerspråkiga såsom invandrare som tvingas lära sig svenska.)
Tolktjänsten vid läkarbesök ska dom också dra in.
Då vore det ju bra om man fick lite lektioner.
Man ska få tre år på sig för att klara kurserna i Svenska för invandrare (SFI)—sedan ska rätten till SFI dras in. Det har Tidöpartierna enats om.
I dag tar det drygt 3,5 år i snitt att slutföra kurserna i SFI.
Man måste alltså lära sig ett av världens svåraste språk på flera månader under genomsnittstiden.
—Det är fullt möjligt att lära sig svenska på ett år, på två år.
Det måste vara outliers som kan det för det är inte speciellt lätt för vuxna att lära sig språk. Jag har pluggat franska sen jag var 14 och jag är fortfarande superdålig på det.
Men nu sätter vi gränsen på tre år för att det ska vara tydligt att det bör man kunna klara av, säger arbetsmarknadsminister Johan Pehrson (L) till SvD.
Det fatt man ju att det var den blåklädda brunskjortan nummer ett som hasplade ur sig det! Vila i frid Liberalernas socialliberala politik. 🪦 Nu är det utanförskap som gäller. Alienera mera.
Undantag från treårsgränsen ska kunna ske om en elev exempelvis varit sjuk.
Som man måste ansöka särskilt om.
Alltså att ha en gräns för dom flesta med särskilda undantag är väl rimligt men det är inte rimligt att lägga gränssträcket betydligt under medelsnittet. Istället (för att fånga in kurvans långa svans) så borde gränsen vara betydligt högre än medelsnittstiden. Spelrum gör att allt flyter bättre.
When the Galactic Empire killed two billion on the planet Alderaan, there was a of both-sides-do-it rhetoric in the public discourse afterwards. The rebels also kill people, even shoot them and they have Y-wing ships that drop actual bombs. “Surely they would blow up Coruscant if they could”, they were saying on debate shows.
Both sides do it, but one side does it a heck of a lot more and is killing twenty times more people in the most brutal conflict in modern galactic history. To me, that does matter. Intent isn’t everything, actual actions and results matters a lot too.
Why? Because with great power there must also come great responsibility.
Snopes quotes Getty Images:
For several days now, Israeli settlers have blocked trucks carrying humanitarian supplies to Palestinians in the besieged Gaza Strip.
Yes, and how many deaths will it take till we know that too many people have died?
In some weird way I have empathy for people who have been brainwashed into this kind of cruelty.
On a lot of levels I’m not fully onboard with Sartre’s messages about human choice and responsibility and still see us all as being at least partially influenced by our memetic environments, and I’m not sure I’m wrong about that since we see it happening to people in our own lives, too. Folks heading down a right-wing path from YouTube or chan sites, or turning rightwards because of talk radio or “news” TV.
Even as I’m weeping as I’m reading this article, I can understand a life trajectory and circumstances that put someone in that position, but there is a missing puzzle piece for me.
I can’t follow down the mental rabbit hole that makes people homogenize and dehumanize their outgroup to the extent that hurting or killing one is appropriate revenge for something another human has done.
Some ideologies place great weight in the concept of the “individual”, an atomic person. Kind of a misnomer since “individuals” are made up of thousands of impulses and cells and strains-of-thoughts and tensions and desires and emotions. But looking at it from the other direction makes some sense:
A person is in-exchangeable, non-fungible, irreplaceable, non-disposable, not the same as someone else.
They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!
And that’s a bad way, the whole “one of his” idea. I’m no fan of revenge to begin with, even as I’m steeped in a culture founded on a punitive conceptualization of justice, and then from there taking the leap to this incredibly wack idea that if someone hurts us, we can kill someone else to make up for it.
What makes that wack idea even wilder that it’s so often paired with an idea of escalating revenge. Some sorta cockamamie “OK, we couldn’t get the right guy, but at least we killed 100 people with his eye color, that’ll do for now, more killing tomorrow” perspective.
Even killing the right person won’t make things better, and neither will killing a couple of million wrong people.
En stor frustration jag har med argumentationen mot AI är allt snack om att “det är stöld” osv.
AI har jättestora problem med hur det ökar produktionsmedelscentraliserandet och kapitalkoncentrationen (en del av AI-modellerna går att köra hemma iofs, men andra gör definitivt inte det), och att hur klimatpåverkan av modellträningen är helt Texas för vi har en energiprissättning som inte fullt ut tar miljöexternaliteter i anspråk, så jag diggar dom som dissar AI men inte dom som använder argumentet “det är stöld”.
Ja, jo, jag har alltid sagt att exemplarframställning (“fildelning”) är svinbra, ex vis ge polarna kopior av filmerna man ser, men att jag är mot att klejma att man själv har gjort dom typ utge sig för att vara Warner Bros och att ens förfalskade DVD:er inte alls är förfalskade, det är jag mot, medan om DVD:erna såg mer uppenbart hembrända eller tredjeparts, då är jag för det, för det är kopieringsrätt & patent jag är mot, inte trademark.
Att AI producerar rena ripoffs på det sättet händer ibland, och det är inte rätt. Men det vanliga är snarare att den gör nya saker i stilen av gamla saker. Som när Bill Sienkiewicz först började teckna, folk blev sura för det var så likt Neal Adams, men jag tyckte inte det var fel för Sienkiewicz’ grejer var ändå nya & fräscha & egna, han hade bara “lärt sig” av mästaren Neal.
Nu är ju hittills AI-bilder ofta svinfula, obehagliga, har sex fingrar osv, “kusliga dalen”, fattar inte att det redan används så mycket för jag tycker dom ofta är misslyckade, men det gäller hittills. Om dom fortsätter vara såhär dåliga är det ju inget problem för då kommer flugan snart vara lika glömd som fidget spinners, och om dom blir bättre i framtiden kommer det här argumentet mest vara pinsamt. Men det har inget med “att lära sig av andra är stöld”–argumentet.
Sen är det så att det gnager på människans själ att vi har uppfunnit den här skiten. Jag älskar att måla & skriva och det var jättejobbigt att lära sig det och sen kom AI som kan göra det automatiskt. Vi måste jobba & knega medan robotarna får uttrycka sig & vara kreativa, det är ganska hjärtekrossande och jag har fortf inte kommit över det. Allt jag försökt bli bra på—programmering också, inte för att det är speciellt kul—är sånt som AI är inne & klampar på. Är urledsen för det. Försöker trösta mig med att när kameran uppfanns så var det svårt för porträttmålare osv. Men illustration flydde in i fantasins värld med dinosaurier och smältande klockor och nu klampar maskinerna in den nischen också. Sorgligt. Fast jag skulle tycka om om det fanns uttrymme för att använda AI som verktyg tillsammans med målning, att använda AI-filter för bättre versioner av ex vis sharpen eller blur eller infill än dom primitiva & fula som Photoshop har, men tabut mot AI gör att det inte riktigt går för det har blivit en allt-eller-inget–polarisering kring det här.
Men ja, grund-tejken om att på samma sätt som kopieringsrätten centraliserade ägarkoncentrationen & jagade folk för deras blandband så centraliserar AI ägarkoncentrationen rent praktiskt och att i båda scenariorna är det storföretag som vinner medan folket får påken, den håller jag med om. Tror inte det är teleologiskt men vi har absolut ett svindåligt marknadssystem som gör att pengar ger mer pengar och även politisk makt.
Slutsats: storm the palace
10000 tons Tetra style packages get recycled every year in Sweden. That’s way more than I feared. I’m such a pessimist and knowing how Tetra loves to greenwash things, I expected way less. This is millions of packages.
Just over half of what gets collected (19800 tons), the rest is used as fuel.
This was reported as a downer story by people less pessimistic than me and my fear is that it’d be even more grist for all sloppy readers who say “see? there’s no point trying to recycle” and use this as an excuse to not.
But I’m actually pretty impressed that it isn’t way worse.
Now, yes, plastic is not OK and recycling is a pathetically insufficient harm reduction and ultimately we do need to leave the oil in the ground and end all plastic use, but while we’re trying to do that, putting stuff in the recycling bin is better than putting it in the trash. Way better.
Ideally, do not buy these packages. But if you do, recycle them.
Refuse < reduce < reuse < recycle.
One of my fears that we’ll commit politically to a course that’ll head us over a climate tipping point. For example, if we vote climate delayists or outright denialists into office, the next change to vote them out again might be years down the line.
And representation is just one aspect where this can happen; budget proposals is another big one (the Inflation Reduction Act comes to mind) as is other legislation. Pipeline projects, gas deals…
Biden has been the worst president of all time and now Trump and Haley are both pledging to be even worse with their drill crazy policies.
It’s a race to the bottom with these guys.
The way polls stand right now, Trump is looking to win the presidential election. That would not be OK.
Looking at just the eco system, it’s like “OK, things look bad, but we could reverse things”. But then taking the whole decision-making apparatus of FPTP, PACs, DNC/RNC, emergent properties of the election system and political financing and wedge issues and gasoline populism—things look much worse.
While in France the ancom toolbox is being appropriated by gasoline populists using it to fight climate regulations, and in Russia the corrupt oligarch regime is committed to drill mania.
All those “peak oil” fucks from last century are looking pretty damn wrong now. As I said back then and still saying now: We need to leave it in the ground. What’s in the ground isn’t the limit, what’s in the sky is. The lithosphere is limited but it’s still more than the atmosphere can handle.
In the downhill battle era, I used to think there was no way FOSS could be exploited. I saw the sharing-is-caring mentality as our new mindmelting way out of the quid-pro-quo market’s artificial scarcity shackles.
Three seconds later the triple whammy of smartphones (as we had hit hit feature parity on desktop, boom here’s a new goalpost of ever-obsolete pocket porcelain) and silo sites (can’t easily fork
Facebook or YouTube) and DRM’d streaming sites.
All three fueled by the dev practice of appropriating FOSS for non-free projects; Apple was leading that charge with their mix of proprietary and oh-so-exploitable FOSS.
Just now, I was thinking that one issue the wedge fascists never go to is climate and environment. They go for queer, gay, foreigners, other religions etc all in the name of “vote for our rich-gets-richer program and we’ll bind the outgroup to protect you”. The ones who chant “people against people, not class against class” all the way to the bank.
This is the only right wing remaining. They’ve abandoned all pretense of liberty or efficiency or fiscal responsibility. Liberalism is pretty much dead, it’s all jackboot all the time from the capitalists now.
And I was thinking that climate would be “safe” from them, that since fixing climate requires unbreaking or removing market capitalism radically, since industrialist means-of-production ownership concentration is entwined with the fossil fuel economy—exploitation is the surest route to profits—they just inherently can’t go green.
That’s the thought I had for a few seconds until I painfully remembered how FOSS got commodified and we all became free workers in the tech giants’ code mines. The same thing could happen to the climate issue.
Yeah, yeah, they can’t go green for real, but they can start greenwashing like there’s literally no tomorrow. Wedge issues never were about real solutions. The persecution of queer people isn’t really about “womens’ sex-based rights”. Never was. (Which is why the GC cult immediately sold out Roe’s bodily autonomy, lesbian rights, and domestic abuse victims.) It was always about putting the exploiters in power.
Same goes if they grab ahold of the climate agenda. Musk and Thiel have already started trying the greenwashed Gyro Gearloose approach. People hate climate stuff and it’s constantly low tier among “most inportant issues” in polls. They don’t understand the urgency, they don’t have hope, they feel it’s lecture-coded, goody-two-shoes–coded, femininely coded.
So that’s, uh, a silver lining I guess? They wrested the reigns of the downhill battle generation precisely because it was the zeitgeist and everyone was sharing. Whereas climate awareness is loser-coded and uncool, so why would they even wanna make it a wedge? They wanna be the ingroup on the cinder.
Now, I wanna clarify something here. This process is not teleological. (Teleologival is a fancy word for something someone is doing on purpose.) There’s no “them” that gathered in a smoky room and drew up these plans for the future of the right wing. I know we on the left can be fascinated by the rare times something really does appear that way, be it strategists like Lee Atwater and William F. Buckley, or media houses like Fox News. Yeah, but for the most part, it’s more something that’s an emergent result of the way the market system’s media and policy landscape and its reward structures inherently work.
Exploitation, and using wedge issues to gather support for exploitation, thrives because it’s effective. People on both right and left are flailing around trying all sorts of dumb things and it’s just survival of the stickiest spaghetti.
As a macro example of this: everyone knows who Ron DeSantis is but he’s just one of twenty-six republican governors. They were all trying all kinds of wack ideas. DeSantis’ crazy anti-science, anti-mask, anti-vaxx, anti–black-lives antics happened to resonate with the poor fools at the polls. Same goes for Trump.
On a micro level this process is not just politician by politican, but essay by essay, clip by clip, tweet by tweet. We’re always at the crumbling edge of memetic evolution.
Conclusion: dismantle fossil capitalism.
The laundry room in the building I moved to and the laundry room where I moved from have very different rules but two rules that are in both rulesets are:
Now to the weird part.
In the old place, people didn’t do the first one but almost always did a really good job on that second one.
In the new place, people are super diligent about doing the first one but are really sloppy about the second one. (Which is kind of too bad since it’s easier to remove the drier lint right away and more difficult to do it after a while.)
That’s been a surprising lesson for me on how codified rules aren’t worth much compared to communal actual practice and actual habits.
If everybody knew what they wanted
There’d be nothing, nothing left
Today as I was being kicked up and down the street by how awful Medium is, I was considering why I have such a hard time recommending my own setup. I love to rag on iMessage and WhatsApp and Gmail and Tutanota and Medium and Facebook and I don’t even know what the kids or their parents use because I’m still on 1970s stuff, but I present little in the way of alternatives.
I like to kid around that my setup (a generated static site on Nginx + IMAP + SMTP + XMPP + ActivityPub + Atom + git + some stuff I’m probably forgetting), since it’s hosted on a VPS, it has all the drawbacks of a cloud service while also being more expensive and I need do all the work and take on all the risks.
That’s been the running joke. But there’s one pretty key drawback it does not have and it’s one that’s a li’l tricky to explain but it might be easy to see if I throw a ton of analogies at it.
That last one is a weird example of 1870s tech but it’s one where economists first started to become aware of how network exernalities are such a huge and embarrassing bug in market capitalism.
Famously, there’s “The Fable of the Keys”, one of the wrong-headedest and embarrassingest papers of all time written by some free-market wishful-thinkers about how “no actually QWERTY is as good as Dvorak, it really is, it’s not a market failure at all, we promise”.
Back before the right had settled on wedge issues (“Vote for the rich and we’ll protect you from those gay Muslim Mexicans”) as the main approach for the rich to get richer and the drillers to keep burning, their focus was on some sort of delusion about how market capitalism is good actually, it’s an effective way to create and distribute wealth, sort of like as if everything was controlled by a really really smart “invisible hand”, and that tax cuts for the riches would be really good for everyone somehow. That approach was called “neoliberalism”.
Of course, these days, as I’m writing this twenty years later in the first days of 2024, looking back at the year where we finally breached +2° warming, and Twitter is a mess and Facebook has moneyballed Trump onto the throne and killed the Rohingya, it’s become starkly clear that we who were kvetching and complaining about the silos and the externalities and how market capitalism kind of were right all along.
It gets harder to deny a memory leak bug once the processes have been running for a while.
No, people aren’t just typing on QWERTY because it’s better, or using the App Store and Google Play because it’s better, or using Windows 95 and Facebook because it’s better. They’re doing it because they want to use what’s compatible with what their friends or coworkers are doing. That has been shown again and again until it’s blatantly obvious.
“Small government” was a transitional step between neoliberalism and the more overt wedge issue fascism of today, since the government is a boiled-down boogeyman that threatens to “regulate” capitalism or introduce free healthcare or whatever, and becomes a good scapegoat for the wedge issue fascists to target. It was a small step from “vote for the rich and we’ll protect you from the government” to the new era where Bush and Trump both have massively expanded government and now they wanna “protect” us from our own bodily autonomy.
“Fiscal responsibility” (or the UK variant, “living austerely within our means”) was a similar boogey shorthand trying to straddle the propaganda clarity of a good wedge issue with the ivory tower egghead appeal of the free market fantasy. Another slogan swept under the shameful rug of history as Bush and Trump racked up massive gov’t debt like a mittens in a gambling manga.
I can’t say my crystal ball was spotless, though, because ancom (like I was back in the day) kind of inadvertently helped that boogeyman narrative. We wanted to smash the state where we should’ve been trying to smash the corporations that the state was protecting. That’s my own li’l basket of regrets, right there.
Without organization people fall prey to the exploiting class and their silos and drill rigs. Ad campaigns and the network externality and other market-garbling bugs are pretty effective at trapping us.
So that’s the one drawback I don’t have here on this site compared to all those cloud “blogging platforms” on the web: I’m somewhat free of the network externality. I can take my stuff and leave.
I set up the VPS in 2009 at a time when I hadn’t had internet at home for a few years. Ironically, I moved a few months later and in the over-a-decade since then, I’ve been able to have a home server (for mpd and files) with an uptime that would’ve been more than enough for the services I’ve been running on the VPS. Add that to the time-machine list, I guess. I just didn’t think I was gonna be able to do that and now it’s fourteen years later and I guess I could’ve. I’ve switched domain registrars a couple of times but I’ve stayed on the VPS all this time and I’m gonna stay on for the foreseeable, but I could’ve been running a home server like many of my friends are. I just didn’t guess that I was gonna be living in an apt that was hooked up to the internet.
One of the main goals of disinformation campaigns is, rather to get you to believe what the poster is saying (although they’d love that), it’s instead to get you to doubt everything and everyone.
In times like these it’s extra important to have a solid ground in philosophy.👩🏻🏫
Because if you have that you’re already used to doubting everything and everyone.💁🏻♀️
A philosopher already doubts her own senses and basic existence, let alone what others are saying.
The other main goal is to lull us into apathy and inaction. When it comes to resisting that, philosophy is more of a hindrance than a help so I don’t know what to do there. Action isn’t wrong, as long as it’s right action, and that’s where philosophers like me can get super tangled up. I don’t want a solution that’s worse than the original problem.