Painful

During COVID I had structured my day with specific activities. Some hobbies, then some movies, then some book, then some games. A limited number of cigarettes per day. I went on long walks outside as much as possible, and got a couple online friends over Discord. It helped the time pass. It is not a long-term solution, but it is a start.

Another thing I came up with is the time factor. Or the pacing if you will. We have also received that from those other platforms. I have turned to reading e-books instead of scrolling and I have found my attention span has improved. It is the time factor that is internalized and doesn’t allow careful consideration of everything. Conflict and weaponization of sincerity might well be a side effect of this one.

I think it was all over the repo.

I don’t even know if it is about conflict per se, or the very notion that it is virtuous to engage with these media politically. Even these alternative platforms, because they are modeled after Twitter, Reddit, and the like, possess the same qualities, by making us react and respond to similar ways. I guess digital infrastructure for activist groups should be more similar to private infrastructures of orgs rather than corporate social media. And they should be community first, with a sophisticated take on the channels available to communicate to and from the organization and the rest of the community.

Until some time ago, I was still on the fence about Lemmy though. On the technical level it has some desirable attributes in the community structure and federation, that could possibly help. But the user culture, me included, is so fucked up that only with insane levels of moderation it could ever fulfill such a purpose. For this another medium should be considered in Lemmy’s place (I don’t think Mastodon is the one either), that would constrain antisocial and non-social user behavior on the technical level. So, this is a loose argument that Lemmy and Mastodon are not tools for social change, and should be abandoned as such.

I did not expect when I posted this that it would be a field trip on the very phenomena Cross is taking issue with.

You are not jumping with me anywhere. I invited people to comment on the quotes of another author.

Negligence of COVID prevention is important. To me, trans equality rights are important. And a score of other not only important but critical topics, from climate change to ableist structural eugenics.

But by dunking on each other in places like these, even if Lemmy / Mastodon is not corporate, achieves nothing. Your comment does nothing. My comment does nothing.

We had this mentality passed on from corporate social media, and it is just wrong to think that our posting achieves anything good the internet has to offer, to activism or otherwise. This is the true message of the quote, and not minimizing the importance of any macro-, structural, systemic topic.

That said, for those still grasping with the notion of weaponized sincerity, the above comment is the more fine specimen of it.

But the worst people in the Valley also thrive on all the demobilizing disengagement that their platforms have slowly led us towards. They have alchemized activism into toxic Twitter beefs and seduced us into thinking that we’re one viral campaign away from solving some massive socio-structural problem, which makes it all the easier to devote our energies to pursuing these digital white whales in lieu of more tangible goals in our lives and communities.

First and foremost, one of the ugliest side effects of terminal COVID-posting that proliferated amongst the Extremely Online was a deepening mistrust of their fellow human being; every time they fell for outrage-bait about some wanker being a dick about not wearing a mask, their inevitable response was, “I don’t trust people anymore!” This is a neat fit for conservatives, whose entire movement is built on a notion of Original Sin, developed through two centuries of monarchism, fascism, nativism, and lesser varieties of know-nothingism, that treats strangers as essentially threats. But for anyone to the left of Mussolini, such contempt for your fellow human being, such unwillingness to reach out to one’s neighbour for fear they’ll be like That Bitch from Panera Bread I Saw on TikTok, is extraordinarily dangerous — and fatal to realizing the ideals we share, which are necessarily collective.

This myth of social media’s indispensability to our movements, not just as a tool but as the forum for change, is dangerous. If we internalize it too deeply, it actually demobilizes our movements, lulling us into mistaking quote-tweet wars and “clapbacks” for meaningful political action, seducing us into seeing nanoseconds of digital catharsis as an adequate substitute for change. It seduces us into mistaking the profitable content we generate for truly resistive speech — as well as tying our worth and our success, as people and activists, to the engagement metrics created by large tech corporations.

Social media is chock-a-block with political content, hashtag activism, and disinformation that turns grandparents into fascists. How could it be anti-political? Because it demobilizes and scatters the polity; it makes it much harder to come together, deliberate, and effect change in our communities. Worse, social media tricks us into thinking that that’s exactly what we’re doing. What results is a “public square” where real people can get hurt but nothing ever really changes.

The notion of a marketplace of ideas selecting the best ideas and rejecting the worse ones is interesting. It suggests that marketplaces always select for quality, especially the more unregulated they are, which is not something I’ve noticed to be true about how any actual marketplaces operate.

The idea that Nazi “ideas” need to be defeated in open debate, which will cause them to lose power, is also interesting. It presupposes that debates are always won by the most correct idea, which I’ve noticed is often the opposite of how debate works.

It also suggest that the Nazis’ plan is to participate in bloodless debate over their ideas, and accept the outcome if their ideas are rejected, which is not a plan I think Nazis have ever pursued, or the sort of arena in which they have ever admitted—much less accepted—defeat.

It also suggests that what Nazis have are “ideas,” when we know that what they actually have are intentions, and those intentions always create real-life violence toward marginalized communities along racial, ethnic, religious, and other lines of bigotry—and they do so the more effectively Nazis are able to gather and organize and promote their “ideas” into the mainstream.

Source: https://www.the-reframe.com/questions-for-substack/

Also, I find the very definition of your “zero point” as a self-contained bad faith argument. It is quite close to notions of “snowflakes needing safe spaces” or sth, but real life anti-nazi tactics are, and should be, more militant. To this bad-faith zero point my position is either a -10, or on another axis entirely lmao.

to let a generic phrase be forever attached to a political movement in any setting is a bit much

ahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah

BTW this is a prolonged ‘Aha moment’, not a typesetting symbolism of laughter.

“Living space”, like? Displacing other peoples to provide an ideal amount of population density to your own people is still not OK. Or it should be anyway.

Good, but the way the developer spells “nazy” makes me to follow the quoted advice on my own brain process:

if you want to change the wallpaper during runtime, you must pkill the daemon, and then start it again

The first name of the project was “The Final Solution to your Wayland Wallpaper Worries”. The developer reports he was unaware of the connotation until the Ukraine war happened.

Not America, England, France, Italy, Portugal or Spain. This was my meaning. Simplistic or not, I want to hear from the rest of the world.

I just used the term “post war” to define the second half of twentieth century. A knee jerk reflex from history classes. The participation in the war is actually tangent to my request.

Funny how being subtly irrespectful flies under the radar of the mods, yet you keep insulting after you called the mods on me. Noice. Now, on your original question. Does the article say that civil war in the US is outlandish because the standard of living is high, racial tensions are diminished, and there is not clear geographical division between sides? All three of these premises are wrong. It is ridiculous that I even have to spell this out for you, but the irony is lost by the fact that you felt the need to archive the article, which is so funny that I consider this discussion over. So, dress the world however you want, but civil war in the US is both probable and imminent.

Removed by mod

Uhm… all of the premises he lays down by the first two paragraphs are wrong, so I stopped reading.

They want to undo the making of the modern world because it came to allow the public existence of trans people. The horrors of Nazi rule on Europe dies out of living memory, and the rhetoric has a profound appeal to the human animal base instincts. So, yes, here we are.