Here in the US, we used to have an "Office of Technology Assesment" which could produce explainers like that for Congress. It apparently had a tiny budget and yet was very useful.
It was dismantled in 1995 by the newly-dominant GOP who, according to Science magazine, saw it as "duplicative, wasteful, and biased against their party."
The final part of that, to my mind, has always been the tell.
@artemis I can't really remember either one of them being much of a Thing that we did anything about -- though I kind of feel like I remember hearing about Mother's Day first and then later finding out that Father's Day was also a thing?
In this, as in all things, I may be a huge ol' outlier.
It all began with the forging of the Great Cups. Four World Cups were given to the Germans; wisest, efficient and most autistic of all beings. Five, to the Brazilian Lords, great kickers and athletes of the jungled hills. And two, two World Cups were gifted to the French, who above all else pretend not to care at all about football.
But they were all of them deceived, for another cup was made. In the land of tartans, within the goals of Barclays Hampden, the Tartan Army of Scotland forged in secret, a master cup, to rule all others. And into this cup they poured all their lagers, ales, whiskeys, and various other alcoholic beverages.
One cup to rule them all. One cup to link them. One cup to bring them all, and in the pub, to drink them.
Hello #fediverse, I'm Rolandas!
I'm a programmer by trade, currently on a long break from a regular job. I haven't used social media in any serious capacity for 17 years, but with all excitement about fediverse I'm willing to give Mastodon a try :-)
I'll write about whatever comes to mind, but mostly it'll be about personal projects (I'm building an RSS reader), music production (very new to this, been learning a ton), free software, internet, privacy, and some other things.
āAnd now, inevitably, half of my #Bluesky timeline is like: oh, we need a service thatās resistant to this sort of shit, something thatās not beholden to capitalist pressure, something thatās queer-friendlyā¦, quickly followed by but donāt say #Mastodon!
Sorry, Iām saying it. We want fucking Mastodon. Itās run by an actual non-profit foundation, none of this āpublic benefit corporationā bullshit. Itās not subject to creeping network-wide puritanism. Mastodon. Goddammit.ā
I think there are two different goals under discussion here:
I'm focused on the second.
@rnd I suspect it has more to do with the general rise of disinformation, which spreads through all media even if it is most rapidly dispensed via social feed, as well as the general decline in education (which is a result of policies instituted by the disinformationists as they achieve more power due to their spread of disinformation).
RE: https://mastodon.social/@JuliusGoat/116759587896674564
I think we agree that they are not to be trusted or, really, respected.
I've been focusing more on trying to understand the mental model, mainly because I find it baffling -- and I think what I've come to understand has allowed me to be less angry at them as individuals (because it's not really an individual problem, but more of a bug in human society) and better able to deal with their existence as a systemic problem to be solved*, rather than an individual person being bafflingly horrible.
(*...as in: anyone who thinks that way needs to be kept the hell away from the levers of power, to start with.)
They're not individuals arguing honestly for something they believe in; they're a mindless herd obeying their programming -- except for the ones at the top who are doing the programming because they're selfish assholes.
I kinda like @JuliusGoat 's modest proposal here, at least as a guiding principle.
Yes but if we allow capitalism, how will we explain it to our children? #ThinkOfTheChildren
@jwcph Not really disagreeing with you, fwiw. Mainly trying to understand what goes on in their... questionably-equipped minds. @riley
Either way, they have an unhealthy respect for power and authority. They claim to believe in courage, but apparently they view "going up against the powerful" as "disrespectful" rather than "courageous".
Come to think of it, "having an unhealthy respect for power and authority" is kind of inherent to political "conservatism".
@clarfonthey ...and of course the amounts of testosterone in any given "man" or "woman" varies a great deal; the ranges overlap.
[gender isn't real, we've all been played for absolute fools etc.]
@artemis The mom of a friend who lived down the street would incorporate twigs and bark into her weaving. That definitely got me thinking about found-materials art.
(added) It probably was somewhere in my thinking process when I decided I wanted to use bits of interesting random recorded real-world sounds in my musical production.
@artemis This is in line with the messaging I got from parents -- you have to get really good (and graduate with high marks from an appropriate institution of higher art-learning) before anyone will even consider taking your work seriously.
That, folks, is elitism.
@clarfonthey Also, people tend to take statements about statistical tendencies and interpret them as absolute verities -- and then, feeling proud of themselves for being so thoughtful, go on to turn those verities into social requirements.
...because, you know, it makes people uncomfortable if you break their expectations, and that's just rude.
I will no longer be taking criticisms about 2 dimensional villains and on-the-nose metaphors. I did not choose these times, I'm only tasked with fighting through them.
