Notices by volkris@qoto.org, page 4

@freemo Yeah, the way I figure if we elect someone to office who is really into dictatorship, well, that’s really going to suck for them because they are going to spend every day in the Oval Office lamenting that they don’t have dictatorial powers

We probably shouldn’t elect such a person, but if we do, honestly that person is probably going to be the worst off from it.

@Hyolobrika @realcaseyrollins

@Hyolobrika maybe the thing that you are missing is that in a system like the US they don’t get that power merely because they get elected.

In the US it is fundamental to the system that no, we absolutely don’t trust ANYONE with such power.

It doesn’t matter if you get elected, it doesn’t matter if you really really want the power, it doesn’t matter if you think you have the power, you still don’t have the power, because the US system was designed specifically to make sure you don’t have that power.

That’s a huge problem with this whole “ democracy is on the ballot” nonsense. No, it’s not, because the US system was designed specifically to make such a thing impossible.

So I would say that if the people want to elect somebody promising things that they wouldn’t have the authority to do at all, then the people are wasting their votes and they’re going to be disappointed, but that’s really the long and short of it.

Might as well vote for the candidate that is promising to flap his arms and fly to the ceiling.

We should absolutely educate the public on civics so that they know those promises are unfulfillable, but if they want to vote for someone based on a promise that he can’t keep, well…

@freemo @realcaseyrollins

@freemo

Notice that I used the plural 🙂
This is not merely one friend, but the prospective offered by many different working historians during their get togethers on, for example, the sidelines of conferences.

@Hyolobrika @realcaseyrollins

@Hyolobrika @freemo

I always find definitional arguments to be a bit uninteresting, but FWIW the professional, trained historian, academic friends of mine have mentioned that fascism is basically a useless word historically because it doesn’t have a workable, agreed upon definition, so they sound like they would rather people just never use that word again unless maybe in reference to Mussolini specifically.

@realcaseyrollins

@Hyolobrika I think the first step in that question is being honest about what it’s doing.

Like you said, sacrifice some democracy. I’m glad you put it that way. So many people not only refuse to put it that way, but they deny that they are doing that in the first place.

We as a society can’t really discuss whether we want to make that trade off or not if we are refusing to call it what it is.

@freemo @realcaseyrollins

@Hyolobrika keep in mind that there is a speech element to barring a person from office if you prevent people from expressing, through voting, their preference for that person.

This is one huge element in the current Trump drama that there’s a huge difference between kicking him off a ballot versus letting him take office if elected, but the two issues are being muddled together.

@freemo @realcaseyrollins

@freemo Right, neither do I, and that's why I would say we both (and everyone else) need to be ready to proudly state that we are intolerant of certain things 🙂

That's my point.

Rather than redefining tolerance we should all own the causes where we promote intolerance.

@realcaseyrollins

@freemo

Well I was channeling the nonsensical notion that in tolerance would be tolerance but to be practical:

If you want to be a tolerance absolutist, to borrow Musk's term, then yeah you do have to be tolerant of even absurdity. If you want to claim such absolute tolerance, well, that might be rough, but it will involve tolerating a bunch of wacky stuff.

And that's why absolute tolerance is pretty unworkable in the real world.

In the real world, in most situations, we will be intolerant, and that is a good and healthy and mature thing so long as we draw the lines in appropriate places.

We should celebrate being intolerant of things that make the world, or our lives, or the situation worse.

Don't like Nazis? (whatever that means to you) Fine! You're probably going to want to be intolerant of them, and that's the right thing to do.

But it's the wrong thing to be reasonably intolerant of Nazis but claim that you're being tolerant.

No, be intolerant! And proudly say that you are intolerant of Nazis!

It's just Orwellian to try to rewrite the word for no particularly good reason like that.

@realcaseyrollins

@freemo nobody said you have to be tolerant!

But if you're going to be tolerant then, yes, you have to be tolerant to the point of absurdity if it comes to that, by definition.

And that's a great reason not to be absurdly tolerant!

@realcaseyrollins

@freemo I'd say the key is to just be honest.

If a person doesn't want to tolerate something, great! They should own it. I'm going to be intolerant about my friends being jerks in my living room.

Intolerance is not necessarily bad.

And in fact a person can highlight just how bad they consider something to be by saying, that idea is so unacceptable that I will be intolerant about it.

So I always tell people to just be honest, own what they are doing, don't try to rewrite the language instead because that just gets silly and even undermines their causes.

@realcaseyrollins

@freemo @realcaseyrollins

2 + 2 = 5 for sufficiently large values of two

Tolerance is absolutely a virtue for sufficiently intolerant definitions of tolerant.

@mike805 My sense is that a whole lot of it comes down to rebels without a place to direct their rebellion.

They need a The Man to fight against, but given the state of the US government they don’t see much to fight against there, so they start making up monsters.

@freemo

@freemo yep.

It's the old internet adage don't feed the trolls.

Trump was on his way out of the limelight and into history until Democrats started renewing the attention and supporting his rhetoric by the way they acted.

@mk firstly, he failed to live up to his promise to end your vast conspiracy when he was in power.

Secondly, after that broken promise he made rude comments that gave the conspiracy extra fodder to work with. All his mean tweets. They confirmed the story being told by the conspiracy.

Thirdly, his losing efforts to challenge election proceedings in courts earned him no benefit but did play into the conspiracy’s hands, giving them even more to say, “Look, we’re right!”

I could go on and on, but the guy basically supported the conspiracy.

Wait, maybe Trump didn’t actually do wrong, and his appearance as being such a loser and failure was actually an act because HE’S PART OF THE CONSPIRACY!

Woah.

@mk even if for the sake of argument we run with your claims of vast conspiracy, what Trump did wrong was to adopt strategies that played into those instead of countering them.

Great, the public is subject to vast amounts of social control? Well what Trump did wrong was in his failure to counter that.

@mk what you’ve written above is RIFE with speculation!

@Nudhul @freemo

@HistoPol I really think Fediverse presents huge technical and managerial challenges to the centralized systems, and it takes time to sort all of it out, to sort out if it’s even possible to integrate.

Technically, ActivityPub is not a lightweight protocol. It takes a lot of resources to manage all the streams going left and right without the computational efficiency of just operating in-house.

Managerially, I don’t think any centralized service has really figured out how to integrate the Wild West into the more controlled environment their users expect, not even getting into moderation issues.

I think they’re moving slowly because there are real challenges and problems that have to be solved, and it takes time to solve them.

@tchambers @ploum

@SirBemrose imagine not realizing that claims of deepstate are thrown around to explain anything the claimer doesn’t want to hear, to the point that apparently pretty much the whole country must be involved in that conspiracy, except that one person.

I guess they’re just lonely?

Have you considered that when the public basically IS the deepstate, based on how vast the conspiracy claims must be, then the will of the public is the will of the deepstate, since they’re the same people?

Now if you’ll pardon me, I need to go laminate my deepstate membership card. The line at the deepstate coffee shop was too long this morning so I had to put it off.

@mk @freemo

@mk

The answer to this is important: Trump’s unforced choices as to how he conducted himself turned off so much of the public that they’d rather vote for the senile and dim witted person heading the dystopian nightmare you described above.

The worse terms one uses to describe #Biden the worse that reflects on #Trump.

Describe Biden as bad as you’d like. It just means Trump’s political strategy still managed to face losing to THAT again.

You can namecall voters all you want, but it doesn’t change that reality.

@freemo

#USPolitics

@freemo I'd say there is so much possibility of major changes in the situation between now and then that it's fairly unpredictable at this point.

This is more than the usual situation of wondering if there will be a significant but unpredictable world event that will tip the scales, since at this point there are so many humans with the abilities to make choices that will directly impact the scales and strong incentives to make those decisions.

Interesting times.