Few things scare you like thinking you’ve lost one of the most expensive and fragile things you use nearly 24/7. And even fewer can make you feel like a complete idiot to realise you’re already holding it. Such a crazy crosswire of feelings.
Just to drive this point home for the quiet listeners at the back of the house, I’ve had very long conversations with conservatives (I’m in a red area) who actually get more distrustful the more you relate to them. I’ve been told to my face that nobody cares that much about other people, and I was clearly only pretending to in order to make them listen to me. That it was obvious, because nobody cares that much. That empathy can only be manipulative, and is never real.
It took me years to understand this isn’t a contradiction, but that since they can’t imagine caring that much, I must be fake.
My whole outlook changed once I realised that. It’s insane, but many people literally can’t envision caring, and they think you’re fake and just want recognition for doing so.
Several of these surveys take on a different meaning once you realise there are fundamentally different perspectives like this.
e: and this is one of the biggest divides with conservatives. Simple word choice will not bridge this gap.
It’s not. I have a Mastadon account (made it nearly a year before BlueSky). It was work. I have to curate it and the interface is awful. BlueSky was easy.
To be clear, I barely use BlueSky, either. I’m almost exclusively on Lemmy. But these platforms need to get their UX ducks in order, and I say that as someone who has adapted to tech and UX since the late 80s.
Oh is that what that noise was? I thought it was from when I nearly strangled myself with my headphone cable in standing, since I’ve apparently forgot how reality works today.
I’ve no idea what’s gone wrong, but someone else suggested weed. I wasn’t on it, but perhaps I should be.
Most of your peers don’t have that reaction. They should~ but they don’t. Ask them to name a king not from a Disney movie and report back. *edit: ask them to name the king independence was fought over. I’ll bet many can’t, and I’ll bet none can give you the actual reasons (other than vague concepts like ‘freedon’ or ‘taxation’).
I’m with you. Let’s stop fighting each other and figure this out.
That’s a big problem that switching from ‘oligarch’ to ‘king’ won’t solve. Using different words is a very simplistic answer, when what we’re fighting here is not a language barrier but a wide cultural one.
The real issue is complex and multifaceted: conservatives have been highly propagandised through increasingly insulated media bubbles to the point that now there’s very little that can penetrate them, and switching up a few words will not get them to listen. They’ve been taught to be distrustful of facts and reality, and to believe that compassion is weakness.
I don’t know how to fix this, but watering down our language will not help. That’s been tried many times, and it always backfires.
I read the article and I completely disagree with her. ‘Oligarch’ means something different than ‘king’, and many Americans don’t have the same negative reaction to the word ‘king’, which is often romanticised in media, whereas ‘oligarch’ calls up images of nefarious machinations in authoritarian regimes – exactly what’s actually going on.
Also, being whiny that the bullies are calling us ‘woke’ is reactionary and misses the whole point. This is where we should be doubling down, not diluting our language.
e: also also, having spent decades in UxD and usability (which entailed a lot of surveying and analysis), I’d be hesitant to rely on surveys that show a population’s preference for one word over another, because word feels are affected by far more than knowledge of their definitions, and the reasons aren’t easily captured in a survey. The reasons are what matter, not necessarily the word, and I’m sure she didn’t explore this enough to understand the sociology here.
The oligarchy is killing us, and spinning language won’t change that. Meanwhile, ‘woke’ just means ‘social empathy’, which is ironically the solution to many of the problems the oligarchy is causing (and they’re not shy about this – Musk recently said empathy is bad).
We need more ‘woke’, not less. And being butthurt that the fascists are using ‘woke’ as a slur against us is childish and easy to ignore if you’re not too simple to get it.
Fuck this. I’m woke and proud of it. We all should be.
LillyPip @ LillyPip @lemmy.ca Posts 44Comments 1,726Joined 2 yr. ago
I’m confused, then. Do I bridge it from Bluesky?
I clicked your link but it didn’t make sense from my end.