millie @ millie @beehaw.org

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10

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Joined

2 yr. ago

I've had pretty decent luck with Notesnook. I wish they'd give it the capability to open multiple windows, but at least it hasn't lost me any writing like Notion and Obsidian did.

I literally mean political manipulation. Fully bad faith attempts to derail the Democratic party via arguments that the person in question doesn't actually believe. Again, this may not be that, but I think it's a mistake to pretend that Beehaw is somehow immune to this technique that the right is demonstrably using on other platforms.

We are in a notably leftist, anti-establishment, anti-authoritarian space with users who clearly speak their minds and bring the conversations had here into bigger spaces. It is ripe for being targeted by bad actors.

To be fair, Beehaw has been clearly inundated with bad faith arguments about the election for weeks. Let's not pretend it hasn't. This may not be that, but it's not appropriate to scold users for calling out dead obvious political manipulation.

Okay, so if we take it as a given that Trump's supporters are largely, even mostly racists, how does that allow us to 'start moving forward'?

I'm honestly less and less sure that pointing fingers, even for good reason, is politically useful at all. To those who are already convinced, it seems heroic, sure. But for those who aren't? All it does is put them on the defensive and entrench their position.

I'm not saying we shouldn't call out racism when we see it, because we should. The left needs to call out injustice, because the right isn't about to do it. But like, that can't be the entirety of our political strategy. It doesn't work. It makes us look preachy and more importantly it puts the impetus for us getting our goals accomplished on racists.

When we're focusing all our political energy on decrying the wrongness of the right, our visible political identity becomes just that: criticism. That's not what wins elections. If anything, it signals to the racists on the right that this is a rallying point for them, and it gives them the opportunity to turn to others who tend to lean Republican and say, "See what monsters they think you are? We know what you're really like."

If we want to win the election, we need positive energy. We need to motivate our own base, and we need to give people on the fringes of our ideologies something that draws them in rather than something that makes them feel defensive. That doesn't mean we can't also call out injustice, but we have to do it with empowering language, not with language that shifts power to those we see as an obstacle.

This is why the Obama campaign's "Yes We Can" slogan was so effective. It allowed Obama to have a platform for addressing the obstacles he wanted to direct attention at, but it did it in a way that highlighted Democratic agency rather than simply saying "this is wrong". Each time one of these problems was touched on, he could again touch back on the positive energy of "Yes We Can" and it energized crowds and voters rather than making them feel bored and doomed.

"Or We're Fucked" isn't a very good campaign slogan, as we've seen with Biden. Harris has a chance to move away from that, and seems to be doing so. You can already feel the power shifting, because her campaign uses her personal confidence and magnetism to show voters that she can handle it. Yes, we have problems, but they're not going to crack her armor and make her stop expressing joy. Yes, the right is sinister, but we don't have to obsess over it. We can call them weird and move on with our actual work, while building confidence that we have the ability to get it done.

Dress for the job that you want.

If you want to get something done, you're a lot better off if you know that you can do it. We need to know that the injustices of the right are just some ill-tempered old fogies spouting off about a time that's passed as they slowly fade away. We need to know that their weirdness is ultimately going to lose.

Their threat is real, to be sure, but if we focus on the threat and give it power, we give ourselves nothing. We need to build that power inward, and for that we need energy that focuses on our own confidence in our ability to get things done.

Harris and Walz seem to know this, which is a great sign. Once they're in, we can put their feet to the fire on taking care of this stuff, but just pointing at the Republicans and identifying the reasons they're a large ideologically motivated threat just makes the optics seem more and more hopeless for us and more and more like the wild thrashing of a dying prey animal to the right.

If we focus on our goals regardless of any crazy bullshit they run up their flagpoles, we get to pick the focus. If we let ourselves be led about with patter and distracting hand-waving, we may well miss the plot.

Are a lot of Republicans racist? Obviously. Is laser focusing on it to the point of in-fighting going to give us the ability to render their racism irrelevant to public policy? I'm skeptical.

I kinda loved Miracle Girls when I was a teenager. In retrospect, I think it was mostly because identifying with the characters gave me gender euphoria. I don't remember a ton about the details, but it was fun and sort of slice-of-life wholesome. That was in the early 00s so there may be some shockingly outdated stuff in there that I just glossed over and don't remember, but I feel like that's probably just my reluctance to recommend anything 30 years old uncritically!

Too much hand wringing. We do better when we're not tiptoeing around our own words and actions terrified to sneeze.

I feel like if I were trying this myself I'd give an arcade style game pad a shot and try using it with my feet. No idea how well it'd work.

Yeah, it very much depends on the person. I find that just my voice isn't as helpful as my voice and visible body and face, but only if I'm in a space where I feel confident and self-actualized.

A biiiig part of that though may be that I'm trans and my voice is the least passing part of me. Also my voice and text don't have dimples.

Agreed. The people on the internet are real, living their lives out somewhere else in the world. They are just as important as anyone else. I've had times in my life where I've socialized extensively offline and times where I've socialized extensively online. I don't see a fundamental difference to the relationships I make. The people I've become close with who I exclusively talk to online and haven't shared physical proximity with are some of the most important people in my life.

I do think it can sometimes be harder to build an initial rapport online. The lack of body language can make it tricky to convey meaning sometimes in the same way you would offline, and you don't get these other cues that tell you about what a person is thinking. That said, though, sometimes face-to-face interactions introduce a lot of noise that isn't necessarily helpful either. The body language of anxiety, to me, isn't typically super usefully communicative, and it can often become a component to offline interactions.

Also, like, some video games do have pretty compelling body language. DayZ, in particular, is incredibly good at being emotive. It does a great job of translating tiny movements that convey a lot of personality. Everything from moving your head around to different ways of gesticulating while talking and even the way people walk can have a huge impact on communication. A lot of the time I can spot my friends, even in totally different outfits, just based on the way they move around in-game. It kind of reminds me of the 'body language' of vehicles on the road, but with much greater articulation.

Personally, for me, I find a lot of comfort in online spaces and in the relationships I've developed with people I've become close to through those spaces. As someone who isn't always super comfortable with eyeballs on me, and as someone who mostly grew up in a place where people were pretty fucking hostile, I think it's enriched my life substantially.

Also, like, I get to have relationships with people all over the world. I feel like it gives some perspective that it's tough to have otherwise without extensive travel.

Honestly, my reading of Marxist theory makes me look to the inverse of this. The uprising Marx and Engels talk about is a reaction to the injustice and instability of capitalism. As resources are consolidated, as capitalists become more entrenched, the forces that create a change increase. More people see it for what it is until eventually we reach a critical mass spontaneously.

Authoritarian communism doesn't work because it's trying to jump the gun. It comes from people seeing changes down the road, but they're not changes that they can force to come too early. The fruit of the proletariat ownership of the means of production and the withering of the state literally isn't ripe yet.

Ironically, it's acts of suppression that ripen that fruit. From active attempts to keep it from ripening to socially destructive capitalist practices like elevating C-levels and chasing quarterly profits.

An authoritarian imposition, to my reading, not only won't work, but slows down the process by essentially letting off steam as well as creating a negative association between communist social structuring and authoritarianism.

At least reform has positive results in the short term, potentially building greater association between distributed resources and greater social benefit at large. But even then, it may literally be the reverse that brings us closer to the end state of universal proletariat throwing off of chains and the eventually withering of the state.

Next they'll call hiding in the woods ecoterrorism.

Presumably this will mostly affect Republicans. Nice own goal, Elon!

Awww is this headline too effective? 🤭

I honestly loved it. Wish there was more.

It would be nice to see a decent show in the GoT universe again. Something that isn't just all rich people planning who is married off to who and blah blah blah blah.

Nah. It works. The fact that it isn't true literally doesn't matter. This is not the time to worry about what strategies come with the integrity of accuracy. If it works and has steam, at this point, we need it.

Fuck em. Flipper Couch-Fucker Vance doesn't deserve our careful accuracy.

Also, like, have you seen this guy? There's no way he's not fucking couches.

I would honestly bet money that if someone shows up to a BBQ and complains about what's available, 9 out of 10 times it's going to be someone who eats meat and is upset that there either isn't their favorite meat or like, that there aren't eggs in the potato salad or something. Not much money, because I'm broke, but I'd put like five bucks on it no problem.

I mean, you shouldn't expect anything particular at a BBQ that you're not bringing yourself or like helping with the planning of. Like, hamburgers and hotdogs are pretty standard, but if I showed up at someone else's BBQ and all they had was ribs I'd be kind of an ass for whining about it.

But like.. why are vegetarian options specifically a problem? Is this something that's coming up? Is there like, a rash of vegetarians throwing a fit about it? Did someone get invited to a BBQ and ask if there'd be a veggie option? You know, like, so they could participate in a social event with their meat-eating friends?

This kind of stuff usually feels to me like people who eat meat and don't want to think about the cost in suffering pointing a finger at people who abstain so they don't have to think about it. Like, I personally do eat meat. I find that my brain functions better with a little animal fat than without. Buuut I'm also well aware of how much torture goes on in the process of making that meat, and I at least try to minimize the calorie to suffering ratio.

That's not to say that I'm going to spend my days criticizing people who don't choose to push against the horrific system of factory farming that supports our societal penchant for meat, but I do think about it. And I have noticed that certain meat-eaters seem to be pretty defensive about it, which generally translates into being shitty to people who don't eat meat.

Posts like this coming unprompted certainly seem like that kind of defensive behavior to me.

Anyway, food for thought.

Sure. Something like a poorly configured sprite sheet could be an appropriate metaphor too. Personally, I have PTSD. For me it tends to manifest as getting wrapped up in memories and in grappling with thought patterns that make it hard for me to process them or that leave me struggling with how I feel as a result. A lot of my own stuff is very internal, and often comes in response to my trying to process trauma. I feel less like I'm tinting the world than struggling with buggy internal processes. Not to say that interpretation of outside stimuli (social stimuli in particular) isn't also a factor, but it's not the main thing for me.

Where you put the error, whether in interpretation or in execution, is largely beside the point, though, to my thinking. The main thing is that you're looking at an error versus a choice.

I do think that a lot of these destructive and malicious behaviors could certainly be seen as being the result of toxic thought patterns and compartmentalization, but I don't think that's quite the same thing as a buggy, error-prone brain.

Like, somebody who drives around in a massive pickup truck ignoring traffic laws and bullying their way around knowing that people will fear being hurt by their vehicle and will avoid them is just an abusive, dangerous asshole. There may be some underlying insecurity or discomfort that leads them to react that way, but it's the reaction they've chosen and habituated to. We can discuss free will all day, but there's a big difference between the guy who runs stop signs in a 2 ton vehicle and someone whose depression keeps them stuck in bed. One of those things is a pattern of choice-related behavior, while the other is someone struggling to have the energy to exist.

The fact that many of us seem to have a hard time conceiving of anyone making these kinds of choices on purpose, to me, is simply illustrative of it being related to volition. They make different choices because they're a different person, who sees things very differently. When the behaviors are taken to their extreme and other people are hurt, it can be harder to see the volitional difference, but at a simpler level I think it's a little more obvious.

Does knowingly blasting everyone with your high-beams indicate mental illness? Does being rude to service workers? Littering?

The volition aspect here is pretty obviously different in someone who, for example, dumps their trash in a river rather than paying to have it removed. We may not know exactly what's going on in their heads, but we can at least sort out that they probably don't really care about nature or pollution or the people swimming down-river. I think it becomes a little harder to see in those more extreme behaviors because it's so extreme, but I don't think the fundamental nature is all that different.

Someone carrying out a murder is not, in type, fundamentally different from someone who merely doesn't care if anyone gets killed by their 8ft tall truck. They're different in degree.

While I think this is a reasonable sort of surface-level interpretation, I think it misses a bit of what typifies mental illness versus just being destructive, malicious, desperate, or extremely entitled.

Mental illness is something your brain is doing to you. It's not just a thought that you have and roll with, it's a persistent pattern that you struggle against. Just deciding that the thoughts and feelings being produced are inaccurate or unhelpful doesn't make it go away. It's not just extreme emotion, it's emotion that's being switched on in a way that isn't tied into the continuity of your more volitional patterns of thought and feeling. It's not just that the thoughts and behaviors playing out are unhealthy.

To put it into metaphor, think of your life and your interactions with the world like a video game, with your brain being essentially your character controller, interpreting your actions and bringing them into the world. You can decide to do healthy or unhealthy things with your character, but those things are under your own volition. Mental illness, then, is like a poorly coded character controller throwing errors and causing unforeseen bugs. Like, for example, if I push the down button there's a 30% chance that I randomly move to the left first, rather than moving in the appropriate direction.

That 30% chance might send me careening into a pit, but chances are that once I'm used to having this bug, I'll be aware enough of it to try to compensate. It might not always work, and I might drift a little left occasionally, but if I give myself a bit wider berth for any obstacles on my left, I'll probably be okay. This is distinct from someone who uses their volition to throw themselves into a pit on purpose.

Are both potentially bad for the character's health? Yes. But only one is caused by a character controller error, and because my goal isn't 'throw myself into pit', I'll probably do a much better job avoiding pits than someone who's jumping into them intentionally. These two problems are fundamentally different in that one is a product of a person's volition, while the other is a problem with the means by which they interact with the rest of the world.

That's not to say that people with mental illness are going to accidentally assassinate someone because they pressed down and went a bit left, but it illustrates the fundamental difference in making a bad decision versus struggling with errors in your brain.

That someone jumps into a pit on purpose does not imply that their character controller is bugged, especially if they smoothly beeline it while showing all signs of acting with intention.