millie @ millie @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

Once I sat in a field listening to Victor Wooten and whistling along with him. On a fence nearby was I think a brushed shouldered blackbird? Brushed shouldered something. It started singing with me and doing a little dance. Eventually it even started syncopating its part. Like, you could see it waiting for the timing to be just right for each note. On key and everything. Went on for about half an hour.

Birds are cool.

Honestly, this may be one of the concepts that it would be better to bring to people once they've already found some kind of leftist solidarity. If you take someone steeped in right-wing rhetoric and the first hurdle you put in front of them is expecting humility and understanding before you even give them a reason to want to understand? I don't think that's a terribly effective approach.

If the first thing I say to a cis person is that they have privilege that I lack because I'm trans, I'm doing a few things right out the gate that probably aren't going to get them to listen. First, I'm highlighting the separate categories that we're in rather than the unified categories that we're in. Second, I'm asking them to defer to my experience of the world and to show sympathy and understanding before I even attempt to win them over. Third, I'm asking them to start from a place of humility before I've shown that I can be trusted with the very vulnerability that I'm requesting.

I find it's much easier to look for common ground first and foremost. Find the ways that they have to struggle and recognize that struggle. Show them that I have some of the same exact struggles that they do. Often this comes down to health, finances, or other experiences that are more universal. It doesn't even necessarily have to be a shared struggle, it can be a shared interest. But whatever it is, the first step has to be highlighting affinity. There's a reason people talk about the weather, because we're all in it together. Rain falls on everyone.

Once they see that we're not so different, they tend to be much more willing to hear the stuff that's outside their experience. You might even be able to highlight patterns like the interplay of intersectional privilege. But if you try to start from there? Good luck.

Complain about traffic. Complain about the price of eggs. Hit enough of those universals and they won't be so skeptical when you bring something that requires them to stretch a bit to the table.

Our problem, I think, is that we've largely got the cart entirely before the horse.

Too low. I should not be able to personally afford a whole ass ton of excess greenhouse gasses for the same price as my car insurance.

I'm sorry, but who the hell quotes stuttering verbatim?

That's what I was thinking. Maybe they're just Community fans.

.. Should we be pinching our nipples at their AI?

Car free rhetoric like this is often as not nonsensical and ablist. It's one thing to want to reduce traffic and give people options other than driving. That's great. But what a lot of people seem to mean by "car free" is less accessibility for locals and people with disabilities.

For example, I live in a college town. Our public transit is abysmal and we don't have anything like a subway system. We have buses that will bring you to the mall or to other cities and towns in the area, but they don't run frequently enough to be a replacement for personal vehicles. Parking, for people who actually live and work in the area, is an absolute pain in the ass because we get a lot of tourism and people from neighboring areas flock here for our restaurants and shops.

For a while now there's been talk about eliminating on street parking downtown. There has been no suggestion about adding parking anywhere to make up for this or restricting any of the existing parking to be resident-only. So if you live downtown? I guess you'll just have to walk across town to get home, or even drive around in circles until the shops close and people drive their cars back to the suburbs.

It's already rough parking close to home if you live on main street, and much of the existing parking requires walking uphill. We have a single parking garage, which typically gets full when we have a snow storm because the entire town is expected to park there or get towed unless they have a driveway.

This won't have much impact on the upper middle class home owners who are largely the ones pushing for it. It will definitely have an impact on the working class people paying out the nose to live in the available rentals downtown in a place where so many of what might have been affordable apartments a decade ago are now airbnbs.

Increased walkability is great when it's well thought out. But when it's not? It's literally just a form of gentrification that lets those who push for it feel superior to the working class people who pay the price for it in commutes, physical labor, and reduced access.

When I say bot farms I don't mean literal LLMs. I mean people hired or forced to work in a call-center type environment where their day is spent disseminating propaganda and sewing meaningless conflict. Often using multiple sockpuppets. Some are working for hostile governments, some are working for companies. They try to sway elections and influence public opinion to strengthen their allies and weaken their enemies. They're all over the place.

I mean, honestly, they make it incredibly obvious. The idea that we somehow can't tell is just a tactic they use. We can both smell it on them. Why pretend we can't?

I've been saying this for months and I'll keep saying it. These people aren't genuine users. They're a combination of bot-farm workers and useful idiots. There's a reason their perspectives don't reflect those of actual human beings that we meet and talk to out in the world. Because they're literally just hired to demotivate us.

I trust the content I see on Beehaw and Lemmy in general less and less as the months go by, because it's inundated with this shit to the point that it's clearly being targeted to demotivate any resistance. It's literally flooded with messaging designed to make us feel hopeless and helpless.

Thank you for this. There has been far too much of people utterly ignoring the hard work that people have done against authoritarianism in the US and the actual impact it's had. Lemmy seems to be inundated with people insisting that nothing anyone can do could possibly help and the no one has ever done anything meaningful to resist, and that's just bullshit. It's some terminally online doomerism and it's the last thing we need.

Frankly, it's complicity. It needs to be called out and opposed, and you're doing good work by not mincing words here.

People who pull this shit day in and day out are as much a part of the problem as the MAGA idiots, both in their constant attempts to undermine any and all resistance and very likely in getting us into this situation in the first place.

We need to stop tiptoeing around them and throw their bullshit back in their faces. It's fucking shameful, and they should be embarrassed to be such spineless bootlickers.

Tompato!!!

Potamto!!!

That's quite possible. This administration has shown that it doesn't care about the rule of law. However, that's a far sight from the justice system bending over and letting them.

It's important to be precise about what's happening right now and not to give up and admit defeat. There's a world of difference between "this is bad, we have work to do" and "we're absolutely cooked and have zero hope". Trump's administration wants you to give up. They want you to decide the fight is over before it's even properly begun. Don't do them the favor of making it easy.

I'm not sure that checks out. I mean, fair, I do think that someone being habitually cruel toward AI might not be the greatest indicator of their disposition in general, though I'd hesitate to make a hasty judgement on that. But if we take AI's presentation as a person as fictional, does that extend to other fictional contexts? Would you consider an evil play-through in a video game to indicate an issue? Playing a hostile character in a roleplay setting? Writing horror fiction?

It seems to me that there are many contexts where exhibiting or creating simulated behavior in a fictional environment isn't really equivalent to doing so with genuine individuals in non-imaginary circumstances. AI isn't quite the same as a fictional setting, but it's potentially closer to that than it is to dealing with a real person.

By the same token, if not being polite to an AI is problematic, is it equally problematic to repeatedly say things like "human" and "operator" to an automated phone system until you get a response? Both mimic human speech, while neither ostensibly have a legitimate understanding of what's being said by either party.

Where does the line get drawn? Is it wrong to curse at fully inanimate objects that don't even pretend to be people? Is verbally condemning a malfunctioning phone, refrigerator, or toaster equivalent to berating a hallucinating AI?

That is also bad, but it's a ruling on another aspect of the issue. They ruled that the Alien Enemies Act can be used against supposed Venezuelan gang members, but they also ruled that anyone being accused of this has to be informed ahead of time and have an opportunity to contest it. It does not say that those deported in a so-called administrative error can just be left in a foreign prison because oopsies.

The ACLU even referred to the ruling as a victory.

"We are disappointed that we will need to start the court process over again in a different venue, but the critical point is that the Court rejected the government's remarkable position that it does not even have to give individuals meaningful advance notice to challenge their removal under the Alien Enemies Act. That is a big victory," the ACLU's Lee Gelernt said in a texted statement.

So again, it's not really what you're construing it as. It would be better if they'd decided that the deportations were entirely illegal, but this also definitely isn't permission for the administration to deport anyone they want with no due process.

Do you have a source for this claim? Because that's not what your link says at all.

If humans went extinct.. um...

Um.

UUMMMM.......!!!!!

Massachusetts has much more dude than this.

Imagine if Trump got congress to let him run for a third election, and then Obama ran and kicked the shit out of him.

I know that when I'm playing cards in a dress that's melted into my skin, with my favorite half-bracelet draped over my wrist, I love to intimidate my opponent by flashing them two face cards. Who wouldn't be shaken by the Kinmb of Back of Card and the Quing of 21s? Especially when I've already played my oversized red card.

Rocker it's evolving!
Rocker evolved into..