Also, it’s always Taylor Swift.
I feel like this is seeing in action the thinking that led to the cultural revolution. “Sure, he’s just a chemistry teacher. But he’s one of the evil ones. He’s in the bad group. Into the labor camp!”
Fixing the awful problems with our society requires changing a lot of things, among them taxes and the power of the wealthy to distort government and public opinion. Demonizing Taylor Swift relentlessly will do fuck all.
I’m sure it was a success for the customers. The viewers are not the customers. The viewers are the product. For the customers, Bari Weiss airing some shit that no one wants to see in order to inject it non-consensually into the discourse is her delivering a perfect product. She’s doing her job. I’m sure it was very popular with the customers.
Prison is not designed to be a place for rehabilitation. Prison is designed as:
It is, as you said, actively hostile to the goal of rehabilitation. Some of that is deliberate, because recidivism is further profit for the people involved in the system, and some is just how it happens.
The system also happens to occasionally fulfill a useful goal of keeping violent or dangerous people off the streets, but almost every single other thing that it does is harmful.
Sounds about right. A lot of these situations are symptoms of societal rot. Investing in punishing crime after the fact does basically nothing to reduce it, where fixing economic working conditions so that people won’t be put into desperate situations helps to resolve theft and violence because people can just live and be normal and it’s okay. Imagine that.
That said I am deeply skeptical of the idea of abolishing prisons before doing that so that all these broken people can just be loose roaming the streets damaging others in the meantime. But you’re not wrong I think about the uselessness of it as a permanent solution. And making police and prisons more punishing as a solution to invest any type of effort into, because there is still crime because our society is broken, is worse than useless.
Tim Leary’s autobiography has a fascinating part about this, about him organizing a research project inside a prison, trying to use LSD and meditation to bring people to an actual awareness of themselves as humans. It’s fucking fascinating. By far the best part was that because he was actually rehabilitating people and bringing them to a positive solution where they as individuals could be functional members of a working society, people inside the system predicted to him that the project would be shut down because it’s unprofitable to go that way. I don’t know if that was why it got shut down, but it did get shut down. Even though it was bringing great results even within the awful limits of our broken society and system. Exactly as predicted. Go figure.
They do not work for their alleged intended purpose (often just making things worse) and treat people like shit.
I partly agree with this part, definitely as they are implemented in the US. What do you think the solution should be if someone robs a liquor store or rapes their neighbor?
I think that’s some weird behavior of the web site… for me, on VPN it redirects to YouTube, but when not using a VPN it gives the text article.
Maybe they’re redirecting non-US visitors to their YouTube channel or something? I have no idea honestly.
Yeah, because everything was fine and everyone got soft and complacent.
Like it or not, we’re coming to the end of that, we’ve not even scratched the surface of how bad it’s actually going to get. The people and communities that smarten up will (sometimes) survive, and more and more, the ones that do not will not.
Yeah. It sounds cliche, but “listen with your heart” is really accurate. She’s saying she misses the old days when America worked. That’s not wrong (I mean for white people it’s not, I would recommend not to go down that rabbit hole lol). A lot of it isn’t about what you say to her, it’s how you say it. If everything you say sounds cold and factual and correcting her, of course she’s not going to want to listen and it’s just going to be a hostile interaction.
It is tough. My experience with stuff like this is that they just live in a whole different reality, so it is hard to get a foothold. I had to work really hard at having conversations with people for whom the tone of voice and emotional intent is a huge part of how they process the information (which I think is most people). That’s not how I operate, so it was hard to keep it in mind without coming off as fake or condescending, but if you’re genuine about what you mean and focus on sort of the core of why you came to your beliefs (not the facts but the reasons why you care about the facts so much), a lot of times it comes across better. And then on top of that, you’re dealing with someone where their factual understanding of the world is off in la-la land, so it’s hard to not just lecture them or tell them what’s what.
Like that kind of thing about Reagan, my first reaction to the answer is “Yeah, and have you wondered why that hasn’t ever happened since then? Why everyone was doing okay until the late 80s and then it all went to hell and hasn’t come back? Honestly that’s what I want, is to get back to when working people had a fair shake and people could make a living. Don’t you want that? It sure as hell is not happening now under Trump…”
But again, it’s not the words, it’s the intent behind them. If you’re reasonable and you care, then it’s hard for her to take your statements hostile even if she doesn’t agree with them (honestly I can guarantee you that one conversation or even several about it will not change her mind.) But you can sort of plant seeds and then she’ll come around on her own, or if she does not then oh well.
If she is being overtly hateful on her own then it’s different. IDK what you can even do then. But mostly in my experience it is people who are so twisted up that they think the Democrats are so hateful that of course things X, Y, and Z make perfect sense and are the only humane thing to do. Mostly.
I can’t really offer specific advice on this situation. I don’t know. But I will say, in general separating from the person who’s victimized by propaganda just helps the propaganda spread. A lot of this stuff actually has deliberate features and habits that it tries to instill into people, to make it drive away people who might talk sense into them and make it harder for them to hear sense if someone does say it to them.
I think you should view your MIL as a victim of propaganda, similar to a drug addict or a person with significant trauma in their life. A lot of them are victims. Of course, if she’s telling you “I’m glad they’re snatching all those US citizens and deporting them to hellish nightmare prisons in other countries just because they’re Hispanic,” then maybe you want to shun her. But usually what’s happened is that they’ve gotten so twisted up in their perceptions that they think that what they’re saying and supporting is something really good, and everyone should support it. The stuff that she is victimized by is incredibly powerful, it’s not surprising to me that a lot of people get taken in by it.
Like I say it’s hard to give general advice about what you should do. But this may help you to be more gentle with her even if you are aware of the hatefulness at work in the stuff she was victimized by and have some understandably big feelings about it.
You forgot one of the best. A lot of these are kind of funny, but there is a certain amount of stupid sounding legwork that the attorney is obligated to do that they may slip into doing too much of just by habit. It’s like the cops ask “And did he have your permission to punch you in the face? Did you consent to that?” They just have to cover the elements of the statute.
Anyway. From memory so the precise wording is not verbatim (I think this one’s from a divorce trial):
Attorney: And did you ever have sex with him in Salt Lake City?
Witness: I’m not going to answer that question.
Attorney: Did you ever have sex with him in Miami?
Witness: I’m not going to answer that question.
Attorney: Did you ever have sex with him in Key Largo?
Witness: No.
The whole model is just absolutely stupid. I mean, I get how it was what Aaron and Spez came up with back 20 years ago, but the fact that nobody bothered to make anything fundamentally better at any point since then is just fuckin’ weird.
Here’s a book based on extensive history and study of when revolutions have and have not succeeded in a huge number of countries across the world, and what the factors are that lead them to be successful:
https://www.files.ethz.ch/isn/126900/8008_FDTD.pdf
One of the most critical conclusions is that in a military conflict, with the lines of allegiance staying fixed in their pre-revolution locations, the oppressor will win. It’s not to say that violence or forceful resistance is never a good strategy, but starting a physical fight with the government forces is (in most cases) about like starting a fistfight with your physically abusive spouse. That is the terrain they want the conflict to take place in anyway.
(Edit: Oh, I didn’t notice you were posting this under a month-old article. Why did you post this comment lol? I would recommend posting it under my new Robert Reich post instead)
Yeah. It’s a necessary task, just I think the idea of parceling it out to overworked volunteers who are traditionally encouraged to create “rules” for the types of things that people are and are not allowed to say within their little domain, is a stinker of an idea.
Slashdot had a far better model for this: Duties pretty similar to what would be “moderation” in the current system got parceled out at random in tiny, tiny increments to well-established and active users. If it happened to be your day to take your 3 allotted mod actions (or whatever), and on that day you saw some spam or racism or something, you clicked to deal with it, end of story. Other than than, people just got to talk.
That model had some flaws (and I am oversimplifying a bit with that summary) but I think that now that we’ve had some experience with a variety of systems, that kind of idea showed itself to be infinitely superior to the Reddit model and pretty foresighted in a couple aspects of its construction.
This is 100% a problem. The whole moderation model for Reddit/Lemmy really invites this kind of censorship, whether intended or not (for example, prioritizing “civility” means that groups of users can start long, infuriatingly bad-faith arguments with anyone who expresses certain views, which will inevitably get them banned eventually when on one random day they manage to lose their temper about it). And even well intentioned things like banning “misinformation” can also feed into this silo-creating effect, yes.
For what it’s worth, !politics@piefed.social does not delete comments based on viewpoint or civility, for exactly this reason. There is also !deleted@quokk.au; it was intended as a space to restart conversations or repost things that were getting deleted elsewhere. It pretty quickly evolved into my personal sandbox for griping about the moderation but it could in theory still be that other thing too lol.
Yeah. I do see the point, Reddit moderation at this point is hilariously bad so I guess I shouldn’t assume that this person did any little thing wrong.
The whole moderation model which depends on volunteers with unlimited power and allows any random idiot to create an unlimited number of alts, is broken. Reddit devs and moderators have made a good go I guess of trying to make it work, but all they have done is demonstrated that it is not the way.
I do think it makes some kind of sense to be at least a little secretive about White House trash, if for no other reason than that it will attract random people who want to poke through it out of sheer curiosity. I think the sinister part is the why this particular trash is noteworthy to poke through, not the idea of just wanting to discourage that with White House trash in general.
Yeah, it’s fair. I know the moderation on Reddit has gone entirely off the fucking rails at this point.
The one thing that this whole analysis is missing is this: There is a ton of work to do. The oceans are dying. The planet is boiling. The garbage is stacking up, endless and endless. There are crimes big and small going undiscovered, or un-processed and dealt with in a trustworthy fashion if they are discovered. There are wars, there are dangerous materials that need to be removed from the soil and the rivers, and the policies need to be set up and enforced to stop their cousins from replacing them within the year. WE’RE NOT FUCKING DONE. This illusion is wholly wrong that capitalism has created, that it is fine to drive the car off the cliff as long as we keep paying salaries and dividends up until the moment of impact comes
Yes, we’ve gotten more efficient and powerful in our ability to translate a human into an effective change in conditions at the earth’s surface. But the problems have gotten bigger, too, and more urgent to the point that they threaten our entire species. Just because we can now keep growing the food and doing layout for the advertisements with only 15 hours a week, doesn’t mean that’s all we need to fucking do.
I am opposed to systems that create oppression and injustice. Taylor Swift had fuck-all to do with creating any of that.
She benefits from it, sure, and she shouldn’t. But targeting her as the problem just feels like the vicious habit of just targeting the weakest example you can think of and pretending that if we keep shitting on that target, it’ll make everything better.