PhilipTheBucket

PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

What? Sure it does. Upvote a comment from Lemmy, then go to Mastodon and look at the same comment, and you'll see a "like" from the Lemmy user that upvoted it. Right?

PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

The continuation is meant to be “or I’ll ban you,” but since you’re not on his server and he has 0 social capital outside that little environment to leverage against you, he is impotent.

https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-weak-strongman applies equally well to Trump, Putin, and the Lemmy.ml mods. I wonder why the similarity.

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

Mastodon shows you the votes just by clicking and seeing who liked the thing. No admin access necessary.

This is one among a few different reasons why hoping for votes to be private on Lemmy is a lost cause.

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

Yeah, but now they're on his radar. When he thinks of "Africa" now he has this frame of reference of these specific countries and leaders, and probably not much else that's specific.

I don't really know if these people had the option of gracefully just refusing to do the visit or participate in any way, but if there was any smooth way to do that, I think it would have been better. Both for their own personal dignity and the dignity of their people, and for their long term future.

Columbia University tried to appease Trump by punishing their protestors severely, and all it did was put them into the news cycle associated with "protestors" and get them punished even more harshly by Trump. Zelensky was invited to play this humiliation game, and pushed back instead, and Trump and Vance got very mad and made some shows of humiliating him, but nothing really happened. Because Trump's a punk, he's still pushing to send aid to Ukraine.

He's not some kind of Tito / Stalin figure where crossing him means your days are numbered. He's just an old man who's confused and mean, and generally gets distracted before he does much of anything. Just staying out of his field of awareness is better, if you can manage it, is my read of the situation.

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

I don't really think so. With some leaders, playing along with the theater might be humiliating but they might at least secure a better future for their people. With Trump, the prize they get for their humiliation is nothing. He's not organized enough to even follow through on whatever good things are supposedly due to them for their obeisance.

PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

Give it time… I feel like a lot of the creative web is sort of reawakening. A lot of the existing web and social media encourages and models this kind of slot machine interaction and I think it will take some time for people to come back to a more contributory tradition.

PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

Tito smoking Cuban cigars in the White House while sitting down with Nixon is also hilarious.

Nixon told him, “Mr. President, we don’t smoke in the White House.”

Tito laughed and said, “Lucky you!” and finished his cigar and no one attempted again to make him stop.

PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

This is where my real concern lies, the suspension AND partial application of habeas corpus is essentially – in my view – a casus belli due the public. Habeas corpus must be universal in its application by the state, or the federal-state must be seen as a direct threat to the civilian public. They’ve tested the waters on this already in prior protests. At what point do we admit that it’s no longer being honored by the federal-state and realize that we’ve been stripped of our right to accuse those who have wronged us – also part of due process – and take matters into our own hands to restore our rights?

Yeah. The entire concept of American governance was that the people in the country fight to maintain control of their own government, and then take responsibility for it running properly. We’ve wandered pretty far from that at this point. To a large degree because the tools that we might use to coordinate and organize the fight have been co-opted by people who want to run the government on their own behalf.

Apologies for the long winded response, apparently I had more to say on this than I realized. TL;DR we agree, apparently – as I’ve just come to realize – the only difference is that I believe that we’re already at war, just not entirely de facto.

Agreed. Yeah, I was talking just about what the desired end state should be once democracy is reestablished, not saying we shouldn’t be vigorously defending ourselves right now.

PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

Türkiye

PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

Yeah I think any time you hear someone in the “geopolitics” part of the government talk about antisemitism you can safely assume it’s that second thing.

PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

Older readers might be interested in this one.

Un called for

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

I'm addressing what you said, in a succinct way. If it's a little too unclear, then:

The real underlying question is ‘are those that violate social contacts due the protections of said social contracts’?

No, they're not. But, you have no idea who has violated the social contract unless you have due process.

Those that you're not sure yet have violated the social contract, because it hasn't been proven, are due the protections of said social contracts. Yes. That's the trial phase. Then, after that, we decide they might not be due the protection of the same social contract. That's the punishment phase. They're different. It is extremely popular in times of crisis to start to skip ahead to punishment without trial, as part of the official process, because things are so dire, and that's explicitly what this person was advocating for. That is wrong. Because you'll wind up punishing people who haven't violated any social contract at all.

Are we still bound by the rules of a contract that another party actively violated, in regards to that party?

No. But once it gets to a broad scale, and due process breaks down on all sides as people start a big melee for their own safety against their enemies, things can get very very bad.

Sometimes there's no way around that, of course. That's what we call a war. Maybe that's where we are headed. But deciding ahead of time that you're going to abandon due process within a civil society, because of how dangerous it is that your opponents want to abandon due process, is just hastening the phase of "might makes right." It's pretty hard to come back from that once it happens. A lot of people have had to grapple with this, notably the allies after World War 2 trying to figure out how to punish the guilty. If they'd gone with this "they're SO bad that they don't deserve due process" type of thing, Oskar Schindler would probably be dead.

If you answer yes, this leads to the ‘paradox of tolerance.’

No. Not having the trial and doing nothing, or having the trial and then not doing the punishment, is tolerance. Having the trial and then punishing is justice. Not having the trial and doing the punishment anyway is terror. I'm not aware of a time when that was the solution that didn't go horribly sideways almost instantly.

There are times when there was some massive crime against humanity and the paradox of tolerance prevented effective resolution, and it was very bad. Reconstruction is a good example. But just doing arbitrary punishment for anyone some random person decides is guilty is ten times worse. Even if you get it right 100% of the time, which you won't, it sets a precedent that is horrifyingly hard to stop once people have gotten in the habit.

Seems a little more clear spelled out that way?

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

Yeah. People said 100% the same thing about Hitler. He was a clown, he was the weird guy that came to fundraisers and scarfed all the food because he didn’t have any money, and scared away donors and political allies because he would get in their face yelling about Jews. Until, all of a sudden, his big opponents got sent to the camps or just killed, and it wasn’t funny.

They’re doing a great job at following the playbook so far. People are upset but no one’s really done that much to stop them, which means it will continue and get worse.

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PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

"I don't want this guy setting fire to our shared apartment building. That's a violation of the social contract. So I'm going to set fire to our shared apartment building. That'll show him."

PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

"Nothing compares to the excitement of stepping foot in the airport for the start of a summer holiday, and this new soundtrack perfectly captures those feelings,"

This is what happens when you don't have enough bullying in your schools

PhilipTheBucket @ponder.cat 8mo ago

This whole situation is rotten. 😞

Completely agree. Democracy just can't function if a third of the people in the country don't want it, and just want their faction to rule by force, and that's where we're at right now.

All I'm saying is that postwar Germany is probably the best I am aware of out of a selection of bad historical precedents for how you recover from that situation into something approximating a stable and safe society. Organized trials with due process for anyone who killed innocent people or otherwise participated in the worst of the horrors, and acceptance of the idea that a lot of people, especially at the bottom of the org chart, just aren't going to "get it" that anything that they did was wrong.

I think once the tribalism gets engaged firmly in people's heads, where their faction is the one with God on its side and anyone who's an enemy deserves to be snuffed out, you can't really fix them from the outside. They have to either come to it themselves, or not, and in the meantime life has to move on as best it can. The problem with Germany as a precedent is that there was someone from outside to come and impose it...

Edit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCHeFjADTTs