Did you read the article? I think it does a pretty good job of explaining what the author means by that phrase. The author articulates her concept of a “far center” (as opposed to far right and far left), which she describes as people who take liberal values to reactionary extremes, valuing civility over justice, etc.
The far center is for free speech and bourgeois institutions; it is against cancel culture, student protests, and radicalism of any kind. Yet it rejects the idea of a shared ideology or politics. Instead, its members see themselves as independently sane individuals — concerned citizens who wish only to defend civil society from the unbearable encroachments of politics. So the far center is liberal, in that its highest value is freedom; but it is also reactionary, in that its vision of freedom lacks any corresponding vision of justice.
@thelucky8@beehaw.org, when you’re posting obvious satire as genuine news, you might need to take a step back and do some self evaluation. You’ve been posting a lot of articles with a pretty clear point of view, and if you’re not concerned about veracity or quality then you might want to slow down and think a bit more, no?
I actually also think it’s probably both, to a degree, that’s just not what the author of the article is arguing. I think there’s probably a certain amount of persuasion that is pulling people deeper into a belief system that they might only be partially invested in at first, and then they are sucked into ecosystems that reinforce those beliefs and pull them further in. I don’t have anything but vibes and lots of half-remembered reading about online radicalization, though.
You’re right, but I think they are using the term “brainwashing” in a colloquial sense. There’s a perception that misinformation on the internet is persuading people into more extreme views, but what the author of this article is arguing is that what is happening more is that online misinformation is allowing people to easily justify beliefs that they have already formed, and quickly and easily get rid of cognitive dissonance associated with encountering information that contradicts their beliefs. This is something that people have always done, but it’s become so easy on the modern internet that more and more people are embracing fringe worldviews who might previously have been unable to cognitively support those views.
It’s a small difference in the way we think about misinformation online, but I think it’s important that we understand what is likely happening. It’s not so much that misinformation is changing people’s beliefs, but that it’s allowing people to hang onto beliefs that contradict reality more easily.
So I’m not an expert in nuclear weaponry. However, more modern warheads don’t somehow magically vaporize everything within a certain radius and then not cause effects outside that radius - that’s not how things work. They may have a larger fireball, which is the area within which things (and people) are going to be vaporized, but they still have very large areas where people will receive burns decreasing in severity depending on distance, and (if the warhead is detonated at ground level) radiation doses that will kill within 5 days to 1 month. Check out Nukemap to see those areas in different scenarios. Here’s one that I did for a ground burst of a 800 kt Topol warhead. You can see that the areas for radiation are larger than the fireball itself, and the areas for 2nd and 3rd degree burns are quite large. Setting one of these off anywhere populated would cause an immense amount of human suffering even if the folks in the ~220m fireball never saw it coming.
I’ve wondered before if my perception of headlights being so much brighter was them really getting brighter, cars getting taller, my eyes getting older, or a combination of all those (and other) factors. It seems like there might be a few things going on, but it does definitely look like lights are getting a lot brighter, and I’m obviously not the only one to be frustrated by it…
Hey @UngodlyAudrey@beehaw.org, I know we don’t really know each other and I’m just a random dude on the internet but I’m shattered for you and other folks like you that are rightly scared by this outcome. I’m raising kids in this nightmare and I’m terrified of what they’re going to face growing up. I don’t know what to do either. I know this is all empty words but it’s what I’ve got right now.
Yeah Firefox on Android is extremely so for me at times. I’ve never noticed it specifically being on the first page load after a while, but I haven’t been paying that much attention. I use firefox on mobile so that I can install ublock, because when I’ve tried to use a DNS-based solution in the pass I ran into all kinds of issues with battery drain, but the experience does leave a little to be desired at times.
I saw this headline and expected something very different than what I got, and I’m really glad. I think the last decade has made me really cynical about technology and the internet, for some good reasons, to the point where a story like this is almost surprising. I found myself a little caught off guard by how emotional I got while reading it. Thank you for posting this.
I suspect their argument would be that they are more like a flea market. If you buy something fake or faulty at a flea market then the flea market probably isn’t liable, the seller is. Now, I don’t think this argument holds water, especially in light of Amazon’s practice of combining all of the stock of a single product into one place, regardless of who the seller is, so that there’s no way to know if you’ll actually get product from that seller.
Hi @rosethornRangerTTV. I can see you’ve just recently joined our instance, so let me first say: Welcome!
While you’re here, please keep in mind the ethos of Beehaw when interacting with other folks in the comments - Be(e) Nice. We’re working hard to make Beehaw a pleasant little corner of the internet that is welcoming and inclusive.
I personally don’t have any issues with something like this being posted in !politics, but @coyotino’s question is valid. I think in the future it wouldn’t hurt to include a question (or questions) related to your ideas to help get discussion started, or link to an article expanding on the idea that you’re interested in discussing. Regardless, I’m glad you’re here, and I hope you enjoy the community that we’re working to build.
Reports should work even if you’re registered on another Lemmy instance, but they might be broken if you’re browsing from Kbin. Kbin’s federation is a hot mess and we’ve had a lot of issues with it.
I don’t have a problem with this thread. I was already aware of it, I’m aware it’s borderline editorializing, but honestly I think it’s funny and I’m not going to be a stickler when it isn’t harming anyone or making the community worse off. I’m more concerned with editorialized headlines if/when they are misleading or don’t reflect the actual contents of the article. If this starts to be a trend, we’ll address it, but as a one off it’s not a big deal.
Hi Tomato - a lot of what you’re saying here has already been addressed elsewhere in the thread. The OP isn’t just addressing Lemmy, but other Fediverse services like Mastodon as well. He also notes in the article several people who been addressing ways in which Fediverse culture has been toxic to black users. These aren’t imagined problems, they exist in a lot of places off of and on Lemmy, and providing suggestions to make these sites better for black users is a good thing, not something to get defensive about. This post isn’t accusing you personally of anything, but if you feel challenged by it then it might be a good opportunity for you to interrogate those feelings.
Also, others have addressed your comments about not seeing other’s race online, etc, but I think it’s worth taking a step back and pausing. If people of color say they experience racism online, even though you don’t notice what race other people are, do you think it’s possible that there may be systemic problems or unconscious biases that might cause those folks to experience racism even when it is unintended? Those are the kinds of problems that aren’t solved by saying “I don’t say racist things to people and I don’t see color”. They’re problems that are built into our society just by the fact that we were all born and raised in an imperfect culture.
Nobody is accusing anyone of anything here, and nobody is trying to make anyone feel ashamed of who they are. But we can all benefit from stopping, thinking about the ways that we interact with others, and taking the time to try and be sure that we aren’t acting in ways that harm others even if that isn’t our intent or we weren’t aware of the harm in the first place.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this, but please remember:
I was reminded of the trend of Milkshaking a few years ago. That wikipedia article includes a quote from a Vice Article on the trend that refers back to Serbian resistance as well.
But there’s a method to all this dairy-based madness. Milkshaking can be seen within a tradition of nonviolent civil disobedience known as “dilemma action”. A term coined by Serbian activists in the 1990s, dilemma action creates a lose-lose situation for the opposition. It’s a genius move reserved for some of the absolute worst people in our society, because there’s no good way to respond to a milkshaking: do nothing and you look like a twat, or fight back and look like you’re overreacting. Plus, a milkshake will really mess up your suit. Still, that’s not to say you should go out and do it, unless you want to risk arrest: the guy who milkshaked Farage has since been charged with assault, after all.
Other commenters provided feedback that was given in good faith. Those replies were left up. I hope you can see why we might consider jumping straight to comparing the poster to Hitler when you disagree with their well intentioned post about how to better be anti-racist on Fediverse communities to be a bit problematic.
I agree completely. We do work hard to keep things inclusive and nice™ on Beehaw, but Technology is our largest and most active community by a fair margin, and sometimes folks don’t respect the vibe on the instance when they comment - either because they don’t realize what instance the post is on, or because they don’t understand or maybe don’t care to understand the ethos of the instance.
We’ve done some cleanup in the thread, but removals can take time to federate (if they federate at all, which is not guaranteed in my experience. Hopefully the discussion from here out will be more inclusive, but we’ll be keeping a closer eye on the thread in any case.
We’ve removed some of the comments in this thread for expressing the exact racist sentiments which would warrant this type of post and for arguing in bad faith. This is a perfectly salient conversation to be having in this community so we will be leaving this thread up, but as a reminder, please engage in good faith and be nice. If you don’t want to have conversations about anti-racism in Technology then I suggest you unsubscribe from this community and others on Beehaw.
On a personal note: I would be absolutely thrilled to see more, better discussions of the intersections of areas like race, gender, and sexuality with technology, and fewer arguments about which Linux distro is better.
Yeah, a good bit of the article is dedicated to pointing out that there are a whole swathe of public “intellectuals” who describe themselves as Liberals but are shallow and regressive in their actual ideas.