The law should be revoked. I would not assume that the legislature is more legitimate than the local prosecutor who decides not to enforce. Often this situation happens when the legislature is captured by special interests who are unconcerned with popular will (and the risk of resistance), or by a national government trying to micromanage local and personal affairs.

I suspect the 'affirmative action' trend also reflects the difference in ambition/drive between the low-income high achievers and the >70% high achievers. The low income group is smaller than the >70% group (look at the size of the 'above average odds' regios and the 'below average odds' regions). This is because most of the people in the low income group will never even apply for a private college -- only the strongest applicants apply. But from the >70% group, basically every kid applies to college, and they are much more comfortable applying for 'reach' colleges (even if it costs their parents a few hundred extra dollars). They've also gamed their test scores.

It's apparently based on this painting (with apollo at the table, and bachus in the foreground) https://musee-magnin.fr/en/node/19

But more importantly, even if it were based on the Last Supper, I don't think this performance would necessarily be mocking Christianity.

If you are up for a big, dense piece of 1950s social philosophy, Hannah Arendt's "Origins of Totalitarianism" is a classic. It covers imperialism, racism, mob violence, antisemitism, propaganda, tolerance for lies, and the development of mythologies. It's got a lot of ideas - many of which have been challenged. It's also excessively wordy. One thing to keep in mind is that most of the components have been around for a long time -- supremacist ideologies, conspiracy theories, propaganda systems.

Rich folk are also good at gaming all the other criteria (varsity sports, extracurricular achievements). "opportunity hoarding" I think is the term that's been used, or resume padding. It's also about being able to pay full tuition.

Perhaps the first thing was realizing that this is my life and it's up to me how to live it -- 'society' doesn't get to put any demands on me, and my life will be what it will be. With that being said, I probably lucked out to have parents who gave me opportunities without imposing burdensome expectations, and studying philosophy helped me to not follow them down paths that I thought were misguided, even when they put some mild pressure on me. Books are always a good way to realize that you aren't the only one with these doubts and ideas.

Second, is I have a decent job, which gives me some economic and social status. In some ways this was straight forward for me -- I was always studious and there always seemed to be some sort of obvious opportunity ahead of me that I was ready to pursue. There were several times when I seriously doubted the path I was on and felt a lot of anxiety, but things worked out eventually.

I don't have everything I want, and I see a lot of places I could improve in my time management and interpersonal interactions, but I feel pretty stable overall.

Yeah, obviously need the first that that will kill you. We take breathable air for granted. But if you need an infinite supply of clean air, you are probably dead anyway. An infinite supply of water has many uses beyond drinking and hygine -- irrigation, power, and cooling come to mind as very useful post-apocalypse.

Interesting. One potential difficulty in implementation would be the creation of a believable decoy conversation (for the dictator to read) -- but LLMs might be able to automate this.

Note that both qoto.org and newsie.social are moderated as "silence" on the Tier 0 list. Please don't block them! I have no objection to them being silenced/limited. My understanding is that it will only affect the federated timeline (though I'm not sure about boosts -- they are not mentioned in the documentation). It may be worthwhile to silence everything on this list while you decide if blocking is needed.

I skimmed over the Oliphant unified tier 0 blocklist, and it does not block any instances that I interact with, for what that's worth. I am a bit concerned with the idea of routinely updating the block list based on the Oliphant algorithm. I suspect that the Oliphant project has a tendency to attract administrators who most enthusiastic about blocking. The justifications that I see for blocking would often apply to a lot of mainstream/establishment opinion in the USA (and probably more so in GA).

That said, I'm fully in favor of blocking obnoxious sites simply for the purpose of maintaining a pleasant and productive environment. For instance, brighton.social is on the tier0 list -- this is basically a conspiracy theory propaganda mill; the local feed screams paranoia. I'd support blocking brighton.social purely to protect theATL users from wandering into a conversation prompted by their nonsense. I consider this to be the same as public parks having a policy that people need to clean up after their dogs. I consider it very unpleasant to be at the receiving end of a propaganda firehose, even if the propaganda is not personally threatening. (I don't know if this captures the entire story for why they are on the blocklist -- there could be other problems with them)

I did notice two sizable instances that are often considered "borderline problematic" in the defederation debates -- and both were set to "silence" rather than "suspend". One, is newsie.social (where Decaturish is located). I vaguely remember some criticisms about newsie.social a few months back -- I think part of it was that people were reposting or repeating opinions that published in the Washington Post or New York Times. Many of the critics wanted nothing to do with journalists. As we've seen with the BBC instance, there are a decent number of people in the fediverse who would block those mainstream publishers, either because they have different standards from mainstream society or because they simply don't want that experience on their Mastodon instance. I wouldn't necessarily take their 'block' as meaning that the instance is anything we'd consider horrible.

The other 'borderline' instance I saw silenced was "QOTO" -- this instance is controversial because its policy is to only defederate when absolutely necessary (e.g. spam overwhelms the server). Many other instances block QOTO either because they view this as aiding hate-mongers, or because they just want to keep the hate-monges a couple steps removed from them. (Disclaimer, my account was hosted on Qoto before I came here)

So I guess I don't have a clear opinion here. I think even tier0 may be a bit too stringent, but i can't suggest a better way to quickly distinguish between those that are exceptionally horrible and those that are everyday horrible. Perhaps just silence them, and treat that as a strike, so that if we have any problems with harassment we quickly block the whole server. I suspect that some need to be blocked outright -- if you look at Qoto's blocklist, that could give you a small number that are absolutely intolerable.

I was just pondering something similar -- a lot of the current weirdness seems to come from a refusal to face mortality head on. They start reaching for straws, hoping that there is some magic elixir that will save them, then getting angry when there isn't one.

Hi Michael and everyone. I wrote up some general notes for thinking about this...

#The need for community-level moderation:

I think most Mastodon users get by fine with the standard individual-level options -- you follow people you find interesting and block people who act obnoxious when you encounter them. There's no algorithm pushing obnoxious content onto your 'home' feed, nor is it easy for harassers to discover your posts. The first level of discovery is the 'local timeline' -- this is the main place where members of TheATL.social interact with each other, and why the top priority is to have good moderation of content posted on TheATL.social itself. We already has a clear set of policies for members of the community.

These same moderation policies can be applied to members of other communities -- blocking those who violate our rules from interacting with members of our community. However, this strategy has some limitations -- first, it effectively asks our moderators to moderate the entire Fediverse, which is an impossible task, especially when harassers may have multiple accounts. It also leaves our users exposed to coordinated harassment campaigns across communities -- as long as the harassers are allowed to keep their accounts, they can swarm one target after another and systematically drive anyone they dislike off Mastodon.

Finally, I think we also need to consider indirect interactions, such as slander. It's not enough for a user to be shielded from abusive messages if the abuser continues to spread rumors among the user's acquaintances. For this reason, I'd be inclined to simply cut off any community that allows an abuser to participate... though of course, we don't have the resources to litigate slander accusations.

#What are the options for community-level moderation?

The Mastodon software provides three options for Moderating entire websites. 'Suspend' (aka defederation/block) is a complete block; 'limiting' (aka silencing) will only prevent content from showing on the federated timeline (If I understand it correctly); 'reject media' will avoid copying/showing any images.

TheATL.social currently blocks 5 servers (1 is a subdomain) (see 'Moderated Servers'). My understanding is that this is a pretty light touch in terms of typical Mastodon moderation. Other community administrators have created long lists of communities that they consider problematic, and others have compiled these into composite blocklists such as Oliphant. Communities can be placed on these lists for a wide range of reasons, so there's some risk of going along with over-zealous blocking.

Note also that individual users can import these blocklists -- so they can hide themselves from these communities, but doing it alone means that a user may be cut out of conversations that their other friends/contacts/acquaintances are participating in.

The 'selective enforcement' occurred because strict enforcement would be much more expensive than what anyone wanted -- yet a fanatical minority was able to play games in Congress to repeatedly block bipartisan deals for "comprehensive immigration reform" (under Bush, Obama, and Biden).

Flesh-toned shirts always bother me

Their bias is a direct response to the rhetoric from the 'leaders' of the AI industry, who have collected billions of dollars and turned it into BS expectations.

live and let live

syncretism is my default. The only reason to choose one at the exclusion of another is if conclusions are based on fundamentally different assumptions. For example, ancient stoics would borrow from Epicureans when they made a good point. Likewise, Thomas Jefferson borrowed from both John Locke and others when drafting the Declaration of Independence. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15f6pl/comment/c7m1fpn/

I get an XML doc here: https://roughdraftatlanta.com/rss

It includes a few paragraphs plus metadata for each story

If you are interested in continuing to discuss Stoicism, I'm currently studying it and made a Lemmy community for discussion https://yall.theatl.social/c/philosophy_of_life