Mastodawn

LISTEN, I survey a lot of more social media; more than most of you ever do, and I can tell you this with some certainty.

99.999% of all social posts we see — even by the most famous scholars historians, journalists and pundits — are all about the contours or specific examples of our “MAGA/Trump” problem. It’s become a kind of national horror-porn. A bottomless well of nutrients for doom-scrollers that is powering the (often-shrinking) careers of many respected people and institutions, but …

has very little value beyond that.

Sadly, perhaps even tragically, a much bigger problem is that almost none of them are proposing or even promoting any solutions to any part of our problems.

Diagnosing socio-political problems is really pretty easy: almost anybody can do it. And almost everyone has in some form or another.

But proposing even pieces of solutions — or even some process to arrive at solutions — requires some degree of intellectual courage.

Unfortunately very few of the …

people we want so desperately to respect have very much of said courage. And that, in my view, is America’s — and perhaps the modern world’s — biggest single problem.

And we’re all partly to blame for this by allowing our society to evolve with almost no mechanisms for respecting or transmitting any form of traditions, norms, or rules of order from one generation to the next. Most of us don’t trust anyone anymore, because there are no accepted community frameworks for building and sharing …

that trust. Almost everyone seems to be largely working with norms and values assimilated from popular culture. Especially from television and films. This is why so much of what politicians say sounds so cliché. Because it is cliché. They watch and learn from the same video dreck we’ve all been bombarded with since we were children. Few ever read or study philosophy or the classic literature anymore, once the transmission mechanism for most shared human values. Hell, many don’t read …

anything at all anymore. They get their learning from pop culture and entertainment, not from any kind of accepted frameworks for what life and society should value.

If religion ever did have any real value, it was at least providing frameworks that a large number of people would abide by. It’s no longer a big (or admitted) part of most people’s lives, but nothing has replaced it as a transmission source for shared values.

And MAGA has exploited all these conditions and cultural failures. …

By routinely and forcefully shouting down almost any credible positions or opinions, they have made it very risky for anyone with status or stature to speak up on just about everything.

Consequently, few speak much at all, but when they do, it’s mostly outrage, outcry, or contempt for what’s happening to us. Proposing even the smallest practical steps we MIGHT take is left to the “extremists” who we’re all implicitly taught to distrust because, well, “they’re extremists.” As a result, the …

closest we come to reforming anything is untenable demands such as “Abolish Ice,” as if that was really some kind of easily effected solution. It’s not remotely that. It’s just political rhetoric with absolutely no serious operational value. But someone with proposals to “Reform Ice” will never even be heard, because magnifying such reasonable proposals carries that inherent risk that either MAGA or the Left will shout it down, mock it, or ignore it. No one wants to be seen shouting into a …

void that gets little if any popular reaction. It just feels too weak and ineffectual. (That’s where the lack of courage is best seen). This is merely one small example. There are thousands of others across the entire landscape of critical issues we face.

Just ask yourself when was the last time you saw somebody definitely reposting any kind of solution (even bad ones) to anything, as opposed to just one more piece of token evidence that we live in a badly broken society on a very …

dangerous and dark path. But you’ can see the non-productive memes and agitprop — the junk food of social media — reposted literally thousands of times a minute wherever you look.

We have to develop a means to surface the people with the courage to surface tangible ideas and make everyone else aware of them. It’s the only way we will ever move past this toxic political agitprop posing as serious discourse that just generates more Gummy Bears for doom-scrollers.

Daytona Slim Feb 5

Abolishing ICE is not a radical idea. Just open the borders, immigration policy is and always has been racist. The main reason people come to this country is because our imperialist foreign policy ruined their country. I genuinely do not give a fuck if I offend you by pointing out your petty bourgeois white supremacist worldview for what it is.

Daytona Slim Feb 5

@shoq
GTFOOH with that “reforming ICE is reasonable, abolishing ICE is irrational” bullshit.

Spineless people like you are why this country is sliding into fascism.

And when ice isn’t abolished you will say what? Oh, but it should have been! That isn’t useful for anything but your own rhetorical satisfaction. I am not defending ICE by suggesting that it can be reformed and turned into what it was supposed to be, which is not what it is now. And my larger Point didn’t have anything to do with ice anyway. But I don’t think you much cared about my larger point. You wanted to vent your ideological spleen, and now you have. Moving on.

Oh, and perhaps my post immediately prior to that one will be more to your liking:
https://bsky.app/profile/shoq.bsky.social/post/3me4qw5fhun2q

Shoq (@shoq.bsky.social)

Few seem to realize (or say out loud) that immigration is just pretext for ICE. It’s Trump’s (Stephen Miller’s) private police (that will enforce “fair elections” we are promised). Sound familiar? This is what ICE really is. Wake up and pass it on.⏵ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schutzstaffel

Bluesky Social

Doug Wade Feb 5

@shoq for me, calling out Abolish ICE as your example here is enacting the same paralyzing effect that you are describing in your broader point. I find the abolition of ICE to be a reasonable, concrete step that people are proposing, and I perceive its use as an example here as being a more thoughtful and well-articulated version of the phenomenon you’re describing.

Doug Wade Feb 5

@shoq which is not to say that any of your point is incorrect, but that I was kind of hoping it would model how you imagine an improvement to social media by including another proposal or something similar.

I intend to implement a few of things, and soon. Those I can’t discuss yet. But generally, social media suffers mostly from lack of effort. Many interesting apps have been possible for 20+ years. We decided to be content with the Facebook/Twitter model. Even the Fediverse is still basically “status updates” at is core. There has been nothing really new in a long, long time. We’ve been living in the aftermath of a tech fever dream that pretended to be innovative.

It’s no different than the abolish the police movement in the first place. that was an equally extremist take that even Black communities hated, And this is impossible to separate from that. Same rhetorical driver, similar context. When you have to explain what you don’t mean by a slogan, you’re already losing politically. We may just disagree on our fundamental take on what practical and achievable politics are in the USA. And that would probably be the case during good and more reasonable …

times, which these are not :)

Doug Wade Feb 6

@shoq I see abolish ICE and abolish police differently, because I am unaware of other alternatives to policing, but know of lots of other ways to enforce immigration law, like fining employers who hire undocumented workers. Abolish ICE to me means ending the practice of treating individual immigrants as threats to “homeland security.” I suspect our disconnect is that I think of moving immigration enforcement from DHS to DOL as abolishing ICE, and you think of it as reforming.

Doug Wade Feb 6

@shoq but more than anything, I’m just glad to hear you’ve got a project in the pipeline because I really just wanna believe people’ve got ideas about how to move forward and hope for the future.