rhythmisaprancer

themeatbridge, 6 months ago

Conservativism has evolved over the last 40 years, but at its core, it has remained consistent in having precisely one priority: the self. Conservatives define the self, and conversely the other, and then determine which policies and priorities benefit the self. The other is anything that stands in opposition to the promotion of the self.

There is no foundational ideology and no inherent identity of the self. It is simply whoever the conservative wants to include on their team.

Viewed through this lens, every decision or statement made by conservatives is entirely rational. There is no requirement to remain internally consistent views. The only consideration for a conservative is “does this benefit me right now?”

Demonizing Biden is best for conservatives because hate is a powerful motivator for voters. Their base does not need reasons to hate the other, regardless of their choices or beliefs.

There is no hypocrisy in conservativism because there is no objective standard or ideology beyond protecting and promoting the self, and the self is whatever conservatives decide exists within the self. The self is good, and the other is bad. Everything else is negotiable.

To someone who is not conservative, this looks like hypocrisy. See: The only Moral Abortion is My Abortion, or The Card Says Moops, or Gun Control for Black Panthers, or My Daughter is a LGBTQ+ so now LGBTQ+ are People, or It isn’t “Drag” when I do it, or But my state deserves FEMA Funding, or Regulate this industry because it is a threat to me, or My sex scandal is a private matter so please respect my privacy, or Election fraud exists and I’ll prove it, or I’m a job creator so please bail me out, or just take literally any conservative talking point and you will find conservatives who are suddenly the exception to their own rule.

That’s the feature of conservativism that is so appealing. It’s like having a personal God that will forgive any transgression as long as you believe and pray for forgiveness. Being part of the self is like a warm blanket, and as long as you agree to maintain the farce, you get to stay under its protection.

This isn’t new information. Conservatives have always existed, under different banners and with different definitions of the self. Trump has laid bare the grift, abusing it past the point of credibility. That’s his hold, that to oust Trump is to abandon the ruse, and conservatives can’t do that. That’s why they will try very hard to make him a member of the Other. They will claim they were duped, that he was a secret Democrat, that he was never one of them. But he was always one of them, even when he was a Democrat.

jettrscga, 6 months ago

I think you’re describing diffusion versus the typical reflection where all light continues in the same direction. In this case the light diffuses, scattering in every direction. Because of that scattering, no specific point will receive a significant amount of energy to burn anything.

http://www.physicsclassroom.com/Class/refln/u13l1d3.gif

Prouvaire, 7 months ago

This is one of the biggest issues and barriers to discoverability with the Fediverse in my opinion.

As I understand it, unless an instance has already subscribed to a community (magazine in kbin parlance), then in order to make that community (magazine) appear in your own instance, you need to:

• First search for the community (including the community's home instance) name in the magazine search function.
• The search will come up blank, but the act of searching for it will trigger a backend request for your instance to start federating content from that community. However there's no message to tell you that it's doing that. It just looks like that community doesn't exist.
• Further, it may take up to several days (in my experience) for federation to start, ie, you have to repeat the search for the community and only then can you subscribe to (follow) that community
• And when it does start, it only starts grabbing new content. So first it looks like the community doesn't exist, then it takes a long time for content to appear, and then it looks like the community is sparsely populated unless you go back to the community's home instance, rather than staying in your own instance, to catch up on old content.
• Further pinned posts aren't federated (at least between lemmy and kbin I believe), so you can't even rely on a "here's what you need to know" introductory post to orient new members.

Contrast this to reddit, where (because it's a centralised system) searching for a subreddit produces immediate results, you can join a subreddit immediately, and you can immediately see all current and past content for that subreddit. Much more intuitive and useful to users.

Unfortunately the activitypub protocol that underlies lemmy and kbin doesn't appear to have been designed for reddit-like communities in mind. Ie communities that tend to feature long-form content, posted relatively sporadically, and where having access to the community's archive is very useful to members. It works somewhat better for twitter-like communities where it's easier to jump in "mid-stream" and - because posts tend to be only a few words long - you're more likely to start seeing new content after only a short delay.

I wish that this is something that's addressed at the Fediverse level.