@rndeon My "I do not consent to instruction via Socratic method" T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt, which is explicitly what I do not want.
I sat in on the kickoff meeting for the "AI-Curated Democratic Discourse" project for JSALT at Johns Hopkins Engineering. The team is spending the summer on new user interfaces for encouraging productive discourse in online discussions -- building it with a new Mastodon Web UI and using the fediverse discourse as a base. I am extremely encouraged by this project.
One of the most important things for me in the further development of the fediverse is that we don't have any obligation to mindlessly ape the commercial social networks. We can build social interactions that serve our own needs, enhance our relationships, and make our lives better.
I talked about this in 2020. I will bang on this drum forever.
@eamon@troublewithwords I think we fall into the trap of accepting received biases that there are exceptions. Like: that is a bad neighborhood, their country has a troubled past, they don't belong here, they have committed some unforgivable fault. They are a continuum, a condition, and not a collection of real human beings.
@eamon@troublewithwords so, we have to work proactively to identify and correct these systems that deny people full rights and participation in human thriving.
I realized after posting this that I am actually a time traveler from 1974, although I took the scenic route to get here. No regrets, wouldn't have skipped a minute of the trip.
@evan I mean, there seems to be parallels with Vietnam, where we accepted a lot of Vietnamese immigrants displaced by our foreign policy (also Afghanistan?).
I don't know that I'd want to immigrate to a country bearing responsibility for destroying my home, but I think we're obligated to accept them if they do.
One very cool, very normal thing that non-war-criminals do is threaten collective punishment in retaliation for potential indictments on human rights violations
Another cool normal thing that happens in lots of modern democracies is when a senior cabinet minister threatens to bring down the government unless it commits genocide.