FoxAndKitten

The paradox of tolerance is such a ridiculous notion to me. It's like someone responded to a bad faith argument and the idea caught fire.

There's no paradox. Tolerance doesn't mean you tolerate people punching you (or a bystander) in the face, it means you tolerate who they are - not what they do.

I'm a Jew, and if I run into an old school, final solution Nazi I'm going to think "wow, what a stupid piece of shit excuse for a human being". As a person, I'm going to judge them for being dumb and having terrible moral character, but I'm going to tolerate them.

Now, if I catch them holding a rally, painting swastikas, or just overhear them advocating for the theoretical extermination of my bloodlines, I'm going to react accordingly. That's not about who they are, that's about what they're doing - they can believe whatever they want in their heart of hearts, but the moment they try to spread that shit it's an act of violence, and it demands an appropriate response.

If they spread their nonsense in some private corner of the Internet, you fight back with words. You don't virtually chase them into an echo chamber beyond your reach or into isolation - just because you're on the right side doesn't make your actions right.

By attacking them for who they are (an idiot susceptible to dangerous ideology), you feed their delusions and cut off opportunities for a better take to be hammered into them.

Deplatforming them is a serious thing. When it's just words, correct them, maybe mock them. Deplatforming is what you do only when they organize - you break that shit up, because it transitions from a shitty take to a group that is making increasingly credible threats. And when they start to actually act, you do what you have to do so they fear showing their colors.

You have to police actions - never identity. First you remove the ability to do harm, then you pull them back from the fringes and let them rejoin society (so long as they can abide social norms).

And in doing that, there's no conflict. The paradox only appears when you start to overreach, and at that end lies a different flavor of fascism - theirs is prejudice, on ours is ideological. Regardless, it's still fascism - fascism is all about going after whoever "doesn't belong", regardless of criteria

Tolerance means everyone belongs, it's a nice clear line that has no contradictions - everyone belongs, but you still police actions (including words) appropriately

So I've heard tankies defined as "someone who specifically supports the centralized, authorization flavor of communism practiced by the USSR". They also often mention worship of Stalin and Mao, and a revisionist version of history supporting such a stance

This seems odd to me, especially since a group of tankies flocked early to a decentralized platform geared for long-form discussions

Personally, I believe capitalism is an ideological virus. You can trace a clear path from the Roman empire to the modern day, where a hyper-specialized society eradicated every other system of resource husbandry by sloppily harvesting as quick as possible and using that advantage to gangpress everyone else into service under them (and destroying anything that would even slightly slow down the process )

I don't think communism is the answer, because I don't think it's a path we can walk without first curing the disease, but the guiding concepts resonate with me.

So in that light, I'd like to ask in good faith:

Self-identified tankies - how do you define a tankie?

I have an interesting protocol for this.

Moonlight rituals. The idea is, you get a bunch of people together, say 20-50, in the same place at the same time. Everyone opens an app, and it takes control of the screens and gives semi-random actions - like hold up your phone to the user to the left of you, get everyone in a circle with phone screens on your chest and walk forward, enter the middle of the circle and slowly spin around, hold it up to take a picture of the moon...

The idea is, you constantly change the screen, take synchronized pictures, record audio, get flickers in gps signals, record fluctuations in the magnomiter.

The idea is to synchronize everything with millisecond precision, randomly take snapshots both across the group and between groups, and use all this to corroborate the fact that there was one user per phone present at this point in space and time. By using reality to generate enormously complex data sets, you can make it arbitrarily difficult to simulate, and doing it in real time could use cheap hardware and require processing orders of magnitude faster to spoof.

Doesn't matter how much processing you throw at it - a system like this would theoretically be able to measure gravity waves and stellar radiation - no way you to measure that and adjust your data before you time out the recording window

On top of nodes doing all this, you'd build a web of trust with random nodes spot-checking each other.

It's crazy and impractical, but I love the idea just because it's turning technology to magic - making group rituals to authenticate is just such a fun concept to me

My big thought is this: one bot-infested instance could get anyone up to infinite "karma". So, direct "karma" doesn't work.

Now, you could do some simple stats, and be like "how many lemming's worth of karma do you have, taking an instance's active population divided by your share of 'karma'".

IDK - I like stupid internet points. I never cared how much other people had of them, but it's fun to watch mine go up. It's gamification in the most pure state - quantifying something to make it more pleasurable

I think it's best they remain pointless, and someone's 'karma' only appear when you click on their profile... but it'd be a shame if there was no way to earn them. Even if you received a total per-server, it's just fun