JollyG

joined 2 years ago
[–] JollyG 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Political hobbyists are people who consume political content, but don't do anything substantive with it. There probably are MAGA types who are political hobbyists, but the movement in general is extremely politically active, organized, motivated, and effective across all levels of public life. They influence conservative politics through those organizational efforts. The MAGA movement came to power by leveraging networks of activists and voters to build political infrastructure that could be used to drive voters to the polls, fund candidates, coordinate campaigns and set the scope of policy, which they do very effectively. If you want to be effective you should be building political networks too.

Also, this is an aside, but political messaging is way less effective at persuasion than your comments here suggest. In practice this type of messaging tends to only reach people who already agree with it, and the persuasive effects of media on political attitudes have very weak effects that are attenuated quickly (Look up something called the hypodermic model of mass communication if you want to know more). Benkler, Faris, and Robberts offer really good illustrations of this in practice. By analyzing the spread of political messaging in news and social media networks, they show that most of the misinformation, lies, and propaganda that circulate through conservative media spaces do so because conservative media consumers want that content and punish outlets that criticize it. Creating 'counter messaging' is unlikely to be effective because conservatives would just reject the messaging.

[–] JollyG 56 points 1 week ago (10 children)

I am writing this with the assumption that you are tacitly asking about US politics because of the moment in history. What I have to say will make people mad, but here goes:

A lot of the people on this webzone are what Eitan Hersh called "political hobbyists". These are people who do not really take political action in their daily life despite voting or occasionally attending a rally. They may be well informed about politics, but being well-informed in itself is not really effective at changing politics. You can get on your phone and "rub the glass" to complain about politics, or to find people who agree with you. But outrage on social media won't change anything, and if rubbing the glass and occasionally voting is all you do, then you are a political hobbyist.

Political hobbyism mostly functions as a consumerist approach to political engagement. A political hobbyist will passively receive news and information about politics, but will never really try to change anything, because to them engaging in a news feed is all they really do. That consumerism is painfully apparent here when, for example, posters denounce a Democratic candidate as being "not exciting" or someone they are "not passionate about" as if the candidate was the newest model in a brand of laptops that failed to zazzle in Q3. We see signs of political hobbyism again when political parties are treated as entities that are somehow completely separate from the public. For example when a lemmy user denounces the Democratic party for not doing what they want. "The Democrats need to do X!" Why are you complaining about that on the internet? You know the DNC isn't reading these threads right?

If you really wanted to influence the Democratic party (which I think is the best bet for resisting fascism right now) why aren't you lobbying the party? Why aren't you mobilizing voter bases? Why aren't you building political power in your local community so you can influence larger political organizations? Because its hard, because you don't know where to start, because you are busy? Ok, but fascism is coming, and you are too busy to do anything about it. Or too overwhelmed to even try?

The truth is, if you wanted your ideas (and I am including here opposition to fascism as an idea) to influence policy, or what candidates gain traction in nomination races, then you should have been working on that LOOOOONNNNNG before the national candidate was nominated. Treating the Democratic party as a vendor that offers political products is a losing strategy for gaining influence. There will be an endless parade of glass rubbers ready to denounce the various political parties, but by and large, they didn't do anything to gain influence with those parties. Their denouncements are ignored, they are irrelevant. My advice is to ignore the glass-rubbers. Identify one or two local issues in your physical area and try to improve them. What you should do is find a little slice of America (or your own country if you are not American) and try to make it better. Use those efforts to build up influence at higher levels. My goal here was to convince you not to listen to the glass rubbers. But my advice for resisting fascism is: Try to build political networks, try to mobilize local voters in local issue elections. Doing this will make your network an invaluable asset to larger (state and national) organizations. If you have a network of voters, of issue conscious citizens, or donors, larger organizations are going to want to leverage that network when it comes time for lager races. That gives you leverage. That gives you power. The glass-rubbers are going to tell you that is impossible. Its not. People do it all the time. The book I cited has examples of people doing it. Fascist conservative groups do it all the time. So why not you?

I will admit, this is hard. When I first read Hersh's book I was offended, because when he was describing political hobbyists, he was describing me. But it did give me some motivation to think about politics from the perspective of power. And set me down the road of trying to do all things I wrote about here. It is early days for me yet, and I have only seen limited success. My work complicates things. I am busy, and often overwhelmed. But fascism is coming.

[–] JollyG 9 points 2 weeks ago

Not the op, but an obvious example is that in any post covering current events, there are always half a dozen comments complaining about "late stage capitalism" or denouncing the elites. Those comments don't really add anything to the discussion and kinda just reduce a thread to a boring whinge-fest.

[–] JollyG 252 points 4 weeks ago (9 children)

This is not that funny but I was amused watching it happen. One time I was at the DMV in a college town and a kid was at the counter trying to get his license renewed. From what I could gather he had it revoked because he was underage and had a DUI. Lady at the counter bounced the kid and a few minutes later, the kid came back in with his father and they were apparently from a rich family. Or at least rich by Ohio standards. When the lady at the counter explained that he could not have his license renewed because he had a court order against him, the father started in on the "Do you know who I am? I will buy this whole town!" routine, but the DMV lady was not having any of it. Both the kid and the father insisted that the judge did not have any right to take his license away from him and that it would be over turned on appeal so the DMV lady had to give him his license, because dad would make sure she got fired if he didn't. But the DMV lady would not relent and issue a license. The father and kid were getting pretty animated, so finally the lady picked up the phone and said something to the effect of "Your kid lied on this form and is probably violating his probation, we can call the court right now and see what your judge thinks about that." Which at that point caused them to sheepishly leave. When I got to the counter she told me that was not the first time in her career someone tried to do that to her.

[–] JollyG 2 points 1 month ago

Every "big data" data source I have ever worked with is already filled to the brim with low-quality, obviously wrong data. I have to think that is also true of the data scraped or collected by the big companies. I don't think it matters that the personal data they collect is wrong, so long as they can convince ad buyers that it is accurate.

[–] JollyG 12 points 2 months ago

The day to day reality for me at least is that the new hyped up llms are largely useless for work and in some cases actually detriments. Some people at work use them a lot, but the heavy users tend to be people who were bad at their jobs, or at least bad at the communication aspect of their jobs. They were bad at communicating before and now, with the help of chat gpt, they are still bad at communicating, except they have gotten weirdly obstinate about their crappy work output.

Other folks I know have tried to use them to learn new things but gave up on them when they kept getting corrected by subject matter experts.

I played around with them for code generation but did not find it any faster than just writing and debugging my own code.

[–] JollyG 16 points 2 months ago (1 children)

One of my big beefs with ML/AL is that these tools can be used to wrap bad ideas in what I will call "Machine legitimacy". Which is another way of saying that there are many cases where these models are built up around a bunch of unrealistic assumptions, or trained on data that is not actually generalizable to the applied situation but will still spit out a value. That value becomes the truth because it came from some automated process. People cant critically interrogate it because the bad assumptions are hidden behind automation.

[–] JollyG 2 points 2 months ago

Yes they lost the civil war. We know this because the CSA does not exist any more. I think that losing your entire country and failing to achieve any strategic objectives is a pretty good definition of "lost a war." The fact that traditions of racism still existed in the southern states during reconstruction does not mean that the CSA won. That's silly.

[–] JollyG 1 points 2 months ago

I suspect it is because he believes he can con Trump into giving him control over the entirety of NASAs budget

[–] JollyG 39 points 3 months ago (5 children)

The cyber truck is, at this point, a malfunctioning status symbol. I suppose a 100K truck that sucks at being a truck is intended to communicate the driver is a successful tech guy but, whenever I see one, I think "there goes a rube". I have a similar reaction when I see those gaudy designer bags or "luxury" branded tee shirts. I don't think "there is someone who is successful" I think "that person is an idiot."

There should be a catchy term for status symbols that communicate the opposite of their intention. Stupidity symbol? Status irony? Status error? None of these really roll of the tongue.

[–] JollyG 22 points 3 months ago (1 children)

When bad people do good things they are generally seen as sinister, as if they are concealing a horrible action behind a facade of good will. So if you believe the government is fundamentally evil, and you see it trying to do something good (which is the whole purpose of FEMA) then its actions are going to look sinister to you. So stories about FEMA having camps (at their core, these are stories about the government using the facade of aid and assistance to hide something evil) will make sense to you because they are consistent with your sentiments about the what the government is. So too would stories about FEMA using disasters as a pretext for land snatching or stories about FEMA ignoring people in peril because these are all stories about an evil government. To the extent that they are consistent with your sentiments about the government, they are easy to accept as true, even if they contradict each other.

[–] JollyG 2 points 3 months ago

I often have the opposite experience when looking for technical documentation about programming libraries. For example I will be dealing with a particular bug and will google the library name plus some descriptive terms related to the bug, and I get back general information about the library. In those cases, it seems google often ignores the supplemental information and focuses only on the library name as If I were looking for general information.

What is worse is that the top results are always blog-spam companies that just seem to be copying the documentation pages of whatever language or library I was looking at.

6
submitted 8 months ago by JollyG to c/law
 

This looks to be the first instance of a set of fake electors from the 2020 presidential election being charged with a crime. Eight felony counts for each fake elector.

view more: next ›