Posts by tiotasram@kolektiva.social
(DIR) Post #ATXyRlxUFYhomGE01o by tiotasram@kolektiva.social
2023-03-12T17:50:36Z
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A lesson from my analysis of choice poetics in #PapersPlease that I think is relevant right now: #fascists don't need to convince the center to like them or agree with their ideas. They just need to sow doubt and deploy threats.Whenever they can convince people that the morally right thing to do isn't certain (e.g., lies like "defending trans rights might be enabling pedophiles") and can simultaneously provide certainty that doing that right thing will definitely result in negative consequences (especially consequences for your loved ones) they can convince a good fraction of people to comply, at least a bit. And a bit of compliance leads to the engagement of ego mechanisms that try to self-justify, twisting your morality into something that is okay with what the fascists want. This is the "it can't be #genocide because I know I'm a good person who wouldn't stand by in the face of actual genocide, and I haven't even spoken up yet" pretzel logic.At least three tactics for fighting fascism are implied here:1. Moral clarity: refuse to let fascists sow uncertainty about the impacts of compliance.2. Highlighting uncertainty of fascist punishment. For example, talk about how even if you do comply, the fascists won't keep you safe.3. Take even small actions against fascism (and entice others to do so). Sure, a statement or peaceful protest doesn't change the balance of power much, but it helps inoculate participants against the compliance logic the fascists are trying to deploy. Other actions are of course desperately needed, but broad & low-stakes acts of defiance are useful here.I'm definitely not an expert on this stuff so I'd welcome others' thoughts.
(DIR) Post #AUehqiJ4JmyZqEU7Rg by tiotasram@kolektiva.social
2023-04-08T16:14:10Z
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@FinalOverdrive @livinghell @Elizafox I feel like the assumption is that having more reach or more people willing to follow you is bad because it would be misused by some to create inequality. But if the baseline that everyone took as granted was that dominating others nonconsensually was bad for both you and them, then you would be able to use your followers to dominate others, because they'd not follow along with such a plan. So it would be fine for some to have more influence than others as long as the people being influenced resist the misuse of that influence. And I don't think it's "human nature" to be totally controlled by others, I think the level to which that happens in our current society is a function of the ways we educate people into that society from a very young age, which are things we can change.
(DIR) Post #AUehqjp0gW7WXaR8s4 by tiotasram@kolektiva.social
2023-04-08T16:16:03Z
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@FinalOverdrive @livinghell @Elizafox for sure cults are a thing, and would still arise from time to time. But if a broader society that was strongly anti-cult existed, they could be shut down from the outside by education (perhaps not without some conflict and/of violence, but the point is their dominance is not inevitable).
(DIR) Post #AXBqGcyRGIrdjLOsb2 by tiotasram@kolektiva.social
2023-06-29T16:26:59Z
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People are getting pretty nostalgic over the end of #NationalGeographic, so it's a great time to remind everyone that the magazine has from its inception served the cause of colonialism in America. Portraying the American West as empty/wild is part of this, as are its many profiles of indigenous peoples across the globe which constantly portray them as "primitive" and as fundamentally destitute. Even its portrayal of nature as fundamentally separate from humans is something I can now understand as a colonialist mindset that fundamentally undermines positive human-animal relationships.
(DIR) Post #AaPIHgAIDXKvjDKVZw by tiotasram@kolektiva.social
2023-05-13T11:54:24Z
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@pineconeclare @davidho the problem with "planting trees" as a concept is that even if you don't plant trees, they will still grow. Anywhere that a tree wild naturally survive for a couple of decades, if you just leave that space alone trees will grow by themselves. So the marginal impact of "planting trees" is mostly nil. Actually changing land use from things like grazing to forest certainly has good impacts, but that's not what most "plant a tree" initiatives are doing.
(DIR) Post #Ab7oWbrCSs7H8Vno0G by tiotasram@kolektiva.social
2023-10-25T09:38:44Z
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@em_7dice there's always a tradeoff in color spaces between making the edges neat and distorting the perceptual properties of the inside, because of the way that the human eye responds differently to different wavelengths of light (for example: greens appear brighter per photon than other colors, because our receptors for greens trigger more easily, but even among greens there's variance by specific hue). I haven't worked with OKLCH before, but I'm guessing it has some neat perceptual regularity metrics?The experiments that were done to measure perceptual regularity are fascinating, involving looking into a peephole and using a knob to adjust hue/saturation/brightness until you think two colors match. HuSL i'd an interesting color space to check out, IIRC.(Sorry for the infodump if info wasn't sought.)
(DIR) Post #AdRoN5gGghrNXntX04 by tiotasram@kolektiva.social
2024-01-02T18:06:09Z
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@Linux_in_a_Bit feel like this is too simplistic: AI has several other typical harms, notably when it replaces more-reliable or less-biased systems. For example, I'd definitely hesitate to say that medical AI is "mostly good" when we'd expect such systems to typically do a lot of harm through bias.