🎓 Dr. Freemo 🇳🇱 @freemo@social.cleverlibre.org

@timorl

Good info, thanks.

Which cases did he loose exactly? That seems weird that he would loose a csae for rape and not go to prison.

@bonifartius

@bonifartius I think you meant to send me a picture of something underneath the parliament? Thisis just a picture of an ordinary parliament session.

@ceoln

> Also no. This wasn’t a vote to pass the bill, it was just a rule vote to advance it toward consideration. The bill would still have to have survived amendment, passed an actual vote, gone through reconciliation, and so on.

I didnt say it was a vote to pass the bill, you missed my point.

I said if there was no independent thought... this means we are talking about a scenario where on **Every** vote democrats vote against GOP bills and GOP votes for... no exception.

Since (though you left out) in my quote i specifically talked about a scenario where there is a GOP majority, that means it would have been garunteed to pass every single one of those stages you listed

That means the rule to advance it forward would have been a garunteed pass

that means no matter what amendments are added, pass

That means the actual vote garunteed pass...

reconcilation, garunteed pass.

As I said literally the **only** way it couldnt pass would be either if the GOP lost majority, or if some people fromt he party dissent. Independent thought would literally be required if there was even a chance to stop such an evil bill.

@tiffanycli

After seeing how he handled tesla the last thing I want is that man having access to uploading data to my brain.

@thor Wait, there are people on the internet that arent mildly irritating?

@TruthSandwich

If that was their motivation (dont know myself) that is a pretty lame reason.

@ZuriBella

@TruthSandwich

> What complicates this is that there’s more than one way two instances can be hostile towards each other. Sure, there’s full defederation, which is relatively rare, but there’s also silencing. And there’s more than one type of that, as far as I understand it.

This is true, there are other ways. We measure that a bit indirectly using another metric that gets around it. Its called insularity. It basically doesnt look at federation in this case but actual communiction. It looks to see how diverse the users from once instance are at communication with and following users from other instances. An instance which has followers across many different instances has lower insulatiry.

Even when we measured insularity last I checked QOTO was ranked extremely high.

> It’s one thing for an individual user to block me, but we have cases like sdf.org, which have silenced me for the entire server. I can see their toots but nobody on that instance can see mine. And, no, they did not respond to my complaints, because why would they?

Silencing you as an individual i cant speak to, I dont know how well spread that is. But sdf as a server doesnt block QOTO and as I pointed out if they or other servers silenced us it would show up through the insularity metric.

@ZuriBella

@TruthSandwich

Sorta, we are talking about slighting different things and its important to explain i guess.

I talked about federation footprint rather than "blocked" for a reason, because remember its a two way street.

For example Stux's instance blocked a great many servers. I dont know the exact count, but just to throw out an arbitrary numbers lets say it was 200. On top of that Stux's instances is currently blocked by some number of instances, lets say 50. That would mean a total of 250 instances where federation is never going to be possible

QOTO on the other hand encourages our users to select which block lists to pull in (and we provide some for that purpose). So the server itself doesnt directly block anyone, we enable our users to curate that. So our block list is 0. Now lets assume twice the servers blocked us and we 100 servers blocking us. That means despite having twice the blocks we are only defederated with 100 servers, less than half of Stux's.

Now to complicate this a bit further its important to point out that the number of servers that block you is actually a poor measure. A proper measure would be to weight those servers by the number of users they have. So your really seeing how many **users** can see you, not servers.

The overwhelming majority of servers that block QOTO are very small instances with less than 10 people. Obviously there are a few larger ones, but nothing too big. This was actually exploited against us once where a bunch of 1-user servers were created and blocked us to make it look like we were heavily blocked when we werent.

Anyway when you take all this into account and actually check the federation footprint (which is a measure of how many users can see you, which is the only measure of value) then QOTO is quite high on the list.

@ZuriBella

@ceoln

> It is not 210+ Republicans who are threatening to remove McCarthy if he puts forward anything that will pass with Democratic votes. It is a specific nasty subset of the house GOP, and the votes of those 5 members on the Defense appropriations bill rule were part of the same overall movement.

Thats fair, you'd have to quantify the actual number... but either way this is pretty irrelevant to my point and simply a tangent anyway.

@georgetakei

@ceoln

> There was no indication whatever in your comment that it was entirely about that one sentence in the OP, and not about everything else the OP said. But okay.

Originally in my first comment i didnt explicitly state that. But my comment only stated that while the GOP was a piece of shit and i in no way give them praise, that this one property, independent thought, is something the Dems could stand to adopt rather than attack.

I made no attempt to address any other aspect of the post, which should have been the hint

That said as you continued to try to push to the other aspects of the post I did many many times try to make it clear what I was discussing.

That said, the fact that you didnt understand that was the point is understandable, miscommunications sometimes happen (even if something is said more than once), and thats ok. Not going to hold it against you. Just glad that that is clarified now.

> Their independence even on that one vote was in the direction of evil, in the sense that they voted against the rule because it did not make enough cuts.

"because it" that is intent, not direction... The "because" for something is your reason, the desired effect. It is not the direction, the actual effect the action is headed in... which we both agreed was positive (blocking the bill)

> The ultimate effect of that attitude is most likely to be negative, even if it had a small positive effect in this one specify case. The larger impact is the more important.

Well "attitude" is intent. I never claimed anything about their intent or if that intent would ultimately lead to good or bad... Again we are talking action, and actual results..

So yea their intent, i agree, likely long term will have largely negative effects.

But their action, which only came about due to their willingness for independent action, was positive, regardless of what effects other things that were not their action (like their intent) might have.

> I don’t think we agree, in that you think (or you have said things that I interpret to mean) that independent thought is a good thing even in bad people; that a bad person who is an independent thinker is better than a bad person who isn’t. I don’t believe that, myself.

No i did not say independent thought in a bad person is a good thing... i choose my words **very** carefully, ever word i pick is very important when i say things like that.

What I said was that independent thought in the context of a group which one elects to be a part of, is a good quality to have. I stated this is because bad people will elect to join groups of other bad people. So independent thought gives the possiblity of change where group think garuntees exclusvely evil behavior.

I also pointed out independent thought in an evil person will result in evil actions regardless of if their in a group or not. So while it has the advantaged of opening up to the possibility of change, it will not produce a better person on its own. However when combined with other good qualities like morality, it will.

@georgetakei

@ZuriBella

QOTO actually has one of the largest footprints in the entire fediverse. In other words we are federated with more servers than most instances (last i checked we were in the top 10 in terms of federation footprint, though i think closer to top 20 these days).

So if your concern is being heard by the most people, then we would be a good fit there. Keep in mind you will still find servers that block us, but overall we are less blocked than most.

@TruthSandwich

@TruthSandwich

If your admin wants to adopt it and has any questions you are most welcome to have them talk to me.

@ZuriBella

@ZuriBella

Happy to help if I can.

We are a STEM based instance. All our members are STEM professionals, researchers, or to a lesser extent enthusiasts.

Something like half us are research scientists, maybe 30%. Myself included (worked on COVID the last few years).

Our primary philosophy is to engage everyone with respect and dignity, especially those we disagree with.

That along with our STEM focus I'd say probably makes the most noticeable quoality on our time line a lack of toxicity and a level of comfort so people dont need to feel paranoid if what they say might be taken incorrectly.

Sexism and racism and stuff like that is strictly moderated.

@TruthSandwich

@TheGreatLlama I mean I am literally a published, public, vocal COVID research scientists... literally a few seconds of googling could have told you that... its very clear from my work in the field I have dedicated a huge amount of effort to addressing covid, and am both pro-mask and pro-vax.

So im sure you thinkk whatever you want.. clearly you care more about being toxic, than actually bothering to know the reality.

@JonKramer

> Nope, I am saying they are both right wing. And posted a link that I agree with, that shows they are testibly both right wing.

Yes that much is clear. That is also not the comment you made where i said you seemed to be confusing the two.

> Pretty easy. Licencing.

Ok so what act of licening did Obama carry out that explicitly forced the creation of a monopoly?

> The right stands firmly against individual freedoms.

yea, no.

> They are against body autonomy

Mostly no, though there are always exceptions from individual members.

For example on abortion (I am pro abortion myself).. the right usually focuses on preserving the bodily autonomy of BOTH the mother and the baby. Some go so far as to only care about the bodily autonomy of the baby by completely outlawing abortions. Others care about both by proposing extremely narrow abortion windows that garuntee the woman still has a right to abortion early on, but once nerves and braincells form in the baby that its own self-determination is also honored. Generally the left cares **only** about the mothers bodily autonomy and is perfectly fine violating the babies right to self-determination. They do this for the "greater good" because otherwise it would harm our communities and mothers. Meanwhile the right doesnt care too much about the community or the reprocussions so long as both the mother and childs life is protected.

Another example of bodily autonomy is vaccines, while the right generally sided strongly with personal freedom and allowing people to have the right to choose if they want to vaccinated or not, the left went the other way and sided with collective welfare and prefred to support vaccine passports, getting fired from jobs, and being denied service, all grossly intrustive to the individual forcing us to make public part of our medical history effectively. It is clear on this issue again the right sided with individual rights and freedoms while the left focused on collective welfare.

Even on issues of Drug use the right has focused more on personal freedom of late than the left. While Biden explicitly stated he would not legalize cannavis Trump claimed to support its legalization. While he never legalized it he did pass the farm bill which comes pretty damn close (its now legal in america to order psychadelic cannabis products across the whole country, though still with some restrictions).

> And, I would say the ‘left’ in America is not far separated from the ‘right.’ Because there is no left wing in America.

Well as established this is wrong, per the thread.

@Free_Idealist @pyranose @georgetakei

@ceoln

> You have very selectively quoted from the OP there. :) It was about more than just that one sentence.

I did, but nothing else in the OP did I disagree with... so then what were you arguing for?

You responded to my comment, not the op. My comment was about that single vote, and a very specific aspect of that vote (independent thought) and nothing else.. everything in my comment was about "it".

Obviously if you wanted to comment on the other stuff you could. But since it was never in question im not sure why you argued with me about it as if it was when im just sitting here not even disagreeing with you on any of that.

> And lol, I guess there is a sense in which their independence “resulted in good happening”, but it’s an awfully silly sense.

Nothing silly about it at all... I mean really just think about it if no one ever dissented, and one party had a majority in both houses, and everyone on both sides followed party lines, what would you have? several years of absolute GOP dictatorship. Anything the GOP proposed would always pass, no exceptions.

Thats the case in the house right now, it has a GOP majority. If no one was an indepent thinking the bill failing would have not been possible at all.

Literally independent thought is the **only** reason this bill got block from passing through the house. If it werent for independent thought your only hope would be a veto from biden... if Trump were in office even then no hope.

> this is just political theater and power plays within the GOP, so the defeat of the rule did a very minimal amount of good.

Glad to hear we agree it did good, however small. QED

> I think it’s much more significant that their “independence” was in the direction of evil, even if it did block a slightly bad thing (for not being evil enough). I don’t think this is evidence for this particular kind of “independence” being a good thing.

This is dishonest wording to push your agenda again...

It wasnt "in the direction of evil" you literally just admitted it did good, not evil, ergo it was the opposite, in the direction of good. Stopping something that is bad, is **not** in the direction of evil.

What i suspect you mean is something more like "I think it is much more significant that they have evil motives than the fact that they did a good deed while carrying out those motives". And while I would agree with you that is true if we were sitting here having a discussion about the overall state of our government. But that isnt what the discussion is about, its about if independent thought is a desirable quality in a good politician. In that regard their personal motives are not at all significant because we arent discussing them as individuals, we are discussing one property they demonstrated once.

> I think we do have a fundamental disagreement there, but I doubt we’ll convince each other either way.

Still kinda sounds to me like we agree and your just arguing something completely unrelated to the one point I am discussing.

@georgetakei

@nosat

Why would you say that... I dont even own a tv. I cant even remember the last time ive even been in the same room as one that was on.

I am a research scientist so I was describing my work environment.

@BetaCuck4Lyfe

@ceoln

> Okay. :) Maybe it’s that you tend to focus on small specifics, and I am more out in the generalities.

Actually I was kinda thinking the opposite lol.

While im focusing on the general idea of independent thought as a desire quality among many in a good politician... you seem to be focused on these **specific** politicians and if they are good people simply because they were the example that initiated the thought.

> The people who voted against that rule (because the bill didn’t cut enough) are a subset of the people who are threatening to remove McCarthy if he puts forward a bill that might pass with D votes.

Yes an extremely small subset (5 people out of 210+)

> And those two things are part of the same crazy swing of the GOP to the right and to obstructionism.

You tried to use the fact that I said 5 people out of 210+ were independent thinkers against me when I said something all 210 people did was an act of group think.

Do you not realize that 5 people can act independently as part of a group of 210+ people who act according to group think? Do you also not realize why it seems quite strange when you objected to the fact that I pointed that out?

> I guess there is a sense in which the votes against the rule were “independent thought”, and the pressure on McCarthy not to compromise an inch is “group think”

That too... the group overall will act in group think because thats still pretty common in the GOP (despite being slightly less than in the dems). So there will be plenty of examples of group think for the GOP as a whole even when a small number might dissent from time to time.

but also the fact that im not implying everyone is independent all the time. Even these 5 people who were indepdent in this one case I'm sure will tow the link the majority of the time. They are just slightly more capable of being independent some of the time, thats all.

> I just don’t find it a very interesting sense, I guess, since I see both things as part of the same overall phenomenon, being done by the same basic group of people.

Thats because your still focused on the specific (these people and if their good people or whatever) rather than the general "is individual thought a desirable trait in a politician who has all the other desirable traits a politician should also have"
@georgetakei

@JonKramer

The ACA's stated goal when Obama pushed for it was universal healthcare. In the form originally proposed it would have been true universal healthcare. Sadly after it got revised by the senate to be able to pass both parties the revised form fell short of actually providing universal healthcare. but it is quite clear Obama proposed and supported it, he just didnt have the power to get it through in that form.

@pyranose @georgetakei