EnsignRedshirt [he/him]

  • 0 Posts
  • 41 Comments
Joined 4 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 26th, 2020

help-circle



  • The structure of Reddit’s content aggregation and curation leads to a regression to the mean. Things that are broadly agreed-upon, even if wrong, are amplified, and things that are controversial, even if correct, are attenuated. What floats to the top is whatever the hive mind agrees is least objectionable to the most people.

    One solution that seems to work elsewhere is to disable downvoting. Downvoting makes it too easy to suppress controversial perspectives. Someone could put forward a thoughtful position on something, and if a few people don’t like the title and hit the downvote button, that post may be effectively buried. No rebuttal, no discourse, just “I don’t like this, make it go away.” Removing the downvote means if you don’t like something, you can either ignore it, or you can put effort into responding to it.

    The “downvote to disagree” thing isn’t just an attitude problem, it’s a structural issue. No amount of asking people nicely to obey site etiquette will change the fact that the downvote button is a disagree button. If you don’t want a hive mind, you necessarily need to be able to allow for things you don’t like to be amplified.

    Twitter is actually better for this than Reddit because it has the quote function. You can amplify something you don’t like as a way of getting other people to hate it with you. It’s not perfect, but there’s no way of having it both ways. “Reddiquette” was never a real thing, just a polite fiction that ignores the Eternal September world that we live in.

    If you have the same structure as Reddit, you will recreate Reddit. Lemmy isn’t going to be different if all the incentives and interactive elements are the same.



  • Internal politics is going to be responsible for some of it. This is an unexpected opportunity for individuals to advance their careers or agendas outside of the usual process, and some of them are going to take the opportunity. They might not even dislike the idea of Harris being the nominee, but they want to find a way to use their support to their advantage. The Democrats are hardly a monolith, they’re a broad coalition that barely holds together at the best of times, it’s not that weird that there would be conflict.

    There’s also the issue that there hasn’t been any sort of democratic process to select a new nominee. Harris makes sense for a number of reasons, and the party does have the authority to nominate whomever they want, but they have to avoid making it look like the party insiders are just coronating a new nominee. It’s bad optics, if nothing else. This is also a pretty unprecedented situation, and it seems like no one knew it was going to happen for sure. It makes sense that there’s a conversation out in the open about who is going to be the nominee.

    As a candidate, she’s not the best choice, but she’s an improvement over Biden. I doubt she would have won a genuinely competitive primary process. She’s probably in the best position to be the nominee at this moment, but there are no doubt plenty of people who feel that this could have been handled better and are going to make their opinions heard.




  • Bill Burr is a surprisingly thoughtful and principled guy with consistently good opinions. He’s a comedian, and he doesn’t have any theory underpinning his worldview, but I bet if you look at why he’s been criticized in the past it’s by liberals who are mad that he’s being critical of liberals. I’m not at all surprised that he lit up Bill Maher on his boomer-ass Israel-Palestine takes.








  • The existence of time travel and the idea of a Temporal Cold War suggests that any given future is just one of many possible futures. The events in Discovery are canon, insofar as they did happen, but whether future Star Trek properties will take the Discovery future as a given is a more open question. Discovery was written very deliberately to avoid being constrained by canon, but that also means that the events are narratively very removed from the rest of the franchise.

    My guess is that whoever ends up in charge of making the next chapter of Star Trek will want to establish their own timeline going forward for the same reason that the Discovery creators did, and they’ll largely ignore the easily-ignorable Discovery events, at least as relates to the far future. The alternative is either to set the next series in an even more distant future, which comes with its own issues, or setting it before the 31st century and having to write around a whole bunch of barely-established future canon that only applies to Discovery. I could be wrong, but it seems like the path of least resistance.


  • The actor of captain Picard

    Do you honestly not recognize Sir Patrick Stewart? No shade, it’s just wild to think there would be people who don’t recognize him at all, given the length and breadth of his career.

    In answer to your question, I can’t speak for Patric Stewart, but my guess is that he chose to play the scene that way because it’s likely that very few people in the Federation smoke, and that’s probably doubly true for people who spend most of their time on a spaceship. My guess would be that Stewart was trying to indicate to the audience that smoking would be somewhat of an anachronism in the 23rd century.