I realized in a reddit argument a while back that one huge difference between Trump supporters and the rest of us is: Trump supporters expect less from Trump. Hold him to a lower standard than they hold themselves or non-supporters to.

In the argument, I had a supporter tell me that “raking the leaves” was advocating wildfire management – including controlled burns. And the person followed it up with remarks along the lines of, “you should have been smart enough to know that’s what he was saying.”

Which was crazy to me because:

• they were measuring my intelligence by my ability to come up with numerous unique rephrasings and potential meanings to Trump’s words
• they were scoring higher than Trump by their own intelligence metric
  • Trump could only come up with “raking the leaves” and the commenter came up with “as a country, we should be putting more resources into wildfire management”, a much more coherent and intelligent phrasing
• in expecting me to be able to read multiple meanings into “raking the leaves”, this person was ALSO expecting me to score higher on this measure of intelligence than Trump. And calling me stupid for not outscoring Trump.

Basically told me that if I wasn’t smarter than Trump, I was stupid.

I pointed this out to them and never got a response.

Anyways, different standards. According to Trump supporters:

• if you’re no smarter than Trump, you are an idiot;
• if you’re no kinder than Trump, you are sadistic and malicious;
• if you are no more effective than Trump, you are useless,
• But Trump is the smartest, kindest, most valuable person there is.

Technically still a touch!

Alternatively, it’s possible cell companies like T-Mobile will lobby against these anticompetitive agreements, since it does reduce their number of potential customers. I don’t like cell company lobbying any more than ISP lobbying, but in this case, let them fight.

Something tells me T-Mobile’s got a little too much class solidarity to have any interest in reducing the profits of Charter Communications.

Thanks for the well-written explanation, stranger.

Who knew a company with an unhealthy obsession with harvesting every screen tap of data from every person using their services… would chicken out from connecting their servers to a bunch of clients they couldn’t monitor.

… That said, I actually didn’t see this coming. It baffles me that I didn’t, but I didn’t.

Even the babies have evil in their hearts.

Damn it, it’s now GNL and we have to rewrite all the textbooks!

Duly noted. I’ve subscribed to the writing prompts community.

Oh! You could call yourselves

• “the slight right” or
• “right lite”

I don’t know. The name feels weird. I could see calling your community,

• “moderates”
• “moderategop”
• “RINOs” (just like Trump’s supporters embraced calling themselves “deplorables”, non-Trump conservatives should probably ready themselves for turning enemies’ insults into their own battle standards.)
  • plus RINOs also gives a decent logo idea for the community (the rhinoceros)

I recently started a Kbin account and noticed that a few of the communities I searched:

1. were empty, and
2. had, in their info, the claim that they had started right when I searched them.

Which tells me that the Kbin instance only stores local information about a community after the first of its members searches that community.

Such an eloquent response

Not to be mistaken for “tough love,” the concept that manipulative people will often use to defend their coercive verbal assaults on their targets.

Hell yes to all of this! Any defense of capitalism requires social darwinism.

That is, if you can get someone to comprehend what “capitalism” even is! I am astounded at how difficult it is to communicate the difference between a worker co-op and a privately owned business. To anyone!

It’s weird because it seems so obvious to me. It’s a difference in how the worker is treated. A difference in the dignity of their work. A whole different social contract.

I don’t know what combination of words I need to use to get them to see this! It’s so frustrating. How can they so easily understand the difference between a dictatorship and a representative republic, but not be able to extend that logic to how we run businesses? What kind of incredible social programming have robber barons performed on them?

Anyways, rant over for now. I agree that we are hobbled by overwork. I agree that our creativity is forcefully suppressed in order to make us better cogs. I just wish I could figure out how to spread the word.

Oh, yes. I am fine with the idea that every human – regardless of their occupation or their results on an IQ test – can engage in something that could be called “stupidity.”

Absolutely everyone makes stupid mistakes. Absolutely everyone holds at least a few stupid beliefs.

But I also think when we encounter those aspects of a person, we can use better words to describe the concept. Words that don’t have a social darwinist connotation. Words that no one mistakes for “permanent, unchanging” attributes.

Like: I don’t like Trump supporters, but “Trump supporters have an impressive resistance to information that might challenge their worldview” is so much better than “facts don’t work on them: Trump supporters can’t read.”

The former describes a choice these people repeatedly make. The latter is immature name-calling.

And to be honest, my main gripe with conservatism in general isn’t even how its proponents handle information. (Everyone has to use heuristics to quickly estimate the reliability of a news article before believing the headline. They take as much issue with our heuristics as we take with theirs.)

My main gripe is that conservatism is a social darwinist philosophy at its core.

“Black people get lower grades. Clearly they have worse access to an environment that facilitates learning. We need to expand access to libraries and safe spaces so we can better foster these children’s growth” A progressive might say.

And the conservative will respond: “you had me at ‘black people get lower grades.’ That says everything there is to say. They just can’t compete. Strongest chimp gets the most bananas, you know?” /Shrug/

Giving up on people is practically the bedrock of modern conservatism. I would accuse them of being cruel before I would accuse them of being unable to read. I would accuse them of ignoring information that does not justify their cruelty before I would accuse them of being too stupid to process that information.

I tend to tutor people randomly. Siblings mostly, sometimes friends, occasionally strangers. It makes me feel good. I get a pretty strong shot of vicarious triumph when I help them achieve a goal.

And I would always hear the same things from people who struggled.

“I’m just not good at this” I would hear.

“I suck at math” would be pretty common too.

This was never spoken by people whose minds were actually incapable of comprehension. Each and every one of them proved smart enough to perform what they deemed an impossible task. But in order to instill the confidence necessary to make it through the problems, I always had to set them straight, open their minds to the possibility that they were wrong about themselves.

At first it seemed kind of inspirational: “no one is too stupid to accomplish their goals,” you know? But after it happened enough times, I started to feel like I was some brain surgeon pulling the same damn tumor out of patient after patient, skull after skull. It was a fucking epidemic of self-doubt so strong it literally affected people’s entire life trajectory.

At some point, unrelated to tutoring, I wound up chatting with a stranger who had just walked out of some, “Donald Trump’s key to success” kind of conference that had taken place on my campus. (It was like, 2013. I didn’t know who Donald Trump was back then.) He asked me a few questions. My answers impressed him, and he called me “smart.”

And I hated him instantly.

The second that word came out of his mouth, a wave of distrust and enmity washed over me, and I felt like he was trying to scam me. Mind you, I am a 5’11" 180lb man. It’s not like he was practicing pickup on me. It was almost-certainly an attempt at practicing the “networking” skills he picked up from the conference he just attended. And the only reason it didn’t play well to his audience was because I hated the word “smart” and hated anyone who believed in the concept.

And then, some years later, I was able to finally articulate it after someone chastised me online for calling my own actions stupid – for using, as a commenter described it, “an ableist slur.” Boy did the pieces click together after that.

This is going to seem crazy, but ladies, gentlemen, esteemed in-betweens: there is so such thing as “stupid.” There never was.

The human brain is a miraculous thing. It can literally rewire itself if it needs to. With the right techniques, a brain can even be induced to repair itself after certain kinds of strokes. Meaning if, hypothetically, one were “stupid” then the proper application of societal resources could actually turn that same person smart. Just like how I was able to tutor “bad at math” students into “good at math” students.

Which is probably why Rockefeller and Carnegie were so keen on making everyone believe in the concept. Because what I just described is expensive, and if there’s a ceiling on a person’s potential (like “stupid”), then that gives society a really good excuse to give up on that person before spending a dime.

“We’re already doing all we can for these people.” the well-intentioned steel monopolist tells you, “They get every opportunity they need. The reason they struggle so much in this society? They just… aren’t that bright. They were just never capable of that much to begin with.”

“Stupid” is, in other words, a social Darwinist myth created by billionaires to abdicate responsibility for the poverty they were creating. And if someone expresses a belief in, “stupid” I know I cannot count on them. I hope to someday surround myself with people who despise the word and everything it stands for. Because those are the people I can trust to actually improve the world.

Well, first of all, I’d throw half of it into that project trying to create open source insulin.

After that: co-ops, co-ops, co-ops, and more co-ops! And some random open source / decentralized projects as well.

Wonderful. Thank you South Samurai. I’ll do just that.

This is one hell of a write up, stranger. Thank you!

Mastodon and calckey have the most active writing communities imo.

It is very difficult to search for something when you don’t know it exists. Now that I know Mastodon and calckey have a vibrant writing community that you recommend, I know there’s some value to finding it and learning how to immerse my account in that community. Much appreciated.

I think the best route is a lemmy or kbin author account combined with mastodon. Instances rarely matter in terms of where you join, so long as it’s a fairly stable and not heavily defederated/defederating one.

You even gave a recommended route!? Seriously, you have my gratitude. This is awesome.

By “combined with mastodon” do you mean to create one new account at lemmy or kbin and one at mastodon? Or do you mean to create one new account at lemmy or kbin and use it to connect with the writing communities at mastodon?

Thank you kindly. I feel like this answer supplements Samurai’s answer really well and gives a solid illustration of their point when they said,

I’ve looked over the other options, and they’re pretty meh tbh, for a writer in specific.

Now I know what’s so “meh” about at least one of them.