For most of the life of this blog, I posted close to daily. Within the last six months or so (maybe longer) I've given myself permission to slack off. Why?
- This should be fun, or at the very least satisfying for me.
- There's so much crazy out there to write about it's hard to choose how to best spend one's time dealing with it.
- When I write about important issues I want to do it right - get most of the key issues and back up what I saw with evidence and that often takes time. But that means working harder than just popping off with my opinion
- Much of that crazy is simply intended to confound rational people, because
- it isn't intended to make sense,
- but to waste rational people's time as they try to 'expose' the lies
- The key things we need to focus on are:
- signing up non-voters, people who
- have never voted because they aren't interested in politics
- have never voted because they weren't old enough and may not know how to vote and for some, are leery about doing something they aren't good at
- for those of us who went along with our parents when they voted, this may seem hard to believe, but lots of people have parents who didn't vote or didn't take them along to familiarize them with the process
- stopped voting because they think both parties are equally bad
- don't vote because they think their one vote doesn't make a difference
- developing scripts with evidence explaining
- why voting is important
- that there is a huge difference between the parties
- that democracy is threatened if the GOP hold on to the House, regain the Senate, and/or the Presidency
- how to vote and how to get their non-voting friends to vote too
- [UPDATED MARCH 27, 2023 - How to distinguish between fact and fiction, human and bot.]
I was on political information diet until this indictment thing. Hard not to watch. Not surprised at your post: there is only so much of the same thing over and over -- with no resolution or accountability -- one can stomach. I open a few headlines to read more, but anything with this "may" happen I eschew. I am pessimistic that I ever see any real justice melted out for the insurrection's leaders (including congressmen). The system (including the Supreme Court) is so compromised as to warrant existential despair. But we must continue to bear witness... and get out the votes as you say.
ReplyDeleteTake pleasure in the beauty around you - a flower, a smile, a tree, a bird, a crunchy apple, the list goes on and on. My take is that all this nastiness has been there all along, but in the shadows. Now it's desperate and has been forced out into the open. Like a disease that we can't treat until the symptoms appear. I stress voting because the Constitution 'gerrymandered' the Senate (small states have = representation to much bigger states) and the GOP have gerrymandered House districts, and state legislative districts. We can only overcome that by getting out the votes of the democracy leaning non-voters. But otherwise there's much to be optimistic about. I'm going to add one more script to be written in the post above: how to distinguish between political fact and fiction.
DeleteWhere do Chatbot outputs come in? IMO we are on the Event Horizon of such confusion there will be no Fact/Fiction separation. Trust no one? Without that there is no civilization.
DeleteIn an ideal world, all Chatbots products would be watermarked or otherwise stamped with a notice that it was produced by such and such Chatbot. Just as many products have sell by dates, or are marked Kosher, or certified organic. That's not likely to happen. But producers of content could voluntarily state whether it was produced by human or chatbot on each document. If you don't have that up, people can use caution. Perhaps we'd need some legal teeth to deal with folks who lie at that point. Not sure how to prove someone lied, but probably there are technical ways to evaluate the content.
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