Public Issues

Why does the Justice Department clear homeless camps?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What do you think of the Justice Department planning to clear homeless camps and involuntarily hospitalize the mentally ill on the streets?”

This sounds very much like a typical MAGAt CONservative brain child. It’s precisely what Pierre Poilievre suggests as a solution for Canadian tent cities.

Poilievre promises to let police break up tent cities, arrest occupants

It’s precisely the mindset of MAGAt CONservatives everywhere:

The irony in this thinking is so dense it generates a gravitational field.

“To fix a government failure, we’ll sweep it out of sight so that you don’t have to be visually confronted by government failure. You can wait until it escalates into increasing crime waves that we can use to leverage your fear and elect us to solve the problem we created.”

It is precisely this mindset that births abominations like hostile architecture.

It’s always the same heavy hand that creates problems to give them excuses to indulge in their misanthropic treatment of the vulnerable people they victimize into early graves.

No example of this kind of monstrous thinking is an attempt to solve a problem. It’s an excuse to get off on perverted Machiavellian desires.

Conservative plan to tackle tent cities looks like ‘political theatre,’ experts say

If they could legalize fights to the death among the homeless, they would.

If they could legally implement a Squid Game television show, they would.

Within the misanthropically short-sighted mindset of reactive thinking that MAGAt CONservatives wallow in, the idea is to pretend to solve a non-problem by punishing the victims of systemic problems they create, creating the non-problem.

I am deliberately describing tent cities as a “non-problem” because they’re not the problem, but a symptom of the problem.

To solve problems, one must look to their causes and address those issues before the symptoms of those problems can ever be addressed.

It’s like affixing a bandage on an open wound while expecting to stem the internal bleeding of a patient.

Making matters even more surreal in the incompetence driving these problems is how the MAGAt CONservative mindset fixates on scapegoats that are part of a comprehensive solution, the non-problems they create with their short-sighted and misanthropic thinking.

In this case, PP blames the “lax liberal drug laws” while completely ignoring how their draconian attitudes toward drugs in society have resulted in an entire host of expensive and socially destructive problems, including punishing the victims of horrible policy while creating an underground growth network for criminal enterprises.

One would think decades of failure in an old problem created by the same thinking which made the same criminal incentivizing problems with alcohol bootlegging about 100 years ago would result in some lightbulbs going off within the dimmest of minds. Still, they seem completely inured against learning from their mistakes.

The kind of self-destructive stupidity that CONservatives perpetually indulge in is like a never-ending nightmare of a Groundhog Day repetition.

The MAGAt flavour of CONservatives wonder why their opposition thinks of them as stupid, and they never stop to look in the mirror and ask themselves why they choose reactionary and destructive approaches toward problems in society. It’s not like the information is unavailable or that educating oneself on issues is impossible. They can’t work through their biases to question their logic.

The mentally ill on the streets has been a problem created by CONservatives to begin with, when Reagan shut down institutions and forced them onto the streets. The homeless issue has grown because people who work full-time can no longer afford to house themselves. At the same time, the billionaire class buys up residential property and inflates prices as their government lackeys continue to refuse to raise minimum wage.

Then they whine that reduced birth rates are an existential threat without putting two and two together to realize they created that dynamic with their misanthropic policies.

The self-destructive stupidity is beyond mind-boggling.

MAGAt CONservatives don’t seem to care about solving problems as much as they prefer to focus on destroying the most vulnerable humans on the planet. Ironically, they often cite how much more money Conservatives donate to charities as they indulge in the same overcompensating behaviours that criminals indulge in when they create laws to ban gay marriages or abortions.

The CONservative mindset seems far more driven by hatred of one’s fellow humans than by working together to build a better society for all.

One day, we might be lucky enough to realize that the mentally ill are not those coping with life on the streets, but are those who walk among us, spreading hatred and voting to destroy lives, only to find the consequences mean destroying their lives as well.

What is Quora used for?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “What is Quora used for? Can I use it to post my social life? What can I use Quora for?”

You can use Quora to ask questions or answer questions.

What you do with those questions or answers is entirely up to you.

For example, my use of Quora has evolved into a sketchbook of ideas where I repurpose some of the answers I write here into articles for publication on other sites.

This was a natural evolution for me that occurred from when I first joined over ten years ago. I was drawn to an academic vibe at the time, with primarily intelligent questions and answers from people who were very knowledgeable and extremely generous in sharing their knowledge.

It felt like a welcoming environment of aspiration for contributing value to our world.

Sadly, most of that is gone or buried under volumes of nonsense as the profit motive prioritized decisions that cared little about preserving knowledge sharing. Quora has succumbed to the same community-deteriorating profit-chasing phenomenon that all other social media sites have.

My personal life was also supremely upended shortly after joining, and I stuck with Quora, not out of my original intent of adding to a marketing funnel for my consulting efforts as an instructional designer but out of a therapeutic need to feel I was still able to make positive contributions to other people’s lives.

As Quora quality devolved, so did my participation to such a degree that it became a vessel for venting. As much as that has helped me to cope with what I’ve endured, it’s often toxic and destructive to a fragile state of mind. Fortunately, writing leaves a trail for facilitating introspection, which has become a path out of personal darkness for me.

I hope my latest stage of using Quora as a springboard of ideas and back into a life of some modest dignity will be a stage where I can leave most of my negativity behind and be grateful to Quora for functioning as my only source of productive therapy over the last decade.

A condition of where my life is at right now involves meeting with an actual therapist. I have concluded, however, that he’s a hired assassin for an entity that seeks to escape responsibility for the consequences of its actions through a strategy of encouraging suicidal ideation.

That may seem like hyperbole, but there is no other explanation for the overtly antagonistic and abusive behaviours exhibited by this “professional.”

For me, the only valid forms of therapy I have ever experienced have been through my creative expressions, which have mostly been through writing and creating pictures.

For me, Quora will, hopefully, be a means of moving on from a stage of inertia into a productive future where I can encapsulate ideas I’ve explored here into formats that can serve as some form of legacy to my life I can feel proud of.

What you want Quora to be for yourself is whatever value it brings to your life. Generally speaking, however, as social beings, how we manage our social interactions, whether in person or online, defines our lives for each of us.

Is Neil deGrasse Tyson wrong?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Is Neil deGrasse Tyson wrong to suggest that talented athletes credit God when they win on social media?”

I think there is something severely wrong on so many levels that it’s impossible to address them without an entire book and a lot of research to identify the dynamics of a business decision justifying the dissemination of lies in society to stimulate engagement and generate revenue.

This is horrifying on so many levels that it insults every aspect of humanity, human society, and the social contract. This contributes to the widespread decay and ultimate destruction of civilized society on the most malignant levels. This crap is worse than the stage of “subliminal seduction” we went through in the 1970s when laws were crafted to prohibit embedded “invisible messaging” within entertainment media.

Psychorama — Wikipedia

Neil deGrasse Tyson has never suggested any such thing, and although it’s easy to attribute this claim to a believer on a mission of Lying for Jesus, it’s not. This is even worse than a believer trolling for reactions by lying.

For non-Quorans: This screengrab indicates the question author, and in this case, the question was written and posed by a bot designed to stimulate engagement on this social media site. This is a common revenue-generation strategy employed by media outlets across the board. Fox Entertainment, for example, has built its empire entirely upon this toxic revenue generation model.

Targeting information appealing to the limbic system is like serving up crack to a heroin addict, and that shapes the society we are cultivating by allowing this practice to dominate media. The effects are profound. 

Not only does this represent an abysmally immoral strategy for generating revenue, but it’s also a strategy that furthers a divide between people in a society already at the edge of fracturing into chaos. This strategy for engagement is ultimately a violent assault on our social contract and is responsible for the dramatic divisiveness characterizing our social dynamics today.

This precisely reinforces the post on my Thotbag space, citing Yuval Noah Harari’s statements during a round table discussion about the threat democracy itself is facing. Here is the meme I posted that includes his full text:

Along with Mr. Harari’s warning, Ian Bremmer pointed at the problem this divisive, conflict-escalating disinformation creates for society:

This fraudulent question is worse than Quora violating its own, now primarily defunct BNBR policy; it’s an assault on human decency on the most corrupt of levels for the most corrupt reasons.

This should not be disturbing only to atheists who fight back against a daily assault from believer trolls seeking to provoke emotional reactions. This should be disturbing to everyone who cares in the least about things like integrity and the social contract that has never been strained to such a degree as what we are living with today.

If society collapses into chaos — If people’s lives are unnecessarily lost because we can’t or won’t back away from the cliff we march toward — Then this kind of manipulative nonsense perpetrated upon us all for the sake of profit will be responsible for the nightmares ahead that we are about to encounter.

This is central to my argument on why social media should not be operated on a for-profit model. Social media is a community development endeavour, and we must consider how we approach its role in society more thoroughly than consigning personal information to a feeding ground for mining material profit.

That we are being strategically and systematically provoked by algorithms to hate each other should horrify all of us.

Do you think that Quora users are mean?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/How-mean-are-the-people-on-Quora/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

Quora users are no different than anyone else on other social media sites.

The virtual environment, coupled with the insulation of an identity divorced from who people are in real life, allows them to indulge in their basest behaviours without repercussions to themselves.

Some are deliberately more abusive online than they would be in person because of a lack of consequences to them in life. Some use social media as a vehicle for venting their frustrations, and that often involves victimizing others.

It’s a dynamic that exists everywhere but is exaggerated online due to the shield a fraudulent identity provides.

All social media is much like Quora, but I would argue that Quora is more civilized than Facebook. A lot of aggression on Facebook is expressed passively through the emoticon reaction system. Facebook UI also sucks big time for permitting extended dialogues, while Quora’s system of ownership of content and content threads by the answer writer helps to minimize aggressions here.

Quora’s system is less antagonistic than Facebook’s because of its structure and is more efficient than other sites at handling long discussion threads.

Insofar as degrees of meanness on social media, my decades of experience on Usenet remain unsurpassed in meanness. Still, social media has generally degenerated in decorum to more closely resemble interpersonal dynamics on Usenet.

It’s a shame that social media has become so toxic. This devolution of courtesy is an argument for a publicly owned and supported social media venue that eliminates the profit motive by operating as a non-profit entity to serve as a community development tool, performing various community development functions and providing various public services.

A sign-on system, for example, could replace the various sign-on systems that people use for logging into sites where sensitive data is stored while ensuring one’s data is accessed through a single entity that provides access to one’s government-related needs such as their taxes or identification needs, and etcetera.

Social media has always been about community development. I have found amusement in statements about upholding community standards from privately owned entities like Facebook that routinely violate the bounds of decency within a community-oriented context. I often complained to Quora about inconsistently applied BNBR standards, and the result of attempting to manage nuance was resolved for them as a business decision deemed too expensive to operate effectively. There was no profit-oriented point to them to pretend that being nice and respectful was an important feature to protect.

Part of the problem with moderating systems is that petty people find ways to weaponize moderation against people they decide to behave spitefully toward.

I’ve been considering a series of articles on social media while arguing in favour of a community-based, owned-and-operated system that can address a number of the shortcomings while functioning as a means of “encouraging” improved interpersonal dynamics through a self-moderating model, but that’s a significant endeavour while I’m currently in the process of addressing more profound to me issues through a struggle I’ve been undergoing for the last decade. I hope I finally get a resolution to it soon and in time to focus on other areas in which I hope to make more constructive contributions to society rather than the wholly destructive path I’m currently on.

In short, and as a summary, however, people can be pretty mean everywhere, and sometimes, there’s nothing one can do about it but try to avoid or dismiss their meanness. It might help to be aware that not everyone is always mean. I’ve noticed within myself while using Quora as a public therapy tool for coping with my circumstances that my bouts with meanness correlate directly with my mood, and my mood is often affected by my current experiences. The best I can do is to learn to understand myself so that I can better understand the meanness of others, and that seems to be helping because their meanness over time has a decreasing impact on my psychology while I’ve become more effective in addressing their meanness in ways that I hope help them to improve.

That’s essentially all we can do for each other is to ensure we protect our boundaries in ways where the meanness doesn’t destroy our self-image. If it impacts it, then it serves as a teaching moment where we improve ourselves and become less mean over time rather than more mean — which is precisely the distinction in attitude I see creating the division between the toxic MAGA phenomenon and a world struggling to cope with increasingly aggravated divisions that have been cultivated within us by the people who have been setting us against each other while they rob us of our dignities.