helena (5/8)
this morning's exercise: sixteen different "colors" for comments. 💡( as far as the taxonomy becoming too large to be sorted by color ... yes? That is a problem we will solve later.)
https://www.reddit.com/r/neoliberal/comments/1icsjsk/yglesias_throw_biden_under_the_bus/ 💡( about a recent piece by Matt Yglesias, entitled Throw Biden Under The Bus. because, as I said multiple times, his performance in the last six months of the presidency was atrocious. and he led us directly to 4 more years of the Donald.)
📣 I know there's Guild Law. But I'm over-riding on the point of Yglesias is right; by the end of his term Biden was a shit president.
💡 Not sure if this is history rather than politics or if you think I'm wrong, I don't care. But, more importantly: we don't get interesting data from boring Reddit threads.
- typo fixes. These are, generally, also other things. But, pointing out typographical errors is a type of comment.
- dismissal/contempt. You don't like it. Great. You're wrong, but you're allowed to be wrong.
- quotes for emphasis.
- memes. "Cool story bro" type comments.
The more substantive comments require engaging with the substance.
Some of them are bad: your comment was a hypothetical, so there is no way we can know for certain 🔥( so we can assume the opposite (which is also a hypothetical) is definitely true)
Others are nonsense 💡( is "nonsense" the word? maybe Frankfurt-ian "bullshit"? maybe just "deflection"). "Trump is bad, so how can you say Biden was bad?"
Some people say we need less of liberal policies. Others say we need more. Some comments point out that nobody is quite sure what liberal means here anyway.
It is all a mess. And, perhaps, there are too many dishonest participants for there to be any hope of the system converging to useful content. In particular, once the hypotheticals don't exist, so your hypothetical is wrong arguments get loud enough, there is nothing to be done.
🔥 perhaps it is best to quarantine this all in a sound-chamber, and focus on less-useless discussions.