emsenn @emsenn@tenforward.social

I've been published way too many times in way too many contexts for "this online argument is your fault because you communicate through text poorly," to do anything but make me chortle.

It's my partner's birthday in 4 days, which is great because they'll finally be the age I've been saying they are for the past two years. (No particular reason I was just consistently wrong.)

(They'll be 24.)

So by pure chance I learned that my partner loves Leslie Nielsen comedies - I put on police squad for myself the other day and they ended up laughing more than me.

Which, omg. I had no idea they'd like that sort of humor.

And they've never seen... any of his films. Not Naked Gun. Not Airplane. Nothing!

Can't wait

If you're one of the people that conflate a bunch of discrete philosophies and theologies as "they believe in the golden rule," I really encourage you to read this article that has a pretty good breakdown of the history of the term and its place in our history of philosophical language, as well as its distinction as a philosophical concept from other similar beliefs:

https://www.iep.utm.edu/goldrule/

me: don't just avoid doing bad things to people, but actively do to others what you would want done to you - this is kinda the point of the new testament

others: oThErS sAiD iT fIrSt ThOuGh

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yea okay but despite the repetition you still aren't giving it a try, are ya? If you were going around advocating people be nice, would you like someone running up to you to say "SOMEONE ELSE SAID TO BE NICE FIRST, LETS TALK ABOUT THAT RATHER THAN WHETHER BEING NICE IS GOOD?"

Probably not.

And that's a concrete benefit to cultivating a relationship with a dozen or so online folk, rather than having a large audience of relative strangers who might know more about what you've said, but aren't there to be talked to, individually. 8/8 @brandon

Having this inner circle provides a new layer, at rougly the same scope as "living room," but with a key difference: these people probably haven't heard you explain every opinion you have in a dozen different ways, the way irl friends and family have. So you get to "demo" new approaches to explaining and synthesizing your opinions with them, since they're neither personally nor generally familiar with your beliefs. 7/n @brandon

So the inner circle feels almost more like how real life associations feel, where it is still fairly uncommon someone dives into my digital portfolio.

But this also - sorry, this is long - also plays into another idea I have, that i refer to in a bunch of terms but the "escalation of conversation:" i advocate people share opinions first in the bedroom, then living room, then tavern, then town hall - basically, slowly go more public with your opinions. 6/n

@brandon

There's like, "inner circle" of people who talk to me, like @brandon, and then the outer circle of people who know about me and see my posts but we don't like, chat one-on-one.

Those people, I've noticed, tend to look up more about me, compared to the closer contacts. So closer contacts end up with a more contemporary, but more incomplete, view of who I am, while relative strangers sometimes have a fairly detailed knowledge of my work and personal history. 5/n

I'm not complaining - I think anyone being able to have a portfolio of more... formal... opinions... is a great thing for our society - not to be reductive, but it means many more manhours per year spent on philosophy, and philosophy has secured us cool things like "human rights," so, I'm for it.

Anyway, that's not the point - what I wanna talk about is how because of this amount of public personal information, there's now this weird inversion of information in social circles. 4/n

@brandon

But now the baseline is an expectation that people might be supplementing your provided information with your public information.

And I even lean into that - I have out there recommended reading lists that I kinda... expect folk to have read the items from before engaging with me in a serious conversation about economics or game design. I often just link to my own essays when it's relevant in personal, private conversations. 3/n

@brandon

Now when I first remembered it this morning I thought "Wow, that's really respectful, because he could've easily just searched online for some simple terms and surely found it. But didn't."

And then I thought, well, now, isn't that strange, that I consider not-snooping to be respectful. I can't remember how long ago, but there was a time when that was just... the baseline. 2/n

@brandon

I want to talk about something that happened to me yesterday that I didn't really give much thought to, until I was ruminating in my shower.

First I'll explain what happened, then ramble about my thoughts.

Yesterday I was videochatting with @brandon about nothing in particular, and at one point I mentioned that I had produced a piece of commercial media. He asked if it was still for sale, I said I didn't think so, and he asked what it was, and I said I don't share anymore, and we moved on. 1/n

I also just found an essay that I wrote in May 2016 that argues that clickbait will save journalism.

Which you might think "hah, bet you feel dumb for thinking that, huh!"

But no, actually, I still believe that. Are y'all aware it's Buzzfeed News doing a lot of the legwork to pursue sunshine requests across the planet to pull Trump/Russia evidence into the public?

Oooh I just found my library of digitized tabletop role-playing books - most pirated, some legit, everything from Dungeon World supplement adventures I got off now-deceased forums to the all the AD&D books.

Cool!

I saw some shirt for some local church last night that said in big print on the back

THE GOLDEN RULE: Don't Be Mean To People

and it's like... swing and a miss, Pastor, but y'know that explains why your church fought against a soup kitchen being built adjacent to their parking lot, so cheers on that I suppose.

Even a lot of well-meaning people don't recognize that the goal isn't to just not be mean - the opening books of the new testament are an argument about why that isn't enough - but to... actively go be nice.

Not doing things to others without their approval doesn't make you a good person. It just makes you not actively bad.

To be good, the bible argues, you need to work to do for others as you would have them do for you, not just do for yourself what you like as long as it doesn't hurt others.

tired: saying the "golden rule" is "don't be mean to people"

wired: saying the golden rule is "go be nice to people"

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this is really abstracted but tl;dr: judaism had the "silver rule" of "don't do things to people that you wouldn't want them to do to you," but christianity introduced the golden rule, of "go actively do things for other people, that you would like other people having do to you"

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(I know most modern christians suck on both fronts)

Cool, had a brief talk with my partner this morning basically explaining, "Look, you gotta play with the cat sometimes, otherwise it's JUST me playing with her which leads to her anxiously trying to play with me all day, which is shitty because i'm here all day so now just have a cat that trails my feet meowing to play, but ignores me if I wanna pet her, and you get a cat that cuddles up in your lap and sleeps there for hours, and that's... not fun for me."

And they agreed, which, good, lol.