Woozle/2022/01/10

About

This is a crosspost from Nextdoor, introducing myself to the Durham Democrats & Leftists group. Admin is Joy Kaufman, who posted about editorial policy on 2021-07-26.

Post

subject: an introductory post, because Nextdoor suggested I do one.

Greetings, fellow kids!

I'm keenly interested in epistemics -- processes for determining truth. It seems clear that most of the political divide in this country is basically a clash between authoritarianism and horizontalism, and that authoritarians don't believe in honest debate -- so there's little point in trying to debate them, but still some value in debunking their BS so they can't bamboozle new victims.

That said, it seemed like a good idea to seek out other people who actually, you know, care about evidence and facts and stuff -- which is why I joined here ;-)

I run issuepedia.org and cwre.org (political analysis sites), htyp.org (a reference site), and toot.cat (a multicentralized social network).

More general stuff about me: Sandy is my partner of 2 decades now; we both grew up here in Durham (Duke Forest) in the 1970s. I also lived in Providence RI and Athens GA (with brief stints in Ann Arbor MI and Appleton WI). When I'm not getting sucked into political discourse, running errands, or fixing things, I spend most of my time writing horizontalist software, building utility furniture, and recording music.

My personal web sites are woozalia.com (creative output), wooz.dev (software development) and hypertwins.org (family).

Comments

Overnight, a number of comments and responses were deleted. Jane and I posted further comments about these deletions, and I added the following:

I'm thinking that these arbitrary deletions are a problem, whether they're being done by Nextdoor or by our friendly neighborhood admin.

Apparently some posts were deleted from *my* group (one of them a post *by me*) without my permission, so that's obviously Nextdoor either acting directly or enabling others to act on their behalf without any kind of accountability. Either way, that makes Nextdoor *not* a safe space for rational discussion. It might also be what's been happening here.