I am too mercurial. I oscillate between time killing activities every couple of months or weeks, so I might use Lemmy for a month or two and not open it back up for another six. There also are exactly zero topics or interests where I could maintain the high level of interest and involvement needed for moderation. Moderating a community would become intolerably boring very quickly.

Probably the biggest reason I couldn’t or shouldn’t moderate a community is that I have a very rigid idea about how discussions should be moderated and a low tolerance for non-compliance. Guaranteed I would be on that power tripping mod community (Ye power tripping bastards or something) within a few weeks of taking over.

I’m happy to just be the slightly unhinged person in the comments.

I mean I kind of see what you’re saying but it doesn’t really pass the smell test.

Yelling in someone’s face is assault. Spreading harmful lies about specific individuals or businesses is lible. Speech that incites violence is not protected by the first amendment. And the rest: January 6th and the misinformation machine aren’t something that can really be legislated. Lies unfortunately are protected speech unless they incite imminent violence. As much as I would like to hang the raid on the capital on Trump I watched his speech (and Bannon’s) and he only ever implies violence. The crowd whipped themselves up into the violence frenzy we saw that day.

Words absolutely can cause harm in the right conditions, but the ones that do the most damage would definitely not be hate speech. Fox News ran a segment last year where one of the hosts said homeless people should be killed and within a few days there were three separate incidents where armed men walked into homeless encampments and opened fire. I think the death toll was 9 people across the three events. But fox news spreading lies about ivermectin and masking during covid killed potentially tens of thousands. In the case of the homeless what the host did was already illegal, but the lies can’t be legislated.

The more I think about it the less I’m concerned about hate speech. The things that need to be illegal, inciting violence, already are, and the things that aren’t are murky at best and a slippery slope at worst. Especially when you consider who would be determining what is or isn’t hate speech. Right now the powers that be would label your comment as hate speech because it’s critical of the gop.

Forgive my ignorance, but how can words infringe on the rights of others? As a member of a minority class with several hateful and hurtful slurs (that were on their way to becoming hate speech prior to the second Trump administration) I understand that some folks can get very upset but I don’t think anyone has the right to not be upset. I could be misunderstanding something though.

Absolutely not. No one wins an argument and it’s the least likely form of communication to result in any part changing their mind. Even formal debate with rules and timers doesn’t lead to changed minds often.

I personally strive to be factually and logically correct about anything I might discuss (that can be validated by facts or logic). Despite spending large portions of my time reading and researching so that I understand the world I live in better, I could count on one hand the number of times I’ve been able to change someone’s mind.

The truth is it’s very hard, bordering on impossible to change someone’s mind who isn’t open to it and most people are not. It’s easier to make a snap judgement and never reconsider it or let someone else form one’s opinion of something than to do the work to understand a topic enough to warrant having an opinion at all.

The extreme polarization of opinion and the politicization of basically everything makes it so that it’s rapidly becoming functionally impossible to interact with people of different ideologies as they now encompass most of one’s life.

I’d say less than 10%? The vast majority of my problems result from my own irrational actions and poor choices. I’ve had problematic idiots in professional and social settings but again the main issue in those cases are largely because I cannot stand willfully ignorant people. If I were more chill about morons, it’d be 0%. But that’s just me personally and I’m usually an outlier.

This is kind of a hot take, but I don’t think we should try to measure and assess IQ and EQ at all. The IQ test in use today tests very specific, very narrow types of intelligence and is not a meaningful measure. In a practical sense intelligence is mostly a matter of speed. Someone with a low or average IQ can solve any problem a high IQ person could, it would just take longer. At every step of thier journey a low IQ person spends more time. Learning the requisite knowledge, understanding the concepts, breaking down the problem, and crafting a solution. Most folks in that situation opt not to continue at some point along the way, but they would eventually get there with enough time and knowledge.

With EQ that’s learned behavior. Some people have a natural knack for it, but outside some types of mental illness, emotional intelligence can be taught.

Realistically, the world is too complex and too large to even remotely be able to predict the outcome of making everyone 50% smarter.

My best guess though is that it wouldn’t change much. If everyone is smarter, no one is smarter. High intelligence doesn’t automatically mean Mr. Spock. I used to be involved with Mensa and many of the people I met were nuts, lacked critical thinking skills, or were so full of themselves for testing well they were blind to external information. I myself am highly intelligent on paper, but if you looked at my life you would see a lifelong series of dumb choices and in many cases choosing the worst possible option even knowing it was.

What I mean is being smart isn’t as valuable a skill to have as one might think. Especially at the top end of intelligence, smarter basically equates to faster at solving problems. Raw processing power does play into it for sure but the difference between someone with an IQ of 130 and an IQ of 160 is how fast they finished the test.

The best way to make the world a better place would be to teach everyone critical thinking and emotional intelligence skills.

Not books, but there have been a few creepypastas that had me on edge for weeks after reading them. There was one about a murderous doppelganger that disguised itself as a household pet that had me nervous around one of my cats.

I saw her napping in my living room and then a few seconds later sitting patiently by the bathroom. She must have slipped by me without me noticing, but I was a bit afraid of her for a while after.

Good. I enjoy network security as a hobby and at one time a profession but even still I don’t envy your threat model. A state level actor as your adversary is next to impossible to foil. Tech-wise if it exists, they can crack it or recover it. Even a (software) shredded drive can be restored, it would just be very costly and time consuming for them. Heck it’s even possible to recover a physically smashed drive. On physical security, no amount of guns or prep can evade them. You’d basically need to hit the road in a car made before 2010 registered to someone else and use only cash to pay for things for the rest of your life. And even that’s not a sure thing thanks to the growing surveillance state.

Honestly there is little that could be done to protect one’s self in your situation. If going to prison isn’t an option for you, Hunter S Thompson always carried a revolver on his person in case he needed a way out, which he eventually felt he did.

If you’re tech savvy, use an anonymous crypto wallet to setup a server outside the 5 eyes countries and their allies and put all of your info there. Then destroy (with fire) any hard copies of the data you have. Be sure to ‘shred’ the local files with at least 50 passes once they’re uploaded, or better yet shred the entire drive and reinstall your OS. Then configure a dead man’s switch so that if you don’t log into the server as root every seven days the server will automatically send a full copy of the data to the press (the more places the better).

But you’d need to use tor plus a VPN from a car parked outside the range of any security cameras that has access to a public wifi network. A burner laptop with a hardened linux distro would be advised, and your server should be hardened as well.

Even with hyper paranoid levels of security that still doesn’t guarantee anonymity.

If you’re not already fluent with security tech, it would be highly advised that you don’t attempt the above. My advice would be to ditch tech entirely and get the data out of your possession. Put it all in a freezer bag and bury it somewhere. Give the coordinates to at least three people you would trust with your life with instructions to retrieve and distribute it if you get arrested, go missing, or die. That way if the feds do raid you there is nothing for them to find. Also don’t write anything down, memorize it and burn anything physical.

I wouldn’t say we’re past the point of reform, we lack the political will in our elected representatives and the numbers to force the issue. It is possible, but very unlikely, that we could flip the house and senate with enough progressive politicians that reform would be possible. However the establishment democratic party is unwilling to take the necessary steps or support the needed candidates. Their aim seems to be to become more centrist than they already were and maintain the status quo.

Unfortunately though the reality of the situation is very complex, ambiguous, and inundated with misinformation. Most reforms in the federal government won’t change the policies in red states, which are by far more egregious than what’s happening in Washington. While it’s likely true that there are no true red states, just gerrymandered purple states, there are still a sizable portion of the US population that want some or all of what’s going on in red states and the federal government.

There doesn’t seem to be enough political will among the left to carry out a revolution. Even if there was, there are almost as many right wingers (who are better armed, equipped, and trained) who would stand in opposition and turn the revolution into the second civil war.

Realistically while there are things that could be done to mitigate or stop the far right, not enough people seem to have the bravery, resources, and will to do what needs to be done.