@heiseonline@social.heise.de2026-06-22 08:39:00
@hex@kolektiva.social2026-06-22 04:44:36
The first record of the parable commonly known as the "Blind Men and the Elephant" showed up around 2500 years ago, in a Buddhist text from India. At this point it's pretty commonly known. I assume that most folks reading this will be familiar with some variation of it.
If not, it's essentially a story about people who have limited information making assertions about something: one man grabs a tail and says, "it's like a rope," another the trunk and says, "it's like a snake," a third the leg saying, "it's like a tree," and so on. Later variations are less kind to the men, having them not simply report their findings, but fight over them. The first English translation draws a parallel to religion.
This comes to mind for me, because social media has a tendency to incentivize us to make those hard assertions, to dig in, to argue our perspective as part of a spectacle. Free and federated social media isn't structurally that different from corporate media, so the incentive models built to maximize engagement by maximizing conflict tend to leak through the similarities in the user experience and the conditioning of other platforms.
I didn't really come here to critique the fediverse, but rather to remind everyone, "no one sees the whole fucking elephant." We are limited and there are necessarily some things so big they will never be individually comprehensible. Any system that relies on us all agreeing cannot possibly respond to those big things.
We can see that concretely if we look at the difference between "democratic unity" and "diversity of tactics." In the first model, everyone either agrees or gets forced to behave as though they agree (at least on some issues). That's how liberal democracy works. Diversity of tactics (which systematically described, for example, in the "St Paul Principles"), on the other hand, let's people align on goals without needing to agree on exactly how to achieve them. The reality being that often there are multiple "correct" paths, and sometimes those paths can only work if multiple paths are taken in unison.
No one sees the whole elephant. We won't even see the elephant later. People will still be arguing about the elephant long after it's gone. But if you want to get rid of the elephant, you're gonna need to accept that you can't comprehend it all and you're gonna have to figure out a way to work together that doesn't require a unified approach.
@cdarwin@c.im2026-05-21 18:57:42
'Broadview Six' case will be dropped after closed-door hearing about grand jury transcripts
The case is one of the most highly publicized prosecutions to result from last fall’s Operation Midway Blitz deportation campaign.
That’s because it began as a conspiracy case against six people who protested outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Chicago's Broadview suburb
The remaining four members of the so-called “Broadview Six" are Br…
@Dragofix@veganism.social2026-05-21 02:49:21
Sea levels rising dramatically in some areas due to land subsidence https://phys.org/news/2026-05-sea-areas-due-subsidence.html
Sea level rise is swallowing US Mid-Atlantic farmland faster than expected, study finds
@jby@ecoevo.social2026-04-22 19:43:42
This Earth Day, I'm grateful for the many different ways I get to encounter the living world, from wild landscapes to manicured gardens, from trees by the sidewalk to protected green spaces
Mt Roosevelt over Snow Lake; the Japanese Garden in the Washington Park Arboretum; a robin in New Haven; a lupine at Sepulveda Basin
#naturalist
@heiseonline@social.heise.de2026-06-22 10:16:00
Chiphersteller: SK Hynix erstmals wertvoller als Samsung
Vom Fast-Bankrott zum Börsenstar: Chipproduzent SK Hynix stößt Samsung Electronics vom Thron des wertvollsten Unternehmens des Landes.
https://www.
@cdarwin@c.im2026-04-22 18:48:48
The Trump business behind
"Truth Social" is replacing a former congressman and big supporter of the U.S. president as the leader of the social media platform after a stock collapse that wiped out billions in investor wealth.
Devin Nunes,
a former California congressmen in Donald Trump’s first term,
is being replaced "temporarily" by digital media executive
Kevin McGurn as chief executive officer.
The company, Trump Media & Technology…
@heiseonline@social.heise.de2026-04-22 17:22:00
EU-Kommission: RTL darf Sky übernehmen
Mit der Übernahme von Sky will RTL sein digitales Abo-Geschäft stärken und unabhängiger vom klassischen Werbemarkt werden. Die EU hat keine Einwände.
https://www.h…
@cdarwin@c.im2026-06-22 16:32:11
Right-wing Trump ally
Abelardo de la Espriella
has clinched a narrow victory in Sunday’s runoff presidential election in Colombia,
defeating leftist Senator Ivšn Cepeda, an ally of current President Gustavo Petro.
De la Espriella ran a fearmongering, “tough-on-crime” campaign,
promising to build mega-prisons inspired by El Salvador’s authoritarian President Nayib Bukele,
to bomb “narcoterrorist camps”
and to abandon Petro’s peace efforts.
His…
@cdarwin@c.im2026-06-21 04:08:47
U.S. Ambassador to France,
Charles Kushner,
whose son Jared is married to Trump’s daughter Ivanka,
clashed with his French hosts weeks after arriving last July
when he accused them of not doing enough to combat antisemitism.
Nearly a year later, he contends the problem has gotten worse
— so much so that he has suggested the Trump administration grant refugee status to French Jews, even as it otherwise scales back asylum provision.
“It would be an obje…
