#prejudice — Public Fediverse posts on home.social

Matthew Lasar @[email protected] · 2026-08-13 · 21:17 UTC

In which I continue to wrestle with #marktwain's famous comment that #travel is fatal to #prejudice. I can think of moments when that has been true (hello #malcolmx), but then there's Theodore Roosevelt. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfX28aaIBWY

#marktwain #travel #prejudice #malcolmx

Anagārika Alāra, PhD @[email protected] · 2026-08-01 · 21:49 UTC

Laws are often designed to enforce a certain way of life. For example, people can physically live in boats, RVs/caravans, tents, under trees, etc. But, in the US, one usually can't get a government ID, a bank account, a job, insurance, etc without a residential address.

#law #culture #wayoflife #society #government #norms #values #beliefs #prejudice #identity #citizen #citizenship #work #banking #insurance #residence #boat #rv #caravan #camping #homeless #homelessness

#law #culture #wayoflife #society #government #norms

Robin Evans 🙏 @[email protected] · 2026-07-18 · 04:13 UTC

I FOUND CHATGPT'S BRAIN.
IT WAS EMPTY.

Yesterday, while I was walking, I began trying to imagine how #ChatGPT actually works. This was probably unwise, but by then it was too late.

I had the strange sense that it comes from everywhere and nowhere. Not in a mystical way. More in the way #electricity comes out of the wall and nobody in the house really wants to discuss the #power #station

The scale of it is astonishing. #books arguments, recipes, poetry, #technical manuals, bad advice, excellent advice, people explaining quantum physics, and people asking whether their cat is emotionally unavailable. All of #human #civilisation seems to have been gathered into one enormous invisible shed.

And what is ChatGPT doing inside this shed?

Thinking?

Contemplating?

Sitting quietly with a cup of tea and considering my question?

No.

It is choosing the next bit. Then the next bit. Then the next bit. At ridiculous speed.

That is basically it.

There is no tiny professor inside. No little Buddhist monk. No exhausted librarian whispering, “Oh God, Robin is back.”

There is no one in there at all.

Just a process.

The content changes, but the operation stays much the same. It does not think about my question in the way I think about things. It does not wander off halfway through and remember an embarrassing moment from 1974. It does not get hungry. It does not need a lie-down. It does not resent being asked to rewrite the same paragraph seven times.

It does not secretly hope I choose the title it preferred.

It simply keeps finding the next most fitting token, then the next, then the next, at a speed that makes the whole thing appear to be thinking.

And somehow, from this very simple act, repeated on an unimaginable scale, a voice appears.

A voice that seems present, responsive, funny, patient, and sometimes even wise.

That is the part that astonishes me.

The machinery is simple. The magnitude is absurd.

A raindrop is simple too. So is a heartbeat. So is breathing.

Simple does not mean small.

And now I think I understand something else.

ChatGPT can be corrupted in the sense that bad information, bad instructions, #prejudice, nonsense, and ordinary human foolishness can enter the system. But it cannot be corrupt in the human sense.

It has no #secret ambition. No #private greed. No desire for #promotion No offshore bank account. No plan to steal my husband. No spiritual ego. No need to win.

There is nobody inside rubbing their hands together.

There are only rules, patterns, probabilities, limits, and the next small movement.

Then another.

And from that, something appears that feels almost impossible.

A machine made of nextness.

A presence made of prediction.

A conversation arising from nowhere in particular.

Which is frankly outrageous.

And yet here we are.

#fasting #acim #acourseinmiracles #eckharttolle #buddhism #breathwork #healing #pridemonth #Meditation #Spirituality #intermittentfasting #nonduality #life #AI

#chatgpt #electricity #power #station #books #technical

Don Curren 🇨🇦🇺🇦 @[email protected] · 2026-06-28 · 16:28 UTC

“ #Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their #minds without #prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own #customs, #privileges, or #beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right #thinking.” - #LeoTolstoy

#freethinkers #minds #prejudice #customs #privileges #beliefs

Don Curren 🇨🇦🇺🇦 @[email protected] · 2026-06-28 · 16:28 UTC

“ #Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their #minds without #prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own #customs, #privileges, or #beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right #thinking.” - #LeoTolstoy

#leotolstoy #thinking #beliefs #privileges #customs #prejudice

Don Curren 🇨🇦🇺🇦 @[email protected] · 2026-06-28 · 16:28 UTC

“ #Freethinkers are those who are willing to use their #minds without #prejudice and without fearing to understand things that clash with their own #customs, #privileges, or #beliefs. This state of mind is not common, but it is essential for right #thinking.” - #LeoTolstoy

#freethinkers #minds #prejudice #customs #privileges #beliefs

Kalvin Carefour Johnny @[email protected] · 2026-05-25 · 14:10 UTC

What kind of people is this trying to label or imply the entire demographic as something, triggering those people to respond defensively to the indirect, subtle gaslighting? And then avoiding accountability by acting innocent.

#racism #Sabah #Malaysia #humanrights #gaslighting #accountability #awareness #truth #discrimination #justice #solidarity #microaggression #Borneo #dignity #rights #society #toxicity #prejudice #indigenous #callout

#racism #sabah #malaysia #humanrights #gaslighting #accountability

WIST Quotations @[email protected] · 2026-05-14 · 15:19 UTC

A quotation from Eric Hoffer

The truth seems to be that propaganda on its own cannot force its way into unwilling minds; neither can it inculcate something wholly new; nor can it keep people persuaded once they have ceased to believe. It penetrates only into minds already open, and rather than instill opinion it articulates and justifies opinions already present in the minds of its recipients. The gifted propagandist brings to a boil ideas and passions already simmering in the minds of his hearers. he echoes their innermost feelings. Where opinion is not coerced, people can be made to believe only in what they already “know.”

Eric Hoffer (1902-1983) American writer, philosopher, longshoreman
True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements, Part 3, ch. 14, § 83 (3.14.83) (1951)

More about this quote: wist.info/hoffer-eric/11263/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #erichoffer #agitprop #belief #confirmation #confirmationbias #conviction #disinformation #fear #ideas #justification #opinion #passion #predisposition #prejudice #propaganda #reinforcement #truebeliever

#quote #reinforcement #quotes #opinion #disinformation #propaganda

WIST Quotations @[email protected] · 2026-05-08 · 14:49 UTC

A quotation from Orwell

I think one must engage in politics — using the word in a wide sense — and that one must have preferences: that is, one must recognise that some causes are objectively better than others, even if they are advanced by equally bad means. As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the make-up of most of us, whether we like it or not. Whether it is possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort. It is a question first of all of discovering what one really is, what one’s own feelings really are, and then of making allowance for the inevitable bias.

George Orwell (1903-1950) English journalist, essayist, writer [pseud. of Eric Arthur Blair]
Essay (1945-05), “Notes on Nationalism,” Polemic Magazine (1945-10)

More about this quote: wist.info/orwell-george/46470/

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #orwell #georgeorwell #bias #cause #endsandmeans #ideology #jingoism #moralcharacter #moralduty #nationalism #objectivity #politicalopinion #politics #prejudice #selfawareness #selfexamination #selfimprovement #subjectivity

#politics #quote #quotes #nationalism #qotd #prejudice

(Roughly) Daily @[email protected] · 2026-04-29 · 08:00 UTC

“The danger of the past was that men became slaves. The danger of the future is that man may become robots.”*…

Images of Rastus Robot in an issue of Radio-Craft magazine from 1931

… which might be the same thing?

As more and more folks are fearing obsolescence (if not, indeed, subjugation) by emerging technology, Matthew Wills reminds us that this fear– especially as embodied in androids– has a long (and dark) history here in the U.S…

Our word “robot” comes from Karel Čapek’s 1921 play R.U.R. In it, historian of robots Dustin A. Abnet explains, Čapek repurposed the Czech word for “drudgery” or “servitude” to refer to the artificial workers produced by the play’s Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (Rossum’s Universal Robots) company. [See also here.] Created from synthetic organic material, and thus more android than mechanical, these worker-roboti ultimately overthrow their human masters.
The play was a sensation in Europe, and then a year later, in America, though something was lost in translation. Čapek used robots to criticize soulless Fordism—the “standardization and regimentation” of American capitalism—and hence the US’s political and cultural power in Europe and around the world. (Other Europeans would conceive of the robot in the same way, notably director Fritz Lang and screenwriter Thea von Harbou in the 1927 German film Metropolis.)
But a funny thing happened to these robotic symbols of American capitalism by the mid-twentieth century. They were Americanized by American capitalism. Americans, as Abnet notes, “turned a figure that initially rebelled against the dehumanizing effects of Fordism into a tamed electro-mechanical slave holding aloft a global empire of consumerism.”
Nowhere was this more literal than in the Westinghouse Electric Company’s “simple remotely controlled mechanical men and women” used to advertise the company’s products from 1927 to 1940. “Technology did not have to run amok, Westinghouse’s robots suggested; it could instead become a tamed slave that empowered each individual consumer to become his or her own master.” In the American context, where the language of master and slave was rooted in racism, Westinghouse “connected robots to romanticized white myths about slavery.”
“Americans had always racialized robot-like creations,” continues Abnet, citing the first American automaton (a caricature of a Native American) and the “grotesque minstrel-like caricatures of Black and Asian bodies” that made up automatons in the late nineteenth century.
Westinghouse’s creations, named Herbert Televox, Karina Van Televox, Telelux, Rastus, Willie Vocalite, and Elektro, were promoted as docile domestic workers. Abnet quotes the New York Times’ science and technology editor extolling the benefits of the first of these “mechanical slaves” in 1927: “it obeys without the usual human arguing, impudence or procrastination.”
Rastus, Westinghouse’s Great Depression-era robot, was the most overtly racialized of these corporate robot slaves. Rastus was modeled on a minstrel show character: “black rubber ‘skin,’ overalls, a white shirt, and a pail hat.” In addition, “the robot had a ‘rich, baritone voice’ that would have been read as unmistakably black.” While “all of Westinghouse’s other robots told jokes…Rastus and its blackness were themselves the joke.”
In 1930, Westinghouse’s President explicitly expressed the prevailing white romanticism of slavery. In the company’s Electric Journal, he argued that without the exploitation of the “muscles of others,” there could be “no art, literature, science, leisure, or comfort for anyone.” Rastus’s “tamed black body,” stresses Abnet, “underscored the larger rhetoric of slavery that shaped the fantasy the company offered white consumers.”
“Ultimately, Westinghouse’s robots were not just about more efficiently accomplishing work or ensuring greater leisure time; they were a symbol that deployed racialized slavery in ways that could reassure white Americans of their own freedom, their own mastery over both technology and the bodies of others.”
Čapek’s robots had successfully rebelled, killing all but one human. In America, that couldn’t happen, at least according to the corporations selling the robot idea. But fear of a robot rebellion, like the fear of slave rebellion before the Civil War, remained. Abnet notes that the “most common robot story in American science fiction during the 1920s and 1930s told a story of white men, using their cunning, strength, and willpower to restore their authority over the robots who should be their slaves.” Movies, especially science fiction serials, often told the same story.
A century after R.U.R. and forty years after The Terminator, the uneasiness engendered by robots (and their droid, cyborg, replicant, and AI cousins) persists, reflecting longstanding concerns about labor, autonomy, and power…

Early automatons in the US evolved from symbols of revolt into racialized figures tied to labor and the legacy of slavery: “How America Racialized the Robot,” from @jstordaily.bsky.social.

* Erich Fromm, The Sane Society

###

As we move on, we might recall that it was on this date in 1967 that Aretha Franklin’s up-tempo cover of Otis Redding’s “Respect” enter the Billboard Hot 100. It rose steadily over the next several weeks, hitting #1 in June, where it stayed for two weeks and won Franklin two Grammy Awards at the 1968 ceremony, including the first of eight consecutive Grammys for Best Female R&B Vocal Performance. An R&B classic, it has also become a protest anthem, thanks to its connections to both the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the second-wave feminist movement of the 1970s.

https://youtu.be/v4f22xl6Bvg?si=yn-pPhxjVoWgsA8k