Hard to come up with non-joke suggestions without knowing the locale. Seattle? Un Bien. Las Vegas? The Double Down Saloon. San Francisco? Smitten. Portland? Powell’s books.

Generally? Grab a pebbled ice machine and turn the lights off on your way out.

I was writing in the midst of a morning torpor, and could not think how to put such a fine point on it. You’re spot on.

I don’t want to discourage you, she seems like a worthy candidate. It’s this “even if they did nothing” talk that grabs me. The average dem voter is so accustomed to weakness that we’re starting to sound like a battered partner.

It’s not federated, but something like BookStack could be an option for self-hosted collaboration.

Please understand that they still will cheat if they can, because it’s more fun for them that way

You’re a shitty reductio ad absurdum, my kid and I live in England where rain was invented and I do fine without a car.

The people who made phpBB didn’t, so far as I know, have teams of behavioural psychologists gaming out how best to sell us ads and waste infinite amounts of our time.

Kinda my point. Even the scientific process is imperfect. It’s definitely workable, but all our theories are less “really real” and more a highly refined consensus that is only valid while we lack a better one. All firm beliefs require a leap of faith, however small.

Yes but it’s worth pointing out that peer review is also a form of consensus-building. It’s not a perfect process, but it’s pretty workable if everyone’s pulling in the same direction.

He was three at the time, it was a vocab issue. Still funny years later.

That’s reasonable. In trying to clarify my stance I’ve basically talked myself over to your way of thinking.

Thanks for taking the effort. I know that it’s a losing battle when you’re dealing with people spreading disinfo in bad faith and you’re trying to counter everything. The worst part is that it makes conversations far harder to have, so I really do value that olive branch of trust.

I can’t speak to what others are thinking when they talk about “the system” in this way, but I’ll try to explain where I’m at. I do have to allow that it’s a bad rationale to ascribe any overt intent to the incredibly vast and dynamic nature of “the system”. We’re talking about a single sentence that is broadly gesturing at not just centuries of continually changing case law, but also the ongoing interactions of massive regulatory, financial, and legal systems run by many thousands of people and is also constantly changing. That is too wide a swath to cut. To equivocate further in your favor, it is also wrong by what it fails to account for - failed systems.

The main takeaway I would hope people get from the idea (one that I heard from a forgotten source and then began using in the light of my own understanding I have to confess) is that we are living under a system that has been disproportionately and consistently shaped over much of its history by moneyed interests in various ways for the specific aim of winning the class war for the wealthy. That’s what the system is doing, that is its purpose.

In the future to avoid raising anyone’s hackles (at least those whose hackles don’t deserve raising) I should be more specific and speak of the 1971 Powell memorandum and how we are essentially living in the aftermath of its victory. Would that be more acceptable?

Calling out disinformation takes effort. If I’m wrong and you give a shit, talk to me. I’m a regular person who is generally pleasant, maybe you can be too.

Do you notice how what you just said is not a conversation starter or even a joke? What’s your goal here, just to talk shit? What’s your ideal outcome for leaving this remark, exactly? Do you even have one.

I do benefit from reading these accounts. Helps ground me. My kid sometimes makes me feel like he’s completely unglued, an assiduous non-participant in consensus reality. “Mayonnaise is spicy,” or he will calmly inform me that “my favourite green thing is nobody because nobody is green”. Doesn’t remember anything about anything, totally time blind, filled with chaotic impulses that leave him perennially scraped and bruised.

And yet on the sliding scale of kids in general, he’s basically lucid.

The purpose of a system is what it does. If this wisdom was truly internalised by most people, there would be global revolution.

More “survived a punch” than “won a fight”

I don’t think it’s conspiracism territory when you have specific people/corporations with definite short to mid-term goals that are concrete and realistic. Elites hate not controlling mass media, been that way since movable type. If we went back to having town criers they’d pass anti-shouting laws.

It’s almost like billionaires buy media outlets for a reason

Propaganda is OP, really can’t nerfed hard enough to change the meta