Every time I search for a simple answer Google suggests I use Gemini instead, or they show me a “switch to AI mode” pop up that covers the lower third of my screen. I’ve just started receiving emails about using it on my old Gmail account apropos of nothing. These companies are begging people to waste that energy.

Surprisingly yes, I tend to agree. I think you wanted to communicate a general desire for retribution and nothing deeper. I get the sentiment. I’m sorry. I hope we choose a different path.

I am on the cusp of getting sidetracked by a discussion of the fundamentals of communication theory. Let’s just ignore all of that for a while.

Let’s say you understand the de-nazification program as it unfolded in East and Weat Germany. What aspects of this program do you like and how will it help the people of the world?

Oh, well that’s cherry picked, obviously ignores the connotation of most use cases like the ongoing Uighur “re-education”, and is a terrible example because it was an unpopular and ineffective program. But if you don’t care about being understood by other people or about making a good point, you can use the word that way!

Yeah obviously my beef isn’t with disarmament it’s with your comment about re-education, which means torturing and killing people. So we’ve still gone nowhere in this discussion.

Yes, in the same way that Jahmal Kashoggi’s murder was facilitated by the ordinary citizens of Saudi Arabia, or chat control was facilitated by the ordinary citizens of EU nations, the ordinary Russian is responsible for the aggression towards its neighbors. Or are we perhaps talking about problems caused by politicians and oligarchs that don’t actually answer to anybody in a meaningful way

What the fuck are you talking about. As if the actions of the Russian state are some democratic groundswell of aggression from the people.

sLaUgHtEr :^)

Daryl Davis. The main message to take away from his work is to get to know people. I’m commenting on an anonymized forum. I will generally never know if I’m about to speak with an adult, a child, a paid actor, an expert, a liar… I’m not going to use him as an excuse to not say anything. Generally discussions on social media seem pointless when it comes to changing minds, given that there is even less room for empathy than in a real life conversation, but I think they can be informative for people who are not directly involved but are rather just scrolling through to get a feel for others’ opinions. And there’s always a chance you come across someone who has never critically examined their stance and remains open minded enough to do it now.

Plus, I’d love to know! I’d hate to trigger someone by saying something like “another ~10,000 acres of the Amazon rainforest were clear cut today because you can’t stop eating burgers!” So I just need to know what phrases to avoid. Shame they didn’t reply :^)

Do you have a preferred term that helps you disassociate from the cruelty your lifestyle inflicts behind closed doors?

As always these things are complicated. The way the animal is treated very much matters to me. How can I argue in good faith against something like Cooperative Payún Matrú, a goat herder’s collective, in the Andes? Their animals are truly free roaming. The animals’ lives are not constant suffering. It’s more sustainable than the way many of my vegetables are grown.

I don’t think it’s stupid to be swayed by the hundreds of millions of dollars being used to control the conversation and steer us in the direction they want. Media sources are increasingly centralized, candidate choices are tightly controlled, “scandals” are only published when it’s time to get people angry and emotional and push them to make a rash decision in an upcoming election; otherwise they’re covered up. The people who are aware of how rigged everything is—and I think that’s a lot of them—are still stuck in the mindset of voting for the lesser evil, because that’s the best you can do in an electoral system where the people don’t decide the candidate. I think pretending that elections are some sort of fair fight prevents us from finding common ground.

Where we differ is the idea that you have to be dumb to be manipulated. I don’t think so. I think some people are; I think some people bury their head in the sand; but being manipulated comes from being social. It’s natural to believe in other people. It would be very hard to form connections with other people if you couldn’t trust them. And we’re in an arms race with advertisers, politicians, newsrooms and PR firms where they keep coming up with new ways to pretend to be a trustworthy voice in our lives while our actual connections with our neighbors become more and more distant.

Well, then they are. The point of both articles is that people are being manipulated. It is hard not to be manipulated.

Would you consider an article about billionaires, Super PACs, and Russian election interference to be implying that U.S. citizens are too ignorant to vote for their own interests?

Depends—do you often do construction or renovation on houses you don’t own?

Oh agreed. I think we’re talking past each other to a certain extent. I certainly don’t think that we can expect billionaires to ever be the ones to help. Andrew Carnegie’s act of giving most of his stolen money back under very specific directions on how to use it, after repressing wages and worker actions and literally having people killed his whole adult life, is considered a high bar for them. They have an addiction of some sort. I think it’s obvious if you read Carnegie’s journal—he talks early in his career about how his success has been beyond expectations and he’ll only need to work a few more years and then he can just travel the world on that nest egg and be a business consultant. Lol.

But still some disagreements. Religions have been around for a long time, but they’ve come in quite a few varieties. Christianity in most implementations is very top-down authoritarian in nature. I don’t think that’s something “the people” decided on and then elected to hand over autonomy to meritocratic leaders, and I think this is evidenced by the many other religions that do not work the same way, like Earth Lodge religion, Malagasy spiritualism and spiritual warfare, Mahayana Buddhism, or even subsets of Christianity like Quakers that eschewed hierarchy. Unless there is something in our blood that makes certain “races” of people think differently, then it’s cultural. If it’s cultural, then the loudest voices shape it the most.

No, I think within Christianity and Christian territories people established themselves as rulers by co-opting the desires of humans to have some greater story such as religion that helps explain their lives. Likewise, I think senses of entitlement and beliefs in justice were co-opted. Reinforcing the notions of justice by constantly emphasizing its importance in your culture explains away many of your despotic actions. It provides a shield that slows the tide of revolt. Your political enemies are simply getting what they deserved; the people starving must be unrepentant sinners. In the U.S., the people who are directly responsible for so many people having less than what’s needed for a comfortable life are able to avoid scrutiny precisely by focusing on how those people deserve so much more. They do! It’s true! They know it, and hearing someone admit it feels very liberating! But listening to those voices allows billionaires and their mouthpieces to coax people into believing in their twisted idea of what society should look like—that instead of being entitled to live a good life, people should be entitled to pursue a great one.

I think the proliferation of billionaires points to a cultural problem, but not a grassroots groundswell of belief in billionaires. Too much of culture is asserted surreptitiously through native advertising in the news and PR in our newsfeeds. We haven’t adapted quickly enough—we still think these voices are our peers. We don’t realize how few voices there are, or how many parrots repeating them.

Agree on point #1, but on point #2 I lean toward “yes they can”. Billionaires’ constant PR campaigns that they conduct to avoid having their heads chopped off are what normalizes a society where people are okay with looking the other way when confronted with such unimaginable wealth disparities. There are limited resources, and the ones that are being hoarded are what will help. Obviously we the people have to do better, but intrinsic in the discussion of why we suck so much at helping one another is the fact that this culture was crafted and nurtured by the people it benefits.

It’s a band-aid measure that makes cars behave more like buses, trains, or any other form of transit that takes the mental strain off of the individual. Yet it still uses cars, so we all still get those sweet sweet carbon emissions and ridiculously outsized infrastructure degradation. It’s a step in the right direction but we’re still on the wrong path.

Things cost a lot to produce. It’s cheapened by underpaying laborers and underestimating the cost and impact of resource extraction and power consumption, and the current path of massively scaling up factories, overproducing, and driving the repair economy out of business by making “just buy a new one!” so affordable really looks like The Big Thing That Ends The Current Epoch that people will really struggle to comprehend when they learn about it in history class

I disagree with most things you’ve just said. I agree that there’s no mental PT test, but I disagree with the concept of writing something that dumb. And I’ll end on this point: it’s a sad state of affairs when the nation can’t find enough fit individuals to fill out its military branches and the response is “it’s about time” instead of “wow, we need to make some serious changes.”