I don’t attribute a lot of positive things to social media, but I will give it credit for turning me around on spiders. Arachnophobia scared the crap out of me as a kid. For years afterward, I’d never sit down on a toilet without first getting down on my hands and knees to make sure there weren’t any spiders lurking underneath the bowl. Thanks to years of spiderbro memes, now I generally view them as comrades.

Nothing to do with cryptocurrency. Great podcast, though.

In the actual world, governed by actual mathematics, you are incorrect. This has been repeatedly pointed out to you, with illustrative examples, by many people. Your stubborn, willful ignorance cannot change the fabric of reality.

I think you’re right, but I’d like to believe there was at least one person out there that thought, “Shit, I’d better vote for Harris, or he might shoot me in the face!”

What a twat.

Whataboutisms aside, if you’re going to claim an article is libelous, you ought to at least be able to refute one of the assertions made by it. You haven’t actually done that here. Jill Stein’s defense is that she’s naive to the point of idiocy. So she’s either a witting catspaw of Putin and the GOP, or an imbecile that has no business being president.

Furthermore, I was unable to find any language in the senate intelligence committee’s report to indicate that she’d been cleared of wrongdoing— merely the absence of an indictment. Regardless of whether she’s committed any crimes, she is objectively a spoiler candidate. She could be as pure as the driven snow, and it wouldn’t change the fact that the only thing her campaign stands to accomplish is to elect donald trump.

If she really wanted to further her purported agenda, she would use her candidacy to get concessions from Harris in exchange for dropping out and endorsing her. Stein could actually effect change that way. Instead, she parrots Russian talking points, exclusively attacks Democrats, and consequently is completely counterproductive with regard to her stated goals.

No, it’s the logical and inevitable consequence of the action you’re advocating for. Just saying it’s “dumb” in no way refutes it.

Whether that’s true or not, it doesn’t change the math. The world’s full of people advocating against their own interests. You still haven’t addressed the argument.

Care to engage with any of these, then?

But your proposed course of action clearly doesn’t align with your stated goal, for reasons that have already been pointed out to you. I don’t see you engaging with that argument. This leads me to believe that you don’t actually care about what happens to Palestinians; you just want to feel like you’re taking a moral stand. People that actually give a shit tend to care about what the consequences of their actions will be.

If the last person who talked to him was Stephen Miller, it probably is. To paraphrase George Burns, putting an idea into his head is like putting a basketball into a thimble.

I guess what we want to do is to cultivate a community where people—and especially bots—will have a hard time engaging dishonestly. Having said that, I’m no closer to knowing how to do it. The struggle with misinformation disinformation seems like an arms race where the bad actors will always have the advantage.

barely a percentage point compared to the fossil fuel industry’s war on Green Energy

That’s not really relevant in this context, though, is it? Maybe a better comparison would be 2024 election spending by foreign-connected PACS. According to opensecrets.org, the “nearly $10 million” allegedly distributed by RT employees is equivalent to the sum of all other foreign pac money donated to the GOP this cycle. It’s certainly not “dwarfed by any other country” as you spuriously claimed.

Saudi sportswashing and other shenanigans are also cause for concern. That in no way lessens the severity of this problem.

I just think calling people bots and shills has no place in honest discourse and the brushstroke always tends to get bigger and bigger.

Bots and shills have no place in honest discourse, but they obviously exist. Should we pretend they don’t—assume everyone is arguing in good faith, regardless of how blatantly dishonest and inconsistent they are? What would you suggest?

I don’t disagree that there’s a slippery slope problem; there’s no shortage of fringe internet echo chambers that dismiss all dissenting opinions as coming from npc’s, cia shills, shitlibs, bloodmouths, breeders, <insert dehumanizing label>, etc.

Yeah, I don’t think he’d have made an overt dick joke on stage at the convention. This, as you say, was masterfully done. It’s just the kind of thing that I’d expect to get under trump’s skin. I’d like to have been in the room when they came up with that, assuming it wasn’t a brilliant improvisation.

I had a science teacher that told us, “If you sneeze three times and nobody blesses you, the devil takes your soul!”

It’s science.

FWIW, I’m dual-booting windows and mint atm. Separate drives, but just one EFI partition, and this update hasn’t borked things for me.

I think it’s a RDR2 reference, but I couldn’t be more specific.