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.

I have a really hard time staying cool and collected when I discuss politics with people who hold right-wing positions. As a result, I never do volunteer work for political campaigns, because it seems like the only positions available are phone-banking and door-knocking. It’s frustrating; I want to help, but I feel strongly that I’d do more harm than good, doing either of those things.

How about Anthropogenic Catastrophic Kindling (ACK)? Then we can at least get Cathy on board.

While this is true, people still bear responsibility for the media they choose to consume. People wake up every day and decide to get their information from liars and grifters, because they prefer the way lies feel. It isn’t as if they don’t have options. Now, media literacy is definitely a problem. But the only solution is education, and that’s a silver bullet too slow to save us from all the extant ill-educated mooks.

When people tell me that their stubborn ignorance has reached levels so acute as to endanger the lives of everyone on Earth, I find it prudent to believe them.

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.

Hold your breath, so you don’t blow me

Away dude—I’m dust

I really appreciate this take. It’s good-hearted and makes good sense. I’ll try to remember it going forward, when cynicism overwhelms.

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!”

I really wish I’d just taken your word for it. That’s depressing.

Yeah, I think there’s also a lot of tone-deafness among economists, that seems to reflect a lack of understanding (or at least acknowledgment) that the economy is built on—and designed to perpetuate—massive inequality. The average person derives comparatively little benefit from an economy which is—on paper—booming, because the profits are overwhelmingly siphoned off by the wealthy. This is probably mostly a problem with the way the economy is reported on by the media, but economists are the face of that.

Economics is a soft science. Economics is not about describing how things should work, economics is about describing how things do work.

I mean, tell that to economists? In my experience, they are extremely dogmatic. With vanishingly few exceptions, every economist I’ve ever heard, seen, or read in any media acts as though whatever model they subscribe to is gospel, and that any issues you might have with it must therefore stem from a lack of understanding, rather than from the faulty assumptions underlying it.

ETA a recent example: Harvard economics professor and former Obama economic adviser Jason Furman on Jon Stewart’s podcast.

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.

Thanks for the write-up! Am also ex-11B, and this really takes me back. A lot of things I don’t miss about the army. Having a new officer come in and make some shitty changes, seemingly just to stroke their ego and put a bullet on their OER—that’s definitely on the list.