I love this, nobody can actually defend this as a healthy way of engaging with politics.

Oh phew, I was worried. Okay okay, what year is it? Do you have any plutonium? I need to get back to my dimension and you’ve been so helpful so far

I love the implication that reading books is bad

It’s just shallow and disappointing.

Your idea of what politics is about has to be bigger than shitposting and trolling.

They are both carbon-based life forms. Which means that at a psychological level they’re probably identical. And there’s probably no difference whatsoever between the respective nations cultures, economic or political conditions, or their respective geopolitical interests.

If they’re living breathing creatures, and they both rely on carbon to form complex molecules that make up their bodies, it naturally follows that their countries have identical geopolitical alliances.

Agian I ask of Trudeau made the same claim, or the Prime Minister of New Zeeland, would you be making the same argument

Wouldn’t that depend on their particular geopolitical interests, which could be entirely different from those of Russia?

I feel like these questions are so absurd sometimes not because an answer is being sought but because it succeeds at the goal of degrading the quality of conversation.

Exactly. Putin is really concerned about student loan debt.

He says he wants blue team to win in 2024, but we are blue team and we hate him!

Well we’re off to an awfully bad start because this is about the shallowest bad faith caricature I could possibly imagine. Let’s put it this way:

• Putin absolutely has a propaganda strategy aimed toward the west that utilizes a number of tools and messaging strategies
• Among the strategies reported on, one has been to escalate existing divisions within the United States, with one example reported on being creating opposing conservative and liberal events and scheduling them at the same location
• Purin preferred Trump for his first term
• Putin preferring Biden can be politically damaging to Biden in the context of domestic politics
• a Trump victory could prove exceptionally destabilizing to domestic politics in the United States

I’m not even 100% saying I’m right, but every step of this is perfectly reasonable, it doesn’t rely on any outlandish assumptions, and communication about this isn’t helped by mocking people with bad faith caricatures and performative incredulity.

or escalate the war.

This seems to run contrary to everything I’ve read about Trump’s position. The first half of what you said is at least somewhat accurate. But the second half is contradicted by numerous reports from Trump that his approach would have been to “take a deal” and get out, implicitly with substantial land concessions from Ukraine. And then there’s the fact that both of them have profess to having positive relationships with one another and admiring one another.

It can be both - a terrible amoral system that concentrates wealth to the point that major world events are driven by wildcard personalities of rich idiots. And then, the rich idiots themselves.

okay but still where is the nepotism? You’ve commented on the general hypothetical possibility of nepotism not having been dis-proven.

Being at Stanford in and of itself is not nepotism so it’s a pretty fair question to those of us who want words to mean things.

(Psst it’s not actually the socratic method)

I don’t think so? The Socratic method wasn’t necessarily a strategy intended to carefully persuade someone by bypassing psychological blockers. If anything, Socrates’ counterparts were often antagonized and angered by his questions because he exposed contradictions.

I think the ethos behind it was that Socrates presumed he knew nothing, other people seemed like they knew things, so he asked them what they knew, since others were so bold as to make knowledge claims.

I just logged in to two smaller instances where I have accounts, anticapitalist.party and mastodon.xyz. I found them in one step and I could see their posts and replies on both of them.

This article depicts Elon Musk trawling for plaintiffs so he can fund lawsuits against Disney. Peter Thiel has publicly said in interviews he funded lawsuits aimed at Gawker as part of an intentional strategy. So that is in fact a perfectly legitimate comparison despite your protestations to the contrary.

You can find Gawker’s behavior objectionable, that’s fine, but that doesn’t have anything to do with anything insofar as it relates to my comparison, since that is not the element I was comparing.

Edit: Also, be sure to downvote and run away without engaging with what I said. Thanks!

Edit 2: Thanks for your compliance.

I think all stars in the galaxy will be dead by then.

Uh?? Is War & Peace not literary fiction? Also I think Diablo, arguably the most famous RPG game (for better or worse), is an action RPG.

Because even for me, a full time systems coder, just figuring out what server to join was a pain

What was there to figure out in your case?

I couldn’t just find you by searching for p03locke, I’d have to search for @p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com.

I literally just searched “p03locke” from mastodon.social and found them in one step.

Echoes of Peter Theil’s strategy to destroy Gawker.