TheSanSabaSongbird

Not only that, but there's a very strong case to be made that from a purely economic perspective, a tipless system is better for everyone.

All that and The Golden Gate Bridge is still way better looking. It's not even close.

Or, you know, we go back to the time when the news media had real gatekeepers and not just any random jackass could churn out some bullshit copy and broadcast it to the world, let alone have it get published by their local paper.

It's nice that the Internet has democratized access to a national or even global audience, but let's not pretend for a moment that it hasn't caused a ton of problems in the process such that now many people have no idea of what to believe while others believe whatever they want.

It's still pretty easy to tell the difference. You have to have a pretty low level of media literacy to not be able to easily spot it. Unfortunately we already know that most people don't have a clue when it comes to mass media, and even if they did, we also know that people tend to believe whatever reinforces their priors.

It also raises the very thorny issue of who adjudicates what is and is not "memetic effluent."

As a whole Lemmy users are deeply stupid or deeply ignorant or both. I think it's an age thing, but I could be wrong. Most of what gets tossed around here as Lemmy's received orthodoxy is pure amateur hour bullshit that has very little to do with reality.

Another cause for this is that Lemmy's userbase tends to be very ideologically driven as opposed to forming political views on the basis of evidence and solutions based rationality.

Obviously I'm not very popular around here. Fortunately I don't care. I'm just killing time and if I can shake even one person's ill-founded convictions, I am happy.

Except that if Trump wins there wont be any voters to win since we won't have elections anymore. What part about a dictatorship do you people not understand?

Somebody doesn't understand basic game theory.

You're not about to change your mind anyway, so why not have some fun calling you out for what you are?

This is incorrect. The executive was never intended to be anywhere near as powerful as it has become. It has become increasingly powerful over the years for a suite of reasons, some perfectly legitimate (like the threat of nuclear war), but most because of cowardice in the legislative together with the conservative theory of the unitary presidency.

There's an entire body of literature in poly sci on the subject and how it can be addressed.

While I am definitely onboard with your skepticism of elite institutions such as Harvard, I urge caution in automatically attaching a negative connotation as a sort of reactionary default. More than one thing can be true at once and while it's entirely possible that our elitist system creates a lot of bullshit, it can also be true that our elite educational institutions create a lot of good.

It wasn't the media at all though; it was fucking Elise Stefanik deliberately interrupting her prior response to hide the fact that her response was the same with regard to student speech vis black people or Israel.

Michelle Goldberg did a great write up of it in the NYT.

But let me correct myself. The news media in general did blow it by not catching on to and calling out what Stefanik did, but it wasn't universal as obviously some of us, including Michelle Goldberg, understood Stefanik's intellectually dishonest fake-out.