ZoWie wrote: ↑Tue Jan 30, 2024 10:48 am
No, I don't care what other people post, I just like to use my time for something besides arguing with the convinced. Bandwidth is scarce on a board like this one because bandwidth is like speed in race cars... how fast you go is proportional to how much time and money you throw at the process. We all know who has the scratch to be first in line when the flag comes down in US politics, and it sure isn't us.
This board seemed like a good idea, but the commercial structure of the Internet combined in a positive reinforcement scenario with what people on the business news channels call "fair competition." Basically, we have spent years proving that there's still no substitute for cubic money. We're not twitter, sorry, X, and if we were some robber baron would just buy our asses out and turn the board into an incoherent time waster.
It gets worse, though. No one can start an account because new accounts have long since succumbed to the Russian spambots. This is a provable fact amply supported by the evidence that is seen daily, beyond all rational denial, but still in the end it means that the side with the scratch wins.
In my circles, Internet is a marketing tool. Very large and profitable corporations throw billions of dollars into cultivating "influencers." They wine and dine them. Many are too young to drink what is served at the parties, but that seems to be no constraint. You can usually be sure that what you see for your entertainment is largely determined by the unformed tastes of 15-year-olds.
I thought this board could be better than that, but at some point the money from the other people is impossible to fight any longer.
I'm not going anywhere, since I'll go down with the ship on this one, but still, there are constraints on my time and I do not want to spend two hours a day arguing with the convinced.
So we will just go on with a situation in which three users frame the debate, same way their political identity group frames the debate on more visible media.
The only silence you will get from me is with regard to the border. It's obviously a very emotionally charged issue and there's no place for rational debate based on the facts. Therefore, I don't go there anymore.
My bad on the Middle East. I dropped radio silence a couple of weeks ago because we'd reached the point where the fundamentals were being debated daily. I should have said something to that effect. It has no real world significance, though. That's because this particular debate is based on personal experience and religious beliefs, and outside the limited province of rational thought. In fact, rational thought has no positive effect, and it never will. Still, since all the brown stuff was already in the fan, I had no more reason to quit the game.
I've also decided to drastically limit my time spent on Biden, since this an election year, and rational assessment of his performance is impossible. I'll just leave it that it seems rare that anyone with all the qualifications to be president actually survives the campaign process in either party.
Now, for goodness sakes, can we get back to the escalating situation in the Middle East? It is currently the major threat to the survival of this species, yet it gets 1/10 the attention compared to today's drumpf tantrum.
