I don't have to like it, That's literally my point. Let's try this, rather than try to find my line, which I've already said was somewhere around causing bodily harm to uninvolved people, what do YOU think is an appropriate form of protest? It seems like that's what you're trying to get off your chest in a round about way.

Good eye!

My understanding was that usually people get private insurance through their job. The other poster who answered me seems to indicate you can get private insurance on your own, so I seem to have been wrong.

I know Germany has a public / private system. Private insurers reimburse more, so they're more desirable from the perspective of medical professionals. But there is a public baseline that Germans can fall back on. This is second hand info though so take it with a grain of salt.

Upvotes for Tali!

Oh I see. Yeah that's cool. I've seen several posts around the fediverse that take a real tsk tsk signal user kind of tone, So I responded to yours kind of defensively. As a person with middle of the road tech knowledge I also curious if how I think about it stands up to scrutiny (because people will tell me!). Didn't mean to distract from the intent. Thanks for posting this in any case.

Yeah, I guess that's just more responsibility on us as individuals...hurray -_-

Thanks for engaging with me on this, I feel like it did clarify some things in my mind just having to justify myself. I appreciate. I hope I see you out there again Beltalowda.🖖

Yeah, this argument is getting at what's underlying my concern I think. There is a huge vacuum of trustworthy authority right now. It seems like institutions have been lighting themselves on fire left and right. This may be a problem that simply comes from the existence of the internet. 50 years ago everyone just trusted that Walter Cronkite was telling them the truth every evening, he was a big arbiter, likely because they didn't have any other sources of information the internet makes available. He may have been acting in good faith, he may have been parroting defense department talking points, who knows. Now we have a website to cater to every intellectual pretaliction. That isn't helpful to find definitive truth. Add to that, over and over we've found existing authorities to be completely self serving (e.g. the government lying about WMD in Iraq, CDC obfuscating it's funding of gain of function research early in the pandemic, recent revelations of perhaps long running corruption concern in the supreme court). Maybe that's because they've gotten worse, maybe they've always been like that and we didn't have enough information to notice it. So, like you said, all of this is happening and we no longer have arbiters to sift out this wheat from the chaff as it were. That's a huge problem.

So what's the solution? I certainly don't want Republicans to be removing books from their shelves because they deem them "harmful to the children" or whatever the fuck. But at the same time, I don't want self serving billionaires (the shitshow that twitter has become) or newly revealed corrupt institutions making those decisions for me either. So what's the solution?

I think right now it's basically an unsolved problem, with all of us just floating around to the sources that suit us best, allowing for the divides between us to absolutely explode in breadth and width (I have family that has strait faced told me that COVID was created and released on purpose to kill Republicans...shit like that). I know that I've struggled with who to "trust" consciously. And maybe that's the real difference between our perspectives is just that. Maybe that's what this all comes down to is that you don't trust American right wing institutions (rightfully) and I've lost faith in all of them. I don't know what the move is, but we need to figure something out fast.

Isn't the process of refuting something properly by definition critical rather than uncritical? Not all ideas are equal by a long shot, I'm just saying someone shouldn't decide for us which ones we can engage with.

I'm pretty far on the left and I'd debate that Democrats are also very fond of the status quo. But your point stands.

I wasn't trying to say that they're the same, I just think it's important to be weilding the same analysis for "allies" as for "enemies". Otherwise you get into a situatiin like the US, telling the world that Russia is a war criminal for using cluster munitions, then sending Ukrain cluster munitions.

Last one I remember was in like 2012. I was searching around for a wireless HDMI system and actually found and purchased it. For WEEKS post purchase this thing kept showing up in my adds. Everyone has case after case of these fuckers reading their mind and my only story is one that was so fucked it was funny. They were always overselling their capabilities I think.

If people internalized that last line of yours we could get shit done. ..