I proposed to my wife at Christmas by putting the ring in a bigger box so she was surprised. It was a box for skincare product, and she was actually excited for it before she even opened it to see the ring. Obviously she was happy for the proposal, but she also seemed a little disappointed she didn’t get skincare stuff.

The following Christmas, I got her a tiny container of a skincare product she liked and put it in a ring box.

Who knows, maybe the accelerationists are right and this term will be so bad leftists will actually unify and start acting strategically.

Probably not, but maybe.

The far right has gotten their act together, productivity-wise. They’re out there publishing a literal handbook, and they step in line to implement it.

Where’s the left’s Project 2025? Blue-no-matter-who has always been a time-buying strategy. But if you want things to go great, we have to do something with the time we buy.

The core of that something is organization. Not just locally (though yes, locally), confederate with other groups. Until we have a MAGA level movement with MAGA level engagement and MAGA level narratives, the left will remain a fractured archipelago.

That means getting along with all the thousands of “wrong” leftists long enough to build common ground. That means a dead-simple, unified narrative. That means recognizing poisoned vocabulary and framing policy in more 'murican terms.

Just in general, swallowing our pride to focus more on getting results than being right.

Step by step. I’d rather push left from the Democrats’ status quo than the Republicans’.

Maybe early detection?

They could digitize creatures and encapsulate them in pocket sized containers. Their tech is a bit more advanced

If you can taste cinnamon, you put too much. It gives almost a smokiness while making the sweetness of the tomato pop. But you should use so little you worry it won’t do anything.

And he gets to keep the flute after!

I suggest breaking it down into sub questions based on expertise of the audience and nature of the information: technical, narrative, cultural, emotional, etc.

This is too broad. It’s like asking “what’s the best wrench to tighten nuts and bolts?” For some applications that’s a torque wrench, some it’s a box end, some it’s a socket wrench, some it’s a crescent wrench, sometimes it’s a pair of vice grips and a hammer. Anything that could properly be called a mode of communication has use cases where it’s clearer than others.

The OBD code that’s unintelligible to the lay person is the clearest way to communicate a discrete engine problem to a mechanic. A graph that plots a particular change over time might perfectly communicate the raw data, while being incapable of communicating narrative context. A meme image or referential quote might perfectly communicate a specific emotional concept to a broad group that gets the reference, while being totally opaque to those who don’t.

There are a lot of ways to interpret this question, it really depends on the information and the people.

Between experts trained in the method of communication? Between experts and a general audience? One expert and one non-expert? Is it technical data? Nuanced opinion? Simple message?

I didn’t wear a trenchcoat. If I told you what I did instead, I’d probably doxx myself. It was cringe.

Not OP, but also an annoying adolescent atheist. After actually giving it some thought, I realized I was contextualizing the concept all wrong. Just because most people seem to contextualize God as a Santa Claus figure (bearded man who lives above us and judges our conduct, with fitting consequences) didn’t mean I had to accept that context.

There have been many very intelligent people across history who had many interesting things to say about deity. Few of them were using the Santa Claus model.

How tho

I’ve long ascribed to the theory that, if time travel is ever invented, no one kills Hitler because WWII was inevitable and Hitler actually bungled a lot of key decisions. I’m praying Trump is the same. Maybe this is the most painless purging of nationalist sentiment across the timelines.

Going online to gripe about DNC strategy to other online leftists accomplishes nothing but generating more apathetic non-voters. Organizing in effective ways can actually accomplish something: mass letters directly to the DNC, banding together into massive documented coalitions, mass petitions.

If the Uncommitted movement had tens of millions of registered voters come together and pledge to vote Harris if and only if she took a harder stance on Israel, that might have helped.

When you’re speaking up to the wrong audience, and thereby doing more harm than good, yes you should shut up. Toward that audience, or at least with that message. The Democratic party is a lot of unsavory things, but they aren’t totally stupid. They have a great number of analysts developing strategy based on the information they have. If you want them to change, they need actionable information that supports that change.

Complaining in already largely leftist anonymous online spaces is not actionable information.

Yeah I really don’t see the situation in the comic often at all. I won’t say it doesn’t happen, but I’ve personally witnessed way more of this reactionary diversion when men are discussing their unique issues.

And complementary to Chesterton’s Fence is a principle I’ve heard called Grandma’s Ham or the Monkey Ladder Experiment. Sometimes “we’ve always done it that way” is covering up outdated practices for purposes that no longer exist.

And I doubt most of us are “duped”. We know this is how it works, and the best strategy is still to keep butting back up against the catch until we have reach the conditions to lift it. Every Dem victory is like a pause button on the rightward slide while we boost candidates for the next primary.

Epic what Battle?