The person you’re talking to is unlikely to be pursuaded but there’s usually silent, invisible lurkers who can be.

I know I’ve changed my mind on things because of arguments I’ve read on the internet.

It is proven that people do double down on their views when confronted with opposing evidence, but IMO this is more about the psychology of trust and confrontation between individuals, rather than proof of the futility of argument as a concept. Hell, Vsauce made a video called ‘The Future of Reasoning’, where he makes the case that argument might have been selected for as an essential part of human psychology and necessary for our survivial.

The trick is to argue with the voices in your own head and simply project them on to other people’s comments.

Yeah and Hitler injected human shit into himself, so what? Where does this sense of confidence come from? He said he’d kill people and now he’s legally allowed to do it.

Actually History isn’t always written by the victors. After WW2 a load of german officers fled to south America and began writing books about how great they were and could have won if only they had finished developing all their wonder weapons in time. This is the origin of a lot of persistent and false memes about how advanced and brilliant the nazis supposedly were. It’s history written by losers.

If 17 million dems just showed up out of nowhere to throw the vote, the GOP would just overturn the results.

You are suggesting that anti-Israel protesters should have spontaneously joined the Republican party en mass as a ploy to throw the primaries?

Damn, when you put it like that I guess it is their fault.

I think the Tankies have already made their minds up. The real people who won’t be voting Biden are some % people who saw the debate.

Damn you raise a good point. Afterall capitalism is when the means of production is owned by small elite, and socialism is also that but like even more.

IMO the issue isn’t that there’s too much negative content, but that there isn’t enough of everything else. I’d encourage people to post, engage with and signal boost other kinds of content they’re interested in. May just be that politics and social issues are some of the most popular interests in the community.

I would have become a socialist way sooner if Tankies weren’t so prominent. ‘USSR good’ is not a great selling point.

Youtube has always claimed that it doesn’t turn a profit but I don’t believe them. My reasoning is that if the server costs are more than the revenue today, then they’re going to be worse tomorrow. A gorillian gigabytes of data are uploaded to that thing every nanosecond. A company can’t get exponentially less profitable every second and still survive. And what else is there to prop it up? Google ad results? No way is Youtube not profitable. They’re saying that to avoid tax.

I imagine they’d go under if they rely on the general public as their customer base. Companies that cater to the wealthy would probably grow. Companies are created and go bankrupt all the time, individuals in the owner class will win or lose but that won’t affect the broad distribution of power. If it gets really bad feudalism might come back.

A lot of people have left-leaning economic views ( tax the rich ) but there’s basically no political or media representation of those views. ( because the rich run the media and government )

I think a big factor is the western labour movement wrestling away some of the prosperity created by the industrial revolution. Developing nations have profitable industries but the wealth doesn’t make it’s way down to the average citizen because they haven’t forced it to happen. The small minority of people who do profit from dirt cheap labour are quite happy for things to stay that way indefinitely, and so it does, because they are the ones who hold political and financial power.

There’s this sentiment that all journalism cannot be trusted. But if so, how does anyone ever get to find out anything at all? Word of mouth? Gut feeling? Distrust of journalism is reasonable, but not good enough. There are specific reasons why misinformation exists and you need to know WHY that is so. Because otherwise you discount information which is true, and the end result is the same as you’d get with blind trust: A false understanding of the world.