/townhall/ - Townhall

My grandmother (or aunt or I don't even remember how we're related) posted a thing about Oliver North predicting Osama Bin Laden publicly, if only people would listen, but wouldn't you know it he was denied this opportunity thanks to Al Gore.  Which had a bunch of obvious red flags, but I wasn't doing anything so I looked it up.  FactCheck had a post about it.  The Senator he was talking to was not Al Gore, the terrorist he was talking about was not Osama, North himself explained this in 2001, which is when the post was from, which makes sense because I have no idea why people would still be talking about Osama or Al Gore.

And as always, I think briefly about commenting.  Being like "Hey, I'm not sure that's right."  But what would be the point?  To change their mind about Al Gore?  To 'cause them to doubt media sources even more than they already do because all of these posts are about how you can't trust the media?  Would they even believe me?  Should they believe me?  All I did was fucking Google it to some other huge media website, is that really a trustworthy source?

And realistically do either of us have any real knowledge here?  This happened in 1987, so I wasn't even alive.  There's a fair chance she wasn't watching every bit of coverage of the Iran Contra affair, much less the actual hearing.  Even if they did they probably legitimately wouldn't remember the name of the terrorist by now (Abu Nidal, who I imagine none of us have heard of, still, also he's probably dead by now).  It's possible neither of us had even heard about anyone actually involved, ever, nor will we again.  The only knowledge either of us have is not just secondhand, but like third or fourthhand, and the impact of this knowledge is just as far removed, as is our ability to impact the situation (which, as a reminder, was 38 years ago).

And yet despite all this, we're expected to engage with and discuss this because that is human nature.  For the safety of the tribe, we have to communicate all of our knowledge about how to keep each other safe, which includes arguing about which of us are right.  This is an innate biological drive for the majority of humanity.  It's what drives a significant amount of engagement on all of the biggest sites, and also some of the smallest sites, like this very board.  And because I am here, posting this on this board, I would like to ask questions.  I would like to recieve knowledge about my questions so as to better protect my tribe.  I would like to share my own knowledge, in return, to better protect your own tribe, wherever they may be.

But I don't feel like we can do that, /townhall/.  Because enough of humanity is just confirmed to definitely be lying that the default level of trust for anyone must be zero.  I cannot trust people to share their information, because they may be lying.  And if they're not lying, then they may be misunderstanding.  Or maybe they recieved their information from somewhere else, and they were lying.  A memetic chain of lies all the way down, sometimes interwoven into a whole fence.  And similarly, no one here can trust me, a random anon on the internet, because all of this still applies, so anything I say is untrustworthy!

So the debate topic I present is:  when is it worth it to debate anything?  Should we be here?  (Here including any other site where you might get into arguments.)  Has human evolution hit a standstill, wherein society is doomed to fall apart from the overwhelming amount of disinformation?  Who benefits from these spaces existing?  Who would benefit if we took them away?