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Comment by john01dav | Hacker News Reader

I acknowledge that such telling exists, but there is still responsibility for people choosing to listen to it. Skepticism is vital. Beyond being skeptical of what you see, it is wild to me that we don't have approximately everyone blocking all ads, cable news, most social feeds, and other such transparently manipulative shit. Advertisement especially is literally industrialized and research-based psychological manipulation to make people do things that make no sense (see what Alfred Sloan did to GM, for an early example) — it's toxic and should be absolutely avoided.

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People aren't going to learn to be skeptical or think critically because we've been literally removing that from the curriculum in schools. How can someone be skeptical of something if they don't even know how to be skeptical?

Social media runs rampant with a form of skepticism, but I would call that closer to paranoia than critical thinking, and I don't think it's really being helpful in the same way.

>> Social media runs rampant with a form of skepticism, but I would call that closer to paranoia than critical thinking

For my generation this was always refered to as a "healthy skepticism", but lately I've noticed many don't necessarily see this as a good trait - an example: any sort of measured, full-picture response to the impact of AI on software development.

As usual, it's a spectrum. The pettiest example is one of Reddit, where you see some random cat video, and the comments all go "this is fake" or "this is posted by a bot" or "how could you do that, you're torturing the cat!".

1. They may all be true, but yiy gotta pick your battles at this point. If you think all of reddit is bots, what use is there complaining in every post

2. Healthy skepticism is supported by observation and findings. The internet as of late has grown lazy on that overall and people just throw out accusations without explanation. That definitely comes more off as paranoia at best, or bad faith at worst.

I see this as directly correlated with the gradual denigration of liberal arts education, a core tenet of which is critical thinking.

Liberal arts education leaders haven't been doing themselves any favors. During the recent COVID-19 pandemic we saw many college administrations abandon all critical thinking to enforce blind obedience and mandatory compliance with pointless and counterproductive policies around lockdowns and mandates. Scientists were condemned for daring to even discuss alternative views.

I absolutely see value in classical liberal arts education. But popular denigration is inevitable when people see hypocritical academics casting aside true liberal thinking and using their platform to promote pernicious ideologies.

Million of people die in the US. In a pool of 300 million people that might be a small minority but it could be much worse.

I was diabetic and still am, and was obese. I was also young. There's no telling that a viral infection would have landed me in the hospital but I do have risk factors.

COVID is definitely a risk. It would be foolish not to practice at least some measure of risk control.

There's definitely some loss of trust in institutions, but if it weren't for RFK, I would still trust them more than some random skeptic covid. Now, I don't trust the FDA anymore, how ironic.

In Southern California, surfers were arrested for surfing on an empty beach. Parks were closed. This was hailed as a safety measure. I suspect these sorts of policies are what GP was talking about, rather than vaccines or masking.

These were completely valid short-term responses to a situation where an effectively quarantined country had a small outbreak in Venice Beach and we didn't know a lot about spread.

But we were not that country. If the front door is wide open and there's a large sign above it saying "Free stuff - take what you want" because your spouse wants to embrace minimalism and throw away all your joint belongings, then triple deadbolting the back door and installing security cameras are not effective measures to protect your belongings.

There are other policy areas where states can experiment with "Red state" vs "Blue state" policies and compare how they perform, but pandemic spread is not one of them. The most permissive line of defense is the decision that has been made for everyone, and all it takes is one person (we used to call these 'bioterrorists', now we call them 'Presidents') to decide to "get this over with before the election", and it renders any other sensible precautions moot.

Areas where very aggressive precautions were implemented to counterbalance reckless policies elsewhere... didn't do that. You can't do that, without a very strong quarantine around the different policy regions.

This does not offer any commentary on the idea of sensible precautions, in a vacuum. The politicization of COVID that happened very rapidly didn't need to occur, and it did not occur in most other pandemics in this country, or in many other countries during COVID.

You should read about the politicization of the 1918 flu: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7893336/

You picked two odd examples. A beach is debatable as being capable of being opened and closed, and whether or not a person is tresspassing, but parks are generally managed by the state or country. Of course they can close down. They typically close from subset to sunrise.

The idea of a beach closing at night-time was novel to me, when I first came to the US. In the UK beaches are ... just beaches, their status is that of "beach", and access is not controlled at all.

Generally there's a fine for being caught sleeping on the beach I think, but that's really to discourage people being swept away.

With a few exceptions for snooty uptight municipalities who've written rules far beyond the norm you're generally allowed on the beach 24/7 on the east cost and access is likewise uncontrolled (except New Jersey). I can't speak to the west coast.

I picked two examples of everyday activities that should have been obvious to everyone that they were safe.

Mere weeks later public health authorities encouraged this sort of behavior (going to the beach or the park with ample space between individuals). It seemed a relevant example of "pointless and counterproductive policies around lockdowns"

> There's definitely some loss of trust in institutions, but if it weren't for RFK, I would still trust them more than some random skeptic covid. Now, I don't trust the FDA anymore, how ironic.

I stopped trusting the institutions the moment that the CDC admitted that they lied to people about "masks aren't effective" in an effort to preserve supplies for hospitals. Even if their motivation was good, that doesn't matter in terms of trustworthiness. If they lie to me (as they indeed did), I'm not going to trust them any more.

I would find that a little more convincing if the people complaining about being lied to about the efficacy of masks were also the people who were afterwards arguing most strongly in favour of masks.

Strangely, it appears to be the opposite.

That doesn't seem that strange. If they can't trust an institution, people stop trusting lots of things.

No, people are supposed to then test themselves

I think it's very easy to Monday morning quarterback administrative decisions about COVID-19 mitigation now that we're past it, when, at the time, we had very little information which led to a ton of hysteria. I'm not going to relitigate the COVID-19 pandemic response, but I will say I don't think it was inconsistent or ill-advised at all to err on the side of following national health guidance in an emergent situation like that. Even from a purely legal/lawsuit-aversion standpoint, you'd ignore federal guidance/mandates at your financial peril.

> at the time, we had very little information which led to a ton of hysteria

If anything, this simply underscores GP's point. Getting hysterical when you lack information is a total failure of critical thinking, so to the extent that liberal arts educators did so, we should be skeptical of their ability to think critically.

No, that's not a correct conclusion in full generality. The first days of Covid where a case of decision-making under uncertainty: what if R had been 10 and the fatality rate had been 25%? We did not know at first, and these are not absurd numbers: they have existed in past pandemics and if they had held again, fatalities could have been in the tens of millions. Locking down until you can gather more data to rule out this possibility is a rational decision under that uncertainty, because there's asymmetric downside risk of "tens of millions die" versus "chattering internet commenters are annoyed they can't go to the beach".

There's more of an argument here regarding lockdowns going on longer than they needed to, but as much as people want to blame "the experts", most of that was bottom-up from voters. To cite one example, despite how many times I've heard to the contrary, the CDC never, at any point, recommended school closures: that was pure grassroots demand from parents.

You're really missing the point. Many liberal arts college administrations went far beyond any sort of federal government guidance, and imposed lockdown and mandate policies with zero scientific basis. Or look how the Stanford University administration and fellow academics treated Dr. Jay Bhattacharya; that story was repeated at colleges all over the country. The level of hypocrisy and inconsistency makes it clear that they don't deserve any sort of benefit of the doubt.

Classical liberal arts are wonderful, and have been a great benefit to all of humanity. But sadly many academics no longer live up to those ideals in thought, word, and deed. Instead they're more focused on indoctrination and political advocacy then a search for higher truth. If they want to restore public trust in liberal arts education then they need to start by reforming themselves. Otherwise no one will take them seriously, and many taxpayers will oppose public funding.

>imposed lockdown and mandate policies with zero scientific basis

The If Books Could Kill podcast just came out with an episode last week about how the phrase "lockdown and mandate policies [have] zero scientific basis" is almost technically true but is certainly incredibly misleading. The short version is that it would be incredibly difficult to ethically test many healthcare policies to the point that they have scientific support in the way we usually think of having evidence... but we can look at the preponderance of evidence we do have and understand that masks help block germs and viruses, staying home from work or school means I won't transmit contagious diseases to my colleagues, etc

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2040953/episodes/17348825-in-covi...

Isolation and masking have been proven again and again to minimize the transmission of infection. There are still 700-1200 excess deaths per week: https://www.pmc19.com/data/PMC_COVID_Forecast_June232025.pdf

I don't know how any of that had to do with liberal arts. To give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're interpretation is correct: do you blame the person when they panic in a major earthquake, as they watch their peers crushed around them?

It wasn't normal times and abnormal times need preparation. It's a great thing the acting president during COVID removed the pandemic response team the previous year. It's not wonder we were chickens wandering about without our heads.

> because we've been literally removing that from the curriculum in schools

Do you have any actual evidence of this or is this just more parroting of vibes based history?

Most of the people I know who say things like "School didn't teach me X" were just not paying attention. Turns out, if your society doesn't care about or value education, kids aren't going to pay attention.

Like, some states definitely have mediocre education in a lot of ways, but people will say shit like "Why didn't school teach me how to balance a checkbook" as if school didn't teach them basic arithmetic and the ability to read a single paper of instructions included in your checkbook by middle school.

Or you have people saying "Why didn't school teach me how to understand a loan" as if they didn't learn algebra and how to plug a couple numbers into a calculator right next to me in class.

Ironically enough this is a good display of critical thinking!

For what it's worth, I learned how to balance a checkbook in fifth grade. My child is not old enough for me to know the curriculum these days but my impression based on talking to my younger colleagues is that it seems to have stopped being taught around the mid-00s. It's hard not to pay attention to something like that--we spent a week with fake money, buying things and having to balance it out. It was fun.

We had a unit (~3 weeks) focused on critical thinking in my seventh grade english class. I do not know for sure if that is still taught the same way. Honestly it is hard to say how widespread it is beyond anecdotal evidence like this because every state has different standards.

The "vibes" are that the US government has been cutting funding from education since the 80's. I feel this is very well established, but if you really want a source I can fish up a few charts. As a fun fact, today we still spend about as much per student as we did in the 80's for university. The main difference is that funding cratered, so colleges need to make up for that out of pocket.

>people will say shit like "Why didn't school teach me how to balance a checkbook" as if school didn't teach them basic arithmetic and the ability to read a single paper of instructions included in your checkbook by middle school.

Not sure I agree with this interpretation. It's like responding to "why didn't they teach CS" with "well they taught you discrete math and binary". Specialized instruction on applied mathematics is well worth pursuing. It's arguably the big reason Al many students end up thinking "I'm bad at math". They get no context on what it's really used for.

https://www.cato.org/blog/new-k-12-productivity-chart It's hard to believe that education is getting less funding. There seems to be a perception that spending more money on education will result in smarter students or higher test scores but that doesn't seem to be the case. Obviously if you spend $0 on education results will suffer, but there's a point of diminishing returns where $1 more in spending doesn't seem to have any impact on key metrics

How much we spend on school systems is not a meaningful indicator of how much we spend on education.

American teacher income has barely tracked inflation over the past 30 years, and it sure as shit didn't start high in the 90s. Teachers still have to buy their own supplies, still rely on old material, and still basically can't afford to live.

Gee, why is it so hard to get good teachers into the American school system when someone who is able to go through 4-6 years of college and is smart enough to manage and teach a room full of 30 kids can do pretty much anything else and make way more money? The money isn't going to education.

So where's the money going?

Yeah, It's one part of the equation. But if the money is being funneled by administration and the actual teachers can't afford proper resources for kids, who wins here.

>why is it so hard to get good teachers into the American school system...

I'm sure we both know the answer, but I'll give a historical account as well. Even pre 70's, teachers were dominated by women. Since this was a single income household system at the time, most jobs offered to women would pay low wages because the roles weren't expected to support a family.

At least back then, there was still respect in the profession. But that was also stripped away in the 80's with the infamous "A nation at risk". Little did we know that the administration was the risk at the time.

That's part of the system, grovelling powerless teachers that will roll that shit downhill.

The system will never tell you how to escape from the system. Don't hold your breath waiting for that to happen.

"Critical thinking" was never really taught in schools. It was always just training in how to dismiss any proposition by "criticizing" it selectively, with a heavy bias towards criticizing anything outside the system, and a token zone of approved disagreement to convince yourself that you really are free to disagree with things.

You guys never did "This house believes that..." with random teams ? We had one lesson a week on it while English Language was compulsory in senior school (ages 11..16), and the winners got to choose the next week's topic.

Critical thinking was taught in schools. That’s English class and, to a lesser extent, history or social studies.

Naturally a lot of engineer-types blew those off as subjective mumbo jumbo. But that’s critical thinking.

Something I'd stumbled across a few years back:

First, the universities were given the task of providing an unceasing supply of ideologically correct candidates for vital positions in government, church, and business. The state was able to make the faculties of the "venerable institutions" of higher education, or rather indoctrination, assume this duty because it controlled appointments and held the purse from which "emoluments" flowed into the coffers of academics. Hence the members of the university "hierarchy" made it their "business, the business for which they ... [were] paid," to "uphold certain political as well as religious opinions," namely those of the "ruling powers of the state" (J.S. Mill, Autobiography and Literary Essays, p. 429 (1981), J.S. Mill, Journals and Debating Speeches, p. 350. (1988) ). Thus the universities pursued with vigor their assignment to inculcate in their students those political and ideological views that were cherished by the power elite. The graduates of the ancient universities were, therefore, well prepared for employment in, and by, those institutions that were instrumental in perpetuating the existing maldistribution of income. All of this might come to naught, however, if the masses of the underclass should achieve anything approaching success in potential attempts at throwing off their fetters.

The state devised a second educational strategy in order to prevent such a calamity from occurring. According to Mill, the "elementary schools for children of the working classes" were given the task of ensuring that the poor would continue to accept docilely their dismal station in life. It was very easy for the state to force the public schools to assume this role. It did so simply by failing malignantly to allocate sufficient funds for the operations of what Mill identified contemptuously as "places called schools" (J.S. Mill, Essays on England, Ireland, and the Empire, p.200; emphasis in original). These places were therefor understaffed. Moreover, the few teachers who were actually employed were completely "unfit for their work." The pupils therefore were so "wretchedly ill-taught" that they "did not ... even learn to read." And, said Mill with disgust, no attempt was "made to communicate ideas, or to call forth the mental faculties" of the children". (J.S. Mill, Public and Parliamentary Speeches, November 1850 - November 1868, p. 322 (1988). J.S. Mill, Essays on England Ireland, and the Empire, p. 200 (1982)).

Hans E. Jensen, "John Stuart Mill's Theories of Wealth and Income Distribution" <https://web.archive.org/web/20190828233020/http://www.tandfo...>. Review of Social Economy. Pages 491-507. Published online: 05 Nov 2010.

Previously noted: <https://web.archive.org/web/20190828233020/https://old.reddi...>

This is conspiratorial nonsense.

It sounds very familiar to a fundamentalist Christian, taught in either private or home schools that fostered that sort of thinking.

>>This is conspiratorial nonsense.

>It sounds very familiar to a fundamentalist Christian, taught in either private or home schools that fostered that sort of thinking.

That's as may be, but it doesn't make it any less "conspiratorial nonsense," does it?

Maybe. For some reason it seemed like a more poignant reply at the time, but now I see it doesn’t add much to the conversation. :)

I think contemporary events force people to be skeptical. For one generation it was the Vietnam War, the dissonance between what generals were saying and what was happening on the ground. Another generation had that happen with WMDs in Iraq. I think many in this generation had it happen with "2 weeks to flatten the curve" and the dissonance between promises made about COVID, the efficacy of lockdowns or the efficacy of vaccines.

You can’t block all of it all of the time, and children (some of the most vulnerable) especially can’t.

Or you end up with the opposite end of the problem. I grew up in destitute poverty and was told all my childhood that credit was an evil trap - I should absolutely never use it.

Well, spring forward to me starting a pretty good career as a software developer and wanting to get my first reliable car. I had no credit history and ended up with a 19% APR. That really, really sucked.

It's been 10 years since then and I still get dinged for not having "enough" credit history despite having a couple car loans and several credit cards that I rotate bills on. The whole system feels like it's designed to punish anyone who doesn't fit into the role of a perfect consumer.

You didn't get fucked with 19% apr because you had no credit history. You got fucked with 19% APR because either the parameters of the loan were really bad or there were some other circumstances. Income less existing obligations vs payment size account for the lion's share of interest rate on an auto loan or just about any other consumer loan.

Credit history is massively over-sold as being impactful by the kind of idiots who live payment to payment.

I agree. My first use of credit was a car loan when I graduated. I had the offer letter to show income (I had not started yet) and some up front sign on / relocation money for the down payment.

It was fine, I paid it off quickly.

No, I got 19% APR because I had no credit history. I know this because there is a big detailed letter full of reasons for your offered rate that you receive when you take out a loan.

The fact that you don’t know this suggests you probably don’t know a lot about how loans work.

I got a car loan at a 8% rate right out of undergrad… you got hosed, maybe you were in a hyperinflationary environment though.

I bet they sent you a letter telling you it was your lack of credit history. You didn’t find one of the many credit providers and have them fight to give you the best rate?

Credit is an extremely elementary thing to grok in a day or so

> I still get dinged for not having "enough" credit history

Maybe the data is wrong? I took out a few loans over the years with strange comments from the lenders like "You don't have much credit history", but since it didn't impact anything I didn't think much of it. Somewhere down the line a lender was like "I don't think this is you". Turns out that it wasn't.

What do you mean? Your credit report was someone else’s credit history?

As I understood it, it was a bit stranger than that. There was some minimal activity on the report that was actually me (a phone account, if I remember right), but my credit cards and whatnot didn't show up. But also some activity did that wasn't mine. I was somehow partially combined with another credit history, or something like that. I am not well versed in the technical details to truly understand what the problem was. I had to fill out some form to get it corrected and haven't thought about it since.

I’ve had entries show up on my credit report that were not mine, but my father’s in another city 750km away. I did not want his bill payment history mixed in with mine. At all.

It was actually more difficult to have them removed than you’d expect. I’m sure it is by design. You could start the process only after signing up for an online account, but the actual request needed to be made via fax.

Why'd that suck so much? As a software dev couldn't you just pay it off a month or two later?

That would depend on what car they bought.

I dunno about you but my first car was when I was 16 working at Tim Hortons for minimum wage, long before I had a software developer salary...

I’m not sure what software devs make $15 grand a month in disposable income 2 years into their career, but I certainly was not one of them.

Some of the ones in the Bay Area do. Sometimes they don’t realize it’s not the norm.

Yeah, it's pretty common in the Bay. I did project that on wherever they're from.

I also didn't expect $15k-$30k in the jump from "not reliable" to "reliable" cars from somebody worried about a 20% interest rate over a long period of time. I have no idea what their background is, but even at today's prices you can do much better than that.

True, and this is why you shouldn’t just hand your kid an iPad and peace out. I’m all for technology and video games for my kids, but I’m vigilant to keep my kids’ eyes away from ads. As a result, my kids aren’t foaming at the mouth for the latest and greatest toys and games which was my experience as a child.

One of the important purposes of a society is to improve the raising of kids who might not be raised well by their parents alone, because it is a valuable outcome to everyone.

You don't choose who you get born to, so if society chooses to say "If you get born to a shitty person, you will suffer immensely and we will do nothing about it", that is a bad society.

Nobody deserves to suffer due to an accident of birth.

Also, "It takes a village to raise a child" is not exactly metaphorical.

It takes a lot of work to be a parent and also monitor all that media consumption/stop all ads. The “average person” isn’t as tech savvy as most of us here and that stuff just doesn’t come as easily to them.

For instance I am very comfortable letting my kids play video games. I play a lot myself, I can make good judgments about what is appropriate for them, what is an appropriate amount of time to play, what is good/bad behavior when playing, what systems are a good choice or if online access (if any) is appropriate. I barely need to think about these things, but for some people this is an incredibly time-consuming, intimidating task.

Is it not ok that parents that spend more time and effort with their kids have better outcomes than parents that spend less time? I’d rather that than have the nanny state regulate everything bad for kids out of existence; we already know what kind of civil rights violations politicians try to justify with children.

It is very hard work raising kids if you are interested in parenting and want to do your best.

The thing is that not everyone's life goal is to be the best parent around. And there is pressure from the society/culture/government to reproduce for healthy economy.

If we as a country want people to have more children, then we need to make their job easier. That may include censorship, age verifications, etc.

You’re making this a very stark, binary choice. Reality is far more nuanced.

Half of the country is teaching their kids to take religion literally and never question it, and that any news story that you don’t like isn’t real, simply because you disagree with it.

Handing over an iPad is the least of the issues facing a large portion of our youth and frankly they might be better off if their parents did sit them in front of it and walk away.

Thing is, keeping children out of Instagram, Facebook, or whatever new social media is hyping currently will probably make them kind of weirdos in their bubble, e.g. in school. At least this would be my fear (don't have children). And good luck trying to use any of these ad-infested privacy-invading platforms while trying to avoid ads.

Learning how to stand on your own in school is good practice for doing the same thing in life. By which I’m absolutely not saying “don’t have friends” but rather, you don’t have to be like everyone else.

My kids won’t be on social media until they’re not kids anymore. If none of us take a stand, nothing ever changes.

Your kids will create hidden social media accounts that you don't know about. That's what I would have done in their situation.

Their exposure will still be much less than someone who gives them free reign and lets them sit in the livingroom staring at a phone. They won't be staring at the phone distracted while they're hanging out with the family.

Hiding things from parents is a far bigger problem than staring at a phone in a living room.

No it’s not. Everyone hid things from their parents. I hid soooo much from my parents. It’s fine. It’s normal. It’s far more important to have limited exposure to modern smart phones.

The people who say things like this inevitably are the ones who spend ten minutes with a therapist and the therapist’s eyes go wide

What, exactly, is so problematic about not telling your parents that you smoke weed with your friends before playing video games? What, exactly, is so problematic about not telling your parents who are dangerously religious, that you had sex with your high school girlfriend? These are all normal, innocuous activities of teenagers. A therapist would not think twice about hearing them.

Indeed, I might have done the same. At least that will be a challenge, lacking smart phones.

Being an outlier when the in-group is actively having their brains turned to mush seems like the better of the two outcomes.

This argument is popular but doesn't hold water. If we suppose for the sake of argument that social media is bad for kids, then it is a parent's duty to keep them off it even if that makes the kid unpopular. As an analogy, consider a kid whose social circle is all shooting heroin. Would it then become acceptable to let your kid do heroin? Of course not. Similarly, even if all the other kids are on social media, it doesn't become acceptable to let your kid use social media (going with the assumed premise that it's bad for them).

It doesn't have to make them weird, especially if you're in a school district where there are no-phone policies. Otherwise it can be difficult, for sure.

I’m not sure my kids have ever seen an ad except for little computer games, and they have laptops and iPads (but no network TV or cable). They are far less exposed to consumerism than when we were kids. My teenage daughter dresses like a hobo.

If they've seen Paw Patrol they've been exposed to ads. I don't mean "commercials" I mean that the entertainment itself is the ad - generating excitement for branded merchandise, but also normalizing the idea of kids accomplishing things and learning life lessons in 20-minute increments with the aid of a tremendous amount of stuff that they just have.

Maybe they haven't but the idea extends to most kids' entertainment.

And that's why government regulation was invented.

You mean corporations regulating the government? Oh wait...

> children … especially can’t

Worry about your own kids, teach them the right values, and use others’ imperfect knowledge to the advantage of your family.

Yeah who cares about society?

Like virtue signalling techies are actually able to do anything about it.

Fix your own house - as the previous poster said - and then worry about outside your family unit.

How do you propose to at least get society off TikTok or Instagram? You will only face backlash if you try to utter in that direction.

I’ve never had anyone say anything other than “yes, that seems like a good idea, I wish I could do that” when i tell them I do not have a TikTok, instagram, twitter, facebook, etc account.

I guess they all need those accounts for their student visas.

> but there is still responsibility for people choosing to listen to it

yes, sure, this is easy to say, but hundreds of billions of dollars and uncountable person-hours go into this manipulation machine, and many peoples' lives and livelihoods depend on maintaining it. it's a lot to ask of every individual to be solely responsible for the negative impacts of advertising when we all have lives we want to live.

i'm not saying personal responsibility doesn't play a part, but we shouldn't atomize - we should be organized and wield regulation more effectively against the profit motive.

There are MILLIONs of human years of effort, by experts at manipulating people, put into making people feel this way.

Saying bro, why can't your willpower overcome MILLIONS of years of experts trying to manipulate you is a pretty weak argument. It's basically the same as saying 'why can't you take on the top UFC fighters?' at this point. There is a battle to squeeze everything possible out of the sheep on one side, on the other side is us sheep that just want to chill, enjoy life a little. The sheep are f'd.

GP isn't saying "why can't you take on top UFC fighters?" They're saying "why would you try to take on top UFC fighters?" It's exactly that one-sided battle that makes it so avoiding the engagement is necessary. A lot of effort is no doubt spent developing psychological weapons to use against me. Fortunately there are very few channels for any of them to use to reach me.

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