[igor47]

Capable -- yes. Having to actually do it -- no. I would prefer to live in a world where I can depend on my fellow humans instead of living out a fantasy of self-sufficiency.

The "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" meme is hyperstitious. I wish people would think before spreading it.

[Schmerika]

> The "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" meme is hyperstitious. I wish people would think before spreading it.

Out of the 27 authors of Daszak's Lancet paper, used worldwide to claim that Coronavirus couldn't have come from a lab, how many had a conflict of interest?

How many news outlets repeated their claims verbatim, rather than reading it themselves to find the obvious 'errors'?

And how many academic institutions pointed out its flaws?

...

Too old an example? Ok - how many institutions sat on the Epstein files, lied about them, kept them sealed, etc, for decades? How many political leaders and business owners worldwide had direct links themselves?

How many media companies are giving adequate attention to climate change, and refusing to run ads from fossil fuel companies?

How many institutions/countries dared to tell Biden that arming genocide and vetoing ceasefires isn't actually okay? How many countries have sanctioned the perpetrators?

Read anything about EPA corruption lately? How about what ICE have been doing? Anyone in DOGE face any accountability for permanently compromising key government databases yet?

Because again, if you're relying on media and institutions to get your news on these things you might think everything is fine. It really, really isn't though. You gotta do your own research, I'm afraid.

... And no, none of that was because people believed the "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" "meme". It wasn't ever that they just didn't trust the system enough.

Quite the opposite.

[greggoB]

> You gotta do your own research, I'm afraid.

So again, how do you propose one actually does this? Via crowdsourcing on FB? AI-generated news gathering? Consulting with a medium? Like what is your actual, concrete solution for how to obtain and distribute events and occurrences?

Journalism may be as imperfect as the humans who do it, but it's at least a concrete, operating means of informing the general public, with an ideally healthy array of outlets having overlapping coverage of the same events. Within this framework, "do your own research" would be called "reading broadly".

> ... And no, none of that was because people believed the "all the entities are wildly rotten and corrupt" "meme". It wasn't ever that they just didn't trust the system enough.

I have been around long enough to know that the meme does fit for some non-negligible section of the population. It's not to say that the system hasn't given a lot of people good reason for doubt, but a lot of people were already primed to throw the baby out with the bathwater and declare everything a conspiracy.