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Pictured: Reminder that polyamory isn't dividing your love between people like "each of my three partners have 33.3% of my heart", it's being able to love multiple people 100% .

So first of all the title is a bit misleading. There are actually two different kinds of political debates, and I can only help you with the second one. This is NOT advice on how to settle arguments with your friends; these are hostile tactics, meant to be used only on enemies, and if whoever u use it on wasn't your enemy before then they sure as hell will be when you're done. Anyway.

First off, you have to know ahead of time what kind of debate you're in. The two kinds of political debate are internal and public, and they have to be approached very differently because they're very different animals. The internal debate is a dialectical fact-finding process wherein some people resolve contradictions within their group by discussing the relative strengths and weaknesses of various positions; the internal debate should be respected, and the only way to win one of those is to have a good and well-presented argument. Good luck w/ that one.

Then there's the public debate. The public debate--and this remains true whether it takes place on a fancy stage or in the comments section of a youtube video--is a circus. More to the point, it's your circus, and you are the ringmaster.

The true target of a public debate is not the opponent, but the audience. You are not acting as a political worker educating a potential contact, but rather as a performer putting on a show for the audience. The object is not to win over your opponent; the object is to leave any observers with the impression that your side is reasonable and intellectual while their side is silly and histrionic. Always keep this in mind.

Try to avoid addressing your opponent's points directly, except to ridicule them. Instead, use phrases like "But what about--" and "Oh, so you're just going to ignore--" in order to keep bringing up additional points of your own, thereby monopolizing the conversation for your point of view and preventing your opponent from organizing a coherent counterargument.

Take any opportunity to imply that your opponent's arguments are foolish without saying so overtly. Keep an ear out for any lines of argument or turns of phrase that might sound peculiar to the general public, such as cumbersome academic jargon or obscure subcultural metaphors, and roll your eyes while repeating them back to your opponent in a condescending tone.

If you find yourself unprepared or otherwise caught out by a question, just refuse to answer it. Or refuse to elaborate. Imply that your opponent is being foolish by even bothering to ask such a question. "It's not my fault you don't already know about XYZ, someone who'd done any research on the topic would already know about XYZ and wouldn't need me to explain it to them. Anyway, have you considered--" You're never ever refusing to answer or elaborate because you don't have an answer, no, you simply refuse to embarrass yourself by condescending to answer such silly questions. Come on.

If at all possible, try to bait your opponent into getting angry or otherwise distraught. How to accomplish this will vary from person to person, but your pretentiousness and aloof indifference should get you about halfway there on its own. Remember, however, to try not to resort to overt personal attacks unless you're absolutely sure they're going to land; you're meant to look like the voice of reason dispensing sage wisdom while they're meant to look like an angry, blathering jackass. If you can so get under your opponent's skin, it's pretty much over. You can aloofly (and infuriatingly) dismiss whatever else they have to say as a baseless appeal to emotion and proceed to "Anyway, have you considered--" your way into using the debate floor as a soapbox from which to preach to the audience.

Keep these tips and tricks in your back pocket and you'll never, ever lose, as long as you define "winning" as your opponent giving up and storming out of the venue.

And now you're one step further on your journey to becoming a rat fuck! More to come. Quote to think on:

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And even though money is pretty tight for her, she told me I could name my price if I would help her, because it was so far away.

I told her she was a dummy for thinking i would take her money but that i would accept the traditional helping-a-friend-move price: a meal (i know she would feel wrong about herself if she didn’t do something for me in return, that’s just how she is) Tradition suggests pizza and beer, we opted for enchiladas and a margarita.

we crashed on the floor of the empty place and left back north in the morning - when we got back to the city three more friends met us at her storage place (the place she was moving into wouldn’t be vacant for a couple months) and we started to move all her stuff up to a storage room on the THIRD FLOOR (because large city storage places be like that)

we had just taken the first box out of the truck when the (only) lady working there walked by and told us they closed in an hour and twenty minutes, and she couldn’t stay even a little late because she had to get to her other job.

One hour twenty minutes. To completely un-jenga a large uhaul and re-tetris it back into a similar sized room on the third floor.

We all just, shared a look, took off hoodies, and got the fuck down to business. 

It was actually.. I still cherish look we passed around. The tiny eyebrow quirks and chin nods. The eye glints. The bigger breath we each took as we prepared to kick it up several gears. That moment of wordless connection, when we all just silently agreed that we were damn well going to do the impossible and didn’t even waste the time it would take to say anything, just got to it.

And we did it too. Finished with exactly two full minutes to spare. And then we all went for dinner and drinks to celebrate. And my friend’s friends that came to help? Two of them were acquaintances/friends of mine already. Like I lived with one for a year a decade ago sort of thing. But this experience? Brought us all closer. Made myself a new friend too.

And the friend i helped move? She and I are closer than ever because of it.

When i left our storage success diner to go home, she asked me again if I was sure i wouldn’t take any money.

I said “I ever tell you when I was 22 I went down to Hollywood to try that scene out? Anyway ten months later, when I just couldn’t do it anymore, and needed to come back, I called one of my best friends and said i can’t do this anymore i need to come back. You know what he said? He said: I’ll be there tomorrow. Not how much will you pay me, not what do i get out of it, not will you be able to cover my gas, just: I’ll be there tomorrow. Okay? You’re my friend. If you need help, I’m going to be there”

His response: "No, it's my name now."

I went to the pharmacist yesterday, his nametag is my deadname. He informed me he's immigrating and in the process he's changed his first name to my deadname to have an English sounding name. That's why he's now able to get a reprint of his nametag to be my deadname. And repeated, with the intense seriousness of someone who is going to die on this hill: "It's mine now. Not yours. I'm taking." His tone indicated that decision is final.

Created in 2000 by R. Hunter Gough and Savant Garde (website is dead, unsurprisingly), this game is for 3 - 5 players age 15+, subtitled "The Most Pretentious Card Game Ever Made" and the back of the box reads:

"Gother Than Thou is a new card game of backstabbing and betrayal set within the gothic community.

Cloves, Absinthe, Eyeliner, Boots. Everything you need to make it big on the scene is here, but so are Dire Fashion Blunders, Infections, Debt, and the dreaded Visit From Mom.

Will you be the first to achieve 20 Goth Points and declare yourself Gother Than Thou? Or will you fall into sickness and debt, wallowing in your own misery?"

Ancient Egyptian DooDad, Wardrobe Sale, card backs, Absinthe Minded. . ., Disturbing Southern Accent, Pet Named Hecate, Blue Black #124

I have never had enough IRL goth friends to play this and have it be fun/ny, though I think we must have played it at a Convergence in that era (C7? C9?--those were ones I attended in the 'Aughties).

This must have sprung from the Usenet groups alt.gothic and/or alt.gothic.fashion, given the date of creation and many of the references. Minus a billion Goth Points to me for not remembering where this came from or where I bought it/how I got it.

Deep Newsgroup Posts, Up Before Noon, That Wasted Look, Fun With Eyeliner, Boots!!, Genital Piercings, Steady Clove Supply, Dire Fashion Blunder, Face Like Murphy, Visit from Mom (you gain money but lose Goth Points for that last card LOL)

Not sometimes. Not until the next update. Always. They proved it with math.

Even with perfect training data and unlimited computing power, AI models will still confidently tell you things that are completely false. This isn't a bug they're working on. It's baked into how these systems work at a fundamental level.

And their own numbers are brutal. OpenAI's o1 reasoning model hallucinates 16% of the time. Their newer o3 model? 33%. Their newest o4-mini? 48%. Nearly half of what their most recent model tells you could be fabricated. The "smarter" models are actually getting worse at telling the truth.

Here's why it can't be fixed. Language models work by predicting the next word based on probability. When they hit something uncertain, they don't pause. They don't flag it. They guess. And they guess with complete confidence, because that's exactly what they were trained to do.

The researchers looked at the 10 biggest AI benchmarks used to measure how good these models are. 9 out of 10 give the same score for saying "I don't know" as for giving a completely wrong answer: zero points. The entire testing system literally punishes honesty and rewards guessing.

So the AI learned the optimal strategy: always guess. Never admit uncertainty. Sound confident even when you're making it up.

OpenAI's proposed fix? Have ChatGPT say "I don't know" when it's unsure. Their own math shows this would mean roughly 30% of your questions get no answer. Imagine asking ChatGPT something three times out of ten and getting "I'm not confident enough to respond." Users would leave overnight. So the fix exists, but it would kill the product.

This isn't just OpenAI's problem. DeepMind and Tsinghua University independently reached the same conclusion. Three of the world's top AI labs, working separately, all agree: this is permanent.