Etiquette



DP Etiquette

First rule: Don't be a jackass. Most people are good.

Other rules: Do not attack or insult people you disagree with. Engage with facts, logic and beliefs. Out of respect for others, please provide some sources for the facts and truths you rely on if you are asked for that. If emotion is getting out of hand, get it back in hand. To limit dehumanizing people, don't call people or whole groups of people disrespectful names, e.g., stupid, dumb or liar. Insulting people is counterproductive to rational discussion. Insult makes people angry and defensive. All points of view are welcome, right, center, left and elsewhere. Just disagree, but don't be belligerent or reject inconvenient facts, truths or defensible reasoning.

Monday, November 17, 2025

Blog note: Branching out to Reddit


As discussed here yesterday, Google has choked off easy public access to independent publishers like me. Google wants to make lots more money than the vast buttloads it already makes. Therefore, it's sensible to try to branch out and break free. To try that, I'm building a subreddit, r/RationalDemocracy. Doing that should put me mostly outside the reach of Google's greedy claws. I'll keep posting and responding here to maintain continuity. I put up a first post yesterday to explain what I'm trying to do there.

I'm still in the process of trying to figure out how to build that site. Pxy has been amazingly helpful. It keeps slapping me around and telling me I'm too academic for redditors. It's probably right about that. So now I'm trying to learn to be less academic. Not sure how that is gonna play out. Whether that blog ever takes off or not is unclear. I'll give it the good 'ole college try.

My posts at RatDem will be similar to those here, but with a greater emphasis on (i) the cognitive biology and social behavior of politics, (ii) who is deceiving and manipulating us, and (iii) how and why they do their deceit and manipulation. 

As people here might guess, the "why they do it" almost always boils down to one or both of the same thing, namely the human drive for wealth or power. The core motivator and definition of politics focuses on power and how people and interests try to get it. Power is usually needed to accumulate wealth. And, wealth usually confers power. The two almost always go together. 

At this point, I plan to keep this blog completely independent from the subreddit. But since there's now ~4,000 posts here, I will use material from some of them for RatDem posts. The learning curve there is really big for me. It'll take a while to get familiar with that setup and how to shift to the seemingly incongruous goal of composing content with more rationality focus in less esoteric/academic ways. 
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We'll see how this little experiment is gonna play out. I'm Germaine8 at RatDem. 

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