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Cake day: July 4th, 2023

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  • You have friends that have made a therapeutic ritual out of using essential oils which helps them only because the placebo effect can be very powerful for pain. Literally anything could stand in for the essential oils. Swap their oil vials out with convincing fakes and they’ll never know the difference because it’s the ritual of smelling and/or applying the oils that’s helping them, not any real physical mechanism of the compounds in the oils interacting with their biology.





  • When people say democracy, they usually mean direct democracy.

    This just isn’t true. The majority of democracies around the world today are representative democracies, and people colloquially refer to them simply as democracies.

    And even at that, the party establishment control who we can even vote for. So we only get to choose from the representatives they give us for the most part.

    That’s partly true to varying degrees depending on what country you’re referring to, but it also isn’t that simple. The methods the establishment uses to control who gets party nominations are mostly indirect (i.e. media manipulating the narrative, PACs and dark money to campaigns, etc.). I think you’re being overly cynical - which is fair - but we have more power than you think we do, we’re just not very good at using it. Cynicism itself is one of the ways that the establishment controls who gets elected.

    In short: the establishment has a stranglehold on democracy not because our democracies are fake (flawed, maybe even rigged a bit, sure, but not fake), but because they have us out-organized.