Even if you often try to make that person feel understood and empowered to express their views, everyone’s needs are different. For example, if they tend to feel inadequate or are self-conscious about their achievements/intelligence/etc., you may need to go the extra mile here.

Try to identify all the positive and negative interactions with them (i.e., those in which they get the impression that they are right versus those in which they don’t) and make sure that positive ones greatly outnumber negative ones. If you need, you can try to acknowledge more situations wherein their contribution to a conversation deserves praise, or even simply not point out their mistakes if the question at hand is not critical for you (easiest imo).

When a person says this, sometimes even if they do it in a positive tone, it’s usually a way to verbalize more concrete concerns that you should address. For example, they might feel that you are always dismissing their opinions, that you don’t listen to them in general, or they would simply like to get support when they express their views in a group so they get some recognition. In any case, they feel like you can do something to help but may not feel comfortable to express it or may not have fully identified it. If that person is important to you, you should be able to see what they want and take action.

Brilliant. That makes a lot of sense, especially the more concrete the goals are. I wish it were easier to achieve, maybe the theoretical frameworks for this will be a reality in a few decades… Your implementation at least seems more plausible.

Okay, my answer is pretty removed, but I’d say I’d like a system where decisions are made by submitting automated proofs of their optimality, either absolute or over all submitted proposals in a defined time frame. The conditions of optimality would be pre-defined in a Constitution, and non-provable facts would be accepted or rejected via a decentralized voting system that would keep multiple diff chains and penalize e.g. voting for facts that are later proven false via a submitted proof. The proof system would hold all powers, but would be able to delegate decisions to entities under proven rules, which would come faster but possibly be overriden.

Absolutely. But I don’t want to influence anything, just make the OP slightly happier and hopefully have a good read myself.

I tend to upvote everything, no matter how much I disagree. I don’t trust my own opinions or the authors’, all of them are flawed in some way.

Yes, that’s it.

That view being wrong, yes.

Could have been it before that comment, but you insisted. We have had a fruitful exchange, I learned something, don’t spoil it with meaningless pride. Hope you make lots of new friends here!

I’m a Marxist-Leninist, member of an organized group.

I believe countries try to shape and weaponize citizens’ opinions about other countries, so I refuse to defend or criticize them unless I can argue that doing so is beneficial to my ideas (i.e., not based on feelings or ethics). Thus, I’m neutral towards most countries and defend multipolarity.

I tend to doubt my ideas as much as I can.

So you think it’s morally wrong to be wrong? That’s an interesting perspective. It’s usually taken for granted that people are free to believe anything (religion, etc.). How would you tackle that if you had a choice?

It’s perfectly nice to say things I believe to be true and learn that they aren’t, why wouldn’t it be.

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Tht wasn’t quite nice on your part, but still thank you.

Thanks, I wasn’t aware of those actions by the army. Guess that gives me a different view of the incident…

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You can accuse anyone of anything and start a trial, that’s how the justice system works.

What does that mean?

NATO will act according to their interests. If they can defeat an enemy, they will do so. If your point is that the US will simply point all its weapons towards Russia and China and then simply smile and let them peacefully develop to overtake the US in every aspect as they are doing, you’re wrong.

Who started the aggression in Ukraine?

Russia did. But I don’t think they should just sit back and watch as the US prepares to deal a lethal blow to them. The US has set up bases all around Russia, formed military alliances with countries near its border. The US has also promoted coups in many post-Soviet states to make their governments US-affine. Even after the 2014 pro-US coup in Ukraine, Ukrainian citizens voted for the seemingly pro-Russian Zelensky, who had promised to normalize relations with Russia and embrace the Russian culture and language in the Donbas region, and were fooled by what turned out to be a new US puppet regime and continued war against the Donbas. Even US officials admit they were planning for the war, just that they didn’t think Russia would strike first. At this point, who even launched the first missile in this particular development of the 2014 war is just a small technicality in a complex hybrid war that’s been developing for years.

Let’s hope for democracy everywhere.

If two authoritarian behemoths are fighting to death as they are, randomly biting and scolding both in hopes that they’ll magically become democratic is a stupid strategy. At best, you will achieve nothing. At worst, one of them will weaponize your innocence against the other, which is quite the case.

Of course. If anti-war activists achieve their goal, Russia will withdraw from Ukraine. Then, NATO will set up bases there, including nuclear weapons, in the most strategically relevant outpost at the Russian border. This, of course, will allow NATO to easily defeat Russia, the largest military power barring itself. Unopposed, it will take on China, the only real contender to the US on the economic front. This will eventually result in the US keeping its hegemony for the rest of our lifetimes, which by simple imperialist logic is detrimental to current global South nations. So as much as I dislike authoritarianism, those activists don’t know what they are doing (or, worse, know it damn well) and stopping them by any means will help the rest of us.

As bad as this may seem, it is actually beneficial to the rest of the world.