Personally, I’d start with his wikipedia page, and the pages for his books. The people you’re talking to are likely caught in the fascism algorithmic funnel and have only watched videos rather than reading themselves. So they probably don’t have a deeper understanding than what wikipedia provides. That’s part of the appeal of conspiracy theories, that they’re bite-sized talking points that fit neatly together inside even the smallest minds.

I’m willing to bet there are people who have already done the work for you and picked apart the books, and there’s probably conspiracy theorists who have come up with stories for each of those points. And now we’re approaching the point of Branolini’s Law, “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it”

Beyond the scope of your Q, but if I could offer some advice: Instead of arguing, ask interrogating questions, as though you trust them and you’re genuinely trying to understand all the contours. You’ll quickly find many holes in their weak foundation. Success is bringing some awareness to how weak their info is. It’s like asking someone to show you around their messy apartment and now they’re a little embarrassed, so hopefully they’ll clean up or stop talking about it.

Honestly, though, I’d have those convos in person (and worryingly, i have). Algorithmic social media is not built for deep thought or meaningful discussions. IMO It’ll just suck up time and energy that can be better spent elsewhere.

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Team 13-month-calendar assemble!

I haven’t done enough digging on metric time, but if it’s implemented as a UTC/global time I can get behind that. I’m sick of timezones and DST.

If you have an old laptop sitting around, put a linux server or NAS distro on it and start tinkering. There can be a lot of analysis paralysis with this stuff. Sometimes it’s best to just try and fail and learn and try again. More likely you’ll try and succeed and realize other wants and needs and redo it a year later. I think that’s why it makes for a great hobby. Lots to learn and improve upon.

Start small, on your local network. Maybe something like paperless-ngx: not very demanding of resources, and (I assume) easy to backup/migrate. You could see about putting it on truenas to get a sense of what that process is like. I personally like to keep a nas and server separate, then mount the nas on the server.

I’ve found owncloud a bit complex and prefer dedicated solutions. For the seas, servarr apps come up a lot. Paperless ngx for docs. Immich (or ente) for photos/vid. If you’re just starting out, installing on linux and/or using docker is going to be your shortest path to success. proxmox or other VMs can complicate things if you’re not familiar.

Scammers about to try a new angle instead of the tired, old: “Hey (some random name)”

Bill Gates the farmer?

Just trying to find a decent link led me past so many deceptive headlines like Bill Gates owns a lot of American farmland, but not the majority.

So… he’s the largest private owner of US farmland , but he doesn’t own a majority-- What a relief /s

I think about this often-- followed by Homer Simpson’s voice saying, “Better say something or they’ll think you’re stupid.”

I would say there’s been a mass migration from Twitter to Mastodon and from Reddit to Lemmy. The current numbers are still a small fraction of the original services, but the federated services have reached a critical mass where they now offer comparable value. YouTube hasn’t been ubiquitous for that long and it’s already pretty enshittified. I see a lot of people who are fed up with it and looking for an alternative. The peertube platform is there, I think with more people and content and it’ll join the ranks.

Me if that happens:

jk, i barely use YT as it is. I’m waiting for the YT ToS update that causes a mass migration to peertube

I’m convinced Mark Zuckerberg had a wet dream about pupil tracking when he bought Oculus.

Never have I ever read a single book or watched a single movie of the Harry Potter series.