It’s impressive how terrible the amtrak website is. I’ve used amtrak pretty extensively over the years and haven’t been able to login in over a year. I know it’s probably due to some verification code that my tech stack violates but the site certainly doesn’t fail gracefully. I won’t touch the app, of course.
I can still buy tickets, but I need to checkout as a guest and manually enter my rewards number for each transaction. I imagine at some point I’ll need to transact by phone or in person.
I strongly disagree. I certainly understand why this idea has risen to the forefront, but I find this mentality to be far more obtuse than attempting to flesh out the nuance of a situation. Assessing both sides of an argument is of utmost importance. Qualifying the pursuit of more accurate information as “stupid” is peak irony.
I know, the internet is full of bots and rabble rousers. No doubt they are directed at divisive issues and engage in “both sides” messaging to cast doubt on popular sentiment and advance some propaganda. This is annoying and a real problem, but the wholesale rejection of valid observation or analysis, with reactive, myopic aphorisms is precisely the type of response that allows propaganda to continue its insidious spread.
An evident tactic of propagandists is to flood the zone with emotional binaries. It seeds chaos, disrupts chain of thought, and invokes group selection posturing. I believe the “smart/dumb” binary to be one of the most powerful, and engaging with it, even if one thinks they are on the right “side”, disrupts and obfuscates the pursuit of truth.