But why not mix them together the way the IndieWeb has done?! A few people are using the new W3C recommendation spec for Webmention along with fragmentions to send a version of comments/marginalia/annotations to sites that accept them and have the ability to display them!

A good example of this is Kartik Prabhu's website which does this somewhat like Medium does. One can write their response to a sub-section of his post on their own website, and using Webmention (yes, there's a WordPress plugin for that: https://wordpress.org/plugins/webmention/ ) send him the response. It then shows up on his site as a quote bubble next to the appropriate section which can then be opened and viewed by future readers. Example: https://kartikprabhu.com/articles/marginalia For those interested, he's opensourced the code to help accomplish this: https://github.com/kartikprabhu/marginalia

While annotation systems have the ability to overlay one's site, there's certainly room for serious abuse as a result. (See an example at https://indieweb.org/annotation#Criticism) It would be nice if annotation systems were required to use something like webmentions (or older trackback/pingbacks) to indicate that a site had been mentioned elsewhere, this way, even if the publisher wasn't responsible for the resulting comments, they would be aware of possible attacks on their work/site/page.

Why would the odds be in his favor if there will be more men than women? Sounds more like the deck stacked against him.

But we know from longer term analyses that this isn't the case or else why doesn't Egypt rule the world? Rome?

Perhaps they may work in the near term, but certainly not in the longer term.

Here I wonder if it's possibly the case that in an ever sub-specializing world that people have somehow lost the time, effort, or even inclination to attempt to put all of the facts together themselves to create a cohesive whole. Instead they rely on others to manufacture these stories on their behalf and thereby make it easier for such totalitarian propaganda to insert itself.

Perhaps the working man isn't spending time reading the paper anymore, and/or it's certainly easier to read third and fourth party stories on Twitter, Facebook, or listen to infotainment on Fox News, MSNBC, or CNN. Why try to follow more direct sources when we can read Facebook and worry about who's going to win this season of The Voice or The Bachelor?