stpd.net / Percy Did It
A note on method
This site does not claim to be the last word on anything. It is closer to the opposite: a standing invitation to argue back.
The model is Socrates, not Moses. Moses came down the mountain with the answer already carved in stone — finished, total, not up for discussion. I am the Lord thy God; thou shalt have no other. There is something in that posture I distrust deeply, wherever I find it — in religion, certainly, but just as often in politics, where parties on every side tend to arrive with their conclusions pre-installed and treat any subsequent evidence as something to be managed rather than absorbed. I don't think that's how anyone actually gets closer to the truth. I think it's how people protect a position they've already decided to hold.
Political parties don't just believe they have the truth. They build the belief into their own structure. Membership of one typically requires you to pledge you will not be a member of any other — an institutional commitment to having only one source of truth, made before you've even seen what that truth turns out to be. If someone outside the party has a good idea, there is no clean route for it. It has to be smuggled through gatekeepers who are paid, in effect, to be suspicious of ideas that arrive from the wrong direction.
And yet good ideas don't respect party lines. The people on the side of the angels in one party often hold answers nearly identical to the people on the side of the angels in another — not quite identical, but close enough that the gap between them is smaller than the wall built to enforce it. What we need, more than either side winning, are people willing to be the bridge: willing to belong, in some sense, to both camps at once, and to carry an idea across the wall rather than defend their own side's monopoly on having one.
Socrates worked the other way round. He didn't deliver conclusions. He asked questions, followed the answers wherever they actually led, and was willing — famously, fatally — to be shown wrong. That's the method this site is trying to use, however imperfectly.
The essays on this site go up as drafts and stay drafts, sometimes for a long time. I revise them when I learn something that changes the picture — a fact I had wrong, a connection I'd missed, an argument I hadn't considered. Several carry a note saying as much. This isn't a failure of editing. It's the actual method: gather the best evidence available, make the clearest argument I can from it, and stay open to the conversation that follows.
I try hard not to over-claim. Where I'm not sure of something, I say so, in the text itself, rather than smoothing it over for the sake of a cleaner sentence. Where a fact turns out to be wrong, I fix it and say that too. Confidence is cheap. Being right is harder, and usually arrives slower than a single sitting allows.
Percy Did It is a project about systemic harm — about who pays, who benefits, and who gets blamed for things they didn't choose and often couldn't have prevented. A method that insists it already has the whole answer would be a strange way to write about that, because certainty of that kind is so often part of how the harm gets done in the first place. Governments, ideologies, and institutions that cannot be argued with are exactly the ones least able to notice when they're wrong — and the people who pay for that are rarely the people holding the certainty.
So if you read something here and think I've got it wrong, or missed something, or made a connection that doesn't actually hold up under scrutiny — that's not an inconvenience to the project. It's the project working as intended.