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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • I feel like it should be noted that the western pressure campaign to get rid of Netanyahu forced him to rely even more on people like Ben Gvir and other Hadreem, which allowed them to extract concessions in regards to expanding the settlements.

    Like just from a place of pure competency it was an awful strategy. If Schumer has said something like “Israel has a right to defend itself, but the US refuses to help the IDF so long as they violate court orders and refuse to draft Hadreem” Bibi would have been gone.

    I just don’t get the sense that the US State Department has a fundamental understanding of Israeli Politics, or the internal politics of most middle eastern nations. Without that knowledge projecting soft power becomes so much harder.


  • So one reason that everyone is glossing over is that republicans had a legit primary.

    Trump is an extremely well known quantity. Republicans had a large variety of options to replace him. These were real candidates; There were multiple senators and governors who would be considered real candidates in a more traditional election. The entire political spectrum that makes up the republican party was represented.

    Given all those options, republicans still chose Trump. They 100 percent knew what they were getting into.

    On the other hand the Democratic establishment collectively chose to not challenge Biden. There were exactly three choices: Biden, a no name house member, and a woman most famous for trying to stop a hurricane with spirit energy. The extent of Joe Biden’s mental and physical decline was also hidden from the public to the point where bringing it up would largely get you attacked for being a MAGA republican.

    The end result is that a lot of voters feel blindsided and gaslit when it comes to Biden, while Trump is exactly the asshole he portrays himself as.

    I watched the debate with friends. We’re all liberals. We were all extremely upset over Biden’s performance. However during one of his more lucid moments, he brought up how Trump cheated on his pregnant wife with a pornstar. As he was talking, Trump grinned and shrugged. Even though what he did was objectively awful, the entire room burst out laughing. I feel like the election kind of has that energy.






  • I feel like the smartest thing for a corporation to do when asked about DEI is just to be like “in this economy, we’re focused on the fundamentals of our business”.

    Like it or not, DEI is a huge culture war issue. Unless your customer base is almost exclusively on one side, you’re gonna end up alienating a huge portion of them.

    Plus it’s not like you get some huge benefit from pushing DEI anyway. The people who like DEI have mostly realized that 99/100 times when a company says they are doing DEI it’s a cynical ploy. That McKinsey study that was supposed to prove DEI is better for business performance has been largely debunked. ESG funds are in full retreat, with many of them struggling to justify their own existence.

    If Tractor Supply respectfully demurred when asked to implement DEI in the first place, I’m sure the outrage would be virtually non-existent. Instead they’re in this bud light situation where they’re at risk of alienating both liberals and conservatives.







  • I think you all have a delusionally inflated opinion of both Bernie Sanders and progressive politics as a whole.

    Bernie is a self described socialist. He lost in the primaries to middling candidates in both 2016 and 2020. He in particular has dismal performance among women over 30 and black people as a whole.

    The progressive movement as a whole is even worse. At least Bernie makes an attempt to win hearts and minds. Progressives are obsessed with insane purity tests and horrible messaging that alienates everyone who doesn’t already agree with them.

    Look at this tweet. The whole “anyone remotely to the right of me on Israel/Palestine is morally repugnant” stuff works in echo chambers, but would get you absolutely rocked in an election.




  • I feel like this is directed towards ICE vs EV cars. If that’s the case, it’s sort of frustrating.

    EVs have some very real drawbacks. Even if those drawbacks are solvable problems, they are still problems right now. Pushing this narrative that EVs are universally better or that the biggest hurdle to adoption is irrational consumer sentiment will just make people feel gaslit. It’ll also make people more hesitant to adopt later on, because they’ll be skeptical of positive reviews that are honest.


  • Honestly if he was just like “yeah I was a complete asshole 20 years ago. I apologize” I wouldn’t hold it against him. I believe in the capacity for people to change.

    However when asked about the Man Show he claimed it was supposed to be intricate satire, the fact that the audience genuinely liked it disgusted him, and he hated every second of it.

    Kimmel was the creator, producer, and head writer. He could have easily changed the format if he truly despised it. Or just got rid of the part where he had scantily clad women dance on trampolines.