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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.








  • You know in 2021 I thought that the MSM was deliberately ignoring the issues with EVs and promoting overly rosy timelines as part of a political agenda.

    After seeing the massive amount of FUD they published about EVs over the past year, I think they are just bad at their jobs.

    It feels like the media covers EVs based on vibes versus doing actual research. As a result they’ve consistently publish articles that are either borderline nonsense hopium or complete doomerism.

    IMO I still think hybrids will be instrumental tech over the next decade. Those 300 mile EVs often get much worse range in weather conditions that are common in many parts of the country. It’s also simply going to take considerable time for fast charging infrastructure to become ubiquitous enough to truly address range anxiety.


  • I get that social media seems to be a constant stream of outrage with nobody actually caring, but I think this story might actually derail her.

    There are articles in Fox News, NY Post, and other conservative media outlets about this. They are fairly critical. The fox news one includes tweets from a “country boy” who is like “there’s a difference between taking an old animal out back and a fucking puppy”.