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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 22nd, 2023

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  • There’s no reason to take this guy or his organization at face value when they make claims. It’s been hype and hopium for a decade now, fueled by TED Talks and wunderkind-loving media.

    Cleaning up the garbage patch isn’t just a matter of collecting nicely floating big pieces of plastic. Doing that is good, but it’s not actually something that can ever get it to “clean”, it’s just something that helps slow the accumulation over time. You get the big stuff (relatively) easily, then it gets progressively harder, and eventually impossible.

    Which is progress. It’s just not the lofty result they keep promising. If all it took was a big net and a relatively modest (by government standards) budget, this wouldn’t be a problem.



  • It’s literally the question, unlike vague concepts of “supporting Israel militarily” until an ideology is disbanded (hello War on Terror).

    Proposals for a cease fire include releasing all the hostages. And for those that want to somehow accomplish the impossible task of dismantling an ideology, only half support it. Less than half to be precise. And those are mostly Republicans.

    Nearly seven in 10 Republicans (67%) favor supporting Israel until Hamas is dismantled, compared to only four in 10 Independents (44%) and Democrats (41%).

    Another way to say this is “a majority of Democrats and independents do not favor supporting Israel militarily until Hamas is dismantled”. Yeah, great factoid. One might even call it misleading to use it to indicate Democrats don’t support restricting arms.


  • If the question is “do you support Israel”, yeah, but that’s not the question.

    At the same time, a bare majority of Americans (53%) agree on restricting military aid to Israel so it cannot use the aid toward military operations against Palestinians, similar to previous readings. Seven in 10 Democrats (68%) and more than half of Independents (54%) support restricting military aid to Israel, while the majority of Republicans (59%) oppose doing so.

    Combined, nearly two-thirds of Americans (64%) also say the United States should pressure Israel to accept a ceasefire, either with diplomacy (27%) or by reducing arms shipments (37%). However, three in 10 (29%) say the United States should continue arm shipments to Israel and not pressure it to accept a ceasefire at all. While the majority of Republicans say the United States should continue its arms shipments to Israel and not put any pressure on it (53%), nearly half of Democrats (47%) and a plurality of Independents (42%) say the United States should pressure Israel to accept a ceasefire by reducing its weapons transfers.

    https://globalaffairs.org/research/public-opinion-survey/americans-see-united-states-playing-positive-role-middle-east








  • Diversity of thought is very important

    So she’s going to appoint a Democratic Socialist? No? Someone from Sunrise then? No? A Palestinian-American Democrat? They couldn’t even get 2 minutes at the convention. How about a BLM activist? She marched for that cause, surely that’s some diversity she’d want to have represented. Not that either? Hm.

    Maybe this isn’t about diversity of thought and instead about the doomed Democratic instinct to try to coopt the center-right, which according to the theory of centrism will make them win forever! Just not any of the times they’ve already tried it.