pachrist

But what about Istanbul and Konstantiniyye?

My wife keeps threatening to get me a “My other Subaru is a Subaru” for my old Outback. I threaten to get her one for her Tribeca, but a Tribeca isn’t a Subaru.

It’s traditionally explained with two lemonade stands on a long beach. If their product is generally indistinguishable and both want to maximize their number of customers, they will eventually settle on halfway mark of the beach. One gets all the foot traffic from the left, the other from the right, splitting it 50/50.

The same applies to businesses on a map, not just a one dimensional beach. Most consumers don’t really care if it’s a Home Depot or Lowes, or a BP or Exxon. If one of them discovers a gap in the market and places something there, someone else can come along and grab half the market. It’s something Walmart has done in a lot of small towns. They’ll come in and split market 50/50 with a small, local shop knowing that there’s not enough money to turn a profit with splitting the market in half. But they know they the can run a loss for a year or two, the competition will close, and then they’ll have 100% of the market.

It’s a really topical thing in politics. There are more centrist voters than at either extreme end, so politicians tend to fall more in the middle. Politicians like Trump change the landscape though. While an extreme candidate, the Republican party had already been shifting more right for a while, so he only marginally pulled the voter base right, but pulled most Republican politicians right, or pushed them out. Democrats moved to match. It essentially means that far right Republicans have a short stroll to the nearest lemonade stand, but far left Democrats have to trudge a couple miles in the hot summer sun, and they’re deciding it’s not worth it.

I’ve had some luck explaining it by asking folks why multiple gas stations are at the same intersection, or asking why Lowes and Home Depot are always right next to each other.

If a significant portion of the electorate did that, Biden would be on the phone this minute applying all possible pressure to stop what is happening. Instead they are playing chicken with your vote. Children died today and every day for the past 8 months because a political party is betting that you’ll vote for them anyways.

Again, the original issue I raised is that it’s cruel to quote a man lamenting the fact that he and others like him didn’t do enough soon enough to stop the Holocaust. That same behavior is happening right now. But it’s fine. We just have to accept it. A few losses for the greater good. I’d bet you don’t have any Palestinian friends, but if you do, please let them know I’m the one who’s privileged and see what they say.

I think that accepting that some groups, like Palestinians, will just be oppressed no matter what is what leads to things like the Holocaust. Saying you can’t afford to take a stand on your principles today and draw a line in the sand, but maybe you will tomorrow leads to the situation Martin Niemoller found himself in. It may be too late already, and making a stand won’t make a difference, but it’s never too early.

What a sad misunderstanding of a quote literally describing state enforced genocide. I mean, this is how it starts. Both sides would kill Palestinians. Can’t do anything about it I guess. Oh well, best not put my foot down and take a principled stand here.

Who’s next?

Yes, they would.

It’s really hard to see. Hearing that it doesn’t matter that Biden supports Israel’s genocide in Palestine because Trump would too is a bad take. It mattered to the thousands of people that have died. It matters to their families. It matters to their friends. So many of Biden’s bad policies are just unforced errors. He doesn’t have to be an unappealing candidate. He chooses to be an unappealing candidate. If he loses to Trump, that will be why. It’ll be 2016 all over again. The genocide in Palestine is Biden’s equivalent of just not setting foot in Michigan. And they’ll blame voters, primarily independents and leftists (they already are), just like Hillary did, but ever think about what they could have done differently or better.

It’s almost like two organizations have totally monopolized US politics. It’s a billion dollar industry, and they’d both rather alternate losing to each other and keep their seat at the table than let anyone else play the game.

I live in Tennessee. The number of lives that Dolly Parton has changed for the better is immeasurable. The two things you’re supposed to do as a Christian are to love God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself.

She loves her neighbors more than she loves herself. Anyone talking trash about Dolly is the worst kind of person.

One of my favorite pieces of the Bible is the Parable of the Talents where Jesus tells a story about three men who are given different sums of money. The first two are given more. They do stuff with it and are rewarded. The guy who gets the least buries it in a field and is punished.

It’s often used an an example of stewardship, and regularly used as an excuse to not give drug addicts and homeless people money. They might use the money for drugs. That’s a sin and a “bad investment.” It ignores the fact that nobody looses money in the parable. The point of the story is that any good thing you do in good faith with the gifts you’re given is commendable.

I don’t understand telling 50% of your church that the most important thing they can do is be a PreK Sunday school teacher or nursery volunteer. That’s burying talents in a field.

Yeah, about a year ago when all the “wow, lemmy really feels like an edgy early internet discussion forum” threads were popping up, I think people forgot that those early forums were just eternal flame wars between communists and anarchists.

Yeah, when he entered the race, it was hilarious. You were able to distance yourself from the hilarious things and the horrible things he’d say about Marco Rubio, or Ted Cruz, or JEB! (please clap) Bush, because he’d never win. But as he crept closer to the nomination, it got less funny and more horrifying every day.

Wow. We’d be lucky if that were true today. With slavery, it’s 3/5, but with things gerrymandered correctly, it’s essentially 0/5.

Recently, I noticed that a lot of the YouTube recommendations I was seeing were folks based out of Utah. My wife calls it Mormon YouTube. Outdoors Boys, Matt’s Offroad Recovery, Brandon Sanderson, and a few more Mormon adjacent channels started popping up everywhere. I started wondering what I had watched that started brining all these other things up.

It’s Mark Rober.

You’re getting downvoted, but this is true. 13 colonies were able to fight the British better than each one doing their own things. Reich means realm, or more specifically empire. Germany unified as a single country in the mid-late 1800s. Hitler then came along and decided Germany needed more space, lebensraum, and prestige to do all the things they wanted to do. They killed millions for it. Manifest Destiny, from sea to shining sea, all that is what this is. The US has done it too. We murdered and moved native Americans for decades for white immigrants to have “living space”.

However, I don’t think any of the dumbasses who made this stupid video know any of that. It was a joke to them. Right now, I’m not scared of Nazis in the White House. I am scared of people who think Nazis are a funny joke being in the White House, because that leads to Nazis in the White House.

Nah, scratchy dick has everything to do with the sand and bits of shell in your shorts. The burn comes from the salt and the crabs.

“I’m not gay for sucking dick; this dick is gay for getting sucked.”

This is logic.

Fielding bad candidates because you can’t be bothered to do the bare minimum has been a thing forever. As a friendly reminder, the thing that scared the DNC and RNC the most in my lifetime wasn’t Trump, 9/11, or anything like that. It was Ross Perot.

They’d both burn everything rather than let anyone else play the game.