What message are you trying to send by boycotting a vegetable domesticated in South America, and brought to Europe by Spanish explorers about 500 years ago?

Can you find Haldiram’s chips in your local stores? Potatoes were native to the Americas, but have been widely naturalized around the world. India is the second-largest potato producer in the world, and Haldiram’s is based it Uttar Pradesh. I would wager that they use local potatoes.

Sunburn, maybe. Perhaps he’s a “sunscreen skeptic,” too.

Did DOGE fire all of the deep-state, bird-drone operators?

(Apologies, this story is seriously distressing, but about all I can do right now is engage in some gallows humor.)

I saw this headline while clicking through into another post. Goddammit, I ate the whole onion.

Heh, this discussion underscores my point. Here we’re parsing how much age has affected Biden, how much he’s slowed down, how much he struggled to articulate his ideas, which were at least indicative of a fundamentally-sound mind. I mean, he said, “We beat Medicare,” but we all knew what he was trying to say. Meanwhile, his opponent was a gibbering baboon, who got easily emotionally triggered (not a quality I want in a President), and his best response after getting visibly angry was “no u.” But hey, at least he was able to bellow it out, and that feels like strength to monkey brain, so we can pretend he’s not manifesting more and more dementia symptoms as time goes on.

It’s hard to say how much that was a factor. We know that the campaign’s staff were instructed to record voter concerns about Gaza as “no response,” but independent polling organizations found that most voters ranked the issue well below the usual, immigration and the economy. IIRC, only in Michigan was the number of protest voters high enough to perhaps swing the election.

That’s an interesting one: That dig requires a measure of empathy, a capability often diminished by dementia. Biden had to understand the mindset of his opponent to pick something that would get under his skin in particular. Boy howdy, did it work! The target was totally unable to recognize the bait, and brush it off.

No, but he could maintain a train of thought for longer than 2 sentences.

That’s an interesting example, because the unions were correct. Reagan happened, but then when they did endorse the next Democrat for President, he fought hard to undo the damage, and didn’t promote something like, say, NAFTA, right? Or when they endorsed Biden, he didn’t break a strike, or anything?

Basically, when does this process of putting promoting better people in the party begin?

The last couple of years have really opened my eyes as to how many Americans are just fucking morons with, like, monkey-level brains.

Quiet voice == losing his mind and not lucid.

Loud voice == strong leader!

Okay, which version actually happened over the past 50 years—yours or mine?

The one that stands out in my memory is the time that I interviewed with the owner of a small, retail business, who was an out, gay man. (It’s relevant.) When I got there, I noticed that all of the employees were 6’+, blond boys. I’m neither of those things. Immediately, he did The Look, and I knew it was over, but I still had to go through the motions of the interview.

(The Look consists of looking you up and down, and then peering into the empty space over your head, as if imagining the tall man that they want to see instead.)

Here’s the hitch:

It is a literal yet unfortunate fact that we must hold our noses and vote for anyone who stands a chance at beating a Republican in a national presidential election. Until such time as the parties have been taken over by people who wouldn’t nominate someone like that.

This strategy guarantees that the parties will keep nominating someone like that. (After all, they keep winning.) There’s no mechanism for replacing the party leadership in it, nor any realistic scenario by which it would happen.

In a nutshell, what this meme is about is all the people that we’ve run into who say, “both sides are bad,” because they believe the Republicans lies about Democrats, and the Republican talking points on issues. Actual centrists, in Republican lingo, are “the far left.”

Interesting. From the inside, it feels like the U.S. is the obnoxious high school jock that turned into a belligerent toddler.

Please adapt this comment to a post in !YouShouldKnow@lemmy.world to reach a bigger audience. It’s a truth that everybody Should Know.

A lot of people know that the conservative mind runs on fear and disgust. A friend years ago clued me into the key bit of insight that merges this observation with the “I’m a good person” ethic into a Grand Unified Theory of the conservative mindset: Underneath it all is a deep self-disgust. They fear more than anything else that they are not good people, and hence subscribe to an ethic which axiomatically says that they are. But somebody who truly believes that they are a good person could sit quietly at home in an aura of smugness. (Which, to be brutally honest, we can all probably think of some leftists like that.) The conservative, who doesn’t believe it deep down, has to have it constantly demonstrated.

And that explains everything about the performative cruelty that they go nuts for.

The example that perhaps makes this dynamic most obvious is the deeply-closeted, evangelical Christian, homosexual men. But, everything they do comes back to this truth. Like: “re-open Alcatraz” -> “exaggerated, symbolic vengeance against criminals” -> “performative cruelty against bad people” -> “performed by good people” -> “I’m a good person”.

That’s the problem with the 2-party system, isn’t it? One party can decide to be objectively terrible, and the other party discovers that it only needs to be ever-so-slightly better, because what are the 66% gonna do— vote for the greater evil?! And there’s a lot of personal benefit to the party insiders to be had! Trouble is, when the margin between the two parties is so small, electoral fuckery by the terrible party, and stochastic events mean that they sometimes win.

Which seems awfully familiar.

First off, I’m not an expert, I’m just a guy who poured mold-making silicone gel on the deck of my boat a couple of days ago, in order to capture the surface detail to re-create it after making repairs. The cured mold is definitely the same sort of rubbery feel as the gel wrist rest I’ve owned, just firmer. According to the ScienceDirect article, the basics are all the same: It’s a matrix of loosely-linked silicone elastomer molecules, but the final product can vary a lot depending on the amount of cross-linking, and the amount of fluid infused in the matrix. That ultra-soft product that you linked, like the mold-making stuff that I used, probably has dyes in it for user-friendliness. (To know when you’ve mixed the two parts thoroughly.) That means the product won’t be clear. Also, I think the wrist rests may have some sort of polymer (vinyl?) outer layer for durability. That would make it look a little different.

Silicone gel. Don’t try to use them as implants, though, they’re probably not medical grade.