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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • No, just defending someone that I know for a fact is a genuinely decent human being. He doesn’t give a shit about burnishing his reputation through the philanthropy he does. He does it because he hates seeing billionaire mansions on mountaintops as much as anyone who isn’t a fuck, because he wants everyone to have natural places to enjoy in the future. If you can’t see the difference between someone like Sweeney and someone like Musk, DeVoss, etc., that’s on you. He’s not trying to make the world worse for everyone.

    Do I have issues with the concentration of wealth and growing inequality in the US? Yes. If you gave me a list of billionaires, where I had to rank them in terms of their benefit to the world vs. negative impact to the world, would I put him high in benefit and low in negative impact? Yes. He’s not spouting antisemitic nonsense, or trying to influence politics, or ruin education, or poison the minds of the American public. He’s just running his business, treating his employees well, and preserving land. So if you want to call me a bootlicker for points, fine. Given the world we live in, I’d rather have our billionaires be like Sweeney instead of Musk or DeVoss.


  • Tim Sweeney is awesome. He’s one of the biggest conservation donors in my state and is personally responsible for permanently saving over 50,000 acres of land from development, protecting crucial habitat in a rapidly developing state, allowing public trail and nature preserves to get created. He lives in a normal house and drives a normal car and hikes the land he preserves when he’s not working. He’s a billionaire that lives a modest life, doesn’t mess with politics, and a true philanthropist. He doesn’t give to get press. The few articles out there about his philanthropy are because reporters stumble across it when reporting on whatever new nature preserve is opening in their area.

    He might have some business practices that are problematic but are endemic to the industry.




  • I spent a year living in Israel during the Second Intifada, studying the conflict and talking to everyone I could, Jew, Arab, etc. I do a pretty good impression of a constipated Ariel Sharon giving a speech, “Anaaacchnu tzrichim [labored grunting] bitachon b’Israel v’hakol olam!”

    You have a well-informed and factual view of the situation. Must be because you are an Israeli ex-pat and (let me guess) are secular. It’s disheartening to see propaganda-fueled idiots who have zero idea what they are talking about arguing with you–who wants reform in Israel–all because they have a black-and-white view of right and wrong, see Islam as “the underdog” that is therefore allowed to commit atrocities, and had hiphop artists telling them to “free Palestine” since 1995.


  • How? Ranked choice voting and well-designed non-partisan redistricting are necessary reforms that too few people know about. We need a duo of liberal and conservative billionaires that make this their pet issue, a handful of country music stars, pop stars, and hip-hop/rap/RnB artists behind it and we’d get it in a heartbeat. Fuck, Elon Musk could distract people from the media nightmare that is his mouth and become a big advocate of it and we’d have Chads burning down the internet for these reforms the next day.



  • Good take–hate on Americans while ignoring the Americans correctly explaining to you how the American electoral system is broken. Spend more time telling Americans that want viable third parties that they need to also support ranked-choice voting, and less time casting shade. If there’s any truth in your words, its simply that people need to know that having viable third parties REQUIRES ranked choice voting. I’m terrified that the US “No Labels” party will hand the election to Trump, because under the current system, ANY third party is an election spoiler.


  • Even I, who think the Palestinian leadership is full of shit and has been full of shit since before 1948, and think that using meat shields to protect military assets is the war crime, and that the civilian deaths that are occurring in the destruction of said tunnels are the foreseeable consequences of the aforementioned war crime, WILDLY AND ADAMANTLY DISAGREE WITH YOU. What my government did in Gitmo, The fact that there was a prison at all at Gitmo, is a shitstain on American honor. What these individuals in the IDF are doing, or are allowing fucking nut bag whacko settlers to do, is a shit stain on the reputation of Israel.




  • Sorry, this whole mess has me upset, and I haven’t been able to reach an Israeli friend of mine. And I’m sick of one-sided hate, usually coming from ill-informed “liberals” that act like the Palestinians are justified in their violence like it’s a US race riot instead of absolute bloody mayhem, who have never met a member of Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood in real life and seen the murderous hate in their eyes, who never got the soles of their shoes sticky from blood in the streets from a suicide bombing in the Dolphinairum that wiped out over 150 lives in less than a second, who never contemplated the only reason that they are alive right now is because they stopped for a cup of coffee and missed their bus which then exploded killing everyone aboard. Israel is absolutely wrong in a lot of its policies, needs a fair constitution that treats its citizens equally, and like every other country has made bloody terrible decisions from time to time. But the ahistorical propaganda successes that Palestinians have had with bleeding hearts that are supposedly educated absolutely pisses me off. “Israel oppresses us”, yes, because you let your house be used by snipers, yes, because you officially sanctioned bombers to come murder people, etc. It doesn’t justify flattening the Gaza Strip, but to think that Israel is just going to want to talk about it is patently absurd.


  • I wouldn’t call it a “real” history, just a richer history that leads to a more nuanced understanding of the situation, starting with the Ottoman Empire’s tax reform efforts prior to WWI leading to the fellahin legally conveying their land to town leaders to avoid taxation, the descendants of said leaders considering themselves as landed gentry and who had little connection to the land, in fact most of them were living the high life in Beirut and who were more than happy to sell land to Jews. Or the state of Arab intellectual thought as it transitioned from pan-arabism to regional nationalism. Or the role the Arab League played in manipulating many Palestinians to act against their interests in the leadup to and during the 1948-1949 war (Arabs that ignored the Arab League are now, by and large, Israeli citizens, though they have legit gripes and deserve a fair constitutional government that protects them from the vageries of the volatile Israeli political process). Or how Arab nations allowed/encouraged pogroms to occur against their Jewish residents both before and after the creation of the State of Israel, persecution that (surprise surprise) led Arabic-speaking Jews to flee to the mandate/Israel. I’m NOT saying that Israel did no wrong. I’m just irritated as fuck by Israeli AND Palestinian apologists that ignore the role their side played in making the situation what it is today.