Not Christian, so take it with a grain of salt, these are just my observations:

These are people who thought that public schools not actively supporting their religion was the same thing as religious persecution. If “woke” stuff represents their shrinking influence over public life, then a government being “anti-woke” lets them go back to asserting themselves over others, or at least not having their views challenged. So even if the leading guy isn’t a moral paragon of their religion, the fact that he’s giving them permission to go back to their old ways is probably good enough.

Also, not really relevant, but the last bit about the Pope is funny to me. Most American Christians are Protestant. Evangelicals specifically are Protestants. While it probably isn’t a big deal anymore, tensions between WASPs and the more recent Catholic immigrants from Italy and Ireland were a feature of early to mid 20th century politics. It was actually a pretty big deal when JFK was elected because he was Catholic. So I really doubt Evangelicals care much about the Pope other than when he happens to agree with them.

If you ever feel like your job is meaningless, remember that there are people who are paid to be marketers.

He’s an example of a trope I’m not found of. I don’t know if there’s already a name for it, but it’s the trope of the villain turned hero at the last minute but dies by the end so that the story can give them both redemption and punishment without having to have our heroes deal with the messy matter of bringing them to justice when the story ends. It’s romantic to see the villain have a change of heart and do the right thing in the end. Less so watching them get taken away in handcuffs for their crimes after the fact because one good deed doesn’t erase what they did.

Certainly wouldn’t be the first time.

I think we might need a book to answer that. A comment seems insufficient.

I’m finding this funny/interesting. Because normally I think consumption boycotts don’t really work that well as a strategy since it takes a lot of people not buying the thing to affect big companies and big companies tend to have so many products people need that it can be hard for a lot of people to completely avoid them.

But Tesla is in a uniquely terrible position for withstanding such a boycott. They sell one big ticket product market substitutes and its success depends almost entirely on its brand. They’re status symbols. They’re virtue signals for climate consciousness. (without you know, actually supporting real solutions like mass transit) And before people noticed how much of a shitbag Musk was, they were associated with his cool Tony Stark tech persona.

Then Musk put himself into a position where anyone who was able to ignore his nonsense before definitely couldn’t now. So this company that was almost entirely dependent on people liking Musk enough to think the cars were cool now loses most of that market appeal.

For leaks there is rarely going to be a way to know for sure. So you have to evaluate whether or not you think it’s reasonable given what you do know. We do know that they’ve done this kind of thing in other races. We do know that the party is funded by capitalist interests. We do know that the campaign didn’t really put forward a positive agenda and therefore had to look for other ways to gain advantages. As far as the character of the people/party involved, I’m not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt knowing all the awful things they’ve been complicit in. Lastly it doesn’t seem like it’s some crazy infeasible or irrational thing to do. We’re not talking about demonic sex cults or mind control or some nonsense. We’re talking about political maneuvering through media strategy during a campaign. The objective was rational even if it was unconscionable.

As you said, they thought it was a good strategy to optimize their chances at winning. Not only did they turn out to be wrong, but the act of trying to instigate one of the only two political parties we’re stuck with to take further right positions and possibly nominate a very right wing candidate is not an acceptable byproduct of the strategy.

Do I think we were headed in that direction anyway? Probably. As long as the parties aren’t willing to address the fundamental problems with capitalism, the door will always be open to a right wing demagogue who knows the right things to say. But spending your effort to speed that along instead of, idk, working on actually popular social programs, certainly didn’t help.

Did you not read about the part where their plan was to boost the more extreme candidates in the primary to try to get the rest of them to move further right in hopes that it would make an easier opponent for them?

That they realized they screwed up after the fact doesn’t change that.

Yeah you’re right, it’s nothing compared to helping Trump get elected.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/missteps-doomed-clinton-campaign/story?id=43422676

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/hillary-clinton-2016-donald-trump-214428/

https://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaign-intentionally-created-donald-trump-with-its-pied-piper-strategy/

Yeah look how well it’s worked. Far right nutjobs have totally not been normalized. Nope.

Ah yes. Give money to the “progressive party” so it can do progressive things like funding ads for far right republicans in primaries:

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/27/1106859552/primary-illinois-colorado-republican-candidate-democrats-ads

Or backing “centrist” primary candidates against progressive candidates.

Very progressive. This amalgamation of rich people’s money and consultants is a great political ally.

Yeah I’ve yet to get this with Ublock. It warms my heart to know that the professional coders at a multi-billion dollar company can’t outfox some open source devs who are just really determined to not have to look at ads. lol

Page 3:

“Oh no. It’s coming for me literally as I’m writing thi… aaahhhggggggg!!!”

You’d think it wouldn’t be that hard for publishers with billions of dollars to hire enough competent devs for enough time to make a halfway decent storefront, especially when they don’t even have to reinvent the wheel on a lot of UX and marketing research that’s already been done for them by Steam existing as long as it’s had.

That none of them have even come close to that is a monument to their incompetence.

I’m sure he would have appreciated some AC though.

Even if this worked, this seems like over-engineering at it’s finest. “Lets create a machine that takes power, maintenance, and proprietary catridges to replace a cheap rubber object people can use with their hands easily.” Kind of reminds me of that “smart” juicer.

That’s super dumb. Also, I thought there weren’t 3rd party Reddit apps anymore? Do you not still have to pay for the API?

It probably depends on the accent, but we say “Double U”.

This isn’t a shower thought. It’s a bath thought.

Game mechanic patents are such an unbelievable joke it’s hard to understand how any court could take them seriously. “Yes your honor. As you can see, we own the exclusive rights to the idea of throwing a ball at a creature in a video game.”