Yes, Costco's proprietary program has different rules from Amazon's proprietary program. This is obvious.
I am suggesting that for a manufacturer larger than the very smallest, compliance is simple. They just create another SKU (or brand) and sell it for less off Amazon. Voila, the customer cannot purchase the same product for less money off of Amazon.
At least 3-4 times a week, ranging from groceries to various household items, like water filters and what not.
I mean, different people have different behavioral patterns and preferences, if Amazon is not for you, it’s fine. It definitely works for me and saves me a lot of time.
Amazon delivers next day or the same day many of the items if you have Prime.
I tried many times to order something directly, and most of the time it’s the same price and longer shipping. So, for me in terms of convenience Amazon wins.
Any time the basic premise is 'humans should stop doing the thing they've always done' you better have a hell of a mechanism to hold that vector, and the mechanism better keep working forever, or it's a non starter.
Literally no human progress has been based on 'we should be better'. It's been based on exploiting bugs in the human firmware to achieve some result. See: organized religion, the city-state, democracy, etc ...
Individual people can be rational and morally driven. People as a general population cannot.
Nothing incongruent there. The campaign funds can of course be used on wedge issues that don't actually relate to Israel. Changing public perception towards scenes of destroyed homes and dead children is much more difficult.
It's not some magic wand to "make sure Trump is elected". It's give him a slight bump up and Harris a slight push down (mostly by demotivating left-leaning voters so they stay home). Affecting thin margins in an election is different from changing everybody's mind about something.
That is exactly why I said, "The campaign funds can of course be used on wedge issues that don't actually relate to Israel" to explain the influence of the funds.
I think the actual postmortem analysis is that cosigning a genocide against an ethnic group whose members and sympathizers are a must-win bloc in a must-win state (Michigan) was a tactical error. Kamala could have distanced herself from Biden's "bear hug" relationship with Israel. Other Dems won statewide races in Michigan who didn't carry the genocide baggage.
How is this surprising? Let's just call a spade a space: Arab muslims are anything but leftist, especially on social issues. So making them vote against Kamala Harris was probably a lot easier than a lot of people think.
In the Netherlands a party called "DENK" (think, in Dutch) was created, by 2 Turkish muslims, and immediately half the leftist voters (PvdA, party of labour) switched sides. They are more rightist, but especially they are extremely socially conservative. They want extreme punishments for crime and harsh application of the law, except on immigration. Along with the obvious issues (like essentially abolishing animal rights and standards of treatment, allowing islamic schooling, including extremist islamic schooling, pro-minority, except for that one minority with "confusion" between Judaism and Israel, ...)
Anyone who thinks about it for 10 seconds will realize that a long-term alliance between progressives and muslims is impossible. They are forced into that as long as they are very weak, but there's a point where that stops.
It'll be very funny when what has happened in Eastern Europe before happens first in Western Europe, and then in the US. Extreme "friction" will develop between leftist parties and any concentration of muslim voters. This has already happened in a few locations but you've seen nothing yet.
I do not think that Arabs in Michigan voted against her because of Israel. I think people make their votes based on the variety of factors, and not a single one.
They voted against her because she was progressive on social issues, in a country and a party that already makes these voters extremely uncomfortable with what is allowed in the US. Probably including that she was, well, a female presidential candidate.
Plus, if I can be less than subtle, muslim Arabs are antisemitic and strongly anti-Israel. They are not pro-Palestinian. The big difference being that do not want Palestinians to have a good life, you will have big problems bringing the conversation to that. They want to eliminate Israel by pushing the Palestinians into misery and using them as a weapon against Israel. Sorry, but that's the reality of Arabs' political position on Israel/Palestine. They are not looking for compromise here. They are not looking for peace.
This viewpoint does not match in the slightest with Kamala Harris or any part of the democrat party as a whole, in fact it's almost the direct opposite. It has the most overlap with extreme leftists ("tankies") and republicans (because of their viewpoint social issues, LGBT, repression of viewpoints, ...), and while everyone is 100% accurate to say republicans absolutely don't share this opinion, they just want to use them for votes, it's still by far the biggest overlap.
No one voted for Trump, they simply did not vote for Harris because she supports Zionism. This is very clear and easy to understand. I'm a progressive atheist and proud to support my Muslim brothers and sisters. Zionism is modern day Nazism (well, it actually pre-dates Nazism).
Plenty of muslims from Michigan voted for Trump, some even made it to the news regretting their votes. You can easily find a variety of news articles from different outlets about this.
Some definitely voted against her, others didn't vote as a consequence. You have to realize that Biden's administration was enthusiastically backing the people who were killing their families overseas, and Kamala not distancing herself from that position made her unsupportable. Of course it's naive to think Trump would be better, but when the Dems were supporting the gleeful killing of their family members can you perhaps understand the skepticism toward Kamala?
No, I’m not buying this argument at all. I think most voters are not single issue voters as you make them to be. Democratic Party on average advocates for pretty progressive values compared to those held by a typical middle eastern person, e.g., gay marriage, abortion, etc. For me it’s easier to believe that they weighted the issue of supporting Israel vs progressive social causes and decided based on that not to support democratic nominee.
That's ridiculous. The uncommitted movement and pro-Palestinians in general were very clear that they were not voting for Harris because she refused to back away from Biden's genocidal and pro-Israel policies. I didn't vote for her (or anyone) either. I was excited when Biden dropped out and she became the candidate because I thought she might make a change, but she explicitly stated that she would not, losing my vote. I'm not Arab or Muslim, I just don't want to support Israel and genocide. This is common among younger people (thankfully).
Also, Trump is obviously awful and extremely pro-Israel, but so was Biden. In fact, more Palestinians were killed under Biden. I do think the Democrats are starting to shift though, they simply cannot support Israel any more and hope to win elections.
Ask me in 2023 "will Palestinians be better off under Trump or Harris" and the answer was a no-brainer. We Americans would have been better off too. And a bunch of now dead Iranian citizens. Sheesh, crazy logic by some American voters.
I'm not sure voting for the admin literally slaughtering your family is a "no-brainer". I won't vote for anyone who supports Israel. Period. Let's put it this way, would you vote in a Nazi election?
That’s not what I asked. Every candidate in a Nazi election is a Nazi. Zionists are worse than Nazis. We’re having Zionist elections. I’m not voting in them.
We love to ask the hypothetical “what would you do if you were in Nazi Germany?”, aside from being telling that is the only era we’re asked to empathize with, it turns out most liberals answer is: “be a Nazi”.
It is in no way hard for me to say that I'd vote for the lesser of two Nazis. Especially when the consequentialism is so obvious.
The only justification for not voting at all is some sort of belief in "accelerationism" that will lead to a revolutionary overthrow of the Nazis. Which is not just unrealistic, but also likely to have worse consequences if it did proceed.
(It's also stupid, because you can both vote for the lesser Nazi AND still keep working towards your overthrow or whatever.)
At the end of the day, we're talking about people prioritizing their own self-satisfying moral superiority over the actual greater good. Being an adult means sucking up and doing things you'd rather not sometimes. I'm going to keep calling people out on that childish thinking and illusion of moral superiority. The proof is all around us right now.
>That's ridiculous. The uncommitted movement and pro-Palestinians in general were very clear that they were not voting for Harris because she refused to back away from Biden's genocidal and pro-Israel policies.
What is ridiculous is to think that "pro-Palestinians" are a monolithic body that voted and thought exactly like you. First of all, even among the "pro-Palestinians" the opinions on what does it mean to be "pro-Palestinians" range from one extreme to the other, and second, it is ridiculous, in my opinion, to assume that Arabs and muslims did not vote for Trump at all despite his pro-Israeli stance.
Also worth mentioning that both Harris' and Hillary's campaigns were significantly better funded than Trump's. The ratio was around 2 to 1.
Delusion about Trump runs very deep. He was underfunded candidate with most of the media and Internet working against him. He still won because of the issues he was campaigning on which are important for the people.
Only people on the right think NPR is on the left. NPR is the most middle of the road you can get. Just because they report facts that contradict the administration doesn't make them left leaning.
Right, so it is broadly seen as more on the left than the right. Or, to be glib: only a radical leftist would think NPR doesn't lean left is far more correct than your initial assertion.
Have you heard the phrase "reality has a left wing bias"? People perceive highly factual information as left wing.
For example, if I told you yesterday the President made a statement, and then repeated the second half of that statement, which is a sign of dementia, you'd probably accuse me of being far left, even though that information is just simply factual.
That plus the fact that if you dig into the reports, the two that said "barely left" even admit that they only chose that because their rating system doesn't allow for "center".
I’m curious about how you would objectively define “woke”. I’d also be curious about how NPR scores on those measures relative to other comparable media.
EDIT: And if you didn't mean it in that way, and were serious, consider looking at e.g. Ground News' rating of NPR: https://ground.news/interest/npr. They (and others) clearly show NPR to have (slight) left bias. This means you are almost certainly going to see woke perspectives there from time to time, and more often than other less-biased or right-biased sources.
I know hard core leftists love to bash NPR/PBS, but as a non-leftist, non-centrist, non-right wing person, I definitely find NPR to have a left wing bias. Not as left wing as Democracy Now, etc - but definitely left leaning.
I think it's important not to tie identity to any part of the spectrum (e.g. "I'm center left").
I have opinions on issues, and they can vary across the spectrum. On some issues (e.g. healthcare) I'm far to the left (well, in the US - would just be considered "normal" left in other countries). On things like immigration I'm either center or right (everyone seems to have their own idea of what "center" means). On gun control I'm both left and right - I'd like to outlaw them, but am opposed to some gun control initiatives.
On several social issues I can be far to the left on some and far to the right on others.
In an election, I voted both for a Green Party candidate and a Republican candidate (different offices, of course).
What I see is people who identify on the spectrum may have strong opinions on some issues (e.g. left), and then they adopt the leftist viewpoint on other issues - in order to be consistent. In my experience, these people are also more likely to follow "leaders" than be opinionated.
I don't know that one needs to identify with part of the political spectrum for it to be an accurate description. It sounds like you're broadly left leaning, but that assessment of you doesn't need to do anything to how you view yourself. I'm likewise very left leaning on just about everything, but don't really consider it to be part of my identity
I would agree with your assessment. It's just that if I go and say "It's OK to deport undocumented people who came as children"[1], people will have a hard time calling me a leftist.
But since it's not my identity, things can change.
When I was younger, my views were more consistent with the right. At some point, after learning a lot of realities, a lot of those views moved to the left. Since it was never part of my identity, it was easier to shift. No internal strife, crisis, etc.
[1] My views on this topic are more nuanced than this, but I phrase it this way to illustrate the dichotomy one can have in politics that people fail to comprehend.
It's not a clear divide between right and left, and NYT, the Atlantic, and NPR stans right wing voices constantly, have constantly used their editorialization to promote right wing ideals, and have gone out of their way to center right wing voices to give the appearance of being centrist to the right, which has had a direct impact in their perception as not really left wing by any of the left.
Now the center right is supporting concentration camps like "alligator alcatraz" so the overton window has shifted a lot in the last ten years.
I do not get the complaint. People shop at Amazon because they see the value Amazon provides: easy returns, free and fast shipping, etc.
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