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Cake day: February 16th, 2024

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  • The answer, as always with extremism, comes back to indoctrination, disenfranchisement, and finally, radicalization.

    There have been tons of studies in this, but at a high level, men are indoctrinated by constantly being put under a lens of toxic masculinity by their peer groups and male role models.

    Then they become disenfranchised from “mainstream” ideals, not hard to do with the mental health crisis and wealth disparity we see in the world every day. Or the simpler method of being raised in a small community (a church or small town) where such progressive ideas are frowned upon and demonized.

    And finally, they search for meaning and inclusion in an ‘in group’. This is natural human behavior, and is preyed upon by a laundry list of bad actors who are all too happy to offer answers, meaning, and most of all, some nebulous group to blame and attack for your problems. This step in particular has become easier and easier for more extreme groups with the advent of the internet.

    It’s a vicious cycle. And that’s not to say the victims here are blameless, because of course they made their choices along the way, but they are indeed victims.










  • Yes, true of most any national/international chain.

    It’s because they value large volume, year round availability, and high consistency from their beans and roasts, so that no matter what location you go to it tastes exactly the same.

    To do that, they select and blend several bland varieties of coffee bean, put them through an aggressive industrial cleaning and drying (which reduces the natural fruity and funky flavors but minimizes costs) then roast them in huge batches to several steps past where a normal roaster would stop for a given roast (a darker roast gets rid of more of the unique flavors of the coffee cherry and brings out more uniform roast flavors instead).

    Again, not something exclusive to Starbucks at all, and plenty of small coffee shops don’t bother with the hassle and just buy cheap bulk coffee pre-roasted by large scale operations and will have similar results.

    But man, when you get coffee made in small batches, with natural processing or even fermentation and gently roasted… It’s an entirely different experience.








  • I think it’s very telling that through his tenure in office here in Minnesota, the local QGOP’s best attack against him is that he spends money (on good things) and his tax policy produced a surplus (because he fixed the deficit).

    He is a vet, a devoted family man, and an avid fisherman and hunter.

    He’s exactly what they fear most. A blue collar progressive.

    So he’s not unassailable. You can attack his policies. But the problem is, they’re fairly popular and have made Minnesota safer and more prosperous than all our red and purple neighbors.

    I will add that the local media in MN has cast Minneapolis/STPL downtowns as a horrifying, unsafe, ruinous hellscape following the riots that followed the murder of George Floyd. This has in the last year or so become less impactful as rural folk have started coming to the city again for sports games, etc. But that is another attack vector I’ve seen them get some mileage out of.