2024 US Election
the funniest thing about musk is that hes a pioneer in electric vehicles, space travel and what is essentially "futuristic" technology. yet hes now online trying to convince people that democrats are creating hurricanes with lasers. its some of the dumbest shit ive ever seen. most right wing lunatics on social media are just grifters trying to make a few bucks off of people with low double digit IQs. hes still an insanely wealthy person who doesnt need the $27 checks from the company he owns to further his bottom line. its just kind of wild to me.
He's obviously making a play for political influence in "conservative"/Republican circles. Being stupidly wealthy is sometimes not enough for stupidly wealthy folks.
He seems to regularly destroy his family and romantic life, and to be a generally unpleasant piece of work. I don't think he's got any degree of calibration about these things.
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the stuff that happened with his ex and his daughter caused so much emotional damage that he doesn't seem capable of processing, so he's decided to do the billionaire thing and process all of his trauma by buying a social media company and waging a personal war against 'trans/woke' and anyone he's perceived to enable it. his positions has attracted the 4CHANish elements of the internet, who have been acting as a trauma blanket for little elon for the last 2-3 years, and the enabling has led to him going full MAGA.
He's just cosplaying as an alt-right lunatic, largely because it benefits his position in Twitter. It was barely a decade ago when Musk portrayed himself as a moderate Tony Stark like figure to the point that he even had a cameo in Iron Man 2 because it benefited his interests.
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he's knee deep in illegality imo. he's sucking up to trump because he'll get some favours that will keep him out of legal trouble. twitter is a loss leader for his goal of getting trump elected. it was never intended to be a profitable endeavour.
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really excellent piece on where we are right now in terms of the absolute nonsense coming out of the far right/grifter space
What we’re witnessing online during and in the aftermath of these hurricanes is a group of people desperate to protect the dark, fictitious world they’ve built. Rather than deal with the realities of a warming planet hurling once-in-a-generation storms at them every few weeks, they’d rather malign and threaten meteorologists, who, in their minds, are “nothing but a trained subversive liar programmed to spew stupid shit to support the global warming bullshit,” as one X user put it. It is a strategy designed to silence voices of reason, because those voices threaten to expose the cracks in their current worldview. But their efforts are doomed, futile. As one dispirited meteorologist wrote on X this week, “Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes.” She followed with: “I can’t believe I just had to type that.”
Not to be Johnny know-it-all but the stubbornness with which conservatives cling to delusions about the climate is no greater than the liberal bulldog grip on the premise sufficient clear, public reasoning produces rational government in the collective interest.
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incredible the curve that this utter fuckstick gets graded on. in the last 2 weeks alone, he has publicly and repeatedly:
- threatened to withhold aid from states that don't adopt his policy positions
- said he'd look at revoking CBS' broadcast license because he didn't like how one of kamalas interview was edited
- been outed for sending hospital grade covid supplies to putin in 2020
- talked about invoking the alien act of 1798 to get rid of immigrants
- said that law enforcement will be given total federal immunity to enforce the above
and the above weren't singular off the cuff comments - he's repeated most of them in different interviews 2-3 times. feels like when trump speaks, the words of nazi gollum Stephen miller come spilling out verbatim. Ive never seen the tactic of 'flooding the zone with shit' employed so effectively
the idea of supporting this because he's some kind anti-establishment peoples champion simply doesn't wash. he's going to install a start-up oligarchy that will be far shittier than the old one, and put the absolute dregs of society in charge to oversee it
the funny thing is, it is easy to see why the media wants him back in office. from 2016-2020, literally every day there was some new disaster or scandal or crazy story, and it led to countless articles and interviews, and lots of spots on tv for these journalists to be the stars of the show. it was a minute by minute "oh my god what will happen next!" vibe and it led to lots of books and notoriety for the journalists. then, 2020-2024 happened, and the minute by minute monitoring for scandals/disasters pretty much disappeared. the only thing that got tons of coverage was....obviously the trump court cases and whatever ghoulish shit the supreme court was passing. there wasnt a scandal every day in the white house briefing room, or covering some insane interview biden gave where he was convinced a secret society was harvesting the brains of americans or whatever.
so these journalists that are helping to sanewash trump's craziness are doing it for THEIR own benefit. they think 4 more years of trump is going to be great for business, more clicks, more tv interviews, more books. what they dont realize is, eventually the state will come for them too and they wont be doing interviews, they'll be imprisoned for writing a negative article about trump once he feels hes sufficiently insulated and he can do whatever he wants without repercussion. and given the decisions SCOTUS has handed down the last 2 years, he must believe hes almost there.
mdgoonah41 to be honest, I think most of the liberal media eventually realised just how daft they were in that original Trump run and won’t play along. You see now in a lot of interviews with Trump and Vance people are asking them serious questions.
The problem is the damage is done. The far right has destroyed the credibility of media and institutions. Right now this week we see people questioning everything. Whether it’s government intentions, or climate change. There are no longer any anchors for fact or reason.
that is how the NYT is currently covering trump's plans for ethnic cleansing, fwiw
they havent learned anything or adjusted at all
Yes. There is certainly a style issue. These papers as a rule do not use judgmental language in reporting, only in their opinion pieces. So they will not call Trump a racist or misogynist, etc in their headlines. They will tiptoe around it.
So there is one part where you need to just report the facts - what the hell did the guy say. And people themselves need to have the wherewithal to see that someone who saying that women should have no governance over their bodies, or the law should be overturned, or dark people are intrinsically savage is a faulty individual. i'm fine with the news separating reporting and opinion. the public needs to do better as well.
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Claudius the media had already destroyed most of its credibility on its own. trump and his allies just put the final bullet in. the newer and more worrying problem, is that - in the pursuit of pleasing big techs algorithms - the much lauded independent/online media has speed run to the same level of impotency, except instead of taking 60 years its taken about 10.
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Claudius They will tiptoe around it.
But it's false. Trump isn't interested or obsessed with genetics. He doesn't know anything about genetics, nor is he interested in learning. He's interested in eugenics. These aren't equivalent. Neutrality does not mean reporting falsehoods to sanewash public figures. They posted this right next to a story trumping up Kamala's weak answers to uncomfortable questions as avoidance, rather than the very equivocation they afford Trump for his racist idiocy. NYT is a good for nothing rag, although my wife likes the word games.
One of my relatives is a huge trump fan. When he sends me messages I get a guage on what’s hot in maga world. Recently it has been transgender talk. Framed as child abuse. Pediatric mutilation he calls it. Aghast at the concept of puberty blockers.