Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Technically true, but collectively nonsense

Disagreements are healthy; personal attacks are not.

Not so fun when the rabbit gets the gun, is it?

I’m more christian than these people and i’m an atheist.

Dumb motherfuckers cannot understand a consequence that most 4 year olds have fully sorted out.

Trump’s cabinet: like a magic 8 ball that only gives wrong answers.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

So many bastards, so little time.

Sadly, there is no cure for stupid.

Compromise? There is no middle ground between a firefighter and an arsonist.

Wow, you are pre-disappointed. How surprising.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

White supremacy is terrorism.

When I was faster i was always behind.

It’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

You are so fucked. Still, I wish you the best of luck.

It is not hopeless, and we are not helpless.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

If you can’t control your emotions, someone else will.

This country desperately needs a functioning fourth estate.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

… gradually, and then suddenly.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Saturday Pre-Dawn Hangover Open Thread: Suck One Down for Elon

Saturday Pre-Dawn Hangover Open Thread: Suck One Down for Elon

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Suck One Down for Elon Cyberbeer - STOCKPILE

… Or one could buy a really terrible form of alcopop, apparently. Per Albert Burneko, at Defector:

You might not guess that Tesla Inc., famously the electric car company controlled by Elon Musk, would be a repository of beer brewing, bottling, or distribution expertise. After all, making and bottling and selling beer all seem like very different processes than making and selling electric cars! At the very least I do not think that electric car-making involves wort at any point.

You might then think that for this reason Tesla would, or anyway should, stick to making electric cars, and stay out of making and bottling and selling beer. Ah, but you see, you are suffering from a reasonable misunderstanding. Tesla’s real business isn’t making and selling electric cars any more than its real business is making and selling beer. Tesla’s real business—like that of several of Musk’s other companies—is creating opportunities for the sweatiest, most credulous, most eagerly bootlicking shit-for-brains who have ever lived to give appalling sums of money to Elon Musk in exchange for evidence that they have done so. …

… The beer is “Cyberbeer,” named for the Tesla company’s ugly and stupid Cybertruck and sold in bottles theoretically reflecting that truck’s (ugly and stupid) design; like everything else by Tesla this has been done poorly and with corny taste, so that what the bottles actually share with the Cybertruck, designwise, is the mere fact of being very dumb looking…

Here I want to reiterate that however many traits Cyberbeer might share with beer, it isn’t really a beer so much as a way of telling the world that you like Elon Musk very much. (It’s also, appropriately, only a Tesla product on the outside: The beer itself, the actual liquid included in this enterprise more-or-less coincidentally, comes from a California company called Buzzrock Brewing.) Accordingly, Cyberbeer isn’t priced like beer, a thing that it isn’t. A two-pack of the stuff, including two angular ceramic mugs that would be nightmares as actual drinking vessels, runs $150. This way not everybody can or will have it, giving Elon Musk’s fans all the inducement they need to buy it.

Is the Cyberbeer good, as beer? As a bottle of beer? That feels like an acutely ridiculous thing to even wonder about, given all I have just written. But also: The beer seems pretty bad…

Then again, if you’re a sane person, you can be grateful that you’ve avoided anything but the news of this horror.

Reader Interactions

49Comments

  4. 4.

    Martin

    I don’t think people get just how directly Musk is implementing the plan that Republican strategists put out years ago for why Musk should buy Twitter.

    Step 1: Blame the platform for its users;

    Step 2: Coordinated pressure campaign;

    Step 3: Exodus of the Bluechecks;

    Step 4: Deplatforming.

    The rationale is incredibly antisemitic:

    But in practice, it’s not that easy. In fact, one would be hard pressed to imagine a project moredangerous and difficult than restoring free speech to a major tech platform like Twitter. At the same time, it’s hard to imagine a more worthwhile project. Restoring genuine free speech would do more for patriotic Americans than the GOP taking back the White House in 2024, and it would pose a greater threat to the ruling Regime than anything Russia, China, or Iran might plausibly do.

    Free speech online is what enabled the Trump revolution in 2016. If the Internet had been as free in 2020 as it was four years before, Trump would have cruised to reelection. Massive censorship and suppression are the tools needed to prop up Covid tyranny, the Ukraine war fever, and the idea that Lia Thomas is a “woman.” America’s decrepit and illegitimate ruling class intuitively understand this: Absolute freedom of speech, or even the speech norms that prevailed a mere decade ago, would instantly cause the American regime as we know it to crumble.

    In short, transforming Twitter back into a real free speech platform would represent nothing less than a declaration of war against the Globalist American Empire. 

    There’s enormous fasciation with ADL

    Greenblatt’s wording was deliberate; by calling Twitter’s “mainstreaming” of anti-Semitism the worst seen in the ADL’s history, he was accusing Twitter of enabling a flare-up worse than the prelude to the Holocaust. The message: Play ball, or be ready to be put in league with Nazis.

    The gambit worked, and by 2021 Greenblatt was essentially gloating over how thoroughly he brought Twitter to heel, while still signaling that more submission was expected.

    If Musk or any other billionaire tried to steer Twitter back in a real free speech direction, the old threats would return and then increase a hundredfold.

    and finally

    With the exodus of bluechecks also goes the exodus of advertisers. That’s not necessarily because ordinary American consumers actually care. Advertising itself, on the other hand, may be the most willingly ideological field in corporate America.

    The whole idea was that Musk was rich enough to operate Twitter at a massive loss for ideological benefit, and at each turn cast Musk/Twitter as the victim of globalists, appealing to Musks stubborn nature. He will always be the victim of someone else for his own failures, and his instinct is to buy those suggestions when they’re made, lean into them, and then lash out at the presented threat. As such, Musk has become significantly louder in alignment with GOP/MAGA/fascist talking points. When they amped up anti-trans sentiment, he followed. When they amp up antisemitic sentiment, he follows. When they yell about wokism, he yells about wokism. He never says anything independent of the political narrative du jour, and he never pushes against it.  And this is a known tactic for recruitment into hate groups, etc. It just doesn’t usually work on billionaires.

    Maybe he’s a true believer, but it seems more likely based on his statements before 2020 or so that he’s not a believer of anything. He mostly just jumps on whatever bandwagon is near him, sometimes conspiracy theories, sometimes the outrage du jour, but never really shows much if any independent thought on the topic. He seems like so many of these people that have rise to prominence on the right in recent years to be an asset. That doesn’t absolve him of any of this shit, but it also means that Musk isn’t some random incident – he’s just part of a broader campaign, knowingly or not.

  8. 8.

    Tony Jay

    Here’s a thing I discovered last night. The Tories have been blocking the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights from taking up an offer to come to the UK and produce a report. Everyone knows why; the last time a report like this was produced in 2019 it opened with the lines

      The UK Government’s policies have led to the systematic immiseration of millions across Great Britain

    And they don’t want to have to explain why all of the experts are wrong again and, in fact, really, when you think about it, it’s all the fault of immigrants and Leftists isn’t it?

    Well, apparently, as her very last act in office Therese Coffey, the recently sacked Minister for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (and a horrible, horrible person who seemed to take great pleasure in fucking poor people over) decided she’d shove a pineapple of revenge up Prime Miniature Rishi Sunak’s polished bumhole by signing off on approval for the Special Rapporteur to enter the country. Merry Christmas, Rishi! Have fun in the run up to the Election fielding questions about how many millions of Britons are living lives of misery and hunger while you shove all of the money into the pockets of your obscenely rich friends.

    Also, too, while you may recall the stratospheric levels of contempt I have for our ex-Home Secretary Suella ‘13 Words’ Braverman, apparently she did make a secret trip to Liverpool, just before she tried to incite a right-wing riot in London, and met with families and survivors of the Hillsborough Disaster (where 97 Liverpool Football fans were unlawfully killed in April, 1989 by senior officers of the South Yorkshire Police who issued orders for them to be forced into overcrowded stands where they were crushed to death – and then lied about it for 30 years).

    As a result we might be getting some sort of Hillsborough Legacy education added to the national curriculum. So that schoolkids can learn not only what actually happened that day, but how the entire British Establishment (Police, Media, politicians, Courts) all colluded to smear the dead as drunken hooligans and spare those responsible for their deaths from having to face justice.

    So I suppose, we’ll done to both women. They may both be appalling human beings 99.9% of the time, and in Coffey’s case it was most likely all about the revenge, but in these isolated cases they both did the right thing.

  13. 13.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Martin:

    That is a Hell of a lot of words for “Elon Musk is a bigot.”

    Maybe he’s a true believer

    Yes, he’s a true believer.  Of course he’s a true believer.  He has a record outside of Twitter.  There are lawsuits against him for it.  His family left him for it.  That he runs with the current topic of bigot discussion is consistent with that.  All the other true believers are doing it.

  15. 15.

    WereBear

    @Frankensteinbeck: That’s the risk when you go on the grift.

    You start believing in the lies. Then you are con victim Mike Lindell. Conned himself out of the fortune he conned out of others. Ultimate self-own.

    That is what so impressed me with the film, The Grifters. After so much cheerful treatment of the subject, we rarely get to see the dark side.

    The real side.

  18. 18.

    The Thin Black Duke

    @WereBear: House of Games (screenplay by David Mamet) is another excellent movie that exposes the rotten underbelly of con artists.

  20. 20.

    WereBear

    @The Thin Black Duke: That one occured to me as well. It’s the essence of broken trust.

    But I couldn’t think of too many others. That’s what I mean, it’s all finger-aside-the-nose until someone gets hurt.

    I think The Grifters stands out to me because I am a huge fan of Donald E. Westlake, and not that much of Mamet. :)

  22. 22.

    WereBear

    @NotMax: I was always a killer in Trivial Pursuit. Even in the obscure categories I did better than average.

    Bookworm kind of mind, filled with sticky notes. Now obsolete for anyone with a smart phone :) What surprises me is how some people still don’t.

  29. 29.

    bjacques

    Huh. I looked for the Cybertruck Beer on Xitter but ended up with John Legend and his ex, Osama bin Laden’s niece. Dunno if that was the same niece who waved a Trump 2020 flag from her boat on Lake Geneva or a different one but can’t be arsed to find out.

  30. 30.

    Shalimar

    I don’t get why he tried his $75 beer at all.  Everyone knows collectibles go down in value if you open them.

  31. 31.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    I sort of get $75 beer guy. I had a half dozen chicken thighs I was boiling on the stove that I was looking forward to, then forgot about till they set off the smoke alarm. Packed up the remains (“they’re only HALF-charred”) thinking “I paid for these, I’m going to get some enjoyment out of them.” Even had one “barbecue” sandwich with the “smoked” chicken.

    Narrator: He did not get any enjoyment out of them.

    At least I had the self-discipline to give up and throw the rest out. My wife wouldn’t let me give any to the dog either.

  32. 32.

    Brit in Chicago

    “if you’re a sane person, you can be grateful that you’ve avoided anything but the news of this horror.”

    Until just now I had managed to avoid not only the thing but also the news of it. I think I would have preferred to go on living in ignorance of it.

  34. 34.

    BellyCat

    @Martin: All true. The issue that these so-called  “free-speech advocates“ fail to grok is that what is happening on Xitter is not individual people expressing diverse opinions. Instead, there are thousands of unverified bots that are automatically propagating coordinated messages of hate, falsely giving the appearance of individual consensus. The MAGAs then simple follow where led, uncritically.

  35. 35.

    Kay

    randall_m_facts_matter

    In Sweden, Tesla meets up with a union juggernaut… not just a single union whose workers repair Teslas, but now also dockworkers and package delivery works. This phenomenon of other unions helping out a single union is something we do not much see in the US… yet.
    What’s the issue?     Sweden doesn’t have labor laws like minimum wage – they rely on a general collective bargaining agreement to enforce minimum standards. Tesla refuses to sign. Not signing threatens the Swedish labor relations model.

    Denmark has the same labor relations model. We’ll see if this spreads.

  38. 38.

    Kay

    @BellyCat:

    Sweden, Denmark, Norway, a version of this in Germany… I think Tesla has a big production facility in Germany.

    Apparently they don’t want their countries and social compacts “disrupted” by asshole, idiot billionaires.

  42. 42.

    Jess

    The more the bigots spend on the beer, the less they’ll have to spend on political campaigns. Everybody here should be telling them how much this beer offends liberal fee-fees.

  43. 43.

    Bill Arnold

    @Shalimar:

    Note the word “misrepresenting.” So basically everything they reported is true, but he thinks it doesn’t happen often and how dare they.

    They are claiming an internal analysis of internal twitter data, including statistics.
    Discovery, if it gets that far, will be LIT.

  45. 45.

    Hob

    @Martin: ​
      “I don’t think people get just how directly Musk is implementing the plan that Republican strategists put out years ago for why Musk should buy Twitter”

    I really don’t understand why so many people (including major news outlets) have referred to that document in the way you’ve done here, as if the 4 “steps” were steps Musk has implemented or was supposed to implement. They’re very clearly describing their paranoid idea of what everyone else was going to do to Twitter if Musk bought it. “They” were going to blame the platform; “they” were going to attack Musk with a pressure campaign; the “bluechecks”, in the then-current sense of “legitimate verified writers and organizations”, were going to leave; Musk would get deplatformed. The author was telling Musk to expect all of these evil liberal attacks. It’s just typical right-wing victim mythology, and it was already the way Musk and his pals talked about everything, so there is no sense in which this “plan” was eerily predictive of anything.

  46. 46.

    Enhanced Voting Techniques

    that Tesla Inc., famously the electric car company controlled by Elon Musk, would be a repository of beer brewing, bottling, or distribution expertis

    Brewing is a pretty popular hobby in the Valley.  I am going to guess some Tesla engineers BS the brewery equipment out of their managers and then Elmo go involved in his usual attempted to ingrate himself.

  47. 47.

    Martin

    @Hob: Because the 4 steps *are* steps Musk needs to implement. They only occur *if* he tears down moderation, if he returns people like Trump to the platform, and so on. Those 4 steps only happen if Musk runs the platform the way the right want him to – which is precisely what he did.

    Additionally, each set of decisions that Musk makes is a response to the predicted actions in the previous step.

    So these are not natural predictions. They are a bit like a recipe: if you buy Twitter and do x (blame the left for Twitters failure to be profitable) that leads to a certain response but it also leads to a certain set of conclusions to be drawn – invite more users from the  right back on, which means recognizing that the policies that kicked them off were wrong and need to be reversed, etc. which takes you to step 2, which also proceeds according to the recipe, etc.

    The recipe *requires* Musk to go after the ADL, which is certainly not something you would anticipate happening back before Musk buys Twitter, but a year and half after that document is published, this happens:

    Driving the news: Musk accused the ADL in a post on X of “trying to kill this platform by falsely accusing it & me of being anti-Semitic” after the nonprofit reported a spike in hate speech on the platform following the reinstatement of banned accounts there.

    • The billionaire said that U.S. advertising revenue “is still down 60%, primarily due to pressure on advertisers by @ADL (that’s what advertisers tell us), so they almost succeeded in killing X/Twitter!”

    That’s perfectly parallels the predicted step 2.

    Now, you can argue that the author of that document is *really* good at predicting the future, but I think a more plausible read is that the 4 steps are an aspiration presented as a prediction, which these same individuals are steering Musk toward, through social media, personal interactions, and so on. And Musk is blithely going along, because again, he doesn’t really have independent thought on these things, he’s just really susceptible to influence. As a smart lady once said “A man you can bait with a tweet is not a man we can trust with nuclear weapons a social media platform.”

    And look at what Musk responds to most – to posts on his own platform. The first step – blaming liberals for the failure of the platform – results in inviting the right back on the platform where they can say the things that the author of that document knew Musk would read and be influenced by, thus starting the feedback loop. The ADL pushing back against the all-but-assured antisemitism from Musk himself continues the feedback loop, the loss of advertisers, and influential users continues the feedback loop, and so on. So the aspirational goals get met – with some steering from some parties.

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