it's not a novel observation, but musk's lived for a long time at a level of wealth that i have to imagine resembles having some kind of delusional disorder. every single person who interacts with him in nearly every encounter has a vested interest in lying to him about whatever he wants.
— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) September 28, 2024 at 3:08 PM
My personal opinion, Musk has always been a Sales Guy, and Sales Guys need to lie to themselves before they can successfully lie to their potential customers. But there’s no denying he’s gotten worse at distinguishing lies from fact over the last decade or so… At the Atlantic, Lora Kelley interviews Charlie Warzel:
Lora Kelley: Elon Musk has been crossing into the worlds of conspiracism and disinformation for a while—but he seems to be taking things even further lately. Why might he be going this far? What’s in it for him?
Charlie Warzel: It’s complicated, but it’s also deceptively simple. We can’t be inside this guy’s head, but he does seem to truly feed off of and love attention. Musk has been moving in a right-wing direction for a long time. But his purchase of Twitter and how he mishandled it—with advertisers, and de-verifying users—really alienated people and accelerated his turn. Many people used to think of him as the Thomas Edison of the 21st century. He was branded as this innovator and savvy businessman. When he walked into Twitter and made a mess of it, he lost cachet among this group of people who saw him as a genius. Now he’s trying very hard to appeal to the only people who really care about him anymore—including those who reside in the far right corners of the internet.
Lora: Why is Musk getting so involved in this presidential election, and with Trump (who apparently said he would give Musk a role leading a government-efficiency commission if he wins)? Is he making some kind of play to be a great man of history, or is he after power in a potential Trump administration?
Charlie: Elon Musk basically bought Donald Trump at the top. He endorsed him moments after the first assassination attempt, when Trump was riding a wave of positive attention, when Joe Biden was still in the race and it looked like Trump was probably going to dominate him. So much has changed since Musk endorsed Trump in July. If he were truly a savvy political operator, he would be hedging his bets right now, saying I can’t fully alienate myself from one political party, because I have all these government contracts and so many other interests that I need to be able to at least sit in a room with with Democrats.
I think the fact that he has effectively just become the in-house social-media team for Donald Trump speaks to the fact that he’s not just making a political calculation. He’s not playing a game of 3-D chess. It seems to me that he’s truly radicalized.
Here’s a guy who has, like, six jobs and has decided to spend most of his time tweeting propaganda for a political candidate and hosting him on his platform. Does he want another job? It’s entirely possible. But I really think what he wants more than anything else is to be that sort of Rupert Murdoch person for this political group. He seems to be trying to fit himself into the role of power broker…
Because of his background and fame in tech, everything that he does that seems outrageous becomes newsworthy. Media organizations don’t cover everything that Alex Jones says, because Alex Jones has been a conspiracy theorist since the beginning. But when Musk muses trollishly about the assassination of Kamala Harris, as he did last weekend on X, it is covered in this way of: What happened to this guy?…
Lora: How has Musk’s audience shaped his actions?
Charlie: When you’re captured by your audience, you behave in a certain way—in Musk’s case, tweeting a lot and being a troll—and you attract an audience as a result. And then the audience, over time, starts to own you, because you are performing for them. You’re allowing the audience to dictate what it is that you do and say, because you’re so hungry for approval.
Musk has found this group of people who are giving him the attention he wants for doing this. And in the classic social-media way, he’s got to keep coming up with ways to delight them. That usually means increasing the intensity of his posts. If he tweets a conspiracy theory, and people laud him as a truth teller, then next time, that conspiracy theory has to be a little more extreme. You become the person that your followers want you to be, instead of thinking for yourself…
bjacques
Ketamine-addled Boer
lamh47
DAFUQ is going on!!!
#BreakingNews #KrisKristofferson died …he was 88 years old.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-country/kris-kristofferson-dead-1107074/
TBone
How low will fElon go to top this masterpiece of extremity? 🤡
I knew this was coming.
gene108
Takes a unique mindset to be in sales knowing the amount of rejections that will happen before closing a deal.
Musk’s a hype man and promoter for his companies. He was phenomenal at this until he started getting into a spat with Twitter, bought it, and ruined it.
He really did push into areas that were new, like companies sending rockets into space*, and grabbing people’s attention by making a stylish fun to drive EV’s.** Changed the public’s expectations on what to expect.
*There was skepticism about a private space rocket company succeeding at making space rockets, when SpaceX started (as well as Bezos’s spaceship company). It was new for a private firm to try it.
**Musk bought Tesla from the founders, but his ability to promote the brand changed expectations of what’s possible with EV’s.
TBone
@lamh47: 😔
scav
I somehow doubt he has the intellectual depth to be radicalized: he’s just a frenetic attention seeker with tons of money and no brakes or anyone even slightly willing to stage an intervention.
TBone
@scav: he’s a Nazi, they don’t call him Apartheid Clyde for nothing.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@lamh47:
He was 88. That’s a pretty good run imo.
Princess
I had a colleague who was once a good friend. I thought their politics were pretty much like mine. We had a falling out. Soon after she started blogging. Right wing stuff but ordinary Republican stuff. Jonah Goldberg. Ann Coulter is over the top but a useful corrective. Then she really disliked Obama. And then, Trump was elected and the mask came all the way off. This friend went full bore white supremacist, fascist, Milo, Groyper, flat earth etc etc.
You could say this person was radicalized. But when I looked back, I realized that they were testing me all along with right wing ideas. I think they were always privately who they became publicly. And I think the same of South African Elon.
piratedan
Fascist Marionette, convinced of his own righteousness.
TBone
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): it’s still a huge loss. Remember what he did for Sinead O’Connor?
https://youtu.be/B9HEn1pqq4g
Tony Jay
When Tony Stark got involved in US politics, it was on the back of his history as an Avenger who had actually, like, saved the whole world a few times. Now that’s cachet.
Elon Musk just temporarily boosted the share price of an electric car company and partially funded some rocket scientists. He hasn’t even punched a Hulk. Cachet my ass.
lamh47
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): Maggie Smith, Drake Hoegsyt, John Ashton, now Kris Kristofferson!
It’s been 2/3 days..
I know they were older, but still.
ETA: Also too, my mother’s uncle passed last Thursday. Hopefully they’ll bury him next week
gene108
@TBone:
Trump’s been promoting police brutality against suspects since 2015. He wants the cops to be able run wild and bash “bad guys” heads in. It’s his simplistic stupid view of how to deter crime.
Also, I remember growing up in the 1980’s, when crime in big cities was increasing conservatives lamented about Miranda rights, because before crime started rising in the 1960’s, which coincided with the Miranda decision, cops could get rough to force a confession.
A misplaced understanding of cause and effect, which I think applies to Trump, whose worldview was shaped by the 1960’s and 1970’s and hasn’t changed.
scav
@TBone: But he’s always been that, and it was just preinstalled: he didn’t think himself into it. He may have decided to flaunt it more when it became edgy cool.
lamh47
Is anyone near here?
Yutsano
Someone please explain to me why we need to do armchair psychoanalysis of Muskrat. I’ll wait.
TBone
Not gonna normalize, sanewash, or make any excuses for Nazis or using The Purge for real life inspiration.
Chet Murthy
@TBone: Thank you for mentioning. I found this: https://americansongwriter.com/remember-when-kris-kristofferson-defended-sinead-oconnor-and-their-unlikely-friendship-and-collaborations/
Just two weeks after her SNL appearance, O’Connor stepped on stage at MSG to perform Dylan’s 1979 song “I Believe in You” during his 1992 tribute concert and was met by an audience of boos. Kristofferson, who had introduced her as an “artist whose name has become synonymous with courage and integrity,” was asked to get her off the stage but did the opposite.
“I was not about to do that,” said Kristofferson in 2010 on the Irish television show Saturday Night with Miriam. “I went out and I said ‘Don’t let the bastards get you down,’ and she said ‘I’m not down,’ and she sang. It was very courageous. It just seemed to me wrong, booing that little girl out there, but she’s always had courage.”
TBone
@Yutsano: THANK YOU
TBone
@Chet Murthy: a true hero
https://youtu.be/3HwWDOQoCBM
Now I’m crying watching those hugs 💔
Chet Murthy
@TBone: When I read that, I though (instantly) “Radio Milles Collines” (the radio station that poured the gasoline and then lit the match for the Rwandan genocide). He’s not talking purge, he’s talking “night of machetes”.
dexwood
@Yutsano: Agree with you. Another Musk thread. Fuck him. Going to do something else. Y’all have fun playing in the Musk litter box.
TBone
@Chet Murthy: 👍 thank you, you are 🎯
hells littlest angel
A: Twitter and Trump.
Q: Name two things Elon Musk pissed away a fortune on.
Barry
Something that was almost said in the excerpt above – the current media sanewashes the elites at levels I don’t remember for quite a while.
That means that when Musk actually reads the ‘liberal MSM’, they agree with him a lot, never pointing out just how crazy he is.
karen marie
@gene108:
Can we put employers who steal from their employees at the front of the receiving line for Trump’s one-day free-for-all?
TBone
@karen marie: good question.
eemom
@Yutsano:
I’m so old I remember when this blog was obsessed with Andrew Sullivan.
Yutsano
This is Tesla adjacent, but late-stage capitalism sucks. I feel so much for this family.
Geoduck
One odd bit of trivia about Kristofferson that always stuck with me is that he appeared as the sort-of hero in the reactionary 80’s miniseries Amerika, made as a backlash against The Day After. (You knew they missed the intended mark when the most interesting character in the whole thing was the Soviet bureaucrat rather glumly administering a defeated America.)
West of the Rockies
@TBone:
I bet the media ignores this. TFNYT may not even mention it.
Parfigliano
@bjacques: Bingo
SatanicPanic
If we win in November Trump is going to mostly disappear from our notice. Like sure, we’ll follow the various judicial trials. But we won’t be all that concerned about him anymore. And even better I think Musk will be in the same bucket. We only care about his deranged ideas because we think Trump might adopt them.
Baud
@Yutsano:
Send a note to Senator Blumenthal in support of his bill.
Anne Laurie
Except… Musk’s *not* Boer! His parents were ‘English’ (in his mother’s case, Canadian). I’ve always thought this was part of his mindset; the soutpiels, unlike the Boers, were accused — with reason — of keeping one foot in Britain. Young Musk was packed off to his mother’s country when he couldn’t cope with the end of apartheid in his birthplace; he (semi-legally) crossed the border to America because that’s where he saw the best chance of making big money; he’s made it clear he’ll go elsewhere (London, Malta, Dubai, New Zealand — doesn’t matter) if his American citizenship becomes a burden. Elon doesn’t commit… except to Elon.
lollipopguild
@hells littlest angel: Elon wants what Murdoch has which is tremendous power without any responsibility.
lamh47
Lordt…I”m too damn OCD for eyeglasses!
WHY CAN’T I GET THIS ONE SMUDGE OFF!!!!!!
Yutsano
@eemom: I bet if we tried hard enough we could re-ignite those battles. You know, for science.
TBone
@West of the Rockies: this is where it appeared when I saw it in a comment section.
https://www.rawstory.com/trump-proposes-the-purge-policy/
I bet crooksandliars and Spocko and Digby won’t miss it.
lamh47
Whoa, had no idea Kris Kristofferson wrote one of my fav Al Green songs!!
https://x.com/hartoftravel/status/1840521508252487849
TBone
@lamh47: 😆
TBone
@lamh47: link doesn’t work for me
Ksmiami
@bjacques: cut his government contracts
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@eemom:
I wish I could easily find and read the threads where Cole moved away from the Republican Party and the reaction his right-wing commenters had to it back then
lamh47
@TBone: For The Good Times
Anonymous At Work
What surprises me about “Starlink Snowflake” is that he hasn’t given any apparent thought to what happens to HIM if TFG loses. Elmo is now the entire GOTV operation. You think Senator Vance or Blackburn or Cotton is going to protect him if President Harris decides to use the War Powers Act to use Starlink services for Ukraine but revoke Elmo’s security clearances? Elmo will have shown himself to have NEGATIVE coattails after TFG and DeSantis, and the 2028 far-right candidate will have better means for wooing Nazis and the Klan. Tesla as well depends on heavy subsidies to survive.
And on the other side of the equation, Elmo is depending on TFG’s famous sense of honor and gratitude. A Cabinet post or equivalent goes through the Senate for questioning. Drug testing.
At the end of the day, Elmo is not a “salesman” who pitches, negotiates, and then closes the deal. He’s the hypeman, the carnival barker, who pitches ideas, draws investors into the circus tent, but now Elmo has no more new ideas and has bought into the hype he was pitching.
Yutsano
@Baud: I could also send it to my Senators, as both are co-sponsoring the bill.
Side note: I love Patty Murray, but I really want this to be her last election. Unless something happens to Schumer or Hoyer (FSM FORBID!) she’s stuck at #3 in leadership. I’m thinking getting someone new would help. But in six years.
Chet Murthy
@Ksmiami: As many have noted here-and-there (e.g. at LG&M today: http://disq.us/p/30huf0t )
TBone
@lamh47: thank you. They should add a blue broken heart emoji.
So damn beautiful.
Baud
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka):
Probably one of these.
https://balloon-juice.com/20th-anniversary-links/
Baud
@Yutsano:
Hoyer is in the House and has already stepped down.
But Schumer probably isn’t going anywhere.
Baud
@Chet Murthy:
Same with Tesla and Starlink. Musk had a good and important run of investments there. He could have been something other than a laughing stock.
Anonymous At Work
@Chet Murthy: Then again, Starlink evolved a layer of management dedicated to verbally fellating Musk [sorry but lesser metaphors wouldn’t be enough] and keeping him away from the actual layers doing the work. It’s why it works and Tesla Cyber(tron) Trucks don’t.
Chet Murthy
@Baud: I’m reminded that Henry Ford was a good bit more than Nazi-curious. And we reined that fucker in notwithstanding.
Matt McIrvin
@gene108: I’ve always thought it was deeply unfortunate timing that the big rise in crime that convulsed the 1970s and 1980s and the first half of the 1990s happened right after (1) the civil-rights movement and (2) a bunch of landmark civil-liberties decisions. It led people so inclined to make the connection that would obviously occur to them, and contributed mightily to the conservative backlash of the Reagan era (fat lot of good that did to bring crime down). Along with the Vietnam war, the oil crises and stagflation, it was one of the several things that caused people to identify liberalism as a failed god.
Chet Murthy
@Anonymous At Work: I sure don’t mean to imply that Kums (a)Lone had anything to do with the actual tech at SpaceX. Only that he controls the company, and we’re somewhat beholden to it at this point. It can be unwound (starting with “sell all your goddamn shares, Elon, every last goddamn one of ’em”) but that’ll take time and more importantly, -resolve- on the part of our elected officials.
TBone
OMGOODNESS YOU GUYS!
My cousin in Michigan just texted me. She ran into TIM WALZ today and has a photo of her with Tim and her husband!!!!
I am SO framing this in a huge print tomorrow!!!
FAMILY REPRESENT
Harrison Wesley
@dexwood: You’re not up for another…..https://youtu.be/KS5GKIAsyik?si=PrP4nVYG40ZoAD6A
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
The Great Depression helped usher in the liberal era and, with it, American power. It happens.
The problem is that a lot of white people are still clinging to Reaganism despite empirical evidence that we’re better at practically everything.
Yutsano
@Baud: Meh. Need coffee.
It was Dick Durbin I was supposed to be thinking of. Which, although I’m not from Illinois, would wish that he would consider his retirement as well. He’s had a good career.
Quantum man
Has anyone heard TFG’s recent statement about a purge day in which he would instigate extreme violence in order to end crime?? Saw something about this and brought the movie Purge to mind. He is clearly becoming more frightening all the time. He apparently said this in PA.
Anonymous At Work
@Chet Murthy: War Powers Act to seize use of satellites for Ukraine. We pay cost; he gets them back later. Also, his ketamine use should disqualify his security clearance, leading to stoppage of (checks notes) over 70% of Starlink’s business.
Another Scott
@Chet Murthy: Meh.
Timeline of private spaceflight.
Orbital Sciences, Scaled Composites, and others, were building the foundation for SpaceX and others. Dumping a lot of money into something at the right time, and getting lots of government funding at the right time, is important, but it’s unfair to folks who were working in the trenches years or decades earlier, when Melon was still playing with PayPal and the like.
Cheers,
Scott.
Jacel
@TBone: I’m a little surprised that Trump didn’t make a campaign stop in Tulsa, OK to introduce this line of rhetoric. Or is his run of campaign rallies in historic “Sundown Towns” considered enough to underline this point.
Bupalos
Power corrupts.
Period.
There was a time when even Putin could have been digested within a functional state. But power corrupts. Period.
Kelly
@Chet Murthy: There’s also the time Kristofferson told off Toby Keith.
https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/kris-kristofferson-last-outlaw-poet-ethan-hawke-interview-714098/
HumboldtBlue
Yesterday, employees at Primanti Brothers told JD Vance to fuck off.
Today, Harris and Walz were taking pictures with the entire staff.
Ishiyama
I will always remember Kris Kristofferson and Muhammad Ali in Freedom Road: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Road
Bupalos
@Quantum man: Standard right wing authoritarian play, and in fact it can blur into a semi-left political space as well. Maduro made his whole career on this particular maneuver. It will be deployed at some level in the United States, France, and the UK at some point. In the US maybe by Trump, if not him, by the next more competent practitioner of post-truth right-wing authoritarianism.
TBone
@TBone: two photos, one with Tim Walz and hubby, one with Gwen Walz. I feel so warm and fuzzy right now, family photos with Tim and Gwen Walz!!! I might swoon!
TBone
@HumboldtBlue: 😎💙🥰
West of the Rockies
@Quantum man:
Yeah, let’s just chuck probable cause, due process, jury of peers, the appeals process. And go straight to judge/executioner.
Judge Dredd: “I am the law!” (A super shitty movie, BTW.)
Bupalos
@Chet Murthy: Maduro is the more correct analogue. Although the worst places in the United States don’t contain even 1/5th the genocide fuel factors of Venezuela, let alone Rwanda.
You shouldn’t just try to amp everything up, you think it helps and it doesn’t. Things are bad enough. Springfield ain’t Rwanda and isn’t going to be Rwanda and you end up being a boy who cried wolf. Such that people roll their eyes when we talk about democracy at risk
We aren’t in range of becoming Rwanda or Nazi Germany. We ARE in (fairly long) range of becoming Hungary. If you want to prevent the latter, don’t sensationalize with reference to the former.
Scout211
I think you mean last month, right?
Falling Diphthong
@TBone: It’s his own Kristallnacht.
We’ll see if the legacy media tomorrow report on this, or if they remain locked in their “We could only report on this if Harris called for her own Kristallnacht” mindset.
TBone
@Scout211: yeah, not today. I have photographic proof that Tim Walz was at a farm/pumpkin patch/brewery in Michigan today. You should the smiles on their faces! My cousin is absolutely beaming! Tim Walz also ear to ear!
Bupalos
@Chet Murthy:
Lame.
TBone
@Falling Diphthong: it had better be widely condemned.
Falling Diphthong
Elon Musk basically bought Donald Trump at the top.
I think this is insightful–after running Twitter into the ground, Musk is desperate to be acknowledged as a brilliant Jedi leader of The Rebel Alliance.
Sadly, I do not mean this metaphorically. It drives him nuts that Mark Hamill et al refuse to engage with his “I can’t be the Empire” pleading.
Chet Murthy
@TBone: @Falling Diphthong: sigh. it won’t be.
TBone
@Ishiyama: 💙
Bupalos
Why would he need to? Do you think “our side” has any capacity to actually strategize about what we’re going to do if we happen to win? The house is burning, we’ll eat lunch later.
We’re shoveling our assets into the boiler as fast as we can to keep whatever head of steam we have. Did you not notice that we’re all now massive fans of fracking? Falling all over ourselves to say how much we’ll never ever ban it and are offended that you’d even suggest we have any thoughts about it beyond “YES!!!?”
TBone
@Chet Murthy: I dunno, I think Moanin’ Joe might have a lil’ sumpin’ to say tomorrow. We’ll see…
Kay
When he took over Twitter I said I thought he would be the Rupert Murdoch of social media and that has pretty much happened.
Disaster.
Media just gets further and further Right.
TBone
Are you fucking kidding with this?
GTFOH with that silliness.
zhena gogolia
@lamh47: Haha, I just interrupted dinner to go try to clean my glasses. Can’t stand smudges!
Bupalos
@TBone: The flip side of folks here being convinced that this is mostly an effect of “The MSM” not doing their jobs is that folks here retain some idea that “The MSM” doing something differently could change politics.
It won’t and can’t. “The MSM” is a trailing indicator.
The Thin Black Duke
@TBone: Remember, pie is delicious.
TBone
@Bupalos: blow that smoke elsewhere, please.
Chet Murthy
@TBone: A meta-question: where did you get that text? I ask b/c I googled the text, and got no matches. I wondered if it was from Twitter …. b/c if so, then that might mean that Google is indexing less of Twitter’s content …. which would be fine by me *grin*.
TBone
@The Thin Black Duke: 😊
Eric S.
@eemom: same
Bupalos
@TBone: We don’t. We’re in a panic. We have some ability to do tactics, but strategy? That takes more of a margin than we have.
Everyone here and everyone on our side is just like “we’ll figure that out after Trump is gone.” That’s why it’s perfectly rational for Elon to let it all hang out. This will all be forgotten one way or the other. Bigger stuff is going down.
TBone
@Chet Murthy: oh wait, what text do you mean?
The Purge quotes or the jabroni who needs pie?
wjca
More to the point, he doesn’t need a security clearance. The techies do. Some of the low level managers do. Possible one of the C-level executives does. But the owner? No.
I’m guessing him having it is some kind of status thung for him. But he certainly doesn’t have anything resembling a need to know.
frosty
@eemom: OMG I must be old too! Damn!!
Snarki, child of Loki
While it was somewhat disappointing at the time, it turned out that it was *absolutely* for the best that I got perma-banned from TwitFace by some reprobate with the handle “Snarki”.
Bupalos
@The Thin Black Duke:
Absolutely. The kind of algorithmically pleasing experience you’re seeking where you don’t think about the things you don’t think about is a click away.
Everything is just a click away. Always. There is no need to be confronted with any thoughts that don’t immediately seem right to you anymore. That’s why the internet was created and you’re a fool if you don’t take advantage of that.
We’ll see what morning Joe says. If we don’t like it, we’ll turn it off.
frosty
@lamh47: Maybe the smudge is like mine: a scratch. Hope you avoid it though.
Bupalos
@TBone: Hopefully morning joe will say the right things.
lamh47
@zhena gogolia: always just ONE damn smudge…smh
Chet Murthy
@TBone: Ha, I meant the “strategize” quote. But I think you answered my question: it was the local troll (whom I have pied, so I didn’t even see the text!) Ha! Chalk one up for good ol’ Cleek! Huzzah!
Bupalos
@Chet Murthy: It’s weird to me that the pie thing doesn’t work both ways. Seems kind of unfair to you people who use it.
wjca
Did you not notice that the reason given for not banning it is that it is rapidly becoming uneconomic? So, no reason to waste political capital on legislating a ban on something that is going away on its own already. At this point, demanding, or enacting, a fracking ban is basically performative.
Bupalos
@wjca: That’s not remotely true. I’ll admit I wasn’t aware that this was some backchannel excuse for it that was likely communicated only to folks likely to be like WTF???!”
But the reality is that we’re embracing “low gas prices” and not shaking up the energy mix because that’s what we have to do in order to try and win an election. And we have to do that because the vast majority of Americans are not ready to do anything in their personal lives about climate change. I’ll go ahead and extend that and say the majority of people HERE are not willing to do much of anything in their personal lives to address climate change, and are very happy to have the excuse that “only government action matters.” Funny how one plays into the other. When people in their private lives prioritize low energy prices, it turns out to be incredibly hard to make government do something that moves in a different direction.
As someone who has been arrested trying to slow fracking, I’m very aware of what we’re doing here. Even as I admit it’s what we have to do. But the point here is that we can’t strategize. We’re at the point where we do whatever they ask to save whatever we can save. It’s OK to admit that. This started with “why doesn’t Elon fear us???!”
That’s why. We’re retreating. He knows it.
Matt McIrvin
@Falling Diphthong: Weird, it’s more common for those guys to go “The Galactic Empire did nothing wrong!” and be all contrarian about it.
satby
@The Thin Black Duke: even more peaceful is just white space. Unfortunately so much comment spamming means not much left to actually read.
Bupalos
@satby: White space doesn’t confirm your priors.
satby
As to why we should pay any attention to Elmo: because he’s a threat to democracy. He’s doing the convict’s dirty work amping up the creeps they need to vote and muddying the community waters with ugly conspiracy theories. If we all had caught on IRT to the power of the toxins Rupert Murdoch injected into the body politic and tried to thwart that early, we’d be in a better place today. Keeping tabs on Elmo and calling him out is vital. Pushing back is vital.
Bupalos
Elon Musk is going to be in soooooo much trouble if Kamala wins. How can he not see that??!?
Baud
@Bupalos: That’s my job.
@satby, your priors are awesome. Truly excellent priors. 👍
wjca
Damn, out of step with my friends and acquaintances again! Since I coughed up the money for solar panels on my roof a couple of decades ago. (And cut spending on other things to pay for them.)
They’re both cheaper and more efficient now. Finding it a little difficult to believe most people here haven’t got them already. (Apartment dwellers excepted, obviously.) Have you got them?
Suzanne
@lamh47: So I have had a ton of trouble in recent years with glasses being smudgy. I learned that lens cleaners with alcohol apparently soften the lens coatings, especially the anti-blue-light coating. So. That could be why your lenses aren’t getting clean.
I’ve been washing them with Dawn dish soap and have been having better luck, but still.
satby
@Bupalos: you read your way, I’ll read mine.
satby
@Baud: Thanks. No idea what that was even supposed to mean, but concluded I didn’t really care.
lowtechcyclist
@TBone:
That is SO COOL!!!!
Sally
@Anne Laurie: Billionaires have no nationality. No patriotism. No loyalty to anything but their money. They are a club, aligned with no one but themselves. They buy citizenships from various countries in case they have to scram from wherever they are. Musk is not South African, not American or Canadian. He is just Money.
TBone
@satby: Bayesian priors were referred to in a blank space.
TBone
@lowtechcyclist: I am still on CLOUD 9 about it!
My cousin is almost 10 years younger than I am, and she just got promoted at her university job in Michigan teaching the teachers! She trains ’em up good to be good perfessers.
The photos are just so beautiful – inside the honeywood beamed brewery bathed in golden light, everyone’s eyes are smiling!
Joyous is the word for the photos. My cousin said
Bupalos
@wjca:
Thank you.
You aren’t the majority. And indeed I have. For myself, and I put about 4 months of my life into working out an installation that feeds 3 houses on the street that are technically all individual leases of a neighboring “preserved farmland” property…it’s all pretty fucking complex and subject to lawyers… thanks Ohio for making doing the right thing nearly impossible!! I also farm mushrooms and forage a large part of my calorie intake.
Chevy Bolt for my transportation.
When you do this stuff you get a little bitter when people talking about their 9th cruise to Cozumel talk about how mad they are that “we” aren’t doing anything about climate change.
Ken
In that first tweet up there, did Musk go on to say anything of substance, or draw any conclusions? Because yes, eighty years ago Germany and Korea were both divided, and one went Communist and the other Western. Thank you Elon for reading the first page of the assignment, but did you notice that their subsequent histories have been very different?
Jackie
@lamh47:
My heart is sad… this leaves Willy Nelson as the last of the Highway Men😢
Bupalos
@Baud: I agree that I think I like Satby’s priors, the “you” was a general thing about the pie filter and having a need not to see the opinion that Musk knows what he is doing and doesn’t fear us because in fact we are mostly busy retreating. There is absolutely zero thought about what we dems are doing wrong right now because there is one overriding need.
There is one overriding need because we (in the big picture) are (in the big picture) losing. Which is why we wake up every morning and are like “what is this shit??! This can’t be!!! This is crazy!!!?”
Anoniminous
@TBone:
Baysian Priors. Are we talking Unknown Knowns now?
Baud
@Bupalos:
I don’t know who “we” is, and I don’t know whether we’re losing or winning. But the reaction you describe is an intrisinc aspect of many liberal personalities, no matter what the situation. Many like being melodramatic.
TBone
@Anoniminous: I am pixelated by my family’s brush with Walz glory today!
And this is how I feel about spelling and punctuation just for today because I am so high on life right now. I feel like dancing a jig!
https://youtu.be/Q-Q3gd6S1as
Jackie
@Quantum man:
Here’s a link: https://www.rawstory.com/trump-proposes-the-purge-policy/
Bupalos
In our desire not to “normalize” the Trumpist moment, have we made the mistake of not understanding that in historical terms, this Trumpist moment is in fact very normal? All too normal? Pretty much guaranteed?
I know and interact with a lot of Trumpers, and every now and then it occurs to me that if I had their education and experience and had to live their lives, I would probably just be looking to do damage. It fucking sucks to be those people. We know it and they know it. Is that so abnormal?
cain
@lamh47: Really sad to hear this – what a good man. Great actor and entertainer/singer.
Another Scott
Childless Carpenters for Kamala 2024
👍 👍
Cheers,
Scott.
Bupalos
@Baud: “We” is progressives generally. Anyone with 2/3′ s of a brain or 1/3 of an education, which works out to about 48.1% of the population just now.
There’s no more common sentiment among us than “this is fucking crazy, how can this be… WTF???!”
frosty
@Suzanne: @lamh47: I’m using Zeiss wipes which they recommend for their binoculars and other lenses, all of which have some expensive coatings. So far I haven’t seen any issues with my glasses. Other than the aforementioned scratches.
Chris
Somewhat nastily, I think Musk let his freak flag fly for largely the same reason that the Supreme Court did: they either think they’ve won and it no longer matters how many people hate them because these people will never again have a chance to hold them accountable, and/or they think they’re within sight of that goal and it’s time to drop any pretense, get out and give the team a good push over the finish line. (Might be worth asking if a lot of people in the so-called mainstream media are thinking this way too, because this has been an unprecedentedly awful decade from them).
Baud
@Bupalos:
48% of the population are not progressive.
cain
He doesn’t have to worry about pissing of the Dems. Our military has so far still haven’t booted him to the curve and I suspect a lot of that is because they need the tech for Ukraine or there are things happening in the field.
I hope they are feverishly working on an alternative because the man is not to be trusted given his current trajectory.
chrome agnomen
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): takes a lot of searching, but one of the catalysts was the Terry Shiavo incident. you could poke around in that time frame. there were other events, too, but it was a slow accumulation of morally outrageous acts by the right that changed Cole’s course. I’ve been reading here daily for close to 20 years.
acts that seem almost sane by today’s standards on the right.
Bill Arnold
@Bupalos:
Low gas prices have seriously cramped the coal industry, and GHG emissions from coal are roughly 2X as bad as from natural gas. Fracking contributes to those low prices.
(Ignoring fossil methane emissions, which are much shorter term in the atmosphere than CO2, and are more or less controllable depending on federal regulation/enforcement. Trump admin was a nightmare.)
Also, gas is (functionally) very suited to peaker generation to smooth out renewables variability. Storage fed by surplus cheaper-than-natural-gas renewables power is much much better, but still much more costly.
A niche paper most have not seen: The Human Cost of Anthropogenic Global Warming: Semi-Quantitative Prediction and the 1,000-Tonne Rule (Frontiers in psychology, 2019/10, Richard Parncutt)
Paper is partly about messaging – 1000 tonnes per human life is easy to communicate and remember. (I’m more pessimistic and place it at 250, FWIW.)
Do the arithmetic (and also include species extinctions); shutdown of a single coal plant and replacement with natural gas is a big deal.
Jackie
@cain: And song writer! 108 songs he wrote:
https://artists.spotify.com/songwriter/2LYO2TUZb52Fuh9qCZOMcz
PJ
TLDR: None too bright guy + credulous tech press + buying his own hype + divorced + sycophants + boatloads of money + white South African + drugzzz = what happened to Elon Musk
TBone
@lamh47: I have this song on repeat tonight for life’s rollercoaster. 💙🥰💔💜
Suzanne
I don’t know why there has to be a reason. Some people are just shitty, and when they happen to be rich, they have more reach.
wjca
On the contrary, we (in the big picture) are winning. That’s what’s driving the hysteria on the far right: they know we are winning, even if we do not. They see this as their last gasp chance to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat — and they’re not wrong. Not entirely. Although their chances of anything but a pyrrhic victory are slim.
Granted, we have been going thru one of the 1 step back phases of our constant “two steps forward, one step back.”** Which can make it hard to see the long term trend. Granted also that we may well not be winning fast enough to avoid serious negative consequences. Which is not, however, nearly the same as the dire consequences if we were really losing.
EDT Plus, what @Baud: said.
** Actually, more often than not, five to seven steps forward, one or two steps back.
West of the Rockies
@PJ:
Maybe BPD or Narcissistic Personality Disorder… lotta that going around it seems.
Chris
@Princess:
Yeah. There are a whole lot of people whose politics used to be in all kinds of places (basically, anywhere but “proudly and partisanly liberal”) who’ve really gone all-in on Trumpism and show no sign of backing off. (Greenwald is one of the ur-examples).
One of the big takeaways of recent years for me is that there’s simply always been a large faction of people in this country who were social-Darwinist authoritarians to the point of being functionally indistinguishable from Nazis, and in far more cases than we’re willing to admit, aware of being Nazis and okay with it. Not just in the podunk settings that movies like Deliverance are set in, but among all kinds of “respectable” people; the rich, the cops, the media, far more public servants than we’d like to think about, etc.
Mainstream culture since the civil rights victories of the mid sixties have sort of painted things in such a way that a couple generations of white liberals-to-moderates could grow up largely unaware of this. Pop culture embraced at least rhetorically the idea that racism was beyond the pale of social acceptability, the freak flags were mostly confined behind closed doors, and media engaged in a lot of sanewashing, even before Trump, to conceal the magnitude of the problem. But behind closed doors, yeah, a whole hell of a lot of people simply never stopped believing that racist authoritarian elitism was a good thing and/or simply the way things were. (And for a lot of people, when they complain that “political correctness” and “wokeism” mean that you can’t speak your mind anymore, this is less than subtly what they actually mean).
anitamargarita
@lamh47: Sunday evening coming down, he was a good one.
MagdaInBlack
@Suzanne: This.
wjca
@Another Scott: LOL!!!
Truly a gem.
TBone
Sunday night mood music, life is coming at me fast, gotta enjoy the honey when we can
https://youtu.be/eTzM6yn8hQg
TBone
@Another Scott: 😍😆😎
2liberal
I am also shocked that he was 88 years old.
lowtechcyclist
@Another Scott:
Jesus, what’ll they think of next? ;-)
sab
OT: Our cats from Satby rescue.
Day Four for new cats. Sneaking around house but still very nervous. Hiding a lot.
Then all Hell broke loise at about three p.m. A bunch of men came over to watch football and scream. Cats fled to basement, but their sanctuary in the back was right under the football field (figurativeley speaking. Where the old guys were shrieking at the tv.)
New brother cat climbed into his big box and stayed there, looking out with huge eyes.
Sister cat fled, and I found her under the bed with Dobby, who seems to have a crush on her. They stayed there for four hours, snoozing as far as I could tell.
TV football ensued and men shrieked. Pitbull wallowed in and was in dog heaven. Happiest I have ever seen her.
Our cats were annoyed and hid. New cats? Echo was annoyed and hid under a bed with Dobby. Dobby acts like a young teen in love.
Three hours later the men left and every cat appeared within seconds, except Solly in the basement. That is starting to concern me a lot.
Everyone else was frisky and hungry. Sweet little Echo turns out to be a huge gorgeous cat. Dobby has a fascination but she is so big. She is several inches talker than him and more inches longer than him but he thinks she is fascinating (maybe gorgeous, who knows what cats think.) He just spent four hours hiding under a bed with her, when she tought they needed to hide and he knew they didn’t. He is smitten by a moose cat.
Reminds me of my sister in law (5′ 11″) dating stories.
Poe Larity
I am profoundly disappointed that John Cole has failed us in this capacity.
Sure Lurkalot
@Suzanne: And, no one wants to bed him, or alternatively, the women he wants to want him don’t and no amount of money makes any difference.
Starfish
@SatanicPanic: Musk is an actual billionaire.
His satellite company is now more than half the satellites in the sky so he still has orbital pollution. He has electric car companies and other stupid car companies that have derailed improvement in public transit.
We can ignore him, but Musk will still be influential. What is interesting about him is that he is one of the more visible billionaires. Most of them are happy to do stupid and evil things quietly.
lowtechcyclist
@TBone:
Thanks for sharing that one! My dad used to be a big TJB fan; I wonder if my stepmom still has his albums of theirs. “The Lonely Bull” is still a song that frequently goes through my head.
Citizen Alan
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): I have no intention of living to 88. If I make it to 75, or earlier if I have any serious health crisis, I’m liquidating everything, bumming around Europe until the money runs out, and then ending it in a drug-fueled orgy in Amsterdam. I watch both my father and then my mother die at 85 after years of decline followed by months of invalid helplessness. Going out like that is literally my greatest most pathological fear.
Quantum man
@Jackie: Thanks. Scary sh!t.
sab
@Citizen Alan: You must be young. I am seventy and barking out at seventy-five seems a tad young. But living to 100 horrifies me if dementia is part of the package.
Starfish
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): If you read about the Terri Schiavo stuff from 2005 to 2006, you see how Cole empathizes with her husband and wants all the godbotherers to mind their own business.
Here is a great example where he wants to be more measured and sympathetic to the other side, and then he decides that he just can’t.
Citizen Alan
@sab: I am 55 last August. So on top of everything else, if I live that long, I will turn 80 in 2049, which is, IIRC, around the time that the next Great Die-Off is supposed to begin. I do not believe anything meaningful will be done to address climate change in my lifetime (and it will be too late, if it’s not already, to do so after my lifetime), I find that I am not enthused about being an elderly single man with no kids in the dystopian hellscape we are careening towards.
Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)
@Starfish:
Thanks. Most of those comments from his old commenters were incredibly stupid and painful to read
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Starfish: thanks for that link. I wasn’t a Jackal back then. Good to learn the back story.
[cc: @Goku (aka Amerikan Baka)]
Chigail
@Chet Murthy: and Kristalnacht. It doesn’t take much to set people off when they’ve been given permission
TBone
@lowtechcyclist: 💜
catclub
I think Musk has reneged on his big offer to Trump.
Another Scott
@Starfish: +1
God help us (April 15, 2005):
… gradually, and then suddenly.
Cheers,
Scott.
Liminal Owl
@lamh47: 😪
frosty
@Goku (aka Amerikan Baka): OMG those commenters pushing back at Cole on the Schiavo thread … I think I was here for that and I don’t remember it being so awful. Maybe I wasn’t reading comments back then.
satby
@frosty: it was a much more robust commenting crew. And a much better blog content before all the “improvement”.
IMO
satby
@frosty: but TBF, still a lot of comments coming from his conservative wingmen
ron
Musk has never been the genius the ever-credulous tech “journalists” have promoted unquestioningly. They are doing the same right now with Sam Altman. Musk has always been this asshole, just ask his daughter. People like Kara Swisher regurgitated his BS for years and years and now is acting like she knew his was a piece of shit all along.
The fact that so many journalists and govt. entities and “good people” remain on his nazi site that is an inkind contribution to the fascist trump campaign is disheartening.