The guy who rented a Cybertruck in Colorado Springs, drove it to Vegas, parked in the entryway to a Trump Hotel, set off explosives and shot himself in the head has some words for everyone [pdf]:
TIME TO WAKE UP!
We are being led by weak and feckless leadership who only serve to enrich themselves.
Military and vets move on DC starting now. Militias facilitate and augment this activity.
Occupy every major road along fed buildings and the campus of fed buildings by the hundreds of
thousands.
Lock the highways around down with semis right after everybody gets in. Hold until the purge is
complete.
Try peaceful means first, but be prepared to fight to get the Dems out of the fed government and
military by any means necessary. They all must go and a hard reset must occur for our country to
avoid collapse.
As Josh Marshall points out, you’re not going to read the details of this short manifesto in the media (this is the first page, the second can be found at the link). For example, the Post’s headline is “Tesla Cybertruck driver struggled with mental health, investigators say”. Part of that struggle seems to have been advocating the “purge” of Democrats. Yes, he had PTSD, but the question of how endless hours of anti-liberal, anti-Democrat propaganda affect people like him are at least worth asking.
Baud
Is it wrong to be happy that Tesla doors automatically lock in emergency situations?
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: No.
Und Zwei.
Steve LaBonne
If the media explored that question it would be pretty hard for them to skate around their own complicity.
Baud
@Steve LaBonne:
They’d blame Democrats somehow.
Spanky
@Baud: You would think that a Tesla would perform a hard reset in that event.
M31
remember when the MAGA caravan was going to shut down the highways around DC but then no one noticed and then some teenaged girls flipped them off and the MAGAs got all sad, the poor little snowflakes?
good times
lollipopguild
These folks have a fantasy fed by Fox and other right wing outlets that they can “fix” the country by getting rid of “the democrats”. Trump is going to feed this fantasy as a way of keeping his base riled up. May you live in exciting times indeed.
RevRick
What strikes me most about this manifesto is his obvious confusion about who is responsible for what. He railed against the 1% and the sad spectacle of homelessness, but then enthusiastically backed the party that is all in with the 1% and slashes any sort of funding that would address homelessness. He blamed Democrats for the GOP’s handiwork. He was literally blinded by his belief that the source of all bad must be Democrats and the source of all good is the GOP.
Mai Naem mobile ¹
@Baud: i think Mitch McConnell sister in law had something similar happen to her when she died in the accident where her Tesla reversed into a pond. Per the press reports she was also drunk so not saying the whole thing was the Tesla doors not opening.
schrodingers_cat
The burn it all down rhetoric from the far left and far right sounds at times sounds indistinguishable. Except may be for purging the Dems.
MattF
…and then he drove a rented Cybertruck to the front doors of a Trump hotel, shot himself, and then, literally, blew it all up. It’s a drastic understatement to say this doesn’t make any sense whatsoever.
Mr. Bemused Senior
So common. I don’t understand it. Who do people think hollowed out our society and outsourced jobs [ETA whole industries] to China? Hint: it wasn’t Democrats.
Steve LaBonne
@RevRick: Epistemic closure. This is everyone who is sealed inside the right-wing media bubble.
Almost Retired
When I first heard that a cyber truck had erupted in flames, my initial thought was “of course it did.” Terrorism didn’t occur to me. The cyber truck is the 1972 Pinto of our era.
dc
@RevRick: It has to be the Dems for pathetic assholes like this guy, that’s where “those people” and the womens are.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Almost Retired: yeah, I loved Musk’s first response, “we’ve never seen that before.” Like it was a level 1 tech support call.
TONYG
@Mai Naem mobile ¹: I realize that it’s naive of me to even ask this question in our contemporary oligarchy, but … How the hell can it be legal to sell a vehicle whose doors automatically lock in an emergency situation??? Elon Musk should be charged with murder for every person who died in one of those situation.
Barbara
@Mai Naem mobile ¹: She must have been incredibly drunk because she apparently put the car into reverse when she intended to put it in drive. The Tesla gearshift stalk isn’t complicated, and putting it into reverse brings the rear facing camera onto the screen along with lines showing the trajectory of the vehicle as it goes backwards.
I thought all new vehicles with electronic door locks automatically lock when you start driving. My new Volvo and my daughter’s 2018 Subaru both do that, although I don’t know why it would seem necessary.
suzanne
@RevRick:
Yes.
I write here, with some frequency, that I am sympathetic with people’s suffering in this broken and unfair society we live in….. basically right up to the moment that they decide to vote for the GOP to fix it. I should work on being nicer. But I also have to work on protecting myself and my children and my close friends.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Mr. Bemused Senior:
Tech bro sees everything thru a tech bro’s lens.
This is my shocked face.
catclub
I think Timothy McVeigh thought blowing up the Murragh Building would start a race war, too.
Dylan Roof thought that his shooting would do that too, right?
Another Scott
ICYMI, Suzanne bait – Cheryl Rofer at Nuclear Diner:
Worth a click, as always.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Denali5
I think the idea behind the automatic door lock is to prevent children from opening the door and falling out. Of course, it was not thought through for the potential of trapping passengers inside.
UncleEbeneezer
Agreed. It’s also worth asking for very-online Progressives! Fantasies of Dem purges are not limited to right-wingers. With a few minor tweaks and less violence, I feel like this manifesto could just as easily come from a local DSA chapter.
scav
They are wrestling with a bit of a problem as they’re pushing the poor mentally-wounded heroic lone-wolf vet angle which means they can’t fully weaponize his hatred of demoncrats. Plus his whole calling for a military coup like patriotic tourism rerun — did the guy really think it would get eagerly hyped by the media to the same degree an Isis flag would? Are the white mice running paired experiments with a single factor changed just to mess with our minds?
Chief Oshkosh
@RevRick: And did he not get the memo that his Blessed GOP just won the House, Senate, and Executive, AND owns the courts?
I get that he was crazy, but I’m guessing the blind rage must’ve broken the part of the brain that understands 1+1=2.
Steve LaBonne
@suzanne: It’s hard to be nice when you realize that they only want it to be fixed FOR THEM, not for those other people whom they hate.
sab
@TONYG: I may be wrong, but I think it’s that they are already automatically locked, and fail to unlock in an emergency situation.
Otherwise I agree.
Scott
Since this is just standard MAGA fare, are you saying that MAGA is a mental disorder?
Joking aside, I don’t let them off the hook that easily.
kindness
Trump’s Gestapo leaders have to be happy. Trumpies are skipping Hitlers initial concentration/kill list (I think it was Communists, Gypsys, Gays) and going straight to kill all the Democrats!!!11!!
We live in amazingly weird times.
Scout211
Since my whole career was in mental health, the “people like him” can be a multitude of personality traits, mental illness, indoctrination, substance use, etc. But at the top of the list for him in particular (from what I have read) is traumatic brain injury and PTSD.
From an NBC story interviewing an ex-girlfriend Livelsberger had contacted apparently after leaving his wife and child in Colorado (or she left him and took the baby) and was driving the cyber truck. The text messages they exchanged were part of the investigation and she then was interviewed by NBC. They broke up in 2022 and he went on to marry his wife.
Some snippets:
He may have been a right wing asshole, but he was also not well.
ETA: clarity and formatting
sab
@Denali5: My brother in law has that because grandchildren, and even on vacation he wouldn’t flip that switch for the week, so every time we went anywhere in their car with us in the back seat it took forever for him to get around to letting us out. What of there had been an accident? I will never ride in their car again.
I believe the Tesla locks automatically because Musk thinks pedestrians are scary.
Geminid
@Barbara: One aspect of this accident is she backed into an artificial pond late at night. Once the victim backed off the road and onto a downslope covered with grass that was wet from dew, she couldn’t have stopped even if she hit the brakes.
Or at least, that’s how I reconstructed the accident from a thousand miles away.
raven
@Mr. Bemused Senior: “Who do people think ” your first mistake.
Elizabelle
Ah. The other shoe drops.
Will never happen this administration, but we really, really need to get rid of Fox News Channel off of Armed Services cable offerings. It was channel one on a USA military base I visited in Germany.
Rupert Murdoch and Rush Limbaugh paved the way for The Felon. And now we have this craziness from military that marinate in all the hatred and misdirection.
Rather sad for Livelsberger’s sake that another Army veteran grabbed the big headlines hours before his own self-immolation.
Elizabelle
All that said: we are not making enough mental health counseling available to our service members. It is a scandal how little they get.
Wapiti
@Chief Oshkosh: I get that he was crazy, but why didn’t his Special Forces teammates and leadership spot it? They’re supposed to be some of the smartest people in the services.
Dog Mom
So many messages telling people to wake up. . . Hmm . . . They want to be woke now?
SomeRandomGuy
@RevRick: You sound like you’re not sure that Republicans blamed minorities and immigrants for every problem on the planet, with the Democrats worsening everything to the point of ruin.
They are doing that. That’s their constant message. All Democrats are evil, only Republicans can be good.
lowtechcyclist
@Baud:
FINE. But as a former Federal worker, I get so tired of this crap.
This is what I’d like to tell those bozos:
What Federal workers do is simple: we execute the laws that Congress has passed.
If they don’t like those laws, their problem is not with us, but with Congress. The reason why there are a few million Federal workers is that Congress has passed a shitload of laws during the 236 years it’s been in existence. It takes more than a handful of White House staffers to do all the things that those laws tell the Executive Branch to do.
If they feel our actions go beyond the scope of those laws, it would be nice if they’d come up with specific examples that could be verified or refuted.
But fuck this “blame the bureaucrats” crap. Blame us if we don’t do our jobs very well. But don’t blame us for doing our jobs – doing the work that the laws passed by Congress require of us. Fuck that shit.
raven
I had a SF buddy in Champaign (I actually ran into him in Vietnam when I saw a high school friend who was his A team commander on the Cambodian border. He was driving the van when I broke my back in 1975 and we met up at the Wall a couple of times. I would talk to him about his Wingnut ideas and you would never have known he was off the hook but when I saw his FB posts about Democrats just wanting to kill babies I realized it was bullshit. Adam had a mentor who was a high ranking SF officer and he had a blog I frequented and he was equally off the hook. These motherfuckers hate you and you better get used to it.
RaflW
The difference in how the New Orleans and Vegas guys are treated in the press (and the American culture, since the press is not just out there all alone in this) says lots of bad things about where we are and are going.
RW extremism is always, always a lone wolf. This is a category error, but so far those who know that have not been able to persuade enough of the culture or the press.
raven
@Elizabelle: Counseling won’t do shit for these people.
UncleEbeneezer
@Another Scott: If you ever want to really aggravate a 10-13 year old boy, make him play on the team that has slightly more girls than boys on it. Most often, they’d rather be on the losing team with more boys than the winning team with more girls.
Geminid
@Elizabelle: There also aren’t enough hospital beds available for people in mental health crises. A couple years ago a friend committed suicide after the hospital couldn’t admit her. Her wife took her home but she slipped away while they were taking a map. They found her car up on the Blue Ridge Parkway, and her body at the base of a cliff used by hang gliders. A preventable death.
raven
This shit pales in comparison to what would have happened if they had lost the election.
NutmegAgain
“Hardcore Maga shoots self in exploding truck. Democrats to blame.” Some headline, somewhere.
lowtechcyclist
@Almost Retired:
More like the “unsafe at any speed” Corvair from a few years earlier.
Omnes Omnibus
@Wapiti: Special Ops people are all a bit crazy in some way.
sab
@Wapiti: Do they help you or just kick you out?
RevRick
@Steve LaBonne: @dc: @suzanne: @Chief Oshkosh:
He was as programmed as The Manchurian Candidate.
Anyway, I wrote a letter to the editor of the local newspaper which essentially duplicated my post.
Omnes Omnibus
@raven: Unfortunately, this is probably true. It doesn’t mean a lot of people don’t need counseling, but a lot are just assholes/fundamentally nuts/etc.
Eolirin
@RevRick: So is almost half the electorate.
Jeffro
Has anyone else read the ProPublica piece about the guy who infiltrated far-right militias?
Crazy stuff.
Wapiti
@Omnes Omnibus: Ayup. I was in a Civil Affairs unit for a while at Bragg. Most of the enlisted guys were seconded from the SF Group there at Bragg.
I’d generally characterize SF enlisted as (1) much smarter than your average enlisted, (2) protective of each other to a very high degree, and (3) somewhat beyond accountability because they operate far away from their headquarters.
Smart and unaccountable can be a bad mix.
M31
at least this guy skipped right to the ‘kill yourself in a bunker’ part, kind of
[more mental health care and less Fox News might have made a difference, maybe, not sure how sympathetic I can be with that manifesto]
RevRick
@SomeRandomGuy: Oh, I know all about GOP propaganda. It often frighteningly mimics what my parents heard when they served in the American Embassy in Berlin before the War.
Baud
@raven:
They do and many is us won’t.
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: The second guy I mentioned loved to talk about how the combat arms were largely white and the support troops were “of color”. (that ain’t how he put it) I remember when Obama visited Iraq and this dude couldn’t wait to point out who was at the event.
raven
@Baud: You may not get used to it but you best be aware.
Wapiti
@sab: I knew of 2 people who were so messed mentally up from Somalia that they were medically retired. So they’d have a pension, and get treatment from the VA, but being helped doesn’t mean being cured.
karen marie
@Mai Naem mobile ¹: I considered the report that she was “drunk” was slander intended to remove responsibility from Tesla.
Scout211
@Wapiti: Here’s one of his fellow SF soldiers quoted at CNN
It’s like a motto or something:
”Don’t tell, don’t see.”
Baud
@raven:
I’m used to it.
raven
“Why did I personally do it now? I needed to cleanse my mind of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve
myself of the burden of the lives I took.”
I guess that’s progress.
Eolirin
@Wapiti: With some rare exceptions, you don’t get cured of mental health issues. You just manage them.
Really all chronic disabling conditions are like this.
karen marie
@scav: The media is quick to blame Democrats when they one makes even the mildest of critical statements about Republicans. Here we have evidence of the effect of Republicans’ constant drumbeat of “Democrats are evil,” and not a peep from the media that perhaps Republicans should tone it down.
Baud
Via Blue sky
raven
God said, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
RevRick
@Eolirin: No doubt the majority of Trump’s supporters were hardcore reactionaries who toe the line about evil Democrats, but the ones who gave him the victory are what Paul Campos over at LGM calls Ariana Grande voters. They are to politics and news in general what I am to Ariana Grande. I know she’s a pop singer, but my knowledge stops there. The ten percent who put him over the top did so on the basis of vibes…. that during his administration the economy did okay and he didn’t get us into war. They have only the foggiest awareness of things which propel this blog.
lowtechcyclist
@Jeffro:
Yeah, satby linked to it in the morning thread, and I clicked on it then. Crazy indeed.
(Not suggesting there’s anything wrong with your linking to it again – I sure don’t read every thread, and I’m certain that I’m far from the only one. Or sometimes it isn’t until the second or third time I see a link that I decide to click through. So it’s all good.)
Baud
This dude killed one in the explosion, right?
Eolirin
@RevRick: There’s a deeply embedded weaker form of the nearly religious zealotry in which the Republican base exists, which says that democrats are weak and feckless, stand for nothing and are feminine coded, and not strong and that you need a powerful man in charge of things, that’s the rest of that group.
The GOP floor is around 45% of the vote between the two. Almost half the electorate.
That’s what allows the people who know literally nothing to decide elections.
Citizen Alan
@schrodingers_cat: Nah. The Cosplay Marxists want to exterminate us too. Once the “feckless corporate Dems” are out of the way, then we’ll get that Socialist Nirvana at last.
Raven
@Baud: Himself and that was a gunshot
WaterGirl
@Baud: What do you – or anyone here – know about the Boston Review?
Wondering if they should be included in the list of alternative news sources I’m putting together.
Denali5
@RevRick: I assume you have read Erik Larrsen’s book, In the Garden of the Beasts, and the family of the American Ambassador to Germany in Berlin before the war,
Kay
@Jeffro:
I did read it. It worries me a little. It doesn’t ring true to me. Propublica has been growing very fast – I just hope they didn’t get taken in.
schrodingers_cat
@Citizen Alan: I was trying to give them the benefit of the doubt but I am afraid that you are right.
lowtechcyclist
@karen marie:
This is all too true. I guess it’s just one more item in the bucket of “only Democrats have agency” but that drumbeat is cumulatively extremely dangerous.
It’s one thing to believe the other side is wrong, but it’s another to believe they’re evil. A society can only function for so long when half of it believes the other half is evil and is out to get them.
Scout211
Such a good book.
Citizen Alan
It is one thing for doors to automatically lock. My SUV does that, but it will still open when I pull the handle from the inside. It is another thing for doors to automatically be locked from the inside with the manual release button hidden in a secret compartment!
TBone
@kindness: his initial list, the first rounded up and sent off to camps, were his political opponents who are memorialized outside of the Reichstag. Rick Steves did video about this right before the election, when he endorsed VP Kamala Harris.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memorial_to_the_Murdered_Members_of_the_Reichstag
Baud
@Raven:
Thanks.
gene108
@Another Scott:
I did my undergrad in geology at a large state university, whose biggest department was engineering. We had more men than women.
That ratio makes it so much harder to meet women at college. I cannot understand why a man would not want to be in a situation where there are more women in their classes. Sitting next to women in classes at least gives the proximity to actually talk to one and may be hit it off.
Kay
@UncleEbeneezer:
So just pure smears now?
It’s “worth asking” if “the Left” are seeking to kill all Democrats?
Is this because they sometimes run in Democratic primaries, which upsets you? That’s equivalent to a manifesto vowing to kill people?
You’re “just asking questions” am I right?
Suzanne
@Geminid:
As someone who has managed the design and construction of about 300 behavioral health hospital beds in the last fifteen years…. you are 100% correct. The last statistic I read was that the U.S. had approximately 16% of the capacity needed.
I will also note that community opposition was a significant aspect of delay in all of those projects, save one. Everyone says “we need better mental health care!” right up until the moment that that means “nearby me”. I did a couple of low-income senior living facilities (with HUD funding) and ran into the same thing.
It makes me intensely sad and despondent about our ability, as a country, to make positive change for one another.
Raven
“Livelsberger mostly bore that burden in private but recently sought treatment for depression from the Army, according to a U.S. official who spoke on condition of anonymity to provide details that have not been made public.”
so much for that
Kay
@Citizen Alan:
You should haul them in for questioning on…something. How dare anyone in the US be to the Left of the Democratic Party. That’s just like a suicide bombing.
RevRick
@Denali5: Yes. My parents arrived after his ambassadorship. Dad in the Fall of 37, mom in the Spring of 38.
satby
@Baud: himself. 7 injured but supposedly none seriously.
Baud
@satby:
Thanks.
scav
@satby: Well those and the many to be purged by any means possible downstream of his wake-up non-woke call to arms. Clearly, those purged didn’t count against him as he relieved himself of actual lives he took.
Kay
@Jeffro:
I was glad that they seem to have checked his criminal record – he probably voluteered it, not saying they had to turn it up, but they did check it.
They’re getting bigger fast, Propublica. That’s exciting but also risky.
Nukular Biskits
Good afternoon, y’all.
I’m late to the discussion but MM2 points out a very salient fact about our supposedly liberal media.
Can anyone here imagine the coverage had (shamelessly plagiarizing from my Bluesky post), had he been a self-described liberal/progressive/BLM/antifa/socialist/transgendered/feminist/_________ <insert whatever is the current rightwing bogeyman>?
eclare
@lowtechcyclist:
The tax code doubled in size in the 1980’s under Reagan. I still remember being a green bean at Arthur Andersen ( tax and auditing firm) in the early 90’s when a retired partner showed up at the office. He saw the most recent printed code. “When did they start putting it in two volumes?”
gene108
@Scout211:
Some people are good at masking their mental health problems for stretches of time during the day. People close to you may not notice.
Also, most people have not attempted suicide or have had suicidal ideations. It’s hard to think someone will do something like suicide that you’ve never ever thought about and most likely will never consider.
Sister Golden Bear
@Barbara:
If I remember correctly, she was about 3x the legal limit. And yes, as a Tesla 3 owner I can confirm that the gear stalk is identical to non-EV cars, and the screen changes to “reverse mode” showing the back up camera. So it’s really apparent that you’re backing up.
matt
@Mr. Bemused Senior: Those Hollywood liberals.
kalakal
@gene108:
When I was doing Chem Eng back in the late 70s/early 80s the m/f ratio must have been about 9:1. But at least there was the rest of the university*… at Loughborough ( the UKs leading sports university) the ratio for the whole place was around the same. The joke throughout the entire university system was the proudest boast a male undergraduate could make was “I’m at Loughborough and I’ve got a girlfriend”
*I actually met my gf at Physical Chemistry lectures – the Chemistry department had a much more even ratio
matt
So this guy committed suicide to try to trigger a nationwide pogrom against the Democrats. Just peachy.
eclare
@lowtechcyclist:
They say that we kill babies born alive, and the media lets them get away with it. Also with grooming, pedophile rings, etc.
raven
@kalakal: wrong thread?
Kay
@matt:
Its what people said would happen. Winning elections is no longer enough. Now there can be no dissent at all.
The Right were always authoritarians. They’ve never really even hidden it.
Geo Wilcox
@Another Scott: I don’t remember where I read this but it was from an old book I had laying around. I don’t have it any more because I was so disgusted by the author’s premise (not the one in your post).
He said the exact same thing, as more women enter a field (any field from military to medicine) men will stop entering those fields.
kalakal
@raven
No, it was a reply to #85 & #22 but I see now it would fitted the newest thread better
apocalipstick
@Barbara:
Doors lock automatically as part of the structural integrity of the vehicle, but they can be disabled or defeated. That is not an option on a Tesla, as I understand it.
Chris
@suzanne:
My stance for basically my entire adult life is that I can be sympathetic to stupid people, but I can’t be sympathetic to malignant people.
We can complain all we want about all the idiots who think Biden ended abortion and Trump sent them checks, and voted for Trump because they miss cheaper gas prices and honestly think he’s going to bring them back, but the fact is that there just aren’t that many of them (even if it’s enough to swing an election). The average person who voted for Trump, just like the average person who voted for basically every Republican since 1964 at the latest, is explicitly doing it to hurt other people. They’re bad people, full stop.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
It’s also worth noting that by some reports the Cybertruck bomber was caught by his wife in an having an affair with another woman. As much as I can read other people minds, I would say this guy came up with that manifesto BS is distract from that.
Gloria DryGarden
@Steve LaBonne: nice allegory! Brilliant.
epistemic closure, the bubble sealed them in…..
Chris
@RaflW:
It’s especially egregious because RW extremism is literally the only version of this in the country that isn’t “lone wolf.”
There is no black, or Muslim, or left-wing equivalent to the militia movement in this country. There is no black, Muslim, or left-wing equivalent to the NRA building an entire culture around the idea that you need to arm yourself and prepare to shoot the government because it might turn evil at any minute. There is definitely no black, Muslim, or left-wing equivalent to a national politician putting out a call for people to overthrow the government and finding hundreds of people flocking to do it to the point that it very nearly succeeds.
Black, Muslim, and left-wing terrorists, when they happen in the U.S, are lone wolves. No organized infrastructure of any kind supports what they do; some people from those demographics still turn violent because, y’know, there’s assholes in every culture, but they’re as alone as it’s possible to be. Only the right-wingers aren’t.
Chris
@Omnes Omnibus:
Finally read his autobiography last year, and I very much agree with William Slim’s idea that Special Ops units do vastly more harm than good.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Yes, with a monster – the entire message from the right wing media is “be scared!” There is no peace for these guys.
Betty
@Mr. Bemused Senior: Dave McCormick is one of those who made his millions at least in part by sending jobs to China.. He just replaced Bob Casey as Pennsylvania’s Senator. So yes. People have been thoroughly brainwashed.
Soprano2
So as far as the big storm is concerned we’re right on the edge between rain and snow here, so it could go either way. They’re saying “wintry mix”, so a mix of rain, sleet and snow – yay. The stores were busy this morning as people who live in town are shopping as if they’ll be snowed in for a week. 😂🙄🙄 I’m so glad I have a gas furnace, as long as the power doesn’t go out we’ll be fine. I feel sorry for the counties to our east, they’re forecasting ice for them *shudder
kalakal
@Chris: Slim had a very high level of experience
and expertise to back up that view
Noskilz
As Granny Squidbilly would say, he seems to have been been a very confused individual.
There was an especially bizarre youtube video from someone claiming he had contacted a podcaster before the attack since I would have expected ravings about scf-fi Chinese drones to be worth at least a passing mention in other accounts, if only as evidence he was profoundly unwell. Since there are references to the Shoemate’s appearance on Ryan’s show in a variety mainstream accounts like CBS , I’m assuming the account of the contact and content of emails aren’t a hoax.
different-church-lady
@Baud: It seems the best way to stay safe in a Tesla is to never get in it.
different-church-lady
@Denali5: Well, I can tell you this, if my car exploded into flames the last thing I’d want is my kids accidentally falling out of it.
Chris
@Noskilz:
A few weeks ago, a conversation between office-mates turned into one of the most painfully fucking stupid things I’ve heard all year when they all started talking about those sightings of drones in the sky that’ve been happening recently. Except it’s no longer just drones, now apparently it’s also plasma balls in the sky being chased by drones, with my manager sharing some blurry video about it. The consensus seems to be that “something” is up there and the government’s investigating it with drones and doesn’t want any of us to know about it. What’s the “something?” Probably aliens!
Refreshingly, the possibility of a hostile nation like Iran being behind the drones was dismissed, because “they don’t have the technology.” Which, if anything, is even more eye-wateringly stupid than any of the alien shit, but hey, any time they spend working themselves up about flying saucers from Mars is time they’re not spending working themselves up about Secret Iranian Illegal Immigrant Terrorists Living Among Us.
All of which is to say that “ravings about sci-fi Chinese drones” are, sadly, the kind of shit that’s way more normalized than it’s ever been. (Most of the people in that conversation weren’t even white, male, or, as far as I know, Republican, and this is East Coast blue suburbia. I don’t even want to think of what the equivalent of that conversation in rural Idaho would be).
different-church-lady
@Chris: I don’t think anything confuses crazy people more than someone not being as crazy as they are.
Geminid
A Syria story from Turkiye-based Clash Report:
On the other hand, submarines are not so welcome:
The post showed a picture of the Baltic-bound sub. It’s named after the eastern Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, but the sub can’t sail there. When Russia attacked Ukraine almost two years ago, Turkiye closed the Turkish Straits to Russian warships.
This was Turkiye’s right under the Treaty of Lausanne signed by the major powers in 1934. The Soviets never much liked the Lausanne treaty, and after the Second World War they “requested” that the Turks renegotiate it. Turkiye ended up joining Nato instead.
JaySinWA
@Kay: and @Kay again:
From the article the mole sent things to other media before the ProPublica reporter followed up on it. I expect to see more reporting from different sources if this story gets much play. I trust that the reporter did the follow up checking he claims to have. If it’s a fraud, I expect the story will collapse very quickly, especially since the mole has gone public.
theturtlemoves
I somehow got fed a video of a SF dude on YouTube that was very interesting. He said flat out that nobody should look up to him or anyone like him because he’s a sociopath and he knows it. Special Ops leaders look specifically for at least mild sociopaths because they are tasked with murdering people and then going on with their days. He said sometimes full-on psychopaths slip through but every damn one of them is at least a sociopath because you have to be to do the job. And the Army Special Forces I remember years back had a pretty serious neo-Nazi problem.
Chris
@theturtlemoves:
Yet another argument in favor of “maybe special ops just shouldn’t be a thing, either that or it needs serious revision.”
Call me crazy, but if being at an “at least mild” sociopath is a literal job requirement, then maybe it’s time to reconsider whether in fact the job needs doing? I mean, what’s the job? It’s not generally considered that every soldier who ever shot a German or an Iraqi was a sociopath or needed to be in order to do their work – or even most soldiers who ever shot a German or an Iraqi. Wars offer unmatched opportunities for people who are sociopaths, it’s true, but it takes more than simple soldiering to make you a sociopath. If what you’re doing is so far beyond the regular requirements of soldiering that you find yourself seeking out sociopaths to do it, then you’re not looking for soldiers anymore, you’re looking for war criminals, and the simple fact that you’re doing that should speak to how ill-considered whatever you’re doing is.
catclub
That remains a conjecture. Didn’t particularly happen after the 2020 election.
FLD
When the Biden administration met with a bunch of influencers about having them help get the message out, a big chunk of leftist Tiktok excoriated those influencers as “feds” and DNC shills. There’s really no messaging that won’t get that treatment from leftists. Unfortunately, I don’t think we can quantify it the way we could with Stein voters in 2016, but it’s something to study.
TBone
@catclub: whut? The electric boogaloo didn’t happen but this did
bsky.app/profile/fancysplace.bsky.social/post/3lewwqa5mgk2l
Miss Bianca
@schrodingers_cat:
In other words, indistinguishable.
I only wish I were joking.
Miss Bianca
@Scout211: Christ. This guy could have been any one of a number of vets I know. The main difference between him and them, far as I can tell, is that they got treatment for their PTSD and TBIs, and he, apparently…didn’t. Or couldn’t.
And that their marinade in the toxic stew of RWNJ media etc has been leavened with contact with regular people (some of them, like me, even liberals who argue with them! I keep thinking/hoping that they could turn into Cole at literally any moment!)
@raven:
That, my friend, is the textbook definition of “cold comfort”.
Roberto el oso
None of the reporting seems to answer the question of a) why a cybertruck & b) why at a Trump property? For a RWNJ messenger, wouldn’t blowing up a Prius at some place associated with Dems (like a public library) make more sense?
Kathleen
@UncleEbeneezer: I agree
Kathleen
@raven: You are spot on.
Kathleen
@RevRick: I would love to hear more about that if you’re comfortable with sharing.
Gloria DryGarden
@Kathleen: seconded.
Matt
@UncleEbeneezer:
Yep, a local DSA chapter is indistinguishable in impact from national-level right-wing media. /s
We lost this year because people like you hate the left far more than you hate the right.
BellyCat
@Jeffro: That Pro Publica story is WILD. Thanks for alerting us to this excellent piece. Chilling.
Chris
@Matt:
Those hippies ain’t gonna punch themselves.
Dave
@Roberto el oso: Not everyone is well practiced in the art of semiotics.
Less tongue in cheek the number of bad planners far outweighs the number of competent let alone good planners. And while a lot of Spec Ops guys are very intelligent they aren’t as a bunch inclined to practice epistemic humility. If anything that is selected against.
An acute mental health crisis isn’t likely to improve on this either and a cyber truck outside of a Trump hotel did achieve the attention seeking portion of his goals.
Chris
@Dave:
The entire military sector in general, not just spec ops, seems to select for a personality type that George Orwell once described as “competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits,” and Michael Crichton once described as “thintelligent” – “they think narrowly and they call it ‘being focused.'”
The military adores people who have great aptitude in resolving technical problems, like, for example, “how do I blow up a Tesla.” It’s at best indifferent, and at worst outright hostile, to whether these people have any aptitude at putting the things they’re doing in any kind of context. Like, for example, “why am I blowing up a Tesla.”