Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Oppose, oppose, oppose. do not congratulate. this is not business as usual.

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Everything is totally normal and fine!!!

Our job is not to persuade republicans but to defeat them.

People really shouldn’t expect the government to help after they watched the GOP drown it in a bathtub.

Sometimes the world just tells you your cat is here.

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

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

Prediction: the gop will rethink its strategy of boycotting future committees.

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

The republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

Second rate reporter says what?

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Do we throw up our hands or do we roll up our sleeves? (hint, door #2)

You know he’s going to shit a cat.

He wakes up lying, and he lies all day.

You cannot love your country only when you win.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

You would normally have to try pretty hard to self-incriminate this badly.

They traffic in fear. it is their only currency. if we are fearful, they are winning.

If you don’t believe freedom is for everybody, then the thing you love isn’t freedom, it is privilege.

You are here: Home / Economics / Grifters Gonna Grift / Balloon Juice ‘Still Technically After Dark’ Open Thread: Zuck’s Midlife Crisis

Balloon Juice ‘Still Technically After Dark’ Open Thread: Zuck’s Midlife Crisis

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Look below the fold. Clay Jones deserves a Pulitzer, which I somehow doubt the committee will have the courage to award.

ordinarily the CEO of a publicly traded company should not declare, in public, that he doesn’t give a shit if their users leave, but meta is not a normal publicly traded company

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— GOLIKEHELLMACHINE (@golikehellmachine.com) January 9, 2025 at 1:08 PM

This is an act of incredible weakness. No healthy organization lets a policy that uses these terms leave the stable.

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— Chatham Harrison is tending his garden (@chathamharrison.bsky.social) January 7, 2025 at 1:59 PM

Actually, wrapping billionaires in giant gold chains & requiring them to live with that daily burden might not be the worst idea anyone's ever had

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— Chatham Harrison is tending his garden (@chathamharrison.bsky.social) January 9, 2025 at 12:48 PM



Balloon Juice 'Still Technically After Dark' Open Thread: Zuck's Midlife Crisis

(Clay Jones via GoComics.com)

Reader Interactions

65Comments

  3. 3.

    Baud

    So, for example, you still cannot call all members of a specific religion mentally ill. I can’t come up with a reason for that difference other than the fact that it would be frequently applied to Evangelicals and also isn’t (currently) a meme on the American Right. 🧵 10/11
    — Dave Willner (@dwillner.bsky.social) Jan 9, 2025 at 3:29 PM

  5. 5.

    Ramalama

    When I was at Nantasket beach south of Boston, a few years ago my wife was convinced mark zuckerberg was there too. It was right after Labor Day and the place was empty, everyone back to work and school. His wife was Asian and preggers. It was hot. I was hitting the waves one last time before going back to Quebec. The swimming was great. “That’s NOT him,” I told my wife. “You’re crazy. Why would this zillionaire come to this beach of all places?”

    It was mostly a Masshole beach. Tourists didn’t usually frequent it due to the long winding roads to get there. The town was mostly fisherman, townies, and people who’d grown up going to this beach for summers only. Even if they normally lived far away like New Orleans, they’d grown up there. It’s an insider’s place.

    My wife has a photographic memory. One time in NYC I’d left behind my bag with laptop in a taxi. My friends who we were visiting said that my bag was gone. No, my wife said. We’re getting it back, she paced and willed herself to recall the name and photo of the drivers taxi badge that hung on the passenger side. No way, I said. I’m screwed.

    We called the taxi company and she recalled the guy in such detail, including mostly his name along with a threat to curse the man all his life, like she was a genie from a bottle, that it worked. I got my bag back, laptop and all.

    She took stealth photos of this flaccid white man and his wife with a cute baby bump on the beach even though we were the only people out there, the mile Long Beach that was enjoying crashing waves. Two other women spotted us from their beach house and came out to swim, too. They were out there clearly to swim with us as it really was iffy to be in the water on our own. It was the nicest thing anybody in that town had ever done, or maybe I had frequented the beach enough to finally get my masshole bona fides , my vibes.

    Turns out his wife is from nearby Quincy, I think. So maybe?

    I don’t know if I kept those photos but if I did you better be sure that I’m going to publish them on Facebook.

  6. 6.

    p.a.

    Good morning!

     

    re: our billionaire overlords, despicable.

    I flippantly asked this in a comment a while back: has tRump ever driven a car?  Any photos of him driving a car?  Not posing in a Bugatti he bought for shits and giggles, but just driving somewhere.  Always in limos?

    Did the billionaire New Yorker ever go to the Met?  MOMA?  Met Opera?  Probably went to some Lincoln Center events as a chance to show off.  Ever serve on the board of a cultural institution?

    Can you imagine having that (yes, inflated) wealth and living like he does?

    Echoing Atrios’ comment on so many of these fekers: imagine having all that $ and spending it to make other people’s lives worse.  Why not just go buy a nice tropical archipelago and enjoy yourself?

  7. 7.

    suzanne

    Probably more appropriate for the thread downstairs, but there’s a rumor that the Pizzagate gunman is the brother of the Hawk Tuah girl. Man, time really is a flat circle.

  11. 11.

    montanareddog

    @suzanne: Both surnamed Welch. But she is from Tennessee and he is from North Carolina. Siblings end up living in different places, sure, but more likely it is just one of those dumb, speculative posts that take on a life of their own.

  17. 17.

    JoyceH

    @p.a.: Golf appears to be his absolute only leisure activity. He doesn’t read. The only TV he watches is Fox. He doesn’t play bridge or poker or chess or checkers. He doesn’t play an instrument or practice a handicraft or swim or dance. He doesn’t drink. He doesn’t have a pet! He schemes and he golfs and he instigates quarrels among his minions and he eats junk. And that’s about it.

  18. 18.

    narya

    @p.a.:

    @JoyceH: I’ve thought about this, especially but not only for TFG. What a sad, mean (in the sense of impoverished) life. And so many of his followers seem to aspire to it as well. I miss seeing so much of our VP and Tim.

  20. 20.

    p.a.

    @JoyceH: GF lives near a major music venue as well as a golf course that has in the not-too-distant past hosted PGA events.  The neighborhood used to be inundated with visitors until the city cracked down.  She said the absolute worst, arrogant, ignorant, were the golf fans.  Next country music.  Parking, pissing, trash etc…

     

    ETA: most arrests at Gillette always country music fest, although now that Pats suck they will become competitive.  I was at the MNF game in, ’81 IIRC vs Dallas where it got so bad the team was banned from MNF for about a decade.

  23. 23.

    MagdaInBlack

    @Baud: Yes, I’ll be petty: Someone mentioned she hadn’t even done her hair, and holy cow, that looks like my hair on a weekend of sloth

  25. 25.

    Starfish (she/her)

    When Facebook is full of grandmas and no one else, it is not cool to young people. Zuckerberg has been pretty clear that he does not mind losing the olds for a cool trendier user base.

    Facebook has been less appealing to men in general. It seems weird to go so hard for a group of users that are not interested in your platform AND are going to chase grandma, and anyone else left, off the platform.

    I think the manifestation of mid-life crisis is more visible now, but it has been going on for several years. I would say somewhere around taking up MMA and buying a huge chunk of Kauai to build his bunker.

  26. 26.

    p.a

    @Starfish (she/her): When Facebook is full of grandmas and no one else, it is not cool to young people. Zuckerberg has been pretty clear that he does not mind losing the olds for a cool trendier user base.

     

     

    Fbook started out as the cool, college-centered site, and Myspace was for proles.  Everyone online then migrated to Fbook.  Now he’s flailing to keep it relevant.

  27. 27.

    Baud

    More evidence that the price of eggs ruined the economy.

    Delta Air Lines (DAL.N), opens new tab said on Friday it expects 2025 to be the most profitable year in the company’s 100-year history, thanks to robust demand for premium travel as well as the industry’s improved pricing power.

    The U.S. carrier also reported a higher-than-expected fourth quarter profit and forecast stronger earnings in the current quarter. Shares of the airline were up nearly 4% in premarket trading.

  28. 28.

    Starfish (she/her)

    @Baud: It turns out that if you make the regular seats small enough to comfortably seat a 12 yo child, you can get regular adult humans to pay more money to not have their knees tucked up right beneath their chins.

  33. 33.

    Gvg

    We forget the past sometimes too. Facebook was behind the influencing operation in the UK for I think Brexit, for Cambridge analytica scandal. Zuckerberg has leaned right for years. It’s not recent. I would also say he is better at it than Musk and the Trump weirdos. The only hopeful thing I can point out is that some of the long time right supporters we have worried about seem to have lost support or fallen out of fashion, and the cycle is getting faster. Perhaps now that they seem near their goals, cooperation is breaking down and they are fighting over whose version of their ideals gets implemented plus who gets the most power. At any rate, the rich each seem to have a few politicians bought and they aren’t all cooperating with Trumps destructive plans. Zuckerberg is a competent businessman unlike Musk or Trump. I am pretty sure he doesn’t want to destroy the dollar and understands enough to avoid that. Most of the rest of the GOP, let alone Trump and frankly most American voters don’t understand that and if that happens everything becomes much harder even if democrats win afterwards. They won’t be able to fix things in one cycle, and voters won’t accept the reasons why I am afraid.

    Its just better all around if it doesn’t come to that.

  34. 34.

    Citizen Dave

    TFG rarely laughs–in fact I’ve never seen it. He cracks sick mean jokes but doesn’t laugh.  I heard his and Obama were joking yesterday but I’m avoiding him visage if I can.

    I’d like the WH press to–when he mentions some batshit idea–start their question with “Sir, what have you read that leads you to this proposed policy” or “What are the steps necessary to enact this proposed policy?”   Stop giving him ridiculous material in your questions, like “Can you absolutely rule out using our space alien technology to solve this issue?”

  35. 35.

    different-church-lady

    One of the worst things about Facebook is how utterly fucking unnecessary it was to have it in the first place.

  39. 39.

    prostratedragon

    Historical heads-up from The Atlantic:

    Ninety-two years ago this month, on Monday morning, January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed the 15th chancellor of the Weimar Republic. In one of the most astonishing political transformations in the history of democracy, Hitler set about destroying a constitutional republic through constitutional means. What follows is a step-by-step account of how Hitler systematically disabled and then dismantled his country’s democratic structures and processes in less than two months’ time—specifically, one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours, and 40 minutes. The minutes, as we will see, mattered.

  40. 40.

    Gin & Tonic

    @p.a: I’ve mentioned before, my daughter was the original target market, a student at an Ivy when “the Facebook” started up. Obviously she joined. I don’t think she’s posted anything on it in 6-7 years now.

  42. 42.

    JML

    I’d be more enthusiastic about dropping FB if I wouldn’t lose track of so many friends that are scattered about the country and the world. I’m bummed every time a friend leaves the platform and I hear about them less.

  44. 44.

    Mr. Mack

    Recently lost every photo on my hard-drive.  Found them (most of them) of FB.  I interact with far flung family and friends.  Sometimes, I visit Marketplace to buy or sell something.  I never check my feed.  I never click on ads.  It has its uses, but I understand the desire to quit it altogether.

  46. 46.

    different-church-lady

    If Facebook is the only way to keep up with your friends, are they really your friends?

  49. 49.

    Geo Wilcox

    I just scrubbed my Facebook account of everything. I need it to play some games I really enjoy so I cannot delete  it without losing access to those programs. Several games migrated off Facebook, they used to use it to let you add players in your game to give gifts to. I am so glad but I wish all the other ones would do the same.

  50. 50.

    Starfish (she/her)

    @different-church-lady: Agreed. These relationships are a mile wide and an inch deep. Various people can keep up with my cousins and my high school classmates and tell me about it. But it is not like I am taking any of these folks a casserole if someone dies.

  51. 51.

    p.a.

    @Gin & Tonic: Most of the (very few) younger, say 35 & under, single people I know (not even as Fbook friends, just know they post posted), when I’ve gone to check on their posts about restaurants, travels etc, maybe 2019 is the most recent thing.  Don’t think any (only talking 6,7 people total) have closed down their page.

    Younger w kids is a different story.  Doing it for grammy/grampie I assume.

  53. 53.

    Shakti

    It’s not FaceBook which causes the dilemma; it’s migrating off Whatsapp and Instagram/Threads.

    Meta owns all three.

  55. 55.

    bluefoot

    Yet another instance where Zuckerberg’s practices/platform is actively and intentfully working toward harming people.

    most of the younger folks I know are on Instagram, as well as artists and creators of all types. I don’t know what they are going to do now.

  56. 56.

    There go two miscreants

    @Mr. Mack: Recently lost every photo on my hard-drive.

    BACK UP YOUR STUFF! Even if it’s just to a thumb drive, which is better than nothing and cheap. USB-attached disks are not that expensive.

  60. 60.

    TONYG

    @different-church-lady: Good question.  My actual friends (and my relatives) I keep in touch with via phone, text, email and sometimes face-to-face.  Many of them never got an account on Facebook (or any other kind of “social media”).  The people that I’m “in touch with” on Facebook are people who were friendly acquaintances decades ago.  In the pre-social-media era I wouldn’t be in touch with them at all now, and that would be fine.  Facebook is a habit, but it’s a habit that I could quit with no downside.

  61. 61.

    Almost Retired

    @Citizen Dave:  I watched (to my detriment) the footage of Trump at the funeral making faces that in a regular human would be considered a “smile” or a “laugh.”  And it looked vaguely familiar.  And then it hit me.  It’s the same expression used by C. Montgomery Burns when he’s fired a nuclear power plant employee or the Grinch when he surveys the family room devoid of ornaments and gifts with steepled fingers.

  63. 63.

    Ruckus

    @JoyceH:

    What he does requires very little humanity and keeps him away from all the normal humans, you know the one’s he can’t measure up against in any positive way.

  64. 64.

    Ruckus

    @TONYG:

    I was on FB early on and have been off for a number of years now.

    Most of the time it seemed like 24/7 back fence gossip and nothing more. Haven’t missed it in the least.

  65. 65.

    Shakti

    So what are y’all doing to convince your friends and family to get off IG/Threads and Whatsapp? Because that’s where most of mine are active, especially Whatsapp?

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