If only we NPCs could apppreciate…!
This man looks like he’s literally about to start sobbing in a Jordan Peterson style emotional breakdown.
— Schnorkles O’Bork (@schnorkles.bsky.social) March 27, 2025 at 7:26 PM
This is the man who told us that "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy."
— soonergrunt (@soonergrunt.bsky.social) March 28, 2025 at 7:44 PM
i am reminded of the infamous story of his being bullied when he was in school.
the story he tells is that a group of boys attacked him for being different.
the story ppl who were there tell is that he was attacked by the friends of a boy musk mocked after the boy’s father had committed suicide.— elias isquith (@eliasisquith.blog) March 29, 2025 at 11:37 AM
Hey Elon.
That brings joy to millions. Like, losing your money is the one thing you could do that would bring the greatest happiness.
— Marc L (@marclivolsi.bsky.social) March 29, 2025 at 7:06 PM
I got to fly first class to the UK once for a gig—money lets you pretend that there are very few people in the world. Short customs queues, leg room, lounge, pre-boarding…
No wonder the social web melted so many rich folks’ brains. “There are this many people? And some of them don’t *like* me??”
— Max Gladstone (@maxgladstone.bsky.social) March 27, 2025 at 3:37 PM
Imagine how weird that must be when everyone you’ve met for *decades* is either your employee, or someone who has a strong financial incentive to tell you how smart, pretty, noble etc you are
— Max Gladstone (@maxgladstone.bsky.social) March 27, 2025 at 3:37 PM
Why are you making it impossible to plan and raise a family then
— Cake or Death (@johngcole.bsky.social) March 29, 2025 at 4:27 PM
War for Ukraine Day 1,129: Putin & His Security Detail Have to Be Lucky Every Time
prostratedragon
A little good news to help the other tuff go down:
Geminid
A number of Muslims have seen the new moon and attested to that, so Happy Eid al-Fitr to all who celebrate. Thinking of our dear, departed friend Amir Khalid on this holiday.
Martin
Plan and raise a family? Why not just randomly impregnate women and then ignore them and their kids instead? It’s a lot easier.
Baud
@prostratedragon:
Whoa.
Baud
“Which is a better outcome than raising my taxes to help people, but still….”
Baud
Via reddit, on theme
prostratedragon
@Baud: Turnout was pretty low, which is why it’s only a little good news, but I’ll pounce all over it anyway.
Baud
@prostratedragon:
Win’s a win.
WTFGhost
Yeah, Elon, who would make mockery of a single man’s misfortune, completely unlike you prancing on a stage – was it actually at CPAC, where soi disant conservatives plot mean and unlawful things? – carrying a chainsaw, mocking the pain of every single person you laid off, each of whom you fraudulently insisted had poor performance, without any regard for their pain, economic misery, nor the harm to the country if they were unable to do their jobs?
You aren’t so evil as to make such mockery of a single man’s misfortune – you waited until you could immiserate tens of thousands at once.
Also? Dude? Paintings are supposed to stay the same, okay? Your Dorian Grey portrait will always be the same. It’s the face, the one you deserve, that’s supposed to show up on the portrait, instead of your face – that was what made it a “story” and a work of “fiction”.
(Unless your painting really works, and this is the best you can get, in which case, ouch, dude, I hope those Victorians weren’t right.)
Betty Cracker
It’s a soggy dawn here too, and the frogs are singing about it.
Was perusing Bluesky coverage of yesterday’s #TeslaTakedown protests. I will probably do a write-up of my protest adventure Saturday at a Tesla dealership later, if I have time. We had a little drama; nothing too serious, just belligerent morons FAFOing.
Also saw a Forbes summary of all the ways Tesla is fucked due to Musk torching the brand and the rise of competitors. If the piece was accurate, the Chinese government played Musk like a fiddle. Feel-good stories!
robtrim
Elon Musk – the David Koresh of Oligarchs – living in his $35 million dollar compound in Texas, with his haram of fertile women and bastard children. Sobbing about how mean people are being to him.
Musk, the guy with the chain saw and hard-on for government workers and poor people. The guy who buys elections and threatens those who oppose him. Only Donald Trump could have wrought such a bizarre brother-in-arms.
sentient ai from the future
it’s stunning to me how much of a pisspants this guy is, looking for sympathy about his bullshit company’s stock price.
who does he think his target audience is for this horseshit?
like, the markets have evolved straightforward ways for people to make money from your stock price going down. i personally stand to benefit financially if your stock price comes more in line with your actual earnings, and i guess you think going on fox and looking like you’re going to cry, as the richest human being on earth, is going to get someone to reconsider those bets?
i just don’t understand the thought process here, even more than i usually don’t understand. completely fucking bewildering what he thinks he can achieve through this display.
lowtechcyclist
It’s very simple: to him, HIS pain is real; everyone else’s, not so much.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
Looking forward to hearing about that.
satby
As I said on the Acyn skeet in answer to Elmo’s “who derives joy from that?” whine: “We all do Elon. Deep, deep joy”
Baud
Tesla protest sign
matt
If he’s sad I’d be happy to comfort him by punching him in his rat face.
satby
As far as soggy days go, it’s day 3 of rain with more predicted tomorrow. Expecting that we’ll be at flood watch stage by tomorrow too. Looked like the river rose two feet overnight yesterday morning, still dark out now.
Edited to add: I’m on the high bluff side, so no danger to me; and when a certain wonky mayor was in charge so much was done to improve the river banks and restore flood plains that we don’t have to worry much even if it overtops. Now it’s mostly going to flood parks, not houses.
no body no name
@Martin:
We’d like to have a kid. We’d have to adopt the wife is too old to get knocked up. Why didn’t we have kids? Because despite our fancy jobs we cannot afford one. It was sheer math. I don’t care but she still wants to adopt but that would mean buying a bigger home and right there we are screwed. We both make six figures but have medical bills out the ass and cost of living here is insane.
We are not going to raise a child if we cannot offer it a good life. I don’t care that much but the wife does and it pains me to see her pain over this. Instead we love our cat and care for our nieces and smother them with love and attention. They love us back.
If Elon wants more people to have more kids he’s part of the fucking problem. People like sex and people like children you usually have to talk them out of not making a baby.
p.a
I’d love to send Elmo a “Fuck Your Feelings” t shirt but they are a MAGAt cash source…
no body no name
@satby:
Elon Musk cheats at easy video games and got caught doing it online. Not just cheating paying other people to play your games for you. Who does this?
He wasn’t even cheating against other people he was cheating in a role playing game. He paid someone else to play his character and level it up. For non gamers this means he paid somebody else to beat up orcs and zombies. The person got him all the best gear and Elon did not know what gear he had and when he complained it wasn’t the highest level gear, which does not translate into best gear, people caught him. Who does this?
Baud
@Martin:
Giga Baby Factory
no body no name
@sentient ai from the future:
This is a man who cheats at video games because he sucks at them. He’s not capable of taking a loss and saying OK next time we try differently.
Not only does he cheat he’s too fucking stupid to realize if you live stream your cheating self people around the world will see you cheating and being bad at the game. He got pissy when he got called out for cheating!
satby
@no body no name: I just wish we weren’t held hostage to his ketamine fueled toxic psyche due to his ability to purchase a senile figurehead as “president” while Elon destroys everything he can.
Baud
@no body no name:
Yeah. That’d be like paying other people to comment on Balloon Juice under your nym. What kind of pathetic person would do something like that? Not me.
satby
@Baud: By the way, the check bounced.
no body no name
@satby:
If it’s any comfort by his track record in Elden Ring and Path of Exile he’s going to fuck up good and proper and rage quit on stream.
Chief Oshkosh
@Baud: So…I shouldn’t be expecting a check this week?
ETA: Dang it, satby! I can only type so fast without coffee! 😜
lowtechcyclist
And yet the world’s population continues to grow.
Yeah, he is saying “not enough white babies.”
no body no name
@lowtechcyclist:
If Elon Musk gives me a million bucks I will knock up a white chick and me and my brown wife will raise it. I’m serious. I also know I will not get a check.
If he can pay people to play video games he can pay me to bust a nut.
sentient ai from the future
@satby: this fossil motherfucker still pays you via check?
i had him switch me to venmo MONTHS ago.
Deputinize America
@Geminid:
I didn’t realize he died. Always liked him.
p.a
They’ve worked for generations to destroy the middle class and deprive the working class of any countervailing power (while telling both the problem is taxes and “those people”), then whinge about “where’s our people? Why aren’t you fuckers reproducing? Oh, I guess we have to MAKE women reproduce with the chuds we’ve produced…”
Baud
@Deputinize America:
He disappeared. We fear the worst, but don’t have confirmation of anything.
oldster
This is the guy who boasted about feeding USAID into a wood chipper.
What an evil thing to do. What a jerk, what a creep. Who would take joy in abandoning millions of people around the world to famine, disease, and autocracy? Who would take joy in destroying the good name and reputation of the US?
oh yeah. A guy who regularly has private chats with Putin, and owes his livelihood to Xi. A guy who hates America and its values.
no body no name
@p.a:
The chuds are oddly the ones making more humans. It’s the middle class libs that stopped. Which is you know, your skilled work force.
satby
@sentient ai from the future: well played 👏
satby
@Baud: And Amir mentioned previous hospitalizations for a heart condition and that he might need surgery, IIRC. So not an unfounded fear.
Betty Cracker
@oldster: Right? I’m with @satby; I take deep joy in watching this greedy prick’s empire crumble under the weight of his own hubris and fervently hope it’s too late to salvage it at our expense.
Musk and the enfeebled ceremonial “president” he purchased will have a Pol Pot-scale body count by the time this shit is over. The USAID and NIH vandalism alone ensure that, and I’m confident further horrors are forthcoming.
There’s not an end sticky enough that those two don’t deserve it.
Professor Bigfoot
@Geminid: Oh, wow, I didn’t know he’d passed!
Well, damn.
sentient ai from the future
so https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/sketchy-first-reports
the infosec community is like what the fuck is going on.
if both the feebs and DHS were involved that suggests some targeting by the fash, based on current leadership, but noone knows a goddamn thing, including people on mastodon who have worked alongside the guy for 20+ years.
also i think it’s probably a mistake to target people in this academic specialty if thats what has happened. tight knit, highly suspicious of government overreach, capable of doing structural damage.
Professor Bigfoot
@oldster: An Apartheid South African who hates America and all the values it supposedly stood for.
Baud
Via reddit
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: I bet it’s closer to 73% of Americans wouldn’t touch one… and the 27% are eagerly buying them.
WaterGirl
@robtrim: perfectly stated.
Baud
@Professor Bigfoot:
I hope not. 27% of people buying Teslas would be a huge win for Musk.
Betty
@Betty Cracker: Several posts on Threads are pointing out that although Musk has been responsible for a lot of damage, Stephen Miller is probably doing more of the evil stuff and not likely to get bored and leave. It looks like Musk is either bored or can’t take the heat or both. Anyway, as long as Miller and Vought stick around, there is likely to be more pain.
Betty
@Baud: I doubt the 27% are ready either to give up their pickup trucks or afford a Tesla.
sentient ai from the future
i would invite mr musk to …[checks notes]
“FUCK YOURSELF in the face”
i hope i’m pronouncing that correctly
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
Me me me me me me me me me me! Sorry I was just warming up to sing a song I wrote. It’s called “I do, I really really do when it’s happening to you!”
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Baud: I, for one, wouldn’t get one even if you paid me, or even if there was a knife to my throat.
Now if I were being paid and had a knife to my throat, then I’d have to give it some thought.
satby
@Professor Bigfoot: We don’t know, we’re just assuming because of his health history he mentioned and his sudden absence. He is sorely missed.
Rusty
The richest guy in world, after telling the poor and sick that they need to suffer so the wealthy can get a fat tax cuts, is now whining about people being mean to his company? It’s all obscene.
Gin & Tonic
@Betty Cracker: The official Twitter account of the House Foreign Affairs Committee posted a stupid meme mocking the death of USAID. No, I will not re-post. But I’m so old I can remember when our government actually took things seriously.
no body no name
@Rusty:
Leftists laser focus on economics isn’t entirely wrong. I’m old enough to remember when Musk got funded by Obama as part of our program and leftists and conservatives flipped their shit. Also old enough to remember when facebook and twitter shouldn’t be touched because they were liberal tools and would give us all the wins. Turns out moderate educated Democrats don’t know what the fuck are talking about.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
You know these guys, Trump and Musk, it’s obvious how out of touch they are just because both of them seem to have gotten into politics thinking it was a path to being universally adored.
Like, anyone with even a passing familiarity with American politics knows that politicians take shit from all sides. I think Obama is still the Country’s most admired politician and HE took shit all the time. It comes with the job.
I can’t even fathom how ignorant you have to be to do what Musk is doing and think “everyone will love me and there won’t be any blowback.” The thing is he had that when he stuck to running his businesses because the financial press will give you that in spades. Step into the public sphere though and you start goring oxes that matter a lot to millions of people and criticism starts coming. And it won’t stop until you go away if then.
My theory as to why he decided to do this is he likes fucking with people but there’s a limit to that at his companies – he needs people to stay on and do the work to keep them a going concern so his sadism’s limit is he can’t make everyone so so miserable that a critical mass quit or the place goes belly up.
So he cast around for a group of people who weren’t attached to the bottom line at his companies and “oh federal workers don’t work for my companies I can fuck with them all I want and it’ll never boomerang back on me!” And Trump and minions were like OK because Trump is senile and has a mean streak too. So here we are. But again what did he think would happen? Anyone who isn’t a complete ignoramus could have seen the backlash coming, and the form in which it would come. What a maroon as Bugs Bunny would say.
Matt McIrvin
The thin-skinnedness of these guys has always amazed me. It’s not enough to have absolute power and wield it to rule by fear and wreck anyone or anything that displeases them. They want to do that and be loved for it. When that doesn’t happen, they get so upset–it doesn’t compute. It’s not fair. It must be some kind of plot.
rikyrah
Good Morning, Everyone😊😊😊
Gin & Tonic
@Betty: Musk’s status as a Special Government Employee is statutorily time-limited.
rikyrah
AL,
Glad to see you posting.
Glad that you are on the mend.🙏🏽
rikyrah
@Matt McIrvin:
WATB
The entire lot of them😒
Jeffg166
No gardening chat today?
I had three potatoes sprouting in the pantry. Took them out and dug a hole to put them in. They should be ready by July.
Betty Cracker
@Betty: Agree. The legions of evil apparatchiks behind Trusk & Mump also deserve to reap what they’re sowing. Miller in particular is a sick, cruel and twisted individual. Vought seems like the “banality of evil” guy in this horror show.
lowtechcyclist
@no body no name:
Cite?
Matt McIrvin
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: I think it might have something to do with right-wing approaches to childrearing. They’ve been raised to believe that your strong daddy earns your love by hurting you when you displease him. Eventually, through punishment, you learn obedience and good behavior and realize it was all for your own good.
This kind of language was all over the right when Trump got reelected. Daddy was home again and he was going to bring pain to rebellious, perverse America until she got back on the straight and narrow, and then everything would be wonderful. But they’re baffled that when the punishment comes, the people don’t just fall in line. (The billionaires do!)
Professor Bigfoot
No, it just shows that “leftists,” like conservatives, are far more concerned with their money than the human rights of their fellow citizens.
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@Gin & Tonic: In theory yes but does anyone think these guys will be bound by mere things like statutory law? One thing I’m realizing is that nobody seems to know the punishment for violating a lot of these statutes. If it’s a normal everyday federal worker the threat of being fired is a sufficient deterrent but unless Musk is facing doing time there’s not much binding him. I guess maybe the other potential punishment is he can no longer get government contracts which would mean a forced divestiture from SpaceX. That would sting.
Dorothy A. Winsor
We’re trying to decide whether to sign up with our local Indivisible chapter to go to a Hands Off rally on April 5. At least, I’m trying to decide. Mr DAW wants to go, but I’m worried about his mobility and endurance. Maybe I can talk him into taking his walker so he’d have a place to sit.
Matt McIrvin
@Professor Bigfoot: The candidacy of Hillary Clinton, in particular, really brought out a lot of “no war but class war” types who insisted that any push for civil rights was actually a corporatist distraction from economic inequality. Those kinds of leftists aren’t as prominent as they used to be, but it’s not for a great reason–it’s because most of them just outright flipped to being MAGA Trump supporters.
There are still some of them writing for Jacobin.
satby
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?: When we get back to a place of semi-sanity, the government needs to divest or otherwise remove Musk, Inc. from government contracts and reverse the idiocy of privatizing government departments. Between the massive clusterfuck of bad, quickly reversed firings, lawsuits, and gutting the IRS’ ability to collect taxes, the “efficiency” will end up costing exponentially more than the savings that haven’t materialized at all.
Matt McIrvin
@Professor Bigfoot: Most of the 27% can’t afford a Tesla. They’re expensive cars! Owning one used to be a marker of being a professional-class technophile with environmentalist sentiments, and it’s hard for what amounts to a luxury product to shift market segments overnight.
Geminid
@Matt McIrvin: I think you mispelled Jerkobin.
Professor Bigfoot
@Matt McIrvin: I’m still seeing a LOT of Bernie love out here, so I think they still have plenty of influence.
Professor Bigfoot
@Matt McIrvin: I assure you, there are PLENTY of white men belonging to the 27% who consider themselves “professional-class technophiles,” I worked with lots of ‘em.
BC in Illinois
Tesla stock is in the toilet.
Um . . I do.
Matt McIrvin
@Professor Bigfoot: The Bernie fans I know IRL aren’t actually that kind of person, they’re liberals who just think the Democrats need to focus more on economic redistribution than they do. I’m thinking about the Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi types.
(Actually it wasn’t just the class-war-first people, it was the foreign-policy “leftists” who were mostly preoccupied with wrecking the hegemonic American empire–they went MAGA first, because their interests aligned with Vladimir Putin’s and Trump is in fact totally doing that.)
Professor Bigfoot
@BC in Illinois: Beethoven himself is snickering at that one.
Professor Bigfoot
@Matt McIrvin: Sorry, but in my experience it means they want nothing to do with preserving the rights of marginalized communities; they consider that a waste of resources.
lowtechcyclist
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
My county’s Democratic Women’s Club has chartered a couple of buses to take people in to the one in DC, and I’ve reserved my seat. (Note to Spanky: as of Friday, they still had some seats left!)
My wife isn’t coming with me on account of mobility issues, just too much walking in crowds, on grass, and other problematic situations even with a walker.
no body no name
@Matt McIrvin:
They aren’t wrong. I’m a consultant who probably ruined thousands of peoples lives. But it’s all OK as we have more female partners and are one of the best places for LGBTQ to work at. I know this because Goldman Sachs gave us an award.
We are going to have to admit the truth. Social liberalism might not be compatible with working class economics. It might just be hostile to it. And if so we need to pick. I choose social liberalism which means fuck the poors. I’m OK with that.
Matt McIrvin
@Professor Bigfoot: I’m kind of reminded about how the Third Symphony was originally supposed to be the Napoleon Symphony–Beethoven was a Napoleon fanboy. He saw Napoleon as the embodiment of this modernizing, progressive force.
Then Napoleon declared himself Emperor. Beethoven was furious and crossed his name out on the manuscript. Napoleon was cancelled.
ColoradoGuy
The Max Gladstone posts hit the nail on the head. These guys are incredibly isolated from real life. They don’t shop, they don’t commute to work, they don’t drive their own cars, they have personal doctors and in-home chefs, and fly a fleet of private planes that go to boutique airports with limousine service at the plane. It’s no-waiting lifestyle with a fleet of personal attorneys to make all the rough edges go away.
It’s a way of life that mirrors that of antebellum Southern plantation owners. People are playthings to be abused for entertainment. It’s a lifestyle that goes far beyond notions of good or bad, truth or lies, or anything we’d be familiar with. The closest analogy would be living in Disney World forever.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@lowtechcyclist: Thanks for telling me that. It helps.
Betty Cracker
@Matt McIrvin: Same with the Bernie fans I know IRL. I agree with them that the Dems need to focus more on wealth inequality, and some are doing that, including Chris Murphy. It’s a false dichotomy that it has to be civil rights or wealth inequality. It can (and should, imo) be both. Especially now.
sab
@Martin: We have a guy like that in the family and the results are not pretty (although his children are.)
lowtechcyclist
@BC in Illinois:
Unfortunately, not really. It’s back down to where it was six months ago, IOW it’s still wildly overinflated.
Ksmiami
@Betty Cracker: Totally agree. They are genocidal monsters. The horrors they will unleash will be on an epic destruction scale.
Professor Bigfoot
They are plantation aristocrats, just like their antebellum ideological antecedents. It’s just that their plantations produce more than just cotton.
Professor Bigfoot
@Betty Cracker: But WILL IT BE?
I just don’t think so.
ETA— I personally believe that the moment we stop thinking about human rights and put economics forward first, that those rights will tumble down the order until we’re back in Jim Crow land.
That’s how it worked in 1877, at least.
Ohio Mom
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Go late, stay at at the edge of the crowd in case you have to leave early. Bring a small water bottle and snacks.
That’s my plan, anyway. It’s going to rain so I’m probably not going to bother with sunscreen.
ETA: but going late risks not finding nearby parking. Maybe down load the Uber app.
Ksmiami
@Professor Bigfoot: you know as well as anyone that preserving rights is necessary first step for any economic gains to be sustained. Esp among poor and marginalized classes. It’s a false dichotomy.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Ohio Mom: That’s all good advice. Thanks.
Ksmiami
@lowtechcyclist: it should have a value around $30/share and that’s generous. The brand is New fucking Coke now.
lowtechcyclist
@no body no name:
That makes no sense to me. Given centuries of slavery, quasi-slavery, and plain old discrimination, Black people in particular are distinctly less well off and more ‘working class’ on average than white people.
So if social liberalism means giving Blacks and other minorities not just a seat at the table, but making sure they’re well represented there, do you think that once there, they’re going to ignore or overlook the economic interests of working class people? I hardly think so.
Matt McIrvin
About natalism vs. antinatalism, clearly Musk doesn’t believe there are too many people, he’s more on the “people are not having enough babies” side. But of course there’s always this eugenic angle–the right sort of people need to breed. People more like them.
A lot of them suddenly start ranting about the Population Bomb like they’re Paul Ehrlich when they think about immigration. It’s the only context in which they ever worry about overpopulation–it’s all about some threatening wave of brown and Black babies.
(In fact, most of the countries that still have high fertility rates are in Africa, so the medium-term solution to a population crash would be for any smart country to be welcoming to African immigrants, but racists are never going to do that. It’s all about demographic race war to them. Eventually the world is going to run out of high-TFR countries entirely, but the stabilization of world population is a distant thing, decades away at least.)
Hoodie
Seems like Elon is in a downward spiral that’s accelerating. Tesla is slipping in the EV sector because he doesn’t have a second act and other companies are eating away at market share, helped along by his own malicious idiocy. Cybertruck, his lame attempt at a breakthrough, was a porn-induced woodie that shrank on exposure. Now Tesla risks becoming an also ran in an increasingly commoditized space, suffering from a lack of model diversity and no proven ability to quickly evolve its lineup beyond software updates. Starlink is limited because there aren’t enough people in the boondocks needing low performance internet. Spacex will soon be out of gas because we aren’t going to fucking Mars. It will be just one of a group of companies that can chuck junk into space. His AI venture stalled at the starting line and now he’s way behind trying to use government databases to catch up, likely producing a product that talks like the Federal Acquisition Regulations. And, of course, X is a Nazi bar that charges too much. No wonder he’s so whiny.
Professor Bigfoot
@Ksmiami: Is it, though? I firmly believe that if we aren’t four-square solidly in support of the human rights of our fellow citizens; of their actual, literal, freedom and liberty, that we’ve completely lost the plot.
Again, I take you back to the death of Reconstruction. It’s very easy to let the rights of some go by the wayside when you have Confederates trying to strangle you and I get that… but understand that they are implacable enemies to some of us, and if the rest of us don’t stand strong in their defense, who the fuck are we?
”No war but class war” insists that racism, misogyny, and homophobia are only secondary concerns when, among those folk, it’s primary on the daily.
If y’all believe that we can focus on “economics” and WON’T decide maybe we’ve been trying to hard to protect those icky trans people… well, I hope I live to see it.
Ohio Mom
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Now I’m wishing I had a rollerator myself. All that standing makes my back sore the next day.
Professor Bigfoot
@Ksmiami: Yeah, Tesla’s share price makes no actual business sense whatsoever.
Who would choose a Swasticar when the Ioniq6 is so gorgeous, right?
Professor Bigfoot
@lowtechcyclist: There are those among us who will throw the human rights of some of us over the side for their economic concerns.
Just like I’ve been talking about.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Professor Bigfoot: All those things are tangled together and affect one another, so you can’t really pick one and say it solves everything.
On another topic, since we’re talking about Tesla, every time I see their logo I wonder why someone is holding up an IUD
Suzanne
I mean, I also derive joy from that. I think it’s fucken hilarious.
I’m definitely evil, though.
Matt McIrvin
@no body no name:
I don’t believe you choose that, I think you’re a troll who is trying to start this fight.
As the social justice warriors say, intersectionality is hard. It doesn’t mean we have to abandon it and pick who to throw under the bus. Lots of marginalized/oppressed minorities are poor because they’re oppressed. The richest people in the world have started ripping the mask off and proudly revealing themselves to be cultural reactionaries. Corporations jumped on the diversity bandwagon because they thought it was good for their bottom line–they weren’t the source of it, and they abandon it when they think the wind has shifted.
I just think red-brown alliances are a dumb idea that never works, any more than it worked in 1941.
Nelle
@Matt McIrvin: As of last night, I’m a great-aunt for the first time. So, add another brown baby to the threatening tide. Suck on that, Elon. (Our family is a mixture of white Mennonite and Congolese Mennonite. We come in many hues.) Little Laura Camille has joined the tribe!
Suzanne
@lowtechcyclist:
This brings up two interesting questions.
One is: how do you define “working class”? Are people with college degrees who earn salaries working class?
Next would be: if not….why are people with college degrees voting in line with the economic interests of working class people? Moreso than those working class people themselves? There’s a huge degree divide amongst white people, but it is present in every race in the U.S. to varying degrees.
lowtechcyclist
@Professor Bigfoot:
This. And especially right now when the Trumpists are already busily trying to pick off groups one by one (trans people, brown-skinned furriners, disabled people look like the next target), if it isn’t clear that that’s the battle we absolutely must fight, just like Niemöller warned us, I can’t imagine what it would take to get that message across.
Suzanne
@Nelle: Congratulations to you and the fam! Laura Camille is a beautiful name!
TONYG
As my father used to say, Elon can dish it out but can’t take it. What’s interesting here is WHAT triggers little Elon — mockery of a stock price! What a sad little empty man.
Ksmiami
@Professor Bigfoot: I agree. And the experience of Black and indigenous populations that attained wealth before rights were encoded tended to lose everything- either in Tulsa like scenarios or like the Osage, in systematic deprivation- the Osage were violently attacked, but lost most of their mineral wealth through corrupted courts. Not to mention women were non economic entities prior to massive legal changes in the 1960s and 70s. In other words, fighting for civil rights and changing the laws, is a necessary condition, but not necessarily sufficient in America to securing a prosperous future.
lowtechcyclist
@Nelle:
Congrats!
Y’all have a good morning, I’m gonna go play some Frisbee golf since it isn’t raining.
Steve LaBonne
@TONYG: He’s not empty. He’s full of ketamine, amphetamine, cocaine…
Ohio Mom
@Professor Bigfoot: I have a young Marxist in my life, the 30 year old son of a late friend. Boy is it hard to act engaged when he goes on and on, even with all my affection for him.
He certainly recognizes racism and sexism as malevolent forces but to him, as the dedicated Marxist he is, economic oppression always comes first. He is true to form.
I try to remind myself that he has grown up in an entirely different world than I did. In the 1950s-60s, the wealth disparity was much smaller, the city college system in NYC was free, and then the late 1960s and early 70s, that spirit of anything was possible, all that social change! Yes, the social changes turned out not to be as deep or lasting as we expected but there wasn’t any way for us to know that back then.
His lifetime has been the War on Terror, including those two very long wars always in the background, the vanishing middle class — and his family was especially “vanished” —and much fewer opportunities all around. He can not afford college though he is a voracious reader of history and would ace a major in that subject.
The things Trump/Musk/Vought are doing are beyond shocking to me but I think to him, it’s only incremental tinkering around the edges. It’s just late stage capitalism, we need a revolution.
Suzanne
@lowtechcyclist: Another thing to note: the U.S. population is still growing! It is growing more slowly than it used to, but it’s still growing! This is part of the equation about high housing prices…. we haven’t been adding units as fast as we’ve been adding people.
PIGL
@Geminid: did we ever learn what became of Amir?
Betty Cracker
@Professor Bigfoot:This is zero-sum framing: “the moment we stop thinking about human rights…”
I don’t believe we have to stop thinking about human rights to tackle wealth inequality. As we all know, they’re interconnected.
Matt McIrvin
@Professor Bigfoot: There was a time when the Communist Party of the USA was one of the few prominent organizations willing to even talk about civil rights for Black people. It was why a lot of Americans associated with it and ended up in trouble during the McCarthy era, when the 1950s version of MAGAs were trying to purge society. But it’s also one of the reasons it bothers me when I see “left radicals” pretending none of that ever happened.
They Call Me Noni
@Nelle: Wonderful news. Congratulations on a new baby girl to love.
Suzanne
@Betty Cracker:
This.
It’s not by accident that marginalized people are, on average, poorer and in worse health.
sab
@Suzanne: I prepare tax returns. If you invest in mutual funds and it has 199A dividends, those are from REITs. REITs are real estate investment trusts, the main purpose of which is to destroy America’s rental housing stock
ETA We give a tax break to these things.
A Ghost to Most
Finally, the rain is falling on Swastika Street.
prostratedragon
@Matt McIrvin: Version I heard is that he rubbed a hole through the manuscript with his eraser.
Update:
Here it is.
gene108
I watched those clips. He looks like shit, like he hadn’t slept in days.
Phylllis
@ColoradoGuy: The hubby and I were discussing this the other day, in light of Lutnick’s comments about anyone immediately calling about a missed SS check being a fraudster. Either they’ve never known what it’s like to be on the edge of your seat waiting for a paycheck or a tax refund to show up to keep everything in (barely) homeostasis, or it’s been so long ago they’ve forgotten what that anxiety is like.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
Starting in the 90s, Dems hitched their wagon to the tech community, which because of its deregulated nature allowed people to become gratuitously wealthy. Dems were never gonna be able to address problems of economic inequality when their voters reaped such rich rewards from it.
Democrats were really banking on their alliance with Silicon Valley but failed to recognize the reactionary intellectual tendencies within the tech bro community.
The industry has always been driven by libertarian douchebags who have no regard for democracy, education, or civil rights. They instead believe that their work will make such things obsolete.
Geminid
@PIGL: No. I looked into Malaysian journalist asociation obituaries for around the time he dropped off this blog, but did not find much. I believe Khalil lived in Kuala Lumpar and that’s a big place.
Other things I knew: Amir had been to the U.S. as a working journalist but had been retired on disability for a while by the time I got here 5 years ago; he had a sister and niecesand/or nephews; he knew German well; and he was a Liverpool Football Club fan.
I also remember that Amir was a faithful Muslim, which is why I thought of him this morning.
Baud
@rikyrah:
Good morning.
Hoodie
@Phylllis: They know. They just don’t care. People depending on those programs are inferior losers and don’t matter to them except when it’s politically expedient to say that they do.
Professor Bigfoot
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Doesn’t solve everything. But it does address the one biggest thing that drives our enemies and gives them aid and comfort.
I never say it’s the only thing.
But it is the BIGGEST THING, by far; and not addressing that one biggest thing means we’re just nibbling around the edges.
Professor Bigfoot
Amen.
My personal ethos says that ALL humans are better off if EVERY human is allowed to live their lives as themselves, unfettered– happy people are also productive people.
“Every sophont has the inherent right to self definition and self determination,” is my core belief.
Professor Bigfoot
@Betty Cracker: We don’t have to.
But history tells me there’s a large chance we will.
Professor Bigfoot
@Matt McIrvin: Yep, that woulda been back in the 1920s and ’30s.
Of course, from that point forward ANYTHING that smacked of civil rights for Black people became “Communism,” and the stupid bastards are still at it.
Professor Bigfoot
@prostratedragon: Now THAT’S cancel culture. ;)
Kayla Rudbek
@Professor Bigfoot: there are at least two Incel Caminos that I see in the parking garage at work
Shalimar
@p.a: Turn the t-shirt into a non-MAGA cash source. It wouldn’t be hard (for someone with design talent) to make a “Fuck Your MAGA Feelings” or “Fuck Your Fascist Feelings” t-shirt and sell it online.
gene108
On birth rates, they are trending down pretty much everywhere. Even Arica and parts of the Middle East with growing populations, the trend is declining birth rates.
This scares the crap out of the business world, because their measure of success is year-over-year sales and profitability growth. If there fewer people to sell to in the year 2055 than there were in 2050, how can business drive year-over-year growth? They may have to rethink their measure of what is success, but I don’t think they can.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Communists at that time were looking to gain influence in newly independent Third Word countries. Not so much today.
Omnes Omnibus
I think that is most likely horseshit.
Matt McIrvin
@Hoodie:
Musk is trying to solve that one through naked corruption: the air-traffic control network is going to become dependent on Starlink! Now the US government can’t just let the constellation fall out of the sky; planes are going to crash too if they do.
RevRick
Sounds like Elon could use a GoFundMe. Pity the poor, much-maligned billionaire.
Matt McIrvin
@Baud: Yeah, and “but you lynch Black people” was the Soviet Union’s go-to whataboutism response for every atrocity Stalin committed. Couldn’t really fault them for it because it was a fair cop. But it attracted some support in the US.
Matt McIrvin
@gene108: Yes, the last BIG country that still has a sky-high fertility rate is Nigeria, but I’m pretty sure that won’t last.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
If there’s a conflict, I’m sticking with social liberalism, win or lose.
RevRick
@Betty Cracker: And it’s all linked, moreover, to the threat of climate change, which will, of course, hit the poorest, most vulnerable hardest.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Maybe China will be able to provide the competition we need to progress again, like we did after WWII.
gene108
@Suzanne:
This is due entirely to immigration, which has stabilized the U.S. economy somewhat from dealing with the issue of a large old people population and smaller working age population.
Japan is managing this situation. China will be facing it soon.
I really think the only way to save the environment in the long run is fewer people, which should translate to lower demand for natural resources, less pollution, etc.
Baud
@gene108:
Agree. I support natural population decline.
Matt McIrvin
@gene108: Japanese science fiction has spent decades working through this in a low-key way–all these stories about depopulated futures.
They’re much more wary of immigration than even most Western countries, but as a tourist, I noticed the one kind of foreign food you could get that wasn’t altered beyond my recognition was Indian, and South Asian immigrants were clearly running that.
Chief Oshkosh
@Matt McIrvin: Plus, that ship has pretty much sailed among the techno crowd. Competitors learned from some of Elon’s mistakes and make a better product. Part of Tesla getting left behind is that Elon’s ego won’t allow for bad choices to be quietly discontinued (the giant, one-stop-shopping touch screen being a great example).
However, I think Tesla will be around at least through Trump because Elon will play Trump to his companies’ (plural) advantage. In the case of Tesla, blocking or at least hindering non-Tesla use of Tesla charging network is an obvious play.
Nukular Biskits
Good mornin’, y’all. Y’all been busy this morning. Or I’m late. Or both.
Raining here. Sitting on the back porch, drinking coffee.
WRT to the Max Gladstonepost above, I’d say this applies to a LOT of elected Republicans as well.
I’ll never forget the look of absolute disbelief on US Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith’s face outside Ingalls Shipyard Gate 4 (she was campaigning for reelection back in 2020) when I told her there was no way in hell I’d vote for her.
gene108
@Matt McIrvin:
Nigeria and much of Africa have high birth rates, but those rates have been trending down for decades. They are falling at a much slower pace than what happened in Asia. Even Nigeria’s population will peak a some point, if the trend in birth rate continues.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?locations=NG
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@gene108:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/06/17/worlds-population-is-projected-to-nearly-stop-growing-by-the-end-of-the-century/
And yet, whenever population decline is raised, there’s a block of folks who then talk about how that’ll upend everything (but typically what they mean is the current global capital system):
https://www.capitalgroup.com/advisor/insights/articles/population-decline-upend-global-economy.html
A very nice counter to that:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/population-decline-will-change-the-world-for-the-better/
NotMax
@Matt McIrvin
That Christmas staple, KFC?
Suzanne
@gene108: It’s not entirely due to immigration. We still have more births than deaths in this country, but that’s expected to shift around 2033.
But that’s a quibble: the trend is that Americans (and Europeans, and South Koreans, and pretty much the entire developed world) are having fewer kids than they used to. I agree that this isn’t a problem in and of itself, but — like all of our big systemic issues — we need to plan for it in advance. And that’s not a thing we do well!
Eunicecycle
@Matt McIrvin: or they are the ones getting punished!
Matt McIrvin
@NotMax: I’ll give you that, KFC was KFC.
The biggest shock of that type was that in Japan, 7-11 is awesome and you can buy good pre-made meals there.
Nukular Biskits
@Matt McIrvin:
Japanese 7-11s really have to be experienced.
I’m not sure we have anything comparable here in the US.
Baud
@Nukular Biskits:
I blame Biden.
M31
I’m starting a GoFundMe to support kicking Elon in the junk. Who’s in?
p.a.
Ex-KGBer V Putin has copped to what the USSR didn’t: to weaken the US, don’t cultivate oppressed minorities. 1) They’re minorities. 2) Despite everything, they are loyal to the ideals expressed by our prettier words.
To weaken the US (and Europe), appeal to the worst of our majority population; it’s a much more sure way to the levers of power, and you have built-in ideological allies. Fox, GOP, NRA…
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Chief Oshkosh:
That’s not gonna happen for a number of reasons.
First, part of what got automakers to agree on the NACS charging port as the standard was Edolph agreeing to open up the Soooper Charger stations.
Second, the rollout of CCS charging stations over the last 2 years has been so significant (helped, in part, by Biden’s two bills and it doesn’t look like Hair Furor has decided to somehow cut funding for that) that having access to the Tesla network isn’t all that necessary and diminishing every day.
Third, Tesla, by opening up, obtained sweet, sweet Federal dollars Edolph loves so much, by opening them up:
https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-open-us-charging-network-rivals-75-bln-federal-program-white-house-2023-02-15/
Fourth, although Tesla has never broken out it’s charging network’s costs and profits in the detail needed to see if it’s every made a profit, most EV industry analysts agree that it probably hasn’t…until opening it up to others. Now, Tesla has a far, far larger market to service and it’s doubtful they’ll walk back on that given the other moving parts.
Nukular Biskits
@Baud:
That’s the only responsible thing to do.
Matt McIrvin
@p.a.: And, to get back to an earlier theme in the thread, Putin also did court the US radical left, but it was very much the white, college-educated radical left that was preoccupied with US imperialism and willing to attack liberals over it.
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
Except in North America
Geminid
My thoughts are pretty random this morning, so here are some random thoughts on the “working class” question.
A couple days ago people here were talking about the dropoff in Democratic voting among the white working class– a perennial subject– and someone said that election data showing a decline in Democratic voting among Hispanic voting meant there was a decline in working class support among this demographic.
I thought, but what if this was a decline in support among middle class Hispanic voters? There are plenty of them, enough to register in voting data.
Speaking more generally, I think the working class/middle class distinction is faulty as a matter of practical politics. I’ve noticed more and more Democratic candidates and electeds adopt the “working families” rubric, which is not the property of a particular New York political party.
A family’s breadwinners might be a nurse and a teacher, or an acountant and a union electrician. Are they middle class or working class? I could not say, but that is a working family for sure.
I am single nyself, but I have no problem with this rubric because my four best friends are part of families, as are most of my neighbors and most voters.
WereBear
@Matt McIrvin: They suffer from more cognitive dissonance than anyone. The more they expect adoration, the more they solicit disgust.
Cliosfanboy
@Professor Bigfoot:
Well, damn. Rest Well, Amir.
UncleEbeneezer
@Matt McIrvin: The Class-Not-Race assholes on the Left haven’t gone MAGA, they’ve just pivoted to other ways to justify throwing all of our civil rights under the bus. Like with Dronez!!1!, they are back to using foreign policy (Gaza!) as their reasoning for why nobody should ever vote for Democrats. Many have even adopted social justice language of White Supremacy that positions Jewish People as white (which would be pretty surprising news to Adolf Hitler, Nazis, the KKK and any other virulent White Supremacist) and Soviet propaganda slogans like: Zionism is Racism/Colonialism/Imperialism etc. They will tell you how much they want to fight White Supremacy (Israel) while simultaneously treating Voting Rights, Affirmative Action, openly-racist deportations as no big deal and not something that we should prioritize by electing Kamala, Biden, Hillary.
Meanwhile, for all their phony social justice bluster, they are deadly silent about the genocide in Yemen, or the fact that Hamas just used murder and intimidation to quell protests of Palestinians, because neither of those horrible human rights violations/war crimes fits comfortably into their worldview where America/Israel/Democrats are the only bad guys we should ever fight. Many are also pretty pro-Russia and have mocked the threat of Putin to the world (including his meddling in our own elections) as being overblown, for years. Writers at Jacobin, Intercept, The Nation, and all the loudmouths at DSA, Justice Dems etc. show us time and time again that it’s always and only about bashing Dems, at the end of the day.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Geminid:
https://www.americanprogress.org/article/what-policymakers-need-to-know-about-todays-working-class/
And for those not familiar with the Working Family Party in NYC:
https://workingfamilies.org/about/
WereBear
@Professor Bigfoot: Dr. King wasn’t killed until he touched economic equality… maybe a coincidence, but that was all tied together.
It’s ALL tied together.
Glory b
@Geminid: Frim what I recall (although I forgot the author’s name), a good percentage of the turn to the Republican party by Hispanics was their growing conversion to evangelical Christianity and growing emphasis on abortion in the Catholic church.
Also, a not insignificant path to the middle class is their growing employment in Customs and Border Patrol, the majority of all the officers are Hispanic.
artem1s
Civilizations are the result of STABLE population – net zero is the best possible outcome.
We’ve got 7-8 billion people on the planet most of which live in horrible poverty. A planet and climate which already suffering the overuse of resources. America has a STABLE birthrate, generally. We don’t need more people. We need to figure out how to maximize our resource usage. The only reason Soutpiel wants another baby boom is so he can have lots of unemployed, starving serfs to choose from. Ironically I’m sure forced sterilization is part of his grand plan to populate the planet with ‘right’ people.
The reality is the only hope we have to reverse our current carbon footprint and counter the growing CO2 levels is to have a global negative birthrate for the next 100-150 years. But that will never happen because of a toxic male patriarchy that measures their dicks by their chattel property. And religious freaks who believe their invisible sky god wins the universe if he has more cult followers when the apocalypse smacks homo sapiens upside the head and extincts our asses. Then Eden will be restored and the rest of what’s left of the planet won’t have to live with the virus of human beings anymore.
Glory b
@UncleEbeneezer: Agree.
There are quite a few reports from Bernie rally attendees that say he spends more time bashing Dems than anyone else.
He has been given another grift opportunity, his rallies include QR codes for donations to his next campaign, but no voter registration drives, except by other groups attending.
Spanky
Reuters telling it like it is
Suzanne
@Geminid:
This is an important question, IMHO. Nurses, teachers, accountants…. most of those workers have bachelor’s degrees, many have master’s degrees. That union electrician with a two-year certificate and apprenticeship probably makes more than the teacher. Is there a meaningful difference between “working class” and “middle class” any longer?
Professor Bigfoot
@Baud: “Social liberalism” is “Human Freedom.”
For all the whooping of “liberteeeee” among conservatives, it’s a liberty that depends on depriving others of their freedom.
As we see with these insane deportations.
JML
I’m choosing to ignore the doom today and embrace a little joy, since Villa is through to the semis in the FA Cup. Tidy 3-0 win over Preston North End, so on to Wembly! Up the Villa!
UncleEbeneezer
@p.a.: The Soviets did cultivate marginalized groups in the US. But it did so not by encouraging actual empowerment but only by tying empowerment to pro-Soviet policies in order to appeal to anti-American sentiments on the Left. This is how you get Angela Davis while head of the Communist Party in the US (funded by the Soviets) adopting the Soviet talking points, verbatim, of “Zionism Is Racism” shortly after meeting Arafat at a Soviet-sponsored, Anti-Zionist conference. Slogans that are still around and were very prominent in student protests and active campaigns like Uncommitted to convince people not to vote for Biden/Kamala.
Eunicecycle
@Spanky: when you’ve lost Arthur Laffer…
WaterGirl
@Nelle: What ever happened with your nephew who was picked up?
(Apologies if I have the details not exactly right.)
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne:
You are making social class entirely about economics. I would suggest that historically class also involves education and aesthetics.
Professor Bigfoot
@Matt McIrvin: I tried to read William Gibson’s “The Peripheral” three times and could not make sense of it ’til I read a quick overview and understood it was two different time frames: one before “the jackpot” and one after; and now that I’ve read the entire book it feels like that’s the path we’re on– in “the jackpot” 80% of the human species dies (along with a whole lot of other species going extinct); driven by climate change and various pandemics.
Seems almost like the Trump administration wants to accelerate that.
different-church-lady
You say that like it’s a bad thing.
Professor Bigfoot
@p.a.: If there’s any organization that existed over the last 250 years that has studied the United States more closely than Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti.
Putin would know EXACTLY what levers to pull and what fracture lines to exploit; and here we are.
WaterGirl
@WereBear:
Not a coincidence.
It scared the crap out of the powers that be that lower income whites might band together with black people to fight for their rights.
That would have been game over, and they couldn’t have that.
Geminid
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: New York’s Working Families Party has gained relevance because of that state’s unique “Fusion” ballot system. With Fusion ballots, votes for a candidate on the Working Families Party and Democratic Party ballot lines are added together; same for votes on the Conservative and Republican Party lines.
The WFP hasn’t gotten much traction in other states. In those, it functions more like the DSA, endorsing candidates in Democratic primaries.
That could change if Ranked-choice voting gets much traction. But if Andrew Cuomo wins this year’s NYC Ranked Democratic primary I suspect that rightly or wrongly, RCV will fall out of favor among most Dems.
Anyway, I like how more Democratic candidates talk now about policies designed to benefit “working families” instead of “middle class” or “working class” voters. It seems to better describe voters in the 21st century American economy.
Aimai
@Matt McIrvin: Neither Glenn Greenwald nor Matt Taibbi are liberals. Hope that helps.
artem1s
@Matt McIrvin:
everytime they get mocked and made fun of they are reliving their childhood of disappointing their bullying, psychotic and demanding fathers. no matter how many people he hurts or billions he has, he can’t make those memories go away. His father is an embarassment to him and yet he can’t cut ties with him. Classic child of dysfunctional family and probably alcoholic parents.
laura
Wither TBone? I miss her zestful, bouncy, razor sharp optimism.
different-church-lady
@Spanky: The American automotive industry is already three decades into trying to eliminate low-price-point vehicles. If this is the death knell, it’s only because reasonably sized, reasonably prices cars have already been poisoned nearly to death.
different-church-lady
@laura: Supposedly banned, and nobody seems to know why.
Baud
@Professor Bigfoot:
Yes. One of the problems I see with liberalism (freedom) is that it leads to more individual successes, but then a portion of those successful individuals join together to pull the ladder up behind them. They get tarred as liberals but what has happened is that they adopted right wing mindset as they became successful.
The tech bros exemplify this, but you could apply it to other groups.
It’s a problem we have to deal with but I don’t think the answer is to have a system where there is fewer opportunities for people to achieve success.
different-church-lady
Also: kick that guy while he’s down. In the nuts.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: I can agree with that, but that brings me back to my question I posed earlier….. which is — if college degrees mean you aren’t part of the working class — why do people with college degrees vote more to forward interests of the working class (Dem) than working class people do?
I would also argue that “working-class aesthetics” involves a lot of misogyny and desire for the single-male-breadwinner household.
gene108
@Suzanne:
Every country is having fewer kids than they used to have. It’s a matter of whether they are above or below replacement regarding each country’s near term population growth. The trend line for birth rates is going down everywhere.
South Asia and Southeast Asia are around replacement now and will drop below replacement in a generation, if trends continue.
Professor Bigfoot
@Geminid: Back when I worked myself, I said to my “conservative” colleagues, “Man, if you get up every mornin’ to the ‘larm clock’s warnin’, and come here to this office every damn day to collect a paycheck, YOU TOO ARE WORKING CLASS.”
No, really just temporarily embarrassed billionaires. <eyeroll emoji>
Nelle
@WaterGirl: No word yet. I have a call in, but I need to go through my sister. Who lives in Kinshasa. Sometimes, it is hard to connect.
Baud
@laura:
Apparently she got a time out and now is hanging out at Mistermix’s blog.
WaterGirl
@Aimai:
So say we all, or at least 99% of us. (Nice to see you here!)
different-church-lady
@Suzanne: Unbaked thought: Democrats have always had a problem with wonkiness, but in the past decade MAGA (with a big assist to Facebook) took a quantum leap in social engineering, and Democrats were very late to pick up on it. (In fact, most of them still haven’t.) The social engineering works better on the “working class” than it does the college educated.
Nukular Biskits
@different-church-lady @laura:
Tbone is banned?
Professor Bigfoot
@WereBear: That was the time they were SUCCESSFUL.
There were earlier attempts on his life. In fact, he applied for a gun license and was denied.
Jim Chaney, Andy Goodman, and Mickey Schwerner never said nothing about economics, they were working to get Black people the vote and they were killed for it.
I’m sorry, but I think you’re just wrong about this one.
different-church-lady
@Professor Bigfoot: According to some of the 1950s British humor I listen to (Goon Show) they had a concept called “brain worker”. It’s not a question of whether you have a 9-5 job, it’s a question of whether you get your hands dirty doing it.
Another Scott
@lowtechcyclist: +1
It’s another example of them wanting to bring back the 1860s.
(repost) NPR.org – Throughline – The Physicians Campaign (transcript of 52 min audio):
(Emphasis added.)
It’s about control, economic power, punching down, and all the things that Democrats fight in our attempt to drag society forward out of the darkness of our past.
Dean Baker likes to remind us that we have the economic system we do because people made choices to create it this way. It’s similar in politics, commercial medicine, and all other human constructs. They aren’t laws of nature. We can and must make them better.
And that’s why knowing the history is important. Those who control the past control the present; those who control the present control the future…
We’ve defeated the know-nothing, dangerous, reactionary monsters before. We can do it again if we keep our wits about us, understand the past, accept incremental progress, and look more than one step ahead.
Hang in there, everyone.
Best wishes,
Scott.
different-church-lady
@Nukular Biskits: Well, yesterday I heard banned, but Baud just said time-out. I still don’t know the real story or the cause. I hope she’s back at some point.
Professor Bigfoot
@Glory b: I didn’t want to mention that guy; but I do note that Black folks do not fucks with him.
But of course, we’re the only ones who can see the anti-Blackness in him and well, what American* is gonna listen to US?
Baud
@different-church-lady:
Satby said it was a time out, which she heard from Cole. Don’t know myself.
different-church-lady
@Professor Bigfoot: I haven’t chased this thread back to the beginning, but I’ll butt in anyway: economics is a tool of oppression. You keep a group down by keeping them poor. The more poor they are, the easier it is to socially stigmatize them further. Feedback loop.
Professor Bigfoot
Modified for accuracy.
NotMax
@
SpankyYup yup. Would never have considered my own ’22 Maverick hybrid (base price then $19,995) as being in the realm of affordability were the tariff tacked on.
UncleEbeneezer
@Glory b: Bernie is about Bernie, period. It’s ironic because his fans have always leveled that accusation at Obama, Hillary, Biden etc., while they often were willing to take serious hits personally for the greater good (like Biden stepping aside). Bernie-bros love to demonize mainstream Dems as being self-interested (as if any politician isn’t…) and ignore the fact that Bernie, AOC and whoever their current fave is on any particular day are just as self-interested or even more so.
Professor Bigfoot
I think in some ways this is the crux of the problem– right now, because there are more opportunities for qualified non-white non-male non-Christian people, straight white Christian men perceive this as “fewer opportunities for (them) to achieve success.”
Fewer opportunities for them to fail upwards, as they so often do.
NotMax
Dunno whence those strike throughs emanated. Fix.
@Spanky
Yup yup. Would never have considered my own ’22 Maverick hybrid (base price then $19,995) as being in the realm of affordability were the tariff tacked on.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@sentient ai from the future: you win the thread. And I haven’t even finished reading it
Professor Bigfoot
@Nelle: Wishing you and your sister and especially your nephew all the luck in the world, right down to the quantum level.
Elizabelle
@Geminid: I know. Praise Allah for our having had Amir Khalid here as long as we did. Wonderful guy; always missed.
MagdaInBlack
@different-church-lady: There’s quite a gossipy little commentary on it a few posts back, if you wish to look. I do not. I found some of it a bit off-putting.
It is what it is. I just observe.
Chacal Charles Calthrop
@Betty: but if the Teslas get cheap enough….
Professor Bigfoot
@different-church-lady: I’m reminded of the “Future Shock” series– Toffler wrote about a coming day when most workers worked with symbols than with objects… IIRC, he referred to a “super-symbolic” economy.
Crikey, it’s been a very long time, I’m gonna have to dig those up and give ’em another read.
Prognosticatin’ is a mug’s game, but I thought at the time he was really on to something.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Beyond Silicon Valley is pretty deep blue, take a drive down 880 or 101 here and you will think the same thing, you wierdo.
Baud
@Professor Bigfoot:
Agree. That’s what the DEI stuff is all about. The system must be unfair if the wrong type of people are successful.
Another Scott
@Ohio Mom: I got one for my mom years ago on Amazon. Extremely reasonably priced (especially compared to ones from the medical supply houses that court the normal US medical system) and worked well. I assume that they still have similar things (that one is no longer available there).
Good luck!
Best wishes,
Scott.
Cliosfanboy
@Spanky:
A couple who my wife and I have been friends with for ages need a new car and may have to replace both of their current cars. We’ve told them to hurry as prices are already increasing, but they are both very, very anal and are going slowly. I have to be very patient with them when we go out to eat, and they’ll take 20 minutes or more to decide what to order, even at restaurants where they’ve already eaten countless times. It drives me nuts@! I know they’re going to end up paying far too much because they’re going to take too damn long.
Ksmiami
@Professor Bigfoot: and that should be the core message of the Democratic Party. We believe in self-determination, civil rights and the ability of all to rise to the levels that they can. With an emphasis on providing a baseline anti-poverty social insurance.
Professor Bigfoot
@Chacal Charles Calthrop: You’ll have to fib a little bit and put a “bought it before I knew he was a nazi” sticker on it… ;)
Tenar Arha
@Dorothy A. Winsor: OMG Me too, ah ahhahaa
schrodingers_cat
@Professor Bigfoot: BS’s pretty xenophobic as well. He was as reliable a vote for any anti-immigrant measure as was Jeff Sessions until he ran for President in 2016. He couches his xenophobia in leftist terms, that’s all. Giving the bros who flock to him plausible deniability.
And all that talk of bending the knee to him when he got 30% in the Iowa caucuses by his cult was rather sickening. I will always be a Never BS vote. He mooches of the Democratic party and then does everything to sabotage them after getting elected
Proving your adage about the horseshoe, I remember quite well when BS and Manchin got together to tank Neera Tanden’s nomination. BS was the chair of that committee IIRC.
Elizabelle
@Spanky: Excellent Reuters article on the economics of lower priced vehicles.
Learn up, Trump supporters. You fuckers just put the bullseye on your own backs, bless your racist little hearts.
Cliosfanboy
@UncleEbeneezer:
That’s why I could never take Angela Davis seriously. Looking to the USSR for leadership on civil rights in the 1930s is one thing but in the 1970s??? Really???
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Baud:
I see this around me constantly in pale blue Denver. Entitled white professionals who’ve gentrified (until they move away because the schools are “better” back from where they came) think that because they voted for Obama and support abortion rights, they see themselves as some progressive paragon when, in fact, they push a lot of policies that have significant impacts on other parts of long-standing Dem voters and low-info/low-motivated voters who just see people who sure, are reliable Dem voters, work the local apparatus to screw them over time and time again.
Elizabelle
@Cliosfanboy: Maybe it just seems like ages. ;-)
Kudos. I have no patience for behavior like that in restaurants. Life is short.
Another Scott
@Professor Bigfoot: Just like W’s war on “… every terrorist group of global reach …” became the go-to accusation of “terrorist” by every regime on the planet against any and every person that they disagree with.
As it was clear from the beginning it would.
Grr…
Best wishes,
Scott.
NotMax
@Elizabelle
Oh I dunno. Grants the time to indulge in two pre-dinner drinky-poos. Or three.
;)
skerry
I went to the doctor this week and found that my Medicare number “wasn’t going through.” They saw me anyway. Receptionist said multiple people have been having trouble with Medicare this week.
When i got home and checked medicare.gov, I found that my number had been changed. Don’t know when. Don’t know why. But I ordered a new paper card and downloaded the image.
Another Scott
@gene108: Someone did some figuring that the US economy’s recovery from the pandemic crash was so strong directly because of immigration.
The monsters don’t look more than one step ahead.
Or if they know these things, they . don’t . care because they want to be on top of a smaller, wretched pile rather than near the top of a thriving, healthy, happy glade. Relative status matters much, much more to them than absolute status.
Drain the Swamp vs A rising tide raises all boats…
Grr…
Best wishes,
Scott.
Chief Oshkosh
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Would love to be wrong, but there’s nothing you listed that Trusk/Mump can’t fuck-up or fuck around with to their short-term benefit and our longterm loss.
schrodingers_cat
@schrodingers_cat: For people who don’t remember the saga.
Here is NPR’s coverage about it.
Elizabelle
@NotMax: And then take off in your flying Wombat.
I loved that clip, and that beautiful car.
Bill Arnold
@Betty Cracker:
Yep. They have already locked in a seven figure human body count, will almost certainly achieve eight figures, and Musk seeks at least nine figures, ideally ten (billion plus). (Mostly darker skinned humans.)
Think the entirety of (the) DC enveloped by an evil pulsating brown cloud, with red highlights.[1]
[1] pun intended.
Eunicecycle
@schrodingers_cat: good grief, Susan Collins talking about Tanden being unqualified. Blech.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@Spanky:
https://www.cars.com/articles/here-are-the-10-cheapest-new-cars-you-can-buy-right-now-421309/
Nissan’s cars on that list are manufactured in Mexico so we’re back to how much ‘content’ each has that falls under Hair Furor’s tariff scheme that will increase the costs.
Much of this, again in the context of cheapest new cars being sold in ‘Murka at this moment, will hit Kia/Hyundai. Having said that, the Elantra is ‘assembled’ in a plant in the Old Confederacy, of course. But how much ‘content’ comes from South Korea will probably impact that model as well.
Professor Bigfoot
@Ksmiami: Most of us get that message.
The only ones who don’t are white dudes (speaking, of course, in gross generalities).
Professor Bigfoot
@Another Scott: OH MY GOD that is so.
I will never forget arguing with my conservative engineer “colleagues” that there really was no WMD in Iraq and that Iraq had nothing at all to do with 9/11 and their OBSTINATE refusal to consider anything other than “smash them!”
zhena gogolia
@Deputinize America: We don’t know for sure. But he’s been gone a long time and he had some heart issues.
Another Scott
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Horse’s, er, something:
Putting a 25% tariff on 75% of US vehicle sales content will have a pretty dramatic impact.
I assume that he’s doing his usual maximalist proclamation with the expectation that vehicle makers worldwide will beat a path to his door to give him his vig in response to exemptions. Or with the expectation that Congress will dump billions on those of his supporters that scream loudly enough (e.g. farmers in the previous term). That’s his playbook.
He’s going to keep doing this crap until he’s stopped. He won’t be stopped until we’re back in the majority in Congress.
Grr…
Eyes on the prizes.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Nettoyeur
Musk wilde generalizations are wrong as usual. S. Korea has the lowest fertility rate at 0.6-0.7 children per woman. Japan is only slightly better, and has a growing number of abandoned houses. Neither country has any immigration to speak of. The US has a housing shortage, and its population grows via immigration. If the Trump-Musk neo Nazi racial purity policies take hold, the US will end up like Japan.
Sure Lurkalot
@Nelle: Congratulations! And welcome indeed to Laura Camille. Lovely name. May we make and see better times for her.
trollhattan
A slice of the Canadian political class is busy forming a Vichy government in advance of the Trump invasion.
Think I see the problem.
trollhattan
@Another Scott:
We’ll see a repeat of the covid hyperinflation of used car prices.
OTOH I remember the insane new car price deflation during the Bush Recession. Friend bought himself a Chevy pickup for some fraction of the sticker price, commuted in it for two or three years then sold it for more than he paid.
That was weird.
Suzanne
@Nettoyeur: A thing I saw going viral on Xhitter yesterday:
(Not linking to it because fuck that guy.)
But I’ll share it, in case anybody still had any questions about what the birth rate freakout is really about.
satby
@Baud: so me quoting Cole is questionable?
@MagdaInBlack: quoting the only person who has the banhammer here was gossipy?
Fascinating.
UncleEbeneezer
@Cliosfanboy: Yup. The romanticized notion that USSR/Russia somehow wasn’t teeming with racism has always been kinda silly and obvious propaganda. We had foreign-exchange students from Russia in 1992 and I remember quite well that they made all the same racist jokes/stereotypes about Black People, that Americans did. In fact, they were even less restrained in telling them.
TONYG
@Another Scott: Yes. I don’t know WTF is going on with the UAW supporting these 25% tariffs. It would not be the first time in history that an American labor union did something stupid.
JaneE
Too many people? As always it depends on too many things to enumerate.
How do you think people should live? RFK Jr. wants us to go back to foraging or early agriculture. Maybe the planet could support a billion people living that way. Probably half that. And there would still be wars over resource rich areas and places that could not support humans in groups of more than a dozen or two. And life expectancy at birth was not that great.
Every time I head south I complain about too many people. Traffic is terrible. What should take 15 minutes takes half an hour or more. Ever try to find parking at Costco? It would not surprise me if more people go to Costco on a weekend than live in my little town up north. That is one Costco.
Death Valley is a really great place to visit (in the winter) but it would not support much of anything without modern technology, from A/C to cars to telecommunications. All those things need a large number of people to develop and build. You don’t find auto plants in towns of 3,000.
There are places in this country that have a glut of unoccupied housing. That is not because of too few people. Conversely, someone is developing a proposal for the old Kmart property on Main Street. It has been vacant for 25-30 years. Worker housing they say. I think my dorm room might have been bigger. Studio apartments, from the look of the drawings. Probably fine for single workers, especially the ones just hired for the summer. Whether or not it gets the go-ahead is TBD. Whether it gets actually built is also TBD. I did not see any parking spaces for it, but you can walk from one end of “downtown” to the other in less than 20 minutes.
Harrison Wesley
@trollhattan: She didn’t learn anything from Trudeau’s experience? He went to MAL and kissed the diaper and what did he get for his efforts?
MagdaInBlack
@satby: If you must, the comment referring to possible drug use, which was not yours, I found off putting.
I’m sure it was ” just a joke.”
I am allowed that feeling, I assume.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@TONYG:
Read the UAW’s entire piece on this:
https://uaw.org/tariffs-mark-beginning-of-victory-for-autoworkers/
Fain indicates that in order for tariffs to work, a crapton of pie-in-the-sky things have to happen ranging from a strong NLRB (under a (R) president? Not a chance) and car companies restarting idle plants in ‘Murka over those currently active in Mexico but paying very low wages.
The summary:
Pipe dreams there, lots and lots of pipe dreams.
And for those interested in the racial dynamics of the UAW:
https://thedetroitbureau.com/2022/02/blacks-played-critical-role-in-growth-of-uaw/
And a really good piece from CNN (not cable) on the outsized impact auto industry jobs on black workers:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/07/business/black-workers-auto-industry-uaw-strike/index.html
If viewed thru that lens, and good lord I need to take a shower after saying this, it could be Hair Furor’s auto tariff’s are aimed at peeling away another core layer of Democratic electoral support.
TONYG
@Nettoyeur: I don’t have any direct familiarity with South Korea, but I’m a little bit familiar with the culture of Japan, having a wife who grew up there and many in-laws over there. My wife’s opinion, which I share, is that there’s widespread isolation and loneliness in Japan because of … wait for it … misogyny. The feminist movement that occurred in the United States never really happened in Japan — it’s still the “Mad Men” era in Japan in a lot of ways. Men ignore attractive, intelligent women who are older than 25 and who have the audacity to pursue a career, because they fantasize about twenty-year-old women who want to be servants to their husbands. It’s a problem that men in Japanese society are not willing to solve.
narya
@Omnes Omnibus: Again, I recommend Pierre Bourdieu’s Distinction. His analysis was on French society, so of course it’s not a good map, but the analytics behind it were very useful for framing.
jonas
Like you point out, though, it’s a total pipe dream that this is going to remotely help the US auto industry. It’s going to destroy it and take all those jobs — black and white — with it. I think he’s thinking more about trying to tank Dem pols like Gretchen Whitmer than turning Black workers MAGA.
Baud
@satby:
Cole is always questionable.
feebog
I went to the Tesla Takedown rally in No. Hollywood yesterday. Somewhere between 50 to a 100 protesters, didn’t try to count and we were near one end of a long line of folks waving signs. Only 2 F yous from passing cars. Hundreds of folks honking as they drove by. I haven’t been to a protest rally since Viet Nam, so a little weird but doing something.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@jonas:
The UAW was a big Biden/Harris supporter and Whitmer signed a repeal of MI’s so-called ‘right to work’ legislation so I don’t think it’s about either of those scenarios you describe.
Baud
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
UAW leadership was. I don’t know how the membership voted.
TONYG
@comrade scotts agenda of rage: Well, sure. And maybe A Republican-led federal government will provide all American auto workers with free ice cream and cake. Supporting Trump’s tariffs IF A LAUNDRY LIST OF THINGS TAKE PLACE THAT WILL NEVER TAKE PLACE UNDER A REPUBLICAN LED FEDERAL GOVERNMENT does not seem like a great strategy to me. Those massive tariffs will decrease the purchasing power of all Americans (including American auto workers) while doing almost nothing to help U.S. auto workers. (And that’s not even taking into account the inevitable counter-tariffs that will take place in the trade war. Really dumb of UAW, in my opinion.
satby
@Baud: no, I get it. Making a factual statement is questionable and gossipy; but the other person in the equation, who stated “for reasons unimportant to her” she was banned when she wasn’t is unimpeachable. Righto.
Nettoyeur
@Another Scott: The Party of Small Govt blows away the budget
Baud
@Matt McIrvin:
@Baud:
Follow up
Baud
@satby:
I didn’t call it gossipy. I just explained I’m a third hand source.
Another Scott
@TONYG: It seems that Fain is trying to walk a very narrow, very curvy line.
Warning! TheHill:
In these days of ever shorter sound-bites and memes, having and trying to explain a nuanced position is a thankless (but vitally important) job. He – like many leaders – doesn’t have the luxury of a binary, all or nothing, response to questions of the day.
FWIW.
Best wishes,
Scott.
Glory b
@Spanky: Trump says gell sign sn executive order ordering the manufacturers to eat the cost of the tariffs.
Baud
@Another Scott:
The problem is many people taken a strong stance against walking fine lines.
It’s hard to start exempting people once you do that.
Nettoyeur
@TONYG: I’ve lived and worked in Japan and what you say is true. But the problem is getting worse. Japan’s population is aging, they need more workers….so they need women to work. With limited daycare, that means fewer children per woman. A vicious circle. I have seen Japanese magazines devoted to encouraging people to have more sex…..complete with instructions.
Matt McIrvin
@Suzanne: There’s a big divide between professions that are usually unionized and those that aren’t. I think one of the things that drove the tech barons to go full fash was that during the late-pandemic “Great Resignation” labor disruptions, there was a push to unionize the software industry. Nothing could terrify them more.
The entertainment industry is interesting in that it has creative workers who are heavily unionized. But the VFX people aren’t.
WTFGhost
@Betty Cracker: Lots of people had been saying Tesla was in a bad situation already, because the (let’s face it) REAL automakers were starting to put out electric cars, and, sure, early Teslas were slick, but, all they really had going for them was, they were first. Eventually, you’d have the big brands who know what people really like in cars, designing fine cars.
@no body no name: There have been times when I would have bought up some levels or gear in an RPG, for a reasonable price. But the last thing I’d do is whine about it, especially without having my hireling show me the build page.
(The “build page” would be where they explain why that gear is good, for that character, built around those parameters. Do you know, they used to type these up, instead of making videos about them?)
Ohio Mom
@different-church-lady: Or, white collar vs blue collar.
Not too many pink collar office jobs left, they were computerized out of existence. You don’t need a girl to file or retrieve your documents when they are in your computer. Or to answer the phone when there are automated phone trees.
Matt
Nitpick: I can think of at least one thing that Melon Husk could do that would make me even happier
Miss Bianca
@Baud:
Nice one!
Matt McIrvin
@Nettoyeur: I think it’s a pretty universal rule that top-down attempts to nudge or force people to have more children, once a real demographic transition has started, don’t work. US religious conservatives imagine you can do it just by banning abortion, but that’s because they got high on their own supply of rhetoric.
WTFGhost
@lowtechcyclist: Brutal fairness: several countries have an aging population problems due to low birth rates; but you’re right, the real problem is not enough of the right type of babies. Immigration can fix the problem. Damn shame there isn’t a country founded on an idea, you know that people hold the power, but, we’ll let a government use it, on our behalf, so we wouldn’t have to worry about the wrong kinds of babies, just, the right kind of idea.
@oldster: Key word in what you said: abandoning. It would be one thing to target USAID for next year, but this year, we didn’t even try to keep our promises.
@Betty: Elon isn’t just evil, though – he also provides endless supplies of campaign cash. Pure evil wouldn’t terrify Republicans – we know that from Covid-19, as they watched it rip through low-income America, and they cheered its spread, in the always moronically mendacious claim that it would provide “immunity.”
@Jeffg166: Yes, their natural life cycle cruelly disrupted, they are deceased and buried, as sacrifices under the cold, cold, earth, until finally, their children may be pulled from their home, where they can experience all the horrors of flame and fire… oh, sorry, I was thinking of what should happen to Musk, and the potato life cycle distracted me.
@Matt McIrvin: Dear lord, you’ve just described the beginning of David Copperfield. Like, literally, this clown Murdstone thinks you have to beat respect into a boy, and even whines in later meetings how David was a clearly defective child, for not showing proper gratitude and respect for pain delivered by angry men.
@Professor Bigfoot: To be fair, it’s a lot easier to try to bring about economic justice than, you know, justice justice.
Ruckus
@sentient ai from the future:
I’m not positive of what he “thinks.”
BUT. And it is a huge, smelly butt.
He thinks he is the lord on high, that his money makes him better than everyone else. Just like djt. Both seem/are/have only one thing going for them – MONEY. And they both think that they are the best of the best because of MONEY. Neither of them have really ever done anything that was not for money – and the power that money affords them. Now that being said there is one thing and that is that we all like money, because having some is far better than having none. Life has been like this since the invention of money. However it was much less a concept of who makes the best citizen, those that earn their place in the hierarchy or those that buy their place when the main thing was belonging in a small circle. Now it is who OWNS the circle. And there are a lot of humans that still think that having money makes you superior. It makes you wealthy, it does not change your character, your morality, your pompous arrogance. It just makes you wealthier. Money is not the end all be all of humanity. It is far more often the downfall of pompous, arrogant, assholes. Oh sure it buys them a place in society, pretty much up to the moment that you think it means you can buy humans. (Some of whom you can….) It is possibly the oldest story in humanity, that money/wealth makes you superior, while it most often does the exact opposite. Because pompous arrogance, and the concept that humans can and should be bought, is as old as the concept of money itself. But pompous arrogance and rational humanity are 2 opposing sides of a very large coin. A very large and possibly rather nasty, asinine, obnoxious, coin. Money buys things, it is not a measure of humanity. And is often the exact opposite.
Kayla Rudbek
@Professor Bigfoot: and/or “I bought this used so he didn’t get any of my money”
WTFGhost
@Ksmiami: I think that might be the point: economic gains are pressed for, but they will only be retained by those with power enough to retain them.
Meaning, the rich get richer, and there’s no real concern for the poor. We don’t really care about justice in the US, not as a whole, not collectively.
@Betty Cracker: It is possible, that once “wealth inequality” is considered to be once again acceptable, lots of people will be glad to lay down the whole “human rights” thing.
@different-church-lady: Per scuttlebutt, here was an excess of comments, and the ban is not permanent.
Mr. Bemused Senior
“Buy low.” Best investment advice there is.
Miss Bianca
@Spanky:
Do you have a link to this article? I’d like to use it in one of my radio newscasts.
Ruckus
@matt:
Naw. Don’t hit him in the face, it’ll just cause him to cry like a baby. Oh wait….
The best way to deal with pompous arrogant rich people is to make them not rich. Because being rich is all they have other than being pompous and arrogant. And they are that because of their money. They have nothing that was not bought. Everything in their lives has to be bought because they have no other way to have anything, rationality, humanity, pride of accomplishment – they use money to make more money, because they have zero idea of actual humanity.
The world doesn’t rotate because of money, but in spite of it. Humanity exists without money. Now money can make it easier to survive, especially in the modern world, where many/most of us do not make the food that keeps us alive, we do other things to make money to buy food. And others make the food for us to buy. And the circle of life rotates. And allows us to live longer, to help those that need it, to have time to enjoy the world around us, rather than just survive. But greed is a trait, there because of the survival instinct all living things have. We have just made it easier to actually survive. But now it is not a singular, survival as a human means finding and using positive attributes to help others, be it things they need or things that they want. And some of course still have to struggle to survive. It is after all – still humanity. In all its positives and in all its negatives.
Geminid
@Professor Bigfoot: I saw another report about Rumeysa Osturk, the Tufts gras ld student whose street arrest shocked so many people. From Turkish journalist Ragip Soylu:
The Turkish government is not raising a public fuss about Ms. Osturk’s detention; they have much bigger geopolitical fish to fry with respect to the U.S. But having their Consul General visit her two days in a row sends the signal that she matters to them, and it might prevent mistreatment. I read that Ms. Ozturk’s lawyers will argue for her release in a Massachusetts federal court on Tuesday.
There’s a Turkish engineer, Bora Bingol* that I have periodic exchanges with on social media. I asked him last night about the reaction in Turkiye to her arrest. He said people nationwide are pretty hot about it.
* Bora Bingol has an interesting history. He went to a military prep school and then graduated from the naval academy with degrees in Engineering and Information Technology. Seven years into his service as a weapons electronics officer Bingol had, as he described it, a nervous breakdown. He compared the ship’s atmosphere to the movie Full Metal Jacket.
After some months in a military prison, Bingol was discharged for medical reasons. Once he got on his feet again, he used his academic training to start a successful career in medical technology. Bora is a fan of Dire Straits, Neil Degrasse Tyson, and Galatasaray Football Club.
frosty
@Professor Bigfoot: After a career in engineering I started telling people we’re just semi-highly educated* wage slaves.
*Not like a physicist LOL
Geminid
@MagdaInBlack: I think I was responsible for that joke. I set it up by wondering “what had gotten into T-Bone” to be commenting so prolifically. So someone named a couple drugs. It was a joke, but not a very funny one.
Ed. As for the general talk– not yours– of scuttlebutt and rumor regarding T-bone’s suspension, Satby said she got the story straight from John Cole and I believe her.
Spanky
@Miss Bianca:
Here ya go.
karen gail
Trump is still talking another term (lots of people want me to do it); frankly, I think he misses the rallies and is bored with sitting around signing EO’s during the week. After his treatment of Zelenskyy he isn’t going to get many chances to go on media while trashing a world leader; though he is trying to get other countries to compile with his anti-DEI nonsense.
Gvg
@Professor Bigfoot: They have to be intertwined because otherwise they get played against each other. That’s how the white “working class” voters got split from the democratic coalition by civil rights but before that it was that a of union and FDR benefits were negotiated to specifically leave out black workers. When there were union strikes, blacks would work as scabs because they weren’t allowed in the unions, which made the union strikes less effective. At that time, in the end, the white unions still won, but they could have done better if the groups had stuck together.
The civil war was a mixture of moral reasons and racist self interest on the Northern side. It doesn’t get well explained that the northern white workers thought slaves were undercutting their own wages and wanted slavery ended so their own pay would not be so threatened. Much as US workers feared American factories moving to the third world in the 70’s. Other people had religious and moral reasons, but many actually resented the slaves AND slave owners.
if you don’t want to concede all power to the rich, and you want some of society’s profits for your own labor, you need to be United with ALL the other working groups in basic rights including human. If you allow bigotries to rule your emotions, you are too easily manipulated and will lose….most negotiations. Which is why we have a few with way too much of our economic power. Ignoring that the emotions exist is also a mistake though.
Ruckus
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
Power comes in many ways but it is always power.
Some respect power, some use it to their advantage in ways that keeps them at the same level – higher than others. In a country that is supposed to demand equality. But then it is humanity. Doesn’t it go survival of the most powerful? No matter how one uses that power, good or BAD.
Juju
@Geminid: I remember his birth date because he was exactly a month older than I am. It’s July 17,1961, if that would help finding information about him.
Geminid
@Juju: Thanks. I make a note. I’ll probably try looking for information again.
Ruckus
@Geminid:
Having been in the USN, during a war, I can fully understand and agree on the atmosphere onboard ships can be extremely toxic. And strangely enough in my experience it did not always come from the top level (In the USN that is the captain) but from the lifers who often thought they were the greatest, bestest, most wonderful human beings on the planet. Their brain wiring was often extremely damaged and ineffective – and wrong. To many of them it didn’t matter what you did, only your time in service. I ran a department on a medium sized USN vessel, that could greatly affect the lives of everyone on board. That actually wasn’t all that unusual, it was after all a warship, that could do a hell of a lot of damage to any ship, aircraft or shoreline, including itself.
Matt McIrvin
@WTFGhost: The 1950s were an interesting time in the US: utterly reactionary from a cultural/social perspective, abominable from a racial civil-rights perspective, but there was something like herrenvolk social democracy going on, with relatively strong civic institutions, New Deal redistributionist structures still in place and unusually low income/wealth inequality.
We threw it all away basically just because keeping it only for white men became morally untenable, and sharing with the rest of the citizenry was apparently culturally intolerable.
“Class not race” (or “no gonadal politics”) theorists seem to want to roll back the civil-rights movement so they can somehow reconstruct the FDR coalition. But they just end up allying with people who want to finish what Ronald Reagan started and send us back to the Gilded Age (or the antebellum South).
Another Scott
@Geminid:
Eyeroller did some sleuthing and posted this on 9/30/2024.
I recall that Amir mentioned working as a journalist in the US for a while (in the ’80s?) but I haven’t been able to find any more clues.
RIP old friend.
Best wishes,
Scott.
satby
@Geminid: I made the joke, and obviously it was a joke. No apologies on my end, people can feel however they want about whatever they want. Like I have the right to feel offended when my integrity is questioned. Which that felt like.
Geminid
@satby: I was thinking of someone else who replied to my wondering, “Ketamine and Adderall.
Geminid
@Ruckus: Turkish Lieutenant Bingol had to contend with his fellow officers. I suspect he had an abusive commander but he never spoke of the details., just the outcome.
Did you ever visit Rota, Spain in your travels? A Navy Underwater Construction Team based at Rota is in the news today. They just succeeded in attaching a second cable to the M-88 armored recovery vehicle lying in the peat bog where it sank last week. Winching operations can commence now although more dredging may be required.
Some of the personnel who’ve been working onsite non-stop took a break this morning to attend a Mass at a local Catholic cathedral for the four soldiers trapped inside.
This was reported by the social media account “OSINTDefender.”
Geminid
@satby: I appreciated you taking the time to get the T-Bone tale from Cole and setting the record straight. I can see how you would be frustrated at being treated like “another county heard from”
thalarctosMaritimus
@Geminid: I also pinged a Singaporean friend to see what might be possible in the way of finding out through Malaysian official records by someone on-site in Kuala Lumpur. He put out some feelers to his contacts in Malaysia, but the responses he got felt so shady that neither he nor I felt it was a good idea to hire any of them to do the legwork.
If I come across a contact in Kuala Lumpur who seems aboveboard, I’ll see what it’s possible to find out through a visit to the records office, and report back.
Geminid
@thalarctosMaritimus: Thanks. I would like to know more.
Miss Bianca
@Spanky: thank you!
thalarctosMaritimus
@Geminid: I just thought of another, *very* dormant, contact to try. No promises–it’s literally been 45 years since we’ve spoken–but I’ll see, and will let you know, either way, how it turns out.
Geminid
@thalarctosMaritimus: Thanks.
CapnMubbers
@Geminid:
@Juju:
Amir Khalid were his given names. You may remember that his family name is Muhammad—I’m not certain of the spelling. We had been discussing in comments that some were researching for information after he had been hospitalized and missing for some time. Amir, when he resumed posting, gave his family name.
Geminid
@CapnMubbers: Thanks, that could help a lot. For some reason I thought Amir’s nym was different from his given name.
No One You Know
@Nelle: Congratulations! Welcome to the world, Laura Camille! May you rise in power as your day dawns.