Little late, Historic Preservation Group! 🤷🏼 “Trump’s proposed 90,000-square-foot addition would overwhelm the White House itself (it is 55,000 square feet) and may also permanently disrupt the carefully balanced classical design of the White House.”www.cnn.com/2025/10/21/p…
…I mean…she said it…it was in writing…he said it…on camera…is there…I dunno…maybe…like…a word for that?
All these people are saying “wait to you think he’s REALLY a Nazi,” and my response is “no I think it’s more likely he’s an irony-poisoned edgelord douchebro, another group that’s absolutely ruining the fucking country.”
…or…are we all firmly committed to the fallacy that if you’re remotely dissatisfied with any aspect of modern society then your only recourse is to become a nazi…& white…& if at all possible a man…oh…& lots of money is a plus…otherwise…nelson muntz is here to tell you ha-ha-sucks-to-be-you?
…which is not to say I think I found the one true take to rule them all or nothing…but…there’s a lot of news…& to take the example of a right royal asshole…there’s a lot of tea leaves to be read in margins you wouldn’t think were even there…to the people who pay an unhealthy amount of attention to the british royal family on a professional basis there’s a wealth (possibly a literal one given that he’s been off the teat vis à vis the sovereign grant & he’s had a lot of legal bills to pay) of difference between “from the palace: andrew has told chuck he would rather not remind people to remind themselves he’s still a prince & the duke of york than insist upon his titles being spoken since that’s what’s making all the fuss about those persistent allegations detract from chuck’s good works”…which is what they went with…& not “the king has told his brother he will always be his brother but life’s too short & he’s the king but his brother is henceforth no longer a prince & there’ll be a new duke of york”…which…it turns out is still a thing a king can do if the paperwork is declared to be filled out according to a tradition that hasn’t been dusted off in a fair old while…but technically there’s “letters patent” involved in at least the duke thing being granted & it can get pulled & re-gifted the same way…or…you can play it their way & then the press will twist the politicians’ arms about doing it by act of parliament…& how does all of that reset the electoral weighting of the distributed network of public opinion to shore up the faith that probably the most salient figure to provide a throughline for the overarching narrative arc is still good ol’ nige…because nothing’s *really* changed, right?
Christ alive. If we, as a nation, can’t do better than this nasty, stale-breathed, stale-minded, racist misogynist prick, then what the hell are we doing? Leading in the polls??FFS. Sort yourself out, UK.
…not to oversimplify complicated multi-layered systemic shit with variables arguably beyond enumeration…but…really quite a lot of it in a nutshell bundled into that gag…& the precise degree of weary with the world you hear it made in *in your head* would be a pretty functional litmus test regarding how dialed in you are on that famous british sense of humor…well…humour for that one, strictly…but…trust, fam, fr fr, no cap…whatever shibboleth the times demand…that one’s like a fucking haiku for ways you can blossom it out…or it’s a cheap shot at low-hanging fruit…real eye-of-the-beholder shit…but…let’s face it…them eyes are beholden to stranger shit for the most part…the world chat’s never really seen uncle sam full on crash out…or even reach the last few months’ levels of sustained incontinence…before…even the first four years of “no we decided we’d just keep punching ourselves in the dick, instead”…so…what do they call it when traffic slows to gawk at a wreck…rubbernecking…that’s their superpower, right…they tap into the rubberneck reflex?
Talking down to a woman who is his intellectual superior, obnoxious Farage patronises, with a flash of aggression. "Listen, luv, you're trying ever so hard" he says, twice, then almost shouts "DO YOU KNOW WHAT I SAID?", which would raise the hackles and lose the votes of any self-respecting woman.
…who was it who said the thing about an easy way to check with yourself whether the thing you were thinking of saying was ok to say being “would you say that to dwayne “the rock” johnson?”…I forget…& they could have picked a different dude built, as the saying goes, like a brick shithouse…speaking of which…this seems to think if you say that about a lady…it…hits different
…but…anywhere I ever heard that said it wouldn’t mean she looked like jessica rabbit…if anyone is built like a brick shithouse then the point is that you ain’t moving them if they don’t wanna move…which…yes…might be described as visibly stacked…& absolutely can be predominately intended as a compliment…but…not buying the idioms online take…which claims that dog hunts in the US…& maybe it does…just…none of the bits of that I’ve ever been in at the time…which statistically is almost all of it almost all of the time when you think about it so it seems like that shouldn’t mean much but you can say that about anyone…even the guy that spent most of the last 24hrs on the floor of the house keeping talking…&…that isn’t what we intended to say we thought about that now, is it?
The fight isn’t between left and right anymore: it’s between oligarchy and the people, between those who hoard power and those still brave enough to believe in democracy…hartmannreport.com/p/trump-is-h…
…calling a mugging a fight is…if we’re talking semantics…a doozy of a two-step…& I don’t really have beef with hartmann…which is sort of the point of picking that framing for an example…he’s not even wrong, really…*in the sense that it is* a “fight”…it *is* true that whatever framework the cultural/societal/sociological/political container may have been…once you parse the formats & protocols & such…there’s a proportional relationship between the folks with maximal agency…of which there are ultimately very few…because when the buck doesn’t stop somewhere we generally just do the thing where for every extra seat at the committee table you double how long it takes to arrive at an outcome in a linear fashion while the utility of the outcome gets exponentially worse from most “stakeholder” perspectives…& then progressively more of each other sort as the significant-for-everyone levels of agency dwindle down to makes-no-nevermind-if-you-do-or-you-don’t-don’t-nobody-give-a-shit-either-way…& every fairy tale we ever lapped up tends to reaffirm the basic intuition that if this stuff really worked top-down with people in charge of reality the way the church insisted the earth was the focal center of creation well beyond the point of killing people who begged to politely differ on the point…then happily ever after lies somewhere the other side of giving one good guy the right to call every play
…sure…another way to frame that is “if the people to whom the decisions fall consistently make those in accordance with the principles they live by in ways that we’d all agree make them a decent person in a fundamental sense then even when there’s drama & shit’s complicated we can still see our way to saying they’d be doing the right things for the right reasons & that’s probably the best we can realistically hope for & anyway you might be surprised how massive a difference it would make if, say, 3.5% of the population felt moved to make some sort of cohesive point about it without trying to force the issue with threats or violence…but…if some asshole or assholes we’ll call “the baddies” for narrative convenience are determined to do that part…we can find some badasses in the ranks of those of like mind & they’ll stomp that right out…so…don’t start nothin’…won’t be nothin’…everyone lives happily ever after”
…but…the “shitheads rule” tendency…whether it’s fucking nige…or the orange tit trying to treat the white house like he’s on a reality TV property-flipping show run by the folks from russia today stripping the roosevelt out to bolt on a winter palace ballroom to overshadow the remains…while doing I-know-not-what-but-if-I-were-responsible-for-that-comms-network-I-might-take-the-fucking-hemlock to hook the new construction into the rest of the campus…or just some bunch of truculent numbnuts looking to cover shattering levels of insecurity with overt intimidation that sets the bar for “how far I’m making out I’m nuts enough to take *this* thing” somewhere fucking insane
A new policy related to sharing information instituted by the Pentagon's Pete Hegseth this week is an act of self-preservation by the embattled Secretary of Defense, claims MSNBC host Jonathan Lemire.
…I meant teenagers…like…not-even-actually-racist-violent-bigot-teenagers…just the ones that can still make ladies nervous when they’re on their own even if really they’re a nice kid who’d totally give up their seat on the bus/train/whatever…& actually don’t need a staff-member to shadow their browsing through the store because if they want something they’ll be paying for that, thank you…because there are a lot more of those, really…but…we worry about the edge cases & err on the side of caution with the teenagers when it’s late & we just wanna be home already…& we mostly used to find that writing the overarching rules went poorly when we did those specifically to induce specific outcomes in specific edge cases…so we largely didn’t codify that stuff in a way that made the levels of redundancy & fail-over…or “resilience”…& other such suspect parallels between IT & other systems that in some senses function by & for the handling of information it is important to be able to know is what it purports to be…or the cascade-propagation patterns of fallout from having various aspects of that get fully compromised & then left unattended…as rock solid & chokepoint vulnerability free as…AWS…or…you know…anything purely speculative that will force me to spend the rest of the day feeling bad about *my* part in making @luigi-vuoto wish it was the 2-day @megmegmcgee happy place between here & the weekend running out too soon…because misery may love company but whatever the ambient provocation might be surely the polite thing to do is not to make anyone else feel like they can’t get away from the things I somehow can’t summon the ability to not think despite trying harder than it probably looks…but…without getting into a whole identity of indiscernibles thing about it
we've basically arrived at the pointing a gun at your spouse and an android screaming WHICH ONE DO I SHOOT while they both protest they're the real one
this is so ripe for feminist analysis. a man who can’t tell the difference between his human wife with her own subjectivity and an object
…we…most of us…think we’re all playing the one game…& very few people are happy with the devs…but…only some people think the game is better if they get to use cheat codes the devs didn’t intentionally incorporate or mod the thing in ways that break it for the good faith players
…uh huh…but…*even if he is/would be a great guy*…what he functionally is…is soaking up wild amounts of oxygen in the big tent like platner is the new stein or whatever…& I don’t know if it’s really true that he opted to cover it up with the immortal norse ragnarok wolf devouring the world tree or if that’s just the thing all the LLM prompts output as the most likely answer if the bug is the feature this far out from that primary field picking its riders from no particular shortage of runners & with an option to throw new hats in that ring still available…so…walking what he hitherto appeared to be talking would probably stack up to talking more contrition & putting any residual goodwill he can hang onto that comes with the electoral force-multiplier behind someone else who’d say that same sort of stuff…this time & maybe all the times to come…but if not this time then probably all the others is the way to go if you ask…quite a lot of people with no vote in the state but sort of an abstract dog in “the fight”…which…goes some places
2026 will be weirder, when the insurance companies are joining with the Democrats in opposition. The GOP's plan may spike premiums, but ultimately, people just will decide that definitely going bankrupt slowly is worse than maybe going bankrupt quickly.
Yeah and just for the record, everybody, this is what comes of NOT punching Nazis
Remembering nearly a decade ago when folks were admonishing people about how punching nazis made you “just as bad as them” while platforming nazis in suits and shitty SS haircuts through profile features and calling all of it the “alt-right,” WE KNEW EXACTLY WHAT THE FUCK YOU WERE DOING
lot of nazi news out of the states recently. hitler praise in dms, swastika signs, tattoos, nazi salutes. more nazi stuff than is normal for sure
"But Marines have always had elite units that display Nazi imagery" is not the winning talking point you think it is, per this 13-year-old post of mine www.motherjones.com/politics/201…
…see…that’s where you fucked up, chief…13 years old…you didn’t get the memo…we logans run that shit after 12 now
Enough time has passed that I can definitively say that the “everyone is 12 now” post is THE load bearing post of Bluesky. The hall of famer Bluesky post. It commands respect even from Bluesky skeptics and haters
I’ve seen the skeet about this principle. I concur. Seeing a preteen develop up close the last year or so has added a lot to my perspective on how adults behave. These people are truly just small humans having big emotions they cannot process because they have permissive emotionally absent parents.
this nazi tattoo story has been weird because it has a lot of post-leftist engagement dipshits and unremarkable Obama era liberal speechwriters–normally locked in perpetual war–dying on the same hill to defend white supremacist iconographynew nazi Twitter has cooked many brains
I know that it’s a very Bluesky thing to assess the problems as being from overexposure to X, The Everything App, but I really do think a major driver of this is the young men that are most visible to Dem policy elites and podcasters are from there, or swim in those waters as well.
There was a time when you could argue that social media was a way to be like Ozymandaias watching every TV at the end of Watchmen, a window onto what the world was thinking at the moment, but it’s way more of a funhouse mirror now. I’m not sure how many people realize that.
…like…even if you had one of these & knew what to do with that shit
Are you familiar with our Bellingcat toolkit? Its a resource to discover open source tools and learn what could be useful for your research. bellingcat.gitbook.io/toolkit
…they aren’t making extra hours in your day or covering your bills while you put the hours in…turns out the fine print on that social contract is some tiny ass cast iron bitch, too
They got Claudine Gay out of the Harvard presidency over a footnote.
Ngl, seeing “you’re holding the nazi tatted racist white man to impossible standards” as a Black woman, aka the demographic ACTUALLY held to impossible standards, pisses me off deeply. The bar is so low for them and they still can’t clear it, but we’re “ideological purists” for pointing that out.
“.. the architects of First Lady meme coin $MELANIA were accused of fraud, allegedly organizing the launch knowing the coin would plummet, court filings released Tuesday show, according to AFP.”@barrons.com www.barrons.com/articles/bit…
It’s hard to convey just how much Chicagoans are mobilizing against ICE. Don’t want to downplay the harm, or make it seem like a fair fight. But in neighborhoods across this city, ICE is getting chased by people blowing whistles and shouting. People are running TOWARD ICE to protect their neighbors.
…if you can’t tell what lane you belong in…or it isn’t that last one…I hope you spend your whole existence swimming upstream while the spawning plays out in the oceans you’re farthest from with all the other fish in the sea…if you used to like to chat shit about voltaire saying the thing we could waste a bunch of time arguing about whether he did…or you could wrap your head around the part where if you meant that shit then you also have a prior commitment at present to be willing to take it full in the face being the thing between ICE & their targets…& here’s the part that’ll upset you…*even if you think you know they’re a wrong ‘un*…because…even the guilty are to be considered innocent until proven otherwise via…say it with me now…”due process”…which does not mean “we’re due to push the button to re-up the process of frothing the waters off south america with ‘extreme prejudice’ in a fully extra-legal & murderously bullshit fashion”…however indiscernible the one thing might be from the other…the rule-set demands that we extend the benefit of the doubt despite there being no ostensible doubt that the deal is 100% bad faith on one side…& now there’s only parts of a white house standing
the “politics can be a game of cultural affinity or it can be a game of winning” actually goes for everyone
look I'm rotting my brain here with everyone else but I have enough of it left to recognize that Online people's sense of what is "normal" is breaking. just weeks ago a Black pundit was describing leaving places where people use the N-word liberally as an abdication of politics
I really liked what he was saying. But if there's any way to recover from "hey man you have a fucking SS Nazi tattoo on your tiddy and thought it was OK to have one," he did not find that path, and it's not puritanical or exclusionary to say so, and its ridiculous to even have to explain this.
"Oh so there's no path to redemption?" Sure there is. Most paths to redemption don't run through the U.S. Senate, though. Go, live a good life. Farm oysters. Diminish and go into the East and be an always improving Graham Platner. Do not be a Senator. And remove that fucking tat.
The day after the Chinatown raid, New York AG Tish James launches an online portal for the public to submit photos and videos of ICE activity. "We are committed to reviewing these reports and assessing any violations of law," she writes. Portal ag.ny.gov/federal-acti…
these nephews gotta learn not to mess w nba posters
[Rohrbach] Overheard in Norfolk locker room: “He got me!” @DHSgov said of @hoodg3nius’s dunk over him. “That f***ing genius boomed me.” Homeland security added, “He’s so good,” repeating it four times. He then said he wanted to add hood genius to the list of posters he wants deported this winter.
they don’t even know what a hesi pull-up jimbo is, they don’t really hoop
one of the interesting thing i have seen in the platner discourse is a refusal to confront a thing on its own terms. to his pundit supporters, platner isn’t a novice candidate with perhaps questionable judgment to be evaluated on his ability to win, but a symbol to wield against rivals
I need to talk a journalist into writing an article about Big Albania Theory. Albania might be the largest state to run a fully scam-based economy. Ponzi schemes integrated themselves into political parties, ate up investments and it ended in a mini-civil war in 1997
Kilmar Abrego Garcia has subpoenaed Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and other senior DOJ officials to testify at the hearing on his mostion to dismiss the indictment for vindictive prosecution. www.documentcloud.org/documents/26…
🧵Just keep asking why the US isn't boarding & arresting these alleged cartel narco-terrorists?Or using them as assets for covert intelligence operations to bring down the whole cartel?It's for the same reason Trump immediately got rid of the Colombian and Ecuadorian survivors.
People really need to wrap their heads around HOW ATTENUATED our election cycles have gotten.They're acting like the Maine primary was a race between Platner and Mills only and it's too late for anyone else to jump in.The deadline to REGISTER FOR IT is in MARCH!Go out and recruit SOMEONE ELSE
I for one think the Epstein Ballroom will be magnificent. I love the decor theme of “what if Uday Hussein ran a Ramada Inn.” And giving it a theme song everyone will associate with it is a stroke of brilliance! “Thank Heaven for Little Girls” is very catchy.
…so…anyway…that’s…sort of…why this is 40mins behind today’s curve & I only just now got to this part the part where I posted the thing & the next bit was a josh johnson set like the spoonful of sugar mary poppins promised would make the medicine go down…but…look…if I didn’t then all of the shit between here & there would have wound up in a wall in the comments & that’s not better…so…apologies where sought or required…something something…shoot the messenger…something…this is sparta, did you say?
…so…I don’t want to inadvertently start over & post a whole other post that’s even more long-winded…but…technically…I never did get back to the thing that started me thinking my way down something that looked like that on a page…which in a bunch of senses was the way two intersecting sets of reply-chains webbed their way out from an intersection between that micah/rincewind.run guy
Trump 2.0 remains a live experiment in "can you do authoritarian consolidation entirely based on control of the information environment while repeatedly kicking your own coalition in the teeth"(I don't know what the answer is! the experiment is ongoing!)
there are few forthright defenses of the bad judgment, just declarations that anyone who is uneasy with him represents the people online whom the speaker does not like. platner himself becomes a stand in for a set of grievances and a figure of identification in an elite status game. the question of winning what is certain to be a difficult general election race is not even being discussed.
anyway it is just fascinating that this has somehow become some proxy battle over “men” and “identity politics” where the critics represent “woke overreach” but as far as i can see it the strong attachment is pure identity politics! and i think the discourse would be better if people just said that
(discourse would also be better if people could separate their obvious anxieties about their own masculinity from their political decision making but that’s a separate conversation) […] Where in this thread did I voice support for Mills? This is an example of what I am talking about. Talk about the thing itself!
…& it’s not like I don’t think josh is right about being known to know your shit about one thing meaning necessarily that you provide a universally reliable yardstick for “where the smart money is” about anything else…but
…when the demonstrated characteristic displayed on one side of an argument & considered anathema to the other is the capacity for coherent critical thought
American ranchers showing up at their local DSA meeting:
Somehow the “saying you’re sorry” part has dropped clean out of the list of things that are supposed to happen on the way to people granting you forgiveness
Where is the political capital to actually see this strategy through? It sure as shit isn’t in the GOP and meanwhile, China Hawk Dems are rambling about AI Manhattan projects so it kinda makes this entire conversation mute
This is what drives me bonkers, very serious people who are very smart just refuse to acknowledge political reality, or offer any real solution besides delusional articles in foreign affairs
I genuinely like Seth personally, I’ve followed years of valuable work he’s produced & I feel like he, in his heart, knows this is basically a ridiculous concept.
There is no American Grand Strategy. Dead.
There may be a “Democratic Grand Strategy” someday.
There’s clearly an authoritarian one.
The idea of a unified American front to counter CCP ambition is a fantasy,
it’s a load-bearing fantasy too.
Makes it even more dangerous.
I think “national security professionaldom” has one small outside shot to regain some power via the midterms,
but it’s more likely that the same kind of planning concepts and professional pathways will be better spent supporting community resilience.
I suspect “national security professionaldom” will wind up looking a lot like “Slotkinism:” empty platitudes about how we need to be tough etc, but will end up light on details/implementation
This makes me feel even worse and my baseline is “barely functioning”
Ethiopia is de-dollarizing and pursuing the Yuan.It’s basically over, especially once the ai bubble pops
The industrial sector has been neglected in decarbonisation policy – relative to global emissions the fewest policies have been implemented in the industrial sector.Future Cleantech Architects graph using data from @ourworldindata.org .
Super interesting analysis about why Trump has withdrawn a record number of his nominations. It's not all GOP opposition (and some of that opposition is not public). It's also Trump deciding they would not be sufficiently loyal.www.wakeuptopolitics.com/p/trump-has-…
This timeline is still so bizarro world because:>they do the advance interview with the video with the pod bros to get ahead of it>>initial spinzone is he didn’t know what it was and no one told him about it>>>pieces drop hours later suggesting he knew what it was>>>>now will get removed
What is *astounding* me is that his Michael Jordan level effort is, like…barely succeeding? Maybe the bottom is going to drop out, but it hasn't yet and I don't think it will until he pushes us fully into a recession.if the AI bubble doesn't pop before 2028, these elections might be close.
I wrote this week on the private military company (PMC) industry: how it has evolved after the Iraq boom, whether mercenaries are associated with more battlefield abuses than regular forces (it depends), and why some believe another boom is coming. www.economist.com/business/202…
Trump 2.0 remains a live experiment in "can you do authoritarian consolidation entirely based on control of the information environment while repeatedly kicking your own coalition in the teeth"(I don't know what the answer is! the experiment is ongoing!)
The first lady of the United States became a pawn in an intricate memecoin scam that resulted in millions of dollars in losses, crypto investors have alleged. www.wired.com/story/melani…
there are good & worthwhile historical & legal arguments for why the unitary executive is nonsense but to my mind the most straightforward argument is that it makes no logical sense that the president has absolute removal power over the people whose job it is to keep the executive branch accountable
I’ll say it again. Not only did they invent this theory. They CHOSE to deliver it to THIS guy, a dangerous raving selfish moron. They could have waited four years and given it all to President Vance or whatever. They chose to give it to Trump.
very strange to have someone whose work i have enjoyed just out of nowhere reveal a genuinely deep-seated resentment toward me that seems to, in all honesty, be less about what i have or have not written and more about a sense of betrayal
My favorite tried-and-true resistance tactic: Being Extremely Fucking Annoying.
the next democratic president needs to roll up to the white house driving a crane with a wrecking ball on day one and smash this thing to bitsnot even kidding, get your operating license and take the first whack at it yourself
The whole point of democracy is so one person’s derangement does not become everybody’s problem. It’s social hygiene. The fact the richest men in the West are a mix of grotty twelve year olds and deranged apocalypse fanatics is a problem, and we should be honest about it.
How many strikes against a candidate will it take for people to say “maybe this guy’s not the guy” ?
How many strikes would it take if he weren’t a white man
His racist comments about Black people can be glossed over because he apologized?
The nazi tattoo that he knows the German word for can be looked over because why
You people are riding really fucking hard for someone you’d never heard of 2 months ago.
Wonder why that is
…keep you head up out there…see you on the flipside?
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I figured out that in the heady days of the first internet boom/cycle that the “people’s” enemies were the oligarchs aka the rich motherfuckers. Didn’t realize that it also included folks on my “side” or I thought were on my “side”, but I suspect that is my personal blind spot. I am one of those who don’t see the knife until it is too late (too trusting.)
That’s why assholes like Cuomo among others get away with the shit they do.
There are those on the right, trying to fight against the same tide we are, but they ended up stooges of the powerful.
It’s an incredibly difficult fight if you don’t know who your allies are…
…which is some sort of mirror universe riff on the prisoner’s dilemma where it works out great for the asshole the several little guys could knock on that ass together spend more time at one another’s throats because the incompatible things they believe they believe are in both cases rooted in a reality they agree about & which is not in the academic sense necessarily linked to the incompatible parts except by their conviction that the same things are different & the different parts are the same & that’s just how it is & how it has to be because there’s simply no way for them to comprehend anyone being allowed to live under any conceivable alternative circumstance
…so…works out in the classic feature:bug better for “them” than “us” ways…even when a bunch of people can see it that way without needing to break out drawings in crayons?
It’s partially how I found Gawker and stayed. I realized that the geographical battleground was always going to be the United States, but if I could fight it there (in my own pathetic way) then I could do my part to keep Canada “safe” or so my line of thinking went. With the actual war was control over information and thanks to unserious dipshits like AJ Delario, we lost.
It’s why I’m not like some of my denser fellow Canadians screaming at Americans like they’re MAGAts or Murricans. Nuance is key.
Are we surprised? No, we are not. This was the actual plan all along.
Some news: The Washington Post is preparing to cut newsroom staff even after several high profile exits. Bezos’ new opinion editor has privately told people The Post is in “severe financial distress.” Details in @status.news http://www.status.news/p/washington...
Bezos bought WaPo for a measly $250 million. That's one Trump ball room scandal, one Trump self-enrichment scandal, or one Kristi Noem jet scandal. It's only 1/4 of a Trump Qatari jet scandal.
…this sounds a good deal more snide than I intend it but I can’t think of a better phrasing that isn’t less accurate…so…there’s a thing a lot of people think they learn as a kind of life-hack from the way their school works…which is that it’s way easier to learn the test than the subject…& there is a viable case in a behavioral psych 101 sense for that result being a function of not studying because you have high confidence that you know the sorts of answers being looked for in the sorts of questions most likely to be asked to demonstrate you’re on the sought after page…& hence not studying up on the importance of being fully drilled in what is & isn’t the quiet part in the paperwork…in which case loads of those Fs are totally passing grade material
…the folks that studied giveaway neo-nazi ink before it was cool say those people would call your prime candidate a clean-skin
…which I’m not saying is what platner was groomed to be…because I don’t pretend to be up on my maine politicians to the point where I’d have even modest confidence in my ability to outdo a coin-flip on making that call…but…might be a useful thing to consider before going to bat for the dude like it was you that had been rocking SS iconography on your very flesh for a couple of decades & might maybe be on your way to warming a senate seat…I dunno…YMMV
…I know at least one person who doesn’t pay as much attention to that stuff as the prince andrew stuff whose first thoughts included “ok but starmer could have the bad kind of runes all over his back like henry rollins has that search & destroy thing with the stylized sun & I’d never know unless you think now we should expect all politicians to strip for a tattoo inspection?”
…&…I do kinda think I have some sympathy for what they thought they were getting at…it’s just that when I try out that train of thought my next stop is literally “no what i’m saying is that if kier had that ink & made it to prime minister he’s suppressed every image ever taken of his naked torso since he got the shit which is a different order of the same nightmare I can entertain as a hypothetical but beggars belief as a reality…much in the way it beggars belief that if you both had that ink & were at some point since the invention of photography of the habit of being drunk off your ass with your shirt off in a public venue…& by whatever path of potential enlightenment made your way to having aspirations for high political office…on a nazis-are-the-bad-guys-still ticket…& you got to the going-on-podcasts part *before* you got to the remove/cover the explicitly-nazi-iconographically-coded indelible mark…you don’t need to strip everyone else to prove maybe *that* guy ain’t the one…but…I might be willing to grant your wider point if you could elaborate on the general principles you think that’s invoking rather than as it pertains to the tell-me-that-isn’t-how-he-covered-that-*after*-the-shit-blew-up-like-a-meth-lab-in-his-face specific guy it’s not really about being scrupulously fair to right now given *gestures wildly while wiping the foam from the side of still moving mouth* I-DON’T-FUCKING-KNOW
…according to the tenets of my chosen faith…the church of the conjoined sabbath…known to some as the enlightened flock that proposeth “nobody should have to go to work on the first day after the weekend if there really is a loving & omnipotent deity knocking about who could pick up the slack & let you ease in & out of the good part”…I am still to be counted among the “eh, it’s a low bar – you more or less belong in the grown ups section”…because the all caps part was only loud in my head where nobody else could hear it much less notice the volume…which…I am realizing now I’m less young than I used to be…is probably somewhat at odds with what most people would think of as their “inside voice”…& probably a pretty decent argument for not typing it out at unhelpfully excessive length while protesting that it isn’t a whole full-time interior monologue being dictated into auto-type software by a brain in a vat that’s salty about being suspended in a damn vat & not getting served up a better class of matrix sim to hang out in
…but even if you could lay claim to a british passport…there’s only so many times you can apologise before the diminishing returns kick on that…so…I probably ought to go spelunk some tunes out of youtube instead of doing all this digging
…it’s a court…in the “of the sun king” sense…&…it is some wish.com versailles shit with more in common with places putin hangs out than any american aesthetic I could define in a way someone probably gave a name to in the tradition of the craftsman house…it’s intended to be bigger than the whole of the rest of the joint…presumably because his ego demands the thing that is the part of the white house to be eternally *him* has to be the biggest…but also because that’s about the proportional split he thinks he ought to be given in terms of focus & importance to the stuff that you’d do in that bit than all the rest of the things that make any of that happen in a vicinity anyone ought to be impressed to be invited to…& lastly to…after his passing…from office or the mortal coil…it is intended to overshadow the previously mighty edifice that represents the seat of american power
…even if it’s just the interior decor that reads like russia is literally in the fucking walls of the thing…that part is so on the nose it’s going to take a bone chisel to get the old face back?
…I thought I was stunned at the audacity of the thing when it was an annexe addition to the property…the gall to just tear it down & let them argue about all the ways you weren’t allowed to later…off the fucking charts
…& that press ramble the aaron rupar guy clip-posted the hell out of the other day could be in a training manual for how to spot acute need in dementia care scenarios…so all this abuse is arguably principally attributable to people who are so respectful of the office of their unitary executive that they’re stepping on themselves to lean further into torquing elder abuse into their sicker-than-irony-poisoning game-pwn-ing mod script
…but…what the hell do I know…I can think of way more reasons people shouldn’t listen to me than ones that suggest they should…&…when it comes to people who say that they have that the other way around because they have answers everyone else should accept in place of lots of stuff I file under open questions…I have to imagine that adds up to some implicit biases on my end some or all of which glare out at other people from places I don’t have a line of sight on
…but…& I used to think this went without saying but…maybe it doesn’t…so…uh…that’s why I confine sounding entirely like this to…well…here, mostly…where it only really bothers you kind folks & is largely unremarked beyond that & quite often politely overlooked even in the modestly apportioned snug of this internet hostelry
…& I’m not…I dunno…trying to figure out my political priorities *after* putting running for a senate seat *before* taking steps to ameliorate the part where I have a waffen-SS death’s-head tattoo
…&…call me naïve…but…to me…one of those is…pretty fucking far from the other in a number of senses I would argue pretty strongly have considerable salience if you happen to want someone to be mad at today?
I’d be willing to bet serious money that this architectural atrocity has new living quarters for Orange that are to his tacky, tasteless specifications. He’s made no secret of the fact that he thinks the White House is a dump.
I will give the pro-Platner people this much: I do pretty firmly believe that the median Dem voter is wildly more interested in much stiffer resistance than what the party has done to date. So I get it, purely politically speaking, that there’s an exciting candidate in a winnable race and you get limited cracks at that sort of thing.
But literally every other single thing about this and him is clearly and objectively wrong and bad. It’s probably good for society writ large that a growing number of douchey edgelord types see Trump for what he is — “South Park” is a standing example — but as a Senate candidate? Even **REPUBLICANS** in 2015 would not have dared run a candidate with Nazi tattoos. Some of that is Trump giving free pass to open bigotry but a lot of the defense is absolutely Twitter-brain “This Nazi bar is surprisingly nice” bullshit.
i suppose i can get the political reasons some might be willing to look away from the nazi tattoo but what i don’t understand is how they don’t also see it as a “I’M THE NEXT KYRSTEN SINEMA!” tattoo.
I don’t know how good/effective Fetterman was ever going to be, but it does seem like the stroke really changed him. Maybe he was always like this and that let it out. But he comes across as not even just a can’t-live-up-to-rhetoric pol; he feels like a totally different person (something supported by comments from many of the people who used to work with him)
The very establishment voices still backing him tells me that they already saw him in that mold! And the party leadership would absolutely take a thousand Sinemas over anyone to the left of, say, Chuck Schumer.
…I’ll go find those tunes…for my sanity if not yours…but…to pull one last columbo homage before I do that…the techdirt thing has more to it than the little embed lost in the deluge…so…some…do we call them highlights?
Trump just stripped SpaceX of a government contract and handed it to Jeff Bezos. Musk’s response? Rage-tweeting at Trump officials, including the immortal question “why are you gay”—the rhetorical sophistication we’ve come to expect from the richest man-child on the planet having a public meltdown because Daddy won’t give him what he wants.
[…]
They thought they were buying hierarchy with themselves at the top. They’re discovering that authoritarian hierarchy doesn’t work that way. It requires constant demonstration of dominance through arbitrary humiliation of subordinates. There are no stable positions. No guaranteed seats at the table. No amount of money that exempts you from being the example.
Musk thought he’d bought partnership. He bought the privilege of being degraded publicly.
This is what Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin and the entire Silicon Valley neo-reactionary apparatus never quite explained to their fellow travelers: In the systems they’re building, someone has to be subordinate. The hierarchy they’re restoring doesn’t stop conveniently at their own necks. And Trump—whatever else he is—understands this instinctively. He knows that power in authoritarian systems isn’t demonstrated through competent governance or policy achievement. It’s demonstrated through the arbitrary exercise of dominance over those who thought themselves powerful.
Musk genuinely believed his wealth made him Trump’s equal. That his “genius” and his billions and his control of critical infrastructure (Twitter, SpaceX, Starlink) secured him a permanent seat at the table. He thought he was Roy Cohn but permanent. He thought “First Buddy” meant something.
He’s learning what Roy Cohn learned: You’re useful until you’re not. And when you’re not, the humiliation is public, arbitrary, and designed to demonstrate to everyone else what happens when you forget your place.
The contract going to Bezos isn’t about SpaceX’s technical capabilities or cost-effectiveness or any rational criterion. That’s the point. It’s about Trump demonstrating he can take from Musk and give to his rival for no reason except to show he can. And Musk—for all his billions, for all his companies, for all his supposed genius—can do exactly nothing except tweet impotently while the adults laugh at him.
This is the system they built. This is what they wanted—rule by the strong, unencumbered by democratic constraints, where power flows from dominance rather than from consent. They just thought they’d be the ones doing the dominating.
…throw a “manufactured” in there ahead of your consent…&…presto never-change-o…or whatever minority ruleth everlasting…& so on & so forth & sing hosanah’s in his name…oh…&…uh…maybe let’s not look up what amen translates to?
Here’s what makes it particularly delicious: Musk can’t even exit. All that crypto-libertarian fantasy about “exit” and seasteading and network states—it was always cope. You can’t exit power when the person wielding it controls access to the government contracts your companies depend on, the regulatory environment your businesses operate in, and the geopolitical decisions that determine whether your satellites stay in orbit.
Thiel’s dictum that “competition is for losers” works when you’re the monopolist. But Trump is the ultimate monopolist—of attention, of dominance, of the willingness to humiliate anyone anywhere for any reason. There’s no competing with that. Only submitting or being destroyed.
And Musk will submit. He’ll apologize. He’ll grovel. He’ll delete the tweets and post something obsequious about how President Trump is making brilliant decisions for America. Because the alternative is watching everything he’s built get systematically dismantled by someone who understands that in authoritarian systems, the point isn’t good governance—it’s demonstrating who’s subordinate.
The man who bought Twitter because he wanted absolute control is learning what absolute control actually means when someone else has it. The irony would be poetic if it weren’t so terrifying. Because this isn’t just about Musk’s bruised ego. This is about oligarchs discovering that the authoritarian systems they funded don’t stop at the people they don’t like. Hierarchy has teeth. And those teeth point in every direction.
Ask yourself: in the system you’re part of, are you ever really at the top—or always potentially the subordinate? The architects of neo-feudalism are learning the answer the hard way.
This is what authoritarian dominance looks like—cultivated by the powerful, weaponized by the dominant, and turned back on its architects.
…it’s…not as catchy as “evil contains within it the seeds of its own destruction”…but…same difference…more or less….give or take…yadda yadda…maybe a dash of “there’s always a bigger bully” with some “always a bigger sucker” on the side…where that bigger sucker will pay more than you sank into the sucker-bet you’re in the hole over…baked in…which…sounds…not great…if you’re *not* elon…so…at least heaven appears to be granting the small mercy of it also sounding not great if you are elon…& also like it might be the sort of rule of thumb you could lift off that asshole & apply to sundry others up to & including the tangerine dwarf star at its galactic imperial core
…the asshole ran to be the eternal candidate & everything after that is an exercise in dog-that-caught-the-car hubris driven by the hind-parts that think they figured out how to wag the dog better than they weekend at bernies…& that is both tragedy & farce…raised to whatever power or order of magnitude that filters out to once parsed through a lens increasingly composed of an internet-fed form of compound vision we know not to be as well suited to our physiology & proprioceptive wherewithal as the binocular sort you’re probably rolling by now
…but…they wouldn’t be digging the hole this deep or this fast or making crabs-in-a-bucket the loyalty test if they weren’t trapped in there with the consequences of their actions…in that respect they actually are just like the rest of us?
The last line of Patton (apparently the Donald’s favorite general),
“For over a thousand years, Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of a triumph – a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeters and musicians and strange animals from the conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conqueror rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children, robed in white, stood with him in the chariot, or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror, holding a golden crown, and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting.”
1 The tech brahs should remember that.
2 You bend to the bigger psycho. All those troubled psychotic tech bras never met a real fucking gangster (not that I have either, but cokehead narcissist claimed she was related to various Russian gangsters which scared the shit out of me till I figured out she wasn’t.) Those motherfuckers are scary for a fucking reason. All the money and power don’t mean shit if you don’t have the physical means AND the mental ability to cripple/hurt or kill your opponents.
Trump is a gangster to upper ranks whose money has insulated them from bullies and psychos. Having gone to school with tech brahs and their ilk, I can honestly state not many of them are actually as tough as they imagined themselves to be. Queeen’s despite making lifelong friends, is a place of where privileged smart shits mingle with middle class gifted students who get a taste of the life of the upper crust.
We don’t go to school with killers and people who are dangerous. Like I said, my experiences with Elon were fucking unpleasant because he always came across as a phony tough guy trying to bully all us lowers (at least that was my perception.)
I figured out that in the heady days of the first internet boom/cycle that the “people’s” enemies were the oligarchs aka the rich motherfuckers. Didn’t realize that it also included folks on my “side” or I thought were on my “side”, but I suspect that is my personal blind spot. I am one of those who don’t see the knife until it is too late (too trusting.)
That’s why assholes like Cuomo among others get away with the shit they do.
There are those on the right, trying to fight against the same tide we are, but they ended up stooges of the powerful.
It’s an incredibly difficult fight if you don’t know who your allies are…
…which is some sort of mirror universe riff on the prisoner’s dilemma where it works out great for the asshole the several little guys could knock on that ass together spend more time at one another’s throats because the incompatible things they believe they believe are in both cases rooted in a reality they agree about & which is not in the academic sense necessarily linked to the incompatible parts except by their conviction that the same things are different & the different parts are the same & that’s just how it is & how it has to be because there’s simply no way for them to comprehend anyone being allowed to live under any conceivable alternative circumstance
…so…works out in the classic feature:bug better for “them” than “us” ways…even when a bunch of people can see it that way without needing to break out drawings in crayons?
It’s partially how I found Gawker and stayed. I realized that the geographical battleground was always going to be the United States, but if I could fight it there (in my own pathetic way) then I could do my part to keep Canada “safe” or so my line of thinking went. With the actual war was control over information and thanks to unserious dipshits like AJ Delario, we lost.
It’s why I’m not like some of my denser fellow Canadians screaming at Americans like they’re MAGAts or Murricans. Nuance is key.
Are we surprised? No, we are not. This was the actual plan all along.
Are we surprised? No, we are not. “Thinking” is discouraged in Trump’s Amerika.
Fat stupid and incompetent is no way to go thru life, MAGAts.
…this sounds a good deal more snide than I intend it but I can’t think of a better phrasing that isn’t less accurate…so…there’s a thing a lot of people think they learn as a kind of life-hack from the way their school works…which is that it’s way easier to learn the test than the subject…& there is a viable case in a behavioral psych 101 sense for that result being a function of not studying because you have high confidence that you know the sorts of answers being looked for in the sorts of questions most likely to be asked to demonstrate you’re on the sought after page…& hence not studying up on the importance of being fully drilled in what is & isn’t the quiet part in the paperwork…in which case loads of those Fs are totally passing grade material
…the folks that studied giveaway neo-nazi ink before it was cool say those people would call your prime candidate a clean-skin
…which I’m not saying is what platner was groomed to be…because I don’t pretend to be up on my maine politicians to the point where I’d have even modest confidence in my ability to outdo a coin-flip on making that call…but…might be a useful thing to consider before going to bat for the dude like it was you that had been rocking SS iconography on your very flesh for a couple of decades & might maybe be on your way to warming a senate seat…I dunno…YMMV
…I know at least one person who doesn’t pay as much attention to that stuff as the prince andrew stuff whose first thoughts included “ok but starmer could have the bad kind of runes all over his back like henry rollins has that search & destroy thing with the stylized sun & I’d never know unless you think now we should expect all politicians to strip for a tattoo inspection?”
…&…I do kinda think I have some sympathy for what they thought they were getting at…it’s just that when I try out that train of thought my next stop is literally “no what i’m saying is that if kier had that ink & made it to prime minister he’s suppressed every image ever taken of his naked torso since he got the shit which is a different order of the same nightmare I can entertain as a hypothetical but beggars belief as a reality…much in the way it beggars belief that if you both had that ink & were at some point since the invention of photography of the habit of being drunk off your ass with your shirt off in a public venue…& by whatever path of potential enlightenment made your way to having aspirations for high political office…on a nazis-are-the-bad-guys-still ticket…& you got to the going-on-podcasts part *before* you got to the remove/cover the explicitly-nazi-iconographically-coded indelible mark…you don’t need to strip everyone else to prove maybe *that* guy ain’t the one…but…I might be willing to grant your wider point if you could elaborate on the general principles you think that’s invoking rather than as it pertains to the tell-me-that-isn’t-how-he-covered-that-*after*-the-shit-blew-up-like-a-meth-lab-in-his-face specific guy it’s not really about being scrupulously fair to right now given *gestures wildly while wiping the foam from the side of still moving mouth* I-DON’T-FUCKING-KNOW
…according to the tenets of my chosen faith…the church of the conjoined sabbath…known to some as the enlightened flock that proposeth “nobody should have to go to work on the first day after the weekend if there really is a loving & omnipotent deity knocking about who could pick up the slack & let you ease in & out of the good part”…I am still to be counted among the “eh, it’s a low bar – you more or less belong in the grown ups section”…because the all caps part was only loud in my head where nobody else could hear it much less notice the volume…which…I am realizing now I’m less young than I used to be…is probably somewhat at odds with what most people would think of as their “inside voice”…& probably a pretty decent argument for not typing it out at unhelpfully excessive length while protesting that it isn’t a whole full-time interior monologue being dictated into auto-type software by a brain in a vat that’s salty about being suspended in a damn vat & not getting served up a better class of matrix sim to hang out in
…but even if you could lay claim to a british passport…there’s only so many times you can apologise before the diminishing returns kick on that…so…I probably ought to go spelunk some tunes out of youtube instead of doing all this digging
…I’m not seamus fucking heany…or something
They don’t need no stinkin’ egghead books or notes. They know what they can do, because their Lord and Savior, DJT, has told them. Case closed.
We should stop calling it a ballroom. Throne room is probably more accurate 😑
…it’s a court…in the “of the sun king” sense…&…it is some wish.com versailles shit with more in common with places putin hangs out than any american aesthetic I could define in a way someone probably gave a name to in the tradition of the craftsman house…it’s intended to be bigger than the whole of the rest of the joint…presumably because his ego demands the thing that is the part of the white house to be eternally *him* has to be the biggest…but also because that’s about the proportional split he thinks he ought to be given in terms of focus & importance to the stuff that you’d do in that bit than all the rest of the things that make any of that happen in a vicinity anyone ought to be impressed to be invited to…& lastly to…after his passing…from office or the mortal coil…it is intended to overshadow the previously mighty edifice that represents the seat of american power
…even if it’s just the interior decor that reads like russia is literally in the fucking walls of the thing…that part is so on the nose it’s going to take a bone chisel to get the old face back?
…I thought I was stunned at the audacity of the thing when it was an annexe addition to the property…the gall to just tear it down & let them argue about all the ways you weren’t allowed to later…off the fucking charts
…& that press ramble the aaron rupar guy clip-posted the hell out of the other day could be in a training manual for how to spot acute need in dementia care scenarios…so all this abuse is arguably principally attributable to people who are so respectful of the office of their unitary executive that they’re stepping on themselves to lean further into torquing elder abuse into their sicker-than-irony-poisoning game-pwn-ing mod script
…but…what the hell do I know…I can think of way more reasons people shouldn’t listen to me than ones that suggest they should…&…when it comes to people who say that they have that the other way around because they have answers everyone else should accept in place of lots of stuff I file under open questions…I have to imagine that adds up to some implicit biases on my end some or all of which glare out at other people from places I don’t have a line of sight on
…but…& I used to think this went without saying but…maybe it doesn’t…so…uh…that’s why I confine sounding entirely like this to…well…here, mostly…where it only really bothers you kind folks & is largely unremarked beyond that & quite often politely overlooked even in the modestly apportioned snug of this internet hostelry
…& I’m not…I dunno…trying to figure out my political priorities *after* putting running for a senate seat *before* taking steps to ameliorate the part where I have a waffen-SS death’s-head tattoo
…&…call me naïve…but…to me…one of those is…pretty fucking far from the other in a number of senses I would argue pretty strongly have considerable salience if you happen to want someone to be mad at today?
I’d be willing to bet serious money that this architectural atrocity has new living quarters for Orange that are to his tacky, tasteless specifications. He’s made no secret of the fact that he thinks the White House is a dump.
Another distraction or real FBI work?
https://www.espn.com/nba/story/_/id/46695228/sources-terry-rozier-arrested-part-gambling-inquiry
ICE budget bigger than almost any country’s defense spending in the world now…
https://popular.info/p/ice-boosts-weapons-spending-700
I will give the pro-Platner people this much: I do pretty firmly believe that the median Dem voter is wildly more interested in much stiffer resistance than what the party has done to date. So I get it, purely politically speaking, that there’s an exciting candidate in a winnable race and you get limited cracks at that sort of thing.
But literally every other single thing about this and him is clearly and objectively wrong and bad. It’s probably good for society writ large that a growing number of douchey edgelord types see Trump for what he is — “South Park” is a standing example — but as a Senate candidate? Even **REPUBLICANS** in 2015 would not have dared run a candidate with Nazi tattoos. Some of that is Trump giving free pass to open bigotry but a lot of the defense is absolutely Twitter-brain “This Nazi bar is surprisingly nice” bullshit.
i suppose i can get the political reasons some might be willing to look away from the nazi tattoo but what i don’t understand is how they don’t also see it as a “I’M THE NEXT KYRSTEN SINEMA!” tattoo.
…politically speaking.
Or Fetterman. What a disappointment that guy has been.
I don’t know how good/effective Fetterman was ever going to be, but it does seem like the stroke really changed him. Maybe he was always like this and that let it out. But he comes across as not even just a can’t-live-up-to-rhetoric pol; he feels like a totally different person (something supported by comments from many of the people who used to work with him)
The very establishment voices still backing him tells me that they already saw him in that mold! And the party leadership would absolutely take a thousand Sinemas over anyone to the left of, say, Chuck Schumer.
…I’ll go find those tunes…for my sanity if not yours…but…to pull one last columbo homage before I do that…the techdirt thing has more to it than the little embed lost in the deluge…so…some…do we call them highlights?
…throw a “manufactured” in there ahead of your consent…&…presto never-change-o…or whatever minority ruleth everlasting…& so on & so forth & sing hosanah’s in his name…oh…&…uh…maybe let’s not look up what amen translates to?
…it’s…not as catchy as “evil contains within it the seeds of its own destruction”…but…same difference…more or less….give or take…yadda yadda…maybe a dash of “there’s always a bigger bully” with some “always a bigger sucker” on the side…where that bigger sucker will pay more than you sank into the sucker-bet you’re in the hole over…baked in…which…sounds…not great…if you’re *not* elon…so…at least heaven appears to be granting the small mercy of it also sounding not great if you are elon…& also like it might be the sort of rule of thumb you could lift off that asshole & apply to sundry others up to & including the tangerine dwarf star at its galactic imperial core
…the asshole ran to be the eternal candidate & everything after that is an exercise in dog-that-caught-the-car hubris driven by the hind-parts that think they figured out how to wag the dog better than they weekend at bernies…& that is both tragedy & farce…raised to whatever power or order of magnitude that filters out to once parsed through a lens increasingly composed of an internet-fed form of compound vision we know not to be as well suited to our physiology & proprioceptive wherewithal as the binocular sort you’re probably rolling by now
…but…they wouldn’t be digging the hole this deep or this fast or making crabs-in-a-bucket the loyalty test if they weren’t trapped in there with the consequences of their actions…in that respect they actually are just like the rest of us?
The last line of Patton (apparently the Donald’s favorite general),
“For over a thousand years, Roman conquerors returning from the wars enjoyed the honor of a triumph – a tumultuous parade. In the procession came trumpeters and musicians and strange animals from the conquered territories, together with carts laden with treasure and captured armaments. The conqueror rode in a triumphal chariot, the dazed prisoners walking in chains before him. Sometimes his children, robed in white, stood with him in the chariot, or rode the trace horses. A slave stood behind the conqueror, holding a golden crown, and whispering in his ear a warning: that all glory is fleeting.”
1 The tech brahs should remember that.
2 You bend to the bigger psycho. All those troubled psychotic tech bras never met a real fucking gangster (not that I have either, but cokehead narcissist claimed she was related to various Russian gangsters which scared the shit out of me till I figured out she wasn’t.) Those motherfuckers are scary for a fucking reason. All the money and power don’t mean shit if you don’t have the physical means AND the mental ability to cripple/hurt or kill your opponents.
Trump is a gangster to upper ranks whose money has insulated them from bullies and psychos. Having gone to school with tech brahs and their ilk, I can honestly state not many of them are actually as tough as they imagined themselves to be. Queeen’s despite making lifelong friends, is a place of where privileged smart shits mingle with middle class gifted students who get a taste of the life of the upper crust.
We don’t go to school with killers and people who are dangerous. Like I said, my experiences with Elon were fucking unpleasant because he always came across as a phony tough guy trying to bully all us lowers (at least that was my perception.)