• Naboo_calls_for_aid@sopuli.xyz
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        3 months ago

        Pretty much fell for the 4chan/8chan memes like the rest of the alt-right. I really wish twitter would die already, so it can fertilize whatever grows in it’s place.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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          I keep linking to this Adam Conover interview with Elle Reeve because it’s so amazing. She talks all about how the modern crop of Republicans are all living in this bubble created by 4Chan where they think trolling and bigotry and misogyny and such are hilarious and believe everyone else agrees. It’s a long interview but absolutely worth the time, even if you just watch in chunks.

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cpwJ7o0o6c

          • Naboo_calls_for_aid@sopuli.xyz
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            2 months ago

            Saw that not too long ago, also there’s a Netflix documentary (the antisocial network) that details a good bit of it too. As someone who was pretty familiar with it in the late 2000s, I was kinda shocked that so much of the bullshit that’s invaded politics in the past decade has stemmed from there. I remember the first time someone was trying to show me all the q-anon crap, they eat up that garbage.

  • DogPeePoo@lemm.ee
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    Elon, if you don’t like the USA system, why the flying fuck did you move here?

    Go back to South Africa you ladder pulling, entitled piece of shit.

    Take Canadian wannabe secessionist Ted Cruz with you.

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      Ted Cruz is Canadian???

      So, let me get this straight…a Canadian moves to Texas, and then when it snows and gets cold, he flees to Mexico???

      Welp. Nobody can say that Ted Cruz is a stereotype. We CAN say he’s an asshole though. Which I will. Ted Cruz is an asshole. There, I said it.

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        Yep. Asshole and secessionist Rafael “Ted” Cruz was born in the taint of Canada 🇨🇦Calgary, Alberta.

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          The only reason I know Calgary exists, is because I was a wrestling fan in the 90s. And Bret Hart has been complaining since 1997 that he gets screwed harder than Jenna Jameson.

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        His mother was American and his father was, I believe, Cuban. Neither had Canadian citizenship. They happened to hatch him in the territory of Canada while his mom was working in Alberta, so he technically was Canadian until this all came out in 2014 or 2015 when he was running in the Republican primary and he renounced his citizenship. Unfortunately for you, he was a dual citizen thanks to his mother so you can’t deport him back to us. Feel free to deport him into the Gulf of Mexico if you want, though.

        • David_Eight@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          this all came out in 2014 or 2015 when he was running in the Republican primary

          Which is one of the dumbest parts since only people born in the US can be president lol.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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          Can we deport him to the homeland of his father? I’m guessing Cuba would have a few ideas about what should be done with Ted Cruz.

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        3 months ago

        Ted Cruz is Canadian???

        It’s not that we’re downplaying it. It’s just that we wouldn’t want the USA to deport him back here…

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        3 months ago

        Yeah but we’re not taking him back. Sorry.

        But do you want to take Pierre Poilievre off our hands? He sounds exactly like Ron DeSantis, do you need another one of those down there?

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          I would feel conflicted about dumping Pollivere over the fence. It’s like when you have a neighbour whose yard is already filled with trash and you are like “well, more can’t make much more of a difference…”

          But then again I am trans and I really don’t want him here to fuck up one of the few places in the world where being trans is actually protected.

          Predicament…

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            Russia is looking for conscripts. Since all these Republicans are so pro Russia, the obvious thing for them to do is move there.

            Tucker Carlson is simply enamored with their supermarkets I hear

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        He is a Canadian by virtue of being born here, but also American because of his parents. Thus he is eligible to become President. Please keep him!

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        Born in Canada ( to an American ) and not Canadian ( not a citizen ).

        The only thing good about all this is that he cannot be President.

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        He basically moved from Canada’s wannabe Texas to actual Texas and we’re not sorry he’s gone… Just kind of sorry he’s your problem now.

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    “high-T alpha males” This is something a 12 year old would post on r/redpill in 2014.

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    Some of the replies are hilarious. “you do not get to drop “low t men” when you look like shane gillis after a baron harkonnen-style milk bath”

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      The level of irony of his spreading easily disproven bullshit that talks specifically about (presumably his prowess in) assessing the truth of statements is immeasurable.

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      Only high T alpha males and aneurotypical people

      He reposted this account before as I remember users discussing it’s name. I feel like they baited him intentionally this time. Post sounds as if it’s been written by Elon and for Elon.

    • Wirlocke@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      Wait until his constant hostility to business partners, the devaluing of Teslas as a luxury status symbol, and defaulting loans tanks his net worth as well.

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        Sounds like he could run for president. Just needs the Supreme Court to rule that born citizen thing unconstitutional. Then him and Shkrelli as vp can run in 2028.

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      How about I’M in charge? Everybody gets all the rights. Nobody has to work anymore. And we make sure this bacon shortage that I keep hearing is approaching, where pigs are going to go extinct, never happens. We’re gonnna make those pigs fuck, and make more pigs, and when they die, we get bacon, and we’ll make their offspring fuck other pigs, and make their own offspring, and eventually THEY become bacon.

      Basically, bacon regeneration is my number one goal here. Fuck money. Fuck power. Eat bacon. Shut up.

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    Same old story, same old song and dance. Dudes with power and influence been screeching this since Plato’s dong dangled beneath his toga.

    • irreticent@lemmy.world
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      Dudes with power and I fluence been screeching this since Plato’s dong dangled beneath his toga.

      Where have I heard that quote before? Is it Shakespeare?

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        I mean this may be my 'tism spiking but Plato has an actual quote about “the weakness of democracy” and its exactly what you would expect; just advocating for the rich and affluent to rule.

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          Marx and Engels were pretty comfortable to philosophize from their cushy socioeconomic status.

    • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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      All his engineers must be yes men, because the engineers I know support much more interesting new social structures.

      • AA5B@lemmy.world
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        You can’t be an engineer without recognizing many way things could be done better, if the people were out of the way.

        This election in the US is partly about this exact question.

        • US executive branch is mostly a meritocracy: people are hired to be able to do their job. Only a few at the top of each agency are political appointees whose role is to guide the agency along the political policies
        • however both project 2025 and Trump vow to replace many of those people with those whose only skills are political and loyalty

        If you think government works poorly now, just wait until they start replacing people who get the job done with people who worship dear leader, but don’t know what they’re doing. We see it at small scale, such as Supreme Court, but imagine hundreds of thousands.

        As an engineer I would never want that Technocracy dystopia, but I sure as heck want government agencies and businesses filled with people hired for their ability to get the job done

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        I assume everyone left at Twitter is a yes man. Just biding their time and collecting a paycheck and going along with the program until the collapse.

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      “He specifically means Engineers and “High IQ” men” No, no he doesn’t. The OP was not talking about intelligence, he was talking about physical strength. You could at least put an argument forward that intelligent people should be running things, but no, this is specifically saying that you have to be physically tough and strong. This is government by MMA fighters.

      Holy this shit is so mind-mindbogglingly stupid.

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      Ok so has he ever met engineers? Firstly our men come in a testosterone range from “full coat of fur except the top of the head” to “I think he might be intersex actually”. Secondly some of us are women. And thirdly, while I wish I could run for city council, the vast majority of us make for terrible leaders. We’re prone to tunnel vision and thinking we know everything. We’re also largely arrogant.

      Oh, and fourthly, Elon isn’t one of us. Like dude, you’re a billionaire, you can afford the tutors to get an engineering degree, but you choose not to while clearly insecure about it.

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        We’re prone to tunnel vision and thinking we know everything. We’re also largely arrogant.

        Which explains why engineers are (at least as far as I have seen) far more religious as a group than scientists.

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      I wonder ispf he read the part where each person gets a set of energy credits instead of cash, and you can’t accumulate.

      • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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        The biggest problem, at least from my perspective, is not his claim of autism. Maybe he has it, maybe he doesn’t. As far as I know, he’s never been evaluated.

        The biggest problem is that he uses the claim of autism as a shield for his awful behavior.

        Autism is not an ‘get out of being an asshole for free’ card because autism and being an asshole are totally unrelated.

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      It’s almost like you’re describing a disability affecting someone and not some sort of super power… too real.

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        Even I, who is relatively less affected by it can realize it’s a disability, even if things well align for me, I feel it just like a personality type.

        One can harness autism as a de-facto super power, but channeling your special interests to more usefult things might not be available for everyone, and could be limited in some way of form. Autistic people can be somewhat better at pattern recognition, which could be useful at times.

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    I get people are gonna say he was always this bad but I honestly don’t buy it.

    While he was always an asshole, everyone has some ratio of bad/good. In the early/mid 2010s he was able to keep enough of a lid on things that he had a positive reputation with among both the public and investors. The limited comments he did make on politics were pretty liberal, and usually specific to the environment. He was liked enough in heavily liberal circles to get multiple positive shoutouts. One of them was from freaking Star Trek, which as a sidenote inadvertently ended up aging like wine.

    Modern Elon is absolutely unhinged. He seems to spend more time on Twitter making an ass of himself in ways you’d normally associate with a teenage edge lord. He’s an active and aggressive liability to his companies, both in terms of his persona and business decisions. He’s huge on politics to the point where he tried to interfere with the Russo-Ukraine war for a bit. A lot of times it feels like it’s a matter of time before he gets on stage with Kanye and starts trying to rap.

    I think a combination of social media and covid broke him. I know Lemmy doesn’t think rich people are human, but I think it’s more nuanced than that. While they often have quirks, at the end of the day we’re all human. There are millions of people whose brains became fried due to culture war shit on social media post 2014. There’s no reason Elon would be immune to the same mechanisms that radicalize an average person.

    • TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee
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      While he was always an asshole, everyone has some ratio of bad/good. In the early/mid 2010s he was able to keep enough of a lid on things that he had a positive reputation with among both the public and investors.

      Back then he still had his handler/business mommy Mary Beth Brown. She had basic control over his scheduling and publicity outreach since he started Tesla. In 2014 he canned her after she asked for a raise, he’s been handling his own pr and schedule ever since.

      The problem with assuming that this is a recent change in personality is that it requires ignoring all his prior reported behaviour. It ignores how much media marketing actually changes our perceptions of powerful people.

      No Elon did not become an asinine child overnight, he’s been that way the whole time. He just believes he’s now rich enough that he doesn’t have to pretend to be a different person. No JFK Jr did not become an insane person because he watched too much fox news, he’s literally been eating roadkill since he was a child.

      All of these wealthy and powerful people have an entire system working for them dedicated to protecting their public image.

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        I’m not saying he wasn’t always an asshole. I’m saying the level of asshole political extremist he is now is a huge departure from how he was previously.

        2017 Elon isn’t a good person, but is a lot better and sane than 2021 Elon, who is in turn a lot better and sane than 2024 Elon. His first huge Twitter spat was the submarine pedophile fiasco, and now he says something more deranged than that on a weekly basis.

        • TranscendentalEmpire@lemm.ee
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          My point was that he’s always been an extremist right winged nut job, he’s just letting people see it now.

          If you look at his work history, the people he hung out with, and how he’s run his businesses, it’s all very consistent with far right libertarian ideology. He’s always been against regulation, he’s always been anti union, and he started a business with Peter Thiel.

          Not much has changed, except he now believes his cult of personality is strong enough to withstand media criticisms.

      • aesthelete@lemmy.world
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        It ignores how much media marketing actually changes our perceptions of powerful people.

        I similarly didn’t know how much of an asshole Steve Jobs was until listening to a podcast about his behavior. I had the same vague understanding of him everyone did (he’s regarded as a visionary, but was a micromanager and a perfectionist, etc).

        PR firms and handlers do the devil’s work of making these monsters presentable to the public.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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      One of them was from freaking Star Trek, which as a sidenote inadvertently ended up aging like wine.

      On the other hand, it was said by evil mirror Lorca, so maybe it works?

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      You’re trying to blame his shift on social media and the pandemic, and you’re also claiming that the same thing happened to millions of other people for the same reasons, and I just haven’t seen any evidence to support that.

      We can point to people acting like lunatics during the pandemic, of course, but if you want to claim that to pandemic caused them to become lunatics then you would have to look at how they behaved prior to it. And you can try to blame social media for how people see politics, but there again I don’t think the facts are on your side. Most people know that things your friend posts on Facebook may or may not be true. But many people, especially middle-aged and older people, believe that there’s a great deal of truth in the 24-hour news cycle that they see on television, when in reality that’s been highly tailored by the major news networks to make it seem like the sky is falling.

      It has been remarked for a long time that many arrogant ultra rich people end up surrounding themselves by yes men, that insulation is created by their money and power, and over time their views grow unhinged because they don’t have contact with the real world or the general public. We know this happens often enough, and if I were speculating, I’d say the same thing happened here.

      • hesusingthespiritbomb@lemmy.world
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        Look if you don’t think there’s any evidence to support social media and the pandemic leading to both a decline in mental health and radicalization, I don’t know what to tell you. Not only have there been like a million different articles on it, but this is patently obvious to the vast majority of people who lived through the entire thing.

        This isn’t exclusively a middle aged man thing, a conservative thing, or even a political thing. A ton of people struggled enormously during the pandemic, sought solace in social media, and left with an extremely weird set of beliefs.

        I’m sure I could find some of these sources, but I feel like I’d be trying to convince someone that the sky is blue. This is so abundantly obvious that you’ve either been living under an extremely large rock or are dead set on believing what you want to believe.

      • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
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        I really wouldn’t discount social media, which he has shown an addiction to.

        I’ve personally watched a very close friend go from a huge Obama / liberal supporter to supporting Trump, Canada’s trump mini, full on climate change denial, anti vaccine stuff by going down the right wing conspiracy theory rabbit hole. All on twitter/youtube/facebook etc stuff. He doesn’t watch MSM.

        There’s definitely a rich/yes man aspect as well, but social media echo chambers can have a huge influence.

        edit: and for what it’s worth, it’s not worth trying to reason with him anymore, and the relationship has pretty much died during covid.

    • michaelmrose@lemmy.world
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      Do you remember the whole debacle in 2018 where he defamed the guy who actually rescued the kids by calling him a pedophile after his stupid sub idea was shot down?

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      The difference between now and the late 00s/early 10s, is that he actually listened to his RP people. Before he took over SpaceX and Tesla there wasn’t much reason for people to pay attention to him so the narrative that he was using his wealth to improve humanity was taken at face value and pushed in the media.

      The more spotlight he got and the more he interacted with other public figures, the more it was apparent that he wasn’t liberal minded as he had been made out to be and the more of his history in South Africa and early days of what we’d call the modern internet started to reveal him to what he always was, a nepo baby using his money to plaster his name over other people’s accomplishments. He never was a modern day Nikolai Tesla, he’s a modern day Thomas Edison, pushing his own bad ideas and ensuring no one who works for him gets proper credit or compensation for the work making him money.

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      I think there are some people who just exist in our communities and lives that can shed some light here.

      The father who’s generally progressive in public, because he never really cared about it when it doesn’t affect him. But he was cruel to his “son” for displaying failure of masculinity growing up, and later when that “son” came out as a trans woman he became a vocal transphobe.

      The business owner who always tried to focus on businesses that addressed new and futuristic ideas. Always tried to keep things as cool as possible, especially in presenting the business to the public. But while he was willing to put in irresponsible amounts of work, he expected the same of his employees. When they started discussing collective bargaining, his facade of being different and socially responsible fell to the wayside as he began fighting tooth and nail against unions, and employees increasingly felt comfortable talking about his bad behavior in all manner of topics as well as the public began listening about it.

      The man who in college falls for a woman, and has a family with her. But he strikes it rich and becomes famous and files for divorce leaving her with the kids and screwed by a prenup.

      The individual who consistently alienates those around themselves, who refuses to build community, instead believing themselves different, better. They may be chasing fame, wealth, and power, but they may not be. Getting it is irrelevant. But regardless in their alienation they find Internet communities. Them develop a sense of communal identity without connection, friendship, camaraderie, or comfortable belonging. A crude facsimile of community that fails to provide for interpersonal needs. And while they’re in these places they begin flowing down the pipeline to radicalization.

      An individual with a strained relationship with a parent understands their parents flaws and swears they’re not going to be like that. They succeed somewhat but not completely.

      Each of these things we can see Elon fall into. He’s all of them in the extreme. He is human, deeply so. Each of these involved him making choices that got him here

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    3 months ago

    “Guy who did nothing to earn any of his power thinks he should have more power.”