• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    5 days ago

    What sets him apart is he is EVIL.

    He’s an absolute piece of shit. But if you think he stands above Donald Rumsfeld or Steve Bannon or George Shultz or William J. Casey or Samuel Alito on the Evilness Spectrum, you’re suffering from profound recency bias.

    The history of evil shits running this country goes back a long, long way. Elon’s just the latest to claim the mantel. And its safe to say he won’t be the last.

    What sets him apart is the recklessness and the fecklessness of his actions. He’s jamming code updates into a 60 year old system without bothering to bug check them first. Very real possibility he bricks a significant portion of the Treasury software suite before he’s done. Prior administrations had an eye towards continuation of careers and legacy of their terms. This administration is treating the term as a Smash-and-Grab, with an eye towards fully expropriating the functions of the federal government to the private sector.

    • chiliedogg@lemmy.world
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      5 days ago

      He’s a special category.

      Lots of people are evil because they want to have more than anybody else.

      Elon already has more than anybody else in the history of the planet, and he’s getting more evil.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        He’s exactly as evil as Henry Ford and for all the same reasons.

        And it’s important to recognize that his accumulated wealth is, ultimately, incredibly precarious. He’s riding a bubble and a lot of his behavior is about getting out ahead of the big POP! he sees coming.

      • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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        5 days ago

        No, the more you have, the more incentive to be evil.

        Also works with power to make decisions, obviously. Especially to make decisions for others.

        That’s where the “small government” thing comes from initially, but unfortunately it can’t come some evolutionary way from benevolent oligarchs and politicians voted in. You have to defeat them both first, managing to avoid creating a new vertical power structure, and if successful, creating a clean environment, and then you can build something.

        Now comes a question, though, why build something that has been tried and has devolved into what you have now, and will devolve again much faster, not in a century or so, but in a decade or less, because you can’t make the environment clean in all dimensions.