Will Musk be the next Trump?

[L'Emmerdeur]

I don't recall coming across this artful circumlocution previously. Somebody in the SpaceX PR department has the soul of a poet:

Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn.

[Tero]

Elon lost a bet to Sam Harris and did not pay it
https://www.threads.net/@coolrandompers ... ZSxgCSfBMw

[NineBerry]

Elon lost a bet to Sam Harris and did not pay it
https://www.threads.net/@coolrandompers ... ZSxgCSfBMw

The full text https://samharris.substack.com/p/the-trouble-with-elon

[Tero]

Who knew? Deporting aliens is costly. That is, if you use trasportation. You could use the army, round them up and march them on foot, camping daily. Who would carry the tents? the army?

Republicans’ prized immigration bill, the Laken Riley Act, is apparently too expensive to implement, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
More than 70 amendments to the bill have been filed, delaying its passage further. The bill enjoys support from Senate Democrats as well, and even has two Democratic co-sponsors in Ruben Gallego and John Fetterman. Among some of the most egregious (and expensive) parts of the bill is the power it grants to state and local governments to help carry out immigrant detention, and some of the amendments concern that provision.

https://newrepublic.com/post/190354/ice ... y-act-cost

[Svartalf]

He's going to turn wine into water

just add enough water and you get homeopathic wine

[Tero]

Robots hold back!
Musk:If we stop having baby humans, there will be no humanity.
https://www.threads.net/@briantylercohe ... i1YSWLQEOw

[L'Emmerdeur]

Trolling for lols and to further an agenda already endorsed.

'Elon Musk's salute falls flat: Why far-right trolling isn't working this time around'

Perhaps someone feels unconvinced that Musk meant the gesture he put so much effort into. And it's true! We can't know what Musk meant with absolute certainty, especially since nothing he says about his own thought process can be trusted. Having not wasted energy arguing about the gesture, one can point to the bigger picture. For instance, Musk backs not just MAGA in the U.S., but also the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, a radical, far-right group whose leaders have been fined for using Nazi slogans, denounced the monuments to Holocaust victims, and declared Germans should be "proud of the achievements of the German soldiers in two world wars." Musk persists in championing AfD, even though German courts found "some AfD members favor a two-tier society in which 'ethnic' Germans are given more rights than people from immigrant backgrounds," NBC News reported.

Some news outlets wisely sidestepped the go-nowhere debate about what Musk "meant" to focus on a more productive topic: the impact of his behavior. On this, there is no debate: Loud-and-proud Nazis were over the moon about the Musk salute.

"Right-Wing Extremists Are Abuzz Over Musk’s Straight-Arm Salute," declared the headline at Rolling Stone. Wired went with a similar headline: "Neo-Nazis Love the Nazi-Like Salutes Elon Musk Made at Trump's Inauguration." The examples are hard to wiggle away from. Thanking Musk for the gesture, one white nationalist group tweeted, "The White Flame will rise again." Another poster, who helped create a chatbot named after Adolph Hitler, shared the clip with the caption, "Incredible things are happening already lmao." Reporting on this impact is far more helpful than digressive debates over the exact meaning of the word "fascist."

Most people, if they made this gesture innocently, would be upset about the neo-Nazis trying to claim common cause with them. As Ed Kilgore argued at New York Tuesday, "there is an easy way to clear this up, particularly for someone who owns a major social-media platform and uses it very often." All Musk needs to do is "make the gesture of denouncing fascism aggressively." He adds that explicitly rejecting fascism and white nationalism "should be worth a few dozen tweets, wouldn’t you say?"

Musk, however, saves his ire for anti-racists and seems unworried about neo-Nazis praising him. That is behavior inconsistent with an honest mistake, but it certainly echoes the model of trolling the left that we saw with white nationalists who flashed the "OK" sign. Ultimately, it doesn't matter what's in Musk's heart, but how he acts. When someone keeps casting warm smiles at racists while mocking anti-racists, they are promoting racism. At every turn, Musk's behavior is friendly and helpful to the worst people in our society. As Ocasio-Cortez said, those who refuse to see his behavior for what it is aren't worth listening to.

[NineBerry]

His Path of Exile 2 profiles were online and playing while he was at the inauguration....

[NineBerry]

In this discussion, recorded in November last year after the election, Richard Dawkins praises Musk for being very intelligent and rational and the silver lining to Trump's presidency.

[aufbahrung]

Balrog on the loose with Musk. A evil from before they invented Richard Dawkins. This is a great time to flee America. There's a storm coming.

[Brian Peacock]

Trolling for lols and to further an agenda already endorsed.

'Elon Musk's salute falls flat: Why far-right trolling isn't working this time around'

<snip>

Giggling before and after, this smacks of a private, inside joke played out on a public stage - like the barrister who was challenged to get the word cunnilingus into the closing remarks of a court case.

[NineBerry]

Trolling for lols and to further an agenda already endorsed.

'Elon Musk's salute falls flat: Why far-right trolling isn't working this time around'

<snip>

Giggling before and after, this smacks of a private, inside joke played out on a public stage - like the barrister who was challenged to get the word cunnilingus into the closing remarks of a court case.

[Tero]

DOGE to clean up post office. Because...we can't have a service. That we use taxes to fund.

Finally, USPS is also an object lesson on why DOGE must proceed and why it is long overdue.
J.T. Young is the author of the new book, “Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left,” from RealClear Publishing. He has more than three decades’ experience working in Congress, the Department of Treasury, and OMB, and representing a Fortune 20 company.

https://thehill.com/opinion/finance/509 ... um=bluesky

[Sean Hayden]

I think they see all government spending as theft.

[pErvinalia]

Unless it's spending on their endeavours.