This post is a response to two questions posed in their complete formats as: Question 1: “To what extent can George Soros be termed as a political figure?” and Question 2: “Democrats, what would you say to a group of Republicans begging you to give them a chance to prove that they are good people?”
To no extent in “capital P Politics” and a limited extent in “small p politics.”
He mostly avoids public statements about politics, politicians, and political issues. He recently made a rare comment referencing tariffs as warfare when Trump began his tariff rampage, but that was the extent of his input.
It had bothered me for some time that he hadn’t been more vocal, but then I realized how anything he says can create massive ripples throughout the marketplace.
His voice is like Marvel’s Black Bolt from the Inhumans.
He has to be extremely careful about what he says publicly because a slip of the tongue can kill an entire industry and dramatically impact people’s lives.
It took me a long time to arrive at that realization and regret being so dense about it.
I wouldn’t want that kind of influence. It’s way too much stress and responsibility that few can handle, and even fewer can be trusted to handle it responsibly.
Elon Musk and Donald Trump are excellent examples of being too incompetent to have as much power as they do.
He is a shadowy figure who quietly does what he can to leave a positive legacy for the world. That makes him a lightning rod for the toxic among us and an inspiration to those who value his contributions.
Question 2: What do you say to MAGAs who claim they are good people?
Stop begging and start doing.
Actions speak louder than words.
Republicans are being judged by their actions.
Remaining silent in the face of a fascist takeover of the nation is complicity with that fascism.
It doesn’t matter how much you beg, you’re still an ass, and a cowardly one at that if you don’t stand up and fight against it.
If you do that, you won’t need to debase yourself by begging. Grow a spine and take responsibility for the actions of the party you identify with.
Why do you think people are just as pissed off with the DNC?
It’s because they have been spineless while all this destructive nonsense has been happening.
People from all walks of life, except the privileged, demand a new world. The status quo can’t survive because we can’t survive it. We need to work together, and that includes the enraged MAGAts who need to stop attacking their neighbours and start demanding changes from the monsters they admire.
After all, you can’t seriously be okay with being told that you’ll have to cut back on buying dolls for your kids this Christmas, and then be OK with Mango Mussolini getting a half-billion-dollar gift from the people who financed the 9/11 tragedy to jet around the globe to visit his branded properties.
No one who can accept those two conditions can be a good person. Only a coward and a hypocrite who refuses to protect their family could accept that. If you want to be seen as a good person, then it’s time to do the right thing, not the Reich thing.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why doesn’t Elon Musk or someone else develop a big project for reverse climate change by 2045–2100?”
There are no “big projects” that can reverse climate change occurring due to a cumulative consequence of many different aspects of human society — from energy production and usage to our diets and the homes we live in.
The closest we can get to reversing the effects with a single solution would be through carbon capture technologies, which currently have power requirements that exacerbate the energy contribution to climate change. It’s also nowhere near mature enough to capture enough carbon to reverse the damage.
Until we can generate energy through cold fusion, it won’t be anything close to a solution.
He should, however, use his platform to encourage the changes we need in society that would mitigate the destruction we are doing to our environment. He began his trek to global recognition of that very potentiality through the success of electric vehicles.
He has since shown us that his concerns have always been opportunistic parasitism and is more interested in fleecing hundreds of millions of victims into destitution and early graves than he is in furthering humanity or securing our future on this planet.
He has the power of a global bullhorn that can be marshalled toward uniting humanity in the common cause of saving our planet and societies. Instead, he’s pissing it all away on ego masturbation at the expense of our future as a species.
He could have chosen to be revered like a god among humans for centuries by leveraging his resources to benefit humanity. Instead, he will be remembered as one of history’s most pathetically egotistical villains… assuming we survive his feckless recklessness.
This post is a divergence from my SOP. I was inspired by Elon Musk’s “Chainsaw performance,” John Oliver’s wondering if Elon believed the sound a chainsaw made was actually “CHAINSAW!!!”
A dumb centibillionaire who has never used his hands to perform any form of physical labour in his life (okay… this is paraphrased and updated for today’s modern world) stormed into a chainsaw store with a chainsaw in his hands and an angry expression on his face.
He scouted the store for the first salesperson he could spot and stomped his way toward him.
He shouted in a loud enough voice for the patrons in the bowling alley next door to be disrupted and miss their throws that he was angry and wanted his money back.
“What seems to be the problem?” asked the nervous salesman who readied a can of pepper spray in his pocket in case he would need to defend himself from a raging lunatic.
“I paid good money for this piece of crap and it doesn’t work! I spent an hour last night testing it out and couldn’t even cut through a two-by-four!! This is a piece of crap and a waste of my money and my time. I want to be compensated for the hours of my life that I will never get back!!!”
“I’m sorry for your troubles, sir, but may I inspect the machinery to see if I can spot the problem?”
Reluctantly, the entitled asshat relented, “Fine!” He snorted. “Waste more of my time. Waste as much as you want because my lawyer will bill you for my valuable time!”
The salesman held his hands out to receive the chainsaw and it was thrust against him so hard that his chest heaved out what was left of his breath inside to force him to sputter a short cough.
“Okay, sir. Thank you. Let’s have a look at this, now, shall we?”
“Okay. Fine! Go ahead! Prove that it’s a piece of shit!”
The salesman grabbed the handle on the pulley to start up the saw and it quickly started up with a roar.
The centibillionaire jumped back in shock and yelled, “What the hell was that sound?!?!”
While “field-testing” this joke on Quora, I got the impression that a few people might not get the punchline. That’s okay. Just give it some time while you envision how the centibillionaire might have been trying to cut wood without the chainsaw making a sound. Once you get it, you’ll let out a guffaw. I guarantee it because the image it invokes in my mind of someone trying to cut wood without starting up the chainsaw is still hilarious decades later. I could be wrong, though; if all it generates for you is a groan, then c’est la vie. It’s Monday, and I tried to give you a chuckle for your day. It’s the thought that counts — amirite? No? Dang.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why haven’t we seen a more transparent Federal Government until 47?”
Nothing is transparent about the obfuscating nonsense a grifter is dumping onto the public consciousness.
Anyone with a lick of sense who watched Elon Musk speaking from the Oval Office as if he were an unelected and self-appointed president, enacting broad changes to public infrastructure as if his words were intended to create the best outcomes for the people would have been horrified by how thick his petard was spread.
It was like watching a Fox entertainment talking head barf up a stream of irrational gibberish because he figures a gish gallop argument of nonsense is enough to sway 350 million people… and if it isn’t, it’s enough to sway 70 million people who will run defence on his behalf so that he can continue to destroy the nation.
The most obvious example of “transparency by obfuscating petard” was hiring child hackers with criminal histories to tap into the private records of 350 million people instead of forensic accountants with a clear mandate to identify waste and fraud. Their agenda, goals, and processes should have been made public before beginning his process. Instead, it was rushed through to get as far as they could into violating the nation’s protections before being stopped by the checks and balances built into the system.
The alarms should have been ringing loudly that he has overlooked the most obvious target of waste and fraud in the military budget — which has never been audited.
Why do you think that is?
Right… it’s because they’re counting on military support to rein in the disruptive elements in society when they need to ramp up their pogroms to the next level of insanity and round up citizens who get deemed dissidents by the state.
The Freedom of Information Act has already guaranteed government transparency. You can bet any effort to obtain details on the justifications of fraud and waste supporting the decisions of what has been cut will never be revealed to the public. Fortunately, it’s pretty easy to spot his motivations, considering that every target of his is a public institution designed expressly to protect the public interest, holding him accountable for his criminal behaviours.
Ask yourself this simple question:
If this administration cared about transparency, why is Trump the only president who has refused to make his taxes public?
Why did Trump lie about Project 2025 during his campaign while appointing a VP who called him Hitler? Why would the VP join someone they thought was Hitler, to begin with? Why is the VP not only a contributor to Project 2025 but also someone who publicly justifies lying to capture attention?
How does any of this constitute “transparency” in your worldview?
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why doesn’t Elon Musk want to save poor people in the world?”
He is saving the “poor people in the world.”
The disconnect is presuming he sees other people in the world as people rather than as objects placed on this Earth to cater to his poor existence.
Haven’t you noticed how much whining Trump does about life even though he was born on third base and has destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives throughout his life? After all that destruction, he still views himself as a victim.
Ironically, they’re both victims of failing to maintain contact with their essential humanity.
They will both go to their graves, completely frustrated and confused about why most people hate them.
Sure… they have devoted followers, but those are the easy and gullible idiots to manipulate. It’s not enough because they know the people who challenge them think poorly of them.
The jealousy is why Trump can still gripe about Obama a decade later.
Supporting a hated monster like Trump is the closest Musk will get to camaraderie. Meanwhile, both regard each other as useful idiots to their self-serving causes. Once the wheels fall off in their relationship — and it will because there isn’t enough room on the planet for two competing egos — eventually, one of them will step on the other’s toes hard enough to escalate into an open conflict — we’ll see embarrassing demonstrations that remind us of all the sandbox behaviours we experienced in elementary school.
Sadly, the more Xitter fails, the harder Musk will go after austerity for the little people, and that’s how he will deal with his “poor stature.” Musk is this century’s poster boy for why restraints on personal wealth and power are crucial to the stability of human civilization.
The MAGAts won’t see that, though, because they’re conditioned to desire submission to authorities they’ve been accustomed to worship. They will identify more with Musk’s struggles than their fellow citizens who suffer from Musk’s spitefulness.
Musk is saving the most essential “poor person” in the world, himself.
Why can a private citizen like Elon Musk address the nation from the Oval Office like he was elected president?
Government representatives support their donors because they owe them — plain and simple. For Elon Musk to support Donald Trump’s presidential campaign with a $270 million financial boost means he expected something in return. That something just happened to be the keys to the halls of power.
Made even worse by the Citizen’s United Ruling that money equals speech, the entire nation has been converted into a kleptocracy. Anyone with enough money can buy their representative who will institute laws favouring their wealth acquisition goals.
They will use fraudulent arguments like consolidation equals efficiency and lower consumer costs, but that’s just bunk.
The harsh reality is that the nation is no longer a democracy or a government of the people, for the people, and by the people.
The U.S. is currently being stripped for parts to be sold to the highest bidder, and the entire world will suffer from its dissolution.
It’s not the government that supports monopolies but the billionaires who buy government representatives who seek to hoard as much of the nation’s wealth as possible and support consolidation while claiming to be capitalists.
Meanwhile, the useful idiots in the crowd conveniently forget how one of the key components of capitalism is competition.
Monopolies not only kill competition, they kill innovation, and they gouge consumers.
For example, anyone who has had to purchase prescription glasses can attest to how badly Luxottica has screwed them over.
Monopolies are cancer for an economy and for society as a whole. Monopolies give rise to dynasties, which push us back to a time of being ruled by monarchs in a two-class society of rulers and serfs.
Democratic governments that have not been corrupted otherwise do not support monopolies and create legislation to break up monopolies.
The disconnect is presuming he sees other people in the world as people rather than as objects placed on this Earth to cater to his poor existence.
Haven’t you noticed how much whining Trump does about life even though he was born on third base and has destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives throughout his life? After all that destruction, he still views himself as a victim.
Ironically, they’re both victims of failing to maintain contact with their essential humanity.
They will both go to their graves, completely frustrated and confused about why most people hate them.
Sure… they have devoted followers, but those are the easy and gullible idiots to manipulate. It’s not enough because they know the people who challenge them think poorly of them.
The jealousy is why Trump can still gripe about Obama a decade later.
Supporting a hated monster like Trump is the closest Musk will get to camaraderie. Meanwhile, both regard each other as useful idiots to their self-serving causes. Once the wheels fall off in their relationship — and it will because there isn’t enough room on the planet for two competing megalomaniac egos — eventually, one of them will step on the other’s toes hard enough to escalate into an open conflict — we’ll see embarrassing demonstrations that remind us of all the sandbox behaviours we experienced in elementary school.
Sadly, the more Xitter fails, the harder Musk will go after austerity for the little people, and that’s how he will deal with his “poor stature.” Musk is this century’s poster boy for why restraints on personal wealth and power are crucial to the stability of human civilization.
The MAGAts won’t see that, though, because they’re conditioned to desire submission to authorities they’ve been accustomed to worship. They will identify more with Musk’s struggles than their fellow citizens who suffer from Musk’s spitefulness.
Elon Musk is essentially living a life of revenge against whatever broke him in his childhood. His and Trump’s attitudes and behaviours are typical for bullies who remain convinced of their infinite entitlement to destroy others. They are self-righteous in their acts of destruction to levels equivalent to extreme religious zealotry.
Musk will sincerely believe he is a poor victim for being denied the $56 billion he demanded as compensation from Tesla. Self-serving bullies like won’t stop until someone stops them. Until then, Musk in his “DOGE” role will strip away lifelines from the little people to save himself a few dollars on taxes with righteous fervour. He will sincerely believe he’s doing the right thing for society by getting revenge on his victimization.
The attitude of being a poor victim is a common among billionaires who brazenly justify denying people their right to life to save themselves a few dollars in taxes. Meanwhile, all of their justifications for austerity for the little people is presented as if tax increases are and should be equal across the board. The wealthy have had their taxes cut by more than half in the last several decades which constitutes billions in savings for each billionaire. The little people have conversely gained pennies in tax cuts by contrast. Meanwhile, people like Musk, Thiel, and those support Trump consider themselves poor and unjustly victimized if their taxes were increased by a few percentage points.
The next time you hear someone use the expression, “victim mentality,” pay close attention to the person who accuses others of having such a mentality because that expression is projection for a sociopath. We’ve all had enough experience now to understand how the corrupt will make accusations that are confessions in disguise — deflections away from responsibility for their actions. People like Musk and Trump embody that mentality. Every choice they make is a form of revenge for their victimization while anyone who suffers as a consequence deserves their fates.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “How soon do you think that the masterminds behind Project 2025 will invoke Article 25 to remove Trump? By now there must be many of the less insane MAGAs who see that his actions are irrational before even taking office.”
I recently thought Trump was going to experience an epiphany where he realizes he’s being treated like the drunk uncle at the family barbeque. He may already be thinking about challenges to his power with Musk in the picture, as Elon has been hogging the limelight that belongs to him.
He needed Musk’s endorsements and money while he was campaigning. Now, he’s only tolerating him while getting some laughs at Musk’s expense to keep him in line.
Since Musk is arguably as much of a narcissist as Trump, this is when he began plotting his revenge against Trump. Musk is also more intelligent than Trump, which means he’ll keep a low enough profile to minimize pissing off Trump until he can devastate him with one punch.
However, Trump can’t be underestimated because his paranoia runs deep from a lifetime more experience fighting dirty than Musk has amassed. He may very well already have plans to shut Musk up for good. It’s hard to tell right now, but their conflict will grow. That’s as inevitable as day following night.
There could very well be a moment of realization by Trump where he begins to see himself being manipulated by the people around him who need him as a populist figurehead for entertaining the sheep but are squeezing him out of the decision-making process.
He may not care much about many of the decisions being made in his sphere of influence. He could mindlessly endorse many because they appeal to his superficiality and deep biases, but he always keeps his finger on the pulse of public optics.
He quickly distanced himself from Project 2025 before momentum against it and his campaign, by extension, could grow. He promptly removed his version of it from his website and his platform and denied knowledge of the endeavour while selecting a key figure from it as his running mate.
He may endorse all or most of it, but he won’t endorse the public backlash, and that’s going to create anxiety for him to crank up his natural paranoia and push his limits. I expect to see more fracturing within his inner circle as he realizes those around him are playing him a fool. He can tolerate that from Putin because he has no choice, but that only means his tolerance for dissent within his ranks diminishes.
He has a lot of clout they would fear because he would not hesitate to throw them under the bus to save his skin.
If he were to view Musk and Vance developing ties, for example, that would be enough for him to show signs of cracking and his paranoia would leak through his polished veneer of dismissive disinterest in things he should be concerned about.
For example, whenever he is asked to walk back comments he’s made that were proven demonstrably false, he doesn’t admit error. He displays disinterest, and he deflects responsibility away from himself.
In a case where Musk is being viewed as collaborating more closely with Vance than he wants, he’ll start driving wedges between them. His nature cannot permit open collusion against him without him taking action against it.
Trump will also find himself increasingly isolated from his staff, partly because he’s pissed them off enough to want to avoid his company altogether but also partly because they will have made enough progress on their agenda to be more comfortable in marginalizing him. It will be a delicate balance for his associates to keep him focused on the attention he craves while keeping him away from the decisions they make to forward the Project 2025 agenda. Much of their success or failure is contingent upon Trump’s ability to maintain optics over what will appear like his decisions.
They will also have to work fast to cement some of their early objectives to secure long-term goals. Trump will likely fail to maintain the integrity of the illusion he needs to satisfy his MAGAt base with his performance. His tariff strategy, for example, will hit them hard in their pocketbooks. The job market will tank, and the economy will shrink while Musk will become the scapegoat for MAGAt dissatisfaction if he receives an official appointment and makes the cuts he indicates he wants to make.
It may be for this reason that Trump tolerates Musk’s attention-whoring antics within his crowd. He will likely rely on favours from Putin to help keep Musk reigned in and set up to take the public anger hit. When the feces begin flying, Trump will do what he has excelled at doing: dodge accountability and redirect it elsewhere. This strategy could work with Musk or backfire if Musk is astute enough to anticipate the inevitable betrayal.
In any case, Musk is setting himself up to be the next Mike Pence in Trump’s administration… and I doubt Vance could be happier about that.
Musk is new and ostentatious money, while the Heritage Foundation is supported by old money. They would not be entirely happy with Musk’s overt, reckless flaunting of his wealth. It’s in bad taste and reflects poorly on all of them.
Musk has been teaching the world to hate wealth through his public antics, which poses a risk to them because they prefer to achieve their agendas through subversive actions, not overt displays of disdain toward the little people. Leona Helmsley is an excellent cautionary tale from recent history that shows how the little people can quickly rally against that kind of condescending disdain from the wealthy.
Trump, by contrast, may indulge in grotesque displays of performative wealth to keep up his appearance of wealth. He at least knows when to keep his mouth shut or where the line is drawn between igniting passions among his base and against those he’s desperate to be perceived as an insider with.
Trump’s view of his tribe was cultivated from a young age by being exposed to old-world wealth that essentially keeps itself out of the public eye, while Musk is a new breed of instant wealth bolstered by his birth lottery. He was born on third base and has behaved like he got a home run. Old wealth has lived on home base for generations, and they know how to stay there and how much more critical being incognito is to gaining widespread public attention. Trump, in this regard, is their sacrificial lamb.
In contrast, Bezos — also new wealth — is much more astute about the importance of reserved public optics than Musk.
If the nation collapses and if chaos arises, Trump will take all the blame. Those funding the Heritage Foundation will slink back into the shadows to begin working on the next phase of class warfare they’ve been waging since the dawn of the industrial age.
I don’t think the Heritage Foundation will move to eliminate Trump until they’ve secured the next election cycle because of his value to them as a pawn. Much of their success with Trump will depend on how well he plays along with them. Meanwhile, Musk, who is viewed as a more chaotic and potentially destructive element in their plans, will be the focus on who needs to be eliminated in the short term.
The MAGAts, for now, are entirely oblivious to the implications of Trump’s cabinet appointments, and many even endorse them. The anti-vaxxers among them, for example, are pleased with RFK’s positions on vaccines and agree with his superficial assessments of food quality. They won’t even blame him after going through a few rounds of food-related fatalities due to his policies.
Another reason why they won’t and can’t remove Trump in the short term is that there is no one else who can achieve a religious-like stature among the little people. My guess is that they would want Musk handled first. Then, once they’ve set up their succession process, they may try to secure their power by turning Trump into an actual martyr because they’ve already run the scenario through theatrics they’ve already tested.
Their succession process is also problematic because Vance is easily despised, even though his presentation is pretty slick. The public will reject him unless they’ve been coaxed to be more accepting of a couch fornicator… which, sadly, is entirely possible because it’s not as bad as being a pedophile.
If they move too soon with Vance, they’ll lose everything. Trump has four years to prove his value and make a graceful exit, which will depend entirely on how secure the transition to the next generation will be. If it appears shaky, his retirement will be made permanent to secure the Republican majority that Karl Rove championed over two decades ago.
All of this is, of course, wild speculation that no one should interpret as gospel. Take my caveat as you will.
This post is a response to a question posed in its full format as follows: “Is Elon Musk evil or corrupt? I tend to admire people that take their money and build something of value.”
Elon Musk is a typical human born into a life of privilege and who happened to be smart enough to leverage that privilege into such a degree of wealth that it allowed him to free up restraints on the ego that drove him to that wealth.
This phenomenon occurs because humanity has no overarching vision that unites us and that we all consciously strive toward in everything we do.
Far too many are still at the toddler stage of “I’ve got mine, eff you,” and our culture of wealth worshipping exaggerates the sort of narcissism we see running rampant everywhere.
Musk, Bezos, and an appalling list of etceteras got wealthy because that’s what they valued, not because they dreamed of using that wealth to better humanity. The people working on the betterment of society are mainly working on shoestring budgets while relying on closely-knit relationships with others who believe in the potential of what they’re doing.
Those are the invisible creators throughout society that people with privilege — the sharks among us love to feed on and claim credit for their creation. It is like a pattern Musk’s fanboys should be able to spot now due to their knowledge of him, but they somehow fail to see the obvious.
The consequence of this worship mentality is that we no longer view the wealthy as we view other human beings. The rich and powerful acquire, along with their materiality, a perception of superiority as a human who magically transcends human failings.
They don’t, but we see evidence of an analogy that money is like salt for food; it magnifies what was already there.
We haven’t come to grips with the implications for us as a species because of this particular blind spot we have cultivated through millennia of worshipping imaginary super/extra/meta humanoid beings as paternalistic avatars for our species.
We are groomed from childhood to worship, which comes naturally through trust between a parent and child. That depth of connection between humans is what defines humanity. For a species that has arisen from a history of barbarism, it’s not surprising to see relics of that bonding psychology in play to serve as the uniting vision for a culture we lack as a species.
This blind spot we have and this compulsion to worship wealth and power have been coming at a cost that nowhere near enough of us can yet see. Those who do are freaking out because of the eerie similarities the fawning behaviour he receives has with cult members. Being a fan is one thing, but abandoning all reason to avoid critical analysis and engage in a blind defence of antics that are blatantly self-serving nonsense only shows that it’s not Musk that’s a problem; it’s us.
We still haven’t gotten to that stage where we understand the meaning of “power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” — however, if we don’t get our environmental issues under control, we won’t have a choice but to believe unlimited wealth in the hands of too few is too much of a threat to the future of our species to allow it to continue without ensuring it halts immediately via guillotine.
Those who still don’t get it should ponder the wisdom of establishing an entirely new industry catering to the wealthy that will be responsible for the most significant environmental damage from a single human activity than all others, and that’s the amount of carbon pumped into our atmosphere to lift a ship into our outer atmosphere for ego boosting junkets for the pampered class.
They’re already responsible for the lion’s share of lifestyle contributions to our environmental issues, and no one is crying foul about their latest space penis ventures.
They’re not necessarily “evil” (even though Bezos does a tremendous job of being convincing in that area); they’re just self-serving adults with power who have the emotional development of children.
The consequences of failing to restrain power will undoubtedly be considered “evil,” but all of us will evenly share the blame.
thotbag 