This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Elon Musk apparently didn’t dismiss empathy entirely, but thought that we have a problem with empathy for the wrong people. How do you judge?”
I partly disbelieve this moronic assertion but won’t deny it’s possible he would say something so stupid.
I wouldn’t put it past him because he disowned a daughter that he paid to ensure she was born physically as a male.
He got pissed that he didn’t get what he paid for and punished his child for daring to assert her identity.
Suppose he lacks empathy, which he seems to demonstrate while bemoaning his inability to experience empathy proudly. In that case, he’s a walking-talking case for how badly screwed up some kids can be when their sociopathic parents severely screw them over.
It still amazes me when I look at photos of him as a kid because he appears as a somewhat sensitive type of nerd who tried being himself but was abused for it.
That’s the only explanation I can devise that makes sense of his severe state of dysphoria (minus the drug addiction of both the chemical kind and the egotistical drug of power through his wealth).
He appears as a youth to be a typical “sensitive” who would likely have been highly empathetic. Still, it’s been beaten out of him through likely mostly verbal abuse (because he doesn’t appear to show typical traits of physical abuse — such as scars or even an emotional coldness in his demeanour). (Unlike DonOld Trump, whose physical abuse is written all over his demeanour. You can almost read the number of times his father physically beat him like counting rings on a tree trunk.)
Statements like the one attributed to him show the child attempting to speak through the cracks of a semi-polished exterior.
Empathy is like any other characteristic, which presents itself in varying degrees throughout the population. Empathy is like muscle mass; it has a developmental potential but must be cultivated to show itself in its most developed form.
In his case, his capacity for empathy was stripped from him and has been starved to (near?) non-existence.
I suspect some vestiges of empathy remain alive within him but that he’s trapped in a world where he cannot trust, allowing himself to experience it because the fear of permitting himself to experience it openly has been beaten out of him by his parents.
It’s not that the “wrong people have empathy” but that people have had their empathy wrongly denied their right to experience it without adverse repercussions.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why are GOP voters suddenly alarmed about Ramaswamy’s and Musk’s stances about H1-B workers compared to locally sourced ones? Weren’t they supporting them and voting knowing that these men would be involved in policy-making directly or indirectly?”
None of their supporters were interested in the sausages their leaders intended to make. All of them have been more wrapped up in being enamoured by the superficial trappings of personality politics.
They voted for Trump because they admire him as a human being, even though he is beyond apparent in his overtly abusive and criminal behaviour.
They believed the only people that Trump, Musk, and their entourage of parasitic human slugs were going to victimize were the people in their imagination that they hated.
They shut their eyes, ears, and minds off to the realities of their words and promises.
I doubt even one of them made the slightest effort to peruse Project 2025 as they dismissed complaints about it as fake news and propaganda.
It’s the same intellectual laziness at play that we see when they make vague references to The Constitution that show they’ve never read it themselves.
They operate purely on instinct, and their instincts tell them to hate the world because they are in pain. Meanwhile, the exploitative parasites in our midst that they trust point out to them who they should hate, and they mindlessly go forth hating the people who are fighting on their behalf to make this a better world for everyone, including them.
They are so lost in the throes of their hatred cult that many will not stop hating their fellow citizens even after significant damage has been done to the nation. They will insist on some nefarious entities, conspiracies, and machinations by their political “enemies within” who are responsible for their policy failures.
If kids get hauled off in cages again, they’re going to rationalize that as a public good in the name of national security. If those kids get sold off to wealthy couples for a profit, they will rationalize that as being a better solution for those kids than being raised by their “filthy illegal parents.”
They will destroy families and lives all over again because they operate on instincts tweaked by paranoia over manufactured fear because the things they should fear are just too overwhelming for them to grasp. It’s much easier to fear and hate defenceless people than to hate the powerful, particularly when they’re all focused on developing sycophantic relationships and worshipping the ground they walk on in the hopes that they, too, will be blessed with unfathomable wealth.
This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Is it okay to not be okay after all people have put you through like the damage has been done?”
Either yes or no, depending upon how one interprets the perspective behind this question.
It’s not okay that you’re not okay, but it’s not okay because of anything you need to be ashamed of. It’s not okay that people have done what they have done to make you not okay.
You don’t need permission to be not okay in the same way you don’t need permission to eat when you’re hungry or use a bathroom when you have to go.
Being not okay with damage done to you is a natural consequence of the damage.
No one escapes being damaged to feel okay, no matter how much they try to shake it off.
Damage is damage.
If your car gets a punctured tire and is flat, you can’t ignore that damage without doing more damage to your car.
Your body and mind are the same.
If you can’t heal and you try to ignore the damage done to you, you will damage yourself and others along with you.
Your highest priority should be to heal, just as if you’ve broken a leg and need to give your bones time to mend.
The mind is no different.
You can’t continue like nothing happened.
It’s not okay that you’re not okay; you need to give yourself time to become okay again.
It’s also not okay for someone else to make you feel like something is wrong with you for needing time and space to heal from your damage.
If that’s the expectation you are facing and what prompted your question, then be aware that such an expectation by others only harms you more.
It’s called victim-shaming, and it’s a heinous attitude and behaviour indulged in by broken people who are not okay themselves. They never took the time to heal, and because of that, they don’t know how to respond to you by doing you damage.
It’s evil behaviour that you should not not tolerate. It would help if you told them that it’s not okay to make you feel not okay for not being okay.
Unfocused rage is likely the most encompassing sound-bite answer to this question.
MAGAts hate struggling in their lives — like everyone does. These days, during our historic levels of income inequality and minimal tax burdens on the wealthy, as they plunder our world into extinction, everyone but the top is struggling.
MAGAts have had their emotions leveraged against them, though, by a steady diet of hatred toward anyone and everyone not responsible for their hardship.
They’ve been taught to hate liberals because the left is a threat to the oligarchs.
They’ve been taught to hate immigrants because they’re an easy target to blame for their misfortunes. It’s a form of manipulated displacement.
They’ve been taught to hate minorities because they have been conditioned to believe minorities, like trans people, are assaulting their way of life simply by existing.
They’ve been taught to hate women because women are easier to victimize when they can be called “baby killers.”
They’re afraid of how quickly the world is changing and feel left behind, and they hate that.
They’re afraid of being unable to keep up and are insecure about their future. Meanwhile, the groups they’ve been taught to hate appear to weather the storm better than they do, and they hate that, too.
They hate a status quo that seems deaf to their pleas, and Trump is a disruptive element in society that echoes their hate. His perceived political outsider status and natural personality of overt indulgence in hatred convince them that he represents their interests.
He validates their hate fantasies and permits them to indulge openly in their hatred while manifesting it in physical reality. They don’t realize how much other people struggle with similar emotions or that they acknowledge how a significant reason why fantasies should remain fantasies is not all fantasies should be acted out because they are too destructive to be made manifest. They are fantasies that should remain fantasies because they function as forms of therapy. Making them real necessitates entirely new levels of treatment.
MAGAts have lived a lie through their belief systems that blur the distinction between fantasy and reality, and that has convinced them to blur distinctions even more, to justify coping with all the pent-up hatred.
They can’t grasp long-term strategies or how distant a consequence can be from an action.
For example, a complaint they expressed was the cost of living, and because their narrow view of the highest authority in the land means that person dictates how everything works, it was easy for them to blame Biden. They didn’t learn to understand how the corporations that feed the media empires with profits would not risk losing those profits by demonizing the price-gouging corporations who butter their bread through advertising revenue.
The Republicans have been leveraging the naivety of their undereducated constituents for decades. States like Kentucky can sink into poverty while their leader overtly grows their wealth and blatantly betrays the entire nation, and they still can’t connect the dots.
All of this is a recipe for wallowing in the kind of hatred that can only escalate dramatically further as the fiscal incompetence of Republicans catches up to them. Their economic mismanagement has now run out of room to blame the Democrats. Trump’s strategy for tariffs and utilizing Elon Musk to be the voice of cutbacks in the trillions while gearing up to make the public accept enduring another round of austerity will begin to crack their support.
His appointments to senior administration roles are already horrifying as an overt pedophile has been appointed Attorney General, his Health and Human Services Secretary is an overt mental health case, and his Secretary of Defense is a television talking head. These three are already a toxic enough recipe for disaster, while the list of notables merely adds orders of magnitude to the levels of concern these already register.
Anything innocuous and unpredictable can become the match that sets the entire edifice of plutocrat manipulation over the last half-century into flames. This administration seems poised to ignite public backlash as Trump pushes an economy-killing tariff agenda and insiders like Elon Musk warn of impending cuts at impossibly surreal levels and public adjusting to another round of austerity.
The MAGAt argument, on its surface level of concern for the cost of living, appears rational. However, its sincerity will be tested in ways that challenge national stability at previously unseen familial levels. The cracks in the social contract will dramatically grow at the level of fundamental building blocks for society.
Once we’ve breached the final veneer of tolerance and the MAGAts realize they’ve been played for fools while hating the wrong people, they will harness all their unfocused rage into a tight focus to enact destruction on orders of magnitude well beyond what they have achieved thus far in society.
Once they reach rock bottom and have their come to Jesus moment, the plutocrats responsible for dividing the people and ripping us all off will have hell to pay.
By the second year of his term, they’ll start to wonder what’s going on.
By the time the next election rolls around, they’ll begin seeing it’s no longer “business as usual.”
They will begin to realize that he meant what he said when he said no one would have to worry about elections any longer.
That’s when the fear will creep into them… the last of them because many will have already undergone harsh awakenings when discovering that prices have skyrocketed while employment protections have vanished. They will freak out when they find out they cannot count on retirement as they struggle with minimal incomes to survive on bare minimums. The entire nation will plunge into a recession that could very well become a depression due to environmental and regulatory mismanagement that will make the Bush housing crisis and the “Great Recession” pale by comparison.
Drug prices will skyrocket, as will medical bankruptcies. Millions will lose their healthcare as employers will cut back on employee expenses, and nothing will prevent them from converting the entire working class into a slavery system worse than it is now. The economy will radically shrink through their isolationist approach to international politics, and whoever remains will fight their neighbours for scraps.
That’s not the worst thing for them to lose, though.
No.
The worst and most profound loss they will experience is the compassion of their fellow citizens who warned them.
When they begin crying foul, they’ll find no sympathy.
There will be no quarter for them. No sympathetic shoulder will await them when they realize they’ve hit rock bottom.
They will finally get the disdain they’ve consistently demonstrated toward their fellow citizens for decades.
They will find their hatreds finally reciprocated in the harshest of terms with a simple “we told you so.”
They will find doors of sympathy slamming shut on them because they won’t be the only ones suffering from their hateful motivations. The entire nation will learn to hate MAGAts on such a visceral level that an escalation of antagonism will become the norm for the following unpredictable number of years — possibly the entire next century.
They’re going to learn how the fabricated hatred they’ve been displaying toward their fellow citizens is nothing like genuinely earned hatred.
When they finally realize the profundity of what they have lost, it will be experienced as a prolonged moment of debilitating horror that transfixes them. They will mourn the loss of a nation they professed to love. They will be overcome by paralyzing guilt accompanying the realization that they killed it by their ignorant and envious “stick-it-to-the-libs” attitudes, their hateful projections, and their self-fulfilling prophecies of doom they feared were to be caused by their fellow citizens.
They will have only themselves to blame. They will become this century’s brownshirts in the aftermath of the destruction they wrought against their people, neighbours, and fellow citizens. The entire world will regard them like drug addicts who have hit rock bottom and can’t be trusted ever again.
When they finally achieve their moment of harrowing clarity, it will be too late to turn back the clock and regain the stature of world power they enjoyed. The entire world will have marginalized the nation while permanently considering it a threat to global peace and security instead of its protector.
They will discover such a profound degree of shame accompanying a sense of loneliness and being lost and adrift in a massive ocean surrounded by the enemies they made of their fellow citizens that many will turn to suicide… and worse, no one will care if that’s what they choose for themselves. Many will feel the same relief they did when Rush Limbaugh finally stopped polluting this Earth with his hateful noise.
It will take all of the rest of this century for Americans to recover their dignity.
thotbag 