In the post shared by Musk, the account lamented the presence of humanitarian groups in the Mediterranean Sea that rescue migrants from distressed vessels....
His PR agents probably did something cool with Tesla and SpaceX. He hired an agency after his PayPal payout and fired them around the time of the "calling an actually helpful scuba diver a pedo" Thai cave incident. This is who he's always been, it was simply previously filtered out by professionals.
If I had someone whose entire job was to prevent me from shitposting or being a complete dick, I would look pretty great all the time too. Everyone would.
He's just a racist egotistic techbro mining heir who wants people to think he's a genius übermensch, and to show him love like his parents seemingly didn't.
10-15 years ago I remember being told that Nazism couldn't take hold again in Germany because of all the laws, and the education in schools about Nazis, and stigma, and people who would fist-fight Nazis in the street if they saw right-wing symbols.
Was I sold an optimistic outlook or has the situation just changed that drastically since then?
As a non-German who is particularly not keen about Nazism but who doesn't speak enough German to keep a closer eye on it over there, I'm grateful for your name and shame overview.
Yeah, exact same thing is happening in Australia. Even the camps, they're just not explicitly extermination camps as much as "destroy your soul with indefinite and lengthy confinement" camps. They prefer the name "detention centres" though. I hope refugees in Europe are treated better than that.
It's something, I'll take it. I suppose I shouldn't underestimate Germany's fondness for legal systems and bureaucracy, even if I'm sad cultural change efforts haven't been as successful as I had hoped.
While I'm not convinced the distinction between extreme right wing supporters and Nazis is as significant as you suggest, I do understand that it is possible to object to unchecked mass migration without being a Nazi or even being right-wing.
Refugees and corresponding xenophobia are a pretty standard global topic for obvious reasons, and as much as I wish infrastructure could be instantaneously built, I know it can't be.
But:
AfD members have called for a second Holocaust ... the execution of refugees ... the imprisonment of homosexuals ... the creation of a new SA ... the imprisonment of left wingers in Buchenwald ... and practicing apartheid.
We're well past discussing the nuances of "what separates Nazis from other far-right ideology" and plausible deniability when someone starts invoking the name of fucking Buchenwald. Even if the rest of that list were somehow acceptable or could be explained away, there's no mistaking what Buchenwald means.
I'm not surprised by the global rise of the right-wing rhetoric as the situation gets harder for 99% of people. I have been watching that closely for years. Xenophobia is always presented everywhere as the false easy solution. What I am surprised by is that Germany is allowing politicians to advocate specific Nazi atrocities when there are purportedly laws against glorifying Nazis.
Agreed about active prevention, I think that's why I'm so surprised and saddened Germany hasn't done much better at it. There were active legal and education strategies put in place and I wanted to believe it could support sufficient systemic change.
At 12.6% of the vote for AfD from last election though, it seems to be nowhere near sufficient. And that terrifies me.
For generations, the Navy SEALs have attracted top athletes who compete for slots on elite teams and take on harrowing missions, but never in all those years did the Navy regularly test the force for illicit steroids and other drugs that could boost performance. Now that is about to change....
I was close-ish in age, and had the same experience. I knew it was warning us about something very important, but I couldn't fully appreciate all the references at the time. I think it changed my life. That's a pretty big thing for a 4 minute song and animation.
It was a total mindfuck for a kid, just watching music videos on Saturday morning TV before the internet really dominated our world, to have the news stories of the time and history lessons shown like this. It was a stark contrast next to "Gettin' Jiggy wit It" by Will Smith and "My heart will go on" by Celine Dion, that's for sure.
Ableism is a huge systemic cultural issue, and like most other huge systemic cultural issues, Trump just exemplifies it. His entire 'value' lies in echoing condensed sound-bite versions of commonly-held antisocial beliefs. He's an empty vessel of a person, a human-shaped Pandora's box.
All we can really do is name those beliefs and actively work against examples of them in our own spheres of influence.
When I described him in 2016 as a "wannabe Lex Luthor comic-book villain", someone said I was exaggerating. The truth is that at the time I was somewhat exaggerating. That person made a fair assessment of what was an emotionally-charged reaction to the election results.
I dislike how accurate the description ended up being.
Like, who even says this shit for real? And who laughs at it? What even? I can't understand it at all; and it sort of scares me to know that I might one day randomly encounter someone in power who laughed when he said it.
Honestly, when I said it, I had a specific image in mind. It seemed just as absurd as the whole situation, and my comparison was more a reflection of that than Luthor's character.
Image description: Entry for the word 'forty' from an old Superman-themed children's illustrated dictionary that uses both the word and numerals. Lex Luthor is running while wearing a hot pink and green super-villain costume of questionable taste. Behind him he pulls a rope attached to a simple yellow four-tier cart of what looks like full 12 inch pies, complete with crusts. The image has a light pink background.
Text content: Forty. When no one was looking, Lex Luthor took forty cakes. He took 40 cakes. That's as many as four tens. And that's terrible.
Hi all! I was hoping someone could give me some advice! I have a new momma and six squirts, five days old. I made her a birthing box and she liked it for a bit, but now she keeps moving the kittens to a place under the bed where it’s kinda dusty and feels like a bad place for babies. I would move them back to the box and five...
I also sort of love how lawyers keep taking these cases, like it's somehow not the legal equivalent of a fly deliberately walking into a Venus fly trap.
Nah, <NewLawyerName>, you got this. All the rest of those lawyers were never as smart as you! /s
I like the quote "You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with“. The longer I'm around, the more true it seems to be.
We don't always get to choose who those 5 people are, unfortunately. But when we can we need to choose carefully who we want to be more like and how we are influenced. Avoiding bad influences would be pretty hard while working in the justice system.
Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani definitely both chose poorly. I wonder how shitty they were as people beforehand though. Maybe they just found their soul-mates/cell-mates.
The buzz out of the Code Conference this week is, naturally, all about the disastrous performance of X / Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, who closed out the two-day affair in spectacular fashion. Vox’s Peter Kafka, who has been going to the conference since it started in 2008, called it “the weirdest session I’ve ever seen.”...
[2 mins 15 sec] Yaccarino: "I work at X, he worked at Twitter, X is a new company."
...
[3 mins 16 sec] Yaccarino: "The team at Twitter is fantastic"
At least she lasted 1 whole minute before that embarassing contradiction. I can't do another 38 minutes of watching that mess though, too painful right from the start.
Elon Musk attacked German support for migrants and promoted a call to support the AfD, a far-right extremist political party (www.businessinsider.com)
In the post shared by Musk, the account lamented the presence of humanitarian groups in the Mediterranean Sea that rescue migrants from distressed vessels....
Red flags in software engineers
Samsung Galaxy S24 leaks, to have thinner bezels than iPhone (9to5google.com)
Navy Will Start Testing SEALs for Illicit Drug Use (www.nytimes.com)
For generations, the Navy SEALs have attracted top athletes who compete for slots on elite teams and take on harrowing missions, but never in all those years did the Navy regularly test the force for illicit steroids and other drugs that could boost performance. Now that is about to change....
Pearl Jam - Do the Evolution (1998) (piped.video)
This song came up in a "Best Music Videos of all time" thread the other day and it has been haunting me since then....
Trump Mocks Hammer Attack On Pelosi’s Husband In Incendiary Speech (www.forbes.com)
Trump makes Bond villains look good by comparison.
Need Help! Hope this is a good place for this! (i.imgur.com)
Hi all! I was hoping someone could give me some advice! I have a new momma and six squirts, five days old. I made her a birthing box and she liked it for a bit, but now she keeps moving the kittens to a place under the bed where it’s kinda dusty and feels like a bad place for babies. I would move them back to the box and five...
Rudy Giuliani’s Georgia Lawyer Just Ditched His Case (news.yahoo.com)
Chilling on the bean bag (lemmy.world)
Bonus picture!...
Linda Yaccarino was set up to fail (www.theverge.com)
The buzz out of the Code Conference this week is, naturally, all about the disastrous performance of X / Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, who closed out the two-day affair in spectacular fashion. Vox’s Peter Kafka, who has been going to the conference since it started in 2008, called it “the weirdest session I’ve ever seen.”...