It takes some reeeeal fucking brilliance to re-invent the Subaru Brat, only...
...uglier and with a smaller truck-bed.
But it's arrow-proof!
So finally! Those fucking carjacking wood elves can kiss my ass!
...........
Remind me again. Why did we ever think this dude was some sort of visionary..?
To me, anyway.
I really don't have much of a fighting-dog on that particular flight. I don't use the app personally (I'm here, still blogging away like the refugee from the Nineties I am, or on Facebook - largely only because I still have long-distance friends that the Metaverse lets me stay in touch with...) so whether it lives or dies in a spectacular collapse is kind of a matter of indifference to me.
So the interest here at the Fire Direction Center is purely academic and out of curiosity.
But I am fascinated, in a sort of bemused way, watching a whole bunch of things very "21st Century America" slam into each other in this Twitter crash.
I've never "got" the Musk-fanboi. The guy owns a company that builds...ohmigoadSpaceRockets!
Yeah, well, so did that old Nazi Werner von Braun.
But somehow this seems to have created a club that looks at this joker as some sort of culmination of The Buddha, Johnny "The Wadd" Holmes, and Croesus. Mostly because of the space rocket thing.
(There seems to be a subset of fans of his cars, but the rockets seem like the big draw).
But...c'mon.
Einstein's Wall means that manned space flight is a nonsensical macguffin best left to science fiction, and since the end of the big NASA programs the inevitable consequence of letting plutocrats take over - space tourism - turns the whole Right Stuff legacy into WTF? Stuff.
The fact that the USG has let this fuckstick take over the launch of communications satellites is infuriating, mind you. It's the astronautic equivalent of what we've let Republicans and greedy privatizing bastard (but I repeat myself) do to the Post Office; turn what should be a public good - communicating with each other - into a cashbox held by a greedy bastard.
Turns out that you don't really have to be that much of a "genius" to own a rocket company. You can be a greedy bastard and clueless outside your lane so long as you start by being a rich greedy bastard. Turns out that the best way to make millions is to start with millions. Who knew!?
We're Americans. We're enthralled by shit that goes fast, makes noise, or beeps when you push its buttons. Twitter is just another tech gimmick, albeit a fairly useful one for talking to other people.
The notion that it's something "important" seems a fairly accurate metric of the sort of thing that the American public finds "important", and runs concurrent in my estimation with the amount of time that the recently-concluded election spent talking about "transgender".
There are such things as transgender people.
They're a tiny subset of the set "people", and they - like all people - just want to live their lives. Some happily and productively and sensibly, some madly and dramatically, some...well, just like everyone else.
In a sensible world, we, the "rest" of us, would mind our own fucking business and let them mind theirs.
Instead, because of a bunch of nitwit wingnuts, we've wasted an immense about of time, money, and intellectual throw-weight fretting about them.
It's the same with tech.
Twitter is a postcard. Facebook is a letter. TikTok is...sort of a postcard with moving cat pictures.
The platform is just another way of talking to one another. The "how" may be gee-whizzical. But the "what" is the same old-same-old that Sumerians did with clay tablets.
Which is to say, if not Twitter? Something else will be there to talk through.
Clay tablets, maybe. Whatever.
If we were willing to think of it that way, we'd realize that what's important is what we say and show and do, rather than the how.
And that brings me to...
Supposedly the whole nonsense began because a) Musk was baked, and b) pissed off because one of his favorite right-wing assholes had been STFU by The Bird, so he c) did some dumb things that forced him into paying way more for this thing than he should have, so here we are.
Supposedly this all started because Musk (who may have been baked, remember...) wanted to "Free the Bird".
And yes, all the wingnuts have been raving for a long time about "freedom" and "their freedoms".
Those "freedoms", so far as I can tell, are largely the "freedom" to fuck around and not get kicked in the ass for it. To do rude, stupid, destructive-to-the-commons stuff and then not have to hear the non-rude, non-stupid, and/or non-destructive bystanders tell them they're being rude and stupid.
(kinda looks back at the whole "transgender" thing here...)
The "open-carry" fucknuts? The "rolling coal" d-bags? The sorts of people who want to pry into your bedroom, or your uterus? The white-is-right open racists, the "wimmens-is-stupid" misogynists?
Yeah, all those assholes.
They're cranky because they were told to sit down, shut up, and stop being rude stupid assholes.
Y'see, I grew up in the Sixties, when ALL that rude, stupid stuff was just "how Americans are".
I remember hearing and using the expression "Jew him down" for bargaining; it wasn't "racism", it was "how Americans talked".
I remember hearing my Chinese friend described as a "slope" and not immediately pounding the speaker senseless because that was "how Americans talked".
I remember seeing how badly the black kids in my school were treated, how girls "did this not that", how there were one set of rules for rich and powerful and another for everyone else, and that ws just "how America is".
Then, slowly, painfully, sometimes violently, incompletely, some "Americans" started pushing back against that rude, stupid shit.
It started to become unacceptable to call people playground names, because, well, that IS rude and stupid.
It became less-acceptable (if not completely UN-acceptable) to treat people like shit because of their skin color, or their gender, or because of who they liked or loved.
And the rude and stupid people haaaaated that. So they fought back.
They found a natural ally in "conservative" groups - since most of the "conservative" groups believed, like them, that "bitches" and "faggots" were icky and that the Good Old Days when you could just call them "bitches" and "faggots" and beat them up were Good - and turned their rude stupidity into "free speech" so they could push back the pressure on them to be less-rude-and-less-stupid by slamming it as "woke" and "politically correct".
So all these rude, stupid wingnuts have been foaming at the mouth in anticipation of Musk turning his new Twitter toy into a place where everyone can be rude and stupid to the people that wingnuts hate.
And that seems to be happening.
A rich, greedy rude (and, it now seems, pretty stupid) "genius" makes a dumb move while baked because his rude and stupid fanbois are fapping to him making the dumb move, and in the process takes something that other non-rude, non-stupid people find useful to communicate and makes it ruder, stupider, and worse.
The fucking Post Office?
Medical care?
Politics?
It seems like there's nothing that 21st Century America can't find a way to let - or encourage - rich, greedy, stupid douchenozzles to make ruder, stupider, and worse.
So.
I'm hopeful that the good (not-rude, not-stupid) people I visit on Twitter (hi, Arielle Dror! Hi, Mark Hertling! Hi, Scamperbeasts!) don't go away if (when?) the Bird hits the window.
Perhaps that's the most irritating part about all this, and what makes me less "fascinated" and more "irked with the antics of greedy rich bastard"; that all these good people (and cats...) are going to take it in the shorts because some baked knucklehead has a bunch of rude stupid asshole fanbois.
But people, eh?
As one of my old platoon sergeants summed it up:
"Some fuckin' people could fuck up a wet dream."
Probably as pithy an epigram for the damned human race as was ever coined, and so, since I can't add anything, here's another cat picture.
Over at Yastreblyansky's joint he's initiated a discussion of the sort of "freedom" the Trumpenscum and assorted tech billionaires like Musk and Thiel are pimping:
"...pursuing happiness has to be something we do collectively, as social beings. That makes it not only a different list, but also a different concept of what liberty is--I mean, making it into a slogan, the conservative idea is liberty from other people and the liberal idea is freedom with other people."
That's fine, as far as it goes. But I think the whole business is a lot simpler and more primal.
This is simply about a certain sort of person, the sort of person who gravitates towards something like the 2022 GOP and someone like Donald Trump, who wants to do whatever the fuck they want to do without a moment's thought for the consequences.
They don't want consequences, period. They want to be immune from ALL the shit their nonsense stirs up; gunfire, lawsuits, mean tweets, censorious looks...it's all about being able to be what they want without so much as a single hard look in return.
Now.
That's a kind of "freedom".
Tom Hobbes described it as "the war of all against all". It basically comes down to that if you can do what you want to without consequence, I can do what I want to, and if I'm bigger - stronger, smarter, richer, a bigger fucking sociopath - that you are, I can do it to you and you just have to suck it up.
It's the 21st Century Melian Dialogue; the rich do what they can, and everyone else - the poor, the dark, the non-cis-het, the planetary climate, everyone - suffers what they must.
It's not a very new concept, or a very original one.
And it only appeals to the sort of nitwit who thinks there can't be anyone bigger, stronger, smarter, more sociopathic, that they are.
In other words, the stupid, the greedy, and the egotistical fathead.
Which means it appeals to a Donald Trump. And all the little mini-Trumps out there (around here we just call them "assholes") who make up about maybe 60% of the GOP.
(...the other 40% or so are just fucking morons, QANuts and people like Margie Green who couldn't think their way out of a wet paper bag. They're the "lean Objectivist jerky" that Scalzi talked about; the real monsters will, if they're lucky, keep them as pets (Greene will be some plutocrat's muppet as long as she keeps her looks) but in a pinch will make do with them as soylent green)
The problem is that a whole bunch of the inhabitants of the US circa 2022 - not just Republicans, unfortunately - have been so addled by the firehose of chatter they encounter every day that they have become largely unable to think their way through this.
I mean...it's hard for ME to keep up with the constant stream of lies, damned lies, and commercials - Steve "I Fell Asleep With My Head In The Toilet" Bannon's "flooding the zone with shit" - and I'm a lifelong cynic, skeptic, and political junkie who is utterly immune to GQP nonsense.
So we have people who depend utterly on an impartial government to protect and defend them from rapacious fucksticks like Thiel and Musk and Exxon and Amazon and every other plutocrat who would be their kings...voting for people like DeSantis and Trump who think that they ARE kings and who will let these plutocratic scum BE kings.
(And the problem with Trump himself, of course, is that so long as someone like Thiel sucks his ass and lards him with flattery and bling Trump doesn't care enough about the actual kinging to get in the plutocrats' way. It's kind of ironic that Tubby loves him some Putin, because Vlad the Impaler made damn sure that he put the boot hard on the neck of his plutocrats. For a while after the crash in 1991 it looked like Russia would become just another kleptocracy, with the mob bosses, the New Rich, looting the joint while their pliant figurehead opened the shopping malls and chaired the committee meetings.)
I'm not sure what the hell the rest of us can do about this.
IMO the real issue is that in a massive industrial democracy the only way that the citizens can be involved and informed is through things like newspapers (increasingly irrelevant) and the various electronic media like television (cable and otherwise) and the various internet sites.
The outfits that inhabit these places, the ones that "inform" Americans, seem utterly unable to be clear about the simple reality I've laid out.
I'm not saying they have to be "against" the notion that the strong/rich do what they can...etcetera.
But that they make it clear that is what will happen without some sort of collective protection - whether in the form of a union, or a government (which is needed to back the union against the sort of money power the union's employer will use against it).
Without that?
You as an individual are prey.
Instead, as Jordan Orlando over at Rectification of Names points out (citing John Ganz here):
"An outline of the institutional shape of this politics is coming in to view as well: there’s rich donor oligarchy on top, in the middle there’s the think tanks, magazines, and podcasts that serve as kind of currency exchanges where the coin of mob grievance is turned into respectable notes, and the concerns of elite politics are translated into terms the mob can understand and use, and then there’s the public platforms where little armies of trolls are mustered for whatever task is required by their political masters.
In short, it’s a model of the kind of corporate society they wish to secure and reproduce on a larger scale: big bosses, middle-management, workers, all happily coordinated and cooperating. No unions, no pesky social movements, no restive professional managerial-classes with their moral pretensions, no federal bureaucracy meddling and gumming up the works with regulations. The “cancellers” will themselves be cancelled: subjected to harassment and intimidation by the mob if they get out of line. There will be no epistemic hierarchy: just “freedom,” an informational anarchy that translates into the impossibility of the exchange of real content and any rational deliberation."
Yep. That's it. That's the plan.
Or, as Driftglass used to sum it up:
There's a club.
And you're not in it.
And people like Trump - and Musk, and Exxon, and Kroger - like it that way.
Those dusky border ruffians are put on notice! The Mount Rushmore State Mosstroopers - a whole platoon of the hardened veterans! - will fan out and become The Wall! No pasaran!
Seriously. Some Republican fatcat is paying for a whole platoon or so from the South Dakota Guard to TDY down to Texas to stop the Brown Hordes.
Be assured that now the Republic is safe from La Raza.
Hey, Abbot? Hey, Noem? I seem to recall we tried this once. It didn't go all that well.
"We left the border for Parral
In search of Villa and Lopez, his old pal.
Our horses, they were hungry,
And we ate parched corn.
It was damn hard living
In the state of Chihuahua
Where Pancho Villa was born."
Update, 6/29 pm: Dan Nexon wins the Internets:
"These were people who were just brutally...marginal; sad, hardscrabble fuckups who were often just one mishap away from being human trainwrecks, deadly combinations of barely-bright, poorly-educated, undisciplined-to-the-point-of-undisciplinable. In the Army we called these sorts of people "shit magnets". “Bad stuff” just “happened” to them; car wrecks, arrests...lost time, lost jobs, lost husbands and wives, lost lives. Tonya was a kind of patron saint for those people..."This is and was a sad fact rather than an opinion; the world is full of such people, and the wreckage that their shit-magnetry leaves behind.
Just in case you're wondering why the 90% top income tax bracket, regulation of credit default swaps, an end to offshoring and downsizing, a public option for health care reform and a swift end to foreign filibustering aren't going to be coming around anytime soon.