#or a conspiracy by elon musk or something

[mytholegy]

.

[wilwheaton]

the scorpion doesn’t care who it stings

I posted this on my Facebook four days ago, and it seems to have taken on a life of its own for a minute.

I thought I’d repost it, here:

I can not fathom the emptiness, the insecurity, the insatiable need for attention and validation, the staggering arrogance, the malevolence and total void of human experience that is Elon Musk.

He's the richest man on the planet. You can't go anywhere or do anything without interacting with something he's part of in some way. There are literal millions of people who uncritically worship him, in spite of overwhelming evidence that he's a douchebag. Some number of them will come after me, as they come after anyone who points at their naked emperor. They'll spend entire days going after me and people like me, slavishly serving a man who does not even know they exist. They are his army of fools, uncritically serving his every whim. And it still isn't enough.

He can have any material thing he wants, and he will *never* be happy or satisfied. He has no real friends. Every single person around him is either a viper, a parasite, or both.

So what does he do? He bullies and threatens and harasses and trolls and behaves like the weak, scared, insecure child he has always been. That's a tragedy for him, but it's dangerous for us. He doesn't care what he destroys or who he hurts as he chases this existential thing he cannot ever have.

You know the saying "hurt people hurt people"? He's a hurt person who is hurting our society, making people I care about less safe. The consequences of this one man's midlife crisis are global, and that terrifies me.

In a comment, about an hour later, I added:

You know what's really interesting is the tiny number of people who are attacking and harassing me are either typical right wing idiots who all spew the same garbage from behind their wraparound sunglasses, or these weird nerds who are DESPERATE to justify how toxic and cruel and destructive Elon Musk is. Like, nerds, listen to Old Man Wheaton, please. 

Don't hitch your wagon to Elon Musk. There are countless people who are amazing and genuinely good, who do all the things we wish we could do. Stop defending this piece of shit who would push you into a volcano without even learning your name, if it would save him half a second on his way to his next shitpost on $8Chan (formerly known as Twitter).He doesn't stand up to anyone. He doesn't stand up FOR anyone. He is not your champion. He's angry and chaotic and destructive, and you have to understand that the scorpion doesn't care who it stings.

Finally, I want to add two things: 1) It’s interesting to me that a lot of the people who came to my post to be dicks used a lot of MAGA language. It reminds me of this thing my friend says about concerts: the audience looks like the band. Of course there’s substantial overlap between the angry, hateful, terrified, cowards who support Trump and the same who Stan Elon Musk, and it’s real interesting to see it in action.

2) I haven’t used Twitter for years. I quit before it was popular (lol) because it was better for my mental health. I logged in once when my book was published, and I deleted all my tweets when he announced he was buying Twitter. When he took over and immediately amplified a conspiracy theorist, I made my account private. In a perfect world, I would delete my account entirely. But I have to keep it for reasons I hope I don’t have to explain. After I posted this on Facebook, it made its way around Twitter (still is, four days later, which is ... a thing that is happening) and when people went to look at my account, they saw that it was closed. As much of a fucking manbaby Elon Musk clearly is, he didn’t do anything to my account. In fact, the only reason he even knows I exist (if he does) is through a vanity search of his name. I locked my account on my own, and so should you.

I am only on:

Tumblr

Facebook (itswilwheaton)

Instagram (itswilwheaton)

and my blog that I’ve been neglecting for too long at wilwheaton.net.

I’ve had a Reddit account since 2006, predating user-created subs! I’m u/wil there.

Okay that’s all. Thanks for listening. Please choose to be kind.

[ominoose]

𝐏𝐫𝐨'𝐬 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐂𝐨𝐧'𝐬

Pairing: Nathan Bateman x GN!Reader Summary: You make a smash or pass spreadsheet with friends, Nathan finds his part. Warnings: Reader made fun of slightly but turns out well in the end, its just silly :) WC: 836

It was a silly, fun little game. A night to let loose with friends, not hold back, no thinking or worries. Just a light-hearted tease. Simple.

It was not supposed to lead to Nathan Bateman storming up to you like a man on a mission, pupils blown wide in fury behind gold frame glasses. Ordinarily he wasn’t a man to be trifled with, even on his best days (as far and few between as they were), and everyone that worked under him, no matter how distant their role, knew to tread lightly.

Nathan was not treading lightly. The crinkle of paper clutched and creasing in his fist was all that accompanied the stomps of his boots on the carpet until silence reigned as he stopped in front of you, nostrils flaring.

“'Arrogant, rich asshole'?!” You’d never heard his voice so angry, so loud from the get go, and if your blood didn’t go cold at the quote you would have had the good sense to be more scared.

"‘Chewtoy biceps’, ‘Condescending in a sexy way’, Sexier Elon Musk!". It wasn’t looking good for you.

The group Google Doc wasn’t even your idea, listing the singles in your lives with the pro’s and con’s of sleeping with them in a “Smash or Pass” group call also wasn't your usual friend-groups past time, but you didn’t need much persuading to join. Nathans name being added to the pool hardly came as a surprise, but you boldly stamping Smash next to his name was.

It was a night of giggles and gasps, losing self respect in the name of forging deeper bonds, like girls at their first high school sleepover. It was not meant to get back to him.

“Mansplaining snob?!” The sharp words snap you back into reality from where you’d rabidly been trying to recall the words you typed that would now serve as your death sentence.

“I-”

“It’s not mansplaining when I have to dumb down simple fucking concepts for you to understand, sweetheart.” Despite the pet name, the way he waves the printed out screenshot in your face made it clear he’d kill you by death of one thousand cuts if he could.

How could you get out of this? You couldn’t, there was no way you’d come out of this with a job or reputation intact. It was a miracle he didn’t wait until you were in the middle of the office cubicles or a meeting to humiliate you. Then again the fact that he was furious enough to come straight to you with fire at his heels was equally terrifying.

“Wanna know what’d I’d say about you, hm?” His weight shifted on his feet, shoulders squared as he used every inch of his height to leer over you.

“I-I didn’t say this to your face!” A pitiful attempt at reasoning, as if the word mercy wasn’t something Nathan Bateman boxed for his morning work-out. Technically it was his own fault, he didn’t own Google, he shouldn’t be snooping in his workers private documents.

“Oh, okay then.” A higher pitch, raised eyebrows, the ghost of a smile. God, you were absolutely fucked.

And then he walked away. No stomping, no clenched first. It was the strut of Nathan that had just had a breakthrough.

This was off script.

The next few days were absolute hell. It was paranoia akin to living under witness protection after whistleblowing a major government conspiracy. Every email that came, every task assigned had you tensing and assuming this was it, this was the deathly blow.

Turns out the deathly blow was even less exciting than an email. It was an A4 piece of paper left on the centre of your desk, perfectly straight and ivory white.

‘Cons: -Overly sensitive -Acne marks -Didn't go to Harvard -Needs validation -Buys shitty clothes, probably from Temu’

Maybe being simply fired when he first confronted you would’ve been the easier option, that or death by the thousand cuts.

Nathan was never a man to mince his words, if you had a weak point he’d punch it and blame you for having it in the first place. You also knew you weren’t perfect, this was a job you’d clawed your way to, losing several nails in the process. Half your mental capacity was spent simply trying to keep above water, who could blame you for wanting a little ‘Well done, good job!’ every once in a while. Clearly, Nathan could.

The paper became blurry, hot tears trembled in your eyes, threatening to spill right in the middle of the office buzz. And how would you explain? Getting fired while having every flaw listed by your incredibly wealthy, accomplished, genius boss?

Blinking back the tears, there’s only half the letter left to read and getting it over with sooner was better than later.

‘Pros: -Funny -Can keep up -Nice ass -Annoying smile -Not materialistic -Honest’

There was only one word left at the bottom, one line above a phone number.

'Smash.'

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Mark Sumner at Daily Kos:

Hints that Elon Musk and Donald Trump are working their way toward an alliance have been increasing for months. Trump has wanted to tap Musk’s billions to solve some of his fiscal problems—like the hundreds of millions he owes after being found liable for fraud, sexual assault, and defamation.  As The Wall Street Journal reports, Musk might be offering something that Trump finds even more attractive than his bottomless wallet. Because Musk, along with fellow billionaire Nelson Peltz, is offering Trump a shiny new “data-driven” election system to stamp out voter fraud that doesn’t exist.  On top of that, Musk and Peltz are conducting regular soirees with other billionaires to convince them to turn against President Joe Biden. Musk isn’t satisfied with cutting a massive check for Trump; He’s trying to cut any support out from under Biden by putting pressure on other members of his billionaire boys club.  And he’s coordinating his efforts with regular phone conversations and meetings with Trump.

[...]

The budding alliance might seem surprising, considering Trump continually attacks electric vehicles, and Musk makes electric vehicles. Not so long ago, the two men were slinging insults at each other, but that was before Musk’s private jet started dropping in near Mar-a-Lago and Musk began insisting that the U.S. could only be saved by a “red wave” in the upcoming election.  Now, according to The Wall Street Journal, Musk is considering an “advisory role” in a second Trump White House. Trump and Musk have found common ground on immigration, where both are big fans of the racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory that insists progressives are seeking to destroy Western culture by allowing a flood of immigrants into the U.S. Musk has repeatedly spread and amplified lies about non-citizen voting and promoted the Great Reset conspiracy theory, which insists that COVID-19 was part of a vast plot to somehow install a “world government.” That’s just a fraction of the long list of COVID-19 and vaccine misinformation Musk has promoted.

Right-wing X owner Elon Musk wants to team up with Donald Trump with the intent to stop nonexistent “voter fraud.”

Before he became a far-right mouthpiece, Musk left the Trump Administration’s advisory boards in 2017 over 45 pulling the US out of the Paris Climate Agreement.

[lizardsfromspace]

Something so dark about seeing stories about advertisers ditching Twitter after Elon Musk agreed with an antisemitic conspiracy theory and said the ADL is suppressing free speech to target white people, and in between that the head of the ADL declaring Elon is a leader in fighting hate bc he'll ban people for saying "decolonization"

I condemn the leopard eating my face, but commend his leadership in eating other people's faces

[creature-wizard]

I am sorry but you criticise people who believe in random pseudo-scientific theories and methods of healing and manifestation but you support pop culture witchcraft? This is so funny because you seem to be so interested in stuff having some sort of meaning and not being woo-woo, yet you think people creating gods and deities based on movies and series is ok? This sounds just as dumb as those with the flat earth theory and other silly conspiracies they believe in with all their brains.

Should I start praying to obi Obi-Wan Kenobi and consider Vader as Satan or something now 🤣🤣?

Well you see, anon, I'm a pretty big believer in the psychological model of magic, and a believer in the idea that belief is a tool. Pop culture magic/pop culture witchcraft goes along with this like peanut butter and jelly. If the effects of magic are primarily psychological, then incorporating Blorbo from your shows is bound to be as effective as anything else.

I'm also a pretty big believer in the idea of "if it helps you and doesn't hurt anyone else, do it." That's why I tell people to go on listening to "healing frequencies" if they genuinely feel better from them. Just, you know, don't expect they're going to cure a serious illness all on their own.

And of course the problem with manifestation isn't that people think that they can change their lives by doing affirmations and writing manifestation letters, per se. The problem is when people start believing that you manifest everything that happens to you, including parental abuse, and think that a dude like Elon Musk just ~manifested~ all his billions of dollars, rather than exploited other people's labor.

As for the flat earth comparison... well. Believing in flat earth requires you to do a lot of mental gymnastics to ignore a very obvious reality. Meanwhile, I've had enough experience to suggest that sometimes, under some circumstances, Some Very Weird Shit Can Happen. To pretend it didn't would be lying to myself, and to strain for a supposedly "scientific" explanation that actually does not suffice at all would be gaslighting myself. Acknowledging that these things happened isn't believing in pseudoscience, because I don't attempt to assign a faulty scientific explanation for them. If I tried to explain them through quantum woo, that would be pseudoscientific.

I hope that clears things up for you.

[mariacallous]

Elon Musk may have put the final nail in X’s coffin. On Wednesday, Musk appeared to endorse an antisemitic post by user @breakingbaht alleging that “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” In response, Musk posted, “You have spoken the actual truth.”

The original post seemed to echo the beliefs of the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, which is popular among white supremacists and right-wing extremists. The backlash has been swift. In a statement earlier today, White House spokesperson Andrew Bates condemned the “abhorrent promotion of antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans,” and marquee advertisers have been quick to pull their business. IBM, Disney, Liongsgate, and the European Union have pulled advertising from X in response to Musk’s post. According to a report in Axios, Apple has also paused advertising on X.

At the time of publication, Apple had not responded to multiple requests for comment, nor has it confirmed that it is pulling its advertising from X.

“Advertisers like IBM and Apple aren’t just big names, they’re big spenders on X,” says Angelo Carusone, president of Media Matters, a media watchdog group which has been tracking advertiser behavior on X. Carusone, citing data shared by data insights firm Sensor Tower, says that in July, the top five advertisers on X by spending were Apple, FinanceBuzz.io, Amazon, Mondelez International, and Hewlett-Packard. In the past, Apple has frequently been among the top 20 advertisers on X.

Carusone adds that Apple typically signals a certain level of brand safety to other, smaller advertisers. The company is also known for its stringent policies around controversial content in its App Store and on its own platforms. If Apple has paused, or plans to pause, its advertising on X, it “could have a halo effect,” Carusone claims, scaring other advertisers away from the platform. “It goes way beyond money.”

In August, X CEO Linda Yaccarino emphasized that the company was expanding its brand-safety tools, designed to give advertisers and marketers more control over what kind of content their ads appeared in proximity to.

But this recent spate of antisemitic content on X, and the juxtaposition of big-brand ads next to it, only underscores to advertisers that X is a risky bet, experts argue. “Even with those tools, if you’re an advertiser right now you’re thinking, there’s quite literally nothing I can do on this platform to improve my experience,” Carusone says.

“The problem with X is not only that there's misinformation and antisemitic content on the platform, and other hateful content as well, but that it's being spread by Musk himself,” says Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst for social media at Insider Intelligence, a market research firm.

“The brand safety concern for advertisers isn't just about the content but about the platform and the leadership.” Enberg argues that Musk has treated the company like something he could remake in his own image, not understanding that “what he wants and what he seemingly believes is not necessarily aligned with what users and advertisers on the platform want and believe.”

Under Musk’s leadership, X is expected to see an unprecedented 54 percent drop in advertising revenue, which previously accounted for more than 90 percent of the company’s total.

Even before Musk took ownership of then-Twitter, experts worried that his particular brand of free speech absolutism would lead to a flood of trolls and hate speech on the platform. In his first weeks as owner, Musk laid off nearly everyone working on trust and safety, the teams responsible for ensuring that hate speech, violence, and inappropriate content stay off the platform. (Hate speech did, in fact, increase under Musk’s leadership.) Musk’s lax approach to content moderation also nearly got the platform banned during the 2022 presidential runoffs in Brazil, the platform’s third largest market.

In response, advertisers began to flee, worried about the brand safety risks of their products appearing next to hateful or inflammatory posts. Since joining X as CEO earlier this year, Yaccarino, formerly global advertising lead at NBCUniversal, has seemingly been hampered in her ability to woo back advertisers by Musk’s decisions. And while X has claimed it was regaining advertisers, an October study from Media Matters found that X’s 100 largest advertisers were spending 90 percent less than they did before Musk’s takeover.

[joannechocolat]

Dear Mr X...

It’s hard to give up a relationship, even when it has become toxic. Even when it brings you no joy, it’s hard to accept the fact that you’re better off without it. To look at the time you spent building it, to write off those years and start again can feel like jumping off a cliff into a bottomless precipice. You start to think of all the things you’ll lose if the relationship ends; the good times, the shared friends, the laughter and the memories. Your heart sinks at the thought of trying to rebuild all that from scratch. The time. The work. The energy. It feels like a bereavement.

I feel like that about Twitter now. A relationship that began fifteen years ago, when I was someone different, and the platform was new and hopeful and designed for communication, rather than spreading division. Sometimes I still find myself mourning that time; the friends I made; the stories I wrote, the thousands of incarnations of the Shed. Some of my friends have been left there for good, their Twitter accounts frozen in time; their words all that remains of them. Perhaps that’s why I’m reluctant to leave, even though the bluebirds have flown, and even the logo is changing to something that looks to me a lot like a modified swastika – an apt comparison, given the way in which certain voices and political views have been given unasked-for prominence, while others seem to have vanished altogether from my feed. Feed someone garbage for long enough, and they start to sicken and die. That’s what happening via this site. I have watched it happening ever since Elon Musk arrived - a man so cartoonishly self-obsessed that it’s hard to even believe he’s real, except that no writer of fiction or game designer would dream of creating such a crass and substandard character.

X. What a choice of symbol.

X marks the spot for pirates in search of buried treasure. X is the mark of a person who is unable to write their name. X is the identity of someone who needs to stay anonymous. It’s a voter’s mark; an erasure; a mystery; a chromosome.

And it’s also an occult symbol, a rune: the rune Gyfu according to the Old English Futhorc, and Gebo in the Elder Futhark; both of which translate as “gift”.

The Anglo-Saxon rune poem that accompanies it goes like this:

ᚷ Gẏfu gumena bẏþ gleng and herenẏs, ƿraþu and ƿẏrþscẏpe and ƿræcna gehƿam ar and ætƿist, ðe bẏþ oþra leas.

which translates as follows:

Generosity brings credit and honour, which support one's dignity; it furnishes help and subsistence to all broken men who are devoid of aught else.

At first glance, this seems the opposite of what Elon Musk has done for the world. A man who sees social media as his own personal platform; a man who sees the cosmos as his own personal joy-ride.

The mistake we made was believing that Twitter was our playground. Elon Musk has made it his, and is currently in the process of breaking the toys, chopping down the trees and nuking the site from orbit, just to prove that play is overrated, and that only money counts. I can’t help feeling sorry for the little boy he must have been, and to wonder what he might have been like if he’d actually had any friends. But it’s time: and the change of branding makes it even easier to step away.

So maybe this is a kind of gift to the ones of us leaving Twitter. Misinformation, misogyny, transphobia, conspiracy theories and other kinds of social media poison have already made it increasingly difficult to feel safe there. (And fun fact, the word Gift in German happens to mean “poison”.) Perhaps the ultimate gift of X is the freedom from the toxicity that has built up in this most volatile of media; the gift of better mental health; of greater connection to our world; an escape from a toxic fantasy back into the open air.

I won’t leave altogether – Threads still isn’t open to Europe, and the jury’s still out on Bluesky - but I don’t want to give any more of my content to a man who values power and money over human connection. I’m @joannechocolat across all my social media - that’s Threads, Bluesky, Tumblr and Instagram – and I’ll still be posting stories on my ko-fi account at: https://ko-fi.com/story. But if you want to know what I’m doing, then sign up to my free newsletter on my website at joanne-harris.co.uk. I’m coming to believe that social media as I once knew it may have run its course for me: I won’t leave it altogether, but from now on I plan to invest more of my time and energy elsewhere.

And as for Mr X - I doubt you’ll be around forever. But while you are, my gift to you is this final story: written live on Twitter, as was, for all the little bluebirds.

There once was a boy who had no friends. His father gave him everything money can buy: toy cars, model aeroplanes, even rockets that really flew, but friends were impossible to buy, and the boy was lonely, angry, and bored. 

One day, when he was playing alone with one of his expensive toys, he saw a group of children playing in a nearby park. They sounded so merry and carefree that the boy was jealous. 

“Why don’t I have friends?” he cried. “I shall buy the park, and then everyone will notice me.”

And so the boy asked his father to buy him the park for his very own; and he settled there with his expensive toys, and put a notice on the gate, saying: Entrance fee, 8 shillings.

The children of the neighbourhood looked enviously at the empty park. Some of the wealthier ones paid the entry fee, but many of the children did not; instead, they waited outside the gates, and looked into the place where once they had all played together.

But still the boy was not content. None of the new children played with him. Instead they played their own games, and climbed trees, or played hide and seek, or lay on the grass watching the clouds. None of this served the boy at all, and he was sulky and discontent.

“If I have all the trees cut down, then maybe the others will notice me,” he thought.

And so he ordered his servants to cut down all the trees in the park. But apart from a few toadies and flatterers, the children still did not play with him, but mocked him secretly from afar, and fell silent whenever he passed by.

“How ungrateful these children are,” said the boy, getting angry. “I bought this park for them, and still they refuse to play with me! Very well, I shall cease to pay the groundsmen and the gardeners. The park will be overrun with weeds. Wild animals will roam there.”

And so the boy did as he had promised, and the park became a wilderness. No-one wanted to pay for it, and even the toadies and flatterers and children of wealthy families went elsewhere to see their friends.

The boy was very angry at this, but there was no-one to be angry with. All the other children had gone. And so he took out his rage on the deer who had begun to roam in the park, shooting them with his toy crossbow, and became known throughout the land as a mighty hunter.

[the-garbanzo-annex-jr]

by Nellie Bowles

→ Hard right goes White Genocide: The right-wing brand of antisemitism is people saying something to the effect of: Jews hate white people. And we’re seeing that a lot right now, all of a sudden, in very mainstream places. 

Let’s start with The Daily Wire: Candace Owens, a charismatic black conservative, has been harshly critical of Israel. Daily Wire co-founder Ben Shapiro, an observant Jew, was recorded at a private event saying her rhetoric was “absolutely disgraceful.” Candace Owens then posted: “You cannot serve both God and money. Christ is King.” Okay. Random time to bring that up, but okay? 

Then Candace went on former Fox News anchor Tucker Carlson’s new online show. And there, things got weirder. Here’s Tucker Carlson admonishing the Jewish philanthropists who are now refusing to donate to Ivy League schools. Those donors are put off by the woke antisemitism, but Carlson is mad they supported the modern Ivy League to begin with.

“I get why donors are mad. I have no problem with that at all. However, then I thought, well, wait a second, if the biggest donors at, say, Harvard, have decided well, we’re gonna shut it down now, where were you the last ten years when they were calling for white genocide? You were allowing this. And then I found myself really hating those people, actually. You’re okay with that? On what grounds were you okay with that? You were paying for it, actually. As you were calling my children immoral for their skin color. You paid for that. So why shouldn’t I be mad at you? I don’t understand.”

Candace Owens replies: “And obviously, you have a ton of white people that are asking that question, and they’re being called antisemitic, and I think that’s wrong. I think these are meaningful questions that deserve to be answered.” 

Adding to the chorus now is Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter/X. First, a random Twitter user responded to a prompt about what Hitler got right (I wish I was kidding) and wrote the following: “Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. I’m deeply disinterested in giving the tiniest shit now about western Jewish populations coming to the disturbing realization that those hordes of minorities that support flooding their country don’t exactly like them too much.” Then Elon Musk himself responded to that random user, writing simply: “You have said the actual truth.” 

And then here’s Charlie Kirk, founder of conservative youth group Turning Point USA, defending Musk: “It is true that some of the largest financiers of left-wing antiwhite causes have been Jewish Americans.” It’s not news that American Jews tend to be liberal. What’s being implied now (and in some cases said quite out loud) is something different, a deep and old conspiracy. And everyone toying with it knows that.

America: we’ve got it all. We’ve got Soviet antisemitism against Israel and Jewish particularity; we’ve got right-wing antisemitism around the question of do Jews want to kill white people and also are they white or what? The gang’s back together. And Jews are screwed.

→ Recess jihad: A Brooklyn parent group has been organizing students to protest the war. The teachers are on board. And so we have scenes out of Brooklyn this week of 700 students from some 100 schools marching, yelling pro-peace slogans like “Fuck the Jews.” Or there’s this great call and response the kids were doing as they marched. Call: Takbir! Response: Allahu Akbar! The kids stopped by some Jewish-owned businesses and did their chants. It was organized by the official parent advisory board, which is funded by taxpayers. I used to think “children are the future” was a hopeful phrase. . . anyway. Takbir! 

→ This man was almost the UK’s prime minister: This week, longtime Labor Party star Jeremy Corbyn refused to call Hamas a terror group, even as a very assertive Piers Morgan pushed him. It’s fun TV to watch because Morgan asked and asked (14 times!) and Corbyn refused, got mad, and eventually just crossed his arms and rolled his eyes. 

But we already know the answer. Here’s Jeremy Corbyn in 2009: “Tomorrow evening it will be my pleasure and my honor to host an event in Parliament where our friends from Hezbollah will be speaking. I’ve also invited friends from Hamas to come and speak as well. . . . the idea that an organization that is dedicated towards the good of the Palestinian people and bringing about long-term peace and social justice and political justice in the whole region should be labeled as a terrorist organization by the British government is really a big, big historical mistake.” 

Kumbahezbollah. 

And this week Corbyn’s brother, former politician Piers Corbyn, called October 7 a “false flag” operation. “The whole thing, whatever happened, was done with the connivance of the government of Israel or they used what happened as a pretext, it was a prepared thing. . . . It was a false flag operation. . . . A bit like Pearl Harbor.” Just like Pearl Harbor. Looks like brother Corbyn has been watching a little too much TikTok. 

In America, presidential candidate and professor Cornel West said this week that the Hamas terrorists were love warriors: “We dish out love warriors and freedom fighters every generation, which means that we stand in solidarity with anybody who’s occupied.” 

[renardtrickster]

Throwing my hat into the predstrogen ban/Exploded With Hammers ring, this might earnestly be more pathetic than anything Elon Musk has done. To be clear, Elon Musk sexually harassed a woman and tried to pay her off with a horse and has been very friendly towards and accommodating of the nazis on his platform, which makes him pound-for-pound morally worse than Matt Mullenweg. But the descriptor of "he's a petty child unaware of how mentally cooked he is" was only an accurate descriptor of him near the beginning. By now, I think he's reached a point where if he banned a trans woman for being mean towards him, he would just avoid talking about it unless he had a gun pointed to his head, and even then he'd be largely flippant or apathetic about the whole ordeal. He more or less knows that he's kind of a malicious dipshit, and acts accordingly.

With Mullenweg, meanwhile, there's something much more insidious about his behavior, or at least it feels more icky to me. Not only did he break the silence when he could have just not said anything and let predstrogen fade into the night, he then tried to paint himself as a reasonable man being victimized because some transgirl furry said "I hope he gets hit by a car with hammers glued to it" or something, premptively deflected any accusations of transphobia with a cynical appeal to the fact that he has gay friends, and then started hitting up random trans women in their DMs to explain himself or garner some support (nevermind how implicitly threatening this is). DERANGED COMPARISON INCOMING, but it reminds me of an observation Slavoj Zizek (schniff) made about a difference between the totalitarianism of Hitler and Stalin, specifically how the former made no attempt to portray himself and his regime as anything but a strongman political movement, while the former would do stuff like have prisoners send him birthday telegrams, or would join the audience in applauding when he was finished with a speech. The fundamental cruelty and level of power between the two was the same, but Stalin made more of an attempt to give a face to his authority, or create an illusion that he and his citizens were both subjects of rationality and hypothetically equal.

On both platforms, twitter and tumblr, nazis run rampant, harassment campaigns against their queer userbase succeed, the flagging system is useless at best and at worst is weaponized towards the end of said harassment campaigns (or flagging sfw selfies of trans women as mature content), and the trans people are scorned despite being the powerhouse of the cell due to all trans people being simultaneously terminally online and chronically funny. The difference is, Elon Musk knows he doesn't like them, takes steps to make it known they are not welcome there, and rarely feels a need to justify himself outside of conspiracy theories of the trans agenda sterilizing autistic children and making his daughter hate him. Matt Mullenweg, meanwhile, lets his abusive dysfunctional system run, causing all the same excesses as twitter, but then makes hollow gestures of him being down to earth, a reasonable man amidst a sea of unreasonable behavior, the guy who owns "the queerest website on the internet" and surely the queerest website wouldn't be consistently alienating to its trans userbase! There is no transphobia in the moderation team, the tagging system is not broken, the moderation system is not broken, there is no sea of bigotry and harassment driving people off the site, there is only a belligerent trans woman making death threats who deserves not only the most harsh and disciplined banning that anybody in the history of the website has seen, but also a visit from the FBI as well. Elon views what happens on X as a feature, not a bug, while Mullenweg denies the presence of any features or bugs. Not on his new PDF.

[morlock-holmes]

I think maybe nowadays people see it as a virtue for their leaders to be insane, and perhaps even to be inconsistent and gratuitously cruel.

Saying absurd things, or monstrous things, or stupid things provokes there anger of your enemies, allowing you to demonstrate your own strength by ignoring them.

"They want to bury me but they can't. The thing you fear most is that they might hurt you, but join my movement and become one with me, you will provide me the resources to be immune from harm, and because you will become an extension of me, you too will be immune from harm."

This is, in fact, extremely bad.

Trump does it all the time, "If they can do it to me, think what they'll do to you." Trump loves cancel culture; he frequently singles out a random citizen or minor functionary and spins elaborate conspiracy theories about them to an audience which salivates with excitement at the idea of going after them.

"Fighting cancel culture" means letting Trump, or Elon Musk, or Ron DeSantis or some other ghoul to say whatever they want, it could mean something else but they aren't interested in that.

[canichangemyblogname]

No. See. You need to understand.

Right wing conspiracy theorists aren’t actually afraid of billionaires. When they’re tweeting and posting about billionaires putting microchips in our heads or under our skin with vaccines; or when they’re shouting about shady billionaires controlling our politics; or even when they say things like “capitalists control the world” or “the elites are oppressing the working man,” they are being antisemitic. It’s not class consciousness.

They aren’t commenting on the power of “dark money” (where donors are undisclosed) in US politics or the influence of “big money.” They aren’t critiquing decisions like Citizens United or complaining about the obscene amounts of money funneled into campaigns. They don’t actually care about these things. In fact, if you let them talk long enough, you’ll find they agree with these things as part of a “free market” or something.

They are being antisemitic. They don’t believe that men like Elon Musk are a problem. They’d probably characterize him as the embodiment of the American Dream. They’d defend his right to do absolutely stupid shit with his money. They’d say he’s a genius, an innovator, and that the only reason you’re angry about his politics is because you’re jealous. They also tweet about “billionaires” trying to implant microchips into us through the vaccines while remaining silent about Musk’s neuralink. Why? Because when they use words like “billionaire,” “capitalist,” or “elite,” they mean “Jews.” Because they genuinely believe Jewish people control every monetary and financial system around the globe.

It seems many leftists do not recognize this. This ignorance of dogwhistles combined with a friendliness to anti-capitalist rhetoric makes many leftists susceptible to conspiratorial antisemitism and recruitment by the right.

These right-wing conspiracy goons aren’t the perfect subject for your Marxist praxis. You’re not going to convince them of the benefits of socialism. They’re just going to condition you to propaganda and make you further susceptible to an antisemitic worldview and policies. You might think they’re being ideologically *inconsistent* right now and are writing them off as dense and witless, but you will eventually find yourself far enough down the rabbit hole that what they’re saying “makes sense” and is ideologically consistent.

They don’t actually hate capitalism. They don’t actually see it as an exploitative economic system. Fuck, their most lukewarm seemingly anti-capitalist ideas are often incredibly vague and half-formed. “Capitalists control the world.” Okay? Thanks for a very… non-specific, vague, and half-formed ideological statement that fails to understand the complexity of capitalism as an economic system. Anything else? Any commentary on the instability of an economic system based on private profit? Any analysis on what this capitalist dominance means for the world, like its relationship with colonialism? Any suggestions for how to create a more equitable economic system? Any study of class consciousness, the intersectionality of class, the social bounds of a class, or class struggle? Anything beyond capitalism? Do they consider misogynistic, racist, colonial, or ableist systems? Are they normal about Jewish people? No. Nothing.

[thewebcomicsreview]

Tats has gone from veiled antisemitism to naked antisemitism with the Saturday and Sunday strips this week, jesus christ. Portraying the head of the ADL as a blood-sucking vampire with space lasers?

He posted this this week. I get that conspiracy theorists are very famously prone to shifting their worldviews to suit the needs of the moment, and that Tats has a history of doing that, but...

I don't know if this is giving Tats too much credit or too little, but something about his constant Elon Musk flip-flops feels...a little inauthentic? Like, this feels a little like trend chasing, now. I'm starting to get the Leasebound vibes, someone's trying to get big on alt-right Facebook right now.

[eerna]

my unprovable conspiracy theory is that Twitter is behind the insane bot onslaughts that have been happening lately bc why do they always flare up the day Elon Musk does something that makes people upset

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Jay Kuo at The Big Picture:

In 2020, Trump launched his Big Lie about a stolen U.S. election. Through a conspiracy among Democrats, foreign countries, and nefarious, shadowy bad actors including innocent voting machine and voting software companies, so the theory went, Joe Biden had managed to switch millions of votes and win his election illegally, making him an illegitimate president. It was such an audacious, almost laughable lie that historians and political scientists dubbed it Trump’s “Big Lie”—one so outrageous and so stunning in its implications that it somehow has to be true, at least in the minds of his followers. Now, in 2024, Trump is back at it again. On top of his original Big Lie, Trump is now pushing a 2024 version for the upcoming election: that illegal immigrants will be voting in numbers by the millions, rendering any result other than a Trump victory yet another fraud upon the American people.

Undocumented migrants aren’t allowed to vote in this country, and there are already laws on the books covering that. And there have been very few documented cases of non-citizens voting, certainly not enough to change the outcome of a national election. Nevertheless, recently House Speaker Mike Johnson made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to stand beside Donald Trump and proclaim that they were united in their resolve to pass a new law to prevent non-citizens from voting, never mind that there’s already such a law on the books and that such fraud rarely ever happens. Their actions are of course performative, meant to plant dangerous seeds that could grow into even more dangerous lies. In today’s piece, I’ll explore this newest attack and how Trump is hoping to spin it into The Big Lie 2024 style.

Existing law already outlaws non-citizen voting

Last week, when Speaker Mike Johnson traveled to Mar-a-Lago to seek Trump’s support, it felt eerily familiar. It’s become a rite of passage for GOP House Speakers to make the journey to bend the knee to Trump. We all remember the photo of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy standing supportively by Trump just months after the deadly attack on the Capitol that Trump helped incite. Like McCarthy, Johnson’s speakership hangs by a thread these days, with the far right ready to decapitate yet another GOP leader for having failed to toe the line, this time for Russia by denying critical aid to Ukraine. Trump’s support of Johnson came with a price, of course, because Trump is always transactional in his dealings. In this case, it was a pledge by Johnson to support a bill to clamp down on the alleged crisis in non-citizen voting. [...]

What the right claims about “illegal” immigrant voting

The idea that millions of undocumented migrants will cast ballots in 2024 and help steal the election for Biden is objectively far-fetched. But it taps into far deeper fears of brown- and black-skinned people taking over America in something broadly known as the Great Replacement Theory. The Great Replacement Theory is a racist ideology that falsely warns that migrants who don’t speak our language and don’t share our values are deliberately being let into the U.S. so that Jews and other Democrats can turn them into millions of future voters. This process will allegedly displace “white” Americans politically and economically. Right-wing amplifiers of this include Tucker Carlson (formerly of Fox News) and Elon Musk, owner of the X platform. This is by no means a recent theory. Waves of immigrants from Ireland, Italy and Eastern Europe sparked the same unfounded fears and conspiracies in the 19th and 20th centuries with respect to the “replacement” of more established “Northern European” Americans. But recent conspiracies around migrants have shortened the timeline of the Great Replacement and are warning that the hordes of desperate asylum seekers crossing into America now will be deployed this November to unlawfully tip the election to Biden. 

[...]

It’s crucial to call this out and push back

When Trump began attacking mail-in voting in 2020, claiming falsely and without evidence that mailed ballots were vulnerable, easily tampered with, and unreliable, it should have clued us in that he would reject the results of the 2020 election if they were unfavorable to him. We also should have known that Trump would exploit the “red mirage” created when Election Day ballots, which would favor the GOP, were counted before the mailed ballots, which would favor the Democrats. Trump would go on to demand that the vote counting stop while he was still ahead, even though millions of mailed ballots remained to be counted. We now already know that a main attack by Trump and the MAGA GOP will be upon the ballot counts, particularly in battleground states with high numbers of migrants whom he will claim voted illegally by the millions. This necessitates preemptive action.

Donald Trump, GOP politicians, and right-wing media commentators are pushing the lie that noncitizen voters will get Joe Biden re-elected, never mind the fact that noncitizens aren’t allowed to vote in federal elections. This is part of the right-wing’s white nationalist “great replacement” theory shtick.

See Also:

MMFA: Right-wing media figures are citing a Spanish-language flyer of dubious origin as evidence that Democrats are importing new voters to “rig” elections

[sevicia]

In 2035 there will be a way to connect apps to your heart rate monitor chip (they became mandatory in 2028) and you can hook it up to Tumblr and they introduce a function that like shows a person's heart rate on their blog (you can disable it but you have to do it again after 3 days) and obviously it bugs out a lot cause this is in fact Tumblr so when people get into discourse and they start watching other people's heart rate monitor blog widgets like HAWKS they'll see it flatline and start cheering all around ("🎉🌟 HOUSEKEEPER DOWN 🌟🎉") (there is discourse about "housekeepers" which is what landlords are called now because owning land became extremely common after the housing market collapsed in 2030) (actual housekeepers are mad as fuck and part of the discourse) and then the monitor just starts up again and everyone's mad as fuuuck not even impressed anymore because the first few times it happened people thought the bloggers who "died" just got revived via necromancy or something and all the "came back wrong" posts started going STRONG again and the x reader/imagine blogs were posting shit like "Imagine Jungkook being in love with you, but too shy to say anything because you are so radiant.... So he watches over you through your Tumblr blog and when he sees your heart monitor flatline he feels his own heart break he's crying so hard, and he DMs you confessing his love to you at last.... except it was just a bug and you get to read it right as your heart rate monitor connects properly again. He sees it start up again and is now crying tears of relief, even though the monitor shows a very high heartrate for some reason.... You decide to reply.... LIKE & RB FOR PART 2!!! 🫶" and then some guy figures out how to hack into people's heart rate monitor chips through reverse engineering the stupid fucking Tumblr blog widgets and starts killing people whose online personas he doesn't like via electrocution and this SUCKSSSS because his reading comprehension skills are like below those of the average Tumblr user (and the average Tumblr user's reading comprehension skills have gone downhill very quickly) so he just keeps fucking killing people and no one knows who he is because every other day there are like 10 to 12 edgelords claiming to be him until he lets his ego grow too big and blows his own cover when he answers an anon calling him a dumb fuck for being pro-widget killing (there's an entire community) by describing how the killing process works (the reply starts with "No. You know what? Fuck this. Fuck you.") and then he gets doxxed and put on the news and Tumblr faces a big fat lawsuit because staff just forgot 🥺 to nuke the post where he described how to kill people via their stupid fucking blog widgets that you have to disable every 3 days and everyone just started killing eachother and so it turns out that the real-life modern Light Yagami was always destined to be a Tumblrina instead of a Redditor/4channer and #monitorTHIS trends on Twxttxr (which is what Twitter/X was renamed to after a #girlboss #ally influencer won an arm wrestling match against Elon Musk back in 2028) (she replaced the vowels with x's to make it "gender neutral") (Musk was shot in the back of the head after he lost the match) (there are conspiracy theories claiming that she's actually on Elon's team and the whole thing was staged so Twitter could rebrand a 2nd time and be more "progressive" and make money off gays paying a monthly subscription that makes it so their tweets can only be read by people with the same labels as them on their Twxttxr bios) (the most used piece of "evidence" to prove this theory is the fact that Elon likes the letter X) for the next 3 weeks until a travel vlogger spots Elon alive and well on a cave near the edge of a cliff in Perú and then #PUSHHIMOFF trends instead