A Perfectly Reasonable Amount of Schadenfreude about Things Happening to Trump & His Enablers (Part 3)

The BBQ Pit
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It’s something leftists yell at me about, actually; that I’m not willing to be all Princess-and-the Pea hypersensitive and refuse to deal with businesses that are insufficiently morally pure. Because I don’t think it’s practical (moral purity is not a common characteristic of business), and in fact self destructive. And ultimately about ignorance more than righteousness, a “moral” business by such black-and-white standards is one where you don’t know enough to condemn it. Any large organization is going to have plenty of terrible people in it.

That doesn’t mean you can’t target especially egregious & clear-cut examples - like Musk & Tesla as of now - but trying to live your life trying to avoid any product that has someone, somewhere in the supply chain who isn’t “good” will either turn you into a hermit or a guilt-ridden mess. It’s not possible to be “good” when you take responsibility for the acts of people a dozen removes from you that you have no control over.

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Dude - I largely agree with you. I sometimes wonder whether you’re the canary in the coal mine or the boy who cried wolf (if he had actually thought that dog were a wolf1). I sincerely hope it’s the latter.

Anyway, the point is that it is not feasible for anyone who bought a Tesla a couple of years ago to go and sell it now. We’re talking about serious money to replace it, and judging by the dozens of Swastikars Cybertrucks on my local Tesla dealer’s overflow lot, there is not much demand, making selling them even more difficult.

I tend to give Telsa (car2) owners a bit of a pass - they likely didn’t know how bad Musk was. I’d always known he was an asshole, even when he bought Twitter. I just didn’t realize he was a fucking Nazi.

1 - It’s not the perfect analogy, but it’s what my increasingly addled brain came up with.
2 - Not cybertruck owners, though. They’re douches, every single one.3
3 - Sorry, James May, you jumped on the douch train by sticking with Clarkson.

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Really, those are the same thing; recall, there was a wolf in the end. The Boy was at fault because at the beginning, he lied. Not because the wolf never showed up.

If he’d really believed there was a wolf then he’d be a “canary”, someone who passes along an accurate warning because he’s more sensitive to the threat than others.

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I would.

I never really understood this “this person is a bad person, therefore you should stop liking anything and everything they have ever put out” mentality.

I had people on FB once guilt tripping others to do the same thing due to an actor appearing in movies that others found good. I forget who it was at the moment, but let’s take anyone as an example, like Roman Polanski movies. I don’t think it was him, but how would you feel if someone was like “everyone should STOP watching Roman Polanski movies IMMEDIATELY or else be accused of being a supporter of his”

Sorry, but the two are not linked…not at all. I can hate Roman Polanski but still think Oliver Twist is a good movie. If it was a favorite of mine, it wouldn’t just SUDDENLY, MAGICALLY turn into an unfavorite of mine.

Let’s use your Paul McCartney example even… Okay, he turns out to be a Nazi, so what? So dislike the man, but IMO, it does not suddenly make “Let It Be” A BAD song. People are still going to like it, much like myself…and yes, I will feel completely not guilty listening to it and enjoying it, just like I would enjoy listening to any song I had already loved all of my life even if the singer or writer of it did something deplorable.

It’s like if Frank Darabont suddenly became a nazi. Or went the Roman Polanski route. Does that mean I have to now hate Shawshank Redemption and NEVER watch it again? That’s silly. It’s just not gonna happen… and look ., if you want to think of me as JUST AS BAD as him (if he did that stuff), I say “more power to ya, have fun”… then I will be over here enjoying my copy of Shawshank Redemption, while you are…
…Shawshank Redemption-less.

At what point does it just become silly?

IMO ANY cultural art peice (book, movie, song, show, art) should never be pooh poohed or rejected due to the makers troubles (that exist outside and not connected to the thing itself). If you don’t agree… well…that’s you

345

There is a big difference between not buying any more Eric Clapton albums and selling your old car and buying a new car immediately.

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Quick derail that’s not too apropos of anything - saw yesterday in the wild my first Cybertruck, and surprised myself feeling an instantly visceral, inwardly-recoiling grossness. Not that it gave me a heart attack or anything, but was an unwelcome jolt, to be sure.

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It just reminds of the show Babylon 5, where one of the human characters told the story of the boy who cried wolf to the alien ambassador Londo Mollari. He tried to explain that the moral of the story was that lying is wrong.

Londo retorted that he didn’t think that was the moral of the story; the moral was just to not keep telling the same lie. I always liked that scene.

The whole MAGA team (including Elon) learned that lesson and bombards us with too many lies to refute them all fast enough to matter.

348

I think you’ve mixed up your Space Station Stories.

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We are all here to nitpick, but despite the songwriter attribution of “Lennon/McCartney”, this one (“Let it be”) was mostly John. (IMHO)

However, Beatlemania goes only so far in protecting us from the ubiquitous trump; let’s not go too off-topic. Yet.

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For me, the Cybertruck just went to being an amusing eyesore to an immediate “Fuck you for driving it.” I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time seething over it, but I’m going to make assumptions about a person’s politics if they own one.

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I own and drive a Toyota D4D doublecab, the epitome of rich white priviledge in my country (South Africa). Even I make assumptions about a person’s politics if they, too, own one.

Sometimes judging a book by its cover is really accurate.

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You’re right, that’s exactly what I did.

(I like both Londo and Garak about equally, they were my favorite characters on both shows with fantastic quotes.)

353

Yes, this. It’s become a symbol of evil, and an ugly one at that.

354

There has never been a good justification for buying a Cybertruck. The earlier Tesla vehicles had a great reputation and especially when there were fewer options for EVs it made sense to get one. I used to say that my dream car would be a Tesla. (Maybe 5-6 years ago anyway.) Ugh, definitely not now!!!

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No, just no, definitely not, it was almost all Paul’s song. It was a reference song to his late mother which partly came to him in a dream. He wrote it with Aretha Franklin in mind, who first was reluctant to sing it because she was afraid that people would identify “Mother Mary” with Jesus’ mother and thus Catholicism, but later she covered it anyway. I don’t know how much John contributed to it, but you can almost always tell who mostly contributed to writing a Beatles song by the one who sings it.

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I remember John telling James Cordon on the Carpool Karaoke show how he conceived of it and it was just as you said.

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I always liked the Cardassian take on things. “Always burn your bridges behind you - you never know who might be following you!”

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Er, you mean Paul, don’t you? John died long before Carpool Karaoke started.

359

Errrm…

360

Fuck, Freudian slip.

Damn interchangeable Beatles!