Now that Elon Musk has bought Twitter - now the Pit edition (Part 1)

[Larry_Borgia]

That was the name!

[Andy_L]

“Return of the Archons” is The Purge-PG style

[Great_Antibob]

@Dr.Drake

For the record, I think Sam is correct to observe that people here think a little less critically than they should about topics and individuals that are associated with the left or right,

Do I think it occurs? Sure

Do I think it occurs nearly as often as this post suggests? No

Do I think it occurs much less here than in virtually all the rest of the internet? Absolutely

[BigT]

What about you, Sam?

The right wing goes gaga over Musk after he buys Twitter and starts publicly agreeing with them. He does a lot of stupid things on Twitter. We make a thread about that. You feel the need to defend everything, no matter how poor the excuse. And you have to attack all of us for pointing out your excuses are bad.

Now the right wing is freaking out over the new CEO, and specifically about her being part of the WEF, pushing a right conspiracy about this being some shady organization that has infiltrated governments. They also freak out about her being pro-vax and pro-mask, and you put forth the “vaccine microchip” conspiracy theory. And you attack us for pointing out that is dumb.

It definitely seem to me that you’re the one being led by your politics. That this is why you take this all so personally. Don’t get me wrong: you’re more reasonable than the Musk fanboys. You actually seemed to get more reasonable in the middle there, when you were willing to admit problems with Musk.

But it very much seems that you just align with the right wing when it comes to how to feel about Musk. It’s very weird to change your opinion at just the same time that the right wing in general is changing their opinion of him.

[BigT]

Incidentally, here’s Beau of the Fifth Column (an admittedly progressive journalist) talking about how the right wing is reacting, and why. Turns out, Musk himself condemned the WEF, saying the same things Sam said about them infiltrating the government.

Let's talk about Twitter's new CEO....

[Maserschmidt]

Kara Swisher weighs in…

Kara Swisher

[Kimstu]

@Sam_Stone

The government of the Netherlands, in accordance with a WEF plan wants to confiscate thousands of farms and shut them down because nitrogen fertilizer is bad.

@k9bfriender

Remember when you were shown how wrong you were on this assertion?

@Wincerind

Could you provide a cite for this statement about the Netherlands? I live there and it is total fantasy. Total and utter nonsense. Not even a faint glimmer of truth on the horizon.

Oh lordy, it’s just a re-run of something I thought we had straightened out back in September.

@Kimstu

For Pete’s sake, Sam, you know better than to keep spouting this particular nonsense. The Dutch government isn’t imposing regulations about nitrogen fertilizer reduction for the sake of some woolly bureaucratic generalization about “how to run agriculture more efficiently”. They’re doing it for the specific purpose of reducing dangerous levels of nitrogen pollution, which the farmers themselves have not successfully managed to do in their efficient running of agriculture.

Not to mention back in July:

@Kimstu

Since the Netherlands’ agriculture and environment have already started severely suffering from its catastrophic nitrogen excess, what makes you think that the situation’s going to get any better if they just pretend the problem doesn’t exist for a while?

Nitrogen crisis from jam-packed livestock operations has ‘paralyzed’ Dutch economy
Ecological damage from manure fumes triggers calls for drastic change to agriculture
4 DEC 2019 […]

Nitrogen, a key nutrient for plants, is also an insidious pollutant. Fertilizer washing off fields ends up in lakes and coastal areas, causing algal blooms that kill marine life. Airborne nitrogen can also harm ecosystems. One source is nitrogen oxides, mostly from power plants and engine exhaust. In the Netherlands, even more comes from the ammonia vapors from livestock urine and manure. […]

The Netherlands is a nitrogen hot spot partly because it is a dense, urbanized nation, although controls on power plants and catalytic converters in autos have helped curb nitrogen oxide emissions. The bigger problem is ammonia emissions from concentrated livestock operations.

[gnoitall]

@k9bfriender

WEF is the new boogieman

The Trilateral Commission has rebranded.

[Kimstu]

I must say, though, it’s kind of refreshing these days to see conservatives doing some of the worrying about the outsize influence of the WEF for a change. We’ve traditionally seen some tepid centrist criticism from the likes of the Brookings Institution:

It is appropriate to criticize the World Economic Forum as an elitist gathering of the super-rich. Billionaires lobby to get all-access badges for the week and then share self-important selfies with the word “Davos” prominently visible. At plenary sessions, the values of capitalism are extolled, risks to the global economy considered, and the relationships between economic trends and governmental policies debated. At invitation-only receptions, at exclusive piano bars, and on the ski slopes, cards are exchanged, introductions made, and business deals concluded. On its face, Davos appears to be a meeting out of touch with the times, focused more on privilege than social change, economic displacement, or cross-cutting global challenges.

It is, however, in these precarious times that we need Davos more than ever. Economic and corporate leadership on global governance challenges is so urgently needed today for two reasons: First, political leadership around the world is stalled or gridlocked, preventing progress; and second, the global challenges we face — from climate emergency to the perils of populist nationalism, from the regulation of cyberspace and the ownership of data to the dangers and opportunities of mass human movements — cannot be solved without action by wealth-holders and decisionmakers of the corporate community.

Along with some more liberal in-depth critiques from the likes of The Nation:

A few weeks ago, the world’s power brokers—politicians, CEOs, millionaires, billionaires—met in Davos, the mountainous Swiss resort town, for the 2023 World Economic Forum. In an annual ritual that reads ever more like Orwellian farce, the global elite gathered—their private jets lined up like gleaming sardines at a nearby private airport—to discuss the most pressing issues of our time, many of which they are chiefly responsible for creating.

The 2023 meeting was organized around the theme of “Cooperation in a Fragmented World” and the topics up for debate were all worthy choices: climate change, Covid-19, inflation, war, and the looming threat of recession. Glaringly missing, however, was any honest investigation of the deeper context behind such an epic set of crises—namely, the reality of worldwide poverty and the extreme inequality that separates the poor from the rich on this planet. […]

All of this has occurred in an era of policymaking intensely antagonistic to the poor and all too favorable to the rich. In the early 1970s, wages began to level off as the economy was riven by rising unemployment, low growth, and inflation, otherwise known as “stagflation.” This was also a period of labor militancy. As economic geographer David Harvey has pointed out, for the US economic elite, these conditions posed a two-fold threat—politically, to their ability to hold sway within the highest reaches of the government and, economically, to their ability to maintain and build their wealth.

America’s CEOs found relief in the theories of an insurgent wave of neoclassical economists pioneering a model of capitalism that came to be known as “neoliberalism.” What emerged was a political project aimed at restoring the full-throated power of the wealthy, whose playbook included: decreased public spending, greater privatization, increased deregulation of banking and financial markets, slashed taxes, and pulverizing attacks on organized labor.

Since then, our economy has indeed been reshaped. At the bottom, growing parts of the workforce are now non-unionized, low-wage, often part-time, and regularly without benefits like health care, paid sick leave, or retirement plans. This labor crisis has been accompanied by an unprecedented $15 trillion-plusin personal (including mounting medical and student) debt. […]

Look at the debate over the debt ceiling taking place in Congress right now and you’ll see Republicans putting social programs on the chopping block in an attempt to both delegitimize and defund the government. If, however, you were to focus on the abundance unequally circulating around us, it’s clear that scarcity is a lie, a political invention, used to cover up vast reservoirs of capital that could be marshaled to meet the needs of everyone in this country and the world.

So far, the conservatives and libertarians like Sam seem to be bothered by the plutocratic elitism of the WEF only when it’s trying to advocate (however superficially) for environmental protection and public-health initiatives, not when it’s servicing the international capitalism status quo. But hey, any degree of skepticism that facilitates getting conservative/libertarian tongues even a little way out of billionaire-aristocracy assholes is a start.

[Smapti]

I guess the honeymoon’s over.

Quartering Receipts

[Euphonious_Polemic]

@Sam_Stone

the Pfizer chairman talking about implanting vax identification in RFID chips under the skin

Sam has completely fuckin’ lost the plot now.

I await his treatise on how the Lizard People are infiltrating our government.

[Cervaise]

the (((Lizard People)))

[Dissonance]

The Quartering? Jesus you’ve got a stronger stomach than me to not have long since blocked that hate filled, red pilled, MGTOW, ‘anti-woke’ cesspool of bile.

[Cheesesteak]

@Maserschmidt

Kara Swisher weighs in

Getting back to Musk… Yes, Yes, Yes, the correct free speech answer is to make the Turkish government throttle Twitter in its entirety rather than “limit access” to content critical of the government.

It’s amazing that this has to be explained to an adult.

[Maserschmidt]

@Cheesesteak

Getting back to Musk… Yes, Yes, Yes, the correct free speech answer is to make the Turkish government throttle Twitter in its entirety rather than “limit access” to content critical of the government.

The Turkish government has lost the same case twice in court, wants to Twitter years ago, and also to Wikipedia. Of course, the notion that he would be familiar with either the history or the law is laughable.

Jimmy Wales

Matt Binder

[Left_Hand_of_Dorkness]

@Sam_Stone

I don’t read that cite

You say this often enough about your cites, can you please just make it your signature?

Everyone else: we’re in Act IV of the Sam Stone play. We all know how it ends. Can we please just take it as read and move on?

[wolfpup]

@Maserschmidt

The Turkish government has lost the same case twice in court, wants to Twitter years ago, and also to Wikipedia. Of course, the notion that he would be familiar with either the history or the law is laughable

I presume you meant “once to Twitter”, not “wants to Twitter”. Yes, the Twitter case was in 2014, and as someone else said, the current self-imposed censorship by Twitter in Turkey comes from the new “free speech” Twitter. Elmo is blissfully oblivious to any of these facts, or the deep irony of his profoundly misguided actions. So instead he begins a debate with someone who challenged Twitter’s censorship in Turkey by asking him if his brain has fallen out of his head. Trump would be proud of this intellectual and factual style of debate.

Elmo is such a fucked-up combination of narcissistic arrogance and cluelessness that he often does sound just like his pal Trump. Both are a danger to democracy. They’re so similar, in fact, in both being narcissistic blowhard sociopaths, that I offer here two key distinctions so we can tell them apart:

• Elmo possesses a good deal of native intelligence, but it’s extremely hampered by being locked up in a sociopathic mind. Whereas Trump is a congenital imbecile.

• Elmo possesses a good deal of actual knowledge, but it’s all technical knowledge, as befits a sociopath. He doesn’t know anything factual about social and economic policy – his beliefs are straight from the wingnut echo chamber. Whereas Trump, needless to say, doesn’t know anything at all.

[HMS_Irruncible]

It’s tough to talk about Musk having anything like a conscious strategy. But I can’t help noticing that the furor over Yaccarino being a Deep State WEF Globalist is a very effective distraction from the fact that she’s an advertising executive.

Astute minds will, of course, remember Musk and his shills laughing off the plummeting advertising revenues by saying “we don’t need ads, the advertising-based model is dead.” Whether Yaccarino was brought onboard to rescue the ad business, or redirect blame for its failure away from Musk, it’s obvious that “post-advertising Twitter” was always a fraud, and Musk still has no concrete ideas on how to rescue the company after toxifying its brand via association with white supremacy.

[Euphonious_Polemic]

@HMS_Irruncible

via association with white supremacy.

Come on now! It’s not just white supremacy. He’s also associating twitter with censorship on behalf of dictatorial state power!

[BeepKillBeep]

@Sam_Stone

Trudeau wants a 30% reduction of fertilizer use in Canada. In modern farming, that’s close to meaning a 30% reduction in crop yield. We don’t fertilize if we don’t have to, because that stuff is expensive.

It doesn’t. Stop lying.