this post was submitted on 03 Feb 2025
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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 day ago

Nobody voted for Musk, but they did vote for Trump. They voted for a GOP controlled senate and a GOP controlled house. They voted for this administration despite the Project 2025 roadmap making it clear what Trump and the GOP were going to do if they were put in charge. And now, they're doing it.

In the past they haven't protested as more and more power has been given to presidents, both D and R. So now Trump is using all that power and delegating it to someone of his choosing. This isn't a coup. A coup is an unlawful seizure of power. The power was handed to Trump and the GOP lawfully, and Trump is just delegating.

This is a real Leopards Eating People's Faces moment for the USA. This is the result of decades of the American people expressing their will, or at least not objecting strenuously. This is the country that voted Carter out of office and enthusiastically voted in Reagan. It's a country where most of the democrats celebrate Bill Clinton, despite his policies of deregulation and deindustrialization. Compare that to Germany where the mere fact that the slightly right-wing government was willing to work with two far-right AfD members has been enough to get hundreds of thousands of people out on the street, protesting.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

yeah but also people voted for the guy after Elon said he's officially buying him and jumped around like a reanimated troglodyte to celebrate his purchase.

anyone with a second brain cell could tell that he would be in charge even if he weren't doing it so publicly.

[–] [email protected] 45 points 1 day ago (4 children)

Remember: it's not just trump and musk to blame, the entire Republican party is responsible for supporting all this.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

Never let Mitch McConnell off the hook, despite how he now says he doesn't like what Trump his doing. Since this all started, he has done nothing but enable him and has done as much as anyone to put the guy in power. Same to be said of Graham. When this all goes terribly wrong(er), none of us should, for a second, allow them a pass on any future backtracking or apologizing that they might do.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago (1 children)

The American people too, don't forget about them

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago

For the second time

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

And to a lesser extent, the corpo Dems for their pissweak "opposition".

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

If you want to do a bit of Both-Sides-ism, big chunks of the Dem Establishment have also been very friendly with Elon. FFS, he didn't have any trouble landing contracts under the Biden Admin. And he led Gavin Newsom around by the nose with his Hyperloop promises for nearly a decade.

But I'd say the more pervasive concern is how heavily leveraged Elon's businesses are with respect to his Saudi creditors. And that's the real snarl at the end of this problem. The US has made the Saudi Royal Family such an enormous nexus of dollar inputs and outputs that Aramco might as well be a second Federal Reserve.

Our addiction to fossil fuels is driving significant chunks of our bad policy, both domestic and foreign. And while you can wax poetic about Americans "not voting for this", there's a deep socio-economic bond between American industry and cheap oil. Americans "vote" for the Saudis with their labor hours and their consumer spending on a daily basis.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

We don't have a lot amount of choice in our employment and consumer spending because of regulatory capture and economies of scale. Without any new coordination mechanism, getting off oil will have to be a top-down change.

Big oil has convinced us to cut down our own "carbon footprint" to encourage purity testing and exhaustion instead of collective action. They know it's an externalities problem... do we?

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 day ago

We don’t have a lot amount of choice in our employment and consumer spending because of regulatory capture and economies of scale.

That's true to a degree. But all too often, I see employment and consumer choices influenced by propaganda rather than raw economic forces. Whether or not you attend college is often not an economic choice but one of peer pressure and social expectation. Whether you move into the city or stay remote in the suburbs/exurbs is as much an expression of your social anxieties (amplified by "if it bleeds, it leads" local media coverage) as your economic position. While driving isn't typically a choice, the size and shape of your vehicle absolutely is. People opting for increasingly large and ostentacious large-cab trucks and luxury SUVs are not acting under economic constraints. Often, Americans will pay a premium to live remote, drive a gas-guzzler, and subsist on disposables as an expression of their wealth.

This isn't a problem other countries have. Germany, Japan, South Africa, India, Brazil, Mexico, even fucking Russia have figured out how to build densely and leverage mass transit to bring down waste. The Americans are uniquely incapable of developing efficiently. A big part of that is purely cultural, with white Americans having fled to the suburbs to avoid their black neighbors in the 70s/80s and putting a premium on one story ranch homes even in areas like San Fransisco or Chicago or Atlanta, where land is at a premium.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

Also if the dem inside trader are happy with their stock going to the moon they dont care what happen to the rest.

The whole establishment is based on corruption and foreign influence.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

Yeah, most of us didn't vote for Trump either. We need to reform the elections to establish an actual democracy

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 day ago (3 children)

It’s amazing that destruction of his reputation is going to go down in history as surpassing his destruction of the Twitter brand.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

His reputation was and is being a scammer who got lucky.

I think the bigger historical footnote will be that he was allowed anywhere near a government in the first place

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

The government was designed for guys like him.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 day ago (1 children)

He's buying the means to determine how history books are written.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

History books are written at a state level actually, you can thank the lost-causers for that one.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 day ago

History books are written by the winners. We'll have to wait to see what they say about Muskrat and Trump.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 day ago (4 children)

You have to have a good reputation in order for it to go down. He was always perceived as capitalist scum

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

He was always perceived as capitalist scum

He was regularly lauded as "One Of The Good Ones" as recently as Trump's first term. The Electric Car Guy. The Hyperloop Will Be The Best Form of Rail Transit Guy. The We're Going to Mars Guy.

He's a carnival barker, but its absurd to say he only gulled the conservatives. Liberals have been falling for this man's schtick for decades. Right up there with Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, and George Soros as an obscenely wealthy gremlin we were all supposed to trust.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 day ago (1 children)

All he needed to do was stay quiet and get rich via multiple companies, maybe keep pushing electrification and renewables, and most of society would have kept considering him the real life Tony Stark pushing humanity forward.

The US especially has no trouble idolizing flawed people as long as they have lots of money and/or high-visibility accomplishments.

If Musk does have one exceptional skill on top of his good fortune in life, it seems to be finding promising companies and taking credit for their shit. And it totally would have worked for him. But no, being a mustache-twirling nazi-saluting villain gets you more attention.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Nah, we hated him for that. Under what corporate media rock do you live in?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

Please note I said “most of society would have kept considering him the real life Tony Stark” and most of society absolutely does live under a corporate media rock.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 day ago (2 children)

No, I remember the time when people went all "he's like the next Steve Jobs!" and meant that in a good way

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 day ago

I'll be the first to admit I liked Elon when I first heard about him. I was uninformed and now that I've been informed I can't tolerate him or his egregious actions done on my/our country. FUCK ELON AND FUCK TRUMP 🖕🖕🖕🖕

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

If Elon Musk had suddenly died days before he accused that diver who saved those children from that cave of being a pedophile, he would've been remembered as the real life Tony Stark that never got the chance to bring us to a new golden age. But now he's viewed as a shitty James Bond villain.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 1 day ago

Tony Stark is an asshole lol. He is the villan

[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

hmmm this was clear as day before the election... so a more accurate headline would be "the majority of people who voted, voted for Elon... the majority of the rest couldn't be bothered"

Putting that aside, I am holding predictions until the Feb 05 marches and I am willing to give the dormant populous of the USA a couple more weeks to go on a general strike and stop this madness... but it increasingly seems the people in the USA are now too numb, too busy, too stressed out, too ignorant to realize they are sheep being taken to the slaughter house

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 days ago

That's just it. Most people are too numb, busy, stressed or ignorant. I reckon it's by design

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