Sadly every major power tends to be the baddies to some extent, it’s how they get to be and stay major powers. We just get to grade on a curve. Nazi Germany really set the curve and the US got to be the pretty unambiguous good guys, at least up to the firebombing campaign in Japan, the nuclear bombs, and being complicit after the fact in Japanese atrocities by shielding them from consequences.

While we have an “ambient” level of baddie-ness most of the time, we at least have balanced it out by sometimes defending against unjust violence and providing humanitarian aid.

Now Trump seeks to turn that baddie scale up to the max while simultaneously cutting out all aid efforts.

Elon musk is a white immigrant, and they are cool with white refugees, per the executive order to prioritize getting white South Africans in.

Multiple of these people have had their wives insulted by the movement, but at the end of the day even if they are their wives, they are “just women” so no big deal for them.

Orange Republic?

Of those actually in power, as a rule they don’t idolize Trump and I would say are manipulating Trump more than Trump is manipulating them.

Trump’s straightforward enough, he’s a megalomaniac. Make him rich and/or stroke his ego and you are golden. Trump doesn’t really have a lot of ideology outside of self-worship.

Much of his executive administration is the brainchild of the Project 2025 folks. Those folks are basically being like Dick Cheney, all agenda zero interest in “taking credit”. Trump is useful, they just have to say “Trump is great” and feed him a mountain of executive orders to sign and he’ll happily do it, while asking for a one liner vaguely describing the order, marveling about it and signing it and moving on.

Musk is different because while the PJ2025 people are all too happy to yield the spotlight, Musk is very loud as he is also a megalomaniac. He’s fine with buying and placating Trump’s ego, but he also must be front and center screaming “look at me”.

To the extent these folks are working together it’s because their interests don’t conflict. RFK Jr. wants to play with a health system that no other stakeholder in this game cares about, but otherwise doesn’t care. The PJ2025 people might not have gone this viciously after USAID as Musk’s vendetta is taking him, but they certainly don’t mind.

So what happens when interests collide? Well see when Trump declared the US was going to go in, take over Gaza, and spend shit tons of US resources on rebuilding that for resort development while doing an ethnic cleanse. That’s a lot of evil to try to hide, more than I think they like trying to pull off this soon, but more importantly to them that’s an expensive thing they don’t want to pay for. So they just pretended that Trump never said the things he said and invented a new narrative retroactively and acting like the media was stupid for failing to understand. The manipulation continues, and Trump is fine because they played it so that he was always right, even as they retroactively changed what he said about US troops and investment. Netanyahu’s manipulation worked, but then his administration manipulated a different way.

Now if PJ2025 and Musk reach a conflict, don’t know how that will go.

lives in a shark at that value.

Well that’s certainly a choice…

And Germany provides just the word for me in this case: Schadenfreude

I’m not big on the video thing, but the Wikipedia article at least mentions most of this. Though you have to be aware of the broader dot-com context to know that getting millions from Compaq for a website in the late 90s didn’t mean anything much beyond luck.

This is a strong reason why I would think it would be a tactical error to mess with the elections. Elections are the pressure valve that people are willing to wait for. You can do so much harm and all is forgiven if you step down after an election loss.

Take away that mechanism, and you put all your leadership at huge risk, for minor benefit (history has shown they can get their way like 90% of the time anyway, the “left” will barely even say anything about their material goals and let them stand).

The funny thing is that as much hubris as some folks show, they have nothing on those that have it in them to get to multi-millionaire status.

You’ll see someone so full of hubris and just talking out of their ass, but faced with a question or statement that derails their talk, even those people will kind of pause while their brain struggles with what the hell just happened, before carrying on generally still out of their ass, but they stammered for a bit to get back to that hubris.

Those that have the real hubris in them, don’t even bat an eye. They don’t even consider for a millisecond that information inconsistent with their world view is worth processing.

In my job I’ve dealt with a number of multi-millionaires and I’m usually struck by just how dumb and incompetent they are.

The economy does not reward hard work or intelligence, it rewards hubris and megalomania.

From what I have read, he’s basically always been this way, but it was more hidden. People who knew him personally would write about his nature, but the media swept all that under the rug because they wanted to relish in the concept of a hotshot tech genius billionaire, and his ego drove him to be quite eager to play that part.

Actually he got his start selling some random website to Compaq in the middle of the “everyone throw their money at random websites” craze of the late 90s. So he was among the folks that won the dot-com lottery.

Then he took his winnings and rolled it into x.com, which was solidly on a trajectory to fail. He also wasn’t allowed to be in charge.

Then after the merger with the much more popular PayPal (which could have done just fine without X.com ever coming along), Elon somehow got put in charge. He wanted to run the whole thing on Windows and it was a terrible terrible decision, with Paypal only being saved by kicking Elon out. Despite his role being just briefly in charge of it taking a wildly successful product and nearly destroying it only to be kicked out, people popularly credited him as ‘the Paypal guy’.

So a guy got lucky and got $22 million from Compaq, and then $170 million from eBay because he still had a ton of PayPal stock despite no longer allowed to make decisions about it, and was carried by his “he was in charge of PayPal!” creds into Tesla, rewriting history of that company to declare himself a visionary founder rather than an early investor after the fact.

All the while the media sucking up to him hard, putting him in various cameos and references to portray him as a great mind of modern times, a real life Tony Stark. Feeding his ego while people close to him personally wrote about what a loser douchebag he was.

near you.

I appreciate the effort, but this sort of minimizes just how far a lot of people are from a state capital, and how unlikely they can just up and take a day in the middle of the week to just go to their state capital. Particularly on what was, at most, a week’s notice. This just seems doomed to produce an underwhelming turnout.

Many of the blue states send republicans to the house, and if those districts went the other way, we’d actually have a house that might actually be interested in holding Trump accountable.

Note that without California republican House members, the GOP wouldn’t have a majority. Nevada despite being a ‘Red State’, contributes more democrat than republican representatives. If three red house races had went the other way, Trump would have had much more meaningful resistance.

The federal government ultimately has authority over the blue states, and as such Trump and American companies have access to their resources and/or status.

Note that Musk also was spewing pro-Russian views on Ukraine too.

Making noise about a relatively sudden midday midweek protest effort overall may lead to underwhelming optics. After all the noise and outage, this is all that shows up? Clearly people aren’t all that enraged…

Given that, I think the claim that there is zero need to offset spending would be pushing it too far. It might not be as simple as a naive interpretation and somewhat more flexible, but it still has a rather significant relationship that shouldn’t be neglected.

I think that while the relationship between tax revenue and spend can be fuzzy, there’s only so far you can push printing the “I helped!” stickers without regard for the amount coming in before it all breaks down. Part of the value of those “I helped” stickers is knowing that the authority doesn’t just print up a few quadrillion because they felt like it, and that the volume of incoming and outgoing “stickers” is at least somewhat in the ball park of comparable, and any deviation between the two at least be steady and predictable and thus subject for planning.

The whole “If the Democrats don’t immediately and completely do everything I want I’m not going to participate at all” is a self-fulfilling philosophy.

On the republican side, when the larger party was “too far to the left”, they didn’t just throw up their hands, they worked at it, slogging away at the relatively less glamorous task of mucking about within the framework of their party, getting small victories and parlaying them to broader victories and preparation to have their time when the ground was ready. But the entire time supporting the party closest to what they wanted while they worked things even as the party failed to move as far as they wanted. All the time learning lessons on how to advance even the parts of their agenda that kept getting rejected even by their own party. They were clowns, mocked, too ridiculous to really be feared, but they were ultimately pragmatic and as a result, here they are…