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(69,360 posts)Goonch
(5,048 posts)
usonian
(25,293 posts)

Initech
(108,771 posts)Noem, Patel, Bondi, Duffy, Hegseth, Homan, RFK, Lutnick, Bassett - these people are all criminally insane and drunk with power. They commit blatant crimes and constitutional abuses of power daily while screaming "NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW!!!". Not to mention they have a 34 time convicted felon at the helm.
Hell, Homan reminds me of the character that James Gandolfini played in that movie "The Last Castle".
jfz9580m
(17,187 posts)Productive elite
Yeah no..Dr Fauci, climate scientists are a productive elite..the various types of medical professionals or publicly funded scientists these creeps attack are truly elite. I should know. As a mediocre scientist who has worked around genuinely elite people it confounds me that these morons get a pass. Ill give them this - they do know how to game the system in Machiavellian ways - ways which civilized humans would find distasteful. Thats not indicative of intellect.
These tech hooligans are a mediocre, but crafty oligarchy. The worst big lie out there is that these guys are intelligent and or hardworking.
I have posted this here several times. Even though it is humor column it does call out this propensity to uncritically perpetuate these guys mythos:
https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/columnists/arid-40861760.html
Doesnt that seem stupid to you? It seems stupid to me. Yet all I hear is how smart Musk is.
Most people, even his detractors, think Elon Musk is brilliant, but Ive been paying attention, and the man has so many stupid ideas and does so many stupid things... I suspect he could be stupid.
You might think that name-calling is beneath me, and you might be right. But remember, you might be stupid too. I could be stupid for all you know. I mean, its pretty stupid of me to call Elon Musk an idiot, even though its true.
Elon Musk is stupid. Its vital to state that in the simplest of terms so that in this frenzied moment, we can hold onto this most pared-down truth. He lacks wit and behaves in ways that can only be explained by that truth. Again, plenty of us are stupid. We lack common sense, expertise, and imagination; we act without understanding, making things more difficult for the people we impact and for us. In general, being stupid is harmless enough; it affects us and a small circle of people around us.
The worst thing stupid people do most of the time is getting in their own way. Potentially, an idiot might mess up their familys day or irritate a co-worker. Being stupid is one thing; being stupid and powerful is another, much worse, thing
Oh come on..these guys are idiots. Who are they kidding? I keep posting this piece viciously since it covers so much of their inanity:
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-mad-religion-of-technological-salvation/
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/22/the-mad-religion-of-technological-salvation/
They have completely misunderstood how the world works, how science works, how people work. I know I keep hammering away at Andreesen, because hes my least favorite person in the entire book. He says in his manifesto that he is the keeper of the true scientific method, contrasting himself with academic scientists. The real scientific method is not to have a statement of beliefs about what the world is and how it works, or what the inevitable future of technology is. The real scientific method is to be curious and questioning about the world and be open to the possibility that youre wrong in fact, expecting that youre wrong. And thats not something that I think that these people are capable of.
TD: One of the versions of utopia as envisioned by Bezos and Musk is space colonization. You show very clearly that this is divorced from reality. How much of a fantasy are we talking about here? And why go to Mars in the first place?
AB: To pick on another guy who absolutely deserves it, Elon Musk has been very consistent about the vision he has for Mars and the justification for it. He says that we need to become an interplanetary and interstellar species to preserve the light of consciousness. His plan is to have a million people living on Mars by 2050 in order to form a self-sufficient colony that will survive even if rockets from Earth stop coming. It doesnt work for so many different reasons. Mars is absolutely terrible. The radiation levels are too high. The gravity is too low. Theres no air! The dirt is made of poison. It is a horrible place.
Musk talks about Mars as a refuge in the event of an asteroid strike here on Earth. More asteroids strike Mars than Earth. And Earth, after an asteroid strike like the one that killed off the dinosaurs, was still a nicer place than Mars. And think about what getting a million people to Mars would require. Say that you could somehow cram a hundred people into a single spaceship, into a single rocket. That is more than 10 times the number of people that have ever gone up in one space mission ever before. And the mission that sent eight people up, that was just to Earth orbit. They could get back to the ground in a couple of hours. And it took less than a couple of hours for them to even get to Earth orbit in the first place. A mission to Mars takes six to nine months, minimum.
I have been going through a rough patch for a while now. If I am honest, one reason I follow these guys so much is they make me feel better about myself. I get dejected sometimes looking at the gap between me and the average scientist in my field. Then I go look at these billionaires and think, well okay at least I am not that stupid..They are coddled by this society which they game as only an unscrupulous tech mafia can. Manipulation of human emotion is their only real talent. I get sick of seeing these overrated technofascists mythologized..
lame54
(39,758 posts)The Cult of Mediocrity