The gods themselves oppose the bosses

We must unionize to defeat the evil giants.

From the 1970s, huh? At a time when I would sometimes read comic books to my staunchly pro-union father. No wonder I got no pushback from my parents when I was avidly reading that trashy stuff — it was fundamentally righteous.

What “myth of the tech genius”?

Was there ever such a myth? I guess it’s been shattered now, since Musk’s battles with Twitter have forced him to reveal the contents of his cell phone. It’s a mess of banality and unwarranted confidence and egotism.

What is so illuminating about the Musk messages is just how unimpressive, unimaginative, and sycophantic the powerful men in Musk’s contacts appear to be. Whoever said there are no bad ideas in brainstorming never had access to Elon Musk’s phone.

In no time, the texts were the central subject of discussion among tech workers and watchers. “The dominant reaction from all the threads I’m in is Everyone looks fucking dumb,” one former social-media executive, whom I’ve granted anonymity because they have relationships with many of the people in Musk’s texts, told me. “It’s been a general Is this really how business is done? There’s no real strategic thought or analysis. It’s just emotional and done without any real care for consequence.”

You might be wondering who has the privilege of chatting to Elon Musk. It’s a gang of rich idiots.

Appearing in the document is, I suppose, a perverse kind of status symbol (some people I spoke with in tech and media circles copped to searching through it for their own names). And what is immediately apparent upon reading the messages is that many of the same people the media couldn’t stop talking about this year were also the ones inserting themselves into Musk’s texts. There’s Joe Rogan; William MacAskill, the effective altruist, getting in touch on behalf of the crypto billionaire and Democratic donor Sam Bankman-Fried; Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer (and the subject of a recent, unflattering profile); Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist, NIMBY, and prolific blocker on Twitter; Larry Ellison, the founder of Oracle, who was recently revealed to have joined a November 2020 call about contesting Donald Trump’s election loss; and, of course, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s co-founder and former CEO. Musk, arguably the most covered and exhausting of them all, has an inbox that doubles as a power ranking of semi- to fully polarizing people who have been in the news the past year.

Few of the men in Musk’s phone consider themselves his equal. Many of the messages come off as fawning, although they’re possibly more opportunistic than earnest. Whatever the case, the intentions are unmistakable: Musk is perceived to have power, and these pillars of the tech industry want to be close to it. “I love your ‘Twitter algorithms should be open source’ tweet,” Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, said, before suggesting that he was going to mention the idea to members of Congress at an upcoming GOP policy retreat. Antonio Gracias, the CEO of Valor Partners, cheered on the same tweet, telling the billionaire, “I am 100% with you Elon. To the mattresses no matter what.”

Lonsdale is also one of the money men behind the University of Austin. Don’t you just love his casual assumption that he gets to talk to members of Congress, and they’ll listen? I don’t have that privilege. You probably don’t, either. Money is the only factor that gives you access.

Liz. Can’t. Read.

Here comes that peculiar political blindness again. Conservatives idolize Ronald Reagan, the greatest political disaster of my lifetime, to the point that they can’t even read criticisms of his policies without stupidly translating them into praise. Here’s Liz Truss failing to comprehend a book that she thinks was wonderful.

As I reported this summer, Liz Truss’s favourite historian is Rick Perlstein, the great chronicler of the rise of the new right in its Nixonian and Reaganite forms between 1960 and 1980.

She told journalists that she read ‘anything’ he wrote. Interviewers noticed Perlstein’s books on her shelves. In a strange compliment to the American historian, Truss or sources close to her briefed The Spectator’s Katy Balls with precise (if unacknowledged) quotes from his account of the rise of Ronald Reagan.

I sent Perlstein my piece and asked for his thoughts. Let me put it like this: he may be her favourite historian, but she is not his favourite politician. Not even close. Not even in the top 1,000.

‘Liz. Can’t. Read.’ he replied, and began a long – and for British readers frightening – account of how and why our new government of wannabe Reaganites have crashed the economy.

Perlstein said that, if she read his books with the attentiveness she claimed, she would not have risked our pensions and mortgages with a naïve belief that tax cuts would stimulate economic growth and raise revenue for the Treasury. Far from paying for themselves, Reagan’s income and capital gains taxes in the early 1980s sent public debt from 26 per cent GDP in 1980 to 41 per cent GDP by 1988.

I wonder if Truss will continue to cite Perstein as “her favourite historian” after that comment.

WTF, seriously?

I’m exasperated with my local money-grubbing Democrats, but NOTHING, I mean NOTHING compares with the freaks on the Republican side. This is from a Marjorie Taylor Greene ad. It’s insane.

She’s got a big gun. She has glowing electrified eyes with lightning flashing around her. She’s getting in a helicopter and shooting wild hogs. What does this have to do with her political work (which she doesn’t do anyway)?

Do Republican voters fall for this macho posturing nonsense? Are they all stunted children?

Tim Walz has the Democrat disease

Our incumbent governor is running for re-election against a raving loony, a guy who has announced that he would ban all abortions, no exceptions. His opponent is a batcrap cartoon of a far-right conservative wackaloon. So what is Walz doing about it?

Every goddamn day he sends me these fundraising emails. That is all they are about, how much money he has, how much money his opponent has, whether his opponent raised more money than he did in a specific 24 hour window, what the latest dismal poll says, etc., etc., etc. It’s what Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic party does every time, shouting about crisis after crisis after crisis, demanding more donations or the world will end. They have to meet their arbitrary fundraising goal by midnight! Or else!

I agree that his opponent is an evil jerk who must be stopped, but they’re not getting a penny from me if their only strategy is to do a minute-by-minute call of the horserace. This is why Democrats lose, because they lose sight of their principled differences and get the idea that we vote for a candidate based on how much money he has — that the only metric is this one-dimensional parameter of current funding.

Who is advising the Democrats that makes them all sound the same, all irrelevant, and eradicates any difference in policies?

Oh jeez. Just got another one. It begins:

Paul,

I don’t want to scare you, but I need to be transparent. Fundraising numbers from the last public reporting period are out, and we were outraised by Scott Jensen and Matt Birk.

I DON’T CARE. Republicans are bankrolled by wealthy people and corporate interests (actually, so are establishment Democrats) so telling me where you stand in a fundraising horserace means absolutely nothing to me.

And you do want to scare me. It’s just not working.

Fuck. Just now I got another one. Multiple times a day! I’m just going to have to block the word “Democrat” now.

Paul,

Berrett and I are giving a fundraising update to the Governor and Lt. Governor at noon, and I’ll just be frank: given where we’re at right now, it’s looking like it’s going to be a tough conversation.

Please, please, please, learn this: VOTERS DON’T CARE ABOUT YOUR FUNDRAISING. Your money-making suite of guys in suits care. Find something relevant to talk about, and maybe I won’t feel the need to roll my eyes and hit delete again.

Why do macho Texans elect such chickenshit politicians?

I am amused. Yet again, a tough-talking Texas pol disappears into the sunset in a cloud of dust, leaving a mess he doesn’t want to deal with behind him. The tale of the process server who tried to deliver a subpoena to Ken Paxton:

Herrera’s affidavit said that he arrived at Paxton’s house Monday at 8:28 a.m. and was greeted at the front door by a woman who identified herself as Angela. When he told her that he was trying to deliver the subpoenas to Ken Paxton, she told him that the AG was on the phone.

Herrera, who said he recognized Ken Paxton inside the house through glass on the door, offered to wait for him. Angela replied that Paxton “was in a hurry to leave,” according to Herrera, who observed a black Chevy truck in the driveway and then saw another car arrive there.

At about 9:40 a.m., Herrera said he saw Paxton exiting his garage. Herrera walked up the driveway toward Paxton and called out his name, at which point “he turned around and RAN back inside the house through the same door in the garage.”

Minutes later, Angela came out to the truck and opened both the driver-side door and the door behind it, Herrera wrote. A few minutes after she started the truck, “I saw Mr. Paxton RAN from the door inside the garage towards the rear door behind the driver side,” Herrera wrote.

“I approached the truck, and loudly called him by his name and stated that I had court documents for him. Mr. Paxton ignored me and kept heading for the truck. After determining that Mr. Paxton was not going to take the Subpoenas from my hand, I stated that I was serving him with legal documents and was leaving them on the ground where he could get them,” Herrera wrote.

“I then placed the documents on the ground beside the truck. Service was completed at 9:50 am. He got in the truck leaving the documents on the ground, and then both vehicles left,” he wrote.

Maybe he was in a hurry to catch his flight to Cancun.

Hey, Texians, did you know that John Wayne was a draft-dodging coward and that you lost the battle of the Alamo?

Oz steps on another rake

The man is an embarrassment of failures. His latest? A right-leaning newspaper suggested it would be a good idea to have the candidates publicize their medical status, and Oz leapt into action!

I would not expect that he had medical concerns, and he certainly seems fit, and I don’t think anyone is questioning his health as a reason to disqualify him. Rather, Oz has tried to suggest that Fetterman is in poor health, so he clearly saw this as a way to get in another dig.

Unfortunately, there is one little glitch: that letterhead.

Cool. The primary care physician for this guy who claims to live in Pennsylvania has a Manhattan office overlooking Central Park, a two hour drive from his purported home. How nice for him.

Of course, Fetterman has a response.

Today Dr. Oz confirmed that he does not actually live in Pennsylvania, because no one who does would have a primary care doctor on 5th Avenue in Manhattan.

We didn’t need to know Dr. Oz’s bone density. We need to know whether he would vote to ban all abortions after 15 weeks. We need to know whether he would vote to raise the minimum wage. We need to know whether he even plans to stay in Pennsylvania after the election.

In June, I released a letter from my doctor where he clearly stated that I am fit to serve. Dr. Oz built his entire career by lying to people about health. I trust my actual doctors over the opinion of a charlatan who played on on TV.

This is the most entertaining political race in ages.

The conspiracy theories are getting wilder

Steve Bannon. Speaking at a Turning Point USA conference. With Alex Jones. Summarizing the evil schemes of the elites.

It’s too much. I couldn’t even imagine what batcrap nonsense was going to come out of his mouth, and Bannon was definitely balls-to-the-wall. This is an impressive conspiracy theory.

“This is the biggest inflection point in human history,” Bannon said. “In the lived experience of half of this room, or maybe more, we’re going to get to a point where you’re going to have Human 2.0. Right? They’re telling you that. They’re funding that. This is not science fiction, this is fact.”

Note: it is not a fact.

Bannon claimed “they” want to be “immortal” and could be working on this covert “Human 2.0” mission under the guise of doing good.

“They talk about they’re going to save kids, and they’re going to do this — that’s all crap. They want to be immortal. Right? And they also say there’s too many people, the carrying capacity of this planet– there’s too many people,” Bannon argued.

The true “great replacement theory,” he added, is the replacement of Homo sapiens.

“You know, they’re all over Tucker [Carlson] and the great replacement theory and about the thing. Hey, the great replacement theory is Homo sapiens. That’s what they’re trying to replace,” Bannon said.

“Of course you haven’t heard about it. They don’t want to talk about it,” Bannon told the crowd. “They’re just going to do it. And they’re going to call it the Cancer Moonshot. This is what we have to stop.”

He gives the game away near the end. Bannon’s ilk have been pushing the Great Replacement nonsense, the idea that “they” (which usually means “the Jews”) are replacing white people with brown people, and this new idea is simply a distraction from the patently racist stuff Tucker Carlson is mainstreaming. Now the idea is that “they” aim to replace all of humanity with immortal genetically engineered non-humans, all done under the guise of treating cancer.

It’s not enough that they have been undermining treatment of infectious disease, hey, let’s spread the conspiracy theory that cancer therapies make you non-human. The logic is going to be persuasive to all those deluded folk in QAnon.

He has got to work on his delivery, though. He has none of the charisma of Charlton Heston.

“You maniacs, you blew it up! God damn you, God damn you all to hell!” “Soylent Green is people!”

He’s not wrong

The current president of South Korea is a conservative jerk, but that doesn’t mean everything he says is wrong. Sometimes he’s on the money, especially when the truth is obvious.

South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol was caught on a hot mic Wednesday insulting U.S. Congress members as “idiots” who could be a potential embarrassment for President Biden if they did not approve funding for global public health.

A bit impolitic, maybe, but yeah, many members of congress are idiots. They don’t get elected for being smart.

Maybe more impolitic than I thought. He spoke in Korean, and called them “saekki deul”, which apparently means something more like “sons of bitches”. Still accurate.

By the way, I discovered a video where I learned about the richly profane Korean vocabulary. Useful for learning what not to say around my Korean daughter-in-law.

The comparisons can’t be avoided

There was a time, way back around the time Trump was elected, that there were people howling about how you can’t call Republicans “fascists” or “Nazis” because they weren’t literally German, or invading Czechoslovakia, or wearing toothbrush mustaches. It was annoyingly literal-minded, and the people most vociferously arguing for an extraordinarily narrow interpretation of the term all seemed to be sympathetic to fascism. People like Rich Lowry scribbled a lot of denials against Nazi comparisons.

Fortunately, we’re starting to see past the smokescreens and recognize that the historical correspondences are inescapable. Ken Burns has made a new documentary about the Holocaust, and while he tries to avoid contemporary comparisons, he finds them unavoidable. When asked if he intended to make a historical documentary that resonates so strongly with current events, Burns says he didn’t mean to.

I don’t think it was the intent. Every film we’ve worked on has sort of rhymed in the present. As we were working on this, we began to realize how much things were resonating with what’s going on now. The assault on the Capitol, the insurrection and other events in which we felt the institutions of our democracy were challenged enough that it was important for us to take this story and remind people what the consequences are of yielding to the various kind of nefarious aspects of the [authoritarian] playbook.

When Hitler came to power, he downplayed for a moment antisemitism and the platform of the Nazis and stepped up street warfare to give the German people a sense that civil war was imminent and that the causes of this were the communists and the socialists. He’s already in power because other conservatives think they can handle him. Those conservatives are worried that there is now what we would call a new progressive majority. And so they are doing everything to subvert the democratic process because they realize, in fact, in a democratic society, these things won’t hold. And so out of this comes the monstrous regime of Adolf Hitler, and one of the many horrific things — the most horrific — is the attempt to exterminate all of the 9 million Jews of Europe.

And he repeatedly denies it! He just couldn’t help it.

No, we don’t subscribe to any of that stuff. We’re just storytellers. Telling a complicated story. I don’t know what critical race theory is. It’s essentially a graduate school legal concept of how to frame certain arguments that has been appropriated by people to use as a cudgel to to beat them up over these various things.

I made a comment about the [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis play in Martha’s Vineyard as being a kind of an authoritarian response, just as it was when Disney says we don’t agree with you, he punishes them. When a state employee doesn’t do what he says, he fires them. That’s the authoritarian thing. It’s not the democratic way that you handle it. But the right-wing media has said that I’ve equated what DeSantis did with the Holocaust, which is obscene. I mean, literally obscene to do that. But it is also classic authoritarian playbook to sort of lie about what somebody just said in order to make it so outrageous that then you can deny the complexity of what’s being presented.

I agree that the magnitude of the horrors of Nazi Germany perpetrated is not at all comparable to what is going on right now. The appropriate comparison, though, is to the pre-war politics that laid the groundwork for the atrocities. There should be no doubt that while DeSantis hasn’t set up camps to murder immigrants, that’s what he wants to do, and would do if he could get away with it. Which he could, if we keep electing Republicans.