rational_lib

Getting sick of all this observational humor.

Russia has been strongly suspected to use Tyler Durden in its influence operations to appeal to the US mainstream-to-far right.

All of Zero Hedge’s posts are written under the nom de plume of “Tyler Durden,” the anti-establishment character played by Brad Pitt in the film Fight Club. “We believe that not only should you be comfortable with anonymous speech,” Zero Hedge contends in its “manifesto,” “but that you should be suspicious of any speech that isn’t.” For whatever reason, people seem to go along with this, and it’s a strange sight to see the name of a psychopathic character in a Chuck Palahniuk novel cited as a source in a Congressional Research Service report and a scholarly law review article, or introduced as a guest on Bloomberg radio.

Neither Zero Hedge’s anonymity nor its Bulgarian connections and pro-Kremlin views have turned off some financially savvy readers.

modern Democrats are not an opposition party, ever. The news media is complicit as well.

The US political system is thoroughly broken but it's not changed much leading up to the Trump era, it's really the news media that made Trump happen right now.

It started in the 80s with cable news and continues today with toxic podcasts and social media. People are like your annoying ex-girlfriend - they don't want to be told the truth, they just want to be validated. Billionaires and con artists (and billionaire con artists) have figured out how to use newer forms of media to exploit that tendency and I think it's still getting worse. Eventually like all predators they'll overconsume their prey but there's a lot of suckers in the world for them to run through first.

I looked up the original thread and given that OP posts in r/Omaha, it's likely Don Bacon but since that's a small district it could also be one of the surrounding districts (possibly even in Iowa)

To me I'm not really sure what his reply even means. I think it's some attempt at a joke (because of course the government uses SQL), but I figure the joke can be broken down into two potential jokes that fail for different, embarrassing reasons:

Interpretation 1: The government is so advanced it doesn't use SQL - This interpretation is unlikely given that Elon is trying to portray the government as in need of reform. But it would make more sense if coming from a NoSQL type who thinks SQL needs to be removed from everywhere. NoSQL Guy is someone many software devs are familiar with who takes the sometimes-good idea of avoiding SQL and takes it way too far. Elon being NoSQL Guy would be dumb, but not as dumb as the more likely interpretation #2.

Interpretation 2: The government is so backward it doesn't use SQL - I think this is the more likely interpretation as it would be consistent with Elon's ideology, but it really falls flat because SQL is far from being cutting-edge. There has kind of been a trend of moving away from SQL (with considerable controversy) over the last 10 years or so and it's really surprising that Elon seems completely unaware of that.

He started doing this on exactly December 4

It's referring to that after-hours part.

It would be highly immoral to do any actual vandalism because that would give them sympathy and therefore would further the goals of Elon and others who want their bootlickers to be seen as some sort of rebels against wokeness.

But mocking them by writing dust or adding your own bumper stickers without doing any serious permanent damage is at least defensible.

There are definitely far left groups, primarily in Europe, that ally with Russia. All groups on the fringes have proven useful for spreading pro-Russian propaganda. In the US, Trump's pro-Russian sympathies and general stupifaction of the GOP has led to the GOP becoming an ally to the Kremlin. But prior to that, both parties were anti-Russia with Republicans being moreso.

The most successful tactic of the right has been judging the left for their politics - "woke" etc. This works because it's "othering" - makes the left part of the out group that people don't want to be a part of. The left needs to be similarly unabashed, even though othering is kind of against the whole point of being on the left.

But it needs to be more fun and less serious than this post. Why is there no "screaming maga" meme? Surely there's plenty of those images, and more.

What's annoying is the US cable/social media incessantly jumps right to the Trump/Musk framing of things.

The US AID shutdown has led to food aid stuck at ports as populations that rely on it starve.

A report on Monday from Paul Martin, the USAid inspector general, found that close to half a billion dollars’ worth of food was rotting because of confusion surrounding Mr Trump’s freeze last month.

How many americans have heard about the consequences of Trump's actions? 1%? How many have heard about Elon's vague and baseless claims that US AID is a big fraud? It seems every Republican I know has heard that.

He did the exact same thing after taking over Twitter, talking about "poorly batched RPCs" in the timeline which makes zero sense because that's obviously not how HTTP works.

The sad thing is Elon regularly shows how much of a very judgmental, "I'm so smart" idiot* he is, but somehow I keep meeting people who think he's a genius. I guess the assumption that money=smart still holds true in the US, despite being disproven time and time again.

*Do we not have a single word for this concept? I come across this kind of person so frequently there really should be one.