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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: December 6th, 2023

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  • The donor class doesn’t really care about Trump’s mental (and psychological) issues, and really don’t even care much about Trump at all. They’re not actually supporting him - they’re supporting the handlers and advisers with which they intend to surround him, and the policies (and primarily Project 2025) that they intend to enact through him.

    If anything, his incoherence is, to them, a benefit, since he’s just that much easier to manipulate. Since he can’t form a coherent thought on his own, he can be readily filled up with someone else’s ideas, just so long as they’re framed correctly.

    He’s like a wind-up toy - all they have to do is feed him carefully crafted stories and get him wound up and pointed in the right direction, then just let him go.










  • This is an example of a thing I’ve said repeatedly about Trump - I’m willing to bet that he’s 100% sincere about this. He’s not dissembling or diverting - he actually, sincerely believes that he had every right to interfere in whatever ways he wanted.

    Why?

    Because he’s a near-total sociopath. I don’t think that concepts of truth and falsehood or right and wrong are even coherent to him. I think his entire measure of everything is wholly personal - if he wants it, then it’s right and if he doesn’t, then it’s wrong, and if he believes it, then it’s true, and if he doesn’t, then it’s false. And it really is that simple. It’s not that he lies, but that he lives in a fantasy world in which whatever he believes is true and whatever he wants is right.


  • If he’s trying to say “Biden wanted this but Trump already started it”

    Which “he?”

    Zuckerberg blames it exclusively and entirely on the Biden administration.

    that tells me BOTH parties requested it. Hence, if you don’t like Biden because of this, you don’t want Trump either. And of course, vice versa. In short, this policy is not unique to either party or administration.

    Exactly, but that’s explicitly not what Zuckerberg is saying. He’s saying that it was entirely and exclusively Biden, which is a lie.


  • Why did Zuckerberg choose now to make this announcement and publicly reveal the inside play?

    There’s actually a tidbit that the author notes that points at the obvious reason for it.

    In his letter to Congressional investigators, he flat-out said what everyone else has been saying for years now.

    In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content…

    The author then goes on to say though:

    A few clarifications. The censorship began much earlier than that, from March 2020 at the very least if not earlier.

    What’s significant about that? Trump was president then.

    So Zuckerberg is rather obviously trying to pin entirely on the Biden administration a set of policies that were already in place under Trump.

    To what end? Obviously to do the same thing he did in 2016 and 2020 - to overtly promote Trump.

    This particular one certainly not coincidentally plays into the whole Republican narrative that the Democrats are oppressive and dishonest, which in turn is meant to provide a context for their intention to dispute the election results when Trump loses. Zuckerberg is simply doing his part to further that narrative.





  • Airbnb is a fine example of a sort of variation on enshittification.

    The way it works is a new company with a new and notably cost-effective way of doing things comes along and is unsurprisingly wildly successful. And then, inevitably, that leads to them hiring a whole raft of executive parasites who all have to be paid obscene salaries for doing nothing of any real value, which means the company needs to raise prices and cut back on services in order to generate more profit to pay those salaries. And meanwhile, the new executives, with nothing of any note that they actually need to or even can do, but with a need to create some illusion that they’re necessary, have pointless meetings in which they propose and wrangle about and eventually approve and implement new policies and new plans that are generally awful.

    And pretty quickly and not coincidentally the new company ends up at least as bloated, mismanaged, overpriced and under-performing as the companies they so recently replaced.

    See also: Uber, DoorDash and the entire streaming industry.