Performative cruelty

[Mike]

I heard the following quote from Aldous Huxley for the first time this week, and it makes me profoundly sad for how true it is:

"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats."

--Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow

A man broke into the home of Paul and Nancy Pelosi at 2:30 in the morning, looking for Nancy. When he couldn't find her, he attacked Paul, who is 82, and broke the old man's skull. Last I heard, he was still in ICU. The attacker openly admits that he is a MAGA supporter, election denier, Q-ANON believer, pizza-gate, the whole bit. He explains that he was there to interrogate Nancy Pelosi, and he had duct tape, zip ties and other equipment to use for this. He says that if she answered him truthfully, he would have let her go, but if she lied, he had planned to break her legs as a warning to other Democrats.

This guy is obviously unwell and this is all horribly tragic. My current problem is with the response. The response to this should be a no-brainer. The response should be identical to what happened after GOP congressman Steve Scalise was shot by some left wing extremist in 2017... everyone on the national political stage should condemn political violence. "Regardless of one's political views, violence such as this has no place..." etc etc.

But the GOP is excusing it. Shifting blame to "the attacker was an illegal immigrant" or "this was actually a gay escort meeting Paul for a tryst while Nancy is away". Trump insinuates that he brought it on himself ("weird things going on in that house"). Don Jr posts a truly gross picture of a "Paul Pelosi Halloween costume kit". Kari Lake running for governor in Arizona uses it as a laugh line as she's campaigning, joking about the lack of security in the Pelosi home. Elon fucking Musk, proud new owner of Twitter, leads off the reasonable discourse by immediately responding with "things may not all be as they seem" with this situation.

Fucking monstrous behavior.

A reminder to myself not treat others this way, no matter how much I may dislike their actions.

[poorpete]

Wow, how accurate and sad.

I do remember in the first few hours of the news breaking, that the motive was still up in the air. And I almost posted on here complaining that some on the left were jumping too quickly to conclusions that fit with their world-view. There's benefits to waiting things out to hear the whole story, BUT we have now have the clearest idea of what happened, and it was that world-view that the left was warning about, and the fact that the right is treating this as a joke (or worse), is only more worrisome... it's, you're right, cruelty.

Musk is so disappointing. We experimented with a troll as a president and now we're going to have a troll in charge of a major social media company. Yich.

[Mike]

Yeah. Not to derail my own topic, but why does someone like Musk pay $44 billion for a $1 billion company that generates $200 million+ in losses annually?

Because control of Twitter is manual control over "what's trending". It's the ability to move public discourse by being able to reliably choose what the most talked about topics will be. Twitter can continue to remain unprofitable and still generate billions for Musk in other areas.

In my opinion.

[Kyle]

Musk is so disappointing.

I disagree. To be disappointed is to have had better expectations of someone in the first place. Which I'm not sure we (or at least I) had. Sorry for the football reference, but as Denny Green said about the Chicago Bears, "They are what we thought they were!"

Musk has never been anything but a gross, privileged troll. He didn't do anything amazing- he was an already rich man who bought an existing car company that made him an even richer man. He's always been gross to women. He's always been gross to labor. He's always been a deplorable bunion stuck to the toe of a delusional society. So I'm not disappointed in him. I expected this of him.

The delicious schadenfreude of the situation is that the current profits of Twitter don't even amount to half of the revenue he needs to generate to pay the interest on the loans he took to purchase it. This is why he wanted out of the deal so bad. Now, with his overtures to stop censoring certain extremist opinions, advertisers are bailing on the platform. And it's a tough pitch to make when you're also winking and nodding at anti-semites and racists about how they'll be able to post up soon.

[Kyle]

[poorpete]

Says a lot that Bezos bought Washington Post, which he took a hands off approach and has let journalism thrive there, and Musk buys Twitter because it's not toxic enough and immediately fires staff