Please stop using Twitter.
I agree, but isn’t it fun that the Harris campaign is using Musk’s platform to counter Trump, and in this case Musk.
I’d be much happier if it wasn’t the FIRST AND ONLY place they post stuff.
It’d be hella funny if they posted screenshots of their stuff from Mastodon or Threads or like Tiktok or whatever people use
Ideally, they’d post to Mastodon first, then link to it on all the other microblog sites. Drive traffic towards Mastodon, instead of keeping it as the backup.
I love the concept of a pseudo Mastodon crosspost.
They do post on Threads and Tiktok and other platforms. They also very much did posted clips of this very interview on Threads
Not to say that Trump normally looks spry and youthful, of course, but that picture of him is the worst I can remember seeing him. I’m surprised they used it for an interview like this.
He’s got those black sleepy-joe eyes.
This photo of Trump looks like the illustration for a Magic The Gathering card for “Withered Ghoul” or something like that.
Pretty sure only the audio is from the livestream. This video was probably created by a fellow lefty that wanted to make trump look bad. The Elon picture isn’t great either.
Damn dude I guess the orange is actually functional fashion holy fuck
Was wondering if that picture was manipulated at all.
Didn’t Trump get famous for “firing” people on TV?
He also is notorious for skipping the bill on as much as he possibly can. A real charmer.
I was literally coming to the comments to say something similar. He’s the “You’re Fired!” guy how could anyone be surprised by this? He criticized the Biden administration for not firing people…
He likes firing people, but can’t seem to do it face-to-face it seems: https://www.cnn.com/2022/09/28/politics/donald-trump-firing-twitter/index.html
Nobody is surprised by this. The Harris campaign is aware of and is reminding people of this exact fact. It’s part of why the ad is compelling. Seems smart and effective to me. It’s made everyone stop to talk about how Trump is famous for firing people.
It all goes back to money in politics. First-past-the-post and Citizens United absolutely fucked us. FPTP gave us a MAXIMUM of two parties (both are “private” organizations that literally have non-democratic bylaws for their primaries) and Citizens United made massive political bribes into a legal form of free speech.
Edit: I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the excellent and nuanced comment below that corrects my hypothesis and details the concerted effort by capitalists and the World Bank since World War II to violently quash any and all leftist/socialist movements that they deemed a threat around the world.
The cavernous power vacuum on the left caused by unchecked capitalism/corporatism (corporate personhood) caused all of the fiscal conservatives in the GOP to leave the circus and take over the DNC (look into the “Democratic Leadership Council” headed up by the Clintons and their right wing buddies). Now, we’re stuck with an extreme right wing vs. a bunch of old school Bob Dole right wingers like Chuck Schumer. As a leftist, it hurts so much to see the Overton window shift unnaturally toward fascism. We have “spirited” debate about things that wouldn’t even be a question in a society (equal rights for all people…like what the fuck. There’s only one answer that even remotely makes sense to non-sociopaths) that isn’t sick to the core with corruption. It hurts to be spat on and shamed by people that should be my allies (or in a different political party altogether) because I have the intellectual honesty to call out the DNC for their blatant corporatism. I always say: Obviously Trump is shit. It’s the power vacuum on the left that caused this shift toward radical right wing ideas becoming mainstream.
Here’s a favorite graphic to show how badly FPTP polarizes the US government:
The cavernous power vacuum on the left caused by unchecked capitalism/corporatism (corporate personhood) caused all of the fiscal conservatives in the GOP to leave the circus and take over the DNC (look into the “Democratic Leadership Council” headed up by the Clintons and their right wing buddies).
You can’t just leave that at the feet of the electoral system. The cavernous vacuum was the direct result of domestic intelligence, surveillance, and disinformation campaigns organized by the federal government to undermine any organization that threatened the white supremacist state structure dominant during the 60s and 70s. The Cold War wasn’t just something Americans fought abroad. It came in the form of political assassinations (Fred Hampton, Malcolm X, and MLK). It came in the form of corporate strike breaking efforts on a national scale. It came in the form of paramilitary operations - the MOVE bombing in Philadelphia was a classic example, but SWAT raids and police harassment efforts stretching from California to Florida helped break down the nascent counter-culture organizations post-WW2, while the CIA-fueled crack epidemic and lead paint/gasoline fumes and other ecological catastrophes demolished the mental capacity of a generation.
Left wing organizations and movements didn’t just vanish, they were systematically uprooted and destroyed. The modern fascist state and municipal governments we live under are the direct result of policies implemented generations ago. The electoral system is as much a victim of that violent manipulation as anything else.
Thank you. I surely oversimplified it.
You’ve hit the nail on the head as to why I prefer to keep my activism quasi anonymous. The long list of amazing activists who were right but still ended up dead…. The only one who survived (Kwame) left the country.
Anecdote: At the beginning of this most recent uptick in the ongoing genocide of Palestine, I was pretty vocal and downright subversive with my language about Biden and his bloodthirstiness with regard to Gaza and was actually taken aside and expressly warned by a friend of mine in the MIC. I decided that my family was too important to me to keep up my activism. I’m sure I’m not alone in giving up and I’m sorry if I sort of glossed over the concerted effort by the that cadre of World Bank puppets working tirelessly to stifle any perceived threats to capitalism.
Thank you for your comment.
I’ma just drop this here
Imagine celebrating the idea that you’ve had no personal growth or made no social progress in twenty years. And not that it needs to be pointed out but it’s also bullshit because the right have been marching fast towards fascism.
The left only seems to be receding when the observer is hurtling rightwards.
I thought these were the years that elmo promised and failed to launch a rocket to Mars, let alone a cargo or manned mission to Mars.
Republicans do. They hate unions also.
Meanwhile the Teamster’s president is looking Trump’s way so wtf
“The leopards won’t fire my face.”
Its just two grifters grifting.
It reminds me of that homeglow commercial where a lady brags about firing her old cleaning lady after using the service. Tone deaf and cruel, it’s astonishing that someone was like “yeah, that’s gonna make us look good”.
It’s like a readymade promo for a guillotine retailer.
Is anyone really surprised? His tag line on his shit TV show was, “You’re fired!”.
Well the sycophants don’t believe it’ll ever happen to them. Mostly because they’re stupid.
Trump’s out there making Sean O’Brien look more and more foolish every week.
Why do you want a leader to begin with?
Leadership is a useful tool in coordinating the efforts of large numbers of people, in order to efficiently gather information, develop best practices, and accurately evaluate the results of organizational efforts.
A whip is a useful tool to force people into coordination, in order to efficiently do stuff. You may want one along your leadership.
Well done, you’ve indeed just described the role of Whip that a person can fulfil perfectly. And you’re right, you do often need those people alongside leadership. And no, the term doesn’t come from literally using a whip, though I suppose it does make for some rather evocative imagery. I do really love the term “lose the whip” to mean that someone is expelled from their own party.
A whip is a useful tool to force people into coordination
It’s an awful tool. It can’t convey complex ideas, doesn’t maintain a useful catalog of effective uses, and only works at a very limited range for a tiny number of subjects on a momentary time scale.
I might suggest replacing your whip with a library. Libraries have been far more successful at organizing and commanding large numbers of people over long periods of time. The library was arguably the most effective tool of the Pharaohs of Egypt, the Chinese Dynasts, and the Catholic Church in commanding populations by the tens of millions.
Wielding a whip makes you a nuisance. Wielding a library makes you a God.
Good you seem to be interested in libraries. Here’s one with many interesting books to read:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/michail-bakunin-god-and-the-state
See, you’re not above being led. And you didn’t even need to get whipped.
Do you want the current president’s duties to be carried out at the snail pace of Congress?
The biggest president’s duty is to lie to the public. We can do fine without that.
Don’t cut yourself on that edge.
Are you pushing that ‘sovereign citizen’ nonsense?
You may believe that you aren’t a part of the system, but the system is much bigger than you are and it has other ideas.
In extreme capitalism, yes.
I don’t live there so I view trump and musk like evening entertainment, and for that purpose they are up for the job.
You need the village idiots for a laugh sometimes.
I know it’s hard to take pity on the US, but real people do suffer from the consequences of these monsters. Also, pretty much any cancer the US dreams up has a nasty habit of spreading elsewhere. Don’t assume you will stay forever safe from the tyranny abroad.
Hi American here. One of these men is the richest man in the world. To assume his behaviors aren’t globally reaching is wrong. The other, if elected, would control the most powerful military in the world. Of course well suffer here but the influence and reach of these two should not be understated.
I know. One example, without the US supporting Ukraine, Russia will win and they will continue taking over more European countries. So it very much affects millions of people what these clowns are doing, just that one example.
Alla you have big tech that is driving the entire path to dystopia with absolutely no privacy.