domain:imgur.com
ABigGuy4U
7m ago
Frankly I suspect European authorities might be straight up lying about the identities of suspects now. I’ve clocked two suspiciously terrorist-like attacks on the last few weeks (a vehicle ram attack in the UK and a mass stabbing in Germany) where the authorities immediately announced that it was committed by a white European. I can’t confirm the Germany one but the on the scene video of the UK attack was ambiguous, the guy looked like he could potentially be English, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out he was Syrian or Egyptian either.
This, more. Seeing the Bannon position (which- to be clear- is really old) being passed / smuggled as 'Trump is seriously feuding with Musk' has put this firmly in the 'can't trust initial reporting: ignore for now and come back in a few days to see what, specifically, has changed' zone. Both Bannon and the democratic media have been trying to meme a Musk-Trump blowup into happening for some time, and the information environment is already contaminated. Maybe that's what's happening now, but then Musk has been distancing from DOGE since its disruption phase was done in the first two months, reporting already indicated his allies were/are still there, and he's been reportedly wanting to go back to focusing on his business. It's not exactly hard to think of various kayfabe reasons* for a quote-unquote 'staged' breakup fight in a way that serves both his and Trump's political interests.
Or he could be ketamine-influenced and this will spiral. Who knows. I'll wait regardless.
Key things I'll look for to validate this being a Big Deal include-
- Are Musk's allies purged from DOGE?
- Are Musk's contracts frozen / suspended?
- Any immigration-specific action against Musk.
*One amusing proposal from a friend: the Dems demanding the Epstein file log, which will be less damning to Trump than hoped, but catch some Democratic VIPs in a way that leads to inter-Democrat fratricide.
YE_GUILTY
9m ago
If only the Democrats hadn't just spent the last few months proving that they punish their apostates more vindictively than Trump ever could,
Never say never.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
11m ago
Despite the uptick in political violence that the US has seen recently, political assassinations really haven't been a thing that much.
Also, people have a relatively short memory. Dems will never totally forgive Musk, but a sufficient number would probably be willing enough to tolerate his existence.
ChickenOverlord
17m ago
I haven't kept up with his content in recent years but my goto for his classics is Paradigm Shift 2070, where he tricked the organizers of a TedX conference into thinking he was some genius young entrepreneur so they let him speak. His talk includes things like teaching African refugees JavaScript on ipads, state-mandated homosexuality, and farming cheesy sea potatoes that will blow your socks off on the ocean floor:
Same. This proves what I've always suspected: Musk was trying to use the Republicans to push a bit of fiscal responsibility. Now that it's clear that this isn't going to work, and after presumably fighting against the Big Beautiful Bill behind the scenes, he's calling it quits.
The real mistake was the left wing's decision to alienate Musk. The Democrats really should have seen this coming (since Trump falls out with all his allies sooner or later) and they should have refrained from spending the past few months calling for people to firebomb Tesla dealerships out of spite. If they had just kept their stupid mouths shut they would be in perfect position to welcome the highly influential CEO of Twitter into their camp, with plenty of time before the midterms. Maybe they could even drive Zuck and the rest back into the fold (look what an alliance with Trump gets you, better join the right team while you have the chance!)
If only the Democrats hadn't just spent the last few months proving that they punish their apostates more vindictively than Trump ever could, they might seem like the safer and more reliable ally right now. As it is they just look dangerously unhinged in a different way.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
24m ago
To what end? If you were to say one or the other of them is picking a fight, sure, but what benefit does having a fake falling out serve?
Yeah, I completely agree, although I think that the "borderline" aspect of BPD conveys important information, namely that the sufferer's emotional distortions can be indistinguishable from psychosis.
And on the genetic front in particular, the evidence from my n=1 family is damn sobering. Maternal grandmother? Check. Maternal aunt that share's my mother's father? Also check. Sister? Check? Her first daughter? Also check. That's 66% of the daughters from mom's immediate family, with the non-BPD aunt having a different father, and 50% of my sister's daughters, with the younger one also having a different father. And none of the men in my immediate family have fathered a daughter.
SSCReader
29m ago
Sure, that could be a cause. But the claim was that Blue mental health is worse than Red mental health because you hear about it more. That they might have different causes that vary over time isn't relevant to whether that is true or not. If Red mental health problems currently seem to manifest in different ways and thus are not as visible and thus not being counted as mental health issues at the rates at which they occur, that would be separate from what is causing them.
Why there are mental health issues is irrelevant as to whether we are measuring them accurately and if they appear at the same rates in the same ways in these different populations at any point in time. Conditions of course vary over time in both populations. If we were in 1975 then we'd also want to be seeing if those urban drug overdoses were hiding mental health issues, if we were doing the same comparison back then.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
29m ago
I think the rest of your comment deserves a full response, but for now:
Why wouldn't there be people out there who get off on cross-dressing or whatever;
Does this pass the sniff test? Are there enough crossdressers out there to explain the phenomenon?
The first study I found with numbers on crossdressing prevalence was this one. 2.8% of men, 0.4% of women. I pointedly did not take the first source for transgender prevalence, as it looked quite opinionated, but I grabbed this likely-looking one which suggests something like 0.2% of the population. I suppose it’s possible that 1 in 16 crossdressers move on to the hard stuff.
On the other hand, these numbers are much lower than I expected from media coverage. 0.5%, 1.6%. If those numbers are more accurate, and there aren’t many non-crossdressing trans people, then the correlation would have to be huge.
I’m not sure what to think here.
Quantumfreakonomics
35m ago
What the fuck is happening?
Elon isn't an idiot. He knows how math works. He successfully gutted foreign aid. Congradulations, DOGE shaved 0.5% off of the federal budget, maybe, who really knows?
Anyone who has ever spent more than ten seconds investigating the federal budget already knows that the bulk of the money goes to Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and Defense. I suspect that Elon has finally discovered the haunting truth that the rural white underclass loves gibs almost as much as the urban black underclass. Arguably, it is insulting to human dignity to be tasked with cutting waste while at the same time being barred from touching the giant money pit.
hydroacetylene
39m ago
He believes doing this will cause him to die before it manifests.
Throwaway05
39m ago
but if mom loved you, you were invincible. If she hated you, you were an enemy combatant to be destroyed.
This is called splitting and is one of the main coping mechanisms associated with the illness.
Throwaway05
41m ago
The rebrand of BPD as emotional dysregulation syndrome or something similar does a lot of work in capturing the much of the practical matter of the illness.
I think a lot of people also miss that most people with APD aren't true sociopaths and are also rendered miserable by the illness (especially later in life).
...and both seem to be mostly caused by a combination of genetics, trauma, and other shit you aren't in control of.
Man I miss free will.
SkoomaDentist
43m ago
I doubt anything particularly serious will actually develop from this but if it does, it will be glorious. I'm going to need to stock up on popcorn.
phailyoor
43m ago
NYTimes is reporting that aides to Trump are urging him to "cancel all of Musk’s contracts and launch several investigations into [him]"
Actually this is incorrect.
NYtimes said:
Stephen K. Bannon, who has been one of the most vocal critics of Musk for months, said he is advising the president to cancel all of Musk’s contracts and launch several investigations into the world’s richest man.
I don't understand how Bannon is still relevant in 2025. Sure he worked for Trump in 2017, but he hasn't touched political power in years and just runs a shitty tabloid. Bannon is a disgraced former pawn and is only being protected as a reward for his past loyalty
ThisIsSin
Cainanites and Abelists
46m ago
Don't take them too seriously. But the fight is real.
It's almost like negotiating these things in public isn't done for a reason or something, especially in the Internet Age.
If you understand how to deal with people that work that way (or aren't one of those people whose salary/political standing depends on you not knowing how to do that), you probably really aren't that concerned. They'll probably rapidly screw around and reach a settlement in a few months, just like the last time.
But maybe I'm weird and find that that "cutting subsidies that allow people to buy inferior electric cars pisses off rich guy whose fortune(s) lie partially in those cars" is not particularly interesting news. At least, it's not interesting yet, no consequences beyond the inevitable stock market dip.
BurdensomeCount
Messenger Status: Shot
48m ago
You are suggesting the US stop paying interest on treasuries? All this will do is rinse out current US treasury holders (whose nominal value will drop like a stone until the implied yield is even higher than it was before the whole fiasco) and make it impossible for the US government to raise any further money for next year's deficit. Plus the US dollar will absolutely tank.
JarJarJedi
50m ago
Denigrating people who disagree with you
I am not denigrating you, but also you are not just "disagreeing" with me, in a matter of opinion. You claim widely known facts do not exist. How else am I supposed to describe it? And to be honest, it's not like your party haven't been habitually throwing this exact word at literally every person disagreeing on it on any matter, fact or opinion. So you can't really claim it's some particularly bad word that is taboo from being used. People have been called "denialists" for questioning dozens of things that are completely legitimate to question (and often these very people were found to be correct or at least not less correct than the opponent), so you have absolutely no leg to claim "denial" is some special insult that can't be used in a polite company and out of place in a political discussion. In this particular instance, its usage is entirely appropriate, as it concerns claiming that things that evidently happened did not.
subpoenaed his bank accounts and repeatedly found nothing of the sort
And the concept of a person holding money in an account under the name of different person or a corporation had not been invented yet. Seriously. I mean, surely the personal accounts needed to be checked, just in case Joe had been brazen and dumb enough to just put money right there in plain sight. But if he was not, that doesn't prove much. Most people are smart enough to do that, especially people that run a large corrupt enterprise for years.
Joe gave excessive leeway to his son Hunter
I'm sorry, "excessive leeway" is when you let the kid live in your basement rent free, poach on your beer in your fridge, drive you car and not fill it up, leave the pizza leftovers on the couch, smoke the weed indoors, that kind of thing. It's not when you allow him to sell access to you, President of the United States, to foreign powers, including China and Russia, and get millions of dollars in exchange for it. Biden may have been non compos mentis by 2025, but in 2015, when it all was at its peak, he surely was sane enough to know it. It's not "leeway", it's RICO. He didn't "close his eyes" or "put blinders" or any stuff like that. He knew everything, he couldn't miss it, his family knew everything, everybody knew everything and participated in it - that was the family business. There are witnesses and testimonies for it. And they got as brazen as invent those "Hunter artwork" scheme - which was selling nicely while his father was the President and turned out completely worthless the second he was out. Again, how naive can one be here?
That’s consistent with a father who keeps family and state separated on paper
Oh sure, on paper I am sure Biden never signed a contract with CCP saying "I will help you do stuff and you pay me through my son Hunter". Nobody is ever that dumb. Hunter just told them "I will be your conduit to my father, and to prove that, I will talk to you in his presence", and Joe knew exactly what is going on, and participated in it. Not once, not twice, but many times over many years. And he for sure knew millions of dollars are changing hands in connection to that. The fact that there's no paper saying "I, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., got this sum of money from CCP as a bribe and confirm it with my notarized signature" is not a big clue you pretend it to be - there's never such paper, nobody is so dumb as to make it. People have been taking and given bribes for millenia by now, and there are many ways to give and take bribes while avoiding creating such papers, and I am sure Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. can name a few of them.
the most histrionic Dem attacks weren't true.
And by "most" you mean every single one of them. At least as it concerns the "Russian collusion". And nobody still admitted anything or suffered any consequences for brazenly lying about it. Moreover, they keep mentioning it as if it's somehow a counterexample to corruption coverups under Biden administration.
AugustDeRosa
56m ago
Trump barely posts on Twitter as it is. He's still full-bore Truth Social, although I have never heard of anybody using the website for anything other than seeing what Trump has posted on it.
veqq
57m ago
you could easily reduce spending by 10% and not to pay this interest payment and be in the same situation
What?
jake
58m ago
You could see this playing out in modern satire, or satire in modern intrigue fiction. The BBB has sections in it, Stephen Miller's posted on this, expanding the authority of the executive in deportations. It would go, the media will care more about the Trump-Elon alliance breaking and Elon's very public tantrum than something dastardly buried in the bill, so fake a fight, and go loud and brash so it's not "insider sources" but the men themselves who force the story. Bill is passed and signed, Trump and Musk post a picture shaking hands with the caption "lol pranked" and the administration proceeds with using whatever new authority they've been granted.
But that is (probably) not how the world works, and I think @nopie has described the truth of it.
AugustDeRosa
58m ago
I think the more important question in the coming fallout - if this is permanent, as Trump has demonstrated a pretty remarkable willingness to 'get over' stuff like this in the past (Cruz, Rubio, Vance, basically anybody that isn't Barack Obama or Rosie O'Donnell), and Musk could potentially try and undo this by groveling - will be what happens amongst the other assorted figures within the tech world. Thiel is clearly closely integrated into the Trump admin, but figures such as Zuck, Huang, Bezos, Ellison who hold an immense amount of clout, power, and capital that spans far beyond the borders of the USA have been very friendly to the admin this time around but are far less intertwined with it.
My prediction: this doesn't fizzle out, Elon remains on bad terms with the admin, Trump makes an example of him albeit not in the most extreme sense, the tech world meekishly maintains its closeness with Trump for fear of retribution, and the economic position of the USA worsens as it demonstrates more dysfunction - and, most importantly, humanity takes a few more steps backwards from any end goal of expanding beyond the rock we are currently stuck on.
While the conflict is unsightly, the economic policy of 'lets continuously cut taxes and raise spending' is Zimbabwe-tier. America cannot afford to treat the rest of the world like retarded clowns forever, no matter how stupid and foolish other countries are. They're not going to keep buying these little bits of paper at a high price.
A trillion dollars borrowed every 180 days? Inflation will inevitably spike and then interest rates will need to be raised, with serious consequences for refinancing.
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