formerly /u/squirrelrampage on Reddit
It’s quite amazing how these people show their asses on LinkedIn and think it makes them look smart, instead of proving that they completely lost touch with reality. It fits the picture that one the very same day they laid of thousands, Microsoft also send out an invitation to hear them pitch genAI at GamesCom. That’s corpo brain on late stage capitalism.
I was once a fan of Nina Paley, because of her activism against copyright and even bought some of her merch. Then I found out that she is a capital-letters TERF.
You can find a “TERFy Archive” with all her transphobic writing on her website, she hosts a transphobic podcast with the subtitle “A TERF and a t-slur walk into a podcast studio” which she uses to promote the “autogynephilia” conspiracy theory, among so, so much more transphobia.
Paley would consider this comment of mine to be “censorship”. As usual with her type she wants to dish out, but doesn’t want to be criticized for it.
Ah, well, better skip “Strange Days”, “12 Monkeys” and “Gattaca” then…
I moments of crisis, I will just start crying, but I can do that very fast.
Es ist nicht okay das Mäh zu verdreschen. 😤
They don’t want to save Hollywood, they want to control it. They can’t control it if the studios shoot their films outside of the US.
When “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade” was shot, Harrison Ford was 47. Sean Connery was 59 and played the father of Ford’s character.
Art is by Kelsie Brumet
I pity the guy. He tried really damn hard (without much success) and then I had to murder him.
Fun fact: The mouse was already invented in the 60s and was part of the famous “Mother of all Demos” which shaped modern computing like no other single event since then.
As other people have already mentioned: No, you are not paranoid. The pattern that you recognise is fake outrage or ragebait.
If you have some time to spare and are curiously about how the right-wing outrage machine works, I can highly recommend the video essay “Stellar Blade: The Fake Outrage” by Shaun. His videos can be a little dry, but he goes to great lengths to pick apart a single example (the video game Stellar Blade) and how the right-wing first embraced the game (in the name of their fight against “wokeism, DEI,…”), only to then do a full about-face when the game did not turn out exactly as they had envisioned (and claim that the game was full of “wokeism, DEI,…”).
It’s a long video, but it does a very good job to expose the mix of unsubstantiated claims, copy-pasted accusations and ultimately fake outrage that underlies right-wing behavior these days.
I can’t take articles such as this one seriously if they don’t mention right-wing terrorists recruiting through the same channels and means. That has been a known problem for more than a decade.
Treating online radicalisation solely as a problem of people with a migrant/non-European/Muslim/… background is very telling and borders on lying by omission.
Consider this headline from Bloomberg in this context:
About 90% of Migrants Deported to El Salvador Had No US Criminal Record
Yes, I think we are both in agreement that there is a distinction between intelligence and education. And - while these two points often get thrown together - it matters in political contexts, particularly because the Trumpists attempt to destroy the education system which they see as an obstacle to their rule. Critical thinking and language skills matter.
AFAIK that depends really: Sure, those who are not really part of the “cult” will likely drop out, but the “ever faithful” will double down, because they will consider such hardship to be a test of their faith.
That effect can be seen here:
The problem is that it’s not a question of intelligence.
Trumpists and their ilk are living in echo chambers of “alternative facts”, perpetuated by Fox News, Murdoch newspapers and an nearly endless amount of rightwing influencers (starting with Rogan at the top). They are not looking at what’s happening, because they are surrounded in a very comforting bubble of disinfo and propaganda that confirms everything they wanted to hear: The illegals get deported, the queers get finally put in their place, the liberals are frothing with anger, finally men are back in charge who tell women where they belong and America is going to be “great” again any moment now.
It’s fascism and fascism has always been a “cult”: The early pioneers of fascism (particularly D’Annunzio and later Mussolini) explicitly said their aim was to create a “secular religion” around the nation, the people and the leader. And you can only be a member of that religion if you accept its “truth” and reject everything that contradicts it.
Very smart people can adhere to a religion for a variety of reasons and the most obvious one is (and always has been) because it promises them power over others.
Obligatory footnote: EvoPsych is mostly bunk, deeply intertwined with eugenics and riddled with homophobia, sexism and rape apologia.
The stock went down when Tesla’s sales numbers for the first quarter of 2025 got out and showed a decrease of sold vehicles, on top of Musk’s shenanigans and the protests at Tesla showrooms. Now these events have been “priced in” and the stock operates on vague estimates and wishful thinking again until the next slew of substantial bad news hits, at the latest when the next quarterly numbers are due.
The art is by Aïda Amer who works for Axios.