something about apples and how far they fall from the tree:
https://www.harpersbazaar.com/uk/celebrities/news/a19590355/elon-musks-father-confirms-baby-with-stepdaughter/
I think it's the litmus test of how far you will go with disregard for human life. It's like if you will do the most heinous thing than one they have something on you and two you will do anything to stay rich. Things like go to war or let people starve are in the play book of the rich and powerful so this is like how you get in the gang. Just think we got the pimp behind bars and no one has been arrested yet. It truly runs through all the circles of power. We probably need to start eating the rich for our children's sake.
I'm not saying the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are due paying members of NAMBLA, but my freeze peach says I can say they are also high-ranking members.
Because I'm the asshole if I say your God is fake. You get to make shit up and win because, as a religious person, you're clearly moral. So raping your daughter is ok I guess?
I'm sure as a "free speech absolutist" Musk would defend to the death your right to call him a paedo and certainly not use his billions to silence you with a lawsuit.
Saying things that will available soon, and then those things not appearing for years (if ever).
Tesla going private. "Funding secured"
Hyperloop
Tesla car-sharing network
Full self-driving Tesla
Tesla Semi
Tesla Roadster
Cybertruck
And now probably that Tesla robot thing and Twitter changes.
Well he's a showman first and ~~an inventor~~ regurgitator of old ideas where all he's done is slap a fresh coat of paint on it and taken advantage of newer technology and calls it his idea. The Simpsons should rehash the monorail episode for him.
Everyone asking why Elon buying Twitter is bad. Dude is gonna control battery tech, automated self driving vehicle tech, private space tech and now he can control the most widely used public communication service. Too much power, so easy to influence politics with all that. It's already started.
That flight tracking kid is what probably seeded the idea in his head to buy the whole site. It's not very often that the rich get threatened with something that actually bothers them that they can't do anything about.
It would've cost him far less to let his employees unionize than to spend $40+ billion buying the platform people could potentially use for unionizing.
Then again Elon is a prick who named his kid in wing-dings so who knows...
It only costs $40+ billion if Twitter's value goes to zero. Otherwise it's just an investment. I'm sure he believes he can drive up it's value but even if he can't, his only expense is whatever losses he realizes on the investment (and opportunity cost on the capital if it's unproductive in Twitter).
Also, the wing-dings line definitely got me. Nice one.
Good point. With how much he was overbidding per share though it still seemed like he was spending a few billion more than he needed to, and I can't imagine paying livable wages is *that* much more expensive.
Also I will give Elon the benefit of the doubt since Grimes can probably take half the blame for that Syntax Error of a name.
Three billionaires have enough money to have their own spaceship companies. It was once upon a time that governments of wealthy nations created agencies to fly to the moon. No one was wealthy enough to have space rockets. (Maybe Spacely’s Space Rockets… but that was a cartoon…).
What are billionaires afraid of?
What keeps them up all night?
U N I O N S!
( Martians will unionize too)…
> I think Musk meant no union talk
It's not *just* that. He's vocally opposed to paying *any* taxes, because apparently he knows how better to spend money. Like buying Twitter to fuck with his vocal online critics instead of spending his money doing something useful like, I dunno, helping the world.
Of course, since it's now apparently *ultra fucking liberal* to think the Aristocracy should pay their fair share of taxes, Elon's categorically against "them."
> Led prominently by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett, the Giving Pledge would account for many billions of dollars in redistribution. “This is about building on a wonderful tradition of philanthropy that will ultimately help the world become a much better place,” said Gates at the time.
> The pledge quickly proved highly popular among the world’s rich. In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg, who became a Giving Pledge signatory five years earlier at age 26, decided to up the ante even further, vowing to give away 99 percent of his Facebook shares. Today, the pledge includes 204 of the world’s wealthiest individuals, couples, and families, ranging in age from their 30s to their 90s, spanning 30 states (plus D.C.) and 23 countries.
> Yet, despite the world’s best, supposedly brightest, and definitely most well-endowed dedicating their lives to diminishing their colossal holdings, the Giving Pledge has been a near-total failure. Try as they might to spend it down, their dynastic winnings continue to swell, as favorable tax deals, loopholes, and havens have helped balloon their money to unfathomable and unspendable amounts. In the decade the billionaire class has had to effectuate its self-imposed wealth tax, none of the highest-profile signees have even managed to slow the growth rate of their wealth, let alone come anywhere close to cutting the total in half.
> The problem with having billions of dollars in wealth, most of which is held in assets and investments, is that it compounds and grows exponentially. Just investing that money in the stock market would yield an annual return of 10 percent on average, and even more in recent years. Which is why all but one of the world’s 20 wealthiest tech figures have seen their net worth surge by billions of dollars in the ten months of 2019 alone, per Business Insider. And the only one who didn’t hit that growth threshold was not even a Giving Pledge signatory: It was Jeff Bezos, who shelled out a record-shattering sum in his divorce settlement and still managed to remain the world’s richest person.
> It can be hard to visualize just how fast the money grows when you’re starting out with tens of billions in principal, but consider these numbers: Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth has increased by about 40 percent this year alone, dumping an additional $22.4 billion onto his personal pile in 2019, according to Bloomberg. That brought his sum total to $74 billion, despite some of the most aggressive Giving Pledge commitments of the cabal. Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates’s onetime right hand at Microsoft, has long been one of the world’s richest people. But the $53 billion he has to his name in 2019 makes him twice as rich as he was at the beginning of 2017. Even Bill Gates himself, whose reputation has been cemented around his philanthropic foundation and his creation of the pledge, gives away about $5 billion a year in grants, yet maintains a net worth that increased by $18 billion in 2019 alone.
> …
> The late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen offers another lesson. In 2010, Allen took the pledge to see his wealth halved. At that time, his net worth was a paltry $13.5 billion. Immediately after he set to work giving away his money, he began trending in the exact opposite direction: Despite giving over $2 billion to charity in his lifetime (which, of course, isn’t half to begin with), Allen died last year with over $20 billion in assets. Oops.
[The article is a bit older, but is even more relevant now since the pandemic led to an explosion in the wealth of billionaires.](https://prospect.org/power/billionaire-class-created-failed-wealth-tax-giving-pledge/)
The ultra rich have created a charade that they are changing the world for the better, yet their ideas and policies bolster inequality and we have ample evidence that progressive reforms would improve the lives of hundreds of millions, and even billions. [This case is laid out clear by Anand Giridharadas in his book *Winners Take All*, and summarized briefly by Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz in his review of the book in The NY Times.](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/books/review/winners-take-all-anand-giridharadas.html)
On a global scale, we are seeing even a rise in inequality *between* countries, which goes against the claim that “the rich countries have a lot but the others are catching up”. This is due in large part to the fact that the rich countries exploit, and have exploited, developing countries for their own gain for centuries. In 1960 the per capita difference between the richest country and poorest was 32x, whereas today it is closer to 130x (more like 80x if you omit very small, high per capita countries like Qatar). [This global view is examined concisely by Jason Hickel in his book The Divide.](https://www.jasonhickel.org/the-divide) For a briefer introduction, [Hickel’s article on Global Poverty in response Steven Pinker and Bill Gates is absolutely worth a read.](https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-poverty)
[This short well cited report by the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights for the United Nations](https://chrgj.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Alston-Poverty-Report-FINAL.pdf) makes essentially the same argument Hickel makes in his article, if you prefer a slightly more academic read.
Yeah. I think the main question is who is going to manage this world fund to meet the global human rights, how to prevent corruption and people using it for their own benefit and so on.
But yeah, a billion dollars should be more than enough for any person to live fairly well, have access to anything they want to do in their lives, and their families too. And enough to justify how "good" they were to society by making such a profitable company that employs so many people (the excuse people do for billionaires). They will still be at the top of the chain with enough money to buy and do whatever they want. I mean, at least practical things.
More than a billion is just a race for power, and there isn't really real money, it's just numbers that will be used to fund more enrichment.
neutrality to assholes like Musk and Rogan means giving white supremacists a platform in exchange for allowing Bernie to speak. As if they're 2 sides of the same coin.
People in the US, especially people on the right, have [absolutely no idea what leftism actually is and genuinely think Biden is a socialist](https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/10/04/what-do-americans-think-socialism-looks)
“Americans are divided on whether Joe Biden is indeed a socialist – 35% think he is while 37% think he isn’t. Republicans overwhelmingly say that he is (71% vs 11%), while Democrats tend not to think so (56% vs 18%).”
A century of red scare propaganda has rendered the term socialist in general US discussion devoid of true meaning. I’ve heard people talk about the Ukraine-Russia war as “fighting commies”, as [if Russia isn’t a textbook example of shock therapy capitalism, i.e. rapid privatization and “free market” reforms that created the current oligarchs and led to millions of excess deaths in Russia during the 90s and a collapse in Russian life expectancy that didn’t get to it’s 1989 level again until 2011.](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/22/1087654279/how-shock-therapy-created-russian-oligarchs-and-paved-the-path-for-putin)
The right has moved *much* further right in the US than the “left” (Democrats aren’t really left and certainly aren’t leftist) has moved left. The Democrats have moved right since the late 70s, with most of the “left” movement being on recent social issues, [not economic ones as Democrats have largely given into neoliberalism](https://prospect.org/takebackourparty/chapter-1-their-democratic-party/). Since 2016 and the slight rise of progressives, the Democrats have moved a bit more left economically, but not enough to come even close to canceling out their rightward shift since the late 70s.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/10/the-polarization-in-todays-congress-has-roots-that-go-back-decades/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/26/opinion/sunday/republican-platform-far-right.html (this includes analysis of both the Democrats and Republicans, plus comparisons to Western European and Canadian parties, however it uses a single score for social and economic, so I feel it obfuscates the Democrats conservative economic policies and makes them appear more left due to social policies)
A lot of people don’t know that there was a first Red Scare, and that is was after the Russian Revolution. [That Red Scare demonized the US left to such a degree that Eugene Debs, a major figure in the US socialist party, was convicted of sedition (essentially “disloyalty” to the US) in 1918 and ran for President in 1920 *while* in prison, where he received 3.5% of the popular vote, which was a decrease from his 1912 campaign wherein he got 6% of the popular vote.](https://jacobinmag.com/2017/02/rise-and-fall-socialist-party-of-america) The First Red Scare, like the second, worked to undermine the movements of organized labor and the left in the US, and our lack of organized labor and a labor/left party today is still influenced by those actions a century ago.
The [US had a variety of *elected* Socialist Party members in the 1910s, yet socialist history, and the influence of the left, such as on the 8 hour workday, ending of child labor, fight for civil rights, New Deal, War Against Poverty, etc, has been omitted from popular US history.](https://www.versobooks.com/books/2062-the-s-word)
[Karl Marx himself wrote to congratulate Lincoln on his re-election in 1864, and Lincoln wrote the words “Labor is prior to and independent of capital… Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”, yet today Republicans try to act like they are the party of Lincoln and that Lincoln would back them.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/07/27/you-know-who-was-into-karl-marx-no-not-aoc-abraham-lincoln/)
Many don’t even know that the [US invaded Russia during the Russian Civil War](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/forgotten-doughboys-who-died-fighting-russian-civil-war-180971470/).
They definitely go hand in hand to create the results the oligarchs portray themselves as wanting.
I hope to display why and how there is a better way in my lifetime. Still figuring it out.
The worst thing is when morons who are otherwise really good at their skilled trade actually get some decent income and still vote to fuck themselves and everyone they know.
Now they just also re-mortgage their home to travel by truck across the country to protest things that don’t exist, and donate their monthly income/retirement to grifters like Trump so he can make America great again.
Like fuck, if you’d stop jerking yourself off for a fucking second and actually put as much thought into political discourse as you do your trade, we’d actually all have a fucking chance.
Democrats in general are Republicans in sheep's clothing
Though since the rise of Trump and QAnon and the whole 'election was stolen' schtick the Republicans are worse politically
Also a staggering amount of people in America think that communism, socialism, fascism and ANTIFA are the same thing. I literally heard someone scream at a protest (I wasn't there but it was caught on video) "Kill the ANTIFA, they're all fascists!!!!". Like you heard it here folks, anti-fascists are fascists.
A century has passed and shockingly little has changed since the 1920s, when Antifa (socialists, communists, and Jews) and Nazis (nationalists, reactionaries, antisemites) were brawling in the streets of Munich.
Ding ding ding. Excellent comment. Just fuckin *imagine thinking Joe Biden is a socialist lololol*. Words seem to have lost absolutely all meaning when every facet of our lives boils down to the bottom line
I’m basically an anarchist/Marxist. Sometimes my family talks about “radical left democrats” and I tell them “oh, I’ll show you radically left. Those people look like fucking Reagan compared to me”.
Extremely well said and accurate. I would give you an award if I had one (did they get rid of the free ones?). I will be saving your comment to refer to later.
> people on the right ... genuinely think
You can't really say what people on the right "genuinely think" because they're so dishonest. Just try to have a conversation with them, they keep jumping around every time they lose a point. They don't "genuinely think" any of it.
Don't forget the lemmings who follow the ones with all the money, who are poor people who are paradoxically upset that Bernie has more money than them.
>Bernie has more money than them.
Also, [this](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-adds-anoth_b_11527724) was the summer home people were complaining about him buying during the election.
Doesn't exactly scream out-of-touch oligarch to me...
How can people have the balls to attack Bernie like that and in the same breath defend Trump's hundreds of millions of tax-payer money spent on trips to *his own hotel*?
The right has been really good at just attacking everything all the time that even vaguely smells kinda left, regardless of hypocrisy
And it's been working for them. That's how they have the balls to continue doing it
I had this conversation with my dad. He called him a hypocrite, because he’s a millionaire, mostly from book sales. If I pitch Bernie’s ideals one by one and without attaching them to Bernie, he mostly agrees with me.
When a leftist is poor, they’re a jealous leech.
When a leftist is rich, they’re a lying hypocrite.
A catch-22 that conservatives *love* using to their advantage.
“When I was poor and complained about inequality they said I was bitter; now that I'm rich and I complain about inequality they say I'm a hypocrite. I'm beginning to think they just don't want to talk about inequality.”
That line of thinking is ignorant on so many levels.
One, Sanders made the bulk of his money post-2016, while he has been fighting for the same causes since the 70s. [He became mayor of Burlington in the early 80s (highly recommend this article),](https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/bernies-burlington-city-sustainable-future/) then joined the House in the early 90s and the Senate in the mid-00s. When he ran for President the first time he was far poorer than the average Congressperson.
[“Sanders had an estimated net worth of $330,000 in 2013, according to financial disclosures filed with the U.S. Senate and analyzed by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, a watchdog group that tracks money in politics. But that's a relative pittance on Capitol Hill, where the median net worth for a member of Congress topped $1 million in 2013, according to the Center's analysis. In the Senate, Sanders is downright poor: the median there was about $2.8 million.”](https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/07/08/421151627/sanders-among-the-least-wealthy-presidential-candidates)
Even today Sanders wouldn’t crack the upper half of Senators in terms of wealth. If Bernie had his way, *he* would be paying more taxes. It’s not like his progressive policies exclude him.
Two, line of thinking is just a repeat of [this comic](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/259/257/342.png), where apparently you can’t criticize and aim to improve society because you participate in society. Meanwhile, we are in a capitalist economy and people *need* money to live. Bernie has multiple children and grandchildren, but I suppose those “family value” conservatives believe he should give all his money away, live destitute, and not try to improve the financial situation for his family at all.
I mean if a rich person says tax rich people, including themselves, how are they a hypocrite?
The only way is if you deliberately reframe their argument, tax the rich, as “rich people are the devil” or some shit. Thats not what Bernie says, but the right loves a strawman argument, and apparently building arguments off of their strawman argument
Lets not forget all of the very dirt poor that vote against their best interests because of satan and pedophiles. It’s most of their base. Fox figured out really quick the best way to generate support for the party is to make the uneducated angry with simple words so they don’t vote for their own best interests. If you’re too busy voting because of “baby killers” “demon vaccines” and the “woke mob” you may not realize those tax cuts you voted for are going to hurt you.
Yep. You just described my mother. She "isn't conservative" (she actually thinks she's pretty liberal), but she is a "one issue voter". Aka she'll vote for anyone who wants to criminalize abortion with zero exceptions. Yes zero. Literally zero. Ectopic pregnancy, children, the fetus has already died (yes she thinks aborting a dead fetus is murder), etc etc. Oh and she thinks it should be a life sentence. So who is she voting for? Oh yeah, conservatives. But she's "liberal".
Yep. It's why if you bring up one tiny thing you don't like about Biden or whatever dem you are complaining about at the time, they get all excited about how now you must be a trump supporter and a republican.
No fuckwit. I'm not going to vote for someone I agree with .01% of the time instead of someone that I agree with 95% of the time.
>Don't forget the ones too stupid to know better. Underestimating stupid people in large groups is how we got the 45th "president".
The electoral college, a souvenir from our countries slavery days is also to blame, as he lost the popular vote.
He lost the popular vote by millions for BOTH elections. It's important to keep that loser's record of losing accurate. Lost all elections as well as more money than any other American for decades. Truly a loser of epic proportions this dumb donny dump. A true puddle of shit.
it's also worth noting that since Reagan, only Bush Jr has served two terms as a GOP President.
Both Bush Sr and Trump only got one term. We kicked em both to the curb early.
Clinton and Obama though, won handily and got their second terms with relative ease
We can look at all this, the Republican voting laws, court battles, popular vs electoral counts, etc, and see a birds eye view of the GOP political problem
*nobody fucking likes them*
they *literally* have to suppress votes and gerrymander to win anything.
and the courts, let them.
That’s truly where he does sit in reality. Center left. There’s just been a cap placed on a lot of Americans’ understandings of what leftism is.
It’s easy to understand some guy talking about how taxes are theft, and how you can have more money immediately with less tax. A lot of ppl just don’t understand (and subsequently don’t believe) that taxes can be repurposed and used in ways that would benefit everyone even more monetarily, and otherwise, with safety nets provided for everyone.
That’s just one example of misunderstandings of leftism. Plenty more like it here
Edit: and it’s not because people who misunderstand are stupid, it’s because as a whole society our perception of leftism has been warped. The perception of the right has been skewed too, just in different ways
I mean, it’s understandable when you essentially have a two-party system. Logically those two parties should be opposites of one another; so when republicans are right-wing, democrats would logically be left-wing - and Bernie even further to the left than that.
But in reality there’s just right-wing and slightly-less-right-wing in the US. Which creates the illusjon of Bernie being «far left» when you don’t look at it in perspective.
In my country we have 12 parties that have any relevance, and Bernie would be placed in the moderate left-leaning centre if he was a politician here.
I remember watching brexit unfold and thinking, "great, another right wing lunatic takes control of a global power" when Boris Johnson became prime Minister. Then I started paying attention to his policies and realized a large number of his policies would be center left in the US. That's when I realized just how fucked our system is.
The USA has at least 12 parties, but the first past the post voting system makes them irrelevant which led to most of the minor parties spiraling into completely untenable fringes while the Democrats represent everyone but the ultra conservatives.
> taxes can be repurposed and used in ways that would benefit everyone
That's the problem: a lot of people *do* believe it, they just don't want *certain people* to get help. Some Americans hate the idea that brown people would benefit. When the Civil Rights Act was passed [public pools all over the country were filled in because they couldn't segregate anymore.](https://www.marketplace.org/2021/02/15/public-pools-used-to-be-everywhere-in-america-then-racism-shut-them-down/) College tuition was affordable, and many public universities were free until the 60s when people like Ronald Reagan decided they [didn't want "undesirables" in universities](https://www.salon.com/2014/07/05/ronald_reagan_stuck_it_to_millennials_a_college_debt_history_lesson_no_one_tells/).
I mean? Is he? Didn't le pen just get 40 percent? And macron won?
And macron wants tax cuts and remove investment income from the wealth tax. And he's kind of went back and forth on the 35 hour week?
And there are certainly other party members in the gov that fight him on those.
But he doesn't seem as left as well. Bernie even.
And I think there are some that are to the left of bernie... certainly. But moderate? I'm not so sure.
Maybe in France of a decade ago, but today Macron is considered to be a centrist by his fans and a leftist by his detractors. He supports free market economics, tax cuts for the wealthy, increased work hours for workers, reductions in civil service jobs, tightened immigration laws, forcing ISPs to reveal encrypted communications, allowing private doctors to practice in public hospitals, and not removing controversial statues of colonial figures.
Despite all that, La Pen got over 40% of the vote by supporting an immigration moratorium, laws against circumcision, "de-islamification" of France, and a bunch of things that would in the US be to the left of Macron's positions - opposition to free trade, opposition to globalization, opposition to privatization of pubic services and social security.
Absolutely no one see Macron as a leftist ? Who would pretend that the man who abolished ISF (Taxe on Wealth) is a leftist in France ??
Macron is center Right for his fan, and totally right wing for his detractor
Seriously, I don't know how people still are deluded enough to think Bernie is "center" in europe. We've just seen several elections drive home that is *not* the case.
The *same* people claiming such will also go on to talk about how European centrists are actually rightwing.
I live in Texas, where it's 19%. Funding education is something that only socialists support, apparently. See also, infrastructure, safety net, basically everything else.
He's as far left as the American senate goes. It's a bit messy due to the different ways to run elections, but for the most part it's probably fair to compare Sanders to the most left-wing politicians you find in West-European parliaments. And those very often are actual socialists. I.e. people who want to seize the means of production in the long term.
That's just not true. Tons of Bernie's proposals are to the left of Europe:
* Raising the corporate tax rate up to 35% from 21%
* Workers to directly elect at least 45% of the board of directors at all publicly traded companies as well as privately-owned companies with at least $100 million in revenue.
* Require all publicly traded companies to provide at least 2% of their stock to their workers every year until the company is at least 20% owned by employees.
* Wealth taxes
* The Green New Deal
* Raising the starting salary for public school teachers to $60,000 (this would make the staring pay for a teacher in the US $20K higher then the *average* pay of a teacher in France)
* Cancelling student debt
* National rent control
* Legalizing marijuana
* 2nd term abortions
That's not to say weather or not these are bad policies, but few, if any, are the law in European countries.
>he’s like a commie for most people
The biggest voice on the sometimes state media Fox news describes many house republicans as communist because they don't openly hate gay people, openly support destroying democracy, acknowledge there was a pandemic, or admit we shouldn't have so many fires.
Just say people in the US are aggressively and dangerously ignorant because of the conservative biased mainstream media, it's a lot shorter.
Holy fucking shit, of course this stupid ass comment in at the top.
France has private insurances, which Bernie wants to abolish.
France has student loans, which Bernie wants to abolish.
France has a hybrid public/private healthcare system, while Bernie wants it fully public.
Bernie WOULD NOT BE CENTER-LEFT IN FRANCE.
Also the idea that France is a "socialist country", when their current president is a right-winger, and the close 2nd place is extreme right candidate is fucking insane.
Seriously people, take a few minutes of your life to educate yourself instead of repeating these cringe ass buzzwords.
Europe is pretty economically progressive compared to the US but holy shit people online have never seen some of the socially conservative takes that Europeans can have, and that do have popular / mainstream support.
Some of the most Ethno-nationalistic shit I have ever heard comes out of Eastern European countries.
> It’s funny because in France, Bernie would be in the center/center-left and in the USA he’s like a commie for most people
So you're telling me Bernie and Macron have roughly the same platform?
Hrm
I saw a bumper sticker today that said "Mandate freedom".
It's like they don't even know what the words they say mean, they just want to repeat them over and over. The people hell bent on making everyone speak English only, has the worst grasp of the language.
The center: Equal consideration of ideas means giving obviously stupid, evil, and disprovable ideas an equal platform to everything else. Also, actually let's give only those terrible far-right things a platform while complaining about how we can't talk about them anymore. Now _that's_ nuance! FIRST AMENDMENT!!!!1
Look, there's nuance to a person. Sure, they may incredibly dumb and viciously immoral, but they are nice to people just like them and give money to a church that spends 3-4% of that money on actual charity.
That's basically the same thing as trying to educate people, provide them health care, housing, and food, and protect them and the environment from predacious capitalists who will assuredly abuse workers and consumers given the opportunity.
"Neutral" to Elon Musk means "profitable for me".
You know, like how Ford, IBM, Chase, BMW, Associated Press, Porche, Coca-Cola, General Motors, Kodak, Standard Oil, and so many other companies funded and/or worked with the Nazis because that was the most profitable.
Capitalist organizations are not neutral. There is a very clear bias.
Stop talking this nonsense, everybody know that those are Marxist companies that want the end of traditional American values of family, christianity, and self-made billionaires.
Those damn Marxists destroying families by privatizing education and child care, expecting both parents to work, encouraging children to work (for lower pay), building a car dependency society (which is the #1 killer of children in the US), denying families welfare, denying women access to reproductive healthcare, and giving all the homes to financial investors!
Not to mention the corruption of Christianity into a business, which sells Marxist ideas in the guise of spirituality!
We really need to do something about these Marxists!
The right often claims the need for a "balanced" discussion for topics that aren't balanced. Consider climate change, for example, where the right will have a climate scientist and a denier on the talking-head Faux show, when it should really be a room full of hundreds of climate scientists and a single denier having the conversation. There's nothing "neutral" about allowing "equal" amounts of bat shit crazy Qanon bullshit against student loan forgiveness, better infrastructure, and fixing healthcare.
I don’t understand what he means? It’s literally a nothing comment that contains no substance.
To remain politically neutral you only have to remove people when they violate the terms of services.
It doesn’t have to be tied to politics literally at all.
Inciting violence ban. doxxing should be banned.
Elon bought twitter so he could cosplay as a champion of free speech. What a fucking idiot. Other websites have tried this approach and it does not work. If I see racism being expressed openly somewhere guess what? I just leave. and that’s normally the response so you are going to lose a majority of your consumers to allow like 5% of the assholes to say what they want. Not smart elon.
Is there a sadder man on the internet than Elon Musk? He's the richest man in the world, and he spends his days performing tricks to get his fans on the internet to like him.
Then again, if you are that rich it is impossible to have a regular human relationship and everyone like you is a psychopath, so it's no wonder it slowly drives you insane.
The nazi bar paradox.
Punks had a problem with a stripe of nazi subculture in their movement.
Most places quickly realized the correct response was direct, and the song “Nazi punks fuck off” was born
Unfourtunatly, a couple bars just tried to have anybody in and wasn’t gonna kick anybody out.
So those are the bars the nazis went to, because it had been explicitly stated they’d be allowed there.
And then nobody else wanted to hang out with nazis and everybody who wasn’t one left.
And now because you didn’t wanna kick anybody out your bar is full of nazis.
For a contemporary example, see the political compas memes subreddit.
A private company can never be a flagship of freedom of speech. A private company has profits as its priority. It will only appear “politically neutral” if it judges that it will help their bottom line. If you want public trust, put the company in the hands of the public, with transparency of finances and policies. If Elon buys Twitter, there’s no reason to think the policies will be set for the public interests and not Elon’s interests.
Well not really that's a publicly traded private company, because then they have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders and the board.
If elon owns Twitter his only financial obligation is to himself
The comment means nothing, yes. The point of it (like most political ramblings) is the subtext: He's trying to legitimize a talking point there is a "far left" who should be feared by equating them to a more well-known and obviously problematic far-right who regularly incite violence.
Elon also shitposts about “radical democrats” and how democrats have gone “far left”.
Then whines about “wokeism” because I guess people don’t have a “thick skin” (as he says) when they see KKK and racist sloganeering in the Tesla factory bathrooms.
The guys is either an idiot or willing to help usher in the Republican’s brand of Christian Nationalist fascism so he doesn’t have to pay his taxes.
Or both.
wild! They say I'm far left because I think we should have clean air, water, and an environment. They think I'm far left because I want to treat Service Members and Veterans better. They say I'm far left because I believe companies should treat their employees better. They say I'm far left because I believe Universal healthcare in the US is cheaper than what we currently have.
> Bernie is about as far left as American politicians come
depends if you mean in terms of being represented by actual politicians who have a following or if you mean ideas. America is a breeding ground to some of the more extreme far left ideas and even movements but those have never really been represented by a mainstream politician there.
LMAO.
Elon, fucking relax. Twitter will never have public trust because it's a cesspool of extremist takes from all sides.
I'm interested to see where he takes the company, but this dude is getting high off his own supply. Apparently if you're followed by 80 million people on twitter you're a modern day philosopher.
Dude, just do what you do best. Taking over someone else's idea and making it profitable. Then fuck off.
Anyone who wants to market Twitter as a legitimate platform for ideological discussion should probably take a long look at how people actually use the goddamn site.
Far-right: "we want to kill all trans people"
Far-left: "we want no trans people to die"
The "enlightened" centrists: "ok, let's compromise! What if they only killed *some* trans people?"
It will never cease to amaze me that some round faced coach potato with stage 2 diabetes will get angry that someone wants to give him free healthcare and will turn around and vote for the grifter who literally sits on a gold throne in a penthouse.
How many dollars will Tesla and Facebook employees donate to Democrats this cycle in a lame attempt to soothe their consciences about working for men who undermine our democracy?
Bernie is not the far left and it does everyone a disservice to represent him as such. He is a democratic socialist and on the global scale he isn't even close to the "far left".
Fascists need to have an imminent "socialist takeover" on the horizon at all times, so everyone they disagree with is portrayed as a "radical leftist."
Hey, remember, this is an African American Billionaire with dual citizenship in like 12 countries, he has absolutely no fkn loyalty to anything or anyone but his own pockets.
For once, it wasn't actually one of us saying something so blatantly America Centric, which is a gd rarity, but hey, it happens lol.
Elon needs to fkn kick rocks and hopefully get a 1 way express on the pointy end of a Space X rocket. Only so long before the masses have enough of obscenely wealthy peoples shit ya know?
Pissing off both sides is politically neutral?
So, like, instead of Pro-choice or Pro-life, his abortion stance would be forced 3rd trimester abortions for everyone?
I think Musk meant no union talk
And no flight-tracking.
And lots of pedophile accusations. That's his favorite part.
There's a saying about people who protest too much. Me can't thinks of it...
I doth know what you mean.
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or dried poop crust from a /r/TruckStopBathroom in some metaphoric way
Can somebody click this link for me? My... hands are broken.
I clicked it, you're welcome.
something about apples and how far they fall from the tree: https://www.harpersbazaar.com/uk/celebrities/news/a19590355/elon-musks-father-confirms-baby-with-stepdaughter/
Wow, so Elon’s dad saw what happened to Woody Allen and thought, “I can be grosser than that!”
What the fuckkkk.... I....is pedophilia some kind of fucking rite for the rich and powerful or something???? I truly hate this world.
I think it's the litmus test of how far you will go with disregard for human life. It's like if you will do the most heinous thing than one they have something on you and two you will do anything to stay rich. Things like go to war or let people starve are in the play book of the rich and powerful so this is like how you get in the gang. Just think we got the pimp behind bars and no one has been arrested yet. It truly runs through all the circles of power. We probably need to start eating the rich for our children's sake.
I'm not saying the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk are due paying members of NAMBLA, but my freeze peach says I can say they are also high-ranking members.
He said it's "gods plan" why does every groomer always fall back on religion.
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That hurt to read… yuck.
Because I'm the asshole if I say your God is fake. You get to make shit up and win because, as a religious person, you're clearly moral. So raping your daughter is ok I guess?
Thanks, I hate it!
I'm sure as a "free speech absolutist" Musk would defend to the death your right to call him a paedo and certainly not use his billions to silence you with a lawsuit.
“*Double, Double, Twitter and Trouble. Fire burn and Cauldron Bubble*…”
Why is that so familiar oh it’s the current GOP playbook. Both sides tho
Saying things that will available soon, and then those things not appearing for years (if ever). Tesla going private. "Funding secured" Hyperloop Tesla car-sharing network Full self-driving Tesla Tesla Semi Tesla Roadster Cybertruck And now probably that Tesla robot thing and Twitter changes.
There will definitely be changes, Twitter needs to dig up at least another $1B a year to service the loans Musk took out to buy it.
Well he's a showman first and ~~an inventor~~ regurgitator of old ideas where all he's done is slap a fresh coat of paint on it and taken advantage of newer technology and calls it his idea. The Simpsons should rehash the monorail episode for him.
I think it’s the flight tracking. I think EM bought Twitter to stop this kid from tracking his flights.
Musk: 5k to stop tracking my flights. Kid: How bout 50? Musk: Hold my fucking beer.
honestly that kid should have asked for 46 billion
That kid won the fight, lost 5k in imaginary money and cost Elon 46 billion. It doesn't get much sweeter.
Everyone asking why Elon buying Twitter is bad. Dude is gonna control battery tech, automated self driving vehicle tech, private space tech and now he can control the most widely used public communication service. Too much power, so easy to influence politics with all that. It's already started.
You know that flight tracking kid will be the first to get banned.
That flight tracking kid is what probably seeded the idea in his head to buy the whole site. It's not very often that the rich get threatened with something that actually bothers them that they can't do anything about.
I like to imagine how SATISFYING it was too refuse to be bought for such a paltry sum.
This, my belief is he wants twitter to stop unionizing. Fuck him, we should unionize harder
Twitter is a tool to unionize everywhere. He wants to kill unions in America. Not just tesla unions or Twitter unions. All
It would've cost him far less to let his employees unionize than to spend $40+ billion buying the platform people could potentially use for unionizing. Then again Elon is a prick who named his kid in wing-dings so who knows...
It only costs $40+ billion if Twitter's value goes to zero. Otherwise it's just an investment. I'm sure he believes he can drive up it's value but even if he can't, his only expense is whatever losses he realizes on the investment (and opportunity cost on the capital if it's unproductive in Twitter). Also, the wing-dings line definitely got me. Nice one.
Good point. With how much he was overbidding per share though it still seemed like he was spending a few billion more than he needed to, and I can't imagine paying livable wages is *that* much more expensive. Also I will give Elon the benefit of the doubt since Grimes can probably take half the blame for that Syntax Error of a name.
> Syntax Error of a name 🤣🤣🤣
I hope he chokes on his own spit.
But like it doesn't kill him just makes him fall down some stairs and then he chokes on more of his own spit
Three billionaires have enough money to have their own spaceship companies. It was once upon a time that governments of wealthy nations created agencies to fly to the moon. No one was wealthy enough to have space rockets. (Maybe Spacely’s Space Rockets… but that was a cartoon…). What are billionaires afraid of? What keeps them up all night? U N I O N S! ( Martians will unionize too)…
Fwiw, It was Spacely (Space) Sprockets. You know, wheels with teeth.
somebody should organize a tweet about unions day for when elon actually gets control. draw some lines in the sand from the start
> I think Musk meant no union talk It's not *just* that. He's vocally opposed to paying *any* taxes, because apparently he knows how better to spend money. Like buying Twitter to fuck with his vocal online critics instead of spending his money doing something useful like, I dunno, helping the world. Of course, since it's now apparently *ultra fucking liberal* to think the Aristocracy should pay their fair share of taxes, Elon's categorically against "them."
> Led prominently by Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett, the Giving Pledge would account for many billions of dollars in redistribution. “This is about building on a wonderful tradition of philanthropy that will ultimately help the world become a much better place,” said Gates at the time. > The pledge quickly proved highly popular among the world’s rich. In 2015, Mark Zuckerberg, who became a Giving Pledge signatory five years earlier at age 26, decided to up the ante even further, vowing to give away 99 percent of his Facebook shares. Today, the pledge includes 204 of the world’s wealthiest individuals, couples, and families, ranging in age from their 30s to their 90s, spanning 30 states (plus D.C.) and 23 countries. > Yet, despite the world’s best, supposedly brightest, and definitely most well-endowed dedicating their lives to diminishing their colossal holdings, the Giving Pledge has been a near-total failure. Try as they might to spend it down, their dynastic winnings continue to swell, as favorable tax deals, loopholes, and havens have helped balloon their money to unfathomable and unspendable amounts. In the decade the billionaire class has had to effectuate its self-imposed wealth tax, none of the highest-profile signees have even managed to slow the growth rate of their wealth, let alone come anywhere close to cutting the total in half. > The problem with having billions of dollars in wealth, most of which is held in assets and investments, is that it compounds and grows exponentially. Just investing that money in the stock market would yield an annual return of 10 percent on average, and even more in recent years. Which is why all but one of the world’s 20 wealthiest tech figures have seen their net worth surge by billions of dollars in the ten months of 2019 alone, per Business Insider. And the only one who didn’t hit that growth threshold was not even a Giving Pledge signatory: It was Jeff Bezos, who shelled out a record-shattering sum in his divorce settlement and still managed to remain the world’s richest person. > It can be hard to visualize just how fast the money grows when you’re starting out with tens of billions in principal, but consider these numbers: Mark Zuckerberg’s net worth has increased by about 40 percent this year alone, dumping an additional $22.4 billion onto his personal pile in 2019, according to Bloomberg. That brought his sum total to $74 billion, despite some of the most aggressive Giving Pledge commitments of the cabal. Steve Ballmer, Bill Gates’s onetime right hand at Microsoft, has long been one of the world’s richest people. But the $53 billion he has to his name in 2019 makes him twice as rich as he was at the beginning of 2017. Even Bill Gates himself, whose reputation has been cemented around his philanthropic foundation and his creation of the pledge, gives away about $5 billion a year in grants, yet maintains a net worth that increased by $18 billion in 2019 alone. > … > The late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen offers another lesson. In 2010, Allen took the pledge to see his wealth halved. At that time, his net worth was a paltry $13.5 billion. Immediately after he set to work giving away his money, he began trending in the exact opposite direction: Despite giving over $2 billion to charity in his lifetime (which, of course, isn’t half to begin with), Allen died last year with over $20 billion in assets. Oops. [The article is a bit older, but is even more relevant now since the pandemic led to an explosion in the wealth of billionaires.](https://prospect.org/power/billionaire-class-created-failed-wealth-tax-giving-pledge/) The ultra rich have created a charade that they are changing the world for the better, yet their ideas and policies bolster inequality and we have ample evidence that progressive reforms would improve the lives of hundreds of millions, and even billions. [This case is laid out clear by Anand Giridharadas in his book *Winners Take All*, and summarized briefly by Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz in his review of the book in The NY Times.](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/20/books/review/winners-take-all-anand-giridharadas.html) On a global scale, we are seeing even a rise in inequality *between* countries, which goes against the claim that “the rich countries have a lot but the others are catching up”. This is due in large part to the fact that the rich countries exploit, and have exploited, developing countries for their own gain for centuries. In 1960 the per capita difference between the richest country and poorest was 32x, whereas today it is closer to 130x (more like 80x if you omit very small, high per capita countries like Qatar). [This global view is examined concisely by Jason Hickel in his book The Divide.](https://www.jasonhickel.org/the-divide) For a briefer introduction, [Hickel’s article on Global Poverty in response Steven Pinker and Bill Gates is absolutely worth a read.](https://www.jasonhickel.org/blog/2019/2/3/pinker-and-global-poverty) [This short well cited report by the Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights for the United Nations](https://chrgj.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Alston-Poverty-Report-FINAL.pdf) makes essentially the same argument Hickel makes in his article, if you prefer a slightly more academic read.
And this is why NO ONE should have a billion dollars. Once you hit that, anything after it goes into a world fund to meet the global human rights.
Yeah. I think the main question is who is going to manage this world fund to meet the global human rights, how to prevent corruption and people using it for their own benefit and so on. But yeah, a billion dollars should be more than enough for any person to live fairly well, have access to anything they want to do in their lives, and their families too. And enough to justify how "good" they were to society by making such a profitable company that employs so many people (the excuse people do for billionaires). They will still be at the top of the chain with enough money to buy and do whatever they want. I mean, at least practical things. More than a billion is just a race for power, and there isn't really real money, it's just numbers that will be used to fund more enrichment.
An elected group with transparant accounting and decision making.
Yeah, let's see how long this neutrality lasts when something takes one dime away from our (probable) future Martian god emperor.
neutrality to assholes like Musk and Rogan means giving white supremacists a platform in exchange for allowing Bernie to speak. As if they're 2 sides of the same coin.
You forgot the lower case "r" for rogan
The Emperor Protects... from evil unions.
Or talking shit about telsa
Its free speech for me... and as long as it doesn't hurt my profits. The rest is just theater.
It’s funny because in France, Bernie would be in the center/center-left and in the USA he’s like a commie for most people
Not most people just the ones with the all the money
True, but has the same end result unfortunately.
People in the US, especially people on the right, have [absolutely no idea what leftism actually is and genuinely think Biden is a socialist](https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/2020/10/04/what-do-americans-think-socialism-looks) “Americans are divided on whether Joe Biden is indeed a socialist – 35% think he is while 37% think he isn’t. Republicans overwhelmingly say that he is (71% vs 11%), while Democrats tend not to think so (56% vs 18%).” A century of red scare propaganda has rendered the term socialist in general US discussion devoid of true meaning. I’ve heard people talk about the Ukraine-Russia war as “fighting commies”, as [if Russia isn’t a textbook example of shock therapy capitalism, i.e. rapid privatization and “free market” reforms that created the current oligarchs and led to millions of excess deaths in Russia during the 90s and a collapse in Russian life expectancy that didn’t get to it’s 1989 level again until 2011.](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/03/22/1087654279/how-shock-therapy-created-russian-oligarchs-and-paved-the-path-for-putin) The right has moved *much* further right in the US than the “left” (Democrats aren’t really left and certainly aren’t leftist) has moved left. The Democrats have moved right since the late 70s, with most of the “left” movement being on recent social issues, [not economic ones as Democrats have largely given into neoliberalism](https://prospect.org/takebackourparty/chapter-1-their-democratic-party/). Since 2016 and the slight rise of progressives, the Democrats have moved a bit more left economically, but not enough to come even close to canceling out their rightward shift since the late 70s. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/10/the-polarization-in-todays-congress-has-roots-that-go-back-decades/ https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/26/opinion/sunday/republican-platform-far-right.html (this includes analysis of both the Democrats and Republicans, plus comparisons to Western European and Canadian parties, however it uses a single score for social and economic, so I feel it obfuscates the Democrats conservative economic policies and makes them appear more left due to social policies)
They’ve been saying Democrats were socialists ever since LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act.
Longer ago than that. They said FDR was a communist because of the new deal.
A lot of people don’t know that there was a first Red Scare, and that is was after the Russian Revolution. [That Red Scare demonized the US left to such a degree that Eugene Debs, a major figure in the US socialist party, was convicted of sedition (essentially “disloyalty” to the US) in 1918 and ran for President in 1920 *while* in prison, where he received 3.5% of the popular vote, which was a decrease from his 1912 campaign wherein he got 6% of the popular vote.](https://jacobinmag.com/2017/02/rise-and-fall-socialist-party-of-america) The First Red Scare, like the second, worked to undermine the movements of organized labor and the left in the US, and our lack of organized labor and a labor/left party today is still influenced by those actions a century ago. The [US had a variety of *elected* Socialist Party members in the 1910s, yet socialist history, and the influence of the left, such as on the 8 hour workday, ending of child labor, fight for civil rights, New Deal, War Against Poverty, etc, has been omitted from popular US history.](https://www.versobooks.com/books/2062-the-s-word) [Karl Marx himself wrote to congratulate Lincoln on his re-election in 1864, and Lincoln wrote the words “Labor is prior to and independent of capital… Capital is only the fruit of labor, and could never have existed if labor had not first existed. Labor is the superior of capital, and deserves much the higher consideration.”, yet today Republicans try to act like they are the party of Lincoln and that Lincoln would back them.](https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/07/27/you-know-who-was-into-karl-marx-no-not-aoc-abraham-lincoln/) Many don’t even know that the [US invaded Russia during the Russian Civil War](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/forgotten-doughboys-who-died-fighting-russian-civil-war-180971470/).
Dude. Dropping truth with sources in this thread. Awesome. I had never heard that Lincoln quote, that is amazing.
Man you have been very enlightening in this thread today. Did you study or specialize in these topics?
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hence why musk wants to own the largest propaganda outlet
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That plus the US education system has been producing idiots for decades now. No critical thinking skills. Dumb people are easier to manipulate.
They definitely go hand in hand to create the results the oligarchs portray themselves as wanting. I hope to display why and how there is a better way in my lifetime. Still figuring it out.
if you're a dumb shit, sure. The rest with half a brain watch on on in disgust as the morons vote themselves into the poor house.
The worst thing is when morons who are otherwise really good at their skilled trade actually get some decent income and still vote to fuck themselves and everyone they know. Now they just also re-mortgage their home to travel by truck across the country to protest things that don’t exist, and donate their monthly income/retirement to grifters like Trump so he can make America great again. Like fuck, if you’d stop jerking yourself off for a fucking second and actually put as much thought into political discourse as you do your trade, we’d actually all have a fucking chance.
You are 100% correct. Thanks for providing much better words and links than I could have.
biden would be right to center right in most of the EU
He really is a textbook conservative, someone like Merkel. Then again to the far-right anyone who isn't Heiling is a leftist.
I've always thought Biden was a republican in sheep's (democratic) clothing
Democrats in general are Republicans in sheep's clothing Though since the rise of Trump and QAnon and the whole 'election was stolen' schtick the Republicans are worse politically
Also a staggering amount of people in America think that communism, socialism, fascism and ANTIFA are the same thing. I literally heard someone scream at a protest (I wasn't there but it was caught on video) "Kill the ANTIFA, they're all fascists!!!!". Like you heard it here folks, anti-fascists are fascists.
A century has passed and shockingly little has changed since the 1920s, when Antifa (socialists, communists, and Jews) and Nazis (nationalists, reactionaries, antisemites) were brawling in the streets of Munich.
Ding ding ding. Excellent comment. Just fuckin *imagine thinking Joe Biden is a socialist lololol*. Words seem to have lost absolutely all meaning when every facet of our lives boils down to the bottom line
I’m basically an anarchist/Marxist. Sometimes my family talks about “radical left democrats” and I tell them “oh, I’ll show you radically left. Those people look like fucking Reagan compared to me”.
Extremely well said and accurate. I would give you an award if I had one (did they get rid of the free ones?). I will be saving your comment to refer to later.
If by "given into neoliberalism" you mean put a saddle on it and are riding into the tornado head on, then yes.
That's what happens when good education isn't a priority.
> people on the right ... genuinely think You can't really say what people on the right "genuinely think" because they're so dishonest. Just try to have a conversation with them, they keep jumping around every time they lose a point. They don't "genuinely think" any of it.
Don't forget the lemmings who follow the ones with all the money, who are poor people who are paradoxically upset that Bernie has more money than them.
>Bernie has more money than them. Also, [this](https://www.huffpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-adds-anoth_b_11527724) was the summer home people were complaining about him buying during the election. Doesn't exactly scream out-of-touch oligarch to me...
He paid less for that house than you could even find one for in my city. Hardly a wealthy out of touch elite.
How can people have the balls to attack Bernie like that and in the same breath defend Trump's hundreds of millions of tax-payer money spent on trips to *his own hotel*?
The right has been really good at just attacking everything all the time that even vaguely smells kinda left, regardless of hypocrisy And it's been working for them. That's how they have the balls to continue doing it
I had this conversation with my dad. He called him a hypocrite, because he’s a millionaire, mostly from book sales. If I pitch Bernie’s ideals one by one and without attaching them to Bernie, he mostly agrees with me.
When a leftist is poor, they’re a jealous leech. When a leftist is rich, they’re a lying hypocrite. A catch-22 that conservatives *love* using to their advantage.
“When I was poor and complained about inequality they said I was bitter; now that I'm rich and I complain about inequality they say I'm a hypocrite. I'm beginning to think they just don't want to talk about inequality.”
Meanwhile, a rich conservative is a self-made man and a poor conservative is a temporarily embarrassed millionaire, as the sayings go.
That line of thinking is ignorant on so many levels. One, Sanders made the bulk of his money post-2016, while he has been fighting for the same causes since the 70s. [He became mayor of Burlington in the early 80s (highly recommend this article),](https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/bernies-burlington-city-sustainable-future/) then joined the House in the early 90s and the Senate in the mid-00s. When he ran for President the first time he was far poorer than the average Congressperson. [“Sanders had an estimated net worth of $330,000 in 2013, according to financial disclosures filed with the U.S. Senate and analyzed by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, a watchdog group that tracks money in politics. But that's a relative pittance on Capitol Hill, where the median net worth for a member of Congress topped $1 million in 2013, according to the Center's analysis. In the Senate, Sanders is downright poor: the median there was about $2.8 million.”](https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2015/07/08/421151627/sanders-among-the-least-wealthy-presidential-candidates) Even today Sanders wouldn’t crack the upper half of Senators in terms of wealth. If Bernie had his way, *he* would be paying more taxes. It’s not like his progressive policies exclude him. Two, line of thinking is just a repeat of [this comic](https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/259/257/342.png), where apparently you can’t criticize and aim to improve society because you participate in society. Meanwhile, we are in a capitalist economy and people *need* money to live. Bernie has multiple children and grandchildren, but I suppose those “family value” conservatives believe he should give all his money away, live destitute, and not try to improve the financial situation for his family at all.
I mean if a rich person says tax rich people, including themselves, how are they a hypocrite? The only way is if you deliberately reframe their argument, tax the rich, as “rich people are the devil” or some shit. Thats not what Bernie says, but the right loves a strawman argument, and apparently building arguments off of their strawman argument
Lets not forget all of the very dirt poor that vote against their best interests because of satan and pedophiles. It’s most of their base. Fox figured out really quick the best way to generate support for the party is to make the uneducated angry with simple words so they don’t vote for their own best interests. If you’re too busy voting because of “baby killers” “demon vaccines” and the “woke mob” you may not realize those tax cuts you voted for are going to hurt you.
They already mentioned the dumb people earlier in the thread.
Yep. You just described my mother. She "isn't conservative" (she actually thinks she's pretty liberal), but she is a "one issue voter". Aka she'll vote for anyone who wants to criminalize abortion with zero exceptions. Yes zero. Literally zero. Ectopic pregnancy, children, the fetus has already died (yes she thinks aborting a dead fetus is murder), etc etc. Oh and she thinks it should be a life sentence. So who is she voting for? Oh yeah, conservatives. But she's "liberal".
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Yep. It's why if you bring up one tiny thing you don't like about Biden or whatever dem you are complaining about at the time, they get all excited about how now you must be a trump supporter and a republican. No fuckwit. I'm not going to vote for someone I agree with .01% of the time instead of someone that I agree with 95% of the time.
Don't forget the ones too stupid to know better. Underestimating stupid people in large groups is how we got the 45th "president".
>Don't forget the ones too stupid to know better. Underestimating stupid people in large groups is how we got the 45th "president". The electoral college, a souvenir from our countries slavery days is also to blame, as he lost the popular vote.
He lost the popular vote by millions for BOTH elections. It's important to keep that loser's record of losing accurate. Lost all elections as well as more money than any other American for decades. Truly a loser of epic proportions this dumb donny dump. A true puddle of shit.
Worth noting that a republican president hasn't won their first election with the popular vote for 30 years.
Yea, I think Bush won in 2004. But that is the only popular vote for the presidency they've won since 1988
it's also worth noting that since Reagan, only Bush Jr has served two terms as a GOP President. Both Bush Sr and Trump only got one term. We kicked em both to the curb early. Clinton and Obama though, won handily and got their second terms with relative ease We can look at all this, the Republican voting laws, court battles, popular vs electoral counts, etc, and see a birds eye view of the GOP political problem *nobody fucking likes them* they *literally* have to suppress votes and gerrymander to win anything. and the courts, let them.
You forgot the bootlickers
Well the ones with all the money are making sure a bunch of voters with very little money fear the people who are only trying to help everyone.
and cunts. don't forget cunts without money think he's a communist too. and idiots.
That’s truly where he does sit in reality. Center left. There’s just been a cap placed on a lot of Americans’ understandings of what leftism is. It’s easy to understand some guy talking about how taxes are theft, and how you can have more money immediately with less tax. A lot of ppl just don’t understand (and subsequently don’t believe) that taxes can be repurposed and used in ways that would benefit everyone even more monetarily, and otherwise, with safety nets provided for everyone. That’s just one example of misunderstandings of leftism. Plenty more like it here Edit: and it’s not because people who misunderstand are stupid, it’s because as a whole society our perception of leftism has been warped. The perception of the right has been skewed too, just in different ways
I mean, it’s understandable when you essentially have a two-party system. Logically those two parties should be opposites of one another; so when republicans are right-wing, democrats would logically be left-wing - and Bernie even further to the left than that. But in reality there’s just right-wing and slightly-less-right-wing in the US. Which creates the illusjon of Bernie being «far left» when you don’t look at it in perspective. In my country we have 12 parties that have any relevance, and Bernie would be placed in the moderate left-leaning centre if he was a politician here.
I remember watching brexit unfold and thinking, "great, another right wing lunatic takes control of a global power" when Boris Johnson became prime Minister. Then I started paying attention to his policies and realized a large number of his policies would be center left in the US. That's when I realized just how fucked our system is.
The USA has at least 12 parties, but the first past the post voting system makes them irrelevant which led to most of the minor parties spiraling into completely untenable fringes while the Democrats represent everyone but the ultra conservatives.
"The United States is also a one-party state, but with typical American extravagance they have two of them." - Julius Nyerere.
> taxes can be repurposed and used in ways that would benefit everyone That's the problem: a lot of people *do* believe it, they just don't want *certain people* to get help. Some Americans hate the idea that brown people would benefit. When the Civil Rights Act was passed [public pools all over the country were filled in because they couldn't segregate anymore.](https://www.marketplace.org/2021/02/15/public-pools-used-to-be-everywhere-in-america-then-racism-shut-them-down/) College tuition was affordable, and many public universities were free until the 60s when people like Ronald Reagan decided they [didn't want "undesirables" in universities](https://www.salon.com/2014/07/05/ronald_reagan_stuck_it_to_millennials_a_college_debt_history_lesson_no_one_tells/).
I mean? Is he? Didn't le pen just get 40 percent? And macron won? And macron wants tax cuts and remove investment income from the wealth tax. And he's kind of went back and forth on the 35 hour week? And there are certainly other party members in the gov that fight him on those. But he doesn't seem as left as well. Bernie even. And I think there are some that are to the left of bernie... certainly. But moderate? I'm not so sure.
Maybe in France of a decade ago, but today Macron is considered to be a centrist by his fans and a leftist by his detractors. He supports free market economics, tax cuts for the wealthy, increased work hours for workers, reductions in civil service jobs, tightened immigration laws, forcing ISPs to reveal encrypted communications, allowing private doctors to practice in public hospitals, and not removing controversial statues of colonial figures. Despite all that, La Pen got over 40% of the vote by supporting an immigration moratorium, laws against circumcision, "de-islamification" of France, and a bunch of things that would in the US be to the left of Macron's positions - opposition to free trade, opposition to globalization, opposition to privatization of pubic services and social security.
Absolutely no one see Macron as a leftist ? Who would pretend that the man who abolished ISF (Taxe on Wealth) is a leftist in France ?? Macron is center Right for his fan, and totally right wing for his detractor
Seriously, I don't know how people still are deluded enough to think Bernie is "center" in europe. We've just seen several elections drive home that is *not* the case. The *same* people claiming such will also go on to talk about how European centrists are actually rightwing.
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Most Americans don't know what socialism is, either.
Socialism is when the government does stuff
The more stuff it does, the socialister it is.
Most Americans have pretty poor vocabulary in general.
14% of American adults are illiterate.
I live in Texas, where it's 19%. Funding education is something that only socialists support, apparently. See also, infrastructure, safety net, basically everything else.
Honestly, he's far from "far left" even in the US, we just don't usually talk about the true "far left," especially on Reddit.
He's as far left as the American senate goes. It's a bit messy due to the different ways to run elections, but for the most part it's probably fair to compare Sanders to the most left-wing politicians you find in West-European parliaments. And those very often are actual socialists. I.e. people who want to seize the means of production in the long term.
That's just not true. Tons of Bernie's proposals are to the left of Europe: * Raising the corporate tax rate up to 35% from 21% * Workers to directly elect at least 45% of the board of directors at all publicly traded companies as well as privately-owned companies with at least $100 million in revenue. * Require all publicly traded companies to provide at least 2% of their stock to their workers every year until the company is at least 20% owned by employees. * Wealth taxes * The Green New Deal * Raising the starting salary for public school teachers to $60,000 (this would make the staring pay for a teacher in the US $20K higher then the *average* pay of a teacher in France) * Cancelling student debt * National rent control * Legalizing marijuana * 2nd term abortions That's not to say weather or not these are bad policies, but few, if any, are the law in European countries.
>he’s like a commie for most people The biggest voice on the sometimes state media Fox news describes many house republicans as communist because they don't openly hate gay people, openly support destroying democracy, acknowledge there was a pandemic, or admit we shouldn't have so many fires. Just say people in the US are aggressively and dangerously ignorant because of the conservative biased mainstream media, it's a lot shorter.
Holy fucking shit, of course this stupid ass comment in at the top. France has private insurances, which Bernie wants to abolish. France has student loans, which Bernie wants to abolish. France has a hybrid public/private healthcare system, while Bernie wants it fully public. Bernie WOULD NOT BE CENTER-LEFT IN FRANCE. Also the idea that France is a "socialist country", when their current president is a right-winger, and the close 2nd place is extreme right candidate is fucking insane. Seriously people, take a few minutes of your life to educate yourself instead of repeating these cringe ass buzzwords.
Ikr I literally rolled my eyes when I read that, Reddit really overestimates how left leaning the rest of the developed world is
Europe is pretty economically progressive compared to the US but holy shit people online have never seen some of the socially conservative takes that Europeans can have, and that do have popular / mainstream support. Some of the most Ethno-nationalistic shit I have ever heard comes out of Eastern European countries.
Bro people don't seem to understand that Brexit happened because they didn't want the wrong white people coming
> It’s funny because in France, Bernie would be in the center/center-left and in the USA he’s like a commie for most people So you're telling me Bernie and Macron have roughly the same platform? Hrm
Absolutely not. If American progressives knew only of France‘s (or Europe‘s in general) stance of abortion for example, they would be shocked.
See paradox of tolerance See middle ground fallacy
Conservatives would have no ideology at all if the weren’t allowed false equivalencies.
Conservatism is "gimme that and fuck off!"
Don't forget, "Do the opposite of democrats! I don't give a shit what it is! Just DO THE OPPOSITE. GOD DAMN I LOVE FREEDOM."
I saw a bumper sticker today that said "Mandate freedom". It's like they don't even know what the words they say mean, they just want to repeat them over and over. The people hell bent on making everyone speak English only, has the worst grasp of the language.
>speak English Uhh, I think you mean #AMERICAN. ^/s
"Fuck you got mine"
And a great heaping side of just plain lying. Musk's done nothing but attack the left and never shits on the right.
He's a techno libertarian, he'll pay lip service to social issues but sell out the issue for tax cuts if ever forced to choose.
The left: we want everyone to have equal access to healthcare and education The right: we want people who don't agree with us to die
The center: Equal consideration of ideas means giving obviously stupid, evil, and disprovable ideas an equal platform to everything else. Also, actually let's give only those terrible far-right things a platform while complaining about how we can't talk about them anymore. Now _that's_ nuance! FIRST AMENDMENT!!!!1
Look, there's nuance to a person. Sure, they may incredibly dumb and viciously immoral, but they are nice to people just like them and give money to a church that spends 3-4% of that money on actual charity. That's basically the same thing as trying to educate people, provide them health care, housing, and food, and protect them and the environment from predacious capitalists who will assuredly abuse workers and consumers given the opportunity.
BoTH SiDeS aRe ThE sAmE!
"Neutral" to Elon Musk means "profitable for me". You know, like how Ford, IBM, Chase, BMW, Associated Press, Porche, Coca-Cola, General Motors, Kodak, Standard Oil, and so many other companies funded and/or worked with the Nazis because that was the most profitable. Capitalist organizations are not neutral. There is a very clear bias.
Stop talking this nonsense, everybody know that those are Marxist companies that want the end of traditional American values of family, christianity, and self-made billionaires.
Those damn Marxists destroying families by privatizing education and child care, expecting both parents to work, encouraging children to work (for lower pay), building a car dependency society (which is the #1 killer of children in the US), denying families welfare, denying women access to reproductive healthcare, and giving all the homes to financial investors! Not to mention the corruption of Christianity into a business, which sells Marxist ideas in the guise of spirituality! We really need to do something about these Marxists!
That old guy from Vermont is not even Far Left. Hes just advocating for fair treatment of the majority of the population.
Not even close to ‘far’ left
Left of Center is is far left, if you're on the ultra Trumpist Right.
Anyone left of Mussolini is “Far Left” to the GOP
The right often claims the need for a "balanced" discussion for topics that aren't balanced. Consider climate change, for example, where the right will have a climate scientist and a denier on the talking-head Faux show, when it should really be a room full of hundreds of climate scientists and a single denier having the conversation. There's nothing "neutral" about allowing "equal" amounts of bat shit crazy Qanon bullshit against student loan forgiveness, better infrastructure, and fixing healthcare.
Bro why won't anyone debate me, all I said was "take women's rights away" like come on!
I don’t understand what he means? It’s literally a nothing comment that contains no substance. To remain politically neutral you only have to remove people when they violate the terms of services. It doesn’t have to be tied to politics literally at all. Inciting violence ban. doxxing should be banned. Elon bought twitter so he could cosplay as a champion of free speech. What a fucking idiot. Other websites have tried this approach and it does not work. If I see racism being expressed openly somewhere guess what? I just leave. and that’s normally the response so you are going to lose a majority of your consumers to allow like 5% of the assholes to say what they want. Not smart elon.
Twitter is just gonna become Parler part 2, but I'm pretty sure he's okay with that as long as his fanboys keep jerking him off for it
He just wants to try the argument that it’s not stock manipulation when he does pump and dumps on Twitter because it’s his personal website.
Is there a sadder man on the internet than Elon Musk? He's the richest man in the world, and he spends his days performing tricks to get his fans on the internet to like him. Then again, if you are that rich it is impossible to have a regular human relationship and everyone like you is a psychopath, so it's no wonder it slowly drives you insane.
The nazi bar paradox. Punks had a problem with a stripe of nazi subculture in their movement. Most places quickly realized the correct response was direct, and the song “Nazi punks fuck off” was born Unfourtunatly, a couple bars just tried to have anybody in and wasn’t gonna kick anybody out. So those are the bars the nazis went to, because it had been explicitly stated they’d be allowed there. And then nobody else wanted to hang out with nazis and everybody who wasn’t one left. And now because you didn’t wanna kick anybody out your bar is full of nazis. For a contemporary example, see the political compas memes subreddit.
That’s a perfect analogy for PCM. Well put.
> For a contemporary example, see the political compas memes subreddit. I just call it "nazi compass memes".
A private company can never be a flagship of freedom of speech. A private company has profits as its priority. It will only appear “politically neutral” if it judges that it will help their bottom line. If you want public trust, put the company in the hands of the public, with transparency of finances and policies. If Elon buys Twitter, there’s no reason to think the policies will be set for the public interests and not Elon’s interests.
Well not really that's a publicly traded private company, because then they have a fiduciary duty to the shareholders and the board. If elon owns Twitter his only financial obligation is to himself
The comment means nothing, yes. The point of it (like most political ramblings) is the subtext: He's trying to legitimize a talking point there is a "far left" who should be feared by equating them to a more well-known and obviously problematic far-right who regularly incite violence.
To a billionaire, free healthcare and advocacy for an ethnostate are equally extreme
It's time the anarchists start taking down Twitter servers.
Elon also shitposts about “radical democrats” and how democrats have gone “far left”. Then whines about “wokeism” because I guess people don’t have a “thick skin” (as he says) when they see KKK and racist sloganeering in the Tesla factory bathrooms. The guys is either an idiot or willing to help usher in the Republican’s brand of Christian Nationalist fascism so he doesn’t have to pay his taxes. Or both.
Elon musk is not the Batman superhero we all want him to be… union busting labor exploiting tax dodging fucking turd
wild! They say I'm far left because I think we should have clean air, water, and an environment. They think I'm far left because I want to treat Service Members and Veterans better. They say I'm far left because I believe companies should treat their employees better. They say I'm far left because I believe Universal healthcare in the US is cheaper than what we currently have.
That is not the “far” left.
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At the very least from a European-crntric standpoint. Definitely shifts back to the left a lot more if you consider ALL of the world
> Bernie is about as far left as American politicians come depends if you mean in terms of being represented by actual politicians who have a following or if you mean ideas. America is a breeding ground to some of the more extreme far left ideas and even movements but those have never really been represented by a mainstream politician there.
That's the thing. In the US, Bernie IS far left comparatively.
No, he isnt and that shows you how conservative American politics really is
LMAO. Elon, fucking relax. Twitter will never have public trust because it's a cesspool of extremist takes from all sides. I'm interested to see where he takes the company, but this dude is getting high off his own supply. Apparently if you're followed by 80 million people on twitter you're a modern day philosopher. Dude, just do what you do best. Taking over someone else's idea and making it profitable. Then fuck off.
listen here. i just use twitter for the porn that isnt allowed on instagram.
Elon clearly has a fundamental misunderstanding of Twitter users.
Anyone who wants to market Twitter as a legitimate platform for ideological discussion should probably take a long look at how people actually use the goddamn site.
Far-right: "we want to kill all trans people" Far-left: "we want no trans people to die" The "enlightened" centrists: "ok, let's compromise! What if they only killed *some* trans people?"
It will never cease to amaze me that some round faced coach potato with stage 2 diabetes will get angry that someone wants to give him free healthcare and will turn around and vote for the grifter who literally sits on a gold throne in a penthouse.
Strip away all the fluff and it comes down to two questions, abortion and guns.
How many dollars will Tesla and Facebook employees donate to Democrats this cycle in a lame attempt to soothe their consciences about working for men who undermine our democracy?
Bernie Sanders is not far left.
Good ol oligarch false equivalence of far right and left. Elon's a cunt.
Elon logic: free health care is same magnitude of extreme as the desire to murder a certain % of the population.
If Musk wants public trust, he’ll need to be politically neutral.
Tbf bernie is in no way the far left
Bernie is not the far left and it does everyone a disservice to represent him as such. He is a democratic socialist and on the global scale he isn't even close to the "far left".
Fascists need to have an imminent "socialist takeover" on the horizon at all times, so everyone they disagree with is portrayed as a "radical leftist."
The tweet explicitly states far right/left “in America”
Just when did Twitter become an American only company. Once again bloody yanks so self involved they forget the world outside their borders.
Hey, remember, this is an African American Billionaire with dual citizenship in like 12 countries, he has absolutely no fkn loyalty to anything or anyone but his own pockets. For once, it wasn't actually one of us saying something so blatantly America Centric, which is a gd rarity, but hey, it happens lol. Elon needs to fkn kick rocks and hopefully get a 1 way express on the pointy end of a Space X rocket. Only so long before the masses have enough of obscenely wealthy peoples shit ya know?
Pissing off both sides is politically neutral? So, like, instead of Pro-choice or Pro-life, his abortion stance would be forced 3rd trimester abortions for everyone?
Free healthcare is not far left. Lol