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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2428 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 19, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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It's the phenomenon mentioned a couple days ago by someone here - the more probable it becomes that Trump is going to win, the more value there is in having shown that you were "on his side"... or, at the very least, not against him. This is particularly poignant for extremely wealthy leaders of highly-regulable industry. Nobody wants the full Elon Musk treatment. Zuck may have genuinely believed various left-leaning things in the past or he may have just thought that he had a good deal going where they were mostly going to protect him so long as he played ball enough. It's impossible to know. Likewise, it's sort of impossible to know whether he's actually emotionally/intellectually moved to take this new lack-of-position, or if he's seen the writing on the wall enough that he feels compelled, for the sake of his company/industry, to find any plausible way to soften on political issues without getting crucified by the media or other interest groups that could cause him problems (like, for example, meta employees, who might already be having meltdowns that their boss can't even manage to oppose Hitler). He's baaarely inching out just hoping that the story of the assassination attempt will help give him even the smallest amount of cover from criticism. This is a guy who is scared to death that he's going to suffer regardless of what he does.

When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse

Did anyone do that in 2016-2019? I don’t recall a tech leader publicly showing that they are on Trump’s side then.

Different world. Trump wasn't supposed to win and the Republicans were supposed to lose Congress in 2016. There were reconciliation noises at first, but Trump quickly proved pretty bad at the job (largely due to lack of bureaucratically inclined assistants and resulting chaos).

This time it's looking like he's got a better set of plans, is likely to win, and at least control the Senate.

I feel that there is a sense in large parts of the elite and elite adjacent people that Trump is actually serious this time and has gathered a large following of competent people who are quite black pilled by the accelerating absurd excesses of the liberal state apparatus in the last decade.

Also he can work around almost any judicial block this time thanks to his Supreme Court appointments.

It feels almost like in 2016 almost nobody including Trump, his biggest supporters and his biggest enemies didn’t quite understand the force pushing the man to presidency.

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