Two hours of aimless ranting
(Of course, he’s been boring all along, but also morbidly interesting the way a fire or an earthquake is interesting.)
It began with 40 minutes of technical difficulties and only got worse. In more than two hours of aimless ranting and ego-stroking with Elon Musk, former President Donald Trump garbled through the greatest hits of his grievances, praised strongmen like Vladimir Putin, and painted his opponent Kamala Harris as an existential threat to America: “If she’s going to be our president, very quickly, you’re not going to have a country anymore,” he said to Musk—whose X campaign launch for Ron DeSantis last year was beset by similar technical issues. Absent from the proceedings? Anything coherent or compelling. “Trump’s entire campaign is in service of people like Elon Musk and himself,” the Harris campaign said in a statement afterward. “Self-obsessed rich guys who will sell out the middle class and who cannot run a livestream in the year 2024.”
The Trump Show has, indeed, grown old and stale, and lately, the Republican presidential nominee finds himself desperate to regain any of the momentum he lost once Harris became the Democrats’ new star.
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He had hoped to regain his footing Monday night with Musk, who has become one of his most prominent backers. Instead, he underscored the personal “weirdness” Harris’s campaign has sought to highlight—and the extremism of his agenda, as seen in his praise of Musk firing striking workers, his vow to shutter the Department of Education, and his comments in support of climate change because, he said, global warming will mean “more oceanfront property.”
Billions of people dead, but more oceanfront property. Good tradeoff.
Musk said Monday that his goal with this livestream was to help people “understand how [Trump] talks when it’s a conversation, rather than an interview.” “Nobody is quite themselves in an interview,” Musk posted, “so it’s hard to understand what they’re really like.” Turns out, though, that Trump is always like this—and after eight years of the same old bullshit, perhaps Americans are finally ready to move on.
Surely we already knew that Trump is always like this. We saw him being always like this for four horrible years, so it’s no surprise that he’s still like it.
This is one of the most infuriating things he does–he dives headfirst into ‘not even wrong’ territory, and his goon acolytes just lap it up. THe direct sentiment of “if it enriches me, who cares who suffers” is, of course, unmitigated evil, but even within a world that such fiscal narcissism was acceptable, he’d still have the wrong end of the stick. At the current sea level, water rising does not create ‘more oceanfront property’–it reduces it, dramatically. It’s basic math–reducing the circumference of the existing continents will cause the total amount of land that could be called ‘oceanfront’ is vastly less. (And then there’s the ecological science, which I’m pretty sure would point out that the sort of thing Trump’s thinking of when he says ‘oceanfront property’–land with desirable views, pleasant climate and so on–is also going to make up a smaller proportion of the surviving beachfront, replaced with the barren soil that you get when someone dumps a ton of salt-water on the palm trees and other ‘pretty’ plants.)
Kind of like the way if someone chopped Trump’s legs off he’d be shorter.
And meanwhile people are calling for more babies, to fill up the shrinking land space even more. They won’t be happy until people are standing nose to nose, no way to turn around, lie down, or twitch…as long as they’re buying the shit that keeps the rich folks in the gated compounds where there is room and they don’t have to see the mess.
I got news for all of them. When you have that many people, unemployment will be high. As we increase the use of technology to replace workers, unemployment will be even higher. Unemployed people can’t buy the shit they make…or anything else. It’ll be a sea of starved dead bodies rotting and stinking up the world.
Well, no. We have over a century of experience with this.
Technology does eliminate some jobs, but it creates others. Workers migrated from farms to factories, and then from factories to offices. And after all that, the U.S. unemployment rate is currently 4.3%.
The problem is structural changes (often driven by technology) that concentrate wealth at the top.
Stephen, I have seen those statistics. Yes, we have had technology. Yes, we have low unemployment. But if we continue making babies, we need to make more and more and more jobs. And many of the jobs these days are in services, like food service, maid service, etc.
I have known people laid off from employment by technology. After a period of time on unemployment, they go off it because you can’t keep unemployment forever. The way we calculate unemployment is by those receiving unemployment and those actively lookin for jobs. There are plenty of loopholes that can make things look one way or the other.
So someone in a well paid assembly line job is RIF’d, and finds a job in food service. He/she is not unemployed, but it is hardly a step up in the world.