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Posted
Well, you should.  It's a false premise.  A person who is incapable of violence of any sort is by definition "peaceful".  This would include some of those who are incapable of "great violence".
It's also just pandering.

Meh. I think that empathy, kindness, and being protective are a good package deal. The problem is when you use your capacity for violent protectiveness as an identity and a badge of legitimacy. Which is what these fake alpha bro types (who Elon fancied himself one of, he’s pathetic) fancy themselves as.
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Posted
5 minutes ago, Brisketexan said:

Meh. I think that empathy, kindness, and being protective are a good package deal. 

Yeah, so?  That doesn't mean one must possess the "protective" characteristic (much less the capability of "great violence") to be peaceful.

It was a dumb statement, it is fundamentally wrong, and Elon is a twat who must likely lacks the very trait he imagines himself possessing.

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Posted
7 minutes ago, ultimaton said:

Mark Rober about to be designated a domestic terrorist 

The dude is really into science and a former NASA engineer so a good chance he was already thought of in that capacity. 

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Posted
9 hours ago, atomheartbevo said:

He’s about to go through his Ayn Rand phase. 

Remember when this guy was the one blabbering about Ayn Rand? 
IMG_4461.thumb.webp.e968980780022eb4273d98459e3ea8b9.webp

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Posted
1 hour ago, ultimaton said:

Mark Rober about to be designated a domestic terrorist 

 

58 minutes ago, Surly Bevo said:

The dude is really into science and a former NASA engineer so a good chance he was already thought of in that capacity. 

Lol, a good friend is a producer for the channel. He’s equally bemused and a bit down over the hate on Twitter for the video.

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Posted
42 minutes ago, YChang said:

 

Lol, a good friend is a producer for the channel. He’s equally bemused and a bit down over the hate on Twitter for the video.

How did he not see the hate coming? Elon turned Twitter into a hate machine to be deployed at anyone who says something he doesn’t like. 

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Posted
7 minutes ago, 956 Worldwide said:

How did he not see the hate coming? Elon turned Twitter into a hate machine to be deployed at anyone who says something he doesn’t like. 

I’m sure he likely expected it and he was still disappointed by it. 

Posted
10 hours ago, jimmyjazz said:

Well, you should.  It's a false premise.  A person who is incapable of violence of any sort is by definition "peaceful".  This would include some of those who are incapable of "great violence".

It's also just pandering.

Moreover, there are plenty of peaceful folks that were not "harmless."  Ghandi, Jesus Christ (although I suppose Pops is capable of great violence), MLK, Bonhoeffer.

He acts as though he's spouting undiscovered main truths, when it's just inaccurate memeshit only undiscovered because his uncritical followers are morons.

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Posted
1 hour ago, YChang said:

 

Lol, a good friend is a producer for the channel. He’s equally bemused and a bit down over the hate on Twitter for the video.

I’m sure a lot of the hate is that the video is showing Autopilot but not Full Self Driving. The point is that this camera-only technology is bullshit and dangerous. LiDAR is the future and the Waymo + Uber partnership is adding to Elon’s downward spiral. 

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Posted
22 hours ago, 956 Worldwide said:

Cringe posting in the middle of the night. 
 

image.thumb.png.949aac0925afcfc6944bd40b4545011e.png

 

19 hours ago, Captain Ron said:

Nah he’s wrong. His cat vs human is dumb because if you get that cat in a bad spot it will do what it can to survive and you better believe that is great violence.

his real mistake is that he thinks weakness means you are hopeless and you're not. Adrenaline is a hell of a drug and can save your ass when you need it to. 

I've said it before and I'll say it again; so much of Elon's worldview is crystal clear when considered as that of a powerless young boy looking to his father for how to please him and earn his approval.

Regardless, he is promoting the hallmark fashy perspective wherein violence is "normalized as a legitimate form of political expression."

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Posted

image.thumb.png.7391387c034391d04ce58fb99d8ace40.png
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/us/politics/federal-job-cuts-nuclear-bomb-engineers-scientists.html

They handled the secure transport of nuclear materials — dangerous, demanding work that requires rigorous training. Four of them took the Trump administration’s offer of a buyout and left the National Nuclear Security Administration.

A half-dozen staff members left a unit in the agency that builds reactors for nuclear submarines.

And a biochemist and engineer who had recently joined the agency as head of the team that enforces safety and environmental standards at a Texas plant that assembles nuclear warheads was fired.

In the past six weeks, the agency, just one relatively small outpost in a federal work force that President Trump and his top adviser Elon Musk aim to drastically pare down, has lost a huge cadre of scientists, engineers, safety experts, project officers, accountants and lawyers — all in the midst of its most ambitious endeavors in a generation.

The nuclear agency, chronically understaffed but critically important, is the busiest it has been since the Cold War. It not only manages the nation’s 3,748 nuclear bombs and warheads, it is modernizing that arsenal — a $20-billion-a-year effort that will arm a new fleet of nuclear submarines, bomber jets and land-based missiles.

Since the last year of the first Trump administration, the agency has been desperately trying to build up its staff to handle the added workload. Though it was still hundreds of employees short of what it had said it needed, it had edged up to about 2,000 workers by January.

Now, with the Trump administration’s buyouts and firings, the agency’s trajectory has gone from one of painstaking growth to retraction.

More than 130 employees took the government’s offer of a payout to resign, according to internal agency documents obtained by The New York Times that have not previously been reported. Those departures, together with those of about 27 workers who were caught up in a mass firing and not rehired, wiped out most of the recent staffing gains.

Engaged in top-secret work, tucked away in the Energy Department, the agency typically stays below the public radar. But it has emerged as a headline example of how the Trump administration’s cuts, touted as a cure-all for supposed government extravagance and corruption, are threatening the muscle and bone of operations that involve national security or other missions at the very heart of the federal government’s responsibilities.

Free link for rest of article detailing specifics and how it hurts: https://archive.is/htd1I

A couple of quotes:

The [Energy] department has said that most of the fired employees handled administrative and clerical tasks that were not critical to the agency’s operation. But an analysis of the internal documents by The Times, coupled with interviews with 18 current and former agency officials, shows that is not true for the bulk of people who took the buyout.

Many who left held a top-secret security clearance, called Q, that gave them access to information about how nuclear weapons are designed, produced and used, officials said. The offer allowed them to go on administrative leave with pay through September, then resign.

*****

“This whole process of trying to downsize the government is being handled in the sloppiest, most irresponsible kind of way that one could imagine,” Mr. [Senator Angus] King said.

 

 

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Posted
5 minutes ago, bolverk said:

Many who left held a top-secret security clearance, called Q, that gave them access to information about how nuclear weapons are designed, produced and used, officials said. The offer allowed them to go on administrative leave with pay through September, then resign.

I just hope they find work with a western European country.

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Posted

image.thumb.png.e6f8d8c69af7ce51dc4f99411773738d.png
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/17/business/social-security-doge-ssa.html

When Eleanor H., 66, called the Social Security Administration last month seeking details about her retirement benefits, she didn’t expect to comfort the representative who answered. The woman started sobbing.

“I asked her what was wrong, and she said she and her co-workers were informed by email to accept a taxable $20,000 payout or risk termination,” said Eleanor, who lives in New Jersey (she asked to use only her first name out of privacy concerns).

The rep still answered all of Eleanor’s questions. “Through her tears she said, ‘What am I going to do?’”

The Social Security Administration, which sends retirement, survivor and disability payments to 73 million people each month, has long been called the “third rail” of politics — largely untouchable given its widespread popularity and role as one of the country’s remaining safety nets.

But in recent weeks, the Trump administration, led by Elon Musk’s crew of cost cutters at the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has taken its chain saw to the agency’s operations. The agency has announced plans to cut up to 12 percent of its work force, at a time its staffing is at a 50-year low. It has also offered early retirement and other incentives, including payments up to $25,000, to the entire staff.

Many current and former Social Security officials fear the cuts could create gaping holes in the agency’s infrastructure, destabilizing the program, which keeps millions of people out of poverty and large percentages of retirees rely on for the bulk of their income.

The actions have caused Social Security employees and former commissioners and executives of both parties to sound alarm bells, saying it would be difficult to repair the damage, which could threaten access to benefits.

“Everything they have done so far is breaking the agency’s ability to serve the public,” said Martin O’Malley, the most recent former Social Security commissioner under President Joseph R. Biden Jr. He said he feared that Mr. Musk’s team had taken most of the actions necessary to create a total system collapse, whether in skyrocketing wait times for customer service, system interruptions or a timely payment of benefits.

Rest of article: https://archive.is/QLOGq

Some quotes:

Michael Astrue, a former agency commissioner appointed by President George W. Bush, said it appeared that Mr. Musk has imported the strategy he used when he bought Twitter, “where you go into some place established, level it and then figure you’re going to improvise your way out,” he said, speaking at a briefing on Thursday held by the National Academy of Social Insurance. “It’s extremely destructive.”

Jason Fichtner, who held several positions at the agency, including deputy commissioner and chief economist, put it even more bluntly at the briefing. “It’s more like a drunk operating a wrecking ball,” he said.

*****

Tiffany Flick, the agency’s former acting chief of staff with 30 years of service at Social Security, recently recounted the events around that episode, which also led to her retirement. She expressed deep concerns about the safety of the confidential data and the program overall, according to her sworn testimony on March 6 in a federal lawsuit. The data, she said, has already been misinterpreted and used to spread misinformation.

*****

Mr. Musk has said that he wants to cut waste, fraud and abuse at the agency, but he and President Trump have continued to repeat false claims that millions of dead people are collecting benefits.

In fact, the Social Security Office of the Inspector General, which is charged with uncovering fraud and inefficiencies, published a report in 2023 that explains why these people don’t have recorded deaths, but also do not collect checks.

“Both Musk and Trump are grossly mischaracterizing the death data,” said Kathleen Romig, director of Social Security and disability policy at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and a former agency adviser. (Mr. Trump also fired the acting inspector general.)

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