It couldn't have happened to a nicer person open thread

by liberal japonicus

This one is outsourced to Shakezula at Lawyers, Guns and Money

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If Nemo Klus gets cyberbullied for nearly two hours does anyone care?

Elon Musk rage quit a livestream of the video game Path of Exile 2 on Saturday night after repeatedly dying while also being ruthlessly cyberbullied in the chat.

Path of Exile 2 is one of Musk’s favorite games—so much so that he once claimed to be one of the world’s top players in an attempt to boost his gamer cred, before later backtracking and admitting that he had been secretly paying people to level up his account to make him appear more talented at it than he was.

By the way, his excuse for being an incredible dweeb that he had to pay other people to play video games for him? It’s the only way to beat players in Asia.

Nevertheless, while attempting to show off Starlink’s in-flight WiFi capabilities while onboard his private jet over the weekend, Musk streamed himself playing some PoE2 on the hardest difficulty, which was broadcast live on X.

The DOGE chief was, predictably, terrible at the game, but that was the least of his problems—Less than five minutes into the stream, a player logged on and asked Musk if he could “please jerk off mr trump so he dies of a heart attack.” It only got worse from there.

For the next hour and a half, Musk sat in stony-faced silence and blasted techno music while dozens of users with names such as ELON_IS_A_PEEDOPHILE and ELON_MUSK_IS_PATHETIC repeatedly spammed the chat to tell him “YOU HAVE NO FRIENDS AND YOU WILL DIE ALONE” and “YOU WILL ALWAYS FEEL INSECURE AND IT WILL NEVER GO AWAY.”

Is it funny to see a bullying billionaire shithead who actively nurtures the worst sort of bullies get bullied? Let’s hear from another anti-fan.

Elon. It’s me, Ashley St. Claire. I have no other means of contacting you so I bought PoE2 early access. Please pay your child support. Thank you Elon.

Absolutely. It isn’t as good as Richard Spencer catching a fist, but this lasted longer.

There’s video. The mayhem begins at 4:44

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Comments

[Donald]

I was just going to post something about that, among other things.

https://www.muskwatch.com/p/the-week-in-musk-truly-a-moron

[wj]

This was a gem as well:
Trump’s team told laid-off workers at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services to contact a particular individual if they felt they were being discriminated against; she turned out to be dead.
See
https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2025/04/01/health-workers-discrimination-complaints-employee-dead/

Combine that with their spurious claims about Social Security payments to people who are dead. You get the feeling that they are a bit unclear on what constitutes "dead" here in the real world.

[russell]

We have handed the reins of government to petulant arrogant children.

The rest is commentary.

[Michael Cain]

This week I ordered a trailer hitch for my Honda Fit, and scheduled a time next week to have it installed. I've had a hitch-mounted bicycle rack practically forever, and have had a hitch put on my previous cars. Somehow I didn't do it for this one. Probably because I could adjust the Fit's rear seats and manipulate the road bike into that space. A few years ago when I started needing to take both my bicycle and a granddaughter's bicycle, I was worried about money and got a cheap strap-on rack. I finally got tired of that. From Thursday next week, I'll be using the good rack again.

[wj]

Now, in addition to tariffs running up to cost of building Teslas, Musk discovers that budget cuts at NASA are going to impact its biggest contractor. That would be SpaceX.

Leopards; faces. Crocodile tears much in evidence.

[liberal japonicus]

this is interesting

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/04/12/china-trade-war-exports-00287123

not bad for a bunch of peasants, eh?

[Snarki, child of Loki]

"Musk discovers that budget cuts at NASA are going to impact its biggest contractor. That would be SpaceX."

cuts orchestrated by the OOFEL (Office Of Face Eating Leopards).

And now, Musk feels OOFEL. Please continue.

[Donald]

Meanwhile, the slaughter in Gaza continues. Supporting this seems to be the one thing that brings Republicans and the majority of Democratic senators together,

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/12/middleeast/israel-gaza-offensive-displaced-rafah-intl/index.html

[GftNC]

I am not a paying subscriber to Comment is Freed, so don't get the full post. But since a) this subject is normally of interest to ObWi, and b) I suppose it might persuade people to subscribe, and in any case he assumes at the top that people will forward it, I am copying and pasting what was in my inbox today:

Hayek's Bastards
The rise of illiberal libertarianism
Sam Freedman
Apr 13

Today’s post was inspired by reading a new book of the same title by Quinn Slobodian, a Canadian academic, whose last book “Crack-Up Capitalism” I recently recommended in my “Ten Books to Understand the World Right Now”. I’d add this new book to the list too and I’ve made use of it throughout this piece alongside other research. The conclusions are mine.

This post can be read alongside two others from the last few months on Musk’s ideology and the growth of global nationalist networks as a sort of trilogy on the intellectual history of the modern radical right.

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One of the many oddities of the Trump regime is seeing self-professed libertarians like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk in alliance with fervent nationalists.

The Austrian sages of libertarianism were not keen on either tariffs or brutally restrictive immigration policies. As Ludwig von Mises wrote back in the 1920s:

“The effects of restricting [the freedom of movement] are just the same as those of a protective tariff…Looked at from the standpoint of humanity, the result is a lowering of the productivity of human labour, a reduction in the supply of goods at the disposal of mankind.”

Or as Friedrich Hayek put it: “nationalistic bias…frequently provides the bridge from conservatism to collectivism.”

Yet many of their followers are now closely aligned with radical right populists. In the US the Mises Institute in Alabama has been one of the strongest advocates for aggressively anti-immigration policies. Former Trump adviser Steve Bannon regularly quotes Hayek’s most famous book “Road to Serfdom” while also slamming “globalists” and advocating crackdowns on migrants. Nor is this a purely American phenomenon. The German AfD’s deputy leader Beatrix von Storch is a member of the Hayek Society, and the director of Vienna’s Hayek Institute, Barbara Kolm, is a leading light in the far right Austrian Freedom Party.

To some extent this is a marriage of convenience – capital attaching itself to power for short term advantage. It’s hard to believe, for instance, that Thiel or Musk agree with Trump’s decision to impose tariffs on every other country, but they presumably consider it an acceptable trade-off for the ability to influence him and gain benefits from his patronage. (Though Must might be reconsidering, he called Trump’s influential trade adviser Peter Navarro “dumber than a sack of bricks” last week).

There’s also an element of straightforward hypocrisy: freedom for me but not for you. One obvious example: Thiel’s protégé J. D. Vance castigating European countries for their lack of free speech, while his boss signs executive orders attempting to destroy law firms and universities he dislikes.

But there is also a deeper, and longstanding, ideological synthesis between one wing of the libertarian movement and nationalist populism, which stems from concerns about the cost of the welfare state. While most (including Hayek) accept you need some safety net, their fear is that people are inherently wired to support an ever expanding, and increasingly expensive, system in search of equality. This is a particular challenge in democracies where those who stand to benefit from improved welfare and services outnumber those who don’t. Thus Thiel wrote in 2009 that:

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible…. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.”

Over the decades there have been all sorts of attempts to find intellectual justifications for slashing the size of the welfare state. Charles Murray’s “Losing Ground” in 1984 argued that social programmes hurt the poorest by incentivising bad choices. This was both deeply intellectually unconvincing and hugely influential on politicians looking for justifications for spending cuts. More recently Tyler Cowan has adapted the case. He recognises that welfare states do benefit today’s poor, but argues they harm future generations.

Unsurprisingly, while these arguments have influence on elites they are not compelling to the wider population. Social security programmes remain almost universally popular in the US and, in general, the cost of welfare states has continued to rise across the developed world even under conservative governments. This has led some libertarians to see radical right populism as an ally that can create the conditions for their agenda, unifying around their shared dislike of equality.

In the rest of the post I’ll explore how this alliance was built over the past few decades and the consequences for Trumpism and radical right politics worldwide.

[bobbyp]

Thanks, GftNC.

On a topic that touches this..there is a recurring thread hereabouts regarding horseshoe politics (please, give me a break) and why we so commonly observe lefty thinkers moving rightward, but never the reverse. I offer this: Don't despair, the reverse does happen, and can be observed in the current political moment:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/14/opinion/dissident-right-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1._04.J2P2.X_r8Y0vQZceK&smid=url-share

[GftNC]

De nada, bobbyp.

And since this is an open thread, and I hope Donald checks in, this from today's Grauniad shows that the Board of Deputies, Britain's most mainstream Jewish body (i.e. pro-Zionist, tending right) is beginning to have second thoughts (or at least is prepared to go public with them):

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/16/members-of-leading-british-jewish-body-condemn-israels-latest-actions-in-gaza

What was happening in Gaza was “a total breach of Jewish ethical values”, he added. “More damage is being done to the Zionist project by Netanyahu than Hamas could ever achieve.”

Oh well, better late than never.

[GftNC]

Wow, someone just sent me this coruscating and important speech by a French senator a month ago. It's only 8.30 long, and well worth the listen. It's subtitled: French Senator Claude Malhuret's address regarding Trump, Europe, and Ukraine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkPLcaKIyl0

I would post it anyway, but as it happens he refers in it to a recent congruence in their parliament between left and right in a) criticising Ukraine and b) favouring Putin, so I'm afraid it does raise once more bobbyp's bugbear phenomenon of horseshoe politics...

[GftNC]

I haven't actually read this (again a free post from Comment is Freed), but it looks like the kind of thing ObWiers might find interesting. This is how he introduces it:

Welcome to our second bonus guest post of the week (Sam is on holiday and back next week). We are delighted to host Phil Tinline, an author and journalist who was a BBC documentary maker for 20 years including a stint as executive producer of Radio 4's award-winning investigative history series, Document.

Phil’s first book - The Death of Consensus: 100 Years of British Political Nightmares - was one of my favourite books about British politics published in recent years. So much so that I’ve quoted it on this site several times and in the introduction to my own book.

His new book - Ghosts of Iron Mountain - tells the bizarre story of a 1960s hoax and its long, unexpected afterlife, and uses it to explore America's nightmares about political power. In his post for us today Phil looks at how the hoax helps explain MAGA-world’s unusual and often contradictory attitudes towards war

https://open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/war-what-is-it-good-for?r=w2vx&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false