this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2025
1206 points (99.0% liked)

politics

20394 readers
3118 users here now

Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!

Rules:

  1. Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.

Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.

Example:

  1. Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
  2. Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
  3. No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
  4. Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
  5. No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning

We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.

All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.

That's all the rules!

Civic Links

Register To Vote

Citizenship Resource Center

Congressional Awards Program

Federal Government Agencies

Library of Congress Legislative Resources

The White House

U.S. House of Representatives

U.S. Senate

Partnered Communities:

News

World News

Business News

Political Discussion

Ask Politics

Military News

Global Politics

Moderate Politics

Progressive Politics

UK Politics

Canadian Politics

Australian Politics

New Zealand Politics

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Attorney, journalist, and Elon Musk biographer Seth Abramson eviscerated both Elon Musk and his “fanboys” who have attempted to use the billionaire’s IQ as an indication of his intellectual prowess in a series of messages shared on X Thursday evening and into Friday.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] Gammelfisch@lemmy.world 12 points 7 hours ago

Leon came from Apartheid driven wealth, which paid for his education, and learned how to suck the US taxpayers dry while firing people left and right. Fuck him and DOGE. What about his brother Kimball who hides behind the curtains?

[–] Substance_P@lemmy.world 20 points 9 hours ago (2 children)
[–] mememuseum@lemmy.world 3 points 3 hours ago

Camacho would be a much better president

[–] uis@lemm.ee 2 points 4 hours ago

They need some Friendship:

[–] yournamehere@lemm.ee 9 points 11 hours ago (1 children)

like kim dotcom. same guy to me.

[–] umbraroze@lemmy.world 11 points 11 hours ago* (last edited 11 hours ago)

There's this website that listed bunch of stuff about Kim Dotcom and his ventures. (the list barely scratches the surface. But the important thing is that people thought he was hack decades ago.)

When I visited the site last time, I was like "ohhhhh, they've found a picture of Kim wearing an SS helmet. I really didn't know what else I was expecting."

[–] drmoose@lemmy.world 90 points 1 day ago (3 children)

I feel like Musk was a symptom of Americans really wanting a genius billionaire to be a real thing as it reinforces this American dream everyone's dreaming about.

Reading the CPAC transcript clearly shows that he's currently below average intelligence if anything.

[–] Thteven@lemmy.world 16 points 9 hours ago (1 children)

They wanted Iron Man and got Justin Fuckin Hammer.

[–] Jumpingspiderman@lemmy.world 4 points 5 hours ago

Phoney Starck

[–] faythofdragons@slrpnk.net 24 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Well yeah, that's the American Dream right? That if you're smart and work hard, you'll be rich?

[–] ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 5 points 11 hours ago

And like most dreams, it just won't happen in real life.

[–] drmoose@lemmy.world 29 points 1 day ago

Yeah and you need to be asleep to believe it

[–] JaymesRS@literature.cafe 23 points 1 day ago (5 children)

My feelings are that Steve Jobs was the quintessential cultural personality CEO and his early death sent a lot of people desperately looking for the next one, who ended up being Elon.

The difference was that Jobs actually had taste and a good vision for the future. He could build a smart team and let them drive progress then motivate to go further without making things up like Elon. So the media papered over Elon's wild confabulation, instead of showing him in a true light.

[–] marathon@thelemmy.club 7 points 8 hours ago

Jobs was just as sociopathic as Musk. You have to be to lead any corporation that relies on profit and is public. People that worked closely with Jobs often said he was an arehle and didn't care about people's feelings.

[–] NoIdiots@lemmy.cafe 22 points 11 hours ago

Steve Jobs tried to cure his cancer with essential oil. If that doesn't scream dumbass I don't know what is

[–] halowpeano@lemmy.world 48 points 1 day ago (5 children)

Most of that's false though. He couldn't build a good smart team, Wozniak could. He was very good at screwing others out of ownership in the company they helped build though. He was also very good at one thing, envisioning a computer in every home, and a computer in every pocket. That was his one true talent.

But he was not "smart". He died to cancer detected early enough to heal with modern medicine, but chose quack treatments instead. There really isn't any such thing as general intelligence. Everyone's got very specialized knowledge in some topic, and are idiots in everything else.

[–] marathon@thelemmy.club 7 points 8 hours ago

Jobs was a salesman, Woz the engineering brain.

[–] merari42@lemmy.world 10 points 12 hours ago

Na, that is just historically inaccurate. The original Macintosh team collected their stories/memoires at folklore.org, which give you a pretty good overview of his talents. He was really mercurial and Woz was the better engineer, but played a really important role in the vision/design of computers as we know them today. In the original Mac team others did the engineering and Jobs never claimed to be and engineering type of person, but he had a good feel on the importance of design, clear visual metaphors and good interaction design and pushed the team relentlessly into that direction.

[–] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 6 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

He was quite good at marketing. He wasn't a technical guy and apparently wasn't terribly good at driving technical people either. But he was great at selling whatever the tech people came up with.

[–] NoIdiots@lemmy.cafe 4 points 11 hours ago

His only smart trick was to sell things super expensive to flatter the ego of the buyer. It's not rocket science.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] yarr 39 points 1 day ago (2 children)

Time has been kind to Mr. Jobs. Read about his early years at Apple... he was famous for skewering anyone that disagreed with him. He also had lovely habits like parking his sports car in handicapped spots so he didn't have to walk as far. You can't disagree with his talent for running a company that did an awful lot of innovation, but he wasn't a nice guy. He named one of his first products, the Lisa after his daughter, but didn't treat the actual daughter that well.

[–] throwback3090@lemmy.nz 5 points 18 hours ago

He also told the daughter it wasn't named after her for most of her life.

I may be misremembering but I think she wasn't a child anymore by the time he acknowledged that he was her dad.

[–] jj4211@lemmy.world 19 points 1 day ago (1 children)

For a "smart" person, his death was quite possibly a very unintelligent way to go. He basically decided to give all kinds of "holistic" crap a chance to treat his cancer and avoided medical intervention for almost a year. If he had gone with the medical path from the onset, he might still be alive today.

But he did have his moments. Like how he basically told the music industry to cut out the DRM, because it just made the ecosystem impossible. Or one time when someone was picking at him over abandoning OpenDoc in favor of Java (Java didn't work out either, but his response was on point, without being dismissive of the person).

[–] GladiusB@lemmy.world 2 points 13 hours ago

Cancer sucks. It's hard to judge someone from dying when everyone dies. I do agree with you that treatment would be better. However finding out you are going to die has a grieving process. He took too long. But I kind of get it.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] LillyPip@lemmy.ca 85 points 1 day ago (5 children)

And the Understatement of the Year award goes to…

Seriously, when I first heard of this guy, I thought he must be smart. Then he started talking about things in my career field, and thought wow, that’s a stupid thing to say. The more he talked, the more I realised he’s a moron about nearly everything. Now I’m not convinced he can actually get dressed unassisted.

load more comments (5 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›