Showing posts with label Elon Musk. Show all posts

November 30, 2022

One person train wrecks and a huge traffic pileup

One person train wrecks and a huge traffic pileup
By Hal Brown

Archives on Right >

Why I was banned from Daily Kos

Is it any coincidence that all of the people who have become one person train wrecks and the large group that has become a huge highway traffic pileup are Republicans? I can't think of a Democrat but would be happy if readers can find one to add to my list.

In a quick glance at RawStory this morning I saw these articles:

The first one is about the coming battle in the House for who will be Speaker. I consider this just the beginning of what will be a huge traffic pileup for the House GOP as they begin their investigations into Hunter Biden, who everyone has heard of but few care about, to Alejandro Mayorkas who nobody has heard of but will once the hearings start. Their eventual goal may be to try to impeach President Biden, an effort that might be successful in the Republican controlled House but will go nowhere in the Senate.

What it all adds up to is a gridlocked (to use another traffic term) legislative agenda in the House which you better believe Democrats will publicize to their advantage when popular bills go down to defeat.

The individuals who have the most ginormous train wrecks Donald Trump and Elon Musk who are the most publicized. The lack of judgment and self-defeating grandiose narcissism of these two is

If Herschel Walker loses he will be added to the list. Hell, if he wins, covering his putting his foot in his mouth as a Senator will prove irresistible to media.

Other train wrecks who make the news who come to mind are Kari Lake (read story) and Ye (who is apparently going to run for president with

Nick Fuentes and Milo Yiannopoulos helping in his campaign ).

I predict that there will be many opportunities for the likes of Jim Jordan (read yesterday's blog story about the soon to be chair of the GOP Judiciary Committee) and other House Republicans, especially those in the Freedom Caucus who crave attention like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, and Matt Goetz, to vie for the dubious distinction of becoming headline grabbing train wreck of the day or week.

The reason some of the individuals who will crash and burn will be due to calculated attempts to gain notoriety and to stand out in a crowded field. Keep my highway metaphor, compare it to someone driving 100 MPH in attempt to beat everyone else to a destination.

Most of them also just happen to meet the many of the clinical criteria for having a narcissistic personality disorder. This is from The Mayo Clinic:

Symptoms of narcissistic personality disorder and how severe they are can vary. People with the disorder can:

Have an unreasonably high sense of self-importance and require constant, excessive admiration.
Feel that they deserve privileges and special treatment.
Expect to be recognized as superior even without achievements.
Make achievements and talents seem bigger than they are.
Be preoccupied with fantasies about success, power, brilliance, beauty or the perfect mate.
Believe they are superior to others and can only spend time with or be understood by equally special people.
Be critical of and look down on people they feel are not important.
Expect special favors and expect other people to do what they want without questioning them.
Take advantage of others to get what they want.
Have an inability or unwillingness to recognize the needs and feelings of others.
Be envious of others and believe others envy them.
Behave in an arrogant way, brag a lot and come across as conceited.
Insist on having the best of everything — for instance, the best car or office.

At the same time, people with narcissistic personality disorder have trouble handling anything they view as criticism. They can:

Become impatient or angry when they don't receive special recognition or treatment.
Have major problems interacting with others and easily feel slighted.
React with rage or contempt and try to belittle other people to make themselves appear superior.
Have difficulty managing their emotions and behavior.
Experience major problems dealing with stress and adapting to change.
Withdraw from or avoid situations in which they might fail.
Feel depressed and moody because they fall short of perfection.
Have secret feelings of insecurity, shame, humiliation and fear of being exposed as a failure.

November 25, 2022

My modified migration to Mastodon

My migration to Mastodon

By Hal Brown

Archives on Right >
Why I was banned from Daily Kos

Update: Dec. 12, 2022

This is what Twitter is doing to those who tweet a link to Mastodon

This is what someone posted on Mastodon:

If you’re wondering about Mastodon’s impact, Twitter is now automatically marking links to mastodon as “sensitive” (aka dangerous) and forcing users who get them to “appeal” the claim. In case Elon didn’t seem desperate enough for you already…

Below is a screen grab of what they tweeted with their identity blocked out by me.

Those who want to view or join Mastodon can do so at web addresses for Mastodon servers including these https://mastodon.social/explore
https://masto.ai/explore
https://mastodon.world/explore
https://mastodon.online/explore
https://universeodon.com/explore

Anyone who wants to promote Mastodon on Twitter may be able to avoid their algorithm tagging their tweet by 1) not using the word Mastodon 2) trying to outfox them by tweeting something like "I have a new home."
Original Story
This is what my Mastodon profile looks like:

In case you haven't heard, Twitter is in trouble. Two alternative sites I joined are Tribel and Mastodon. I will focus on Mastodon here because I find it to be the most engaging and interesting of the two. People I respect and am familiar with like Robert Reich, George Takei, Kathy Griffin, Dean Obeidallah, and Joy Ann Reid are posting there.

As far as I'm concerned if Kathy Griffin was the only celebrity posting there I would be hooked on the platform. I don't think I ever missed an episode of her "My Life On The D List" TV series.

She recently made the news by being suspended from Twitter by Musk:

He then reinstated her the next week:

Many people post under their real names as I do. A number of them would not be familiar to most people but have profiles on Wikipedia, for example Jennifer Taub, Matt Blaze, Jeff Jarvis, Tanja Bueltmann, and T. Ryan Gregory.

Stephen Fry posts there. His name might sound familiar.

He's the English actor, broadcaster, comedian, director and writer known for among other things playing Jeeves in Jeeves and Wooster.

If you are curious about the background of someone who posted (or "toots") there you can click on their name. Most of them are candid about their backgrounds.

I had a seven part dialogue with one poster who actually had business dealing with him about whether Elon Musk was autist or not.

I don't know how many there are but there's a large group of former Twitter employees who post on Mastodon.

There's a news section which highlights articles being discussed on Mastodon:

If you are curious enough by now, you can try Mastodon out by joining here:

If not read more about it. Mastodon has been in the news. For example, click images to read articles:

Many users of Mastodon and Tribel have closed their Twitter accounts entirely. I haven't because I like to monitor what is going on there and keep an eye on what Elon Musk is doing. At resenting he's using polls to determine whether or not to reinstate banned accounts. This is from HUFFPOST:

Oh Look, Elon Musk Is Letting More Banned Accounts Back On Twitter

Chief Twit rules by polling now.

I couldn't resist putting on a reply to the most recent tweet from earlier this morning:

For those of you who don't mind clicking on Twitter you can see the replies to his tweet here.

It's highly unlikely he'll see my reply considering there were over 30,000 replies, but perhaps a few people will. I think if you use an illustration more people may look at what you tweet. It took a brief web search to find these two drawings.

November 7, 2022

HUFFPOST article gave me a chance for shameless promotion of my blog

By Hal Brown

I had nothing in mind to write about this morning until I looked at HUFFPOST and read their lead article:

Days After Laying Off Half The Company, Twitter Asks Some Employees To Come Back

Twitter is reportedly trying to reverse course and hire back dozens of workers it just laid off – continuing the chaos Elon Musk has brought since taking over.

These are the comments I put on HUFFPOST hoping to promote my blog:

As someone who practiced as a psychotherapist for 40 years Musk has intrigued me so I wrote a lot about him on my blog. I can't say this has made me famous but if you do a Google search of Elon Musk and my name my blog comes up as number one. Thank you Elon.
I know this is shameless self promotion, but you are reading this blog so I hope you appreciate my stories. I trust you don't mind my trying to promote it. I like writing and don't think there's anything wrong with having a healthy desire to want to increase the readership.

If do the same search on DuckDuckGo and my blog dominates the top results. In all modesty I have sent Elon priceless therapeutic advice through my comic strip Mired in Muskland but unfortunately for him he hasn't seen it let alone heeded it.

I didn't want to put a direct link in the HUFFPOST comments section because I am not sure whether or not that would violate their rules. I did include two images from the Google and DuckDuckGo searches.

Click the images below to enlarge them.

Most Internet users, about 80%, use Google as their primary search engine but DuckDuckGo which doesn't track your activity to send to advertisers is becoming more popular. If you do the same search there this blog dominates the results. DuckDuckGo is currently advertising on television.

The search engine market is highly competitive. You can read about the most popular ones here.

Here's how the same search came out on those besides Google and DuckDuckGo among the others on the top six.

Bing is the number two search engine and this blog does very well there at number one and number three.

The blog tops the page there and included a "Mired in Muskland" story.

The Russian search engine has the blog at number one:

I couldn't find the blog on the Chinese search engine. The search blocks pro-democracy websites so that may be the reason.

14 readers this past week logged onto the blog from China. If any of them are reading this I really like to hear from you. You can use the comment section o the bottom of the page. Of course this goes for the 95 readers in Russia.

A Musk tweet and my reply:

November 4, 2022

Mired in Muskland - 7 - Elon creates poll for trolls

By Hal Brown

Look, Elon made a poll for us.

The poll Elon Musk posted was supposed to influence advertisers. Really? Unless this is an example of Musk's warped sense of humor this is a lousy poll. For someone so smart he demonstrates that he can be not so smart in certain areas. One of them is how to construct a poll.

Do reputable advertisers really want to focus their ads on members of the group who checked the second options instead of the first?

Of course phrasing the choice as being between freedom of speech and political correctness is the height of a slanted choice of terms.

Musk has no way of knowing who checked the second choice. Some, perhaps most, of them could be trolls who get a thrill be being provocative.

Previous comics

Did you know this?

November 3, 2022

Mired in Muskland - 6 - Whither Trump

Mired in Muskland - 6

Whither Trump?

by Hal Brown

There is a general consensus that once the election in over Elon Musk will allow Donald Trump to tweet on Twitter again. While I expect the prognosticators are correct in this I am not sure Trump will necessarily start tweeting again even if Musk approves this for several reasons.

One is that he is a man who is loathe to appear to beg for anything, let alone accept something whicht he knows will be perceived in his MAGA base as his currying favor with the richest man in the world.

In their collective cultish mind this will be viewed as Musk winning and Trump losing.

Another is that if he goes back to tweeting it would be an admission that his Truth Social website failed to make a dent in the social media world. It would be tantamount to saying he was wrong and we know this is something Trump never does.

Trump wants to control all aspects of his messaging and he can only do that on Truth Social. While it doesn't get many clicks when he posts something outrageous or newsworthy there the media is likely to republish it.

For example this made the news yesterday:

Clicking above will engage but not go to Truth Social

A mere 4,300 people sent it on and 16,967 gave it a heart but journalists picked it up.

Yet an additional reason he'd eschew tweeting, perhaps a primary one, and stay on Truth Social is that he can generate revenue from the platform in the form of donations.

No doubt he or his tech savvy crew are following who the Truth Social readers are and they know they are hard-core MAGAs and susceptible to his grift. They must have a way of tracking where the donations came from.

Click here to read the statistica Truth Social Statistics

Meanwhile for those who don't look at Elon's tweets, here's some of what he's been up to:

Yes Elon, we know you know about neurons. As far as scientists have been able to determine a single neuron in an instant of time is not self-aware but linked to other neurons in the brain we have a functioning mind.

The total number of neurons in the brain of a human is around a hundred billion. I don't think you can double this for Musk just based on his personal worth.

Is Twitter like a neuron having billions of some kind of interactions over time making Twitter being a collective cybernetic super-intelligence?

Elon is super-intelligent. He may be able to develop Twitter into a collective cybernetic super-intelligence. The concern I have, along with many others, is who will program ethics, morality, truth, and common decency into the cybernetic super-intelligence. I don't think he can depend on the so-called collective to do this.

I found the AOC sweatshirt on her website here. He encircled the cost. As far as cotton sweatshirts go $58 may seem excessive, but I assume part of the profit goes to her campaign in some way or another. Consider that The Trump store charges a whopping $185:

So why did Elon use AOC instead of Trump?

Notice he didn't use this from her mech store which is also $58.

Maybe Musk will set his own example and sell some more reasonably priced Twitter merchandise at a discount for those who subscribe and throw in a free t-shirt if your sign up for a year.

Elon makes a good point. Twitter may be the most interesting place on the Internet. You are reading the tweets because you elected to read my blog but possibly don't ever go to Twitter since I don't put links to it here.

He may be revealing more about himself in the tweet about hw interesting Twitter is. He was managed to make himself in around a week to be the most interesting person on the Internet unceremoniously taking the position from Donald Trump who I found interesting because he is the poster child for malignant sociopathic narcissism.

As a therapist I have been intrigued by Musk whose narcissism may be indicative of his having a narcissistic personality disorder but crucially without the sociopathy we see in Trump.

Grandiosity with expectations of superior treatment from other people
Fixated on fantasies of power, success, intelligence, attractiveness, etc.
Self-perception of being unique, superior, and associated with high-status people and institutions
Needing continual admiration from others
Sense of entitlement to special treatment and to obedience from others
Exploitative of others to achieve personal gain
Unwilling to empathize with the feelings, wishes, and needs of other people
Intensely envious of others, and the belief that others are equally envious of them
Pompous and arrogant demeanor

I wondered if he made the cartoon faces himself thinking he might have a talent as a cartoonist. I did a Google Image search and discovered were he found them.

Click to enlarge

About me

November 2, 2022

Mired in Muskland - 5

Mired in Muskland - 5

By Hal Brown

click each image below to enlarge

Link to YouTube shown above here

Reported on TechCrunch (below) and being discussed on Morning Joe as I composed this edition.

Joe said we are seeing him unwind on Twitter before our eyes. Is Musk unwinding, frequently in red tie via his tweets, before our eyes? It is hard to say unless we define "unwinding" exactly. There are times he is impulsive but that doesn't mean he is losing control.

What caught my eye wasn't Musk explaining via tweets the idea of charging $8 a month for extras, hell, I might even pay it.

This didn't strike me as unexpected. What "caught my eye" was his tweet saying that Twitter speaks to the inner masochist in all of us.

He verged from floating a business idea to bringing in the idea of saying all complainers should keep complaining (at a fee of $8 a month) perhaps dare I say as if he enjoyed reading them, to an hour later tweeting his inner masochist tweet.

Most people throw around the term masochism more or less accurately. Here's how The Britannica defines it:

Masochism, psychosexual disorder in which eroticrelease is achieved through having pain inflicted on oneself. The term derives from the name of Chevalier Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, an Austrian who wrote extensively about the satisfaction he gained by being beaten and subjugated. The amount of pain involved can vary from ritual humiliation with little violence to severe whipping or beating; generally the masochist retains some control over the situation and will end the abusive behaviour before becoming seriously injured. While pain may cause a certain amount of sexual excitement in many persons, for the masochist it becomes the chief end of sexual activity. The term is frequently used in a looser social context in which masochism is defined as the behaviour of one who seeks out and enjoys situations of humiliation or abuse.

Masochism as an isolated trait is fairly rare. More commonly, the association of pain with sexual pleasure takes the form of both masochism and sadism (q.v.), the obtaining of sexual pleasure through inflicting pain on others. Often, an individual will alternate roles, becoming aroused through the experience of pain in one instance and through the infliction of pain in another.

This is from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

1) noun The deriving of sexual gratification, or the tendency to derive sexual gratification, from being physically or emotionally abused.
2) noun The deriving of pleasure, or the tendency to derive pleasure, from being humiliated or mistreated, either by another or by oneself.
3) noun A willingness or tendency to subject oneself to unpleasant or trying experiences.

I'd have to literally be Elon's therapist to know whether definition one, above, applies to him, but wonder about numbers two and three. It is better I'm not his shrink since if I was doctor-patient confidentiality would apply.

Update:

I know some people, ordinary Twitterers, even those who never tweeted, have gone off the platform. Not me. In fact, I just Followed Musk.

Musk is engaging back and forth with a number of tweeters today. For example the tweets below. Clicking will enlarge but not go to Twitter.

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November 30, 2022