Teddy Roosevelt never said “The only good indian is a dead indian.” That quote is typically associated with Philip Sheridan.

A number of sources claim a similar quote (“I don’t go so far as to think that the only good Indians are the dead Indians, but I believe nine out of every 10 are…") alleged to be from an 1886 speech in New York, but this still goes against how he treated native americans generally and I can’t find the original speech so I’m a bit suspicious of this as well.

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That’s not so much a murder stab as a flesh stab. To spell that out, it can be a metaphor for:

• “If you’re a trans woman you must use the mens room, or if you’re a trans man you must use the women’s room”
• “My trans child is dead to me”
• “We’re going to remove trans soldiers from the military”
• “We’re going to spend your taxpayer dollars to actively remove anything in government that recognizes the existence of trans people”
• “We’re going to spread hate against you to win elections”

He boycotted Bud Light because they did a promotional campaign that included a trans influencer on instagram. The stock fell 20% and basically made LGBTQ-related promotions a no-go for corporate America since.

That’s not true, companies are plenty worried about this sort of thing. Look at how Bud light panicked over the kid rock boycott. If he can do it, anyone can.

Ok. Make it a consistent thing then. Starting today.

I disagree with both the premise and the conclusion. Even if skipping corporate stuff for a day is only a mild inconvenience, that is still obviously not convenient. Second, there’s no reason to suspect convenience should strongly impact effectiveness. How much did it inconvenience anyone to boycott South Africa in the 80s?

Maximizing effectiveness for unit of effort is smart. And when a tiny change in share price can make a big difference in CEO compensation, we’d be complete masochists not to use that in our favor. But also even if you’re into maximizing pain, if we wanna talk about permanently going after these corporations then it’s gotta start somewhere. And it’s best to start with getting people to do what’s easy.

Because the status quo throughout history is an extremely small number of people getting the most benefits by far and everyone else getting screwed, and everyone seeing this as normal. People are used to it, while having everyone on relatively equal footing is new and therefore scary.

Well that’s what I mean by doing more harm than good. People notice, and then say “I hate whatever those people stand for”.

Protests do more harm than good to a cause, especially annoying protests.

There’s plenty of evidence that he actually is very stupid, and that he may even have a learning disability. To be honest, once you accept the thought that he may be mildly retarded, you can’t unsee it. For example in the recent talk about rare earth minerals, it seems to me that Trump thinks rare earth is actually soil in the way he talks about it and it drives me nuts that the media doesn’t point this out:

“We’re looking to do a deal with Ukraine where they’re going to secure what we’re giving them with their rare earth and other things…They have great rare earth. And I want security of the rare earth, and they’re willing to do it."

But he makes up for it politically with great skill in appealing to people’s base emotions.

Leftism is unpopular by definition, especially to the privileged classes. Leftism seeks to upend the status quo, and loss aversion is a problem.

Not that efforts can’t be made.

One could argue it did work, just a little too well. In 1995 forget trans rights, gay marriage was just starting to become a question and about half of white people were still against interracial marriage. As the one atheist kid in that era, I was certainly an outlier and society still regarded it as a default that everyone was religious. Basically only black people were worried about whether police were beating people up too much and for the vast majority the only question was why we weren’t being harsher on criminals. Society’s views on things have changed very rapidly as a result of being able to access information very easily.

I think what we’re seeing today is not a result of the internet, but a reaction to the result of the internet. Things have changed too fast for some and there’s basically a cultural luddite movement.

People are seriously acting like Bin Laden was bait and switched by the US. I somehow remember it differently…

And your evidence for the US installing this government is what exactly?

Let me say this as a westerner - if someone all of a sudden tried to put me in a Putinist puppet state, shit would burn. To the ground.

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Because some people don’t know how to copy and paste text, and other people don’t discourage these posts by downvoting them.

Well Trump can say whatever he wants, whether he actually can do what he says is another matter. In this case for example, congestion pricing has simply continued as before because Trump doesn’t have power to change the laws of New York. When it comes to killing people, government employees are subject to the same rules as everyone else about unlawful killing, even if they were ordered by the president. Of course Trump can pardon his assassins for federal crimes, but states can still prosecute them and if nothing else the victims can still use deadly force to defend themselves without being guilty of a crime.

So legally speaking, Trump isn’t so much a king as just some fat, old, possibly mentally-challenged man who can’t be punished for things.

But in the technical sense, we’re all kings and can do whatever we want. We’ve just agreed as a society that if people do certain things we all unite to help put them in a cage or whatever.

Getting sick of all this observational humor.

To me I’m not really sure what his reply even means. I think it’s some attempt at a joke (because of course the government uses SQL), but I figure the joke can be broken down into two potential jokes that fail for different, embarrassing reasons:

Interpretation 1: The government is so advanced it doesn’t use SQL - This interpretation is unlikely given that Elon is trying to portray the government as in need of reform. But it would make more sense if coming from a NoSQL type who thinks SQL needs to be removed from everywhere. NoSQL Guy is someone many software devs are familiar with who takes the sometimes-good idea of avoiding SQL and takes it way too far. Elon being NoSQL Guy would be dumb, but not as dumb as the more likely interpretation #2.

Interpretation 2: The government is so backward it doesn’t use SQL - I think this is the more likely interpretation as it would be consistent with Elon’s ideology, but it really falls flat because SQL is far from being cutting-edge. There has kind of been a trend of moving away from SQL (with considerable controversy) over the last 10 years or so and it’s really surprising that Elon seems completely unaware of that.