Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg’s desperation to be cool as they suck up to Donald Trump is so cringe

Frederick Foresight · Jan 20, 2025

TreeFrogTrader said:
Can't deny that all the cool kids are trying to align with Trump now.

What are you going to do about it?
More...

LOL! Who? Chachi? James Woods?

Jon Voight, who lost his mind and can't find it anymore? Mel Gibson, whose reputation is trashed and irredeemable? Or Sylvester Stallone, who's forgotten but not gone?

The tech bros? This just in: they're giving him their lunch money before he takes it from them.

Tuxan · Jan 20, 2025

Frederick Foresight said:
LOL! Who? Chachi? James Woods?

Jon Voight, who lost his mind and can't find it anymore? Mel Gibson, whose reputation is trashed and irredeemable? Or Sylvester Stallone, who's forgotten but not gone?

The tech bros? This just in: they're giving him their lunch money before he takes it from them.
More...

Stallone bugs me going MAzi, my daughter knows one of his daughters. I never took him for a rat by reputation. Really thought he would be team Arnie re; Trump.

Really missed something there.

Frederick Foresight · Jan 20, 2025

Tuxan said:
Stallone bugs me going MAzi, my daughter knows one of his daughters. I never took him for a rat by reputation. Really thought he would be team Arnie re; Trump.

Really missed something there.
More...

I thought the same way. I guess people change. As has my opinion of him.

Tuxan · Jan 20, 2025

Speaking of cool rides, I just saw Jesus H Trump's

gwb-trading · Jan 20, 2025

Let's check out a clip of Elon sucking up to Trump today.

Ricter · Jan 20, 2025

I believe the Nazi salute is just raising your outstretched arm up. Musk is doing the Romulan salute there... ?

nitrene · Jan 20, 2025

Frederick Foresight said:
A woman's opinion on these alpha (alfalfa?) boys.

Rebecca Shaw: I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...wn-i-just-didnt-expect-them-to-be-such-losers

Mark Zuckerberg is a different kind of cringe – but cringe all the same. His cringe moments drip through more sparingly but, when they do, my body tries to turn inside out at my bellybutton,’ Rebecca Shaw writes.

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this but everything seems to be going down the tubes quite fast. And not fun tubes, like at a waterpark. The “ending in shit” kind. The issues are complicated, the reasons diverse, but there are a few culprits who have been making themselves extremely visible.

Alongside those holding political office, tech gragillionnaires (I had to invent a new number) like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg obviously wield huge global influence with their computers and numbers and whatnot. There has been a lot written about them and there will be more, as they continue to shape the world and win favour with Donald Trump. Big, scary, probably ruinous things lie ahead. But I’m here to discuss the smaller part. The insult to injury, the sprinkling of salt in the wound.

Whether I am engaging with the news, or with Musk tweeting constantly like a man with no job or friends, or with Zuckerberg sending out weird videos and appearing on Rogan, I am in pain. Not just because I don’t like what they are doing but because they are so incredibly, painfully cringe.

I knew that one day we might have to watch as capitalism and greed and bigotry led to a world where powerful men, deserving or not, would burn it all down. What I didn’t expect, and don’t think I could have foreseen, is how incredibly cringe it would all be. I have been prepared for evil, for greed, for cruelty, for injustice – but I did not anticipate that the people in power would also be such huge losers.

I’ve always been someone who cannot tolerate embarrassment. I hate being embarrassed more than just about any other emotion and I’ve always skipped content based on cringe humour like Meet the Parents, Borat or Nathan for You. It makes my skin crawl and it makes the contents of my stomach try to crawl out of my mouth. But I cannot skip world events.

Nor can I skip Musk’s clear desperation, even as he holds this much wealth and power in his hands, to be thought of as cool. There are endless examples of him embarrassing himself while attempting to be funny or to gain respect. Unfortunately, while you may be able to buy power, it’s impossible to buy a good personality. Watching his Nigel-no-friends attempts to be popular, his endless pathetic tweets that read as though they come from the brain of an 11-year-old poser, has made me start to believe we should bring back bullying. If yet another humiliating report in the last couple of days is to be believed, he appears even to have lost the respect of some of his gamer audience, who the report claims suspect that he may have been lying about his achievements in hardcore gaming (cursed sentence).

Zuckerberg is a different kind of cringe – but cringe all the same. His cringe moments drip through more sparingly but, when they do, my body tries to turn inside out at my bellybutton. His physical makeover for Maga reasons, performing music because no one will stop him, trying to look cool on a surfboard – all these are extremely difficult to watch. He has been trying to suck up to Trump, going on Joe Rogan’s show to say society has been “neutered” and companies need “more masculine energy”.

Putting on what is clearly a bro disguise to join the boys’ club and sit at the big boy table – it should feel humiliating. This came as Zuckerberg rolled back hate speech and factchecking rules at Meta, in a clear swerve to the right before Trump’s inauguration. What could be more masculine and cool than selling out vulnerable communities and women to impress the alpha male?

Climate crises keep coming, genocides continue, women keep getting murdered, art is being strangled to death by AI, bigotry is on the rise, social progress is being rolled back … AND these men insist on being cringe? It’s a rotten cherry on top. This combination of evil and embarrassment is a unique horror, one that science fiction has failed to prepare us for. The second-hand embarrassment we have to endure gets even more potent when combined with other modern influences on young men, like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.

Peterson is a big voice in men’s rights – well, a small Kermit’s voice in men’s rights – and he’s also an embarrassment. So much so that he has his own Know Your Meme page, which covers that time he reportedly retweeted an image from a fetish film, apparently believing it was a Chinese communist “sperm extraction” facility. He deleted it shortly afterwards.

Tate is facing human trafficking charges but rose to fame as a voice for young men, a misogynist in bad outfits who does really cool things like smoking cigars, wearing sunnies inside and trying to drag human rights back 100 years.

Living your life to impress other men by hating women is one of the most embarrassing things I can imagine. Looking up to any of these men for how to live your life is even sadder.

I’ve worked hard to keep these kinds of men out of my personal life, to keep them away from me, out of my goddamn sight. Now they are in my face daily, not only influencing the world for the worse but making me nauseous at how uncool and pathetic they are, on top of their other sins. It’s too much, I can’t take it, there needs to be a change.

It’s time for us to start getting revenge on the nerds.
More...

It's the Alt-Right ideology gone mainstream. It reminds me of the time I used to read what is now referred to as the Manosphere blogs (2009-2017). They were mainly PUA, MRA & traditional Christianity blogs. I would say most of them always had a tinge of White Nationalism embedded in them.

Before the rise of Jordan Peterson at least here in the US there was a guy who referred to himself as Vox Day. He was at the nexus of all of these movements. He was a former techno music artist and SciFi author. He was very influential right before Trump burst out in the 2015-2016 time period. He was a big believer of US is for (White) Americans. Traditional roles is what he really pushed aka more masculinity for the men. That is one of the reasons the MAGA crowd to a degree liked RFK, Jr.

It should be noted though that the Alt-Right and especially Vox Day really despised the traditional GOP and referred to them as RINOs as far back as 2010, if I remember correctly. To them they were collaborators with the Left by not pushing back. The joke was that Conservatives only conserved Liberalism of 20 years ago. I think also that they became disillusioned with Trump since he didn't really drain the swamp like he campaigned on.

I think by 2018 most of the blogs had shut down and they mostly moved to Youtube & Rumble. Most blogging software were owned by Google (blogspot) & Wordpress and they shutdown most of it based on content violations, incitement to violence I'm guessing. Reddit did the same thing to the r/theDonald & r/TRP (The Red Pill).

Looking back on that period that seems to be a foreshadowing of the culture now. It is ironic that big tech now wants to cozy up to Trump since back then they all hated the alt-right and actively tried to ban them as much as they could.

wildchild · Jan 20, 2025

Frederick Foresight said:
A woman's opinion on these alpha (alfalfa?) boys.

Rebecca Shaw: I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers
https://www.theguardian.com/comment...wn-i-just-didnt-expect-them-to-be-such-losers

Mark Zuckerberg is a different kind of cringe – but cringe all the same. His cringe moments drip through more sparingly but, when they do, my body tries to turn inside out at my bellybutton,’ Rebecca Shaw writes.

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this but everything seems to be going down the tubes quite fast. And not fun tubes, like at a waterpark. The “ending in shit” kind. The issues are complicated, the reasons diverse, but there are a few culprits who have been making themselves extremely visible.

Alongside those holding political office, tech gragillionnaires (I had to invent a new number) like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg obviously wield huge global influence with their computers and numbers and whatnot. There has been a lot written about them and there will be more, as they continue to shape the world and win favour with Donald Trump. Big, scary, probably ruinous things lie ahead. But I’m here to discuss the smaller part. The insult to injury, the sprinkling of salt in the wound.

Whether I am engaging with the news, or with Musk tweeting constantly like a man with no job or friends, or with Zuckerberg sending out weird videos and appearing on Rogan, I am in pain. Not just because I don’t like what they are doing but because they are so incredibly, painfully cringe.

I knew that one day we might have to watch as capitalism and greed and bigotry led to a world where powerful men, deserving or not, would burn it all down. What I didn’t expect, and don’t think I could have foreseen, is how incredibly cringe it would all be. I have been prepared for evil, for greed, for cruelty, for injustice – but I did not anticipate that the people in power would also be such huge losers.

I’ve always been someone who cannot tolerate embarrassment. I hate being embarrassed more than just about any other emotion and I’ve always skipped content based on cringe humour like Meet the Parents, Borat or Nathan for You. It makes my skin crawl and it makes the contents of my stomach try to crawl out of my mouth. But I cannot skip world events.

Nor can I skip Musk’s clear desperation, even as he holds this much wealth and power in his hands, to be thought of as cool. There are endless examples of him embarrassing himself while attempting to be funny or to gain respect. Unfortunately, while you may be able to buy power, it’s impossible to buy a good personality. Watching his Nigel-no-friends attempts to be popular, his endless pathetic tweets that read as though they come from the brain of an 11-year-old poser, has made me start to believe we should bring back bullying. If yet another humiliating report in the last couple of days is to be believed, he appears even to have lost the respect of some of his gamer audience, who the report claims suspect that he may have been lying about his achievements in hardcore gaming (cursed sentence).

Zuckerberg is a different kind of cringe – but cringe all the same. His cringe moments drip through more sparingly but, when they do, my body tries to turn inside out at my bellybutton. His physical makeover for Maga reasons, performing music because no one will stop him, trying to look cool on a surfboard – all these are extremely difficult to watch. He has been trying to suck up to Trump, going on Joe Rogan’s show to say society has been “neutered” and companies need “more masculine energy”.

Putting on what is clearly a bro disguise to join the boys’ club and sit at the big boy table – it should feel humiliating. This came as Zuckerberg rolled back hate speech and factchecking rules at Meta, in a clear swerve to the right before Trump’s inauguration. What could be more masculine and cool than selling out vulnerable communities and women to impress the alpha male?

Climate crises keep coming, genocides continue, women keep getting murdered, art is being strangled to death by AI, bigotry is on the rise, social progress is being rolled back … AND these men insist on being cringe? It’s a rotten cherry on top. This combination of evil and embarrassment is a unique horror, one that science fiction has failed to prepare us for. The second-hand embarrassment we have to endure gets even more potent when combined with other modern influences on young men, like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.

Peterson is a big voice in men’s rights – well, a small Kermit’s voice in men’s rights – and he’s also an embarrassment. So much so that he has his own Know Your Meme page, which covers that time he reportedly retweeted an image from a fetish film, apparently believing it was a Chinese communist “sperm extraction” facility. He deleted it shortly afterwards.

Tate is facing human trafficking charges but rose to fame as a voice for young men, a misogynist in bad outfits who does really cool things like smoking cigars, wearing sunnies inside and trying to drag human rights back 100 years.

Living your life to impress other men by hating women is one of the most embarrassing things I can imagine. Looking up to any of these men for how to live your life is even sadder.

I’ve worked hard to keep these kinds of men out of my personal life, to keep them away from me, out of my goddamn sight. Now they are in my face daily, not only influencing the world for the worse but making me nauseous at how uncool and pathetic they are, on top of their other sins. It’s too much, I can’t take it, there needs to be a change.

It’s time for us to start getting revenge on the nerds.
More...

At least they are not canadian

themickey · Jan 20, 2025

wildchild said:
At least they are not canadian
More...

Much racial bigotry in merica? Nah.

newwurldmn · Jan 20, 2025

nitrene said:
It's the Alt-Right ideology gone mainstream. It reminds me of the time I used to read what is now referred to as the Manosphere blogs (2009-2017). They were mainly PUA, MRA & traditional Christianity blogs. I would say most of them always had a tinge of White Nationalism embedded in them.

Before the rise of Jordan Peterson at least here in the US there was a guy who referred to himself as Vox Day. He was at the nexus of all of these movements. He was a former techno music artist and SciFi author. He was very influential right before Trump burst out in the 2015-2016 time period. He was a big believer of US is for (White) Americans. Traditional roles is what he really pushed aka more masculinity for the men. That is one of the reasons the MAGA crowd to a degree liked RFK, Jr.

It should be noted though that the Alt-Right and especially Vox Day really despised the traditional GOP and referred to them as RINOs as far back as 2010, if I remember correctly. To them they were collaborators with the Left by not pushing back. The joke was that Conservatives only conserved Liberalism of 20 years ago. I think also that they became disillusioned with Trump since he didn't really drain the swamp like he campaigned on.

I think by 2018 most of the blogs had shut down and they mostly moved to Youtube & Rumble. Most blogging software were owned by Google (blogspot) & Wordpress and they shutdown most of it based on content violations, incitement to violence I'm guessing. Reddit did the same thing to the r/theDonald & r/TRP (The Red Pill).

Looking back on that period that seems to be a foreshadowing of the culture now. It is ironic that big tech now wants to cozy up to Trump since back then they all hated the alt-right and actively tried to ban them as much as they could.
More...

it’s not ironic. Big tech hates the alt-right. Most people hate these neo-Nazis who in reality are a vocal but small group of Trumps base. However these people love Trump and so Trump loves them. And big tech knows that if they piss these guys off then Trump will make their life very difficult (especially since he’s shown to intervene more than presidents have been in the past).

Trump isn’t a capitalist. He’s pushing command economy china style.