this was also always a lie

Elon Musk’s oft-quoted declarations about Tesla “autopilot” being safer than human drivers was always a lie:

Tesla keeps these paying liability sponges behind the wheel largely through the strength of a statistical lie: that Autopilot is safer than human drivers. … When road safety researcher Noah Goodall adjusted the best publicly available data for factors like road type and driver age in a peer-reviewed paper, Tesla’s claim of a 43% reduction in crashes turned into an 11% increase in crashes.

Ed Niedermeyer for Rolling Stone, “Elon Musk’s Big Lie About Tesla Is Finally Exposed,” December 17, 2023

Lots more deets at the link.

I’ve had Musk’s and Tesla’s autopilot numbers thrown at me for years. They’re bullshit. Please stop fanboying this fascist marketeer fuckhead. He’s not Tony FUCKING Stark and he never was.

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tucker carlson is “open to” the earth being flat

No. Really. This isn’t the Turning Point conference where he flirted with it several months ago but was very clearly working in a joking way, this is very recent and he’s not obviously joking at all. He’s using it to push the idea that the truth is unknowable, an idea that fascist movements use to cement belief in the great leader, however.

That, and that he believes in guns, that guns are real.

Here’s the clip. You can play it for yourself.

You got any relatives who were into Tucker Carlson? Let ’em know. This is who he is, and so maybe this isn’t the only thing he’s a complete nutbag clown about.

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Fascism Watch for 18 December 2023: Dictator Day One

Let’s talk about Dictator Day One Trump.

Let’s talk about an easy rhetorical slide. That doesn’t sound like it should be the first thing we talk about, but bear with me a second, I’ll get there.

You may and may not recall Trump saying he wanted to be a dictator on Day One when interviewed last week, or doubling down on the idea of being a “day one dictator” to “build the wall” and “drill, drill, drill” a couple of days later in a speech before the New York Young Republicans Club. He’s put the idea out there before, going back a few years, but this is the latest revival of Emperor Trump.

Now. Add this: a right-wing host at a Trump rally, working the queues as part of the warmup crew, last week. One of the people he’s interviewing brings up “day one dictator” and “drill baby drill,” so the MAGA host turns it around and asks the crowd, “How many people here support Day One Dictator?“

He gets some cheers. Some of them are a little nervous, and he has to pad it a bit, goad them up to it a bit, say it’s okay to say it because of how they’ve treated Trump, and that gets them onboard. The cheers aren’t universal, but they’re there.

If it catches – and they’re trying to make it catch – then things get much easier. “Day One Dictator” as an empty “go Trump!!1!” noise becomes “He’ll be a Day One Dictator” like he’s already said he’ll be to “He’ll be a Dictator From Day One…” and that from means he’ll be a dictator, comma, continuing.

See how easily that window of rhetoric slides? So smooth, such small changes, and yet – so important.

I mean, we all know that’s what he wants. Dictatorship. He’s said it before, he “joked” about it, then he threw a coup attempt to stay in power, and now he’s campaigning on it, condemning American democracy using Putin quotes and praising Hungarian’s autocrat ruler Viktor Orban, whose “illiberal democracy” – sham democracy with a pretence of opposition which is not allowed to win elections, akin to the Harlem Globetrotters’ Washington Generals – attracts him so.

Remember how much of CPAC went to Hungary a few years ago. Remember how enamoured they were with Orban’s strategies, and his “elections” that he cannot lose. Remember Trump’s dinner with fascist Nick Fuentes last year, the same Nick Fuentes who has credited Elon Musk’s fascist propaganda machine X for “shifting” the “window” on white nationalism, and who has now called for the extermination of Jews.

Remember that the Republican core – their fundamentalist base – admires so many of the things Putin has done, in ruling with absolute authority, in waging manly war against swarthy inferiors, in putting women back in their place, and most particularly of all in making us queers illegal again.

In 2016, there were still a lot of ‘regular’ Republicans who had at least theoretical respect for the rule of law, and for the Republic. This time around, there won’t be. He’ll make sure of that. He’ll have a cabinet full of absolute loyalists – “acting” all, to avoid confirmation – and a mass purge of the civil service to be replaced by MAGA fanatics who have been selected over the last few years to insure unprecedented – one might even say “dictatorial” – powers.

He’ll likely also have military turned into his personal “muscle,” to be used against his political opponents and anyone else he chooses to attack.

His plan is to stay in power until he dies, and he’s not being subtle about it.

You’ve heard all this before, of course. Not these details, not the overt self-labelling as a dictator – that’s new. But I keep saying it, because people keep starting to pretending it’s not real. That it wasn’t, and isn’t really like that. That it’s really all just normal. Because that’s also a very, very easy conceptual slide. So easy, it’s what most people do. MAGA has slid to fascism in all but name, and is now sliding there in name; everyone else keeps sliding to pretending it’s not happening, and it’s not real.

And I’m here to remind you that he’s literally calling himself a dictator, for fuck’s sake.

Believe him. Keep believing him. And believe his party will let him, because once again:

The rot goes all the way down.

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