Comment by gman83
8 days ago
Re: this report that USAID was sending condoms to Gaza, that was actually in Gaza, Mozambique (which has one of the world’s highest rates of HIV/AIDS), not Palestine. Maybe they knew, maybe not. Anyway, I know many people who have been parroting that stat, so it was effective propaganda.
This is straight from Elon's playbook at Twitter. Cherry-pick some things that sounds bad, find a few real bad things, mix those all together and pretend they are equal, then dribble that out to people while feigning outrage/shock.
And remove any suggestion that there was forethought. It's pure, unfettered trolling. He's desperate for attention from anyone.
Fascinating—if unfortunate—to see the world's 2 most powerful men basically functioning as walking test cases for classic outcomes when a child is not given appropriate attention/affection and also zero boundaries for socially-appropriate behavior.
It reminds me of the "treadmills for shrimp" thing that people used to say that research money was being wasted on about 14 years ago. Every intellectually lazy politician acted like we were spending all our research money on making sure that shrimp were exercising.
The "treadmills" were used to measure the effects of bacteria on shrimp metabolism. Understanding how bacteria affects metabolism, at least to me, sounds like a perfectly valid thing to research. Most people, if they knew the context around that would probably agree, but people are extremely lazy with this stuff, and are really susceptible to stupid catchphrases, so people thought it was a huge waste of money.
ETA:
https://www.npr.org/2011/08/23/139852035/shrimp-on-a-treadmi...
I'm pretty convinced that he's running a SQL query like `select * from transactions where recipient like '%gaza%'`, grabbing the first item that looks suspicious, doing absolutely no research on what that item actually was, and then typing out the first thoughts he could about it on twitter.
Frankly, something DOGE has shown me is how lazy Musk is. I know he's the CEO of like twenty companies, but if what he's doing with DOGE is any indication, he has absolutely no attention to detail and is completely averse to actually learning or understanding what he's talking about. Like, every effort in DOGE is coming off as decidedly half-assed.
It makes me glad I don't own a Tesla, because I would be terrified to see what kind of corners they cut, and how much of it would end up being completely half-baked and not ready to actually be used. I'm not completely convinced that NASA contracting out to SpaceX is a good idea anymore either.