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Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

joanwestenberg.com

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Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#31

Post by riffraff »

florkbork wrote: post #28

I disagree with the parts about Trump: he does know what he is doing. Not because it's a well crafted plan of 4D chess, but because he's deeply anxious/insecure and "lie with grandiosity" is a learned survival mechanism to protect his feelings from reality. It's like expecting a fish to stop swimming - it feels like it's suffocating, it's going to panic and do everything it can to get back into the water, get moving…

I think you have to qualify what you think trump is doing knowingly or not.

Lie in every press conference? Sure.

Posting an image of himself as Jesus? The guy has dementia.

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#32

Post by schnebbau »

margalabargala wrote: post #11
lmm wrote: post #6

And how does the price Musk paid for Twitter look now? Sure, maybe it was really a dumb move and he just got lucky. But he's been lucky a hell of a lot.

Terrible. Twitter is just now back to the valuation he bought it for, four years and lots of inflation later. If the best you can do with $44B is break even after 4 years that is a piss poor investment.

Do you think Elon bought Twitter as an investment?

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#34

Post by mastermage »

I would actualy give the not so benefit of the doubt even to powerful people. Everyone does stupid shit all the time.

There is however a significant difference in how the fallout of this dumb shit affects people. Powerful people may do dumb shit and then due to the power sweep the consequences away from themselves. While everyone else would have had to face these consequences.

And thats the fundamental issue. Too much power allows dumb decisions to stand unchallenged, and removes the possibility for self correction (due to consequences). Which is fundamentally why the power of singular people needs to be limited.

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#35

Post by dv_dt »

sfink wrote: post #4

I kind of feel like people know how to human, and how the humans around them human, but someone they've never met but only heard about or seen on TV or in meme posts? No clue at all. Sure, we know the hotshot CEO of COMPANY_NAME_HERE has to put on his pants one leg at a time, but the similarity ends there. They're different, they won't fall for the stupid tricks we fall for. They don't have trouble getting out of bed…

They are just humans, but if they wield more power, more responsibility should be expected of them. Not just for the business they represent, but also for the society they have an outsized influence upon.

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#36

Post by ggm »

I related to this. I think the 4D chess crowd are, like the "I did my own research" crowd projecting a dominance view in the moment, not actually providing a rebuttal.

It's the deux ex machina of our times. How can Elon be wrong about invading Moscow. You don't understand but I do

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#37

Post by mastermage »

qznc wrote: post #3

For my mental model how White House politics work, this article was very influential: https://www.thewrap.com/obama-aides-say-veep-accurate-west-w... > “The funny thing about ‘Veep’ is, we as people who worked in the White House always get asked, okay, what’s the most real? Is it ‘House of Cards? Is it ‘West Wing’? And the answer is, it’s ‘Veep.’ Because you guys nail the fragility of the egos, and the, like, day-to-…

and the best thing is then the conspiracy theorists do not go after like the realy small set of things that actualy could be called a real conspiracy. Coughs in the trump files ft. epstein.

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#38

Post by khnad10 »

The post cleverly and preemptively disparages people who "show up in a thread and claim that everything is part of a larger plan". Posting a picture of Napoleon is cute, but does not prove anything. Those were different times.

- The Iran attack plans go back a long way. Netanyahu tried the same during the Obama administration and was rejected. There are Brookings Institute papers that outline all countries that need to fall before attacking Iran. The last one was Syria that fell in 2024.

- As is evident now, Trump is not MAGA. Vance was an anti-Trumper in 2016 and is the deepest of deep state via his Thiel sponsor. They are just executing the plans.

- The "pro-Russia" sentiment of Vance and Trump appears to be a ruse. They want to make the EU pay more but continue the Ukraine war.

- Vance's "support" for Orban was fake and achieved the intended goal: people voted for the opposite and $90 billion for Ukraine of EU money is unblocked.

- Vance deliberately torpedoed the Pakistan peace talks.

- Democrat protests are weak. Hillary Clinton only criticizes the (ostensible) lack of a plan.

The plan is to weaken Russia, China and the EU. The latter two are targeted by high energy prices and increased US dependencies in the case of the EU.

The problem is not lone commentators pointing all this out. The problem is that there is a concerted effort to blame all of this on Trump and Israel. Blaming Israel was forbidden prior to the Iran war, now it is a mainstream excuse promoted by mainstream media, left and right wing podcasts and almost all Internet commenters.

That is a deliberate strategy to distract from long term goals.

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#39

Post by Tinned_Tuna »

I don't think the author read even the Wikipedia page on Napoleon's invasion of Russia? Napoleon _did_ have reasons for attacking Russia, he _did_ prepare logistics. His motives, rationale, and actions are well-documented and widely studied.

> watching an unchecked megalomaniac march 685,000 soldiers into a Russian winter without a fur coat in sight

Napoleon famously crossed the Neman River in *June*.

Re: Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit

#40

Post by zarzavat »

WatchDog wrote: post #8
lmm wrote: post #6

And how does the price Musk paid for Twitter look now? Sure, maybe it was really a dumb move and he just got lucky. But he's been lucky a hell of a lot.

He bailed out his Twitter investors by having xAi purchase Twitter, then he bailed out his xAi investors by having SpaceX purchase xAi, and how he is trying to bail out SpaceX by having the index funds be forced to purchase SpaceX. Twitter valuation aside, there must be some intangible benefits to the purchase. Lots of influential people use Twitter, he has amplified his reach, and the purchase seems to have moved th…

> the index funds be forced to purchase SpaceX

SpaceX is a fantastic company full of the smartest engineers that has brought fast internet to the most remote regions on Earth. Even if it wasn't for index funds, investors would buy the shit out of it.

xAI has built an almost-frontier model. It's not Anthropic or OpenAI but it's also not valued like Anthropic or OpenAI either.

Twitter is doing OK, despite predictions. It found a niche with obnoxious right-wing assholes instead of obnoxious left-wing assholes. Twitter does seem to be less excited about getting people fired for wrongthink than before which is a societal improvement. It did succeed in buying Musk influence at the highest levels, but he threw it away. Mixed success.

I know Musk gets a lot of hatred on here for his behavior and beliefs, including from myself, but that doesn't imply that his businesses are all scams. Hugo Boss was a Nazi too and his business is doing fine.

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