I don't remember this being posted here and I just heard about it today, so it's news to me.
In an episode of the podcast "The Problem With Jon Stewart" published this month, Stewart described meeting Bezos at a dinner at the White House with President Barack Obama, then-first lady Michelle Obama, the billionaire Mark Cuban, and an unnamed guest whom Stewart described as the "inventor of the Oculus" virtual-reality headset.
:ummm: That's one hellofa big club that I'm not a part of.
I did not have starfucker John Stewart on my 2022 bingo card
the “inventor of the Oculus” virtual-reality headset
The brony, Palmer Luckey? The guy who was a PR nightmare and was quickly moved out of the public eye following the Facebook acquisition? That guy is in a class with Obama and Bezos?
Lmao he used to post on /r/the_donald…he has since denied that he did the things that he told The Daily Beast he did, but in summary:
Oculus founder Palmer Luckey financially backed a pro-Trump political organization called Nimble America, a self-described “social welfare 501(c)4 non-profit” in support of the Republican nominee.
Luckey sold his virtual reality company Oculus to Facebook for $2 billion in 2014, and Forbes estimates his current net worth to be $700 million. The 24-year-old told The Daily Beast that he had used the pseudonym “NimbleRichMan” on Reddit with a password given to him by the organization’s founders.
Nimble America says it’s dedicated to proving that “shitposting is powerful and meme magic is real,” according to the company’s introductory statement, and has taken credit for a billboard its founders say was posted outside of Pittsburgh with a cartoonishly large image of Clinton’s face alongside the words “Too Big to Jail.”
“We conquered Reddit and drive narrative on social media, conquered the [mainstream media], now it’s time to get our most delicious memes in front of Americans whether they like it or not,” a representative for the group wrote in an introductory post on Reddit.
Man the omitted "then everyone clapped" is real loud at the end of that
Jon didn't see Obama roll his eyes and make a jerk off motion, neither did he hear Bezos snicker.
I think I saw it here or on the old sub and for as much of a massive lib he is gotta respect him for telling those ghouls to their face that people are coming for them.
John Oliver is an example of how far "left" a liberal media personality is allowed to toe the line against interests if capital and our political classes. This article is also a great example because in his show he doesn't even go this far (or at least I've never heard him say "you know what Lenin had some good ideas y'all").
Thanks for pointing that out, tbh though both Johns honestly blend together into a mess of meh
Okay but Jon Stewart actually does real good work rescuing farm animals. They aren't the same and that's a really gross comparison tbh.
John Stewart blew it. He didn't want to responsibilities back in the early aughts and here we are in the 20s and his trying to become relevant and save the country.
His chance to do that was after that rally for nothing where it was clear the guy has political power but didn't want it.
This is it. He rejected any sort of responsibility and tried to do his whole “I’m just a comedian” bit when he could’ve been forming an organizer network like Bernie’s presidential campaign did. Instead Colbert went from doing one of the most timely bits of political satire to being the new Letterman and Stewart took a vacation during The Trump Show season 1
And then you hear Obama from across the couch go, 'I agree with Jon.'"
LMAO. He even stopped doing his elaborate bullshit speeches, now he is just saying "whatever he said", while being the president that oversaw the financial crisis, the foreclosure crisis and the largest decrease of black wealth in modern US history. And the destruction of multiple countries.
Man wish that guy was in some position of power to maybe change that. Guess the best we get though is that he agrees with the comedian, ah well.
The title of this post seems to underestimate the degree to which the ownership class has total domination of the psyches in the imperial core.
Elites know there's no revolt happening any time soon. Jon Stewart is an idealist.
I think they know better than to start starving massive groups of people within the imperial core. They are just fine with the government running huge deficits to pay for people to eat, provided the people are saddled with the responsibility of the debt. They're not stupid.
I think they know better than to start starving massive groups of people within the imperial core.
Do you think they'll have the power to stop it much longer?
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?- Yeats
Do you think they’ll have the power to stop it much longer?
I don't really understand what you mean, or your conception of power. What exactly do you think it is that is out of their hands that would lead to mass starvation?
They are the beneficiaries of the current system, but fundamentally it's not them but Capitalism that has the wheel. And Capitalism will happily drive us off a cliff chasing the line.
Case in point, climate change looms over us and nothing substantial is getting done to prepare us, let alone stop it. There will be famines, this much is a given.
I disagree that the owners of media conglomerates, politicians and right-wing think tanks are not at the wheel.
I agree climate change will lead to famine and nothing is being done to prevent it, but it won't do so for the imperial core for many decades.
I disagree that the owners of media conglomerates, politicians and right-wing think tanks are not at the wheel
Their decision making is still constrained by the meta-game of capital. Conservatives may be "at the wheel", but they can no more make a decision that breaks from the profit lust than their liberal counterparts could. Even if would save their own hold on power, even to keep their own grandchildren from starving in the next Dustbowl.
It's why they're so darn furious. They've gotten everything they purport to want and the results, well, it's proof negative of everything they believe.
This is true up to the point where enough people are starving.
if that was the case then Victorian Britain would have established socialism almost immediately
well Victorian britain had forced labor camps people chose to go to in order to avoid starving to death so it was pretty bad
Every city that’s ever existed has been at most 3 days away from mass revolts at any given time
Elites know there’s no revolt happening any time soon.
We're seeing the kind of street action that hasn't happened since the Civil Rights Era. We're seeing a reversal in unionization trends after 40 years of declines. We're seeing internal revolts in both major political parties, as well as bolder third party movements cropping up with sizable constituencies.
A lot of this shit is still plagued by grift. A lot of it faces intense hostility from mass media. But show up at any political rally in the country and you'll see people in the crowd with a mix of fear and anticipation, waiting for shit to pop off. I remember a Dan Crenshaw even from a few years back during which the question "What should we do in the event of another Civil War?" came up entirely unironically. And the Uvalde shooting has legitimized a new round of hatred for the police.
This pressure isn't entirely new. But the agencies traditionally charged with keeping the lid on have been worn down, both in terms of competency and in raw numbers. Revolts are already happening. Elites are already losing control. The rot is deep and we all know it.
Jon Stewart once told Jeff Bezos at a dinner with the Obamas that workers wanted fulfillment
Well yeah, that's why Bezos called it "Amazon Fulfillment Services"
accumulate more wealth than you can possibly spend in ten thousand lifetimes
tell yourself it's for your children, and your children's children, so they can live like dynastic Gods
make the earth an uninhabitable shithole for them anyway
build underground bunkers where they'll live sheltered from the impoverished masses
need the impoverished masses to perform upkeep on the underground bunkers
invest in life extension technology despite this
need the impoverished masses as guinea pigs to test your life extension technology before using it on yourself
????????????
takeaway: :porky-happy: is on autopilot and literally knows not what they do
We've abandoned the post-WW2 command economy model in favor of the Milton Friedman economic vision of a hundred million little Econoids working in selfish personal interest.
The national leadership used to have huge bureaucracies who had accumulated a lifetime's worth of experience managing the flow of commerce in order to optimize outputs. We used to run enormous surpluses as a result - particularly in the immediate post-war era, when military surplus was being given away to anyone with a friend in Congress and a hand out. And we used to be the largest industrial economy standing, thanks to half a century of continuous warfare demolishing the dividends of the early industrial revolution everywhere else.
I don't think its necessarily fair to say "the ruling class isn't smart". They're generally more well-educated, they're more in tune with breaking news and with the attitudes of leadership figures, and they're doing a far better job of communicating between themselves and forcing a narrative on the plebiscite than the plebs have been in organizing each other.
But a lot of what big businesses had to leverage in the 1950s/60s/70s, in terms of state-managed economic data gathering and development, is gone. A lot more is only available through the lens of Big Data, whose business interests are geared more towards gamifying the acquisition and distribution of information than optimizing the economy as a whole.
We don't have a Cold War unified national government anymore. We've got a thousand petite fiefdoms playing tug-of-war with the husk of empire. No matter how Genius any given individual capitalist happens to be, they are no longer working as a collaborative unit. They're openly at odds with one another.
Tao33 once told Jeff bozo at a dinner party with the obamas that workers wanted the heads, not the fingers or toes of rich people: "you're next fucker"
same.
is this the effect of reading steiner?
or simply a case of
Déjà vu?
I don’t remember this being posted here
this was already posted here
