F**king Mondays: Barbie Wars

Also, how to lose to Donald Trump, Israel's civil war, and Elon Musk's dumbest idea yet.

A very triggered Ben Shapiro

Welcome to this week’s edition of “F**king Mondays”!! In the roundup today:

How to lose to Donald Trump

In George Orwell’s 1945 essay ‘Notes on Nationalism’, he rebutted a bizarre rumor he had heard that American troops had come to Europe during World War II “not to fight the Germans but to crush an English revolution”.

"One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that,” he continued. “No ordinary man could be such a fool."

Similarly, monetarism (extreme free market economics) is an idea so idiotic no one outside of esoteric think tanks and right wing academia take it seriously. Unfortunately, the philosophy has gained major traction in political circles around the world, with predictably disastrous results. Margaret Thatcher for example, subjected Britain to market cleansing when she came into power in 1979, promising to roll back the state to allow markets to flourish. Her cost cutting measures resulted in a big decline in GDP and a huge spike in unemployment. The Thatcher government failed to curb public spending (it rose almost every year under her leadership), and she left office having gutted Britain’s major industries and almost quadrupled the poverty rate.

Similarly, George W. Bush subjected America to extreme deregulation and free market reforms during his tenure, resulting in record poverty rates, a significant spike in those without health insurance, and finally the implosion of the global financial system.

Donald Trump figured out that most of the public does not want their health care benefits slashed, or to see the privatization of social security. So he pretended he was going to keep the programs intact, or replace them with magical programs that would give recipients more benefits for less money. This worked a treat in 2016 as he successfully drew in support from seniors and working class voters wary of extreme Republican cost cutting. Trump’s rhetorical abandonment of free market extremism marked a new chapter in GOP politics — a chapter Trump’s opponents for 2024 don’t seem to have grasped:

In comments on Sunday as well as in interviews earlier this year, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) said Social Security will need to be revamped - but not for people who are near or in retirement.

Former vice president Mike Pence and former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley have taken similar positions since launching their presidential campaigns. From the earliest days of his 2016 run, Trump has vowed not to touch either Social Security or Medicare - a break from GOP orthodoxy that has shifted the party's views - and has more recently hammered DeSantis for wanting to cut the program.

If Trump does win in 2024, he’ll almost certainly go after those programs, but he’s politically savvy enough to realize that he gains more by pretending he won’t. DeSantis, Haley, and Pence don’t seem to have grasped this very basic lesson and believe they can win an election on an economic ideology that ran out of fashion almost two decades ago. Trump brought economic nationalism to the GOP, and even if it’s not real, the philosophy isn’t going anywhere.

Israel civil war?

Frightening times in Israel (via the NYTimes):

Israeli lawmakers on Monday approved the contentious plan of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to restrict the influence of the Supreme Court, defying a wide array of opposition movements that have threatened to shut down large parts of the country with protests.

The plan limits the ways in which the Supreme Court can overturn government decisions, part of a deeply divisive judicial overhaul that has led to perhaps Israel’s gravest domestic crisis since its founding 75 years ago.

Netanyahu it should be remembered, is on trial for very serious corruption charges, so this radical move should be seen mostly as an extension of his desperate attempt to avoid prison time. Netanyahu has denied he will intervene in the trial, but given he has already passed laws trying to protect himself from prosecution, there is little doubt he will use new government power to benefit himself.

With escalating civil disobedience and huge resistance from the rest of the country, it is possible Netanyahu might survive, but he could break his nation in the process.

Is this Elon Musk's dumbest idea yet?

If someone tasked you with the job of wrecking an extremely valuable social media company as fast as you could, you’d be hard pressed to match what Elon Musk is doing over at Twitter. Having decimated the work force, driven advertisers away in droves, ensured far right misogynists, racists, conspiracy theorists, and crypto weirdos have their voices amplified, Elon Musk is now changing Twitter’s name to ‘X’. What is ‘X’? Thankfully we have Musk’s CEO/AI enhanced corporate robot Linda Yaccarino to explain it all:

I for one cannot wait to be a part of this AI powered, transformed global town square of unlimited interactivity and opportunity.

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Poor Ben Shapiro

I’m probably not going to see ‘Barbie’, but I am thoroughly enjoying the Right wing meltdown over it:

Shapiro was so incensed by the movie he set fire to several barbie dolls, then reviewed it for 43 minutes:

The Right’s War on Woke is a giant smokescreen for the very glaring fact that their movement no longer has anything of value to offer the public. They have no coherent economic philosophy, no interesting policy ideas for climate change, no views on funding education, no infrastructure ambitions, and no plans on how to reduce poverty. So instead they fan the flames of the culture wars and hope the public doesn’t look too closely at their cancerous political ideology. Don’t worry about the fascist we helped into power, look at how woke ‘Barbie’ is!

Maybe Barbie is too ‘Woke’, and maybe the left has taken some of its ideas too far. These are issues we should try to discuss, but we can’t, because people like Ben Shapiro demand you are either a pro-Barbie, neo-Marxist Wokester, or a red blooded patriot committed to defeating the feminist trans movement etc, etc. How exhausting.

See you next week!

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