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S ovim sve ostalo postaje marginalija / “fartmoss” : izbori, pravo glasa, prajmeriz, sekonderiz, private spheres, blekberiz, belkichberiz, apples, (agent) oranges, sve
Sta su ovi socijalno i emocionalno retardirani inzinjeri osmislili ili (da iskoristim broj dostojan tim trenutnim cerebralnim visovima covjecanstva o kojima mi smrtnici mozemo samo spekulirati nasim priprostim, drustvenim konvencijama i obzirima za druge-mimo-nas okovanim mozgicima ) desetislili, dobro su rekli, jeb’o atomsku, kako ce nas ovo dzuture satrat.
at the end of Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2007 movie, There Will Be Blood, Daniel Day-Lewis’s oil-baron character, old now and richer than Croesus, beats Paul Dano’s preacher to death with a bowling pin. Dano’s Eli Sunday, a nemesis of Day-Lewis’s Daniel Plainview during his seminal, wealth-building years, has come to sell Plainview the oil-rich land that he once coveted. But Plainview doesn’t need the land anymore, because—as he explains in one of the most famous monologues in modern cinema—he has sucked out all the oil hidden beneath it from an adjoining property, like a milkshake.
Desperate for money, Eli begs for a loan. Instead, Plainview chases him around a bowling alley and murders him with great enthusiasm. Once it’s over, a butler comes to see what all the noise was about. “I’m finished,” Plainview yells.
No matter how many times I watch that movie, and I watch it a lot, I have never once taken those words to mean I’m done for. There will now be consequences for my actions. Quite the opposite: They mean that Plainview has completed his journey, through the acquisition of wealth and power, to a realm outside the moral universe. He’s finished, in other words, pretending that the rules of human society apply to him.
In 2018, I was a guest at Jeff Bezos’s Campfire retreat in Santa Barbara, California. It’s an annual event in which the Amazon founder invites 80-plus guests—celebrities, artists, intellectuals, and anyone else he thinks is interesting—to spend three nights at a private resort. I had recently been approached by Amazon about moving my film-and-television business over from Disney, and although I had declined (or maybe because I had declined), Bezos’s team invited me to Campfire, perhaps keen to impress me with the power of his reach.
On a warm October Thursday, a fleet of private jets was dispatched to airports in Van Nuys and New York to shepherd guests to Santa Barbara in style. At that point I had only a vague sense of who else was coming—famous people, rich people, influential people, and me. A guest list, I was told, would be given to us once we arrived. Families were invited; an on-site nanny would be provided for each child.
So my wife and I got our two children from Austin to Los Angeles and took a 45-minute jet ride north, with a television mogul and a comedian on board. Bezos had bought out the entire Biltmore resort for the weekend, as well as the beach club across the street. He had brought in a security firm from Las Vegas to ensure our safety and privacy. Even the weather felt expensive, and when we were shown to our rooms, the designer gift bags we found were filled with luxury goods.
Each morning, we gathered in a lecture hall to hear presentations. If you’ve ever seen a TED Talk, you understand the format. The year I went, a sitting Supreme Court justice was interviewed, and a neurologist talked about technological advances in prosthetics. In the afternoons and evenings, we were encouraged to exchange ideas over drinks and four-course meals, with no set purpose—to network, in other words, with some of the most rarefied talent on Earth. The most common question I heard was “Why am I here?”
“Why am I here?” asked the 1980s hair-metal singer. “Why am I here?” asked the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist, the famous anthropologist, the presidential historian. Only the movie stars and the billionaires didn’t ask: They had done this kind of thing before. It turns out there is a circuit of idea festivals. Many tech billionaires host one, and if you find yourself on the right list, you can spend much of the year traveling the world, eating Wagyu, and discussing how to make the world a better place with the most famous talk-show host in history.
That’s how the weekend started. Here’s how it ended: My wife broke her wrist slipping on wet grass, and both children and I came down with hand, foot, and mouth disease. This is not a joke. One of us went home with her arm in a sling; the other three developed itchy, painful red blisters all over our faces and extremities. If you’re looking for a sign from God as to whether hanging out with the richest man on Earth is right for you, pay attention when he sends you not one plague, but two. Suffice it to say we have never been back to Campfire, nor have we ever been invited.
At drinks on the second night, the head of a major talent agency asked me what I thought of the weekend. I said, “I’ve spent my whole career trying to figure out how the world works. I didn’t realize I could just come here and ask the people who ran it.” On some level I was kidding. The lead singer of an alt-country band didn’t run the world, nor did a noted author who would later be accused of impropriety. But finding myself at that resort by exclusive invitation, I now knew exactly what people meant when they talked about the elite.
Sitting in the lecture hall, pencils out, listening to a famous chef explain his humanitarian work, it was easy to feel like the solution to the world’s problems lay within our grasp. And yet, looking around at faces I had only ever seen in a magazine or on-screen, I had an unsettling revelation: This is the hubris of accomplishment. To be declared a genius at one thing is to begin to believe you are a genius at everything.
Here we were, 80 individuals with a combined net worth that was greater than a small city’s yet infinitesimal compared with the wealth and dominion of our host. How did he view this exercise—as a first step toward changing the world, or as a performative display of his reach and influence?
Bezos was everywhere that weekend—in a tight T-shirt, laughing too loudly, arms thrown around his teenage sons. He had recently become the world’s second centibillionaire, his net worth hovering somewhere around $112 billion, about half of what it is today. That number, previously unimaginable, had made him unique on a planet of 8 billion people, and you could feel it in the room. Even the richest and most famous among us were drawn to the energy of this impossible wealth.
Though we didn’t know it at the time, Bezos’s first marriage would be over a few weeks later. My defining impression of his wife that weekend was sadness, even though Bezos made a big show of performing the role of family man. In hindsight, it is that performance that sticks with me. The Jeff Bezos of 2018 acted as if he still believed that people’s impression of him mattered, that his financial and social value could be affected by negative publicity. He still believed that his actions had consequences. He had not yet freed himself—the way Daniel Plainview freed himself—from the rules of men.
Eight years later, Bezos and two of the world’s other richest men—Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk—have clearly left the world of consequences behind. They float in a sensory-deprivation tank the size of the planet, in which their actions are only ever judged by themselves.
The closer I’ve gotten to the world of wealth, the more I understand that being truly rich doesn’t mean amassing enough money to afford superyachts, private jets, or a million acres of land. It means that everything becomes effectively free. Any asset can be acquired but nothing can ever be lost, because for soon-to-be trillionaires, no level of loss could significantly change their global standing or personal power. For them, the word failure has ceased to mean anything.
This sense of invulnerability has deep psychological ramifications. If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all. This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I’m talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes. Asked recently if there is any check on his power, President Trump—himself a billionaire, and by far the richest president in American history—said, “Yeah, there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Not domestic or international law, not the will of the voters, not God or the centuries-old morality of civic and religious life.
Decades of research in developmental psychology have shown that moral reasoning develops through consequences—not punishment, necessarily, but experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually israther than as you wish it to be. It’s not that the wealthy become evil; it’s that their environment stops teaching them the things that nonwealthy people are forced to learn simply by living in a world that pushes back. When you can buy your way out of any mistake, when you can fire anyone who disagrees with you, when your social circle consists entirely of people who need something from you, the basic mechanism by which humans learn that other people are real goes dark.
When Peter Thiel said, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” he wasn’t talking about your freedom. He was talking about his own. You don’t exist. When Musk took a chainsaw to the federal government as part of the inside joke he called DOGE, he did so with the air of a man who believed that nothing matters—poverty, chaos, human suffering. He was having fun. It didn’t even matter that the entire destructive exercise ultimately yielded no practical financial gains. For him, the outcome was a foregone conclusion: He could only win, because losing had lost its meaning.
Since the 2024 election, there has been a philosophical shift on the right, and especially among tech billionaires, to vilify the idea of empathy. Musk has called empathy “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.” He sees it as a weapon wielded by liberal society to bludgeon otherwise rational people into operating against their own interests. Empathy is something done to you by others—a vulnerability they exploit, a back door through which they gain access to your resources and will. This rejection of empathy as a human value gives cover to people who don’t want to feel anything at all. If empathy is the problem, then lack of it isn’t a deficiency—it’s an advantage.
I finally met Bezos on the last day of Campfire, at lunch, after my wife had broken her wrist. I went over to thank him for having us, and he asked how our Campfire experience had been. I told him that it was great, but that unfortunately my wife had broken her wrist that morning when she slipped on the wet grass while kicking a ball with our 6-year-old son.
The night before, we’d all stood by the pool at the beach club watching a cadre of synchronized swimmers execute a flawless water routine. I had spoken with a famous novelist, who said, “I just don’t understand why I’m here.” A famous rock star was about to start an acoustic set. The famous chef had made paella. Somewhere deep under my skin, a brutal pox was beginning to form.
The next morning, my wife fell, and I found myself in a black SUV with a team of private-security contractors, who whisked us to the back entrance of a Santa Barbara emergency room, where she was seen and treated right away. We made it back in time to watch the Supreme Court justice Zoom in from Washington, D.C.
How was your Campfire? Bezos asked me an hour later, and because I am an honest person, and because I have been a host myself, I decided he would want to know that there had been a problem, but that his team had reacted quickly and been extremely helpful. To be clear, I was in no way blaming him, nor was I shaking down the richest man on Earth. Instead, I was simply offering Bezos, also a husband and father, a brief human connection.
But when I told him what had happened, Bezos looked horrified. He did not say “I’m so sorry.” He did not say “Do you need anything?” Instead, he made a face, and in an instant, an aide came and whisked him away. When presented with the opportunity for empathy, even performative empathy, he chose escape.
A few hours later, on the private plane home, a famous movie producer offered my wife a blanket. My children’s faces were covered in spots. Under my fingernails, red welts were beginning to rise.
The world has always been run by rich men. The robber barons of the Gilded Age were known for their ruthlessness in the accumulation of wealth—hiring Pinkertons to shoot striking unionists. But they directly engaged with the world around them, using their wealth and power to muscle it into its most profitable form. And although today’s billionaires are clearly manipulating society to maximize their own profit, something else is also happening—a disassociation from the reality of cause and effect, from meaning and history. These men no longer feel the need to change the world in order to succeed, because their success is guaranteed, no matter what happens to the rest of us.
“I’m finished,” yells Daniel Plainview, perched happily on the polished floor of his own celestial kingdom. Though he has just committed a crime, he has never felt so free.
S ovim sve ostalo postaje marginalija / “fartmoss” : izbori, pravo glasa, prajmeriz, sekonderiz, private spheres, blekberiz, belkichberiz, apples, (agent) oranges, sve
Sta su ovi socijalno i emocionalno retardirani inzinjeri osmislili ili (da iskoristim broj dostojan tim trenutnim cerebralnim visovima covjecanstva o kojima mi smrtnici mozemo samo spekulirati nasim priprostim, drustvenim konvencijama i obzirima za druge-mimo-nas okovanim mozgicima ) desetislili, dobro su rekli, jeb’o atomsku, kako ce nas ovo dzuture satrat.
sta nam ovi autisticari bez ljudskih osobina spremaju, to ni charlie brooker u svojim najgorim morama nije mogao napisati. napisali sales pitch manifesto da prodaju svoj proizvod drzavama po svijetu. ursula ne moze docekati da se docepa takvog neceg.
a, demokrate bi sutra dudlale kitu i bezosu i musku i thielu i sve i jednom techno fasisti da im se ukaze prilika. ne mogu prezaliti sto su progresivni debili okrenuli milijardere protiv njih sa pricama o oporezivanju. preziru ih iz dna duse.
Trampovi odani i ćudoredni kadrovi: Seks skandal presudio Trumpovoj ministrici. Spavala s tjelohraniteljem, u uredu joj našli hrpu alkohola. Njezinog supruga zaposlenice ministarstva optužile su da ih je seksualno napastovao…
sasvim slucajno ovo vidjeh jutros 1) mai most favourite girl of all times <3 <3 2) n-ti dokaz o demokratskom establishmentu - zali sto su se tech fasisti odrodili od njihove stranke zbog line. i oporezivanja. a, harrisova je sutila kada su linu razapinjali i sad se distancira, treba dudlati korporacijske i tech fasisticke kite za pare. vec zavrce rukave i vezuje kozu da ne smeta.
side note. traca se o predsjednickim namjerama rahm emanuela. ne moze bolji rendgen demokrata.
Why Democrats with 2028 hopes are calling Lina Khan – and what she’s telling them about remaking the economy |
Elizabeth Warren, Steve Bannon, Pete Buttigieg and — at least as of a few years ago — JD Vance have agreed on this: A short, ultra-private antitrust lawyer plotting a war on tech companies and monopolies from her new office at Columbia Law School understands what Americans are demanding out of their government.
When then-President Joe Biden named her chair of the Federal Trade Commission, Lina Khan was too much for many leading Democrats. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer declined meetings when she was chair, people familiar with the matter tell CNN. Former Vice President Kamala Harris, once she took over as the 2024 nominee, conspicuously didn’t speak about Khan and avoided appearances with her on the campaign trail.
Now, Khan is getting constant calls from Democrats, many of them thinking about presidential runs, who are sounding out problems or workshopping potential solutions. Schumer headlined a press conference in Washington to introduce a bill that would break up meat processing companies, inspired by Khan’s methods and with her input, but which a Schumer aide noted also drew on years of his own consumer advocacy.
Khan, 37, hasn’t changed so much as the world around her has. Many Americans are furious about rising costs, affordability, technological changes and soaring profits for the rich. And President Donald Trump has used federal power in ways that were once considered off-limits in both parties.
If Trump could extract a “golden share” for the government from US Steel, Khan argues, if he could demand proposed mergers and prosecutions, and if he could invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as legal justification for deportations, just think what a prepared, populist progressive could do.
“Sometimes there can be a political perception that the Democrats are the nerdier ones who just haven’t been able to figure out how to talk to regular people,” Khan told CNN in an interview at Columbia. “The way that this administration came in — with not just having a very clear agenda, but mapping that agenda onto very specific legal authorities that they were ready to hit the ground running with immediately — just showed a level of mastery over governing authorities and levers that I think, frankly, our side has a lot of catching up to do.”
What Khan has in mind for the next Democrat in the White House isn’t a 1,000-page blueprint like the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. It’s more of an overall strategy rooted in her specialty: excavating long-forgotten laws already on the books, then finding ways to apply them to 21st century companies that Khan argues are as much as monopolies like Standard Oil ever were.
As Biden’s transportation secretary, Buttigieg found common ground with Khan flexing authorities against airlines to get refunds and pushing back on late flights.
“Democrats’ vision should not be about picking up the shards of what this administration destroyed and try to tape them back together,” he told CNN. “We should be unsentimental about the things that don’t work and bold in fashioning a new and better way of governing.”
New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, another potential 2028 contender, also praises her ideas and invokes President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
“We need to get back to the time of FDR, when everybody from farmers to factory workers knew the Democratic Party was fighting for them, that Republicans were the elite party and we were the party of working Americans,” he said.
In other words: Whomever emerges as the party’s nominee two years from now could be running on Khan’s track, with her influence, indirectly or via a top role she’d have in a future potential administration.
Which is why Warren said part of her time these days is spent giving Khan’s number to the many prospective candidates who come asking.
“If you’re a leader who wants to deliver on affordability, it’s a smart move to call Lina Khan,” Warren said.
“The array of people that reach out, in terms of not just people who code as progressives,” Khan said, “is encouraging.”
Khan’s influence on Mamdani’s administration
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders had already called Khan the best FTC chair in modern history when, backstage at a rally in Queens a week before last year’s New York City mayoral election, he kept asking her for ideas about what Zohran Mamdani should do in City Hall.
The morning after he won, Mamdani named Khan a transition co-chair, but that title sounds more honorary than the direct role she had infusing the administration with her sensibility, setting up groups of lawyers to pore through the city charter and agency codes, helping pick staff and joining nightly calls of top advisers.
If they can make her aggressive progressivism work in the financial capital of the world, Khan and Mamdani believe, they’ll be able to make it work anywhere: in cities across the country, but also among those Democratic presidential contenders she’s still trying to convince.
“She is not satisfied with an answer that says, ‘We have not done this before’ or ‘This is not how we do things,’” Mamdani told CNN.
His first encounter with Khan, Mamdani recalled, was at an event in the Bronx organized by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that he attended as a new assemblyman. Khan talked about price gouging, he remembers, and what laws she was activating in ways to fight the companies involved.
“In a moment where it feels like so much of this work is abstract, that we struggle to translate it to the needs and interests of working-class Americans, here is an example of how we can do exactly that – and we can do so by listening to those very people about the ways in which they’re being priced out of their day-to-day lives,” Mamdani said.
Khan officially wrapped up her role at Mamdani’s 100-day mark but remains involved as an adviser. One of her biggest staff picks was recruiting Sam Levine, the new city consumer and worker protection commissioner, who remembers showing Khan where to get coffee at the FTC when she first arrived as a summer fellow. Levine was the director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection while she was chair.
Now, his creaky office in a nondescript building close to the New York Stock Exchange is the nerve center of making already nervous national companies see an unpleasant future. Mamdani and Levine are going after hidden hotel fees, landing settlements with fast food chains for violating workers’ scheduling rights, and targeting food delivery apps by securing a settlement to give $5 million to delivery workers.
“People should want to go into government to solve problems. And you should go into the government, I think, with a conviction that you are going to find a way to solve them,” Levine told CNN. “And you’re either going to find a tool you have, or you’re going to find way to get that tool.”
Affordability and ‘accountability’
Just 32 years old when she was confirmed as the youngest FTC chair ever – going from the intern desk she used as a summer fellow in law school to the leadership suite in under five years – Khan quickly became known for sending skeptical and sometimes reluctant agency lawyers diving into the archives.
In 2023, the FTC challenged patents it said were improperly listed, pushing drug manufacturers to allow generic, cheaper versions of some asthma inhalers. And Khan dusted off a 1973 rule originally inspired by book-of-the-month club enforcement and tried to use it to require sellers to make it easier for people to click to cancel online subscriptions.
She went after Amazon for fees charged to businesses selling on the platform. She also moved to stop a $24.6 billion acquisition of the Albertsons grocery chain by Kroger on the grounds that it would raise costs and reduce consumer choice. The acquisition was eventually abandoned after a federal judge blocked the deal.
Today, Khan says the “affordability part of the conversation” inside the Democratic Party must be “paired with accountability.”
“Where delivering affordability is going to require conflict with, or taking on, entrenched powerful interests: Who’s willing to do that?” Khan said. “And I think that’s going to be part of both the kind of credibility question, but also: Can you be effective when it is some of the same actors who are hiking up prices?”
Khan still has sharp critics but won over others
These days, Khan has become so popular in a certain hyper-aware corridor of the left that she sometimes gets emails asking for signed photos to be given as wedding presents. Mark Cuban, the billionaire former “Shark Tank” investor working on lowering prescription drug prices, said in an email that he felt Khan should have been more aggressive against insurance companies but credited her for going “after scammers who targeted vulnerable people” using images of celebrities.
“That was a big deal that she didn’t get credit for,” he said in an email.
New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer, the vice-chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus who works with many business-minded moderates, told CNN that he worries about both the policy and political impact of moving more in Khan’s direction. He’s among the Democratic leaders worried about how many tech leaders turned hard against Democrats in 2024 because of what they felt was too much regulation.
“You may fire up some portion of the base, but you’re also going to alienate a lot of people who, while they want competition and success for everybody, they also believe that you can start a business and be successful in America,” Gottheimer said.
Not every potential 2028 contender is jumping on board with Khan. During Harris’ presidential campaign, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore appeared for an interview with CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin, who noted there had been “a lot of calls from the donor class” to move away from Khan. Sorkin then asked Moore if “we are going to hear about a shift in terms of (Harris’) regulatory views.”
“I think we will,” Moore replied. “I think we have to.”
Asked recently for Moore’s views about Khan, a spokesman for the governor replied: “He doesn’t have thoughts about her one way or the other.”
Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and chief of staff to former President Barack Obama, said that while he agrees with many of the problems Khan is pointing to, he is less convinced by her proposed solutions.
“In every period of time in history when we’ve had a concentration of wealth and an economic structure that is only accentuating that, the government has been a countervailing force,” Emanuel told CNN, citing consolidation in health insurance companies and retail especially.
“Rather than say ‘Lina Khan,’ which has its own explosion, the guiding light should be where Teddy Roosevelt was more about regulation and Woodrow Wilson was more about breaking out: that spirit is important, and that mindset,” he added.
Jim Kessler, the executive vice president of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, told CNN that Khan is “very smart, and she’s very creative, and Democrats with national ambitions should be talking to her and taking her viewpoint into account,” but warned against voters seeing that as going after things they like, such as fast Amazon deliveries.
“It is critical that future national Democrats talk about issues that voters care about, not what intellectual elite progressives care about,” Kessler said.
Eyes on a future primary
Democrats aren’t the only ones with Khan on their minds.
Last April, Steve Bannon, the outside Trump strategist, called Khan one of the more important political figures in the country and said Democrats might have won in 2024 if they’d listened to her more. There’s even a photo of them standing next to each other, smiling after a tech competition event in Washington.
Also on a list of onetime Khan fans: Vance, whom she got to know when he was an Ohio senator.
“At that time, he was very focused on issues of corporate power in the technology sector and he was very substantive,” Khan said.
She said she couldn’t remember exactly the last time they spoke, but she does remember how Vance came publicly to her defense not long after being put on the ticket in 2024, in those days when Democratic opponents saw a window to come after her and he was eager for the opportunity to turn the screws of populism against Harris.
“I don’t agree with Lina Khan on every issue, to be clear, but I think that she’s been very smart about trying to go after some of these big tech companies that monopolize what we’re allowed to say in our own country,” Vance told CBS in August 2024.
It’s unclear where Vance, the likely front-runner for the 2028 Republican nomination, stands these days. Asked whether the vice president stands by that quote or his work with Khan when he was in the Senate, spokesman Buckley Carlson declined comment.
For her part, Khan said of the current administration that “the campaign platitudes they had about wanting to fight for the working class or gestures to populism, I think, have just been revealed as totally hollow.”
Khan doesn’t plan to endorse a candidate in the upcoming Democratic primary and deflects when asked if she would serve again in an administration, arguing that her focus remains building up a new center at Columbia Law aimed at training a new generation of antitrust lawyers.
“It does seem like a lot of people are now talking about affordability and the cost-of-living crisis, which is important in terms of being focused on, ‘How do we make sure government is materially making life better for people in ways that is visible?’” Khan said. “That can help restore trust in what government can do and the purpose government serves.”
GandalfSivi wrote: ↑06/11/2024 12:51
Neka nam je bog na pomoci… Cijelom svijetu..,
Ništa se posebno neće desiti osim što će narandžasti objelodaniti dvije bolne istine, nema više palestinskog pitanja (vjerovatno će im ponuditi da se presele u Egipat) i u najboljem slučaju neka PC u Ukrajini. I tu je kraj preslaganju. Umjesto ratova bit će ratovi sa Kinom i Evropom u vidu poreza na uvoz robe… U nadi da i Izraelci smjene onog klempavog Hitlera i to bi trebalo biti to od promjena. Dodik će opet brojati 4 godine “odlazeće administracije” i sve u krug. Američka politika je ista zadnjih 100 godina i tu nema promjene….
