Their family dinners:

You’re right, I should add a $30 fee for the funnel

$75 for a Financial Times subscription?! Why spend that much when for just $10 a month, I’ll hold you down, put a funnel in your ear, and squeeze pudding directly into your skull

This book should be reimagined into a remake/reimagining of Stephen King’s 11.22.63, but instead of our time traveling main character trying to stop the assassination of JFK, he keeps going back to Yale in 1971 to cockblock Bill

Holy shit it reads like an extremely amateurish West Wing fanfic

Also is it just me, or are the liberals getting more into trump-like language? This fantasized speech reads a lot like how Trump and his fans will constantly insist that he’s definitely super healthy and has a bigly brain. I guess it’s an inevitable sharpening contradiction as all they can do is cope as Biden’s mental state becomes increasingly more obvious.

Cheaper food? But at what cost??

Not voting for Kodos is a vote for Kang

But it’s not just one tweet, it’s a very concerning pattern of behavior; the other two examples I gave were much worse than the tweet, and much more recent than 13 years ago.

I did a cursory google to see what he had to say about Marxism himself, and found this:

SR: There’s been a revival of Marxism: for example, commentators have noted that since 2008, sales of Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto have risen. You describe yourself as a ‘non-Marxist socialist’. Can you elaborate?

CW: I think that a Marxist analysis is indispensable for any understanding, not just in the modern world but for our historical situation. I think in the end it’s inadequate but it is indispensable because how do you talk about oligarchy, plutocracy, monopolies, oligopolies, asymmetrical relations of power at the workplace between bosses and workers, the imperial tentacles, profit maximizing and so forth. That’s not Adam Smith. That’s not John Maynard Keynes. That’s Karl Marx.

It’s inadequate in the end because of the cultural issues. You have to deal with death, you have to deal with dread, despair, and disappointment. You have to deal with anxiety, insecurity, fears and so forth. And Marx just didn’t go in that direction. And people say, ‘well, you can go with Freud’. Yeah Freud got some interesting things to say, no doubt about that. But it’s indispensable and, in the end, inadequate. But it’s a beautiful thing to see the revival of a Marxist analysis. I think Marx was the great secular prophet of 19th century Europe. And that makes a difference.

Cultural issues and their solutions are not mutually exclusive from Marxism, that’s literally a fundamental part of base and superstructure. That’s not to say Marxist analysis of culture doesn’t have room to be further studied and expanded upon, but to say “Marx just didn’t go in that direction” feels like he just doesn’t actually understand Marxism. Kwame Ture explains it best, I think, when he describes scientific socialism not belonging to any one person, including Marx and Engels. West, however, seems to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater when he accepts the material harm caused by capitalism, but rejects/ignores the superstructure it both influences and is influenced by. And that misunderstanding/ignorance/whatever seems to have led to him saying and doing weird, Western chauvinist shit like cozying up with LaRouchites and giving praise to fascist ghouls like Reagan and Desantis for things they most certainly do not even deserve critical support for.

Open to hearing more if he’s articulated it better elsewhere, but he just strikes me as more of a “compatible leftist” type; one who can talk at length about how harmful capitalism is, but always stops just short of identifying actual material, revolutionary actions that need to be taken to overcome the forces of capitalism. And most concerning, he’s demonstrably been susceptible to red-brown/patsoc association.

Ronald Reagan was a freedom fighter in terms of supporting our Jewish bros & sis in the Soviet Union & opposing vicious forms of communism.

https://twitter.com/CornelWest/status/23848928873021440

More recently: https://www.wsj.com/articles/desantiss-revolutionary-defense-of-the-classics-florida-western-canon-galileo-caesar-great-books-275268d9

To say nothing of his involvement with the PatSoc/LaRouchite “People’s Party” where he first launched his campaign, and AFAIK never disavowed. People really need to know how much this dude sucks, so we can collectively stop wasting our time on these “compatible leftist” grifters.

I don’t disagree that there’s a lot of onus on Tesla owners to understand how their bazginamobiles function in the climate they live in, but there’s definitely also a failure on Tesla’s part for not having push notifications.

Having your phone ping you with a link to the car manual’s relevant section on battery conditioning or w/e seems like it would be trivial for a company that removed Disney+ after Musk had a temper tantrum. Teslas probably even have external temp sensors that could do this automatically rather than Tesla having to do it manually based on regions’ weather forecasts.

Some other angles to come at:

• Remind him that when we’re talking about the “1%”, we’re talking about people with this much money. And explain that even people with far less can still maintain their capital if they invest it in a business or rental properties. For every person who loses their inheritance or lottery winnings, there’s many multiple other dipshit landlords and small business owners that manage to survive, not through any sort of special skill or competence, but merely through the means of owning capital. Which they either inherited and/or built through exploiting others. (See: surplus labor)

• Make him watch Wyatt Ingram Koch draw preschool-level shirt designs while drinking champagne on yachts. If he still believes in a meritocracy after this, just bully him relentlessly for thinking Wyatt Koch is more deserving of his money than literally any random person on the street.

You really need to start from square one, because this dude is misunderstanding the most basics of material reality.

The 1% don’t make money through their own hard work, they make it through other people’s hard work. Value is created by labor, and the only people performing that labor are the workers, not corporate executives like CEOs and other suits. All the “profits” going to executives and shareholders are therefore value stolen from the workers.

Some of this might be hard to get through depending on how young and naive they are. I’ve worked both manual labor jobs, and jobs where I’ve interacted with administrative/executive types daily, so I’ve got firsthand experience with how much the latter are worthless dipshits and ghouls. Rejecting capitalism is easy when you actually see how the sausage is made from start to finish. But if this dude’s experience is limited to watching the west wing or whatever while they work a cushy desk job, then they’re probably going to base their ideology off of the typical “unskilled labor” propaganda that permeates western society.

If he’s open to it, get him to watch some labor theory of value 101 videos. Here’s a decent one. But, if he really believes in his heart that people like Bezos are somehow “more deserving” of their wealth than Amazon delivery drivers who are working so intensely that they have to piss in bottles, then I don’t think it’s worth your energy trying to convince him of basic humanity. Personally, I would just bully such a person until they feel enough shame to do some introspection, or avoid me so I don’t have to deal with their bullshit. (I’m going to be honest, anyone who says “us humans are not equal, we don’t deserve what we have” is not worth your energy imo, but good luck anyways if you consider them enough of a friend to try and deprogram them.)