Supervillain is giving him too much credit. I’ll grant you that he’s a cartoon character, but cartoon supervillains have more complexity than him.

Kanye and Musk embody a nearly identical archetype and we’d have the exact same problem if they ran for president and succeeded. The cult of personality that follows shitty celebrities is a self-perpetuating one. It’s rooted in nasty people admiring how important people can be nasty like them but without tangible social consequences. They form a mob around their cult heroes for that exact reason, strength in numbers. A safe space for the trash of humanity.

People in politics and business find Trump useful because he’ll open doors for them in exchange for attention. They get cozy with leading him around by the nose with that attention until they forget that he will backstab them when they stop giving him that attention or there is more value in betraying them. Musk does the exact same shit, so again, I don’t think that Trump himself is worthy of being viewed in the light you’re giving him. Similarly shitty celebrities are drop in replacements for him, and worse, they might be more intelligent in their cruelty.

Irony: I clicked on this post because an unemployed friend of mine recently had their mechanical turk account suspended for no clear reason. They’re still waiting on the appeal process two months later…

For anyone considering this work, you should also be prepared for your “employers” to randomly reject your submitted work and deny you pay. Good times.

having people go out for original research is basically saying “Let people make up bullshit.”… not a good idea.

Yeah, I’ve seen what this does to fan wikis. There is a certain type of personality that thrives on having their version of reality be what is reflected in wiki articles, and they will revert any and all attempts to excise their personal theories. If admins step in to break up the edit war, it’s clearly “favoritism” and “admins should only exist in service to the users and have no say in content”. Some of these wiki addicts go out of their way to become the wiki equivalent of Reddit’s supermods in order to ensure that they have the upper hand in these content disputes.

“No original research” is one of the core pillars of your ability to push back against delusional nonsense. If you’re determined to live without it, you need to have very strong content standards in its place to decide the difference between objective fact and someone’s conspiracy vomit. Good content policies save you from having to waste a bunch of time on bad faith arguments about why the content of your wiki pages have to abandon fact for massaging someone’s ego.

(Somewhat of a tangent, but if you’re bored you can look into a brief history of AlexShepherd’s crusade against circumcision in the Silent Hill fandom. He’s not the only person I’ve seen thrive on wikis who don’t adopt an original research policy, but definitely the most entertaining read.)

desperately struggles to maintain character while responding again

turns purple in the face and vanishes in a puff of logic

Unfortunately, I am not an adventurer like you.

He announced something even better: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2y2bIlfbfI

(nsfw)

It’s a common feature of any demographic that is convinced of their moral superiority. Once you’ve accepted that you and your leaders are on the side of justice and are presented a designated enemy, you cease having to look inward. Progress requires acknowledging that you are operating inside of a flawed system, and that you have to work with people from other systems who acknowledge their own flaws.

Tangent: “Enlightened centrists” acknowledge the flaws of both sides of an argument while failing to acknowledge that both sides have to play fair.