Eric Kayden

Just some guy…

[Eric Kayden @EricKayden1]

@wholemars @CARN0N If a bigger SUV is US-centric, why wasn’t the Model Y-L first sold here?

[0HOUR1 @__0HOUR1_]

Never give a fuck what other people think about you.

They dont matter at the end of the day.

Dont waste energy on the bad people.

Ignore them all.

[Eric Kayden @EricKayden1]

@ClownWorld @washghost1 @grok His left hand is underneath the front of the gun. It is an optical illusion in the original picture that his hand is on top. The AI was fooled by this.

[Laura Ingraham @IngrahamAngle]

This is America if Republicans lose in 2028.

[Wasson Watch Co. @WassonWatch]

I just keep thinking about how George W. Bush bent over backwards to tell everyone we weren't at war with Islam after 9/11.

[Eric Kayden @EricKayden1]

@ConceptualJames Wait... You mean they're not already currently betraying him? That's a nice respite.

[Eric Kayden @EricKayden1]

@niccruzpatane I can't even imagine why anyone who buys a new Tesla wouldn't use FSD. I took the 3-month free FSD referral bonus, and now I'm hooked. I can't imagine not using FSD.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

As I'm reading about the American Revolution as a means of not reading the awful stuff I usually read or being on here, I'm struck that during the protests* against the Stamp Act in Boston in August of 1765, the chant was "Liberty, Property, No Stamps!"

This brought me immediately back to my theme of our spiritual malady today being a lack of gratitude. I fear that we may, in fact, lose our liberty because we aren't grateful enough for it; that we take it for granted without realizing how precious it is. The same could go for property, given the events of New York City and so many other places.

You don't protest for your liberty because you have it.

You don't protest for your property because you have it.

You don't even question that you have them, or that you will assuredly have them tomorrow.

We're not grateful for these things because we take them for granted, living in a time and a place where we can assume them and their perpetuity, and so we are sick, spiritually sick.

Take some time to be grateful for what we have as a foundation, and let that gratitude be a shield that protects you from the rashness that would throw it away.

*riots

[Libs of TikTok @libsoftiktok]

Newscum and Fauci did this during covid. Never forget

[Eric Kayden @EricKayden1]

@ConceptualJames Maybe chill tf out... It's objectively funny regardless of whether or not it was intentional.

[Eric Kayden @EricKayden1]

@WilliamShatner Instead, you look at everyone as a potential target of snark. Now please, snark me next! 🫡

[Eric Kayden @EricKayden1]

@sweatystartup It's all handled through the app. There is a place in the app to chat with Tesla. They are very responsive. They also provide 99% of the paperwork online. You can have everything ready to go before you arrive to pick it up.

[William Shatner @WilliamShatner]

🤔“Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me…”🤐
🙄

[Eric Kayden @EricKayden1]

@stuart_mcateer Just wait until self-driving Tesla Semis. You’ll just be paid to babysit the truck while it does all the work.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

I wonder how many Gen Z conservatives ever think that maybe one day their grandkids will ask them what they did in this time and they'll have to explain that they told lies on the Internet and randomly blamed Jews because dumb influencers tricked them while society almost failed.

[Eric Kayden @EricKayden1]

@stuart_mcateer They have to do it, for legal reasons. Their only alternative is to require you to keep your hands on the wheel. But they've already made it way less oppressive since I posted that. The car really does drive amazingly well, and one day soon it won't care what you're doing.

[Eric Kayden @EricKayden1]

@wholemars @thedooberhead Yeah I got bit by this too…

[Kurt Schlichter @KurtSchlichter]

It’s about time to have a new McCarthy Era. The man was a damn hero.

[James Lindsay, anti-Communist @ConceptualJames]

Mao's "great" leadership led to the largest mass death circumstance in human history, the Great Leap Forward.

This was a completely avoidable tragedy that resulted from the cult mentality of Communism and Maoism, especially in the circumstances of the late 1950s and beginning of the 1960s, which are also attributable directly to Mao's "great" leadership.

All his other activities aside, many vile and deadly ones that had secured both his dictatorial power and a cult of personality around him, Mao basically ruined China and led the country through the worst failure of leadership in human history.

It all started in 1957. In the wake of Khrushchev confessing in his "Secret Speech" (1956) to the crimes of Stalin, the entire Second World (Communist countries) had to at least appear to liberalize somewhat to distance themselves from Stalin. Mao had his beefs with Stalin to begin with and could finally use this to get out from under the Soviet shadow, and he hated Khrushchev. Nevertheless, he had to "liberalize" for the world, so awful was Stalin's evil.

Mao's strategy for this fake liberalization of the PRC was called the "Hundred Flowers Campaign," which was essentially opening up of free speech, including to specifically criticize his government and socialism if people wanted to. At first, people didn't dare, but it was strongly encouraged. Eventually, within months, a flood of criticisms poured in and entire provinces started to destabilize out from Communist control. Mao was losing control.

"Let a hundred flowers bloom; let one hundred schools of thought contend!" Mao had said, confident that his subjects were so thoroughly transformed into socialists in mind, heart, and spirit that they wouldn't criticize anything at the core and might offer suggestions for things the state and Party (CCP) could make use of.

Mao was wrong. People were angry about socialism and especially collectivization, which was ruining everything and causing incredible misery, death, poverty, and starvation. Everything was mismanaged. The Communists were brutal and terrible. The people were mad.

Within month or so of launching the Hundred Flowers Campaign, people started to believe Mao and take him at his word. Criticisms flooded in. Within four months -- just four months! -- Mao was at risk of losing everything. That's how powerful free speech is, ladies and gentlemen!

Mao exhibited his great leadership to prevent that from happening, though! Piker would approve!

Realizing the situation and being crafty and evil, Mao launched a new reversal campaign called the Anti-Rightist Campaign. He literally rewrote his previous speeches and edicts about the Hundred Flowers Campaign and had them republished so that they said their purpose was to get the snakes to come out of their holes. Everyone who criticized socialism, the CCP, or Mao was branded a "Rightist" for the purposes of the most violent and vicious purge Mao ever enacted.

The Anti-Rightist Campaign, after rewriting history, purged at least 2 out of every 1000 "Rightists" by death, though zealous cadres often exceeded this quota. A further 2-5 out of every 1000 "Rightists" were sent to prison, still more were sent to hard labor camps. All were purged of any position of authority, punished with their families at the canteens, etc.

For a few months, the Chinese people spoke, and then they shut up.

The cult of enthusiasm to support the Party after that can hardly be comprehended. Everyone who held any position of any authority or standing at all was, first, a loyalist (or pretending to be one), and, second, motivated to prove their loyalty by any and every means, to Mao, to the CCP, to "the people" (LOL).

Mao launched the Great Leap Forward right after the Anti-Rightist Campaign, and no one would dare refuse him now. It was the greatest avoidable tragedy and catastrophe in human history, unparalleled by any rival. A close rival is the "Socialist High Tide" program, and its catastrophic failure, a few years earlier (1956) also executed to horrific consequences by Mao's "great" leadership.

The idea was to prove that China, ten years deep now, was succeeding at socialism. It was maybe a campaign to improve China but largely a PR campaign to show the world two things: that socialism works and that China is better at it than the Soviet Union. The name of the game was simple: prove industrial and farming capacity by producing and exporting more steel and grain than anyone else, particularly to overtake Great Britain in production within just three years.

It's impossible to overstate how poorly this Great Leap Forward was executed in terms of both goals, or what idiotic things people actually did, without tremendous amounts of telling. Frank Dikotter wrote an entire book about it specifically ("The Great Famine"), and it's almost unbelievable. I'll share only one aspect.

Because of the Anti-Rightist Campaign and Mao's huge deception and mass purge of his people the year before, no one resisted. In fact, people enthusiastically tried to prove their commitment and loyalty by boasting about how much of these commodities, especially grain, they could produce.

The Party would put unrealistic, impossible targets on the various counties and provinces, and rather than seeing how they might go about doing the impossible, the lower leadership bragged up the chain that the could beat those targets, sometimes by twice over, sometimes five times over, sometimes ten times over. One locality would compete (lol) with the next in its ambition to exaggerate their target production numbers to completely unrealistic levels.

Then, they straight up lied about production when they weren't even coming close. To make the Party happy, to prove their loyalty to their "great" leader, they boasted that they were exceeding even the wildly multiplied, grossly exaggerated production targets even though they weren't hitting fractions of them, even in great grain-producing areas. It was probably the largest mass lie ever told.

Desperate to prove himself on the world stage and not be embarrassed by his stupid program, and likely believing some of the copium and delusion coming out of his underlings, Mao and the Party took these numbers at face value and set export numbers for grain accordingly, far higher than they could meet. In fact, they didn't just set them reasonably according to inflated numbers, the "great" leader was trying to show off to the world and set them proportionally very high, based on numbers that were many times larger than reality would provide.

You can see where this goes.

Not only wasn't there enough because there wasn't, and not only wasn't there enough because they were shipping it out of the country (nevermind the steel-based disasters alongside), the government had to steal from stores to attempt to fulfill their foreign sales. There was simply no food in many places.

But then, in the winter, something more happened. The winter was bitter. It was a very hard time. There were environmental shocks in addition.

The estimates vary, but conservative estimates guess that 40 million people starved and/or froze that winter because of Mao's "great" leadership. This is something like 8% of the population of China at the time dying of starvation (overwhelmingly) or exposure.

Deaths by disease, which are common in the wretched circumstances described here, were actually shockingly low. The reason: people were simply dying of malnourishment and suicide far too fast to actually get the diseases of lack.

These tens of millions weren't murdered, as many people incorrectly believe, and this is important. They died because of gross, unbelievably gross, mismanagement. The worst mismanagement in the history of mankind. The worst mismanagement almost imaginable. This is Mao's "great" leadership.

Mao's "great" leadership through the Great Leap Forward was so bad that they took the effective leadership of his own dictatorship away from him and installed Liu Shaoqi in the real seat of power afterward, although Mao retained "Chairman" status and much real power.

This opened the next chapter in Mao's "great" leadership, the infamous Cultural Revolution, the most infamous activity of his rule in China, even though it's not the most deadly.

The Cultural Revolution ultimately began in June 1966, but Mao started laying the tracks as early as 1962. His main goal: recover absolute power from Liu Shaoqi and the Party that had partially sidelined him. The method was to stoke up a huge psychotic cult of personality around himself using military psychological operations largely run by Zhou Enlai to brainwash millions of Chinese youth to destroy their own country until they could depose Liu Shaoqi himself.

By 1967, they had Liu Shaoqi. They had also destroyed and shattered all of the "olds" of Chinese culture, including thousands of just older people. Liu Shaoqi was rounded up by a group of students who declared him an enemy, struggled him, and destroyed him.

In the wake of this victory, Mao, with his "great" leadership, thanked the Red Guard he had unleashed by declaring them in the next year "too radical" and had most of them sent to die in miserable conditions doing slave labor in the hard countryside. That's because he realized that if they could topple Liu, they could also topple him, and that couldn't stand. He destroyed them instead.

Things actually only got worse for China under Mao from there until after he died in 1976. Nothing in China started to improve at all until his second successor, the famous Deng Xiaoping, took power in 1978 and started his "open up" campaign that adopted a Stakeholder-Fascist economic policy under CCP direction as a pragmatic necessity to save China and its utterly shattered economy and polity. This model, with some variations, is what the CCP uses to this day.

That's the "great" leadership of Mao Zedong.

May he rest in excrement. Piker too, in his turn, when that arrives.

[Eric Kayden @EricKayden1]

@__0HOUR1_ After she gets someone killed, she can just say Trump told her to drink bleach.