Anyone familiar with canine behaviour knows there’s a fine line between the mutual bottom sniffing that dogs do when meeting each other and full-on arse licking which requires a sharp tug on the lead and a brisk “Come on Fido” from their embarrassed owners.
Unfortunately, there was no one on hand to metaphorically yank the lead as Donald Trump and Elon Musk engaged in over two hours of the most bizarre, technically incompetent arse licking imaginable. Trump is sounding increasingly crazy but blamed his new odd lisp on a technical malfunction. That’ll be the same technical malfunction that meant the streaming couldn’t get going for nearly an hour. Heaven knows, we’ve all had our fair share of zoom, Teams and Skype glitches where someone can’t work out how to turn their microphone on or off, you can only see the top of someone’s head or the background activity is so distracting you turn off your camera and do a crossword instead. (I’m still mentally scarred from hosting a live event in a tent with a government minister joining by zoom from a moving car but that’s another story.) But, come on, this is Musk’s own platform and presumably having sacked anyone half competent there wasn’t anyone to switch it on or off for him or press record otherwise why would he need to put out an appeal for someone to provide the highlights? Mercifully it was audio only so we were spared the sight of these two grotesques performing.
Grotesques appear in stories from ancient myths through Shakespeare, Dickens, Carroll, Tolkien, Dahl and Hugo to zombies, vampires and any number of strange, fantastic, hideous and distorted characters. All of which is fine in fiction and drama but absolutely terrifying in real life, particularly when it concerns Musk and Trump who both want to rule the world at any cost. Trump is certainly a weird narcissist, a liar, a fantasist and a very nasty piece of work but his power could be curtailed by democracy, by the American people who will vote to choose their next president in the coming months.
Musk however is apparently accountable to no one and his power is more pernicious and arguably more dangerous than a crazed president. We’ve seen on the streets of Britain the devastating effects of false news spreading like wildfire at warp speed through X. Musk’s response was to say that “civil war (in the UK) is inevitable”, describing prosecutors as the “woke stasi” and continued to spread misinformation himself while proclaiming to be the guardian of free speech. He’s reinstated the X accounts of Tommy Robinson and Andrew Tate, fired half of X’s election integrity team and scrapped its trust and safety council.
X is dangerous and more so because Musk doesn’t care about the consequences. He’s undoubtably clever and some of his inventions might be useful, but the unfettering of X is just another bizarre experiment for him, alongside implanting computer chips into monkeys’ brains. If he were a schoolboy, he’d probably enjoy pulling the wings off flies for fun while his dopey friend Donald watched on in awe.
Time for people to stop playing the game and get off X?
