The bedside manner of Elon Musk
An amusing article below. One of many. It attempts to "psychoanalyse" Musk on the basis of woefully insufficient information. Musk was obviously provoking commentary by putting up the picture so is probably by now reading the comments with amusement. He is too sophisticated to have been unaware of what he was doing. He probably saw the assemblage as confusing and quietly laughed at the maundering it would provoke.
I wonder what Jo Ellison would make of what is on my small bedside table: Three doilies, a handkerchief, a decanter of water and a drinking glass. Those three doilies would be very suspicious. My mother would undoubtably get a mention
Ellison may have revealed more about herself than she intended. What does it mean that she attributes 1 Corinthians 13:11 to Shakespeare?
Jo Ellison
A long, long time ago, I went out with a man who packed a piece. By which I mean, I went out with a man who wore a toy gun. By which I mean, he strapped a replica gun that fired blanks into a cross-body “gun holster” which he would wear underneath his coat.
As red flags go, this was a pretty big one. Quite apart from the fact that he was basically inviting armed police to shoot him dead in the street — and who would have blamed them? The whole look was deeply unsexy. His relationship with the toy long outlasted our relationship.
I recalled this dark moment in my junior history with a shudder this week while examining the inventory displayed on Elon Musk’s nightstand, a subject presented in a Twitter post earlier this week with the caption “My bedside table”. The tableau revealed four open cans of caffeine-free Diet Coke, an unfinished bottle of water, a Buddhist amulet apparently used as an aid for meditation, a replica Revolutionary war-era pistol in a box decorated with the Emanuel Leutze painting “Washington Crossing the Delaware” (1851) and a handgun, understood to be a copy of one from the video game Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
Now, I’m no Luke Edward Hall, but when it comes to the art of projecting taste and personality into my decorative surroundings, I would argue that abandoning a few unfinished cans beside my pistol of an evening is probably not what interior design gurus have in mind. Commentators were quick to point out that his bedside table featured what seemed to be an even greater offence than the presence of a Diamond Back .357 handgun beside his pillow: the surfacetop was covered in unsightly water stains. Even Musk seemed a little shamefaced about the whole arrangement: “There is no excuse for my lack of coasters,” he wrote in the comments field.
Nevertheless, as a glimpse into the mind of one of the great technological provocateurs of recent times, the tweet offered an unexpected portal. Musk’s nightstand immediately conjured the image of a lonely, very thirsty man-child, suspended in the forever fantasy that he might one day rule the world. Furthermore, for a man who has been three times married and sired 10 children, the table gives off a ferocious smack of “single”. The internet has since been occupied with making tragic nightstand memes.
Rather like the power desk, the bedside table offers its own story for psychological evaluation. But where the power desk is a public tool on which to project status among one’s peer group, the bedside table is more intimate, a tiny vestibule of quiet neuroses, thwarted ambitions and psychic ills. My own, for example, features a towering pile of highly curated books still awaiting my attention, a small porcelain dish in which I collect discarded hairclips, an inhaler, a vat of gummy, full-strength melatonin (for the “jet lag”) and an assortment of adapter plugs.
Unlike other bits of status furnishings — our bookshelves, desk tops or kitchen cabinets — the nightstand exposes our frailer, older, more decrepit selves. My husband stores a lifetime’s supply of ear plugs, as though he were living through the Blitz on our no-through road, while I remember my father’s bedside table featuring a buffet of indigestion tablets which he monitored as closely as those Beefeaters mind the crown jewels.
Musk’s bedside table offers fresh insight into his public image in the world. But does he identify with Washington, championing freedom and democracy with his flintlock pistol, or Page, the villainous protagonist of Deus Ex, in search of immortality and willing to sacrifice the lives of billions in order to achieve that goal? According to Wikipedia, Deus Ex is a role-playing franchise about “the conflict between secretive factions who wish to control the world by proxy, and the effects of transhumanistic attitudes and technologies in a dystopian near-future”. No wonder Musk must guzzle golden cans of Coca-Cola if he’s going to bed with two such extreme totems of progress on his mind. At least both factions can be clearly represented through their choice of weaponry. Nothing helps an American sleep more soundly than the knowledge he’s got a pistol by his head.
“When I became a man, I put away childish things”, says Shakespeare’s Prince Hal as he recognises the weight of responsibility that must come with taking on the crown. But maybe he also had a nightstand where he could pile discarded cans of soda and secrete his treasured toys?
However superhuman we tell ourselves we are, the bedside table is the last repository for all our very human sorrows, our loneliness, addictions, our shifty sinuses, our bloated guts. That they reveal the detritus of human failing turns out to be quite reassuring. Even when that failing is forgetting to put a coaster underneath one’s drinks cans or pretending to be Elon Musket while waving a toy gun.
https://www.ft.com/content/48852b79-ff29-40dc-bb3c-8358a96a4fa5
***************************************************FULL INTERVIEW: Dr Jordan Peterson on COVID hysteria and the culture wars
Clinical psychologist, author and public intellectual Dr Jordan Peterson sits down with Sky News Australia host Rita Panahi for a wide-ranging exclusive interview which covers toxic femininity, climate change activism, Islam, Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, COVID hysteria, the culture wars and how conservatives can fight back.
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Elizabeth Warren Believes She's Got Perfect Rebuke of Musk, Doesn't Realize She Just Made His Case
Leftists’ collective meltdown over Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter has made them careless, and their unchecked reactions have exposed their undeniable hypocrisy to the world.
Perhaps no Democrat’s remarks were more revealing than those of Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Wednesday.
When questioned about Musk’s leadership of the social media platform by Fox News reporter Hillary Vaughn, she replied: “I think that one human being should not decide how millions of people communicate with each other.
“One human being should not be able to go into a dark room by himself and decide, ‘Oh, that person gets heard from, that person doesn’t.’ That’s not how it should work.”
The irony is rich.
Warren was employing that time-honored and frequently used tactic of accusing one’s enemies of what you are doing, a strategy handed down to liberals decades ago from the late community organizer and communist Saul Alinsky.
Prior to Musk’s takeover of the company, one human being — namely, former Twitter chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde — had been doing just that for years.
In fact, Gadde was behind the decision to permanently suspend the president of the United States from the platform. She also reportedly spearheaded the banning of the bombshell Hunter Biden laptop story to shield her preferred presidential candidate from scandal less than three weeks ahead of the 2020 election.
Rather than censoring content, Musk is doing the opposite. He is opening up free speech and allowing those who were wrongly suspended back on the platform regardless of beliefs.
And rather than going into a dark room and making decisions, Musk is being extremely transparent about it.
The left has lost control of a tool it had counted on for years to do its dirty work, and now it is reeling. The ability to manipulate which content voters were and weren’t allowed to see gave leftists tremendous power to influence political opinion in the U.S. and thus shape the national conversation. Understandably, they are grieving their loss and haven’t quite come around to the stage of acceptance.
Twitter may lack the size of Big Tech giants such as Apple and Google, but the company is the go-to platform for politicos and plays an outsize role in controlling the flow of information to the public. No wonder they’re incensed.
But this will be the song they sing now. Democrats will use another one of their favorite tools, the Department of Justice — which has made a sport out of pursuing those who disagree with left-wing ideology — to crack down on Twitter. They will investigate Elon Musk because he won’t bow down to them.
But in doing so, they risk running afoul of another Alinsky rule: “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. ‘Don’t become old news.
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Junko Takase’s Akutagawa Prize-winning novel is a feminist’s nightmare
Traditional female traits are the winners
The novel that won the Akutagawa Prize this July is a deceptively mundane story depicting the everyday work life of three co-workers. It seems at first like a typical Japanese work place drama, poking fun at various office stereotypes. But the book also takes to task a “given” of urbane society (not just in Japan, although it’s certainly a mainstay of Japanese pop culture): the exaltation of foodie culture and the pursuit of deliciousness. The title, which roughly translates to “I wish to be able to eat delicious food,” suggests a story filled with loving depictions of gourmet scenes and smells — but the reality is much less appetizing. (At time of writing an English translation hasn’t been announced.)
The story is told through the alternating points of view of a woman named Oshio and a man named Nitani. The plot revolves around their shared disgust and fascination toward a third co-worker, a woman named Ashikawa. All three are around 30 years old and go by their surnames.
Oshio comes across as a whip-smart, hard-working, physically tough woman whose inner life is dominated by resigned observations about social hypocrisies. In Ashikawa, she sees a sweeter, more feminine counterpart, something of a rival who she nonetheless feels compelled to protect without really understanding why. Nitani is another familiar type fully realized by Takase: a smart man with the potential for an intellectually rich inner life, but who routinely shuns challenging people and conversations in favor of helpless girls who bore him.
Nitani’s most interesting trait is that he despises food and, more than that, he’s irked by the expectation that he should enjoy it. He prefers to pour garbage into his body, subsisting on a diet of mostly convenience store food and instant meals.
“Do you like good food?” he asks Oshio at one point. She gives him a look and says, “Are there people who dislike good food?” Nitani smiles darkly and responds, “I dislike people who chose a lifestyle based around eating good food.” The performance of being “into” food, he thinks ruefully throughout the book, is a waste of time.
Nitani is so convincing that readers may find themselves disgusted by breathless scenes of beautiful cakes, and instead mysteriously craving cup ramen. Layered underneath the themes about food and office politics, though, is a more sinister commentary on feminism and social currency.
Ashikawa is physically weak, prone to headaches if she does overtime, makes mistakes in her work and generally can’t be relied on by the people around her. At one point, Oshio meets Ashikawa’s brother and notices he won’t even trust her to look after his dog when he’s out of town. Oshio and Nitani, by contrast, work late hours and are diligent, highly competent go-getters.
And yet it’s Ashikawa who is the unlikely company favorite. No one protests when she leaves at 6 p.m. on the dot, though everyone else stays behind to pick up her slack. She also has an endearing out-of-office talent: She makes painstakingly detailed desserts and baked goods, which she brings into the office as an apology for the fact that she can’t (or won’t) work overtime. To the reader, Ashikawa is the only character who seems to have a healthy work-life balance. Yet, the subtext is obvious: If she has so much energy to travel all over town for cooking classes and to spend the weekend baking, why can’t she use that for work?
Oshio and Nitani bond over the mix of revulsion, jealousy, pity and resentment they feel toward her. Even after Nitani and Ashikawa grow closer in secret, his confused feelings of attraction and disgust toward her don’t seem to abate.
Ashikawa is an amusingly portrayed “cute” girl stereotype, down to her concerted effort to always be smiling, even when she’s alone, and her habit of saying “That’s good” and “I’m glad to hear that” for no apparent reason. The more helpless Ashikawa acts, the more likable she becomes to those around her. The reader, like Oshio and Nitani, is drawn into the mysterious force of this otherwise unremarkable dead-weight co-worker. Though we never hear her inner thoughts, this doesn’t act to disempower Ashikawa; rather, she gains more of a mythical status, an impressive untouchability.
Takase’s book is written in simple, straightforward language, compared to the more typically literary Akutagawa winners. (As such, it also makes useful reading practice for Japanese learners.) It’s sometimes funny and feels true to life, but that’s what makes the story all the bleaker. Ashikawa represents a nightmarish yet entirely real version of female social Darwinism, one in which intellect and diligence are found low on the food chain, and high up are naivete and the ability to curry sympathy.
In the view of this book, it’s surely better to be loved than to be feared, and even better to be loved for making fancy shortcakes. But readers, be warned: The ending may leave you with a feeling of queasy discomfort, as if you ate too many sweets.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/culture/2022/12/03/books/book-reviews/junko-takase-akutagawa-prize
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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