I knew one day I’d have to watch powerful men burn the world down – I just didn’t expect them to be such losers | Rebecca Shaw

This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a fart.

I kinda thought so.

Sure they are, think of the billions spent so they can ride a dick rocket to space and stay there for 5 min!

It's definitely striking how obviously miserable they are. Like I'm terrified of the harm they intend to cause me, and I'm tired and stressed so often, but holy fuck am I happier than they clearly are.

Popular =/= cool.

Those were actually cruel kids. Common mistake.

That's not very cool of them

The cool kids at my school were actually generally pretty nice. A lot of us nerds had chips on our shoulders, but the reality is that as a weirdo loser, I was picked on by weirdo lovers and the popular kids were nicer to me than I was to them.

I don't think they were all good people, given our school's socioeconomic and racial demographics and the fact that it was a catholic school, I strongly suspect that some may have just appalling beliefs on some topics, but even when I ran into one years later she was nice and open minded.

Idk anyone else's experience and I graduated in the early 10s and I know we were a weird generation in that regard.

Nah fam. You know what musk did to twitter? that's syndrome's backstory. Little shit who tried to shove himself up everyone's arses then cracked it when told no.

Tony Stank

Since I'm an European, lived as an immigrant in the UK for over a decade and was a regular reader of The Guardian for most of that time and even for some time afterwards, your ad hominem missed the target by a huge distance.

Your post says a lot more about you given that you've jumped to such a conclusion about me from what you read and chose an ad hominem as "counter-argument" than it says about me.

Well, I try to make it clear I'm not defending Musk or Zuckerberg.

I just generally think judging people on their style or lack or it is the simpletion young-teen take on people and that it's on their actions (which in the case of these two are pretty damning) that people should be judged on.

The Guardian, being a product of the Society it is in and the quite narrow slice of that Society it tends to represent (possibly because they're very much a bubble were people from a narrow range of origins in that Society almost invariably select their peers to come work with them), ends up doing the whole judging on image and words and putting it above judging on action often, probably because the upper classes in England are very much all about presentation first and foremost (the English Gentleman stereotype is all about presentation and not at all about taking others in consideration when chosing what one does or doesn't do) to a level that in most other Societies would be seen as fake and hypocrite.

The Guardian is indeed more to the left than any American mainstream newspaper (though not some smaller publications). Still center-right (for example they overtly support the LibDems and New Labour whilst detesting traditional - leftwing, pro-Worker, pro-Union - Labour, and are big fans of privatisation), but relative to the mainstream US Press, they're indeed to the left of it. This is because the Overtoon Window is so far to the Right in the US and UK compared to the rest of the World.

I also entirely agree on your points about the "merit" of those billionaires.

The point I was trying to make above is twofold:

• Judge people on their actions, not their "style". Judging people on style is in my world the kind of thing teenagers and superficial intellectually lightweight adults would do. Sadly an excessive concern with keeping up appearances and presenting the right image (whilst empathy or ethics are second plan) is a very English upper class thing and The Guardian is very much a bubble of people who were born in that world and close to it, so they'll tend to resent those who don't share such "values". In my eyes, not maintaining appearances like wealthy English people would is the lesser of Musk's and Zuckerberg's sins, if at all sins - it's what they do that damns them not their style.
• They are being "two weights two measures" about it, or in other words, hypocrites. They do not apply the same standard to their very own ultra-rich as they do to foreign ultra rich (and, believe me, having lived in the UK I've observed that there is a very large fraction of extreme sociopaths amongst their own ultra rich, though they do indeed tend to present a posh gentleman façade all the while destroying the lives of tens of thousands and subverting what little real Democracy there is in Britain). Criticising foreigners is a far lower barrier than criticizing locals in the UK, because a large fraction is not most of the English commonly have the idea that they're superior to other people merely for being English.

So a center-right English newspaper which is basically the voice of the English upper and upper middle class criticizing rich foreigners for essentially not presenting themselves the same as rich English, is totally the wrong vehicle and angle of criticism of people who definitely deserve being criticized, but for their actions not for their lack of proper presentation whilst they do them.