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
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jan/16/i-knew-one-day-id-have-to-watch-powerful-men-burn-the-world-down-i-just-didnt-expect-them-to-be-such-losers
30 comments
Wow, that’s the actual title, neat.
Also, as a country, with Trump in office, we are all really and truly fucked.
It’s still amazing to me how many people are either sleeping through this or support it.
>The second-hand embarrassment we have to endure gets even more potent when combined with other modern influences on young men, like Jordan Peterson and Andrew Tate.
…
>Living your life to impress other men by hating women is one of the most embarrassing things I can imagine. Looking up to any of these men for how to live your life is even sadder.
The Meritocracy has never been less meritorious than now.
Yeah, I kind of agree. It wouldn’t really be a comfort per se if we had competent evil people running things. Because they’d still be evil. But there’s an element of disbelief and a whole lot of cringe that the people coming into power are so otherwise incompetent, buffoonish, and pathetic.
Can we just tell them that they won the game, give them a trophy, then start a new game without them?
I hate living in a world where the most powerful people alive are either ghouls or idiot children.
Decent humans wouldn’t accumulate this much wealth. Decent humans wouldn’t choose to destroy hundreds of years of democracy. So of course they’re going to be wankers.
They really are the most pathetic people you have ever seen.
I can respect nerdy and awkward, I get that. They are like the guy in [Can’t Buy Me Love](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0092718/) who wants so desperately to be like the cool kids that they buy their way in and then become the biggest douchebag imaginable.
Haha exactly what I’ve been thinking. Makes it that much harder to swallow that these pathetic and stupid people are the authors of our demise.
Rome burned, while Nero fiddled. Should be an alternate headline.
Mark Rylance’s character from Don’t Look Up is basically the perfect personification of the out-of-touch, billionaire, god complex, weirdo that we are all subjected to endure, until they ultimately leave us on earth after they’ve destroyed it and then proceed to die in the vastness of space where nobody will finally give a shit about them
This is the way the world ends. Not with a whimper, but with cringe.
It’s the embarrassment of being stuck on this ride with these idiots that does it for me.
It’s true. Our legion of doom consists of a pathetic bunch of weenies. Salty spitoon rejects these jabronis, lol
banality of evil
>has made me start to believe we should bring back bullying.
The other day I was thinking about how we’d probably have fewer Matt Walshs in the world if we had just stuck their heads in toilets when they said something stupid.
Elon and Zuck are about to beach each other off right here
Yeah it’s basically the he-man-woman-haters-club but even dumber than that.
The meek shall inherit the earth. Dweebs
This is one of the most frustrating things about this timeline. Just how goddamn DUMB it is.
Democracy is ending not because powerful nations lacked foresight when signing a treaty, not because some diabolical but charismatic leader has infected the populous with toxic racial occult theories, no its ending because the you’re fired guy from TV needs attention and is willing to burn everything down to get it. Its ending because the people who told us “not to believe everything you see on TV” when we were growing up now get their news from youtube videos and memes. Its ending because Gen Z bros that style themselves as “free thinkers” get taken for a ride by grifters.
As for these tech broligarchs? All I see from them is whining. Whining that their greatness isn’t appreciated enough. Whining that they’re only able to control some of what happens in the world and not dictate every single thing. Whining that they have to occasionally pretend to follow rules.
At the core of all this, its just billionaire men with immense power whining “wah…I don’t have enough money power….people say mean things about me instead of giving me more money and power. Im the victim here!”
pathetic. dumb. cringe.
One of my biggest revelations of the past year is how little billions of dollars actually buys. I always knew that it couldn’t purchase dignity or coolness, but at the very least I thought the concept of “f-you money” meant that you didn’t have to spend your Thansgiving in Mar-a-Lago away from your family, toadying up to an 80s con artist, and eating a sad plate of fixings that looked like a downgrade from Applebee’s.
Hey, talk to every person you know who chose not to vote for Harris, take a nice dump in their living room, and tell them THAT is what they did to the country.
Only losers would want to tear the world down.
It’s so weird seeing our world burn and it’s caused by the biggest uncharasmatic losers on the planet. All of whom have the emotional capacity of a teenager. And they’re all butt hurt because a girl was mean to them once when they were 12 and decided to make that their entire personality.
My son is 3 and I’ll be damn sure he never ends up like one of these fucking losers. Weak ass men
At this point, I’m convinced literal comic-book supervillains would be better in positions of power than some of the current crop of tech-bros.
Like, say what you will about Lex Luthor, at least he was actually smart and not so insecure that he needed the approval of online gamer nerds.
This headline is precisely how I’ve been feeling and what I’ve been trying to say in so many less elegant ways.
These guys are so boring and lame such losers. Not even evil in a respectable way. Nothing but blind ego and money. It’s really not cool.
A commentator about 10 years ago said something like this. She mentioned that the Rockefellers and whoever else had at least received a classical education and been exposed to the great ideas. You knew that they were dragged to the opera and so on when they were kids, had seen all of the great art, had heard all of the great debates, had read the classics, that kind of thing. She mentioned how Gates and musk and others were the type of kids who just played video games and pulled the wings off of flies.
It’s crazy how this country is being taken over by such tragically mediocre men.
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