A federal IT staffer filed a complaint about DOGE, then went public. Shortly after Elon Musk boosted a post calling his claims false, his brake lines were cut. Now he’s suing for defamation.
    • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.worldEnglish
      81·
      1 hour ago

      You know those old timey 1930s movie villains that tie a woman to train tracks?

      Gotta say, I never thought “Ok, now that villain is going to go rape kids after this broad gets runover by a train.”

      It sounds absurd, right? It sounds offensive, doesn’t it?

      Yet, that’s the world we live in. If trump or musk, or any of these other fuckwits were faced with the 2 track trolley problem, they would try to find ways to run over the people on BOTH tracks, and then go fuck kids.

      That is the world we are living in. That’s reality right now.

  • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
    61·
    1 hour ago

    Cutting someone’s brake lines always seemed like a really stupid way to try and hurt them, it seems to me. Unless they happen to already be parked at the top of a very steep hill or something, it’s probably not going to do shit.

    A) Before even getting into the car, the driver might notice puddles of brake fluid around the wheels and know that there’s a problem.

    B) Pretty much every modern car requires that you press on the brakes to shift out of park. And with hydraulic brakes, the moment you push on that brake pedal, it’s going to be immediately apparent that something is wrong – it will easily depress all the way to the floor with no resistance. Someone would have to be pretty stupid to ignore that obvious warning sign and shift out of park anyway.

    C) Even if they do try to start driving, that’s probably going to start with just pulling out of a parking space. Especially if they happen to be backing out of the parking space, they’re immediately going to use the brakes to stop and then change back to a forward direction … and at that point, they’ll immediately notice that their brakes aren’t working. And since they’re moving at very slow speeds at that point, the worst that’s likely to happen is a minor fender-bender.

    D) Even if they somehow manage to get up to significant speed before noticing the brake problem, any decent driver should be able to bring their car safely to a stop during brake failure, using engine braking and/or the parking brake. Or, in worst case scenario, grinding the side of the car against a wall or guardrail.

    E) Even if they don’t manage to stop the car in time, modern cars are quite safe. Even in a major wreck, the victim is likely to walk away from it with only minor injuries.

    All in all, it seems like a really stupid way to try and hurt someone … which, I suppose, means it makes perfect sense for the DOGE crowd.

    • JordanZ@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      13 minutes ago

      I’d imagine nobody is cutting a brake line in today’s world unless they just want to be vindictive for most of the reasons you mentioned.

      There are flexible lines near the wheel wells that are typically rubber / steel braid that can be cut. I wouldn’t bother with those. There are hard lines that run the length of the car(thin walled, highly bendable tubing). I’d imagine if somebody ran a couple tests you could crease/kink those lines that they’d still hold fluid and work fine unless you put a lot of pressure on the line which would cause them to blow out. Which would be a lot more difficult to identify but might also go on for a while before the problem arises.

      Just my random thoughts in the matter.

      • OwOarchist@pawb.socialEnglish
        1·
        4 minutes ago

        If you want to kill somebody and you have unsupervised access to their car, what’s wrong with a good old fashioned car bomb?

    • frongt@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2·
      55 minutes ago

      Well the article says he failed to stop at a stop sign because of it. And also his airbag was disabled. I don’t know how you would see the brakes fail in such a way, but clearly it’s possible if you know what you are doing.

      Most people would probably not know how to use engine braking in an automatic, nor consider the parking brake for this, unlike when it used the be the big pull handle and called the emergency brake. Personally, without those options, I’d lay on the horn, turn on my four-ways, and coast to a stop however possible, and hopefully I’m not finding out in the middle of a long downhill.