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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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People get so polarized about Elon, it's surreal. I think he's done a very good job on rockets and a pretty good job in electric cars, I think he clearly has excellent business and management skills. He must be very smart. But I don't worship the ground he walks on and dislike the weird antics he goes on, some of his political preferences, how he pumped dogecoin of all things. High INT, lower WIS and CHA.

It's like China-US or Russia-Ukraine. You only see the Arnaud Bertrands of this world, people who can't make a single tweet without bootlicking glorious utopian Chinese multilateralism in this late-imperial Amerikkkan hellscape. Or on the other side there are the people who go on and on about Social Credit, implying it's something that it isn't. Making fraudsters and sleazebags pay a deposit to borrow an e-bike is not the end of the world. There's an entire genre of youtube videos full of 'China is FINISHED' 'It's collapsing' 'It's over for Xi' 'DONE' - and it's completely detached from reality where everyone is worried about Chinese overproduction. They're not exactly collapsing.

With Elon, there's this huge community that seems to think he's a complete fraudster, a cartoonishly villainous Apartheid-enriched monster who somehow tricks Muskrats into giving him billions of dollars while he lies ad infinitum. Anything he does do is purely the result of his engineers. The logical conclusion of this worldview is that the reason NASA hasn't been making great strides despite vast funding is because their engineers are garbage - sack them all. But nobody ever says that!