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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 2, 2024

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You have bold posters of attractive, young, bold comrades ushering in a new world

Oh, well, this is a first for me. Merging two current and active threads.

There is an interesting potential connection to this thread (tagging @jeroboam for awareness).

What if a way to encourage more children is to simply have a bunch of posters of attractive young people pumping out babies.

Probably Musk is the closest to that aesthetic, which is pretty pathetic when you think about it.

Yes, on two level. First, hate to say this, but Musk does code as .... weird. A lot of the Musk superfans are that precisely because they see Captain Aspergers doing so well and think, "one of us! one of us!" Normies might like Teslas, but they don't get Musk at all.

Second, he's a pretty awful model for paternal responsibility. By my count, he's got 12 kids with 3 women. Although those aren't Antonio Cromartie numbers, they're still up there. Again, a bad model for normies.

We need conserva-Chads. The frackas with Harrison Butker a few months back showed how those battle lines could get drawn.

Normies might like Teslas, but they don't get Musk at all.

On the one hand, that's why normies ended up getting their fancy electric cars from Tesla. As the old economics joke goes, there can't be a hundred dollar bill plainly lying on the ground, because someone would have picked it up already. Musk had to search through muck like "electric motors are for golf carts" and "it's literally rocket science, you're not going to beat Boeing or Lockheed!" to find his hundred billion dollar bills, because if you pursue ideas that any normie can see aren't stupid, then the normies probably already did, and some of them are way ahead of you to monetizing them.

On the other hand, most apparently-stupid ideas are apparently stupid because in fact they are actually stupid. In PvE fields like engineering that's still fine, because the math or the testing will winnow out the bad ideas anyway. If you try out 199 failed filament materials and one good one then you don't become famous as a 99.5% failure, you become famous as the guy who invented the light bulb. But in PvP fields like social media / business / politics, taking stupid ideas seriously in public burns credibility, wasting social capital you could have put to better use elsewhere. Musk does have enough actual capital to not care so much about that, and I can't help but be amused by someone using "fuck-you money" to literally tell people "fuck you", but he's investing in so many good causes that I wish he wouldn't waste so much opportunity cost on bad ones.

By my count, he's got 12 kids with 3 women.

6 kids (5 surviving, one died of SIDS) with his first wife, one of whom publicly hates him. 3 kids (X, Exa, and Tau) with a later girlfriend (after his second divorce to his second wife, his third divorce total) who he's currently fighting for custody. 3 biological kids via IVF with one of his employees at Neuralink. This sounds like a bad model for Musk, not just a bad model for normies.

His personal life is a shambles, but so long as he doesn't flaunt it (and people only speak of it in hushed, ashamed tones), I don't care too much.

What he needs to do is: every time he feels compelled to share a 4chan greentext on Twitter, he should stop for a second, think about if it's a good use of his time, realize it's not, and instead take that energy and make another revolutionary, innovative, billion dollar company. We'd all be better off.