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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   28029 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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People can get mad about it, but what else is the dude supposed to do with the power of the Dems fully against him?

He could have bent the knee and done what they wanted, such as continue to censor Twitter on their behalf.

I remember "Musk Man Bad" starting before he tried to buy Twitter, I could believe that from his perspective the leftists started gunning for him back when he was nominally apolitical.

I know I saw some screed about colonizing mars being bad because it was colonialism, and colonialism bad, in 2020. When there's genuinely no native people to exploit, or even a biosphere to damage, all that's left is tall-poppy slave morality and braindead word-association snarl.

I think it started with the Thai cave incident.

As I remember it, they were talking about how their plan, training the children to use the diving equipment, was an extremely dangerous gamble. Mr Musk probably heard this and was trying to offer a safer solution. The chattering classes objected to Mr Musk not privileging social consensus over his own reason (many such cases!) and one of the divers told Mr Musk to 'take his publicity-stunt submarine and shove it up his', &c., &c. Mr Musk was probably hurt by the accusation that he was motivated by tribal status-seeking, rather than seeing a problem and trying to fix it; this led to him reaching for the nearest insult he could think of, invoking the widely known image of the Westerner taking advantage of lax enforcement of statutory-rape laws in less well-off nations.

It is my impression that this is when the Blue Tribe started aiming the Two Minutes' Hate at Elon Musk.

Yeah, I think it started here and escalated from there.

And in fact musk will probably get what he wants back if he goes progressive enough.

HAH! I think that as well. Give the guy 5 years and he'll be a progressive sweetheart again... if it's convenient, of course. The ire directed at him has always seemed superficial to me.

If it happened to Lord Vader Dick Cheney, it can happen to anyone.

But never underestimate how much the Left actually hates success. I don't know how Musk can be a progressive now without fundamentally changing who he is.

Bill gates is objectively extremely successful.

I would argue that Gates became too successful to criticize. It's not even the Gates Foundation offsetting his capitalism--he just won so hard at making money that he effectively achieved social escape velocity.

If you're a leftist, what's the point of trying to take Gates down a peg? He won ages ago (in Internet reckoning, anyways), made all his money, and fucked off before politics got really heated. Windows is still fairly dominant in the PC space, Microsoft's war against the government and other OSes ended long ago, and Gates is now free to do whatever he wants.

Musk is also in that category, though? Like I don’t think ‘amount of success’ is a massively relevant difference.

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