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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 14, 2024

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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.