I'm really starting to wonder if 2022 won't be looked back as the year that Elon finally jumped the shark.
A lot of people (myself included) really respect SpaceX and I think that's the last pillar on which Elon's reputation stands. Tesla honestly isn't that interesting and there's a real chance it gets eaten alive as other car manufacturers have caught up. The Cybertruck is still vaporware whereas the F150 Lightning is real and, from what I've seen at least, very highly regarded.
What I think is finally giving people Elon fatigue is his politics. The Twitter acquisition is deeply tied to that. He's just another rich cringe conservative. That's it. Coming out and supporting DeSantis, for example, should surprise literally no one.
He has a very thin skin (remember the whole "pedo guy" incident?), inflates his own accomplishments (eg claiming he founded Tesla) and honestly just comes off (now more than ever) as just an awful human being.
Stories I've heard seem to reflect that SpaceX and Tesla aren't great places to work (at least compared to big tech companies).
I really get the sense that people are increasingly getting sick of hearing from or about him. YMMV.
Given this is HN, I'm just mildly curious about how people who knew Musk 15-20 years ago view him now. I mean, I know this is tangential, but pg had an essay talking about what a bad idea it was that Musk demanded Windows over Linux when Musk ran PayPal - I just got the sense that pg was never a fan.
Do folks view this as "this is an ambitious, hardworking genius whose lack of social constraints due to his success is making him run off the rails, mentally" or is it a case of "Musk has always been more asshole than genius, it's just his 'marketing veneer' that is starting to falter."
I agree, I've always viewed Musk with a sense of awe and amazement ("How can someone have the time and energy to run THREE major companies??"), now I just want him to STFU because what comes out of his mouth/tweet feed is such incessant verbal diarrhea.
I think the success really got to him. As a (cured) ex Elon fanboy who used to like him way before he was widely known to a non-nerd community, I distinctively remember this interview around the pre-Falcon 9 times with him which is like
Interviewer: Neil Armstrong says he doesn‘t want a private company like SpaceX to launch humans to tue moon because it‘s unsafe. What do you think about that?
Humble Elon, literally crying: I… I just wish he could come out here and see what we are doing.
That‘s the picture I carried with me for a long time, together with some really smart remarks about climate change on panels that were way ahead of their time.
These days, it‘s really all an ego shitshow, memes and YOLo. He definitely changed a LOT the past few years.
The impression I got from this article by his first wife was that his growing wealth and power, as well as being surrounded by similarly wealthy powerful people, sort of formed a feedback loop that just intensified personality traits that he already possessed.
When it was Tesla and the beginning of SpaceX, I was like "Oh, that's cool". I didn't care much more than the surface level and didn't care to look deeper. Since then, he's exposed much more of himself and have caused others to look way deeper.
And it's looking more and more like the doesn't so much run three major companies as owns three major companies.
My wife, ever the empathetic, reminds me constantly that Elon is not neurotypical. He has aspergers, and that can explain some of his bluntness, some of his work-life demands, etc.
I don't want to generalize or stereotype ASD in general, but it does produce tangible differences in how people relate to the world.
Aspergers does not explains his behavior. It does not explain grandiosity, oversensitivity, lying, egoism and so on. Also, Musk is pretty good at negotiating, manipulating and can be very charming, people with asperger are usually opposite.
So, that diagnosis is some minor influence somewhere, but does not explains the rest.
I think elon is such a Rorschach blot that people see the evils of capitalism, woes of mental health, drug use, virtuousness of free market ideals, entrepreneurial godhood, corruption of wealth and political power, blah blah, depending on their priors.
Things people say about him reveal more about the speaker than the subject, I mean.
> There’s a common idea that surrounds autistic people, especially those with above-average intellectual ability. This idea states that we have no empathy, that we’re robots who will never understand relationships, that we’re incapable of acting human. TV Tropes calls it Disability as an Excuse for Jerkassery, and notes that Asperger’s is a favorite excuse. The Autistic Jerk has become such an ingrained idea, many people expect and assume that we are going to be assholes. But I’m here to tell you: the autistic jerk is just a jerk who happens to be autistic.
I think you're reading into my comment a bit too much. I never intended to over-generalize or stereotype anyone with ASD, and didn't use any negative words re: Elon or aspergers.
- "Musk has refiled his SF-86 security form, which requires a federal employee or contractor seeking a clearance to acknowledge any illegal drug use over the previous seven years, according to the official, who asked not to be identified. SpaceX has contracts to launch satellites for the U.S. military."
- "Musk’s “adjudication” review by the Defense Security Service continues with no decision yet, the U.S. official said. Typically during an adjudication, a person keeps his or her security clearance but loses access to information classified as secret, according to the official. If the drug use involves minor issues or doesn’t appear to contain any serious security concerns, the unit reviewing the case could just close it and update Musk’s record."
the argument about illegal drugs is, in part, that someone using them can be blackmailed, and may be a total junkie willing to sell out secrets for a 8 ball. He isn't hanging out on skidrow begging for change to get his next heroin fix.
I don't think either of those apply with Musk, because he is a pot afficianado and openly pushing it, and pro-legalization. Some states have legalized because they want those juicy tax revenues, There is a significant part of the populace that realizes pot has been overcriminalized particularly for those with medical issues. While there are risks and dangers associated with all of these (see Alex Berenson), I don't see an adjudication authority seeing Musk as a security risk.
Dollars talk, and saving the federal government hundreds of millions with cheaper launches probably influences this some. But, the feds prolly see the long view and recognize Musk is likely to push the Americans into the infinity cash supplies of space tourism, space freight, deep space exporation, space mining, and the national prestige of first humans to Mars. Why would they want to impair that over a bit of weed?
I had a knee jerk reaction to this but taking the high road. I sincerely don't believe that the venn diagram of people with security clearance doesn't overlap at all with "those that use illegal drugs"
I would guess that there's a culture of delusion surrounding this wherein because "it's the rules" they are actually followed. You know because rules are rules. The world, especially those like the Elons of the world, don't care to follow them as diligently as perhaps a command and control military / public service style structure demands. I'd even be surprised if even in the federal government those with security clearance were completely sober and free of the drugs considered illegal under US law.
You know Elon is gonna do what he wants to do. For better (electric cars, reusable rockets) or for worse (open his twitter feed any day of the week).
I suspect compliance for federal workers is very high, pardon the pun. Your average Joe fed is not going to be treated the same if they are caught using drugs vs elon being caught using drugs.
Some states allow from prescriptions, but it's still Federally illegal - and of course the Federal government doesn't care about state law when making decisions about security classifications.
> the Federal government doesn't care about state law when making decisions about security classifications.
I suspect this is less true than you think; since federal prosecution is blocked by law for state-legal use, one of the major security clearance reasons for it to be an issue (the leverage that the criminal behavior might give others over you because of prosecution risk) is very much affected by state law.
I never realized until the comments today that the reason you can't be on even state-legal prescribed drugs is because you become more open to blackmail and exploitation or prosecution risk.
But wouldn't debt of any kind, or regular motivations such as greed, family (maybe a relative got into drugs/trouble) be the same or even worse?
It just seems like a left-over relic from the 'reefer madness' days.
A big part of my early distrust for police stems from the lies they told me in D.A.R.E. 'class'. Marijuana will turn you into a drug-fueled criminal, it eats your brain cells like this spray paint on a Styrofoam cup, and they never come back, this is your brain (egg), this is your brain on 'drugs' (but it's an anti-weed commercial) and the egg starts frying in a pan. They spent years trying to convince the very young and very old that weed==narcotics.
As I've gotten older I've realized almost everyone has some issue- addiction, drug use, over-indulgence of whatever, just seems some are hell bent on hiding it and pretending they don't.
Admittedly, I'm pretty far from that world, but I follow a bunch of NatSec folks on Twitter and Bradley Moss and Mark Zaid are specialist NatSec lawyers who represent many people denied clearances;
> since federal prosecution is blocked by law for state-legal use
Source for that? One would think the supremacy clause overrides any idea of state law.
> This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.
Seems pretty cut and dry to me that if its federally illegal its still illegal within the states. The only question is if the federal government really cares to enforce the law in states where a large population of the state is openly breaking the federal laws.
I think people are just upset because he is rich I noticed the amount of hatred for him seems to be directly correlated with how much money he has. If he didn't have money people would just see him as a memey nerd.
Ah, yes- behold all of the comments in this thread that have no critiques of Musk other than $!
And incidentally, yes- many poor people despise the rich, just as most rich people despise the poor.
Mamy are the critiques of Musk here, nowhere did I read it was because he's hoarding money.
Edit to add- rich people change laws and construction to benefit them, they can displace and ruin the lives of the poor with a thought. They have all the power and most of the money. They live in gated communities far out of sight of the working class. They literally have an embarrassment of riches while people die around them. There is a very good reason the affluent only live amongst each other in fancy gated communities.
People don't hate the rich because they are rich, it's because of the impact they have on the lives of those without means.
Nice, I love when people put words in my mouth, especially when I've been good enough to state my argument in good faith.
This very comment thread has people saying, among other things, that Musk oversteps on Twitter, bring up the SEC charges, bring up the twitter purchase, bring up his freedom of speech absolution, it goes on for days.
So you are either blind incapable of reading, or are a troll. Since you shoved words in my mouth and are still parroting 'bcuz rich', I'm going with the latter.
I never said you said anything? How is making baseless claims good faith?
> Musk oversteps on Twitter, bring up the SEC charges, bring up the twitter purchase, bring up his freedom of speech absolution
So people are upset with what Musk spends his riches on?
> They literally have an embarrassment of riches while people die around them.
Im willing to bet we are both living in a rich country with ruining water, electricity and plenty of food while little slave kids make our shoes. We are all embarrassingly rich in the context of the real world but I don't think the people upset with Musk are upset about this. I think they just see some one with more than them and get upset and then they use it as a scapegoat that only the richest man in the world has the power to free those little kids making your shoes, and that the rest of us are powerless to do anything but go along with it and keep buying the shoes made with child slavery.
I read your edit wrong. Turns out I was the one who couldn't read. I apologize sincerely.
To your points, stop inserting words into my mouth. Having those issues with musk is in no way an issue with his money. I happen to have both by the way, so this is a possibility as well.
I don't hate him for being rich, nor do the others whose salient points you so succinctly boiled down incorrectly again to 'bcuz rich'.
He has had many issues, and continues to do so. You can pretend it's simply because of his money but for myself I can at least assure you, that is the very least of the issues I have with Musk.
Pointing to poor people and saying there are poorer people in 3rd world countries is a poor argument.
I reiterate Musk has tons of money, sure. And that much wealth consolidation is an issue, to be sure. But that has no bearing on the many, many issues all over this thread people have with him.
Edit to add- your ninja edit and the reason I read your initial response wrong is because you removed the line about him being rich, and added right-wing- not cool.
Sorry Im not putting words in your mouth you just aren't reading me with as much good faith as you think.
You said:
> Edit to add- your ninja edit and the reason I read your initial response wrong is because you removed the line about him being rich, and added right-wing- not cool.
I said:
> The only criticism I have seen here of musk beside money is that hes right wing, not really a criticism.
He has money and is right wing, people who have money are rich. I never edited anything.
You haven't read anything I wrote you just make claims you are unwilling to substantiate and then when I quote you, you accuse me of putting words in your mouth.
> I really get the sense that people are increasingly getting sick of hearing from or about him. YMMV.
I'm just a rando on the internet so maybe not representative, but this uBlock snippet makes anything related to Twitter or Elon invisible on the Guardian front page. Definitely improved my QoL
I think the fame and power has gotten to him. Plus, he spends way too much of his time engaging with people on Twitter. I think his experience on that site has warped his view of the world. It's also amazing to me that someone in his shoes takes time to respond to randos replying to him.
If only he'd achieved something practical, like revolutionising reusable rocket technology, dominating the commercial satelite launch industry, or selling 75% of the electric cars in the US last year. He may be an arse, but he's a very successful arse that gets stuff done. Doesn't excuse him being an arse though.
Does Boeing and Lockheed Martin not have “actual engineers” and “actual factories”? Of course they do. Probably had more and better for most of SpaceX’s life.
They just can’t utilise what w have, because they have no vision beyond “cost-plus contracts”. That’s on management. That’s why Elon literally caused SpaceX and all/most their successes.
> giving people Elon fatigue is his politics.
> I really get the sense that people are increasingly getting sick of hearing from or about him. YMMV.
YMMV indeed, because every conservative I talk to is seeing him as a hero who is finally speaking truth to power, and calling B.S. on the establishment (political, corporate HR, academic) narratives that have been running through the culture.
They aren’t sick of him at all - they’re cheering him on.
Yes, he's chosen his politics to pitch to that crowd. That's why we're so sick of it, it's the same grift you can get from youtubers and talk radio stations.
Gosh that phenomenon is just so familiar, but I can't quite put my finger on it. There's definitely something in my memory regarding a no BS, celebrity businessman who rose to fame as a conservative demagogue. Ah, I'll think of it later I'm sure.
Well, absent a constitutional amendment, the highest level of office Musk can reach (I think) is Governor of a state or Representative (either House or Senate).
Does it matter? Go try and buy a Tesla and see how long the line is.
People are buying teslas and the immediately flipping them for $10k of profit to people who don't want to wait. The demand for teslas right now is insane.
And Teslas are pretty crappy cars from a quality of workmanship perspective.
After testing several different cars in a lab, I got the sense that the people at Tesla know a lot about how to integrate technologies, but only possess the bare minimum viable knowledge base about how to build a car. Whereas the people at Toyota know an insanely ridiculously huge amount about how to build a car, but are risk averse with integrating technologies.
I will say that was a purely technical analysis however. It didn't include things like how marketing might effect perception for instance.
Okay what’s your point? People love Tesla. They want the cars so much that they’ll pay huge amounts of money to get them and even more to get them quickly.
Sounds like Toyota is good at making cars people don’t want. What does that say about Toyota?
It says that being trendy can be very profitable in the short term, but being boring and reliable works out well in the long term.
Consider that well over half of all Teslas have to go in for service within the first month of ownership. For such an expensive car, that is not a good look. Look at how many ex-owners now say they'd never buy another and refuse to recommend them to friends. Go ask GM and Ford how hard it is to regain a reputation that you have squandered.
I enjoyed my P3D. Mostly. It went like stink, which is why I bought it. Lots of misfeatures, though, and still missing obvious features every other car has. I'm in the camp of "won't buy one again, unless something big changes, the competition is better." and we are growing quickly in number.
That isn't a great reason to dump Tesla. A good reason to dump Tesla is that Ford and Toyota are poised to run them out of business. Between the fires and the "autopilot" crash issues and price and production delays, Tesla will end up going the way of the Delorian.
WHen the NY Auto Show rolled around this year I went straight to the Toyota booth to try out the BZX4 (What a stupid name now that I think about it)
This car is the supposed Tesla killer. Take it from me, it is not. The interior is claustrophobic reminiscent of early Nissan Leaf. If you are 6'2 or taller, you are going to have a bad time. Its clear that center console was not tested by any tall person. There is nothing appealing about this car in my opinion other than the Toyota badge. It is ugly inside and out. It is neither a bog standard car(which a lot of people want) nor a stunning looking EV(which a lot of people want). It is the standard mismash OEMs have created int he past. They always make EVs "weird" when they don't have to be. Sure this car is going to sell out whatever limited production they can make because demand for EVs far outstrips supply but Tesla killer it will not be.
For Ford I wonder about their cost structure. The teardown of their EVs indicate that they are still implementing old school thinking from the ICE world that adds unneeded cost to the sticker price. This is uncompetitive with Tesla long term. They need to really reform the organization and fast so their next gen EVs do better.
The F150 is the best selling vehicle in America. American's want an F150 the way it is today. They don't care about gross margins and doing it the most efficient way. And if they can get that F150 with a battery that saves them "oodles" in gas money, but delivers an otherwise same experience, you can bet your ass they will pay for it.
The F150 has its supporters but others can take the steps to cut their costs and as a result, make the F150 a harder sell when you have everything else as equal. I strongly believe the current demand for Lightning is partially due to scarcity of choice.
Just to be fair here, I believe dumping the stock of a company whose leader is acting so inexplicably that one can no longer be certain of his/her rationality is the right thing to do. I always say, no matter how much you have, it's tactless to throw away money. (Probably the more money you have, the more tactless and tone deaf the act of throwing away money becomes.)
All that said, in this case, as you point out, there are multiple reasons to be dumping stocks of companies owned or influenced by this guy. At least until we have a better handle on what's going on. If nothing's wrong, we can always buy it back. But right now, very few of the market's concerns have much to do with politics. He's acting in an unpredictable manner just when the market appears to be entering a period of uncertainty. It may be because of his politics, but the market doesn't care about the why. Rational people are looking for some level of safety, stability and security at the moment. Unpredictable leaders who appear bent on market manipulation fly in the face of that.
Delorean sold about 7,000 cars, total, in its existence. Tesla sold about a million last year. Regardless of how you feel about Tesla, it's safe to say it's now a major, fast-growing auto maker that's not going away.
This is actually bad investment strategy. Warren Buffet once made a shit load of money because of this.
During a more conservative time... waaay back. A company was doing very well but the CEO had an affair. The public caught wind of the affair and the stock tanked, because people had your exact same philosophy. Those people cared about the behavior of the CEO while ignoring the metrics of the company. Warren Buffet looked at the fundamental performance of the company and saw that it was doing quite well, so he bought it at super low prices.
Eventually the stock price changed and began to reflect the fundamentals of the actual business as people forgot about the behavior of the CEO.
You shouldn't care about his erratic behavior. You should care about the business sector and the overall performance of the company.
A CEO having an affair is probably different than a CEO with a sizable control of votimg shares, appearing to be pretty impulsive in general in public.
The CEO with the affair could presumably be replaced if romantic fidelity is important to the company or if the relationship violated company policies, but if it doesn't affect their business choices, maybe it's not needed.
A CEO with strong control is a lot harder to replace, and fighting over replacing such a CEO is likely to happen in public and be a negative for the company. General impulsiveness is, IMHO, more likely to show up in business choices than romantic impulsiveness (if that's what was the basis for the affair), and business choices made for impulsive reasons at the very least increases volitility and may likely reduce expected value. If I'm investing in an established company, I think I want stability and rational choices, not volatility and impulsive choices. But then, I don't invest in individual companies, apart from stock based compensation.
Interesting point, I suppose the affair didn’t affect the bottom line of the company, but Musk trying to buy twitter and considering how strongly his company’s brands are tied to his personal one are not something to be ignored. I believe they have a tangible effect on the value of the company. So in this case his behavior should be considered.
It has a tangible effect on the short term value of the company. Just like the affair. People all tend to have short term thinking. The price of the stock drops because of behavior, this is real... but it is also opportunity. While you sell, I buy. You lose out.
The underlying performance of the company does not change based off of random tweets. If Tesla is good enough to take over the entire automobile industry even the CEO pulling off his pants walking around in public is a separate issue to actual performance.
Doesn't your example support his/her position though? Dump the stock now, wait till the price drops, buy at a reduced price ... profit! I know, timing the market and all that, but this seems like a sensible move now.
His shady practices around market manipulation are starting to catch up to him. He's facing lawsuits from shareholders for tanking his own stock prices. He slimes his way through every loophole.
I hear that cofounder thing about Tesla every now and then. Doesn't matter when the company was founded, if someone joined before the company finds its market fit, that person is legitimate to be called cofounder imo.
"On Monday, a Tesla representative said that Eberhard and other principals in the dispute have come to an agreement. The company did not reveal any details of the resolution, except to say that there are now five, rather than two, agreed-upon "founders" of Tesla.
In addition to Eberhard, other founders include current CEO and chief product architect Elon Musk, current chief technology JB Straubel, Marc Tarpenning, and Ian Wright."
Yeah, it's pretty sad. I think what happened is he "crossed the chasm" so to speak and became mainstream. He was famous for his work, which is super interesting and so he was appreciated by a subset of nerds. In the last year or two he bacame famous for his personality, which turned out to be "generic right-wing edge lord". Thing is, there's very few people who can talk in depth about rocket design or actually bring their wild schemes to life and he's one of them. On the other hand, there's a whole spectrum of thousands of celebrity right wing edge lords to choose from if that's your thing and there's absolutely nothing interesting or unique about his take on this.
Eh he comes off as a normal human being to me. Definitely quite awful, but that's also very normal.
The difference between Elon and others is that Elon doesn't put on as big of a facade.
There are CEO's who are psychopaths and are much worse then Elon but are much better at keeping their actual persona hidden.
Elon is just as awful as the next human being. We tend to have a higher set of expectations for people in Elons position. Very rarely does anyone actually meet these expectations. Most people just pretend to meet this expectation. Elon fails at both meeting the expectations and pretending to meet it.
> The difference between Elon and others is that Elon doesn't put on as big of a facade.
It is fascinating to me that you see Elon as not putting on a facade, rather than his public face constantly being a changing facade.
As far as I can tell, Elon has two modes: "engineering", which is where he's super awkward and, as far as I can tell, totally and completely honest, if optimistic on capabilities and timeframes, and "public", which is where he's totally erratic and populist.
His twitter persona is almost totally public. Nothing is serious, everything is flippant, and his opinions sway with the breeze, or on the basis of who he feels slighted him most recently.
This is a fallacy that really irks me. You can't even argue against a statement like that. If Person A acts like a decent human being it's because they're putting on a facade, if Person A acts like a dumpster fire it's because they're not putting on a facade.
Would you describe your inner circle of friends as "quite awful"? I really hope you wouldn't. I certainly don't. And I presume most people don't. So there must be sizable amount of human being that another sizable amount of human beings consider good humans. The CEO of the multi-billion dollar company I work for seems and acts like a normal (meaning decent, as opposed to your definition "quite awful") human being. Never goes on rants like Elon, quite worker-friendly, always there to chat, doesn't fire people on the spot because they can't answer a question that he only started verbalizing halfway though his stream of consciousness rants. And we compete in the same industry as Elon. Isn't trying to influence politics with his position on several dozens of matters that have nothing to do with out company. Also doesn't cultivate a cult following with himself as the head of the cult.
That's all that matters to me, if there no evidence of him being an awful human being, it would be downright unethical for me to assume that he is an awful human being hiding behind a facade.
Also: Before anyone hits me with the "Well your CEO isnt a visionary trying to get us to Mars". Well, yeah. I'd rather be stuck on Earth with him than live under whatever fantasy a sociopath is promising to unfold on Mars.
>Would you describe your inner circle of friends as "quite awful"? I really hope you wouldn't.
I would describe all humans including myself, my circle of friends and everyone I met to have an immense awful side that they cover up. Only when the media focuses on your every movement will these flaws be exposed.
I'm not a fan of Elon Musk. But unlike the people who hate him, I don't see anything abnormal other then failure to put on a facade. He's as inconsistent and emotional as any other human being.
Keep in mind. What he does, from his perspective appears justified and if you can rationalize from his perspective, you will be able to at least understand how it is justified. Very few people on this earth knowingly act out pure malice.
> I would describe all humans including myself, my circle of friends and everyone I met to have an immense awful side that they cover up.
I don't. Which is why I don't think this discussion will go anywhere. I would never in my life call anyone with an "immense awful side that they're trying to cover up" my friend.
It's discuss-able. Because it's not opinion. You can draw upon actual recorded events as evidence. This can go beyond anecdote (which still has a level of validity) and even into statistics if we dig deep enough. The trouble with your anecdotal experience is that the sample size comes from one country... a wealthy country as well.
When resources are plentiful things are different. When resources are scarce our base nature is exposed.
This is part of the reason why it's covered up. Even for yourself. You don't realize how awful you can get until you've lost everything.
You can analyze the psychology of a country like China where something like this:
is common place. What is the statistical likelihood for this to be an anomaly? Of two hit and run drivers running over a child AND every passerby just ignoring it? You can make a somewhat true statement here that most of the Chinese populace is quite awful. I would know, because I am one of them.
The fact that I am chinese myself, and I am calling MY own race/country quite awful shows you how dispassionate and logical my analysis is. It is very hard for someone to recognize the evil within their race, let alone themselves. This is how you know my answer lacks bias, which is very much different from your outlook.
But you must also ask yourself, what causes the Chinese to be like that?
It's because China was once a hard place to live. The mentality of harder times still pervades much of the populace. There was once a time in colonial america where the mentality was much the same thing. There are even parts of modern america, where you can see the same thing.
Go to places where resources are scarce and people are barely scraping buy. The projects, the ghettos. You will see evil in it's purest form. Evil is a biological base necessity because it is what humans must turn to in order to survive hard times.
Either way this is not an explanation for why Elon is "awful" but it is an explanation for how low humans can sink. For how much capability for being awful we have in our nature. Elon is well within these typical boundaries.
Cringe, yes, he may be. Conservative? Maybe in the opportunist sense. At most, I think he's much closer to being libertarian and would otherwise be left leaning if the mainstream left hadn't drifted so far left. Elon really wants people to get out of the way of his view of progress. Yes, I'm sure ego is a part of that, but when is it not with anyone? I'm not even sure what Elon would be conserving other than whatever ability he has to launch cars into space or dig pointless tunnels.
A better example of a "cringe conservative" would be the My Pillow guy or even Lindsay Graham. And many would of course say Trump.
There is no "far left drift" of the mainstream. Outside the gender craze which is real, the "far left drift" is an entirely made up talking point in the conservative war against basic institutions and freedoms.
For example, never in its history was the SCOTUS so conservative compared to the views of the general population. It used to be one of the most progressive actors in society, forcing race and gender equality judgments to a country where working wives and interracial couples were still a faux pass.
I dunno. I’ve lived in Los Angeles and worked for a few companies in CA where social justice was more important than the product. Also, people seemed to really like socialism despite working at a corporation.
> Grow a spine and push back against the illiberal left.
Utterly insane. Black is white, up is down. Multi-level, coordinated conspiracies orchestrated by the sitting President of the United States are the embodiment of liberal democracy.
To be honest, I kind of went the other way. I saw what republicans are really about and noped my way out. I used to believe them when they said they were USA first, bring the jobs back to America, stand up to foreign dictators, small government, etc... But the past 10 years have put a lie to their posturing on nearly every front. January 6th was a turning point for me, all of a sudden there was a chance that we were going to have a president sitting in office despite the end of his term. A man willing to start a civil war rather than concede a valid election.
The Republican I really respect at this point is Mike Pence. I used to think he was a theocrat idiot with mush for brains. But now I realize he's all that AND a brave and honest man who actually gives two shits about democracy.
Precisely why the two-party system is such an abomination. It boils down ALL politics to a binary system -- are you red, or are you blue? Both you and the previous commenter have completely valid reasoning for switching parties, based on separate issues. But the only method of communication with our democracy requires that you pick one of two awful choices. Sure, you could vote independent -- with the basket of issues that come with opting out of the two majority parties -- and primaries let you cut some of the least-aligned folks in your party from the ballot.
It's kind of like going to a restaurant and being forced to pick raw vs. burned beef, and there's a ton of different sides that come with each option that are nonconfigurable. And then critics constantly debate "raw vs. burned" in polls, and try to gain insight from that on whether people really prefer corn or salad or biscuits. But in reality there's just too much noise to generate any signal.
I feel like Adam Kinzinger talks a similar talk to you, if you're looking for more republicans you can respect (I'm not affiliated in any way, just came across him via twitter)
I can empathize, but my point was in regards to the accusation of being a “conservative” by just coming down in the other direction on the lesser-of-two evils calculus. Sane Americans are struggling with the fact that there are good arguments to be made that both political parties in the US presently present meaningful existential risk. There are several methods one could argue in how to tie break, purely in the interest in minimizing the risk of collapse, tyrannical overtake, or the development of a police state. From example, you may vote against the ruling class broadly, which is left-aligned, if you feel that the broader ruling class has power superiority over the narrow set of elected leaders at a given time. Under that framework, no tyrant can successfully seize power unless they are aligned with the ruling class.
There never really was a chance of that. There was nothing Trump could of done that day to make that happen. Even if the process would of been disrupted, it wouldn't of caused that.
Say that Mike Pence was killed on Jan. 6th before he could certify the election. Now you have an election with no result which leads to the first succession crisis since the post-civil war era with Hayes. Trump appoints a new Vice President which says that he won and refuses to certify the election. When the senate almost certainly gets bogged down trying to elect a new president we are stuck. Now what? Does Trump remain president? It wasn't even a close election, so they can't manipulate the votes any further in his favor.
At that point we have a ticking time bomb. At the end of his term is Trump still the president? Or are we a country without a president? When that happens, if Trump stays in the White House and acts like a president, what then? Would the republican filled Supreme Court back his play? Would the military follow him? Who would oppose him? Would the secret service still protect him? What happens if some states recognize him as president, but others do not?
That's a lot of what ifs. While technically possible, none seem plausible. Many of those things could of happened outside of the riots as well (Pence dies). It's kind of pointless speculation. I don't think Pence had a serious chance of being killed that day, even if they did get in close proximity. That's just my opinion.
Where has the left gone off the deep end other than in Tucker's lunatic and manipulative ravings? Please give us concrete examples, yes woke politics might have gone overboard for many's tastes but where has that had any real impact on day to day life? In the mean time the right has gone full throttle on an anti-democracy cult following of a single person's unproven and clearly false claims of election fraud, and taken the country on a very dark path that is in direct opposition to our constitution, the rule of law and our way of life.
Look at any time series on polling regarding political hatred - the left has been largely ineffectual at enacting crazy policy, but the demonization and willingness to punish people for views that are well within the Overton window of public opinion has increased dramatically in recent years, eg. adopting and defending the views of Barack Obama on gay marriage in 2012 will lead to your swiftly being deplatformed from Twitter, Reddit, etc. This impacts my day to day life in the sense that I am no longer able to express many reasonable, non-hateful views in many parts of the internet being censored and putting my livelihood at risk. If you think that this isn't really an impediment that I should care about, then I don't see how you could lament these SpaceX employees being unable to publicly excoriate their bosses without consequence.
For many of us, seeing what happened to people like James Damore was a turning point that something had deeply changed in the political culture.
So one issue I see here is that you are against gay marriage?
This isn't "the left" it's "the US" that had a change of view. The poll numbers are through the roof. And when it's such a personal thing with the very families that are our friends, it's not hard to see why gay marriage is so popular. That you feel "hated" by others for rejecting their friends families is a weird way to put it.
Obama was a centrist for his time, and often times after society opens up to more people it's hard to go back to closing it off to our new members.
As for James Damore, somebody disparaging their colleagues, publicly, and not even their leader for specific actions, but an entire gender, based on bad reading of biology... do you have similar sympathy for the people fired here, or it only when somebody is expressing beliefs that are hurtful to those not at the top?
Gay marriage was a major shift in culture, but bad sexism has been out of vogue for decades, even if overall sexism hasn't decreased a huge amount.
I have all sorts of politically unacceptable views that I don't share. But I don't play the victim for being "hated" just because I don't get my way.
I'm not against gay marriage. I'm using it as an example.
But you're really illustrating my point here, by arguing not that there hasn't been a shift but that the growing hatred and intolerance is in fact a good thing. I feel like this is a more honest position than pretending that prevailing attitudes haven't shifted.
As a personal example, last week I had a comment deleted on Reddit for being "hatred" because I described drag as a form of kink. Maybe I'm wrong on this, but this kind of banal censorship has become a regular experience for anyone who offers any sort of resistance to woke narratives. If you think this is a good change, then I disagree but at least acknowledging that there's been a change puts us in the same reality.
I've had comments incorrectly deleted in Reddit but I didn't think of it as political persecution.
Same on Twitter. A lot.
And if it were political persecution, which it very well could be, Reddit is moderated by absolute randoms from the internet. Starting new subreddits and moderating to one's one preferences is very literal free speech.
>I've had comments incorrectly deleted in Reddit but I didn't think of it as political persecution.
Please. We know that this isn't considered as "incorrect" by the people doing the deleting, and that a well-reasoned appeal would be productive. This isn't happening due to simple randomness, as basically anyone who pushes back against woke narratives will attest - for example, openly endorsing JK Rowling's views on gender will get you banned from most of Reddit and quite possibly fired from your job if you do it under your real name on Twitter. This wouldn't have happened 10 years ago.
Again, you're free to say that this is a good change, or just wave all this concerns away with pithy slogans like "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", but I'm just trying to establish that there's been a shift on the left and it seems like you don't disagree with this.
This has been my experience too, and it's very frustrating for those of us who have long held left-wing beliefs but are skeptical of these recent social trends. The obsessive focus on identity issues almost seems like a deliberate distraction from the larger societal concerns regarding the cost of living, housing, employment rights, environmental catastrophe, and similar.
I feel that social media companies are largely to blame here, with the impact of their efforts to increase engagement metrics at the expense of users' wellbeing. We all have a perpetually-available outrage machine in our pockets these days, encouraging us all to react with emotion rather than be considered and thoughtful.
Regarding your example of gender views, the other reason why this wouldn't have happened 10 years ago is that hardly anyone believed that stuff. JK Rowling's opinions would have been met with a shrug. But there has since been a concerted effort to capture the minds of the younger generations at an age where they're unlikely to see the inherent contradictions in this ideology.
> And when it's such a personal thing with the very families that are our friends, it's not hard to see why gay marriage is so popular. That you feel "hated" by others for rejecting their friends families is a weird way to put it.
I voted "Yes" in Australia's 2017 same-sex marriage plebiscite, and if they repeated the plebiscite again today, I'd still vote the same way. And yet, I feel like there is a problem here. It is a complex question, and I don't think it necessarily has a simple answer, but a lot of people treat it as a simple binary "Yes"-vs-"No", with only one answer to that binary being socially acceptable. And even in pointing that out publicly, I feel a certain degree of anxiety – should I? I don't think it is all in my (admittedly rather prone to anxiety anyway) head, there are external cultural forces contributing to it, and I think it is fair to question those forces.
To give just one example of the many complexities I see: I compare my own country of Australia to the US, and although both arrived at roughly the same destination (legal same-sex marriage nationwide), they arrived at it by very different routes. In Australia, federal legislation, in-principle pre-approved by the voters in a (non-legally-binding) nationwide plebiscite – as such not constitutionally entrenched, but anything approved in a nation-wide plebiscite (even a non-legally-binding one), is politically impossible to repeal without having another plebiscite to approve that repeal. And it was mostly a symbolic measure, since (nationwide) Australian law already gave unmarried couples in long-term relationships (de facto relationships as we call them), whether opposite-sex or same-sex, 99.9% of the rights of legally married couples. (I won't deny the missing 0.1% causes real practical problems for some people, but that is the experience of a relatively small minority, and there is no reason in principle why those problems could not be solved with further legal or bureaucratic reforms).
In the US, a 5-4 Supreme Court decision (Obergefell v. Hodges), based on highly contested principles of constitutional interpretation, which the current Supreme Court majority does not share – and, given they are likely to soon overturn a famous decision based on a similar style of legal reasoning (Roe v. Wade), you have to wonder how long Obergefell will last. The whole situation seems to support the idea that social reforms are better achieved through the democratic process than through the fickleness of judicial decisions–a viewpoint which in the US is often labelled as "conservative" or "right-wing", but not so in much of the rest of the world. Indeed, what in the US is seen as "conservative jurisprudence", in many other countries (Australia included) is just the mainstream consensus approach to constitutional law, to which few would attach political labels such as "conservative".
And, at the same time, that has happened against the background that unmarried couples (whether same-sex or opposite-sex) in the US still lack most of the legal rights and protections granted the legally married–an unfairness which few in the US seem to care much about, even on the Left–and which made the legalisation of same-sex marriage a change of far greater practical consequence in the US than it was in Australia. Couldn't this issue have been used as a vehicle to try to address that unfairness? Well, I think it could have, but my impression is that most marriage equality activists in the US didn't want to try, because they saw it as a distraction from their ultimate goal. A squandered opportunity?
I don't think it is unreasonable for a person to look at the two situations, and think the way the US has gone about addressing this issue leaves much to be desired, when compared to what certain other countries have done–I'm sure Australia is not the only country which has arguably done better than the US has–and those deficiencies in the way in which the reform was achieved in the US are a potential threat to its long-term durability there. But, that kind of nuanced conversation is rather alien to the "either-you-are-with-us-or-you-are-against-us" attitude to this topic which many people seem to have.
I hate to dove into another country politics on the open internet. But I’ll bite as simile things are happening in canada which ended up with Ontario conservatives dominating the provincial election.
The left needs to pay attention to every day issues. It’s not that the right has answers but they have acknowledged these issues as being the main issues. For instance, it should be absolutely not shocking to anyone that inflation has happened and is a direct result of our fiscal policies. Well, some did not seem to be concerned about printing money to buy bonds to fund record deficits which actually paid people and companies to reduce productivity and output. Surprise! School closures are another huge issue. Most of us with children saw the massive harms from keeping them home. It was absolutely devastating! I could go on. The left NDP party of Ontario admitted they focused too much on the chatter-class (Reddit, Twitter, journalists, etc) and not the working class
Except that it's a flawed democracy in that you only seem to have two choices, with people often choosing the lesser evil, or deciding not to vote anyway because it doesn't matter.
"the left" and "the right", or "the democrats" and "the republicans" in essence, is too wide a net. "The left go off the deep end" is also, when you look into it, a fairly small percentage of the wider population.
But it feels like people are pushed to the fringes, because the Other Side is being pushed to the fringes. There's just, from the perspective of an outsider, a lot of antagonism between the two "sides".
And that antagonism is being fueled by someone. There's people with a lot of money and / or special interests who benefit off of the infighting and polarisation.
For a broad range of voter preference classes, two-party systems are an expected result of majority voting. It's the best way to get the issues you care most about handled while hopefully not inflicting too much harm in all the other less important points that also get brought in. To fix that you need to change people's relative preferences or adopt an alternative voting scheme.
Politicians have no accountability. In 2024 Biden will take zero responsibility for inflation and the economy and spend all his time talking about how Republicans are racist.
And Republicans will take zero responsibility for Trump and Jan 6th and spend all their time talking about how Democrats want to force your children to be trans.
In the end no one has any responsibility to do anything to actually make the country better. If Musk could start a moderate party that took responsibility for results I would be on board.
No party is going to solve the problems the US chooses to occupy itself with currently. They are too complex. The right move is to just pick simpler problems.
There is an upper limit to what level of complexity any group can handle.
But Americans have been told the upper limit doesn't exist so often and for so long that they are learning the hard way where the limit lies.
I'm not American, and definetely not an expert on your politics, but like many other digital native Europeans hold pretty strong opinions on them anyway. I would honestly like to learn what in your opinion the actions of the Democrats are that lead to you sliding into second tier. From my perspective most of the blame would have to be put on Republicans.
It's not quite that easy, to be honest. And here's where I lose my audience...
We have two very pro corporate parties, that are pro military, one who is right and one who is center right, if you look at actual policy and spending. The main difference is on abortion legislation, gay rights, gun legislation (sort of... and that depends on the Democrat), and to an even lesser extent some tax policies, but with political funding how it is, no parties really bite the hand that feed them so 95% of tax policy is talk and "trickle down economic policy" is entrenched, much to the detriment of our country.
Most of the substantial difference is talking points and bluster, it pains me to say. Even gay rights is pretty new to the table... that didn't come about until Hillary Clinton ran against Trump, when she finally changed her position on gay marriage (though I think she was one of the last major hold outs).
The major problem with our American system of politics is the two party stranglehold that has been imposed upon and that those two parties have made nearly impossible to rid ourselves of. It's one of the things (other than war profiteering and insider trading) they vehemently agree on.
Thanks for the reply! Regarding corporate lobbying there seems to be a small relatively powerless group within the Democrats that are strongly against it, and I guess parts of the so-called alt-right fall into this category, too, but I agree that the core of both parties is strongly pro-corporate in a way that is anti-democratic. I'm re-reading a great book currently called "Why nations Fail", and looking at the US through their lense is super interesting.
The main thesis of the book is that the success or failure of nations is predicated on institutions working in a predictable way and guruanteeing broad and equal access to these institutions and the economy at large. The US was better than other countries at this for most of its existence (despite the horrible "exclusion" of non-whites and women). Today, the US seems to be slipping, and while I do agree that the Democrats aren't innocent on this either, and things like insider trading, corporate lobbying and political nepotism apply strongly to both parties, the Republicans always seem to be a bit worse (or have worse marketing).
Only having two choices in party certainly makes this way worse, but there's also the constant challenging of political norms that I would think mostly comes from the Republican side. (Although Obama was the first president to largely rule by EO, which itself is a pretty major breach of convention, and an attack on the democratic instituions)
I’ve disconnected myself from the contemporary political back and forth, but my outsider take is that it rather seems like the US left has… mostly accomplished little? What sweeping changes or policy platforms have them ‘off the deep end’?
They don’t have an answer because the modern democrats are the basically republicans of the 90s leaving the GOP with only a lot of complaining and projection as well as anti government theater.
It’s sort of a joke but it’s more sad. I used to vote Republican and I would again if anyone there was even half willing to be more considerate and rational.
Just so we’re clear, you replied to this person 10 min after their comment posted. You’ve already passed judgment before giving the OP a chance to respond. Discussions here happen over days not minutes. This isn’t a telegram chat. Your comment is in incredibly poor taste.
This is largely true. The US’s political left gained a ton of traction behind Bernie Sanders. As we know his campaign went nowhere (twice). There are a handful of progressive candidates winning some primaries, but this is abysmal in the larger context. For every progressive that succeeds there is another progressive that fails (see e.g. Nina Turner in Ohio and Jessica Cisneros in Texas). And for every attempt there are 10 non-attempts. And we are even seeing equally many conservative democrats that honestly should belong in the Republican party in the national and state legislators.
Outside of partisan politics the left is seeing some more successes, that is in the broader culture war. This includes broader acceptance of LGBTQ+ rights, calls for immigration reforms, calls for reprimands for centuries of slavery, etc. However these successes are not making their way to the legislator by a long shot, and quite often to the contrary (see e.g. reversal of Roe v. Wade).
And I say this firmly from the left wing of the political spectrum.
The far left has been entirely captured by the illiberal (really, anti-liberal) sociopolitical frameworks of Critical Theory, and this has now fully been integrated into most modern day institutions by the ruling class, such as universities, corporations, etc. This is backwards looking, it’s already happened. Before I can vote for the left again (which I used to) I need to see them explicitly reject many of the principles behind Critical Theory.
Can you elaborate? How is critical theory affecting the policy advocated by left wing political candidates? Which left wing ideology did they promote previously which you could vote for, but are unable to now because of which specific policy? Can you give me an example of critical theory expressed by the left wing candidates in your elective district? And why these examples in particular make it so that you can’t vote for them?
Leaving aside the inherent bias of asking the general public whether they support a vague and/or nuanced issue, and also leaving aside these extremely narrow cherry picked issues. Where did you get the data showing that Americans do not support this?
>The poll—which surveyed 1,503 people across the country between May 4 through 17—found 55% of Americans don’t believe transgender women and girls should be allowed to compete in high school sports.
>Almost 60% of those surveyed were opposed to transgender women and girls’ participation in college and professional sports.
>Americans were less likely to oppose transgender women and girls’ participation in youth sports, with about a third of those surveyed saying transgender women and girls should be allowed to compete, while 17% said they did not have an opinion.
>According to the poll, roughly two-thirds of Republicans now believe “parents should be allowed to sue school districts if teachers discuss sexual orientation [70%] or gender identity [66%] when teaching children in kindergarten through grade three.” Independents agree (46% and 47% percent, respectively) more often than not (34% and 36%). And a significant minority of Democrats concur as well (25%, 22%) or aren’t sure (16%, 17%).
And keep in mind that is not people who have read the bill, so they could be basing it on the name.
>When registered voters were shown the actual language of the bill, which prohibits age or developmentally inappropriate sexual education in pre-K through third grade, they supported it by more than a two-to-one margin.
>Overall, 61 percent of voters supported the text of the bill. Just 26 percent were opposed.
I did some vetting on these opinion polls. Your first two seem legitimate. Although I hope you keep in mind the wording of the questions here and the varying levels of nuance that people put into before they answer on a 5 point likert scale. For example the “don’t say gay” bill opinion poll by youGov is not asking about support for the bill, but rather if they should be allowed to sue school districts under certain conditions. You might be in full opposition to the bill in question but still feel like you should always have the right to sue. This is like three levels down from the main focus of the poll and the respondents will read differently into the question, with nuance which doesn’t translate into a 5 point likert scale.
Now for your third poll, it was conducted by Public Opinion Strategies which is a republican pollster. The news source you gave me was written by Amber Athey, a senior fellow of the Steamboat Institute, which is a conservative think tanks that promotes American Exceptionalism and other nationalistic conservative values. I personally don’t put much faith in polls such as these.
Now this is all aside from the fact that these are cherry picked examples. This is hardly proof that “The left is being decimated on the trans and sexual related issue”.
Wow. Just wow. The "radical" US left equals the conservative right in many European countries. While you certainly may think Europe is full of "second tier countries", I think it's time to broaden your horizons. If anything the problem is they are ineffective and are poor at keeping file and rank compared to the GOP. The GOP on the other-hand tries to drive the US towards a ultra-conservative future, erasing the separation of church and state.
This may have been true sixty years ago, but certainly not today. The conservative right in European countries is turning hard-nationalist in response to massive net immigration. Simply look to the campaigns of Zemmour and Le Pen in France or Orban in Hungary.
I don't follow their platforms, but in Europe one can still expect conservative parties to believe that people should have public goods like healthcare and childcare and education and retirement as basic human rights, that dignity is something we deserve, that a job should mean something more than wage slavery and that the average citizen shouldn’t die in debt. Who they define as persons or citizens is up for discussion on the right, but measured on this other corporate-capitalist scale of being "right", the Democrats are off the scale in European terms.
Yes, that's all true, but that does not support the claim that the "American radical left is the European conservative right". In some ways, some of the demands of the American radical left mimic some of the expectations of European right-wing platforms, but the American radical left would still be identifiably left-wing in Europe, mostly due to their positions on immigration, regulation, sociology, and taxation.
The follow-up question to demonstrate this point would be "would an American who identifies as radically left-leaning join a European conservative right-wing party if they moved to Europe?"
I think the claim here that: “The "radical" US left equals the conservative right in many European countries” is a bit of an exaggeration. A more accurate statement (and probably what OP meant; albeit less inflammatory) would be something like: “Moderate and conservative (i.e. mainstream) Democrats in America closely resemble the conservative right wing parties in Europe”. And I think this is largely true. Biden is in many ways to the right of Macron even though Macron is in the center-right of the political spectrum. While Bernie Sanders (the most left wing the US could possibly hope for) really only approaches the center-left Olaf Scholz.
This isn’t that true today, the US far left is solidly left nowadays by European standards, and Europe had a far right that isn’t too distant from the US
The far left in the US is materially different than the classical understanding of the far left. The far left in the US is now primarily concerned with pushing the goals of Critial Theory (a cultural neo-Marxist ideology, to oversimplify) as supposed to the goals of traditional big S Socialist or Marxist economics and workers party goals. This slow dialectical evolution of the left in the US has led to a lot of confusion regarding how it can be possible for people to be arguing the left in the US is not just extreme but increasingly radicalized when it rejected democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. It's because the revolutionary tilt of the left has moved away from overturning economic class and systems of capitalism through labor organization, at least as the primary lever to push on.
Oh my god the Patterson bullshit. Please mate, stop the cap. Bernie Sanders is the furthest 'left' in the US and man wants free education and healthcare which are the status quo in every other developed country.
Cultural Marxism is not a thing, please educate yourself beyond the videos of the lobster psychologist. You claim the left is 'radicalized' in a right-wing country where the right-wing party literally tried to undermine democracy through an insurrection less then a year ago...
My bad, he's the most egregious offender of that BS in the media space. What I'm getting at here is that the US has no true left. Your workers are exploited and healthcare/education/life costs are making it so that jumping over the poverty line is getting so hard you might as well live in a third world country.
And somehow the narrative is about the non-existent 'radicalized left' doing stuff and cultural Marxists trying to change our pronouns. It just feels sad to hear.
Bernie Sanders wants a lot more than that and would be left by European views as well, and yeah the left has become radicalized just like the right has, this is all non-controversial
No he's not. You do realize free healthcare, education and social security is the DEFAULT in Europe. Even in conservative countries. That's far from 'far left'.
The left in the US is to the left of Europe now in many ways. By second tier I wasn’t referring to politics, but referring to our collapse into a weak economic and cultural power.
A slide into a second tier country? I lament the difficulty I have in understanding how one to come to this belief after the last 10 years. It's like we don't even share the same facts anymore.
Guy here who also got pushed into the arms of the right based on what the left has been doing. Interesting that you think going in this direction apparently merits some kind of emergency introspection while going in the other direction doesn’t. People want different things out of life.
What has "the left" done that pushed you away to support a part that says LGBTQ people should be able to get married, that their version of the Christian god deserves special protections in law, etc? Those are explicate positions documented in the GOP platform that members of the GOP are required to support.
Since you seem to agree with the user above, can you give any concrete examples of how the left "went off the deep end" or just explain what you take issue with the left doing?
I am particularly curious about politicians and their actions, rather than woke twitter users, since we are discussing who we vote for. Please do mention if wokeness is your main complaint with the left, as it seems to be the case for many conservatives I know, but I felt the need to mention I don't believe wokeness is actually relevant amongst politicians.
As far as I can tell, left leaning politicians have not gone off the deep end in any objective sense. Their voting patterns seem to be mostly centrist/conservatives leaning and have remained that way for some time.
Without concrete examples, it is really hard to accept "people want different things" as an explanation for statements that I would consider to be outright false. So I ask in hopes that I might understand the opposing perspective on this.
In 2019, Democrats in Virginia tried to pass a bill that would allow abortion at the point of birth. Long past viability, basically just unnecessarily killing the baby.
I'm not a conservative, but I respect conservative values such as the rule of law. I will grant you that the populist wing of the Republican party in no way reflects conservative values.
> There are a lot of people who have seen the left in the US go off the deep end
As crazy as the left in the U.S. might be, it's genuinely hard to beat the craziness of e.g. suggesting that injecting bleach is a legitimate COVID-19 treatment, or shameful pandering to anti-masks, anti-vaccination sentiment.
People who spend too much time on twitter think they have seen the left go off the deep end. But what insane policy has actually occurred? Biden isn't off the deep end. Meanwhile the right has actually passed laws to tear apart families with trans kids, have actually passed laws to turn citizens into vigilantes to track down women having abortions, have actually tried to stage an insurrection, have actually put dishonest supreme court justices on the bench. But the left has gone off the deep end because there exist unhinged radical leftists on twitter saying crazy things.
Left intellectuals have gone off the deep end, sure, but the actual left politicians in power are solidly centrist.
Meanwhile Trump.... The Republican party isn't just off the deep end, they're a genuine danger to democracy globally. As the US goes, many other countries follow and as a Brit, and conservative one that grew up in the Thatcher/Reagan heyday at that, I dread the thought of another Trump presidency. I'll never forgive the Republican party for putting us through that the first time. Thank all the gods and angels the Russian invasion of Ukraine happened under Biden, he may be a bumbler but at least he's not an out-and-out traitor to democracy and the national security of his country.
I see this kind of comment a lot and it's bizarre to me. It echoes Elon's own views [1]. It's bizarre because it shows just how normalized right-wing views are in the US. Some highlights:
1. There are like 4 progressive members of Congress. Compare this to how many Republicans openly support QAnon conspiracies and other right-wing positions;
2. Anywhere else in the world, the Democrats would be a center-right party;
3. The Democratic Party actually hates progressives and goes out of its way to rid the party of them. Look at the hit job on Bernie Sanders in 2016. Look at the recent primary in the Texas-28 where Nancy Pelosi and Clyburn went to campaign for Henry Cuellar, who is pro-gun and the only anti-choice Democrat remaining in the House over Cisneros, an actual progressive;
4. Based on leaks there's a high likelihood the Supreme Court will overturn Roe v. Wade, pushing back 50 years of progress;
5. IN 2008 (in Heller) the Supreme Court for the first time recognized the Second Amendment as an individual right;
6. The Roberts Supreme Court also decided money is speech, which has openeed the floodgates for primarily conservative PACs;
7. The same court gutted the Civil Rights Act in terms of voter protection, which has led to a wave of anti-voter measures in red states;
8. Primarily red state has gerrymandered the hell out of states. For example, in Wisconsin, the GOP holds a super-majority despite getting 10% less of the vote;
9. Despite numerous incidents of easy access to firearms leading to the mass murder of school children multiple times there is not (and will not be) any meaningful restriction on access to mass murder machines (aka assault rifles);
10. Obamacare, pretty much the only lasting achievement of the Obama era, has largely been gutted;
11. Trump's tax cuts despite a Democrat in the White House and Democratic control of the House and Senate remain largely in place; and
12. As soon as the Supreme Court overturns Roe v. Wade, they'll probably next come for gay marriage.
This is just off the top of my head. So how exactly has the left gone off the "deep end" exactly?
There's really only been progress on two issues:
1. Gay marriage was legalized (but, as noted, that's at risk of being reversed); and
2. There have been advancements in trans rights.
This I think is the crux of the matter when people talk about the "far left". They really mean they hate trans people and want them to go away.
Conservatives are sore winners but great propagandists as evidenced by the fact that this myth that conservatives are "losing" perpetuates at all.
They never have any examples to back their claim. But the message is always the same: the left has gone too far. Its clearly more important to get that out then it is to defend it with logic, probably because of the truthiness of the statement.
I would wager good money that in many cases these "I was left wing, but the insane Left pushed me to the GOP!" posters were never, in fact, left wing and are instead trying to spread a particular message. See also the "walk away" hashtag that was pushed in the lead up to 2020.
I agree with your points, but I think you're painting with too broad of a brush with:
> They really mean they hate trans people and want them to go away.
It is certainly an issue; viz various bathroom panics over the last decade. But, at least in the tech sphere, most of the fear I've seen comes from Twitter BS and hate. There are vocal people who want to use "wokeness" as a tool to attack people. I can see how it would be easy to conflate those kinds of attacks with progressivism for people who are predisposed against progressivism from the start.
I'm not sure about that. The right is returning to a more traditional conservatism. The right used to support tariffs, using the government to push their agenda, more of a small tent party, nationalist, etc. The small government conservative, neoconservative, globalist, and big tent ideologies are new (for conservatives) and being rejected. I don't think returning to your roots is "bonkers".
Is your post implying being conservative is inherently bad? It seems like that’s the unspoken crux of your argument - ie you actually have an issue with a “conservative” (I hesitate to label musk as one) winning the culture war. Conservatives make the same argument about “don’t be political” when liberals are winning.
I’m mostly in agreement with what you said, but I don’t think your reasons are coming from a principled place.
For me the weak point in that post is using the phrase "coming out and supporting Desantis" to refer to Elon Musk responding to the questions of if he'd be voting republican ("tbd"), and who he's "leaning towards" ("DeSantis").
That said I think it's a horrible look and DeSantis's response to the matter is one of the most tasteless and tone-deaf things I've heard from him all week.
I'm neither suggesting that supporting a republican is a horrible look nor that being conservative is bad. Please be careful not to derail this into partisanship.
> A lot of people (myself included) really respect SpaceX and I think that's the last pillar on which Elon's reputation stands. Tesla honestly isn't that interesting and there's a real chance it gets eaten alive as other car manufacturers have caught up.
Build quality wise? Definitely, Tesla has a lot of issues there which the established industry has ironed out and perfected over the last hundred years.
Other problems? No way in hell the others can catch up. The old guard of automotive manufacturers simply is too stuck in their old ways - they have to manage the expectations of dealerships (as the only service most electric cars need is brake pad changes and Teslas are sold online, their existence is threatened) and suppliers (your average ICE alone takes something around 1000-2000 distinct parts, whereas electric cars need far fewer for the drivetrain), and no automotive manufacturer has anything resembling a history with developing modern software and it shows everywhere.
You bring up a good point, but I think old school car manufacturers don't believe that directly competing with Tesla is the winning move. If they're smart, I think they'll go for affordability, which is an utterly failed promise of Tesla. Bring down the price of full-electrics and plug-in hybrids, and you've got an audience of buyers that Tesla never took seriously. I for one would love an electric vehicle but in the year 2022 it's still not economical for me to trade in my beater car for even a used plug-in hybrid.
When there's a recession, no one's going to give a shit about a car with a bunch of bells and whistles. They want a car that they can afford to buy and afford to drive. In any case, that's what I want.
You need experience though to bring batteries down to affordable prices - both for yield improvements and for actually figuring out stuff like "how to construct a BMS that keeps batteries somewhat alive?"... Tesla has had well over a decade to fine-tune their entire stack, the only one who can match them in experience is Toyota with the Prius lineup. The second-next is BMW, but the i8 is a niche model for rich show-offs and the i3 is a toy - and BMW hasn't been associated with "affordability" in many decades.
The car manufacturers that are associated with attributes like "affordability" don't have much experience with electric vehicles, so they will have to buy that experience or do it the same way Tesla did, which means they will need a decade.
I don't think experience has that much to do with affordability. Tesla might assemble their batteries at their factory, but the actual lithium ion cells are manufactured by Panasonic, was well as supporting electronics. There's nothing magical or mysterious about the Tesla EV powertrain. Affordability is going to come down to necessity, demand (related to necessity), and how cheap a plentiful number of li-ion batteries can be made.
How much experience do you think is required? Other companies like Chevy, Chrysler, Hyundai, and Ford already have semi-electric vehicles for sale today. They don't all need to be successes. It can take just one of them to come out with an affordable electric vehicle when the economics are right, and sticking to plug-in hybrids gives them plenty of time to get experience.
As I understand it, there are other computer-controlled cars which are notable further along than Tesla. For example, Mercedes is will to take legal responsiblity for their system, while Tesla isn't.
This kind of claims are used also as PR stunt and to assure a "monopoly" over post-sale period. Any repair or maintenance out of Mercedes and I assume that the legal responsibility would vanish. In the past car owners were asked for extra guarantee for a minor increase in the price. Now they probably aren't being asked and is silently included in the overprice.
Yeah, I stopped reading at the assertion that other car companies have caught up to Tesla.
Lots of people have not internalized what's going on at Tesla. They still seem to be stuck on the idea that when the large, experienced auto manufacturers start really ramping up EVs, Tesla will be swamped.
What seems to have gone unnoticed is that Tesla has significantly higher margins per vehicle than all other major automakers, including Toyota. Tesla is years ahead on batteries. While the rest of the industry is fighting over a limited supply of third-party batteries, Tesla is buying nickel directly from Vale, for their own batteries, in their own form factor, with their own chemistry.
Tesla is beating the established automakers on scale and profit margins.
OTA Updates? Rapid iteration cycle? Supercharger network? Doubling factories every few years?
Tesla has lots and lots of problems, from servicing, to pricing, to build quality, to various ethical issues. But they're years ahead on EVs.
> Tesla has significantly higher margins per vehicle than all other major automakers, including Toyota.
I feel like this is because they charge BMW prices for less than Honda quality, especially with the Model 3. Maybe they can keep this up, but we’ll see. Tesla tech is certainly better than most if not all and is a huge selling point.
A lot of people (myself included) really respect SpaceX and I think that's the last pillar on which Elon's reputation stands. Tesla honestly isn't that interesting and there's a real chance it gets eaten alive as other car manufacturers have caught up. The Cybertruck is still vaporware whereas the F150 Lightning is real and, from what I've seen at least, very highly regarded.
What I think is finally giving people Elon fatigue is his politics. The Twitter acquisition is deeply tied to that. He's just another rich cringe conservative. That's it. Coming out and supporting DeSantis, for example, should surprise literally no one.
He has a very thin skin (remember the whole "pedo guy" incident?), inflates his own accomplishments (eg claiming he founded Tesla) and honestly just comes off (now more than ever) as just an awful human being.
Stories I've heard seem to reflect that SpaceX and Tesla aren't great places to work (at least compared to big tech companies).
I really get the sense that people are increasingly getting sick of hearing from or about him. YMMV.