5 Responses to “The last few days”

• #1

  Blood Knight in Sour Armor

  November 18, 2023 at 9:14 am

  To a certain extent the whole Twitter/Musk saga has a whiff of the super villain origin story to it… take an entitled autistic fool with more money and influence than common sense who buys a company to escape criticism from its customers, then have him capriciously run it into the ground in a reactive way all while every critic is interpreting every action in the worst possible light (which is usually what society does to autistic people), and it snowballs from there… Treat people like a villain and more often than not they’ll become one, regardless of their prior state.

  That defense being put out there, he’s not and never has been a dedicated defender of free speech (though he may be sufficiently self-deluded to think so), it’s all arbitrary. He was vaguely left of center libertarian-ish and generally culturally progressive the way tech guys tend to be, now he’s probably just going to chase the rabbit towards “friendly” people no matter how repugnant because that’s how people can be.
• #2

  Sackbut

  November 18, 2023 at 12:25 pm

  He was vaguely left of center libertarian-ish and generally culturally progressive the way tech guys tend to be

  I remember a newspaper essay a friend shared with me in the late 1980s. It was written by a woman in high tech who was politically liberal. She found that many of her male colleagues agreed with her views on certain key topics but not others; she didn’t understand being this kind of combination of what she saw as liberal and conservative.

  Cue her introduction to libertarian views. She described the concepts, and floated some ideas about why it seemed so common among men in high tech. It was an illuminating essay.

  I hadn’t heard of libertarian views before, but I had noticed some of the same things the author mentioned. Four decades on, it seems perhaps more pronounced, and there are many good articles on the topic, but it has been a phenomenon for quite a while, apparently.
• #3

  Coel

  November 19, 2023 at 12:49 am

  @Blood Knight:

  Treat people like a villain and more often than not they’ll become one, regardless of their prior state.

  I think there’s a lot in what you say. If “the left” want Musk as their enemy then they’re going about it the right way.

  Though why they think it’s in their interests to alienate a highly influential person who previously voted Obama, Clinton and Biden rather beats me.

  As for Musk, those who know him say that a large part of his alienation from all things “woke” is his 19-yr-old son Xavier/Vivian going uber-woke, turning trans, IDing as a girl, disowning Elon and cutting off contact.
• #4

  Coel

  November 19, 2023 at 1:03 am

  And replying to my own remark:

  Though why they think it’s in their interests to alienate a highly influential person who previously voted Obama, Clinton and Biden rather beats me.

  Of course they’re also trying hard to alienate vast swathes of women who believe in sex-based rights and women’s sport and the rest of it, who would otherwise quite readily vote left. Why they think that’s in their interests also beats me.

  The right is, of course, worse, trying hard to alienate even more women with absolutist positions on abortion.

  American politics is so toxic. When will people realise that making friends with the center ground is actually in their interests?
• #5

  Jim Baerg

  November 19, 2023 at 9:56 am

  Sackbut #2

  “agreed with her views on certain key topics but not others”

  Pretty much any political tribe holds views that don’t have any logical connection to each other, they are just marks of tribal identification. I expect that examining both her views & the tech bro’s views would show that to be the case.

  I try to be more logically consistent than that, but I doubt I fully succeed.