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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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There's something not right here, I hear familiar bells of dissonance. I notice I am confused.

Opposition to immigration is the principal impetus for the right. Not just the American right, opposition is the common view among the native peoples of all western nations. The belief of what to do isn't uniform, but "Too many, greatly reduce" is dominant. Musk shows an awareness of this, he's also shown an awareness of the discussions of the deep online right apropos "You have said the actual truth." He should know. Consider also his loudly backing AfD, a party that can be defined by its opposition to immigration.

If Musk believes all humans are fungible economic units, how does he turn right? If his shift as has been supposed by many including myself was about viewing the left as a threat, how does he not view the right as a graver threat for their anti-immigrant sentiment extending to close the tap on his source of engineers? How does he ever buy Twitter? Or, after buying it, carrying out the lifting of bans, diving into the discourse of the right, and seeing there "No we mean literally all of them are going back," realize what he's courted, renege and cut a deal? The media would need maybe two weeks of news cycles and his image would be rehabilitated for the normie masses while in the background he received the necessary assurances of allowing him to continue his corporate administration as he sees fit. But there again, if how he wants to manage his corporations by his ostensibly aggressive prioritization of foreign labor, why does he ever consider the left a bigger problem than the right?

I had more and I cut it down and now I've again written more than I think I need because I'm pretty sure all of you reading this knows all of these points. What I run into is that for the last few years for Musk, though really it seems it's been basically all of his career, people have bet against him, for the absurdity of his ideas, for supposed incompetence, for ignorance, more lately for him being "evil", and they've lost every time. This must be stressed enough, they have lost every single time. Or at least every single time it's mattered. So I look at him and wonder, how does he believe the FEU view? He's not evil, stupid or incompetent. Did he just not know what's actually happening?

People are complex but plenty of times it is the mundane or contradictory explanation rather than the fun/schizo/5D chess theory. I'm probably grasping at nonexistent straws, as I so often do. Sure, he believes in this one area of hyper-pure tabula rasa egalitarianism, despite living a life of evidence against it. Sure, he holds the root ideal that underlies the California approach to homelessness and crime, not to mention trans advocacy, he's just not extrapolated one more step to shake it off.

Still I think a possible explanation for his response is this: he believed talent came from India because he had convincing, not necessarily good and certainly not great, but convincing enough reasons to believe it did. In a very short period of time he has since discovered those hiring for his corporations have prioritized Indians because they are Indians, have praised and promoted along Indians because they are Indians, and may be benefiting in appearances from work done primarily by not Indians, all while repeatedly rejecting superior talent because they are not Indian. And so he has struggled, in recognizing his mistake and perhaps in rationalizing against a roiling blood rage at not simply being taken for a fool, but taken in such a way that it is a direct attack on his life's work of getting off the rock and making humans an interplanetary species.

I don't know. Again I'm grasping at straws in seeking fantastic explanation over the simple and probable one. But, and I'm paraphrasing what Sam Hyde said in his video, if this is a real belief for him, not something from a lack of knowledge and understanding but something he won't get past, he's not the man we all hope he is, and he will lose.

Two things:

  1. A big part of why Elon turned to the right was that liberals used to adore him. Then they all woke up on the wrong side of the bed one morning, decided he was the devil, and that he needed to be socially and economically lynched. I still have no idea why, it’s like Joe Rogan, they just seem to have caught some kind of mind virus and they all hate him now. So a lot of Elon’s move to the right is survival instinct and not necessarily agreement with policy.
  2. I’m pretty sure Elon likes hiring H1-B Indians because they are reasonably competent but much cheaper than domestic workers. He dresses it up in a lot of pretty language to cover that up, but that’s the truth. Like a lot of business titans through the years, he ruthlessly optimizes costs wherever possible. Don’t use six dots of glue on the barrel when five could suffice. I doubt Indians have affected his plans to get off the rock, since H1-B visa holders can’t work at Space-X. It’s a government and military contractor so there are heavy security restrictions on foreign nationals from any country working there. The Indians mostly work at Tesla.

Then they all woke up on the wrong side of the bed one morning, decided he was the devil, and that he needed to be socially and economically lynched.

It wasn't this sudden.

There was always a considerable amount of resentment against Elon Musk on the far-left because of his South African background. But the first brick in the anti-Elon wall was his intense opposition to COVID lockdowns -- this allied him with the right almost immediately on an issue of intense salience. Then, he bought Twitter, with the intent of reducing its censorship of conservatives. In other words, he conquered territory the left considered neutral and made it conservative (because opposing conservatism is "about human rights, which aren't political"). This instantly made him a pariah.

Him actually allying with Trump was just the last brick -- but those two issues massively turned the left against him.

Eh, I thought the real backlash always started with those kids trapped in the cave and him calling that ex-pat diver a pedophile over being told that his submersible idea was bad. It wasn't exactly partisan, but I think that was the beginning of the polarization.

Plus, also, I think people were looking for anything to make Elon and Tesla's fanboys shut up, and it just escalated from there.