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So far the latest from the space-side of the internet is that Elon Musk made an X post about bringing home Boe-CFT astronauts Butch and Sunny “as soon as possible”. Trump later followed up with a Truthsocial post confirming that he asked Elon to do so.
For context there is no new information here (see here for additional information w/ added opinions), as far as we can tell at this point SpaceX will likely send up a half manned Crew-9 flight in march and they will return home then. To me this is pretty much just an obvious “spin currents to dunk on the Biden Admin” post, that doesn’t really explicitly lie but it definitely distorts or conflates the truth. Now though people are in my spheres of the net are throwing a conniption, and saying that this is blatant lying. Yet I fail to see how this should be the straw that breaks the camels back especially after a rather muted response to Elon’s choice of hand gestures last week. Perhaps EDS really has infected all previous sane minds, or I simply can’t see something obviously different here?
Elon's choice of hand gestures last week were probably a spastic/autistic mistake that should be ignored, possibly a 4chan-mentality troll that should be disdained, but almost certainly not a Neo-Nazi signal that should be feared. Social skills are not up his alley and being cheered by huge crowds is a bit new to him and this isn't the first time he's flailed around on stage like a 5 year old with too much candy, it was just the first time the shape of the flailing was something that could trigger left-QAnon.
But Elon's choice of wording in that tweet, I can't think of any excuses for. Managing an orbital launch provider is up his alley. He knows those astronauts aren't stranded and are able to leave at any time (on his company's capsule!) in an emergency. He knows that when they were semi-stranded (the Starliner made it home unpiloted fine, just with a level of risk that was unacceptable for humans) it was Boeing's fault, not Biden's. He knows SpaceX was already made Plan A to bring those astronauts back, before the Biden administration ended, and they're just waiting for the next crew rotation. He knows they haven't been there "so long" compared to other ISS long-term crew stays (though this one I would just call a "distortion" rather than a lie; they have been up there quite long compared to their original quick out-and-back plans). And he knows that the last couple months of delay are due to a SpaceX delay, with the new Dragon capsule for Crew-10 taking a little longer to finish than planned.
For years Musk seemed to be somewhat resistant to even the powerful brain-melting effects of Twitter discourse. I'm not sure what combination of MAGA-inner-circle discourse and way-too-much-Twitter discourse and too-much-Ketamine discourse has finally gotten to him, but I wish he'd snap out of it and back away from whatever it is.
He's continually trying to bait people who hate him into making themselves look worse, this is possibly based on direct advice from Trump, who has decades of experience inflaming specific enemies. While I've been using reddit less and less over the years, the core site /r/all became entirely worthless for a week due to the latest round of screeching that he passively instigated. My daily time here, on twitter/x and just doing stuff irl has increased by a few hours.
I'm inclined to think he really did mean a nice heart goes out to you gesture, but it was passive instigation insofar as it doesn't take long to type something like "Hitler was a particularly evil mass murderer, in addition to being cruel and stupid. He was not only a bad leader in policy and war, he was a shitty artist and his conduct from 1942 on suggests he was a psychopath who didn't even care about Germany. Fuck that loser, he deserves hell, fuck the rest of the Nazis too, God bless the memory of their millions of innocent victims and the memory of the millions of heroes who fought, bled and died to stop them." This line doesn't contain an apology or even acknowledge the arm issue, but would chill most of the freakout crowd, and wasn't made precisely because he considers the freakout a net positive for him.
The halo effect (reversed) means that even if Hitler was a good artist, nobody would think he was.
Eh, yes and no. https://www.wikiart.org/en/adolf-hitler/halaman-rumah-tua-di-munchen https://www.wikiart.org/en/winston-churchill/racecourse-nice-1921 https://www.wikiart.org/en/francisco-franco/still-life-with-eagle
Franco has more technical skill, Churchill has more charm. I guess we'd need some art teachers who personally hate Churchill and at least don't dislike Hitler if we were talking about a more objective analysis. Maybe from Bangladesh or other Indian subcontinent Muslims ?
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