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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   32609 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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Richard Hanania continues his criticism of Musk, as a guest author for UnHerd. (Sidenote: On his own website, he wrote "I never thought I would write an article for Sohrab Ahmari, as we disagree on a lot and I’ve regrettably insulted him a few times, but he reached out after my recent piece on Musk and asked if I would like to write something for UnHerd.") It's a combination of criticism of Musk as an intellectual, criticism of DOGE, and contrasting the intellectual traits adaptive for business and non-business success. The closing paragraphs are interesting:

To be sure, this analysis doesn’t explain everything about Musk’s recent behaviour. There may be other dimensions. I recently listened to a podcast he did in 2021 on the history of technology in warfare in which he seemed like a completely different man. He displayed not only knowledge in engineering, but history, including strategy and tactics in the Second World War. This supports the theory that something in this man’s brain broke around 2022, whether it was from drug use, social-media addiction, a combination of both, or something else. It’s possible that all his business ventures begin to fail from now, which would indicate a more general decline in his cognition and ability to regulate his emotions. Much reporting has been done on Musk’s drug use, which has been serious enough to worry many around him.

Yet if Musk continues to succeed as a businessman while being this dumb about everything related to public policy, he will end up having given us what was by far history’s greatest demonstration of the non-transferability of insight and skill across domains where wise leadership is necessary for human flourishing.

The parsimonious explanation is that Musk is using his voice to mold opinion, not to plainly tell the truth. This is “immoral” in the sense that punching someone is immoral, when they have been punching you for years. The news has been doing this forever. Everything else Hanania writes is not a full representation of facts, but a partisan slant to make you dislike Elon (eg, no proof that cutting Department of Ed employees will reduce the longterm collection of debt in any way that it deserves a moment’s thought; no entertaining the notion that he did not cut those specific employees; no entertaining the notion that “build fast and break things” may be the overall utilitarian strategy which simply looks worse when you write a slanted list of all the bad things; etc)

The thing is, when you post provably false s*** like the 4% approval rating thing we discussed in the other thread, and then when called out on it you double down, that alienates smart people who care about the truth. For instance, here's what Steve Sailer said today:

It would be great if DOGE could distinguish who is doing useful boutique research on education and who is wasting taxpayer money. But it appears that DOGE doesn’t have time for that, much like DOGE doesn’t seem to have time for much else in the way of useful analysis.

On the other hand, every time the NYT dubiously asserts that Trump is about to do something stupid, Trump cultists dreams up all sorts of ideas why, actually, that would be a genius 4-D chess thing to do.

https://www.stevesailer.net/p/will-doge-cancel-naep

Seems like DOGE is burning its bridges with the very demographic it was supposed to appeal to, while maintaining the support of people who have never said a critical thing about Trump in their entire lives.

One canceled contract was weighing how effectively Oregon schools spent taxpayer dollars that were set aside to improve reading instruction, by emphasizing phonics, vocabulary and other building blocks of early literacy.

Sailer’s entire post hinges on this.

The lab for which funding was cut spends a lot of resources on addressing “inequitable disciplinary actions” ie wasting money on trying to “address” why blacks are disciplined more, etc. So it’s good that their funding was cut. On WestEd, who was granted money to work on REL West —

Take research consultancy WestEd, which runs REL West and is a supporting partner for several other RELs. With $260 million in revenue and more than 1,400 employees across 13 offices, the consultancy receives substantial public funding. Financial statements show that a third of WestEd’s revenue comes from federal sources, and almost half from state and local sources. The consultancy’s products include a report promoting the replacement of standardized tests with controversial lottery admissions to ensure “equitable” access to competitive magnet high schools, and a teacher’s guide on “culturally responsive” math education. WestEd even trained teachers on “Critical Race English Education.” Participants learned, for instance, how they could lead lessons which examine the role of the “white savior complex” in Atticus Finch’s character development in To Kill a Mockingbird.

https://www.city-journal.org/article/trump-department-of-education-contracts-left-activism

If the media cared about the truth, an iota, they would tell you this. They don’t. They omit and lie. I hope conservatives become the best omitters and liars in the entire world, and then we win. As of now, because it’s such a waste of time to actively determine how the media is lying, I am in a kind of default “the media is always lying” hibernation. Just cut everything at this point, I really don’t care — the Oregonians get what they deserve

The parsimonious explanation is that Musk is using his voice to mold opinion, not to plainly tell the truth. This is “immoral” in the sense that punching someone is immoral, when they have been punching you for years.

Punching a specific person that has been punching you for years is fair game.

Punching people more generally because you were punched for a while isn't remotely the same, and is usually rather frowned upon.

All is fair in existential infowar.

This is one of the big classical problems with democracy.

I’m not sure what you mean. In a democracy filled with uninformed and incompetent voters, if one side lies all the time, the other side must lie in turn in order to compete, let alone win. This is actually the very basis of newspapers in the American democratic tradition. X is not a newspaper, no, but it has taken on the same role. If the American voter wishes to learn about the facts and only the facts, they have to read papers and bills and data, and not Reddit or X or Bluesky. And yet they continue to use these services, at once proving that they are incompetent judges of the most obvious fact that the media lies. To quote Thomas Jefferson,

It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them

It's not irrational to delegate some amount of legal or political understanding to a trusted intermediate. One should still be open to whether they lied/erred and check their work from time to time, but expecting everyone everywhere to be deep subject-matter experts in this stuff is foolish.

The parsimonious explanation is that Musk is using his voice to mold opinion, not to plainly tell the truth. This is “immoral” in the sense that punching someone is immoral, when they have been punching you for years.

Hard disagree. If your opponent burns down the epistemic commons, and you respond in kind, you have just ceded the moral high ground. See Scott Alexander's Guided By The Beauty Of Our Weapons:

Logical debate has one advantage over narrative, rhetoric, and violence: it’s an asymmetric weapon. That is, it’s a weapon which is stronger in the hands of the good guys than in the hands of the bad guys. In ideal conditions (which may or may not ever happen in real life) – the kind of conditions where everyone is charitable and intelligent and wise – the good guys will be able to present stronger evidence, cite more experts, and invoke more compelling moral principles.

If you abandon Simulacrum Level 1, you might win or lose, but to a proponent of the truth it will not matter more than it would matter to an atheist which religion won the memetic competition and established a theocracy.

Also, Hanania argues that Musk is worse than the liberals:

The worst offense here is the deboosting of links. Under the old regime, liberals wanted you to only rely on what they considered credible sources of information. Musk doesn’t want you to read anything at all that is not in meme or tweet form.

The woke left has obviously not been a steadfast ally of the Truth. They certainly pick the studies they cite as cannon fodder for their side, and this has skewed all of the social 'sciences'. The embrace blank-slatism to a degree that they are unable to even engage with HBD on its merits. But to their credit, they at least believe that their world view is correct. This opens up the -- theoretical -- possibility to engage with them over the factual state of the world and convert them.

By contrast, Trump (the guy who Musk is backing and sucking up to) has had a total disregard for Level 1 through his entire political career: birtherism, qanon, election denial to the migrants eating cats and dogs. He is not so much lying (which would mean knowing the object level truth, than subverting it) as much as bullshitting and presumably, the median Trump voter knows this.

The "epistemic commons" have not been "burned down" because they never existed in the first place as a "commons" that excludes a plurality or more of the population is nothing of the sort.

What has been badly damaged is the Blue/Grey tribe's ability to dictate the rules of engagement and maintain the structural integrity of thier information bubbles.

There is no "sense making crisis" there is only a subset of people who are the intellectual equivalent of flightless birds on an isolated island who hadn't had to worry about predatory rodents until a bunch of jerks showed up in a boat and now its the fucking apocalypse.

If you abandon Simulacrum Level 1, you might win or lose, but to a proponent of the truth it will not matter more than it would matter to an atheist which religion won the memetic competition and established a theocracy.

In other words a whole lot, depending on how each religion feels about burning atheists at the stake.

He is not so much lying (which would mean knowing the object level truth, than subverting it) as much as bullshitting and presumably, the median Trump voter knows this.

I'm not sure the median Trump voter knows that so much as does not pay attention to politics?

The median voter does not necessarily engage in this kind of theorising. I suspect the median voter just votes straight R or straight D because that is what they have always done. I suspect that what the median Trump voter knows is more along the lines of - Trump's opponents constantly accuse him of lying, they are liars themselves, sure Trump can be a bit hyperbolic sometimes, but he's correct on the big picture. And then they probably don't think too much about specific details.

The worst offense here is the deboosting of links. Under the old regime, liberals wanted you to only rely on what they considered credible sources of information. Musk doesn’t want you to read anything at all that is not in meme or tweet form.

That’s quite a leap. The more likely explanation is they are optimizing for time spent on X.

When people leave the app they aren’t consuming your ads and might not resume using your app for many hours or days.

Elon found himself with an unprofitable company and took a lot of drastic steps to get to profitability.

This is also parsimonious with Elon’s own recommendation for putting links in a reply. They don’t want people bouncing directly from feed to another surface.

It's funny how so many people I read who are made at Musk are writers who don't have the ability to promote their Non-X writing platforms on X anymore. They find this to be a huge injustice and immoral, I find it mostly annoying because I have to read them complaining about it all the time.

Platform X doesn't let me promote other platform Y doesn't seem like a shocking situation to me. Nothing is preventing them from writing an X-article or wtf X calls their longer form platform if it bothers them so much. They're not being censored, they're being encouraged to produce on the same site they're promoting on.

The more likely explanation is they are optimizing for time spent on X

Fine, but wasn't Elon's whole motivation for buying X to improve or level in some way the social media information space? With which the link de-boosting works at total cross-purposes.

I guess the first priority is making the site self-sustaining.

This opens up the -- theoretical -- possibility to engage with them over the factual state of the world and convert them.

Many of them explicitly say "do not even try to understand what racists are thinking -- or you might yourself turn into a racist".

Yes, but I would rather deal with hypocrites who claim to be on the side of truth and logic than with honest conflict theorists, because with the former there is an opening, however small, to engage intellectually, while with the latter there can be only war. Obviously both sorts exist on either side and we may disagree on their proportions, but to me it seems clear that the median woke progressive is more of a hypocrite (based on revealed preferences when it comes to lifestyle, the neighborhoods they move to, etc.) while the median dissident rightist is more of a conflict theorist.

I specualte that often two conflict theorists often ally against third conflict theorist, and that conflict vs mistake is false dichotomy.

I dunno, I would rather my side wins battles rather than constantly loses them while “fighting fair” against an opponent who refuses to even entertain the idea.

Truth matters in pragmatic affairs science, or from purely philosophical perspective - but it has never mattered in politics. Nope, not ever. This is perhaps the one area postmodernists get it right, in the struggle for power in the political arena, the winners get to tell you what the truth is.

The way I would put it is that there is a correct way to do things, but the people who believe in it were lulled into a false understanding of the world and exploited by the unscrupulous. By the time enough of them woke up to do anything about it the game had already been thoroughly rigged against them, so they were forced to turn to the unscrupulous to fend them off.

I would then go on to say that that through something like deus ex machina, they somehow managed to get Trump. And that his deceptions are red tribe styled not blue tribe and that's essentially what this disagreement is about.

But I left that off the first bit because then the first bit is easier to agree with. Because that's how little effort it takes to influence people if you know what you are doing, and for all their faults the media does know how to influence people.

If your opponent burns down the epistemic commons, and you respond in kind, you have just ceded the moral high ground.

It turns out the moral high ground is not useful.

The woke left has obviously not been a steadfast ally of the Truth. They certainly pick the studies they cite as cannon fodder for their side, and this has skewed all of the social 'sciences'.

And they've got something better than objective truth. They define the accepted truth. If you try to contradict them, they'll print a thousand authoritative studies that back up their work and prove you're not only an evil racist but an ignorant science denier too. THAT is useful. That means that whatever "objective criteria" you try to institute, they can define the truth so those criteria support whatever they want. You can't beat this with words; you can only beat this with an "objective truth" they can't mess with. Not one "so obvious" they can't mess with it, because there's nothing so obvious. One that is as futile to deny as an oncoming train.

It turns out the moral high ground is not useful.

I, as a person who hates and argues against the act of doxxing--regardless of who is involved, have just met an argument I can't defeat.

"Moral High Ground?" Fuggedabout it.

If that's a veiled threat, don't bother; I've already been doxxed.

If not, the point of the term "moral high ground" is that "high ground" is in some way a superior tactical position. If it is not, the term is misleading. Without that implication, complaining that someone should not respond because they will lose the "moral high ground" is basically saying they should follow your (not their!) principles and lose rather than violate them and stand a chance. If you want to say that, say that; using the analogy of a "moral high ground" implies otherwise.

I was absolutely sincere, very confused why you thought it was threat. I think Doxxing is about the most evil and dishonorable thing you can do with the Internet. I consider Swatting a form of doxxing.

What other argument--aside from "moral high ground" is there to not dox people?

It turns out the moral high ground is not useful.

And they've got something better than objective truth. They define the accepted truth. If you try to contradict them, they'll print a thousand authoritative studies that back up their work and prove you're not only an evil racist but an ignorant science denier too. THAT is useful. That means that whatever "objective criteria" you try to institute, they can define the truth so those criteria support whatever they want. You can't beat this with words; you can only beat this with an "objective truth" they can't mess with. Not one "so obvious" they can't mess with it, because there's nothing so obvious. One that is as futile to deny as an oncoming train.

they they they

The claim was that team Musk+Trump have left the level 1 reality + destroying regular people's opportunity to seriously discuss level 1 reality on social media. Instead of employing " "objective truth" " in quotes, they employ bullshit. As far as I understand, you argue it is good and necessary because you will lose to "they" (Team Blue) otherwise?

Consider the downside of this policy: There are several examples modern and past what happens to a country when its governance is based on bullshit. Requiring your underlings and associates to repeat your bullshit back to you leads to success of people who are good at bullshitting or stupid enough not to know the difference. When ideological vibes and feels become more important than material reality, being knowledgeable about material reality becomes a hindrance in a smart person's career. Venezuela and South Africa are prime examples of such countries. If you try to build a dystopia of lies out of Ayn Rand novel except nominal political valence switched, more likely you are going to get more of Trumpzuela where big corp CEOs continue to get fat government contracts to build things that don't work as long they fat flatter Trump's ego. It is unlikely to be a cathartic step in a heroic journey where you win the fight and get to start building country you like after you win. The bullshit apparatus will say that fight is still going on no matter what it achieves. It was built for having power and repeating bullshit and after it has been built, its prime objective is to perpetuate itself.

This dovetails to a more important complaint. If the politician supposedly representing my tribe is running on vibes and bullshit, I can't trust them to do anything long-term useful. Musk claims that DOGE has achieved an amount-you-can't-keep-track-of in saving government expenses and exposing fraud but it has not. Instead, the claim is that Musk does his best to foster an information environment where it is difficult to find out what they really achieved and how they could achieve what they set out to do.

Let me extrapolate: Team Red says they will do something about gender ideology in schools, do something about the border and the illegals, do something about China, do something about economy and trade. Do I really want to hear about Team Red's performance concerning these issues by the way of DOGEfied information environment? Truth-seeker is always in danger of learning something new, followers of philosophical system of abandon-reality get to bullshit everyone, including their voters.

The claim was that team Musk+Trump have left the level 1 reality + destroying regular people's opportunity to seriously discuss level 1 reality on social media. Instead of employing " "objective truth" " in quotes, they employ bullshit. As far as I understand, you argue it is good and necessary because you will lose to "they" (Team Blue) otherwise?

I am saying that most of social media was never really discussing "objective truth". Instead, they were discussing accepted truth, as defined by the institutions. Trying to hew to THAT means you lose, because the institutions are controlled by Team Blue.

Bullshit, of course, has been a staple of political discourse forever. It's just that Team Blue has been able to pass their bullshit off as objective truth for a long time.

Consider the downside of this policy: There are several examples modern and past what happens to a country when its governance is based on bullshit. Requiring your underlings and associates to repeat your bullshit back to you leads to success of people who are good at bullshitting or stupid enough not to know the difference.

This is where Team Blue was taking us.

Musk claims that DOGE has achieved an amount-you-can't-keep-track-of in saving government expenses and exposing fraud but it has not. Instead, the claim is that Musk does his best to foster an information environment where it is difficult to find out what they really achieved and how they could achieve what they set out to do.

One cannot expect Musk, as a principal of DOGE, to give objectively true facts about it. He will boost it and should be expected to do so.

An inherent problem with populism that skepticism goes out the window. People are placed in power based on what they say, and the electorate is hesitant to criticize what they do. Sure, populists don't talk or govern like effete Borgpeople, but their competence, effectiveness, and leadership should receive no less scrutiny. Musk has been positioned like a Soros fever dream: way more money, more involved in government, less oversight, more in control of media.

Its probably too early to tell if Musk's signature DOGE program will be a success like Tesla, or a total failure like Hyperloop or The Boring Company. I'm guessing it will be somewhere in between. He's overpromising and underdelivering with wild claims. This is a pattern. Second human crew to Mars by 2024, self driving LA to NY parking lots with no supervision by 2016. For DOGE he set the mark at 2T in cuts, revised down to 1T, apparently by July 2026. They've already published a bunch of erroneous stats and stories, and people are swallowing the narratives wholesale. USAID is suddenly and obviously bad, and everybody knows it. We shouldn't infer anything from the fact that every other developed nation has an analogous agency - who usually spend more as a % of national income - just ax the whole program, its 100% waste, fraud, and abuse.

I can be optimistic, but that needn't lessen my skepticism. Politics is a game of promising the world and delivering an atlas. Usually there is pushback. Granted, most major political media is now decidedly right leaning (at least podcasts, cable, and youtube), but for a group that rightly (if hyperbolically) showed interest in Bidens Ukraine dealings, The Twitter Files, Bidens mental decline, there seems to be no appetite for investigating the worlds richest man plugged in to the backdoor of government by an agency that tried to permanently dodge FOIA requests, run by what Vance insinuated were "kids".

Musk has more overt power than Soros because he's playing a strongman on social media. Soros, in contrast, was a part of a giant emergent international blob. Financed via other 'billionaire philanthropists' along with tax dollars from all over the world. Working around the clock to skew peoples perception of reality to a preferred political end. There's no comparison.

Maybe when Musk and friends start fermenting their own global blob we can start asking questions. But so far there's not even a coherent idea of what that blob should be or why.

My whole point is people hesitance to even ask questions. Maybe Soros did everything you claim. None of that is my point.

As you stated, Musk has overt power. He bought a SM site, which he uses spread narratives and skew peoples perception of reality to a preferred political end, and has been appointed to directly audit the government, after being the by far the largest donor. Why on Earth should we be allergic to asking questions now?

As I noted, its probably too early to tell, but I'm mystified by the lack questioning given the power. Musk is one of the largest individual beneficiaries of government money. Thats notable. A $400M contract to buy armored Teslas appeared out of nowhere, only to be canceled. The Biden admin authorized a 450k plan to look into a similar EV scheme. Weird. DOGE has made some errors publicly, always overstating their findings. Okay, mistakes happen. They tried to make DOGE un-FOIA-able for 10 years. Whats that about? Practically overnight the media narrative became that USAID is some sort of scam that needs to be shuttered immediately. This came on faster than COVID-19 in Google Trends. How very odd.

Your point, as it could be read from your post, was tethered to the idea that populism was some kind of related problem. I don't see how that can be relevant when so many of the questions you assert to not being asked of Musk can be very similarly leveraged towards the ruling class that sat prior to Musk.

I mean, Musk has seen plenty of open criticism recently. The H1B/Vivek stuff, along with him pretending to be good at video games. Alongside that you have a budding media industry centered around hating Musk 24/7. His companies being subsidized by the government is certainly not an uncriticized element.

I'm not sure to what extent dislike for USAID needs to be astroturfed or to what extent you want to question the media narrative surrounding it. I think there's a sizable population that doesn't like their taxes wasted on trans operas in Ireland or whatever. I find the whole ordeal more similar to something like the 'twitter files'. Just with more meat on the bone. But yes, Musk sure can press his finger on the scale considering his reach on X. And between the reach of him, Trump and Joe Rogan I'm not sure what oddity you are looking to question.

Populism is related in that I think it inherently contains a lack of skepticism. Everybody is just following the narrative with this admin, whereas the prior media trajectory was skepticism often to the point of conspiracy. Its early, but I promote skepticism always. Given that there was comparatively no interest in USAID prior, an about face inside of a few days speaks to mob mentality and blind allegiance to the party line. The media narrative is so far ahead of the details that $50M for condoms in Gaza hallucination was repeated ad nauseum by the admin itself. Of course the vast majority of Americans don't want 50 grand wasted on some trans Irish play, but that's $1 in every $100,000 of an agency that people are acting like needs to obviously be shuttered overnight. I'm not opposed to shutting it down, but relevant and true details matter. The oddities I want to question are manifold. The worlds richest man is personally auditing the entire government with apparent carte balance. Perhaps its for the best, but its worth questioning. The Epstein list was heavily redacted. Whats that about. Why are top lawyers at the DOJ from the Federalist Society resigning en masse claiming they're being asked to do illegal things. Why are Trumps personal lawyers, got appointed to government position, saying they're going to "protect Trump leadership" - which is not their job - vowing to "chase DOGE's critics to the end of the Earth". Seems odds.

Given that there was comparatively no interest in USAID prior, an about face inside of a few days speaks to mob mentality and blind allegiance to the party line.

How is this a problem particular to populism? Are we supposed to forget the constant swapping of profile pics to show your alignment to the Current Thing? The about face from "Covid is no worse than the flu" to "Covid is the biggest disaster since WW2"? Or from "lab leak is a conspiracy theory" to "Covid did most likely leak from a lab, and we knew about it from the start"?

To USAID in particular, is it really an about-face, or did people react to previously unknown information about it being used for Blue-aligned causes, from spreading transgenderism in the third world to sponsoring the majority of Ukraine's "independent" media?

I think that the truth is perhaps much simpler. Musk has not "deteriorated" intellectually so much as he has transitioned from being a darling of progressives and blue/grey-tribe technocrats due to his elecric cars, to being an enemy due to his politics.

Elon has always been erratic and eccentric, (just look at his kids' names) but nobody really cared until he aligned himself with the Tea-Party/Maga right.

It was published in 2019, and it's been a few years since I read it, but I'm trying to think back to examples from Ed Niedermeyer's "Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors," to see if they indicate a trend. Musk's MO was very much fake-it-till-you-make-it, even when that included commiting outright fraud (so much fraud...), but he cared enough about reality to admit (eventually) that certain decisions had been wrong (e.g., the Model X was overly complex and achieving mass-production for the Model 3 by reinventing the assembly line in an unclear way that required "building the machine that builds the machine"). On the other hand, Tesla has removed RADAR from its sensor suite, for pure monocular computer vision (they have multiple forward-facing cameras, but they're different fields of view, not stereoscopic).

I was recently listening to something on the early days of the airline industry and was struck by how much their description of Donald Douglas was giving me Elon Musk vibes.

A sort of "you need to be at least this mad to truly revolutionize an industry", reasonable men need not apply.

Now read about Howard Hughes.

While his kid's names are weird, they're not erratic.

L X Æ A-Xii, 4 Exa Dark Sideræl, Techno Mechanicus aren’t erratic sounding names?

They all sound science fictional. He doesn’t jump from sci-fi name to ghetto name to fundy name- he stays in the same land of strange names.

My guess is that he just mostly lets the mothers name the children. The ones with the weirdest names are the ones with Grimes.

This is not remotely tenable. His achievements at SpaceX were, in every sense of the word, extraordinary.

Meanwhile DOGE is going to end up being simply ineffective at achieving even its most basic goals.

DOGE is a suicide mission (unless a meaningless blue ribbon commission, which is what I expected) and it's a serious demerit against Musk's intelligence/perceptiveness that he actually took it seriously. The executive has relatively limited means to actually do anything about the budget. That has to come from Congress, and the GOP has been anywhere from useless (W. Bush administration oversaw the biggest increase in healthcare spending since LBJ; Obamacare just locked it in and socialized some of it) to merely OK (second-term Obama GOP House did see some deficit reduction) on the budget since Gingrich, who was frankly playing on easy mode (post cold war peace dividend plus the peak earning years of the Boomers coinciding with a small generation retiring and good economic growth) compared to what any House is dealing with now.

Last I checked, the GOP House since taking over in '23 has done nothing but pass continuations of Biden/Pelosi's budgets.

Last I checked, the GOP House since taking over in '23 has done nothing but pass continuations of Biden/Pelosi's budgets.

Because the GOP majority is not a monolith, they have to find something that bridges the freedom caucus folks and the blue state folks and the western-GOP folks.

It's a serious demerit against Musk's intelligence/perceptiveness that he actually took it seriously

It's a demerit against the theory of infinite-transferability of ability, and against him that he didn't realize that.

Will it? What exactly do you think those goals are?

DOGE is arguably being fairly effective in its core goal of providing propaganda to justify tax cuts while convincing the base forward rather than backward progress is being made on government spending.

I agree that this is the most parsimonious explanation. Even someone as public as Musk spends a majority of his time outside the spotlight, so few people, if any, have enough contact with him to make a call like his mind breaking. Sometimes it's obvious, as in the case of people like Kanye or Biden, but in those cases, generally even the people who support them can't deny it, not without massive help from powerful media companies, anyway. This criticism of Musk appears to come almost entirely from people who already disliked Musk and Trump, and the people who currently like Musk don't seem to have noticed this, so my conclusion is that people claiming that evidence points to Musk's mind breaking are characterizing his apparent shift in politics away from them as that, and then honestly believing it (well, I wonder if Hanania believes it, if he's as smart as I think he is; from my following his Twitter account, he seems to optimize around heat and not light, in a way that presents himself as a wise right-wing contrarian, so I'm not sure if he believes in anything these days). If there were some significant population of people who are cheering on what Musk is doing these days who think his mind is broken, that would lend credence to the theory, but outside of that, it's hard to conclude anything other than partisan bias. Which is the correct explanation for roughly 99.9% of all questions in the realm of politics, by my estimation.

I recently listened to a podcast he did in 2021 on the history of technology in warfare in which he seemed like a completely different man. He displayed not only knowledge in engineering, but history, including strategy and tactics in the Second World War. This supports the theory that something in this man’s brain broke around 2022

Who cares what Hanania thinks about human excellence? He has (generously) 1/1000th of Elon's following, maybe 1/100,000 of his wealth. Is Hanania running a viable AGI program? Is Hanania building huge rockets? Are Hanania's opinions relevant in world affairs, does he control key communications infrastructure used by armies? Is he doing anything of importance whatsoever? No. If anything he shot himself in the foot switching from 'I'm a smart tech-right policy guy' to 'let me sneer at all the right-wing retards who are now running the country and are in a position to implement policies'. He's the contrarian rat that jumps on board the sinking ship. What a fool!

Elon may indeed have lost some of his faculties, idk, I've never met the man. I doubt Hanania has either. Armchair psychoanalysis of extremely unusual people is basically just glorified name-calling.

Whatever Elon has lost, if anything, he still makes the rest of the world look like drooling retards. What did I get done in the last 3 years, since 2022? I certainly didn't start an AI company that's outperforming Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. I didn't build the biggest datacentre on the planet at record speed.

It's perfectly reasonable for us to disagree with Elon's choices or think he should do something else. I disagree with Elon about many things, including his whole concept of what a state is for. But if people want to go around calling him dumb or saying that his brain 'broke', then we'd better have some serious achievements to prove that we know what 'smart' or 'successful' is! Certainly something better than 'I wrote a book rehashing Mearsheimer (nobody cares about it) and blew up my political career' like Hanania.

Why should anyone care what Hanania thinks about politics considering how bad he is at it? He was pivoting away from Trump while Elon pivoted towards Trump... I think it's clear who has better political skills and like everything else between them, it's an orders of magnitude difference.

If anything he shot himself in the foot switching from 'I'm a smart tech-right policy guy' to 'let me sneer at all the right-wing retards who are now running the country and are in a position to implement policies'. He's the contrarian rat that jumps on board the sinking ship. What a fool!

As I said in the last thread, when you change add stuff to your platform that didn't used to be there, some people who liked the old platform will decide they don't like the new platform and depart. Others will support ANYTHING the party does, because loyalty to their tribe is all that matters. What's the next thing the Tucker Carlson fans are going to embrace? Are they going to take issue with chlorinated swimming pools? Whatever it is, I'm sure a large proportion of people here will embrace, ignore, or sanewash it. Other people will decide they don't feel like being Republicans anymore and get accused of "jumping ship" for not changing their minds.

So your heuristic is that we should just ignore less successful people when they criticize their more successful peers? So when some Republicans claim that Biden has dementia, we can safely ignore that because the ones making the claim are not a sitting president of the United States, but some congressmen at best?

He was pivoting away from Trump while Elon pivoted towards Trump... I think it's clear who has better political skills and like everything else between them, it's an orders of magnitude difference.

For the career of Hanania, a political endorsement of Trump would have been a no-brainer: Trump might have offer him a job in his administration, while there is no way in hell Harris would have offered him a job. So either he was deluded into thinking that there was no way Trump could win (unlikely) or we must consider the possibility that he is driven by something other than opportunism. I think it is likely that he considered a Trump policy so bad that it would be net negative even if Trump implemented a few of his policy proposals.

Personally, I do not think that Musk turned into an idiot, and more that he turned evil or that he was always evil, but used to mask that fact through backing pro-social causes like electric cars -- that he faked being aligned to the thriving of humanity when it served his interests, and now he fakes being aligned to Trump's interests instead.

Granted, Musk backed Trump before the election (while the other tech billionaires mostly waited until Trump had won to kiss his ring), but this still does not seem an unreasonable gamble. Trump is very willing to use the federal government to harass companies which have offended him personally. The Democrats have certainly also leaned on tech companies in the past, but they might force SpaceX to hire a few more DEI, not blacklist them for government contracts because they hate Musk.

Biden was never smart or capable, his first presidential campaign crashed because he lied about being first in his class and plagiarizing. Pretty poor on 'not sounding like a fool in speeches' and 'avoiding scandals' too. Elon can sometimes sound like a fool in speeches and he is scandal-prone but there are other redeeming qualities that are lacking with Biden.

I don't know what selection mechanisms exist in the Democratic Party for leadership material but the people that gave us Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are clearly not prioritizing skills and ability.

You can be successful without being smart. Clearly I erred in tying 'smart' and 'successful' together when I was primarily talking about the allegations that Elon broke his brain. Most of the time you need to be smart to be successful.

It's particularly jarring because the GOP is now the party whose voters have lower average income.

https://www.cnn.com/election/2024/exit-polls/national-results/general/president/0

Who cares what Hanania thinks about human excellence? He has (generously) 1/1000th of Elon's following, maybe 1/100,000 of his wealth.

This is only relevant if we think that Twitter followers or personal wealth are proportional to intelligence.

There is no doubt some correlation between intelligence and success at one's endeavours. Some. But it is not total, and so if we consider why Hanania isn't fabulously wealthy and followed by a lot of people on the internet, we might consider the very many relevant factors other than intelligence. For instance, Hanania is younger than Musk, Hanania has different personal goals and priorities to Musk, Hanania has a different personality profile to Musk, Hanania wasn't born into wealth the way Musk was, and that's all well before we even get to considering luck or arbitrary fortune.

Maybe you think Hanania is dumb anyway, and sure, maybe he is.

But I'm willing to bet that there are lots of people with fewer than Musk's 219 million Twitter followers who you and I would agree are smarter or more reliable guides than Musk. I'm also willing to bet there are lots of people with less net wealth than Musk's 225 billion that you and I would agree are smarter than Musk.

Likewise for other celebrities. Justin Bieber has 109 million Twitter followers and a net worth of around 300 million. That's a lot more than most people. Are you prepared to become a Belieber?

Be serious. Hanania may well be dumb and wrong, but this kind of sneering "he doesn't have as much money as Musk" is worthless.

But I'm willing to bet that there are lots of people with fewer than Musk's 219 million Twitter followers who you and I would agree are smarter or more reliable guides

There are absolutely people I agree with more often than Musk. There are some people online who I think are very wise and I agree with basically everything they say. Whereas I disagree with many things that Musk says, we clearly have different goals and understanding of the world. So there are people wiser than Musk.

But that doesn't mean they're smarter than Musk. If they're smarter, then why don't they simply implement their visions and smash every obstacle in their path? Musk wants to settle Mars, so he simply takes over the entire spaceflight market with SpaceX. The Democratic Party/decel culture gets in his way, so he moves to smash them with Twitter and Trump. AI coming up sooner than expected, looks like that's important? Why not simply start a frontier lab? Electric cars and robots as well!

These are impressive achievements! It is hard to create things, rather than merely performing a role for someone else like so many. Try starting your own business. It's hard on a wholly different level.

When Bieber demonstrates general-purpose creative ability (at maybe 10 or 100 times his net worth), as opposed to just being a one-trick pony in music/infatuating young women, then I'll defend his general ability. Taylor Swift does the same thing better than Bieber and has basically no political influence (her endorsement had minimal effect), Musk is on a totally different level.

But that doesn't mean they're smarter than Musk. If they're smarter, then why don't they simply implement their visions and smash every obstacle in their path?

The post you are replying to explained this. Intelligence does not straightforwardly equate to success like that - it is one of many correlates. Musk's wealth has multiple causes; a person of equal or greater intelligence might easily not be as successful.

Musk is rich and powerful, but that in itself does not show that Hanania is wrong, nor does it absolve Musk of any of his obvious faults.

Musk is not some baron or duke. His inheritance was by no means significant in him becoming wealthy.

'Personality type' is just a different way of saying intelligence in this context. 'I am smart but lazy' is an excuse, not an explanation. It doesn't matter at all if you're smart in some esoteric way that has no relevance in the real world. Whatever mental ability Musk has that lets him wield great effects on the world, he has a lot of it and so his brain isn't broken.

Criticizing faults is fine but it is bizarre and question-begging for people who are in virtually every way less competent to criticize the ability of far more capable people.

I would say that one's personality may shape one's goals and priorities?

For example: I would say that Thomas Aquinas was devastatingly intelligent by any fair standard. He chose a path of life that committed him to both celibacy and poverty. By the standard you've given, though, he cannot be intelligent. He did not achieve worldly power, office, or glory.

I conclude therefore that your standard is a bad standard. It does not measure intelligence. There are extremely intelligent people who do not achieve "great effects on the world", at least in the sense that you've given. In Aquinas' case this seems to be a result of his choice not to seek that type of success. He sought something else.

Likewise "Whatever mental ability Musk has that lets him wield great effects on the world, he has a lot of it and so his brain isn't broken" is a non sequitur. It is entirely conceivable that a person might have great effects on the world while having a brain that is, in some sense, broken. You just cannot get from "Musk has influenced the world" to "Musk has no significant faults". The claim is fallacious.

Thomas Aquinas was definitely intelligent, we are still talking about his books centuries after his death. He absolutely had impact and significance. Most of what he writes is basically nonsense but that's the nature of theology.

Maybe you can be intelligent and not do anything significant. But doing something significant requires intelligence. Given that we can't read minds and analyse them perfectly, we should assume that those who do great things have greater faculties than those who merely claim to be intelligent.

So I find it disgusting for a nobody like Hanania to go 'oh I listened to him on a podcast and read some tweets of this guy, so I can look down on his intelligence, his basic mental faculties'. That's what I'm upset with.

I recently listened to a podcast he did in 2021 on the history of technology in warfare in which he seemed like a completely different man. He displayed not only knowledge in engineering, but history, including strategy and tactics in the Second World War. This supports the theory that something in this man’s brain broke around 2022

Furthermore, how is Hanania in a position to judge? Does he know anything of significance? What operations has he overseen? What high-performance organization has he built?

If you're down-rating Elon Musk's intelligence in favour of 'luck or arbitrary fortune', where is your reasoning that it's actually straightforward to build a rocket company or start a leading AI lab (which he did while Hanania thinks his brain was broken)? Is NASA too busy huffing airhorn gas to make cheap rockets? Is Meta AI full of dribbling retards? Did Jeff Bezos just roll bad dice with his space company? Obviously not! It's the special competence of this one man, with secrets that we don't understand regarding management, motivation and so on.

How is Musk broken if he achieves massive successes in science, engineering, business and politics?

I think it would make your argument vastly more succinct if you just said "Musk is more powerful", rather than arguing back and forth on the relative value of wisdom, smarts and factual accuracy, as well as whether Musk possesses all of those. Musk has power, Hanania doesn't, therefore Hanania's criticism is groundless and impotent. That appears to be the real gist of what you're saying.

But suppose Hanania really doesn't have the right to speak on Musk. In that case, why do you care enough to correct the public mottizen opinion on Hanania and urge people to not listen to him? Shouldn't his lack of influence be self-evident?

Maybe you can be intelligent and not do anything significant. But doing something significant requires intelligence. Given that we can't read minds and analyse them perfectly, we should assume that those who do great things have greater faculties than those who merely claim to be intelligent.

I did say that I believe intelligence correlates with success. It just doesn't do so absolutely or reliably - there are successful idiots, and unsuccessful geniuses. I think Musk's business success is a data point in favour of his being clever, but it's not the only consideration, nor is it decisive in itself.

As it happens I do think Musk is reasonably clever. I don't go quite as far as Noah Smith, but I think Smith is directionally correct, and people who sneer and declare Musk a moron are being foolish.

Is Musk smarter than Hanania? I don't know. I think Hanania is evidently a reasonably smart person as well - his high standard of written expression and analytical ability show that, even if I do often think he's wrong - but I wouldn't make a general comparison. I don't know either of them in person in the kind of detail that I think I would need to in order to make a credible comparison. Fortunately "is Musk smarter than Hanania?" is the kind of question that never needs to be answered. It's a silly question - in practice, in any disagreement between Musk and Hanania, I have ample ways of resolving it without going down that rather pointless tangent.

What I find bizarre in your comments, though, is this:

So I find it disgusting for a nobody like Hanania to go 'oh I listened to him on a podcast and read some tweets of this guy, so I can look down on his intelligence, his basic mental faculties'. That's what I'm upset with. [...] Furthermore, how is Hanania in a position to judge? Does he know anything of significance? What operations has he overseen? What high-performance organization has he built?

I find this strangely defensive? You almost sound offended! Suppose for the sake of argument that Musk is in some objective sense smarter than Hanania. So what? Hanania is not a peasant bowing and scraping before his lord. People are allowed to criticise people smarter than them. If Person A has an IQ of 140 and Person B has an IQ of 150, it is still permissible for Person A to criticise Person B. Indeed, it is wholly conceivable that Person A might criticise Person B and be entirely correct in those criticisms, because IQ is not a measure of correctness, either factual or moral.

So even if for the sake of argument Musk is objectively more intelligent than Hanania, that would not make Hanania's argument incorrect. It would be a red herring.

This seems like an obvious case of proving too much to me. "People can never criticise their intellectual superiors" is a fake rule we never apply to anything else. Maybe Musk is much better at starting tech companies than Hanania. Bully for him. So what?

And I suppose as far as disgust or moral offense goes, for what it's worth I'm morally disgusted at the idea that the plebs should never criticise their supposed betters. There is nothing that Musk has done that confers on him a right to not be a target of criticism by others. Maybe Hanania's criticism of Musk is mistaken, but if so it's mistaken because of its actual merits, not because Hanania dared to lift his eyes to look upon the god-like mien of the shining Musk.

If you're down-rating Elon Musk's intelligence in favour of 'luck or arbitrary fortune', where is your reasoning that it's actually straightforward to build a rocket company or start a leading AI lab (which he did while Hanania thinks his brain was broken)? Is NASA too busy huffing airhorn gas to make cheap rockets? Is Meta AI full of dribbling retards? Did Jeff Bezos just roll bad dice with his space company? Obviously not! It's the special competence of this one man, with secrets that we don't understand regarding management, motivation and so on.

I'd assert that Musk's various achievements are in no way incompatible with him being pathological in some other respect.

Hanania wasn't born into wealth the way Musk was

I understand that this line was not core to your point, but to correct the record - Musk’s family was middle class, turbulent, and abusive. His father’s financial success was very up and down, and he is now completely broke (Musk used to support him, but cut him off after he repeated slept with and attempted to sleep with younger family members.)

Musk arrived in Canada at 17 with $2000 to his name and never received substantial financial support from his family after that. His mom would sometimes send him $100 for groceries. There is no evidence that he ever received a large cash infusion from his parents. Of all the excuses for why Musk is more successful than you, “rich parents” has to be the worst.

Who cares what Hanania thinks about human excellence? He has (generously) 1/1000th of Elon's following, maybe 1/100,000 of his wealth.

Following this logic, who are you to contradict Hanania?

Is Hanania running a viable AGI program? Is Hanania building huge rockets? Are Hanania's opinions relevant in world affairs, does he control key communications infrastructure used by armies? Is he doing anything of importance whatsoever?

What's your actual argument here? Elon is a super successful businessman so he can't be wrong about Zelenskyy being a dictator with a 4% approval rating who started the Russian-Ukraine War?

Elon may indeed have lost some of his faculties, idk, I've never met the man. I doubt Hanania has either. Armchair psychoanalysis of extremely unusual people is basically just glorified name-calling.

Is wondering if Elon has gone a little nuts "glorified name-calling" or is it... wondering if Elon has gone a little nuts? I guess it could be the former, but it seems like the OP is being earnest and I'm pretty sure the rules here say something about arguing with people in good faith.

It's perfectly reasonable for us to disagree with Elon's choices or think he should do something else.

Uh, is it? According to your logic, I feel like it's not:

Whatever Elon has lost, if anything, he still makes the rest of the world look like drooling retards. What did I get done in the last 3 years, since 2022? I certainly didn't start an AI company that's outperforming Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. I didn't build the biggest datacentre on the planet at record speed.

But whatever.

Why should anyone care what Hanania thinks about politics considering how bad he is at it?

What if I asked, "Why should I care what Elon Musk thinks about politics considering how bad he is at it?" In fact, I am asking that. How is Elon Musk good at politics? He genuinely seems terrible at it. He's more unpopular than ever. DOGE is a mess. What has he achieved? He publicly supported Donald Trump? That's not good politics, that's just expressing preferences. Having actual moral objections to someone isn't the same thing as not having "political skills."

How is Elon Musk good at politics?

How much political influence does Elon Musk have in the US? Politics isn't about popularity. Taylor Swift is pretty popular. Is she good at politics? No.

Elon is a super successful businessman so he can't be wrong about Zelenskyy being a dictator with a 4% approval rating who started the Russian-Ukraine War?

Tweet accuracy does not determine whether someone's brain is broken. Advancing a message in accordance with one's goals is more important than factual accuracy. Trump does this all the time, he blows up every number 2-5x. Doing that has no relation to his political ability, it is beyond doubt that his political ability is immense.

If your brain is broken, then you'd be saying things like Biden did: "And now I want to hand it over to the President of Ukraine, who has as much courage as he has determination, ladies and gentlemen, President Putin". That is what having a broken brain looks like, when you're not on-message, when you're so far off-message that you're supporting the other side.

Elon knows more about the war in Ukraine than the entire Pentagon. Not because he knows the ins and outs of every calibre of artillery, not because he pores over every inch of satellite intel and reads every single powerpoint slide... but because he appreciates the basic strategic dynamics of the situation and adjusts his stance accordingly: 'if military victory is not cost-efficient, use diplomacy to minimize losses'. And if getting rid of Zelensky helps this, then he'll move in that direction with 'get rid of Zelensky' rather than getting bogged down in juvenile narratives like 'Putin is a bully' like our prestigious, military expert class who work day and night bungling everything they touch. Note that Elon started off super-pro Ukraine, donating them hundreds of millions worth of military aid in Starlink. He changed his stance to match the situation. Appreciating the key facets is better than racking up debating point trivia.

Do you really believe that someone leading a for-now successful business precludes them undergoing mental decline? If anything, why not take a look at recent developments in contrast to past performance as more relevant evidence than the simple fact of a successful business existing? Tesla stock not doing so hot these days.

Should we assign truth value to people's opinions based on their wealth and following? I don't see how your comments about Hanania's global strategic positioning have anything to do with the veracity of his opinion.

You also seem to think...people are dumb for not following Trump even if they don't believe in his goals or execution? It seems extremely plausible that Hanania simply did not want to be a sycophant for Trump, which says nothing about how 'bad' he is at politics. You seem to be invoking some assumption that Hanania was clearly angling for some political gain that he fumbled by not supporting Trump, and that doesn't seem much more plausible than other explanations.

Hanania said he was anti-woke, he made all these posts about it. He was seemingly angling to be a public intellectual and influence US policy in various respects before flip-flopping and burning his bridges.

In that scenario, it makes sense to not come out and sneer at Trump. It's called tact, diplomacy, political skill. Or is Hanania just an internet troll with a substack?

Furthermore, I am highly confident that Elon Musk has demonstrated a high level of business ability and 'making things happen' in the last 3 years. Tesla is just one of his businesses. Tesla is exactly where it was in July 2024 or November 2024 in stock price. It's a 700 billion dollar company manufacturing goods in competition with China, which is extremely difficult. Maybe Elon can't be expected to run Tesla, SpaceX, Twitter and GrokAI at a world-class level simultaneously, while also rearranging US politics? Maybe he can only keep 3 or 4 balls in the air at once, he's still pretty good at juggling. People who have never juggled aren't qualified to sneer at the abilities of the best jugglers, that's my point.

Again, you seem to be squashing a lot of plausible complexity into a very simple categorization of Hanania being 'antiwoke'. Does being antiwoke preclude one from disagreeing heavily with other antiwoke people to the point you publically break from them? I don't see why it would. It COULD be the case that he thought this was best for his career and this is some massive error on his part in sensing what his audience wants, but it's just as convenient an explanation that he disagrees with Trump on policy to such a degree that simply being on the antiwoke team is not enough to garner a blind eye.

I think there's a country mile between cynically falling in line behind 'your guy' and being an internet troll. Was Sanders trolling when he ran against Clinton? Or is it more likely that people on ostensibly the same wing of politics sometimes do things that hurt others in the same wing because they have different beliefs?

If you don't accept that people who don't run successful businesses can't provide insight on those who do, then I struggle to see how you manage to derive value from any comments on this forum, where anonymous internet randos constantly comment on the goings-on of high profile business and government leaders who are usually, by every public metric, very successful. A sneer (or criticism, or observation) is just as good as the argument it presents, no more no less. People who are successful may have on average better insights into others that are as well, but you can still always judge the critique on its merits no matter who submits it. In this case, to refute Hanania's comments a good response would be to cite Musk's recent successes, as you've done. The comments on Hanania' lack of business success don't really address anything directly. (And in fact, I find it likely that he is, by this metric you've chosen, more successful than most commenters here, the forum you elect to participate in.)

Who cares what Hanania thinks about human excellence? He has (generously) 1/1000th of Elon's following, maybe 1/100,000 of his wealth. Is Hanania running a viable AGI program? Is Hanania building huge rockets? Are Hanania's opinions relevant in world affairs, does he control key communications infrastructure used by armies? Is he doing anything of importance whatsoever?

No one shall care about Hanania, but you should care, if you care about world's affairs at all, if man who does all these things, destroys his brain with drugs and gets all his information from xitter and 4chan shitposters.

If he's doing those things, then is he destroying his brain with drugs? What about Meta, what have they been doing? Has Zuckerberg been destroying his brain with drugs throwing $20 billion into VR with zero returns and with Meta AI getting defenestrated by Grok 3 and Deepseek, not to mention kowtowing to Trump after he won the election rather than supporting him before, like Elon? Running these huge organizations is difficult. There are ups and downs.

The elite, prestigious sources of information have discredited themselves. They go on and on about climate change (nothingburger) and demand extremely costly and ineffective fixes. They came up with DEI and globalized the whole US race obsession. They swept Rotherham under the carpet and brought us the summer of Floyd. They've damaged relations between the sexes considerably. They cheered for the retard wars in the middle east. They spurred political division by blundering obsessively and then screeching misinformation when anyone tried to point out their inadequacy.

The damage caused by the narratives they put out far exceeds anything Musk and far-right anime profile pics have done.

This is sneering.

Or rather, it's the kind of sneering that people like Hanania indulge to salve their egos.

I am not ashamed to say that I am of origin a 4chan shitposter. I, of course, cannot speak for an amorphous group of internet trolls. But I'd like to think that people like me and people who think like me have no pretensions of gatekeeping the culture or its discourse. But despite this, our little internet sect - if it can even be called that - is upstream of so much of the current political moment that we are either incredibly prescient of the degeneration of propriety or we masterminded its fall and decline. The American president is a living, breathing meme. He trolls the world! And in some insignificant yet important way, we are a part of it.

Or it could be all a big coincidence. It would be just as funny.

No one outside of Hanania's little circle cares about his opinions. He's no thought leader. Not even a secret king. Trump may be master of the media cycle, but he is a boomer and ultimately of their generation. Elon is one of us. At times he may be based and other times he will be a lolcow, but the Extremely Online Right Wing Weirdos have broken into government and there is nothing the bow-tied Buckleyites can do about it.

nothing the bow-tied Buckleyites can do about it.

Hanania is a former white nationalist who wrote for Counter-Currents.

I'm not sure what any of this has to do with anything?

Analysing the tribe that Hanania belongs to may be great sport, but it is, surely, completely inconsequential to the points he makes, which the top-level post presumably wanted to discuss?

In short: he's coping and seething because he is not the court philosopher of the people in power.

In the long: it's no longer 2012. You don't get points for Noticing, no more than you get credit for being a geocentrist in this day and age. Whether Hanania likes it or not, Elon Musk has actually accomplished things. What has he done? Suffered in the desert of barely acceptable discourse for a decade, and when he emerges he isn't treated as a prophet, with respect. He's a nobody, a has-been. Elon brute-forced his way into the president's cabinet to dictate policy, while Hanania snipes at him on a substack. Who is he to say about competence, about anything? Sure, it's not debate club rules, but writing furious tracts on how Elon is a drug addict that is crashing out isn't exactly gentlemanly, either.

Even if Elon is a tenth of the man he was when he started up SpaceX, he's still vastly more influential and powerful than Hanania was on his best day. In the real world, this matters. There is a long history of intellectuals waging personal grudges in the public discourse against their enemies. Nearly all of it is uninteresting.

I'm just going to repeat myself - what does that, even if true, have to do with anything?

I haven't speculated on Hanania's private motivations, in the depth of his soul, because I don't care about them. He's a guy who commentates on politics, and he's provided commentary here. Either that commentary is true and useful, or it isn't, and in neither case does it matter what you think his private dreams and aspirations might be.

Hanania has commented negatively on Musk's character and behaviour. As far as I can tell those comments are well-grounded in observable evidence. What more do you need?

Yes, Musk is "vastly more influential and powerful than Hanania". This is true. This is, in fact, the whole reason why it is appropriate to write articles in Unherd about Musk's character, addictions, changing behaviours, etc., and would not be appropriate to publish similar analyses of Hanania. Musk's character, behaviour, choices, etc., affect vastly more people in the real world, and therefore it is both fair and necessary to subject Musk to closer scrutiny.

The question is why discuss anything Hanania has to say at all? If it's not inherently interesting (and I don't think it is), it would have to be because Hanania is someone to pay attention to. And IMO (and I said this some months ago), he's not.

I don't think he necessarily believes everything he retweets. I think it's more likely that he using 'arguments tweets as weapons'. As someone said in the article's comments (worth a skim btw), the guy is autistic and likely copying a rhetorical strategy he's seen used by others.

I do agree that he is thin skinned (See cave diving submarine suggestion > 'pedo guy' incident, Asmongold Blue Check removal after calling out his fake World #1 Gamer LARP incident) and cracks are appearing at the seams under the current withering pressure. Could also be on enough drugs to affect his behaviour.

All that being said the answer to a flawed Elon isn't 'disband DOGE and make no attempts against cutting spending or the government bureaucracy'.

One last thing, I found the below paragraph from the article interesting:

It might be reasonable to suspect that someone as successful as he is must just be playing dumb online, while displaying a hidden command when it comes to policy. Yet even if you are sympathetic to his goal of reducing the size and scope of government — as I am — focusing on firing federal employees is just about the worst possible way to achieve that end. Fewer people working at the Food and Drug Administration, for example, doesn’t mean regulators getting off the backs of pharmaceutical companies trying to bring drugs to market. Instead, it makes drug-approval processes longer and more arduous. Or consider: Republicans have tended to oppose student-loan forgiveness, but now cuts at the Department of Education may lead to there not being enough workers to collect debt. Put another way: Muskian methods may be enacting a de facto version of former President Joe Biden’s policies.

Isn't this kind of assuming a malicious compliance that's been talked about on here recently? As in 'if you make budget cuts, we will deliberately take them out of areas that will most enrage voters'?

I'm absolutely convinced the thai submarine diver pedoguy incident was directionally correct. You've got a middle aged British dude in Thailand, that's a huge red flag.

If that's all the evidence there is, then how about a solid "I don't know at all"?

Have we considered how destructive having the political left be angry at you is to the sanity of people who aren't cut out for it? That is, people who aren't politicians?

As a prior example, I'm thinking of Jordan Peterson, who seems to have followed a similar trajectory of brilliant man becoming increasingly unhinged as political attacks step up.

Musk got on the political left's shitlist during COVID. I believe he was irrecoverably poisoned on the left when he expressed interest in hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment and complained about labor restrictions in California right as he saved Tesla from bankruptcy.

His fallout with Sam Harris over losing a bet re: the number of total COVID cases there would be in the US seem like early hallmarks of Musk's decline.

Since then it seems like the left's hatred of him has only intensified, not that he didn't help himself by indulging in trolling them back. Basically, having an irresistible urge to troll and being a target of the left can drive some men to ruin.

Musk got on the political left's shitlist during COVID. I believe he was irrecoverably poisoned on the left when he expressed interest in hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment and complained about labor restrictions in California right as he saved Tesla from bankruptcy.

I believe it was specifically the factory closures that did it, because Musk would have seen it as a potential death sentence for his businesses if it carried on. Before this, blue tribe tended to act in ways that were either neutral or positive for his business. That suddenly flipped to extremely negative.

But this is always going to be the elephant in the room for any Trump/Musk is doing a wrecking ball argument. Progressives just drove a wrecking ball that was at least an order of magnitude worse through society, which can justify a pretty big wrecking ball in response if that prevents it from happening again. Or halts it, even. The US avoided some of the worst of it but parts of Europe were still doing severe restrictions in late 2021, after the vaccine rollout, and thus long past any logical stopping point. Worst case scenario for the minimally Trumpy world that Hanania wants is that we're still doing them in 2025.

And to reiterate the below comment, the result is that I’m also okay with pretty much anything if it means driving out whatever political faction we should call this thing.

I think you have a very good point here. I suffered through a set of proto-Woke struggle sessions in the mid-2010s and it does leave certain scars.

The result is that I’m okay with pretty much anything if it means driving out the woke and the people/ideas that produce wokeness. I’m not proud of it but it’s true.

I think the crucial question in this respect is what does it mean to be cut out for it. After all, the trajectories of Musk and Peterson are by no means universal.

Musk and JP could have avoided so much self-inflicted misery if the bottom 99% of their tweets were deleted instead of posted, with hardly any loss in upside.

Being cut out for it means being cool in the face of ugly attacks. It means "acting Presidential". Refusing to be trolled. Refusing to engage in trolling. Have principles, but if you don't, at least pretend to instead of pitching them to own the libs.

A publicist could have saved them each boatloads of treasure, their reputation and their sanity.

To some extent I'd argue that that's the crux of the entire culture war. The left, via their march through institutions as well as their early control over new media, gained access to a super weapon; the ability to point the whole of society against any individual. Western democracies, influenced by Hobbes, had gone to great lengths to make sure this could not be done without considerable hurdles. But suddenly this super weapon was not only available, but at the beck and call of anyone on the left with a good enough narrative. The only constraint was that it could only be pointed rightward.

So for a decade, we had ever increasing use of this weapon against a large number of people. But more often than not, those who were targeted were the "powerful", that is to say, successful people with something to loose . Anyone caught in the crosshairs was ruined; their career, social life, in some cases even freedom suddenly forfeit. But at the end of the day, those people were still alive. Still part of society. And as you said, I think the experience of having your world ripped away for seemingly no reason is enough to genuinely drive someone mad.

And that's what we're now seeing. A horde of these people, crazed to the point of mayhem, ripping apart the core foundations of society. And the left, like a child who shot their parent in a fit of anger, suddenly waking up to the fact that they destroyed their primary means of protection, and that there is no way to wind back the clock.

And while I think quite a few of us might take some grim satisfaction in that last statement, it doesn't change the fact that we're all on this ship as well. If it goes down, every one of us is going to suffer.

I actually have a different issue to raise than my earlier remark: very little of this is new. American business elites have been trying to roll back regulatory oversight, labor laws, and the welfare state since the minute they were created. Certainly the proposition that Musk et al are reacting to being 'ruined' is laughable. Even before he managed to make himself un-elected shadow president, he was one of the richest and most powerful men in the world. Sorry bud, libs hating billionaires isn't new either. All you have to do to get away from them is uninstall twitter.

The only thing new is that the conservative movement has become more reactionary and overtly illiberal.

The only thing new is that the conservative movement has become more reactionary and overtly illiberal.

fitting it would be in reaction to the lib covid hysterics' extreme illiberalism turning the state into a weapon against all of society with its fingers permeating every part of life and causing enormous harm to them

conservatives are the last liberals and it's why they've been losing for many decades

standing atop history yelling "stop!" to the rightwing who were desperately trying to roll-back what the leftists had managed to scheme their way into accomplishing a mere 10 years ago

the ability to point the whole of society against any individual. Western democracies, influenced by Hobbes, had gone to great lengths to make sure this could not be done without considerable hurdles.

This wasn't some ambient power that the Left decided to wield one day. It's a newly developed power, enabled by technology and the virtualization of society. Before ~2000, there was no way the whole of society could be pointed at anyone. Everything was too fragmented for any group (even the elite!) to act coherently, and information was collected, integrated, and acted upon in a much looser cycle. "What should the world do if a random person does a Nazi salute in her car?" wasn't a question anyone considered, because it was entirely unactionable. Now, though, a picture gets taken and shared online, millions of people can see it within an hour, her employer can be easily identified and be communicated to, public relations can carefully track negative sentiments, and she can be fired by lunchtime.

Why was it initially wielded by the Left? Good timing and proximity to the tools of symbolic production.

The left, via their march through institutions as well as their early control over new media, gained access to a super weapon; the ability to point the whole of society against any individual.

This isn't really true*, but it gestures towards something true: the fairly novel experience for social conservatives of not being in the normative driver's seat. For a very long time, social conservatives defined collective norms while social liberals rebelled against them. Every so often the liberals would win a fight and move consensus, but the center of gravity remained with conservatives. Even institutions that tended to be dominated by liberals in composition (e.g. Hollywood) still had to submit to a broader conservative consensus.

In the Obama era, this was upended and for the first time conservatives were in the uncomfortable and bewildering position of being censured for failing to adhere to liberal values rather than vice versa. The cultural center of gravity shifted away from conservatives. Liberals were defining standards of public behavior, and generally not in ways conservatives found agreeable. The entertainment industry shrugged off the aforementioned conservative consensus and started pushing overtly progressive themes (e.g. LGBT/minority representation) in a way that challenged conservatives' sense of rightful cultural hegemony.

This is part of why we get the peculiar phenomenon where conservatives seem to care far more about what liberals say about them than vice versa. The former were accustomed to being able to demand respect and unaccustomed to finding themselves on the outside;the latter were already acculturated to a certain amount of social opprobrium and often took pride in it.

*social media cancellation overwhelmingly affected people in liberal-dominated spaced and was an emergent behavior rather than a directed one. Rupert Murdoch was in no danger of being canceled even though left-wingers absolutely despised him; we can argue about why Musk shifted right

I don’t think conservatives have been in the cultural drivers seat since at least the 1970s. Liberals, up until Obama were just much more careful about showing their power level until the long March was over so they could consolidate power. Hollywood had always been liberal, and even if the movies made in 1970 would be conservative by modern standards, they were absolutely liberal by the conservative standards of the day. Soylent Green was an overpopulation/environmental piece, blaxploitation was an entire genre of film, anti war themes showed up in movies, tv shows, music, and so on. Liberal protests on college campuses have likewise been a thing since Kent State.

I think there are two catalysts for the change. First, social media vastly extended the reach of social opinion, such that private opinions could be easily disseminated online and thus weaponized. You ended up saturating the culture in political opinion, and liberals realized that there were lots of them in cultural power. And it also indexed people’s views for easy reading, thus allowing a purge of crime-thinkers from political and cultural power. The second was the retirement of the old guard who came of age in tge 1950s. They were 60 in 2010, and so a lot of these early boomers retired. They might have headed up a department at a college, ran a music label or tv/movie studio, but they’d imbibed the notion that politics shouldn’t overwhelm the purpose of the institution itself. Entertainment existed to entertain, not preach, colleges were about education. Once those old guys retired, the new leadership felt little compunction about turning the entire thing into a propaganda machine.

I don’t think conservatives have been in the cultural drivers seat since at least the 1970s.

I disagree. The fact that American conservatives don't make very much art isn't especially material*, both because popular art still tended to defer to conservative sensibilities and, more importantly, because I am not just talking about art. Piecemeal challenges to conservative cultural hegemony didn't change the underlying fact that you had to convince conservatives to let you succeed and conservatives were still ultimately setting the baseline. ∃ liberals who have substantial breaks from conservative orthodoxy is not the same thing as liberals driving culture. It took 45 years to go from Stonewall to Obergfell, and that issue still isn't exactly settled. Hell, you had Prop 8 in California in 2008. The 80s were full of conservative backlash to the cultural turmoil of the 70s and the 90s were marked by Clinton's 'triangulation' strategy (i.e. pivoting right on a lot of issues) and a general sense that everything was fine, don't rock the boat.

*Although perhaps a better metaphor then would be that conservatives were in the back of the cultural limousine, being chauffeured around by liberals.

I think art and education are the critical components of gaining control of the culture. Culture is the water you swim in without thinking about it. So if I want to normalize an idea, I would absolutely want to push it into every bi5 of culture I can get away with. If I want to normalize gays then I slowly inject that idea in every story told and song would be written about gay life. If I wanted to normalize Buddhism, you’d see a lot of the heroes of your favorite tv series and movies and references the dharma and meditation and quotes from the sutras in your music. Eventually you’ll not notice it so much, but it will affect you.

I don’t think conservatives have been in the cultural drivers seat since at least the 1970s

And what of the other 5 thousand years of human history?

I believe the Flintstones comic proposes that it was Clod the Destroyer, who punches the liberals in the beef.

I think like everything else it goes in cycles. The modern age (basically since the 1860s has been a time of Cthulhu swimming left, but there are other periods in which Cthulhu was swimming rightward. The rightward swings tend to happen in times of cris, but they do happen.

I am fairly sure American conservatives were not in the cultural driver seat for the other 5 thousand years of human history either.

this was upended and for the first time conservatives were in the uncomfortable and bewildering position of being censured for failing to adhere to liberal values rather than vice versa

Or rather, what "conservatism" was started to cut over at that time. This is a consequence of the Boomers taking over as the primary political power bloc in the US from the generations before them (enough of them had died off at that time to make this possible).

Progressives (which you both do and don't call liberals, and hints at part of the problem for the real liberals and one they've been grappling with for some time) are conservatives, because they act like everything they complain about conservatives for doing. They attempt to enshrine a self-enriching lie that makes them feel better. There is no difference between a Moral Majoritarian of the 1980s and a Moral Majoritarian of the 2020s outside of the fact that the 2020s one no longer feels the need to pretend to be Christian (the '80s Moral Majority wasn't either, of course)- they're both majority-female-led movements, too.

the latter were already acculturated to a certain amount of social opprobrium and often took pride in it.

This is what the modern liberal movement, typified by Musk/Trump and those who voted for them, is starting to rediscover. It's going to be really destructive for a while because the only lever any liberal-minded individual knows how to pull is the one that flushes conservatives (and any good they did) right down the toilet, and so you're going to get people who are more hardened than usual against conservative caterwauling to the point they enjoy it, at the expense of more stable reforms.

This description gives me Wheel of Time vibes, and that is terrifying. Granted, in WoT, it wasn't the women driving the men mad, but it was their failure to work together that tainted Saidin, drove male channelers mad, and led to the Breaking of the World. And if there's a single madman who could break the world ... it'd be the Dragon Elon Musk. ... Wait, what was Ishamael's true name, again? 😱

The ship was heading for an iceberg anyway and they were running articles called "Why Hitting Icebergs is Actually a Good Thing".

JBP was fine until he started using twitter regularly. So were lots of people. I genuinely think that the human mind isn't built for high stakes conversations with thousands of people at once. Let alone doing those every hour of every day.

It takes some character to tell a roomful of people that they're wrong to their face, but imagine if you were brought back to a new roomful of angry people every day for the rest of your life.

I do notice that Elon's zaniness has increased in proportion to his shitposting. But who knows which direction the causality goes there, if any.

Peterson has been a particularly sad one to watch - in some of his early appearances he seems relatively articulate, but watch anything from him later on and it's like watching a man destroy himself in slow motion. My first reaction to Peterson was that he was uninteresting but basically reasonable. Now my reaction to Peterson is a kind of tragic pity.

He used to be a lot more interesting, Maps of Meaning, which is what put him on the map remains a genuinely interesting work if you are into comparative religion from a Jungian perspective.

I want to be fair here, it does seem like he lost some of his wits, but his recent Bible stuff isn't that bad. It just doesn't hit as hard as his old lectures for some reason.

Maybe we've all just moved past such ideas in some sense.

I haven't read that book yet, actually, but I remember Rowan Williams' review of it. Williams is certainly a theologian and biblical scholar of some depth, and one whose judgement I have a good deal of respect for, so that warned me away. It sounded more like Peterson reading the Bible and then using it, no matter what it says, as an excuse to get on one of his regular hobby-horses. This much harsher (and more entertaining) review made it sound quite self-indulgent to me.

You're onto something there for sure. If you ever draw the ire of a Twitter hate mob, the first hundred people that are angry at you make you feel bad. But by the time you've seen the thousandth you have fully dehumanized them and wonder how you can use this power.

It wasn’t a Twitter hate mob. The thing is that in the case of Peterson, they basically got him turned out of university, forced him into choosing between “training in woke” and not being able to practice psychology. And this wasn’t Twitter, a lot of the hate came from news media, political pundits, the students at his university. Basically he was fortunate to have popularity with young men and thus could still earn a living.

I stand corrected.

I don't disagree with anything Hanania wrote, and I do think there's value in publicly stating true things, even if some people in the audience already know them. The general thesis here - that Elon Musk has gotten a lot worse over the last few years, and that lately he seems far too dependent on social media and gullible to conspiracy theories - is, I think, undoubtedly true, and the more people who are aware of it, the better.

However, that said, for a piece titled "How Elon Musk lost the plot", I would have liked more of an attempted explanation as to why this happened. Hanania offers basically three theories:

  1. Musk has optimised his thought process for business, not politics. Certain traits are advantageous in business, like tunnel-vision, innovation, drive, and disregard for limitations imposed by others, but are disadvantageous in politics, or in a serious attempt to comprehend the world. Musk's prior cleverness was non-transferable.

  2. Musk has gotten addicted to social media, trapped himself in a bubble, and this is shaping all his thoughts.

  3. Musk is on drugs.

It is, of course, perfectly plausible that it's a combination of all three - Musk's cleverness didn't transfer, he got himself into an echo chamber of conspiracist lunatics, and drug abuse made everything worse. That seems plausible to me, at least, and a reminder that a combination of factors are likely to exacerbate each other. Brilliance is not a single stable trait, but rather a confluence of factors.

Hanania only discusses the second and third theories offhandedly at the end, though, despite their obvious relevance to the rest of us. I would have been interested to see them integrated a bit more with the central thesis.

Hanania only discusses the second and third theories offhandedly at the end, though, despite their obvious relevance to the rest of us. I would have been interested to see them integrated a bit more with the central thesis.

I think the problem with this is that they mostly (other than observing his social media posts) require private knowledge of him. Also, the transferability of advantageous business traits to other domains may be under-discussed, so it makes editorial sense to give it more attention.

Worse at what? Faking normality? What is the correct level of social media engagement beyond which one appears dependent? Which conspiracy theories does he gullibly believe? You have no doubt these things are true, so I assume you have conclusive evidence.

'Faking normality' is a pejorative way to put it, but yes, he is demonstrably not very good at being socially aware in public. The correct level of social media engagement might be debated between people, but I suggest that it is less than Musk's use. This is too much. As for his gullibility, Hanania covered this perfectly well in the article. He linked this piece which notes, for instance, Musk's belief that Twitter had fake employees, and Musk's belief in the Paul Pelosi false claims. There's Musk's belief that Community Notes were being gamed because they correctly pointed out that Zelensky didn't have an approval rate of 4%, or election nonsense around Dominion voting machines. I do not think it should be very controversial to say that Elon Musk recklessly believes false things. Now not all false things are conspiracy theories, but insofar as a number of Musk's beliefs entail the claim that a clandestine group of people are manipulating events, in secret, for their own agenda, it's reasonable to call them conspiracy theories.

Yeah I didn't read past the first paragraph of Hanania and I really thought you had something significantly better than a rolling stones article called 11 WTF Moments From ‘Character Limit,’ the Book About How Elon Musk Destroyed Twitter.

That's fucking gossip. Gossip based on a ridiculous premise no less. Musk is obviously not neurotypical, he has been accused of weird behaviour all his life and yes that includes ridiculous leaps of logic that don't always pan out. A large part of his success is because of his willingness to say and do things others believe you shouldn't. That practically demands society will call you unhinged.

Nothing in that list looks more unhinged than when he was calling that diver a pedo for making him look bad, and that was well before he bought twitter, so is he just a slow motion train wreck that also makes successful rockets and ai and doge and fakes playing diablo? There's a whole lot of ruin in that man! The last item in the list is about Jack Dorsey also believing some 'conspiracy theories', because gossip doesn't care about truth, it is a social tool used to enforce normality.

Musk doesn't operate like normal people because Musk is not like normal people. And thank God for that.

I linked the Rolling Stone piece because that was the piece Hanania linked in his article, if you were paying attention, and as much as we look down on Rolling Stone (which is absolutely reasonable, it's a rag), the claims that I took from it are true. It links Musk's own tweets. He really did believe that Twitter had fake employees and that Paul Pelosi was attacked by his gay lover. I then gave two additional examples of my own, so I was not relying wholly on one article - Musk's belief that Community Notes were being gamed, and that Dominion voting machines were influencing the election. These are all directly sourced to thinks that Musk said himself, in public.

Nothing in that list looks more unhinged than when he was calling that diver a pedo for making him look bad, and that was well before he bought twitter, so is he just a slow motion train wreck that also makes successful rockets and ai and doge and fakes playing diablo? There's a whole lot of ruin in that man!

Um, yes? Musk is clearly an erratic man with a bizarre relationship with the truth. He said unhinged things well before 2022, and he continues to do nonsensical things today, like buy high level Path of Exile 2 accounts and unconvincingly pretend to be an uber gamer. None of that makes it implausible that he has gotten worse over time.

I am aware the rolling stone article was in the article, my point was that you were unequivocal, so when you said he has gotten a lot worse over the past few years I was expecting a sharp obvious decline, not 'he did the exact same shit half the men on the planet have done at one time or another'. The Paul Pelosi thing was hilarious! I want it to be true too! So, much like I do with serial murderer Ted Cruz, I pretend it is true. This is common behaviour. It's not good, but it's not something you should be using to judge someone incompetent, particularly when they continue knocking it out of the park in other areas.

Similarly common is thinking your employees are lying to you and stealing from you. The voting machines thing I'll just say that I don't see how it's more outlandish than all cops are racist or republicans want all women in chains - the only difference is those conspiracies have social approval.

But yeah everybody does shit like that, the only difference here is that Musk is a public figure so his bad behaviour is isolated and blown up into a big deal. The justification for this is society needs to show people how not to behave, and if you want to say he's being a stupid prick I am right there with you, but the media became the west's new priests without the discipline of the old order and are no longer policing bad behaviour, they are instead weaponising mental illness against their enemies. That's all I see happening here.

If this is what you think everybody does, then... well, I question how many people you've been interacting with. Most people, I notice, seem to be able to not spend hours every day tweeting nonsense. Most people did not respond to the Paul Pelosi story with "LOL, I wish that were true, it'd be hilarious!", even if you hold that Musk was joking, which he does not appear to have been doing anyway.

No, most people are not like Elon Musk in this regard, and I find this an odd defense considering that you just said that Musk "doesn't operate like normal people". Which is it? Even in this post you accuse the media of "weaponising mental illness" - is Musk mentally ill? Is that your position? Is his behaviour normal or not?

But yeah everybody does shit like that, the only difference here is that Musk is a public figure so his bad behaviour is isolated and blown up into a big deal.

If this were the case I would expect there to be similar stories about every public figure, or at least, about every public figure that the mainstream media blob does not like. But that is not the case.

If this were the case I would expect there to be similar stories about every public figure, or at least, about every public figure that the mainstream media blob does not like. But that is not the case.

Lmao ok.

I will clarify some misunderstandings.

I said half of the men on the planet, which was hyperbole, you got me. It is common to want embarrassing stories about people you dislike to be true was my point. if you think it isn't I question how honest you allow the people in your life to be with you. Also most people do indeed say stupid shit on xitter all day every day. That's why everyone hates it? It is also common, when you have a conspiracy theory, to follow it as far as you can for fun. It is also a useful mental exercise, because it allows you to think in ways you hadn't previously.

Secondly, yes Musk is similar to other people in some ways and different in others. He is, in my opinion, more different than similar, but like most people he has two arms, two legs, a heart, and cognitive faculties regulated by hormones. Therefore he is susceptible to influence, he gossips and loves and hates and admires just like normal people, but he isn't normal.

Thirdly the media weaponises mental illness by using it to smear people who are merely badly behaved by isolating their bad behaviour and finding a pattern they can claim shows this behaviour is part of a trend that justifies taking from them. Musk might be mentally ill, I don't know, I'm not his doctor. I do know that he doesn't seem to be 'much worse' than he was 7 years ago, so I guess I remain unconvinced.

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Is there something about this post you wanted to discuss? or are you only posting it so you could quote autistic people making awkward digs at other autistic people? boo outgroup via proxy.

I don’t see how posting a (imo substantive) criticism of one particular person constitutes “boo outgroup.”

substantive criticism = cheesecake_llama is a drug addict that broke their brain with drugs because I disagree with their political opinions?

That’s an obvious strawman of Hanania’s argument

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