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Elon got harshly booed on stage with Dave Chappelle, and I am absolutely baffled. I thought the people who still enjoyed Dave's comedy post-The Closer (when he got deemed transphobic by left-wing activists) would be indifferent, if not positive, towards Elon Musk. But people who like Chappelle and not Elon are not only common, but the majority of the people in this audience. Did I miss something?
It was in San Francisco. Not exactly that surprising.
And yet San Francisco was happy to see notorious transphobic TERF and mild anti-Semite Dave Chappelle.
Maybe his opinions on the trans thing are less unpopular than the screeching media wants you to think. Or even: they screech precisely so no one can sit and have a sober moment to reflect how popular this opinion is. Instead the hope is that the media cacophony is loud enough to convince you it isn't and so you get cowed into silence.
Again: if the audience isn't bothered by Chappelle's trans stuff, then what could possibly bother them about Elon?
His shitposting.
His buying of Twitter
The report about him settling sexual harassment lawsuits
His weird breeding fetish
His oversaturation and the way certain types really praise him? (This might have actually gotten weaker recently, as he's gotten more polarizing)
Him proposing dubious projects like the hyperloop
Him taking over a social media site and firing a bunch of people in what many people (who don't give a shit about business reasons) could find off-putting.
The general "unblue" vibe he seems to have picked up recently (or was imposed on him)
The media told them he Did A Thing That Was Bad but it was something they actually care about as opposed to the trans issue.
Perhaps the simplest and already stated above: Him not being a comedian, which is what they paid for? People don't necessarily want to pay money to help a rich millionaire comedian live out his culture war skirmish and fete his new allies.
(Not trying to rebut you in particular here. This is a rant I've had building up for a while, and you provided a lead-in.)
It's funny: I'm having trouble remembering when he proposed something that didn't strike lots of people as highly dubious. I'm most familiar with SpaceX among his companies, so I'll use examples from there. Some of his absurd ideas:
A private space company without lots of legacy engineering expertise, many billions of dollars of government money on cost-plus contracts, and so on. This was considered somewhere between unlikely and impossible -- Everybody Knows that space is the exclusive domain of governments and their closely-affiliated contractors. (I was online at the time, and I remember the ridicule!)
Lots of people were dunking on the idea of propulsively landing Falcon 9 lower stages -- on tiny barges in the ocean, of all things! -- and the jeering intensified when the early landing attempts kept turning into an entertaining procession of explosion videos. Then one day they stopped exploding, and kept on not exploding at least 9 times out of 10, with reliability improving over time.
A satellite internet constellation in low-earth orbit?! The dumber critics complained that it would have horrible ping times (because they got LEO confused with GEO), and the smarter critics thought that launching thousands of satellites that you have to replace every 5 years would be so ludicrously expensive that it would be a complete non-starter. Today there are more than 3000 mass-produced Starlink satellites in the sky; cost estimates look surprisingly good now, and are set to become much better with Starship launching. They're also trying to turn it into a military-contracting cash cow by offering the US DoD some capabilities that it badly wants, with their very-dramatically-named Starshield program.
Speaking of Starship, it has been ridiculed quite a bit, though the specific contents of that ridicule have been forced to change over the years. At first the problem was that they were trying to make a high-performance methalox engine of a type that had never successfully been made before -- but between some fancy new alloys and GPU-aided combustion chamber modeling, they managed to make the engine work. Then people were laughing at the idea of making the body out of steel plates welded together by guys whose previous job was water tower construction -- but it turned out to work really well in practice. Now people are scoffing at the idea that the $/kg to orbit could be anywhere near as low as SpaceX is predicting... and we'll see how that goes.
Over the years one starts to notice a pattern here. Musk has proposed a lot of things that ended up changing after being found unworkable or suboptimal, but in general, I'm wary of saying that any of them are obviously not going to work. If nothing else, he employs engineers who are capable of doing back-of-the-envelope calculations.
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The expansion is that western civilisation is fucked.
To expand the expansion further: around the gay marriage debates of the 2010s, a losing rearguard argument was put forward by the anti side that I nonetheless think was sound. It goes: expanding the concept of marriage such that it could include gay couples without self-contradiction means changing what all marriages are about. Or more precisely, affirming a change which had been underway in high Western culture since the 60s/70s.
This was the change whereby marriages went from being a cradle for families and child-rearing, to being a site for self-fulfilment and self-actualisation. Marriage's telos was to be fulfilment, and a right to marriage therefore follows from enlightenment rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". No-one within the thinkable window in the 2010s was going to make the argument that gay couples couldn't pursue happiness and shared fulfilment as effectively as straight couples, so excluding them from marriage became artirary, a relic of an earlier belief system. A 1950s vision centred on nuclear families ironically began to look a bit camp (the sincere concern with flower arrangements! A man's wedding is the absolute zenith of most straight men's concern with flower arrangements).
There's a pretty direct line from no-shame divorce to gay marriage. The internal logic leads naturally there, as was pointed out many times by both pro and anti sides (Jon Stewart voice: "What sanctity?? [Republican] is already three-times divorced, and my great aunt Ethel is dancing her tuchas off at over-70s singles nights at the [conservative place]. What are gays going to do to this institution that you haven't done already?)
Anyway, back to the West being fucked: in a context where marriage is a thing that some people like to do because it's fulfilling (and self-fulfilment is high status, marriage is decreasingly for the hoi polloi, who probably are fulfilled by like nativism or something idgaf), then there's only a weak vestigial pairing between pairing and rearing. At this stage the link between the two is like having English mustard with steak; some people like it and it's a traditional combo, but others find [the continuation of the human species] a bit uncomfortable and that's okay.
This is the sense in which, post-2010s, all marriages are gay marriages. "If you don't like gay marriage then don't marry someone of the same sex!"
Too late, Jon Stewart from 2010: I'm now gay-married to my straight spouse.
Hence, together with the brittle crystalising of sexuality taking place in modern culture (you may have one of several dozen/hundred sexual tastes, that's consumerist liberation, but your predilictions must be ordered and legible. Disordered, messy, dangerous sex goes back in the "problematic" box) it follows naturally that the act of sustaining the human race becomes kink #312a, and a rather outré one at that.
It's funny in a late 20th century UK sitcom way; the empire shrinks and crumbles, we are reduced, but there are bleak gags to be had.
A final note: the reason why this "kink" is a bit outré is due to demographic anxiety in whites, which by the way both isn't happening and is A Good Thing. I've never heard anyone criticise a profoundly fecund NBA player as being possessed of a breeding kink.
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Yeah, the last thing I think about in relation to Elon is trans issues.
That said, these days I'm mostly just disappointed in Elon. I wouldn't boo him, but I wouldn't cheer him either.
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