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I've read this thread yesterday. It asserts that Musk stands for a compelling and coherent vision:
Not defending the Temple Mount frame or California-centric analysis, I have to admit that the Civic Religion angle is apt. As @2rafa observed, my support of most tenets of Muskianism is essentially irrational and quasi-religious, following from my basic Cosmism (that Musk, as a deathist, unfortunately disagrees with) and qualified belief in technological solutions to problems that, while social in nature, partially follow from scarcity and technological limits.
Compared to SVU or SJC, what do libertarians offer in the marketplace of ideas? If they know what's good for them, I think they should position themselves as a minor sect allied with the former church.
Likewise for many others. The vision of SJC is totalizing and unforgiving to competitors, being rooted in absolute zero-sum philosophy.
What? Progressivism? Is this just nonstandard terminology, like when libertarians call themselves Classical Liberals, as though libertarianism bears any resemblance to liberalism in the modern taxonomy? Or do you see Musk as actually caring about anything that Nancy Pelosi fights for? In the modern world, "progressive" means "the liberal wing of the liberal party." It's the Squad, John Oliver, pronoun-ism and anti-racism.
Best I can see he is purebred John Galt: low taxes, OSHA can get off his property, openly ridicules pronoun people, doesn't give a shit about worker protections, busts unions as hard as he can, acts like every pointless midwit diversicrat who draws a salary from his companies is effectively stealing from him, and has the absolute audacity to think that people who achieve things deserve more credit and power than people who don't.
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working in a tech hub and knowing a lot of this type of person their response would largely be that those problems are trivial. First off in a post-scarcity society the amount of problem would be greatly reduced. Hundredfold the economic base of humanity and most problems will be cheap to deal with. With boundless resources, a huge number of jobs performed by AI and a massive economy most problems can be solved by spending small sums of money.
The second assumption is that tech runs the world and everything else is a sideshow. Going from primitive agricuture to the nuclear age is a much larger step than deciding who does the dishes or writes meeting notes. The idea is that tech leads and the rest is mainly commentary to it. The big issue is having a trillion people living in rotating space habitats with a GDP per capita 20 times that of a current western nation, not figuring out how many members the local school boards will have on each rotating habitat.
These types of technoutopians tend to favour descentralization and not really want a specific system for the whole solarsystem. The idea is 3D printing and AI can allow for relatively small groups of people to achieve autonomy and with tens of billions or more people spread out in the solarsystem many different systems will exist in parallel.
This assumes that the relevant problems are, in fact, material. What if they are instead zero-sum games of pure status? That's what the last 20 years increasingly looks dominated by.
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Salience is a subjective metric. Plebs are more placated than ever. Folks here have been losing their minds about excesses of BLM, but compare it either to the '92 race riot or the terror wave in the 70's.
There's a great deal of simulacra running wild; most are ephemeral. With actual virtual reality we may wage entire world wars that'll amount to moving bytes around.
I suppose techno-utopians wouldn't count the current condition as a win. But it is largely a product of tech, and economy built on top of technological improvements.
In any case, not caring a lot about the culture war is a legitimate position to hold, and one expected of people who are more interested in objects than in other people – as in, most STEM nerds.
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All these things are details. The main question that is unanswered - aside of question whether Earthly life can survive and prosper long term in Martian gravity - is:
Why? What exactly would the settlers on Mars do, how would they make money, where exactly would come the promised super profits that would justify the super expenses?
Old time colonialism was not done for "destiny", if was done for very concrete benefits (gold, silver, slaves, spices, sugar, tobacco etc...). What Musk promises is, at best, 19th century flag planting in most remote shitholes of the world for "national honor", only several magnitudes more expensive.
Some libertarian types see space colonies as "land of freedom", as place to hide and escape from "the gubmint". This is even more delusionary take.
If/when Elon delivers what he promised, Mars will be as remote and hard to get to as Antarctica and Arctic are right now. Are people fleeing to Antarctic bases or Arctic oil platforms for freedom or for place to hide?
Indeed, Heinlein's Lunar Authority as it existed before the unlikely events of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is probably a better model. Whoever controls the air is the totalitarian leader of society, and if you don't like it you can breathe vacuum.
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I think your persistent schtick of grilling leaders over being poor role models doesn't make for good critique. We may live in a fatherless age, but that doesn't mean it's healthy to seek a Daddy in Musk, Peterson, Trump or any other vaguely authoritative and charismatic male; thus, irrelevant if they are underwhelming in that capacity, as most remarkable figures throughout history have been, in any case. We need some way other than celebrity worship to impart values to laymen. There was a certain institution called Church that worked on that, if memory serves.
From a stratospheric (say Duginist in Noomakhia) point of view where Pharaohs and Plato and actual Nazis and Haredim stand on the same ideological game board as early 20th century progressivists, SJWs and Musk, it may look like «SVU» is a tiny elaboration on a basic Enlightenment take, an unremarkable niche within a niche. But that a priori search space only exists in the abstract; most of those regions either cannot be upscaled for purposes of industrial civilization, or accessed without a catastrophic transition event. Progress may not reveal the Hegelian truth of social organization; it certainly prunes branches away, and all the diversity that practically matters is the diversity we have left on the table. In this sense, Muskianism – or Thielism, or a more broad techno-optimistic «SVU» coalition – is very meaningfully different from «SJC». Space colonization as opposed to penny-pinching footprint optimization, the doctrine of growth as opposed to degrowth, supply side thinking as opposed to grievance-driven spoils system – all that is consequential, more so than speculative details of communal living and sexual mores in eventual Mars colonies. Even if it doesn't have enough verbal novelty to entertain you.
Are you bullish on Islamists inheriting California? What would you suggest to invest in?
I agree having more explicit and legible work in the ideological direction would be nice. These rich dudes should employ someone talented for that purpose, like their opponents do.
Neal Stephenson, maybe.
Lazy counter: isn't God simply the ultimate surrogate father figure, the Biggest Daddy, if you will?
Well, I alluded to «what would Jesus do» prompt, and Jesus Christ is not just God and ultimate role example for Christians but a Superstar, of course. Still, he has the advantage of not being an erratic American CEO.
And even Church doesn't recommend following Jahweh's example.
They do add some confusion with the whole Trinity thing.
I was always under the impression that BPD is part of the traditional Middle Eastern conception of fatherhood.
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