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Notes -
We Won
On Sunday Morning, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went on ABC's This Week and proclaimed, "Woke 1 was crazy". The immediate context was AOC defending Wisconsin DSA governor candidate Francesca Hong, and so a lot of people are clowning on her for handwaving away everything that happened in 2015-2022. To the extent that this is about who you should vote for in the Wisconsin governor's race, I agree with the criticism, but I want to take a step back and appreciate how far we've come.
Think back to remember how it felt in the dark days of 2020 and 2021. It was far from clear that the reign of terror would ever end. Every week another subreddit or Twitter poster was banned. Facebook was removing posts supporting Kyle Rittenhouse as a policy. "Abolish the Police" was treated as a serious (if aspirational) policy proposal. Above everything else, the worst part was the psychological damage, the feeling that the entire world was going insane; that it was just you and a few guys from a Harry Potter fanfiction forum spinoff who were capable of the miniscule amount of critical thinking required to know that removing Aunt Jemima's face from bottles of pancake syrup did absoutely nothing to help black people.
The fact that even the left-wing of the Democratic Party is campaigning on health care, tax policy, and Palestine instead of racial humiliation is a big deal. There is a temptation to equate "woke" (more specifically "woke 1") with generic liberal Democrat stuff, but that's not really true. Conversely, it becomes easy to overlook some of Trump's greatest accomplishments. Turning DEI and Critical Race Theory into curse words and ending affirmative action were huge. People said it couldn't be done, and then they were done so fast that everyone forgot by the midterms.
As an aside: I never understood the people calling AOC unattractive, and still don't. I find the "Zendaya is ugly" thing easier to understand (not that I consider her unattractive either).
It's the same phenomenon as calling Elon Musk "stupid," which is basically dogma in some parts of the country, including where I live. People, even educated, intelligent people who went to academic institutions purportedly meant specifically to disabuse people of that notion, really love the idea that people they disagree with also have other negative characteristics that realistically ought to have minimal - if any - correlation with conformity to one's own personal set of ethics or ideals. So damn physical reality, since I don't like AOC/Musk, then s/he is unattractive/stupid. To be fair, the latter set of people often openly admit to rejecting empiricism as a tool of oppression by White Supremacists, so they're living up to their stated principles there.
As an aside, I'm apparently in a tiny minority in considering Zendaya not only attractive, but one of the most attractive women in Hollywood right now, but also I do find the "Zendaya is ugly" thing not hard to understand. She has bodily and facial features which are not what I'd consider screaming in femininity.
Elon Musk is clearly very smart and he's also such a retard. Both can be true at once lol.
My friends frequently describe me as the "stupidest smart person they know" , so I relate to this
I'm not humble bragging or comparing myself to Elon, I doubt I have his level of engineering IQ or grind, I just observe he says stupid shit that makes it harder for him to achieve his goals a lot
What has Musks actually done that is stupid? Twitter posting? A lot of us credit his Twitter posting and fixing Twitter for saving Western Society for atleast a few years.
I think this shows your bias much more than evidence of Musks stupid actions.
3 and 6 are defensible.
The story with 3 is that they tested it too much just to be sure. They’d done it something like 10 times in the back and damaged it.
As for 6, I’ve seen this situation before and I don’t know about Tesla, but a company at founding can be just a nominal address, or at least a few guys making pamphlets and phone calls. If someone joins at a very early stage when they really have nothing and takes the company to success, it seems fair to call them a founder even if they didn’t own stock on the first day the company existed.
3 is defensible but stupid in a different way, test obsessively, but on a spare item not the demonstration one.
I wouldnt consider Patrick Henry to be a founder of the US either. Important contributor sure or leader of the revolutuon and very worthy of respect, but not a founder.
Similarly, I wouldn't call Andy Grove a founder of Intel. Even though he joined on day one seved as COO from its inauguration, and probably contributed as much as anyone to its most successful state.
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