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Goodguy  2d ago (text post)   Edited 2d ago   9093 thread views

Midterms Megathread

Cause otherwise midterms discussion will be scattered around a bunch of separate Culture War thread posts. And it's nice to have more off-the-cuff rapid reactions in a dedicated megathread.

The first thing I've noticed so far: if the exit polls are correct, Americans are very pessimistic about AI.

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Biggest loser? Individually? Might actually be Elon Musk. He’s about to get investigated, hauled in front of Congress, bro wasted a half billion dollars almost on one of the worst losses in recent GOP history, tons of people hate him, and Trump is almost certainly NOT going to bail him out either

Why did he decide to tie himself so inextricably to Trump and the GOP? I suppose some of it is his genuine dislike of wokeism. Not doubt he is also a rejection sensitivity dysphoria sufferer and this would have been triggered by the Dems disrespecting him over the electric car summit and so forth. But just as a matter of basic strategy, how were his long-term business aims ever going to be served by not maintaining some manoeuvrability within a two-state system that was always likely to pendulum back and forth?

He's a regulations-hater and Trump also has a strong deregulation agenda. On twitter he kept bringing up how the regulators made him drag up sea creatures and put headphones on them to see if they were distressed by the noise of the rockets, he thought that was absurd.

Also he has a feud with California regarding the general Dem anti-billionaire sentiment.

I don't think it was predictable that Trump was going to go crazy with tariffs and Iran. Nobody expected tariffs, markets least of all, Musk fell out with Trump severely over that (now forgotten).

I suppose I understand on the issues why he'd be pro Trump. I don't understand strategically why he wouldn't give himself wriggle room anyway in preparation for the inevitable. I guess he's just an all or nothing, big-bets, everything is existential kind of guy.

I think, like a lot of people, he just got radicalized. A lot of people got radicalized in the pro-Dem direction by a trans child, he went the other route.

I think he got hit too many times from too many directions with no sense that there'd ever be any let up if these people had their druthers. They were uncompromising on the cultural/trans front and were turning it into a loyalty test and they were moving in a more Lina Khan direction of opposing the rich corporations (and then there was COVID). Rarely do personal and private interests line up so well but, when they do, it's almost irresistible.

I feel like the nature of the Woke Panopticon is that since even moderate defection on a singular issue (Rowling/Trans the Ur-example) leads to you getting immediately treated like Turbohitler that a lot of Public Figures that defect on one thing then go relatively extreme conservative since it's not really worth toeing the line on anything else that you're on the borderline about

Rowling isn't remotely "moderate" on trans people. She's about as far right as you can get short of calling for their extermination. For an actual moderate, look at Jesse Singal.

Absurd. Rowling has been for transpeople living their lives so long as it doesn't interfere with women's sex-protected spaces. A more radical opinion between that and extermination exists and it's simply denying them any recognition.

What kind of "recognition" does Rowling support? Because what you're saying sounds like treating trans women as men in every respect socially, and I'm pretty sure that's what Rowling advocates. She doesn't even use people's preferred pronouns, and I don't see what that has to do with protecting (cis) women's spaces.

I guess an in-between position could be imprisoning trans people instead of calling for their extermination.

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