domain:slatestarcodex.com
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1m ago
What a wonderful development. Get the popcorn.
Hopefully Musk learns what the majority of the rest of the grey tribe learned long ago: that Trump, while being useful for trashing wokeness, is broadly a thuggish buffoon. In a perfect world Musk would become an abundance Democrat, or give up on politics altogether and go back to making rockets.
Elevatorgate was the Gamergate of the Atheist community. That either explains the whole thing perfectly or leaves you totally mystified, so I'll break it down a bit more.
You have a community. A woman in the community claims that the behavior of the men in the community is problematic, and what is needed is for the community to begin enforcing stringent new rules developed by social justice ideology. These rules contradict large portions of the community's existing norms, so people resist their imposition. The community rapidly polarizes into those who are on board with Social Justice ideology and those who are not, and social shunning and retaliation forces people to pick a side or have a side picked for them.
A short time later, the community that once existed is now a shell of its former self, if it exists at all.
I say "woman" above because the primary blast wave happened to coincide with a notable wave of Feminism, but this appears to be more or less an accident of history. It could be any identity group favored by social justice, and later often was, but in 2014-2015 it was mainly feminism driving the process. "Elevatorgate" was when the blastwave hit the Atheists. "Gamergate" was when it hit video game fans. "RequiresHate" was when it came for the fantasy/sci-fi community, "The Dickwolves Incident" for the Penny Arcade fandom; I don't know what they called it for the TTRPG designer forums. It came for most online communities sooner or later.
Tree
10m ago
If women don’t talk about it, and they usually don’t (you being an exception), then I don’t think you can pin the blame on men. Plenty of doctors are women, and besides, you can’t expect much from doctors. They have fixed categories they put people in, so they don’t have to think. Tell them a pregnant woman vomits often, nobody panics because it’s all part of the plan. But say that some undefined adult vomits often, well then everyone loses their minds.
As to why pro-choice feminists aren’t publicizing it, my guesses are:
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they prefer to highlight damage they can attribute to men, rather than nature.
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they don’t want to be limited to physical damage, they want the right to abort for any reason, including mere convenience.
yofuckreddit
12m ago
In no particular order:
- I am unsure if this is sooner, later, or right on time. I was 100% confident this would happen, but expected a smaller explosion.
- If Trump thinks he's going to win against someone who is smarter and more driven than he is, with a high amount of innoculative safety via wealth, he's wrong.
- However if Elon thinks that Biden's targeted attacks during his administration were tough, he's in for a wild fucking ride.
Ultimately I'm blown away by how selfish this explosion is to SpaceX and Tesla. All of his employees and perhaps even the human race are going to be hurt because of it. And over what? A completely intractable political reality?
The US electorate is too pants-on-head retarded to save itself from spending. That's it. There is only one way out of this, and it's riding the lightning until we're all consumed by a black swan event in the next couple of years.
ABigGuy4U
16m ago
But how much this is confounded by the fact that the economic outlook for working class men in the Rust Belt is currently really bad? In 1975 you would have seen vastly higher amounts of fatal drug overdose rates in America’s ruined cities than out in the countryside. Now the situation is reversed.
thejdizzler
17m ago
The thing is all of them matter to me, although I guess I have to think about prioritization
50 miles a week is my "normal" mileage, although I haven't been up there for about 4 months because of injuries. I'm at about 35 right now so this is doable. 50 probably will take about six hours total. I'm a very good runner (2:35 marathon, 4;17 mile) and decent swimmer so this should be fine.
I needed to add more context for the Anki stuff! When I say 3k spanish cards I mean get up to that total. I'm at 2700 right now. I'm at 405 with Italian so it would only be 400 extra cards total. And my Spanish is quite good now (I just took the B2 test), so I think I'm ready to add Italian.
I have about 100 (free) subs on substack. I think posting there helps me think more clearly (as does here, but there's not a possibility of being paid for being a motte poster!
I should have also clarified about the reading. The Spanish and English reading are combined, so any reading I do for Spanish counts towards both goals. 400k words is about ~1600 pages, so this would be about half of my total goal!
More negative goals might be a good idea too (quit this, limit that). I have a soft goal of only watching one YouTube video a day. Hopefully this will save me some time.
Savings rate means save at least 20% of my take home income for the month. Basically means cutting down on spending.
Thanks for the feedback!
netstack
Texas is freedom land
20m ago
I’m not thrilled about how AT is putting words in your mouth, but this sort of callout helps approximately never.
Be polite or refrain from responding at all. No one will think less of you for it.
nopie
23m ago
Not staged, it is real.
Obviously, many things said in anger now, can and will be taken back. Don't take them too seriously. But the fight is real.
nopie
24m ago
To me it seems that if you have to pay 10% on interest payments for the debt, you could easily reduce spending by 10% and not to pay this interest payment and be in the same situation. Obviously, that would cause short term pain but long term benefits.
I personally can easily spend 4-5 years at college and/or training and live frugally to get better job or whatever. Everybody can.
roystgnr
24m ago
I'm pretty sure the part where Elon started insinuating Trump is a pedo wasn't staged:
Time to drop the really big bomb:
@realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.
Have a nice day, DJT!
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
26m ago
On the other side: Trump has now an enemy with 200 million followers and who owns the dominant conservative online corner.
I feel like this leads to Trump getting banned from Twitter again, right? It's hard for me to imagine Musk not taking the chance to spite-kick him off the platform.
Muninn
"Dick Laurent is dead."
26m ago
heard legends of people doing stuff like playing bloody knuckles or sack tap, but never have known anyone personally who did that.
IDK if it's age, or peer group, or what, but inflicting pain on each other for teh lulz was a definite part of my childhood and adolescent experience. Bloody knuckles, hot hands, "Indian" burns, and the like were all a part of my experience as a child. And by the time I was a Senior in HS, I had friends that would literally sneak up behind another unsuspecting friend, reach between the legs of the target, grab the target's scrotum and yank it backwards while pushing the target forward and down with their other hand, and then laugh like hell at the results. No one was safe! For bonus points, one of these friends managed to pull of a newly-invented variant of this on me at work just as the CEO walked in, which was funny to me both then and now.
roystgnr
27m ago
Most ironically, he was too liberal. This was the characteristic of Joe Rogan that was damning to them and that elicted the reaction that was damning of them. He may never have been too immoderate for them in the modern sense of "liberal"=="leftist", but he was far too much for them in the older sense of "liberal"=="open minded". While the modern left was discovering the delicious joys of shunning and deplatforming, Rogan was still stubbornly letting any idiot with any wacky or problematic ideology come to him and make a case for it to him and his audience. The last straw for them in 2024 may have been that, when he offered to let their idiot take advantage of his liberalism, at a point where she clearly needed it, she simply chose not to accept!
It's possible that she was doomed either way, that she had good reason for insisting on an hour interview surrounded by her staff rather than multiple hours one-on-one in his studio like all his other interviewees, but if that's the case then what they needed instead wasn't a liberal version of Joe Rogan, it was a didn't-finish-at-the-bottom-of-the-Democratic-primaries version of Kamala Harris.
nopie
28m ago
I don't know why people are so upset. Trump was awful, Elon tried to use him for his purposes, it failed, so he is now against him. There is no point for Elon not to be against Trump now. It all seems totally normal to me, that's how I would act in his place.
TheDemonRazgriz
28m ago
till my death I will point to elevatorgate as the crystallization of feminism+racism+mental issues in the social justice caucus
What is "elevatorgate"?
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
29m ago
Just to insert a congratulations on the kid. I remember a discussion a while ago tangentially related and I'm glad it worked out well!
Armin
33m ago
I do not have anything to say apart from that the Western Right is totally fucked.
Blueberry
34m ago
NYTimes is reporting that aides to Trump are urging him to "cancel all of Musk’s contracts and launch several investigations into [him]" Bannon is quoted as saying “They should initiate a formal investigation of his immigration status because I am of the strong belief that he is an illegal alien, and he should be deported from the country immediately.” The Investigations would look at Musk's alleged drug use and immigration status, and his security clearance would be revoked.
Quote from NYT megathread: „House Democrats are jumping on Elon Musk’s allegation that President Trump’s name is in the supposedly secret documents the federal government has on powerful men who were in the orbit of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. They immediately called for the release of the Epstein files.
„Elon Musk’s friends and associates on Thursday are in a state of disbelief. Several said they, like the rest of Washington, are glued to their computers as they watched their friend joust with President Trump, unsure what exactly his plan is.“
——————
State of disbelief? Me too, me too… What the fuck is happening?
On the personal level everyone knows that two galaxy sized egos will sooner or later clash, on the cultural level the MAGA jocks and the grey tribe nerds are not natural allies: As soon as Musk was out of the door Jared Isaacman‘s nomination for NASA director was revoked.
I am still shocked about the sudden implosion. The coming Moon landing and Artemis missions with SpaceX lander … not happening. Mars mission? Not happening with a hostile administration. Musk supported MAGA because Biden ignored him? Boy, will that be a rude awakening. On the other side: Trump has now an enemy with 200 million followers and who owns the dominant conservative online corner.
atelier
Jimmys: unrustled
47m ago
It escalated to threats to cancel Musk company subsidies and contracts and threats to decommission the rocket that can supply the ISS, I think. Popcorn futures are definitely limit up! I wonder if the spicy bants come out late, or if they simmer down.
The problem with cutting spending now is you pretty much have to cut social security, medicare and defense (or stop paying interest) there isn't enough to cut everywhere else and the grey tribe doesn't have any good answers to the many people who believe they'vebearmed every penny of those social security checks and other benefits and they have a lot more votes.
Probably the best shot is when the trust fund runs out in 8 or so years if the public appetite for us debt is strong enough to absorb all of it.
Rex
51m ago
On one had, I did not expect this fight to actually happen and I was profoundly disinterested in the media that seemed to be egging it on and trying to make it happen for the last few months. On the other hand, does anyone else get the sense that this is a staged fight? It seems so ridiculous and performative that it maps closer to WWF wrestling or Biggie/Tupac feuds that were purely stage managed events. Jon Stewart suggested as much this morning before all the big fireworks went off this afternoon. I cant help but think that he's got it right here, even though I'm sure people will say this afternoons attacks make that less likely.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ, Υἱέ τοῦ Θεοῦ, ἐλέησόν με τὸν ἁμαρτωλόν
55m ago
The war between Trump and Elon Musk is heating up. They've been continuously escalating the fight on both sides, with Elon claiming that Trump wouldn't have won without him.
On the other side, Trump is arguing that Elon only got upset because the Big Beautiful Bill has plans to cut the EV subsidies in it.
The major dispute, at least on a public level, is over deficit spending. Elon was pretty clear during the campaign that deficit spending was a big issue, and indeed most of the "grey tribe" Silicon Valley types who switched sides to support Trump also are starting to regret their decision it seems. Notably David Friedman(?) from the All-in Podcast, and I'm sure there are others if folks want to fill me in.
Either way, to me this breakup seems to be a clear split between the classic red tribe which Trump seemingly still controls with an iron fist, and the grey tribe that Elon Musk typifies.
To quote the famous Scott Alexander article, I can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup:
There is a partly-formed attempt to spin off a Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk – but for our current purposes this is a distraction and they can safely be considered part of the Blue Tribe most of the time.
It seems to me that with the flip to Trump, we're beginning to see the classic Kingmaker dynamic unfold, where Silicon Valley billionaires are playing the third mediator between the two major tribes. I'm very curious to see how this pans out. Personally, I'm very much on the "hey we have to cut spending now" side of things.
Some of the more optimistic folks are claiming that Elon will either support the Libertarian party, or start his own party, based on a poll he made on X asking if a new political party should form.
Either way this is all very entertaining from my perspective, and it actually leaves me a bit more optimistic than I was that something will be done about cutting spending. We will of course see where the chips fall.
Clementine
57m ago
Nah I don't buy that as adequate explanation.
- Doesn't explain women who get severe temporary or permanent health problems but continue to have children (so it clearly wasn't enough to cause them to regret it) not talking about those problems
- Doesn't explain medical professionals who see these women but have no personal stake in their life choices not talking about it
- Doesn't explain men not talking about it
- Doesn't explain how little is done to alleviate or solve it
At the end of the day, I have permanent tooth problems because of how much i vomited during pregnancy. I agree that I wouldn't discuss this with my child, at her current age, but I'm not unwilling to discuss it at all, see eg here. I very much regret not knowing, going in, that this was something that could happen, and for having walked into pregnancy with the totally mistaken belief I just needed to get through it and all the suffering was temporary (for one thing, I'd have dumped the doctor who didn't take my vomiting seriously and found a doctor who would prescribe me something to reduce the vomiting, if I'd known of the lifelong negative effects extreme repeated vomiting has. And I have an excuse for not knowing — why didn't my doctor? We're back to why women's health is treated as an afterthought in medical care, but then we have "even when discussing specifically women's health problems and specifically how they're neglected by the medical establishment we're still not talking about one of the most major medical events many women will experience before they hit old age, the one that will most massively negatively impact their long term health"
Like going back to my mention elsewhere of becoming pro choice as soon as I became pregnant — how is this not part of the discussion? All the prochoice activists can't mention the 25% odds a teen pregnancy ends with the teen girl now needing to wear special underpants for the rest of her life lest she pee herself in public? Oh she might have a psychotic episode from all the hormones, possibly one permanently affecting her for the rest of her life, but that's not at all relevant to the ethical debate we're all having here? Like ok maybe the pro-life people don't want to mention it because it doesn't help their case but I read SO much online debate about this topic and all the discussion about the right to choose and the right to control one's own body and aside from "sometimes you need to abort to save the mom's life" the idea of permanently physically harming the mother just never came up. Which is. Bizarre.
ArmedTooHeavily
1hr ago
It would be exceptionally easy to make him both well known and universally reviled. Imagine the hit piece a talented killer at the NYT could make about Sam Hyde.
Really? Two unbelievably arrogant, thin-skinned men? Who fell into a buddy relationship so quickly? This was the most predictable thing in the world.
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