For those who aren’t familiar with the term, it means believing something that probably shouldn’t be believed, or being influenced to believe something that’s not necessarily in your best interests.
For those who aren’t familiar with the term, it means believing something that probably shouldn’t be believed, or being influenced to believe something that’s not necessarily in your best interests.
There was a time I actually thought that Elon Musk wanted to help save the planet by making electric cars mainstream to displace fossil fuel vehicles, and by helping humanity return to space simply for the science and exploration value.
Musk’s “some kind of pedo guy” comment about the diver that dismissed Musk’s efforts with the cave children was the first WTF moment, but I wrote that off has him just having a bad day as he apologized later. Musk fighting the COVID lockdown was also more evidence that concerned me. This was all before Elon’s embrace of trump and GOP Nazism, and long before Elon’s double Nazi salute on national television.
I tend to think at some point that was true, that Tesla was about saving the planet and SpaceX was about making humanity multiplanetary.
It could be he was always a wretched creep and just really good at hiding it, but it seems to me that the wealth and power just ruined him. He wouldn’t be the first person to fall in that trap.
I’ll append my confession here.
I supported Ron Paul once upon a time. The non-interventionism appealed to me in the context of the Iraq war in particular, and the rights-based libertarian philosophy seemed sound. I was young.
We must be twins!
Elon is a classic tale of surrounding oneself with sycophants and descending into the madness of their own bullshit. I think he started with pure-ish intentions.
I was a registered libertarian and a Ron Paul disciple. Easy trap to fall into as a relatively privileged white guy. Every self-described libertarian I meet now makes me ashamed of who I was then.
I always knew he was an arsehole, but I thought he was at least a like minded arsehole, when it came to saving the planet.
The trapped kids incident also the first proper crack I noticed in his image. Now, I wouldn’t touch anything of his with a 40’ pole.
Capitalist oligarchs are the ones who rule society, and so if there are problems in society, the fault ultimately comes back to them as they are the rulers. They, however, will never admit responsibility to anything, and so they will always seek to shift to blame to other people, but they are the ones who rule, so their blame must be shifted to the non-rulers, i.e. to regular people. Shifting the blame to all of regular people would be vastly unpopular, and so they instead pick out a subset of regular people to blame. Whether it is Jews, Somalis, transpeople, immigrants, etc, it is always the fault of some minority group of people who have no political power, and it is never the fault of those who control everything and are in the position of power to make all the decisions.
deleted by creator
You couldn’t tell he was a maniac grifter? The fact that his money comes from family mines in South Africa and he didn’t renounce it but built upon it didn’t let you know he was a villain? 😕
PS: Weird post to downdoot. Explain yourselves, you cowards, lol.
You’re not wrong, you’re just being a dick about it in a thread that is literally about the time one drank the Kool Aid.
Criticising people that have reflected their previous choices/views and are acting different now is unnecessary.
Where’s the criticism? Stop having an emotional reaction to my actual bewilderment (“you couldn’t tell…”) and just explain it to me (or don’t!). 🙃
Had I said something like “lol you fucking incompetent moron, you smoothbrain fucks”, I’d get it, certainly. But I didn’t.
You asked people to explain. People explained that you’re coming across as a dick, in a thread explicitly about regrettable, gullible moments. I don’t know what you’re having a problem with here but it seems like you’re the one having an emotional reaction, calling people cowards and refusing to hear people’s explanations.
I think the reason your initial comment comes across hostile is because of the way it’s written (chaining questions), and the way you’re asking things that have an obvious answer.
However, you didn’t write anything explicitly hostile. It’s a question that could come across either way, and if you genuinely had no mocking or hostile intent I would have suggested rereading and rewording your comment to make that clearer, as it’s tough to interpret that kind of thing through text. I’ve totally left comments that read hostile when I didn’t intend it to, it just happens sometimes! 🤷♂️
Now this is a proper reply. Fair enough. I wasn’t being hostile, more like 🤔😔, certainly not too positive. It’s annoying that people can be this blind, it’s a big reason why the world is so shit and why the West cranks and exports villains who are loved locally… it’s triggering, for lack of a better word.
Just when you exhibited a moment of possible self-reflection, you just threw it all away and reinforced every negative connotation your prior statements have held.
😔
Maybe the criticism is valid, you just don’t wanna hear it?
I downvoted you for complaining about downvotes.
Understandable, lol.
haha excellent edit/ps.
He was a big figure before the Internet became what it is today. We only saw him through headlines, that he probably paid to have embellished in a positive light.
Before he started going on twitter and we all saw what a prick he was, he was Mr. Most-Likely-To-Be-Iron-Man-IRL. It’s a shame really.