The Boring Conservatism of Elon Musk
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My god, the field of possibilities for how to spend his free time is absolutely limitless - the man could spend a billion dollars a year on personal entertainment and growth, on doing literally anything his heart desires, and die the richest man on the planet. He could visit every corner of the globe, talk with anyone on the planet, see any performance up close and personal, he could build magnificent buildings, found incredible institutions, sponsor whole art movements. He could die on the moon. The possibilities for this man are limited only by the actual possible, and he’s got enough money that on a reasonable timescale even that’s malleable.
But what’s he doing instead? He’s tweeting “my pronouns are Prosecute/Fauci.” He’s engaged in the shittiest, lowest quality, most horseshit expression of whatever passes for politics on Twitter, on which he spends a horrifying amount of time.
Is this what it’s like to watch an artist die slowly from a heroine addiction? Just an incredible breadth of potential, slowly wasting itself in the most obscene and depressing fashion, and all that possibility dying with it. What a goddamn tragedy.
Pretty crazy that this is accurate. This man could choose to go to the moon. To die or not would be up to him.
The moon is an extremely harsh environment. Dying fairly soon is the default outcome.
If a billionaire wanted to die on the moon, they could do that within maybe 5 years of announcing the plan. For EM, less time than that, as his personal space program already exists.
Realistic plans to survive in a small metal box on the moon for some time, might take longer.
And this year his destruction of the TSLA stock value is throwing it away.
The odds of Musk himself physically departing the Earth forever (or even at all) on a mission to Mars are approximately zero.
A true Mars-bound space farer wouldn't fritter about with all this Twitter and political nonsense, they'd stick to The Mission. Twitter becomes 100% irrelevant noise if you don't plan to stay on Earth.
Musk is just another page in a story as old as time.
Yes, he could even solve world hunger, or just US hunger - how much to pay for the food of all school kids who get nickeled and dimed for their school lunches? He could even die on Mars.
Or, we could establish a proper wealth tax and make wealth extraction and inequality of such ridiculous proportions less possible.
I know, first we’d have to un-institutionalize legal political corruption which sounds as impossible as changing the laws of physics.
He just happened to be the one who best took advantage of it. Which looked awfully smart at the time, especially since he succeeded so well at it. And that makes his bizarrely mercurial, seemingly short-sighted behavior seem so inconsistent.
"I really expected the wholesale firing of Twitter staff and mass microservice-removal to crash Twitter immediately, but everything (er, barring some stuff like 2FA) seems to be basically OK. I guess I shouldn't have doubted Elon when moving-fast-and-breaking-things; you've really got to hand it to Fauci."
My entire team could stop working tomorrow, and it would probably take months before things start to seriously break. Now if you're trying to code up a bunch of new features at the same time, and basically the entire world knows your security team just quit, the story is probably a bit different.
I suspect neither you nor I work at hyperscale, where I'm given to understand things break much faster and at more interesting scales. It's hardly "physically holding" anything together, but what happens if you leave a bunch of services unmaintained? "Something bad", IMO, and the fact that something bad hasn't actually happened by this stage is impressive; you've really got to hand it to Fauci.
Why does he have to do any of that, and do you seriously believe you know the "potential" of a stranger? There are likely constraints here you're not thinking about.
"die on the moon" probably isn't an option when a bunch of people depend on him.
In other words, for you to "strongly disagree", it would seem you think it is not sad at all that Musk is engaged in tweeting superficial culture war memes dozens of times a day.
1) You probably don't know what else he does or doesn't do with his free time beyond his tweets
2) Twitter is a form of marketing and always has been
Marketing in the loosest of terms, if trolling counts.
Listen, we're talking opinion here. I don't know what you stand for. You haven't directly taken a stance on whether you think his time is well spent, you are just trying to state that no one has a right to judge it, or doesn't have enough info to judge it.
I do think I have enough info, with my own eyes, to see that his behavior is poor and that whatever time he is spending on twitter is time wasted. Marketing? Self-sabotage.
If there's a tragedy here, it isn't how far Elon has fallen, it's how far above us the rich are to begin with. That one person commands as much power as Elon Musk does is an insult to human dignity. And people talk about him as if he's a divine being. The smartest man who ever lived. More brilliant than Einstein. More cunning than Jobs. More innovative than Da Vinci. The man in whose hands the very course of technological society and human evolution are held. He, and only he, is responsible for Tesla. He, and only he, is responsible for SpaceX. He literally built his rockets in a cave from a pile of scrap.
But it turns out he's just an asshole with money. The rich don't deserve pity any more than they deserve privilege, and maybe the crumbling of the facade that is Elon Musk will help people see that. Is this the one you called Messiah? Behold the man.
From what I've seen people mostly don't credit Musk with building SpaceX on his own. What people found admirable is that of the numerous individuals who could've founded a "SpaceX" and had the means to keep the it afloat through the rocky beginnings unavoidable to newcomers in that field, he was one of the few who actually did. The number of people who fit that description can be counted on a single hand because the majority who are that wealthy are too risk averse and prefer to use their resources to pursue things with greater, safer, and/or more immediate profit potential.
Plus it's not like Musk had all the money to throw into SpaceX at that point. And he came in not as some sort of angel investor, but as a doer who participated in the actual engineering aspect of things too.
Most 'savvy' businessmen would not have acted as he did, given the risks. So as a businessman, Elon's risk-taking and participation deserves the rewards that ensued to him.
Say we have a binary relation R (so we write x R y to say x is related to y by R)
Say this relation is also transitive, so whenever x R y and y R z we always have that x R z
We notice transitivity can be extended over N-hops, not just 2. So what is 0-hop transitivity? We usually call that reflexivity: we always have that x R x
Now we come to the crux: is our relation symmetric, or antisymmetric, or something else?
Ignoring the third case; with an antisymmetric relation, we have either x R y xor y R x, but never both; with a symmetric relation whenever we have x R y we also always have y R x.
Crudely put, the cartoon conservative wants more antisymmetric relations, and the cartoon progressive wants more symmetric relations.
Before the 1960s, many european languages were antisymmetric in 2nd person pronouns: the superior would say tu/du to the inferior; the inferior would say vous/Sie to the superior. ([Edit:Counter example]: one says "thou" and not "you" to God)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T–V_distinction
Since the 1960s, we've moved to a symmetric use of these pronouns. The V form is more formal, but if one party uses vous/Sie the other party will mirror it. Similarly the T form is more informal, and if a company (such as McDo) addresses their customers as tu/du, they'd be fools to think they will be addressed in return as anything else.
Lagniappe: cf "Weak Components Revived" on https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/news.html for a discussion of structure in graphs of the third kind, having a mix of symmetric and antisymmetric relations.
Is there a demand for essays like this? I've been playing around with an idea where I take some of the more talked about legislation and present a semi-neutral deep dive into the actual facts of the matter.
Side note: I suppose this would be the informal version of type/category theory?
Erratum: change "NB" to "Counter Example" above.
PS. Re-listening to Lady Marmalade, and while normally « voulez vous baiser ...» would be even more unlikely than « passez le joint, s'il vous plaît », maybe in the context of a paid transaction, addressing a john, the V form would indeed have been used?
And then, in the gospels christ instructs his followers to pray to god intimately, when he gives them the lord's prayer. It's giving explicit permission to address god as a personal relation: you can call THE LORD daddy now.
In that context it makes sense to use the informal/intimate form, basically reconciling what was probably the earlier usage anyway. It's unclear to me if pre-christian jews would have considered themselves to have this level of intimacy with god. Actually it's unclear to me whether contemporary jews or muslims do for that matter.
In french it's a pretty subtle social practice to know which to use in any given situation. There are a lot of situations where it's pretty obvious or firm but others where it's flexible or depends on specifics of context. It's also a moving target since social norms like this are always changing.
Also, don't forget there's a wide conservative-progressive spread within both judaism and the muslim world, so I would not be surprised if the pronouns used in prayer turned out to differ and could be used as shibboleth.
(One project on my backburner is to collect music videos that are faithful to the beliefs of various points, all along these spectra)
There appears to be some use of the 3rd person/titles in jewish prayer to contrast to the normal 2nd person, and islamic prayer does likewise (even though apparently "business arabic" has added the possibility of a marked 2nd person).
So IIUC all the Abrahamic religions originally used an unmarked 2nd person, and have opted to translate this as the familiar-T in languages which do make the distinction.
Lagniappe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4j55NKXeMk the Shamil Niggun, an orthodox jewish tune, whose denotation is the lament of a sunni muslim Caucasian Imam captured by orthodox christian Russian forces, and whose connotation is the ephemeral "captivity" of the soul in the body.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imam_Shamil#Musical_compositio...
That's not what they sing.
(TIL why DE:der Freier == EN-US:john)
[0] the song was actually broadcastable on US radio in 1974, so some minor infidelities may have been committed.
in my 2022 dialect, on this side, no.
====
pedantically no:
antisymmetric connections give us an acyclic graph (DAG), whose reachability is a partial order.
if we say there are always minimum and maximum elements (adding some[0] if needed), antisymmetric connections give us a graph where we can always find a least common superior and greatest common inferior. In the special case when a = lcs(a,b), we say that a is superior to b, and always find that also gci(a,b) = b, b is inferior to a.
symmetric connections give us an undirected graph, whose reachability is an equivalence relation.
(asymmetric is just not symmetric, which is a distinct notion)
[0] eg under feudalism, we might say that all nobles are inferior to the divine, but any noble is superior to all commoners, so [divine,commoners] are our added maximum and minimum.
Exercise: under what conditions is an acylic graph a tree; ie the DAG of antisymmetric connections is a hierarchy?
It appears governments in the EU are going to further use Musks outburst to further regulate and fine Twitter, likely to the point of non-viability in those nations.
That said, I find the definition of conservatism quoted by the OP insightful: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect." The opposite of that is clearly worthwhile: We want laws that protect everyone because they bind everyone.
https://kottke.org/21/02/conservatism-and-who-the-law-protec...
And the original blog post on the topic.
https://crookedtimber.org/2018/03/21/liberals-against-progre...
I don't think the OP claims to know what anyone is thinking. Please don't attack a straw-man. If your goal is to prove the OP wrong, you could try to find examples that contradict it. (Off the top of my head, I couldn't find any examples that contradict it.)
> Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
I'm not presenting a strawman - it's what the quote said. The quote makes a claim about the proposition made by conservatives. I suppose though I did make an ad hominem attack - the fact that the quote cited came from a musical composer (and not a political scientist of the same name) speaks in neither direction to its veracity. The quote claims that conservatives want laws to apply to some and not to others. That conservatives don't generally think this way can be seen by reading anything from Thomas Sowell, George Will, or Milton Friedman (for just a few examples). I could pull out particular examples from their books, but their books are dripping with examples - open to a random page in any of the three authors and you'll find one.
The quote in question, however, is presenting a strawman, by not presenting any examples in support of it.
Insightful? I found it a straw man. I've long found left vs right to do more with personality traits. Tribalism is not reserved for either side.
On the right, people are more likely to be conservative as they prefer stability and what is known. Those on the left are not as conservative, as they prefer openness and unpredictability.
Both perspectives have merits.
GKC> I believe what really happens in history is this: the old man is always wrong; and the young people are always wrong about what is wrong with him.
the difference is where one looks for these fences, where one notices them, how much time one spends on understanding their reason for being, and how one responds after gaining that understanding.
populism is loudly proclaiming that there are easy ways to get rid od the fence, and making "everyone" happy.
chauvinist nationalism is blaming outsiders for the need for the fence, keeping it up, and claiming that our fence is the best, of course.
fascism is palingenetic ultranationalism, claiming that our ancestors had the best fences, and we are destined for similar greatness, and the way to that greatness is whatever fences our great leader comes up with, because our great leader understands ancestral fences the best.
...
now, what is conservativism? it's very similar to these, it's basically the claim that we need to respect the fences first and foremost and not understanding them. and the claim/belief that fences cannot be really removed anyway, so one should try to live and respect them, and eventually through this process one will also gain the understanding for their reason of being.
liberalism is to allow people to put up their own fences, and get rid of the old big ancestral ones.
neoliberalism is to set up markets where people can buy/sell ask/bid for fence rights.
contemporary rationalism is to set up prediction markets, recruit superforecasters to participate, and then put the fences where they maximize the global fairness & happiness prediction market.
Off the top of my head, I couldn't find any examples that contradict it. Maybe you could?
I mean, if your goal is to prove it wrong, why not find at least one example that contradicts it?
Several projects of the conservative movement would cause sweeping or dramatic changes to the status quo, or are otherwise destabilizing. Trying to reinstate a social or political circumstance that existed 70 or 150 years ago is revanchism and will be just as disruptive as the changes themselves were. Someone who highly valued stability for its own sake would not pursue those projects.
And through that lens a lot of "progressive" positions are conservative: environmentalism, labor relations, regulation on growth of certain industries. A lot of these boil down to "let's just not" or not so much, not so fast or we don't need it; inherently conservative stances.
Literal conservatism is the branding and justification of the political movement but in fact both sides of this are accepting of change in some situations and resistive of it in others. They differ in what values they use to decide what changes to support or oppose. And the model of simple openness to change is completely inadequate to explain which, or why.
So you think someone's politics are boring? Why? Nothing I read told me. Is there a problem with someone else's politics being boring to you? Why would anyone be interested? This apparently wasn't written with persuasion as a goal. So then, why is it?
One thing that stood out was a long, novel definition of conservatism described as succinct, which I'd disagree with. There are more succinct definitions available in any dictionary and they all mean generally the same thing.
Coldtea pointed out that this exact line was being used by conservatives when they were getting banned, but everyone was fine with it. But now that others are getting banned, it’s suddenly not ok.
I think double standards are bad in general, and we should just quit with the banwaves. But that would mean letting people like Andrew Tate stay. Are you sure that’s what you want?
No. Ol' Muskie can do what he wants - if he's bored, he can throw 19 d10s and ban the user who posted that status id and get GPT-3 to generate the reason why they're banned. It's his company. Go nuts, Ol' Muskie!
What he can't do, though, without pushback or commentary, is turn up pronouncing that "FREE SPEECH IS HERE", "BOTS ARE BAD", "ONLY ILLEGAL SPEECH WILL BE CENSORED", etc., immediately go back on all three of those, enable and promote bigots, take a hard turn into transphobia, and then start throwing hissy fits at people who call him out on his hypocrisy and lies by banning people with post-hoc rationales.
If he doesn't like people calling him on his bullshit decisions, there's a simple solution. Hell, liberals and progressives would have -some- respect for him if he just owned his bullshit and said "Yes, I'm a petty narcissist who is now pandering to conservatives and bigots because they'll stroke my ego if I punch down."
Not sure how many times we must explain this, he can do what he wants with his website. But don't tell us you're a champion of free speech while capriciously silencing detractors.
"The left" never claimed to be champions for free speech. "They" sought a balance between freedom of speech and public harm. At least that's my take, I can't speak for "them."
Elon Musk calls himself a "free speech absolutist" and that if it's not illegal speech, it shouldn't be banned. Yet the moment he's at the helm, the bans start flowing for all manner of legal speech.
What I'm saying is, words have meaning. If you want to claim a principle you have to make an effort to live by it. People who claim principles and proceed to ignore them or even act contrary to them are not principled people, they're just making noise. We should not listen to them, or take what they say seriously. For unprincipled people are fairweather friends, and likely have ulterior motives.
The obnoxious thing is that he was so sanctimonious about prior bans, going so far to welcome outright back neonazis, insurrection planners, fake doctors selling dangerous covid 'cures', and on and on because those things weren't technically illegal -- but banning journalists for the act of journalism (so legal that it's a right literally enshrined in the first amendment!) after they reported on his ban of the stupid flight-tracking account?
Conservatives don't actually care about free speech, they care about their reach being limited on digital platforms. But nobody is banning conservatives from Twitter, people were getting removed for hate speech or dangerous behavior.
This wasn't really a problem for a long time, and conservatives don't want to discuss why suddenly conservative viewpoints are becoming synonymous with hate speech. Conservatism in the US has moved to incredibly hard right/far right/fascist positions that its shocking. There are sitting Republicans that advocated for the former president to seize power through martial law.
Sounds like a cesspool alright.
This is a nakedly partisan comment and “conservative” is code word for “dissenting from the regime”. I personally like people who stand up to the regime and support civil rights.
TFA literally provides an axiomatic definition of "conservative" from which to interpret the author's statement. and spoiler alert: it does not mean “dissenting from the regime”
now, whether or not to accept the axiom as truth is beyond the scope of the quoted criticism
"The left is bad because they ban!"
'takes power'
"I can ban anyone I want, feel my ultimate power!"
At the end of the day any and every service has to ban people, the services simply won't work unless that happens. It takes a particular kind of moral bankruptcy and black and white thinking to be unable to differentiate between different actions and associate equal agency between them.
(Corrected a typo)
This is how I see it, the year you identify as the best decade (and you were a democrat in that decade), reveals your new politics:
1980 Democrats are FAR RIGHT today (and clearly now republican).
1990 Democrats are Right today (and now republican).
2000 Democrats are moderate today (and maybe republican, independent or democrat)
2010 Democrats are Left today (and likely still democrat)
2020 Democrats are FAR LEFT.
Conservatives are similar, but you just shift them two sections right, so 1990 Republicans are FAR FAR RIGHT now.
In 50 years we'll have very old trans men and women on the FAR RIGHT complaining that back in their day only natural Human beings could get married after changing genders, and that it should be illegal to marry a human that started as a Frog then a pig then a human through genetic manipulation.
edited to make it more clear, the year + politics of that year => spits out your politics today.
for 2020 republicans, just shift 2, they're just moderates
Repubs and dems switched platforms awhile back though. People need to read up on the dixiecrats. Nixon turned them back into republicans though.
If you want examples The Republicans fought the New Deal hard and then dropped it. The Republicans fought the Great Society and then dropped it. The Republicans fought gay marriage every step of the way and now recently have members voting for the Respect for Marriage Act.
They don't present policy, they just fight progress de jour until it is time to move to the next thing that needs opposition.
And yet he was considered then (and now) as less socialist / more politically to the right than many leaders in Europe at the time.
He was our most progressive president, and certainly further left than any US president since, but even he wasn’t “far left.” And certainly the neoliberal gerontocracy that dominates the current democratic party is nowhere near as left as he was.
What is your favorite decade?
What political party were you associated with IN that decade - be honest?
What political party are you now?
However, you greatly overstate your case by saying an individual person's politics can be "revealed" "just" based on that alone, or that the difference between parties is "just" equivalent to two decades.