Government contracts should not be based on whether or not the president likes the CEO, and the CEO says enough good things about the president.
If you can cancel contacts not based on merit, then it should extend you're likely willing to grant contracts not based on merit and based on nepotism instead.
This is literally the path that led the USSR to ruin. If anyone says anything you don't like, their funding is gone, even if it shoots the country in the foot. If people kiss your ass enough, they get contracts, even if it's clear they're just spending the money on hookers and coke and yachts and not delivering on promises, and it shoots the country in the head.
I witnessed this up close in India where parties openly exist to benefit certain constituencies based on caste, language, religion and so on.
It is horrifying to see this attitude take root in my adopted land.
I think the end goal is domination. From https://mastodon.social/@JuliusGoat/109551955251655267 :
It’s best to understand that fascists see hypocrisy as a virtue. It’s how they signal that the things they are doing to people were never meant to be equally applied.
It’s not an inconsistency. It’s very consistent to the only true fascist value, which is domination.
It’s very important to understand, fascists don’t just see hypocrisy as a necessary evil or an unintended side-effect.
It’s the purpose. The ability to enjoy yourself the thing you’re able to deny others, because you dominate, is the whole point.
For fascists, hypocrisy is a great virtue — the greatest.
https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/hypocrisy-and-fascism-2018-0...
For my friends - everything, for my enemies - the law.
only partisan blinders would cause one to equate trumps actions with anything from our past.
mark my words, maga is about dismantling the american system and establishing a totalitarian state. obey.
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/obama-administration-cla...
It’s based on the flawed assumption that politics can or should be understood on a single axis. It can’t and shouldn’t be. That heuristic is wrong.
If viewed on a 2d axis, the “cohorts that appear similar” on the ends of the horseshoe are still on opposing ends of one of the axes, despite being near each other on another axis.
IMHO, political positioning should be described as a tensor, where each data point is the person's position on a specific policy.
An added benefit is you get to avoid annoying semantic battles such as whether Nazis or Fascists are Right wing or Left wing.
Plus you get to add other axes as needed. My favorite, perhaps relevant today, is principled vs. expedient: do we apply principles like this "Rights" stuff impartially, even to people with whom we disagree, or do we just git 'r done?
Ideally, maybe we would describe a person's politics with something like a tensor, where each value is the person's support of a specific policy.
When this theory is used in discourse, it is always a matter of suggesting that the left fringe and the right fringe are equally to be rejected. Stalin and Hitler, communism and fascism, class struggle and racial theory, Das Kapital and Hitler's Mein Kampf, dictatorship of the proletariat and Nazi dictatorship: the righteous liberal democrat must keep his distance from both extremes in equal measure. The golden path lies in the balanced middle. I am tired of criticizing this nonsense. It is an ideological lie.
The trident means that there is just as much ideology, corruption, political dysfunctionality and all kinds of drivers of suffering, misery and resentment in the supposed political center. But it is very well hidden because it wears a kind of ideological cloak: the horseshoe theory.
So to respond to your sentence I quoted above: the horseshoe theory IS the political compass that should be ridiculed.
Republicans can play all sorts of games because their mistresses will always be able to get an abortion on the DL without consequence, while "single black mom? 25 to life for murder!"
I don't know whether Trump can accurately be described as a fascist, but its been clear to me since his first term that domination is the only thing that matters to him. The obscene wealth and the swaggering deceitfulness and the gold-plated bathrooms are just the secondary outcomes of his need to dominate.
Domineering father-figure; raised as a sociopath; given a lot of money. Kind of inevitable.
Also, frankly, you folks need to stop monopolizing these topics, based on highly polarized ideological filter, because even before Trump there was dissatisfaction about how Musk monopolized NASA contracts on the promise, that he would deliver more efficient and cheaper solution, while in reality the result is that NASA is currently paying more for Musks private solutions, than when it had to do it by itself. There are sure many other options to what Musk offers and if Trump is there to break up that monopoly and open up the market, then it is a win situation.
SLS, NASA's rocket, costs $2.5 billion, PER LAUNCH.
In history textbooks, it's known as the spoils system.
The expansion of executive powers also played a role in this erosion, as both the judicial and legislative branch increasingly devolved their prerogative to the executive, leaving it much more open to political tampering and reducing the power of checks and balances.
There's a reason LKY in SG, Yoshida Shigeru and Sato Eisaku in Japan, and François Mitterrand in France tried to decentralize power to a semi-independent civil service.
Here the corruption is openly displayed as a kind of peacock-tail to the beneficiaries.
In addition, low level corruption is orthogonal to grand corruption as can be seen in Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and the US.
Finally, Indian public discourse around corruption is non-targeted, and fails to contextualize significant institutional differences in how local, state, and federal governments operate in India compared to other states (be they democratic like the US or authoritarian like China).
[Feel free to add questions or points of contention, but I won't be able to reply quickly]
This includes ‘women’. A group that probably has a small majority.
But in the US, “minority” means “less poticial power”. By any reasonable measure straight white “Christian” men should be about 20% of the population, yet somehow they have 80% of political power.
These two sentences, taken together, lead me to exactly the opposite conclusion—exploitation of identity politics allows one to gain power to enact corruption. You play into what people want by being the savior they think they need and then once in power do whatever the hell you wanted in the first place.
And to reply to the comment above yours, there are material factors upstream of idpol. It's not a coincidence that sort of thing is in renaissance across the world.
No but when it comes to local government contracts, building permits and similar stuff its quite different. Also a lot of (what sane people would consider) corruption is legal and institutionalized.
i.e. bribing politicians running for office is perfectly legal and entirely expected by all sides (that Americans are so open about this is quite unique).
What's new to me is that the last couple decades might be a reversion to a pre-war mode of US governance.
(I know WW2 was unifying in some ways, as we'd expect, but I don't recall much from school about how US politics was played before then, other than punctuated events like the Civil War, civil rights movement, etc.)
The slide started in the 80's when Reagan killed off the 'fairness doctrine' which meant news outlets could present completely one-sided coverage of an issue.
Couple that with massive consolidation of newspapers and TV news stations where all the programming is heavily coordinated and groups like Sinclair started pushing identically worded "false news" narratives across all their stations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo
This is high level rather than your direct experience, so it's not a contradiction. Just a different perspective.
Edit: Forgot Pat Buchanan. He belongs in there somewhere.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...
It started before 2017. The right adopted identity politics as a response to the left doing so. Note that even NY Times word usage is a lagging indicator -- this is a case of prestige media picking up trends which originated on social media such as tumblr.
Vox even wrote a defense of the shift back in 2015, with an article called "All politics is identity politics":
https://www.vox.com/2015/1/29/7945119/all-politics-is-identi...
Otherwise, you might as well argue that fake news only existed from 2016 onwards, because that's when Google Trends says it did.
The term "identity politics" is not being tracked. Rather, terminology used by modern left-wing idpol ideology is being tracked. See here: https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/new-york-times-word-usage...
>the meaning of the term applies just as much to ending slavery, womens' suffrage and civil rights movements.
I'm not sure that's true. E.g. Martin Luther King Jr spoke of the "magnificent words" in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Modern activists would say: "Written by dead pale male slaveholders. We need more diversity! Where are the voices of women and POC?" For King, ideas took precedence over identities. For modern activists, it's the opposite.
The American Anti-Slavery Society was predominantly white. That's puzzling for a movement driven by identity politics. It does make sense for a movement driven by universal humanitarian ideals.
In any case, if you still think I'm wrong, and identity politics is an essential force behind trends such as the civil rights movement -- then I suppose you'll be happy that it's being adopted by the political right in the United States? Since it's got such a great historical track record, surely results will be good? ;-)
>Otherwise, you might as well argue that fake news only existed from 2016 onwards, because that's when Google Trends says it did.
This is a bad analogy, because fake news itself doesn't use the term "fake news". If "fake news" was an ideology which was characterized by particular terminology, we could graph the use of that terminology to document the rise of the ideology. That's what's being done here.
In any case, I do believe that "fake news" (in the narrow sense of websites which write completely bogus news, with no effort at reporting, to drive clicks) is a phenomenon which has, in fact, become more widespread relatively recently (due to the ease of internet publishing etc.) So that's another way in which your analogy is invalid. Fake news did increase in popularity when Trump was the GOP candidate, relative to when Romney was the GOP candidate. And Google Trends helps illuminate that!
Agreed, and I was born here. I was taught we expressly want to reject those things, and now it's all the fashion. It feels like a temper tantrum from a third of the electorate, a rejection of adulthood and reason.
All of this is a long temper tantrum about Obama and then Mrs Clinton, emphasis on the Mrs.
If I had a time machine I would take documentation back and convince someone that we need a few more Old White Guys to let the GOP's base unrustle their jimmies for a bit.
I predicted something like this coming back in the late 90's, not that anyone should have listened to me about civics. I say 'like this', but... not like this. And if I had someone would have requested "wellness checks" (which is American for 'check to see if we can have him involuntarily committed to a mental facility) on my behalf.
My notion back then was that the vibe of the country was such that a black man would need to be elected before a white woman was a serious contender. But that there would have to be a delay. When you rush progress you can spin out. And fuck if we haven't spun out.
Maybe they'll go for a whip-smart gay man next term? Who knows.
So how could one design a political system so this behavior doesn't emerge / is not incentivized?
There were two guys: a Roma and a Jew in BiH who also wanted to take the president office. However according to Constitution they didn't have a chance. So they went to EU Human Rights Court to look for a justice. The court told the country it's kinda racist to have a rule like that and they should change it. This was like 15 years ago. Guess whether the rule has changed since then. (Sejdić and Finci v. Bosnia and Herzegovina for more details).
PS. If you find 3 presidents not fascinating enough, then google for High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The executive is led by a First Minister and Deputy First Minister (despite the difference in title, they have exactly equal powers), who are selected from the largest party representing each of the two main communities.
Major decisions require cross-community support - at least 50% of all those voting AND 50% of the representatives of each of the two communities, OR 60% of all those voting AND 40% of the representatives of each of the two communities.
On paper, it seems slightly absurd... but in practice, it's a reasonable way to deal with deeply divided societies.
I assume if you need 70% to pass legislation then you get a grand coalition pretty much every time?
I guess it could incentivize brinkmanship among coalition partners though, since the leader of the coalition has less leverage if a small party threatens to quit?
When I put my programmer hat on, there's something inelegant about this approach, because it involves hardcoding the words "Bosnian", "Serb", and "Croatian" into the constitution.
It seems like with a sufficiently clever electoral rule, you could generate a small "national steering committee" with an odd number of members, where each major faction is guaranteed representation. But that also sounds a lot like a parliament where there's one party for each ethnic group, and then we're back where we started?
What happens when the 3 presidents disagree? Maybe the trick is to incentivize consensus-driven decisionmaking?
That's where High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina comes into play. This is external guy appointed by the EU (US also was participating in the appointment in the beginning, but they withdrew themselves from the process quite a few years ago). This guy has the power to fire any (like ANY) politician in the country. And the permission to overrule or enforce any law.
This guy is probably controlled by EU and can't turn into dictatorship mode, but you never know. At the very least two times presidents were fired due to political disagreement.
EU considered to discontinue this practice, but local people encouraged EU to leave things as is. Cause nobody trusts politicians and the systems is still pretty corrupt.
Anyway, whatever decision presidents have to make, all 3 must agree. That's why a lot of controversial topics are hanging for eternity (e.g. recognition of Kosovo).
When country was trying to choose a national flags, all the parts couldn't find the agreement for a long time. That's why High Representative just approved his own version nobody really liked. So today if you visit the country, you will find Serbian flag in the parts where Serbs live and Croatian flags in the part with Croats. Actual country flag normally is in the parts where majority is Bosnian.
The core issue is that news cannot compete with entertainment, and the firms that appeared after Murdoch on the right, insulate themselves and their politicians from the need to be accurate.
The cycle is essentially:
1) Fringe theory appears on the internet
2) Fringe theory is picked up by Notable Person (Someone who is able to come on Prime time Television)
3) Notable comes onto media network and repeats fringe theory
4) Reporting can now cover Fringe Theory as main stream
This economy of ideas shares little with the processes on the center and the left. People who come up with counter arguments don’t end up getting amplified.
This has demolished the exchange and debate of Ideas, and it has worked in all liberal democracies. Implacable Partisanship has been rewarded.
I think what you want is electoral rules which tend to select for consensus-makers. Approval voting would be an example.
In terms of strength of 3rd parties, I'd say they are generally quite weak in the US system, somewhat stronger in a proportional representation parliamentary system, and potentially overpowered in a FPTP parliament like in the UK.
Historically I believe the 2-party system in the US was pretty good at tamping down on extremism, but recently the 2 major parties have acquired too many extremists.
You're blaming both parties for where the US is now?
Big fat /s
https://ballotpedia.org/Results_for_ranked-choice_voting_(RC...
A good political system is one which continues to work well even when education and the economy suck, so societal self-repair is possible. Ideally it would actually start working better when things suck, so society becomes antifragile.
"More college diplomas" is not a great solution when existing graduates are already working at Starbucks. This is the "elite overproduction" which creates instability.
Americans already have a relatively high standard of living by global standards, e.g. see median income adjusted for cost of living: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=t...
Yet Americans are still dissatisfied. Part of the problem is that our political system incentivizes candidates and media outlets to stir up dissatisfaction so they can exploit it. There's also envy / the hedonic treadmill.
At some point it's necessary to confront the uncomfortable truth: stupid people are easy for smart, ill-intentioned people to herd, which gives the latter a leg up in any democratic election.
This bug in democracy was there in the beginning. But it's only now, 2500 years later, that it can be exploited effectively enough to invalidate the whole concept.
Sometimes the truth is even more uncomfortable than “lots of people are stupid.” A much more insidious scenario is when there’s two groups with no major differences in education or access to facts, but one has a cultural which is actively and explicitly hostile to truth. In such scenarios, ever-escalating hostilities between the two groups is inevitable.
Not sure where the 2500 number came from. The US is about 250 years old, and the founders were extremely wary of democracy based on its history prior to the US. The US constitution was designed to mitigate issues with democracy, e.g. that is the purpose of "checks and balances". By democracy standards, the US has been very successful; the average constitution only lasts 17 years: https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/lifespan-written-constitut...
This article estimates that the US is the #2 longest-lasting republic after the Roman Republic: https://www.broadstreet.blog/p/the-democratic-institutions-o...
Nonetheless, you would think that the "technology" for writing constitutions would've evolved more in the past 250 years. And in fact, in the Federalist Papers, it is predicted that political technology will evolve, just like any other field of technology. Yet results there have been quite disappointing, if you ask me. There aren't that many interesting and innovative ideas in this area. Most people, even programmers, tend to get lost in the object level us-vs-them conflict instead of going meta with their creative algorithmic brain.
Never trust internet comments!
Athens probably? From what I remember of school, this was the world's first democracy. (I've heard that Americans are taught something else!)
In fact, I understand that CamperBob2's critique of democracy is quite similar to that of Socrates. So I'm puzzled by the claim that it's "only now" that the critique is being proven correct, given that US democracy is notably more stable and long-lived than Athenian democracy.
In general, I think times of turmoil are always much more salient when you yourself are living through them. We lack the historical perspective to understand how bad turmoil has been in the past.
Think of it this way: you can't reach people who don't read much by starting a newspaper, but you can reach them with Fox News and Twitter. Mix in a bit of that old-time religion -- Billy Graham with a side of sauce Bernays -- and the left-hand side of the bell curve is yours to do with as you please.
To be fair, those are not things that are taught in school. If they come up at all it is in some historical context, a battle someone else fought--and won. There is no mention that maintaining a liberal democracy requires effort and vigilance. Modern, ie. post-WW2, "fighting democracies" have built-in safeguards to oppose internal enemies of democracy, but if they are effective remains to be seen. The USA mostly does not even have such mechanisms and it shows.
Eh, "internal enemies of democracy" is way too vague. E.g. Trump supporters claim that "unelected bureaucrats" in the "deep state" are enemies of democracy. Anyone can call anyone an "enemy of democracy".
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (aka. Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) completed a report a few weeks ago but is required by law to withhold it from the public due to due process. Of course it leaked, you can read the report here [1] (it's in German, obviously).
Now there is a discussion ongoing, if the Alternative für Deutschland has to been dissolved. That's a fighting democracy at work, following the rule of law.
[1] https://assets.cicero.de/2025-05/Geheimgutachten_Teil%20A.pd...
https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/wo...
Of course, those safeguards were designed in the late 1940s, so it's interesting, to say the least, how they cope with modern demagoguery. In any case it is worth a try.
Tangentially, that's a great site! I hadn't heard of FIRE before, but I'm glad they exist. I hope they don't get suborned by one side or the other.
+1
As an Indian, classic definition of corruption here is something that other people do. When our own do it, its not really called corruption, its more intelligent work done to make our people win.
Similar term is appeasement. It kind of means if people I hate are winning, they must be doing bad things or cheating. It is impossible that people I hate should do well in life.
This is a very important rule stated by the War Nerd: 'Most people are not rational, they are TRIBAL: "my gang yay, your gang boo!" It really is that simple. The rest is cosmetics.'
A small human group is compatible with this tribal behavior because the bulk of actions (or at worst their effects) are quickly perceptible to everyone. The larger the group, the less each person understands what is happening, even the effects of what he does.
Stating it is useful because many neglect (or maybe even ignore) this fact.
The way the War Nerd puts it is IMHO the best.
People stopped giving a shit about anything. This is just one of dozens of things that would have been totally unacceptable a few years ago.
Everybody is turbo-infantilised via social media. I don't know if that's indeed the root cause or if it's a combination of factors, but the fact remains that people don't even feel the need to _pretend to care_ about honesty, character, seriousness, etc.
Human society has not developed an antidote to charismatic demagogues yet I'm afraid.
We shouldn’t give up on law, institutions or culture, but accepting our failings instead of seeing humans as a perfectible project can at least give us solace in confusing times.
When did something of this magnitude just happen in the USA?
P.S.: This does not excuse Germany's actions wrt. WWII but it does help to explain.
An entire cohort born between 1985~1995 reached their 30s in what they perceived as a far, far worse situation all around (financially foremost, but also almost every social aspect) than their parents.
To summarize, there are competing ideas for what got us here, but I think it was less of a real inciting event like WW1 and more of a breaking point that was eventually reached.
Not true, while Germany was not solely responsible, it and Austria-Hungary were much more responsible than others.
Plus Alberta has always on again off again thrown middle-child tantrums.
Australia also doesn’t have an almost religious worship of politicians. Australians don’t identify as members of a particular party unless they literally are part of it.
One could even make the argument that the people of these two countries are even more pliant than Americans when they enable a key capability for totalitarian surveillance states without a blink.
The fact that reputation has been subjected to unprecedented arms race in the face of the internet and social media doesn't fundamentally change the game, it just makes it more exhausting and overwhelming to pay attention to.
This is what a fascist dictatorship looks like. You have a leader who adheres to the persona of a strong man perpetually fighting against enemies who are both too weak and too strong, and at the drop of a hat their enemies change. Then of course rule of law doesn't apply anymore because the strong man in charge is the law, so he is supported in arbitrarily abusing and corrupting the state for his own personal benefit because his personal victories are sold as a show of stength.
The US needs to wake up to the fact that they are now living under a totalitarian dictatorship. The rest of the world is already well aware.
Is it any accident that JD and Elon keep calling for "rule of the people" instead of "rule of law".
It's also wild that someone who was a major contributor to the election campaign and a major advisor to the president now declares "well, the president is a pedophile" and nobody bats an eye either. I mean, Musk supporters now have to believe Musk knowingly supported a pedophile but only turned against him after he had a falling out for unrelated reasons? In the eyes of his supporters, what does this say about Musk?
(Note: whether the accusation is true or not is irrelevant; what matters is that Musk supported someone whom he claims to know is a pedophile).
Trump and Musk are trash human beings and the world would be better off if they were both 100% occupied with trying to destroy each other, with the hope being that then some adults could come in and run the country / companies.
I think Trump was probably always trash. Musk may have had redeemable qualities at one point, but, well, as per my first sentence.
I didn't even know this was a possible defense at all, "everything I say is bullshit, so if anyone takes it seriously, that's on them".
Laughably so.
Musk: I can save those boys trapped in the cave! We can use this stupid submarine thing of mine.
Hero: No need, I and my Navy SEAL cave-diving pals have got this.
Musk: How dare you! You're a pedo.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44779998
The existing recordings and convictions against Trump don’t seem to have hurt him. Why would this?
Also doesn't remove the fact Trump was one of Epstein's closest friends, and everything points to him being involved in some way or the other in those affairs.
Epstein mentored a young model who went onto be a neurosurgeon and married Microsoft's Sinofsky.
Bill Gates had a meeting with Epstein during which an ex-girlfriend of Epstein's who was once Miss Sweden just happened to turn up with her 15 year old daughter.
I'd quite like someone to investigate if our billionaires are being honeypotted left, right and center because it appears you can control a big swathe of the world's wealth if you get old rich nerds laid.
It's still not clear if Epstein made his money by blackmailing yet another Billionaire.
While Musk has a bigger megaphone than most media, he also has a credibility issue - and now especially for the Trump-true-believer crowd that is likely the only group whose bubble would be so shielded that they'd see it as news.
Also, he didn't say that, although he surely implied that. However, he only said that Trump is in the "files", which has actually been public information for a long time. It's known that Trump had some relations with Epstein, but there's no evidence he went to the island or did something wrong.
It's quite obvious that Elon knows that Trump is not on the actual "list", i.e. the list of Epstein's clients who went to the island. That's why the message reads like a silly insult, rather than a serious accusation.
When exactly? He was friends with Trump and working in his administration until a few weeks ago (they hugged in his going away ceremony), and he broke up for reasons explicitly not about any pedophile rings.
So to lob this accusation now doesn't seem like it's because he just learned of it.
I don't know what Musk really believes. The guy behaves like a mentally unstable person, but maybe it's an act? What is true is that accusing the president of the US of being linked to a pedophile ring is not the same as accusing some random scuba diver of being a pedophile.
The scuba diver cannot really fight back, but I think the president of the US might.
(Based on replies to my comments elsewhere, I feel compelled to clarify I'm in no way defending Trump. I think this is a fight between two nasty people).
>>>What is true is that accusing the president of the US of being linked to a pedophile ring is not the same as accusing some random scuba diver of being a pedophile.
I think you might have bigger issues here. Trump has links to mafia - and that is a fact. I'm more interested on what he was doing in regards to Ukraine, as post Soviet mafia(Georgian-Soviet Jewish mix in NY) via NY US Italian? mafia helped him a lot and gave him loans for his projects. Over the time Kremlins took over Soviet mafia and incorporated it - it might sound like a joke, but it is the truth - all the countries have mafia, but in Russia mafia is running country.
So, from the actions of Trump on how he is dealing with Ukraine, Trump is no better than Biden and Democrats that were frozen by fear because of the threats that Putin said. Which is good... if you want to see fireworks of nuclear weapons in action, because US actions(and inactions) are enabling that. Putin will use nukes on US - for many reasons - mainly because Putin is not at fault here and is misunderstanding American mindset, which is not completely decommissioned by Democrats.
From what I understand Musk simply has no leverage what Kremlin mafia has over Trump, also Musk is autistic who has no training on how to influence other people the way how Putin(could be slightly autistic, as he is mirroring what Russians want - just like Hitler did) does as he is blunt and uses brutal force, which people as social beings does not appreciate.
There is also significant difference between Trump and Musk - Trump can say things bluntly, but he also can operate on personal level and have different attitude to very important people - also he likes flattery. Musk has only one of those qualities - he can say things bluntly(but without confidence and aura of power), but as autistic he is completely unaware of when he should really shut up when he is not in control of situation.
PS Trump, Musk, even the opposition to me are insects and entomology of humans is just a hobby to me. Unlike most of people from US(and apparently people that can't understand that they are not part of US) I have my own thoughts, that I don't have a need to resonate and change in frequency according to some general line of one side or other.
I feel like you downplay their relations with your "Trump had some relations with Epstein". There is definitely something fishy as to why they still haven't released the entirety of the files, and lie about having done so.
"Pedo guy" Musk being Musk, though, who knows? What is the likelihood Musk would even have access to those files if they were so damning to Trump and still sealed?
Nothing about this is "quite obvious." It could go either way. To be honest I wouldn't put it past either one of them to be on Epstein's "list."
And apparently he has now deleted the tweet.
And I've certainly seen people on HN trying to defend grant cancellations, Harvard attacks, NSF firings etc. I obviously can't be sure what those people's opinions are on the spacex threats, but I conjecture, that many of them don't like them, while they were ok with the attacks on universities, science agencies.
Your original comment didn't mention that you were conjecturing anything, you just stated your conjecture as an observation or a fact.
Less charitably, this is called building a straw man.
This is a good point. If you imagine something in your head in a particular way, it is not the same as if you imagine it differently in your head. For example, if I imagine that all dogs are boys and all cats are girls, it paints a different picture of the world than if I imagine that there are both male and females of both animals.
It is a curious phenomenon
Too much stuff is happening, not everyone comments on everything, and frankly your comment is only helpful to the administration by dividing its opponents.
If you want to see any efficient pushback at all, don't apply purity litmus tests to your potential allies.
All of this is enabled by the completely illegitimate Supreme Court decision that made the president a god-king by inventing out of thin air the concept of "presidential immunity".
Not only is the scope of "official duties" so broad to make prosseuction next to impossible but the majority went out of its way to say you can't even examine the communications between the president and the DoJ.
The founders were rebelling agaisnt an untouchable executive, remember?
They did; by writing in explicit immunities for some constitutional officers for certain activities, they implicitly rejected other immunities for those and other constitutional officers, by the legal principle “expressio unius est exclusio alterius”.
On the other hand it does grant the members of congress immunity under certain circumstances so it’s unlikely they just forgot about the president when writing it.
Democracies only really work with an educated and altruistic population, and the US is only getting further away from that.
Americans believe that Denmark or Switzerland has an educated and altruistic population. But if you talk to a Dane or a Swiss person about politics, they will laugh and tell you that their country is full of evil and stupid idiots, too.
I am inclined to agree with Acemoglu that good institutions are more important than virtues of the population.
Well, it wasn't. It's a take made by the 2nd president of the United States, John Adams:
"John Adams said, “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”[1] Morality and virtue are the foundation of our republic and necessary for a society to be free. Virtue is an inner commitment and voluntary outward obedience to principles of truth and moral law. Private virtue is the character to govern oneself according to moral law at all times. Public virtue is the character to voluntarily sacrifice or subjugate personal wants for the greater good of other individuals or the community. Specific moral virtues include charity, justice, courage, temperance, reverence, prudence, and honesty"
This is in a sense self evident because any self governing society can only function if its people are equipped with the reason, morality, and temperament to sustain it. Appealing to "good institutions" is tautological. The reason why some places have good institutions and others have bad institutions is precisely because of character of the people who build and maintain them.
https://www.johnadamsacademy.org/apps/pages/index.jsp?uREC_I...
They're right, but it's a significantly smaller percentage than the US, small enough to not do nearly as much damage as the US counter-part population does.
That Dane or Swiss person will also readily agree how shocking the average education level of the average American is.
It seems like both of those can easily be true at the same time.
Does anyone not think that every major corporation is not commissioning psychological reports on certain US leaders? They have public affairs and social media consultants to gauge public reactions. Now they need head shrinks to tell them if and how the guy in the big office might react, be that a state governor, the president, or any number of politically-minded media owners.
That said I think SpaceX is the only service even in the running for said contracts. Nasa doesnt have the capability, and Boeing is quite a way behind. There was already speculation that SpaceX would have to take on Boeings commitments for Artemis.
At what point is SpaceX's benefiting from tax money and NASA technology become a reason to fold into a national asset.
China didn't achieve its Great Leap Forward by pandering to wealthy celebrities who cosplay as geniuses.
Altough most readers will catch your meaning, that phrase does not mean what you think it means.
Was speculating that this might be the outcome. If you wanted to punish musk this would be the way to do it.
You would need to pay off Boeing at the same time but it could work.
With the advent of Murdoch’s papers and news efforts, the infinite money and credibility glitch allowed for these specific circumstances to occur.
The question is whether the information economy is downstream of the political economy, or vice versa.
The mechanisms which were broken, that let these events come to pass - these began with the decision to end bipartisanship by republicans.
This isn’t about toxic bipartisanship, which isn’t even an issue. Unadulterated partisanship as a political strategy, is the start.
The enablement is the news ecosystem that was set up to defend these actions, and eventually launched the conversations entirely out of the gravitational well of facts and norms.
We know the Supreme Court legalized unlimited campaign spending, and we’re not dumb enough to think Elon’s money wasn’t part of the Trump campaign.
The whole point of journalism and freedom of speech was to create a market place of ideas that allows for competition between ideas.
The right side of the information sphere insulates its viewers from the left and center. They do not get punished by their own for platforming inaccurate or fringe theories. Instead they compete on getting the more viral narrative platformed, while voices that counter the inaccuracies do not get platformed.
They are a demagoguery machine. The political party and news media are the same entity.
The left and center are largely stuck with the ideas of being relatively true to facts, getting punished by members for getting things wrong.
There are people on the left which are trying to recreate the success of the fringe right, which has become the core base on the right.
They are starting a decades long process, that began around watergate.
Almost regardless of political positions it's hard to argue Trump is fit or qualified to be president. He is openly corrupt, persuing an economic policy the vast majority of Conservative economists think is idiotic, and has called our veterans losers. Has never held any other government post has no knowledge of government policies and worse doesn't care to learn. Even though his ignorance is causing a lot of damage including to his voters he doesn't seem to care to learn about how any policy stuff works.
To counter that you need media like Fox or worse OAN/News Max to put out propaganda because it's impossible for even the most partisan person to defend him if they're an honest and thoughtful person
The point is about does spending buying an election, not rationality or sanity.
I'm 90% sure it will lead to America's ruin, but it might not quite be the same path that led the USSR to ruin. Hey, at least it looks more entertaining! :/
The end of the Soviet Union as a political and geographic entity was not its ruin. What ruined it and opened the door for a strongman ruler was:
a) an inexperienced President (Yeltsin) who lacked a unifying vision for the newly formed republic and wasn't respected by its business elite or by foreign leaders
b) the 'free market liberalization' reforms passed overnight, with minuscule oversight that predictably led to the open looting of the nation's resources by well-connected elites who quickly absconded abroad with their riches, leaving the country at the mercy of international creditors looking for deals heavily tilted in their favour
c) multiple economics crises triggered by a loss of confidence in the country's currency and ability to service its foreign debt. The Russian bond default of 1998 famously led to the collapse of the American hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management.
Present circumstances in America aren't that different. All it's currently missing is a civil war to call its own, like Chechnya.
The only thing that he was truly unsuccessful at as a politician was failing to shrug off some bullshit credit card bribery scandal.
When you've deployed tanks and mortars against the lawful government, and everyone's fine with that I can't understand why you'd let a few thousands dollars that you put on a company credit card bring you down.
> Present circumstances in America aren't that different.
They are different, in the sense that all the damage happening right now is both unnecessary and self-inflicted. Russia needed to do something to transition from the USSR. Shock therapy was a terrible 'something', but it's at least possible to see how it got there.
2025 is... Something else entirely.
Probably can't mention Yeltsin in the context of strongmen without mentioning the shelling of the parliament building.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Russian_constitutional_cr...
When the soviet empire twitched a bit and seams became just slightly more loose, everybody run the fuck away from them. You can't be literally enslaved for 2 generations and ignore whats around you and whats happening to all your citizens, family, friends, yourself. Not when you clearly see how west has technological, moral and societal advantage in its approach and its getting bigger every year. The only exception is Belarus, and the only reason is that the dicktator there needs desperately strong continuous backing or he would be brought down in quick coup.
Also the volatility of economic growth of smaller countries tends to be much higher than anything experienced by developed countries. When you start from a small scale, GDP jumps of 10x are hardly unheard of. While increases of such magnitude in an already developed country would be unprecedented.
Also, the Russian economy is just a series of frauds run by lawless oligarchs stacked on top of each other. The only limiting factor on them is when Putin randomly decides to throw one of them out of a window. It's a pure patrimonialist system, which is a system sustained by lawlessness, manipulation, and fraud. This is of course the truth of the fascist system itself, its simply an attempt to wrap the whole of society in one big patrimonialist network. There's a reason they had to invade Ukraine - the bills were coming due, and they knew the only way they could make good on promises they otherwise couldn't keep was a sustained program of national subjugation and exploitation. This was inevitable from the moment the system was set up. This system is inherently unstable.
The words of the participants in the system while it is ongoing are meaningless. They are wrapped in some kind of patrimonial network or another, supporting some kind of overhyped fraud or another that represents all their dreams and aspirations. They are censored, subject to constant manipulation, and deliberately manipulated with false flags and psy ops. Their whole society is designed as a giant cartwheel to shove people into various frauds. I can be sad for victims of fraud, yes, but that doesn't make them any easier to deal with before they give up on their expectations and stop believing the lies of the one who is defrauding them, who frequently sicks them on anyone who attempts to combat the fraud, telling them that "Actually that person is the one who's keeping you from getting your money!" Hitler arrayed millions of German youth upon fields of slaughter with such tactics once before, why would we expect any different outcome now? We should've known better.
Speaking of civil war -and asking from abroad-, what the heck is happening in LA?
I write this from direct experience, as I grew up as a kid/adolescent in nearby Romania in the '90s, where we had our very own Shock Therapy. In fact my present political stance (a return to nationalism and a reversal of what globalisation has brought about) is heavily marked by that very traumatic period in my life (and the same thing is valid for many of my compatriots).
Not sure that "reverse" is the best word for it, but, yes, I want the huge societal inequalities that have been created during the last three decades to be "levelled" again. I know that this will probably suck (to use light language) for the winners of those last 3 decades, but that is life.
did people expect any different when they elected a reality TV star to be president?
one that's such an incredible businessman he managed to bankrupt not one, but two casinos
That condition should make him ineligible for any position of power. This is what a society gets when it elects someone mentally ill (in the harmful-to-others rather than the typical harmful-to-ill-person sense).
I am continually astounded by how many people, even if you explain the symptoms to them, will be unable to see it - not just in this one case but in general. There is something in many people that makes them attracted to those who treat them awfully and consider them only slightly above things.
Trump is an absolute genius at fooling people in small ways, then over time ratcheting up the cognitive dissonance until he fools them in big ways. See https://specialto.thebulwark.com/ for a detailed explanation of how he did this with one of the many people that he has turned into puppets.
Trump plays the strongman / oppressed white man card. If the populace valued different things he would happily parade around in negligé. He’s just playing to the audience, and it’s not narcissism so much as bullshit archetypes that they want.
Throughout history, we see cycles of freedom and oppression, separated by either collapse or revolt.
- Collapse happens when anti-socials gain so much power in an organization (whether it's a corporation or state) that it starts to function so poorly that it's overtaken by competitors (or even destroys itself).
- Revolt happens when they gain/use that power too blatantly and people notice. Peaceful revolt is possible on the surface but ultimately, all true power is backed by violence - sometimes that violence is just thinly veiled behind multiple steps of action and reaction (unarmed protesters attacked by police will bring rocks and Molotovs next time which will cause even more attacks from the police which might escalate into civil war).
But right now we're at a point where oppressors have enough history to learn from. They don't care about collapse and revolt only happens when people are willing to act. So what they're doing right now is conditioning everyone that violence is wrong. This comes in many forms: bans on social media (every TOS forbids promoting violence these days), forced self-censorship (just watch a couple youtube shorts, good luck finding one where "kill" isn't spelled "k*ll" and bleeped out), zero-tolerance policies (school will punish both aggressor and target when they get into a fight), ...
Trump is a fascist (https://acoup.blog/2024/10/25/new-acquisitions-1933-and-the-...). Last time people like him got into power in the civilized world, one was shot and hung upside down from a gas station, the other killed himself in a bunker. But this time when people reached for the 4th box of liberty, they were almost universally shunned. So he got into power, elected by the stupid people, and to nobody's surprise immediately started dismantling the system which exists to keep him in check.
He will do it slowly enough that each time he takes a step towards his goal, he will only piss off a small portion of the people and there will never be enough organized opposition at once. At least this time the dictator-elect is so old he might snuff it from natural causes before he does too much damage.
But the average person will not learn from it. The idea that a group of people as large as tens or hundreds of millions needs one special individual at the top is the peak of human stupidity.
---
[note 1]: Some people see this as too arrogant to be said openly but them it becomes just an excuse for them to shut down their logical faculties and reject what I say based on primitive instincts, proving my point.
- Anyway, look at how many democracies use the plurality/FPTP voting system which is known to be pretty much the worst possible (https://rangevoting.org/).
- Look at how many people in the west will say that democracy is obviously good and dictatorship obviously bad but don't question why nearly all corporations have hierarchical (dictatorial) power structures.
- Look at how many people are OK with spending a third or half of their salary on rent, which is just free money that goes to people who contribute nothing to society.
- Look at how many people are unable to differentiate between morality (what is right) vs legality (what the state will penalize you for) and how even the language is warped to mix them (people saying "I did nothing wrong" when they are talking about breaking the rules, whether they are laws or whatever screed a subreddit mod came up with).
It's the slave moral and if you think the majority of people would be better (given the opportunity) you are naive
Yes, but the rest I disagree.
I just think that most people (on both political sides) are not really better. If they would be given the position of power they would be corrupted and incompetent too.
So in a sense you got what you deserve - and your democracy is working.
They are oppressed because they are already morally corrupted. Otherwise they would rather die for their freedom in the first place.
Nietzsche called this slave moral.
TACO, as the saying goes.
The revolution wouldn't have been televised but the polycrisis will be live streamed.
But by destroying the US’ position as reserve currency and establishing the country as too untrustworthy to do business with, Trump has made your statement true.
We can’t afford what we spend without those special economic benefits. And we just threw them away for no reason.
Naturally, that calls into question the incredibly low interest rates, and the reserve currency status.
If you need to blame Trump, the last straw was COVID.
> At incredibly low interest rates, most investments are positive ROI.
Step 1: Hold short term rates at zero, forever Step 2: ??? Step 3: Profit Step 4: Wow, that's a lot of debt
[1] https://www.cfr.org/blog/first-time-us-spending-more-debt-in...
But Musk initiated it, by going against Trump's bill. The new conclusion is "to get contract, you must kiss ass so much and you can't say anything bad, ever"
They didn't see it that way when he was doing it to people he didn't like, why would they see it that way when he is doing it to a person he just decided that he didn't like?
Elon, of course, as usual, is responding to someone upsetting him with accusations of pedophilia.
So far, all of this is quite normal.
* those who were concerned about it happening to others have seen it happen so many times now that they are jaded and it's a bit schaudenfreude. Those earlier cases (Harvard, law firms, etc.) have yet to actually finish going through the courts
* there is a subset that is just super cult of personality around the current president and will bend over backwards to justify actions
https://www.warren.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/130_days_of_elon...
https://cepr.net/publications/corrupt-control-of-the-trump-a...
If Musk is engaging in corruption with respect to the US government, then what could be done to stop it. Whatever the answer, almost certainly Musk's ties to the government would need to be broken, including contracts and funding.
That's a hard argument to hold in the context of recent history. Maybe for the better, maybe for worse, merit has taken a back seat in many cases as we prioritized other factors.
What's interesting to me here is that the executive branch has authority to change these contracts. I do understand that's how it has worked for a while, and you could argue that these contracts are part of executing on congress's mandate, but I personally would prefer the executive branch not have this power.
If it were up to me congressional committees would be responsible for this as part of budgeting responsibilities, and the executive branch would be much weaker than it is today.
2. The US embassy tried to get a Swedish city to agree to some anti-DEI clause in a vendor agreement. Using government money to win ideological arguments is S.O.P. for the Trump II admin.
This is literally also what the dems were doing with USAID discrediting gamergate and funding bias news networks, neither party is above it.
Both sides are totally the same thing, there's nothing to be done.
I did a few quick searches for more information about this claim of yours. I also asked Claude and ChatGPT to research it. I can not find any sources to back up this claim of yours. Can you source it for me?
For example:
https://claude.ai/share/d36c7a89-adff-4625-9cd6-89e60b254ea1
https://chatgpt.com/share/684972cb-0140-8006-9f0f-9075537bf2...
I'd like to see both of them lose their power, because they only abuse it.
Primate brain go brr.
What is somewhat unique here, is the brazen and flippant nature of the funding cut. I'm sure if we looked, we could find similar cases in US history.
Author Patrick Newman has written on the topic of cronyism in US history. It is interesting to read the historical narrative framed from the perspective of who was lobbying and looting.
Here's a recent lecture on the Marshall Plan:
“President Trump said on Saturday that he believed his relationship with Elon Musk was over after the two sparred publicly on social media this week, and he warned there would be “serious consequences” if Mr. Musk financed candidates to run against Republicans who voted in favor of the president’s domestic policy bill.”
So the president can decide who someone supports?
Two truly awful humans fighting it out.
Elon helped Trump get elected. Now Trump has to help Elon get the Trump stink off so people stop calling it the swasticar.
Higher education and research are already being affected. Those reputations aren't quickly rebuilt.
Same with trust on trade and reliability as a defence ally.
Even when Trump is replaced, he had accelerated the exposure of the fragility of the base US system of government. The fact one bad actor can upset many long established apple carts is not something really forgotten.
If you had to make that concrete, what would that look like?
GDP growth under 2% annually for >3 years? Dollar losing >50% of its value against a basket of major currencies? Credit rating downgrade below AA- by major agencies? Loss of reserve currency status (measured by <40% of global reserves in USD)? Interstate commerce disruption lasting >30 days? Mass emigration of >2 million Americans annually?
I'd happily take the other side on any of those, name your price.
>One industry source, speaking on background, dismissed the exchanges as “bluster” that neither Musk nor Trump would actually implement
> ~40% of the country doesn't see that as corruption in any way, shape, or form.
I'm definitely in agreement with the 60 percent. This should be unthinkable and political suicide. Openly speculating on if you can use the government as personal retaliation is absolutely undemocratic.
So why is it so hard for me to care in this case? Because Elon Musk has used the government in the exact same way. He just got done cancelling random contracts he didn't like. He just circumvented democracy to play his little doge game.
It is really hard to care about cheating when it happens to a cheater. Disgust at this move against SpaceX or Tesla has to start with consequences for Elon. If this is wrong, then Elon must be jailed.
This is literally the Department of Goes Around Comes Around. Elon is Trump's Berezovsky.
I am not surprised that Biden didn't cancel all SpaceX contracts for political reasons, neither are most rational people.
Being an adult child has moral and ethical consequences.
Behaviours and emotions that are totally legit and tolerated in a child are no longer so in an adult.
An adult that has all the privileges and freedoms of adulthood over childhood, like the ability to vote, drink, drive and hold an office, also has to abide by the moral obligations of being an adult.
but that's a problem, isn't it?
That's on us. Why on earth did we stop expecting adult behaviour from ultra-rich people?
Or China to current-day prosperity. It’s hard to admit but it’s a double edged sword and there are winners and losers.
Choose your poison wisely.
So you should change the comment to say "most Democrat and Republican voters in the primaries apparently wont vote out those who give or take bribes." That would be correct.
Jethro's advice to Moses in God's Word is still good advice for voters today. If a politician ever meets this criteria, then we'll see amazing things happen. That's below with verse 21 highlighted:
"19 Now obey my voice; I will give you advice, and God be with you! You shall represent the people before God and bring their cases to God, 20 and you shall warn them about the statutes and the laws, and make them know the way in which they must walk and what they must do. 21 Moreover, look for able men from all the people, men who fear God, who are trustworthy and hate a bribe, and place such men over the people as chiefs of thousands, of hundreds, of fifties, and of tens. 22 And let them judge the people at all times. Every great matter they shall bring to you, but any small matter they shall decide themselves. So it will be easier for you, and they will bear the burden with you. 23 If you do this, God will direct you, you will be able to endure, and all this people also will go to their place in peace.” (Exodus 18:19-23) (ESV)
Seriously, I visited the US few times between 2005 and 2010 and each time people were raising the topic of Berlusconi. How can you have a president like that, who voted for him, bunga bunga etc etc.
Now you know how you can have such personality in power too. With even more power.
Oh, and before Berlusconi there was Menem. He's the original clown turned president.
But, no. The Greeks didn't create Western Civilization because the only non-awkward definition of Western Civilization is that scion of the Roman Church.
Surely the cultural exchange with Greeks contributed to this.
Greece was always eastern facing as far back as before Alexander. It is only with the Cold War that they glanced West.
Aside for Magna Grecia, Greeks have very scant presence in Western Europe.
All the great Romans revered Greece and Greek.
Anyway I don't know why I'm explaining history to some random angry kid online, have a nice day
How about the over 1600 years of history since the split of the Roman empire?
The 1000 years since the Schism?
The 500 years since the Fall of Constantinople?
The Eastern Roman Empire was of a completely different character than the Western one, follows a vastly different path, and one that started diverging (due to all the heresies [0]) as early as Constantine. Since the fall of Constantinople the Greeks had very limited contact with the West until independence in the late 19th century.
According to you the West didn't do anything, didn't evolve, in the last 1600 years since we've been de facto incommunicado?
For example, to say that the West of the Scholastics is "Greek" when the Greeks have always rejected them (with very poignant criticism might I add) is a laugh in the face of the Scholastic's transformational contribution to the West (above all our modern university system).
St Augustine [1] , Boetius [2], and the Papacy [3] create the West anew from of these ingredients.
[0] which (Russian Orthodox) Solovyev lays at the feet of a jealous Greek hierarchy [1] accepted but looked down on by the Greeks [2] the last of the ancients and the first of the Scholastics [3] the most foundational institution for the West and rejected by the Greeks
This has little to do with Christianity.
And I find little interest in this pointless discussion, therefore this is my last reply.
But my point is that the West is Rome enlightened by Greeks and humanized by Jews.
What is Athens + Jerusalem? Eastern Europe. Orthodoxy. (No beef, btw. Ive been to Meteora and just missed a chance to stay in Mt. Athos)
What is Rome + Athens + Jerusalem? The Catholic Church.
I wouldn't say it's a misnomer, the lack of ideology is the signature appeal. It's exactly what affords Trump unlimited flexibility among his supporters since there are no expectations of consistency.
Whether true or not (and FWIW, I think it is, at least to some degree), the left largely took the mantra of "tsk tsking" for a long time - you should feel bad about using a plastic straw, bad about driving your car, bad about the US' treatment of Native Americans, etc. etc. So Trump's complete shamelessness is appealing to many
I read a good post recently that explained that Trump and the Republican's rank hypocrisy is a feature, not a bug. It shows that Trump and his team are unbound by the constraints they want to apply to others.
What a morons :D
Did people really think that Berlusconi was the president of Italy?
Unless you mean president !== primer minister, but that would be such a futile remark in this context.
I am surprised at how fast it happened, though. Usually this comes towards the end of a dictatorship. Maybe our dear leader is just as incompetent at being a dictator as he is everything else.
It doesn't seem that way to me, e.g. Putin arrested Khodorkovsky (the richest man in Russia) in 2003. The way I see it, the politician needs the oligarch's money to gain political power, but then he has actual state power, including guns and the judicial system. At that point the oligarch has no purpose -- after all, the politician can just make new ones -- so it makes sense to cast him out or destroy him.
Trump could bankrupt SpaceX with the stroke of a pen and bleed Tesla dry by revoking EV credits. He could even try to revoke Musk's citizenship over (real or fake) issues with his immigration status in the past. If Elon thought he was buying the presidency in exchange for favors, he wasn't thinking things through.
This is the funniest part to me, in the context of THIS president. The guy that demands fully loyalty but gives none?
I can't imagine being the richest guy in the world, and embarrassing myself to such a degree all for.. what? He paid maybe $300M to help elect the guy, wore all the stupid hates, lavished orange man with praise.. and for what. What was ever the upside? The possible downside was obviously asymmetric to any clear eyed viewer.
And so that asymmetric downside now begins.
Probably some sort of "well I am worth $400M, but if I can get that to $2M, I can do my Mars space colony with enough room for my harem, for sure".
vs "Gee I have more money than one can ever spend and remain mortal.. I could go enjoy my life like Bezos before it all evaporates..."
But few have tied themselves as explicitly to the man as musk. Funded. Wore the dumb hats. Went on campaign trail.
It was like a deep romance. You don’t walk away from that stench.
Meanwhile Bezos has been on his yacht in the Mediterranean lol
They're just pro different big businesses, largely based on their demographics.
Personally I'm still annoyed that Obama's administration had the DOE take over servicing federal student loans to "protect students" only for them to somehow be sold to a private company based in Chicago from what I can tell.
Isn't it the opposite? What are you basing this on?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/01/billionaires...
https://americansfortaxfairness.org/billionaires-buying-elec...
Billionaire spending heavily favored Republicans. Over two-thirds (70%) of billionaire-family contributions went in support of GOP candidates and conservative causes. Less than a quarter (23%) backed Democratic hopefuls and progressive causes. (The remainder went to committees without a clear partisan or ideological identity.
Sure the more of the top richest people may have donated more to Trump or Republicans, but Harris raised much more overall.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2024/11/04/trump-v...
Seems like they both raised about the same from their top 20 largest donors:
> The Harris campaign received significantly more funding than Trump's, outspending the Republican advertising machine by more than 70 percent in the final stretch of the election.
> According to data from Open Secrets, Harris received almost $400 million from her 20 largest backers. Trump received over half a billion dollars from his top 20, which included over $100 million from SpaceX, Elon Musk's rocket company.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisondurkee/2024/11/04/trump-v...
My take of that is that Trump raised a bit more from concentrated donations from the richest billionaires, but Harris overall raised more from larger numbers of billionaires and millionaires.
He also wrecked a lot more of the federal government that doesn't affect him one way or the other, and may have harvested a ton of data for his AI company. We'll see if anything comes of that.
At the very least, an arrest by ICE is a real possibility. His brother has admitted on camera that they were illegal at one point, and there is now a lot of precedent for "arrest first - ask questions later" even if you're a natural born citizen.
Like the trade tax, if you’re nice to trump he may decrease your country tax.
It was made very clear in France that we invited him to 14 juillet, notre dame ceremony and other ceremony only to get favor from him.
People of the United States pay the price for his favors, he gets the benefits.
That’s just one step before handling him bags of money.
Of course all of that matters with previous presidents, they are humans before all, but it was marginal. With him, that’s the first time it’s openly spoken about on national tv and by politicians like it’s nothing, like what we did with dictator from middle eastern except it’s the president of the USA.
Like I don’t know, how we used to do things with blogs, MySpace and so on ! The future is great.
https://today.yougov.com/topics/economy/survey-results/daily...
Of course, those are sane considerations. I suppose I shouldn’t accuse the Donald of any kind of rational thinking.
That may sound like it gives Elon power. It's the opposite, actually. No US administration will take lightly threats to national security infrastructure like this. The nuclear option for any administration is to nationalize SpaceX, which they absolutely could do.
Less nuclear: the US has a lot of control over what SpaceX does. The FAA (and to a lesser extent the NOAA) has to approve every launch. They could simply gorund SpaceX.
If you think SpaceX could simply move operations elsewhere, think again, The US prohibits ASML, a Dutch company, from selling EUV lithography machines to China.
Apart from all of that, SpaceX is absolutely dependant on US government funding and contracts. Withdrawing those, or even the threat of such, allows the US to wield a lot of power over SpaceX.
What's rather surprising about this feud is that Trump is currently the adult and has been uncharacteristically restrained in his response thus far. Of course, all that could change. It was Elon who heavily implied that Trump was a pedophile, which is an absolutely insane thing to do.
This isn't at all clear. It's clear that they could easily compel them to prioritize and fulfill government contracts. Far less clear that they could just take it. It is clear that the current administration could "try" but such an effort might result in a lawsuit that lasts longer than the administration does and thereby become moot.
An injunction would be entirely logical as it prevents irreparable harm based on a fanciful understanding of the law unlikely to prevail and hurts the government not at all.
Certainly the government trying to steal like a common criminal puts anyone in an uncomfortable position but the only real risk is the fact we live under incipient fascism.
A public-private partnership is the dream for any shareholder. Guaranteed revenue and profits funded by taxes, investment capital from the government on great terms, becoming "too big to fail", etc.
How is it insane to repeat what everyone already knows? The only novelty here is Musk himself saying it to his legions of followers, who would have been otherwise inclined to downplay the significance of it.
This means Musk knowingly contributed to get a pedophile elected! He couldn't have learned this at the last minute, he obviously held this ace in his sleeve.
This already should "impeach" Musk (informally) in the eyes of his supporters: this is a guy who would help get a pedophile elected president if it would suit his business vision.
Why? He could easily have learned this after the election.
So are we supposed to believe Musk just found out about the Epstein link, hidden in unreleased documents, in the last few days? It's extremely farfetched.
He did it randomly to some guy he didn't like in Thailand who saved some kids trapped in a cave. He's probably done it other times.
It's just an Elon Musk thing. Go totally unhinged on social media and defame people without evidence. He does it all the time.
The only guy more famous than Musk for saying absolute nonsense on social media, is Trump.
It is all fake, lame, and nonsense.
What's shocking is that the people running our country are behaving like absolute children. I feel like they wouldn't be able to hold down a job at my company because they're so unhinged, they would have been fired long ago, and yet here they are, billionaires, deciding the fate of 350M people.
To be clear, I'm not debating the veracity of the accusation, I'm asking what it says about Musk that he claims to have knowingly helped elect president someone he knew to be a pedophile.
If the indictment doesn't apply, then why can't Musk play the same card of "I didn't know/believe/accept" while he was supporting, but only recently has he "now come to know" ?
I don't think your objections are fair. Let's go over them:
The average Trump voter doesn't know much about Epstein, and certainly doesn't believe Trump was involved in anything with that scandal. Any evidence that may turn up would be considered "fake news" to them. Whatever you may think of Trump voters, and whatever things they really are to blame for, knowingly voting for someone they believe to be a pedophile isn't one of their sins.
Musk just implied Trump is a pedophile (or is suppressing certain documents because of his links to a pedophile). Musk also claims without him Trump wouldn't have been elected. These are Musk's claims, so he has thrown away any possible defenses of "but I didn't know/believe this" and "but I'm irrelevant in the grand scheme of things".
You also claim Musk could defend himself with "but I didn't know at the time". This is very, very weak. When exactly do you suppose he learned this? In the few days that have elapsed since this very public falling out, maybe even a few days before? Oh, please. You know you don't believe this, these two were heaping praise on each other and calling themselves friends for most of their collaboration since Trump's second term, and only now Musk found out about Epstein? What, an aide rushed this info to him just in time for their current breakup? Absurd.
Any way you slice it, Musk had this accusation up his sleeve the whole time, he just chose to deploy it now.
So again I must ask, what does this say -- in his fans' eyes -- about Musk as a person?
PS: You seem to believe I'm somehow defending Trump here. If that's your worry, let me be clear that I think Trump is a disgrace. I don't know whether he's a pedophile though, unlike Musk I don't claim to have seen any secret documents. To be honest I wouldn't be surprised if both Trump and Musk are pedophiles, these aren't exactly examples of decent human beings.
PPS: it has also just occurred to me you could be wondering why I'm focusing on the outrageous things Musk has said, but not on the contradictory, absurd or just plain dumb things Trump is saying about Musk? Well, because Trump has an expiration date. I suppose he can do lots of immediate damage to Musk, but he must do so now. Musk, as the world's richest person, has a much longer shelf life and more time to do damage to the US and the rest of the world, and bizarrely, has a large cult following. So I wonder what his followers think.
Elon stans seem to have a similar mindset.
Getting folks to think critically about Elon's actions would require an Epstein video of Trump engaging in SA with a clearly underage child. Likely only if coming out of police evidence lockers sealed before AI video existed. And it would have to be reported widely and maybe even released publicly without cuts (only blurring).
It is not as if supporters will deny all but a clear video tape of such an incident. There is no evidence this is true and there is plenty of reason to think it does not exist. The fact that Trump turned on Epstein while he was alive and Epstein’s attorney tried to find ways to smear Trump because of his involvement with the prosecution stands at odds with Musk’s claim that many here are granting prima facie.
It's very possible the Epstein files do have (or used to have) damning evidence. Though IME folks who call themselves MAGA are unlikely to take any evidence seriously.
Trump himself has said he believes he could shoot someone on 5th avenue and get away with it.
The real distinction is whether you believe that someone who has done bad deeds can be supported for other reasons, or whether they need to be repudiated in their entirety. For example even if you know Trump is a child rapist (and you condemn child rape), but you think as President he's going to do good for the country, you can still support him for President while being intellectually consistent [0].
This is separate from the issue of whether the person who has done wrong should face justice (eg continuing, you can think that Trump should go to jail but modulo that not happening, that he will do good for the country [0]). And separate from the issue of whether someone in a position to facilitate justice happening has an overriding duty to do so (I don't think Musk is in this position either though. Trump's one actual skill is escaping consequences).
> This means Musk knowingly contributed to get a pedophile elected! He couldn't have learned this at the last minute, he obviously held this ace in his sleeve...
> This already should "impeach" Musk (informally) in the eyes of his supporters: this is a guy who would help get a pedophile elected president if it would suit his business vision.
The second does not immediately follow from the first. Modulo the larger distinction I made above, it may just be the case that every second powerful figure is some kind of child rapist or similarly morally bankrupt, and this has been normalized, so even if you have morals to be applied you just have to hold your nose to get anything done. I have no idea, but I do know Epstein was connected to a lot of people.
You're also imparting a narrower business vision rather than political or moral where such compromises would be see as more justified. So no, these events might indict Musk in your mind further, but I don't think this is a universal conclusion.
> Trump has an expiration date. I suppose he can do lots of immediate damage to Musk, but he must do so now. Musk, as the world's richest person, has a much longer shelf life and more time to do damage to the US and the rest of the world, and bizarrely, has a large cult following.
I've got the complete opposite take on this. Trump has his hands on the actual levers of power, power which continues to acrete the more he destroys our institutions. Whereas Musk seems close to his limit with buying Xitter and blackmailing politicians (about funding opponents). It feels like Musk is just an avatar of the terrible dynamics of wealth concentration, which are present regardless of him personally. While Trump is actively pushing our society off a cliff in a way we will not be able to come back from. Just a feeling per my own heuristics, I'll have to ponder this more.
[0] just to be very explicit this is certainly not my own view about Trump!
Nationalization can't work for a company working at the bleeding edge of tech. Everyone would leave, their stock options now worthless or paid out.
Name one single time in history nationization has worked? I can name 100 counter examples.
Is it?
The statement itself doesn't seem to imply anything other than Musk seems to think he is in those files.
Trump is in some of the JE "files" that were already released (flight logs).
I think the cultural obsession with the unknown surrounding Jeffery Epstein informs what people infer from statements like that.
There are many less-than-flattering ways that Trump could be associated with JE that do not include pedophilia.
And this matters, because Musk was a major campaign contributor and advisor to someone he has now implied to be a pedophile. What does this say about Musk?
You know who absolutely is connected to Epstein? Elon's brother, Kimbal (allgedly) [1].
And while not related to Epstein but is just gross and in a similar ballpark, Elon's father Errol, had a stepdaughter from his wife's first marriage, Jana Bezuidenhout, who grew up in his house from age 4. He later went on to father two children with Jana (the first when she was 30, I believe) [2]. It's unclear when the relationship began. The only public statements are after Jana had a break-up.
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/jeffrey-epsteins-ex-girlfrie...
[2]: https://www.scmp.com/magazines/style/celebrity/article/31886...
It doesn't surprise me at all that a guy so gross in his personal life comes from a gross family. Everything about Musk is deranged.
Do you remember the (not so distant era) when Musk was the nerd's and hacker's darling? SpaceX, his genius, his vision! This was before we knew much about his personal life and opinions. It seems so long ago now... Before he took to Twitter to claim it was OK to coup countries for their resources, or started naming children like mathematical formulas.
He's a symptom. It is our society, globally, that has become deranged. Almost all public figures are a shade of scumbag these days. Maybe they always were and there is no longer any reason to hide it.
I can speak for Argentina, where the situation (the sharp deterioration of public discourse, the "rule by Twitter posts", flamewars between government officials, incredibly aggressive public discourse, obvious fraud that doesn't get prosecuted if it's done by some political factions, etc) mirrors the US in many ways. I would say in Argentina we repeat tragedy in the form of farce, except what's going on in the States is also a farce.
Personally, I don't jump to conclusions based on vague statements or evidence.
> What does this say about Musk?
Who knows? Musk has thin associations with Epstein and Maxwell as well, he is a proven liar, is at times visibly manic, and has been reported to drop relationships at a whim when challenged.
There could be plenty of things driving his behavior, but I don't think this informs anything new about his character.
Especially in the eyes of Musk fans.
This guy is now effectively claiming he helped get someone elected president whom he knew was a pedophile. Musk claims Trump got elected thanks to his support (again, Musk claims this). He also claims Trump is a pedophile.
So what do Musk fans think about Musk (not Trump) in light of this?
When it comes to drawing conclusions about the intent of the person making the vague statement, this is an error. It helps create the plausible deniability that public manipulators use to their advantage.
Healthcare, education, roads, prisons, electricity, transit, all of it is designed in the USA so a company can extract profit.
Why wouldn't SpaceX turn into the funding and political football that NASA is, if it were nationalized?
Like, this isn't a hypothetical. SpaceX only has a market because of the incompetence of the "public option."
That's quite inaccurate. NASA doesn't do much themselves, they hire external contractors but keep significant control over them. SpaceX got more funding and less control and they didn't start from scratch, NASA gave them all of their technical documentation, now-how and working prototypes.
NASA could have done everything SpaceX does if they were given the same conditions and funding, however, they've never had funding for blowing up five spaceships in row, they were held to much stricter standards.
The entire story looks like a blatant attempt to take control of space operations away from NASA and thus from the government.
This may have been hypothetically possible, as are many things that never came to be, but it is impossible to know whether this really would have happened.
However, we have a case of a private contractor trying to manipulate the president by means of "revelations" and decommissioning of a service important for national security. If the president cannot change those contracts the US would be literally on the path to oligarchic Russia... I'm not sure what's worse.
Trump is generally moving in the direction of reducing government control of corporations to the point of risking government capture by oligarchic interests. What's happening now is a direct consequence of his policies and it's ironic that Trump's powers are being questioned when it comes to corporate regulation.
Trump's personal faults are irrelevant at the moment, if the GOP doesn't stand firmly behind Trump we are going to find ourselves in an incredible mess.
Are they though? Trump is on Putins side. Who disputes that?
For example Ukraine just carried out a complex drone attack on Russia's bomber fleet, this was careful planned by Ukrainian miliary without any involvement of the US and US was not informed of this ahead of time. And after the fact USA got upset with Ukraine for doing that.
They are literally just running the Howard Hughes playbook over again. Hes a front guys.
USA isn't currently engaged a proxy war with Russia
It feels like a vanity and an anachronism to an era from the past. Manned space travel is risky, expensive, environmentally destructive, and for what? For some human being to manually manipulate scientific instruments in orbit that should have been, or could have been automated and get the same results?
Gone are the days where people actually think we could be living in space. From what we know now, not only is it impractical, dangerous, inefficient, its also unhealthy. This isn't a question of some new technology that needs created to support it, it's a limitation of physics and millions of years of evolution on earth.
Send satellites to orbit? Yes. Collect power from space? Yes. Conduct scientific research? Okay. But we don't need to send people to do that anymore. Manned space travel had its place in time, and it no longer makes sense to do it, so lets have the maturity to move on from the past.
We can have the pragmatic discussion AFTER the fascism is over.
There are a few real things a manned space program does: showing force in rocket technologies, serving as inspiration in STEM fields, and taking an early step to humans flourishing throughout the universe. There are also real but bad reasons, like NASA bloat is seen as a way to buy voters.
A huge amount of scientific invention is made incidentally to another goal. It's intensely myopic to disregard that.
One VERY on topic is "ISS Benefits for Humanity", which shows why the ISS benefits everyone.
See edition 2022: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/iss_benefits...
Seems from the table of contents, it breaks down to: earth observation, microbiology in microgravity, human health research, inspiring younglings, new physics, and "growing the low-earth economy".
Then broader there's a yearly one called Spinoff that points to the technology transfers, but that's not just from human flight, but from all NASA-funded work.
See last few years' edition: https://spinoff.nasa.gov/spinoff/archives
This is very much the wrong question to ask. The question isn't whether something can be done with different payloads. The question is whether something would have been done if not for the drive to send people into constrained environments. Closed loop osmotic water filtration systems would not be so developed without the driving motivation of sustaining life in a box. Sending payloads at all is actually extremely tangential except insofar as if you officially terminate the actual sending of people then the motivation to develop technologies that make it easier to send people vanishes.
It's not super clear from your wording, but it sounds kinda like you want to hear about research within the past 20 years that has made it to already being commercialized, but that would be ignoring the fact that taking decades for research and development done for human spaceflight to get applied to other uses, which it often does, doesn't negate the facts that it often does take longer than that for ventures to reach the public and that the research and development was done for human spaceflight. It seems unlikely that you're looking for older developments that have only been commercialized recently, though I can point you to several, and developments done more recently but not yet commercialized for other uses have no success record yet. It makes your request sound a bit disingenuous.
This is where I started to think this was trolling and that it would soon devolve into overly satirical commentary to prove the opposite point. I was surprised it didn't do this. I'm very interested in this defeatist mentality, welp we know it's impractical we should stop trying. It's not only ignoring the advancements that manned space exploration has brought but seemingly ignores how advancements are done in general for all of human existence. This mindset would have us living in caves after a few hardships.
You could argue we know enough now but this overestimates how much humans know especially with respect to space
Does it? We can't know how many secrets there are out there, maybe there's infinite and maybe there's nothing. It's hard for us to know the opportunity cost until we understand what we're bartering for.
Like, humanity could pool their resources to comprehensively explore the Mariana Trench if we wanted. That's fairly unknown, entirely feasible, and could yield scientific advancement. But it's also expensive, and doesn't guarantee any lucrative returns for us. Maybe there's gold deposits at the bottom of the floor, maybe it's all silt and sand. Maybe we harvest the gold, and discover that humanity has upset a delicate balance that has only survived by us ignoring it.
Iunno, if I was an alien civilization somewhere, I'd be praying to whatever higher powers exist to ensure humanity stays far, far away from me.
But we know it's bad, and we know the fix: Just simulate gravity by spinning the spacecraft like in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or in Interstellar. Easy.
There's this... thing... with NASA that you can recognise once you see it, because you will see it, over and over: Once they find something that the government is willing to fund, they will never stop researching that thing, because to "solve" the problem is to turn the funding tap off.
My favourite example of this phenomenom is water and/or life on Mars. There's been a ludicrous volume of press releases (like clockwork!) about possible life (or water) on Mars. However, notably, not a single mission to Mars has ever included any instrument that could definitively disprove that there is life or water on Mars. To do so would be an instant off-switch for billions in funding, so "oops" these instruments are always omitted.
Send a microscope! A frigging microscope! One! They're not that big or heavy!
Nope, can't do it. That would be the end, you see? Got to keep sending magnetometers, microphones, cameras, stereo cameras, all sorts of things. Just not anything that would accidentally prove that there's nothing to find.
Psychologically, I think this is reflective of cognitive dissonance. The two conflicting ideas are that two people with much to lose would get in the dumbest fight imaginable and the myth of meritocracy [1]. You see, people want or need to believe that people get into these positions through merit: skill, intelligence and hard work.
That's simply not true. We are talking about two of the egotistical, thin-skinned, genuinely stupid narcissists on the planet. Drugs may even be a factor. There is no planet where a charade like this involves calling the president of the United States a pedophile [2].
Media reports seem to universally agree that everybody in the administration absolutely hates Elon. Additionally, IMHO Elon is absolutely on the spectrum. As such, he is a terrible room reader and I believe is deluded into thinking he has a loyal following. He does not. Any clout he has is solely because of being a Trump acolyte.
The myth of meritocracy is perpetuated to keep you working hard to make somebody else rich. It is to reinforce the existing social and economic order. It is to assign blame to those who are poor because poverty is treated as a personal moral failure.
If Trump chooses to, he can effectively bankrupt Elon. That's how insane all of this is.
For starters, Trump can simply revoke Elon's security clearance. There's no recourse for this. And that makes SpaceX's military contracts real awkward.
There are negotiations over a trade deal with China because of the tariffs and what is quite likely the dumbest trade war in history. The terms of that deal could be fatal to Tesla's future.
Trump could even get Elon denaturalized and deported. How? Immigration fraud. It's fairly clear from the facts (and his brother's statements about 10 years ago) that when Elon dropped out of a Stanford PhD to start a company he was technically undocumented. If you misrepresent to USCIS then it is absolutely grounds for denaturalization should they choose, although such proceedings are incredibly rare.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy
[2]: https://deadline.com/2025/06/trump-musk-epstein-files-claim-...
This isn't an issue. Execs nor shareholders are required to have clearance and even the ones that have clearance aren't read in to top secret stuff without a need to know. Elon's focus was starship which is quite far removed from any of those contracts (falcon gov launches or starshield). Gwynne Shotwell runs and will continue to run those parts of SpaceX just fine without Elon having clearance.
No clearance would absolutely compromise Musk’s ability to control SpaceX. (I think that’s a good thing.)
Musk would still maintain the ability to control what SpaceX targets as far as customers go. And he could easily decline any plans to pursue contracts that require changes in strategy.
Him having clearance is irrelevant to both the govt and to the future of spacex. Gwynne runs those parts of the company. Musk is only playing with Starship when he’s looking at spacex at all.
Which in turn affects practically everything from launch timing to fuelling thresholds to whether the rocket can be used in reusable or expendable mode and thus whether that booster can be reüsed for the next launch. (Same for Starshield’s requirements impacting Starlink.)
Note that I’m not even touching ITAR, which Musk could be found subject to as a triple national.
I'm not going to say for sure that it's true, but this is not a conspiracy, or even a super genius move by Elon. I think it's a very natural and plausible instinct given the circumstances. He can't have avoided noticing the crash in sales, and the back of the mind can realize things the consciousness is in denial about. It would just register in his mind as "need to detach my image from this enemy".
Two things:
* Being on the spectrum doesn't make you completely clueless. Elon is also a drug addict, as was revealed recently to all that couldn't tell yet. And his unique position of "richest man ever" certainly must warp his self-image into a form of sociopathy.
* He does have a loyal following, looking at the braindead blue check marks approving of his every tweets. Although it's hard to say how many of them they really are, as they are extremely vocal.
Neither Trump nor Musk has any business running anything more impactful than a used car lot or a corner Starbucks franchise, but their competition was permanently out to lunch in both cases, and here we are. How can anyone be surprised when two merit-free, chaos-loving narcissists fail to get along?
That being said, I don't fully agree with grandparent's statement that ...
> We have some other kind of "ocracy": government by the lucky.
As much as it pains me to say it, it wasn't just "luck."
Musk is reasonably bright and Trump is ... well ... he's not as dumb as many portray him.
Instead they're both horribly broken in other ways.
Trump seems devoid of empathy and that metaphorical vacuum is filled with malevolence. He also appears to have very little self-control.
I can't tell you what is broken with Musk. Maybe the same stuff as w/ Trump, but to a slightly lesser degree.
Luck certainly played a part in their respective successes, but so did intelligence and ruthlessness.
The part about "identifying talent" is where people seem to lose the plot, unfortunately.
The current US administration has gone all-in on this idea. Not an actual merit hire in the bunch.
Probably a bit late to do that as Musk can tap into the Starlink setup at the White House: https://english.almayadeen.net/news/politics/unvetted-starli...
To underestimate your enemy is the most common mistake.
I mean, there is a sense where a conspiracy is always the simplest explanation for public affairs, in the same way "a wizard did it" is simple. But that's not usually what people mean when they talk about Occam's razor.
But they’re both unstable, and have many other negative features.
One can have an extraordinary talent in starting generational companies, and have a social media addiction (among possibly other addictions and problems) that makes one unstable. These aren’t mutually exclusive.
It will be interesting to see if any of Elon's offspring choose to follow in his footsteps. Probably not the transgender child he disowned, or the one whose name has to be written with Unicode characters, but that leaves something like 20 others to vie for the throne.
That's an interesting way of saying they were born into a wealthy family
I though Musk was just adept at buying certain companies
EU is more dead than alive regarding space exploration; India moves slowly for obvious reasons; CH will never be used for any major western country project; Russia space program is gone;
Yet, America always hated SpaceX!! Elon has his problems but SpaceX is one of the best things that has ever happened, now even CH can return rockets back to Earth.
I am pretty sure Australia would accept SpaceX with open arms. Due to being too close to Trump, Elon burned the bridge with EU and Canada so he will never be able to move his company there. Australia is a very good candidate.
Beside the polemic over two toddler arguing in public, what grab my attention is the fact that someone who is considered to be appointed to NASA leadership use to give money to both opposite political side during election.
That’s messed up, someone like that has obviously absolutely no standing, honor,.. whatever you call it. Someone you can’t rely on, that will betray you.
I would consider it to be about the same level as a crackhead, you know he is going to betray you and all its responsibilities at some point, you just don’t know when.
Seriously, you don’t lead the NASA with people like that.
At the very least it might be worth questioning what he found appealing about each candidate’s view of NASA and leadership. But an outright disqualification over this?
Should we pull up voter records and see which party’s primary each person participated in?
I’d strongly prefer a society where agency leaders are picked for their expertise, not party allegiance.
Me too of course, but it’s not even about that. I could understand if they chose someone because he is competent and republican.
What triggers me is the kind of snake this man is, if the Chinese offered him money to reveal secrets and he thinks he can get away with, I have no doubt he would collaborate.
You need a man you can trust at this position, someone that wouldn’t betray his country. If he’s the kind to spread money on both side of the political spectrum, regardless of his moral compass, or just dignity, I would be extremely cautious.
That’s basically not a man with conviction, or dignity.
This is proof that someone pretending to support both does in fact support none and more importantly can’t be trusted.
It’s about being trustworthy and loyal to your country.
If yes, then should he have accepted Trump's decision on who should run the agency.
First there was the (staged?) row with Zelensky. A couple of months later nothing has really changed.
Now Musk left as planned (he couldn't stay longer than 130 days in that position). Time for another public row to show that Trump is tough on subsidies for electric vehicles.
SpaceX will of course continue to get funded. A large number of LEO satellites are needed for Trump's Golden Dome and Starlink is needed in crisis regions.
It looks like it is 130 days per year, not a rolling start from the date of hiring.
Even if it was to his benefit to get called a pedophile, there still would be no reason to assume 4D-chess genius. The malignant narcissist and drug explanation is right there. The long track record of infighting and interpersonal fallouts is right there. The track record of falsely calling people pedophiles is also right there.
But for some reason we must discard all reason and conclude that Trump and Musk are conspiring.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/06/technology/elon-musk-trum...
"The spat was revelatory, it was epic, it was historic, at least according to the thousands of earnest and excited commentaries that were instantly published.
It was also a well-timed outburst.
Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump did not have a feud five days ago and might not have a feud five days from now. Until proved otherwise, all of this is theater. Think of it as the political version of professional wrestling. For a few hours, everyone was diverted by the spectacle of a brawl between the world’s richest man and its most powerful person."
Having you and other politically naive persons shoot down anything as a "conspiracy theory" is exactly what enables the system.
These guys are both masters of dominating attention on social media. It got them to where they are. The way to dominate the national attention in this world we've created, is to act like a child and call someone a pedo. They are not the leaders we wanted, but may be the leaders we deserve.
…Really?
I understand that the US stopped authorizing new shipments of gear to Ukraine like they were doing under Biden.
I don't believe it was staged. I think it was a long-shot attempt by Zelensky to make his case directly to the American people:
https://xcancel.com/RichardHanania/status/189556292259384155...
He couldn't legally stay more than 130 days, but Trump is already ignoring plenty of more important laws and getting away with it. I doubt adding this one to the list would make any difference.
As far as I can tell about Zelensky, he had every intention to cancel Trump's proposed deal after the white house meeting, but he is losing the war with Russia so badly that he absolutely needs US support, so he had no choice but to come back to the table.
Musk pulling out the Epstein thing and Trump pulling out the SpaceX contracts are both two subjects these guys are very touchy about. If they were faking it, they wouldn't have gone for the (emotional) throat on this one.
That said, Trump always chickens out, so there's no real chance SpaceX is getting its contracts canceled, even the ones that legitimately are a huge waste of money.
Trump needs to take his lumps on his BBB. That bill is full of pork for billionaires and cuts funding for poor folks. It should come as no surprise that people don't like it.
I'm always amazed when I read questions like this.
I mean ... have you been paying attention?
Law firms getting security clearances canceled, incarceration without due process, Harvard defunded, memecoins, gutting of the federal government, &c. &c. &c. &c.
Every data point screams malevolence and lack of concern for the common good of the nation.
And you're confused about decision-making over SpaceX that "seems" to ignore how the country is best served?
Don't get me wrong. You pose a valid question. In fact, only a person who himself cares about the common good would ask this type of question.
But man, the big flashing warning signs should be answering your question for you.
Well, SpaceX is owned by Musk. Therefore Trump, if seeking to hurt Musk, could attempt to hurt SpaceX.
The ends justify the means. The country's best interests are collateral damage, the benefit that SpaceX offers the country is not relevant to Trump's ego/feelings having been hurt.
[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/03616843221123...
In that light, we're doing really well with only 1/8 believing such a thing.
Could this dust-up have anything to do with some other bill being passed or a policy implemented? I can think of the big reconciliation (BBB) bill, and Palantir getting access to more information on American citizens, as 2 things that the public could be distracted from by the Musk-Trump issue.
A week ago, "the debt" was really important. Now that Dear Leader has declared otherwise, apparently it's not. Right into the memory hole it goes.
The reality is there is no platform beyond anger (the base), and naked autocratic power (the politicians). Everything else is post-hoc rationalization.
(and just to clarify so I'm not written off as some progressive partisan: I'm a libertarian who was unaligned, understood and saw merit in both camps' ideals - until the Republican party turned its back on conservatism in favor of cult of personality reactionaryism)
There are republicans who care about the debt, but the party as a whole doesn’t. The economic libertarians have been thoroughly marginalized in the modern GOP, because economic libertarianism is unpopular.
To be clear, I admire the traditional small government conservatives, though I am not one. The GOP hasn’t been that party since the 1920s. The mass immigration of the 20th century made that approach unviable. We’re a country of machine politics now and it’s only going to become more pronounced. The guy who ran on “No Taxes on Tips” to buy the Latino vote in Nevada was never going to balance the budget.
Your individual assertion that you don't care about a balanced budget isn't particularly relevant to the larger context where an overwhelming amount of Trump supporters did just make arguments professing support of the need to get the budget under control to justify last week's policies.
That’s especially true because society is hard to analyze. For example, I think it will be bad for society to encourage greater race and ethnic consciousness in a diverse society. I can point to all the sectarian conflict that exists in countries around the world as an example of what I seek to avoid, but that’s hardly definitive. Is the upshot that we have to proceed with a vast social experiment, because we can’t provide a closed form analysis of the proposal a priori?
I had an argument to write here, but I'm having a hard time getting it down to something concise and without a lot of inbaked assumptions, so I am just going to turn it into a question. Like, I am really trying to understand the continued support for Trump. I was an unaligned libertarian. I read Moldbug as he was writing. I got it. I disagreed from a philosophic information theoretic perspective (complexity multiplies, Urbit is just another "write once run anywhere"), but I still get the desire.
Then Trump. I totally got 2016 Trump support. The system seemed so entrenched and immutable, at least this guy is shaking things up and talking about real problems. I was the one telling my breathless progressive friends that he was likely to win. "But he's soooo racist" "uh-huh".
But then just the total lack of performance when actually in office? All performance, no execution besides who can be hurt this week? The only commonality I see is "owning the libs" where "the libs" means anyone who doesn't support Dear Leader. It just seems like one big tautology, for a lack of a real constrictive political direction or values.
I really want see where I am wrong, because none of these policies add up to making sense to me. Tariffs that harm our country, phrased in terms as if needing physical goods is somehow a strength? And then not even followed through on ? Attacking our allies for "not paying their share" while they buy into our economic empire and prop up our currency?
I get the populist anger, yes. But anger on its own does not produce good outcomes - in fact, quite the opposite.
I guess my question boils down to - if there are values besides anger, spite, owning the libs, and autocracy, then what exactly are they these days ? I don't mean the old mantras that are brought up to make people frustrated they didn't pan out, and then sidestepped when discussing current policy (like you've done with the deficit here). But the actual values that can be appealed to critique the current path? Heck, phrase it in terms of what would make you see a different candidate as even better than Trump.
Because like, for example:
> I think it will be bad for society to encourage greater race and ethnic consciousness in a diverse society
I agree with this. I don't call it "reverse racism", I just call it "racism" - a focus on collectivism in terms of group identity. But what I see in Trumpism isn't a repudiation of that general racism, but rather continued escalation of the dynamic merely with the "other side" winning. But I feel like if I tried to flesh that argument out by appealing to what you threw out as a supposed value, then I'm just going to run into a different newly-conjured value that overrides the first - in other words, rationalizations rather than actual values.
But please point out where I am wrong.
According to that document he actually is cutting the deficit by $1.407 trillion with the One Big Beautiful Bill, and with the tariffs and deregulation the deficit will be cut by least $6.6 trillion over the next 10 years.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/articles/2025/06/mythbuster-the-o...
Technically they weren't going to cut them, but they also weren't doing anything to effectively address the upcoming shortfalls in the SS and Medicare trust funds and in fact the tax changes they are trying to enact would shorten the time to those shortfalls.
This is overblown IMO. The government already has this data on citizens and they're merely using it how they like (i.e. consolidating it through a contractor)
The time to stop this would've been before it was collected in the first place.
This time, though, I'm running with the crowd. I think this is just too much. I mean, come on, screaming on Twitter that Trump didn't release Epstein files, because he is in them? Sure, it doesn't hurt him, it's no news nor a real accusation, but I'm pretty sure Trump didn't want that to be posted. The whole thing doesn't look nice for anybody, it doesn't help anybody. No, I really think Musk has become totally insane this time, or/and is drugged out. The left hand still may be doing something, but that's taking the opportunity, not making this all up for the sake of distraction.
In regards to reality as simulation, well - the issue here is that definitions are not very precise. That simulation is reality to us. We have mind limitations, by which we operate just like animals have them and that makes our reality. I have experienced deja vu many times and the mechanisms to that might be linked that things are predestined - pretty much this is main belief, that all pre-Christian societies believed in and generally Christianity is not in opposition to that either - it just states that there is a free will to humans and that they must choose God over Santa and deja vu can be experienced only by saints that are in direct contact of Ultimate Being.
I don't know where Musk is getting his ideas, but what is mundane and boring to some might be exciting to others. Insects controlled by pheromones might be living most exciting life that there is.
I think I have heard some other ideas that most probably developed on the basis of ideas of Lilly. It involves reincarnation of souls in other beings. I'm not completely sold on idea(because that is presented as noble and next nuclear war is not under any definition), but that might explain why society is deranged as that right now, as current beings does not have noblest souls... though it can also be explained by many other factors. Though, the mechanics of transfer of nomadic souls would explain no need for transportation to reach all the other planets that have life, but also - that is not really what matters - we don't think that dinos had more importance over humans and to be fair humans themselves are just an episode in this Universe as well.
The idea of Lilly can be expanded - pretty much Universe can be just a playground for various beings to experience whatever - just like a RPG game or a live movie, where you can play a role. It does not necessarily require soul mechanism mentioned earlier. But it also does not matter for your existence - you are as real and important as you want it to be. Or don't matter at all and there is no reason or value for anything.
Regardless, your destiny is to live through this cosmic theater and experience Musk - do you like it or not. Pretty much your reality can also be formed by your mind and it seems, that Musk is very central part in it.
It's just such a shame that Elon was pressured into this messy politics stuff. After all, he could have just stayed in his own lane, kept his nose clean, made value for shareholders and saved America along the way. It was so easy! Hell, he could have just become president himself with his spotless track record of administrative accomplishment. Who wouldn't vote for him?
Now look at the poor guy. Burned his bridges with the liberals when he bought Twitter, harassed queer people and reneged his environmental commitments. Now the bridge to modern conservatism is on fire, because gasp the Republicans won't agree on making a smaller, less-capable government! Those filthy backstabbers, how was Elon supposed to know he was fraternizing with frauds, socialists and sex pests?
It's... it's discrimination. Don't they know Elon is on the autism spectrum, how are they getting away with this harassment? H-hey, why are you guys walking away - this is important! America's future is on the line, here!
If it's any consolation though, Elon's not alone. Plus, he's probably earned a real nice dacha near occupied Sumy for the valuable work he's done the government.
Nobody taught them how to play nice. I've met eight year olds with more civility and maturity than those two...
Oh well. Reminds me of that Alien vs Predator movie: Whoever wins, we lose.
But the particulars on the ground show that Musk is not smart, just vindictive, power-hungry, petulant, and childish. He literally posted that he would decommission Dragon because of Trump's threat, which was stupid in intent and stupid in potential negotiating effect on Trump (Trump does not know what Dragon is and does not care):
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/06/05/musk-trump-spacex-dragon...
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/president-trump...
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/02/28/us/politics/television-tr...
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