You have to vote for Genocide Joe to finish off the Palestinians and throw even more asylum seekers into concentration camps and send more missiles to Nazis, otherwise you’re a fascist or something.
This only logical conclusion to this naive utilitarianism is reaching a point 30 years from now when liberals will be frothing at the mouths in support of the dem candidate who wants 5 genocides as opposed to the republican who wants 10.
There is a legend about a certain species of caterpillar that can only cross the threshold of metamorphosis by seeing its future butterfly. Proletarian subjectivity does not evolve by incremental steps but requires non-linear leaps, especially moral self-recognition through solidarity with the struggle of a distant people, even when this contradicts short-term self-interest, as in the famous cases of Lancashire cotton workers’ enthusiasm for Lincoln and later for Gandhi. Socialism, in other words, requires non-utilitarian actors, whose ultimate motivations and values arise from structures of feeling that others would deem spiritual. Marx rightly scourged romantic humanism in the abstract, but his personal pantheon—Prometheus and Spartacus, Homer, Cervantes, and Shakespeare—affirmed a heroic vision of human possibility that no longer seems to have any purchase in our fallen world.
If Isreal just wanted every Palestinian dead and nothing else, don’t you think they would have dropped their own nukes on October 8? Zionists have no interest in irradiating the manifest destiny prize they’re currently waging a doomed invasion to take.
If I was on the receiving end of the genocide, I would rather just have a nuke end my people’s suffering than get slowly meat-grinder’d to death by the IDF; but that’s just me.
Also bonus points for irradiating the fascists in Israel.
I didn’t say it was. I said refusing to vote for him is, albeit passively. Hate Biden all you want, but keep the objectively far worse guy out of power at all costs.
Yes, that is goofy. I don’t hate Biden as much as some, but I don’t particularly like him, either. Still voting for him or whoever else the Democrats dredge up to keep fascism at bay.
Tut‐tut, I see that Clinton’s electoral failure in spite of winning the popular vote hasn’t moved somebody’s faith in the pseudodemocracy. Let’s briefly review the circumstances, shall we?
Starting with the national elections of 2000:
Democrats have received more popular votes in 4 out of the past 5 presidential elections, yet only gained office 2 times. Despite winning the popular vote only once in the past 5 elections, a Republican has taken office 3 times.
Democrats have received 24 million more votes for Senate than Republicans, yet have held a majority in the Senate in only 3 out of the last 9 sessions, while Republicans have had a majority in 4 out of the past 9 sessions.
Democrats have received over 500,000 more votes for seats in the House of Representatives, yet have held a majority in that body for only 3 out of the past 9 sessions, while Republicans have held a majority in 6 of those sessions.
Trust me, an overglorified public opinion poll isn’t going to stop neofascism should the ruling class deem its institutionalization necessary. The Fascists ascended to power in the Kingdom of Italy and the Weimar Republic in spite of their want of votes.
To be fair, this is partly how I’ve been looking at it. In the event that power gets delegated to the VP, you want to know the right hand man isn’t an absolute crock of shit as well.
But surely even an old man suffering dementia is a better candidate than Trump.
I’ll keep correcting this when I see it. There was no Musk-owned, South African Apartheid emerald mine.
It was a mine in Zambia. A completely different exploited African nation. And Musk was only about to afford it because, as a wealthy white man in South Africa benefiting from Apartheid, he had a private plane that he traded for a share in the mine.
The “self-made” man got rich because of colonial exploitation in two African nations. Not just the one.
You say “correct” but you’re not contradicting the meme. The reading that “apartheid South African” is referring to the man rather than the mine is to me more intuitive. Even if it wasn’t it would be a possible reading, so I don’t think you should say you’re correcting the meme.
To me, “apartheid South African emerald mine owner” appears to mean that the mine was in South Africa. It does have a bit of ambiguity. I think that it’s important to provide enough detail to make the scope of exploitation involved clear. Sometimes it can be simple, like “sweatshop” but, in this case, Musk has invested a lot of energy into his myth of a “self-made” man, especially in suppression of the origins of his wealth that it behooves use of done specificity to demonstrate how rotten even his origins were.
I support the desire to add context the fact you did add. My only concern is that your phrasing comes off as saying the meme is ahistorical or dramatised, when it’s probably just the phrasing.
You’re absolutely right. My wording is that way intentionally as a bit of a “hook”/humor. Not humor making light of human suffering but to make it bearable to discuss and draw attention to it.
I’ll take the downvotes. It’s both obviously. PayPal is dope and still going strong, Tesla single handedly made the electric car viable, spaceX brought reusable rockets a thing and internet connectivity to rural communities (me included).
I used to be a fanboy but now loathe the guy. It’s ok to hate but don’t downplay his contribution to society.
Paypal is not from Musk, and he was eventually ousted when he tried to rebrand it to X.
The company was originally established by Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Luke Nosek in December 1998 as Fieldlink, later it was renamed Confinity, a company which developed security software for hand-held devices. When it had no success with that business model, it switched its focus to a digital wallet.
In 2000, Musk had become CEO after the merger of his X.com and Confinity, the venture-backed company co-founded by Peter Thiel that owned the PayPal program that was a more popular money-transfer service than the one offered by Musk. The board ousted Musk as CEO and replaced him with Thiel in September 2000.
Tesla is also not of his own. He pretty much just bought an already working company.
He certainly made it his own over the years, investing early on and then overseeing its growth from niche luxury carmaker to mass production, adding on a solar business, and pushing self-driving technologies. However, the tech titan – and now the world’s richest man – was actually Tesla’s 4th CEO when he took that role in October 2008.
I have no idea about Space X, but Paypal and Tesla are absolutely not from Elon Musk. He just happened to cross roads with those companies and invest his emerald money in those.
If he contributed to those companies, it’s via money, not ideas and intellect.
SpaceX’s reusable rockets is from SpaceX if I understand it correctly but…
Obviously musk didn’t build the rocket or planned the rocket but that is not the point.
Nasa had plans for reusable rockets but for the longest time, the financial risk of development was higher than the value of reusable rockets. SpaceX didn’t care about the financial risk because they needed thousands of satellites for the most brain dead idea ever, starlink and because Elon is bad with money (Twitter…)
So SpaceX was “successful” because they were crazy enough to run 2 extremely dangerous projects.
I already replied and I’m sorry if seem to insist but I want to add on the subject and myth of “Elon Musk being a genius” and “contributing to society”, and went over the part about internet, and electric cars in general.
I’m glad you can have internet in a rural area, really. However, doing it via a constellation of satellites instead of having a robust ground network is posing certain issues for the future.
The size and scale of the Starlink project concerns astronomers, who fear that the bright, orbiting objects will interfere with observations of the universe, as well as spaceflight safety experts who now see Starlink as the number one source of collision hazard in Earth’s orbit. In addition to that, some scientists worry that the amount of metal that will be burning up in Earth’s atmosphere as old satellites are deorbited could trigger unpredictable changes to the planet’s climate.
In a paper published in May 2021 in the journal Scientific Reports, Canadian researcher Aaron Boley said the aluminum the satellites are made of will produce aluminum oxide, also known as alumina, during burn-up. He warned that alumina is known to cause ozone depletion and could also alter the atmosphere’s ability to reflect heat.
So as much as this could be useful, it’s also polluting the skies at a very rapid rate, and we’re not sure about the future consequences of it. And depending on where you live, fast and reliable internet in rural areas is often the result of other capitalistic companies not deeming those places profitable enough, and poor governmental regulations on internet as an essential service. We shouldn’t have to launch thousands of satellites in the air for this. But because it’s more profitable this way…
As for electric cars. Call me cynical, and anti car, which I am, but I don’t think the goal is to be ecological. Not anymore. Maybe when the company started with their three first CEOs. But it seems clear to me that Musk used the electric part as an ecological argument for greenwashing and selling to people that want to be “green”.
Electric cars are not to save the climate. They are to save the automobile industry. They want to continue to sell cars because it makes a profit. Electric cars are still posing an ecological threat, are still polluting the environment because of particles from the tires, are still killing millions of animals and people every year, and are still wasting vast quantities of space for parking lots, which are often not permeable.
And of course, people in rural areas will need cars, even if I don’t like them. But most people live in cities and Musk seem to be deliberately trying to delay public transit projects by announcing always soon-to-be-revolutionary technology like the Hyper Loop that has ben watered down multiple times to end up as a glorified LED lit electric car tunnel. Or the FSD which is not “full” “self” “driving”.
Again, I don’t like cars, don’t like to drive, and don’t have one. So I once was excited to see how the robotaxi part of things would evolve. But it’s been many many years and it’s obvious that I won’t be going from a city to a rural area soon, using a robotaxi or a self-driving car. I still need a driver’s licence for FSD. And robotaxis that do exist won’t go very far outside a city.
Also, if Musk is all about the environment with Tesla, why is he now trying to court people on the other side of the political spectrum; the side that doesn’t care about this?
Yes, electric cars are part of the solution, but cities need more public transit and micro mobility, not more cars (but electric and self-driving)! I’m sorry to say but it’s a lot of greenwashing, empty promises, and personality cult. The contributions to society are, I think, exaggerated.
Tags/Flair isn’t Nsfw/Nsfl. Tags could be tedious yes, but a seperate checkmark or a seperate toggle for simply NSFL should have been made from the get go.
Well, that can’t be changed now. People discuss NSFL in there, but I don’t know what will be the rustler of it. Maybe it will be NSFW + NSFL tag. You can always create a new issue demanding NSFL to be treated as a special tag.
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