Musk-Trump dispute includes threats to SpaceX contracts

Ahaha I'm pretty sure he meant that it was Greece and not Italy that invented everything first.

Direct your bewilderment at the conspiracy theorists of the NYT!

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.

Mainly the people that voted for him.

Unfortunately that is way outside too many people's Overton window. And, also unfortunately, I don't think the average human is sufficiently intelligent to understand why he should care.[note 1]

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.

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[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).

What does a democracy do when people willingly and knowingly vote for fascism? “Vote for me and you’ll never have to vote again” won…