Live data from Hacker News

Breitbart, other conservative outlets escalate anti-SpaceX campaign

arstechnica.com

141–150 of 175 posts

Re: Breitbart, other conservative outlets escalate anti-SpaceX campaign

#141
post #58

Not that I agree with it but the conservative argument against SpaceX seems to be largely: >Despite the numerous public statements by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk decrying crony capitalism, SpaceX would not exist without government contracts and subsidies. According to The Wall Street Journal, government contracts account for about 70 percent of SpaceX’s contracts. U.S. taxpayers have provided SpaceX more than $5.5 billion i…

I don't think the US government was just handing SpaceX money, they're paying to get mass into orbit, and less per kilogram than pretty much any other option. It's the market at work. It just happens that the US Government has a lot of hardware that they want to put into space and no available in-house launch hardware at the moment.

Literally the only angle I can see on this is an "all government spending is bad" angle, and that's way off in tinfoil hat territory.

Re: Breitbart, other conservative outlets escalate anti-SpaceX campaign

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Neocons" were the foreign-policy hawks of the 2000s. These guys largely call themselves the "alt-right". They're basically as bad as you've heard, but hiding it sometimes. Even I find this particular turn against SpaceX somewhat weird. My internal model of the alt-right has largely been that they have one wing who are basically Nazi fanfiction, another who idolize the "throne and altar conservatism" of pre-Revolutio…

With regard to Peter Thiel, I am not sure being thrown overboard is the right metaphor. He has chosen to ride the tiger, and may have trouble getting off, if he wants to.

That metaphor is deliberate? — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_Evola#Ride_the_Tiger

Re: Breitbart, other conservative outlets escalate anti-SpaceX campaign

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Neocons" were the foreign-policy hawks of the 2000s. These guys largely call themselves the "alt-right". They're basically as bad as you've heard, but hiding it sometimes. Even I find this particular turn against SpaceX somewhat weird. My internal model of the alt-right has largely been that they have one wing who are basically Nazi fanfiction, another who idolize the "throne and altar conservatism" of pre-Revolutio…

> These guys largely call themselves the "alt-right". No they don't. Most of "these guys", meaning the new right, distance themselves from that term because of its association with white nationalism. > They're basically as bad as you've heard, but hiding it sometimes. No, they're just lumped together in popular media. Breitbart and the Daily Stormer are portrayed as part of the same package, so that distasteful ideas…

>No, they're just lumped together in popular media. Breitbart and the Daily Stormer are portrayed as part of the same package, so that distasteful ideas from one can be used to discredit the other.

No, Steve Bannon said in an interview that he led Breitbart in giving a spearhead to the alt-right in large media.

>This erasure of the middle ground between center-left and extreme right is referred to in conservative circles as the "unthinging" of the right.

There are really three problems here.

* The "center" and "center-left" are already, by historic standards, quite right-wing on economic policy. This really skews the claim that we're talking about a spectrum between a "center-left" and a "right", insofar as we're really just talking about different degrees of permissiveness or authoritarianism on social issues, plus the "center-left" maintaining the barest rudiments of a vestigial welfare-state.

* Within the Right, the factions that we could have called "center-right" got tossed out as RINOs long ago. Ronald Reagan advocated employee ownership of firms as the way of the future; today Republicans would treat that as socialist heresy. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" is now unheard-of, as are Republican appeals to conservative people of color or immigrants. Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell really are far-right, in the sense that Ayn Rand is far to the libertarian right.

* The alt-right has deliberately worked to blur the boundaries between the libertarian right and the authoritarian-nationalist right, usually by invoking anti-democratic, nationalistic libertarian thinkers such as Hans-Hermann Hoppe. You know, the guy who wrote that, "in a covenant founded for the purpose of protecting family and kin, there can be no tolerance toward those habitually promoting lifestyles incompatible with this goal. … [violators] will have to be physically removed from society."[1]

When your party has come to have a political spectrum stretching from Ayn Rand on its left to Augusto Pinochet on its right, yes, you are "these guys". Stop now, turn around, purge the alt-right, purge the Tea Party, and reestablish some common-sense and humanity, or else history will remember you as the bumbling enablers of American fascism.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or "physical removal" by death squads: which side are you on?

[1] -- https://mises.org/library/my-battle-thought-police

Re: Breitbart, other conservative outlets escalate anti-SpaceX campaign

#144
post #76

Suppose Elon is a bad guy. What's to stop him from dragging a big space rock into orbit and holding the planet hostage in X years? Government will build in redundant checks and balances at extra expense. Corporations, not so much.

This is...just...wow. Your argument boils down to being unable to trust any company that works with dangerous materials.

How do we know Dow Chemical isn't going to make a huge poison bomb and hold the country hostage? What about Lockheed Martin creating their own private army to take over the US and sabotaging all of the equipment they sell to the government? Maybe Boeing will threaten to crash brand new 777s into buildings all across the US unless we pay a ransom? SpaceX doesn't even have to capture an asteroid, they build something that easily has the capabilities of an ICBM already!

Supervillian schemes rarely make any sense in the real world. You get a lot more money by just commercializing the tech and selling it normally. Plus you don't have the army knocking at your door and pesky superheroes ruining your day.

Re: Breitbart, other conservative outlets escalate anti-SpaceX campaign

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High quality links that cast credible doubt on the cause of rising co2 ppm and its long term effects? I'll bet money you have none. Items that have been debunked many times are obviously not high quality or credible. P.S. I wouldn't normally be so harsh... It's just a bit crazy how many times these claims keep coming up, when the evidence and the science is so crystal clear.

I didn't say it was my hypothesis

What was the point of your comment, then? It seems to be expressing doubt about the cause of climate change, as well as the risks.

Re: Breitbart, other conservative outlets escalate anti-SpaceX campaign

#146
post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right, not every criticism is about disliking Musk. But I’m pretty sure this one is. I dragged Tesla into the conversation because I think it’s relevant. So do they.

I spend most of my time online in what the HN crowd would describe as "right-wing circles", and I have to agree with this. I'm seeing a rising sentiment that Elon Musk is someone who is skilled at over-promising and under-delivering, while repeatedly using subsidy and direct government funding to fatten his own pockets. I have no idea what this notion is based upon; it's not really something that has interested me.

Honestly I think part of it might be that Musk, in a way, represents an (almost) naive hope ("let's go to mars!"), and as far as I can tell the alt-right mostly runs on cynicism and criticism.

I find it hard to properly argue this, because it's based on mostly a feeling I get from following /r/the_donald and various other alt-right(-ish) sources.

But the best way I can explain it is how I feel when I watch Fight Club, in particular the scene where Jared Leto gets beaten to a bloody pulp, and the main character says that he just 'wanted to destroy something beautiful'. I remember that the first time I watched the movie as an angsty teenager, this scene gave me a (thankfully) fleeting feeling of power, anger, mixed with disgust and self-loathing.

Interestingly enough, a game like Bioshock had a similar effect. The message is clearly that the 'Randian' approach leads to all sorts of horror, but for some reason there's also something appealing about the situation, at least to the person that I am (and I can easily see a version of myself in a parallel universe being part of the alt-right).

Anyways, my point is that anything that has a whiff of naiveté, grand hopes, and the kind of 'moonshot' idea that could possibly lead to utter failure, all of that is antithetical to the general alt-right perspective.

At the risk of shoe-horning an author I like into this, I nonetheless feel that David Foster Wallace somehow is able to capture some of this.

> “So far it seems as if people think it really is sort of a book about drug addiction and recovery and, you know, intentional fallacies notwithstanding, what was really going on in my head was something more general like what you were talking about before, that there is a kind — that some of the sadness that it seems to me kind of infuses the culture right now has to do with this loss of purpose or organizing principles, something you’re willing to give yourself away to, basically. And that the addictive impulse, which is very much kind of in the cultural air right now, is interesting and powerful only because it’s a kind of obvious distortion of kind of a religious impulse or an impulse to be part of something bigger. And, you know, the stuff at the academy is kind of weird because, yeah, it’s very high-tech and it’s very “become technically better so you can achieve x, y, and z,” but also the guy who essentially runs the academy now is a fascist, and, whether it comes out or not, he’s really the only one there who to me is saying anything that’s even remotely non-horrifying, except it is horrifying because he’s a fascist. And part of the whole — part of the stuff that was rattling around in my head when I was doing this is that it seems to me that one of the scary things about sort of the nihilism of contemporary culture is that we’re really setting ourselves up for fascism. Because as we empty more and more kind of values, motivating principles, spiritual principles, almost, out of the culture, we’re creating a hunger that eventually is going to drive us to the sort of state where we may accept fascism just because — you know, the nice thing about fascists is they’ll tell you what to think, they’ll tell you what to do–they’ll tell you what’s important.”

My apologies if this doesn't really add up to anything. The topic just hits a nerve and I'm trying to find a way to properly put it into words.

EDIT: found the full quote

Re: Breitbart, other conservative outlets escalate anti-SpaceX campaign

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Breitbart is a bastion for free-thinking much like HackerNews. While you may criticize their opinions, it's at least sane reporting... instead of cheerleading and narrative controlling like CNN and NBC.

Are you kidding?

Based on their comment history: it's a lost cause. Don't waste your energy here.

Re: Breitbart, other conservative outlets escalate anti-SpaceX campaign

#148
post #58

Not that I agree with it but the conservative argument against SpaceX seems to be largely: >Despite the numerous public statements by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk decrying crony capitalism, SpaceX would not exist without government contracts and subsidies. According to The Wall Street Journal, government contracts account for about 70 percent of SpaceX’s contracts. U.S. taxpayers have provided SpaceX more than $5.5 billion i…

I don't think the US government was just handing SpaceX money, they're paying to get mass into orbit, and less per kilogram than pretty much any other option. It's the market at work. It just happens that the US Government has a lot of hardware that they want to put into space and no available in-house launch hardware at the moment. Literally the only angle I can see on this is an "all government spending is bad" ang…

Yeah my disagreement is SpaceX probably offered better value than paying NASA or defence contractors to do the launches. And there is a strategic value to not say letting Russia do everything.

Re: Breitbart, other conservative outlets escalate anti-SpaceX campaign

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These guys largely call themselves the "alt-right". No they don't. Most of "these guys", meaning the new right, distance themselves from that term because of its association with white nationalism. > They're basically as bad as you've heard, but hiding it sometimes. No, they're just lumped together in popular media. Breitbart and the Daily Stormer are portrayed as part of the same package, so that distasteful ideas…

>No, they're just lumped together in popular media. Breitbart and the Daily Stormer are portrayed as part of the same package, so that distasteful ideas from one can be used to discredit the other. No, Steve Bannon said in an interview that he led Breitbart in giving a spearhead to the alt-right in large media. >This erasure of the middle ground between center-left and extreme right is referred to in conservative cir…

The first time I came across the term alt-right was in this article on Breitbart: https://www.google.is/amp/www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/03/29/....

As a ex Ron Paul supporter with a distaste for the GOP and Neo-Cons, I proudly called myself alt-right.

I joined a few alt-right forums and found similar-minded people. Libertarians, conservatives, nationalists (in the positive sense). Generally smart people. Not Nazis. Not white supremacists.

The term alt-right never seemed to me anything other than right-wing but not Republican.

Then I saw a few New York Times and CNN articles using it differently. Mixed freely with Nazis.

And I heard that white surpremecists were using it to make their views look more mainstream.

Then people started calling me a Nazi.

It’s a beautiful strategy to see a word redefined right in front of your eyes for political gain, but sad too.

If Bannon said Breitbart supported the alt-right, I’ll assume he’s referring to the definition I first understood from the article on his site, and not the one co-opted by the left-sided media and far-right groups.

Re: Breitbart, other conservative outlets escalate anti-SpaceX campaign

#150
post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you kidding?

Based on their comment history: it's a lost cause. Don't waste your energy here.

I honestly didn't think that anyone would think of Breitbart as sane reporting. If the comment was honest then I have to change my opinion and have learned something.
Post reply on HN