A Year of Telepathy

But that is my point - tankie is someone who is a communist, hardcore pro-Stalin. There is no assumption that tankie is someone apolitical who is just joking around. There is no "he is just a tankie, doing things for fun, stop accusing him of being a communist".

Meanwhile, edgelord is someone who is supposedly just joking. A fine guy who just happen to draw swastika to get a reaction. Someone who you should let say and do movement things, because "deep down they do not mean it".

> there's room to discuss if it was genuinely a white nationalism thing or if he was just being an edgelord

This is what I reacted to. You cant replace "edgelord" by "takie" and white nationalism by stalinism in that sentence. It wont work. The "there's room to discuss if it was genuinely a stalinist thing or if he was just being a tankie" does not work, because tankie is literally a stalinist .

> Musk and his ilk are just people who "joked around" on 4chan and essentially radicalised themselves doing it.

Or rather, the were attracted to 4chan because they had the same opinions and values as those people. They did not just joked around, it was what they believed and who they were. And while both center and left pretended they are just playing, they meant it and managed to radicalize other people too.

This sort of blindness is a major reason liberals can't properly respond to the rise of MAGA or Trumpism. They refuse to understand it. Understanding something doesn't mean you agree. You can't properly criticize something you don't understand, nor can you provide an alternative that answers it.

Go back in time to the 1990s and 2000s.

The shuttle program was winding down. The only way to get humans into space currently on the market was the Russian Soyuz program, which is ancient Soviet technology. The only human habitation in space was the ISS, which everyone knows is a good engineering experimental platform but otherwise a dead end. The DC-X (first vertical landing rocket) was cancelled. The Venturestar was cancelled, and it may not have been a good design anyway for several reasons.

A lot of people are writing about this as the end of the space age, that the whole thing wasn't a good idea to begin with and there is no future there.

Then along comes SpaceX and within a few years they go from small orbital rocket to functional first stages that land themselves and now they almost have a fully reusable super-heavy capable of refueling in orbit.

Now look at cars. Common wisdom in the 1990s and 2000s is that affordable long-range cars are impossible without fossil fuels. There's a popular site called The Oil Drum that pushes the narrative that all motorized transport will end if fossil fuels are depleted. There are hybrids, but they still run on gas, and nothing much has happened to ICE technology since fuel injection in the early 1980s.

There are some EV efforts but they're early and half-assed.

Then along comes Tesla with the roadster and shows that EVs can be not just viable but cool and actually faster with better torque and acceleration than conventional cars. Since then many other car companies have caught up, but I still believe the whole industry would not have moved without Tesla kicking them in the arse.

If you really hate Musk, the question you should be asking is: why does the human race seem to need people like this to advance?

We had the technology to build the Falcon 9 and Starship in the 1990s, maybe even the 1980s. The problem wasn't money. The total cost of Falcon 9 development was comparable to two space shuttle launches.

The situation wasn't as absurd with EVs, but we definitely could have built a commuter EV at least a decade before we did. Look into the GM EV1 from the 1990s, which pre-dated the Nissan LEAF -- the first mass market EV, which did beat Tesla on that front -- and it had similar range and performance. The EV1 was killed in spite of demand becuase the conventional auto industry hated EVs. Some still do, like Toyota.

It really does seem like nothing big happens in human history without some manic unhinged asshole pushing it. We have everything -- ability, intelligence, technology, money -- but we don't do it without one of these people. Why?

Maybe we'd need "visionary" CEOs less if we had an over the counter amphetamine-like drug but with less addictiveness or other side effects.

Those are just two of very many recent examples.