I think this is a micharacterization. I’ve followed Musk for years. Like anyone else, he has good moments and bad ones. I’m only a ‘fanboy’ of what he has done for space access. I am happy that he claims to be for free speech and getting rid of censorship, but wary that he’s just going to replace one form of censorship with another. Initial signs are not good. We’ll see.
See, there’s an apparent fundamental difference between me and just about everyone else here it seems: I am completely able to separate personal politics from everything else. Two of my favorite artists were hardcore liberals. Some of my favorite writers are way to the left of me. Many actors I like and anticipate watching have personal behaviours that I find reprehensible. So what?
I try to judge actions, not people. I don’t really care what Elon Musk thinks about politics, except when those thoughts affect things in the real world. I called him an ass for his ‘pedo’ comment during that emergency cave rescue. I called Hyperloop idiotic. I didn’t think much of the Boring company. And I’ve said from the beginning that Musk’s skills may not map well to running a social media company and he could get himself into trouble.
None of those decisions had anything to do with Musk’s politics. I honestly thought he was a center-left liberal, and I think that is still true. He was caught completely by surprise over the WEF thing, which tells me he doesn’t pay much attention to the right historically.
I put Musk in the same category as Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, Russell Brand, Bret Weinstein and other people who thought of themselves as members of a left that no longer exists, and are finding that the right is willing to accept them as the Jacobin left kicks them out. They aren’t right wing: at best they are uneasy travelers with the right at a time when the left has become anti-free speech and authoritarian.
I was never center-left. I’ve always been pretty much libertarian-right. That gave me lots of common ground with the left on issues of civil rights, free speech, etc. The modern left has abandoned that stuff in favor of identity politics, and the modern right has become populist, leaving me with no home. If I sympathize with Musk around politics at all, it’s that he probably feels the same way.
In any event, I support people or not based on specific issues, and I don’t care what their political views are (obviously unless they are politicians). I have supported and opposed stuff Musk did before and after he ‘changed’. I was one of the ones supporting Alec Baldwin. I thought Bill Clinton was a decent President. And I have also supported Sarah Palin and Trump on specific issues where I thought they were right, while also believing that neither of them should be anywhere near Presidential politics. That gets me in trouble here, as the board Zeitgeist seems to be that when a public figure is in the wrong party, any attempt all all to support them on any issue is seen as traitorous and gets attacked. I see the same thing on the right, where everyone assumed Alec Baldwin was guilty and I was the asshole for thinking otherwise, merely because of the guy’s politics.
That’s the libertarian in me, which you probably don’t understand. As a final example: I get along with all of you and have probably supported all of you on some issue or another on this board, even though you attack me uncharitably in the Pit and are completely opposed to my politics. I have corrected errors by many of you over some issue or another over the years without ever thinking someone should be pitted for it. I’m capable of looking at everything on an issue by issue basis, and evaluating people based on their current actions and not their past or their political affiliation. Forgiveness and understanding are also big parts of my worldview. Life is too short for grudges and enemy lists. I have never blocked a single person on the internet.
In an ideal liberatian world, politics won’t matter at all and we’d never discuss it because government would be too small to be such a threat.
As for the right and their conspiracies, I look at everything individually. Remember when the idea of a lab leak origin was considered beyond the pale and a comspiracy theory?
The right was broken the day the George Floyd riots happened in the middle of a lockdown and public health people trotted out and said that since racism was a bigger threat than the pandemic, the riots were good. They never trusted a thing public health authorities said after that. I don’t agree with them, but I understand.
The vax chip thing was a simple conflation of two events. Norman Bourla talking about microchips in pills to ensure compliance, and another talk about implantable under-the-skin RFID chips for identification. I also said that I understood that having a presentation at the WEF does not mean they are trying to implement that program. But then I linked directly to the WEF programs that HAVE been implemented or tried to, to great harm.
And let’s not forget that there were plenty of anti-vax Democrats when they thought it was a ‘Trump vaccine’. Then Biden was elected, took credit for the vaccines, and everything was okay on the left, but for the right the vaccines went from a ‘Trump miracle’ to a deadly ‘clotshot’. And skepticism of big pharma completely flipped from the left to the right. Partisanship makes everyone stupid.