We already knew Elon Musk was a villain

He’s so villainous, sometimes he openly admits his villainy!

Elon Musk has wielded a virtual monopoly on how we think about the future, but will his visions really deliver better lives for most people in our society? For all the tech industry’s talk of “disruption,” keeping us all trapped in cars for decades into the future by equipping them with batteries or upgraded computers doesn’t feel like much of a revolution.

A much more sustainable alternative to mass ownership of electric vehicles is to get people out of cars altogether—that entails making serious investments to create more reliable public transit networks, building out cycling infrastructure so people can safely ride a bike, and revitalizing the rail network after decades of underinvestment. But Musk has continually tried to stand in the way of such alternatives.

He has a history of floating false solutions to the drawbacks of our over-reliance on cars that stifle efforts to give people other options. The Boring Company was supposed to solve traffic, not be the Las Vegas amusement ride it is now. As I’ve written in my book, Musk admitted to his biographer Ashlee Vance that Hyperloop was all about trying to get legislators to cancel plans for high-speed rail in California—even though he had no plans to build it.

Several years ago, Musk said that public transit was “a pain in the ass” where you were surrounded by strangers, including possible serial killers, to justify his opposition. But the futures sold to us by Musk and many others in Silicon Valley didn’t just suit their personal preferences. They were designed to meet business needs, and were the cause of just as many problems as they claimed to solve—if not more.

Monologuing is such a bad habit for villains to get into — they spill all the beans.

So yeah, the Hyperloop was an obviously absurd scheme that was never going to reduce traffic congestion, so it’s useful that he revealed his actual motivations, which was to kill mass transit, which actually does work for his previously stated goal. His “serial killer” rationale is also silly — like Ted Bundy was knocking women unconscious and flagging down a bus to carry them to the murder site, or the Green River Killer was picking up prostitutes on the King County Metro.

Now I’m wondering, though, what is his ulterior motive for colonizing Mars? We know it isn’t going to work, and we know it’s not to save humanity, so what’s going on in his selfish little brain to drive him to hire people to build SpaceX?

I guess it was a joke?

You know, bro humor, so not actually funny.

The responses are “hilarious”.

He probably wanted to smoke a big cigar next to the proof of his potency.

You gotta feel sorry for Matt Walsh. He doesn’t understand what a woman is, so how can you expect him to empathize with one?

I was right there by my wife’s side during all three births, and I find it hard to laugh about all the pain and the sweat and the blood she went through. Maybe if I were a bro I could get through those jokes. Maybe if it were their wives, rather than a bunch of smarmy men, making the jokes, I’d be able to see the laughter through the pain.

The only kind of humor conservatives like, though, is punching down.

Goon University shot their wad

Would you believe that a two week course in a rented building led by a team of conservative wankers was the majestic peak of intellectual achievement this summer? Bari Weiss thinks so.

They’ve reached their peak so soon. It’s all downhill from here.

THREE HOURS OF JORDAN PETERSON?

If it were just 3 hours of Peterson alone, it would be hellish. As 3 hours of exposing Peterson as a shallow right-wing grifter, though, I found this entertaining. Infuriating. Infurataining? Try it as a kind of background anti-ASMR, maybe.

Hey! If you’ve got a little time after that, Abe and I seem to have similar tastes, so you can go over there and spend an additional hour watching Thoughtslime explain how hard work is a grift.

By the way, life hack here: I usually play videos at 1.25 speed, which doesn’t wreck listenability too bad, and if you’ve got a little free disk space, use an app (I use one called ClipGrab) to download the whole video and play it from there — it removes the annoying commercials which are currently a plague on YouTube.

He’s such a good Republican

An empty football helmet. Perfect!

Herschel Walker personifies all those good ol’ Republican ideals: stupidity, ignorance, greed, and dishonesty.

He might be the next Senator from Georgia. You can hear all the chucklefucks in the audience clucking approvingly over his ‘science’, and you can hear the gears grinding. Why should we do something that benefits us if it also benefits the rest of the world? They’re all thinking about modifying their trucks so they can roll coal now and teach China a lesson.

Now I wonder if he’s actually lying, or his brain is so rotten that he doesn’t know he’s lying.

Doesn’t matter, the deader the brain and the more corrupt the morals, the better the Republican candidate.

He is so angry!

Boy, Jordan Peterson sure is upset that other people don’t share his Objective™ and True™ evaluation of beauty.

How dare Sports Illustrated insist that a non-athletic body could be beautiful? I’m going to take that personally.

Then he’s offended that SI was exploiting Yumi Nu…as if no other woman asked to pose in a skimpy bathing suit was exploited. He pretends that he’s defending her by insulting her.

It’s weird how he exposes his rage over such subjective issues, as if he is the final arbiter, and he and he alone gets to decide who is beautiful and who is not for everyone else. His authoritarianism is exposed.

How long until we get to Cloud Cuckoo Land?

Someone asked Elon Musk when we’d be landing people on Mars.

His answer: 2029. In seven years.

I’d like to know when everyone finally realizes that Musk is completely out of touch with reality. The current big project his hired engineers are working on is the Starship (such hubris…) heavy lifter — they’re making bigger and bigger rockets, and that is supposed to take off this year. But that isn’t even touching the real problem of getting people to Mars. It’s a 7-9 month one-way trip! 21 months if you plan to bring them back home…not that I’m at all confident that Musk would care about that, he’s not going, after all. He’s nowhere near working out the problems of sustained life support in an incredibly hostile environment, where the crew would be completely isolated from any chance of aid, and where they’ll be soaking in radiation. No one is going to be ready in seven years. The tech won’t be here.

I’ll remind you that we got to the Moon six times, with astronauts hopping around for a few days each time, and that was it. We haven’t gone back. It’s doable, I could imagine people could make a few more trips in the 2030s to the Moon, but that’s trivial in comparison to going to Mars.

I’ll also remind you of the history of Musk’s grand projects. He was going to solve traffic with tunnels, remember.

It turned out to be a pitiful short, but expensive, tube that a few cars at a time could drive through. When Musk promises, expect something far short of the dream.

He might be vaguely aware of that.

That first comment is a lie. He doesn’t love humanity — maybe he has a few idealistic fantasies about his vague vision of “humanity”, but he’s an out of touch billionaire who is totally isolated from the herd. That’s why he hates traffic and mass transit, he wants to live in a bubble.

That last bit though, that oh-look-a-squirrel moment, is perfect. Yeah, I believe he’s capable of marketing pez dispensers.

I get email (Phillip edition)

If you experience difficulties typing exclamation points in a comment here, it’s because Phillip Jones has been hogging them all. I just discovered a vast stagnant pool of missives from him deep in the bowels of my university email account, which has a lot of filters on it to prioritize messages from students and colleagues, so email from outside those groups tend to languish in neglect there. He seems to go on a rage jag every few weeks and dump a lot of repetitive invective, with numerous exclamation points, typically including links to his own posts on Twitter or Facebook, as if they are authoritative sources.

But lately he’s raging on Gettr, the right-wing pro-Trump Twitter look-alike, because his Twitter account has been suspended. Poor man. At least his emails are getting shorter.

https://gettr.com/post/p1a8bdj013f https://gettr.com/post/p1a8cis02f9 I’m going to contact the police and ask them to arrest you! And I’m going to contact UNMM and ask the to fire you!

Now I want to ask my local police if they’ve been contacted by a very emphatic kook — that was sent last night, so if the cops knock on my door and drag me away in handcuffs today, you’ll know why.

He’s going to have a tough time contacting my employer at UNMM, though. I don’t even know what that is!

Jordan Peterson can’t see any holes in his argument

But I can!

The Bible is true in a very strange way. It’s true in that it provides the basis for truth itself. And so it’s like a metatruth, without it there couldn’t even be the possibility of truth. And so maybe that’s the most true thing, the most true thing isn’t some truth per se. It’s that which provides the precondition for all judgements of truth. I can’t see any holes in that argument. And I can’t see any holes in it from a scientific perspective either, because I think we do know well enough now as scientists that the problem of deriving ethical direction from the collection of facts is an intractable problem.

Oh, yeah, the familiar is/ought problem. I agree with the last sentence above, but what I don’t see is Peterson’s solution. So we should derive ethical direction from a collection of contradictory, incoherent myths in a specific holy book? Why should I accept the precondition of the Bible’s rules instead of some other holy book, or instead of a framework of empiricism? That’s all he’s saying, is that ethical action requires a standpoint and a goal, but he doesn’t even try to justify the mish-mash of primitive ideas in the Bible as that good perspective needed to drive ethical behavior.

Why should I consider the ravings of a Jungian weirdo with bizarre dietary beliefs to be representative of a “scientific perspective”?

In his tweet, he seems to be claiming that “the west” should have a different precondition for truth than the rest of the world. Is this relativism? Or maybe it’s post-modernism. I have no idea what philosophical mumbo-jumbo he’s drawing this claim from — I think it might just be what you get emerging from a drug-addled, overly-entitled brain.

Nice suit, though. It drapes well even when its contents are empty.