Comment by gpt5

As a European my problem is that any additional success by Musks means more support for far right extremists that want to destroy the EU. Being against that is not moralizing or Tribalism.

My theory is that tribalism is hard coded in our brain, strongly selected for by those bad times in the past, where the ability to turn off emotion and critical thoughts meant you, a generally social creature, could murder your fellow man, to keep your family/in group alive/fed.

I think religion helped reduce tribalism, at a societal level, by making evil/demons/bad acts as the "them" and everyone that went to church on sunday (it was the whole town previously) was the "us". Now, without religion, and the physical/social bringing together it brought, that hardware in our brain still tries to segment a clear "us"/"them", but with much less guidance.

People who themselves eschew nuance should not be surprised when they and everything they touch are polarized into "good" and "bad" buckets. I'm pretty neutral to most companies on earth, because their CEOs wisely don't make wild comments every other day on their personal politics.

This isn't a new thing, ideas and actions have always been judged by who says them. If anything, the difference is that in the past, his behavior would have gotten him thrown out both from his companies and out of polite society.

I hoped to get across that I still find this to be a nuanced issue. I like the content, I just dislike the discourse around it, which makes it hard for me to get excited about the content.

I too would like it to just be about the content, but nothing exists in a vacuum.

This seems like less of a today thing and more of an ancient human tendency.

A lot of Buddhist practice is basically trying to train against immediately collapsing reality into self/other, right/wrong, craving/aversion.

Practicing this with Elon Musk is effectively ultra hard mode.

--

Though I do think there’s a subtle irony here too — the original commenter may simply be describing their own emotional reaction/disillusionment, while your response risks collapsing them into "part of the problem."

Feels like everybody in the thread is pointing at the same tendency from different angles.

Musk is not just "one of them"; the financial success of SpaceX is extremely unevenly distributed.

Personally I am looking forward to the post-IPO world where a lot of very smart people with hard-won knowledge will have their golden handcuffs off.

Well, Musk illegally wrecked half the federal government and killed tens of thousands of Africans in the process. Now he spends his days boosting and funding white nationalists and far-right politicians around the world. Why does everything have to be "good" or "bad"? Because some things are just pure evil and need to be called out as such, as well as thoroughly boycotted if the wheels of justice are too slow to turn.

This is not a nuanced case of "he did a few icky things, but also lots of good things." No. He is a fucked up, deeply racist megalomaniac who is doing his best to reshape the Western world in his fetid image. If he stopped with Tesla and SpaceX, maybe he would be penned differently in the history books, but alas.

If you replace "online" with "modern", then your comment could be an impassioned 1940s-era defense of Nazi Germany for their "merits" in face of their flaws.

The sum of these merits adds up to something. SpaceX is a political venture, and just like the uncomfortable questions that Microsoft/Google/Apple all pose, it's worth asking what the consequences will be in the long term. Lawful intercept sounded like a great plan, before it was leveraged by America's adversaries in Salt Typhoon as a prepackaged surveillance network.

[dead]

>people will now mostly criticize and support ideas based on who proposed them, and not based on their merits.

"People" were always like that and will be so..stupid. Let me quote Agent K from MIB for you.

> A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals and you know it...

The funny thing is that these are the same people who applauded obvious scams because Musk proposed it when they liked him...