If the richest man in the world behaves as if he believes he’s a character in Atlas Shrugged, doesn’t that make Ayn Rand’s novel relevant? Personally, I think he’s the Man Who Fell to Earth.
– Gustav La Joie
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If the richest man in the world behaves as if…May 30th, 2026 |
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Atlas Shrugged is indeed relevant.
However, Elon Musk still believes that civilization can be saved – that talented people do not have to hide in some secret valley waiting for everything to collapse so they can rebuild afterwards.
Importantly there are signs that some (some) other rich men who once tried to “buy off” the left, such as Larry Ellison and Jeff Bezos, now understand that this is impossible – that throwing money at the left to “save the environment” or “save the Washington Post” will NOT buy them mercy – that the left will destroy them and their families, along with everyone else, unless the left is defeated.
They are still learning – for example CBS (in spite of being bought by the Ellison family – at a vast cost) recently gave a prize to a student (from the Columbia School of Journalism – long a cesspool of evil) who made his name telling lies about the Trump Administration about immigration, and used his speech to accuse the Jews of “genocide”. Do not give prizes to such people, and do not employ them.
They, such students, want to rob and murder you – and rob and murder your family, do not give them money and do not give them other help – you can not “win them over” – you could give them the Moon and Stars and they would still eat your liver. When they use the word “genocide” what they are really doing is revealing what they themselves wish to do – wish to do to you (they are engaged in the old leftist game of “Projection” accusing the “capitalists” of what they, themselves, wish to do to the “capitalists”).
The “sanction of the victim”, stop giving money to your enemies, is the correct approach.
“The Man Who Fell to Earth.” 😄
Isn’t Musk “The Man who Reached For the Skies”?
I mean SpaceX, Starlink etc…
This is my take on Elon Musk. I think PayPal is ace. It has made my life vastly easier in this internet World. I have tried to explain this to my Dad but he won’t buy it. My Dad has never sent an email so it’s a bit like trying to explain a dynamo to Ugg who has just brought fire into the cave and thinks that’s the bleeding edge…
As to Musk’s other capers… I think humans on Mars is silly. O’Neil cylinders at L4 and L5 made largely from stuff from the Moon is the way to go. Well, until we can get an Alcubierre drive. The later is a big “if” but if it can be done the drinks are on me at Wolf-359!.
I think Musk is the sort of guy who can save us. Yeah, he has “quirks” but he has vision and a track record of making things work. I know his rockets blow-up but have you seen the compilation vids on Youtube of NASA’s early failures?
Musk believes in progress and not in the miserabilism of the “progressives” or the horror-show that is the “Greens”. And that matters.
Anyway… This whole dissing the rich… I’d like to be rich. Why not? I’d buy an Avia L-39 and not have to rely on the NHS and stuff like that. It would be a lark. And I’d hang with Elon and I wouldn’t expect him to buy all the umbrella drinks! It would be ace. I might even hire Owen Jones as my cabana boy just to hear him say, “Yessir, Mr Nick” when I ordered him to clean the toilets.
I have a faith in the future and that is because of people like Musk and Bezos.
I’d put him on a stipend just to keep his mouth shut. Call it philanthropy.
I don’t know if he is Rearden or Newton, neither really. It is a charming anachronism in Atlas Shrugged that they are focused on railroads which seem so old fashioned to me. Nonetheless, that isn’t really the point. The technologies that Musk and his competitors are working with are so dramatically more transformative that railroads, they challenge the very nature of humanity, the very nature of the science of economics. When the machines are much smarter than humans (by many orders of magnitude) and the robots can do all the manual labor, where does humanity even fit in? Musk’s company will dominate both these areas since all compute will have to move to orbit and Bezos has proven, just yesterday,[*] that only Musk can do that. And the Tesla robots are far and away the most advanced, and more importantly Tesla is the only company with the capability of manufacturing them in the tens of millions, hundreds of millions. And, moreover, the network effect applies VERY strongly in AI, so once you are ahead, you quickly become unassailable. What does that future look like?
What I think is this: there is lots of talk about the dangers of computers and robots taking over, of a Terminator style dystopia. But I think that misses the most dangerous force in this new world, namely idle hands. What does a world where people don’t have much to do look like? Humans with not much to do often get into a lot of mischief and self destructive behaviors, and it seems to me that nobody is really talking about that. What we as a society really badly need is a discussion about deeper philosophical ideas about what people should do with their time and their lives when they don’t really have to work very much to provide for themselves and the technology provides for them in abundance. Our society, especially our male society, is structured around the idea that value, meaning, self worth, comes from the work that you do. So what happens if you don’t have any work left to do? I think that is far scarier than anything James Cameron can come up with. The next ten to twenty years are going to be chaos as human society transforms itself around these issues. So watch out.
It is also worth pointing out that without these technologies the world will collapse into chaos anyway as the idiotic policies of socialists the world over come back to bite them in the butt and as unsustainable debt causes the collapse of our western institutions. So these new technologies are a frightening threat to the future of humanity while at the same time being the only thing that can save us from our folly. However, FWIW, I am really very optimistic.
[*] FWIW, although I am not a Bezos fanboy in the way I am a Musk fanboy, I really do hope that he can make Blue Origin work. We really do need some competition in that field. Blue Origin is the one that is closest (except perhaps the CCP) and he is at least a decade behind Musk, maybe two decades. This latest explosion will set him program back at least two years and New Glenn is no Starship even with the best of assumptions. Blue Origin are going to have to go cap in hand to SpaceX their biggest competitor to launch their Starlink competitive constellation. I mean how embarrassing and weird is that from an economics point of view? And SpaceX will agree to launch them. Any sensible company would tell them to go pound sand, but I suspect SpaceX does this both because Musk is driven more about his vision for the future of humanity than the mighty dollar, and perhaps out of concerns for anti trust regulation.
FWIW you see this also in AI with Claude being hosted on xAI servers and probably all AI companies (except OpenAI) are going to end up there in Musk’s orbital data centers because he owns the infrastructure. It kind of reminds me of a reverse situation at Amazon, when Netflix hosted their streaming service on AWS owned by Amazon, who were trying to establish their own streaming service competing with Netflix. And, mysteriously, Netflix’s servers ALL went down at Christmas just when Amazon Prime was trying to dominate the market. There are big dangers in asking your competitors to host your stuff.
Elon Musk is the most important human alive today, perhaps the most important in a century. I also think, for all his bugs and flaws, he one of the most interesting people in the past 100 years too. He is a gift to humanity and I, as a Tesla stock holder, would be very much in favor of doubling, tripling his security detail. He needs better security than the US President. Next on my reading list is Isaacson’s biography of him. I am sure it will be a very interesting read.
Fraser,
I have a (cheap – Samsung A16) phone and Google Lens can translate surprisingly well. This September I shall be using it on holiday in Croatia because, “Moj hrvatski nije dobar”. This simple 100 quid device winds the missus up something chronic. My wife is a freelance translator. Is she getting less work because AI can do the job? No! The job is changing though. She is doing much more editing and style-checking. Essentially due to translation becoming simpler and cheaper and with a globalized economy (which does alas means she has to work sometimes funny hours depending on whether the client is in Singapore or Seattle) demand for translation is increasing. This is in no small part due to translation having a high price elasticity. Hence Jevons…
The doom-mongers are luddites. They simply don’t see the future. Leave Jevons to one side for a moment and consider geometry (and Elgar). If “Wider, still and wider shall our bounds be set!” then for an expanding sphere the surface area goes up at the square of the radius. We are going to get jobs which nobody ever conceived. We already have that in a way with DEI co-ordinators and the like. But we could have that in lots of new and cool and froobie things. I am an optimist. I try to be this site’s Anti-Marks. No disrespect to Paul is meant there and his analysis is always worth reading. I’m just not as pessimistic as he is.
We could have a future of brilliance if… we regard Musk as the Tesla, the Stephenson, the Ford, the Guttenberg of our day. If not it’s back to banging rocks and hoping for an obelisk.
A big “if” but not impossible.
PS. I tend not to use Claude because I can’t help but think of it as a very camp hairdresser from a bad ’70s sitcom. And I have enough arguments with my Alexa anyway.
PPS. Datacentres in Space? “Pigs In Space” is more likely (at least in the short-term). They are much easier to put on the ground. In space you have massive issues (starting with “mass”) but also cooling.
Musk is J. J. Harriman, “The Man Who Sold the Moon”.
It’s shocking to realise that, but you’re probably right. While the New Glenn vehicle is a larger rocket overall than Falcon Heavy, the payload it can deliver to LEO – at least in its current “7×2” iteration, which obviously still isn’t ready for primetime – is comparable. And Falcon Heavy’s been flying without incident since 2018. Its launch cadence is low by SpaceX standards – 12 flights in 8 years, and the first paying one was over a year after the Tesla Roadster test flight – but every single one has been a success. A couple of failed booster recoveries, but that’s minor compared to New Glenn’s earth-shattering kaboom. The payloads were all delivered to orbit. So while Starship’s tribulations get all the publicity, SpaceX was arguably already ahead of where Blue is right now by February 2018.
@NickM I totally understand what you are saying, and I would have said the same thing a few years ago. Huge revolutions in technology do precisely that, they take away the labor and allow humans to specialize in intelligence. In our field (I think you are a computer guy like me — I also wrote my first commercial software on a Spectrum — Z80 machine code for video games. Those were fun days!!) But in software you used to enter programs by flipping physical switches on a box, then you could enter hex on a keypad, then you could use assembly language mnemonics, then you could use low level languages like C, and on up the scale till you are writing set notation in SQL, plugging components together in BizTalk. This is the progress from low level manual stuff where you were primarily concerned with the how, and moving up the cognitive scale where you are more concerned with the what, the how taking care of itself.
And that sequence is true in most technological developments. Steam engines transformed the world by allowing us to be less concerned about where power came from and think instead about what to use it for. Spreadsheets allowed us to walk away from the massively complex paper calculations and allowed us to think about much higher level financials than we could possibly do with a skyscraper full of human “calculators”. I don’t know if you watch that movie Hidden Figures about NASA and the launch of the earliest space missions, where they did all the orbital calculations by hand. The limitation that the HOW places on you radically reduces what you can get done, reduces the WHAT you can do. Until automation handles the HOW and lets you focus on the WHAT.
So technological advancement allows us, as humans, to walk up the tree of that thing we humans have uniquely — intelligence, imagination, innovation and so forth. But what happens when the machines are better at all these things than us? This is why this is such a radical change. AIs do better than us at the very thing that we are holding out as our specialty. And when AIs are 100x better at that, what then?
Don’t get me wrong, there are jobs to be had — jobs that are at the interface between humans and technology. Nobody wants to talk to a robot doctor, or be given their medicine by a robot nurse. However, both doctors and nurses will get most of their medical guidance from AI. For you and me there is an interface where we are the ones who determine what sort of software people need, then the AIs will produce it. So again, at the interface of humans and technology there are these jobs. But the will not grow exponentially to meet what technology provides.
We will see. Something I have been thinking a lot about is how much I’d like to spend my time doing the things I want to do rather than the things I have to do to put bread on the table. I think a transformation of society where people seek their own personal goals rather than grubbing around to survive is pretty utopian, but it’ll require a huge change in the institutions, cultural ideas and thinking patterns of society. It’ll be a tough transition.
@NickM
PPS. Datacentres in Space? “Pigs In Space” is more likely (at least in the short-term). They are much easier to put on the ground. In space you have massive issues (starting with “mass”) but also cooling.
Gonna disagree with you here. Starship has a lift capacity of 100 tons to LEO, the next version will be 200 tons to LEO. That is probably ten megawatts of compute, and if he can get to the launch cadence he is talking about he could be putting tens of gigawatts of compute in space each year. Cooling is this thing I keep hearing about and it just isn’t true. It is a solved problem. After all SpaceX has more satellites in orbit than all of the rest of the world put together and they take in energy and have to get rid of all of it through radiative cooling, so apparently they know how to do it. It’ll need to scale up, but solar panel/radiator ratio will stay the same for the most part (actually they will need less than conventional satellites because of the orbital configuration, but that is a whole other story.) For reference, the ISS has 8m² of solar panels for every 1m² or radiator. You can look it up!
As to “easier on earth than space”, I’m afraid that isn’t true. It is a massive growing problem where the NIMBY crowd are doing everything to resist the building of data centers, and it is growing more and more difficult to source power for those data centers (or even the parts to make the power stations. Gas turbine blades are something like 8 years on backorder) There is an almost infinite demand for tokens, but they cannot build enough datacenters to keep up with it, and it is going to get worse not better. Space solves the two basic problems with building data centers — real estate where the NIMBYs don’t get to complain, and access to enough power.
In many respects orbital data centers are the killer product of space (though arguably Starlink was a junior killer product already.)
I’ll bet you a bottle of Newcastle Brown Ale that by 2030 90% of inference compute will be in orbit. Most likely all those ground data centers will be retargeted to training clusters since they require higher network bandwidth than is easily obtainable in space.
50% of the people in the USA have an IQ of 100 or lower. So, what intelligence-providing role do you see for that mass of people?
What scares me about this is, you keep talking about how work is going to be done by machines, and the ex-laborers – and everyone – will simply live on the public teat.
But who decides that John gets 10 chocolate bars and Bill gets 20 and Alan gets none? All of humanity, at that point, would seem to be existing on someone else’s decision of “what do you get?”
I do not like the most obvious pathways that I see for governance in such a world. I would prefer to have a choice of working hard and doing well or working lightly and having less. That wouldn’t seem to be a possibility in your future world.
“What we as a society really badly need is a discussion about deeper philosophical ideas about what people should do with their time and their lives when they don’t really have to work very much to provide for themselves…”
This is a subject that has long been discussed when on the subject of retirement. When I was approaching retirement I became acutely aware that the world seemed to be divided into two distinct types of people. Those who found that retiring left them aimless and with nothing to do and those who found that retirement left them busier than they had ever been. Since retiring I find myself very much in the second camp, I don’t know how I ever found time to go to work.
@bobby b
50% of the people in the USA have an IQ of 100 or lower. So, what intelligence-providing role do you see for that mass of people?
Ironically it is the people in the top half who are most at risk, since it’ll take a while for robots to get enough experience to do that “muscles” type jobs that people below that 100 IQ tend to make their living at.
What scares me about this is, you keep talking about how work is going to be done by machines, and the ex-laborers – and everyone – will simply live on the public teat.
As I have said before, I’m not advocating this, I’m just saying that is what is going to happen. Or something like that. Don’t shoot the messenger.
But who decides that John gets 10 chocolate bars and Bill gets 20 and Alan gets none? All of humanity, at that point, would seem to be existing on someone else’s decision of “what do you get?”
I don’t know, we will have to be deciding that over the next ten years. But let me offer a different perspective. What if John wants 20 bars, Bill wants 20, and Alan is on a diet and only wants five. What happens in an economy that produces 10,000 chocolate bars per person, or at least has the capacity to do so at little more than the cost of the materials. What happens then? We all need oxygen, but there is no need to have some socialist allocation to assign BobbyB 20 liters and day and Mary 15 liters. Why? Nobody is going to complain if you are breathing too much and hogging all the oxygen because there is so damn much of it that it doesn’t matter.
No doubt there will be some scarce goods and services, after all, we can’t all sleep with Sydney Sweeney, and as I mentioned above there are lots of jobs at the interface of humans and technology, but it is very hard to predict what the new economy will look like.
I do not like the most obvious pathways that I see for governance in such a world. I would prefer to have a choice of working hard and doing well or working lightly and having less. That wouldn’t seem to be a possibility in your future world.
I think in the Utopian version you can. But working hard for your own satisfaction rather than doing it to pay your bills. The currency you get paid in is more like satisfaction, or reputation or other non pecuniary goods, because you already have all you need. Isn’t that better? I don’t know. Like I say, don’t shoot the messenger. I’m not saying I want it to be there, I just don’t see any other positive outcome. The alternatives are not great. One option is allowing China to have all the chocolate bars, and that is not good. That’s what happens if you “regulate” it, or interfere with it. Another is the economy crashing from insane leftist policies and the collapse of the money system under their mind blowing debts. That isn’t good. So what do you want exactly?
Any my point earlier is — can people cope with this where that path that the world sets for them — go to school, get a degree, get a good job, get married and have kids, work till you are 65, retire and play shuffleboard till you die — no longer applies, and they sort of have to chart their own course. I think that is not something our society is built for, and I don’t know what is going to happen. I can see chaos ensuing. What the soviets used to call the “decadence” of the west could be a huge problem. It is our wealth, and the lack of focus on work and being useful that leads to climate change fantasies, and Covid nonsense, and all the other things rich young things do because they have no other real purpose in life.
The “Man Who Fell to Earth”?
Not this one?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074851/
The Midas Plague by Frederik Pohl, first published in 1954, describes one way for us to deal with an AI future. Also remember Julian Simon, human imagination rules.
NickM:
That’s funny. I thought that i was this site’s anti-Marks.
Not that i ever wanted to be, but that seems to be what Mr Marks himself has taken me to be; because of our disagreements on philosophical issues that are indeed fundamental, but should, in my opinion, be considered in isolation, analytical-like.
(As GE Moore said, analytical philosophy is about considering philosophical problems one at a time, instead of trying to build a philosophical system.)
Anyway: I am also an optimist, although a very cautious optimist, as befits my skeptical nature.
The coming revolution will not necessarily spare me*, but humankind as a whole seems likely to benefit.
* I think it my personal responsibility to make sure that it does spare me.
The Man Who Fell to Earth is a movie starring David Bowie from the 1970s about an alien trying to return home. He patents inventions to finance a private space programme. Gets shut down by the government when they finally realise something is odd. A gay lawyer is murdered for helping the alien entrepreneur.
Rip Torn was surely cast as Agent Zed in Men in Black because of his appearance in this movie.
NickM and Snorri – my first comment on this thread was quite optimistic.
Antoine Clarke – yes indeed.
Jeez, I thought that was me. ROFL
No neonsnake – you are anti everyone here, not just me.
And you would most certainly kill us if you could.
What will I do when I retire? For the first ten years, I did busy – wrote two novels, did a few jobs as a freelance museum curator. Served as first editor for another novelist. She’s up to thirty sold, though she’s in a dry spell as she, too, is in her eighties. Can’t say she’s retired, it’s been about forty years since she’s held a conventional job.
My second ten years of retirement, I’ve been reading and surfing the net. Same for her.
You don’t need to decide what you’ll do during retirement — there are too many possibilities to choose from. Unfortunately, too many people have fallen into the “idle hands are the devil’s workshop” school of life. If we are talking books, The Marching Morons by C. M. Kornbluth is almost as good a prediction as Atlas Shrugged. Except too many of the morons aren’t morons. They’re smart, useless people frothingly set upon changing the world.
Paul, I don’t feel that Neonsnake is anti-me. Or anti-most-people-here.
But being in favor of smaller or larger government lies on a different continuum from lib/con.
I’ve always thought that the libertarian-bent is the prime driver of Samizdata, and no one has really said differently. If I’ve read this correctly, Neonsnake is progressive-libertarian, while most here seem to be conservative-libertarian. Both libertarian. So the battles here don’t implicate the site’s prime theme – just fights between the various sects.
It’s People’s Front of Judea vs. Judean People’s Front. Sort of.
If Elon Musk is an Atlas Shrugged character, he strikes me as a Francisco d’Anconia.
The question is, which of his future ventures will be his San Sebastian mines, i.e. something planned and developed solely for the purpose of failing, and in the process taking down his enemies who have nevertheless sought to free-ride on his talents?
SpaceX stock bubble anyone?
@Gustave LaJoie
SpaceX stock bubble anyone?
Yup, just like the Amazon stock bubble. It’ll pop any day now.
I have this saying I use, that the only people who made money in the 1848 gold rush were the saloon owners and the hookers. People who service these spectacular industries make money steadily while others take the crazy risks. Something that not too many people know is that the large majority of Amazon’s profit comes not from its retail business but from AWS (which, for the non computer people out there, is a service that hosts probably a third of all commercial web sites). Servicing others making money. Steady money.
SpaceX is perfectly positioned to do this going forward as compute moves to space. Already Anthropic are moving their compute to SpaceX’s terrestrial hosts, and of course as I said earlier, as it all moves to orbit there is literally no one (not even huge nations like China or Russia) who can do what this private company can do. Grok will also very soon be one of the dominant models, of that I have little doubt.
And I also have little doubt that Tesla and SpaceX will merge (specifically SpaceX will absorb Tesla, so that Musk can get full control of both.) When that happens it’ll be far and away the largest company in the world. I don’t doubt that by early 2030s it’ll have a market cap over ten trillion dollars probably more. Why wouldn’t it? They’ll own the satellite launch business (they already do), they’ll own the AI hosting infrastructure, they will own the MASSIVE robo-taxi marketplace around the world, and they will own the humanoid robot business, which, as Musk correctly points out, will be the largest commercial product ever built, and another huge business they have that is largely unknown, is the power infrastructure business which could easily, in itself be a trillion dollar business. That isn’t even to consider what they do with Terrafab if they extend it beyond filling their own needs.
Is it terrifying that one man should control so much of the planet’s infrastructure? Yeah, it kind of is. Just as well he is a good guy who seeks freedom and growth, and does things like saving free speech.
So go ahead and short it. You’ll loose your shorts in both senses of the word.
Per Lewis Carroll
“Through the Looking Glass”:
“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master – – that’s all.”
bobby b – it is a lot more than being supportive of bigger government.
The support for the Labour Theory of Value and Ricardo’s theory on land is BECAUSE these doctrines are false – not in spite of the doctrines being false, BECAUSE they are false.
And the attacks on heroic men who are long dead, confirms the matter.
neonsnake is not someone who is just intellectually mistaken (which we all are at times – I certainly am) it is a matter of personal viciousness.
Someone who would do terrible things – because they are terrible things.
Indeed, bobby, I’m certainly not anti-you; there’s also a good number of people on here who I have a large amount of respect for (I’m not going to name names, as I will inevitably forget someone, I’m sure!)
I find common ground with a lot of what is said, as well as – obviously – disagreeing with a lot of it as well. By and large, I tend to see those disagreements in “good faith” (the chat I had with Lee Moore a few weeks back was a good example, I think).
Paul disagrees in “bad faith” – the constant of ascribing murderous intent to me, and the accusations of lying. Indeed, I laid out over the course of several days, in some detail, my understanding of the Labour Theory Of Value, when talking to Lee, along with where it applies, where it doesn’t apply, and where I believe it’s limits lie (and how to reconcile it with the Subjective Theory Of Value). I very, very clearly wasn’t lying when I did that; hence my belief that Paul’s accusations of me supporting beliefs “BECAUSE they are false” is in bad faith on his part. I find it VERY hard to believe that he thinks, deep down, that I’m “lying” – because clearly I’m not. Am I wrong in some of my beliefs? Possibly – obviously I don’t think so! – but that’s a different thing to lying.
I personally wouldn’t describe myself using the word “progressive”, even if only because people might take that to mean that I’m a US-style “big-government liberal”. I share common cause, in part, with progressives, particularly on matters of bigotry and, uh, “social” oppression (clumsy phrasing, apologies), but tactically and strategically I tend to disagree. I am not a liberal, in that sense.
Instead, I describe myself as left-libertarian, or indeed anarchist, depending on the audience. I’m very, very much against bigger government, and indeed am very much for a radically smaller state.
Despite common (and sort of understandable in the mass populace) misconceptions, “left” does NOT inherently mean “big government” (there are four quadrants in the Political Compass, after all). In the sort of people who theoretically “should” understand libertarianism and its history, I confess to finding it very frustrating that they appear to think that left-libertarianism is an oxymoron, especially as libertarianism originated on the left.
Yeah, on review, that was a lazy characterization on my part. “Left” is better.
I have not forgotten neonsnak3 threatening me so I’ll take a hard pass on ascribing good intent and general goodnatuerness to him.
Damn phones
Although neonsnak3 sounds quite good.
Clovis:
Coming to think of it, i haven’t forgotten his pledge to respond to fighting words with physical violence.
I blame that on a diet that makes him subject to wild mood swings.
More worrying to me (since i am out of his reach) is his apparent wokeness.
Wokism is the principle of legitimization of the current Anglo-American establishment. Therefore, neonsnake is, objectively speaking, a supporter of the establishment, and a peculiarly slimy establishment at that: not a true libertarian (contra bobby).
I mean, if someone is actively saying and signalling that they are going to cause me or my friends harm (“fighting words”), I’m not going to wait for them to do so before using physical force to stop them. This is the real world, not the Wild West where one waits for the music box to end, and Clint Eastwood draws faster than the other guy. I don’t need to wait for the other guy to throw the first punch, and hope I can block it in time and respond in kind. That’s not how it works.
I especially don’t need to wait for them to harm a friend who isn’t as capable or as trained as I am in self-defence. I offer zero apology whatsoever for pro-actively protecting myself and others. There’s a principle in (some) martial arts of “disarm, damage, destroy”, whereby one aims to “disarm” your opponent (ie. remove their ability to do harm; it doesn’t literally mean removing a “weapon”); the next two are escalations. I’ve not done, generally, any more than the first. But I will do if needed.
I’m unclear on what you mean by “Wokism is the principle of legitimization of the current Anglo-American establishment” – I *think* you’re trying to say that Western Governments are “woke”? I mean, clearly they’re not, but either way, I don’t really care what they think in this context.
None of my principles would change if I discovered that my government happened to agree with them – my principles are my own; I’m not someone who says “Welp, the government is saying the same thing as me, so now I’m not doing it”.
I presume that if your own government came out with “seed oils are bad, actually” as a public health statement, you wouldn’t suddenly start guzzling rapeseed oil like there’s no tomorrow?
Neonsnake:
Sure, but that is not how you told the story the first time.
I assume that you are not familiar with the concept. IIRC I got the label ‘principle of legitimization’ from Samuel Finer, but it is closely related to Marx’ ‘cultural hegemony’ and Gaetano Mosca’s ‘political formula’. (Mosca had no talent for choosing labels.)
The problem is not the principle of legitimization per se: my own philosophy can be described as a principle of legitimization of an establishment that, unfortunately, does not exist.
The problem is that this particular principle is oppressing the (private-sector) middle & working classes all over the Anglosphere, and increasingly in Germany. And the middle & working classes of all ethnicities and sexual orientations are suffering and dying; except for regime henchmen such as HR bureaucrats, of course.
The current US gov. does say that seed oils are bad. Not only that, they are acting on it; changing what the armed forces are served at lunch and dinner, for instance.
Yeah, you’re gonna have to remind me. IIRC, I’ve mentioned two incidents, one where a drunk racist was aggressively getting in peoples’ faces on a train insisting that they “speak English”, so I dropped him before he got a chance to say it to my (at the time) Argentinian girlfriend and her sister, who were speaking Spanish to each other. The other time I may have mentioned that I used violence, the fella in question had raped a friend of mine. If I’ve mentioned other times, then remind me; in those two incidences, I stand by what I did.
As for your “principle of legitimisation”, and whether I’m familiar with it – no, evidently not. I’ve no idea who these “Finer” or “Mosca” people are. I don’t need to invoke names or figures or authority figures to be, like, y’know, “not a bigot” or, indeed, “anti-bigotry” in a broad sense. Just seems like basic human decency, frankly, to me.
Gail Wynand. Or if I’m being generous, Hank Reardon (based on the first comment posted).
But really, Musk is the man who fell to Mars.
This thread reminds me to read Heinlein more regularly.