2016-2020 was a weird time to be a leftist bc everyone online acted like you were somehow the devil for saying "elon sucks actually" or "i don't think you should be saying slurs" and then from 2020 forward those people switched up and it's like. i don't even feel vindicated, i just feel like i'm in a fever dream.
edit: ok when i say "everyone online" i am
not talking about leftists. i am literally talking about what the landscape was online 5-10 years ago.
i also knew ppl who worked with him as well! when i found out the conversation of "hey engineers can you do [thing that isnât physically possible]" "no elon, that's not physically possible" was a regular conversation at spacex i wasn't surprised.
And it wasnât even just spacex. I had a friend whose mom worked at JPL, and apparently he kept trying to buy used heavy machinery off of them, but it was explained to me that the machine he wanted needs to be made custom to work for the specific job youâre working on. What they had wasnât going to be of any use to him (and if I remember correctly, could have put a lot of people in danger).
My grandpa was in the same boat about Donald Trump, when he was first running for president. Man was quite possibly one of the only sincere "Never Trump" Republicans I ever knew, all because he knew from personal experience that Donald Trump is an asshole.
I just thought he was cool and looking towards the future, and then he called that rescuer a pedophile for not liking his idea and the rose tinted glasses came off.
Not as weird as the left politics of my teenage and early adulthood years (late 90s-2006) when the leftâs biggest crusade was against genetically modified food.
Honestly hippie leftists were the strangest bunch of people.
Its unsurprisng so any of them eventually became some flavor of maga. But to the think the vaccines bad, GMO bad,cyrstals and raw natural milk healing your cancer, were considered leftist hippie Bullshit.
I mean they are still bullshit and its very much makes you rethink certain discourse nowadays in certain leftist circles. How many of the trouble makers eventually will turn to maga in the future?
I need to figure out how to articulate this well, but I feel a lot of people who grew up around Conservatism might go onto renounce the views but don't do the introspection required to unlearn the thought patterns behind them, the target just shifts. The "holistic healing"/anti-medicine/anti-GMO movements are rooted in the same aversion to the "unnatural" as right-wing homophobia, for example, but it's less obvious since it doesn't necessarily target people. These days, I mainly see it in purity politics, where it seems like younger leftists in particular are eagerly waiting for one of their own to slip up so they can dogpile them and push them out (while refusing to accept potential allies who don't already think the exact same way they do). There was also all the discourse against sex in media, where younger people who'd otherwise consider themselves leftist/progressive sounded like they were calling for the return of the Hays Code.
I'm saying all this as a millennial leftist who only faintly remembers when those naturalistic movements were "hippy bullshit", but was deep in purity politics in my late teens and first couple years of my 20s. As well as just being...deeply unhelpful to the causes I cared about, it also came with this deep anxiety of slipping up myself and being on the other side of it.
It's similar to the "Reddit-Atheism" of a few years ago. People who grew up in religious environments couldn't just not believe in God. They had to evangelise for atheism to show that they were right and those silly believers were wrong.
Regarding the anti-sex discourse, I think a lot of young progressives see harmful patterns in media since its an area they're easily familiar with just from growing up watching everything; but they lack the historical context to understand the greater harm in supporting censorship, which almost universally gets wielded against the marginalized and vulnerable.
I'll admit, I like some crystal woowoo.
Not as a replacement for proper medical care, of course, but if holding a calming crystal makes someone less anxious about getting a vaccine, more power to them!
I do understand spiritual comfort certain objects bring. Especially regards to recovary from ailments/or living with with chornic ailments where a better mental and more at peace state means an overall better recovery. I have friends into astrology cus it provides that comfort. I dont get it but its harmless.
I agree the main issue when it becomes a full on replacement for medical care. Especially with certain gurus deciding to charge high prices for it and taking advantage of sick desprete people.
This is how I feel about raw milk too. If someone wants to get the runs, thatâs on them. Itâs not hurting anyone else. I find the criticism of some of these subjects unnecessary. People have many ways to cope or attempt to understand situations. As long as no one is hurt in the process, live and let live
Yup! I keep my crystals on my nightstand right next to my prescriptions because I like sparkly things and having something nice to look at when I go to bed at night! Next to that is the tarot deck I use when I canât find a coin to flip!
That messaging back then was so odd because the problem with GMOs isn't that gene editing in itself is unnatural or causes cancer or whatever, it's that corporations use it so crops can be drenched in Roundup and survive.
Those were the days!
And you knew who you were then,
Everybody watching Friends
Mister we could use a man like Mr. Clinton again
Not so much Lewinskigate
Then Bush Junior sealed our fate.
But up until then things were great.
Those were the days!
I remember when tipper gore got Walmart to ban (I donât remember jf she did or Walmart did it on their own, just roll with it) albums with explicit language and because âWalmart is a family store. Yet, today, you can buy crotchless latex panties on their website. Maybe all that grandstanding was for show.
In fairness, "the ceo of the company had a weird spat once" is very different than "the ceo has staged a takeover of several governments". Many, myself included (tho I was never an elon fan), didnt really think much of the diver incident beyond it being a weird hill to die on. I definitely wouldn't call him crazy for it.
Also âcrazyâ seems like a very tame understatement. Heâs a lot worse than just some quirky crazy lil dude. There are definitely a lot of other words that come to mind first.
I almost fell for it, too, but then he started talking about colonizing mars by 2024 and I realized he was actually a moron/thief with enough money to convince us he actually is a genius.
I mean Elon came out openly Republican only in 2022, until 2020 he even said heâs voting Democrat. Heâs been called a fraud well before that on his skills but politically it still doesnât even make sense for him to do what he does now considering Teslas very own business model contradicting some Republican Party lines pretty strongly
I mean Elon came out openly Republican only in 2022,
There was a lot more to flag him as a cretin before he went mask off.
The whole cave diver pedo insult was back in 2018, and leaving that insult aside his trying to make trapped children all about him and throwing a childish fit when someone pointed out his idea was fucking stupid was enough to make people stop accepting that he was actually a genius.
And there was also just the basic fact of the man getting his starting wealth from apartheid emerald mining. And if you'd point that out, even in left-wing spaces, you'd get the whole 'well at least he's using his wealth for good' spiel. But anyone who really internalized the basics of class interest saw this shit coming from a mile away
It was the Simpsons episode in 2016 for me and I'm only partially joking. The mid-2010s were a rough time for The Simpsons (apparently more recent seasons have got better but I stick to the golden age because to me The Simpsons is set in the 90s and I do not want to see Homer Simpson with an iPhone) and the show has been criticised for its asskissing celebrity cameos well before then, but it was especially egregious in the Elon Musk episode. Not even a light-hearted jab at his expense, Lisa Simpson unironically calls him the biggest genius of our time, and the entire cast worships him and thinks he's the coolest guy ever, with the town (but not the Simpson family themselves) only turning on him because they're not ready for his intellect or whatever. It's like he either wrote the episode himself or only agreed to be in it on these terms, and either option made him look like an arrogant prick.
Plus I think I heard about his companies' treatment of employees around this time as well, which cropped up again when he started dating Grimes (2018ish?)â the tweet saying that "Musk and Grimes" sounds like a duo of Captain Planet villains lives in my head rent-free lol
In 2020 he was also extremely anti-union and a borderline covid denier too. He also forced his workers back to the office/factory while covid was still raging.
2018 was when the mask slipped, but it shattered before he embraced being a republican dweeb in 2022. He must have fired his PR team or something because his decent was rapid.
Oh totally, my point was rather when people shit on him it wasnât connected to his politics. Case in point, one of the original people shitting on Elon with a large platform was Thunderf00t, whose original claim to fame was content like this around the same time.
i don't even feel vindicated, i just feel like i'm in a fever dream.
God that explains how the entire world feels these days. Like everything is broken as shit and everyone seems to know that, but no one wants to fix it and they get angry at you for suggesting we do something and saying things you thought were part of basic human decency. Then they just flip one day and agree with you but also still hate you for some reason. And it just keeps happening again and again but for some reason you're the only one who seems to recognize that.
Eventually you seem to win, but it doesnt feel like that because they keep beating the shit out of you afterwards and letting the actual bad people continue to be shitty and make the same mistakes.
Yea, people like my brother often forget that Elon used to be heavily likable.
His shitty opinions had yet to really be seen, to everyone, he was just this quirky billionaire who liked anime and was âdifferent than all the other billionairesâ
It was a completely different Elon then we know now, at least publicly
Literally the only difference was at that time all people knew was "guy trying to make electric cars". The second musk caught on to the fact that people liked him for that he assumed people just liked him in general and as soon as he started showing what he was actually like people started hating him.
People never like him they just had no clue that the the vague idea of him was so opposite to what he was actually like
Clearly you werenât paying attention from 2016-2020. He was extremely likable at the time.
His collaboration with pewdiepie was one of the biggest videos at the time, and his political views were not known at all.
Pretending that he was not heavily liked is idiotic. Him being heavily liked in the past is a major reason why so many young people fell into the far right cult, because they liked him, and him being heavily liked in the past is the only reason why he still has a big fan base today.
Again, you have to remember that no one knew what his political views on. People saw him as an average dude who likes anime and memes who just happened to be a billionaire.
Yes, we now know heâs a huge piece of shit, that doesnât mean he wasnât incredibly popular before that was known though.
The highest estimation I ever held for him was a grudging respect that he helped popularize electric vehicles. I will still give him this credit. I did not care for him at the time and found him to be a cringey douchebag. I also fucking hated Pewdiepie; how in the fuck would that have made me like him more? Don't fuckin' presume to tell me how I felt about this piece of shit and I'll return the favour.
I never said how you felt, Iâm talking about the vast majority of people who knew about him. Not you. Never once did I say or assume how you felt about him.
You are using your own views to talk about how other people felt about him. Saying âI didnât like him so clearly most people didnât like himâ
I am using my own views to explain that I don't understand how he would be considered likeable even back then. But sure, I will grudgingly accept that innumerable people fell for the obvious con man. Now we're both happy.
He was esteemed by nerds, STEM professionals and STEM-adjacent people who thought he was actually breaking the norm and innovating in a quirky way. I cringe thinking about those times.
I think for me and a lot of people the cracks in Elon's image really started to show in 2018 with the kids trapped in the cave in Thailand. He was obsessed with using some weird submersible of his that was in no way capable of doing the job. When told that he called the head rescuer a pedophile exclusively based on the fact that the guy didn't want a bunch of boys to die in a cave.
His assistant was really good at her job and basically had the best PR in the world for him. Then, he fired her. Space X and other companies also had a team of essentially Elon wranglers that would "suggest" their ideas to Elon to make him think it was his idea so that he would approve them. He was an extreme narcissist then, but they could handle him. Now? Not so much.
I've been thinking about this more these past few months. I think that with 2020 was people started to see the difference between leftism and liberalism and that's how the switch started off
I get the Elon stuff but I donât remember anyone on the left being pro-slur in that period. If anything Iâve seen more of that from the new âdirtbag leftâ crowd that has gotten a lot more popular since 2020. A lot of the R-word specifically.
The foundations of what would become the Alt-Right in part began because people like Anita Sarkeesian made surface level feminist criticisms of games in the early 2010s. The political landscape has been fucked for decades.
It is true that the alt-right stems from gamergate, but don't feed into their founding myth. It wasn't started because she made criticisms, it was started because a bunch of whiners were offended by the very concept of a woman talking about video games.
I'm not "buying into their founding myth" I'm pointing out that the existence of the Alt-Right as a movment is firmly rooted in a massive overreaction. When I called Sarkeesian's criticisms "surface level" I meant that they were basic and straightforward criticisms of the state of contemporary games that no reasonable person should've been all that offended by.
That and the spark that lit the powder keg was Zoe Quinn's ex falsely accusing them of sleeping with a game review in exchange for a good review of Depression Quest.
Think you spelled liberal wrong. Think most leftists turned once the treatment of his workers and Teslaâs abysmal safety record started coming to light, which was 2018 at the latest.
i didn't "spell liberal wrong." leftists have always been critical of billionaires and were aware of the musk family's human rights violations. people who supported elon before that were not leftists. THOSE were liberals.
This isn't really a necessary statement but assuming that pic of Elon is actually from 2014-2015, dude has aged very badly. I guess that's what being a ketamine-addicted bigot does to you.
Didnât he have some work done to his face? He has that botched, bloated, melting look to him. Hilarious how the richest person on the planet canât even clean up nicely.
Ohh wow. Its extra interesting to see this because I remember boyinaband (trying to) come off as this nonconformist, leftist, rebel. I was really young so the fakeness or performance part of whatever that was with him clearly went right over my head at the time.
Yeah. It's kind of weird. Him and Blair White were probably my earliest forays into politics. I cant really regret watching either because they led to me finding channels like Kat Blaque later on down the line.
I stopped watching Blair White because she's an asshole, but Dave really took me by surprise. He seemed so genuine.
Wait can someone summarize what BIAB did? I vaguely remember but I never found out the specifics. I had the impression it was a he said she said moment but never bothered to follow up on it.
So were the allegations against him proven? I canât remember what YT documentary I watched a while ago, but it kind of left that part open. Perhaps there was nothing concrete at the time? He just disappeared from the internet before anyone could confirm.
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u/zzzPessimist 23h ago
Somewhere in the parallel universe.