Tag: Elon Musk

Salting the Earth and the Vandalism of America

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Elon Musk

To tear something down is infinitely easier than building something of benefit or beauty. Constructing an elegant house that will last through the ages, can take years.  From a dream, to design, to approvals, to construction means gobs of money, skilled designers, and dedicated builders. When you see that handsome house perched just so on a hill, with its cedar siding, cased windows, and tidy balconies, know that dozens of men and women labored and strove to get it just right—hundreds of mornings planning, sawing, hammering, painting, plumbing and polishing.

But give me a forty-ton excavator and a couple of dump trucks, and I will demolish that house and clear the site in one day. To a person of evil intent and ill mind, tearing down so much effort in so little time will be a thrill.

That’s what makes vandalism so attractive to people with festering resentments. Destroying something precious to someone else in the dark of the night is the sort of sugar rush that thrills degenerates.

When the richest man in the world takes hammer and tongs to our government and delights in tearing down agencies central to our economy, farms, public health, environment, and foreign policy—when a man-child of his accidental consequence recklessly fires thousands of public employees without knowing the first thing about government, it’s time for anyone who does love this country to stand up and call out a flat NO!

Watching Elon Musk with his strange gothic uniforms of black jackets, t-shirts and ball caps, and reading his inane tweets sprinkled with juvenile humor, brings to mind a deeply insecure adolescent. And yet, that puffed-up adolescent is tearing apart the lives of thousands of Americans directly, and millions of people worldwide as a consequence. Read more »

Thursday, January 16, 2025

The Normalization of Sexual Violence

Posted on by Andrea Scrima

by Andrea Scrima

1. Bloodthirsty

Swedish journalist Kim Wall in a 2015 portrait taken in Trelleborg. Wall died aboard Danish inventor Peter Madsen’s submarine.

I have a morbid personality; sometimes I stay up late at night, googling serial killers and rapists. In the light of the computer screen, scrolling through articles on websites published by amateur sleuths, I feel the dark pull of the unspeakable deed. But my fascination isn’t for the blood and gore; there is no thrill bubbling up inside, no voyeuristic kick. Nor am I moved by an urge to understand the killers’ psychological predicament or the geometry of their desire. The pull I feel is not toward their person or otherwise banal lives, but that point of no return when the not-yet-killer gives in to the irresistible urge, forfeits his allegiance to society, and defects to the other side. How strong does that urge have to be?

I worry. The brain is an organ, it’s unreliable, prone to illness; a sick brain thinks sick thoughts. There was a point in the killer’s life, I think, when he or she hadn’t yet committed the crime, a point when it would have been possible to stop and reflect on the inevitable consequences—not a life of adventure and freedom, but the monotony of prison, of incarceration and boredom, isolation, enforced celibacy. Could this happen to me—could something push me over that tipping point, and I’d find myself a moment later in a foreign land? I am horrified by physical violence; a bloody scene in a movie makes me turn my head away. The mirror neurons in my body tingle in response when I see someone else’s wound. What happens to people who lose this visceral reaction, who grow numb and enter a realm in which the divide between the self and the other is so absolute that they live as though in a vacuum, sealed off, in communion with their darkest compulsions, indifferent to the living reality of another human being’s existence?

I scroll through reports of repulsive deeds: the Danish inventor who murdered the young journalist who came to interview him because he was convinced that the rush he would experience at the very moment he was annihilating her would be superior to all the orgasms he’d had previously; the Coloradan who strangled his wife and smothered his two children in the expectation that the life he would then be free to live with his girlfriend could be happy and carefree, unencumbered by child support payments and filled with the real-life equivalents of the emojis and exclamation marks that decorated his love letters to her. Unremarkable, contemptible people on nearly every level. In the first case: megalomania and a history of power issues and abusive relationships; in the second, murderous intent hidden behind a mild-mannered demeanor and a stupidity so dumbfoundingly obvious that the footage of his interrogation at the hands of a brilliant woman detective deftly guiding him toward claims that proved effortlessly refutable is almost a pleasure to watch. And yet: there’s something I’m not getting. What is it that draws me in? Read more »

Monday, January 13, 2025

Hard Times and The Forgotten Man: Remembering the 1930s

Posted on by Mark Harvey

by Mark Harvey

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.
—Langston Hughes

Dust Bowl, Oklahoma

The years from 1930 to 1945 were some of the most trying times in American history. Our forebears suffered close to ten years of The Great Depression and then, with next to no pause, were thrust into five years of World War II. It’s no wonder that so many men and women of that generation who survived those struggles came away with a quiet stoicism and other-worldly courage. I have a nostalgia for a time I never saw because I knew many of the people who were shaped by those times, and I miss them.

George Orwell said, “Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it.” That’s one affliction I don’t suffer from. I consider the generation that weathered The Great Depression and World War II to be, for the most part, a cut above any generation since. I don’t think it was necessarily their innate character, but rather their mettle shaped by the age.

Having read a number of letters written to the White House during The Great Depression (from a wonderful collection in Down and Out in the Great Depression: Letters from the Forgotten Man by Robert S. McElvaine), I know that the times led to much bitterness and suffering. How could it not? But a tender humility and reserve also runs through much of the correspondence. Many of the writers address the president or first lady as if they were intimate family who might somehow wrangle them a job or free them from their desperate situation. One thirty-one-year-old woman expecting a baby writes,

Dear Mrs. Roosevelt: I know you are overburdened with requests for help and if my plea cannot be recognized, I’ll understand it is because you have so many others, all of them worthy…. We thought surely our dreams of a family could come true. Then the work ended and like “The best laid plans of mice and men” our hopes were crushed again.

A widow with a fourteen-year-old son writes to Eleanor Roosevelt asking if she has a spare coat to get through the winter and even offers to pay for postage if the first lady will send her one. A woman with seven children and just sixty-five cents to her name writes to Franklin Roosevelt asking for help to feed children too proud to beg for lunch.

In reading these letters, it’s clear that many of the writers truly believed Eleanor or Franklin would actually send them a winter coat or give them a job. Read more »

Monday, December 30, 2025

The Melting Pot Melts Down

Posted on by Michael Liss

by Michael Liss

Shall oppressed humanity find no asylum on this globe? —Thomas Jefferson, 1801

“Spoiling the Broth,” political cartoon by E.W. Gale, Los Angeles Times, November 14, 1920.

Last month, after 3 Quarks Daily published my “A Requiem For Post Mortems,” I got a direct email from a reader politely critiquing it. We exchanged emails afterwards, and I asked him if I could raise some of his points in a subsequent post. I’ve chosen one, not intending to diminish his other ideas, but because this one, where he said I’d “misse[d] first on the importance of the migration issue, i.e., that … Trump was right and Dems wrong on the need to control migration [and] that Trump controlled migration much better than Biden, who didn’t even try until the 3d trimester” has the most salience right now.

So, since Elon and Vivek and Laura Loomer and pretty much all of MAGA-land are talking about immigration, let’s go there. Let’s do something we have never ever been good at and talk about immigration.

We can start by acknowledging my correspondent’s point, although I would phrase it differently. Certainly, from an electoral perspective, Trump was right on the need to control illegal immigration. Biden didn’t do it until very late in his term, too late to help Harris in the election. It is not clear to me why Biden didn’t move more aggressively earlier, but, during his four years in office, aggregate immigration, legal and illegal, rose to a level not seen since 1850. I can ascribe to Biden a good-hearted intention—a genuine desire to ease the suffering of others—but it cannot be ignored that part of a President’s job is to be practical and even a little cold-hearted when the situation requires it, and Biden, for whatever reasons, wasn’t. We don’t have hard polling data that indicates that swing voters, and even some Biden 2020 voters, went Trump in 2024 solely because of the immigration issue, but it could not have helped Harris.

Would voters have been less critical of Biden’s approach if he had been able to curtail illegal immigration while otherwise maintaining a generous posture? Hard to say, not just because of the potency of the issue and the effectiveness of Republican messaging, but also because of the layering of how policy is determined and applied. Read more »

Monday, May 10, 2021

Is Tesla the Future of the Auto Industry?

Posted on by Fabio Tollon

by Fabio Tollon

Tesla Model S

Elon Musk. Either you love him or you love to hate him. He is glorified by some as a demi-god who will lead humanity to the stars (because if it’s one thing we need is more planets to plunder) and vilified by others as a Silicon Valley hack who is as hypocritical as he is wealthy (very). When one is confronted by such contradictory and binary views the natural intuition is to take a step back and assess the available evidence. Usually this leads to a more nuanced understanding of the subject matter, often resulting in a less binary, and somewhat more coherent narrative. Usually.

The idea to write something about Musk was the result of the reality bending adventure that was Edward Niedermeyer’s Ludicrous: The Unvarnished Story of Tesla Motors.

Let us take a look at the basics. Musk is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who made a fortune by helping to found PayPal. Using the capital gained from this venture, he invested $30 million into Tesla Motors, and became chairmen of its board of directors in 2004. He also eventually ousted the founders of the company Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning. He is currently CEO of Tesla, Inc. (the name was officially changed from Tesla Motors to Tesla in 2017) and is in regular competition with human rights champion Jeff Bezos for the glamorous title of “world’s most successful hoarder of capital”. I don’t want to spend too much time on the psychology of Elon Musk, as Nathan Robinson has already done a fine job in this regard. Rather, I want to focus on how Tesla is not the market disrupting company many think it is.  Here I will be concerned with the mismatch between Silicon Valley’s software driven innovation versus the kind of innovation that exists in the auto industry. Read more »