Too many people have given Elon a pass. Don't give him a pass.

He's a marketer, not a founder or an engineer. He didn't found PayPal or Tesla; he bought into them early. He's good at selling narratives and equity valuation for perpetually unprofitable companies.

Everything for him is a narrative. His green revolution was a narrative to sell more cars and get more subsidies. His bitcoin purchase was to gain appeal among bitcoin/crypto people in a bull market. And he shilled doge like a dumbass. His SpaceX narrative is to get money from the government.

His rooftop solar thing was an outright scam; the technology isn't ready and went nowhere because of that. His full-self-driving-in-an-intermediate-term timeline was a scam, and is going nowhere because of that. He makes scams to draw people and capital in, because for him it's all about narratives and equity valuation.

And then he dug unproductive holes, suggested unproductive hyper-tubes, built meme flamethrowers, for what? It's a narrative, not a business. None of this is real productive shit to make peoples' lives better.

His latest "we need free speech" narrative was a scam too. He tapped into something real, which is what marketers do and why it kind of worked. Yes, we need free speech. Yes, Twitter had censorship issues. He saw that and jumped on it maliciously rather than productively.

But what did he replace it with? He replaced it with arbitrary journalist censorship about his private jet, arbitrary censorship of Substack, selective Twitter Files release, won't talk seriously about any of his China connections because Xi Jinping fucking owns him economically there like Jack Ma, has his balls firmly in his grasp, etc.

Elon's playing the narrative, the anti-woke meme of the day. He's a master meme-momentum-player. Don't fall for it.

I feel you, but where would you go?

Tbh I still like Brave, can turn off the shitcoin nonsense pretty easily.

They've seemed to add many useful features over the past year or two I've been using it (latest being their "cookie consent blocker"). Will check back on this browser in a few months to see how people like it and if there have been any patched vulnerabilities, but I have no reason to switch at the moment..

Since the leftists are the apparent majority on certain communication channels *cough*Reddit*cough*, probably also FB and the bird app (neither of which I use, so I don't know), most likely accelerated by algorithms, orange-pilling the leftists is what would give the most bang for the buck, if the fiat idiom is excused. (Bang for the kSat?)

Bitcoin doesn't care about left or right. Only keys.

Liberalism and, by extension, libertarianism has achieved nothing except the empowerment of its so-called enemies through appeasement. It’s a failed experiment that won’t exist in 20 years except in the LATAM enclaves to which its remaining proponents hide from the consequences.

Yes, but I won’t get into an hours-long political debate about it. That’s not why I’m here.

I believe in engaging people from

where they are and not starting from a point of telling them everything they stand for is stupid. I find that’s the least effective way to win people over to any position.

Ideas are subjective. I bring in people who I think offer value.

I don’t think it’s healthy to be a purist. It makes you too susceptible to manipulation.

Bitcoin needs people from all sides to succeed, and it seems Peter is doing what he thinks is the best way to accomplish that. That’s cool. As someone who was once a huge Bernie supporter and now can’t stand any political party, I have a lot of friends and family who think I’m insane for promoting bitcoin.

Being a bitcoiner with ideas the left is super hard because then everyone you talk to gives you shit. 😁

Echo chambers are fucking boring, please keep having a variety of people on for interesting chat and ignore the whinging 🤙

Ideas are subjective. I bring in people who I think offer value.

Or Russians to talk about undermining the west.