I always knew he was an arsehole, but I thought he was at least a like minded arsehole, when it came to saving the planet.

The trapped kids incident also the first proper crack I noticed in his image. Now, I wouldn't touch anything of his with a 40' pole.

I tend to think at some point that was true, that Tesla was about saving the planet and SpaceX was about making humanity multiplanetary.

It could be he was always a wretched creep and just really good at hiding it, but it seems to me that the wealth and power just ruined him. He wouldn't be the first person to fall in that trap.

I'll append my confession here.

I supported Ron Paul once upon a time. The non-interventionism appealed to me in the context of the Iraq war in particular, and the rights-based libertarian philosophy seemed sound. I was young.

Never liked the guy in the first place, but what really sealed the deal was when I heard him talk about the stupid fucking Hyperloop, and then later when he built the even more stupid Loop system in Las Vegas.

As a Swede who knows trains and remembers reading about Swissmetro, the Hyperloop system was not just a stupid idea, it was an old discredited stupid idea from the very start.

As for the Loop system, the less said about it, the more time is left to laugh at it.

Capitalist oligarchs are the ones who rule society, and so if there are problems in society, the fault ultimately comes back to them as they are the rulers. They, however, will never admit responsibility to anything, and so they will always seek to shift to blame to other people, but they are the ones who rule, so their blame must be shifted to the non-rulers, i.e. to regular people. Shifting the blame to all of regular people would be vastly unpopular, and so they instead pick out a subset of regular people to blame. Whether it is Jews, Somalis, transpeople, immigrants, etc, it is always the fault of some minority group of people who have no political power, and it is never the fault of those who control everything and are in the position of power to make all the decisions.

Professional grifter Jill Stein

I fell for this, too. I felt like I needed to "punish" the democrats for corruption that blocked Bernie from what should have been rightfully his. It felt like the democrats were doing election fraud. I thought Trump wouldn't possibly win in my state anyway. Oh how naive I was.

What was the intent of your vote? To voice displeasure with both candidates?

How did you escape? Because it seems a lot of people can't

Have you ever listened to the podcast Knowledge Fight?

In fairness before the Internet we could pretend people were decent and thoughtful. Facebook well and truly ended that.

Americans would vote to cut off their own nose to spite their neighbor's face.

seems inherited, did you ever find a cause?

Oh man. Yeah, I remember in middle school reading about WW1, WW2, Vietnam, the Civil War (USA) and thinking that thank god we're smart enough to be past that.

Yes, also, COVID killed any hope I had left. I remember before the pandemic thinking that if aliens landed all of humanity's petty bickering would end once we had something that united us all, and when COVID hit I thought "this is it, we have no choice but to come together as humans and face a challenge"...holy shit was I wrong. In the years since the pandemic I've had to actively try to forget most of what happened for my own sanity.

Humans are smart.

But this isn't our natural habitat. Its a laboratory and we are the lab rats.

Can you judge an animal's intelligence if they are in a controlled environment and manipulated by mad scientists? (mad scientist = the 1%)

People are naturally curious but we live in a system that punishes curiosity.

covid also shifted the anti-vaxers to the RIGHT.

In early days of Tesla I felt pretty sure a Tesla was going to be my first car. Now, I’m kind of just happy not having a car at all.

I knew of Tesla and SpaceX and I'd vaguely heard of him but didn't really care so I wrote him off as another rich asshole immediately. Then I had some friends raving about him going to Mars and saving the world. I almost bought in but within a few weeks of that happening he called the guys who rescued the kids trapped in a cave a pedo just because he couldn't use his sub. That started my hatred of the man.

For a while there with the "Not a flamethrower" and stuff he did manage to put a veneer of "Wacky" over the way he conducts business.

The Mueller Report was hamstrung at release by William Barr’s summary that effectively contradicts the contents of the report.

If it makes you feel better, political bombshells don't work anymore because nothing will ever phase the Republican voters enough to turn against their own politicians. Nothing, ever.

What the bleep has zero merit. What in that movie isn't bullshit?

Me too. I really thought that one day my dad would say "You were right. I'm sorry." There is nothing that can change their minds, and I don't know what the solution is.

Conspiracy nonsense is one of my favorite hobbies to the point where I read your first sentence and immediately thought 'Erich von Däniken!' and two sentences later he is mentioned, coincidence, I think not!

He is one of my favorite weirdos, humans developing through aliens fucking apes? That's exactly the kind of freaky shit I'm in to chef's kiss

Hollow earth is also great.

I read von Daniken knowing he'd already been thoroughly debunked as a crank, it's actually highly entertaining if you don't take it too seriously.

The extraterrestrials have visited earth. It was so long ago we have forgotten that we were the aliens. We were fleeing from a dying planet, which we killed. Rinse and repeat.

That could be me. I swapped christianity for the burgeoning new-age and neopagan stuff that was having a moment.

Chariot of the Gods, by Erich von Däniken, was actually published in 1968. The nonsense has been going on for quite a while.