You might as well have asked me if Iād accept Gavin Pepperās technology if it meant a cure to my eye issue, because Gavin Pepper has about as much chance as Elon Musk of solving my eye issue or anybody elseās eye issue.
Gullible lads like their āscienceā to be by virtue signalling press release by a fascist fraud who fears the walls are closing in on him.
Do we have Tesla drivers on here?
Neuralink has already made great strides for people with spinal injuries and offers some hope to them
Amazing and scary tech, agree with use for people with disabilities to regain use of body but the whole speeding up thought process or military use is what i fear
The parallels between South Africa then and the US today are striking
yesterday
Elon Musk lived in apartheid South Africa until he was 17. David Sacks, the venture capitalist who has become a fundraiser for Donald Trump and a troll of Ukraine, left aged five, and grew up in a South African diaspora family in Tennessee. Peter Thiel spent years of childhood in South Africa and Namibia, where his father was involved in uranium mining as part of the apartheid regimeās clandestine drive to acquire nuclear weapons. And Paul Furber, an obscure South African software developer and tech journalist living near Johannesburg, has been identified by two teams of forensic linguists as the originator of the QAnon conspiracy, which helped shape Trumpās Maga movement. (Furber denies being āQā.)
In short, four of Magaās most influential voices are fiftysomething white men with formative experiences in apartheid South Africa. This probably isnāt a coincidence. I say that as a fiftysomething white man whose formative experiences include childhood visits to my extended family in apartheid South Africa. (My parents left Johannesburg before I was born.) Weād swim in my grandparentsā pool while the maid and her grandchildren lived in the garage. These experiences were so shocking, so different from anything I experienced growing up in Europe, that they are my sharpest childhood memories.
So what connects these menās southern African backgrounds with Maga today? Southern Africa under apartheid offered an extreme version of some of the main themes of American life today. First, there was tremendous inequality. The mine where Thielās father worked was āknown for conditions not far removed from indentured servitudeā, writes Thielās biographer Max Chafkin. āWhite managers, like the Thiels, had access to a brand-new medical and dental centre in Swakopmund and membership in the company country club.ā The mineās black migrant workers lived in work camps.
To whites of a certain mindset, this inequality wasnāt due to apartheid. They thought it was inscribed in nature. Certain people were equipped to succeed in capitalism, while others werenāt. That was simply the way it was, and it was pointless to try to mess with nature. Two of Thielās contemporaries at Stanford in the 1980s recall him telling them that apartheid āworksā and was āeconomically soundā. His spokesman has denied that he ever supported apartheid.
The white South African nightmare in the 1980s, hanging over everything, was that one day Black people would rise up and massacre whites. Like the US, South Africa was a violent society and becoming more violent in the 80s. Muskās teenage recollections of seeing murders on trains may not be entirely factual, but do evoke the atmosphere of the era. He warned in 2023 about potential āgenocide of white people in South Africaā. Trumpās recent claim about āAmerican girls being raped and sodomised and murdered by savage criminal aliensā preyed on similar white fears.
The final commonality between many white South Africans who experienced the end of apartheid and todayās American right: a contempt for government. The apartheid regime and then the African National Congress left millions of South Africans without electricity, dignity, safety or decent schooling. That experience can encourage anti-government libertarianism. Furber has said that the first online message of what would become QAnon ā āOpen your eyes. Many in our govt worship Satanā ā made perfect sense to him.
If youāre a libertarian who believes that inequality is natural and lives in fear of race war, you will be drawn towards a certain type of American politics. You certainly wonāt want government or institutions to try to intervene against racism. In 1995, a year after the ANC began attempting that in South Africa, Thiel and Sacks, who met at Stanford, published The Diversity Myth in the US. Itās a well-written defence of āwestern civilisationā against āmulticulturalismā (or what the right now calls āwokeā), written by two white twentysomethings who are sure racism isnāt the problem. Indeed, they explain: āThere are almost no real racists . . . in Americaās younger generation.ā
Three decades later, this duo and Musk, with whom they united in Silicon Valleyās āPayPal mafiaā, are backing a white Republican ticket that peddles made-up stories about Black immigrants from Haiti eating pets. The opposing Democrats are fielding a Black presidential candidate for the third time in five elections. The racial aspect of politics is almost as plain as it was in South Africa.
Obviously, Musk et al incurred many other influences besides apartheid, ranging from science-fiction to the billionaireās fear of the tax bill. Still, an old, white South African mindset lives on in Trumpism.
Thinly veiled Iād let Trump stick the new eye in with his Mickey there
And whod blame you !
Weāll be in big trouble when the Israelis have microchips in our brains
There wonāt be a new eye. The reality is that opthalmology and science in general is very limited in what it can do and advances are much, much less than people imagine. The only thing which can really sort out messed up vision is the brain itself.
30 years ago Christopher Reeve fell off a horse and paralysed himself from the neck down. He spent the next decade trying to fool himself and fool the world that heād walk again and have feeling in his legs again. And people cheered wildly, like idiots. You could at least excuse Reeve, because he was desperate and had to try and fool himself into having hope. He didnāt even have the means to kill himself. But Reeve would have been far better off dying on the spot. Today, many of these people who genuinely believed Reeve would walk again voraciously consume vacuous memes and have turned against science, and they worship Elon Musk, a gobshite who spends all his time on Twitter pretending to be on the verge of a cure which will never happen in our lifetimes or very likely the lifetimes. He isnāt even involved in any āadvancesā in any area happening in any entity he āownsā, which will all be for dastardly military purposes anyway. He isnāt even an engineer, he has as much actual engineering and general scientific and āinventingā ability as Barry Scott of Cillit Bang. Heās a rich, obscenely privileged child of apartheid of below average intelligence and boundless and baseless self-confidence. Such people have a long history of creating catastrophe for the world.
Rent free microchips too
Stem cells probably could have made reeves walk again. But the research was suppressed for decades. Tje likes of yourself are all for suppression of Elon, due to idealogy. Funny how cyclical things are
Really. Reeve is dead almost exactly 20 years. Go paralyse yourself there tonight and see will stem cells help you walk again in the rest of your lifetime.
Oh do go on. Who was against it? The anti-abortion headbangers. The people of Elon Musk and Donald Trump.
Any reasonable person is for the suppression of the modern day Josef Goebbels. Reasonable people oppose Nazis and want them suppressed. They want them routed and locked up.
There are people who got science degrees by collecting 12 crisp packets who have more scientific knowledge than Musk.
What are you doing to stop all this?
Thiel, rjk, musk, trump and joe rogan will hopefully doing podcasts from jail this time next year.
What will they be jailed for?
Brilliant piece, thanks.
After all his bluster he has backed down in Brazil
The odd thing about musk is the only reason heās a voice is because heās a lot of money not because his opinion is worth listening to.
There is fellas obviously in a similar boat to musk but what is odd they are all aligning themselves to trump whoās gone bankrupt any number of times and lost a pile of money.
I wonder why that could be?
Maybe he owes them a few bob.
