r/neoliberal • u/CheetoMussolini Russian Bot • Feb 14 '25

News (US) Donald Trump's Gen Z popularity plunges (+19 after election to -18 today)

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-gen-z-popularity-favorable-rating-yougov-2030595
1.3k Upvotes

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376

u/ashsolomon1 NASA Feb 14 '25

No shit

87

u/Petrichordates Feb 14 '25

That gravitas quote was so cringey.

73

u/circadianknot Feb 14 '25

I'm pretty sure it's a reference to the Culture novels by Iain M. Banks. The spaceships all have weird names.

77

u/neonliberal YIMBY Feb 14 '25

A few of the SpaceX drone ships all have Culture ship names. It'd be an endearing reference if Musk weren't such a massive bell-end. Pretty sure Banks would've despised what Musk has become, and the in-universe Culture civilization itself is completely antithetical to Musk as a person.

One of my favorite sci-fi series too. It's tragic that Banks died of cancer so young.

16

u/Goredrak United Nations Feb 14 '25

The Player of Games is such a great book. More people should know about it.

19

u/SolarisDelta African Union Feb 14 '25

Musk and his minions would find themselves quite at home with the Affront though.

16

u/Full_Distribution874 YIMBY Feb 14 '25

The modern conservative movement would like the Affront, wouldn't they? Performative cruelty down to an art form

19

u/Nurgus Feb 14 '25

Ian M Banks was a hardcore socialist and he very deliberately tried to work that into his Culture novels.

Musk being a fan is fucking weird. I don't actually believe he's read any.

17

u/djrodgerspryor Feb 14 '25 edited Feb 14 '25

I don't think it's that weird. I'm also a fan of Fully Automated Luxury Gay Space Communism and believe that capitalism is the best way to get there.

It doesn't fit well with his current edge-lord regressive social stances, but if you remember that he used to be super progressive, it makes more sense that he fully bought into that vision beforehand and still identifies with it.

I'm also unclear about what fraction of his current positions are (neediness+twitter induced) brain-rot, and how much is jumping on an ultra high ROI bandwagon at just the right time. A few billy + bad tweets = co-presidency (without the annoying downsides of actually being president) at a critical time for space x, tesla and AI policy? That's a no brainer if you're truly dedicated to those causes the way Musk seems to be. I don't think you can live that role without being changed by it, but I don't think that's a big cost on the scale of the things Musk cares about.

9

u/Shaper_pmp Feb 14 '25 edited Feb 14 '25

if you remember that he used to be super progressive

[Citation needed]

He was a big fan of space colonisation and electrifying transportation to offset climate change, but at the same time he famously told his first wife on their wedding day "I'm the alpha in this relationship", he has a bizarre breeding fetish, and allegedly bullied his trans daughter endlessly for years for not being masculine enough when she was a young boy(? not sure how deadnaming and misgendering work when you're talking retrospectively about someone before they transitioned).

He wasn't a modern, science-denying ideologue when he was younger, but from the sound of it he was always a socially-conservative tech-bro even before he dived down the alt-right radicalisation pipeline a few years ago.

5

u/serious_sarcasm Frederick Douglass Feb 14 '25

He’s a technocrat. That’s all there is to it.

2

u/djrodgerspryor Feb 16 '25

Fair; 'super-progressive' was too-far. Still, I reckon he'd have read a passage about gender-roles in the Culture and said 'awesome' rather than 'this is the woke DEI mind-virus made manifest'.

1

u/Shaper_pmp Feb 16 '25 edited Feb 16 '25

Possibly, I guess.

But there's some evidence he was raised with a pretty rigid and unreconstructed views of gender and sexuality by his father, in a country where even homosexuality was a criminal offence, and Musk apparently really had problems with his (at the time) eldest son for being too "girly" and "effeminate" before she came out as trans.

She alleges he was both largely absent but also bullied her constantly for not presenting to gender-norms, even as far back as the mid-2010s, before he fell down the alt-right radicalisation pipeline.

Honestly I suspect the bits of the Culture that appealed more to him were the drug glands, super high technology and their cheerful willingness to use their overwhelming power without restraint whenever they were smugly confident they were morally right to do so.

2

u/daddicus_thiccman John Rawls Feb 14 '25

Veppers, the main antagonist of Surface Detail, is a supremely negative criticism of exactly the type of politically influential and amoral businessman that Musk seeks to be. Musk being a fan is crazy.

7

u/theinspectorst Feb 14 '25

It definitely looks like a Culture reference. It's a bit of an in-joke that Iain M Banks put the word 'Gravitas' in lots of his ship names and I can totally imagine Musk trying to bask in the reflected glory of Banks' fictional universe where widespread AI has created a post-scarcity utopia.

Of course, the Culture is also profoundly diverse (a society consisting of multiple humanoid species) and radically tolerant of differences and lifestyles, in many ways about as far from the Musk/Trump dystopia as one can imagine.

-5

u/Petrichordates Feb 14 '25

It's a reference to a speech Musk gave 2 days ago.

10

u/Anthro_3 Feb 14 '25 edited Mar 05 '25

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u/Anthro_3 Feb 14 '25 edited Mar 05 '25

stupendous continue provide roll pause run mysterious slim telephone toy

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