[narrator]

They do it because the narrative is that all good people are smart and all bad people are stupid. Everyone must do everything that good smart people say and ignore everything bad stupid people say.

When Elon changed his political opinions, articles were generated to tell people he's stupid so he could then be called a bad person without violating the narrative.

[noirbot]

I'm not sure that even remotely tracks if you're trying to imply that the American left claims that everyone that agrees with them is the only smart people. If anything a lot of their narrative is that they're oppressed by people who are smart and better at politics and business than they are.

Did Elon ever really change his political opinions? Or just become more clear about them? Either way, I think a lot of it was the Twitter takeover just going full "he's either taking this 0% seriously, or doing the most insane maneuver ever" and I'm not sure the evidence has come down on the side of him being all that serious about it.

You can debate if it'll ultimately work out better for him/Tesla/Twitter, but it certainly seems like he's playing pretty loose with his money, Tesla's future, and a lot of other things.

There's a lot of articles about how he maybe is doing something dumb because he may be doing something dumb. It's not the first time he's done it, and most of the things I've seen have included a caveat that this could very well work out.

[narrator]

Think about the number of times that Donald Trump got called stupid starting from when he launched his presidential campaign. You may hate the guy's politics, but he is objectively not dumb, but the "bad people are dumb, smart people are good" narrative must be reinforced relentlessly. It's the golden hammer of political propaganda because IT WORKS!

The counter for Donald Trump being stupid is that Greta Thurnberg is smart and good and everyone must listen to her and do what she says when she is at best very average.

[astrange]

Trump historically hasn’t been stupid, but that doesn’t mean much in the present. Age gets everyone and his frontal cortex doesn’t exactly seem in shape.

Beyond his usual behavior of believing the last thing anyone told him, when you let him in front of kids he tells them Santa isn’t real, he gave a bunch of Boy Scouts an unrehearsed speech mostly anecdotes about high society parties he went to as a kid in NYC… is that “smart”?

(Also, after he got hospitalized for covid, it was notable he kept bragging in public that he’d passed a dementia test.)

[edgyquant]

Both Bush Jr and Trump actively played dumb as political theater. That is not the same as the narrative switching to Elon being dumb (and totally not even an engineer, can’t even code lol) the second it became clear he held right wing opinions and planned to act on them.

[myko]

> When Elon changed his political opinions

Has he changed his political opinions?

His downfall to me started when he called an actual hero a pedo for no reason at all, except to salve his damaged ego.

[Phlarp]

Elon is a litmus test for nerds. You can tell a lot about an engineer by when they decide(d) Elon is a clown. No doubts the insanity started long before the cave diver defamation incident (although this was the turning point for me personally as well)

If you're a techie that is still holding onto Elon as a hero, good businessman or otherwise decent human being after the Twitter fiasco I'm not sure there is much left to save (or the horse incident, or the time he had secret children with an employee, and the time he stole Grimes' eggs to have a child with a surrogate, and the time he.... )

[xeromal]

Yeah, he's kind of went down the Q-anon route if you watch his increasingly deranged tweets. He's always been a troll but he's increasingly spouting dangerous thoughts. I knew something was up when my family from the southeast US started supporting him.

[perryizgr8]

> dangerous thoughts

It's getting awful tough to separate the serious from the satire nowadays.

[astrange]

I think assuming any white guy living in Thailand is a sex tourist was pretty common up through the 2000s. It’s like the kind of joke you’d expect South Park to make.