It’s an academic exercise discussing the democratic system and how most voters are not looking at the long-term health of the country that they are leaving to their children or the children of others. I find nothing objectionable to Elon expressing his opinion, which by the way was very short and to the point. What’s more concerning is how people get so riled up about these things and talking about Elon and how much they dislike him. The masses are being entertained and you are all falling for the bait.
What I find disgusting is not anybody’s expressed opinion on anything no matter how objectionable I may find it. What I do find disgusting is a political system that no longer works for the greater good of the society as a whole. The voting system is there to give the voting public the illusion that they hold the keys to change. Government and its servants for the lost part can disregard those votes. What matters is $$$ and how these $$$ can affect elections by a voting public that for the most part is uninformed and falls easily for simple slogans that the $$$ get repeated often enough till people believe them to represent the truth.
And somehow restricting the right to vote even further towards those with a material interest towards maintaining the system as is, while disenfranchising those most negatively effected by the system, will lead to better outcomes for those disenfranchised and disaffected groups?
I don’t think that viewing the world through the else of “racist or not” is necessarily the best way to approach a thought experiment. There is an old, perpetually mis-attributed quote along the lines of “it is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain an idea without accepting it”.
I happen to take personal objection with the notion that felons can’t vote in the USA. It provides a path to disenfranchise undesirable votes by perhaps abusing the law, or creating laws specifically to diminish the voting capacity of groups. I think that’s “facist”, but simply applying that label without a good faith explanation towards that “what” and “why” doesn’t lead to anyone learning anything about anything.
I’ve heard support of adding upper age limits on legislators under the justification of “they’ll be dead before they ever feel the results of their bad decisions”. I don’t see that argument as fundamentally different.
To be clear, I am not in favour of anyone’s vote getting taken away.
But I AM in favour of grown up discussions about how as a species, our ability to transform the earth has reached a point that our decisions can echo so far into the future, so far past our own lifespans, that it’s become way too easy to let future generations hold the bag.
We already see it financially. The boomers policy absolutely pulled the ladder up behind them buttfucking millenials and genz.
The headline isn’t"you must have children to vote", thats controversial and a bait solution.
Don’t fall for it. accept and consider the actually existant issue that the incentive model for legislation who’s effects push past the lifetime of decisioning stakeholders is broken… Because it is.
“A society is great when old men plant trees under who’s shade they will never sit.”
There’s hundreds of years of experimentation with different democratic formations. We have pretty solid data on what does and doesn’t work. Put simply, the entire system we have works exactly as intended. Minority rule by private property holders and owners of capital is expressly the intended outcome of our system. If you want better outcomes, you need a system predicated on creating those outcomes, not one predicated on ensuring elite rule in perpetuity. We’ve reformed the system hundreds of times, we‘be got to accept at some point that you can’t reform a system away from the very thing it was built to ensure.
I could get into a discussion about alternative and significantly more equitable and representative forms of organization, but that’s not what Musk is doing here. He’s doing, as he always does, the work of the far right while masking his intentions behind bullshit transparent “I’m just asking questions” shtick that I don’t understand how anyone ever fell for in the first place, much less how people buy it now.
If the system is working as intended, but giving minority rule to large businesses interests, then I think we all agree that discussing alternatives is appropriate, no?
Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you need to involve Musk in this conversation at all. You don’t. I’m not.
So, it sounds like we agree: our system has flaws. There aren’t features in place that incentivise things like, not causing the planet to be uninhabitable in say, 150 years (when we’re all dead anyway so not OUR problem).
So, what would you do? I’m sincerely asking in good faith. You have a soapbox and I’m listening.
I am of the opinion that nothing short of a completely new constitution and reconstruction of our systems of governance will be sufficient. Complete dismantling of the Prison Industrial Complex, the Military Industrial Complex, and the school to prison pipeline are entirely necessary. Justice should be predicated on restoring and rehabilitation, not imprisonment and punishment.
If we continue with a representative system, representatives must be tied to the will of their constituents, with removal and possibly criminal charges for going against said will.
I think that any system which enshrines the right to private property will inevitably suffer corruption as those with capital are able to leverage it into more capital, which can be used to inevitably buy politicians. So I think that while personal property is acceptable, private property should be abolished entirely, and all workplaces turned over to the employees. We live in a system that promotes itself as ostensibly democratic, but 99% of the institutions we interact with on a daily basis are oligarchies at best, feudal dictatorships more often. You cannot have a democratic society when the decisions of how to utilize resources are made privately.
What does personal but non-private property even mean? I’m having trouble conceptualizing this modality of ownership, and I want to make sure I understand what you’re saying before I start forming any kid of opinions
Ahh it’s actually a rather common conception, dating back to at least the 1700s, and espoused by individuals such as Adam Smith.
Essentially, the things you use in your life. Your home, your car, your toothbrush. If you’re an artisan, the tools you use to create your goods. Essentially everything you own falls under personal property.
Private property, on the other hand can be defined as follows: Modern private property is the power possessed by private individuals in the means of production which allows them to dispose as they will of the workers’ labor-power (that is, the ability of the worker to labor for certain periods).
One cannot utilize private property fully oneself, and must rely upon the labor of workers to transform the productive capacities of the factory and materials and machines into real, tangible products. No one man creates private property. Factory owners don’t create factories, laborers do. No man creates all the machines that run in a factory, other laborers do. But private property allows one to profit purely off of ownership. It is rent seeking at its height.
I disagree with his fundamental premise that people with children can see the interests of society better.
I don’t have children, but I have heard from every possible source that once you have children they become your world.
How is a person expected to reason clearly about the interest of millions of people when they are running an ancient biological program focused on the interests of a tiny family unit?
edit: I once saw the argument that having family doens’t make you a better person. Having family makes you a ruthless user and taker on behalf of your family. Most of the stories you hear of people giving in to corruption, happen because those people can’t afford to lose their jobs, because they have mouths to feed. Once you have kids, you must choose whether you value your kids over your civic responsibility, or vice-versa.
For the same reason the opinion of someone like Rupert Murdoch matters. Its not about their viewpoint directly as an individual, its the fact they control massive platforms that can and do sway public opinions.
In murdochs case he’s had an influential impact on British politics over the last 40 years and has used his media empire to act as a king maker.
Musk isn’t as savvy or as intelligent as Murdoch but that doesn’t mean is influential position should be ignored.
I don’t like Elon Musk, but can you explain what makes him a fascist? I feel like people are really throwing that term around a lot and it’s kind of concerning.
I think eliminating voting rights for citizens without children is a fascist policy. Fascism is about enforcing a “correct” or “natural” hierarchy in society. Historically this has usually been about race, but has also included other factors (for example, disabled people were the first group targeted for extermination by the Nazis). For some of us, not having kids is a choice (and imo a valid one that shouldn’t be punished by the state). But this sounds like an easy way to discriminate against same-sex couples, and all fascist systems have a history of doing that.
I personally find Ur-Fascism by Umberto Eco a good read. Fascism is really hard to pin down because it’s quite a wide category due to the different tendencies in history.
It’s a fair question, but you’re probably getting downvoted because you “feel like people are really throwing that term around a lot and it’s kind of concerning”. People are throwing the term around a lot because of all the fascism, and the fact that you find the term more concerning than the actual fascism is a bad look.
Point would be that if you have kids you have skin in the game and would make more responsible choices with your vote. Same has been said about military service, which also makes a lot of sense. Not practically, of course, but the point highlights the fact that we could have people who are unqualified to make decisions, even if its electing officials, making decisions that impact everyone, including and maybe more importantly, the generations to come.
In a true democracy there is no mechanism for qualifiying or handling quality control for the voting population, and so for elected officials and their policies. This is why we are a democratic republic, and Elon is just saying if you’re going to be involved in electing officials you should have skin in the game.
We already have requirements to voting and if you think about it, they are in the same spirit.
Don’t non-parents have more stake in the future than parents? Parents always need immediate help, they don’t care about the long term consequences, that will be faced in 10, 25, 50 years.
No way, it wasn’t until after I had my kid that I really started ***seriously ***thinking about how shit would be 80+ years in the future after I was dead. Like maybe I had some passing thoughts about the future before that but it was always very theoretical and not a concrete thing to consider.
They don’t actually have 1 billion dollars tho, they have stocks with an estimated value of 1 billion dollar. I don’t think there’s an effective way to tax that.
More realistically you can make more tax brackets for levels of income higher than $500k. Cash income regularly exceeds this for CEOs.
You can also pass laws restricting how much can be paid out in ways other than cash both in value and percentage of shares. Or increase capital gains tax further past certain limits (this has already happened in 2013). Or have a graduated tax on loans taken against certain collateral (like stocks, bonds).
The laws themselves can get a bit complicated but such is law. There are plenty of ways to make sure the rich pay their fair share. They just don’t want us doing it.
It’s generally just beneficial for ultra high tax rates as wealth goes up. That’s what actually incentivizes “trickle down economics”. As the uber wealthy approach the tax limit it stops making sense for them to horde the wealth. And, instead of letting the tax man get it most of them decide to put their money back into the businesses or charities or whatever.
We definitely shouldn’t care what he says; He’s probably just begging for attention. But he is a US citizen. A quick search shows he became one in 2002.
Who would have the power to stop Elon Musk from running for President?
Presidents are also not supposed to be actively running their businesses while also being President. But Trump brazenly didn’t even pretend to not be running his companies while in office. Nobody could stop him.
So if Elon Musk was like “I’m running for President” at what point does someone have the power to stop him? Who has the power to stop him from taking the office if he wins? It seems like a lot of those things we learned were impervious norms were really just impotent words that have no actual enforcement system behind them. And Republicans love breaking such norms.
I’ll also point out that according to rightwing folklore, we already had an illegitimate African president who served two terms. I think Republicans would run Elon just to troll.
crazy that this guy used to be the billionaire that wanted to use solar power and electric cars to make an impact against climate change, now he’s half Murdoch, half Hitler
I like how he’s burning bridge after bridge with everyone. No one would want to associate with him, and everything he touches turns to shit. Sure he can enjoy his money, but to an extent he’s kinda screwed his venture start-up goodwill for life.
People forget a huge side of this as well. It’s not just being financial able to have kids but physically able. More and more people now days are seeking fertility treatment and having fertility issues. According to elon, those people would not have the right to vote.
People who go to college and then university and then intern somewhere to get a junior position and then a senior position are in their mid 30s when they're in a stable enough position to plan for kids.
By contrast, a lot of people who are happy with a high school degree have kids before they're 20.
This is not a value judgment, but separating people by when they're having kids segments the population of into very distinct strata.
It's not hard to guess why a billionaire who's running a right-wing social media platform would prefer a certain demographic.
We waited until our 30s to have a child for a lot of reasons, and I’m glad we did it. We were more financially secure and had sowed our wild oats, so we were also not likely to go out and party. Elon was already financially secure when he had is first child. He has no idea how much a child costs in terms of money and in terms of what sort of life you want to live for most people.
I also doubt he’s done much child-raising, either. People of his social class don’t tend to be very involved with their kids, probably because they don’t have to be. Honestly I don’t blame them for that, but I do with they’d STFU about what all of us peons should be doing.
in this case i don’t even think it’s representative of the average republican since he’s got like 9 children and probably thinks himself the second coming of jesus kkkrist who will bring humanity to a new life in free speech mars
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