Emerald

All of that is consistent behavior for him. He doesn't have integrity. He wants power and admirers and will do whatever it takes to get that. And whether he gets that through building rockets or buying elections... it's all the same to him.

The term Woke has always been an imaginary boogeyman of what a leftist is like, as a means to brand jam the left so that the general populace never considers their perspective as worthy of consideration. It's just like a company might attempt to brand jam their competitor to discourage people from ever considering doing business with them. It's kind of like if McDonald's put out a bunch of ads that showed a bunch of unhinged crazy people eating at Burger King. And then, they advertised McDonald's as "The place where sane and logical people eat." This brand jamming of "wokeness" discourages people who may otherwise hold Christ-like Golden Rule values from continuing to support them and from coalescing together with others who support them. This means values like accepting your neighbor, wanting people to be treated fairly, being kind to the foreigner, and embracing the principle of non-judgment. And it's especially to make sure that they don't join the left because... you wouldn't want your friends to see you as an illogical little effeminate snowflake, would you? And it even encourages them to get more mean and anti-social, because the more mean and anti-social you are the less illogical and unhinged you are... and the more sane and logical you are. And the more sane and logical you are, the more you will be accepted. And it's easiest to find cringy examples of 18 year old college kids with blue hair. So, they work very well for the brand jamming to convince open-hearted people to close their hearts to those who are different from them in order to avoid being like the cringy 18 year olds going through a phase and screaming that speaking Spanish as a second language is cultural appropriation.

Our discussion a couple months back was in regard to whether or not Elon Musk has integrity. Use basic common sense and discernment, and you will see that he doesn't even care about integrity. He cares about power and about being admired. That's it. You don't even need to be a "biased lefty" to notice that. And you don't even need to be paying all that much attention to him. It's obvious. And Elon Musk hasn't degenerated any in the past couple months. This is the way he's been for years... and he hasn't been hiding it. And giving Trump all this money is 100% consistent with his previous political behaviors. Elon clearly wants power. That's why he purchased Twitter and turned it into a political propaganda machine for the far right. That's also why he's given the Trump campaign all this money... in hopes of buying his way into being a Shadow president. That's also why he proudly owns the label of being "the George Soros of the Right". People who like him and see him as aspirational tend to be partially or wholly in Stage Orange, so they don't want to see the negative about him because he represents the pinnacle of Stage Orange success. There are too many stars in their eyes to see the corruption. So, they're biased and don't want to see that about him. They want to maintain the image of him as the super genius who's helping the world. And it's easier to point the finger and call Green lefties biased about Elon, as opposed to recognizing how correct they are (and have been) about how he really is. You don't need to be in Tier 2 and totally unbiased to be correct about someone's character. Like them or not, Stage Green Lefties have been right the entire time about Elon. They just may not have Stage Turquoise perspective of seeing all things (positive and negative) as inter-connectedly working together to create something greater than the sum of their parts. So, they may not recognize that Elon is integral to the structure of now. But they're right that he's a far right oligarch who has no integrity.

If you paid attention to the content of the things he's said in that Twitter shitposting... you would not have been so surprised about him campaigning for Trump. It's been pretty obvious for several years who and what he supports. Supporting Trump isn't even the slightest bit out of character for him.

I sense that I do understand his perspective and worldview, as well as what's making him tick. It's quite human and relatable, especially for an entrepreneurial type like myself. He wants to be the hero and save the world using his gifts. And undoubtedly he's developed certain skills to enact this goal. He just has a lot of power. So, his neuroses and feelings of disconnection turn into collective positives and negatives on a large scale. And the negative part of it is that, he craves acceptance and admiration because he sees it as an antidote to feelings of alienation... even though it isn't. And people who are most willing to give that to him is the far right echo chamber. He gets to feel like part of the cool kids club. He proudly owns the label of being "The George Soros of the right" because he gets to be celebrated and appreciated as an asset. And I very much disagree with your second point. The only thing that's changed in the past couple months is that he's associated himself more closely with Donald Trump. He's been holding these viewpoints and patterns for quite some time... and not in a private way. All of this has been very predictable for the past several years. If you were surprised by his Trump sycophantry, then you weren't fully paying attention to Elon Musk's public behavior before.

Oh but Leo... what about all the wonderful Elon Musk interviews you wanted to have me watch a couple months back to support your point that he's more than just a douchebag oligarch? And when I called him out on this very thing, you said it was a something like it was a leftist caricature of what he actually is and that 'Go watch 10 hours of Elon Musk videos, and you will know better.'

You're thinking too short term. "The wise man plants the seeds to trees that he will never sit under the shade of." It's only when you set your vision for humanity outside of yourself and connect it to all the people of now and many generations beyond our own, that you can find motivation and meaning to move towards a vision for a better world. Also, you're not seeing the cyclical nature of collective happenings... and that things always arise out of their opposites. Things will ebb and flow within a proximal range during our lifetimes changing a lot in some ways and a little in other ways. Right now just happens to be an ebb period, which will probably last a few years or a decade. And it could be incredibly destructive... or more mildly destructive. But it is in these catabolic ebb periods that momentum gains for a pendulum swing towards the flow. In the tale of the Chinese Farmer, there is a series of SEEMINGLY fortunate and unfortunate happenings. And with each successive happening, the positive event seems to turn into something negative. And the negative event seems to turn into something positive. It starts with the farmer's horse running away. And the farmer goes to his neighbor and says "My horse ran away." And the neighbor says, "That's terrible!" And the farmer says "Maybe." Then, the farmer's horse comes back home, along with several other wild stallions that the farmer comes to own. And he tells his neighbor. And the neighbor says, "That's wonderful!" And the farmer says "Maybe." Then, the next day the farmer's son is riding one of the wild stallions, and it bucks him off. And the farmer's son breaks his leg. And he tells his neighbor. And the neighbor says, "That's terrible!" And the farmer says "Maybe." Then, the next day the army comes to draft to farmer's son to go to war. But because his son's leg is broken, the army decides not to draft him. And he tells his neighbor. And the neighbor says, "That's wonderful!" And the farmer says, "Maybe." If you want to preserve the current system for as long as possible, elect a Bernie Sanders progressive type. He has been the most conservative option out of anyone running in the past decade because he would make the current system a lot more livable and sustainable. If you want to shake the system apart and introduce chaos and change, elect someone like Donald Trump. If his power is unchecked, his Narcissistic ways will erode the system away and in the chaos, the problems will become harder or impossible to ignore. And change will happen. And the Shadow of our current system will be laid bare for all to see and integrate. We're getting the latter option. And it will suck in the short term. But if we're going to wake up and solve global problems like Climate Change, the current system has to become totally untenable.

100%

That's definitely true. It tends to have the same narrative structure. New Agers tend to believe that, in the past, humanity was more brilliant and wiser than it is now. But then, "they" (the Reptilians/elites) came and now we're in a fallen world where we've forgotten our wisdom. And there's lots of hierarchical ideas of Indigo children and awakened people who will graduate to 5-d consciousness and we'll be wise again. And Fascists tend to believe that, the nation/race was once idyllic and great. That is until "they" (the cabal of elite Jewish people) came and brainwashed everyone into Feminism, multiculturalism, and post-modern Neo-Marxism, and now we're in a fallen world. But we, the great people, will defeat that Cabal and rise again into our former glory and become a mono-cultural patriarchal theocratic utopia once again. So, the structures of the story is very similar. And I notice that New Age people tend to get easily tricked into Fascist thinking.

I could be wrong. I've acknowledged that I don't know for sure. So, it isn't slander. It's an interpretation. But I am more inclined than not to believe that it was a dog whistle. And if he doesn't want people to think that of him, he should try to distinguish his conspiracy theories from QANON's conspiracy theories.

That's the nature of a dog whistle. You don't say it directly, so that you can give yourself plausible deniability. But the intended audience (and those familiar with the code used by the intended audience) will hear it. But if you point it out (like I did) average people and the intended audience will go, "Nah! You're crazy. You're reading too much into it. He didn't even use the word Jew once." And perhaps that wasn't who he was talking about when he mentioned "scheming overlords". But also... perhaps he was. Either way, I know how Neo-Nazis and White Nationalists received what he said. And I'm almost positive I could go on a Chan board or Reddit board right now and find posts by Neo-Nazis that say, "Is Aaron Able Crypto?" Whether or not that was his deliberate intention is hard to tell. But it certainly pricked my ears up, and he lost all credibility in my mind.

Certainly, Andrew Tate draws in guys who are insecure and he exacerbates the misogynistic feelings that were already there. But the issue that I take is that you think of overtly aggressive guys like Tate as the average misogynist. My experience has been that for every 10 regular, awkward, insecure guys who are misogynists, you have 1 macho aggressive misogynist like Tate. I suspect the general populace over-estimates the Masculinity, aggression, and virility of the average misogynistic guy. When I've been on the receiving end of misogyny, it's usually some really insecure average guy who's gotten resentful and is trying to take me down a beg. But perhaps that's just my own experience. And maybe there are more aggressive emotionally stunted misogynists who have gone numb to their vulnerabilities than there are insecure and vulnerable misogynistic guys. It just doesn't seem to be the case.

That can happen too. It just doesn't match my most common experiences with misogynistic men.

Green mostly gets picked on because it's the one that's new. And the people here on this forum are mostly in Stage Orange with a strong attachment to Stage Orange values that are woven into their identity.

I still think you're underestimating how much people's connection needs are playing into this dynamic. The main reason why people (individually and collectively) stay in a particular phase of development they're at and don't progress to the next isn't usually because of intellectual deficits... or just because that's the phase of development they're in. People hold onto their current stage of development or clamor for earlier phases in development despite the societal technology changing to reflect a higher stage in development, precisely because they believe that's where they can best meet their needs. And that usually isn't true most of the time, once the societal technology moves on. And right now, Stage Orange's atomization and social isolation is pushing some people forward towards the abstractly collective (but still hyper-individualistic) focus of the earliest semi-Orange iterations of Green that are seen in the contemporary progressive Left. And it's making some stage Orange people clamor for an idealized mythology of what Blue once was because they have a learned resistance towards the initial iterations of Green that are seen in Lefty politics. And like I said, it's mostly men who are in Stage Orange that believe that going back to Blue is going to bring them into a communal utopia where they'll be the most self-actualized version of themselves and respected as a traditional man and have status and an obedient Stage Blue trad wife while they get to have all their usual freedoms that Stage Orange society affords them. But of course, that's not real. That's just a Stage Orange idealization of Blue. Plus, if we truly regress back to Stage Blue... we'd need to un-invent the atom bomb to even survive as a species. And we'd also need to get rid of the internet and international air travel to pull off a consistent Stage Blue consciousness. --- Also, the same values war that's happening now also happened in the Weimar Republic during WWII, as there was a lot of similar initial iterations of Green where people were more accepting of the LGBTQ community and had a more world-centric cosmopolitan view of things, and there were all sorts of art movements and academic expansion associated with Bauhaus. It was Modernist times with the schools of thought in academia and the art world, but verging on the beginning of a Post-Modern era. And then, a demagogue came in to promise the Stage Orange/Blue society that they'd purge the Stage Green cosmopolitan degenerates and Communists who are funded by the Jewish elite, and bring back an idealized version of Blue when Germany was rural, traditional, pastoral, and idyllic. And then, that failed miserably because you can't really have the government come in and retrofit Stage Blue onto a Stage Orange society. And after the crash, it eventually led into a worldwide clamoring for Stage Green peace and unity which eventually precipitated in the 60s and 70s with hippie movement, anti-war protests, the Civil Rights movement, 2nd Wave Feminism, and ecological movements that progressed even further into Green than during the Bauhaus era of the Weimar Republic. So, you can look at these types of patterns that came from WWII (and WWI as well) and see that there tends to be a natural burgeoning of Green world-unity values to contrast the devastation of global war caused by nationalistically minded people that are maladapted to a unified post-atom-bomb world. And then we that trailed off into a less popular version of that in the coming decades where there was a holding pattern of Stage Orange society with Stage Green values taken for granted as the norm. And all these Shadows were under the floor boards until Trump came along. And now, we're going back into a few years of top-down authoritarian attempts to reset the idealized version of Stage Blue society. And it will also fail. And similarly, people will likely polarize to the opposite in a decade or two... maybe quicker. That's what happens when you try to re-install a previous phase of development in a top-down authoritarian way. It fails and sends people careening forward as far as they can go. And we enter into a new cycle. Then, all the unintegrated Shadow get pushed under the floorboards again for another generation or two... until we get another authoritarian movement trying to retrofit the old ways onto contemporary society.

It is the same archetypal story. But my ears tend to prick up when I hear it because it is often used to demonize and marginalize real people. And if someone starts with "the lizard people are in government and are controlling us", it probably won't be too much longer until they transition over to a more tangible real-world enemy.

They are old conspiracy theories, but not so complex. Qanon takes a lot of their Jewish conspiracies directly from Nazi Germany. Hearing it now, it's not so clear that he's talking about Jewish people. But that's the thing with dog whistles. They're not supposed to be clear. They're meant to be taken in by each person according to what they think it means. But it can be subtle signal to people on the far right that says "Hey, I'm one of you." I just remember hearing that short last year and going "Uh oh. Not another one."

Yes, the royal "they". It's an easy scapegoat to invoke to make people feel like they're fighting and evil and elite force together. And all of that "scheming overlords" talk usually gets projected onto Jewish people.

If it were something longterm and abiding like enslavement, there would be a generation or two of backlash and then a tacit normalization and acceptance as "just the way things are". But the loss of the right to vote would probably be normalized by the majority of the populace in a few years because it isn't something that affects people every day. And when people would protest about it, people would be weaving the dissident Neo-Suffragettes as the newest edition of the "woke mob."

But most people who are clamoring to go back to Blue are not Stage Blue either. They're just lonely Orange, Green, and Yellow people. And it's mostly Stage Orange men who are clamoring to go back to stage Blue because they think it will be better for them. But they will find Stage Blue to be too constricting because they are past that phase of development. When my first child was a toddler, one of my former professors came to visit me at my house. And I was nursing my daughter, and asked her a question about how her kids handled the weening process. She mentioned that she'd weened her son at age 2. And when he was 3, he got really upset and insisted that he wanted to nurse again. So, instead of denying him, she let him nurse. And he did for a minute and got bored. Then, he was over it because he didn't get what he wanted out of it. It wasn't that interesting to him. If Stage Blue wins the values war (which they might) and we go back to a monocultural patriarchal theocratic values like the days of old, the majority of the people who think they want it now will quickly be clamoring for lost progress. Like the first grader who believes they want to go back to kindergarten... one day into kindergarten they will realize the magic is gone and that they can't wait for the 2nd grade.

I'm sure that the amount of sexual success men have with women (or lack thereof) doesn't lead to misogyny. I just tend to think of misogynists as being more socially awkward around women because of the hatred patterns. So, my claim is the inverse of what that study is studying. It's not that awkward guys who have little success with women become misogynists. I know plenty of guys that this describes who are lovely guys. It's more that misogynists become awkward guys who have little success with women because of their misogyny. But of course, this could be a vocal minority. But I personally suspect that it's not a minority but the majority based on my experiences.

I didn't realize that she'd lost support among women. I thought her numbers with women stayed the same. But it's probably women focusing on the economy and looking for a change. I suppose it's just that the loss of rights becomes easily normalized in the wider populace. If women had the right to vote taken from them, they might be upset for a few months. But then it would probably would become quickly normalized by the populace and just the way things are done.

I disagree with that. People really only care about getting their needs met. They don't care very much how they get it... as long as they get it. It's like, "Do you want the water in the green cup or the blue cup?" If you're thirsty, you'll take the water in whichever cup is available to you. But the collective has already had a lot of collective experience drinking from blue cups. We have a history of blue cup drinking. And we have lots of idealized stories about how blue cup drinking is that draws in people who are in Orange, Green, and Yellow. So, there is a desire to regress to Blue (even with people who are not themselves Blue) because they cannot yet conceptualize drinking from a green cup. But they don't realize consciously that connection is what they're searching for. They have a vague notion of being for the old ways, but what they really want is belonging in a tight-knit community. If right now, there was some Stage Green cult where people could come together in a community... it would attract a lot of the people who are currently in resistance to Green because the reason why they're currently in resistance to Green is because they perceive that opening up to the Green stage in development will get in the way of their needs.

I would give young people a little bit more credit than that, even though their views can be more socially malleable than the average adult. I know I held some very strong views at the time that were contrary to what many of my peers were thinking, which are still part of my internal compass. And I've worked with kids who also have their own nuanced views about the world derived from their own thinking. But to your point, young people are more malleable and influenceable... especially by peers. For example, it's clear that young men are skewing more conservative because of peer pressure and the right wing media environment that's geared towards young men. And this is in spite of previous the previous generations of men being more left-leaning than the generations prior. So, it shows that there can be a regression in values based on peer pressure and propaganda geared towards the youth.

WIth Roe v Wade, that's true that women are still angry. And women came out in near identical numbers to the last election. It was left leaning men who mostly stayed home and didn't vote for Kamala... likely because the men were more focused on the economy than on abortion rights because abortion rights feel less relevant to them. But understand that Trump is the face of MAGA. And lots of Republicans are really into Trump. They're not as much into other MAGA people.