As everyone probably all knows, SpaceX just launched their second Starship/Super Heavy rocket. It successfully lifted off the pad and the stages separated before Starship self terminated due to some as of yet undisclosed problem. (The current speculation as of this post is that there was an O2 tank leak that caused lower than planned thrust and it self-deleted when the computer determined that it could not achieve its preprogrammed flight path.) SpaceX's own goal was to get to stage separation and not wreck the pad in the process, and this rocket met that goal. Of course, the mainstream media rushed to publish headlines like Bloomberg's “SpaceX Starship and Super Heavy Booster Launch and Failure.” (You can see that Bloomberg changed the headline at least once but sadly the original hater headline wasn't captured.)
Ars's Eric Berger (who's probably the last journalist worth reading on that site) penned an article in direct response to all of the haters titled "Sorry, doubters: Starship actually had a remarkably successful flight" (archive). Most of the article talks about why the test was a success and at the end of the article he touches on the elephant in the room, that most of the negative coverage of SpaceX is directly because of people's hate of Musk himself. I will criticize Berger and the article here because he leaves out that the true motivation of the haters in both the media and in general is their hatred of Musk's politics.
So of course the leftists had to fight it out in the comments section. Some going with the "you can hate the artist and like the art stance" while others went with the tried and true "Musk is a white supremacist nazi" route. So Berger himself commented in response to one of the critics bemoaning the fact that he doesn't have a full hate boner for Musk by saying this:
So you may feel that he is a piece of shit. A lot of people do. But not everyone does. A lot of people think Donald Trump is a piece of shit. Should every article about him say he's a piece of shit? What about Joe Biden? I find some of Musk's comments reprehensible. But I don't view it as my job to apply my full judgmental value to them in a news article about a rocket launch. I do feel it was important to acknowledge their existence, and so I did.
(Link, Archive) My reaction to that is that Berger is still operating on normie tier politics and doesn't get that leftists demand 100% ideological purity and to suggest that Musk isn't 100% evil or that Biden might be a piece of shit will make them hate him. The pearl clutching over some of Musk's comments and Trump-hate is also indicative of normie level politics.
Having said all that, its refreshing to see a journalist not want to insert leftist ideology into their work. It's also nice seeing a journalist push back on the MSM narrative, especially on Ars of all places.
That's a hell of a way to celebrate Trans Remembrance Day.
You owe me a new keyboard for spitting coffee on this when I laughed.
How about dis one?
I don't even need to look, I know the commenting audience at Arstechnica. They are undoubtedly roasting Eric Berger alive, and anyone even a little bit out of lockstep is being ruthlessly dogpiled.
That place deliberately drove away everyone even remotely right wing due to how rabidly hostile the commentators were during the Obama administrations, and since 2015 it has gone full tilt libtard. It no longer has any redeeming value, not even a little bit. I was a subscriber there since 2000, and I let my subscription lapse in 2016 because everyone had developed a rabid case of TDS.
That garbage is why I left Slashdot long ago. I went there hoping to see some banter between techies who knew their stuff; instead it was just reddit with different web code. There were so many political stories on it that some techies dared to ask why it was on the front page, and the response was always mental gymnastics that tried to make the questioner sound absurd. And back in the day, you didn't even have to look far into the comments of a post like "AMD comes out with new chip" to find someone calling GWB a war criminal. Not sure what that has to do with an AMD chip...
The straw that broke the camel's back was when they shut down anonymous posting. I never went back...don't know if it's still true, don't care.
To me seems the tech crowd wasn't absolutely polarized and homogenized towards one direction until the mid 00's. It's a representation problem more than a nonexistence of right-wing computing wizards.
He'll probably be the few that end up with some kind of career when their site is the next to shut down..
The Elon hate is so blindingly obvious in why they hate him that only completely braindead or blind can't see it. He's another billionaire they can't fully control, probably because he ain't a pedo so got no blackmail material on him. And unlike Trump, his business is HIGHLY IMPORTANT to America so they can't do lawfare like they did with Trump so mostly use defamation on every project he has.
Journalists know nothing about what they're reporting about.
We've seen this song and dance before.
Rockets blow up. It's nothing new. 'In the Shadow of the Moon', a really, really good documentary on the race to the moon, is basically a bunch of astronauts talking about shit while the docu switches over to videos from the time period.
Early on, one of the astronaut's remarked that getting into a rocket to go to space at the time was 'a really great way to have a really short ride' before cutting immediately to a series of US rockets blowing up on the launch pad.
As for Elon... well, I think he's great. He lightly shitposts on twitter like it's 4chan and proceeds to drive people mad. He strips off the illusion of 'noblesse oblige' that leftists really, really want to buy into and shows that, yes, even accomplished and successful people have feet made of clay. People that know nothing about leadership screech and caterwaul about how Elon doesn't really do anything for the businesses he leads.
I still think EVs are silly, though.
I missed this kind of nuance in this modern age.
This guy was their hero three months ago, until he came out in favor of free speech. They get no credit for not being a pathological hater.