BF2S Forums I am Time Magazines Person of The Year

How clever of you... /sarcasm

But seriously, congratulations dude...I didnt get shit.

Last edited by d3v1ldr1v3r13 (2006-12-17 08:30:01)

I win too. Yay me.

Another Time Person of the Year.

I really don't care about Musk one way or the other. I see the things he says and don't like them but he isn't worth the mental energy caring about. He is as real to me as a character on television.


That said...another whiff from Time. I stopped reading their magazine in 2015. The quality of it was already bad then. There is also so much other great content out there. Time doesn't have a monopoly on good writing. And lets not forget how these esteemed journalist collaborated with the Bush admin during the early War on Terror. (We will get back to that in a moment...)

Of all of the threads to bump I decided on this one since the 2006 decision to name "You" as person of the year was probably where TIME lost its way. Of course this wasn't the first time they named something vague as person of the year but they got much more in the habit of doing so in the time since then.

Come and see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Person_of_the_Year

Now what is bad about the Musk pick...it's very American. I mean Musk has done great things, I guess. But picking him as Time's person of the year feels like pandering to tech focused young Americans in blue states. I guess that's my group of people but I still feel like Musk worship is the nerdy white male equivalent of Kardashian worship. I frown upon celebrity worship.

Anyhow, I voiced my displeasure with a lot of other people on reddit and got this response.

Reddit Man wrote:

Teslas were the most sold vehicles in Europe a month or two ago. The entire world is transitioning to EV's and pushing for autonomous tech as a direct result of teslas growth. The entire world is affected by crypto. The entire world is affected by rocket technology, and the breakthroughs SpaceX has made. I mean I can't scroll through reddit or any site without hearing about something the guy said or did.. he's everywhere. Was on SNL, said a bunch of stupid shit about covid, tweets dumb shit all the time, etc. Whether you like him or not, he's easily been the most influential figure.

Oh wow, he's on reddit. The 20th top website in the world. For reference, Xvideos is #10.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_m … d_websites

WhO wOuLd YoU pIcK tHeN?

Osama Bin Laden. Wait! I have a point:

In 2001 Time picked Rudy Giuliani as Time's Person of the Year. Their original pick was Osama Bin Laden. They decided to pick Rudy though because they were worried about offending Americans. So instead of doing an article on OBL, the man who helped kickstart an international movement that will be with us for the rest of our lives, they picked Rudy G. People will buy magazines with Rudy but not OBL. Simple.

People will also buy magazines with Elon Musk on it and not either of the two men who I sincerely believe to be worthy of 2021's Man of the Year: President Xi of China or the leader of the Taliban. Both have much more of a claim to leader of the year but Americans can't stomach seeing either of their faces on a magazine. So they picked Musk.

i just find it very cringe how, as you said, the sort of ‘blue state liberal’ looks up to elon musk. the guy by all accounts seems to be a complete tool, nobody who has been close to him has anything good to say about his personality, actions and behaviour.

he’s cavalier and rash, immature and prone to twitter drug-induced outbursts. right now he has a haircut like the villain from the fifth element. the world’s richest man is also one of its most prominent examples of a man-baby.

the media fawn over things like him selling a huge amount of tesla shares ‘after asking his twitter followers’. nevermind that he literally had to start cashing in his shares in a given timeline, anyway, or that the way he manages his finances are literally to pay as little tax or capital gains as possible. ‘but elon doesn’t even take a salary! he sleeps at the tesla factory!’ oh give me a fucking break. musk is a pro at PR. give the credit for the EV revolution to actual engineers. this is a jobs-wozniak situation all over again and i really don’t understand just what it is about the american psyche that craves these narcissistic man-babies for public figures/legends.

‘he’s done so much for crypto!’ wtf. elon has engaged in some of the most reckless pump and dump tactics with crypto just because it’s a joke to him. meanwhile the consequences of his actions, or more properly his inane twitter ramblings after being wired on LSD for 3 days, have wiped out entire portfolios of small-fry crypto investors. how is this laudable in any way? the guy has been censured and fined by the trading and securities commission on multiple times for the way he uses the markets as a giant vanity mirror for his own psychodrams.

i really see this whole pantomime as an extension of that sickness in american society, the rotting black tooth giving off a stench from the back of the mouth, which seems to have been expressed so well and so forcibly in the writings of ayn rand, and so on. americans love these ‘libertarians’ and ‘visionaries’ whose entire schtick seems to be using their privilege to undermine or exploit governments and shit all over everyone in their quest to arrogate everything to themselves. elon musk hasn’t invented shit. he’s used closeness to governments and huge state contracts to amass unimaginable wealth, all the while exploiting his regular workers and misleading his investors (which often times, in the case of major state-level public investments, means ripping off the american taxpayer), and then turns around and whines like a baby whenever the topic of taxing billionaires is raised in washington. what a fucking tool.

Last edited by uziq (2021-12-13 20:28:32)

Yes, no-one likes to see progress.

They invented electric cars in the 70s. I understand the tech wasn't there yet but the tech still isn't there to make it viable for most people. Can't fill up your electric car like you could your gas powered car. We would also need to do a lot of work on the electric grid in order to make it able to handle hundreds of millions of cars being charged up daily.

elon musk has also supported, troll some or not, coups against democratically elected governments in latin america (lithium-rich nations, that is).

the guy is a huge tool. he doesn’t pay any tax and thinks democracies, be it his own or of other nations’, are just there to service his gargantuan ego.

I found this interview with a Harvard Historian regarding the beatification of Elon very interesting:

https://www.vox.com/vox-conversations-p … ing-rocket

There's a link to the audio of the interview and the podcast itself at the bottom of the article.

That is a pretty good piece, not sure I agree with it in its entirety.

Elon, Bezos, other billionnaires and the obsession with their existence bores me, really. Personally I barely spend a passing moment of my time thinking about them, they're mostly thoroughly uninteresting individuals imo. But they do appear in media.. frequently. Where it indeed gets interesting is if you analyse the overarching systems these individuals are a part of and what their companies/movements represent and mean. Though I'm not so sure I agree with the author that she designates these people as belonging to a plutocratic class of sorts, and I don't think Elon Musk is the best example of that either.

Tesla and SpaceX, while big players, are 'just' overvalued overhyped companies that do not remotely possess the types of power that is in the hands of companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon's digital branch (AWS), perhaps Facebook in the future if this whole metaverse thing pans out. The crucial difference as I see it is that these companies control an entire global/western infrastructure that is of vital importance to the functioning of all of modern society. Their position growing in prominence even over that of the energy giants of today & old. Together they form a powerful corporatocracy of sorts, the billionnaires individuals figureheads of these behemoth organisations. They're certainly more powerful than individual small nations and states, again much like the energy giants during the 20th century. Or the trading companies of colonial times.

They're still balanced and somewhat subdued by state power of particular types; the US, the EU, modern Russia, China. While the big aformentioned companies surely do have (some) influence on what these societies do, the billionaires could only wish they were in the seat of lawmakers, or that they could actually call themselves plutocrats. Increasingly, their involvement with these government is in protest to rules/regulations that affect their business' growth or power over markets and competition. They're pushed away from agenda-setting, because they're coming a little too close to societal control and the perception of these companies as benign motors of innovation is making place for discomfort. Sometimes they'll be on the receiving end of hefty fines, like in the case of the EU.

As such I don't quite see the imminent rise of plutocratic rule and I don't think the various conceptions of capitalism provide a satisfactory lens to view their evolution either. Their influence and wealth is huge, but historically there have been far bigger players in the private sphere still, and richer ones too.

Simultaneously I'm reminded of the growing inequality in wealth distribution, but that's another topic too. Don't have a clear view of how to connect that to what I wrote above yet.

Should also be noted that the (vast) majority of huge, influential & trend-setting corporations that have risen in the past 30 years are from the US. Another point that doesn't quite sit well with us this side of the atlantic.

Last edited by Larssen (2021-12-14 14:00:28)

SuperJail Warden wrote:

They invented electric cars in the 70s.

1870s you mean?

Dilbert_X wrote:

SuperJail Warden wrote:

They invented electric cars in the 70s.

1870s you mean?

like most of his 'amazing' ideas, they are rehashes of very old ideas.

with regards to tesla electric vehicles, hyperloops, spurious and spectacular forms of transit using vast tunnels and improbable vacuums ... all of this shit is like early 20th century futurism reheated in a modern PR guise ... and ALL of it, from a public infrastructure and city-planning perspective, is vastly superseded by the terribly uncool and terribly non-futurist tech of ... trains and buses.

elon says that self-driving cars are so important because they remove the 'drudgery' of driving. but driving isn't drudgery: being stuck in traffic and having to navigate car-choked cities is drudgery. for that you need a whole lot fewer cars on the road. build bus lanes. revamp your rail network. ffs. instead he's more interested in building vastly impractical and hugely expensive tunnels for a few rich VIPs to shoot through to get to their office or priority seat at the baseball stadium a little quicker. he's a visionary! genius!

Last edited by uziq (2021-12-15 19:33:22)

they're not exclusive propositions. people should commute less and work from home where possible; but cities and their infrastructure should also be making a significant shift away from the era of the car/personal transport. city centres should be car-free, pedestrianized zones. bike lines should be encouraged. public transport should be the norm.

air pollution kills an order of magnitude more people per year than even the worst ravages of covid-19.