2/ Okay so Jim confused some Russians who contributed to a line of philosophical thought, what's the big deal? Well it's clear Jim has either done extremely poor quality research or is trying to create a scary narrative to sell substack subs to Liberals.

Let's get on to the meat of the subject. Why is Musk talking about a Russian scientist and does it logically follow that Musk subscribes to his broader world view?

Musk knows about Tsiolkovsky because he's the guy who invented rockets. He's also well known with space nerds because he was extremely eccentric and worked out the physics of rockets in a wooden hut in the Russian wilderness. I'm also going to note that despite what Jim claims he'd been dead an buried for decades before the ground breaking USSR cosmonaut program started in 1955. I think he's confused Tsiolkovsky with the first man in space Yuri Gargarin.

This shows a complete failure to research because the Gargarin associated with cosmism that had influence on cosmism is a different person Pavel Gargarin a Russian Prince who died in the 1800s. That Gargarin was the father of the founder of Cosmism, Nikolai Fedorovich. ( https://academic.oup.com/book/6271/chapter-abstract/149924030?redirectedFrom=fulltext )

Now Musk also does quote Tsiolkovsky in the 2018 SXSW Q+A and unlike Jim I'll even link the whole video ( https://youtu.be/kzlUyrccbos ) because it paints a very different picture. Musk quotes dozens of different sci fi references including people like Asimov and there's no specific adoration of the man.

3/ So there's no real evidence of an ideological link between Musk and the Russian scientist that invented  rockets.

So why is Jim doing this? Maybe poor research but there's a pretty strong circumstantial case that Jim is being deliberately deceptive here.

Why? Because of what follows. He uses anodyne statements about the Russian space program and cooperation as evidence of a Russian link. This is pretty funny given the head of the Russian space program threatened Musk over twitter ( https://www.space.com/russian-space-chief-rogozin-threatens-elon-musk ). Oh well never let the facts get in the way of a good narrative!

This becomes extremely clear when Jim tries to tie Musk to the Bolsheviks, which is yet another red flag.

Without creating any direct link between Tsiolkovsky, Jim immediately jumps to Alexi Bogdanov. Once again, a red flag to those reading critically. We then make another non sequitur to technocracy which is pretty telling because I found references to direct democracy in the little bits I was able to find on Tsiolkovsky. (I'll assume the claims about eugenics are correct given what I know about some of the wacky shit Soviet Scientists believed in during this period.)

Factual Errors 4
Red Flags 6
Non sequiturs 1

4/ Oh you thought we were done? Nope we are not even a third of the way through. If you've managed to last this long, well done.

Before we move on I'm also going to point out that Jim misidentified Bogdanov as an anarchist when I started asking about the obvious inconsistencies.

So on post 8 we double down with a second non sequitur and we jump to the technocracy movement that has no direct links to the random Bolshevik he just brought in. This becomes clear when you realise the organisation he's referencing was explicitly opposed to a communist revolution.

This is important because as Jimbo says Musk's grandfather was a part of this movement. So there's certainly a real link there. So I decided to do some digging.

Elon's maternal grandfather was a rabid anti-communist ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2485067/#:~:text=Abstract,leader%2C%20and%20sportsman%2Fadventurer. ). What's especially interesting to me is the organisations he was part of.

So remember Technocracy Inc? It really looks like they were heavily influenced by fascism, and opposed Canadian participation in WW2. They were banned by the Canadian government in 1940 for allegedly trying to overthrow the Canadian government. ( https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/56367658.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwiWy92I_p78AhW9UGwGHUazBw84ChAWegQIKxAB&usg=AOvVaw2k2Gs-XbLBEa9cSfggB1N7 )

He was a part of the Social Credit party which at the time was run by hard right evangelicals and heavy leaned on anti-Semitism ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_Party_of_Canada ). This is one of the dangers of chasing reds under the bed conspiracy theories with sloppy research. You miss critical links to the far right.

5/ This piece of information is actually really important to understanding why Musk's maternal grandfather moved to South Africa.  There's a good chance his reputation never recovered for being arrested for his membership of Technocracy Inc during WW2.

Technocracy Inc was very into eugenics and fascist pseudoscience so it's definitely not a huge stretch to that he assume his racism was tied to the move. The trail is suspiciously cold after the move to South Africa in 1950s and it looks like it's been scrubbed from Google. 

Someone with access to a South African Newspaper archive should probably investigate this, but I've reached a dead end.

Another really important fact left out is critical information about Elon's childhood in South Africa which is detailed in the link that Jim just carelessly slaps on the end. ( https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/05/world/africa/elon-musk-south-africa.html )

It details a childhood exposed to a stream of racist propaganda while living in an isolated community where the only black people he interacted with were servants. This is probably the root of Musk's extreme vulnerability of right wing narratives and propaganda. This is yet another important pattern than should have been focused on but is discarded in pursuit of red baiting.

6/ It's also important to note that despite this Musk's father actually ran for office for an anti-apartheid policy. That's not to say that Errol Musk is a good person. He's an extremely creepy dude who knocked up Elon's step sister ( https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/celebrity-kids/elon-musks-dad-errol-has-secret-baby-with-stepdaughter-jana-bezuidenhout/news-story/1c1c91093fa1b2436bd39dcea29fc6a4 ).

There's also reasonably well supported claims that Elon's father was emotionally abusive ( https://www.news.com.au/finance/work/leaders/hes-having-a-tantrum-like-a-spoilt-child-elon-musks-father-hits-back-after-being-branded-evil/news-story/df7279080de9ed5253bb6733b1d73c22 ) which goes a long way to explaining Elon's very visible need for affirmation.

Getting back to the misinformation thread Jim takes the massive leap of Elon tweeting that he was a "utopian anarchist best described by Iain Banks" to be proof positive of a link to cosmism rather than the fact Elon simply uses sci fi literature to sell an image.

It's also very clear that Musk's views don't line up with Banks Culture which has explcit themes of a post gender society given his rampant transphobia that destroyed his relationship with his daughter. ( https://www.advocate.com/transgender/2022/10/11/elon-musk-says-communism-caused-rift-transgender-daughter ) We will touch the ideology of the this sci fi society at the end of theis thread.

I also really want to draw attention to Musk's use of social contagion and the cultural Marxist conspiracy theory which has been a consistent theme of European fascist rhetoric.

Jim misses this completely because he's either trying to spin a nonsense narrative or is simply unable to identify right wing political ideologies.

7/ I'm going completely ignore the segments on long termism because this thread is long enough. Now we get to the most rediculous claim of the thread.

"Musk is an anarcho-communist". Yes really and it's going to be a casse study in motivated reasoning.

He gets off to an incredibly bad start by quoting Karl Marx's line Gotha Program " From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs".Now the spirit of this may be true, however there's huge problems with quoting Marx as the foundation of anarcho-communist as  the Anarchist - Marxist split is one of the bitterest divides in radical politics.

The divide predictably was over the state as a transitory mechanism. Marx advocated:

"Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat."

The anarchists, such as Bakunin on the other hand were adamantly opposed to this.

"People’s State, is a yoke, on the one hand giving rise to despotism and on the other to slavery. They say that such a yoke – dictatorship is a transitional step towards achieving full freedom for the people: anarchism or freedom is the aim, while state and dictatorship is the means, and so, in order to free the masses of people, they have first to be enslaved!"

This is going to be very important later.