Brazil's X ban is sending lots of people to Bluesky

I remember when the Toyota Prius was a potent symbol of everything that was wrong with smug liberals. Lazy comedians still use the Prius as a punchline. Why doesn't a Tesla Model 3 carry the same sort of political baggage? Why don't right-wing conspiracy theorists consider Musk to be part of the "WHO/WEF globalist elite", despite the fact that he's a tech billionaire who is literally trying to plug people's brains into The Matrix and colonise space?

By taking sides in a partisan culture war, he has made his core mission essentially non-partisan. Maybe he does really believe all of that stuff about "the woke mind virus", or maybe he realised that he can buy a priceless amount of political capital amongst people who would instinctively hate the goals of his project just by uttering the right incantations.

> Why doesn't a Tesla Model 3 carry the same sort of political baggage?

When was the last time you were in a red state? Driving an EV of any kind is a strong political statement.

> By taking sides in a partisan culture war, he has made his core mission essentially non-partisan

Not how partisan affiliation works--think of someone who flip flops from one side to the other. They aren't seen as above the fray or non-partisan. Just unreliable (albeit, usually, useful).

Funny thing is that he is poisoning his own well by making leftwing people , who are much more likely to drive an EV, abhor him and Tesla.

It’s not only happening in the US but has also started to happen in other countries like Australia.

Weirdly Hybrids have now become a climate denial fave.

In any thread about EVs there is a typical HN commenter desperate to tell you that they drive a hybrid, not an EV like those silly virtue signalers.

For those who remember the vicious attacks on the Prius it's a wild shift in attitude.

> Driving an EV of any kind is a strong political statement.

This surprises me (I believe you though!). I've read lots of articles and fun facts lately about how places like Texas go fastest at installing solar panels, because solar is now the cheapest source of energy and all. I'd blatantly assume that those new solar field owners would be charging their cars with their own electricity, also purely for money reasons and not climate/ideological ones.

Weird how pointing out climate change inaccuracies destroyed scientific debate.

In any thread about climate change they are desperate to tell you that you’re a climate denier when you point out inaccurate information.

For those who remember the vicious attacks on science, we called that the dark ages.

Yup - the hole turned me off so much I've switched my first EV buy to Hyundai ioniq 5 (N if my wife authorises it LOL) ... not saying they're any better but it's a branding thing ... I couldn't stand to be associated with anything to do with that hole.

In the late 1990s there were still medical scientists who questioned the causal link between HIV and AIDS. This was at a time when effective drugs were already approved and saving lives.

Those scientists believed they were asking reasonable questions and pointing out potential inaccuracies. But imagine you were an HIV positive patient in 1995 and you latched on to this scientific debate to conclude that probably you should just eat a lot of vitamins and things will work out fine, since the scientists can’t seemingly even agree on whether you’ll get AIDS…

This is not a theoretical example. AIDS denialism cost hundreds of thousands of lives during roughly 1995-2005. There was a Nobel prize winner (Kary Mullis) who supported the movement with his authority despite never having done any HIV research. The government of South Africa was also involved for their own political reasons.

It was a lot like today’s climate change denialism and needs to be remembered. The major difference is that the personal consequences of HIV denialism were felt within a few years on an individual level, so the matter was resolved within decades. With climate change, it’s going to take a century and today’s denialists won’t be around to feel the effects.

> By taking sides in a partisan culture war, he has made his core mission essentially non-partisan.

There is a significant amount of people choosing to not purchase a Tesla because they don’t want to be associated with Mr. Musk.

SpaceX is more insulated because there is essentially no alternative. If Yspace existed, I’m sure a significant amount of people would choose to champion that instead.

I think you’re vastly underselling how much Mr Musk his communications and his association with the new hyperbigoted misinformation-hub Xitter has turned people to dislike him, powerful and influential one’s among them.

It's in full swing here in Sweden too. Me and a close colleague bought new cars a couple of months apart. My left-leaning teammates who are usually pretty climate aware only offered congratulations to my colleagues new gasgussler, but had some criticisms for me who bought a Tesla.

I found it weird tho, like fair, they were pissed about Twitter, but surely the planet is the bigger issue?

Musk has pissed off the left to the point where the left is not thinking clearly about him and his companies anymore. Regardless of what you think about Musk, Tesla is actually pretty great.

> There is a significant amount of people choosing to not purchase a Tesla because they don’t want to be associated with Mr. Musk.

Yep, and I know people who have sold their Teslas because they don't want to be associated with Musk any longer.

"Pointing out inaccurate information" in HN comments is not scientific debate, nor a science.

> With climate change, it’s going to take a century and today’s denialists won’t be around to feel the effects.

The thing that is so maddening is that we're already feeling the effects of climate change, but the denialists just claim those effects either aren't really happening, or are caused by something else (without bothering to define "something else").

If you want an honest answer to Prius vs Tesla, it's because Prius was seen as a slower and lamer version of existing cars for people who didn't care about cars. While Tesla's could get from 0-60 faster than hypercars of the time.

Tesla's offered an experience in terms of pure acceleration off the line that actually made them cool, even people who might never buy one wouldn't mind experiencing one off the line.

> In the late 1990s there were still medical scientists who questioned the causal link between HIV and AIDS

This is how science works. Being right is not "science". Science is verb. If the questioners were right we would be calling them heroes.

Yep. And he could have effortlessly achieved tolerability in most right wing circles that reflexively dislike "smug liberals" simply by not saying "smug liberal" stuff whilst encouraging right wingers to talk up what a great capitalist innovator he was, running red state targeted ad campaigns and making a pickup truck that people that normally drive gas-guzzlers would actually want to drive. His aspirations for colonies on Mars were already at least as appealing to much of the right as they ever were to the left.

Buying Twitter and wading into political debates isn't a depoliticization strategy, and if he'd wanted to pick a colour of his politics to optimize his business success (surprisingly unimportant when your product line is as far ahead of competition as SpaceX/Tesla have been) the correct choice would have been beige.

I said as much in my comment, pointing out that these scientists with differing takes were not the bad guys: “These scientists believed they were asking reasonable questions and pointing out potential inaccuracies.”

The bad guys were the people who took this receding debate within the field as evidence of conspiracies and worse, and convinced thousands of people to treat their AIDS condition with quackery instead of effective drugs derived from the HIV-AIDS theory. The organized denialism killed people. That’s not science.

Well with climate change we have no scientists saying otherwise because we see they get attacked and lose funding by the quackery of the public and governments. As evident by the idiots on HN.

Funding is a red herring. Powerful interests would love to fund serious climate science that could assure the status quo is fine. If only they could find serious climate scientists willing to claim that.

Fifty years ago, there was no shortage of funding for medical scientists who tried to prove that tobacco didn't cause cancer. (You can guess where that funding came from.)