I was thinking about this article again, and the problem boils down to this:

Even feminists use the epistemic and hermeneutical framework of the society in which they are embedded and share still 99%+ of its values.

Nerds have little power and are thus easy to shame. Because feminists (as well as all women and men) are so similar to everyone else just by nature of participating in a society, the objects of most of their attractions and those who can inflict the most real harm on them are the societally-approved powerful jock types.

Therefore attacking them would be dangerous. Very, very dangerous. Much easier and safer to attack those who can’t and won’t really fight back much, and whom they are extremely repulsed by in principle and practice. So when a nerd approaches someone like Amanda Marcotte, she’s absolutely revolted and interprets it as an affront to feminism. However, if a physically-fit jock type exhibits the very same behavior (or worse) even if she turned him down, she’d be flattered (secretly or openly).

This isn’t some feminist flaw, though it is hypocritical. It’s just a human reaction to the powerful that nearly everyone has.

(And no GamerGaters aren’t mostly nerds, but rather part of the FPS gaming subculture, many of whom are actual jocks or jock wannabes and who share far more in common with them in all ways.)

While I agree that treating Elon Musk as some sort of flawless messiah is a mistake, I fail to understand why people pretend that Tesla and SpaceX have done nothing at all interesting or innovative. In both areas, they’ve accelerated some areas of human progress by perhaps two decades.

But this sentence from here is just great.

We now live in an era where raising a billion dollars of other suckers’ money and developing a new “app” to take selfies or find imaginary creatures in a porta-potty is considered the apex of human civilization but investing your entire fortune in a quest to build a self-driving electric car is treated like dangerous, egomaniacal adventurism.

Anyone who builds anything that interfaces with the real world does seem to take on withering criticism these days. Perhaps it’s because we live so much of our lives behind screens that anything with moving parts is seen as disreputable and too disorderly to dignify with any concession to its usefulness.

I don’t know.

But would the world be better of if Tesla and SpaceX didn’t exist? I can’t find even a scrap of a good argument for that. Because it’s goddamn stupid, mainly.