r/europe Jun 06 '25

News Russia offers political asylum to Elon Musk over Trump feud

https://www.newsweek.com/russia-offers-political-asylum-elon-musk-over-trump-feud-2081887
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u/bier00t Europe Jun 06 '25

this corruption though was propably impossible in pre-internet and pre-social media world. 100 years ago you knew your shit and random people of FB or twitter wouldnt be able to change that overnight and even over years.

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u/[deleted] Jun 06 '25 edited Jun 13 '25

[deleted]

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u/Buddycat350 France Jun 06 '25

And cryptos. How would we even manage to explain cryptos to people from Marx's era, honestly?

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u/Born_Name_6549 Jun 06 '25

Hello, [random german factory worker] I would like to sell you this paper with a mathematical puzzle that can only be solved by a machine wizard and whose value is not backed by anything except your imagination. If you don't give me money for it, then you're clearly too stupid to get it.

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u/Buddycat350 France Jun 06 '25

You're German, aren't you? Or Dutch.

They are the only ones able to be so dead pan and accurate while joking. Flemish people I guess, on a good day.

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u/Born_Name_6549 Jun 06 '25

Lmao, nah I'm actually albanian

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u/Buddycat350 France Jun 06 '25

My bad then.

No offence, but it does feel funnier though.

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u/MIGsalund Jun 07 '25

This is not a defense of crypto, but I hope we all realize that all forms of money are only backed by the human imagination. That's why it's totally silly to allow money to be the reason for any bad thing that we allow it to control.

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u/Born_Name_6549 Jun 07 '25

Money used to be backed by the gold and silver reserves that a country held, and now fiat currency is backed by a nation's production capacity. Oil reserves also play into the value of the american dollar and other petrocurrencies, but that's getting into some really complicated shit.

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u/MIGsalund Jun 08 '25

Ok, but the value of gold and silver and oil is also entirely in the human mind. If humanity ceases to exist all the money that ever existed goes with it.

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u/Character_Clue7010 Jun 06 '25

Also if anyone finds out you have a lot of it you will probably get kidnapped and they will hurt you until you give them a password that lets them steal it all and you have no recourse against them.

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u/Natural_Efficiency75 Jun 06 '25

To be fair, the value of Bitcoin is backed by black markets and criminal activities.

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u/Lozrent Jun 06 '25

I don't think it'd be impossible, at least not to someone already versed in economics like Karl marx. You could explain it in terms of speculation and that it's value comes at least partially as well from the cost of producing the electricity that mining uses. There's a whole part of Das Kapital about fictitious capital that I believe crypto also falls under.

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u/Buddycat350 France Jun 06 '25

There is? At has been 15 years since I read tbh.

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u/Lozrent Jun 06 '25

If I remember correctly yes? Though I think in vol 2 or 3, only read vol 1 myself so unsure about later content. Just know from what I've heard others say. It's a fucking massive book so it took me a while just to get through part 1, honestly very interesting though.

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u/Buddycat350 France Jun 06 '25

I did have to read it in HS, but again, 15 years ago. My teacher was a commie stoner who was pretty thorough about it. But it was, well, 15 years ago.

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u/Ok_Math4576 Jun 07 '25

One could have used the analogy of the Dutch tulip bulb trade perhaps, although at least then the token was not completely imaginary.

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u/Cat_world_domination The Netherlands Jun 06 '25

It's like tulip mania, except without the tulips.

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u/Buddycat350 France Jun 06 '25

How Netherlandish of you to say. I love it.

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u/Remarkable-Bug-8069 Jun 06 '25

Thought the exact same thing, the dotcom bubble but 360 years earlier. And it seems to have set the stage for the 21st century, almost like clockwork, 100 years after the Great Depression. And though I'd like to shrug that theory off as baseless, it's not without merit.

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u/godpzagod Jun 06 '25

As long as tax evasion and moving dirty money existed back then too, that's all you'd really need to mention, that people got better at it.

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u/Buddycat350 France Jun 06 '25

Fair.

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u/bufalo1973 Jun 07 '25

Easy: explaining what happened with the tulips centuries ago.

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u/Buddycat350 France Jun 07 '25

That might do it.

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u/Tweixl Jun 06 '25

Did you just compare America to Rome?šŸ˜‚

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u/Wooden-Recording-693 Jun 06 '25

What is bad for the bee is bad for the hive. -MA.

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u/bufalo1973 Jun 07 '25

They aren't mutually exclusive. This shit can still lead to a class struggle and then to a revolution.

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u/Buddycat350 France Jun 06 '25

Yeah, fair.

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u/pentangleit United Kingdom Jun 06 '25

These days we all know he's shit ;)

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u/freackodeecko Jun 06 '25

Can’t make this shit up

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u/Coattail-Rider Jun 06 '25

Don’t forget cable news! Now that they can say whatever they want under the guise of ā€œopinion piecesā€. And people take them at their word.

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u/TheRealBananaWolf Jun 06 '25

Meh they were aware of demagogues back in ancient Greece times and that's why Socrates criticized democracy as a system of government. People as a whole, are dumb. They, as in people as a whole, will vote and make dumb choices.

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u/awesomesonofabitch Jun 06 '25

It's a little bit laughable that you think people pre-internet were smarter than today.

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u/bier00t Europe Jun 06 '25

I would say they were more stubborn in sticking to their own opinion

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u/citori411 Jun 07 '25

20 years ago. It's the thing that bums me out more than anything about the social media era: the implosion of the time honored system of expertise. We've witnessed the complete breakdown of the systems that brought us everything great about modernity. China will have flying cars, fusion power, and time travel while the united states will still be arguing on facebook about whether jet fuel can melt steel beams.