House of Eratosthenes

Elon Musk — and by extension, DOGE, and President Trump as well — has been at the receiving end of a great deal of criticism, not all of it crystal clear or earnest. We should expect “big government” types, some of whom identify as big-government types and are proud to do so, to come up with some arguments against shrinkage of the government. But how is anyone opposed to eliminating waste? That’s the key question.

If you’re a big-government type, or if you’re neutral on where the size of government should go but you have some favorite pet program; you might come up with an argument against a specific action to cut the program, or to gut the program. But if Elon Musk and crew find out about Social Security checks going out to dead people, you should be all in favor of reclaiming that money. Right? If your own program is so important, you shouldn’t be wanting another program stealing money from it. Government can only spend so much.

It’s surprising how many loud people don’t seem to understand this.

But behind all this criticism against Musk and DOGE, which comes off looking like a critique against the second-wife’s evening dress coming from the first wife…it seems like there is something else.

These claims that Musk is “not a scientist, not an engineer…[just] a billionaire con man with a lot of money” ignore his many achievements, which have not been low-key by any stretch of the imagination. The intended audience for such remarks would seem to be people who are unaware of what he’s been doing, and those people would have had to have been living under rocks for the last ten years or more.

He lands rockets. Lands them. NASA has been launching rockets for years and decades, but landing a rocket on a target the size of a pie plate is a different thing entirely. And to ignore or to criticize such an achievement, with the criticism coming from someone who can’t even parallel park, is in bad form.

I think what really changed yesterday — culturally — was the nerd earning genuine respect, legitimately, from President Trump who is the guy on top of it all, the seat at the apex of the power pyramid. Our sense of normal for nerds, as I’ve noticed many times before, is very far removed from that. The way we’re used to doing it, the nerd may achieve a grudging acknowledgment that he’s capable of doing something the rest of the team needs to have done, and there’s no one else who can do it. And that’s the best a nerd gets. Like, ever.

You see it in our police procedural programs fairly constantly; it isn’t even worth the trouble to go out gathering links to provide examples. Just about every single episode of every single show has this scene. The nerd starts to explain what “ambient data” is, or how a key logger works, etc. Someone much cooler than the nerd lets him get five to ten words into it, then interjects to remind the nerd to speak in English. Then the nerd starts over again. It only burns off five or ten seconds or so, but ten seconds is ten seconds. They keep doing this. it’s become all but mandatory. Why?

To remind people: This nerd can do something you can’t do, in fact it’s something you need to have done, but never, ever forget, your objects of veneration are elsewhere. Not him. Those other guys. The ones who can high-kick and crack safes and hot-wire jeeps…but don’t know computers. Don’t learn the computers, kids. Learn the video games.

As one dating-age nymph commented in a thread I remember seeing some twenty years ago: “Everything worth inventing has been invented already. Learn to rap and do your crunches.”

This is cultural. Don’t be the nerd. That’s the social milieu to which we have become accustomed, and we’ve been getting accustomed to it for a long time.

“Fact checks” abound claiming Elon and his team haven’t actually found anything. It’s too bad we’re now living in the post-credibility age of the fact check, and everyone paying attention has figured out fact checks are just feelings-checks. From where come these feelings?

Part of it is the mission of DOGE. People don’t want elimination or reduction of fraud or inefficiency. There’s a distinct “Not anti-war, just fighting for the other side” flavor to this: People want the fraud to continue because they’re benefiting from it.

But also: To watch the nerd sail off into the sunset, with his significant contributions acknowledged by the guy on the top of it all. Gratitude expressed, earnestly, meaningfully, and with merit. To actually focus on the idea that the nerd got something done we needed done. He actually traced the carpet fibers on the dead body to where the murder took place, or decrypted the drug sale inventory, guessed the password, etc. He actually did that and it was pretty cool.

People aren’t accustomed to that. It’s more than they can handle.

To me, this is what Making America Great Again — is. It’s a renewal of focus on the objective of actually getting something done, of achieving the mission, in whole or in part. We have been needing that, for awhile. We’ve gone too long allowing the nerds to be upstaged by these hot sexy men and women who swing their big hair around and get in arguments about nothing, between the action scenes of karate-chopping bad guys. It hasn’t worked out well for us. It’s translated, by and large, into potentially talented, capable people doing next to nothing, because in real life there aren’t that many occasions to hot-wire jeeps, stow away on helicopters or karate-chop bad guys.

But we are surrounded by computers and other high tech devices, and someone has to figure out how to make them go. And then there are those rockets.

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The Nerd Takes a Bow and Makes an ExitSaturday, May 31st, 2025

The Nerd Takes a Bow and Makes an Exit
Saturday, May 31st, 2025