So Musk is a charlatan and a bullshit merchant, and often does not know what he's talking about, as well as a threat to democracy.

However, the number of people gleefully proclaiming this and then proceeding to write utter uniformed bollocks themselves about the Starship/Super Heavy test flight is ... aggravating. I find hypocrisy annoying.

In particular, the " People said he knew what he was doing with rockets, but look at that, lol!" take.

The reality is that SpaceX does know what it is doing. Do not confuse production launch services, their bread and butter, in which they are literally more capable than the entire rest of the planet put together, with a research and development facility blowing up test flight articles.

I get it, it's funny ti laugh at the arsehole because his rocket blew up and his launch pad got destroyed, but the idea that building stuff deliberately to test to destruction is somehow bad engineering practice is simply wrong. We've done it before with spaceflight (there was far more of it during the race to the moon than most people realise), we deliberately crash cars to see how they survive in accidents, we deliberately crash trains, we deliberately fire chickens into jet engines, we deliberately crash planes, we deliberately sink boats, and so on and so on and so on.

Sometimes the only way to get good data about how and when stuff fails is to destroy it and see what happens.

A big issue with people citing Orwell's 1984 is that most people doing who have never read it, and therefore don't really have a good idea of what the book is actually about. They pick up on a few concepts: censorship, newspeak, restricting the press, and think that's the point of the book.

But for me, the real point of 1984 is the way it provides a window into a totalitarian state in so far as its effects on the people living under it. It's a character study of a man who lives in a state so obsessed with power and control that it cannot accept that he can even be free in his own mind.

The point of totalitarianism, as depicted in 1984, is just that: it's total.

It depicts a state that is systematically reshaping society in such a way that it isn't even possible to conceptualise any form of opposition to the state's mindset and control. From cradle to grave, your life is the subject of aggressive intervention to turn your mind into a perfect ideological prison guard for the state, doing its work for it.

There can be no opposition, because there can be no concept of opposition. The necessary education, upbringing, and mental tools required to conceptualise such a worldview are absent.

This is what North Korea does. This is what the USSR did.

And this is what the Republican Party, spearheaded by the likes of DeSantis, is doing. They have realised that their grip on power is threatened by generational change, and are trying to reshape American society in such a way that their power base is never threatened.

And that means that the very idea that you can live in ways that aren't in thrall to their particular brand of anti intellectual, white supremacist, lowest common denominator, ultra heteronormative christofascism, must be eradicated.

No LGBT people. No women in positions of authority. Rule by a select band of ideologically pure* white male elites, and only them.

And everyone else must conform, be made to conform, or be eliminated.

This is what they're doing.

* - and this is why it ultimately never works, other than for a little while, because these people are never ideologically pure. Totalitarian states rot from the head down because their ruling elite becomes decadent. It happened in the Soviet Union, it was happening in Nazi Germany before the process was interrupted by bombing them until the rubble bounced, it will eventually happen in North Korea, and it was in the process of happening in 1984.

And if the DeSantises of this world succeed in creating their white supremacist totalitarian hellscape (for some, paradise for those already slavishly devoted to their hate-fuelled worldview, the only people genuinely free in such a society because they already think the "right" way), then that too will eventually rot from the head down.

But they will kill a lot of people first, and make countless more live lives of filth, squalor and despair which they will be made to believe is heaven, Or Else.