From the BBC comes an assessment of the original and real American Superman.
“…it blew my mind when I saw it. He’s essentially a violent socialist.” The earliest issues of Action Comics bear out this assessment. When there are wrongs to be righted, Superman knocks down doors and dangles suspects from fifth-storey windows, and he makes hearty jokes while he’s doing so: “See how easily I crush your watch in my palm? I’ll give your neck the same treatment!”
…of the people who are roughed up by this boisterous outlaw…the majority are so wealthy that they don’t need to rob banks: there is the mine owner who skimps on safety measures, the construction magnate who sabotages a competitor’s buildings, the politician who buys a newspaper in order to turn it into a propaganda sheet. Rather than being a typical costumed crime-fighter, then, the Superman of 1938 was a left-wing revolutionary.
The S was for being an American socialist, a super one at that.
When efficiency becomes the supreme value, it crowds out everything that actually makes systems robust and humane.
It’s weird intellectual laziness disguised as sophistication. Like, “we’ve solved it, just optimize for the single metric!” But real systems – whether they’re societies, ecosystems, or self-driving cars – are irreducibly complex.
The obsession with efficiency creates blindness to interdependencies, to edge cases, to the messy realities that don’t fit the clean model. It’s literally being blind, by refusing to see things that are obvious, acting like a toddler in a tantrum.
It’s why engineered systems fail catastrophically rather than gracefully degrading. It’s why societies that optimize for pure economic efficiency end up weakened, brittle and cruel.
And there’s something almost masturbatory about efficiency worship – this self-congratulatory feeling of having cut through all the “unnecessary” complexity to find the One True Way. But complexity isn’t a bug to be eliminated; it’s often where resilience and adaptation live.
The horrible deadly Tesla failures for example have always been by design, idiocy dressed up as visionary. Musk gets to feel like an emperor for rejecting a “complex” multi-sensor approach, yet meanwhile his cars are literally stopping in intersections and speeding through school zones mowing down children.
The efficiency ideology revealed him as dumb, unable to process basic feedback that the redundancy and “inefficient” backup systems are actually what safety requires.
Historians recognize this. It’s really just an old white supremacist authoritarian impulse that reality must conform to their elegant racist theory of total control, rather than the theory of power adapting to actual human reality.
It’s about a worldview that sees nuance, interdependence, and adaptive complexity as weaknesses rather than strengths.
When your system is built around the assumption that you’ve already found the One True Way, then any evidence that contradicts that becomes noise to be filtered out rather than signal to be heeded for true innovations.
Tesla’s dumb deadly Robotaxis stopping in intersections, driving “scary as hell” on the wrong side of the road and committing crimes… aren’t sensor bugs because causing harm to society is classified as an inconvenient fact within a deeply racist ideological edifice.
A single police officer in 1994 killed South African “efficiency experts” (AWB) who had been “gaming” Black neighborhoods by shooting at women and children. It was headline news at the time, because AWB promised a race war to forcibly remove all “waste” from government, and instead ended up wasted on the side of a road.
DOGE is simply a racist DOG whistle.
A South African Afrikaner Weerstandsbeweging (AWB) member in 2010 (left) and a South African-born member of MAGA in the U.S. on 20 January 2025 (right). Source: The Guardian. Photograph: AFP via Getty Images, Reuters
I grew up around the pleasant sunflower. Perhaps I took it for granted, but Native American art presented thousands of years of expressing the variations of sunflower respect.
Never, ever did I consider any European impressions of a sunflower anything more than a footnote by late movers who never really quite understood or captured the proper context of the natural power flowing over endless prairie hills, which a sunflower could survive. You want to see strength? Crawl out of a tornado bunker after torrential rains to find a sunflower being baked by a blazing sun.
Sunflowers after a deadly EF-4 tornado went through Barnsdall, Oklahoma. Source: News on 6
The BBC thus has just achieved something remarkable by throwing away all basic history and instead publishing a tone-deaf article about a sunflower having symbolism that only begins in… 1568.
Unlike many other symbols in art history, the sunflower is relatively new. They are native to the Americas and were only introduced to the “Old World” following Columbus’s explorations and European colonisation in the 16th Century. When they were successfully cultivated and propagated in Europe, the fact that immature sunflowers move their faces to follow the sun (a phenomenon known as heliotropism) became the plants’ most compelling feature, which fundamentally shaped its symbolic meanings. In 1568, the botanist Giacomo Antonio Cortuso, linked the flower to an ancient mythological character…
What? It’s like reading a treatise on the law of gravity that says it didn’t exist before Galileo started playing with his balls. The structure of the short-sighted BBC argument is that “the history of sunflower symbolism” only started when the violence of European foreign extraction decided to pay attention to one of their imports. Next the BBC will opine how water wasn’t wet until King Charles decided to tax people for inland ships and someone complained any boat that doesn’t float isn’t a boat.
Oh British writers, where would we all be if we didn’t get to ready your peculiar form of intellectual provincialism whereby your own ignorance is presented and undeniable universal absence. Van Gogh’s paintings are as revolutionary as the English laying claim to have found tea, conveniently blind to traditions developing forever before him. This represents a category error of impressive scope. The conflation of “European discovery” with anything actually having a “beginning” produces the same logical fallacy as claiming that fire was invented when the first Tesla rolled off the assembly line and crashed into a tree burning everyone inside to death. Before that? Not a real fire, not expressionist enough.
What the BBC presents us is the disgusting “colonial solipsism” that should have been made illegal around the same time slavery was banned—the systematic inability to conceive that knowledge might exist independently of a particular race claiming the first observation. It is philosophy of the most impoverished sort: the mistake of one’s own limitations for the limits of reality itself. The inability to wonder. The cultural bankruptcy of the BBC article is to deny a thousand years of indigenous sunflower iconography from being acknowledged. Who knows why this can still happen in 2025? Is it too much to ask for the modest effort of learning something not already pre-masticated by self-congratulatory institutions of white superiority?
The BBC’s history isn’t just wrong; it’s a continuation of racist colonial scaffolding that undermines knowledge and should have been dismantled generations ago.
Musk Watch reports there’s a severe cash crunch at a certain information warfare platform that has been trying and failing to rewrite history.
…burning through cash at a high clip. Bloomberg reported last week that xAI had already exhausted much of the $14 billion it raised since 2023, with only $4 billion remaining on its balance sheet as of March 31. While Musk denied the report, xAI’s financial demands are apparent. The company is currently attempting to raise $4.3 billion via an equity investment after securing a $5 billion debt sale last week.
Any historian could have told Musk that there’s no money in it. You don’t write history to be profitable.
And, any information warfare historian could have told Musk when you cut your special holes into a dissemination platform the public discourse pegs never fit. This is propaganda 101 stuff.
Nazi Germany has many examples of why and how this failed, as I’ve written here before, unintentionally predicting how horrible Musk would be at rewriting history. To be fair, he’s bad at everything other than taking people’s money for nothing.
That is to say Musk isn’t someone who cares about reality, or real history. He was believed only so far as science fiction had opened the door for him to weaponize STEM against itself. But that skill at defrauding the public about science doesn’t translate well to the humanities. Science fiction is about the possibilty of science, whereas fiction is not at all about history, it’s the diametric opposite. The more fiction the less history. He faces a completely different and much more sophisticated trigger set among general populations.
Maybe his matrix of foreign-backed fraud balloon schemes will continue floating another minute on the hot air from burning piles of cash…but what does a delayed crash mean? If history is any guide, they will expand harm a year or two from now. Remember the hundreds of Tesla killing people after investors piled into the fraud of FSD in 2016, such that by 2021 it was an unmistakable threat to the public?
I mean, to this historian at least, this looks like the kind of lesson that was handed to German white supremacists in 1948 (Elon Musk’s grandparents’ decision to move operations to South Africa) and the lesson handed South African white supremacists in 1988 (Elon Musk’s parents’ decision to move operations to Canada – and then illegally the US).
So apparently we are right on time for the grandson and son of white supremacists to learn his 2028 lesson – 40 years on the dot. Third time is the charm? Can we end this white supremacist transmission cycle?
a blog about the poetry of information security, since 1995
