Yeah, I don't think I could do a pure 'passive income' thing with no 'soul' to it, but there is something to be said for building a business that runs and makes money even when you are asleep or on vacation. This is something that some 'passion businesses' where it's all about the founder and their skills, fail to do.
My grandparents were pretty WASPy, conservative people who lived in northern Idaho. And they hated the white supremacist/neonazi groups up there with a burning passion. They were of an age to remember people going off to fight in Germany and Asia against that kind of ideology.
They would have been absolutely appalled and ashamed to see a business leader throwing those salutes and backing it up with talk of a "white homeland" and similar comments.
I find it deeply dismaying that people consider that "just politics" or that opposing it is "ideological". We can argue all day about the proper rate of corporate taxation or debate the best way to implement environmental regulations, and I will not consider you a bad person if you disagree with me. But the kind of crap coming out of that guy? That's beyond politics.
I live in Idaho I know loads of people and family who I would have bet would reject what is happening in today’s Republican Party but man was I wrong. With very few exceptions they gobble it up.
Yes. In the 90's in particular. I'm old and I was in Idaho at the time. What I remember, and I try in vain to remind my conservative family and friends, is that both parties wanted that shit rode out of town on a rail back then. It is now the dominant world view in Idaho conservative politics. I will point to the "accomplishments" of our last legislative session as evidence.
This is exactly what I'm talking about. My grandparents were no paragon of 'racial justice' but did they ever hate those Nazis. Back then, the Nazis were excluded from 'polite society' and had no hope of gaining power through normal democratic channels. That has changed.
Sure, so did my dad, and Idaho politicians who are still in office to this day. Guess what? They don’t hate Nazis any more. Well, they don’t hate Republicans acting like Nazis. If a Democrat were to throw a Nazi salute they’d be upset about that.
I specifically remember my dad talking to his parents about that one on the phone and being scared for them.
Like my other comment below though, part of the reason they resorted to violence is because at that time, they had no hope of participating in mainstream, electoral politics.
Well. Treasure Valley felt remarkably more WS-ey to me this last time visiting home. The time before that was right before the election, so it feels like it's gotten even worse over time.
If you read Anti-Semite and Jew, one of Sartre’s main points about the rise of anti-semitism is the intentional adoption of a “nothing matters, lol” attitude of its adopters.
The entire point is to invite/allow otherwise “good” people to be able to think it’s not entirely serious, and that caring is pearl-clutching and is lame.
That way they can vote for their tax cuts, wear their “team” colors, and keep voting for “their” party.
It happens with successful sports teams all the time. Tiger Woods just got in his fourth (likely under the influence) car wreck, and sports media is already making excuses or talking about how hard he must have it. It’s the same process.
This is a controversial opinion, but I do think that there are objectively right and wrong sides of political ideologies.
At its core, there's nothing wrong with conservatism. Wanting to preserve traditional cultural and social values; the nuclear family with a father and mother figure; theology as the moral backbone—all of these are reasonable ideas. But somewhere along the way this got associated with xenophobia, racism, bigotry, intolerance, hatred, and all kinds of evil shit, which goes against even the teachings of their holy scriptures. How people can hold these conflicting viewpoints is beyond me. Either they're using this ideology as an excuse for their heinous thoughts and behavior, or they're intellectually incapable of introspection and critical thinking. Maybe both.
I'm moderately left leaning, and the extreme left has also undoubtedly lost the plot, but at least that side espouses tolerance, humanism, and some ideas that I find appealing but don't consider essential to humanity, such as secularism, skepticism, liberalism, etc. There are objectionable ideas on the left as well, but these are often a reaction to the intolerance of the other side, and rarely a product of the ideology itself. I do think this is needed to a certain extent, as complete tolerance is a weakness that opportunistic people will exploit (paradox of tolerance).
So to me it's clear that one side is on the right side of history, and the other one isn't. One is trying to move us towards a better future and well-being for everyone, while the other is sabotaging this to destroy and hoard riches for a few.
I'm still unable to process that people like Trump, Putin, Orbán, et al, are able to not only be successful, but to accumulate unimaginable wealth and power. It's not only that I disagree with their politics. It's that I'm baffled by the fact that we put people like this in power, and that the majority are unable to see the harm they're doing to the world, only so that they can enrich themselves and their very close inner circle. These are signs that humanity is still held back by some deeply rooted social traits which I'm not sure we'll be able to overcome before it's too late. Part of me is also disturbed by the negative role technology is playing in all of this, yet we're all entranced by its appeal to do anything about it.
One of the five fundamental pillars of conservative thought, as phrased by wikipedia (which is itself merely paraphrasing Russel Kirk, a foundational of post-war American conservativatism), is:
> A conviction that society requires orders and classes that emphasize natural distinctions.
Racism and bigotry are not errant additions to conservatism, they're a logical extension of one of its foundational pillars. (Though that is not to say that the left is not without its racism and bigotry as well, it's just less of a natural fit)
Political ideas don't come in isolation. You cited some relatively benign aspects of conservatism. But those are symptoms of a deeper process, and that same process brings both the benign aspects and the malignant aspects. People's stances on these issues aren't independent. They are correlated by some common factor that causes all of them, and we're not quite sure what that is and it may have evolutionary underpinnings. We call the common factor conservatism (or progressivism, when it's flipped the opposite way).
A lot of it is based in social position / class. People that benefit from the existing ways unsurprisingly want them to continue. People that do not benefit, would like to see it changed.
Conservatives are a minority because we live in an unequal society, so necessarily the people benefiting and wanting that to continue are that same minority. There are a relatively small number of people that are confused about their class position or are aspirational and confuse their current position with actually achieving a social leap.
Of course, then there are personality types that metabolize this in different ways, but the basis of politics is materialism. A lot of money and words are deployed to obscure this, which has been known for over a hundred years. I was reading Thucydides (440 BCE) and in the first few pages he grounds significant political events in materialist forces.
> I'm still unable to process that people like Trump, Putin, Orbán, et al
I am sure you put these people in the same basket by no logical reason, as they are very different and the reason behind each of them is very different. As an Eastern European I understand a bit more Orban and Putin, I don't have to agree with them to understand how things work, and they the 3 have almost nothing in common but being targeted by the political left as the enemy.
Come on, you know what they mean. They're authoritarian populist leaders with a disregard for the rule of law. Cruel men that rejoice in the "destruction" of their political enemies both figuratively and literally. Men with little emotional control that suffer from severe anxiety at anything that doesn't fit their very narrow view of the world.
Anyone who doesn't think what Musk did was a Nazi salute, I encourage you to watch the video over and over, enough times so that you can memorize and replicate it, then go into work and do it in front of your manager, and see what happens.
Of course, as expected, the Elon Musk Defense League showed up right on time. Does he give out $100 for every post defending his honor online?
I think there are better things to focus on about Elon Musk, like his role in getting Trump elected, the misinfo tweets he reposts with "Exactly" and "Concerning" (where the top community note trivially debunks the tweet -- he doesn't care whether it's real), making a stink about the Epstein files until he was cool with Trump again, promoting right-wing slop like Gunther Eagleman, changing Twitter in general like how you can freely say the n-word now, how he went about DOGE, what he promotes vs what he's silent on.
But I've yet to see someone show video of a prominent democrat doing the same salute as Musk. Which is probably why it's left as an exercise for the reader to find.
That said, we don't need to speculate about his salute when you can look directly at the slop he posts on Twitter.
“If you ignore the ways they’re different, they’re the same”
Those are different gestures. Musk is clearly forcefully throwing out his harm, mimicking the Nazi salute. Booker is moving his arm from his chest to a waving motion, using two hands instead of one at some points.
I guess we're at "it's your fault for having eyes" part of the defense of the action.
It seemed pretty blatant to me if you watch the whole video, the chest pound and the clear arm/hand extension really makes it difficult to see as anything else.
It was distinctly different from the stills of other politicians waving that often get used as comparison by trolls trying to defend it... when you compare videos the difference is not even questionable.
They all know it, they want to dominate the narrative by filling it with a stream of garbage that reasonable people can't help but argue with. It's not worth the time.
Getting excited about Elon claims is foolish. His fab will go nowhere similar to his endless battery claims. It’s just another Musk attempt to grab federal subsidies.
Yeah, similar situation for me. All the promises of an optimistic sci-fi future become hollow when one remembers that the person espousing them is openly and actively opposed to those optimistic ideals.
Even just the disingenuous boosting of obvious lies that are convenient to his worldview (claiming genuine curiosity), by a supposedly intelligent man, is gross enough.
It has me wonder how much he wants those futures or just knows they are very good vehicles for fundraising, because his personal business model seems to be more based on fundraising and stock price than profits.
Ever since the pivot to having SpaceX go public, claiming Mars plans would be taking a back seat, and burdening SpaceX with X, I am convinced it is just about fundraising. He broke pretty much every promise about SpaceX's long term ambition.
Maybe he did once believe in these things, but he has definitely changed on that now.
I'm going to assume good faith on your part, and that you're ignorant of specific things Elon has said and done in support of white supremacy in general, and promoting antisemitism in particular.
Elon has frequently lied about George Soros paying activists, and espoused the "white replacement theory", which is that Jews are conspiring to "dilute" and replace the white population.
He has also platformed literal white supremacists on X -- at the same time he has silenced his own critics. If Elon isn't a literal Nazi, he supports ideologies that are 100% compatible with Nazism.
I find it telling that both of those sources (one of which cites the other btw) conflate posts about "race science" and posts that are "anti-immigration conspiracies". These are not remotely the same thing. Elon is clearly against immigration policies enacted by a large number of western countries, a stance which does not make one a Nazi or white supremacist.
Also in that Guardian article the evidence given for him being an anti-semite are that he unbanned people on Twitter and that he supports the AfD and told the country to get over its "past guilt" (a two-word quote btw is a sign of journalistic malfeasance, if you can't fit the context of a quote in your article then don't include the quote at all).
So, that's really extremely underwhelming evidence and honestly I'd appreciate a more critical reading of the source material you've provided.
I think you and MANY others should probably have a significantly higher bar for calling someone a white supremacist or a Nazi given all that such a statement implies.
I dunno, I read through their good faith post, and I judge it to be pretty convincing.
Sorry you don't feel the same way, but I guess no matter what someone says, there will always be at least 1 individual in the world who disagrees with it or simply doesn't like it.
Here's some explicit promotion of white supremacy for you: Elon quote tweeting -- to over 43 million views, including many people who only saw it because Elon ordered the algorithm changed to promote his tweets! -- the following:
"If White men become a minority, we will be slaughtered. Remember, if non-Whites openly hate White men while White men hold a collective majority, then they will be 1000x times more hostile and cruel when they are a majority over Whites. White solidarity is the only way to"
Referring to all "non-whites" as violent brutes who would indiscriminately kill all white people is white supremacist thinking. It's a necessary part of white people justifying control of, and violence against, people of color.
> So, that's really extremely underwhelming evidence and honestly I'd appreciate a more critical reading of the source material you've provided.
I assume you are an intelligent person. That makes playing dumb like this so frustrating. If you don't think the sources I cited are convincing, I would urge you to do even five minutes of googling and see if you could find the evidence that has somehow eluded you so far. It is not hard to find.
PS I belatedly realize you did not even acknowledge Musk's Nazi salute. Perhaps you don't think that's anti-semitic, either.
> Referring to all "non-whites" as violent brutes who would indiscriminately kill all white people is white supremacist thinking. It's a necessary part of white people justifying control of, and violence against, people of color.
To be clear, I think that person Elon quote-tweeted seems pretty racist from looking at their post history. However I failed to see where that particular quote referred to all non-white people as "brutes". The idea being communicated is clearly "if non-Whites openly hate White men while White men hold a collective majority, then they will be 1000x times more hostile and cruel when they are a majority over Whites."
That is clearly an argument from statistics not universalality. I'm not interested in debating those particular statistics, but again your critical reading skills are not up to snuff.
> I assume you are an intelligent person. That makes playing dumb like this so frustrating.
I fail to see in my previous post how I am playing dumb. I think you might think that your own position is so overwhelming obvious that you cannot conceive of someone disagreeing on reasonable grounds, and yet that's exactly what I'm doing.
> PS I belatedly realize you did not even acknowledge Musk's Nazi salute. Perhaps you don't think that's anti-semitic, either.
Honestly, I think so many people were calling him a Nazi at the time that he just did it to fuel the trolls . Maybe you don't think that public figures fuck with people like that, but it sure seems like they do to me.
EDIT: as I've said elsewhere I think there should be a very high bar to actually think that someone is an actual Nazi. Hyperbole is all well and good, but people are dead serious when they say these things and that's actually insane to me
> Honestly, I think so many people were calling him a Nazi at the time that he just did it to fuel the trolls
If your reaction to being called a Nazi is to behave like a Nazi, then perhaps you actually have Nazi sympathies. Honestly, that "reasoning" can be used to justify literally ANY behavior. The "I was just kidding bro" defense is intellectually dishonest because it cannot be disproven. What if Elon said, "I am a white supremacist" but then winks afterwards? Would that be enough plausible deniability?
What if he supported a political party in Germany that wanted to ban immigrants based on their religion, and even deport naturalized citizens based on their religion? Oh wait, he already does! But again, you will pretend that this is not evidence of any kind of bias based on race or religion -- or, if it is, that he is simply "trolling the libs".
>What if he supported a political party in Germany that wanted to ban immigrants based on their religion, and even deport naturalized citizens based on their religion? Oh wait, he already does! But again, you will pretend that this is not evidence of any kind of bias based on race or religion -- or, if it is, that he is simply "trolling the libs".
So you're aware that the article you linked once again doesn't support what you are saying, right? I'm reasonably aware of German politics, although I wont claim to be intimately familiar with various minutiae, but the impression I have is that in general AfD wants to deport people from "third-world countries", most of which happen to be Muslim, due more to geography than anything else, just like how Trump is focused on deporting people from south and central America. You realize that not wanting people who were raised in under-developed countries with under-developed rights and rules is not the same as being racist or discriminating on the basis of religion, right? You can debate whether not wanting such people in the country is right or wrong, but don't call it something that it isn't, if you believe that you're doomed to misunderstand.
I bet there are AfD members who want to deport all Muslims, that doesn't make it the party's platform, just like there are members of the Democratic party who support reparations for slavery and members of the Republican party who would also support deporting all Muslims, but those are not part of either party's platform.
> If your reaction to being called a Nazi is to behave like a Nazi, then perhaps you actually have Nazi sympathies. Honestly, that "reasoning" can be used to justify literally ANY behavior. The "I was just kidding bro" defense is intellectually dishonest because it cannot be disproven. What if Elon said, "I am a white supremacist" but then winks afterwards? Would that be enough plausible deniability?
You cannot take a single gesture and say that performing it is outright behaving like a Nazi with the implication that such a thing would only be done by a Nazi. I'll add that many other non-Nazis do similar hand gestures, turns out humans like the hand gesture going from heart-to-sky.
You know what I would call behaving like a Nazi? The systematic rounding up and/or extermination of specific groups on the basis of nothing but their ethnicity, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, etc. And before you try to say ICE is doing that, kindly shut the fuck up, because coming into the country illegally is precluded by the words "...on the basis of nothing but...". I'm pointing that out to you ahead of time because your reading comprehension has been poor throughout this and I just know you'd pick up on that.
> You cannot take a single gesture and say that performing it is outright behaving like a Nazi with the implication that such a thing would only be done by a Nazi
I am continuously surprised by how hard you work to rationalize away everything Elon is doing as an isolated action, when I have gone out of my way to show you a pattern of acting in a way that betrays white supremacist sympathies. Your behavior is baffling.
> You know what I would call behaving like a Nazi? The systematic rounding up and/or extermination of specific groups on the basis of nothing but their ethnicity, religious beliefs, sexual orientation, etc.
Perhaps this is the explanation! Judging by your own words, the only thing that would convince you is Elon personally rounding up vulnerable minority groups and literally sending them to death camps. Indeed, that would be a very convincing argument. It would also come far too late.
I personally think it's enough to show that Elon has given a bullhorn to some of the loudest white supremacist voices out there and personally allied himself with a president who has repeatedly targeted those most vulnerable minorities: trans people, immigrants (including green card holders, asylum seekers and, increasingly, naturalized citizens), Muslims and others.
If you will not be convinced until you see with your own eyes that Elon is rounding up Jews to the gas chambers, then I am starting to wonder if you are arguing in good faith.
You actually should have a high bar to make grandiose claims like calling someone a Nazi.
> I personally think it's enough to show that Elon has given a bullhorn to some of the loudest white supremacist voices out there and personally allied himself with a president who has repeatedly targeted those most vulnerable minorities: trans people, immigrants (including green card holders, asylum seekers and, increasingly, naturalized citizens), Muslims and others.
Right, so you think anyone who's allied with Trump is a Nazi. To be incredibly clear, I have never voted for Trump, but people like you who are incapable of nuance are what is wrong with everything in the world.
You may doubt whether I'm arguing in good faith, but I long ago became certain that you are not arguing with good reasoning skills.
Say you're Elon Musk, billionaire and really smart guy. And you're asked to give a speech. That speech will be viewed by millions.
You probably have a speechwriter, and a PR consultant, and hey, why not a body language consultant. When you get on stage, you're going to present exactly the message you mean to. Anything less would be a waste of your time, right?
I don't actually believe this, but am picking an argument that I expect deadeye an Elon apologist to believe. If you don't think he's smart I don't need to convince you?
I'd suggest you dig a little deeper into American history. For example, "America First" isn't a new slogan. It's been used in its current sense for at least a century. Murdoch via Roger Ailes poured oil on the fire, but that was only possible because the sentiment already existed here and always has.
Seriously, our constitution was literally written to embolden a minority of slave owners and make sure that the people could not hold them accountable due to the structure of the government.
It was always a colonial white nationalist state and it took a civil war + second founding before people weren't treated as property. It then took nearly another 100 years before all peoples in this country could vote.
We're literally the first generation of Americans who grew up with nearly total emancipation + universal suffrage and we still have people fighting to bring back polling taxes and removing citizenship.
Unfortunately this is true. Around a year, or two years ago the WaPo (back before it was a total shill, yes it was still bad but... you know) had an article about how all the rhetoric from the far right in the US was almost, word for word, what was said a little more than 100 years ago. It was downright scary. Some part of the US has _always_ been that way. Maybe someone can find the article.
You’re right that this has always existed and at times even driven governance and society in the US.
There’s also been times when other values more like what the GP implies have driven governance and social direction in the US. There was a side with values like that in the civil war. There was government and there were movements with those values for much of the 20th century especially following periods of national trial when it was clear we needed governing values that truly drove the common welfare.
A lot of us grew up and are still living with the fruits of that. That’s the America we’ve known. We’ve also always known that there are many Americans who never bought in, who had a vision more like the other side of the civil war, or want welfare that’s a bit more unevenly distributed, perhaps not even distributed in some directions at all.
It can still be a bit of a shock to find out that illiberal portion growing with a grip on a growing number of levers of power.
Can the America with a vision of truly common welfare reassert itself? Maybe. Maybe not.
Manifest destiny? Trail of tears? Japanese internment camps? Madison Square Garden Nazi rallies in the 1930s?
I'd argue that at least 30% of Americans throughout history have been white supremacists. Heck, the country was founded by rebelling against the British, that amongst other measures (many to do with taxes) wanted to limit Western expansion against non White peoples.
Shouldn't like, half of Oklahoma - LEGALLY - belong to Native Americans? Based on treaties the US has signed.
The entire history of the US is founded on white supremacy. From the genocide of Indigenous people, to slavery, to Hiroshima, Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Palestine...
Only Titanic and Avatar earned more money (inflation adjusted) than this film:
One of the biggest accounts on X hosts one of the most listened to podcasts on Spotify/Apple and has a huge following that's grown exponentially since 2023. He's an active Holocaust denier, proud antisemite, and dined with the president and members of his cabinet on more than one occasion.
To say there's no growing movement towards Nazi and anti-Jewish ideologies is to be willfully ignorant of the world around you.
Twitter has over a billion users. You can find big accounts saying all sorts of inflammatory things.
What you are complaining about is that tweets which rile you up are not censored. But those days are basically over, so you may want to consider leaving twitter if you insist on a higher level of censorship than what twitter is giving you.
Of course if you already left twitter, and are still complaining merely about the existence of a business that doesn't censor to your taste, then I would recommend looking for other past times. Try baseball.
Sorry, hard disagree. Bad faith entirely precludes debate because debate is about updating and improving a position through exchanges of views, and that starts with the ability and willingness to budge from said position in the first place.
Which incidentally means that there is by definition no debating tenants of a position that can't survive one minute of good faith review. They're not there to debate. They're there to drown out and silence a truth about material reality that they're upset about.
Elon is a narcissistic man-child with too much influence. But he's not a Nazi, and I'm really sick of Americans throwing that word around without a modicum of thought.
Nazis are why my great-grandfather fled Poland at 17 after losing his brother and both parents. He evaded the Germans across Europe, joined the Polish government in exile in Scotland, and never returned. He married a Scottish woman while he had no fixed address in 1947, found some kind of peace working as a coal miner for 37 years in the worst conditions imaginable, and didn't see his sisters again for decades. He didn't even know if they were alive.
Millions were displaced like this, millions more had their family lines ended entirely. You trivialise that when you slap "Nazi" on every arsehole with a platform.
Money and power are not the same thing. You just make it true by believing it. The boss of IKEA's political opinions don't matter here in Sweden because he can't actually do anything (He’s an actual documented Nazi sympathiser btw). The institutions won't let him. If yours will, that's a problem with your institutions, not a reason to call someone a Nazi.
How much of your headspace is Musk renting? He does not matter as much as you think. And if he did, you'd be better off explaining why what he says is dangerous rather than screaming "Nazi" into the void.
Dismissing someone isn't the same as defeating them. You want bad ideas to not take root? Dispel them. Make the argument. Show why it's wrong. That changes minds, or at least puts enough out there that the ideas don't land with someone else (which is why the rise of the right is happening). Shouting "Nazi" and walking off doesn't make the problem go away. It just moves it somewhere you can't see it, and it'll come back for you, probably wearing a stupid red hat when it does.
Ok so make that case. What specifically is he doing, what mechanisms is he using, what does the trajectory look like? Because that’s an argument worth having and I’d probably agree with a lot of it. But “this is a Nazi before he gets into his stride” is still just the label doing the work instead of the argument. That’s my entire point.
I’ll grant you he’s a Nazi sympathiser, there’s enough evidence for that and its easy to lay it out. But that’s the argument you should be making, with specifics, not just calling him a Nazi and leaving it there. Because the specifics are what actually alarm people. The label just lets them dismiss you.
Wide reaching propaganda that advocates for a white ethnostate (this alone is enough), explicit displays of Nazism with the heil, financial support to white supremacist parties in the US and abroad.
See, this is what I’m asking for. You’re making an actual argument now and I don’t even disagree with most of it. The AfD support and the white solidarity stuff is indefensible. I’d call him a Nazi sympathiser based on the evidence.
But that’s not what the original comment said. It said “he’s a Nazi and there’s nothing to debate.” There’s a world of difference between building the case you just built and just slapping the label on and shutting down the conversation. One of those persuades people. The other one lets them dismiss you.
> If we turn our back on the voting population you have to accept that someone else who reaches out to them gets their vote.
So you need to start spreading fairy tales too?
A bunch of those votes are from people that don't like what's going on. But if you ask them what they do want, you get blank stares. It's easy to, mostly with hindsight, say what things were bad decisions. It's much harder to be in favor of something because that makes you 'vulnerable'.
To keep it US centric, some person campaigned on cost of living issues and how he would fix them all. He got plenty of votes for that and just doesn't care (paraphrasing).
I can campaign on lower taxes, better healthcare, better schools, higher wages and more jobs.... But unless I have a way to actually get there, accounting for political realities, that doesn't really mean anything...
Hilary's Basket of Depolrables speech 2 months before voting
> you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.
She's talking about more than 30 million voters there. She's actively rejecting them, and criticising Trump for engaging with them.
> She's talking about more than 30 million voters there. She's actively rejecting them, and criticising Trump for engaging with them.
Ok, but let's say there are 5M xenophobic people. What's your proposed solution for bringing them back into the fold?
It used to be that there was a shared basis of facts. Numbers don't lie, you can explain them any way you want though.
In the past 10 years, America has really just lost it's ability to look at numbers. Partially because of them being explained differently by both sides but mostly I think because of actively discrediting them by one side that doesn't want to talk numbers, but feelings.
Trump wants to address feelings, he'll lose any other debate. He doesn't know his facts, he doesn't care about them, he's basically built his life on selling a brand. And a brand is whatever you think it is today.
"losing by default" on elmu's "X" is actually totally okay
> If we turn our back on the voting population
I don't see how refusing to patronize 1 nazi is "turning your back on the voting population". Especially when the voting population doesn't like nazis. It's more like embracing the voting population.
But if far right parties are gaining votes - then some voting population is giving votes to them. Or are you saying that far right parties are not Nazis?
Which votes are those again? In the USA, which we're talking about here.
If refusing to patronize 1 nazi means the far right gets more voters, we would expect to see that in USA election results over the last year or so.
Fortunately, this hypothesis is not borne out in the data. In fact, I'd say your purported correlation is inverted, but I suspect there is a deeper, correlated variable: "doesn't like nazis" -> ( "doesn't vote for nazis", "doesn't patronize nazis" ).
We must be looking at different data. Most of Europe has seen a significant increase in far right support. Italy, France, Germany. And in the US, like it or not, there are people who feel represented by the MAGA movement. And last I checked - they managed to elect a president who invented this acronym.
Pretending these people don't exist might feel nice but ignore them at your peril. If this is what "Nazis don't vote" looks like - what would it look like when they start?
That’s a strawman. The real reason is the ridiculous amount of unchecked hate that is allowed to run amok on the internet that it’s becoming normalized. Everyone is susceptible to propaganda and no one has a chance when you’re constantly bombarded by it. Having a “debate” doesn’t work with fascism, that’s what they “engage” in while they are implementing their plans.
They are very demonstrably not making the same movement and I strongly feel like it would take someone trying to reason backwards from a predetermined conclusion to see this
>What about when Zohran Mamdani or AOC or Kamala makes the EXACT SAME MOTION?
If they did, they'd make international news for the same reason.
They did not. A freeze frame of someone waving their hand ain't remotely close to the specific "from my heart to the stars" gesture that Elon Musk did twice in a row.
Which doesn't even matter as much as his long, established history of pushing white-supremacist views, supporting white supremacist movements, and using neo-nazi dog whistles (like posting 14 flag emojis at 14:14PM EST).
I can't believe you're making me defend Tucker Carlson of all people, but he's pointing out that races should be treated equally. (Apparently in response to someone's statement he considered racist? I don't know or care enough to find out.)
But at least I see where you're making the connection to the phrase "white homeland" even though neither of the people involved are calling for that. Thanks for the link.
> business leader throwing those salutes and backing it up with talk of a "white homeland"
It is not every commenter's duty to cite their sources when you have the ability to easily infer the context and search the internet. These are very well documented actions that they refer to.
Your attempts to drive sentiment through casting doubt are noticed.
I know exactly how my grandparents would've reacted because I've seen it first-hand, and it's ugly and carries precisely zero validity. It's not to be emulated any more than someone who was born in 1850's skepticism towards automobiles and airplanes is.
You can call it white nationalism if you like but you are spouting the exact same talking points as white supremacists, you just prefer to buy it under a different brand.
What exactly would happen according to you? The state in question got more Mexicans or South Americans which are also descendants of European colonists? Almost every American have European heritage. In my opinion this doesn't make much sense for Americans.
There's no 'white' culture, there is modern North American culture and it's not something that belongs to a particular complexion. It's norms and traditions. These aren't remotely under threat of extinction from 'race mixing.'
The things that are under threat are the contemporary cultural values of openness and acceptance of other cultures/relgions/traits. These are truly valuable, positive aspects that stand out in contemporary American and European societies, and these are the things that are legitimately under threat, ironically, by those who attempt to normalize racism and xenophobia.
> There's no 'white' culture, there is modern North American culture and it's not something that belongs to a particular complexion.
This doesn't seem right to me. WASP culture absolutely does exist. Anyone can see it in full display by watching films like Dead Poets Society or Home Alone.
White Americans descend from a number of cultures that voluntarily moved here and involve food that thinks pepper is spicy.
Slavers deliberately mixed different groups of kidnapped Africans so they had no shared language and sold their children so they couldn't pass anything on to the next generation.
USA has a long history of erasing culture. If there is a lack of “white” culture it’s more the fault of other white people not “woke” culture. EVERYTIME there’s a new ethnic minority in USA they’re forced to assimilate through persecution and through the school systems.
> I find it deeply dismaying that people consider that "just politics" or that opposing it is "ideological"
It depends: if you support far right viewpoints, like wanting to deport minorities, the MSM will cover it as just politics. If you support far left (for America) viewpoints, like, wanting free healthcare, the MSM will cover it as if you're a radical communist.
To most people “I want to deport minorities” would imply nothing about citizenship status.
Someone with the opposite opinion would frame it as “open borders”, which is an extremist viewpoint globally and also not what people on the left in the US are advocating for.
Media coverage in the US is partisan. This is not an insightful viewpoint or nearly as incendiary as you’re making it out to be.
> I find it deeply dismaying that people consider that "just politics" or that opposing it is "ideological". We can argue all day about the proper rate of corporate taxation or debate the best way to implement environmental regulations, and I will not consider you a bad person if you disagree with me. But the kind of crap coming out of that guy? That's beyond politics.
Elon's behavior is truly disgraceful, but spouting dumb shit is not "beyond politics".
You wish to lead with "dumb shit" in framing why people have a problem with Elon Musk? Why not lead with the Nazi salute at the presidential podium? That would more quickly get to the point.
You do not have to look beyond Elon’s own Twitter accounts posts, retweets, and likes, to see that he is a full fledged white supremacist. Calling him a Nazi is appropriate.
Nazi salutes are protected speech and not "beyond politics". Yes it's disgraceful, and it's reasonable to leave his platform. But it qualifies as "dumb shit".
I think the point is to distinguish ‘political opinions that I am comfortable disagreeing with people about, and can still be friendly with people who strongly disagree with me’ and ‘morally unacceptable opinions that I will neither listen to nor associate with anyone who hold them’.
There are many political opinions that I strongly believe in that I am comfortable disagreeing with people on. I believe everyone has a right to health care, and that society should guarantee basic necessities for everyone. I even feel that belief is a morality based belief. However, I can accept people disagreeing with me, and can accept that there are some strong arguments against my belief, and that good people can disagree with my position.
On the other hand, if someone believes that certain races should not have the same rights, or that women should be given less agency than men, I will not entertain that argument or accept that it is just a political dispute. That is a fundamental moral issue, and is beyond JUST politics.
Affirmative action and similar policies are examples of those sorts of political opinions that I can happily debate, and I definitely don't think I have the perfect answers for how best to obtain the goal of equality.
As far as your particular question goes, I don't agree that believing that all races should have the same rights is inherently in conflict with the idea of affirmative action. In most implementations, there are no rights that are denied to anyone when affirmative action policies are implemented. The entire point and purpose is to counteract existing norms, institutions, and system structures that are actively denying rights to citizens in particular groups/races.
For example, take the original affirmative action order (from which the phrase was coined) signed by JFK in 1961. The text stated, "take affirmative action to ensure that applicants are employed, and employees are treated [fairly] during employment, without regard to their race, creed, color, or national origin"
What rights are being denied if that is followed? The idea is that it is clear through observation that the criteria that was being used before was preferential to white Christian men, so they were instructed to proactively address that unfairness by changing their hiring process to attempt to eliminate those biases. How is that in any way denying rights to any group?
That JFK quote is not what it means. It means denying access to limited places in education based on race. Do you mean those aren't rights so denying them doesn't fall within you definition of intolerable ideas?
You don't need to explain what it's for because what what it's for doesn't change what it is. If I robbed somebody to use the money to cure cancer, it doesn't change the fact that I still robbed somebody.
That is literally where the term comes from. It isn't a quote, it was an executive order. That language is what it legally meant.
> It means denying access to limited places in education based on race.
Every person accepted is a denial to someone else. As you said, there are limited spaces. If you define it as a right to have a space at that school, then by definition you have to deny some people their rights, since you can't accept all of them.
Affirmative action means you are supposed to factor in the existing disadvantages that minorities face when deciding between two candidates. It doesn't mean accepting a less qualified candidate, it means acknowledging that our previous methods for choosing between candidates was inherently discriminatory already, and in order to counteract that, we need to take 'affirmative action' to make things more fair.
You can always argue about what criteria should be used to choose between two comparable candidates, there is no such thing as a perfectly 'objective' evaluation. Even if you chose to base everything on a test score, you still have to decide what goes on the test and how the questions are worded. There is no way to do that that is perfectly fair for everyone, even if we accepted the premise that test scores are an accurate and fair measure for choosing who to accept to a school.
Why shouldn't the pervasive, clear, and systemic racism and discrimination that many minorities face be used as a factor when determining school acceptance? How is ignoring that reality 'more fair', and how is acknowledging and compensating for that reality a 'denial of rights' to anyone? Wouldn't it be a worse denial of rights to ignore the discrimination and racism, and making decisions as if the world wasn't the way it is?
> That is literally where the term comes from. It isn't a quote, it was an executive order. That language is what it legally meant.
It doesn't matter what the history is - we both know that is not what it means in practice today. Continuing to lean on this incorrect definition is dishonest. If that's really what you mean, then I completely agree with you, but you've shown that it's not what you really mean.
> then by definition you have to deny some people their rights, since you can't accept all of them.
Yes but you can do that without using their race as a factor.
You are still literally justifying denying rights to people because of their race. You have some reason for it but as I said, the reason doesn't change the fact that it's still denying rights because of race.
To show why it's wrong, imagine you're a black immigrant from a black country and you've never suffered any of this discrimination you talk about. You now get preferential access to tops universities because some other people who aren't you did suffer discrimination. That really just entrenches the unfairness.
Do you also favor a Jew tax because Jews are rich? That's the logic you're using. Treating individuals according to their group's characteristics. It's also the core of modern leftism (wokism) which why I suggested leftists would hate you for your ideas.
> It doesn't matter what the history is - we both know that is not what it means in practice today.
That isn't true. The sort of affirmative action I am talking about is still used in the world today. People who are against any sort of action to counter systemic racism have chosen to pretend that all affirmative action is the "racial quota" type that you are talking about and that has been illegal for quite some time. Continuing to pretend that is what affirmative action proponents are talking about is how opponents are attempting to get rid of fair and reasonable affirmative action by treating it all as the illegal kind.
The 'Jew tax' example is completely disingenuous. This is not applying any rule or law to a specific race, ethnicity, or religion; it is simply taking into account the effect that discrimination and racism has had on people when evaluating candidates for limited positions. It is not the same at all.
Your black immigrant example also is quite the reach. For one thing, that immigrant is facing racism and discrimination the moment they step into the country.
You say you are worried about unfairness being entrenched, but this has already happened and is what we are trying to fix. Racial discrimination against minorities is CURRENTLY entrenched in our institutions, and affirmative action is the attempt to overcome some of it.
I find it very interesting that you are so concerned about any advantages that might become entrenched for minorities, but are completely fine allowing the entrenched advantages for the majority to persist. You are more worried about hypothetical future advantages rather than actual present advantages.
The whole point of affirmative action is action is to acknowledge that if two candidates are equal or close to equal in qualifications, the one that has had more disadvantages is probably the better candidate and should be chosen.
"if two candidates are equal or close to equal in qualifications, the one [whose race] has had more disadvantages is probably the better candidate and should be chosen."
Now that I've changed it to say what you actually believe and have stated before, you can see why it's controversial.
You are really struggling with the idea that race-based discrimination is something you actually favor even though society has told you you're supposed to be intolerant of it. It's leading you into all these contradictions and justifications. Modern leftists have resolved these contradictions by not making such bold simple claims as you did.
I'll just leave you with an example from my own country. It's a kind of quota (100% for a specific race) so you might not like it or maybe you will. I have no idea because your idea is so inconsistent.
Well, all of these are politics and ideology. It's OK to have an ideological bent of some sort or other. You can indeed be highly intolerant of those who are intolerant in certain ways. You can hate certain kinds of hate. And you can call out greedy callous bastards wherever you see them. It's basically being discerning.
GP is saying neo-Nazis are "not just politics, but also something worse". You're not really disagreeing with them, maybe just missing their point about some ideologies being worthy of planned exclusion from a civilized society. Aka the paradox of tolerance. That's what makes some political stances "not just politics".
I find a lot of the paradox-ness goes away when one look at such arrangements a peace-treaties. (Or at least, it gets subsumed into a broader set of respective and respectable dilemmas.)
For example, just because Country A "wants peace" doesn't mean they do nothing as Country B gets taken over by a revanchists regime declaring the treaty evil and massing troops the borders. It would be ridiculous (and depressingly realistic) for some critics to say: "They don't really want peace, or else they would be a nation of pacifists who would let themselves get annexed right now without bloodshed.)
I view this paradox as just an effect of poor framing. We should not look at it as “I am against intolerance/hatred/XYZ”, but “I want to minimize intolerance/hatred/XYZ.” The first focuses on local, case-by-case contexts, the latter in aggregate. Some XYZs, in some contexts, have properties that make them effective local tools to mitigate themselves in an aggregate context, which is probably a better candidate paradox here.
But since when did using a business's product come to require sharing (or not sharing) political views with the business's owner? Seems to me that this is what has changed.
PS. It's amazing to me, and worrying, the anger and vituperation this position is provoking. It was once almost consensus. To take the obvious parallel, buying a newspaper did not imply agreement with the reactionary press baron who owned it.
In the case of X, the business owner is aggressively pushing his political views on users by heavy-handed methods like prioritizing his own posts in algorithmic feeds and overriding the context of his AI bot to parrot his pet ideas.
If you went to a restaurant and it had Confederate flags and pro-slavery memorabilia on the walls, would you think: “Well, that’s just their political view, I don’t have to share it to eat here?”
> pushing his political views on users by heavy-handed methods like prioritizing his own posts in algorithmic feeds
He's also using his fame and fortune to much more directly fund and promote political change in places like the UK. It goes beyond this one service, but moving away from this service weakens his position more broadly as well.
I will always remember fondly the story of "Little Black Sambo". I was at that point in childhood where judgement was not yet developed but I could appreciate a good story, especially if fantastic things happened. After all, I was a little boy like Sambo.
So I feared for Sambo when he encountered the tigers. I was elated when he eluded them by first racing around the tree and then climbing it. I was mystified how tigers running round and round a tree could turn to butter (but set that aside so I could continue the story and reduce my fearful suspense). I was relieved to see that Sambo was safe. I identified with Sambo (although I am neither black or brown).
Hoorah for the fantastic tales from many lands that filled my childhood and those of my brothers and sisters with wonder!
I am still a child when I read fairy tales and fables.
Same. From a child’s perspective, that’s what the story was.
But walking into a Sambo’s meant being immersed in the visual world, which was loaded with racist tropes. Sambo was depicted as a foolish child with dark skin and either a giant grin or eye-popping fear.
Again, I was a kid in the 1970s and I knew it was racist.
> the business owner is aggressively pushing his political views
That's always been the case with Twitter - Dorsey was just as bad, but just with a different set of political views. (Views that, I presume, the EFF is aligned with).
> If you went to a restaurant and it had Confederate flags and pro-slavery memorabilia on the walls, would you think: “Well, that’s just their political view, I don’t have to share it to eat here?”
Even more so if it's not just a personal decision to get a bite to eat, but one taken by a lobbying organization about where to host events promoting speech rights, and the new owner is co-opting their language of speech rights to justify his policy of putting Conferedate flags behind the bar (whilst actually barring more people he doesn't like than the old owner as well as scaring off most of the people who supported the organizations mission and pasting KKK event ads flyers over the top of theirs). At some point continuing to hang out there and host events for ever diminishing numbers of people who mostly seem to reinterpret everything you say as screeds against 'woke' ceases to be a "politically neutral, pro-free speech" stance.
Last year my sister visited me and she wanted to go a nearby karaoke bar because she loves karaoke. I'd never been to this place before.
We get there and it's all white people, and there was an older gentleman singing a country song. We take a seat at an empty booth underneath a confederate flag and a sign about the 2A. We joke about how rednecky the vibes were.
For context, my wife is Chinese and wears a hijab, my sister and I are southeast Asian, and my sister's boyfriend is Indian. Couldn't have a more non-white group if you'd asked for one.
Despite feeling deeply out of place, but not unsafe, we got some songs in, ate some meh bar food, and had an all-around good time. My sister's boyfriend chatted with some people in the smoke room. Everyone was friendly.
A lot of people really don't care about the politics of the establishments they visit. They just want to have a good time.
"If you went to a restaurant and it had Confederate flags and pro-slavery memorabilia on the walls, would you think: “Well, that’s just their political view, I don’t have to share it to eat here?”
Yes? If you go to the southern part of the United States, there are many restaurants with Confederate memorabilia and Confederate flags on the back of truck windows.
Some trucks even have hairy testicles hanging off the hitch haha!
If people get gender-affirming care for their trucks, that's their own business, but no, no I will not eat in a place with a Confederate flag.
I find the idea of venerating an ideology that held that it was ok to hold human beings in bondage from the moment of their birth to their death to be abhorrent.
In the past, most business owners would perhaps quietly donate to a party or candidates, but probably wouldn't hang their ideology out in front of people all day, every day. Think about someone like Warren Buffett. He has political views, but they are not something he's out there loudly airing on a huge platform.
And like I pointed out, these are not just any old "political views". It's extremist stuff that in the past would have gotten you ostracized. I'm old enough to remember Trent Lott losing his Senate leadership position, for instance.
Also, because of "network effects", simply providing content to Twitter makes the site more valuable.
This stuff sold well in the 20s and 30s and contributed to the initial wishy washy US response to the start of WW2. Imagine a priest way more influential than Rush Limbaugh rooting for the 3rd reich. Now imagine a rich Afrikaner who doesn't begrudge their precarious social standing.
Yes, but also much of this was due to Stalin/USSR having alliance/agreement with Germany on attacking Poland. Many/most? US leftists were pacifists until Hitler attacked the USSR.
There have always been business owners who shouted their ideology, and others who were quiet. You might remember some cases more than others, and some have had a louder voice than others, but both go way back.
Have there been any so brazen as Musk, who used his influence to infiltrate our government and usurp the congressional power of the purse directly and illegally?
Details are different, but there have been lots of examples over the years. Andrew Jackson had his "kitchen cabinet". There was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teapot_Dome_scandal, Watergate. There are plenty of other examples. In large part if something is an example or not depends on your politics - people tend to overlook the mistakes of someone they support.
It didn't used to be nearly as common for owners of midsize to large businesses to be loudly outspoken politically, especially those holding more extreme views. It used to be common sense to keep that sort of thing to oneself, if only to avert PR disaster. Not knowing when to shut up was more of a hallmark of the stereotypical two-bit owner of a crappy local business that perpetually struggled to grow.
This helped keep a neutral or at worst ambivalent image of these owners in the minds of the larger public and thus for the most part didn't factor into purchase decisions.
It's now easier than ever to see the true character of a business owner and so it's only natural that customers have begun to factor in this information in purchase/usage decisions.
That's because they don't stay in their lane as business owner, but use the proceeds of that business (and a bunch of others) to influence world politics in a way that no single individual should ever be able to.
If I have trillions of monkeys on typewriters generating every possible combination of characters, and then from what they "produce" I carefully select what I want to show everyone who comes to my website, how responsible am I for what my visitors see?
No, but they decide the moderation policy that incentivizes the content produced (by nature of selecting which users feel comfortable using their product and which do not).
For example, I do not feel comfortable using the same platform as people that post child sexual abuse material. X's Grok is infamous for generating such content on demand. I opt to use platforms that do not have this as a first-class feature. X has selected against my participation and for the participations of people who hold a contrary opinion to me. Even if Grok stops producing CSAM, that selection bias will persist.
Well, part of the product is Elon's posts and his editorial choices that go into the algorithm. Also your example of the newspaper is also odd, because newspapers were and are well known to be influenced by their publishers and people very often will trash them if they have a contrary ideological bent
Why should I contribute to the wealth of a man who wants people like me dead? Why should I tolerate others who happily contribute to my own oppression?
It isn't strictly required and it hasn't changed; it's always been complicated and it's always been a balance. This isn't speculation or a hot take. Consumer boycotts are as old as the hills, so it's an observable fact that our relationship with firms and their politics has been complicated and negotiated for a very long time.
Regarding your later edit:
> PS. It's amazing to me, and worrying, the anger and vituperation this position is provoking. It was once almost consensus. To take the obvious parallel, buying a newspaper did not imply agreement with the reactionary press baron who owned it.
It really shouldn't surprise you that if you express something that's a bit of a hot take that you'll get a reaction to it. You shouldn't draw any more of an inference from it then "people are passionate about this and some of them disagree with me." Whether people do so amicably or not has at least as much to do with the problems with the Internet as a means of communication as the issue itself.
Regardless, this status quo you refer to was mostly imagined. How much pressure people exert to boycott some platform or another waxes and wanes, because the underlying disagreements wax and wane in relevance. That doesn't really make it a new thing, just a new phase in the same unfolding history.
That's why you refer to the press barons in the era of yellow journalism - the past is not an undifferentiated mass where everyone held some set of values that have fallen from favor. To the people who were alive at the time, things were contentious and in flux and the future was uncertain.
We have a tendency to flatten the past and imagine it as a straightforward narrative where we necessarily arrived at where we are today because of the inevitable interaction of historical forces, and similarly to flatten the people who lived at the time as being caricatures who reliably held a certain set of values. But they disagreed with each other, viewed the future as up for grabs like we do, and they changed their minds as history unfolded.
Probably around the same time as the Citizens United decision. Supporting a business with your money also means supporting the things they choose to spend that money on
You might investigate the origin of the term 'boycott.' It turns out that ostracizing someone's business for political reasons has a long and cherished history. Colt and S&W were targets because their owners cooperated with Clinton's gun control efforts. And to your point, there are plenty of examples of that: https://www.unz.com/print/SocialJustice-1939may22-00001/
First, as others have pointed out, it's always been like that up to a point. But that's not the problem with X.
I didn't leave X when Musk acquired Twitter, and I'm not scandalised by people's political positions, even when they're extreme. But a position and behaviour are two very different things (e.g. being a racist vs making a Nazi salute on live television). I left when the atmosphere amplified by the site became... not for me. I won't go into a pub full of football hooligans not because I disagree with their club affiliation but because their conduct creates an atmosphere that's not for me.
As for newspapers (even ignoring those with political party affiliations, something that was common in newspapers' heyday), most of them preserved some kind of civil decorum, and those that didn't weren't read by those who wanted some decorum. How civilised some environment is is not a matter of political position.
Also, there were always some people of influence that held extreme views. But such people behaving in an uncivilised manner in public was less common (and certainly less accepted).
>But since when did using a business's product come to require sharing (or not sharing) political views with the business's owner?
Since 18th century at the very least; see: anti-slavery sugar boycott[1].
That's if you absolutely ignore the parent's point that political views are things like specifics of policy, not whether some people should be considered subhuman.
>Seems to me that this is what has changed.
It seems so because you don't know history, and didn't do a one-minute Google search for history of successful boycotts.
The article I'm linking is in the "bite-sized" category.
The Body Shop was fairly vocal about animal testing and Ben and Jerrys was famous for their political messages on their products and that was in the 80s. And Levi Strauss and their LGBTQ+ support.
If you were not aware of it, it is not because it wasn't happening. Historically, excepting media companies, left leaning companies have always been outspoken about this while right leaning ones believed in the idea of focusing on business and avoiding overt political messaging.
So companies like Exxon were not broadcasting their views but were still lobbying government directly to change the laws in a way that benefit them (see deregulation).
I keep saying this, but do you remember a single political remark made by owners of Toyota or BMW? Do you even know who owns these companies without looking it up?
People aren't raking through Musk's obscure remarks to find something objectionable. Musk has been force-spraying his political opinions onto everyone for quite a while, and people have gotten tired of it.
Most people hold a set of political views, while also admitting a spectrum of competing views into their personal, financial, etc. lives. For the average person, doing business with a neo-Nazi (or someone who is "merely" neo-Nazi adjacent) exceeds that spectrum. This is eminently reasonable, and has not changed significantly in a long time.
There are plenty of business' products that I use where I'm unaware of if I share or don't share the owner's political views and I'm totally fine using them. Elon Musk has made it impossible to not be aware of his political views by constantly shoving it down our throats.
I mean, there are a lot of conservatives I respect including Mitt Romney, Robert Nisbett, George Will, and Thomas Sowell. Then there are the jerks like William F. Buckley and David Horowitz. [1]
Then there is Musk who's below even them -- but I am not particularly offended by Hobby Lobby or Chicken-Fil-A.
Not really. People have boycotted products for political and ideological motivations for a very long time. The change recently is that people stopped caring as much. [1]
Social pressure has literally always existed. Nothing has changed lol.
And I wouldn't call white nationalism a "political" view, like it's some ordinary kind of opinion. That's sanewashing something disgusting and disgraceful. That type needs to get shoved back under the rock they crawled out from.
Personally I left Twitter less because Musk owns it now, and more because Musk's changes turned my previously tolerable feed into a deluge of far right drivel. Expecting me to keep using it is like expecting me to keep shopping at a grocery store that replaced its bread aisle with a swastika-festooned exhibit glorifying the conquests and exploits of Hitler and his Nazis---even if I am generally apolitical, I will have to start shopping somewhere that sells bread.
Notwithstanding the above, given how powerful network effects are in social media, I think boycotting platforms operated by people like Musk (I struggle to find the words to fully encompass how repulsive he has become) is arguably one of the more effective forms of protest available to people, and I encourage them to exercise it.
In turn I would argue that this kind comment, i.e. an entirely unfalsifiable calumny, is a poisonous waste of space that would best be deleted by the moderator (along with the current one of course).
TWFKAT (the website formerly known as Twitter) is not a product, it's Elon Musk's safe space. He bought it to be his sandbox and to use it to soothe his constantly battered and fragile ego. His own personal clubhouse where he sets the rules, and he's the ultimate authority. You can join if you want to be a part of his cult of personality, but don't fool yourself that you're dealing with a "product" and a "business".
It was an awkward gesture that he did once in the moment, you are making it sound like he is going around doing it all the time. He's a bit of an eccentric, I genuinely believe he wasn't intending on it coming off like that.
To me one of the big downsides of LLM's seems to be that you are lashing yourself to a rocket that is under someone else's control. If it goes places you don't want, you can't do much about it.
3rd party dependency for a business always freaked me out, and now we have to use LLM to keep up with the intensified demand for production speed. And premium LLM APIs are too inconsistent to rely on.
That's true for traffic on Facebook, Apple App store guidelines or Google terminating your account as well. What's new is the speed of change and that it literally affects all users at once.
They could have released Opus 4.6.2 (or whatever) and called it a day. But instead they removed the old way.
Becoming dependent on those platforms was bad too, but this feels like another level. Making your entire engineering team dependent on a shady company with an apocalyptic fantasy as their business plan just seems insane.
That sounds specifically like the housing shortage that is afflicting some of the most dynamic, productive parts of the country, like NYC and the California Bay Area.
Driven by NIMBYism and some other things, those areas stopped building anything like enough housing, with the obvious result that demand outstripped supply and prices rose, putting them out of reach of many.
That's kind of the origin story of the YIMBY movement, which started forming to fight that trend.
I don't disagree but i also think in terms of actual numbers, the majority of the people that earn these upper middle income salaries are living in more expensive urban areas (at least before work from home)
Yeah, if we cut back a bit on the war crimes we could easily fund both more moon missions and cool science, as well as a shit ton of great programs to help people with the basics like food and rent and health care.
The US spends more per capita, and even as a share of GDP, on healthcare out of public funds than some advanced industrialized states that have universal systems, as well as spending even more on healthcare out of private funds than out of public funds. If we didn’t have a system which expended vast quantities of additional resources in order to assure that a substantial subset of the population is denied needed healthcare and instead just provided the needed healthcare, we could fund all those other things without cutting back on the war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace, either direct or those that we subsidize that are executed by other regimes.
We still should cut down (ideally to zero) on war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace, but the reason is because those things are unqualified evil on their own, not because doing so is necessary to fund healthcare and other priorities, which it very much is not.
They want to fly by at lunar sunrise as the shadows help see depth better. Also, they have very sensitive cameras (up to 3,280,000 ISO!); the Earth photo the other day was taken at night, so you can see how they'll be able to get detail even in the dark parts
"Well look, I already told you! I deal with the goddamn customers so the engineers don't have to! I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people! Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people?!"
> It was incredible to see all of these people with very different backgrounds and interests coming together for one common goal: making the world better with technology.
I feel that's been kind of absent for a while. Sure, tech is huge and there are niches, but the general zeitgeist.
Like... the tech world went from this kind of niche thing, to "hey, hackers, you could set yourself up by creating a company and then get to do what you want", which then shifted more and more towards companies, and is right now lurching towards a world where you must pay a mega AI corporation if you want your output to be competitive.
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