But, he bought cool companies
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If anyone else in the world had done a nazi salute, even if by accident, their response would be to apologise.
I do not care what he did or did not intend. I suspect he knew what he was doing and wanted to signal to the extreme right wing types that he has been supporting of late. But even if he was trying to say that his heart goes out to everyone, while getting the simple hand gesture for that completely wrong, it’s still a reasonable thing to apologise and distance yourself from nazis. And it’s a reasonable thing for anyone to expect that apology, instead of using autism to justify “accidental” nazi support. I can’t speak for autistic people, but I doubt many would be happy with that narrative.
We truly are in the stupidest timeline.
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I don’t think he’s a Nazi.
Or a fascist.
I think he has a severely underdeveloped social/empathetic personality.
To the extent that, like a lot of ten or eleven year-old boys, he thinks it would be really cool and triggering and wild to do a Nazi salute with just…so much gusto.
So…yeah, I’m buying into the Asbergers…
But if that’s what you want me to do, then you also have to accept that this is the mental age of the person saying anything about personal and social issues.
Which is obviously something to be completely ignored, and if you buy into That…then…you are way worse.
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If we are to forgive Musk for that due to him being, and I only use this term because it’s the defence being used, him being mentally compromised… then surely him being compromised must call into question his other views and actions that rely on social understanding and empathy.
But no, Musk will still be seen as a flawless beacon of perfection, unless he does something else horrible in which case it will be waved away. It’s a flaw that will only ever be remembered when it’s convenient.
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There’s footage of him speaking in 2023 where he similarly states that his heart goes out to everyone.
The gesture he makes is radically different however.
I think he’s trying to be funny by being an edgelord rather than signalling he’s an avowed fascist, but he’s earned no benefit of the doubt.
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His cosplay, his tantrums, his thinking nazi salutes are cool, his personal fragility and revenge seeking…
All of it is the profile of a pre-teen boy.
Which does nothing to detract from his business acumen or…out of the box thinking.
But on social issues…this is who we’re talking about.
A selfish, insecure child.
That he’s not an expert on the stuff outside his wheelhouse that he can’t stop spewing, is obvious.
But it’s far worse than that.
And again, if you’re basing your views on those pre-adolescent ramblings out of hero worship, then…
Find yourself a better role model.
Literally your neighbour would be better.
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People are far too apologetic for Elon. Remember he is in chargee of companies that have major defense contracts and have access to some of the most secret defense data. If he cannot pass a security clearance beacause of his public behavior, then he should be removed from those companies, or the companies lose the contracts. His public action cannort be forgiven, it risks everyone.
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“The problem is the president doesn’t have any leverage over him and Elon gives zero ■■■■■.”
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This headline is incorrect.
It’s not that Elon has abused his proximity to the President.
It’s the President that hasn’t understood his subservient relationship to Elon.
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he has heaps, could just instruct DOJ/DOD to take over all elons projects
He is ‘too big to fail’ and sadly I think he’s become too big to criticise by people that have a lot to lose.
Nah, this is a good old fashioned case of the corrupt advisers squabbling over access to the mad emperor.
Looks a LOT to me like there’s a bit of a power struggle going on between Musk, and some of Trump’s non-Musk allies. Musk was sniping about how the AI plan sucked (presumably because it wasn’t his AI plan), and now the other mob is returning fire by claiming that Trump can’t control Musk, which is a barb aimed directly at Trump’s ego.
This isn’t about policy in any way, or even about personalities. We’ve got to stop thinking of the Trump presidency like a regular US administration. Everyone wants to be the guy close to Trump, because Trump is senile and dumb and has no attention span and doesn’t really give a ■■■■ if you enrich yourself off the taxpayer as long as he gets to as well. You’ve got to think of it as being like a corrupt medieval monarchy, where there’s a backstabbing bunch of plotting scumbags trying to manipulate a drunken syphilitic inbred king.
In another age, they’d all be keeping each others’ food tasters and bodyguards on their toes. In the civilised modern world, it’ll just be twitter feuds until one of them gets on Trumps wrong side and Trump sacks him.
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Well we remember the first term, it will be the same or worse for relentless infighting second time around.
I dont think many serious people on either side of politics value what Elon thinks on social matters? I doubt Trump does. Hes an ideas guy / futurist. My experience with those on the spectrum is that they have ability to perceive the system and see things as they are and where they are headed. At that macro level there are no “feelings”. Just tendancies within a system.
Bluesky has had a big jump the last 4-5 days. Up quickly to 29.4M users. 2M more in just 3-4 days
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Even though I’ve almost completely migrated over to Bluesky, I’m still taking their user numbers with a grain of salt. They’ve become a big enough channel to start being of interest to bad actors (victims of their own success, to some degree), and I’ve noticed a BIG uptick of scammers, spammer onlyfans peddlers, and bots on there recently. So I suspect a lot of those new users aren’t legit. There’s one particularly insidious type of bot that seems to be designed to partially agree with your post but then contradict you or insult your reasoning. There’s a lot of those around, and it’s a bit uncertain what their purpose it. Best guess is that their an attempt to train LLMs for propaganda/astroturfing purposes.
But yeah, bluesky is growing, but there’s definitely some growing pains. Once you get big enough for the bad guys to see you as an opportunity, you start to get a whole lot of new problems coming your way even if things have been relatively smooth so far.
I have also taken the time to migrate from twitter, unfortunately not all the users I follow have a bluesky account yet.
I would love a free Bluesky native app for OSX rather than have to use a webpage. Anyone have a recommendation?
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Oh my!
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