The same brain that is so pig-headed as to believe whatever $Conspiracy today, is also the brain that was pig-headed enough to think he could fund an EV and a Rocket company at the same time, when he had experience of none, during a recession.
If he was reasonable minded, he would have realised the whole EV and Rocket thing is a stupid risk not worth taking and he would have invested his paypal money into something safe like all his fellow paypal mafia members who started VCs, and today we would never had heard of him except in esoteric terms, and he would have been sipping mai tai or whatever it is that VCs do when they are lazing around in their 3rd yatch.
Like acc to his bio (mentioned somewhere in his 1st bio by ashlee vance) the man literally had an intervention with fellow rich white buddies that he's gonna go bankrupt, that's how stupid the idea was.
to speak in explicit 4chan terms, that autist brain of his what created/funded this, and his stupid tweets are frankly a cheap price to pay for it (at least for me, I'm not american ;p)
A thousand times this. All humans are fallible. If you presume someone isn’t you just don’t know them very well.
Unforgivable offences should not be forgiven. Beyond that - celebrate wins, cherish humanity, embrace humility and tolerance. Don’t have to like anyone, but need to tolerate and respect.
The dude plays footsie with white supremacists. https://www.mediaite.com/tech/elon-musk-skewered-for-posting.... One of his first act upon taking over Twitter was to reinstate white supremacists. I don't know if he is a full white supremacist, but he really seems to like them. And that type of person is getting none of my respect or money.
In a way the melting of the statue can be viewed as a continuation of the northern purges of southern institutions.
Twitter/X is crap for nuanced discussion, but a facet of the US history is the tendency of the east coast to crusade over the sensibilities of the other states in a form perceived (rightly or not) as puritan zeal.
And as I understand it, not all of the cases are hardly as obvious as the abolishment of slavery.
I’m not from US so I might be completely off base though! I don’t follow the white supremacist scene so this might very well be a dog whistle from all I know.
@lettergram, it's not that nuanced. The culture you speak of that you would love to protect literally revolves around the dehumanization of other races
The only reason the frame the war as a matter of Southern morality is to distract from its actual stated purpose and to shame a conquered people into silence via revisionist moral smokescreen.
The North invaded the South to "preserve the union", and only emancipated the slaves as a "lever" toward that end.[0] The South fought back because it was invaded by a foreign power--one which sought subjugate the South and force its inclusion in the American Empire, contrary to the will of the southern people. This is simply a matter of fact. The men who fought off the invader will always be Southern heroes, and rightfully so. The pretense that it is immoral to defend a revolution while also engaging in slavery is, coming from the land which claims Washington and Jefferson as its greatest heroes, so utterly hypocritical that it's hard to consider it to be a good faith argument. Because it's not. It's moral blackmail.
[0]Abe admitted as much in a letter: "My enemies say I am now carrying on this war for the sole purpose of abolition. It is & will be carried on so long as I am President for the sole purpose of restoring the Union. But no human power can subdue this rebellion without using the Emancipation lever as I have done. Freedom has given us the control of 200,000 able bodied men, born & raised on southern soil. It will give us more yet... My enemies condemn my emancipation policy. Let them prove by the history of this war, that we can restore the Union without it."
Bahahahaha. The South seceded explcitly so they could keep black humans as slaves. Full stop. Any defense saying otherwise is playing into a bullshit narrative spun over years by southern apologists and the KKK.
The South fought to maintain black humans as slaves. The South fought to preserve white supremacy.
Anyone who argues otherwise is an idiot or a white supremacist trying to hide it.
> The South seceded explcitly so they could keep black humans as slaves. Full stop. Any defense saying otherwise is playing into a bullshit narrative spun over years by southern apologists and the KKK.
Did you read the comment you're responding to? It doesn't say otherwise.
> The South fought to maintain black humans as slaves. The South fought to preserve white supremacy.
Here's where you become confused. The south seceded to maintain black humans as slaves. The south started a country to preserve white supremacy. The south fought because it was invaded.
> Anyone who argues otherwise is an idiot or a white supremacist trying to hide it.
Anyone who claims that an invaded country 'fought for' their moral failings as opposed to fighting against invasion is high on the invader's propaganda. Anyway, now that you know how to spell 'secede', consider continuing your education so as to prevent further embarrassment. Read 'Battle Cry of Freedom' by James McPherson--it's a good start.
Regarding Abe’s motivations - Abe was one super-canny player (lawyer who read Euclid for fun and spiritual sustenance). I would read anything he wrote as a piece intended to persuade an audience. My point is an audience reading a single quote from a letter from him should not take it at face value.
I don’t argue your points as such.
In the moral calculus of history slavery needed to end. But there were other motives involved for sure.
Abe was definitely a crafty guy and had a tremendous gift for rhetoric, so it is certainly possible that he was playing a double-game. That leaves two possible readings of the quote, but IMO the "double-game" reading is only 'better', from a moral standpoint, for Lincoln himself. It doesn't provide any more moral cover for the Union as a whole.
If we take Abe at face value, he is admitting that emancipation is, as declared in the Emancipation Proclamation, merely a war measure, i.e. a lever which aids his goal of sectional domination. This is neither a good look for Union nor for Lincoln, as it undermines any moral impetus for the war.
The alternative is that we're reading Abe the moral operator, who is merely telling the people what they want to hear, so as to gain their support for his moral mission. While this is a better look for Abe, it is no better for the Union as a whole, as it still implies that the Union was broadly against emancipation (for most of the war, anyway), which forced him to defend it as a necessary war measure.
So either A) the North invaded to subjugate the South, and only freed the slaves as a war aim, or B) the North invaded to subjugate the south, and thought that they had to free the slaves as a war aim, when in actuality they were duped into doing so by the super-canny Abe Lincoln. In either case, the nation as a whole is driven forward by imperialist motives, and the moral outcome of emancipation was, at best, incidental for all concerned, except perhaps for Abe Lincoln.
This is a bit of a narrow point, but I think it's worth making, as it underpins my original point--The idea that the South was "unnuanced evil" is utter, a-historical nonsense, spread by goobers who don't read history. The Southerners were a people who suffered the most common moral failing of their time. When they were invaded (for the sin of believing that governments powers are derived from the consent of the governed, rather than military might) they were not immoral, let alone evil, for fighting back. Their posterity is not immoral for celebrating their ancestors' valiant defense of their country.
Regarding ”Fighting for your country as a virtue” - yup.
Regarding motivations of the north-”more imperialistic rather than abolitionist” - yup.
The point remains though - the southern system even post-civil war was so vile and dehumanizing with jim-crowe and all that nazis used it as a template for the ostracism of the jews.
So in my books it’s a system that does not deserve to survive.
I acknowledge the sacrifice of sourhern soldiers was honorable as individuals but they defended a system built on a deep evil.
Similarly as nazi germany was a political entity that needed to lose the south was a political entity that needed to lose. Regardless of the ’true political motivations’ of the time.
But military victories are hardly tools of building better societies.
What alternatives are there to strategies of borderline genocide then? Is there any version of history where the slaver-components of the southern cultural heritage can be isolated from the non-slaver parts?
The post-apartheid South Africa handled the heritage of the afrikaaners pretty well IMO. No purges, no melting of statues. Just huge effort to make everyone understand - including the truth commission - what the new rules are, and what is now acceptable.
Germany post-ww2 was rebuilt and the nazi elements eradicated.
Both of these examples had a country with a long history before the super oppressive systems took place.
South otoh was built by slavers with slaver institutions from the early beginning. I honestly don’t know how much there is of non-slaver stuff to fall back to.
That does not make genocide right, nor does it explain away the trauma of cultural eradication. I hope there would be some method of healing but I guess close to two centuries no one has come up with one. I’m not convinced melting statues helps at all.
You are completely off base. Everything you said is a smokescreen and a retroactive narrative built by the KKK and white supremacists between the 1920s and 1960s.
The case is very simple: the South fought to keep Black people as slaves. The leaders of the confederacy lead the movement to keep black humans as enslaved property. They lost. The South put up statues of them during reconstruction and Jim crow as part of a system of legalized white supremacy to subjugate Black Americans through systematic terrorism, rape, torture, and brutality. Monuments to these leaders are celebrations of the rape, torture, and enslavement of Black people.
+1 for it being nuanced, after moving to the south it really was not clear how much this is true. The statue was the embodiment of a heritage / culture. There were bad parts of that culture, but so is there in every culture. However, rarely do we support obliterating other cultures.
I'm going to walk through the logic of the people I've met in the south (not necessarily my own opinions).
The south was under military occupation for years after the civil war. The north sent teachers from the north to "re-educate" the south. Many of the farms were destroyed and unmaintainable due to the war, deaths, famines, and removal of slaves. Many southerners were not allowed to hold office until there was a pardon issued.
Part of the compromise on the 1877 disputed election was that they removed "reconstruction".
In many ways, the south felt a genocide was committed. Their culture, society, wealth, etc was taken from them. We can argue it was justice due to them holding slaves or rebelling, but they left the union peacefully in their minds and wanted to be left alone.
Fast forward to today -- the US government has consistently regulated every primary export of the south (intentionally or otherwise). Cotton, alcohol, tobacco, coal, oil, etc have all been systematically regulated. I've witnessed first hand the large swaths of the south that had their communities destroyed by these regulations (most of them). Further, their state governments constantly derided for the last 150 years.
Opioids and obesity are also much more impactful (imo unrelated to the government) in the south the opioid epidemic (which is still raging) completely decimated the communities. The dispensary rates are also WAY higher in former confederate states than anywhere else.
When you combine massive regulation, loss of jobs, obesity, etc it's clear why many southerners look to their heritage when they once had pride in their community, state, country, etc.
At the end of the day, the people of the south have slowly seen their culture collapse over the decades and the melting of the statue was kind of the death of it. The burning of their institutions, melting of their statues, and erasure from the history books.
It seems a little crass to say "it felt like a genocide" considering the horrors of slavery. Similar thoughts regarding erasure from history, given the amount of controversy around whether or not schools should be able to discuss the horrors of slavery.
Is there anything more constant in American history than the impulse to cloak American wrongdoing in the moral failures of their victims?
> It seems a little crass to say "it felt like a genocide"
It seems more than a little crass to nitpick whether or not the word "genocide" is appropriate in reference to an invasion that killed 25% of southern fighting age men. The Yankees burned homes and granaries as a matter of policy, for the express purpose of starving civilians, which is a war crime. Genocide is a fitting word.
”Genocide” does not mean simply killing, the full definition is broader that.
The definition includes
”genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
…
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;”
I.e. just eradicating a national identity from a group of people suffices. This is the main reason Ukraine can be considered a genocidal war, for example, to eradicate the Ukrainan state and identity.
Similarly it’s not implausible to view the reconstruction period as an attempt to do some culture- and state eradication in the slaver states.
Nobody is defending the horrors of slavery. But, state institutions were demolished, a specific cultural identity was attempted to be eradicated. I’ve never visited US south of Colorado but just by reading about it the feeling of genocide comes strong.
World is not black or white.
Was eradicating the institution of slavery right? Hell yes. Was it right to attempt a bit of genocide on the side? I have personally no frigging clue. I do know it took to 1960’s to complete the process of allowing full citizenship rights with civil rights movement so clearly some things had to settle for over a century.
To maintain rule based order we must be committed to view events via the same objective interpretation.
The same north-led US was pretty good in genociding the native american nations decades the civil war ended.
Just achieving one good thing (ending slavery) does not give a state free pass on all the other things.
We (as the western world) try to improve by admitting our failures and trying to do better. This requires first admitting fallibility, and naming things correctly.
The current zeitgeist tries to view the world via the infantile manichean lens of victimhood (of pure goodness) and oppression (pure evil).
This is a very narrow ethical model, and seldom applicable towars any beneficial goal.
Things are complicated. The same state that fought and bled to end slavery also committed multiple genocides during the same historical period.
Was reconstruction period an actual genocide? Probably not. Did it use the same methods one would use to implement change that can be categorized as genocide? I’m pretty sure, yes.
A point I would like to be argued: I guess it' fair to say that
From point of eradicating culture, melting Lee's statue would be comparable to melting a statue of Sitting Bull. Both are representatives of hostile nations towards US, both of which were eradicated.
But are there any arguments against this point of view?
I think one still needs to acknowledge that cultural eradication is painfull to those whose culture is eradicated.
If this is necessary, then the basic courtesy would be to acknowledge the pain with empathy. ”Your ancestors were all fucking slavers so we are going to grind their memory to dust” is not really it.
Cultural eradication is always traumatic. You can’t heal the wounds by just saying to the victims ”your culture was evil anyway”.
Regardless if the culture objectively speaking was based on evil. The trauma will still be caused.
The question is not ”who is right and who is wrong” but how we view and analyze actions.
In general ”the end justifies the means so we really don’t care about civilian collateral” thinking is not considered anymore healthy way to do politics.
As far as I can tell he hasn't personally done much worse than say things on twitter that at least a third of people agree with, broken SEC rules and run companies his way.
As far as evil goes he isn't even going to be the evillest person in a room of 10 random people.
That said, the echo chamber effects will continue to get worse as the media continues to pile on him.
I'd respect Elon critics more if they frequently noted that they grade Elon more harshly due to his high level of influence, but I rarely see them do that.
Ultimately in a democracy, everyone is entitled to their opinion. There are lots of people who think the way Elon does, but most of them aren't as prominent about it as Elon is. Seems to me that in a healthy democracy, we shouldn't be particularly upset if an opinion that's common among the general population also has some representation among the elites. https://today.yougov.com/topics/economy/explore/public_figur...
Indeed, if this weren't the case, and elites had wildly different opinions than common people (and also more influence), you could make the case that we were living in a plutocracy or an oligarchy, not a democracy. So Elon's willingness to say aloud what many common people think privately is pushing us away from that plutocracy/oligarchy failure mode.
I think Elon has made major mistakes -- funding of OpenAI being the biggest, from the point of view of humanity's survival. But the hate he gets rarely seems well-justified or rational. Here's my theory for what's going on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38046411
No idea about the others, I do grade Elon as harsh as I'd grade everyone else who does the same things. I only know about his attics the other peoples because of his public profile.
The danger I see, because already happened more than once, is that once certain opinions are publicly acceptable, those opinions risk becoming policy. And once those policies get enacted, as history showed, a lot of inncent people suffer.
And with Musks outsized crowd of fanboys, he is even more dangerous than he would be simply controlling Twitter.
>The danger I see, because already happened more than once, is that once certain opinions are publicly acceptable, those opinions risk becoming policy. And once those policies get enacted, as history showed, a lot of inncent people suffer.
This sort of reasoning doesn't help us identify correct opinions or good policies. I could just as easily say: "If critics are silenced, the people silencing critics may be allowed to dictate policy. And once the people who silence critics get their policies enacted, as history showed, a lot of innocent people suffer."
In a theocracy, the dictator can make arguing for atheism a crime, on the grounds that: "Arguing for atheism causes people to go to hell. A lot of innocent people will suffer. Therefore, we throw atheists in jail, in order to save innocents."
My basic position is: If your ideas are strong, you should be competent to argue with those who disagree. If your ideas are weak, you should not bully others into submission so you can enforce weak ideas.
Insimply explained why I argue against right wing opinions everywhere I encounter them. And I am all for having those arguements. Not being American, I see the reasoning behind certain limits of free speech, advocating for hate and violence for example. It should be up to the courts to act on those limits, censorship of opinions has to be avoided. I have zero issue with opinions having consequences so.
And yes, we have seen time and again that, as soon as othering people becomes policy, really bad things happen. That othering starts with words, and the political right are those using those words, and ideologies, far more often than the political left. And it is the right who does that othering on things like ethnicity, sexe, religion, skin color... The left tends to other based on opinion, which while still bad, is a far cry from actually argueing for interning said others in camps, excluding them from voting, access to health care...
I think it's worth noting how the right sees things:
Many on the right would say the left others people based on ethnicity, orientation and sex (primarily against straight white men).
They would also say that leftists have far higher levels of support for using violence in response to words ("punch a nazi").
They also see a symmetry in banning support for "hate and violence" and banning support for abortion. "Surely saying "transwomen aren't women!" isn't worse than advocating for the murder of hundreds of millions of babies?!"
-----
In general it is extremely hard to come up with rules for what you can and can't say without already presupposing a particular political viewpoint is the right one. Which is putting the cart before the horse really.
Historically speaking, it is common to argue that a group of people is super privileged in order to create the justification for atrocities. Just look at 20th century totalitarian leaders.
I prefer the liberal-democratic approach of ensuring rights for all instead of making decisions based on who is most privileged. There's no way to calculate privilege objectively, and the idea is inevitably wielded for political purposes.
Fully agree on the liberal-democratic approach. Hell, if you extent, just to pick a really controversial topic, adoption and full marriage rights to gay couples, rights I have myself, you are not taking anything away from me.
The important difference is so between calling a group priviledged and a geoup being priviledged. And men held power for most of human history, white men in particular since European colonialism became a thing. Women' right to vote is a fairly recent thing, the 1970s in Switzerland for example. Or bot requiring the husbands approval to take a job in Germany. The list goes on and on. White men habe been, and still are but less so, priviledged. Some men have a problem with loosing some of those priviledges so, a sentiment easily abused by demagogoes and populists (I put Musk in the latter group, more of an industrial / capitalist populist but a populist none the less).
In a sense the youngen falling into right wing extremism and islamistic extrimism have a lot in common, more than either of those groups like. But we digress, I think.
Regarding Starship, good for them to launch again. Good on the FAA to insist on high standards. Now we'll see how the launch on Friday goes.
> calling a group priviledged and a geoup being priviledged.
Group based reasoning is ambiguous in English.
When you say a group is privileged are you talking about the mean? The median? The peak? Every member?
Because you could easily have a situation where every person in power is a member of X group while the median member of X group has less power than the population as a whole.
There's also proportion of the total population to consider. If there were a group that only has 1% of the positions of power but every single member is in a position of power then is this group privileged or not? They can't control policy...
And there's also to what extent people in power actually push for the interests of the groups they are supposedly members of as opposed to the interests of the subgroup they're part of.
I'm not trying to "win", I'm trying to introduce readers to a useful tool to add to their toolkit for reasoning. A reminder that there's a class of potentially important ambiguities around groups in our language.
If it matters, this tool is also pretty useful for dismantling racism.
By most metrics Jews are more privileged (wealth, income, education, rate of murder, representation in positions in power) than white people in the West. And yet there is also genuine discrimination and hatred towards them.
(Also, you are somewhat out of date, e.g. white British boys currently have worse educational outcomes than girls or immigrants)
Anyway, you're very much missing the point by focusing on one example.
OP stated that many of the rigjt see discrimination, based in race and sexe, against white men. As I ahve yet to call those same people out discrimination against anyone else, I started with "Exclusively...".
>The left tends to other based on opinion, which while still bad, is a far cry from actually argueing for interning said others in camps, excluding them from voting, access to health care...
An editor for Huffington Post South Africa defended a post she published arguing that white men shouldn't be allowed to vote, saying: "[The] underlying analysis about the uneven distribution of wealth and power in the world is pretty standard for feminist theory". https://qz.com/africa/966763/huffington-post-south-africa-ed... What does that tell you about feminist theory?
In any case, the most important point is: I've never seen Elon Musk argue for interning others in camps, excluding people from voting, or excluding people from access to health care. In my eyes, your argument makes about as much sense as me saying that you should be banned from Hacker News because you sound vaguely communist, and Joseph Stalin killed a lot of people.
I never argued for banning Musks opinion, and I wont. Regarding the radical feminist in South Africa, call.me again when she has a realistic shot at becoming President there
Sure, Musk didn' propose camps as far as I can tell. He is, squarely by his own words, in the right leaning political camp in the US. Amd the current front runner for the presidencial candidacy of that camp called for all of those things, publicly, during a rally on Veterans Day.
Also, one opinion piece regarding the rescriction of voting, which is just a nut job idea, is quite different from gerryandering, reducing poling places and planning to impeach judges wjo said they don'z like gerrymandering (which actually is a thing, multiple courts in the US threw out district maps because of it). Actions weigh heavier than words, always.
Funny that you think I'm leaning communist, were I live my political opinion is somewhere left / social liberal of the center but a far cry from the left extreme of the political spectrum. No surprise so, it just shows the difference between the US and Europe.
>He is, squarely by his own words, in the right leaning political camp in the US.
I remember him tweeting a meme to the effect of: "My political opinions have stayed the same while the left has gotten more and more radical"
>Amd the current front runner for the presidencial candidacy of that camp called for all of those things, publicly, during a rally on Veterans Day.
Has Musk ever endorsed Trump?
>Also, one opinion piece regarding the rescriction of voting, which is just a nut job idea, is quite different from gerryandering, reducing poling places and planning to impeach judges wjo said they don'z like gerrymandering (which actually is a thing, multiple courts in the US threw out district maps because of it). Actions weigh heavier than words, always.
I'm against these illiberal ideas in the same way that I'm against illiberal ideas from the left. I haven't seen Elon Musk show any support for them either.
>Funny that you think I'm leaning communist, were I live my political opinion is somewhere left / social liberal of the center but a far cry from the left extreme of the political spectrum. No surprise so, it just shows the difference between the US and Europe.
I don't think you're a communist. From my perspective, the mistake you're making is akin to the mistake of blaming social democrats for the actions of communists. I was trying to explain that to you in a way that you'd understand.
After all, squarely by your own words, "my political opinion is somewhere left / social liberal of the center". Need I say more? :-)
Nobody is harmed by people thinking Einstein or Mother Teresa were great and not worthy people. Same for Gandi and MLK, if you choose which aspects to value and respect.
It is useful to have examples of people who made a positive impact on the world.
Look I am from a 3rd world country, and I have been observing online discourse on primarily US-based websites for decades, and the amount of kittens Americans have for their 1# richest member is amazing. I remember the days when Bill Gates was the Borg, then it was Bezos, now Musk.
If we were to plot a chart of misery caused in the average American's life, per million dollar of wealth, I doubt these three or other of their group would top the charts. They would be there definitely, but their wealth exaggerates their effect, imho.
I think the average American faces more misery resulting from the collective action of the thousands of non-famous multi-millionaires and low-billionaires.
These people have the wealth (usually inherited) and the capacity to cause a lot of misery while still flying below the public radar, and there are just so many of them in the US that it's impossible to collectively sum them up and point at.
They are from all walks of life, all race/gender/ethnicities, and yet their wealth allow them to a lot of things, either directly, or by donating to political action, indirectly, that would go unnoticed because we wouldn't even know where to look.
I am not saying that you shouldn't keep an eye out for Elon's wealth and spending, but to treat him as the spawn of satan is a bit much.
Today it's his turn, in some time, some other nincumpoop will be 1#, it's OK, look at BillGates, he was a weirdo but he turned out.... well mostly OK I guess.
We should use the pressure on the rich to bend them towards good causes, NOT to alienate them, all it does is give them a free leash to get into mischief. Keep the pressure on but keep them looped in.
I think you might be missing the conspiracy. Yes politicians are the ones causing the damage, yes they ultimately bear the responsibility. But you have to see how the interests of the rich are given a priority in any political system. Without the rich asserting their influence into politics, by persuading and demanding their interests in public policy, the politician is but a boring bureaucrat, neither making harm nor good. However with the rich conspiring with the politicians, the harm they do to the common people is ultimate.
I will not admire anyone who’s interests are looked after, compensated, subsidized, and payed for by our politicians. They are nothing but bastards, they deserve no praise for having been put in their place of privilege by circumstance and conspiracy.
IMO in terms of achievement and impact Musk is an Einstein-caliber historical figure, and we have to treat what he says and does very carefully. That's why anyone who follows him must always remember that road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Apologies, I didn't mean to target any race, I was simply sharing an observation of mine. I have past the HN editing time limit or I would have removed the offending remark, no offense was meant.
Nope, it doesn't go both way. Racism and classism only go one way, which is towards the poorer or more vulnerable part.
Pick on the weaker is a sign of cowardice. Do the same on the stronger is well-accepted, and rightfully so. Always punch upwards.
Yeah, just like western industrialized countries polluted for a literal century, accumulating wealth from it, and now that things are getting really screwed, everybody must not pollute.
I'm not saying it is "right" to fuck with the World pollution or to hate someone and beat them because their skin is white. But in a certain way, they "earned" that right.
Can we please get some "vulnerable" people into the NBA? You know, the ones who aren't represented there? Definitely seems like the stronger people seem to dominate there, and it's really unfair to the weak.
NBA like in the National Basketball Association? You mean like the many European players that rock the NBA that are totally not Afro-American?
Maybe the issue is in how the selection is done in American colleges.
But I'm pretty sure the Afro-American population would gladly swap 50% of black NBA players to have 50% of them in the middle-class.
A couple famous chilled dudes prescribed to not punch at all. The ones I'm thinking of were referring to Romans and British colonisers, but I suspect they'd have applied it to white rich buddies as well.
(Please note that I didn't write what I think of it, I'm only fuelling the debate)
Pacific resistance doesn't mean at all you are not punching/criticizing upwards! Also the imaginary guy from Nazareth had very harsh words for the merchants in the temple... (he even (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻)
Even though I mostly take a "white X" as a metaphor for a lack of diversity (of opinions and mindsets), I don't think most people do. These people aren't assholes because they are "white X", they are assholes because they are bourgeois stuck in their echo chamber.
And they are bourgeois because they are white. Or put in another manner, with the same brain and willpower but another skin color (which usually means being of another economic class as well) it would have been much much much more complicated for them to be some snob bourgeois.
> (which usually means being of another economic class as well)
Class seems to be the determining factor, really. Europeans had a couple environmental advantages early on [0] that allowed them to monopolise the world's resources, which were never fairly redistributed.
The current bourgeois are bourgeois mostly because their parents were, much less because they had the advantage of being white when building their wealth. There are of course outliers and ethnicity does have an impact, but overall there is very little social mobility anyway.
Exactly, European (aka "the whites", but I don't want to enter into what's white in the US vs rest of the world) had some advantage, they used it, gained more power and as everybody with power does, hold on to it by all their means. And even if rich families or dynasties come and go, the accrued wealth tends to not move too much. And it moves through generations, as you pointed out.
> brain that is so pig-headed as to believe whatever $Conspiracy today
I see the risk that someone who has been consistently so stubborn and capable of making reality match his absurd aspirations, might even succeed in making $Conspiracy come true before he changes his mind :)
Plot twist, the story is still running, we are yet to see how the plot ends.
after all, a few years ago every one was saying Bezos was the bad guy, there still time for some one else to pop up. Have faith, reality is weirder than fiction :)
> The same brain that is so pig-headed as to believe whatever $Conspiracy today, is also the brain that was pig-headed enough to think he could fund an EV and a Rocket company at the same time, when he had experience of none, during a recession.
A lot of the innovation that went into Tesla and SpaceX occurred before he decided to transform himself into a complete tit.
Because I believe he was always like this, we either didn't know or didn't care about it, or worse, just assumed that because he liked/disliked X, Y, Z, then must also like/dislike A, B, C.
You can definitely pick and choose, mind you, you don't have to accept a personality whole, you can like some parts while disliking others, but you can't just eliminate parts of him, and his stupid tweets are a part of his mentality, whether we like it or not.
So, if at some point he starts funding military spaceships that can shoot illegal migrants from space, do we still take the good with the bad, or do we denounce his behaviour?
we can cross that hypothetical bridge, if it ever exists and gets crossed, no use in raising hypotheticals.
right now it's just stupid tweets, I ignore them and live my life, after all, my life has never been in danger from any of his tweets, but it HAS been from actual american drones doing actual bombing. I survived that, I will survive his tweets.
I am not from your part of the world; application of Godwin's law in online discourse always amuses me, since I damn care about hitler or what he and his ilk did, my part of the world had other boogie men.
In deed they did. After the elections in 1933, free and fair elections prior to the Nazis taking power in the staged elections later that year during which the Nazis used their party apparatus as a shafow administration and blunt and brutal force and violence, the conservative establishment picked Hitler and the NSDAP for exactly that rwason: The needed someone to lead a coalition government against the left, they choose Hitler because they didn't take him really serious and thought they could easily manipulate him. We all know well that turned out.
Firstly, that would be illegal, and government(s) could step in.
Secondly, there are quite a few steps between having enough of woke twitter and buying it, which I'm pretty sure 20-30%, maybe even 40% of the population agrees with, and shooting illegal immigrants.
I know the media try their best to portray these two as equivalents, but they're just not. Also keep in mind the biggest loser from the twitter acquisition is probably the establishment journalists, so they do have an axe to grind. Their views are not going to be objective on musk.
Elon Musk isn't just "denouncing woke twitter". He is actively, politically involved in Mexico border crossing debates, meeting with politicians and border patrols, etc.
No. OP was suggesting we shouldn't denounce the bad things he's doing, because of the good things he's doing. My point is, should we wait for the bad to outweigh the good, and who will be the judge of that?
The same brain that is so pig-headed as to believe whatever $Conspiracy today, is also the brain that was pig-headed enough to think he could fund an EV and a Rocket company at the same time, when he had experience of none, during a recession.
If he was reasonable minded, he would have realised the whole EV and Rocket thing is a stupid risk not worth taking and he would have invested his paypal money into something safe like all his fellow paypal mafia members who started VCs, and today we would never had heard of him except in esoteric terms, and he would have been sipping mai tai or whatever it is that VCs do when they are lazing around in their 3rd yatch.
Like acc to his bio (mentioned somewhere in his 1st bio by ashlee vance) the man literally had an intervention with fellow rich white buddies that he's gonna go bankrupt, that's how stupid the idea was.
to speak in explicit 4chan terms, that autist brain of his what created/funded this, and his stupid tweets are frankly a cheap price to pay for it (at least for me, I'm not american ;p)