Musk has fallen off the rails completely in recent years. I guess being constantly told that you are the smartest man alive over and over does that to a man. He is genuienly embracing some fascist ideas lately though, and that's worrying because he is a global celebrity with a huge following, not some drunkard in a pub that no one listens to.
My impression is that he is certainly holding back less.
He is certainly less cancellable than ever, owning Twitter and ingrained with the US government via SpaceX, so I suppose perhaps he feels he can now afford to be bold.
Indeed, watching Hacker News go from a nearly unanimous Musk Cheerleading Squad to the precise diametric opposite of that -- literally in the course of one month -- because he didn't echo CIA talking points about Ukraine was hilarious to watch.
He has started embracing white supremacists, far right politicians and even qanon conspiracy theories. it's a terrifying and dangerous situation for something as influential as social media (as if it wasn't bad enough)
.....literally the very article we're commenting on? Or you can go to his twitter account, no need for reading opinion peaces, just read what the man says.
Have you wondered maybe the whole world is where it was and you’re veering off into an area of belief system that makes you think everyone else is Fascist?
I have. I don't think that's what it is - if you have a guy commiting mass shooting while literally covered in swastikas, and Musk says the whole thing is a "psyop", I really don't think it's me who is getting the situation wrong.
I'd like people to remember another quote, this one from Voltaire;
> You believe things that are incomprehensible, inconsistent, impossible because we have commanded you to believe them; go then and do what is injust because we command it. Such people show admirable reasoning. Truly, whoever can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. If the God‐ given understanding of your mind does not resist a demand to believe what is impossible, then you will not resist a demand to do wrong to that God‐ given sense of justice in your heart. As soon as one faculty of your soul has been dominated, other faculties will follow as well. And from this derives all those crimes which have overrun the world.
It's why I genuinely believing in rancid conspiracy theories is dangerous. It's the prelude for what comes next. People start out at conspiracies hating some sub-group. They end up at the "Jewish question," or their cultural equivalent.
Reason and reason alone is what protects us from the insanity that has plagued humanity since the dawn of time.
"Reason and reason alone", it's a bit more complex than that, unfortunately. From Voltaire, Descartes (Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée [1], "Common sense is the best distributed commodity in the world, for everyone is convinced that they are well supplied with it, and even those who are the most difficult to please in everything else are not in the habit of desiring more of it than they have."), and others, Enlightenment has risen. And there is a rather pertinent critique of enlightenment, as in the Dialectic of Enlightenment [2] by Adorno and Horkheimer. For them, the Nazis also think they must purify the race because it's the most rational thing to do, even if they view as the best leader a brown-haired, weakly-mustached, average height methamphetamine abuser.
[1] "Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée : car chacun pense en être si bien pourvu, que ceux même qui sont les plus difficiles à contenter en toute autre chose, n'ont point coutume d'en désirer plus qu'ils en ont.", 1637, Descartes, Discours de la Méthode; the French, only their guillotines are sharper than their words.
I don't mind people calling Musk names, but I dislike this because there is no sense of proportion. Musk isn't a unique evil, or even an unusual evil. Anyone wealthy enough to own their own PR firm deserves the same level of scepticism. The more power someone has, the more they do, the easier it is to write an article being nasty about them. The solution isn't to focus on Musk, it is to preserve systems that distribute power and reduces the damage any one person can do.
But it is common to learn the wrong lesson, and respond to Musk by trying to create an even more powerful body (usually in the government) to "protect" people - which then doesn't protect anyone when the situation is analysed holistically and usually has a raft of second order effects that kills off any real chance for the situation to improve.
Very few people are “uniquely evil”, and even then, those folks tend to do very same things, albeit sometimes on a difference of scale determined by their resources they had at the time.
The article quotes Sartre: "Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies". Slavoj Žižek's point is better however: even if all the things anti-Semites say are true (Jews control the banks, the movies, whatever), the anti-Semitic fixation is still pathological: they need this fixation in order to assert their own identity [1].
The author is right on at least one point, we do not really have fascism in the west right now, it's only protofascism. Even the Italian 'postfascism' is in fact proto-fascism.
Its quite easy to notice if you read enough political books of the early 20th century, and compare them to current day nationalists/supremacists.
They don't have finished ideas. They don't have much ideas at all to be honest. It's mostly stupidity without a plan or vision. Their books (not a lot of them tbh) are either plain and dumb rehash of 1930s books, or interesting rehash of 1890s ideas (hello Renaud Camus, if you want, I know other books you can leech of, send me a message!).
I think they're just a tool to get political power.
The American far right is mostly too illiterate to understand, much less formulate a coherent fascist outlook. So we get social engineering hobbyists manipulating Christian White Nationalists to blindly, if incoherently, support fascism in return for support on taking the bodily autonomy of women, for example. This is an issue of very limited value to fascists except by way of coalition building.
Yes, I wrote a paragraph on that, but I removed it at it was caustic and a bit insensitive, but to me, this neo-fascism in the west and in the USA in particular have no aim, doesn't really change policy, and in general have no agency. At the most, its kind of the useful idiot of this weird Christo-conservatism.
yeah, every time a topic exposing right-wing loonies in Silicon Valley is posted here, it gets insta-nuked... from a site owned by Graham, a known loonie himself
Anything that can be done regarding this? Imagine if Paul Graham was defending a white supremacist murderer or spread anti-Semitic rhetoric or saying things were psyops conspiracies, would that be quickly outlawed and flagged here?
The more interesting conversation is about outspoken individuals with wealth, sustaining power, massive communication reach, and what ethical behavior responsibilities they have.
Readit News
He is certainly less cancellable than ever, owning Twitter and ingrained with the US government via SpaceX, so I suppose perhaps he feels he can now afford to be bold.
Dead Comment
You mean like Vint Cerf? That he also thinks that Vint Cerf has become a fascist?
I mean, that is the conclusion of your theory.
Reason and reason alone is what protects us from the insanity that has plagued humanity since the dawn of time.
[1] "Le bon sens est la chose du monde la mieux partagée : car chacun pense en être si bien pourvu, que ceux même qui sont les plus difficiles à contenter en toute autre chose, n'ont point coutume d'en désirer plus qu'ils en ont.", 1637, Descartes, Discours de la Méthode; the French, only their guillotines are sharper than their words.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectic_of_Enlightenment
I can't even parse this sentence.
Dead Comment
But it is common to learn the wrong lesson, and respond to Musk by trying to create an even more powerful body (usually in the government) to "protect" people - which then doesn't protect anyone when the situation is analysed holistically and usually has a raft of second order effects that kills off any real chance for the situation to improve.
[1] Žižek repeats this point across interviews, as he often does, most recently, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrkVoPljJiM
Its quite easy to notice if you read enough political books of the early 20th century, and compare them to current day nationalists/supremacists.
They don't have finished ideas. They don't have much ideas at all to be honest. It's mostly stupidity without a plan or vision. Their books (not a lot of them tbh) are either plain and dumb rehash of 1930s books, or interesting rehash of 1890s ideas (hello Renaud Camus, if you want, I know other books you can leech of, send me a message!).
I think they're just a tool to get political power.
"What do insanely wealthy people buy, that ordinary people know nothing about?"
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