Yesterday, I posted this comment in the overnight thread:
So, Elon Musk endorsed the Great Replacement theory yesterday (CNN):
An X post Wednesday afternoon said: “Jewish communties (sic) have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” The post also referenced “hordes of minorities” flooding Western countries, a popular antisemitic conspiracy theory.
In response, Musk said: “You have said the actual truth.”
The “actual truth” is that Musk — an increasingly deranged, bigoted oligarch — controls a communication platform that could easily become a worldwide Radio Rwanda. Oh, and also receives billions in U.S. government contracts for satellite communications and NASA support, a situation I desperately hope someone in the government is reevaluating.
Since politicians are policing the language of every powerless lefty campus group (some of whom, I should note, deserve the criticism), I thought Musk’s casual endorsement of the ideology expressed by the Tree of Life synagogue shooter should get more attention.
Well, now it is: (CNBC)
The White House on Friday lashed out at Elon Musk for promoting “Antisemitic and racist hate” after the Tesla CEO and X Corp. owner said he agreed with a social media post accusing “Jewish communities” of pushing “hatred against whites.”
White House spokesman Andrew Bates said it was “unacceptable to repeat the hideous lie behind the most fatal act of Antisemitism in American history at any time.”
“We condemn this abhorrent promotion of Antisemitic and racist hate in the strongest terms, which runs against our core values as Americans,” Bates said.
The White House’s statement noted the proximity of Musk’s post to the deadly attacks in Israel by Hamas on Oct. 7, which it described as “the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the Holocaust.”
“We all have a responsibility to bring people together against hate, and an obligation to speak out against anyone who attacks the dignity of their fellow Americans and compromises the safety of our communities,” Bates said.
The White House spokesman has said the actual actual truth.
Open thread.
Baud
Thanks for the pointer, BC. I wasn’t aware of the response. Hopefully, it’ll increase exposure.
rikyrah
Apartheid Clyde supporting anti-Semitism?
Who coulda known?
Old Man Shadow
Now cancel the Space X contracts.
(Having said that, I realize there’s a lot of irony there about wanting to kick Nazis out of the space program given the history of the U.S. space program.)
counterfactual
At SpaceX (including Starlink), Muskboy is quite firmly leashed. As evidence, I present the curious incident of Musk shittweets against the FAA, NASA, or Space Force. The curious incident is that there are none since the Biden administration took over. Musk has raged against the SEC, FTC or other agencies and governments, but not against the ones that deal with SpaceX.
“And what about Starlink geofencing?” you ask? That came back up with the Isaacson biography released in September of this year, about Starlink problems in 2022. Since the DOD took over paying for Ukraine’s Starlink bill, I haven’t heard any Ukrainian complaints.
oldster
Not the most important point in this story, but what in the everliving fuck is “dialectical hatred,” other than evidence that high-school dropouts wanna sound like they run grad seminars?
It’s the same tech-bro pseudo-intellectualism that has Andreesen writing “manifestos” by cut-and-paste. These people hate universities and people who actually think, but they want to commandeer what they take to be the language of sophisticated thinkers. “Dialectical hatred” my dialectical ass.
Baud
@oldster:
Heh.
trollhattan
@oldster:
The judges would also accept diabolical or dielectric.
hrprogressive
Unless or until he starts suffering some sort of financial consequences, he’ll continue his Nazism unabated.
Actually, this is true of all Nazis, whether they are elected Republicans or not.
way2blue
The Atlantic published an article on September 20th that addresses the roots of Musk’s toxicity:
TL;DR. Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, moved his family from Canada to South Africa in support of apartheid. This quote gives you a flavor:
Mag
Maybe have this blog stop linking and embedding to Xitter would be a good first step. There’s always an excuse to use their content… it’s so easy to use, etc. But, stop using the platform may be a good step to taking away its power so it doesn’t have the reach of say, Radio Rwanda.
Anoniminous
@oldster:
TechBros are highly and rigorously trained and very poorly educated. I see Formal and Informal Logical Errors due to the lack of Critical Thinking Skills all the time in technical and research papers.
Anoniminous
@trollhattan:
And diuretic!
Baud
@trollhattan:
@Anoniminous:
And de-lovely.
sdhays
@counterfactual: He’s not firmly leashed at SpaceX. You must have missed the recent story where he doesn’t allow workers to follow safety protocols because he doesn’t like bright colors. And SpaceX’s launchpad was destroyed in, what, April? Because Elmu, who personally knows jack shit about launching rockets, didn’t think the standard infrastructure was necessary and wanted to launch on 4/20.
He’s an evil raving lunatic.
Oh, and per Media Matters, the FTFNYT has Elmu slated as a speaker at their “Dealbook Summit” on Nov 29. They’re so very concerned about anti-semitism at that venerable institution…
counterfactual
@Old Man Shadow: And what are you going to replace them with?
All of United Launch Alliance’s (ULA) remaining Atlas rockets are spoken for. Their Vulcan launcher replacement may, may have its first test flight this year. Northrup-Grumman’s (NG) Antares vehicle had its first stage built in Ukraine, they’re still scrambling to get a replacement built. Blue Origin (BO) says it will test New Glenn next year, but I will believe that when I see a New Glenn clear the launch tower. Amazon’s Kuiper is a competitor to Starlink, but they have AFAIK exactly two test satellites in orbit, with the operations starting “sometime soon.”
No matter how loathsome Musk is, and oh BOY is he loathsome, but it turns out that SpaceX is actually a great value on cost for results and oddly is by the low standards of the military industrial complex is actually an ethical paragon.
Brachiator
I guess that Musk really wants to be the return of Henry Ford, with his noxious bigotry.
It is damned outrageous that Musk is not only killing Twitter, but also openly abetting the most vile and squalid hatred.
Chris
Random question since it’s an open thread: can any of the more foreign policy inclined people comment on what the hell is going on in Burma?
I haven’t wanted to drop this on Adam’s threads because Jesus knows he’s got enough on his plate covering Ukraine-Russia and now Israel-Gaza, but apparently several rebel groups in the north of the country have gone on an offensive that seems to have actually gone pretty well, enough to inspire similar rebels in the state next door to now start their own similar operation. Don’t know enough about the country to comment beyond that, except that it’s apparently significant enough to pop up in Wikipedia’s “In The News” section, which is where I saw it (had no idea before that, presumably because Ukraine and Gaza are sucking up all the foreign affairs air in the room).
Taken4Granite
I attended a talk last night about AI. The speaker expressed an opinion that Musk was our likeliest savior against the takeover by ChatGPT and similar algorithms. $DEITY help us all.
Alison Rose
When white Jews try to explain to other groups, who insist we cannot really be victims of prejudice because we’re white (which translates to: We don’t give a shit about you because we basically believe the same garbage Musk does), that we only have conditional access to whiteness and its associated privilege, this is the kind of fucking shit we’re talking about.
H.E.Wolf
CNBC’s word choice is odd. “Lashed out” connotes (to me) an intemperate, out-of-proportion response.
It could have been reported as “the White House rebuked” or “the White House criticised” instead. Interesting that CNBC didn’t.
Anoniminous
@Brachiator:
Anyone using “the real facts” and “actual truth” should be repeatedly hit on the head with a baseball bat; a cricket bat can be substituted if needed.
Chris
@oldster:
I always got the sense that this was the biggest reason for the word “socialism” in the phrase “National Socialism.” Borrow a phrase from a more sophisticated political movement and then add the “national” modifier to be sure people understand that it’s for the right kind of people. Sort of like Men’s Rights Advocates naming themselves in the kind of nomenclature usually associated with feminist or minority rights groups.
Baud
@Alison Rose:
There are unfortunately a lot of people who aren’t right wing who believe that the right wing approach towards outside groups expressed strength.
CaseyL
Open thread, so: as a sortof follow up to last night’s Zoom with 4 Directions:
h/t DailyKos:
Full story here.
eclare
@H.E.Wolf:
Good point.
Hoodie
@oldster: He has no clue what it means but probably thinks it sounds vaguely Marxist because Marx used the word “dialectic” (which, of course, happens to have nothing to do with what they’re saying) and was a Jew.
Chris
@way2blue:
Jesus, and I thought the Russians had an inflated opinion of their importance.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Anoniminous: Along with the people who say “free gift.”
Baud
@Chris:
Appropriation and projection are two of the right wing mainstays.
TeezySkeezy
IMHO, what little it is worth, I feel like this is a red line for Elon, and anyone continuing to produce content on X and contributing to engagements is complicit in helping actual nazism. And I know at some level we are all complicit in this or that injustice in our political and economic systems, but holy hell, if we can’t quit a failing social network that promotes fascism, how the hell is anyone going to resist the fascist bullshit we are gonna have in 2025?
Ned F
The BJ post, Why Has Biden Has Been Polling Poorly On the Economy? ,
has disappeared. It was on my Feedly, but nowhere to be found. ??
Baud
@Ned F:
New post? Author may have pulled it to avoid bigfooting this one.
oldgold
Musk’s main business is the manufacture and sale of electric cars. Supposedly this is a ‘green’ enterprise. Given this, why has he thrown in with a party that is anti-green and wed to petro?
Steeplejack
@Ned F:
I presume it was pulled to avoid big-footing this post (or vice versa).
ETA: What Baud said.
Scout211
Another part of this story is major brands discontinuing advertising on X after Media Matters reported the ads were placed next to pro-Nazi content.
CNBC
Not intentionally!? Huh? Maybe that’s what happens when your advertising team is all AI all the time?
Matt McIrvin
@oldster:
it’s a way of shouting “Commie”.
Chris
@Alison Rose:
My impression is that as far as anti-Semites are concerned, the ambiguous “whiteness” of Jews is sort of the point?
Most anti-Semitism (in the West at least) ends up embracing the narrative of “the Jew is using the Negro as muscle against you,” where the Jews are the masterminds running the show, and the less ambiguously nonwhite demographics are the dumb henchmen. The implication being that Jews are smarter or at least in some inherent way more “fit to rule” than these other people… and the reason they’re that way, presumably, is because they’re “more white.” But because they’re still “less white” than white people of Christian heritage, that doesn’t end up helping them; it just singles them out as “more dangerous.”
Alison Rose
@Baud: That might be part of it. But also, there are a lot of people on the left who are about two steps away from believing the Protocols. And they think that’s fine. And a lot of others agree.
Suzanne
@oldgold:
White patriarchy is a hell of a drug.
teezyskeezy
@Mag: Agree, but probably it would be okay to repost screenshots so we can all see things being discussed there while only one person had to create an engagement to view it. But I think creating content on X should definitely be stopped by anyone who doesn’t want to be complicit in what Elon is doing, which is promoting nazi ideology.
Some people would say we should read the “good people’s” tweets, but ultimately we should drive the good people off twitter too by minimizing engagement with the whole site. I’m no accelerationist when it comes to real world politics, but an accelerated demise of X’s influence would be for the best.
Chetan Murthy
@oldster: It’s the same thing as “Cultural Marxism”: remember that one? It’s not about techbros, but about (actually) people who know better (with liberal arts educations (of a sort) weaponizing language. B/c “Marxism”, that’s about Da Joos, as always. Same thing with “dialectical hatred”. You invoke words that connect with past bogeymen, to tar the current set of enemies.
Chris
@Baud:
There’s a common Christian trope that the devil can’t create, he can only corrupt.
And while there are a lot of things about Christianity that I’ve kind of dropped as I grow older (like church attendance), that’s one thing where the more I follow politics, the more I believe it. A stupendous number of bad things turn out to be half-assed attempts to recreate or appropriate a good thing, e.g. “anti-Semitism is the socialism of idiots.”
Matt McIrvin
@oldgold: His ex left him for a trans woman. Also he’s pretty racist and hates government regulations, the usual stuff.
Suzanne
@Matt McIrvin: Don’t forget the whole “we’re running out of white babies” thing.
E.
@Chris: In the fever swamp where you find the likes of Nick Fuentes and his ilk, Jews are pretty much the same as liberals. They have been espousing Enlightenment ideals like science and multiculturalism and threatening the proper God-given order of things, which is unremitting racial violence. These people hate us all. But Jews don’t get exceptions the way maybe I would.
Delk
Diacritical hãtrëd.
bookworm1398
@9. As an explanation for Musk, this is ridiculous. We all had bigoted ancestors. So what?
@15. As far what’s the alternative goes, it should be nothing. If it’s not possible to get to the space station ethically then we shouldn’t be on the space station. It’s not complicated.
@33. This has puzzled me too. Especially at a time when choices for electric cars are increasing, why?
counterfactual
@sdhays:
let my stipulate that Musk’s obituary is one that I will read with some pleasure. But ignoring the man’s accomplishments underestimates the damage he can do.
I read the article the day it came out. Elon ignores regulations and SpaceX workers are overworked. I’d known that for a decade now.
The human stories were real avoidable tragedies, and hard to read.
The statistics in the article are… debatable. SpaceX is just weird. They build, stack and launch rockets at about 10 times the rate of any other US company. They also assemble and demolish industrial buildings in-house, and build 400-foot launch towers. If you compare the accident stats to a construction company, they’re similar. And SpaceX does at least go through the motions when OSHA writes them up, if you read the article closely.
Again, Musk is loathsome, SpaceX has a nasty work culture, but is still the best and for many purposes only space company around.
Space enthusiasts just have to deal with it. Wernher von Braun was a card-carrying Nazi (perhaps not willingly) and witnessed war crimes but did nothing about it. Sergei Korolev thrived in the politics of Stalin and Khrushchev, who knows how many lived he destroyed getting and keeping to the top. The politics of Jeff Bezos are as bad as Musk, he’s just quieter about it.
WaterGirl
@Ned F: @Baud: I had that post scheduled for a particular time, but as soon as I saw Betty’s post, I pulled it. It’s now scheduled for 3pm.
Jackie
@CaseyL: That IS good news! Maybe GQP gerrymandering is finally being taken seriously as the voter’s suppression it is!🤞🏻
Frankensteinbeck
@Matt McIrvin:
And his trans daughter disowned him so hard she changed her name. Musk really hates trans women. The first public action he took on Twitter after buying it was to unban an account that was banned for transphobia.
MattF
The current specific question is why various big companies, e.g., Apple and others, are still advertising on Xitter. After all, Musk has shown, repeatedly, who he is.
My guess is that there are a small number of bright flashing red lines that Musk won’t cross. It’s hard to tell because they are big dogs that don’t bark— but I’d bet that Musk has been told in person, face-to-face, that any whiff of Holocaust denial would leave him without big advertisers and without any pals in the Xitter C-suite. There may be other verboten topics, but they are less obvious.
Chetan Murthy
@counterfactual:
Oh, I was unaware of this. Certainly his economic politics is terrible, but I didn’t realize that he was a white supremacist. Do you have any pointers to this?
coin operated
@Anoniminous:
I’ll go with the cricket bat…I happen to like the sound a cricket bat makes on contact.
H.E.Wolf
@eclare: Thank you for the reassurance! I thought maybe I was being a bit fussy (mis-typed that as “fuzzy”, which is appropriate since I’ve just been to the optometrist).
Baud
@WaterGirl:
But I want it now.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Baud: you can’t always get what you want.
Alison Rose
@Baud: Okay, Veruca.
RaflW
@Mag: More screen caps and fewer links could be a start. I realize that lots of people aren’t on Bluesky yet, but to the extent that some of this content is cross-posted, could we get links over there when available?
All that makes more work for the FPers, though, so it’s easy for me to be all suggest-y here in my IKEA lounger but annoying to our bloglords.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Alison Rose: or is it Giblets?
Chris
@MattF:
No, I think it’s just because Twitter has become such a behemoth that everybody was using it and there still isn’t really one service that’s established itself as the replacement.
R-Jud
@Delk: lôl
Chris
@Baud:
Well, as long as you don’t want it all.
Chetan Murthy
@RaflW: until Blue Sky gets a website where people without blue sky IDs can see tweets (or whatever they’re called), it’s infeasible to link to blue sky tweets from a blog. I mean, they would be literally inaccessible to anybody who doesn’t have a blue sky ID.
I had a Twitter ID for many years, and can I attest to the fact that leaving it blocked (for intemperate language) has dramatically improved my peace of mind. I wouldn’t get a blue sky ID if you paid me.
Chetan Murthy
@Mr. Bemused Senior: I miss Fafblog
mrmoshpotato
@trollhattan:
What about “assclownical?”
Major Major Major Major
@Taken4Granite:
Ah yes, the guy who said we must halt all AI development… because he was behind in the race and didn’t have an LLM to release yet.
counterfactual
@Chetan Murthy: No, I was more thinking of his implied, “Techbros are aristocracy to be worshipped by the unwashed masses.” But somehow that and racism end up entwined.
MattF
@Chetan Murthy: A Bluesky website is apparently in the works. The big unanswered question about Bluesky is how they can monetize without enshittifying. We shall see.
Major Major Major Major
@Alison Rose:
If my experience swimming with the communists on bluesky is any indication (and my Jewish friends’ experiences going to pro-Palestine rallies), it’s a lot fewer than two steps.
MattF
@Chetan Murthy: Yes, fafblog was the best blog, but it’s been gone for many ages.
Major Major Major Major
@bookworm1398:
We could always force Musk out under threat of nationialization/ruination. SpaceX is critical infrastructure.
Tony G
@oldster: “dialectical hatred” sounds like something a freshman would write in an essay that got a grade of D minus.
cain
@Chetan Murthy: That’s true – it’s a walled garden and thus hard to link to. One of the nice benefits of mastodon. The content is easy to access and certainly people have been doing that here.
Chetan Murthy
@Tony G: The entire meaning of dialectic is conflated with “Ooga Booga Boogeyman” when in fact it’s a very simple idea that’s obviously everywhere in the real world.
Major Major Major Major
@MattF:
One of their primary engineering goals is to make themselves enshittification-proof (“the company is a future adversary”), and it’s looking good on that front so far. I need to get a post up on the updated architecture there, it’s really coming along nicely. They actually federated themselves last week. Running a hosting service should be really cheap, running the firehose aggregator is pretty expensive, but it’s the “app view” layer where the enshittification would happen. (It’s the transformation pipeline that puts the posts in your app.) Running your own would be pretty cheap too.
cain
@Tony G:
Dialectical hatred definitely sounds like a condition that requires hemorrhoid pain relief meds to sooth.
C Stars
@Mag: I’m really kind of shocked that non-rightwing crazies still use Xitter, including politicians and writers and whatnot. How much lower does Musk have to go before folks put their values ahead of their social media addiction? I’ve been curious about this for a while, because he completely predictably keeps getting worse and more hateful and repulsive. I read the Atlantic article last night about Musk’s recent use of Xwitter to show us even more of his disgusting, racist ass, and then came to BJ this morning and was surprised to see a post full of links to the guy’s product. Not just his product, his lifeblood, really, because he desperately needs ever-increasing doses of infamy or attention or whatever it is to stay relevant and “successful.” And we happily give this to him.
All very easy for me to say, I realize. Where else to find a large concentration of pithy quips and links from political celebs and pundits? It just seems there must be an alternative..
ETA And no, not bluesky. Jack Dorsey is untrustworthy as fuck.
cwmoss
@H.E.Wolf: “Rebuking” someone sounds like some hifalutin nonsense, but “lashing out” is suitably click-worthy
RaflW
@bookworm1398: Tesla was about being niche, premium (I still think of them as all costing $100K & up even as that’s no longer true) and cool. Green was very secondary to being high tech.
And how can anyone look at the Cybertruck and think Tesla is a ‘green’ company. It wastes electrons (and stainless steel, etc) prodigiously. As well as looking like a slapdick DeLorean ripped from the pages of 1982.
Baud
@Alison Rose:
@Major Major Major Major:
We’re in the throws of political realignment.
Alison Rose
@Major Major Major Major: I was attempting to be generous and to soften my actual thoughts before putting them into words. But you are correct.
A Jewish friend on FB linked to a TikTok where a Jewish woman was trying to explain to others why the discussion around I/P and the history is very complicated for Jews and why it’s difficult for us to have people who are largely or entirely ignorant of that history insert themselves into the topic. Her video was really concise and balanced and not anti-Palestinian or pro-IDF or anything. But of course, the majority of comments were the most vile, hateful dreck, including one who asked, in response to a comment from the creator, “Are you claiming you don’t get paid for being Jewish?”
And the thing is, that is not an outlier opinion. We joke about our Soros checks, but people really believe that all Jews just have some kind of giant hamster water bottle affixed to our homes that pours gold coins out into our waiting pockets. Meanwhile, here I am living in a shithole apartment waiting and praying to be approved for SSDI which will barely be enough to cover my rent so my mother will have to pay my other bills and expenses out of her savings. But sure, all Jews are secret jewel-hoarding dragons, stealing wealth from every other group.
Part of the reason I don’t debate with people like that is because they’re hateful bigots who want me dead. But another part is that they are stupid as shit. Listen to a portion of the antisemitic left and you will realize they all seem to share custody of about eight brain cells among them.
Major Major Major Major
@Baud: People spent years denying reports of rising antisemitism on the left, and now here we are.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major: Looking forward to the post. I just got on recently, but it seems like the roll-out to general usage has been frustratingly slow.
WaterGirl
@Major Major Major Major: I was thinking along those same lines.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major: There’s so much junk about the “left” out there, it’s hard to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Chetan Murthy
@C Stars:
first, I haven’t had a Twitter account in many years. I block Twitter cookies, and only sea tweets via nitter. That said, since I only look at Twitter lists at individual Twitter users, i never see any of this Nazi content. That is to say, there’s a way to use Twitter to author and receive contentfrom knowledgeable sources without ever seeing any of the Nazi shit. It goes without saying That since I Block all Twitter cookies, I don’t get any advertising either.
For many specialists there still isn’t any other way of communicating: not all the people in some of these specialty areas are on Mastodon or Blue Sky, they’re on Twitter. And by specialty areas I mean things like international relations arms control the Ukraine war Russian studies etc.
I’m not defending it; it is what it is.
Chris
@Baud:
That too.
Major Major Major Major
@C Stars:
You do you, but I’ll note that it’s designed explicitly to be billionaire-proof and defensible against itself, and that he hates it so much he deleted his account there. In the current social media landscape, the services eligible to replace Twitter are Threads and Bluesky.
Baud
@Major Major Major Major: Threads has been a disappointment. Apparently Meta decided they didn’t really want to compete with Twitter, or with what Twitter was.
H.E.Wolf
You could be right!
I used “rebuked” as one of my alternate options because I tend to get biblical when I get irate. I once sent a FaxZero to Sen. Mitch McConnell and told him he was a hissing and a byword. :)
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Alison Rose: I relate. We get some of the same crap as white lesbians. “But you are accepted now..” Um. Not really. In urban environments, the haters are quiet about it. They just sabotage your career. In rural environments, you are at risk of physical harm.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Baud: That’s not a bad thing. Zuckerburg can not be trusted to do the right thing. He has zero interest in it.
Alison Rose
@Baud: If it’s coming from right-wing media, sure. But if the groups being targeted are telling you it’s happening, that’s not something you should need to ponder as to whether it’s wheat or chaff. If liberal Jews talk about the antisemitism we have personally experienced on the left, expressing doubt in response feels like gaslighting.
Baud
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: Definitely would prefer another company. But I’m at the point that anything is better than Musk.
Not that I was a twitter user before, or that I’ve done anything of note on Mastodon or Bluesky.
Chetan Murthy
@Major Major Major Major:
Do you have a pointer to their federation design?
Lapassionara
@Baud: can you say more about this “political realignment” you mentioned? (Or were you referring to “throw hands” from earlier and making a subtle joke)?
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@Major Major Major Major: And yes, these are younger people. This is why we have to fight forever. Demographics will not save us.
Baud
@Alison Rose: Personal experiences are by definition anecdotal though. It’s hard to get a sense of how widespread the problem is until you start seeing it everywhere.
MomSense
I think we’ve finally attained pique wingnut.
RaflW
@Baud: I haven’t pulled the plug on Bookface, but I loathe Zuckerberg, and I don’t trust Sheryl Sandberg or other senior leaders to do the right thing either (ie: Bookface green-lighting political ads that “question” the 2020 election results). So no way I’m joining Threads.
I got a tour of the BF HQ campus back in 2016. It felt like Westworld robots were the workforce even then, it felt so insular and creepy.
C Stars
@Major Major Major Major: It seems like stepping right back onto the same merry go round. Blue sky is run by crypto people, right? And Dorsey smoothed the way for Musk to buy Twitter to the point of even accepting Musk’s offer of a stock buyback option as a kind of corporate bribe?
Doesn’t seem trustworthy.
RaflW
@MomSense: Brava!
trollhattan
@MomSense: pique wingnut
All the golfclaps are awarded.
gene108
@Chris:
NSDAP didn’t have a clear economic agenda when it was founded. Even after Hitler took over, in the 1920’s, there were people who leaned towards socialism in the leadership.
Even Hitler thought socialism might be good. I forget what I read that caused him to abandon that flirtation with socialism.
Though leadership didn’t have a consistent economic policy, they were consistent in their propaganda of nationalism, anti-semitism, and tapped into the public’s frustration with how WW1 ended.
There’s also Germany’s Lost Generation of young men coming back from war and looking for a place to fit in. These were battle hardened young men and rising politics parties, in the new republican Germany, tried to use them as muscle against opposition.
I think NSDAP was good at this.
Betty
@Baud: I hardly know who people are referring to as “the left.” Noam Chomsky?
Major Major Major Major
@Chetan Murthy:
What documentation there is is at the protocol website… the blog has some stuff… but most of what I know I learned from the dev discord.
Major Major Major Major
@C Stars:
No, they’re distributed web people, which shares some concepts. Unfortunately all the oxygen was sucked out of this space by NFT idiots, but they’re not the same thing.
That’s completely irrelevant to how Bluesky works. It cannot be ruined in a way that matters. It is literally impossible for somebody to buy it.
Baud
@Betty: It’s fuzzy, I agree.
C Stars
@Alison Rose: I am so saddened by this whole situation. I’m deep in ultra-left land (Berkeley) and the antisemitism seems to me to be kind of baked into young, progressive belief systems right now.
I used to look at these hate movements in history and not be able to comprehend on a gut level how they could have happened, how folks could’ve let them happen. And now I think I see how it works: Hate becomes fashionable among people who pride themselves on being morally flawless.
Martin
I think it’s a mistake to look at Musks racism and seek its source in South Africa or his relatives. That leans much too close to general anti-immigrant sentiment, and is nearly identical to anti-Muslim sentiment in the US simply because someone’s roots are in Palestine, etc. A 6 year old in Chicago didn’t carry any kind of genetic antisemitism simply because his family tree had roots in Palestine. He was a 6 year old from Chicago and nothing more, because he was 6.
We know where Musk’s behavior comes from because we have documentation of it. Musk has been a target of radicalization from the right using the same Gamergate recipe that radicalized DePape. Musk was always seen as susceptible to this sort of thing, and his wealth made him a particularly important target. And given that he has followed that document pretty much to the letter, I think it’s safe to say that the effort worked, and is effective enough that we should be worried about it being used on other important individuals. I think the fact that Kanye got sucked into the Georgia election stealing case suggests he too was being recruited by the right.
I think it’s a mistake to think that all of these people are getting radicalized in some kind of mass coincidence, rather than this being a broad psyops operation by American fascists like Bannon, with the help of foreign governments when they can get it, US media outlets like Fox News, and a heaping of social media run by corporations that don’t understand the weapon they are holding. And we know these kinds of things do happen and do work because that’s the takeaway of Rachel Maddow’s Ultra podcast and new book. It’s not our first time here. Musk is a rube, sure, and I don’t mean to suggest he carries no responsibility here, but the answers to his behavior lie much closer to home, and much more related to who the current Speaker of the House is, why Trump is taking the campaign turn he is, why the media are failing to call it out, and so on. Keep your eye on the ball.
JoyceH
@Martin: Speaking of the Trump campaign- the vermin speech had gotten a lot of coverage but when you look at the clip, he’s obviously reading from a teleprompter, so — who wrote the speech? Not that Trump isn’t a fascist but his campaign seems to be well-stocked with fascists too.
Major Major Major Major
@JoyceH: Miller.
Timurid
@RaflW: That thing will 100% be the time machine in the Back to the Future reboot…
JoyceH
@Major Major Major Major: Do we know it was Miller or does it just sound like his sort of thing? Is he with the campaign now?
Chris
@Alison Rose:
The problem is that if I take at face value every statement of “I, a Jew, am telling you about anti-Semitism at a pro-Palestinian rally,” I’m very quickly going to end up categorizing the entire spectrum of movements opposing some Israeli policies or advocating for human rights in Palestine as anti-Semitic. Because there are quite a few Jews, even otherwise liberal ones, who effectively will not accept any opinion other than “Israel is always right” and consider all other views to be anti-Semitic, even if they don’t phrase it that way. Which I take to be Baud’s point about separating the wheat from the chaff.
So listening to the groups being targeted comes with asterisks. Palestinians, pro-Palestinian activists, and pretty much all Arab or Muslim American groups are also among the groups being targeted by the fash. Doesn’t mean I can take everything I hear from these groups at face value, either, and if I did, I’d end up in exactly the anti-Semitism den you’re describing.
Subsole
@Delk:
Ok, folks. Shut it down. This is today’s winner, right here.
Bill Arnold
@oldster:
It is rare that 2-word combinations are not found all over with a google search.
The first that google found for “dialectical hatred” is from 2015, at this odd (hive of) page(s): Quantum Hermaphroditic Genetics, related to circumcision and Gnosticism. And fonts. (Quantum memeotic fonts!) (Q&A)
It is a genuine rabbit hole, a fan of David Baum’s philosophical works. (“Wholeness And The Implicate Order”, e.g.)
(F-in wordcels attempting to map divine spaces using symbol graphs. Just, no. :-)
Brachiator
@Martin:
I agree that this was wrong-headed. It is a typical social media snap judgment looking for an easy way to label Musk as a Standard Evil White Man.
Kanye is mentally ill. He was largely recruited by the voices in his head.
As for Musk, I don’t know that he has been radicalized and don’t much care. I only know that he spouts racist crap and enables other racists on the huge social media platform he owns and controls.
And even though it is reasonable to bash tech bros, there have always been Free Speech idealists who believe that all ideas should be expressed and that the best alternative to hate speech is more speech that challenges it.
Geminid
@JoyceH: A friend of mine has followed Trump’s speeches very closely. It’s kind of an obsession. A month or so ago he analysed one of Trump’s rally speeches, and noted that about 50% was Trump riffing on familiar, repetitive themes. The other half came off the teleprompter, and my friend was certain Stephan Miller wrote that part.
Chris
@gene108:
I think in general the kind of people who ended up NSDAP don’t really care for understand economics, unless it’s to translate it into the kind of things they do care about, namely racism.
Socialism is good if it means expropriating Jews and redistributing their goods among the Aryans. It’s bad if it means expropriating goods with no regard to the person’s race and handing them out to people you consider Unpersons. Capitalism is good if it means allowing good honest Aryans to rise by turning a profit. It’s bad if it means that Jews or Slavs or Poles can also rise in your society simply because they can turn a profit. Etc.
At the end of the day all fascisms that I’m aware of will end up siding with the right over the left, for at least two reasons. One, the upper class is almost always going to disproportionately represent whoever the historically dominant ethnic group is, and the lower class is almost always going to disproportionately represent historically disenfranchised groups. Two, more crudely, a huge part of fascism comes down to “winners rule and losers drool.” Winners, by definition, are the people who are rich, and losers, by definition, are the people who are poor.
Chris
@Brachiator:
The story about Musk’s grandpa is illuminating, but not so much in a South African centric way.
The reality is, almost all of us have a Racist Uncle like that, and that’s one of the easiest ways that young people can be exposed to that kind of bullshit that we’d like to think of as backwards and coming from the past. Ideally, the young people will reject it. But there’s always those who don’t, more than we’d like to think.
Alison Rose
@Chris:
Most of us talking about antisemitism we’ve experienced from that side are not saying “and thus every single person who cares about Palestine is New Hitler™”. So if you choose to react to our statements about what we have been through in the way you describe here, that’s something you are doing, not something we’re making you do.
While this may be somewhat common among older Jews (meaning, say, 60s and up), among younger generations like mine and those after me, you will rarely hear “Israel is always right” or anything even approaching such a sentiment. Most of us think Netanyahu is a putz of the highest order and want to see a peaceful coexistence emerge. Also, be careful with “…even if they don’t phrase it that way”. You are not a mind-reader, and it’s precarious to pretend to be in order to categorize people’s comments in a way that fits a narrative.
Martin
@Baud: It’s also hard when in any crowd expressing opposition to the tactics of the Israeli government you end up with a lone expression of antisemitism (and often not even one), the entire operation is labeled antisemitic – when the vast majority was not.
Was the March for Israel antisemitic? Because it featured Hagee as a speaker, and that boy is hella antisemitic. He wasn’t just there, he was invited to speak.
I say this because where I used to work the biggest friction we had was between our sizable Jewish student community and our sizable Muslim, Palestinian community. This dynamic went on for over a decade, through times of crisis and not. It was confrontational, often loud and impassioned. The Muslim/Palestinian community goal was to educate other students on the situation in Gaza and the West Bank – settlements, security crackdowns, restrictions on travel and other rights, and general living conditions. They did this verbally, with large displays, photos, essays, etc. And this was multiple generations of students. When these efforts tipped up, the Jewish student community usually set up nearby looking to educate on the history of Israel and the Jewish people, and so on.
We always had an administrator assigned to broadly monitor these events because they got the attention of people outside the community (so many death threats…) and to make sure they didn’t get past the loud stage. During most of this time it was someone I knew who was a) Jewish, b) a lawyer, and c) a lawyer with expertise in free/hate speech. A good choice. They spoke regularly to individuals in both groups, was involved in any disciplinary measures (usually violating the permit they had), worked with campus police to determine when they were needed and how they should interact. This person was also involved in our media relations – usually trying to correct the record of the local papers.
A regular observation from them was that they found it remarkable how infrequent either group made anti-semitic, anti-muslim statements – as in almost never. Even when heated, the groups were pretty disciplined and focused on policy, etc. They were often fairly generous with expressions of sympathy for their historical issues, effects on civilians and the like. Jewish students defended Gaza crackdowns on the need for security against rocket attacks, etc. Palestinian students countered with the impact of settlements on displacing Palestinians, etc. These were not always calm discussions either, it was often shouting and angry. It was when outsiders showed up, usually older individuals, that it VERY quickly became antisemitic or antimuslim.
But when these interactions which again lasted YEARS were described by others, by the papers, etc. it was almost always as antisemitic or antimuslim, and they almost never actually were – at least the students role in them. And it was always pretty clear to us administrators that both groups worked very hard to keep it from going there, despite the ulterior goals of the outsiders that would sometimes show up.
There are strains of people – of all sorts – that are either incapable of distinguishing between a criticism of a government’s policies and a criticism of the category of people who generally live there, or they are motivated to not make that distinction. They don’t want to engage with the policy criticism so they claim the criticism is racist. And it’s a REALLY big thing on the right now where any attention shown on slavery and Jim Crow is instantly cast as being anti-white. Where any discussion of patriarchy means you’re anti-men. And the problem is bad enough that you pretty much can’t even have the discussion, which from tactics we know, is the goddamn point. If you try to criticize Israel, someone (not everyone, not even some generalizable group of people) will call you an anti-semite and that’s the only thing that will matter from that point forward.
I find it extremely hard to believe that students at Ivy League schools went immediately to antisemitism without any stop whatsoever on Israeli government policy criticism, and yet, that’s exactly how things are being reported – even now with protests by the Israeli government. That’s not a denial there is antisemitism, or that there were some expressions of antisemitism among the group, just that by casting *all* of it as antisemitic by association is a way to control the conversation by bad actors. It’s part of the toolkit for how you radicalize someone like Musk and liberals really, really, really need to learn how to not fall for it, and call it out when they see it.
Subsole
@Mr. Bemused Senior:
But if you try, sometimes,
You can get arrested for trespassing
Martin
@Chris: That wasn’t my point though. My point is that there is an organized movement right this second in the United States that seeks to radicalize the population. Whether or not someone has a racist uncle is beside the point. It may make the radicalization process easier or harder, but it’s immaterial to the fact that there is an organized psyops operation in the US trying to radicalize Americans toward fascism that is working relatively well. By all accounts, they’ve successfully captured about ⅓ of the country. That may be as far as they get, but that they got that far tells is it is the only thing we should be focused on around this topic.
Subsole
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony:
Is thinly-veiled fetishization really so different from acceptance, though??
//////s
TriassicSands
Well you can never have enough white babies. It’s just people planning ahead for Soylent Green. You can dye white any color. In the U.S. there may not be enough minorities to fulfill the Soylent Green needs, so low income and poor whites may have to be used.
Obviously, that is tongue in cheek, but it reflects what I think of the Right in America. They won’t hesitate to “eat” their own, and they will always “eat” their “enemies.”
Bill Arnold
@teezyskeezy:
Lay off with this moralizing, please.
There is, at the moment, no seriously replacement[1] for twitter, so you are saying that good people should restrict their means of 1-to-many communication , and leave certain means to bad people. Advantage: bad people. You are arguing for the differential empowerment of bad people.
On this we agree. I am reasonably confident that Musk will achieve this for us, with a little subtle prodding as required.
[1] Bluesky is close, but is still a closed platform, and invite-only.
Martin
This is a mistake. His mental illness simply makes him a better target to be radicalized. The radicalization effort doesn’t try to target you or me – it does try to target certain other people though. They target people who feel like social outcasts. They target people who feel they were promised something by society. But they narrowly and specifically target individuals of status and wealth who look like easy marks. Look at how much of Trumps statements we now see are being fed to him by others. I’m not saying Trump isn’t a terrible person, he absolutely is, but he’s also an impressionable terrible person and others can feed into his insecurities and make him terrible in specific ways.
Kanye fits this description as well, but why did he get caught up in this obscure vote stealing action in Georgia? It’s the narrow specificity of his role that is suspicious. It wasn’t yet in the news, it wasn’t something that was broadly available to the public. DePape going after Pelosi – yeah, railing on Pelosi was everywhere. Anyone could have fallen into that. But that’s not what happened in Georgia in the place that Kanye’s staff were intervening. Nobody in the public even knew that was happening.
Freemark
@Chris: I understand what you mean. I am highly critical of Israel, as in its actions as a country not as individuals. I’ve been called anti-Semitic numerous times for pointing out how evil it has been in the West Bank. I believe in Israel’s right to exist, I don’t equate Jews and Israel, I certainly don’t believe in the POZ bullshit, and I do believe that the Holocaust, pogroms, etc. all happened. But because I believe Israel has committed pretty severe heinous things to the point I don’t see Hamas being worse than Israel I have been called anti-Semitic. Not only do I have to say how evil Hamas is I have to also say how incredibly good Israel is in order to not be anti-Semitic.
I don’t see this as much here at BJ but it is certainly pretty common elsewhere. Then of course as soon as I show support for Israel’s right to exist and for some level of self-defense I become a fool who fell for the Zionist propaganda.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Suzanne
@Brachiator:
Kanye West has bipolar disorder. Spawn the Elder has bipolar disorder and isn’t a racist POS.
Mental illness doesn’t make you a racist asshole.
Layer8Problem
@Mr. Bemused Senior: “Giblets is a very demanding Giblets.”
Bill Arnold
@C Stars:
Fashion is orthogonal to rationality. Or morality.
Betty Cracker
According to Axios, Apple yanked its ads off ex-Twitter. Sounds like the frantic attempts at damage control aren’t working. ETA: Also Lion’s Gate Entertainment.
Geminid
@Martin: I think a reflexive identification of anti-Israeli with anti-semitism is stupid. That said, I’ve seen plenty of racism towards Israelis as a people. I knew a guy who never said Israeli without the prefix “pig,” as in “pig Israelis.” I don’t know if he was anti-semitic, but he sure as hell was racist.
There is an assumption by some that racism can only be towards underdogs like Palestinians, but I don’t believe that. And people who disdain or hate Israelis might say, “I am not racist! These people deserve my disdain and hatred!” But racists always say this.
Bill Arnold
@Geminid:
Yep. Stephen Miller is a Nazi propagandist, or close enough to be treated as such.
C Stars
Rationality, OK. Morality? I think you could make an argument that fashion and popular morality are the same thing.
Geminid
@Bill Arnold: I think that to the extent there is an intellectual framework in Trump’s speeches, Miller is the architect.
Gin & Tonic
@Bill Arnold: Thank you for this. As I have pointed out repeatedly, reporters and regular citizens in many other countries have no current practical alternative for this sort of communication.
Bill Arnold
@C Stars:
“popular morality”, LOL, true.
Calouste
@Betty Cracker: Good timing to trigger an advertiser boycott, about 25% of the annual online ad budget is spend in the six weeks between now and Christmas.
Brachiator
@Martin:
RE: Kanye is mentally ill. He was largely recruited by the voices in his head.
Sorry, I am skeptical about arguments about radicalization even when offered by supposed experts on the issue. What you are offering is speculation about people you don’t know.
And again, I am more alarmed by the impact of what Musk says and does than I am curious about the origin of his bigotry.
C Stars
@Bill Arnold: Well, the pure moral philosophy that you are probably engaging in is surely not tainted by fashion or any contemporary tendencies of thought.
Scout211
@Betty Cracker:
See my comment at #35. Also IBM. The exodus of the companies is in response to a Media Matters report revealing that those company’s ads were placed next to pro-Nazi content even though they were assured that X would not do that.
Added: Also EU due to possible “reputational damage.”
Brachiator
@Suzanne:
RE: Kanye is mentally ill. He was largely recruited by the voices in his head.
Individuals vary. Kanye says a lot of things that make no sense, compared to his earlier behavior, and some of this stuff is bigotry.
At the very least, whatever he “believes,” he says stuff that is hateful and self-harming, things that a person more in control of himself might simply keep to himself.
I had a relative who never said hateful things growing up. Then, as a young adult, they began spouting obsessive and hateful stuff, including delusions of being persecuted. Some of their ravings were parodies of stuff you hear on Fox News and late night conspiracy talk radio.
But this stuff also seemed to be repeating and amplifying bigoted statements by non-relatives. Maybe some of this reflected their own deeply held and previously hidden fears and hatred. I don’t know. But the anxiety and expressions of hatred are often muted by medication.
This person also lashes out against family members and nurses, making accusations that are clearly false and absurd.
espierce
@Betty Cracker:
Musk has also managed to reduce Tesla’s market cap by $40 billion since Wednesday. Genius move, again.
You go, Elmo!
Princess
@Martin: I think with Kanye’s radicalization we know exactly who was responsible – it was Milo Yiannopolis of whoever is keeping Yiannopolis in hair gel these days.
lowtechcyclist
@TeezySkeezy:
I haven’t been back to Twitter after Elmo called that atrocity the “actual truth,” and I won’t be going back. I don’t care if any of the attempted Twitter replacements are adequate for my purposes or not. I’d rather just do without it than to patronize that site a moment longer.
Martin
Again, I am not questioning that in any way. My point is that there is a known technique to conflate valid criticism with hate speech that is employed by bad actors knowing that there are good people who will interpret this as allyship and I the process recruit good people to help shut down that valid criticism because they do not take the time (nor can they reasonably do most of the time) thoroughly investigate that claim.
I would argue that there are numerous people here susceptible to this, as well as a lot of people in the media, some lawmakers, etc.
And again, this is same technique you see with Moms for Liberty and those groups that scream that criticisms of structural racism are anti-white. Most of us don’t fall for that, but a lot of well meaning people do. And I think some people that have otherwise insulated themselves to the anti-white argument because they’re confident in their place in society are less so when it comes to assertions of antisemitism.
Again, not saying there isn’t antisemitism or that their personal experiences with it aren’t perfectly valid – they are – it’s how we interpret other people’s accusations of antisemitism and whether we are sufficiently skeptical of their real motives, because honest to god nazis have a LONG history of calling out perfectly reasonable things as racist or antisemitic because it serves the purpose of tearing groups apart, which gives them opportunities to recruit.
Martin
@Princess: Yes, I agree. And Milo comes out of the Gamergate movement, out of those radicalization techniques, and was part of the transference of those to the alt-right which was ultimately the vehicle that brought Trump to office. Bannon was also in that space – was also involved in Gamergate, also brought those same radicalization techniques to the GOP and specifically the Trump campaign.
These all form a single movement, and a big part of that movement was how to radicalize people particularly through social media.
Martin
@Betty Cracker: Losing Apple is really important. Not only are they the largest advertiser on quite a few platforms, they are used by a LOT of companies as a proxy for safety.
I’ve been really disappointed that Apple has taken this long to get off the platform given that they know they perform this role for the industry. Their presence alone gives credibility to the outlet they are advertising on.
Geminid
@Martin: Well, I wasn’t saying you denied there is anti-Israeli racism. I was following up on the discussion because I thought this was relevent.
Anti-semitism is just a particular form of racism. In ways it’s unfortunate that a 19th century German academic coined the term as a more refined word for Judenhass, “Jew Hatred.” There are some people who ardently espouse anti-racism that think anti-Semitism is not as toxic. The reaction to the Holocaust sent anti-semitism underground for decades but it has come roaring back and I think a lot of people do not understand how dangerous it is, even though they vehemently champion anti-racism in general.
I think Syria provides a negative example of anti-Israeli racism. Over the last 10 years, Bashir Assad has been the biggest butcher on the planet. Most left-wung people have people in the West have hardly paid attention. For them, Arab lives are cheap unless it is Israel taking those lives.
For years, the UN called has called the war in Yemen the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. But one leftwing news site I checked only reported on it when Bernie Sanders and others would try to cut off US weapon sales to Saudi Arabia. The ceasefire of 2022 that seems to have become permanent this year did not receive a word of notice in that rag.
It’s like human suffering only counts when it can be framed as Western countries oppressing the “Global South.” That’s why some on the Left actually side with Bashir Assad, or with the Iranian regime despite the repression.
MomSense
@Suzanne:
Thank you.
Quiltingfool
Late to the thread, but I was over on John Scalzi’s site, reading about his leaving Twitter, er, X. I like to read the comments and came across a link to David Simon’s (The Wire) essay on why he left X…some damned fine writing.
He really, really does not like Musk.
https://davidsimon.com/die-of-boils-mr-sparky-car/
J
When Musk, in a fit of pique, call one of the cave divers in Thailand a ‘pedo guy’ I knew something was terribly wrong with him. The cave divers, one of whom lost his life, undertook one of the most terrifying rescue operations of this century and succeeded. Awe and admiration are their due, not peevish resentment and slander.
Brachiator
@Geminid:
It’s not just about the value of Arab lives. Many Americans and some leftists only care about places where the US has military operations or where US allies have military operations.
For some, even Israel is an issue only because the country is a US ally.
There are terrible events happening in Mali, where a Taliban type group is creating havoc and running out UN peacekeepers. But it barely gets any attention here.
Civil War, including claims of ethnic cleansing, continues in Sudan.
War continues in Myanmar, where recent news reports that a military jet bombed a school, killing a number of children.
Selective outrage, along with hatred of the US and sometimes Israel, greatly influences news coverage and commentary.
Bupalos
@counterfactual:
“The politics of Jeff Bezos are as bad as Musk, he’s just quieter about it.”
This really doesn’t make any functional sense.
Bupalos
@Geminid: very well put.