Well, since this wasn't an election and therefore I didn't vote for Elon my conscience is clear. And if he's less shitty than the people who came before him then I won't be happy that he's still shitty, but I'll take what I can get.
Does this mean that if an evil person does one good thing, you're going to say that the good thing doesn't matter and that we were better off with the previous evil person who wouldn't even do THAT much?
I don't know how you're going to answer this. The question isn't rhetorical. But I know of OTHER people who are talking about how monstrous Elon Musk is and how it was the darkest of days when he acquired Twitter. You hear enough of this stuff and you start to wonder if maybe they preferred the old censorship regime that censored even more. If they're not even reading anything in the Twitter Files because they think "Oh, it's just PR for Musk, who is evil."
Yes, I want Twitter and the other companies to be run by people who don't censor at all. But right now we don't have that, and since it costs so much to buy one of these companies we're not likely to get it anytime soon, if ever.
You can be happy that Elon released the Twitter Files and is doing less censorship without being a stan for the guy, you know.
The liberal ideology of "net good" is another bad myth that serves to construct, enable, and selectively launder evil. We can be happy that the, er, some Twitter files have been released without affecting our judgment of the moral agent who did it. A sardonic gold star is all the moral celebration the ownership classes deserve. Frankly, it's all most of us can afford these days.
Would you kindly not imply I'm a liberal, please? If I were, then I would have checked the box for Biden on my absentee ballot and driven like a madman to the closest place I could mail it. That's not what I did. I wrote in Nina Turner, although considering how she turned out I even regret *that*.
I know all about what you're referring to because I've criticized it myself, and it seems to me that you're missing a key difference here.
In an election, if I say to myself "Oh, I HAVE to vote for this person I don't like, because if I don't then things will be even WORSE!" then I am taking an action. I am actively supporting somebody who is going to harm the world more than he helps it, and by a very wide margin.
Since the question of who runs Twitter isn't something that I can vote on, I am taking NO action whatsoever.
If I had voted for Biden, then I feel I would deserve part of the blame for Biden's subsequent crimes against humanity. Even if that blame were split hundreds of millions of ways, that's still not okay with me.
Whereas with Twitter, if I'm sick and tired of seeing good people censored and banned, and then Elon comes along and says "I'm going to stop this", and I say to myself "You know, I hope he DOES buy Twitter! There's no way I can help it happen, it either happens or it doesn't, but it can't possibly be any worse than it is, right?"
So I got my wish, even though I would much rather have, say, Jeremy Corbyn in charge of Twitter. One of the few politicians I still have faith in, although considering that he's been smeared to hell and back already I doubt he would want to be in Musk's current shoes getting smeared even more.
Now, if he's only going to fire that one FBI lawyer (not because he's FBI, but because he actually tried to alter the documents that the journalists doing the Twitter Files received) while leaving lots of other spooks inside the company, that's bad. And that's how things are right now.
If he goes on to say that he's generally pro-FBI, which he did, then that's worse. The most charitable way to read that statement by him is that he's ignorant AF about what the FBI does.
If he does propaganda for the US Empire by making sure pro-Ukraine/anti-Russia stuff trends and that the opposite is suppressed, then in that respect he's no different from the people he's replaced.
If he's not going to unban Scott Ritter, Robert Malone, and all the others who were banned unjustly for wrongthink on Ukraine or Covid or whatever, then he's no better when it comes to that either.
I could go on but I hope that you're convinced you are NOT talking to a shitlib by now.
And okay, his thought process behind even the Twitter Files dump might have gone something like "OK, I'll show everybody how the previous people censored them, I'll provide the indisputable proof of what everybody suspected all along. And then I'll shake my head, and say 'Tsk tsk, what assholes those people are. Look at all the censorship they did! I'm different. If I weren't, I wouldn't be showing you all of this and saying it's bad, would I?' Then, everybody will think I'm different, and nobody will suspect me of censoring just like they did. It's good PR for me."
Even taking all of that into account I am, in fact, savoring the Great Musk Panic as Mr. Taibbi advised me to do here:
I fucking LOVE that the very same journalists who wanted everybody to the right of Rachel Maddow and to the left of Rachel Maddow to get banned are now getting banned themselves.
I fucking LOVE that they're getting a taste of their own medicine.
I fucking LOVE that the people who begged for more censorship are now at the mercy of this guy who is--unless they're all putting on a hell of an act--enraging them and censoring the people they agree with, which will hopefully teach them a lesson but probably won't, so I'll just enjoy the schadenfreude of it all if you don't mind.
I want these motherfuckers to suffer, all right? I don't care who makes them suffer. And I don't think that "suffer" is too strong a word to use considering how thin-skinned the likes of Taylor Lorenz are. If a bad person is making bad people suffer, that's fine with me! As for the bad person who's making the other bad people suffer, well, hopefully somebody else can make him suffer as well later on. At the moment I just want to watch the show and eat my popcorn.
Now, if you think that me feeling this way and saying so somehow benefits Elon Musk and the Empire which he still serves (and which, if he should ever choose to stop serving, has enough leverage to keep him in their service since they can ruin his bottom line if they want), well, you're entitled to your opinion.
I beg to differ. It's two scorpions in a jar fighting, and when bad people fight each other, bad people get hurt, and I am SO here for that.
If that's something which is beyond your comprehension and if you feel that I'm obligated to loathe every last action Elon Musk takes, whether he's sending equipment to Ukraine that prolongs the proxy war or whether he's pouring himself a cup of coffee...well, I'd say that I'm sorry to disappoint you, but that would be a lie.
An evil person would do a good thing to cover for or divert from the bad things to go on.
I posted a link to a podcast in another comment where you can hear an example of the First Look's Omidiar. And drawing parallels to Musk, but it could be anyone in this context.
I'm glad that you brought up Omidyar, because I sure don't like him. I hate what The Intercept has become, that it pushes out good journalists like Glenn Greenwald while bringing in Russiagaters like James Risen and doxxers/liars like Ken Klippenstein.
But when Ken Klippenstein teamed up with Lee Fang (Lee might be the only decent journalist left at the outlet, but maybe I'm forgetting somebody or unaware or somebody) to expose this...
I still hate Ken, because overall he's still a POS who doxxed Fiorella Isabel and called Jimmy Dore a "horse dewormer med guy" after Dore shared a study *from the NIH* saying that ivermectin might be effective at treating Covid. And I wouldn't be surprised if he ends up doing 100 or 500 more stories that just kiss the establishment's ass before he ever does another story that exposes establishment wrongdoing.
But you know what? I'll take it, just like I'll take Musk doing one or two things right re. Twitter. It's better than if they never did anything right at all.
Seems to me that when they do something good--even if they might do it for the wrong reason, like maybe doing it not because they want to help anybody but because they want to make life difficult for their enemies--we should be glad that they did something good, and let me stress that being glad they did something good does *not* mean we should believe they are overall good people, nor does it mean that we should consider them trustworthy in the future.
I’m not exactly sure what you mean, but I’ll take your comment literally, which is that the “role” of the billionaire character known as Elon Musk is often played by an “actor.”
I was a fan of magic shows when I was a kid, then I learned that the “beautiful assistant” introduced during the first trick is actually one of a pair of identical twins. This, of course, makes it possible to perform the trick of sawing one of the twins in half on stage only to have the other twin emerge seconds later from the rear of theater.
Also, in filmmaking, the use of a body double or stunt double is routine, and we generally just accept this practice without reservations (and many just assume the actor performed her own stunts).
If even average no-name stage magicians can afford to hire twin beautiful assistants, imagine the techniques billionaires like Musk (who brags he works with the most sophisticated AI in the world, which is no doubt capable of deep fake videos) might employ for security reasons alone, not to mention for PR or propaganda purposes.
Let’s not go that far... Elon is nothing like
Yoel Roth!
Another lesser of two evils.
Well, since this wasn't an election and therefore I didn't vote for Elon my conscience is clear. And if he's less shitty than the people who came before him then I won't be happy that he's still shitty, but I'll take what I can get.
Nothing to do with any election. The attitude is what matters. It is still evil.
Does this mean that if an evil person does one good thing, you're going to say that the good thing doesn't matter and that we were better off with the previous evil person who wouldn't even do THAT much?
I don't know how you're going to answer this. The question isn't rhetorical. But I know of OTHER people who are talking about how monstrous Elon Musk is and how it was the darkest of days when he acquired Twitter. You hear enough of this stuff and you start to wonder if maybe they preferred the old censorship regime that censored even more. If they're not even reading anything in the Twitter Files because they think "Oh, it's just PR for Musk, who is evil."
Yes, I want Twitter and the other companies to be run by people who don't censor at all. But right now we don't have that, and since it costs so much to buy one of these companies we're not likely to get it anytime soon, if ever.
You can be happy that Elon released the Twitter Files and is doing less censorship without being a stan for the guy, you know.
The liberal ideology of "net good" is another bad myth that serves to construct, enable, and selectively launder evil. We can be happy that the, er, some Twitter files have been released without affecting our judgment of the moral agent who did it. A sardonic gold star is all the moral celebration the ownership classes deserve. Frankly, it's all most of us can afford these days.
Would you kindly not imply I'm a liberal, please? If I were, then I would have checked the box for Biden on my absentee ballot and driven like a madman to the closest place I could mail it. That's not what I did. I wrote in Nina Turner, although considering how she turned out I even regret *that*.
I know all about what you're referring to because I've criticized it myself, and it seems to me that you're missing a key difference here.
In an election, if I say to myself "Oh, I HAVE to vote for this person I don't like, because if I don't then things will be even WORSE!" then I am taking an action. I am actively supporting somebody who is going to harm the world more than he helps it, and by a very wide margin.
Since the question of who runs Twitter isn't something that I can vote on, I am taking NO action whatsoever.
If I had voted for Biden, then I feel I would deserve part of the blame for Biden's subsequent crimes against humanity. Even if that blame were split hundreds of millions of ways, that's still not okay with me.
Whereas with Twitter, if I'm sick and tired of seeing good people censored and banned, and then Elon comes along and says "I'm going to stop this", and I say to myself "You know, I hope he DOES buy Twitter! There's no way I can help it happen, it either happens or it doesn't, but it can't possibly be any worse than it is, right?"
So I got my wish, even though I would much rather have, say, Jeremy Corbyn in charge of Twitter. One of the few politicians I still have faith in, although considering that he's been smeared to hell and back already I doubt he would want to be in Musk's current shoes getting smeared even more.
Now, if he's only going to fire that one FBI lawyer (not because he's FBI, but because he actually tried to alter the documents that the journalists doing the Twitter Files received) while leaving lots of other spooks inside the company, that's bad. And that's how things are right now.
If he goes on to say that he's generally pro-FBI, which he did, then that's worse. The most charitable way to read that statement by him is that he's ignorant AF about what the FBI does.
If he does propaganda for the US Empire by making sure pro-Ukraine/anti-Russia stuff trends and that the opposite is suppressed, then in that respect he's no different from the people he's replaced.
If he's not going to unban Scott Ritter, Robert Malone, and all the others who were banned unjustly for wrongthink on Ukraine or Covid or whatever, then he's no better when it comes to that either.
I could go on but I hope that you're convinced you are NOT talking to a shitlib by now.
And okay, his thought process behind even the Twitter Files dump might have gone something like "OK, I'll show everybody how the previous people censored them, I'll provide the indisputable proof of what everybody suspected all along. And then I'll shake my head, and say 'Tsk tsk, what assholes those people are. Look at all the censorship they did! I'm different. If I weren't, I wouldn't be showing you all of this and saying it's bad, would I?' Then, everybody will think I'm different, and nobody will suspect me of censoring just like they did. It's good PR for me."
Even taking all of that into account I am, in fact, savoring the Great Musk Panic as Mr. Taibbi advised me to do here:
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/savor-the-great-musk-panic
I fucking LOVE that the very same journalists who wanted everybody to the right of Rachel Maddow and to the left of Rachel Maddow to get banned are now getting banned themselves.
I fucking LOVE that they're getting a taste of their own medicine.
I fucking LOVE that the people who begged for more censorship are now at the mercy of this guy who is--unless they're all putting on a hell of an act--enraging them and censoring the people they agree with, which will hopefully teach them a lesson but probably won't, so I'll just enjoy the schadenfreude of it all if you don't mind.
I want these motherfuckers to suffer, all right? I don't care who makes them suffer. And I don't think that "suffer" is too strong a word to use considering how thin-skinned the likes of Taylor Lorenz are. If a bad person is making bad people suffer, that's fine with me! As for the bad person who's making the other bad people suffer, well, hopefully somebody else can make him suffer as well later on. At the moment I just want to watch the show and eat my popcorn.
Now, if you think that me feeling this way and saying so somehow benefits Elon Musk and the Empire which he still serves (and which, if he should ever choose to stop serving, has enough leverage to keep him in their service since they can ruin his bottom line if they want), well, you're entitled to your opinion.
I beg to differ. It's two scorpions in a jar fighting, and when bad people fight each other, bad people get hurt, and I am SO here for that.
If that's something which is beyond your comprehension and if you feel that I'm obligated to loathe every last action Elon Musk takes, whether he's sending equipment to Ukraine that prolongs the proxy war or whether he's pouring himself a cup of coffee...well, I'd say that I'm sorry to disappoint you, but that would be a lie.
An evil person would do a good thing to cover for or divert from the bad things to go on.
I posted a link to a podcast in another comment where you can hear an example of the First Look's Omidiar. And drawing parallels to Musk, but it could be anyone in this context.
I'm glad that you brought up Omidyar, because I sure don't like him. I hate what The Intercept has become, that it pushes out good journalists like Glenn Greenwald while bringing in Russiagaters like James Risen and doxxers/liars like Ken Klippenstein.
But when Ken Klippenstein teamed up with Lee Fang (Lee might be the only decent journalist left at the outlet, but maybe I'm forgetting somebody or unaware or somebody) to expose this...
https://theintercept.com/2022/10/31/social-media-disinformation-dhs/
...that was a good thing.
I still hate Ken, because overall he's still a POS who doxxed Fiorella Isabel and called Jimmy Dore a "horse dewormer med guy" after Dore shared a study *from the NIH* saying that ivermectin might be effective at treating Covid. And I wouldn't be surprised if he ends up doing 100 or 500 more stories that just kiss the establishment's ass before he ever does another story that exposes establishment wrongdoing.
But you know what? I'll take it, just like I'll take Musk doing one or two things right re. Twitter. It's better than if they never did anything right at all.
Seems to me that when they do something good--even if they might do it for the wrong reason, like maybe doing it not because they want to help anybody but because they want to make life difficult for their enemies--we should be glad that they did something good, and let me stress that being glad they did something good does *not* mean we should believe they are overall good people, nor does it mean that we should consider them trustworthy in the future.
Elon musk is more than one man
I’m not exactly sure what you mean, but I’ll take your comment literally, which is that the “role” of the billionaire character known as Elon Musk is often played by an “actor.”
I was a fan of magic shows when I was a kid, then I learned that the “beautiful assistant” introduced during the first trick is actually one of a pair of identical twins. This, of course, makes it possible to perform the trick of sawing one of the twins in half on stage only to have the other twin emerge seconds later from the rear of theater.
Also, in filmmaking, the use of a body double or stunt double is routine, and we generally just accept this practice without reservations (and many just assume the actor performed her own stunts).
If even average no-name stage magicians can afford to hire twin beautiful assistants, imagine the techniques billionaires like Musk (who brags he works with the most sophisticated AI in the world, which is no doubt capable of deep fake videos) might employ for security reasons alone, not to mention for PR or propaganda purposes.