Yes, that piece refers to the same event.

I feel like when I said, “Elon has been a public Nazi for a few years now,” what you heard was, “the general public has known Elon is a Nazi for a few years now.”

Were you trying to imply moral culpability for people “buying their own coffin from a Nazi” or not? Moral culpability only works if they reasonably would have known, so that “buying it” is a choice eligible for moral consideration.

If you’re merely observing the situation without moral consideration to point out gee, that’s ironic, then I’m forced to agree: that is ironic. However, you seem to be claiming more than that with the word excuse.

if you have a Model 3, you may have an excuse, but if you have a Cyberdump, you have no excuse

Thus, for your claim to work they had to be aware, and since we know nothing about them, we can only reasonably expect they knew if the general public knew. So, I don’t think I misunderstood you.

Yes, maga idiots have excused his behavior for years

Excused? No, they do the same and have for years. Feeding into Nazi conspiracy theories & agreeing with Nazis is typical MAGA behavior.

Remember Pizza Gate & the adrenochrome conspiracy? Both have roots in old antisemitic conspiracies of Jews consuming the blood of sacrificed children, though I doubt MAGA conspiracists know that.

Musk had a firm reason to know he was agreeing with a Nazi: the tweet he agreed with was answering a challenge for “cowards” posting “Hitler was right” to explain themselves. Even so, agreeing with Nazi conspiracies doesn’t amount to essentials that define Nazi: white supremacy, advocating for genocide & an ethnostate, etc. It doesn’t surprise me that people often see it as more MAGA idiocy similar to Trump saying both sides include “some very fine people”.

until after much of this behavior had already been very public

I agree it was public. I also submit that the general public probably saw it as MAGA instead of Nazi if they paid attention at all.

When people shop for a car, the company’s CEO may not be their top consideration if any. In the case of a Cyberflop, they may be looking at the environment, self-driving features, or fall for marketing gimmicks & believe they’re buying the greatest innovation.

Also, it’s just a fucking awful truck.

Totally. For that alone, they deserve all the blame for getting that deathtrap.

Let’s just forget this minor disagreement. That car’s a piece of shit. Fuck that car.

Not exactly a prominent headline & I don’t see a transcript. The 16-page sources documents links to online references including of a large number of tweets, several articles not regarding Musk, and some news articles on Musk. This is quite a bit to wade through. It’d be better to name clear, prominent headlines as I suggested before. Nonetheless, I’ll glance through.

The articles I’ve glanced through cover his descent into right-wing extremism on X, suspensions of journalists’ accounts, overtures to Putin & Trump. They cover criticism by advertisers & special interests of Musk’s tolerance for the spread of hate speech on X. There was that episode when Musk agreed with a post making a veiled reference to the antisemitic Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which led to denunciations by the ADL, advertisers pulling out, and Musk responding by posting objections to antisemitism & to organizations that push “racism of any kind” and by paying visits to Israel & Auschwitz.

Most of these could be construed as forgettable online MAGA mayhem. While that last episode drew headlines, rather than pin Musk down as a Nazi, a casual observer could easily discount it as online outrage over a MAGA idiot who falls for conspiracy bullshit & rolls that back. They could do that right before they easily forget it.

I don’t deny the conduct is troubling. However, these online distractions don’t exactly make memorable, prominent headlines that conclusively pin Musk down as a Nazi to the casual public. They don’t capture the public’s attention as clearly as Musk’s double Nazi salute.

If you could point out such a headline that the people in the collision would have known before they purchased the vehicle, then I’d concede your point, but at the moment I don’t see it.

MAGA idiot: sure.

Nazi years ago: name high profile headlines years ago that would have made that apparent to the casual public, and not only to obsessive social media dwellers heaping constant attention on his every move. Until the double Nazi salute, I doubt most people had any idea.

The Highway Patrol’s investigation into a November Cybertruck crash

Were they supposed to know that with their time machine or divine it through the occult?

Even as a kid, I never understood kids’ fascination with stickers. What’s so cool about a drawing on adhesive paper? I thought.

Self-cleaning oven setting: complimentary.

permanently

How permanently? Luigi?

That’s the most delulu & citation-free comment I’ve read in recent time: good job!

The premise of free expression is that the people get to decide what speech they want to hear, and it’s not the role of an authority to decide that for them. Seems you oppose that liberty & want an authority to decide. Isn’t there a name for people who oppose freedom & want everyone to obey authority? Aren’t there some rather unsavory characters who agree with you? That’s some awfully bad company: despite your superficial differences, you’re a bit too alike.

because calling out nazis as liars about their interest in free speech has got to mean abandoning freedom of speech.

No duh insincere people claiming to advocate for free speech don’t really mean it. This isn’t exactly new or debatable: what is argued with it is debatable.

Earlier, you write about “statements nearly impossible to implement” & looking for “solutions” as if free speech needs solving. It doesn’t. Free speech is its own solution: it means free for speech you dislike and for speech to answer it. There’s nothing to solve but a lack of dedication to & endurance of free speech.

application of ethical principles may change

this is a nice summary statement here.

Not to be lifted out of context, “people’s awareness & recognition of” is an important part of that quote.

It doesn’t mean their application to the same circumstances changes. What changes is people’s awareness/recognition, not that it applies or how (it always applied the moment it was possible to apply). Like finally recognizing equal rights apply to women or minorities. Or that protesting topless is protected speech. Or that free speech applies to communication over new technologies.

If you got that, though, then it’s a nice summary.

Technologies

yes

and ethics continuously change

no

and adapt to new technologies

Yes. Technology may change, people’s awareness & recognition of the application of ethical principles may change, however that doesn’t mean the principles themselves change.

In terms of ethical reasoning, the essence of a matter may remain the same regardless of superficial guises (like technology). Adapting to a technology means applying the same general principles to novel, special cases. The principles concern rights & moral obligations people have to each other. Technology isn’t essential or relevant: the use of technology to perform an action is irrelevant to whether that action is right or wrong. The principles themselves can be timeless, immutable, and concern only essentials necessary to evaluate actions. Thinking otherwise indicates confusion & someone who doesn’t know what they’re talking about.

I’m not interested in discussing the analogies of going from codexes to printed books vs. going from printed hard copies to human-human interactions being hijacked by human-passing bots, because to me these are evidently not comparable.

Well, you’re wrong. They’re ultimately ways of disseminating expression. Just because you think some shiny, new, whizzy bang doodad fundamentally changes everything doesn’t mean it does.

It probably indicates lack of historical perspective. These problems you think are new aren’t. People have long been complaining about lies spreading faster than truth, the public being disinformed & easily manipulated. In the previous century, the US has been through worse with disfranchisement, Jim Crow, internment camps, violent white supremacy, the red scare, McCarthyism. Yet now contagious stupidity spread through automations is an unprecedented threat unlike the contagious stupidity of the past? Large scale stupidity isn’t new. Freedom of speech was essential to anti-authoritarian, civil rights, and counterculture movements.

There’s something contradictory about trying to defend liberal society by surrendering a critical part of it.

The fact that this discussion is taking place on Lemmy and not Xitter tells plenty about the actual complexities of this story.

Not really. Decentralization is part of the solution.

Some people never liked Twitter.

That’s just technology & fearmongering. Socrates was critical of writing out of concerns it would deteriorate minds & make superficial thinkers. Critics were concerned the printing press would lead to widespread moral degradation with the abundance of low-quality literature. People criticized television & media for brain rot.

Guess what you’re the next iteration of?

Technologies change, yet good principles hold regardless.

You know what you can do with free speech? More free speech. No one has a monopoly on LLM, bots, or algorithms. If people were inclined, they could launch these technologies to counter messages they oppose. People can choose to tune out & disregard expressions. Much more can be done with free speech.

Does anyone?

Yes, old-school liberals, the ACLU, etc.

It’s bizarre & disappointing that newer generations seem to associate freedom of speech with right-wing authoritarians when freedom of speech has been a firmly liberal value advanced through the enlightenment & civil rights movement. Everyone ought to defend it.

The point of my post is that some of the loudest proponents of free speech have ulterior motives.

So what? Free speech is still right: everyone should fervently defend it. Whether they’re sincere about it or not, free speech is indispensable to a liberal democracy.

The problem isn’t free speech. The problem is people who want to take it all away. If you fall into the trap of abandoning basic values from the enlightenment when they make it inconvenient, then you play into their game & help them set back society.

Right: the moderation is really to serve themselves including by protecting brands of commercial interests & advertiser revenue, but these platforms have deluded users into buying the pretext that it’s an essential part of a “safe, non-toxic” culture.

Though that may be the case with references to Luigi, they’ll happily abide by much senseless moderation like

• blanket blocks of comments containing links of any kind in subreddits such as r/mildlyinfuriating
• blocks of meta discussions
• strange ideas of brigading that treat a link to a post in another subreddit as “community inference”
• practical bans of subreddits airing grievances about bad moderation
• blocking any insult even when it doesn’t amount to harassment
• blocking any expression of violence even when it’s not incitement until it swings back & strikes against expressions of class consciousness that refer to Luigi.

With newer platforms like mastodon & bluesky, it seems like more of the same: their advocates often gush proudly of their robust moderation & claim that their extra moderation is indispensable to a safe, non-toxic experience.

I think all we need from moderation is removal of illegal content & perhaps offloading of off-topic content somewhere else. Rather than block offensive content, they could label it & let users decide whether to filter it out. Bluesky already does this, but they hardcode their in-house moderation, so users can’t opt out as we saw when they blocked the Trump toe-sucking Elon deepfake video.

Reddit sucks because of the moderation, yet the current zeitgeist continues to be that this extra moderation is some wondrous, beautiful thing that improves everything it touches, and new platforms need more of it. Fuck that & fuck Reddit.

The guy who said he’d build a wall & Mexico would pay for it doesn’t know why he started a trade war?

That’s a shock.

Not saying you should. The fact remains, though, you’re already investing it in real estate in an all-eggs-in-one-basket situation, inflation & property taxes are real, and insurance costs. Real estate still has some risk compared to low-risk assets that appreciate: do you remember any recent real estate crashes?

Investment accounts are generally insured (against things going missing) up to high limits, and you can split them up to fit in those limits.

If it all goes to shit, practically none of it will be worth much anyway. If armageddon doesn’t come to pass, you’ll be stuck with some property, livestock, crops, so not all bad.

Tax-free growth at compounding interest, beating inflation, diversification to mitigate risk & lessen volatility (eg, not putting eggs all in 1 basket). Markets always have risk: if you’re really afraid of risk, you can shift to mostly low-risk types of investments (bonds, money market, cash equivalents, etc). Real estate is typically considered riskier.

Retirement isn’t necessary: qualified distributions (no tax penalty) only require reaching a certain age or any of the many exceptions (including terminal illness). Early distribution with tax penalty is always possible.

It’s all basic information a certified financial planner or advisor or some articles on the internet can tell you.

Wouldn’t it be easier to disrupt the system by—I don’t know—something old & boring like asking everyone to clean out/close their bank accounts at the same time to cause a run on banks?

Where do people come up with these weaker ideas? Trump’s inanity might disrupt the economy more than these efforts.