Being kind enough to apologize to a minority group that collectively has been traumatized in the past, is simply kind. The apology could say that it was not meant the way it was taken and sorry for any confusion. I don't engage in trading insults, George. Good day.
"I simply watched the clip of Musk performing two very clear, incontrovertible Nazi salutes; I didn’t need media people to interpret to me what I was seeing"
So incontrovertible that the ADL says that's not what it is? So much so that it's more similar to a gesture Tim Walz made, than the exact choreography of an actual bona fide Nazi salute, where touching one's chest has never been a part of the gesture? Please. This is so patently false and obviously that your own opinions on Musk from before this happened steered you and so many others towards it.
"If media sources have been discussing Musk’s turn towards the far-right for years, it’s because the media has a long-term goal of slandering and destroying Musk. The possibility that Musk’s lean into extremism is actually real is something Gooding quickly raises and dismisses."
A large majority of American and German voters agree with Musk on immigration. Is there anything other than that the media keeps painting into the "far right" narrative? What you are describing as "extremism" is in reality just disagreeing with articles of faith in the reality-detached chattering class.
"On the other hand, Gooding accepts Musk’s claims and explanations uncritically and at face value"
I can be persuaded by actual evidence that Musk's claims about his own beliefs and views are not genuine. I will not be persuaded by innuendo, smears, and lies that are wholly derived from political objectives.
"So Musk runs one of the biggest, most powerful communications platforms in the world and takes no responsibility for what he does, with whom he engages, and which narratives he amplifies? I think Musk is more aware of what he’s doing than that, but regardless, it says something that this is Gooding’s defense of Musk."
What makes you think it's a "defense"? It's an explanation, a descriptive explanation of Musk's behavior, not a normative one. I'm even inclined to agree with you, that Musk should not be as careless as he is. Yet I see no evidence that he is not just that, ambivalent and careless, or not concerned with keeping up appearances, such as many others are.
Musk has "fuck you money", he literally does not have to care whether someone believes he is something he is not. The same can be said of Trump. Some people care about keeping up appearances and spend a lot of time avoiding any risk of rubbing people the wrong way.
Hillary Clinton reportedly had a team of a dozen advisors green-light every tweet she made during the 2016 campaign. Trump and Musk don't give a shit and write their own tweets without belaboring them to keep up appearances.
It's totally fine that you and many others think the former is the only correct way to act, but that does not in fact mean that everyone in the world agree with you, and that any deviation from this is evidence of ill will or a conspiracy to commit thought crimes. You only reveal your own desire for controlling others' behavior, which is a defining firewall between political clans these days.
The ironic part is that controlling others' behavior is naturally more in line with fascist ideologies.
"Saying that Musk has opened X to extremists because extreme speech is protected by the First Amendment is a complete non sequitur. People who talk like this don’t understand what “free speech” actually signifies, and at Gooding’s age the choice not to understand has to be interpreted as a deliberate one."
By what power would Musk regulate speech on X? Would the rules be anything other than arbitrary? I understand what free speech is, but you seem locked to the idea that owners of a platform cannot choose to align their content policies to the limits that are placed on speech by the society that platform is operating in. Your opinion is that Musk should regulate certain types of speech on his platform because you don't like them, that's fine. But Musk disagrees, and wants to practice no regulation of speech aside from that which can be derived from applicable law (such as libel, doxxing, etc).
The laziest argument is to claim someone doesn't "understand" something, simply because they don't agree with you. You are just trying to avoid the argument of what we're disagreeing on.
"I think that the dumb games of rhetorical footsie that these guys are playing are obvious."
Once again, you are being disingenuous, and pretending that they have said things they have not said, subscribing to clear logical fallacies where one has to agree to everything a person has ever said if one agrees with a single utterance from them at any time, and you are ascribing paranoid thoughts about their "real motives" without any evidence that this is in fact the case.
It's just dressed up smears and slander. Provide evidence, or keep the insinuations and aspersions to yourself.
"He doesn’t see himself as operating within a mythology which tells him that only these things are real and nothing else counts."
Where have I said that nothing else counts? I'm sticking to the argument at hand. If I haven't said that nothing else exists, I have not said that nothing else exists. It's a slanderous game to continuously attack people for what they haven't said in some limited context. You haven't brought up Stalin's genocide in this discussion, so you must not think it happened? That's the level of argument you are doing here, it's absurd.
I am not a lifelong leftist, but in fact a moderate that campaigned for Reagan and would still consider voting Republican.
Your series of essays you seem to seem necessary to show Elon's intent, is telling. It should not take backflips and changing the subject to Biden and the laptop, etc, without cited sources, to explain Elon's state of mind. Anyone that cannot make the leap of becoming a Trump supporter, has seen these long-winded, noncredible explanations with no citations, too many times. I sincerely dug into the laptop mess, and although Hunter is choosing to let it go for now, I still haven't turned up anything more than a weapons charge and tax evasion. Those are awful, and I would never do either, but they are not the scandal that Trump lovers describe. I taught many autistic teenagers and even they know what a Nazi gesture is, and generally avoid anything resembling such a movement. Thank you George for the Rogan clip, as I will listen this weekend. Most of us have witnessed Elon's slide down the slippery slope, not the least being his claim the the AFB in Germany is the ONLY WAY TO SAVE GERMANY. Where have we heard these types of claims before? Claiming that we are desperate, and there is only one solution, when there are many possible solutions, is historically very telling. Lastly, claiming we are desperate for a decade, where we clearly we not desperate, and we must choose the childish bullies that we now have, is heartbreaking, because we are now watching the destruction of many beneficial departments like medical, environmental, and even the lowly Social Security and Medicaid Services. Looking back, dismantling these services to hand the funds to our filthy rich citizens (Trump once said "Who better to lead us than the financially successful?"), hoping again after the Reagan Eighties, is to repeat an experiment that didn't work, and throw steroids into the mix by raising the stakes exponentially.
Back to Elon, when he posts memes on X, saying simply " Wow" or "Interesting" or "Concerning," he like you, stirs the pot, without citations, and leaves us to add community notes, after his lies make several rounds throughout the world stage. He knows he bought the world's most effective microphone.
The tangent about the concerted effort to censor New York Post's original reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop story was not to explain Musk's state of mind, but the types of activity that Musk has dismantled after buying X, and which has caused quite a lot of opponents among powerful interests. Why else do you think a top EU bureaucrat threatened Musk and X with sanctions simply for doing an interview with Trump during the campaign?
The accusations of fascism and Nazism are born out of the existing opposition to Musk, which was generated by the fact that Musk has become a threat to certain powerful interests.
There is literally no evidence that Musk is a Nazi, none. I'm not the one doing back-flips, those who keep misconstruing, misquoting, taking things out of context and playing a 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon game to smear Musk with ridiculous "connections" to this and that are the ones who are straining credulity to work their way back to the politically convenient conclusion that they already had to begin with.
Your comments about AfD and Musk's support of them, is illustrative. It is Musk's opinion that certain fundamental problems in Germany cannot be solved unless AfD comes to power there. Among these are Germany's dismantling of nuclear power, becoming reliant on Russian energy, becoming too reliant on unreliable green power, and the massive problems that have been caused by immigration that has not scaled well at all. Musk's interests in Germany are in the industrial sector, the electric vehicle market. There are massive problems there now, causing problems for his business.
You can disagree all you want with Musk that AfD is not the only solution to these problems, but then it's on you to actually argue how those problems can realistically be solved through other political means. Will the other German parties be solving them, after having created them for the last few decades? Please tell us how that will work.
Yet you can't, so you smear him through lazy "that's Nazi rhetoric" claims instead. I mean, the Democrats have been running on "the only solution to prevent dictatorship is to defeat/jail/kill Trump!" How isn't that the exact type of reductionist rhetoric that you would have to connect to "Nazi rhetoric" in the same manner? You're a hypocrite.
You claim we're seeing the destruction of Social Security and Medicare; where's the evidence? This is simply hyperbole straight from the DNC, but where's the facts to support it? They don't exist, at least not yet. It's politically motivated speculation to scare people into opposing Trump.
I totally agree that Musk should refrain from his ambivalent "Wow", "Interesting", "So true" type of posts on X, because often he doesn't check the content well enough, and gets caught up in having to defend not only the content he quoted, but the person behind it (and every single thing that person ever said or believed in, because guilt-by-association is fun for idle hearts), and anything else related to it.
"I taught many autistic teenagers and even they know what a Nazi gesture is, and generally avoid anything resembling such a movement."
See, this is the thing. Some people, especially those scoring higher in neuroticism, are deathly afraid of doing something that they will be attacked or criticized for. So they go through life overly cautious of everything they say and do, which really does limit their ability to get things done and puts a damper on their creativity. When your top concern is to ensure you are not doing or saying anything that a single person in the world will be offended by - no matter how unreasonable - then you are boxing yourself in and making yourself passive.
Teenagers these days have grown up with social media, phones, TikTok, Snapchat, and cameras that are available around them all the time. They are deathly afraid of someone taking a picture or video of them out of context and spreading to their peers. Of course they are on high alert for everything they do, but is this healthy? Doesn't this cause quite a bit of anxiety? Is that any way to live your life?
This gets back to the need to control others, and the passive-aggressive style of taking other people down to build oneself up. If you can miscontrue someone's actions or words as something negative, you can present yourself as a better person in comparison. That's the backbone of the woke movement: a need to be better than others, and to find new ways to one-up your peers, in being the Wokest of them All.
Musk doesn't allow himself to be harassed by this system of master suppression techniques, and nor should anyone else, in my opinion. Be yourself, do your thing, if someone gets offended by something you do which there was no real reason to be offended by, that's on them, not you. Musk has over 200 million followers on X, he can't act in a way that will please every single one of them every single day.
He, like Walz, made a gesture of "from my heart out to you", which made sense for him then and there, and even said those words directly in connection to making the gesture. I have never heard a Nazi taking about from their heart to anyone, nor have I seen any bona fide Nazi salute include touching their palm to their heart first. Those things in themselves disqualify and claims of "must be a Nazi salute".
Anyone who claims otherwise is pretending to be a mind-reader, and they aren't. Just coincidentally, the same people also hatet Musk for obvious reasons beforehand, and were just looking for ways to drag him down. That's all this is about, and you can claim otherwise all you want, but it's obvious for any rational, thinking person.
Why not clear up the whole question by asking Elon exactly how he meant the gesture? It seems he would want to clarify it, since so many indoctrinated normies somewhere in the center, either took him wrong according to the author of the Norwegian article, or at least get the impression that Elon is a sympathizer, and has been enjoying threatening us on X, if we disagree with him. Maybe I'm just a simpleton, but it seems to me that Elon could easily clear the air.
Why all the lying? He rejected the notion that it was a Nazi salute the same day, in several ways, among them thanking the ADL for their take, and he just talked about it again on Joe Rogan a week ago!
My point, almost lost because of all the tangents you desire to litigate, is that nobody has the time in any given day to pick apart each of your points in your original reply to Evan. I read your entire piece and each additional comment by the way. If you don't cite sources and you throw that much spaghetti at the wall with credible resources, no one has the time to debate you.
Regarding the Nazi salute, I'm listening to your Rogan interview and I notice a comment below it asking for an apology, if Elon didn't mean it as so many saw it.
I know it doesn't register with neurotic people, but you don't actually have to apologize for things that only exist in the imaginations of people who don't like you.
If Musk apologizes for something which he says he hasn't done, the next step will be that the same people will take that as an admission of guilt of having made a Nazi salute.
It's kind of like asking for a presidential pardon, even though you haven't done anything wrong. Why are you asking for a pardon then? Same here; why should Musk apologize for something he says he didn't do?
He made a hand gesture, 50% of which could be compared to a Nazi salute, but in context and the 100% content of the gesture, shows that it was not. Why should he apologize for those who are willingly deriving something from his physical body language which was neither his intention nor explicitly given?
This is a master suppression technique, getting people to apologize for something you have accused them of which they don't agree that they have done, and for which there is tenuous evidence.
That will be all, George. My Substack isn't a space for you to serially insult people, project psychological maladies onto them, call them liars, etc. Go exercise your freedom of expression elsewhere.
Being kind enough to apologize to a minority group that collectively has been traumatized in the past, is simply kind. The apology could say that it was not meant the way it was taken and sorry for any confusion. I don't engage in trading insults, George. Good day.
"I simply watched the clip of Musk performing two very clear, incontrovertible Nazi salutes; I didn’t need media people to interpret to me what I was seeing"
So incontrovertible that the ADL says that's not what it is? So much so that it's more similar to a gesture Tim Walz made, than the exact choreography of an actual bona fide Nazi salute, where touching one's chest has never been a part of the gesture? Please. This is so patently false and obviously that your own opinions on Musk from before this happened steered you and so many others towards it.
"If media sources have been discussing Musk’s turn towards the far-right for years, it’s because the media has a long-term goal of slandering and destroying Musk. The possibility that Musk’s lean into extremism is actually real is something Gooding quickly raises and dismisses."
A large majority of American and German voters agree with Musk on immigration. Is there anything other than that the media keeps painting into the "far right" narrative? What you are describing as "extremism" is in reality just disagreeing with articles of faith in the reality-detached chattering class.
"On the other hand, Gooding accepts Musk’s claims and explanations uncritically and at face value"
I can be persuaded by actual evidence that Musk's claims about his own beliefs and views are not genuine. I will not be persuaded by innuendo, smears, and lies that are wholly derived from political objectives.
"So Musk runs one of the biggest, most powerful communications platforms in the world and takes no responsibility for what he does, with whom he engages, and which narratives he amplifies? I think Musk is more aware of what he’s doing than that, but regardless, it says something that this is Gooding’s defense of Musk."
What makes you think it's a "defense"? It's an explanation, a descriptive explanation of Musk's behavior, not a normative one. I'm even inclined to agree with you, that Musk should not be as careless as he is. Yet I see no evidence that he is not just that, ambivalent and careless, or not concerned with keeping up appearances, such as many others are.
Musk has "fuck you money", he literally does not have to care whether someone believes he is something he is not. The same can be said of Trump. Some people care about keeping up appearances and spend a lot of time avoiding any risk of rubbing people the wrong way.
Hillary Clinton reportedly had a team of a dozen advisors green-light every tweet she made during the 2016 campaign. Trump and Musk don't give a shit and write their own tweets without belaboring them to keep up appearances.
It's totally fine that you and many others think the former is the only correct way to act, but that does not in fact mean that everyone in the world agree with you, and that any deviation from this is evidence of ill will or a conspiracy to commit thought crimes. You only reveal your own desire for controlling others' behavior, which is a defining firewall between political clans these days.
The ironic part is that controlling others' behavior is naturally more in line with fascist ideologies.
"Saying that Musk has opened X to extremists because extreme speech is protected by the First Amendment is a complete non sequitur. People who talk like this don’t understand what “free speech” actually signifies, and at Gooding’s age the choice not to understand has to be interpreted as a deliberate one."
By what power would Musk regulate speech on X? Would the rules be anything other than arbitrary? I understand what free speech is, but you seem locked to the idea that owners of a platform cannot choose to align their content policies to the limits that are placed on speech by the society that platform is operating in. Your opinion is that Musk should regulate certain types of speech on his platform because you don't like them, that's fine. But Musk disagrees, and wants to practice no regulation of speech aside from that which can be derived from applicable law (such as libel, doxxing, etc).
The laziest argument is to claim someone doesn't "understand" something, simply because they don't agree with you. You are just trying to avoid the argument of what we're disagreeing on.
"I think that the dumb games of rhetorical footsie that these guys are playing are obvious."
Once again, you are being disingenuous, and pretending that they have said things they have not said, subscribing to clear logical fallacies where one has to agree to everything a person has ever said if one agrees with a single utterance from them at any time, and you are ascribing paranoid thoughts about their "real motives" without any evidence that this is in fact the case.
It's just dressed up smears and slander. Provide evidence, or keep the insinuations and aspersions to yourself.
"He doesn’t see himself as operating within a mythology which tells him that only these things are real and nothing else counts."
Where have I said that nothing else counts? I'm sticking to the argument at hand. If I haven't said that nothing else exists, I have not said that nothing else exists. It's a slanderous game to continuously attack people for what they haven't said in some limited context. You haven't brought up Stalin's genocide in this discussion, so you must not think it happened? That's the level of argument you are doing here, it's absurd.
I am not a lifelong leftist, but in fact a moderate that campaigned for Reagan and would still consider voting Republican.
Your series of essays you seem to seem necessary to show Elon's intent, is telling. It should not take backflips and changing the subject to Biden and the laptop, etc, without cited sources, to explain Elon's state of mind. Anyone that cannot make the leap of becoming a Trump supporter, has seen these long-winded, noncredible explanations with no citations, too many times. I sincerely dug into the laptop mess, and although Hunter is choosing to let it go for now, I still haven't turned up anything more than a weapons charge and tax evasion. Those are awful, and I would never do either, but they are not the scandal that Trump lovers describe. I taught many autistic teenagers and even they know what a Nazi gesture is, and generally avoid anything resembling such a movement. Thank you George for the Rogan clip, as I will listen this weekend. Most of us have witnessed Elon's slide down the slippery slope, not the least being his claim the the AFB in Germany is the ONLY WAY TO SAVE GERMANY. Where have we heard these types of claims before? Claiming that we are desperate, and there is only one solution, when there are many possible solutions, is historically very telling. Lastly, claiming we are desperate for a decade, where we clearly we not desperate, and we must choose the childish bullies that we now have, is heartbreaking, because we are now watching the destruction of many beneficial departments like medical, environmental, and even the lowly Social Security and Medicaid Services. Looking back, dismantling these services to hand the funds to our filthy rich citizens (Trump once said "Who better to lead us than the financially successful?"), hoping again after the Reagan Eighties, is to repeat an experiment that didn't work, and throw steroids into the mix by raising the stakes exponentially.
Back to Elon, when he posts memes on X, saying simply " Wow" or "Interesting" or "Concerning," he like you, stirs the pot, without citations, and leaves us to add community notes, after his lies make several rounds throughout the world stage. He knows he bought the world's most effective microphone.
The tangent about the concerted effort to censor New York Post's original reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop story was not to explain Musk's state of mind, but the types of activity that Musk has dismantled after buying X, and which has caused quite a lot of opponents among powerful interests. Why else do you think a top EU bureaucrat threatened Musk and X with sanctions simply for doing an interview with Trump during the campaign?
The accusations of fascism and Nazism are born out of the existing opposition to Musk, which was generated by the fact that Musk has become a threat to certain powerful interests.
There is literally no evidence that Musk is a Nazi, none. I'm not the one doing back-flips, those who keep misconstruing, misquoting, taking things out of context and playing a 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon game to smear Musk with ridiculous "connections" to this and that are the ones who are straining credulity to work their way back to the politically convenient conclusion that they already had to begin with.
Your comments about AfD and Musk's support of them, is illustrative. It is Musk's opinion that certain fundamental problems in Germany cannot be solved unless AfD comes to power there. Among these are Germany's dismantling of nuclear power, becoming reliant on Russian energy, becoming too reliant on unreliable green power, and the massive problems that have been caused by immigration that has not scaled well at all. Musk's interests in Germany are in the industrial sector, the electric vehicle market. There are massive problems there now, causing problems for his business.
You can disagree all you want with Musk that AfD is not the only solution to these problems, but then it's on you to actually argue how those problems can realistically be solved through other political means. Will the other German parties be solving them, after having created them for the last few decades? Please tell us how that will work.
Yet you can't, so you smear him through lazy "that's Nazi rhetoric" claims instead. I mean, the Democrats have been running on "the only solution to prevent dictatorship is to defeat/jail/kill Trump!" How isn't that the exact type of reductionist rhetoric that you would have to connect to "Nazi rhetoric" in the same manner? You're a hypocrite.
You claim we're seeing the destruction of Social Security and Medicare; where's the evidence? This is simply hyperbole straight from the DNC, but where's the facts to support it? They don't exist, at least not yet. It's politically motivated speculation to scare people into opposing Trump.
I totally agree that Musk should refrain from his ambivalent "Wow", "Interesting", "So true" type of posts on X, because often he doesn't check the content well enough, and gets caught up in having to defend not only the content he quoted, but the person behind it (and every single thing that person ever said or believed in, because guilt-by-association is fun for idle hearts), and anything else related to it.
"I taught many autistic teenagers and even they know what a Nazi gesture is, and generally avoid anything resembling such a movement."
See, this is the thing. Some people, especially those scoring higher in neuroticism, are deathly afraid of doing something that they will be attacked or criticized for. So they go through life overly cautious of everything they say and do, which really does limit their ability to get things done and puts a damper on their creativity. When your top concern is to ensure you are not doing or saying anything that a single person in the world will be offended by - no matter how unreasonable - then you are boxing yourself in and making yourself passive.
Teenagers these days have grown up with social media, phones, TikTok, Snapchat, and cameras that are available around them all the time. They are deathly afraid of someone taking a picture or video of them out of context and spreading to their peers. Of course they are on high alert for everything they do, but is this healthy? Doesn't this cause quite a bit of anxiety? Is that any way to live your life?
This gets back to the need to control others, and the passive-aggressive style of taking other people down to build oneself up. If you can miscontrue someone's actions or words as something negative, you can present yourself as a better person in comparison. That's the backbone of the woke movement: a need to be better than others, and to find new ways to one-up your peers, in being the Wokest of them All.
Musk doesn't allow himself to be harassed by this system of master suppression techniques, and nor should anyone else, in my opinion. Be yourself, do your thing, if someone gets offended by something you do which there was no real reason to be offended by, that's on them, not you. Musk has over 200 million followers on X, he can't act in a way that will please every single one of them every single day.
He, like Walz, made a gesture of "from my heart out to you", which made sense for him then and there, and even said those words directly in connection to making the gesture. I have never heard a Nazi taking about from their heart to anyone, nor have I seen any bona fide Nazi salute include touching their palm to their heart first. Those things in themselves disqualify and claims of "must be a Nazi salute".
Anyone who claims otherwise is pretending to be a mind-reader, and they aren't. Just coincidentally, the same people also hatet Musk for obvious reasons beforehand, and were just looking for ways to drag him down. That's all this is about, and you can claim otherwise all you want, but it's obvious for any rational, thinking person.
Ok man
Why not clear up the whole question by asking Elon exactly how he meant the gesture? It seems he would want to clarify it, since so many indoctrinated normies somewhere in the center, either took him wrong according to the author of the Norwegian article, or at least get the impression that Elon is a sympathizer, and has been enjoying threatening us on X, if we disagree with him. Maybe I'm just a simpleton, but it seems to me that Elon could easily clear the air.
He could but he won’t.
Why all the lying? He rejected the notion that it was a Nazi salute the same day, in several ways, among them thanking the ADL for their take, and he just talked about it again on Joe Rogan a week ago!
Why all the lies, Evan?
My point, almost lost because of all the tangents you desire to litigate, is that nobody has the time in any given day to pick apart each of your points in your original reply to Evan. I read your entire piece and each additional comment by the way. If you don't cite sources and you throw that much spaghetti at the wall with credible resources, no one has the time to debate you.
Regarding the Nazi salute, I'm listening to your Rogan interview and I notice a comment below it asking for an apology, if Elon didn't mean it as so many saw it.
A simple apology is in order.
I know it doesn't register with neurotic people, but you don't actually have to apologize for things that only exist in the imaginations of people who don't like you.
If Musk apologizes for something which he says he hasn't done, the next step will be that the same people will take that as an admission of guilt of having made a Nazi salute.
It's kind of like asking for a presidential pardon, even though you haven't done anything wrong. Why are you asking for a pardon then? Same here; why should Musk apologize for something he says he didn't do?
He made a hand gesture, 50% of which could be compared to a Nazi salute, but in context and the 100% content of the gesture, shows that it was not. Why should he apologize for those who are willingly deriving something from his physical body language which was neither his intention nor explicitly given?
This is a master suppression technique, getting people to apologize for something you have accused them of which they don't agree that they have done, and for which there is tenuous evidence.
That will be all, George. My Substack isn't a space for you to serially insult people, project psychological maladies onto them, call them liars, etc. Go exercise your freedom of expression elsewhere.
Neuroticism isn't an insult or psychological malady, so I'm not sure what you're referring to. We're all neurotic to varying degrees.
*no credible resources... Sorry for the many typos.
Musk talked about this a week ago with Rogan: https://open.spotify.com/episode/4OKO5j5RFCx5efek9XXlj3?si=463a74f116314560
Ah, ok. Well there you have it, case closed.