Cont: Musk buys Twitter II

[HansMustermann]

Thats amazing. In my youth a manifestation of OCD was woodturning. I had books and.books and tools. I started on my fathers metal lathe, Myford.
I built spinning wheels, my mother used one and made more horrible fair isle jersies than the world deserves.

Musk and X ....

With apologies to the mods for further fuelling this derail... that's not a symptom of OCD, mate. Unless you have unwanted obsessive thoughts about it, or an excessive compulsion to do it even if you recognize it as excessive or harmful, it doesn't fit either the O nor the C in OCD.

At a superficial and unqualified look at what you describe, and especially while lacking any other context, it sounds more like the narrow focus of interest in autism.

So what I'm saying is: don't self-diagnose this kind of stuff, much as TikTok made mental illness sexy. Hell, don't self diagnose anything. Reminds me of Jerome K Jerome in "Three Men in a Boat"

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St Vitus's Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too—began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright's disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with.​

By the end he seemed to have practically every symptom of every disease (except housemaid’s knee)

So just go to a flippin' doctor.

 

[Samson]

(bolding mine)

Yes.
Why not?
It can impact on family and social life, so I am sure we should be mindful of the condition.
I really do not want to be off topic.
So I think you all see Musk as a malevolent weirdo.
Have I got that wrong?

 

[HansMustermann]

Can't speak for the others, but I don't even see him as malevolent. More like, it reminds me of Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

 

[Samson]

With apologies to the mods for further fuelling this derail... that's not a symptom of OCD, mate. Unless you have unwanted obsessive thoughts about it, or an excessive compulsion to do it even if you recognize it as excessive or harmful, it doesn't fit either the O nor the C in OCD.

At a superficial and unqualified look at what you describe, and especially while lacking any other context, it sounds more like the narrow focus of interest in autism.

So what I'm saying is: don't self-diagnose this kind of stuff, much as TikTok made mental illness sexy. Hell, don't self diagnose anything. Reminds me of Jerome K Jerome in "Three Men in a Boat"

I remember going to the British Museum one day to read up the treatment for some slight ailment of which I had a touch—hay fever, I fancy it was. I got down the book, and read all I came to read; and then, in an unthinking moment, I idly turned the leaves, and began to indolently study diseases, generally. I forget which was the first distemper I plunged into—some fearful, devastating scourge, I know—and, before I had glanced half down the list of “premonitory symptoms,” it was borne in upon me that I had fairly got it.

I sat for awhile, frozen with horror; and then, in the listlessness of despair, I again turned over the pages. I came to typhoid fever—read the symptoms—discovered that I had typhoid fever, must have had it for months without knowing it—wondered what else I had got; turned up St Vitus's Dance—found, as I expected, that I had that too—began to get interested in my case, and determined to sift it to the bottom, and so started alphabetically—read up ague, and learnt that I was sickening for it, and that the acute stage would commence in about another fortnight. Bright's disease, I was relieved to find, I had only in a modified form, and, so far as that was concerned, I might live for years. Cholera I had, with severe complications; and diphtheria I seemed to have been born with.​

By the end he seemed to have practically every symptom of every disease (except housemaid’s knee)

So just go to a flippin' doctor.

I love that 3 men thing. It has been described as the funniest discourse in the English language. Must check who said that.
Ok.
I bet my two arms it currently offends women between 15 and 25.
That is the demograph Wesley Yang says can not be reached.
I bet Musk loves the literature
Jerome K Jerome for completeness.

 

[HansMustermann]

Oh, Jerome K Jerome is funny as heck.

 

[Roboramma]

Why not?

Mainly because his views don't have much in common with the other people on your list. But also because he's much more thoughtful and considered in his views. His discussion of vaccines (and covid in general) has been very good and level headed, as compared to the insanity that everyone else on your list has been spewing for the last few years. He's consistently been publicizing problems with Trump since he entered political life in a way that no one else on your list has done. Some of them I think endorse him, while the others have been sending mixed messages. I remember Rogan, for instance, during Trump's first presidential run talked a lot about while he didn't think Trump was a good candidate, he found him funny and also hated Hillary, when Trump came up, he'd pretty consistently start talking about Hillary Clinton (and conspiracy theories about her). You will not find Sam Harris talking about conspiracy theories. You will find him spending hours talking about how Trump is a liar, immoral, a bad president, etc.
He's also got a solid understanding of science. I'm reminded of how Jordan Peterson tried to argue with him about the existence of truth, and constantly tried to play games of redefining truth as that which it's useful to believe (he didn't state it exactly like that, but that was the gist of it). Sam would have none of it, and wouldn't let him get away with the word games.

This doesn't mean that you have to like Sam Harris, and it's certainly possible to disagree with many of his viewpoints, but just because someone wrote an article that labeled him as part of the "intellectual dark web" doesn't mean he actually fits in with those people (and he has since repudiated that label).

ETA I guess if more relevance to this thread is the fact that Sam Harris has been quite critical of Musk's purchase of Twitter, and his handling of it since that purchase, both in the policies enacted and Musk's personal behavior on the platform.

 

[Gulliver Foyle]

I'm also not a lawyer, this is not legal advice, yada, yada, but yeah, it seems pretty accurate. And I was already wondering about it essentially admitting that yeah, just as reported, if you scroll long enough and follow certain twits (bad pun intended), you will get those ads there.

About it being filed in Texas... I'm taking a wild GUESS that he WANTS it dismissed. It fits that pattern I've been mentioning of making grand claims and not following through.

BUT I still don't get it why specifically Texas. You'd think if he's doing it for publicity, he'd choose a state without an anti-SLAPP statute. A SLAPP (strategic lawsuit against public participation) is a frivolous lawsuit, typically exactly a defamation lawsuit, designed to just discourage someone from saying legitimate criticism, or else. Typically "else" meaning you'll bury them in legal fees even if they win.

But Texas does have an anti-SLAPP statute, in the form of the Texas Citizens Participation Act.

So... what exactly is Elon thinking, your guess is as good as mine.

Texas is well known for having the most anti-American judges in the counrty, both in volume and in willingness to break the law. Plus in Paxton the state has a politician stupid enough to do Galaxy Brain's bidding.

 

[Gulliver Foyle]

I know of Jordan Petersen.
Konstantin Kisin is a young aspiring public intellectual who stated yesterday Musk has saved freedom of speech.
I am drawn to the idea of agreeing on facts, and progressing from there.

Kisin is an idiot neo-nazi shill and anybody taking him seriously isn't worth listening to you. We've seen what happens when people like Kisin are allowed spread their vile propoganda when a bunch of his fellow scrotes were set loose in Dublin.

 

[angrysoba]

Mainly because his views don't have much in common with the other people on your list. But also because he's much more thoughtful and considered in his views. His discussion of vaccines (and covid in general) has been very good and level headed, as compared to the insanity that everyone else on your list has been spewing for the last few years. He's consistently been publicizing problems with Trump since he entered political life in a way that no one else on your list has done. Some of them I think endorse him, while the others have been sending mixed messages. I remember Rogan, for instance, during Trump's first presidential run talked a lot about while he didn't think Trump was a good candidate, he found him funny and also hated Hillary, when Trump came up, he'd pretty consistently start talking about Hillary Clinton (and conspiracy theories about her). You will not find Sam Harris talking about conspiracy theories. You will find him spending hours talking about how Trump is a liar, immoral, a bad president, etc.
He's also got a solid understanding of science. I'm reminded of how Jordan Peterson tried to argue with him about the existence of truth, and constantly tried to play games of redefining truth as that which it's useful to believe (he didn't state it exactly like that, but that was the gist of it). Sam would have none of it, and wouldn't let him get away with the word games.

This doesn't mean that you have to like Sam Harris, and it's certainly possible to disagree with many of his viewpoints, but just because someone wrote an article that labeled him as part of the "intellectual dark web" doesn't mean he actually fits in with those people (and he has since repudiated that label).

Yep. I agree with that. Harris certainly has his blind spots, which has mostly manifested as almost 90% of the people he used to hang out with having turned out to be insane conspiracy theorists (The Weinsteins, Peterson, Maajid Nawaz, Dave bloody Rubin, etc...) or just general right-wing twats (Douglas Murray, Ben Shapiro, etc...), but he's not remotely in the same league of dipshittery as most of the people on that list.

 

[angrysoba]

Can't speak for the others, but I don't even see him as malevolent. More like, it reminds me of Hanlon's Razor: "Never attribute to malice, that which is adequately explained by stupidity"

There is no non-malicious reading of him calling that diver a pedo.

Similarly, this does not look non-malicious:

Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety, has been forced to flee his home after receiving death threats stemming from Elon Musk’s suggesting that Roth is a pedophile, CNN reported on Monday.

Roth, who initially supported Musk after he took control of the platform, resigned on Nov. 10, saying he had hoped “to avoid an escalation in the volume of dangerous speech online.”

Over the weekend, Musk shared some of Roth’s past tweets and what appears to be an excerpt from his PhD thesis about Grindr, the LGBTQ social media app. Roth is quoted as saying that the app is possibly too “lewd or hook-up-oriented” for people under age 18 who are already using it, but that providers should “focus on creating safe strategies … for queer young adults” that aren’t just about hook-ups. Musk commented, “Looks like Yoel is arguing in favor of children being able to use adult services in his PhD thesis.”

Link

There are some other situations which could indeed be stupid rather than malicious such as believing in the conspiracy theories around Paul Pelosi's attacker.

You could even believe, if you want to, that Elon Musk leaning into anti-semitic conspiracy theories is that he really has no idea what he is saying, but that is to assume that his IQ is far below average let alone that of someone who is CEO of SpaceX and Tesla.

I think it is more likely that he is audience-captured and hubristic as well as having a nasty vindictive side to him, and some serious empathy deficiencies.

 

[angrysoba]

Kisin is an idiot neo-nazi shill and anybody taking him seriously isn't worth listening to you. We've seen what happens when people like Kisin are allowed spread their vile propoganda when a bunch of his fellow scrotes were set loose in Dublin.

I don't think he's either an idiot, or a neo-Nazi. Those are both hyperbolic.

He's clearly, whatever his protestations, gone right down the red-pill right-wing route, and is buddies with many of the most egregious ex-friends of Sam Harris: Rubin, the Weinsteins, etc... and some of the people who are even worse (Lawrence Fox, Sargon of ******* Akkad, some weirdo called Matt Goodwin, whose main complaint about British politics is that it is not right-wing enough - yep Brexit Britain with its 15 years or whatever of Tory rule is still too left wing...)

 

[Samson]

Kisin is an idiot neo-nazi shill and anybody taking him seriously isn't worth listening to you. We've seen what happens when people like Kisin are allowed spread their vile propoganda when a bunch of his fellow scrotes were set loose in Dublin.

Here is the thing.
I regard your idea as useful.
I like the youthful enthusiasm of Konstantin as an escapee from an authoritarian enclave.
I think his appraisal of X as arguably valid.

 

[jeremyp]

Texas is well known for having the most anti-American judges in the counrty, both in volume and in willingness to break the law. Plus in Paxton the state has a politician stupid enough to do Galaxy Brain's bidding.

But Media Matters is incorporated in Delaware and based in Washington DC. Now, I'm a foreigner, so I'm speaking partly out of ignorance here, but it seems to me that the authority of the Texas State Attorney General must be somewhat limited outside of the state of Texas.

This echoes a point made by some of the commentaries on Musk's lawsuit. None of the parties involved (the case is brought by TwitXter, not Musk personally) are connected with Texas. Why won't the case just be thrown out because the Texas Federal Court has no jurisdiction?

 

[Samson]

Yep. I agree with that. Harris certainly has his blind spots, which has mostly manifested as almost 90% of the people he used to hang out with having turned out to be insane conspiracy theorists (The Weinsteins, Peterson, Maajid Nawaz, Dave bloody Rubin, etc...) or just general right-wing twats (Douglas Murray, Ben Shapiro, etc...), but he's not remotely in the same league of dipshittery as most of the people on that list.

Just catching up
You are clearly misunderstanding for your perfect satisfaction what ex left are railing against, and they are smart constructs that are functionally extinct.

 

[HansMustermann]

@angrysoba
I don't really believe that IQ is a measure of much in the real world, but let's not go down that rabbit hole this time. Certainly doesn't stop anyone from doing stupid stuff or having stupid beliefs.

As for Tesla and SpaceX, I don't see how owning something would prove someone isn't stupid. Contrary to his claims, he didn't start Tesla, nor PayPal for example. He bought Tesla, just like he bought Twitter, while in the case of PayPal actually PayPal bought his crappy X.com competitor... and was promptly dismayed at his unusable spaghetti code. And he didn't design any of the space stuff at SpaceX.

And that's ignoring the stuff he's hyped and failed, like SolarCity. Or half-baked and abandoned ideas like the hyperloop.

What he's done in all cases is hype it with some unrealistic claims and promises, and occasionally outright lies. E.g., in his SolarCity big presentation, where he claimed that all those houses had his solar roof tiles, which not only wasn't the case, they didn't even EXIST yet. He had some tiles glazed to LOOK kinda like solar panels, but they weren't.

Or on the subject of Tesla, promises like that he'll soon produce 20 million electric cars a year... which would need about as much lithium per year as was mined in the previous decade, not to mention running into the problem of the known world-wide lithium reserves. He dismissed that as his being able to just extract lithium from clay with salt and water, but again that process didn't even exist, so he was just lying on the stage.

Plus other promises that pumped the price up, like the Tesla Roadster, Cybertruck, etc, which never seemed to actually get done. Nor match his initial promises, even in their current vapourware state. (E.g., the cybertruck went from a monocoque hydroformed one-piece body to attaching sheet metal to a conventional chassis, defeating one major point of why that body would be better.)

Plus other vapourware claims like the ability to deliver full self-driving any time now, for several years.

Etc.

And in all that, the only constant seems to be self-aggrandizing himself for attention. (I.e., what I called a Tinkerbellend.) Again, occasionally with outright lies.

So basically, not much different than what he's done with Twitter.

So... why does that prove he's not an idiot?

 

[Darat]

I know of Jordan Petersen.
...snip...

You provided lists of names - is this the only one on your lists that was banned and then unbanned?

 

[angrysoba]

Just catching up
You are clearly misunderstanding for your perfect satisfaction what ex left are railing against, and they are smart constructs that are functionally extinct.

Who? The Weinsteins? Eric Weinstein is upset that he and his brother have not won Nobel prizes, despite the fact that people in their fields don't find much merit to their ideas. Therefore they invented a conspiracy to explain it - the Distributed Idea Suppression Complex (or DISC) and the Gated Institutional Narrative (or GIN). Bret has also come to believe the 2020 election was rigged in Biden's favour, that the Covid vaccines were dangerous and designed to weaken the US armed forces (perhaps at the behest of China) and to believe that ivermectin was suppressed as a perfect prophylactic for Covid. Eric seems sure that either the US is covering up UFOs or working to fool the public into thinking there are UFOs. How he holds these dissonant thoughts in his brain is presumably a wonder of his intelligence. Bret of course cheered on Musk's takeover of Twitter because he assumed his reach was being throttled. Now that Musk is CEO he is bewildered that his reach still hasn't grown beyond his InfoHorse following and assumes that there are gremlins in the machinery that Musk should try to uncover. This is why Elon Musk took Rubin around to meet the engineers to find out if such luminaries as Catturd2 were being somehow suppressed.

Peterson has gone way down the whole slippery slope. I think he's mostly high on his own supply, wearing his Batman-villain suits railing against the conspiracy of climate change, vaccines and various other incoherent gibberish. His story intersects with Twitter because he was told his tweeting privileges would be suspended unless he deleted his obnoxious tweet about Elliot Paige's breast being cut off by a "criminal physician". Wherever you stand on the trans stuff, Peterson was just being an ******* with that. Anyway, he was never left-wing.

Dave Rubin is a total joke who thinks that Hungary (where same-sex marriage and adoption is illegal) is a model for the world.

Seriously, these people are not left wingers who have concerns about trans children etc... They are raving right wing propagandists.

 

[Samson]

You provided lists of names - is this the only one on your lists that was banned and then unbanned?

Yes.

Edited by Agatha: 

Edited to remove off-topic content

 

[Darat]

Are you sure we're reading the same filing?

Just the first paragraph says that MM maliciously manufactured images to paint the wrong picture about X. Paragraph 5 on page 2 calls it a smear campaign. Paragraph 6 says MM was falsely portraying X. Paragraph 7 on page 3 calls them "undeterred by the truth", basically meaning they lied. Paragraph 11 again accuses them of basically lying, albeit this time by omission. Paragraph 12 on page 4 calls it a "specious narrative". Paragraph 13 says that the truth bears no resemblance to their narrative, i.e., again says that MM lied. Etc.

Whether or not it actually says the words "defamation" or "libel", that IS what Musk alleges in the filing.

But ok, I'm not a lawyer, so maybe I'm reading it wrong. It's entirely possible that you have better sources. So could you explain to me then what DOES he sue about?

He is suing for “business disparagement”, “interference with contract” and “interference with prospective economic advantage.”

Which are quite distinct from suing for defamation or libel. It is an entirely nonsense filing, it's not even flinging mud at the wall to see what sticks, rather more like flinging a nice sparkling water at the walls and seeing it evaporate.

 

[Darat]

Yes.

Edited by Agatha: 

Edited quote to remove derailing material

Why then did you not provide accurate information when you were asked?