Cont: Musk buys Twitter II

Orphia Nay said:
Agreed. I think making stuff up about him is being as bad as he is.
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That is misguided on many levels.

Unless Gulliver Foyle is a billionaire with the media reach and fanbase of Musk, nothing he could make up could be as bad as what Musk has been saying, even if it wasn't this particular thing.

Secondly, the natural instinct of everyone in society must be to show solidarity with your fellow non-billionaires against those who very clearly have taken more than their fair share.

Defending the super rich and super powerful is always wrong - unless they pay you to do that, and it better be a big pay check.
You shouldn't do it for free.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
That is misguided on many levels.

Unless Gulliver Foyle is a billionaire with the media reach and fanbase of Musk, nothing he could make up could be as bad as what Musk has been saying, even if it wasn't this particular thing.

Secondly, the natural instinct of everyone in society must be to show solidarity with your fellow non-billionaires against those who very clearly have taken more than their fair share.

Defending the super rich and super powerful is always wrong - unless they pay you to do that, and it better be a big pay check.
You shouldn't do it for free.
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I'm not defending him at all, I literally said he is bad. I'm defending the truth.
 
Orphia Nay said:
I'm not defending him at all, I literally said he is bad. I'm defending the truth.
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Against whom?

Do you think that the truth is going to be enough to bring down the likes of Musk and Trump, but only if it stays 100% pure?

We owe Musk nothing; he makes up stuff all the time - and so should we.
 
jeremyp said:
No we shouldn't, especially as there is plenty of material that isn't made up.
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So what?

We know the facts, and they don't affect the Musk Cult at all.

But look what the rumors of trysts between lounge furniture and a certain VP has created: a scrambling of everyone to repeat the story in order to debunk it.

This is what we had to do with Trump for almost a decade, fact checking, and in the process repeating the lies and insults.
It hasn't worked.

Let the other side waste some resources explaining why Trump did not, technically, have sex with his daughter.
Or how Musk's father decided to have sex and two children with his stepdaughter.

Note: at least one of the two is factually correct.
 
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jeremyp said:
No we shouldn't, especially as there is plenty of material that isn't made up.
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I'm far more in agreement with this.

Seriously, why would we need to make stuff up? There's already so much that's true at one's fingertips, should one so desire.

With that said, that "weird" thing works just fine as a cutting joke. It's not directly true (yet), but it pretty much cuts to the figurative heart of what Musk's done and is on course to do with his actions, should he stay the course.

I can see TGZ's point, of course, but I think it's short sighted. Trust is hard to earn back, after all, even if exploiting it can give momentary gains.
 
This is a malaise caused by the Sorkin Virus and the Fair&Balanced brainbug.

Neutrality and objectivity are an illusion outside strict science, and often not even there.

I consider it far more short-sighted and counterproductive to try to make yourself and others believe that you can see all the relevant the facts and contexts, and draw the logical conclusions from them - so naturally everyone who disagrees with you does so because of ignorance and/or malevolence.

Much better to return to the times of very open, explicit but smart partisanship: find your ideological niche and defend it (in the full awareness that others have their ideologies), instead of committing the fallacy that every right-thinking person will naturally end up thinking like you.

We don't want everyone to see the same things and think the same way - we want people to be tolerant of each other's ideologies, and support or oppose each other's policies on a case-by-case basis.
 
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jeremyp said:
So you agree Gulliver Foyle’s assertion was wrong.

Musk hasn’t said he will punish people for saying Tr*mp supporters are weird and as far as I know, he hasn’t just done it. GF’s assertion had no evidential backing and while I believe Musk is a liar, a grifter and all round bad person, I do not believe that making stuff up about him is justified.
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This is literally my point, and I'm not sure how it got missed. You wouldn't know because he wouldn't ******* say it. He'd say they were suspended\banned or shadow banned or whatever the **** for some other reason. If you think that doesn't happen then I have a bridge to sell you.

Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence and all that. I don't think making stuff up about him is justified either, but when he first took over he removed all sorts of accounts, and tagged accounts with false bull **** all of the time. Take for instance labeling NPR as a government funded media just to discredit them.

That and along with stuff like this:
The specific sort of shadowban applied to these accounts is known as a search suggestion ban, which limits an account from showing up in search results.

Several accounts have been slapped with search suggestion shadowbans in recent weeks, including: this journalist, USA Today journalist Will Carless, an NBC affiliate account focused on LGBTQ+ news, and a Texas anti-cryptocurrency activist group.
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He never announced those either, but they happened.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
Against whom?

Do you think that the truth is going to be enough to bring down the likes of Musk and Trump, but only if it stays 100% pure?

We owe Musk nothing; he makes up stuff all the time - and so should we.
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I don't know whether we "should"; but it's fair cricket on Twitter at least. If a deepfake video making a presidential candidate say things they never said is an acceptable form of political satire and doesn't qualify as misinformation per the site's owner himself, then a screenshot of a corporate CEO posting something he never posted must be as well.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
We owe Musk nothing; he makes up stuff all the time - and so should we.
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That's an unexpected comment from a thoughtful poster such as you. Here, your audience mostly consists of people who are aware that Musk is a lying, bigoted *******. I would like not to be lied to. And I would like not to scroll past your posts because they aren't trustworthy.
 
varwoche said:
That's an unexpected comment from a thoughtful poster such as you. Here, your audience mostly consists of people who are aware that Musk is a lying, bigoted *******. I would like not to be lied to. And I would like not to scroll past your posts because they aren't trustworthy.
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And I trust that everyone who's opinion I value will have the good sense to verify any claim, from whatever ideological origin, at least superficially.

The "intercourse with couch", instantly debunkable, was nevertheless a pure hit.
This is the kind of made up story I'm talking about: a single funny post with the right content in the right place - not some deep fake that requires hours with A.I. or fake footage from an abortion clinic:

the entire point is to make extra work for the opposition, not for yourself.
You have something better to do.

the problem with Right-wingers joking about bringing fascism is, most of the time, that they are just not funny.

humor is the one weapon we will always have against them.
 
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The Great Zaganza said:
...We owe Musk nothing; he makes up stuff all the time - and so should we.
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I couldn't disagree more. The problem isn't that his lies support the other wing of politics, the problem is that they are lies.

One cannot fight lies with more lies. We don't need to make **** up, we only need to point out his ********.

Your approach: he is making **** up, so I'll make up opposite **** is a terrible approach, that leads to a tsunami of ********, where no-one can trust anything that anyone says.

******** and lies should be countered with facts and citations.

The only way to effectively resist the ******* insane 'post factual' worldview is to refuse to play their game, and to hold fast to demonstrable, provable reality.


You are right that we owe Musk nothing. We are also under no obligation to accept the new rules he demands that we play by. Much as he wants it to, reality doesn't bend to his will.



He is rich. He isn't God.
 
How does that matter?

I would love to have transparency when it comes to extreme wealth - in fact I think it's necessary for the survival of democracy.

But billionaires have for a long time borrowed more than anyone else, at ridiculously low rates, against the shares in their companies; this also saves on taxes.
 
Gulliver Foyle said:
It's less a case of that than the fake tweet is 100% in line with Musk's publicly stated positions.
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In response to the discussion kicked up by this, I didn't say Galaxy Brain said what was in the tweet, I said that it was in line with the stuff he's actually said, which is incontovertably true.

Remember this is the man who's banned cisgender from his platform, who's banned users for mocking him or for publishing publicly available data about him, who's called others paedophiles (libellously) because they've shown him up for an idiot and many other petty idiocies.

In fact, if that tweet had been real it would have been quite mild for Galaxy Brain.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
And I trust that everyone who's opinion I value will have the good sense to verify any claim, from whatever ideological origin, at least superficially.
.
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And when I tried to verify a claim, I was told that it's OK to lie about Musk.

Sorry, but no it isn't. I don't like being lied to and I will call it out if I find out.
 
jeremyp said:
And when I tried to verify a claim, I was told that it's OK to lie about Musk.

Sorry, but no it isn't. I don't like being lied to and I will call it out if I find out.
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is it okay to make jokes about him that are not 100% based in reality?

It's not like comedians haven't been doing that since forever - so I don't know why I'm getting so much hostility for it.
 
The Great Zaganza said:
How does that matter?

I would love to have transparency when it comes to extreme wealth - in fact I think it's necessary for the survival of democracy.

But billionaires have for a long time borrowed more than anyone else, at ridiculously low rates, against the shares in their companies; this also saves on taxes.
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all i'm saying is, what if a significant amount of their shares in their companies are collateral on a loan, and those shares are overvalued, and then he lit $44B on fire? well you'd move all your companies to texas, sue to try and get an illegally formed deal reinstated to get more shares, and constantly try and prop up the stock price by defrauding investors with promises of technology that doesn't exist.
 
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