The Tesla, last I read about and test drove one, is a great car. Why tear at a company that makes a great car over anyone's political preferences? The phrase "shooting oneself in the foot" comes to mind. It makes no sense whatsoever.
>Why tear at a company that makes a great car over anyone's political preferences?
With how our society is set up, you are suggesting not holding any political viewpoints or preferences.
I had a whole diatribe typed up that I deleted because I realized I cannot actually empathize or have a theory of mind for how you could think this was an acceptable way to live life. Do you silo every interaction you have with everyone else?
If it makes you feel better, the person you're replying to isn't siloing. These people set up a wonderful Catch-22: "we don't need laws or regulations: consumer choice and people voting with their wallets is enough to ensure good behavior. If people really care, they will stop buying it" (people exercise consumer choice and vote with their wallets) "Hey, whoa, not like that! Let's not bring politics into this!"
What the OP and others like them actually want is a total lack of accountability for bad actors, and they will pick whatever argument is convenient in that moment regardless of consistency.
> What the OP and others like them actually want is a total lack of accountability for bad actors, and they will pick whatever argument is convenient in that moment regardless of consistency.
I guess the new normal (building your identity around politics) is either the cause of or correlated with the general rise in mental illness in our modern society.
Yes, not talking or caring about politics within various social silos is (used to be) normal.
Having political viewpoints is fine. Protesting at their showrooms is fine. Making purchasing decisions for yourself based on your political viewpoints, also fine.
Punishing people (vandalism, scrawling Nazi symbols, hostile/threatening interactions on the road) for owning a brand of car and not sharing your viewpoints is not fine.
I remember when tech people were deeply suspicious of expanding the definition of "terrorism" to encompass protest and dissent. Now apparently it's awesome and based if Glorious Leader does it.
Because it is destruction of private property. If you can destroy my car, I can set fire to your house, because, you know, Swastihouse. Our society hinges on protecting individual citizens from vandals and thieves, otherwise we’re back to the jungle.
He is suggesting the opposite. Attacking every company run by someone you disagree with politically is a recipe for not being able to participate in society in any meaningful way. Musk's views are quite normal and are shared by people involved in every company and institution out there. Are you going to boycott them all?
These boycotts only work as isolated, selective outrage. It is the same with countries. If you wanted to be consistent, you'd have to boycott every country in the world. They all do some bad things.
Absolutely, it is impossible to draw a line based on, say how evil the person is or how much they are trying to spread the evil. Because anyone can be evil, we simply cannot take action against anyone!
You, and most who believe that, are ignoring the part where he said something like, "My heart goes out to you!" as he threw his hand from his heart out to the people in the crowd.
it ends up reading to me as an afterthought or half-hearted attempt to explain away the salute. a salute which was given with a grimace and a violent force, twice; it doesn't match the warmth of a message of 'my heart goes out to you.'
when you say 'my heart goes out to you' your hands typically stay on your heart ( which he seemed to know to do then ) or move very slightly directly out, not diagonally and up.
If I use a word to describe you, and you took it as an insult, but later found out the word was a compliment, is my description of you still an insult?
If someone who increasingly looks like a nazi sympathizer does a nazi salute and says 'my heart goes out to you,' it's still a nazi salute.
not to mention the out and out white supremacists thought that's what it was.
i would probably view this more charitably in his favor if he just apologized or clarified like a mature person. instead he doubles down on 'corrupt' media, calls to defund wikipedia, and makes juvenile nazi jokes.
No one is ignoring that, and it's bizarre seeing people defend Musk in such a ridiculous fashion.
The plausible deniability angle would hit a little better if Musk hadn't also been endorsing a number of Nazi-adjacent parties and views, pushed literal white nationalist views repeatedly (which he has been doing for years -- he isn't concerned about birth rates, he is literally only worried about white birth rates while he runs his creepy birthing farm down in Texas, and that's aside from his endless "empathy is our weakness" attacks on migrants), and most recently literally excused Hitler on the basis that really it's the public servants who are to blame.
It's quite incredible really. If the guy wasn't already absolutely soaked with extremely far right rhetoric and beliefs -- save the absurd "oh he's a centrist" nonsense that zero people believe if they have any functioning grey matter at all -- it might have been excusable as something that just looked concerning.
I wouldn't be so quick to say a 'majority of the American people.' The 'majority' that voted for him is only about 31% of the voting-eligible population.
right. with the availability of early voting, that implies that most of that 69% didn't care enough either way. it was a pretty close election, probably with a slight edge going in for Harris, so that would tend to cause more would-be Trump voters to stay home.
in other words, there are plenty of valid complaints, but "abnormal" or denying a clear democratic mandate aren't any of them.
> The phrase "shooting oneself in the foot" comes to mind.
It should come to mind for elon, not car buyers. He built a car company based on environmentalism that naturally appealed to people with environmental concerns and then pivoted to publicly insulting and denigrating those exact people.
It's not even really political. Elon isn't the first CEO to hold political values that differ from a majority of the company's customers. It's the fact that he goes out of his way to call his most likely customers retards.
Making a sacrifice, whether great or small, is a very common ethical behaviour.
I refuse to make purchases on Amazon. Sometimes that's a minor inconvenience: perhaps the alternative has slower delivery. Sometimes purchasing elsewhere probably costs me more than it would on Amazon.
My purchase value is low considering the whole world, but it's not zero. I can also influence my employer's decisions, which are larger — and we use Azure rather than AWS.
The car isn't the problem, but it's tied to an incredibly overvalued stock, which in turn made it possible for Musk to buy massive influence and political power, and wield it irresponsible self-serving ways.
I think this phrasing mellows the reality that he has, regardless of intent, displayed Nazi-like behavior. Why not tear at a company whose absentee CEO acts this way? Tesla is not the only great car or the only great car company. Let it thrive or die based on myriad factors, including leadership optics.
I guess the question is when does accountability stop? If a company and its descendant employees and products are built on an evil foundation and benefit from it, how do we rectify as a society? Ford is hardly alone here, many German, Japanese, and American companies were built on wartime atrocities and exist today from that previous goodwill. If the malignant founder is dead, is then the rest of the machine exempt from responsibility?
I personally think the only way to be truly principled is to boycott basically everything. I imagine the vast majority of people reading this right now are wearing clothes produced by child slavery or eating imported products that clear cut rainforest and villages or whatnot. Society for better or worse has to carry some amount of baggage to just subsist without emotional stress.
I agree, and I've long thought that there is no such thing as a clean dollar. I could donate $100 to an animal shelter, and some % of that will eventually make its way into evil hands. But I'd make that trade-off because the money is being used more for good than bad, and the bad part is largely out of my control.
Musk's wealth is however causing very direct and obvious harm to causes I care about, and he uses his platform of 100M+ followers to spread hateful views which now permeate every conversation. I am tired of him being relevant. There are many alternatives to Tesla so it is easy enough to not give him money.
I also take a forward-facing view. I can't change what people's past dollars were spent on. Instead I care about what my dollars be spent on after I give them to a company. I buy Porsche cars today even though their founder was a Nazi and the company is still majority-owned by the Porsche family. But their founder is dead, and today's Porsche has strongly disavowed Nazi views. Seems my money mostly goes toward developing cool cars while the owners stay out of politics.
> I guess the question is when does accountability stop? If a company and its descendant employees and products are built on an evil foundation and benefit from it, how do we rectify as a society? Ford is hardly alone here, many German, Japanese, and American companies were built on wartime atrocities and exist today from that previous goodwill. If the malignant founder is dead, is then the rest of the machine exempt from responsibility?
Corporations aren't people. Yes, I understand the supreme court rulings on this subject, I'm saying the supreme court is wrong.
Each person in a corporation is responsible for their own actions.
This is a very big problem in our society. A more recent Ford misdeed, the Pinto, was rushed through production despite 40+ crash tests in which the fuel tanks ruptured in every test. People knew it would kill people, did it anyway because they could make more money by letting people die, and shareholders were the ones punished. This is an injustice: the people who pushed through the Pinto committed at the very least manslaughter, and have as far as I can tell, never even been named publicly.
Until we address this problem we're going to keep having these problems. GM in 2014 refused to replace faulty ignition switches which ignited, killing 13 people. The car industry is littered with bodies, but these faults are not limited to automotive companies. In 2010 PG&E refused to fix known problems with a gas line and it exploded, leveling 38 homes. It's a miracle that Boeing hasn't killed someone yet. And this is setting aside simple safety neglect: letting people die isn't just a small cost-cutting measure for healthcare companies, it's a core part of their business model.
These decisions are not made by corporations, they are made by individuals, and as long as we continue to punish corporations for individual decisions, while letting literal murderers move on to the next job, this will keep happening. We need to hold individuals, not corporations, accountable.
Unfortunately, a lot of the people with money and power don't want to be held accountable, and have crafted a legal and propaganda system that avoids that. So until that changes we have Luigi Mangione and tanking Tesla stock--actual justice isn't an option we've been given.
The 737-MAX killed 346 people. Which reinforces your point rather than taking away from it. In any sane world the CEO should have gone to prison for that, but instead he walked away with $62 million.
He’s called a nazi because he does nazi signs, endorses the German far right party (not a literal nazi party in itself but endorsed by neo-nazis), keep getting closer and closer to say Hitler did nothing (apparently Hitler didn’t murder millions of people himself so no responsibility according to him).
If Hitler was a candidate today, Elon would endorse him, period.
He could tattoo a svastika on his forehead and people would still find him excuses.
He didn't do a Nazi sign, he waved. He didn't endorse a "far right" Nazi party unless you're saying a quarter of the German population are secretly Nazis? They're right wing but they're not "far right".
He didn't say Hitler did nothing or that he wasn't responsible for the Holocaust. He made the very good point that one man can't do that amount of damage alone, and it relied on the power of a centralised state with excellent record keeping. There is a reason modern European states don't even collect this data! States are dangerous.
YOUR view is warped if you think that was a wave and not a nazi sign. Watch it again and do it in a public place exactly as he did (no "I’m giving my heart" bullshit) if you sincerely believe it was just a wave.
This is so fucking unambiguously a nazi sign, it’s infuriating seeing people like you saying it’s just a wave. Damn, people suck
He didn't even use that phrase in the typical context which makes it look like a flimsy cover to muddy what this really is. You say that to express sympathy or sorrow. Maybe he was pre-apologizing for the sheer madness we are in now.
Oh you can salute in public, that’s not the question. Can you do the salute Elon did, in public? Stretched arm, palm down, no wave.
> It literally looks NOTHING like a Nazi salute from any angle
I don’t know what to say to someone like you who’s talking in extremely bad faith. Finding excuses is one thing, saying it doesn’t even look like a nazi salute is straight up lying. I can’t engage anymore with straight lies.
> Musk, who is called one because... he is against illegal immigration?
Why are folks so incapable of making an argument in good faith on this subject? Like, even if you give elon the most benefit of the most doubt you can muster and you manage to handwave away the multiple sig heils and nazi sympathetic tweets as just some sort of quirky behavior and not at all related to nazism - you have to realize that not everyone does.
He did not doubt fatality numbers, he made the point that one man cannot kill millions alone. It is something that requires the resources of a state. One man didn't kill millions, the state apparatus of Nazi Germany did.
There were numerous pogroms of Jews in European history but they pale in comparison to the Holocaust because it was the policy of an advanced, centralised, bureaucratic state.
Whether you support a big state or not, one undeniable fact about them is that they are highly capable. That capability can be used to do evil. cf. The US federal government of the 1890s, for example, was institutionally incapable of genocide.
So I wasn't referring to the recent tweets about public servants perpetrating the Holocaust. I was referring to the incident from late 2023 where he replied "this is the actual truth" to someone who posted that Jewish communities are trying to create divisions in society. It was quickly discovered that the person he replied to had posted plenty of Holocaust denial material - specifically about fatalities. I misremembered the actual tweet that Elon promoted. One could make the argument that he was making a very narrow point, recklessly doing no diligence on who he chose to amplify. He did follow it with an apology tour though.
> Unlike Musk, who is called one because... he is against illegal immigration?
He's called a Nazi because he boosts and endorses Nazi content on twitter, and recently repeatedly emulated an aggressive arm gesture that looks exactly like a Nazi salute.
> Maybe you shouldn't buy Fords then. After all, Henry Ford was basically an actual Nazi.
Henry Ford was indeed a Nazi.
He's also dead, so purchasing a Ford vehicle doesn't support his Nazism any more. But you knew that.
> Unlike Musk, who is called one because... he is against illegal immigration?
This is a straw man.
Nobody thinks Musk is a Nazi because he is against illegal immigration. I think he's a Nazi because he's repeatedly doubled down on racist remarks, Nazi saluted repeatedly, and keeps supporting economic and social policies that Nazis support.
Illegal immigration is and always has been a red herring. The right isn't against illegal immigration--if they were, they would be providing reasonable paths for legal immigration instead of pretending they don't know ladders exist.
That's also my point. No one gains anything by not owning one, either. If one does like and want the car, they only hurt themselves by not buying one. If Tesla went out of business and one couldn't buy a car they wanted, they hurt themselves.
I buy things that make me happy or give me an advantage of some sort. I wouldn't want to lose that. Someone else's politics or personal life don't matter to me.
