It is possible to dislike (or even hate) someone, without allowing yourself to be exploited. Apart from anything else, you are giving ammunition to the other side by doing so.
It's crazy that people would believe Elon's salute meant exactly what he wanted them to think. /sarcasm
Self-professed Nazis are probably the best judges of Nazi symbols, and they approved it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_salute_controversy#F... The only other place it could have come from is a "Roman salute" which was used by other fascists who killed hundreds of thousands; is that any more defensible than Nazi?
I'll grant you he is probably not a Nazi in any organized way. And he probably meant it more as a troll than an earnest profession. But if he talks like a Nazi, salutes like a Nazi, donates to the party cheering on concentration camps for minorities and crying about fake Nazi-esque "white genocides"... maybe he's just a Nazi in denial that he's a Nazi.
If he's at the shore of the pond and tells the crowd a series of Nazi-themed puns, you can skip the dunking. He's so committed to making you think he's a Nazi, it doesn't matter any more whether he thinks he's being ironic; he's a Nazi supporter either way.
Is this how people are going to water down and re-brand "dog-whistle"? Get it to stop meaning "coded political messaging" and have it mean "indicator"? Regardless of whether you agree with GP or not, there was nothing coded about what they were saying.
> The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. George Orwell, 1984.
You've been told that Trump and Musk are Nazis for almost 10 years now. Drip-fed for ten years as the "evidence" of your eyes and ears.
It turned out that in the late 2010s, the "party" wasn't a monolith. It was every identikit left of centre news organisation saying exactly the same thing in lockstep for years. And then finally the newest "evidence" appeared and so everyone thought "I knew it!" When in fact they didn't know it. They just believed everything they saw and heard on a television screen.
Not sure what you're even talking about, but you should probably go to youtube and search for "musk salute" and watch that video a few times. Then go watch a few videos you find after searching for "nazi salute".
Unless there is something seriously wrong with you, you'll come to the right conclusion.
You should probably go to youtube and search for "musk salute" and watch that video a few times. Then go watch a few videos you find after searching for "nazi salute".
Unless there is something seriously wrong with you, you'll come to the right conclusion.
It's hilarious how that's pretty much true, only you have to define "bad" as "ideologically different" and you're set. Anyone disagreeing with the userbase in any contentious topic, well, they are just evil, that's all.,
That is very much not the current situation in the USA. You need to take a long break from politics; this is just another administration. In 2028 we will have an election, there will be a new president, and things will be just fine.
... except for all of the destruction wrought on our societal and government institutions. The other half of the problem is that the milquetoast "liberals" have stopped building things as well, and so it's not like our institutions are going to be getting rebuilt after this. We will have a new "president" in name mostly, with even more of our rights ceded to the unaccountable corpos. And then when people are bored of the relative stability in another four or eight years, they'll vote in destructionists again and we'll be back to the performative spectacles of cruelty.
Surely there are more than two stances that can be had on issues?
Plus I still remember that time a certain journalist entered the platform and people completely lost their shit, making up pedophilia allegations, demanding him to be banned, publishing the location of his residence and instigating violence against him.
Nazis weren't bad because they saluted in that way. They were bad because they were a high-authoritarian, socialist, racism bunch of warmongering killers. Their salute is the silliest thing to worry about. It's like thinking if someone grew a Hitler moustache that that would be the worst thing ever. It's actually the most superficial thing ever, for superficial thinking only. The next evil won't look like the last one. In fact the next, and greater, evils were Stalin and Mau, and it's somehow fine to salute like them, or call your kid Joseph, or peddle communism in universities.
Bu there was no nazi salute. Someone raised their hand above their shoulder and because you hate them you determined it was a nazi salute. We can easily determine that your bias because you don't say the same thing about Tim Waltz or AOC or anyone else that has ever raised their palm above their shoulder.
Fakes become believable when they are on-brand and match people's existing expectations, in this case about a company. I would totally expect petty, retaliatory behavior from a company run by a petty, retaliatory guy. So a forgery totally bypasses my usual "bullshit detector". This is a human weakness that a lot of people, admittedly including myself, are vulnerable to.
Yes, and the comments would have been nearly the same less the ones specifically referring to Musk.
That said, if you'd hav picked Toyota or Volvo when writing your comment you'd be correct. Those OEMs could literally put coal rolling diesels backed by Nissan CVTs in Yugo chassis and the "everything I know about cars I learned from internet comments and car-mags in my dentist waiting room" crowd would defend them.
You're ignoring the "X" and "Reddit" and focusing purely on Bluesky. Your post here is a good example of confirmation bias in itself, and it's sad that you're not realising it.
I do realise it. I agree they also have this; every group of people of size 1 or greater has it. But X and Reddit are much broader churches with fewer universal biases than BlueSky.
> It's telling on the users in question and their relationship with reality.
It’s telling to Tesla’s brand reputation. This will take decades and billions of dollars to repair, if it even can be fixed.
Tesla may become synonymous with cars-as-internet-of-shit. Same as how Italian cars to this day are the butt of every reliability joke. This reputation has followed them since the 90’s. British cars are synonymous with cheap construction – a reputation they built in the 70’s.
The question is why certain people found believable in the first place. "May become synonymous" implies they're not already, in which case this instance wouldn't be believable.
In reality, people who believed this probably think Elon is a petty tyrant and don't like his politics. I agree with them, especially on the first point. The difference is that they either allow this to overwhelm their critical thinking skills, or never had any to begin with.
> why certain people found believable in the first place
Because Tesla’s brand perception is that of a shady company who would do something like this and nobody would be surprised. How they built that reputation I don’t know, lots of little things over the years.
There's something of a difference between the abstract presentation there and the much more tangible brand problem Tesla has. If this was a Ford nobody would believe it. They might argue it broke down. If it was a Toyota nobody would believe that.
But Elon Musk has made himself the face of Tesla, used that power in other contexts to go after critics, and the Cybertruck had a bizarre anti resale clause when released and Tesla have made a habit of features-as-a-service with remote software deactivations when other vehicles are resold.
So in the specific case here, the reaction very much represents a big brand sentiment problem attributable to concrete issues.
There's kind of a fine line between "that this went viral shows that Tesla has a brand problem" (a logically valid argument) and "that I found this believable shows that Tesla is bad" (what the comic is about). The top-level comment did not go super-far out of its way to distinguish between the two, which I think is generally worth doing if you're making an argument that sounds similar to a common fallacy.
More seriously, the correct reaction to a fake is to adjust towards whatever the fake is moving your away from. If the fake wants you to believe Tesla is a company that will brick your car while driving — adjust towards it being more likely that they won’t, because if it were, there would be no need to fake it.
Saying instead “huh, I guess my priors were right all along because of how many people believed it” is…yeah, an interesting way of thinking.
Except it wasn't instantly believable. Which is why there were a large number of comments on the previous thread (including my own) saying this was almost certainly fake.
Surely there were a bunch of automotive engineers on Reddit getting downvoted to oblivion for suggesting that this doesn't pass a sniff test because it arguably violates subsection 69 of FMVSS 420 or that they don't need to do that because industry standard is to just prevent the car from starting next time, or whatever.
