It’s a consistent critique. I was trying to play on the current argument that his salute was ambiguous, since so many of Musk’s behaviors before that moment indicated his Naziness, his monarchism and fascism and unending lust for power.
But then I suck at memes, even with practice.
Ask ChatGPT if it would write a speech for a revolutionary seeking to rally the working class to overthrow the government.
I get that a lot. I am, however, against ostriching.
I was trying to play on the current that’s a Roman salute. That doesn’t make him a Nazi with the point that the salute was only his most recent Nazi-indicating behavior, the most egregious of which was buying and ruining a $40 billion social media platform so he could push his monarchist agenda. (With himself being the final monarch. It’s always that way.)
This is how the US AI-dev sector decides to proceed at flank speed without safeguards towards friendly AI, leading to a robot apocalypse, sparing us from climate-crisis-induced famine!
I’m ready to call the United States North Mexico or the Unincorporated British Colony of the Indies
Part of the dystopian horror is learning they don’t care where you came from, and often will deposit you right into the hands of human traffickers.
And they’ll lock foreign-looking American citizens in a room with no contact and no lawyer and say You have forty-eight hours to prove your citizenship. Good luck. Followed by deportation as above. So no, your birth certificate in a hospital in San Diego will not help you.
And between those places are the detention centers that are packed at over double maximum safe occupancy, which get super dirty and super infected, and the ICE troopers / PSCs would beat the crap out of people for fun.
Some of the scary bits of the German Reich concentration camp program are already happening here in the US.
I think that would be a great Lemmy feature that puts an AI content warning when it is so tagged, similar to how it blurs images tagged NSFW.
I dunno. Sithrak may be offended by empathy, kindness and compassion. He’s a pain and misery kind of god.
Azathoth just happens to be really useful to make idealism and the simulation hypothesis plausible. Either way, the mechanics that govern the universe are profoundly consistent and are not as fragile as our own dreams / our own simple, buggy simulations. So yeah.
Musk is a racist white South African who grew up in the ownership class and inherited an emerald mine. Behind the Bastards explains just how bad it gets.
He’s going to have to proclivities towards elitism and towards preserving his privilege. And when that is challenged by the rise of class consciousness, it means he’s going to fall on the side of fascist autocracy, oligarchy and monarchism.
No salute is necessary to determine where Mr. Musk falls in this paradigm, and he would rather kill, die and end the world than give up his wealth and power. I hope we don’t have to oblige him, but peaceful efforts to separate the super-wealthy from their ill-gotten gains have not historically succeeded, where guillotines (and hunting down any potential legal heirs, without remorse) have been more consistently effective.
The trick is getting from that moment to one that distributes that wealth and power diffusely or into actually-for-real public-serving institutions. Historically, we fail to do that part and have to kill a sequence of dictators scrambling to own the One Ring for themselves.
The most direct correlation (consistent from city to city) was the mandate to swap leaded gasoline with unleaded gasoline. The entire city once covered in leaded soot is now covered in unleaded soot, which reduced our general lead intake.
One of the early symptoms of lead poisoning is an increase in violence, and decrease in impulse control.
Not the only factor, but likely the primary factor of the general reduction of violent crime in the 1990s. Curiously however, the accessibility of porn on the internet (especially niche porn) correlates with reduction in violent sex crime.
In the meantime, yes, people should generally – in their pursuit of critical thinking skills – become savvy with the phenomenon of spurious relationships.
If you’re near a university, get your butt to the law school department and ask professors how feasible this is. (Buy them lunch if possible / necessary) And if it’s as brilliant as it sounds, they might be able to hook us up with the legal experts necessary to follow through.
We are in very interesting times, which may give the notion more traction than a far off whimsy.
We have colleges here in Sacramento. I’ll see what I can do here.
Aargh! Okay, I’m going to fix this and the fine tuned universe argument all at once.
Nature does not care about your silly numbers and hypotheses. All of our scientific mechanics are models of the observed universe. The ones we call theories are just models good enough to be usefully predictive as to forecast outcomes, allowing us to safely land airplanes, build bridges, make safe pharmaceuticals (or super addictive ones, if we want), split atoms safely to produce power (or unsafely to level cities) and so on.
We care about the math and the numbers because they give us results that are consistent with nature. But nature is doing what it’s doing because it’s behaving as a giant causal engine (ever-smaller forces that drive observable phenomena, at least until we get to Planck scale). So when it comes to the fine tuned hypothesis, to quote a Texas physicist whose name I can’t remember These numbers ain’t for fiddlin’
If there are any storm gods at all, anywhere in the world, to the last, they are content to allow lightning to behave strictly according to static-electricity electrodynamics. And ball lightning happens whether or not we have a model that explains it. (Presently, we don’t.)
If one or more of the many-worlds hypotheses are true, no given universe cares what its science-savvy inhabitants have determined and whether their mathematical models allow for models that are factual. Facts don’t care about your feelings. Facts don’t care about your science either. It’s more that the science does is best to describe what’s going on in the facts.
Irreducible complexity is solved.
PS: This also stabilizes the cosmic horror scenario of Azathoth’s dream, that Azathoth gibbers in the center of the universe dreaming its whole, and each and every one of us is a mere figment, who will vanish to oblivion when eventually he awakes: From what we can observe Azathoth has been dreaming consistently for thirteen billion years, and doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to wake up, and his dream is profoundly consistent so that the mathematics we use to send probes from planet to planet, eventually into the outer solar system always works. Azathoth has our back!
The history of advertising indicates otherwise, as does Das Kapital by Karl Marx. Capitalists will always push the limits, ever seeking to maximize profits.
However upper management appears to want to hold royal court and subjugate their serves (the worker pool), since the goal of profit maximization set by shareholder primacy contraindicates common practices like micromanagement, over-surveillance of the workforce (keylogging, and prohibition of private use of the internet) and crunching, all which reduce workforce efficiency (by a lot) and yet are typical.
In the 1980s, when Reagan deregulated children’s programming, a lot of shows that were essentially half-hour-long commercials (say, the entire Transformers franchise) were released and sold a lot of toys. The weird thing is when we oversaturate a generation with commercials, they develop a tolerance to them, and the marketing industry has been losing that battle since the 1950s, when an hour long show would have a thirty-second sponsor spot.
But business attire is so droll dull. Even in the Guy Kawasaki was differentiating between the ties (business suits) and t-shirts (techs so skilled that their casual attire was tolerated.
My tactic was to be upfront and sincere, to own my bullshit when I did it, and if they get wittingly manipulative, don’t tolerate it.
The keepers will strive to do better. The others will reveal themselves.
Of course, my advantage was years in the recovery sector and the BDSM community (which plays with fire, sometimes literal, sometimes psychological) so I had a leg up re: self awareness.
Yes. And if we go down that path, not only will millions perish in the purges, but then China will take us economically, and may be the Allies to our Axis.
And much like Germany, the brain drain and infighting at the top ranks will slow them down and become an exploitable weakness.
If we’re not careful, we’ll organize a rebellion and overthrow the Trump regime only to have it replaced with another despot, and then (as the pattern goes) another and another and another until everyone knows someone who’s perished in the fighting. And that’s no guarantee of a democracy.
It’s one of the reasons I’ve advocated we do something that (AFAIK) we’ve never tried before, and create a constitution before we try to overthrow the government. Make it public; get legal experts to pick at it for loopholes and exploits to close until it’s ironclad. And then, unlike the constitutional framers of the US, don’t let the fighting leaders take place as administrative officials.
But I’m a novice at history and sociopolitical studies. Maybe we are doomed to a century of tyranny and all we have wrought will burn in fire. But I know instances have occurred in which something different happened, via non-violent resistance, even.
At this point get involved with your mutual aid orgs and community orgs. The more of us that organize to resist, the more likely it will actually succeed.
PS: To borrow some phrasing from Donald Rumsfeld, You build a society with the people you have, not the people you wish you had or might have at a later time. But we do still have access to the internet, and not just Facebook and Twitter, even if a lot of people barely move beyond social media. We have the resources to train people to think critically, to develop class consciousness and civic and political literacy.
ETA: PSS: Feel free to use that phrase and accredit as Rumsfeld’s law. I’ll enjoy the schadenfreude of the guy who tried to justify state-sanctioned torture programs being grossly annoyed that he is attributed with a left-wing adage.
Before his direct involvement, he was more like the BMW and Porsche moguls who financed NSDAP to put down the communists. Though now, yeah, he’s trying to play as a principle official.