Elon Musk's lies, propaganda, etc. - Page 54

On January 25 2025 05:56 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


In before the "X" logo ends up being redrawn with 4 bendy arms "as a joke": https://imgur.com/a/JUygjYz

On January 25 2025 05:56 DarkPlasmaBall wrote:


In before the "X" logo ends up being redrawn with 4 bendy arms "as a joke": https://imgur.com/a/JUygjYz

On January 24 2025 13:11 ETisME wrote:
a Nazi salute is a salute.

A salute is a salute because the entire form matter, it's with back straight and form upright, with correct gesture.

What Elon did arent even close, even if we dump it all down to just try gesurrey which is all wrong.
You don't hit your chest flat handed, you don't throw your body out while lifting your arm.

This is as silly as thinking a reverse peace sign is a peace sign, and that's not even a salute.

The fact that so many are biting this, is pretty embarrassing for everyone involved.
Well at least the far left conspiracy theorists posts are interesting to read.

At least the rise of right wings everywhere is showing how extreme left wings are becoming, because most centralists arent that far gone to see right wing constantly as Nazi just because similarities.

On January 25 2025 09:52 Zambrah wrote:


I blame Reagan.

On January 26 2025 23:20 KlaCkoN wrote:
I think you guys are wrong about that. LIke I enjoy shitting on Reagan as much as anyone but I dont actually think there is a clear (or even fuzzy) line between economic inequality and expansionism/imperialism/fascism/far-rightness

Thinking through a timeline of the past 150 years or we have:
From the mid 19th century up until WW1 industrializing countries were getting more democratic, less authoritarian and I think significantly more economically unequal.
Massive capital destruction in the war then caused a significant decrease in economic inequality. However, that did not stop the rise of fascism in the interwar period.

After the war the democratic countries saw a period of relatively low inequality and high growth, and they also continued to become gradually less imperialist. But note that countries like France, the US and the UK continued to fight imperialist/expansionist wars well into the 60s and black people in the US south effectively didnt get the right to vote until 1965.

Neoliberalism arrives in the 80s and with it rapidly increasing economic inequality. However countries continue to become gradually more democratic, (gay rights, womens rights, etc etc), and less imperialist/expansionist.

However, starting in 2010(?) we start seeing a fascist right re-emerge in Europe, this culminates with the first election of Trump in 2016.

Looking at this timeline it's hard for me to draw the conclusion that neoliberalism is the cause of this particular problem. Sure the period between 1945 and 1965 saw a strong correlation between high growth, low inequality and gradually less imperialism and more civil rights.. But the period between 1980 and 2010 instead had increasing inequality, but it continued to see decreasing imperialism and more civil rights/democracy.
((as an example JFK straight up fought an imperialist war in Vietnam, Reagan had to be content with 'subtle' coups in South America, i do think this represents a quantitative change in the direction towards 'less fascism'))

Once we get to 2010 we have sky high inequalities and we start seeing a turn towards the far right, but in absolute terms inequalities are still very comparable to the period period between 18xx and 1914 where we instead saw increasing democracy (starting from low levels ..) simultaneously with increasing inequality.

Basically neither the relative change in inequality over time, OR it's absolute value, seem to correlate with how far right a society is.

On January 27 2025 00:20 Nebuchad wrote:


The way you can tie rising inequality to the rise of the far right is through the political mechanisms that had to happen in your society in order for that rising inequality to take place. You need a weakened left, otherwise it would have fought that rising inequality. But you're still in a democracy, there can't be only one political party to vote for, you need a political opposition (if you're dealing with white people, that is, of course otherwise you can send Pinochet). So what would happen before 1980 is the right would have power for a while, disappoint some people, so the left would gain forces back and be less weak on the next election. But neoliberalism pushes the Overton window to the right enough so that this doesn't happen, and instead the political opposition changes from one between a socialist/social democrat and a liberal, who discuss economics, to a liberal who has progressive views and a liberal who has conservative views, who discuss societal issues.

The reason why this system leans conservative over time is because political systems that have two main choices have a direction. There's always a side that represents change and a side that represents keeping things mostly as they are. Under neoliberalism obviously it's the centrist that doesn't do much (because if he was doing too much, he might become a leftist, and that's precisely the thing that we're trying to avoid). So as power switches back and forth between the two, over time the system becomes more and more far right, and the far right becomes more and more acceptable.

On January 27 2025 00:53 KlaCkoN wrote:

But this doesnt really seem correlate with what we observe. For almost 30 years after 1980 people and countries continued to became less far-right and civil rights continued to expand, even as the left was to weak to stop an accelerating increase in economic inequality.
Like I think reducing economic inequality is a worthwhile goal in and of itself. (Like I pay my union dues, and social democratic party membership dues lol) But I also dont really think we can expect the world to become less fascist if this is achieved. Peoples turn to the far right is driven by something else.
Here is a more recent story making the same point im trying to make
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/01/biden-economic-populism-failure/681289/
Basically American towns that saw enormous state-driven investment and and had a corresponding growth in prosperity did not to start to vote for Democrats, instead the share of Democratic voters dropped.
If you care about economic equality for reasons of principle thats great, but there is no reason to believe it will reverse the trend towards the far-right.

On January 27 2025 01:04 Nebuchad wrote:


I don't see this as a contradiction, it takes time for society to adapt to the new paradigms. Even today you will commonly encounter the notion that there is no racism in the far right and we're just imagining things, because my generation, from after the 1980s, was still generally raised with the idea that bigotry is bad and you shouldn't be a bigot. The generation that is raised watching Elon do nazi salutes, by parents who proudly vote for Trump? Well...