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Captainant

Burnt Ends
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Posts posted by Captainant

  1. ·

    Edited by Captainant

    42 minutes ago, HenryJames said:

    https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/05/i-read-everything-elon-musk-posted-for-a-week-send-help/
     

      Hide contents

    I Read Everything Elon Musk Posted for a Week. Send Help.

    If your media diet looked like his, you’d be red-pilled too.

    A photo illustration of Elon Musk surrounded by screenshots of his tweets and laughing/crying emojis.

    Mother Jones illustration; Michel Euler/AP

    Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

    Last January, not long after agreeing with an actual Nazi that western Jews have brought antisemitism upon themselves by welcoming “hordes of minorities” to their countries, Elon Musk took a quick trip to Poland. The billionaire chief of SpaceX, Tesla, and X laid a wreath at Auschwitz and then preceded on to a symposium in Krakow, where he told the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro that social media could have averted the Holocaust and bragged that he considered himself “aspirationally Jewish.” The tweet, he explained in a different interview, at a different symposium “might be literally the worst and dumbest post I’ve ever done.” But he did not take it down, nor has he moderated his views. If anything his descent into the online fever swamp has only accelerated.

    It is hard to appreciate just how thoroughly one of the world’s richest men has been red-pilled until you actually follow along with his media diet. So that’s what I decided to do. Last month, I read everything Musk had to say on X for a week and tracked everyone he interacted with. He tweeted 389 times in five days. He posted the laughing/crying emoji 45 times. But there was a clear signal piercing through the noise. Musk is not a tech visionary with a side interest in politics these days, nor is he just another bored billionaire with a nativist streak; the political activism and the technological ambitions are inseparable. He believes his work is part of a civilizational struggle in which woke progressives pose an existential threat to humanity. And he spends most of his days inside a feedback loop that’s radicalizing him even more.

    Over the course of the week, Musk dabbled in a range of small-scale freakouts and smoldering obsessions. He sent 13 tweets about Brazil’s supreme court, as part of a weeks-long battle with the government over efforts to censor disinformation and hate speech. He twice promoted a statistic about the murder rate among Black Americans. He spent one afternoon earnestly amplifying a follower who claimed that “Over 1,000 African migrants have taken over NYC’s City Hall.” (It was an overflow crowd for a hearing on racial disparities in the shelter system.) But one subject came to drown out all the rest. During the week Tesla recalled its CyberTruck for a faulty accelerator pedal, Musk’s most urgent public concern was Katherine Maher.

    Musk tweeted about Maher, the CEO of National Public Radio who formerly served as executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, nearly 60 times. It began relatively simply, with Musk lamenting the resignation of Uri Berliner, a former NPR staffer who wrote a critical essay about what he considered the media outlet’s leftward drift. Then Manhattan Institute fellow Chris Rufo—the conservative strategist who helped orchestarate the backlash to Critical Race Theory—began dredging up old comments from Maher, in which she talked about correcting for white historical biases at Wikipedia and pushing back against disinformation at NPR. “Katherine Maher is blatantly racist and sexist – one of the worst human beings in America,” Musk tweeted at Rufo. “She’s evil,” he tweeted again, one minute later.

    Rufo and the Canadian behavioral marketing guru Gad Saad are two of Musk’s favorite sounding boards when it comes to wokeness. From Rufo, Musk learns what he should be mad about—clips of Maher speaking to the Atlantic Council, clips of Maher delivering a Ted Talk, screenshots of Maher’s old tweets. From Saad, he gets a more holistic intellectual framework for being mad. Musk is obsessed with the idea that a “woke mind virus” is infecting society. Saad happens to be the author of a book called The Parasitic Mind, which Musk has said gave him “nightmares.” In March, a few months after Saad tweeted at Musk to ask him to promote the book, they held a glitchy 38-minute public discussion on X Spaces. The billionaire has continued to plug the book—including three different times in the week I tuned in.

    If you only pay glancing attention to Musk, it’s tough to fully grasp both the intensity and shallowness of his conservative convictions. I knew that he previously said that the rise of Artificial Intelligence could bring about “civilizational destruction,” but I had, in my ignorance, assumed that this fear stemmed from a simple Matrix-style kind of doomism: Machines will grow sentient and enslave us. The reality, which became clear as Musk’s fixation with Maher progressed, was a bit darker: He believes AI will destroy the world with wokeness.

    It was a “severe civilization-level risk,” Musk wrote in a late-night exchange with the billionaire venture-capitalist Marc Andreesen. (Andreesen’s own spiraling antipathy toward progressive buzzwords like “sustainability” and “social responsibility” has made him a leading proponent of Effective Accelerationism—sort of the anti-woke mind virus.)

    “Now imagine if this is programmed, explicitly or implicitly, into super powerful AI – it could end civilization,” he said in response to a Rufo tweet about Maher’s TED Talk, in which she discusses how Wikipedia moderators think about truth when it comes to thorny subjects like religion. “Now, no need to imagine. It is already programmed into Google Gemini and OpenAI ChatGPT.”

    Musk returned to the theme of civilization-destroying woke AI throughout the week. “Imagine if instead of merely rendering forced ‘diverse’ images,” he said in reply to a follower with the handle DogeDesigner, “it decided to make that true in reality, potentially killing millions of people to achieve diversity goals.”

    Imagine! With those stakes, everything fits in this heroic or apocalyptic dichotomy.

    “[T]he West…wishes to be eaten alive and to have its children sacrificed because then death could be the ultimate expression of its progressive purity,” Saad wrote toward the beginning of the week.

    “Suicidal empathy for the L,” Musk agreed.

    All of this might sound familiar. That’s because it’s a facet of the same complaint that led to his remedial education at Auschwitz last year, stripped of the most obvious antisemitic signifiers: Woke progressives are opening the doors to the forces that will destroy us all: Falling birth rates, gender ideology, flag-burning immigrants, socially-conscious AI. There was a basic fallacy in expecting a tour about the horrors of genocide to soften the views of someone currently worried about “white genocide” and civil war, and who believes the ideology of his critics could lead to millions of deaths.

    Musk described the current state of his red-pilling, and how all-encompassing it is, most succinctly in a response to Rufo about a five-year-old tweet from Maher about feeling “deep discomfort” about having children.

    “Once you see that the true battle is expansionists vs extinctionists,” he wrote, “you can’t unsee it.”

    And once you see that Musk truly can’t see anything else, you can’t unsee that. Still, there are some things Musk doeswant AI to kill off. The emerging tech is a boon to Musk not just because of what it promises for his companies, but because of what he hopes it can replace. “Legacy media simply can’t compete with hundreds of millions of humans providing real-time, AI-assisted, interactive information,” he boasted, responding to a chart from DogeDesigner showing declining traffic at major news sites. Musk is doing his part. His feed looks like a newsroom after private equity came to town—one of the only articles from a legacy media outlet he shared all week was a New York Post story about X’s advertising situation, and the only reporter from a legacy news outlet he interacted with was Bill Melugin, Fox News’ man on the border.  

    Musk touts his platform as the future of news even as he uses it to spread misinformation. Not long after taking over the platform, he shared—and later deleted—a report from a notorious fake-news site that falsely asserted that Nancy’s Pelosi’s husband, Paul, had not been brutally attacked by a home invader and instead had gotten in a fight with a male prostitute. Communicating in emojis and exclamation marks makes it harder to commit factual errors, but he still made some. Musk twice expressed his alarm at a too-good-to-check story about a non-profit that works with migrants in Mexico handing out flyers asking them to vote for Joe Biden when they get to the United States. The non-profit said it had nothing to do with the flyers, and the text appeared to have been crudely translated using an online app. The allegation, which originated with a right-wing site called Muckraker.com, was amplified by the Heritage Foundation and found its way to Musk by way of both the Heritage Foundation and Nate Hochman, a Republican writer and activist who was fired from Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign after featuring a Nazi symbol in a campaign video. It may seem like a small thing, but there’s no such thing when it comes to truth—I’m told the future of civilization hangs in the balance.

    A lot of his time is just spent saying the same grim things, to the same grim people, over and over. He has the mannerism not of a master of the universe, but of the reply guys clamoring for their attention. Musk tweeted “DefundNPR” at Rufo three times in two days, like a man at a ballpark by himself, trying to start the wave. He will sometimes respond to the same post multiple times, hours apart with a slightly different reaction. One of the big stories last week in Musk’s circle was a report from the popular account End Wokeness that the actress Naomi Watts has a daughter who is trans.

    “Funny how so many progressive actors have children who are transgender,” Gad Saad wrote.

    “Terrible,” Musk said.

    “‘A ‘trans’ child is the ultimate Hollywood virtue signal, meaning EXTRA approval. Two is even better. 3 is god mode,” said a finance influencer and self-described Tesla shareholder, a few hours later.

    “Yup,” said Musk.

    It is hard to overstate that this is just what one of the most powerful men in the world does all day. It is the media diet of one of those influencers who only eats organ meat. At least Howard Hughes kept out of sight. But even amidst this right-wing emoji-storm, there were still occasional glimpses of the Musk who, until fairly recently, enjoyed a less polarizing reputation as a billionaire who built cool stuff. He does talk a lot about SpaceX, although those interstellar ambitions take on a different light when you realize his quest is now part of a civilization struggle against pronouns. If you catch him at the right moment, you can still find Musk sharing math jokes, politely engaging with people with product complaints, and offering unsolicited medical advice. “If you’re experiencing severe neck/back pain, I recommend looking into a disc replacement,” he suggested. I don’t know if that’s good advice or not, but I do at least get where he’s coming from. 

    Once, in the course of 389 tweets, the father of 11 even talked about what it’s like to be a parent.

    “Whoa, I just realized that raising a kid is basically 18 years of prompt engineering 🤯,” he wrote.

    “Our first child will be born next month – what’s your biggest piece of advice?” a former Tesla employee asked in response.

    It was right there for him on a platter—a chance to be normal. What would it be: Treasure every moment? Stock up on wipes?

    “Be super careful about what schools teach your kids,” Musk replied.

    Never mind.

     

    What if you just never worried about what you were reading and watching from your Twitter feed or who wrote it and just took it at face value and ran as fast as you could for the culture war clout?

  2. 50 minutes ago, immamac said:

    you have just flooded the discussion which makes it counter-productive as these videos aren't exactly all that different from eachother. You could just put a video and say, there were 50 more like this in my feed that weren't from the same protest and achieve the same effect. 

    This is moreso the essence of my issue. There is original reporting for the incident(s) which I don't have a problem with, and then there is the breathless repetition of old shit that's already happened being presented as ongoing and escalating insanity. The fact that it's mainly right wing shitheads doing it is more a correlation with the depth and breadth of thread shitting than it is the cause of my consternation. 

    It's literally the exact same shitheads on Twitter amplifying the culture war framing in the 2020 police brutality protests, as are amplifying shit right now with the Palestinian campus protests. You poured gasoline on a dumpster fire when you said "if it's just videos of what's happening then it's honkey dorey" and gave him a pass to ramp up whatever the fuck elmo chooses to amplify on Twitter. 

     

    It's not good content to just mindlessly spam whatever your social media feed gives you without anything else. You've taken stances against that sort of thing with workswithseed in the past, why is this any different?

  3. 1 minute ago, immamac said:

    you need to take a step back man, I think you are real in your head about a lot of this stuff. The unfortunate reality is no one gives a shit, and you are giving way too much of a shit. I'm not telling you to become apathetic, because that's part of the problem, but you aren't going to fix it so care appropriately.

    If nobody gives a shit that they're reading propaganda as unvarnished fact, then we are all drinking poison. 

    Pass the fucking Kool-Aid! 

  4. 21 minutes ago, PRONG HORN said:

    good point on their not being any anti semitic stuff in those clips.  I didn’t hear anything specifically anti semitic but I also didn’t make that post.  I just posted the video of actual reality unfolding.  

    No, but your Twitter source claims it's antisemitism in action, so it's continuing to suck the oxygen from the discussion. Like for fucks sake you're literally doing trump's defense for violating his gag order: "I didn't post it, I just reposted it!!"

    You are creating an incredibly skewed and dishonest representation of what is happening. Yes, there are pro-palestinian protesters going WAY over the line. But just because it's happening in one place does not mean that it's characteristic of everyone everywhere. Your zeal to post and repost the sources you're including really make you look like an asshat.

    The majority of twitter profiles you're posting are reposting days old stuff that's been repackaged by tucker carlson's network or libzoftiktok - who have literally incited murderous violent action through their rhetoric - and does not add new information to what is supposed to be a news and current event thread. You're just shit posting your echo chamber and building one here on Surly.  

  5. ·

    Edited by Captainant

    2 hours ago, Pancho said:

     


    You’ve never cared about Blacks before but now all of a sudden you’re trying to use Blacks as political pawns. I wonder why?

    Because he had it pushed to his Twitter feed, and it's much easier to just listen to an apartheid heir for what is right and wrong. 

    Prong is just dancing to whatever tune his social media is playing, completely oblivious to what happened in 2016 and who was ultimately behind it. And since prong probably doesn't know, even the Senate republicans said russia was pulling the strings to get people riled up

  6. ·

    Edited by Captainant

    3 hours ago, PRONG HORN said:

    Video is one of the purest forms of news.  It doesn't lie. 

    Yikes, dude. You really need to learn some media literacy and understand that provacteur shitheads make a living off of people like you

    https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/01/31/project-veritas-pfizer-mutating-covid/

    https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/us/politics/project-veritas-ilhan-omar.html

     

    And do I really need to explain why a Kremlin affiliated tucker carlson network like daily caller or fox news may be looking to incite useful idiots into a rage right around election time?

    You really think that such illustrious Twitter follows as "END WOKENESS" and libzoftiktok are trustworthy sources looking to inform and not incite?

  7. 6 minutes ago, Anastasis said:

    The first wave exposure data is an absolute mess. 

    It's almost like there was a concerted effort during the first wave to act like there was nothing wrong at all, or something. 

  8. 1 hour ago, Frank Drebin said:

     

    7 minutes ago, Helobious said:

    Apparently the two actually went outside and the altercation turned physical, then the agitator went to his car and got a gun. In Texas it does not matter how or who starts a fight, if you feel threatened you can respond with force if it’s reasonable. A fight with a stranger could constitute fear for life, will be interesting to see how it plays out. 

    From the article, it sounds like it was a shit show from top to bottom:

    Quote

    Utilizing cuss words and other profanities, Jeff stepped in to try and deescalate the situation try and calm him down. 

    ...

    Investigators say the angry McDonald's customer grabbed a gun from his car and opened fire on 46-year-old Jeffrey Limmer, killing him. 

     

  9. 3 minutes ago, BeardIP said:

    https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/16/covid-vaccine-side-effects-compensation-lawsuit.html

    You can’t sue Pfizer or Moderna if you have severe Covid vaccine side effects.

    • Under the PREP Act, companies like Pfizer and Moderna have total immunity from liability if something unintentionally goes wrong with their vaccines.
    • A little-known government program provides benefits to people who can prove they suffered serious injury from a vaccine.
    • That program rarely pays, covering just 29 claims over the last decade.

    We can't sue Armalite or Bushmaster if one of their products has severe side effects either, why should the companies that developed the vaccine be liable?

  10. ·

    Edited by Captainant

    32 minutes ago, Parliament said:

    Ohio Revised Code 3761.12 makes it a felony to commit a crime with two or more people while wearing white caps, masks or other disguise

    Oooooh man that's some good turning a shield into a sword and finding an old law meant to target klansmen and now using it to shut down peaceful assembly. To use that law in that way is an implicit equivocation of what these university protesters are doing to what the KKK was doing.

    It's diluting what the KKK was and did and STILL FUCKING IS to threaten and target college students with this law

  11. 12 minutes ago, BeardIP said:

    Then why make it to where there is legal immunity and the people being compelled to take the vaccinations have no legal remedy, as they usually would? That strikes me as an implicit acknowledgement.

    Wtf are you even talking about Chrispy? Links? Or is this just what many people are saying

  12. ·

    Edited by Captainant

    9 minutes ago, BeardIP said:

    Processess that exist sequentially to optimize stafety standards were run in parallel to streamline and expedite production. Again, I get why they did it and support the wartime-esque effort behind it, but I think it's unethical to do that with legal immunity and unreasonably "mandate" the vaccination. 

     

    Why do you think these for profit companies do ANYTHING for safety if they aren't legally required to? My guy, they normally do these things one step at a time because of how immensely expensive it is to get a drug or therapy through approvals. Running every option in parallel is how you make massive progress extremely quickly, but you also are going to burn a SHITTON of cash doing so. 

    The Manhattan Project followed the same ethos; they didn't know what was going to work and what wasn't, so they did everything in parallel at once.

    The COVID caccine project/effort was a medical Manhattan Project. It broke new ground into a field of science that had not really been successfully wielded and designed by man yet. mRNA vaccines had been in development since the first SARS outbreak, but it was too risky to pursue because of the potential for failure. The COVID vaccines made it through all the same trials as any other vaccine would - it just didn't do things one step at a time for fear of a failure or setback causing wasted money (and thinner profit margins), because they had a blank check to make it happen. 

     

    I just completely disagree with your uncritical and unsupported opinion of it being inherently more dangerous, despite clearing the exact same regulatory and safety bar as every other vaccine and drug.

  13. ·

    Edited by Captainant

    On 4/20/2024 at 11:24 PM, Michael Knight said:
      Hide contents

    The gist of the story is that while some of the vaults were actual shelters designed to repopulate the earth at some point the story writers went off the deep end with the dystopian future where vault tec were just crazy bastards who made most of the vaults into social experiments, I blame fallout 3 writers who made almost all the vaults into joke encounters. The original story in fallout 1 was your vaults water chip broke and you had to do out and find a replacement which then got retconned into your water chip being designed to break. And Vaults being populated with 1 man and 99 women and vice versa. Vault 31-33 was another social experiment with connected but separate communities. And 2 of them having designed flaws

     

    Spoiler

    The idea of vaults being used as experiments on the inhabitants is from the original fallout games

    https://old.reddit.com/r/Fallout/comments/ej66ru/a_list_of_all_the_vaults_and_their_designated/

    And the "Fallout Bible" published by the game's writers in the early 2000's had some pretty nutty ones too

    https://fallout.fandom.com/wiki/List_of_known_Vaults#Vaults_in_supplementary_materials

     

    And by the way, did any of yall spot the extra "episode zero" content that Amazon made? It's a bunch of Vault-Tec training videos for early sales associates up to senior junior executives! It's under the "extras" tab for the show

    image.thumb.png.cb8cfc0828c10cc8f304ad0fb639e65f.png

    They definitely are making some statements with the show's writing, I'm excited to see where they take it - and glad that Todd Howard is working to build a unified story across the games and show

  14. 12 minutes ago, bolverk said:

    The other was just a cavalier asshole about it, who a mutual friend of ours later showed me one of his last FB messages to him that read, and I quote, "I ain't skeered." He caught it about a week later and was dead within the month.

    That's some real Herman Cain award shit

  15. hah the newly announced Lego Star Wars special looks fun and silly, lots of nods to fantheories and the old EU books - everything from Darth Jar Jar to an Ewok bounty hunter that says "Yub yub" just like in the X-wing books gag

     

  16. ·

    Edited by Captainant

    3 hours ago, BeardIP said:

    I think the issue is that this vaccination was fast-tracked and a lot of the life cycle and governance for bringing a vaccination to market was streamlined and/or parsed down

    Care to cite your source on this? The vaccine was fast tracked but didn't skip any approval steps. It was more a matter of moving them to the front of the line for every review process and trial opportunity rather than some shadowy cabal jumping on the opportunity to inject 5G into your kids

  17. ·

    Edited by Captainant

    4 minutes ago, We’reTexas said:

     

    Also, just a point of order, "national socialist" was an intentional misnomer to troll the socialists and engender working class support. Nazis and authoritarians are intellectually dishonest fucks, whodathunkit

    https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/09/05/were-nazis-socialists/

     

    Edit: lulz that an anti-vaxxer is the person making that mistake (judging from clicking on his profile and reading 3 tweets down)

  18. 4 minutes ago, TKthunder2 said:

    Keeping the status quo would be the middle. Increasing shipments of weapons would lean too far right, restricting shipments leans too far left and thus they are handing “red meat” to the opposition who will use it like a cudgel during this election cycle to sway those in the middle.

    It’s highly likely that anyone supporting Palestine is already in your camp. So while you can celebrate this as a short term win for that cause, this may be one of the things that could hand the election of your the opposition. And if they win, what do you think the ramifications will be to the Palestinian cause? Win the battle but lose the war.

    Historically speaking, shutting up and sitting on your hands and hoping that the authoritarians will stop and go away is not very successful. Analyzing every action taken and worrying about "handing red meat" is a red herring.

    They'll always find something to demonize and convert into red meat for the base. So just do what you were gonna do already because they already were going to grab whatever they could find and swing it like a cudgel. 

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