>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.
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?