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Comment by Tehchops | Hacker News Reader

Despite the zealous beliefs of the visionary, thought-leader techbro space that Musk's every move was to drive civilization forward in some kind of libertarian, technocrat utopia, it seems very clear at this point every one of these moves was absolutely a self-serving narrative shield around incredibly typical corporate/rich-person bad behavior.

Oh but who could have seen this coming except oh wait everyone.

The schadenfreude has been hilarious. Twitter has been blessedly devoid of the kind of chest-thumping he typically elicits and it has been glorious.

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The divide here about Elon is much deeper than I anticipated.

It’s crazy how one sided HN is. Seems entirely subjective and political. If one were to read the comments here, the only conclusion would be that Elon is the force of evil and a reincarnation of satan.

Is there a grand conspiracy plotting against him to discredit him? Or are his own actions doing the damage?

To me it seems like there are 3 things at play.

1) Political incongruency.

2) Character flaws.

3) Actions and actual impact.

These 3 things mix together in a toxic cocktail of hate (or love) depending on which side of the table you’re on. The sides of the table are primarily determined by 1) and the 2) and 3) are glued together to fit the narrative.

I am expecting more from HN tbh.

> I am expecting more from HN tbh.

In a previous comment you(an HN user!) framed all comments or discussion that might portray EM in a negative light as painting him as:

> "...the force of evil and a reincarnation of satan."

A pitch-perfect example of a straw-man argument, and now you're claiming the level of discourse is not up to your standards?

It was an intentional hyperbole to thrust a point across if you didn’t read between the lines. I thought it was obvious. I could improve in my message though.

I do expect more from HN than vitriol of this sorts.

It is strange to use charged words such as "crazy", "evil" and "satan" in a comment and then complain of vitriol on the forum.

I've been around here long enough to realize that when discussions are leaning one way, I become extremely skeptical of the situation. Not going to address your ad-hominem slant, but I hope you can empathize with where my skepticism comes from. This forum tends to usually have a great discussion between opposing viewpoints, except here.

Where was the ad-hominem slant? More straw-men and an appeal to authority! I'm convinced you're playing logical fallacy bingo at this point.

> the only conclusion would be that Elon is the force of evil and a reincarnation of satan.

Speaking of one sided... I'd argue there are many more nuanced conclusions you could derive.

I'm sure there have been comments towards him that are ad-hominem accusations of "evil", but in general and this thread specifically I think it's his virtue signaling around "free-speech" and "innovation" rightfully being called out for what they are; self-serving and quite vanilla capitalist maneuvering.

Setting up straw-man arguments like you've done is the same kind of defensive, fallacious reasoning his aforementioned zealous followers engage in.

Like Rick & Morty and Jesus, the worst thing about Elon tends to be his fans.

This is of course, correct, but it is something not exclusive to Elon Musk, you just have to read the stream of accolades some of the darlings of this site receive here when they are just your run of the mill capitalists with all the usual interests and biases.

Yep. You’d think Patrick Collison of Stripe invented the internet based on the praise he receives here rather than the reality that he made a PayPal clone with some custom branding options.

Brian Chesky directly ripped off a popular free product called CouchSurfing then said “ok same thing but I get to be a billionaire, local housing markets lose long term rentals in exchange for teenage keg parties, and I get to buy virtue signaling billboards all over SF cause I get to be rich AND morally superior.”

Then after we lionize those guys we can make fun of the Musk fan club.

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