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Comment by gambiting | Hacker News Reader

Musk has fallen off the rails completely in recent years. I guess being constantly told that you are the smartest man alive over and over does that to a man. He is genuienly embracing some fascist ideas lately though, and that's worrying because he is a global celebrity with a huge following, not some drunkard in a pub that no one listens to.

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Recent years? He hasn't changed, just the general public perception of him has.

My impression is that he is certainly holding back less.

He is certainly less cancellable than ever, owning Twitter and ingrained with the US government via SpaceX, so I suppose perhaps he feels he can now afford to be bold.

Indeed, watching Hacker News go from a nearly unanimous Musk Cheerleading Squad to the precise diametric opposite of that -- literally in the course of one month -- because he didn't echo CIA talking points about Ukraine was hilarious to watch.

It's not his position on Ukraine/Russia that's worrying. It's his retweeting of known white-nationalist content pretending it's not. It's his complete faceplant of "free speech maximalism" and numerous public moves that prove he's the exact opposite (latest being his currying favor with Erdogan by hiding his opponents tweets during voting hours).

In short, it's him shredding his image and principles (even if that was a cover) that gave him any legitimacy in public discourse.

I have to admit, I used to stan.

It's been way longer than a month, I stopped respecting him around the time when he kept pushing the idiotic self driving system in Teslas when it was already obvious that it's nothing more than a scam designed to extract your money. It was only downhill from there.

Sure. There were a few people, perhaps you, who tried pointing out how he was a charlatan, how Tesla's profits were wholly due to carbon credit sales and the core business was a disaster, how he rarely delivered on his insane promises, how the new Roadster, the Cybertruck, and the Semi were vaporware, how there was nothing revolutionary about SpaceX reusable boosters etc, who were roundly and consistently downvoted because the HN zeitgeist was to huff Elon's farts.

Literally one month after his infamous Ukraine tweet, it was completely reversed.

My comment really isn't even about Musk, it's about HN. HN doesn't care about facts or rational arguments, despite the relatively high IQ here. It's politics, and always has been. And this abrupt change demonstrated that quite well.

There's already been plenty of detractors, especially around the "full self driving" system.

The big shift seems to have come more from when he made a very public ass of himself with the Twitter acquisition and subsequent clear hypocrisy on free speech issues.

I used to be an admirer if not exactly a stan. I was an optimist that pushing FSD would result in safer roads. I liked the cheeky touches like a virtual whoopie cushion. Many tech bros are small-l libertarian without being asses about it. Who doesn't want regulation to be simple and government to be non-interventionist where there is no benefit?

Russia started a land war in Europe and Elon is an appeaser from the start. Not cool. The magnitude of Russia's aggression, and the extent to which it would have grown if appeased threatened to create a global conflict.

From there, Elon went on a weird red pill journey, boosting racists and outright Nazis with replies on Twitter that made him impossible to excuse.

The CIA is not the source of Elon's problems. He's got a screw loose.

He’s living proof no one is safe from being pulled into social media’s black hole of idiocy.

He has started embracing white supremacists, far right politicians and even qanon conspiracy theories. it's a terrifying and dangerous situation for something as influential as social media (as if it wasn't bad enough)

Can you provide any sources? Or is this just an emotion driven as hominem attack on him?

.....literally the very article we're commenting on? Or you can go to his twitter account, no need for reading opinion peaces, just read what the man says.

yes but the article is terrible nonsense. Musk also allowed far left wing people back on. Secondly not risking being booted out of an entire country is kind of the default business decision, you are asking of him things that practically no company on the planet will do. You don't see Apple leaving China or Blizzard leaving China over chinese repressions. But because Elon Musk dared to go against traditional leftwing mass media, now we have to deal with these attack articles and its followers who get captured by their content.

...I feel like you read maybe the first two paragraphs of the article? There's a lot more to it than just his stance on Turkey.

>> But because Elon Musk dared to go against traditional leftwing mass media

The what now? I'm not american so I literally have no idea what that means, and I find the way americans use left/right to be confusing and not how the rest of the world uses it. Please explain.

Can you read the article?

Have you wondered maybe the whole world is where it was and you’re veering off into an area of belief system that makes you think everyone else is Fascist?

I have. I don't think that's what it is - if you have a guy commiting mass shooting while literally covered in swastikas, and Musk says the whole thing is a "psyop", I really don't think it's me who is getting the situation wrong.

> and you’re veering off into an area of belief system that makes you think everyone else is Fascist

You mean like Vint Cerf? That he also thinks that Vint Cerf has become a fascist?

I mean, that is the conclusion of your theory.

Not really. The article documents his recent activity on twitter where he’s been promoting far right conspiracy theories.

Remember when Covid lab theory was a “far right conspiracy”? Most of the conspiracies have just been a difference of opinion. And then they’re labeled in a gas lighting contest of political cultural war.

HN was so hung up on Science(tm), that everyone was flagged suggesting even a hint of it in 2020. Then the entire thing mob made a U turn in 2021.

Hell, I remember my comments were flagged for a mere suggestion of inflation when the dominant narrative was “transitory”.

What an epic failure of a forum that’s suppose to espouse and foster difference of opinion.

To be fair, it's because of the HN front page that I have read about the possibility and credibility of a lab leak. A very well argued science based article with a reasonable timeline and explanation that allowed to me to know about a position made unhearable elsewhere.

Broad statements on the "HN crowd" don't make much sense to me. It's the internet and there's much more diversity than most other subgroups, get used to it.

That’s not my recollection. Back in 2020, there were many intelligent and measured discussions about the lab-leak theory on Hacker News. I came away with the conclusion that a lab leak was certainly possible – but that there just wasn’t any strong evidence to indicate that it was a more likely source of SARS‑CoV‑2 than naturally-occurring zoonosis.

Discussions on Hacker News also convinced me to start wearing a face covering in late March 2020 – even though the mainstream orthodoxy was focussed solely on hand-washing and surface transmission. At the time,health officials and other public figures were advising that wearing a face-mask at best provided no benefit and at worse increased the chance of infection (by touching one’s face while donning or adjusting the mask).

Disclaimer: I don’t live in America or read anything on “social media” (other than the odd niche old-school forum).

You're both right. There were some discussions that got through, but also a lot of suppression, e.g.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23660413

in which the top comment is asking why the story is flagged/dead. Also if we search during the first four months of 2020 for comments mentioning "Wuhan lab" the first comment literally says:

> I'm actually going to flag this, since basically it seems to be working quite hard to pretend that the US was funding Gain of Function research in Wuhan, when that doesn't seem to actually be the case.

and sure enough the story is flagged:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22943411

Fail! We now know that the US was indeed funding GoF research in Wuhan. We can even read the grant proposals for the work.

Thanks for providing those links. It’s interesting to back in time to previous discussions (three years already seems like a life-time ago).

I guess it’s a form of selection bias: I don’t recall the flagging of those articles/discussions because I never read them in the first place. I usually check https://hckrnews.com/ once a day or so (depending on available time) and scan the “top 50%” for topics that might interest me – or have a lot of upvotes and/or comments.

That's exactly why people flag such stories, to prevent you learning things that might make you doubt the greatness of the prevailing ideology.

Now, the really important thing to ponder is: what's currently being flagged to ensure I don't see it?

> what's currently being flagged to ensure I don't see it?

For one, this article making the case that Elon Musk is a proto-fascist has been flagged while the other submissions from the same substack are now “dead”: https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=nickcohen.substack.co... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

(I enabled “show dead” a while ago just to see what I might be missing).

Do you think the Texas shooting was a psyop? Or do you think that’s a nutty conspiracy theory?

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