Did Elon Musk Appear to Sieg Heil at Trump Inauguration?

The alternative interpretation of the gesture that Musk did is however written on the Wikipedia article on the Nazi Salute, and on the article on Musk himself. It says: "it could indicate a sort of gesture of thanks to the crowd".

People see what they want to see. Having said that (and looking at the snarky "ad-hoc to rationalize inaction" comment), does it help producing a discussions on ethics and symbolism that produce intellectual curiosity? A more neutral way to describe it is likely to quote Wikipedia that quoted multiple other sources: "regardless of what Musk meant, his salute was widely embraced by right-wing extremists". As such, while different people will interpret the gesture differently, what matter is the outcome. That would be the ethical discussion we are not talking about but that I have now written twice about. What is the effect of the gesture and what was the goal.

> And I don't know about the people who were present in that rally, but Andrew Tate for example loves it: https://bsky.app/profile/junlper.beer/post/3lgemglpkws2s

That is a association fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_fallacy). A speech during a rally is no the same as a short clip. If we are asking why people present during the rally did not react to the gesture, we need to ask what those people saw in the context of being at that rally and the speech up to that point. A good thing to have in the intellectual tool belt is the Invisible Gorilla, in that people don't always see what other see if you change the context. My personal guess is that taken out of context, if we gave the gesture blindly to people and especially without the "my heart goes out to you", most people would label it as a salute, and a subset would label it as a Nazi Salute. Give the pretext and the post-comment, an other subset would see it as a gesture of thanks. Give a context of a Nazi rally and close to 100% would see it as a Nazi Salute. Give the context of a funeral, and close to 0% would see it as a Nazi Salute. Context matters in interpreting the meaning of a gesture.

As I said above, part of the draw of this website is having a chance to see the comments from people who may or may not have the experience that they claim to have and to decide yourself if what they're saying has merit. A big difference between this site and Reddit is that people often use their real names and they'll even sometimes link to their github pages or resumes. Even if they're using pseudonyms they'll have extensive comment histories that span years of thoroughly written comments. All of this is stuff that can allow the reader to better judge the veracity of claims made. Regardless of the difficulty in verifying people's claims it's really hard to find another website that such a great concentration of people in these kinds of fields.

And there is an intellectual curiosity to this subject, but it isn't the kind that can be encapsulated in a single discussion. The value in something like this comes over time as a chain of discussions are posted on a site like HN. This allows us to observe and understand how people's opinions on this controversial figure evolve over time.

Imagine if HN existed during the time when Von Braun became instrumental in the American space program. Being able to go back and read comments on that critical and fascinating slice of American history and geopolitics would be fascinating even if it's the mundane knee-jerk crap that people post on forums immediately after events like these. Historians would certainly find it absolutely intellectually interesting. It's the kind of content that would even shape contemporary conversations about this current event.

I understand that there are extreme difficulties in moderating these kinds of discussions but there is absolutely merit in these kinds of discussions happening on a site like HN.