I'm not sure how well that's going to work when the boss of X is doing gestures that are illegal in Germany.
I personally find that they don't add much value to discussion. Perhaps it's a sign of the community growing with outsiders not being familiar with HN guidelines [0], or that Dang is stretched too thin to constantly moderate everything.
Do I think it's worth talking about in this context? I honestly don't know. I get your point. I also understand that it was the type of "Lol, nothing matters" flamebait, meant to ruffle feathers intentionally, but it's relevant that this is exactly that ethos pointed to in Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew about the actual brownshirts and blackshirts this salute is meant to directly reference:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Semite_and_Jew
No, I would agree with you that the salute isn't directly relevant to the pledge in the article, but it's certainly directly relevant to whether or not the pledge is being made in good-faith. This is why I think it's relevant, even if it's exhausting. We just live in exhausting times.
It's pretty obviously a PR stunt done in bad faith to delay actual legal consequences. I don't understand why this kind of "legal" construct even exists tbh.
Another example is how the EU asked the phone manufacturers to agree on a common charger for years on a good will basis, and only had to regulate when samsung said they were going to back out if no regulation was made because apple was not playing ball.
So the idea here is "guys, we really don't want to come here and make a law about what is or isn't allowed to be said or what has to be fact checked and everything, we want you to behave like adults and agree together about said rules".
I believe in this case, the fact that every company is part of the same country and same bunch of absurdly rich tech companies means it's never going to work at all.
This is precisely the censorship policy of the PRC. It ensures that nobody ever knows for sure what speech is permitted, so no speech is completely safe. Platforms compete for users by permitting marginally legal speech and compete for the favor of regulators by censoring it. This system is much more effective at suppressing political dissent than the US system, in which censorship decisions can be challenged in open court.
The hardware and software industry has about a million standards that were collectively designed and adopted by the industry. Every single IETF RFC governing the internet and W3C RFCs governing browser standards for starters - we wouldn't be on this website having this conversation without those.
It's completely reasonable to say "multiple competing standards harms consumers with no benefit, come up with a common standard". This is what governments are supposed to do! If there is a single manufacturer not adhering to the standard it is reasonable to tell that manufacturer to comply. Is any reasonable person unhappy that we're all using common chargers for phones now?
Nor did this charger regulation seem to have negative consequences. Apple proactively licensed their wireless charging standard tech to the whole industry to get ahead of any legislation. Might not be great for Apple's profits, but I prefer that as a consumer.
In particular, right now, there are numerous credible claims of human rights violations by Israeli troops in Gaza, and widespread criticism of those violations is being labeled as anti-Semitic hate speech, correctly in some cases, while defenses of the same violations are being labeled as Islamophobic hate speech, also correctly in some cases.
These are among the reasons that hate speech is uncontroversially legal in the US.
What I am saying is that it doesn't matter weather people label others as hat speech or not because EU countries don't work by a curt of public opinion and convictions aren't based on this.
The regulations are about removing clear cases of hate speech, not about policing gray areas.
Like there is absolutely no reason to give someone who says all Jews of Muslims should be killed a platform. Or someone who main talking point is that Hitler didn't succeed in killing all, or people which systematically harass other people.
And more or less all of the things social platforms have to police are things _which anyway are already illegal_. It's just that due to the pseudo anonymity of the internet, internationalization, bots, sock puppet accounts and social platform having little reason to cooperate with the police persecuting such things in the traditional way isn't viable.
Sure making it viable would be nice, but I have to yet find a practical way which wouldn't be a form of mass surveillance much worse then such regulations.
Also both in past and presence there have been more then just a few examples about how not hindering hat speech will reliable kill innocents. There are larger examples like the genocide in Myanmar Facebook contributed to. Or smaller examples like recently a innocent teen being murdered by a mob because of people having been radicalized/riled up by hate speech on social media. Or if you want to go back to the 30th a huge part of why the Nazis gained power was that they could effectively spread hat speech and misinformation about how the Jews where at fault for everything bad (WW1, the depression in the 20th, the terms Germany had to accept at the end of WW1 etc.), or about the so called Stab-in-the-back myth, or about pseud science about how the "grate arian race" gets replaced and all mixed up etc.. The relevant part here is how effective they where able to spread this and make part of the population accept it, not whether they came up with it. (Other huge parts where that politics was too polarized to continue working and the previous conservatives helped him as an external person into power as they hoped to fix their issue of losing ground and unify Germany, in a very twisted way they did succeed, at cost of their own existence).
Then, if they're sensible, the industry creates a code of conduct that addresses the problems that drew the attention of legislators, without being too onerous; all the main players in the industry sign up and follow it; and the government doesn't have to pass legislation.
Politicians are happy because the problem goes away, and regulatory burdens on industry don't increase. Industry is happy because they get soft-touch regulation that's under their control.
It doesn't always work, of course.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Semite_and_Jew
It isn't that this type of behavior is designed to get something, it's that the type of mindset, one that has decided not to care anymore, to reject nuance and embrace a kind of good-guy/bad-guy explanation of complex problem in the world, ultimately leading to bad faith engagement... well all that leads to this type of behavior.
The idea is that this type of action isn't trying to achieve anything, it's the result of a worldview.
It's shameful and at no point does any word play and excuse making around it make it ok. This needs to stop now. Right now.
Add to that the literal support for the far right parties definitely and conclusively aligned with nazi ideology, such as the AfD, it's terrible for everyone.
The ADL last called out Musk for reinstating and awarding a tick to Kanye West after West made anti-semitic remarks which got him banned from Twitter. However, that's not as important to them as maintaining the war in Gaza.
no and they never have been, outside of the US and US contextualized business not many even know what it even is
through it is maybe the worlds foremost anti-antisemitism organization
But in case you might have missed it some neo Nazis and many more non-nazi fascists have dropped their antisemitism from a core point to a not much talked about side point, blaming everything on jews is just currently not very effective. You also might have missed that Israels government hasn't been exactly anti-fascist in recent times. Giving their far right, fear driving, not so open for opposition government which is fine with committing war crimes they themself aren't that far away from fascism.
Fascism doesn't need antisemitism, it just happens to most times come with it.
Even this is underselling his actions. He's retweeted accounts of people who are openly neo-nazis, unbanned neo-nazis, tweeted many known nazi dogwhistles himself, and recently visited the German as-close-to-openly-neonazi-as-you-can-legally-be-in-Germany party.
(1) through I would say it's interpreted as Nazi idolizing fascists in many situations which isn't quite exactly the same as Nazi but not necessary any better either
Not to mention that your average dabbing looks like a seig heil while snizzing.
That's kind of the "will twist themselves to deny what is fairly evident in plain sight" OP is talking about.
"The Roman salute, also known as the Fascist salute,"
Also from the link:
"However, no Roman text describes such a gesture, and the Roman works of art that display salutational gestures bear little resemblance to the modern so-called "Roman" salute."
But relevant questions are: Is that salute normalized now? Is the era between WW2 and present going to end?
Yes, post-WWII "thanks" to fascists.
As I've said in a different comment: I'm not saying this is somehow "ok" now or that Musk didn't do what he did. My point is that people see one's stupidity and immaturity as something bigger than it actually is.
As a symbol of fascism.
> average dabbing looks like a seig heil while snizzing
No one being serious would ever confuse the two.
Post WWII? Sure. Pre-WWII? No.
hand placement is that of the Hitler salute
arm placement is that of the Hitler salute
high of the hand is that of the Hitler salute
placement of hand before doing the salute is that of the Hitler salute
even his speech before indicates it's a Hitler salute:
"This is a new beginning. Let’s hope for healing and work toward unity in the months and years ahead"
Now this part needs a bit more explanation: The Hitler salute proper name is "Sieg Heil" which yes meas to "Hail!" someone. But it also literally translated means "victory heal".
The meaning here was to "heal" Germany (which include taking over territories in the twisted interpretation of Nazis) but also to "heal" Germany (from Jews, queer people, disabled people etc. by killing them. It also was all about creating a unified fascist Germany under Hitler. It was also about projecting power and that it's a new Germany.
I.e. "new beginning/new Germany", "heal", "unify", "let's make it grate again" (to use modern lingo) where the core aspects of "Sieg Heil" just with very perfidy interpretations of heal and unify. But then taking otherwise well meaning symbolism (e.g. the swastika) and then appropriating it and turning it into something evil was the standard mode of operation of Nazis.
So he makes a Hitler salute after saying things which Hitler (in slightly different words due to language changing over time) would have said (before going full maks off let's kill all yews).
I rally don't know how anyone could interpret it as not being a nazi salute, that would be supper naive/self blinding/foolish.
Now the more interesting interpretation is does it mean he is a Nazi?
Well probably no.
Nazi is a very specific term, and there are many other kinds of fascism which aren't Nazis (which to be clear "different" doesn't contain a judgement. It neither implies "better" nor "worse").
Through what it is is a very clear statement of "I'm a fascist" and/or "I idolizes at least some aspects of Nazi Germany".
Which, let's be honest, shouldn't surprise anyone who followed what he was doing in roughly the last year.
Among the first acts on his first day as president he shuts down an app that helped people immigrate legally.
The first swath of Biden era executive orders rescinded[1] includes migration related ones to now loosen and reduce oversight and enable more heavy handed treatment of the matter, creating the foundation to conduct the type of raids that started happening the second he was certified[2].
Then at his inauguration this unfortunate little mishap occurs. Twice, mind you. By a man who continually promotes and enables alt-right ideology.
If you squint really, really hard, it's a dog whistle. That's the best case scenario. For everyone else, Elon Musk unambiguously performed a Nazi salute.
The absence of this moment from alt-right safe spaces like r/conservative and the X/Twitter feeds of prominent influencers despite the fact that their user base seems to have loved it is, in itself, a story worth telling.
[1] https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/01/init...
[2] https://calmatters.org/economy/2025/01/kern-county-immigrati...
> deportation of illegal immigrants
Initially Hitler Germany also, at least to the outside, pushed a position of them just wanting to "deport" Jews outside of Germany. They then decided to instead place them into forced labor camps to extract value out of them while slowly working them to death and later (but not much later) they also started with the industrialized mass killing in death camps.
Similar before murdering Jews they started with going after disabled people and then queer people as this was part of their idea of healing (i.e purging) Germany.
Not saying the US will treat immigrants like Nazi Germany did treat Jews, that would be dump.
But given how they have a profit orientated prison system which more or less forced people to extremely underplayed work and how being an illegal immigrant is a crime and given how some US companies are looking for replacing "cheap labor" from China with something else more under their control I would still be worried.
Sweden for example asked germany to provide jews with a jewish-non-german passport so that they could be identified as jews and denied entry.
_which is something EVERYONE involved knew before Nazi Germany "tried" to deport them_
but do you really think things will be much different just because the "large blob of not-wealthy people" are not Jews?
I mean sure it will be a bit different, like there likely will be less systematic disowning of wealth (but then it's hard to imagine Trump not trying to fine and deport them and US police not confiscating money they have (like abuse of civil seizure is AFIK a huge problem in some US states). And for those who have a Mexican passport or similar Trump might be able to force Mexico to take them back.
But we are speaking about so many people that there will be thousands or more likely tens of thousand where you can't just place them back where they came from, weather it's because you don't know where they came from or that place simply not taking them back as long as you can't proof they are from there which you often can't.
Then what you do with them? You already arrested them, treated them as pretty bad criminals, right? So you place them in prison. Except prisons are full, so you create new camps, eh prisons, for them and then for money saving you make just a few of them where you concentrate all the refuges in... congratulation you just reinvented the core concept of concentration camps. Now here is a thing, the use has a problem with forced labor and all this people need to be feed and they can't work freely, so what do you do, you force them to work to reduce the cost of such camps. Now we are at the early state of Nazi Concentration camps (not to be confused with Nazi death camps).
But you still have the problem of a huge blob of people you can't let go or bring anywhere and pretending it's "just" forced prison labor will only work for so long. A nasty problem to solve where most solutions are either expensive or evil and inhuman (even more so then what I described before). Or in other (Nazi) terms you need a final solution.
Anyway my point isn't that Trump will build death camps, even if we do for a moment assume he is evil enough to do so he has no reason to do so. And Nazi Germany didn't create industrialized death camps because they wanted to do the most evil shit they can imagine, but because that seems for them the most practical way to get ride of all Jews. Same for the non-death camp concentration camps, they where created for practical reason, too. (Which doesn't make it less evil.)
So the point here are two:
- the "only deport them" thing of Nazis was all just make pretend, excuses for the public allowing Nazis to then do much worse things "because there is no other choice". Other countries not wanting to take them was well known beforehand and part of the plan.
- doing huge mass deportations in any even just somewhat human way is basically never practically possible, and it's a steep slippery slop where you easily can end up with concentration camps, even if such camps aren't created with the intend of genocide they are still a huge issue
Now the lucky part is: Trump probably can somewhat reach his goals with just deporting a small fraction of the people he claims he will deport. And doing so would be much cheaper for the US. The unlucky part is "immigrant prison camps with forced labor" is more profitable for a few people running this "prisons" and Trump seem to not care about the health of the US as a whole (at lest there is no other way I can interpret him nuking the bipartisan passed bill to at lest slightly fix US infrastructure and drink water quality issues, well except if you nuke it because you expect to have thousands of cheap forced labor soon...).
In conspiracy and qanon circles leaders of the left and basically anyone voicing dissenting views have been labelled as pedophiles for years (while Trump's presence on Epstein's flight logs, pictures of Trump/Musk with Epstein and Maxwell continue to be ignored and explained away) and this I fear creates enough ambiguity to not only cause a lot of harm to those affected, but to abuse these policies and go after political enemies for supporting/enabling these now outlawed things.
As someone from Germany, the whole Project 2025 document reads like a nightmare come true again, but this bit in particular mirrors the past in the most dreadful ways.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/29/us/politics/trump-project...
[2] https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-executive-orders-list-...
[1] https://jacobin.com/2025/01/trump-executive-orders-project-2...