I think that in general it's going to be hard to square the liberal bedrock ideal of government accountability with networked mob violence, individual superempowerment, the rise of surveillance capitalism and the surveillance state, and autonomous swarming weaponry. When the people winning every armed conflict are those who can protect their anonymity while penetrating the anonymity of their opponents, republicanism itself seems like it has to be politically unstable, much less the consent of the governed.

Briefly, in the firearm age, respecting the popular vote was a Nash equilibrium, because if you lost the vote, you probably wouldn't be able to field enough riflemen to win on the battlefield either, so your best option was to lick your wounds and make do under the opposition party until the next election. Despite the resounding defeats of the US by masses of riflemen in Vietnam and Afghanistan, and of the USSR in Afghanistan in between, that equilibrium seems increasingly unstable in the drone age. The first warning signs of this were the staggeringly unequal death tolls in the US's first Iraq invasion, reminiscent of the Scramble for Africa. Recent examples of this instability might include the US's successful initial invasion of Afghanistan, the US's successful eventual defeat of Daesh in western Iraq (despite the relative hostility of current Iraqi leadership to the US, which counts as a sort of defeat), Israel's utter dismemberment of Hizbullah, Israel successfully stymieing Iran's nuclear weapons program, and Ukraine's surprisingly successful resistance to the invasion by Russia's much larger army. Also Hamas doesn't seem to be doing very well at defending Gaza.

Unfortunately the literature I could recommend to you on this topic has mostly been flagged as wrongthink, so I won't recommend that, but Slaughterbots is probably still safe to watch. It contains the memorable line "nuclear is obsolete", a riff on Putin's remarks at Valdai in Sochi 11 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA

It's fiction, of course, but thought-provoking fiction, scripted by leading AI researchers to be as realistic as possible, and it may have more truth in it than we would like.

> Somehow, there is no such thing as left wing edge lord.

I mean, I'm a pretty staunch socialist/commie and there are plenty of hard-left edgelords out there "joking" about gulags and executing academics and so on.

> Somehow, there is no such thing as left wing edge lord.

Your comment is absolutely correct; Musk and his ilk are just people who "joked around" on 4chan and essentially radicalised themselves doing it.

HOWEVER left wing edgelords absolutely exist. Look up (at your peril) the phenomenon of "tankies". They're not your average communist, but rather apologists for Stalin's genocides.

Maybe your comment is more about the terminology at play, but it's interesting to see that the left wing mirror image of the average 4chan poster absolutely exists.

Have you considered that doing a nazi salute, whether earnest or ironically earnest, is just not okay?

It strikes me there's no particular reason a modern Nazi should hate Jews when there are plenty of other groups to be scapegoated, like immigrants or liberals. There was historical prejudice against Jews then, there is against others now. I can well see Musk loving the trappings of fascism, the hilarious fun of trolling as a Nazi, and having people pay attention to him, while not being directly antisemitic.

You have to remember that fascism's application of othering is not logical, it's just a convenient method of gaining leverage. The Nazis targeted Jews because it was easy to weave a narrative about them, and because their population within Germany itself was so small that it was electorally inconsequential to victimise them. You see this with the Musk-Trump regime's position on trans people; trans people are not a threat to anyone, and are so few in number that you can easily weave a narrative about them and use it to push a more extreme agenda.

You are absolutely correct that modern Nazis are not really bothered by the Jews, but you have to remember that fascists just look for easy targets to hate.

Essentially, yeah, fine, he's not a card carrying member of the NSDAP. But he's a hateful individual pursuing a hateful agenda all the same, and he did the salute to signal to edgelords that he sees them.

Probably some of the Nazi leaders may have been opportunists to varying degrees, but to say that most of the leaders were not hardcore Nazis is not accurate. Out of the various biographies and books I've read, they're were all aligned about racial supremacy, antisemitism, and German expansionism, this is 100% crystal clear. Even private diaries from people like Goebbels that are now public, makes their commitment abundantly clear.

Another example is Albert Speer (whose biography I've also read), where he initially was an opportunists but eventually became active participants in furthering the goals and believing the "mission" of the Nazis, even though initially (and afterwards) wasn't as convinced (edit: by his own accounts, many historians disagree with this today).

Characterizing the leadership/inner-circle/leaders as merely power-seekers who didn't believe their own ideology minimizes their moral culpability and misrepresents the historical record.

> I'd say he slipped if he did do it

I mean yeah, but he did it more than once, and it wasn't like it was an odd sort of wave, it was a full on parade standard Hitlergruß (thumpy on the chest hand out at the ascribed hitler angle). Which he then repeated to the audience in the front and the people behind him.

Monty python use to do it all the time, as did a number of other comedies. but the important distinction is that comedians aren't in power.

Musk arguably has more power than the president. So him thinking that it can't harm to try the old nazi salute, with unprecedented power isn't a healthy thing for democracy, regardless of who you think should be in power. Do you think he's going to give up that power willingly?