The Tesla, last I read about and test drove one, is a great car. Why tear at a company that makes a great car over anyone's political preferences? The phrase "shooting oneself in the foot" comes to mind. It makes no sense whatsoever.
With how our society is set up, you are suggesting not holding any political viewpoints or preferences.
I had a whole diatribe typed up that I deleted because I realized I cannot actually empathize or have a theory of mind for how you could think this was an acceptable way to live life. Do you silo every interaction you have with everyone else?
What the OP and others like them actually want is a total lack of accountability for bad actors, and they will pick whatever argument is convenient in that moment regardless of consistency.
Thank you for eloquently putting this into words.
I guess the new normal (building your identity around politics) is either the cause of or correlated with the general rise in mental illness in our modern society.
Yes, not talking or caring about politics within various social silos is (used to be) normal.
Punishing people (vandalism, scrawling Nazi symbols, hostile/threatening interactions on the road) for owning a brand of car and not sharing your viewpoints is not fine.
These boycotts only work as isolated, selective outrage. It is the same with countries. If you wanted to be consistent, you'd have to boycott every country in the world. They all do some bad things.
when you say 'my heart goes out to you' your hands typically stay on your heart ( which he seemed to know to do then ) or move very slightly directly out, not diagonally and up.
not to mention the out and out white supremacists thought that's what it was.
i would probably view this more charitably in his favor if he just apologized or clarified like a mature person. instead he doubles down on 'corrupt' media, calls to defund wikipedia, and makes juvenile nazi jokes.
The plausible deniability angle would hit a little better if Musk hadn't also been endorsing a number of Nazi-adjacent parties and views, pushed literal white nationalist views repeatedly (which he has been doing for years -- he isn't concerned about birth rates, he is literally only worried about white birth rates while he runs his creepy birthing farm down in Texas, and that's aside from his endless "empathy is our weakness" attacks on migrants), and most recently literally excused Hitler on the basis that really it's the public servants who are to blame.
It's quite incredible really. If the guy wasn't already absolutely soaked with extremely far right rhetoric and beliefs -- save the absurd "oh he's a centrist" nonsense that zero people believe if they have any functioning grey matter at all -- it might have been excusable as something that just looked concerning.
Citation please
in other words, there are plenty of valid complaints, but "abnormal" or denying a clear democratic mandate aren't any of them.
It should come to mind for elon, not car buyers. He built a car company based on environmentalism that naturally appealed to people with environmental concerns and then pivoted to publicly insulting and denigrating those exact people.
It's not even really political. Elon isn't the first CEO to hold political values that differ from a majority of the company's customers. It's the fact that he goes out of his way to call his most likely customers retards.
I refuse to make purchases on Amazon. Sometimes that's a minor inconvenience: perhaps the alternative has slower delivery. Sometimes purchasing elsewhere probably costs me more than it would on Amazon.
My purchase value is low considering the whole world, but it's not zero. I can also influence my employer's decisions, which are larger — and we use Azure rather than AWS.
I think this phrasing mellows the reality that he has, regardless of intent, displayed Nazi-like behavior. Why not tear at a company whose absentee CEO acts this way? Tesla is not the only great car or the only great car company. Let it thrive or die based on myriad factors, including leadership optics.
I buy things that make me happy or give me an advantage of some sort. I wouldn't want to lose that. Someone else's politics or personal life don't matter to me.