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Just in the last week Musk reposted "Stalin, Hitler and Mao didn’t murder millions of people. Their public sector workers did."
I would rather not be getting a car in return for a sizeable donation to someone who is spreading that kind of rhetoric.
I guess the question is when does accountability stop? If a company and its descendant employees and products are built on an evil foundation and benefit from it, how do we rectify as a society? Ford is hardly alone here, many German, Japanese, and American companies were built on wartime atrocities and exist today from that previous goodwill. If the malignant founder is dead, is then the rest of the machine exempt from responsibility?
I personally think the only way to be truly principled is to boycott basically everything. I imagine the vast majority of people reading this right now are wearing clothes produced by child slavery or eating imported products that clear cut rainforest and villages or whatnot. Society for better or worse has to carry some amount of baggage to just subsist without emotional stress.
Musk's wealth is however causing very direct and obvious harm to causes I care about, and he uses his platform of 100M+ followers to spread hateful views which now permeate every conversation. I am tired of him being relevant. There are many alternatives to Tesla so it is easy enough to not give him money.
I also take a forward-facing view. I can't change what people's past dollars were spent on. Instead I care about what my dollars be spent on after I give them to a company. I buy Porsche cars today even though their founder was a Nazi and the company is still majority-owned by the Porsche family. But their founder is dead, and today's Porsche has strongly disavowed Nazi views. Seems my money mostly goes toward developing cool cars while the owners stay out of politics.
Corporations aren't people. Yes, I understand the supreme court rulings on this subject, I'm saying the supreme court is wrong.
Each person in a corporation is responsible for their own actions.
This is a very big problem in our society. A more recent Ford misdeed, the Pinto, was rushed through production despite 40+ crash tests in which the fuel tanks ruptured in every test. People knew it would kill people, did it anyway because they could make more money by letting people die, and shareholders were the ones punished. This is an injustice: the people who pushed through the Pinto committed at the very least manslaughter, and have as far as I can tell, never even been named publicly.
Until we address this problem we're going to keep having these problems. GM in 2014 refused to replace faulty ignition switches which ignited, killing 13 people. The car industry is littered with bodies, but these faults are not limited to automotive companies. In 2010 PG&E refused to fix known problems with a gas line and it exploded, leveling 38 homes. It's a miracle that Boeing hasn't killed someone yet. And this is setting aside simple safety neglect: letting people die isn't just a small cost-cutting measure for healthcare companies, it's a core part of their business model.
These decisions are not made by corporations, they are made by individuals, and as long as we continue to punish corporations for individual decisions, while letting literal murderers move on to the next job, this will keep happening. We need to hold individuals, not corporations, accountable.
Unfortunately, a lot of the people with money and power don't want to be held accountable, and have crafted a legal and propaganda system that avoids that. So until that changes we have Luigi Mangione and tanking Tesla stock--actual justice isn't an option we've been given.
The 737-MAX killed 346 people. Which reinforces your point rather than taking away from it. In any sane world the CEO should have gone to prison for that, but instead he walked away with $62 million.
If Hitler was a candidate today, Elon would endorse him, period.
He could tattoo a svastika on his forehead and people would still find him excuses.
He didn't say Hitler did nothing or that he wasn't responsible for the Holocaust. He made the very good point that one man can't do that amount of damage alone, and it relied on the power of a centralised state with excellent record keeping. There is a reason modern European states don't even collect this data! States are dangerous.
Your view is insanely warped. I don't know why.
This is so fucking unambiguously a nazi sign, it’s infuriating seeing people like you saying it’s just a wave. Damn, people suck
It literally looks NOTHING like a Nazi salute from any angle. This is such an obvious example of psychological priming.
I have waved plenty of times and nobody thinks it was a Nazi salute.
You are being taken in by propaganda.
> It literally looks NOTHING like a Nazi salute from any angle
I don’t know what to say to someone like you who’s talking in extremely bad faith. Finding excuses is one thing, saying it doesn’t even look like a nazi salute is straight up lying. I can’t engage anymore with straight lies.
Thiht said:
>German far right party (not a literal nazi party in itself but endorsed by neo-nazis)
Don't twist words. Not to mention their political alignment isn't up for debate or judge-y quotations.
Why are folks so incapable of making an argument in good faith on this subject? Like, even if you give elon the most benefit of the most doubt you can muster and you manage to handwave away the multiple sig heils and nazi sympathetic tweets as just some sort of quirky behavior and not at all related to nazism - you have to realize that not everyone does.
There were numerous pogroms of Jews in European history but they pale in comparison to the Holocaust because it was the policy of an advanced, centralised, bureaucratic state.
Whether you support a big state or not, one undeniable fact about them is that they are highly capable. That capability can be used to do evil. cf. The US federal government of the 1890s, for example, was institutionally incapable of genocide.
He's called a Nazi because he boosts and endorses Nazi content on twitter, and recently repeatedly emulated an aggressive arm gesture that looks exactly like a Nazi salute.
Henry Ford was indeed a Nazi.
He's also dead, so purchasing a Ford vehicle doesn't support his Nazism any more. But you knew that.
> Unlike Musk, who is called one because... he is against illegal immigration?
This is a straw man.
Nobody thinks Musk is a Nazi because he is against illegal immigration. I think he's a Nazi because he's repeatedly doubled down on racist remarks, Nazi saluted repeatedly, and keeps supporting economic and social policies that Nazis support.
Illegal immigration is and always has been a red herring. The right isn't against illegal immigration--if they were, they would be providing reasonable paths for legal immigration instead of pretending they don't know ladders exist.