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Comment by rootusrootus | Hacker News Reader

> Clearly people's principles are contingent on the car sale discounts.

Okay, I'll bite. Do you routinely make your purchase decisions solely on a single factor? Especially big ones, probably second only in size to your home?

It is possible to loathe Elmo but also conclude that given all the various factors driving your decision making, a Tesla ends up being the best fit.

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When buying our refrigerator, I didn’t look into how evil the CEO of whirlpool is. It’s quite possible he is as bad or worse. However, at least he has the good sense to be quiet about it.

> at least he has the good sense to be quiet about it

For sure, I think a good CEO stays the hell out of politics altogether, because it will never recruit more customers, it can only alienate.

Yea, for most CEOs, I have no idea what their politics are because they don't wear it on their sleeve and make it part of their company's brand. I can probably guess their politics, but it's not going to affect my purchase decision.

There are a handful of CEOs who just can't seem to keep it to themselves, to the point where they're just begging for people to include those politics in their purchase decisions.

It's all quite true. What is surprising though, that the SAME people who are very outspoken in criticizing Musk are driving Teslas. First, they would put some lame stickers to make the whole thing seem like a joke, now they don't even care to do that. It's almost like their self-proclaimed virtue ends where (tiny) financial pain begins.

Where I grew up in the US it was not uncommon for people to intentionally only buy union made vehicles. Not sure how that works out now when things are built and assembled in a dozen factories but it used to be more simple and union workers supported other union workers. (this reads like the rantings of an old boomer, I'm not either I swear)

There are enough EVs on the market these days that people can afford to include more frivolous factors into their decision making. I was in the market for an EV a few years ago. Solely because I dislike Elon and don't wish to support his business, I took teslas off the table after 5 minutes of research to make sure they weren't drastically superior.

> It is possible to loathe Elmo but also conclude that given all the various factors driving your decision making, a Tesla ends up being the best fit.

Musk is unambiguously an unashamedly a Nazi, and not just for the triviality of his arm gestures. He calls people like my parents traitors for not sticking with their respective races and says people like me should “remigrate” because the west should be white only. He says people like my wife express “hatred against whites” and routinely retweets antisemitic posts. He called his ai system the “mechahitler” and it routinely returns racist responses when asked.

And when people patronize his businesses it amplifies his own wealth, which he then spends to spread his vitriol in multiple countries.

So yes, if you support Nazis financially or otherwise it makes you one too.

> So yes, if you support Nazis financially or otherwise it makes you one too.

Wow.

What’s your “wow”?

You somehow managed not to know the extent of his racism and cruelty?

Or you don’t think that anyone who provides material support to Nazis/Communists/Hamas/the IDF/MAGA is is basically one of them?

Or?

How casually you decide other people are nazis.

That's a conversation-ending statement. And so it is.

For you, out of convenience, nazi supporter and actual nazi (what, performer? activist?) are positions just micrometers apart, if at all. Not everybody considers moral fluidity some sort of virtue to brag about, in contrary

It’s hardly casual, but also hardly complex: if someone is a Nazi in both word and action, that’s pretty clear. It’s duck typing in the real world: the actual origin of the term.

But your defense of racist speech, acts, and the propagation of same sends a clear message too.

Ugh. Rootus made no such defence.

I was about to purchase a £6 tool on ebay, but noticed the seller was named truth_com. I decided to buy it from another seller simply because i intensely dislike the noise coming from that direction. Had i not noticed, and completed the sale, would i be a Nazi?

If i drop pennies in a collection box on a shop counter, unwittingly supporting a terrorist organisation, have i blown up schoolchildren?

What if i see the collection box, research the charity, discover that it funds terrorism, correctly decline to contribute, but then fail to immediately kill the shopkeeper and his entire family? Am i supporting terrorism, by suffering a terrorist to contribute his activities?

Develop some fucking nuance. Your direction is fine, but your insistence on your authority as the ultimate arbiter of morality is not. Calling all Tesla owners Nazis is petulant and self-satisfied.

There’s a difference between making a low-cognition effort (buying a toothbrush or holding a door open) and a complex choice like buying a car, typically a household’s largest or second-largest investment. I’m sure you know this too.

But not between buying a car and marching with blackshirts?

I take it Ford drivers are also Nazis? Henry Ford admired Hitler and advocated for eugenics in America. VW and Porsche, obvs.

Or have these marques aged out? When was the cutoff? Beatniks in air-cooled vauvi buses, all nazis? Jared Holt on youtube, fixing his wrecked 356? Did vw stop being a Nazi endeavour on VE day, or do they remain an overt wing of the third reich in the 21st century? Or was the changeover day the 19th of March of 1982?

You're going to hate the Marshall Plan when you learn about it. You're going to hate the Apollo program. Fucking Nazis, landing on the moon, makes me sick.

Are Tesla shareholders nazis? Where's your fucking pension, gumby? You'd better be whiter than the driven snow, you self-satisfied prat.

I do, something about having actual moral values and stances, not some pathetic when-it-suits-me. Can make life sometimes a bit more complex but then I can look myself in the mirror and be content with what I see without some advanced mental gymnastics.

Nazi germany may have been making the best cars of that era, would you still give them money out of convenience? Not that teslas are best electric cars in the world in quite a few aspects, but they have emotional momentum of early starters.

One simply does not have strong moral opinions and then act directly against them at first minor inconvenience.

This generalizes to "Morality means nothing without a price tag.". People have morals right up to the point that it inconveniences them, so those morals mean nothing. But if you persist in having your morals in one piece in light of discomfort or financial penalties then that is proof that those morals were real.

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