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Elon's choice of hand gestures last week were probably a spastic/autistic mistake that should be ignored, possibly a 4chan-mentality troll that should be disdained, but almost certainly not a Neo-Nazi signal that should be feared. Social skills are not up his alley and being cheered by huge crowds is a bit new to him and this isn't the first time he's flailed around on stage like a 5 year old with too much candy, it was just the first time the shape of the flailing was something that could trigger left-QAnon.
But Elon's choice of wording in that tweet, I can't think of any excuses for. Managing an orbital launch provider is up his alley. He knows those astronauts aren't stranded and are able to leave at any time (on his company's capsule!) in an emergency. He knows that when they were semi-stranded (the Starliner made it home unpiloted fine, just with a level of risk that was unacceptable for humans) it was Boeing's fault, not Biden's. He knows SpaceX was already made Plan A to bring those astronauts back, before the Biden administration ended, and they're just waiting for the next crew rotation. He knows they haven't been there "so long" compared to other ISS long-term crew stays (though this one I would just call a "distortion" rather than a lie; they have been up there quite long compared to their original quick out-and-back plans). And he knows that the last couple months of delay are due to a SpaceX delay, with the new Dragon capsule for Crew-10 taking a little longer to finish than planned.
For years Musk seemed to be somewhat resistant to even the powerful brain-melting effects of Twitter discourse. I'm not sure what combination of MAGA-inner-circle discourse and way-too-much-Twitter discourse and too-much-Ketamine discourse has finally gotten to him, but I wish he'd snap out of it and back away from whatever it is.
He’s pretty much a full time propagandist these days
How so?
Do you think a lot of the Musk coverage isn't biased?
Do you think there's a chance that you are biased?
I'm biased, in favor of Musk. I'm a huge lifelong fan of spaceflight, and I can see that SpaceX is at least a decade ahead of all its competition and that this would not have happened without Musk. At best the competition would have been mere decades further behind without SpaceX to inspire and motivate and be emulated by them, and at worst they would be infinitely further behind because they would be too cowardly to seriously pursue dreams as grand as his. He may have drastically changed human history for the better there.
But I also have a Twitter account that lets me see his posts and reposts, and the ability to count that at the moment 15 of his latest 20 are right-wing politics. "Full time propagandist" is hyperbole if you interpret it as "does nothing but propaganda", but if you interpret it as "spends 30+ hours a week on propaganda" it might be literally true right now. This isn't inherently a bad thing; "propaganda" does include the motivated spreading of true and good ideas, not just bad and false ones. But it is an actual thing, not just bias.
Yeah I gave him a lot of credit, but the evidence he got online right brainfried is rapidly mounting.
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Objectively he spends nearly 100% of his time promoting right wing ideas
To be fair he throws in some space stuff as well
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Thinking about it more: even calling them "semi-stranded" as I just did is excessive. Even after the Starliner failures made it an unacceptably risky crew return vehicle, and even before the Crew-9 Dragon capsule was available, the plan in case of emergency was to send the Crew-8 Dragon back with two extra passengers in place of the typical load of return cargo, and it was outfitted accordingly, and if they'd had to use it everybody would still have been fine. The Starliner astronauts' extended ISS stay has been necessary to avoid inconvenience, but has never been a matter of incapacity.
The more I write about how SpaceX was already the backup plan after they were the emergency plan, the more galling it is that Musk decided to exaggerate anything. His company already looks really good here! There's no need to make up a fictional version of this narrative!
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He's continually trying to bait people who hate him into making themselves look worse, this is possibly based on direct advice from Trump, who has decades of experience inflaming specific enemies. While I've been using reddit less and less over the years, the core site /r/all became entirely worthless for a week due to the latest round of screeching that he passively instigated. My daily time here, on twitter/x and just doing stuff irl has increased by a few hours.
I'm inclined to think he really did mean a nice heart goes out to you gesture, but it was passive instigation insofar as it doesn't take long to type something like "Hitler was a particularly evil mass murderer, in addition to being cruel and stupid. He was not only a bad leader in policy and war, he was a shitty artist and his conduct from 1942 on suggests he was a psychopath who didn't even care about Germany. Fuck that loser, he deserves hell, fuck the rest of the Nazis too, God bless the memory of their millions of innocent victims and the memory of the millions of heroes who fought, bled and died to stop them." This line doesn't contain an apology or even acknowledge the arm issue, but would chill most of the freakout crowd, and wasn't made precisely because he considers the freakout a net positive for him.
The halo effect (reversed) means that even if Hitler was a good artist, nobody would think he was.
Eh, yes and no. https://www.wikiart.org/en/adolf-hitler/halaman-rumah-tua-di-munchen https://www.wikiart.org/en/winston-churchill/racecourse-nice-1921 https://www.wikiart.org/en/francisco-franco/still-life-with-eagle
Franco has more technical skill, Churchill has more charm. I guess we'd need some art teachers who personally hate Churchill and at least don't dislike Hitler if we were talking about a more objective analysis. Maybe from Bangladesh or other Indian subcontinent Muslims ?
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