Comment by davidw
3 days ago
> I'm genuinely surprised at the amount of people that stuck to it.
I thought more people would see a guy doing ... that salute, or things like the antisemitism in Grok in the past few days and say "no", but a huge number of people seem to be able to rationalize things away.
I'm with Wil Wheaton https://bsky.app/profile/wilwheaton.net/post/3ltkjyzjb4k2p
I profoundly dislike the politics of most “leaders” for lack of a better word in the world of tech, but here I am typing these words in an iPhone. Refusing to use something because of who created it or who benefits from it is a bit too much I think, to the point of being unworkable depending on the case.
In other words as much as I’d like to vote with my wallet that is not always practical. And that extends to everything, not only tech.
> Refusing to use something because of who created it or who benefits from it is a bit too much I think, to the point of being unworkable depending on the case.
Having a hard and fast rule that can always be applied about this is impossible. We're just too interconnected and interdependent, and there are too many unknowns.
That doesn't mean we can just ignore it and not think about it. We owe it to each other to still do our best, even if it's not going to be perfect.
It’s not a question of who benefits from it. It’s that the place got weird and creepy and the algorithm is maximizing for engagement of an unpleasant type. I quit last July because I couldn’t stand the angry know-nothing blue checks being promoted into my replies and the cryptocurrency scams.
I'd love to know a reason why not to use an iPhone because of Apple's leader. Is he not right wing enough like Musk?
We all have our ideas on politics. Not all ideas are as universal as some think or pretend.
8 replies →
[flagged]
>"If there's a Nazi at the table and ten other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with eleven Nazis."
Change nazi for any other adjective and you will see how absurd it is.
14 replies →
[flagged]
"literal Nazi" What utter nonsense.
15 replies →
[dead]
[flagged]
8 replies →
Bluesky is not better (see for instance [0]). I think no one has cracked how to properly run a microblogging website.
[0] https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/did-i-publish-the-private...
Blue Sky has a lot of left leaning folks, but the ownership isn't putting their thumb on the scales for that; it occurred naturally.
And I find that there are some thoughtful conservatives who do ok there. I follow some of them.
I am seriously restricting my inbound and outbound reach by boycotting X. It's a hit I can afford to take, but for some people they'd be making a very foolish choice when that's where their audience and the content they want to read is.
NPR found that they really didn't lose much:
https://bsky.app/profile/carlquintanilla.bsky.social/post/3l...
But sometimes you have to make some sacrifices in life over your principles.
And the more people move, the easier it is for everyone else.
NPR's audience is very different from mine (AI researchers and thinkers) though. Some communities seem to have managed the move wholesale: all the cartoonists I like switched, for example.
2 replies →
Are you really? I found my personal network got pretty much shredded. At this point it doesn’t matter much if I used X or didn’t use it.
By the time I left I was deleting multiple bot followers a day. You cannot take X's claims at face value, everything about the platform is aggressively dishonest. NPR's experience is instructive: https://niemanreports.org/npr-twitter-musk/
I don't think it's realistic to pretend that abandoning X is seriously restricting anyone. If anything, sticking with it is brand endangerment and by leaving it you're making the smart move, with or without animus.
> I thought more people would see a guy doing ... that salute
I don't think that gesture was a nazi salute and was grossly taken out of context by everyone who hates the guy. I don't like Elon Musk either but stressing over something like that exacerbates the appearance that the accuser has a biased opinion. It also made the media who covered this for weeks desperate and very shallow.
I watched the video with surrounding context and it looked like a Nazi salute. Did he ever deny it was a Nazi salute?
It's not just the salute, either, which was pretty clearly a Nazi salute that he did twice. It was support for the white Afrikaaners and the AfD in Germany and ripping the aid away from children in Africa, killing them, and on and on.
yes
They liked the gesture. The rationalization is just public pretending they would theoretically mind.