Comment by terminalbraid
4 hours ago
> Trust me, I hate Tesla and Elon as much as the next naysayer
But then you go to defend them as if it were something you're obligated to do. I think you demonstrably do not hate Tesla and Elon as much as the next naysayer.
No I hate disinformation that makes people on my side look uninformed and stupid.
On a deeper level, I hate bandwagons because they are invariably full of idiotic parrots.
Elon has done a enough demonstrably stupid and bad shit that we don't need to play deception to drum up resistance. Especially when that deception plays on "government subsides in the green sector have been a colossal waste of money".
I call this the 12 fingered hitler, frequently seen on reddit.
It goes like this:
Person A makes up some unsupported fact about a despised figure. For example, "Hitler had 12 fingers".
Person B comes in and says "I think Hitler just had 10 fingers like normal"
And then person A or some other person responds "holy shit dude, I can't believe you're defending Hitler!"
Exactly
And then neo nazis go around telling susceptible people "Look, Hitler's detractors think he had 12 fingers, just look at any picture of him, he clearly only has 10. You're gonna trust people that stupid to be honest about him? To know anything about him?"
Disinformation feels good in the moment, but is immensely damaging overall. Even the people who believed he had 12 fingers will feel betrayed and question everything else when they one day learn he actually had 10.