Has anyone recently told you how superior you are to everyone else, with your secret knowledge oh great wizard? I feel like that's what you bunch want to hear, since you are in on the world conspiracy.
I’ve given up most of my Twitter usage but every time I go there to view a tweet the ads are always some kind of knife self defense class or bizarre right wing causes.
I’d imagine that even when IBM and Apple were still advertising, it was much less than before.
Mine are really really weird. They’ll be an ominous photo of Elon with some headline like “This changes everything” from some blue check person account with 500 followers and the URL is like, “vegans.site” or something else entirely unrelated.
They’re not even running low-end ads at this point. They’re running generated clickbait.
Oh and absolute blatant trademark violations. An ad with Elon’s face and the X logo for “X Coin official ICO”
How can they possibly pivot to money handling services if they have no choice but to let their brand be completely eroded like that?
The other day I came across an ad in the form of a sponsored post (with an official Twitter link inviting me to follow the screenshotted accounts) for 'feetfinders.com', a foot fetish website. It was teasing $195 bounties for pics of good looking feet trampling apple pie.
In the last hour he's gone to the opposite extreme, posting :
As I said earlier this week, “decolonization”, “from the river to the sea” and similar euphemisms necessarily imply genocide.
Clear calls for extreme violence are against our terms of service and will result in suspension.
'Decolonization' has been in the air a lot recently due to the ongoing war in Gaza but is mainly used to describe the gradual unwinding of European colonialism/imperialism; Wikipedia's article provides a good overview. The term is often associated with Frantz Fanon, who opposed the French colonialization of Algeria, and wrote several influential books on the subject, the most famous being The Wretched of the Earth.
For Musk to engage in such an abrupt reversal of his stated free speech ideals (and barely-qualified endorsement of white nationalist conspiracy theories yesterday), Twitter's financials must be undergoing a severe erosion.
As a thought experiment: these "opposites" aren't really that far apart if you think of Musk's political demographic as consisting, in part, of Christian eschatologists (i.e. people who are simultaneously anti-Semitic and pro-Israel).
That doesn't mean that he himself is one, only that his grift currently lies with some of those people.
> Christian eschatologists (i.e. people who are simultaneously anti-Semitic and pro-Israel).
“Christian eschatologists” could apply to about 100 different touted beliefs with a 1000 nuance flavors of each. Let’s not paint all those folks with a pro-Israel yet anti-Semitic brush. There may be some of that, but it’s certainly not all and not even enough to consider it a defining characteristic of most.
Not every Christian is a Zionist and not every Christian is an evangelical. And not every Christian ascribes to the same eschatological belief. It’s a mistake to paint Christians and Christianity with a broad brush.
There is also a distinction that should be made between political Zionism and religious Zionism. I am a Christian, I hold a preterist eschatological viewpoint and don’t belong to an “evangelical” church. As such the restoration of Israel in 1948 has ZERO theological meaning to me. However, can I accept the creation of Israel in 1948 a politically valid political event? Sure, the established world authority of the time made it happen and did it for a reason. To me the current conflict is just like many—-over land, money, and power. So I believe that Israel has a right to exist because the world authority gave it that right in 1948. In that sense I am a political Zionist.
That makes me definitely not the same as a Christian who believes the restoration of Israel in 1948 is a sign post pointing to a ton of biblical prophecy culminating in an apocalypse with the current conflict having a supernatural meaning with a theological side that must be taken to scare people into a belief system. Those are religious zionists with a futurism eschatology. We may both believe that Israel should exist, but we don’t believe in the same “why”.
I didn’t say that every Christian is a Zionist. I linked to a statistic that shows that the overwhelming majority of evangelicals are Zionists because they believe the Jews need to be slaughtered in the holy land to bring back the messiah.
It’s entirely possible for you to be the kind of non-evangelical, Christian “political” Zionist that this doesn’t apply to. But that doesn’t change the statistic, and it doesn’t change Musk’s audience.
Your original post didn’t specify evangelicals, you used the phrase “christian eschatologists” and defined it much too broadly which is what I am commenting on. Perhaps you meant “evangelicals” and used the wrong word. Perhaps it was intentional and you simply misunderstood the difference.
Either way I wanted to provide context against the generalization/stereotype your post created.
If they wanted Israelis to be slaughtered wouldn't you be hearing evangelicals saying we need to cut all military aid to Israel, and wouldn't we see these Evangelicals teaming up with left wing progressives who also want to cut military support and Arms shipments to Israel?
I suspect that the commenter believes that by having a futurist end times belief that contains a prophecy predicting a Jewish slaughter to motivate conversion of the remnant Jews to be fulfilled as a stepping stone for their desire for a new heaven and new earth amounts to anti-semitism.
Decolonization is widely used for much more than simply unwinding European colonialism: It's also invoked when teachers object to simply teaching kids math (because the curriculum and terms are European/Euro-descended American in origin), desperately trying to find a way to teach evolution without Darwin because he's an old white Euro man, and so on.
Invariably, "decolonizing" a subject means systematically booting white authors out, or pivoting from teaching the subject matter plain and simple to teaching ideology and relativizing everything because Heaven forbid a minority kid would feel bad (which itself is mostly just an excuse)
musk explained his comment below in that thread and i thought it was done acceptably, he wasn't antisemitic, he just continued a conversation that implied [correctly] that throughout the last ~10 years there has been a tail-wagging-the-dog relationship between what is currently the demographic with a large outcry of support for israel and the demographic with a large outcry of support for hamas. that the demographic in support of israel is usually the manipulator in this situation, and that this has usually been used against a lot of the people who actually are in support of israel in the current day.
he's not wrong, its not antisemitic, and taking this stance doesn't imply you're a nazi, and certainly doesn't imply who or what kind of solution you might suppport.
yet complexity is not allowed.
but what's interesting here is X's apparent rise in the status of its advertisement real estate[0]. I think this will turn out positive for twitter and elon no matter what, people seem to like twitter and want it to keep being what it is. I for one look forward to the day when we can have simple conversations in public without other people panicking in response.
As I said yesterday, if he expressed this opinion in the abstract it wouldn't be that controversial. It's the fact that he gave an uncritical endorsement to an explicitly anti-semitic white nationalist conspiracy theory first that caused people to recoil. The more anodyne follow-up (a few tweets of Musk beefing about the ADL were deliberately making him look bad) is imho just a rhetorical gambit; it wouldn't have attracted a fraction of the attention if posted in isolation.
X's apparent rise in the status of its advertisement real estate
that's an interesting way to describe running more and cheaper ads to make up for the loss of revenue.
you're basically saying that his intentions weren't the problem, but that points out everything that's wrong with the situation.
> anti-semitic white nationalist conspiracy theory
and this, is somehow an attempt to skirt around what i'd already written. its not a conspiracy theory, its not white nationalist, its not antisemitic, its just an observation of dynamics between demographics over the latest in modern history.
however, there is in fact a mainstream narrative that scares people with stories of nutjob right-wing conspiracy theories. and sure they exist, in extremely small numbers. the problem is that the people who push this narrative also ignore plenty of racism and spew plenty of conspiracy theories while ignoring extremism on their own side. and anything you say that can possibly look like you're within the bottom 1% of IQ on the right-wing extreme will be used against you through the power of misrepresentation, despite not having any relation nor any appreciation of it.
there's nothing within the substance of the criticism that isn't used hypocritically against who its aimed at.
all i want is to be casual again. over-analyzing simple remarks to attack an individual is a sign of genuine malice, there's more written between the lines of the actions taken against him than whatever meta-conversation someone might imply exists in the background of a single tweet.
No, I'm not saying that at all. I'm quite clear on what I meant, thanks.
all i want is to be casual again. over-analyzing simple remarks to attack an individual is a sign of genuine malice
GMAFB. If Musk wants to be casual he can just have an anonymous shitposting account, and perhaps he does. You're asking that we just ignore his extremely vocal aspirations on free speech, on transforming Twitter into an 'everything app', on the commercial realities of social media data mining with all the implications for privacy, surveillance and so on, and on the fact that we're on a news website for hackers where we take pride in finding clever ways to store, sift, and exploit huge fields of data. It's asinine to expect that the guy with the not-inconsiderable personality cult also be treated as a regular goof with a bunch of low-IQ takes and immunized from criticism on that basis.
Being casual is what anonymous posting is for. You can go to 4chan or wherever, shitpost, get things wrong, make an ass of yourself sometimes, and have conversations of no great consequence. I have done so for many years, and still do. Anonymous fora work because good or bad, popular or unpopular, your comments aren't tied to an identity and it frees you from a lot of ego traps as well as social restraints.
Musk on the other hand is vocally against anonymity, often citing the need to fight spam (although I don't think he's sincere about this, given the way Twitter/X actually operates and the specific changes he's made around API access and how reports are handled). If he doesn't believe in anonymous shitposting, and thinks people on social media should own their posts, then it's not unreasonable for others (eg advertisers) to take teh same attitude toward him.
From the article: "They followed IBM, which cut its spending with X on Thursday."
Let's *never forget* that the Holocaust wouldn't have been as effective if it weren't for *International Business Machines* punch cards and its ties to the Nazi party.[^1] I'm not surprised they split.
Remember kids: a crypto-fascist is still a fascist.
39 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 94.1 ms ] threadE.g. this https://www.cbc.ca/news/editorsblog/editor-in-chief-note-use...
I’d imagine that even when IBM and Apple were still advertising, it was much less than before.
They’re not even running low-end ads at this point. They’re running generated clickbait.
Oh and absolute blatant trademark violations. An ad with Elon’s face and the X logo for “X Coin official ICO”
How can they possibly pivot to money handling services if they have no choice but to let their brand be completely eroded like that?
It's really been a race to the bottom.
I wish CEOs and owners were more vocal about their beliefs. It would help weeding the garbage out.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u9l_2E4LPgY&t=1018s
As I said earlier this week, “decolonization”, “from the river to the sea” and similar euphemisms necessarily imply genocide.
Clear calls for extreme violence are against our terms of service and will result in suspension.
'Decolonization' has been in the air a lot recently due to the ongoing war in Gaza but is mainly used to describe the gradual unwinding of European colonialism/imperialism; Wikipedia's article provides a good overview. The term is often associated with Frantz Fanon, who opposed the French colonialization of Algeria, and wrote several influential books on the subject, the most famous being The Wretched of the Earth.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decolonization
For Musk to engage in such an abrupt reversal of his stated free speech ideals (and barely-qualified endorsement of white nationalist conspiracy theories yesterday), Twitter's financials must be undergoing a severe erosion.
That doesn't mean that he himself is one, only that his grift currently lies with some of those people.
“Christian eschatologists” could apply to about 100 different touted beliefs with a 1000 nuance flavors of each. Let’s not paint all those folks with a pro-Israel yet anti-Semitic brush. There may be some of that, but it’s certainly not all and not even enough to consider it a defining characteristic of most.
There is also a distinction that should be made between political Zionism and religious Zionism. I am a Christian, I hold a preterist eschatological viewpoint and don’t belong to an “evangelical” church. As such the restoration of Israel in 1948 has ZERO theological meaning to me. However, can I accept the creation of Israel in 1948 a politically valid political event? Sure, the established world authority of the time made it happen and did it for a reason. To me the current conflict is just like many—-over land, money, and power. So I believe that Israel has a right to exist because the world authority gave it that right in 1948. In that sense I am a political Zionist.
That makes me definitely not the same as a Christian who believes the restoration of Israel in 1948 is a sign post pointing to a ton of biblical prophecy culminating in an apocalypse with the current conflict having a supernatural meaning with a theological side that must be taken to scare people into a belief system. Those are religious zionists with a futurism eschatology. We may both believe that Israel should exist, but we don’t believe in the same “why”.
It’s entirely possible for you to be the kind of non-evangelical, Christian “political” Zionist that this doesn’t apply to. But that doesn’t change the statistic, and it doesn’t change Musk’s audience.
Either way I wanted to provide context against the generalization/stereotype your post created.
Invariably, "decolonizing" a subject means systematically booting white authors out, or pivoting from teaching the subject matter plain and simple to teaching ideology and relativizing everything because Heaven forbid a minority kid would feel bad (which itself is mostly just an excuse)
musk explained his comment below in that thread and i thought it was done acceptably, he wasn't antisemitic, he just continued a conversation that implied [correctly] that throughout the last ~10 years there has been a tail-wagging-the-dog relationship between what is currently the demographic with a large outcry of support for israel and the demographic with a large outcry of support for hamas. that the demographic in support of israel is usually the manipulator in this situation, and that this has usually been used against a lot of the people who actually are in support of israel in the current day.
he's not wrong, its not antisemitic, and taking this stance doesn't imply you're a nazi, and certainly doesn't imply who or what kind of solution you might suppport.
yet complexity is not allowed.
but what's interesting here is X's apparent rise in the status of its advertisement real estate[0]. I think this will turn out positive for twitter and elon no matter what, people seem to like twitter and want it to keep being what it is. I for one look forward to the day when we can have simple conversations in public without other people panicking in response.
0. https://twitter.com/xDaily/status/1724106350584648109
X's apparent rise in the status of its advertisement real estate
that's an interesting way to describe running more and cheaper ads to make up for the loss of revenue.
> anti-semitic white nationalist conspiracy theory
and this, is somehow an attempt to skirt around what i'd already written. its not a conspiracy theory, its not white nationalist, its not antisemitic, its just an observation of dynamics between demographics over the latest in modern history.
however, there is in fact a mainstream narrative that scares people with stories of nutjob right-wing conspiracy theories. and sure they exist, in extremely small numbers. the problem is that the people who push this narrative also ignore plenty of racism and spew plenty of conspiracy theories while ignoring extremism on their own side. and anything you say that can possibly look like you're within the bottom 1% of IQ on the right-wing extreme will be used against you through the power of misrepresentation, despite not having any relation nor any appreciation of it.
there's nothing within the substance of the criticism that isn't used hypocritically against who its aimed at.
all i want is to be casual again. over-analyzing simple remarks to attack an individual is a sign of genuine malice, there's more written between the lines of the actions taken against him than whatever meta-conversation someone might imply exists in the background of a single tweet.
all i want is to be casual again. over-analyzing simple remarks to attack an individual is a sign of genuine malice
GMAFB. If Musk wants to be casual he can just have an anonymous shitposting account, and perhaps he does. You're asking that we just ignore his extremely vocal aspirations on free speech, on transforming Twitter into an 'everything app', on the commercial realities of social media data mining with all the implications for privacy, surveillance and so on, and on the fact that we're on a news website for hackers where we take pride in finding clever ways to store, sift, and exploit huge fields of data. It's asinine to expect that the guy with the not-inconsiderable personality cult also be treated as a regular goof with a bunch of low-IQ takes and immunized from criticism on that basis.
Being casual is what anonymous posting is for. You can go to 4chan or wherever, shitpost, get things wrong, make an ass of yourself sometimes, and have conversations of no great consequence. I have done so for many years, and still do. Anonymous fora work because good or bad, popular or unpopular, your comments aren't tied to an identity and it frees you from a lot of ego traps as well as social restraints.
Musk on the other hand is vocally against anonymity, often citing the need to fight spam (although I don't think he's sincere about this, given the way Twitter/X actually operates and the specific changes he's made around API access and how reports are handled). If he doesn't believe in anonymous shitposting, and thinks people on social media should own their posts, then it's not unreasonable for others (eg advertisers) to take teh same attitude toward him.
Let's *never forget* that the Holocaust wouldn't have been as effective if it weren't for *International Business Machines* punch cards and its ties to the Nazi party.[^1] I'm not surprised they split.
Remember kids: a crypto-fascist is still a fascist.
[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_and_the_Holocaust
All these threads talking about the same reports/same mix of companies
Consolidate or something
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38297685
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38306215