Quintus 🏛️ on X - "Elon’s power lies not in his supposed inherited wealth nor his intelligence/work ethic/drive He simply knows how to wrangle autistic engineers into doing what he wants better than any other living person on the planet The baseline engineer is a very weak, frightful, and timid creature. This is why they chose engineering as a career path in the first place—it’s safe. They are deathly afraid of failure. They just want to not get yelled at, they don’t want the “bad thing” to be their “fault.” They are like sheep who get sick and die if they get stressed. If something they’re tasked with doing seems like it might fail, they will put all of their energy into crafting a rationale for why it’s impossible rather than actually making a good-faith effort at carrying out the task. They are masters of creating massive Rube Goldberg machines where the final output is an excuse. Elon has no patience for this. He sees through it. He is not a guy in a suit. The weakness of the suit guys is that they believe what the engineers tell them because the suit guys are ripping them off. They also don’t understand the natural sciences, so engineers have this power over them. “The naive autist who I’m ripping off can probably be trusted,” they think to themselves, not knowing any better. But Elon is different. He speaks fluent autism. He questions their assumptions. He asks them to innovate on a solution, not just the excuse. “If this way is impossible, why not try it that way?” These simple framings cut through the autistic mind, which tends to hyperfocus and loop on figuring out how to solve an unsolvable puzzle rather than go out and find a more tractable puzzle. It’s pure psychology. Elon exists in the liminal space between autism and not autism, he is a cognitive diplomat of the highest order. That’s why he gets shit done. He is able to process crude unrefined autism into weaponized autism at a scale and efficiency that cannot matched by any other living human."
Democrats Cruelly Make Fun Of Autistic African-American Jumping For Joy | Babylon Bee - "While the guy springing up and down for joy was not available for comment, former president and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump weighed in on the matter. "It's very sad, very sad, but unfortunately in character for Democrats," Trump said. "Very sad. Not good. Racism is bad! We love our African-American autistic supporters very much. They're the best, believe me, everyone says so. No one has done more for the African-American community than me, folks. Or the autist community. Absolutely tremendous. The best, maybe ever." At publishing time, the African-American autist had responded by buying the entire Democrat party and renaming it DemocratX to force it to support free speech."
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson Says SpaceX Hasn't Done More Than NASA; Elon Musk Gives Epic Reply
SpaceX on X - "Commander @rookisaacman has egressed Dragon and is going through the first of three suit mobility tests that will test overall hand body control, vertical movement with Skywalker, and foot restraint"
Antonio García Martínez (agm.eth) on X - "The fact humans are returning to space exploration, paid for by putting up a network of internet satellites and technically feasible due to reusable rockets that magically land on their rear ends, has to be one of the greatest business and engineering feats ever. This is history."
Meme - Renson Seow: "Elon: accepts risk of bringing back astronauts after Boeing screwed up.
The media: says "different spacecraft" as they can't even bring themselves to say SpaceX."
"Biden: Billionaires like Elon Musk are ruining this country!
Harris: Yeah, we need to tax their unrealized gains, forcing them to sell their companies!
Biden: By the way Elon, can you help clean up Boeing's mess and bring these astronauts home safely?
Elon: Anything for my country"
ABC News: "BREAKING: The two astronauts who went up to the International Space Station on Boeing's Starliner will have to come home on a different spacecraft, NASA officials announced Saturday."
"And if anything unfortunate happens to the astronauts I bet the media will happily blame him."
Media Warns Community Notes May Make It Harder For Them To Lie | Babylon Bee - "Members of the mainstream media sounded the alarm about the Community Notes feature of X, formerly Twitter, which they say makes it harder for them to lie. "It is the duty of journalists to report our truth, which sometimes doesn't match up with what many people would call 'reality,'" MSNBC's Rachel Maddow said on her program Thursday evening. "We often have to lie for the greater good, and X's Community Notes is making that much more difficult." Several anchors and newspaper columnists echoed Maddow's sentiment, calling on X to pull Community Notes from the social media platform. "How am I supposed to make you think what I want you to think if I keep getting fact-checked? This isn't fair!" CNN's Anderson Cooper said, his eyes moist with tears. Time magazine has reportedly delayed its upcoming issue, hoping to avoid blowback from Community Notes. The editorial staff, however, feared publishing only material approved by Community Notes and removing all lies would leave the entire magazine blank."
Melinda French Gates weighs in on the generosity of billionaires like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel: 'I would not call those men philanthropists' - "French Gates also told the Times that she found Musk's criticism of her political activism "silly." When asked to elaborate, French Gates said she thought tech CEOs frequently gave advice on topics on which they weren't experts."
Ironic.
Edward Luce on X - "Can't say this enough; Elon Musk's menace to democracy is intolerable. He's using the largest & most influential platform in the democratic world to stoke racial conflict and civil breakdown - in his own posts & what X promotes. Democracies can no longer ignore this."
wanye on X - "Progressives had every single large platform, lost one, and they think it's intolerable"
Mike Spicer on X - "It’s because too many of their positions cannot stand up to scrutiny. The way to implement their goals is to silence those that point out flaws in their thinking. Good policy requires hearty debate and sharpening of ideas."
Cheese For Everyone! on X - "Similar vibes to SCOTUS — any institution they don’t control is irredeemably broken"
Elon Musk on X - "The same legacy media dingbats who lied repeatedly, claiming “X/Twitter is dying”, are now saying it’s the “largest & most influential platform” 🤣🤣🤣 The real crime here is that my sides hurt from laughing at the irony! Listen Ed, if you want to refute something, it is easy to do on this platform, unlike the tripe you publish in your legacy paper."
Richard Hanania on X - "The Global Alliance for Responsible Media, a nonprofit pro-censorship organization, is shutting down in response to Elon Musk’s lawsuit against them."
Elon Musk’s X just sued a nonprofit advertising group out of existence
Sky News on X - "Tech billionaire Elon Musk has intervened in British politics once again by posting images of an offensive deleted tweet from a Labour MP. 🔗 Read more https://t.co/rN0Dx2A27K"
Fr Calvin Robinson on X - "@SkyNews Posting a tweet is now classed as “intervening in British politics”?"
Don Keith on X - "@SkyNews So you can post about politicians’ tweets but @elonmusk can’t?"
Weird. I thought only authoritarian countries accused foreigners of interfering in domestic politics
BBC Newsnight on X - ""[Elon] Musk is trying to pretend freedom of speech as some absolute right. It's never been an absolute right." Keir Starmer's biographer Tom Baldwin says there should be more regulation of social media #Newsnight"
Gad Saad on X - "What we are seeing is precisely why the West was such an anomaly in the history of mankind. Specifically, the reflex to suppress speech with which the rulers/elite disagree is the default reflex, and we are seeing a return to it. The West is facing the classic Herculean fork in the road. Take the easy or hard road in defending free speech."
George on X - "BREAKING: The European Union just issued a letter to Elon Musk demanding that he censor Donald Trump in their upcoming interview. Threatening him with "legal obligations" if he fails to stop the "disinformation" Europeans are interfering in American elections
"This notably means ensuring, on one hand, that freedom of expression and of information, including media freedom and pluralism, are effectively protected and, on the other hand, that all proportionate and effective mitigation measures are put in place regarding the amplification of harmful content in connection with relevant events, including live streaming. which, if unaddressed, might increase the risk profile of X and generate detrimental effects on civic discourse and public security. This is important against the background of recent examples of public unrest brought about by the amplification of content that promotes hatred, disorder, incitement to violence, or certain instances of disinformation.""
Meme - RAW EGG NATIONALIST @Babygravy9: "Today's headline from The Scotsman, courtesy of Scotland's former first minister Humza Yousaf. Preserving freedom of speech and thought for ordinary people makes Elon Musk "one of the most dangerous men on the planet." The battlelines have never been more clearly drawn."
"Musk one of most dangerous men on planet, says Yousaf. X owner using his vast wealth 'for some of the most wicked evil I've seen'"
Why do the left hate free speech so much?
As an ex-Twitter boss, I have a way to grab Elon Musk’s attention. If he keeps stirring unrest, get an arrest warrant | Bruce Daisley
He's upset the left doesn't get to control the narrative and stir unrest anymore
When the left controlled twitter, censorship was dangerous, of course
Twitter Shadow-Ban: Remembering the Journalists and Elected Dems Who Dismissed the Twitter Shadow-Banning - "For years, Twitter executives and journalists dismissed the shadow-banning complaints. Documents revealed by journalist Bari Weiss on Thursday proved the so-called “conspiracy theorists” were right all along"
Elon Musk Can’t Solve Twitter’s ‘Shadowbanning’ Problem - The Atlantic - "Since Elon Musk took over at Twitter, he has apparently spent a considerable amount of time “looking into” the personal complaints of individual users who suspect that they are not as visible on the platform as they should be."
One Musk hater accused him of hypocrisy for limiting visibility on hateful tweets, but Musk's original complaint was about lack of transparency on shadowbanning, so props to him for delivering!
Meme - Elon Musk @elonmusk: "When they keep telling you that you are threatening free speech for advocating for free speech
"Wait, you're serious?" *laughing Elon*
Liam McIntosh (He/Him) @Liam...: "Cisgender."
"Visibility limited: this Post may violate @ X's rules against Hateful Conduct. Learn more"
Weird. Even putting aside the free speech issue, left wingers used to claim that freedom of speech was not the same as freedom of reach. Turns out they didn't really believe that, and were just grasping at straws to hobble those they disagreed with
Meme - Richard Hanania @RichardHanania: ""Europe has free speech just like America, it just decides a lot more speech is not allowed." This man is one of the most important researchers in the world in artificial intelligence. Reminder you can be brilliant in your field and a complete moron about ethics and politics."
Elon Musk: "A reminder that free speech in America is special and we need to do everything possible to preserve it"
Global Government Affairs: "Last night, Alexandre de Moraes threatened our legal representative in Brazil with arrest if we do not comply with his censorship orders. He did so in a secret order, which we share here t..."
Yann LeCun: "BS. The EU also has free speech. In fact, the only EU countries that violate free expression have far-right governments, like Hungary. The US and the EU have slightly different ideas about what speech is okay and what speech isn't."
Terry Newman: Brazil bans Twitter, Trudeau dreams of the same for Canada - "in Brazil, X (formerly Twitter) was banned after what appears to have been an Epic Rap Battle between Elon Musk and a Brazilian Supreme Court Justice. Alexandre de Moraes had ordered Musk to suspend over 100 accounts on his platform, calling his order a “ battle against misinformation, hate speech and attacks on democracy .” Musk refused, accusing Moraes of “censoring conservative voices online.” Notably, the accounts Moraes wanted suspended just happened to support Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, with some questioning his loss in the last election. In retaliation, Moraes made Musk a subject of a Brazilian “fake news” investigation. The battle concluded with X’s legal representative fleeing Brazil to avoid arrest for not complying with secret censorship orders . His fleeing triggered a unanimous ruling in the courts to ban X entirely. Moraes threatened Brazilian citizens with fines of $8,900 per day if they even attempted to use a VPN to access X... Nigeria banned X after it removed threats of violence posted by, of all people, the country’s own president at the time, Muhammadu Buhari . India has threatened to detain or arrest employees of X if its legal demands were not met. Service has since been re-established in both countries, with Nigeria and India forcing the platform to have legal representatives in both countries. There is, of course, a non-zero chance they too will need to flee at some point. The Twitter Files uncovered so many levels of American government requesting information be taken down from Twitter that a formal system had to be created to manage such requests. The UK’s recently passed Online Safety Bill , yet to be implemented, will give media regulator Ofcom punitive powers and the ability to levy massive fines on platforms that fail to police and report hateful content to their satisfaction. To aid in this enterprise, a complainant can visit the easy-to-remember website www.report-it.org.uk and report hate under various categories, including disability, race, religion, sexual orientation, transgender, and others, provided a perpetrator is perceived to have been “hostile” in some way towards a person in one of these communities or the entire community itself. In fact, reporting others for possible hate crimes in the UK has never been easier, as the site “ Stop Hate UK ” has launched a handy app for your phone so you can report hate crimes on the go. Of all the countries hopping on the government regulation of the internet bandwagon, Canada might be the most devoted. The Liberal government’s Online Harms Act , Bill C-63, essentially sets up its own team of legal representatives , including a Digital Safety Ombudsman, a five person Commission, and a Digital Safety Office, all to ensure social media platforms comply with what they have decided is in the best interests of Canadian citizens. Platforms will have to hand over their Digital Safety Plans , detailing how they will mitigate Canadians’ risk of exposure to harmful online content, keeping us children safe. While the bill includes a number of provisions to protect actual children, and legislation of acts most Canadians would agree are heinous, like intimate content distributed without consent, it also includes acts that may be more difficult to assess, such as content that foments hatred. Under proposed amendments to the Canadian Human Rights Act, anyone can file a complaint against anyone else for posting allegedly hateful content. A committee will get to decide if what was posted fomented hatred, and issue fines of up to $50,000. Anyone who wants to be on such a committee probably shouldn’t be the person making those decisions. And the Liberal agenda of trying to control the internet goes well beyond “online harms.” It has also decided to micro-manage our content producers to ensure they meet obscure mandated cultural standards through the Online Streaming Act . Passed last year, the legislation requires various content producers to register, and then set out to ensure that content producers are filling Canadians’ web browsers with material they deem is “ varied and comprehensive, providing a balance of information, enlightenment and entertainment for people of all ages, interests and tastes” and reflecting “equal rights, the linguistic duality and multicultural and multiracial nature of Canadian society and the special place of Indigenous peoples and languages within that society.” Yes, Mom. As an indirect result of the Liberal government’s actions, specifically passing the Online News Act , Canadians have been unable to read news on Facebook or Instagram since August, 2023. The Liberals thought they could use the act to force Meta to pay news publishers for articles shared by Canadians on its feeds. Meta, seeing which way the wind was blowing with our increasingly bureaucratic government, refused. Brazil wanted to censor Twitter. Does Trudeau dream of the same? Given how enthusiastically he enjoys bogging down the internet in regulations, he’d probably relish the opportunity, if given the chance, to have more direct censorship powers."
Government censorship that's transparently politically motivated is good when it pushes the left wing agenda
Elected leaders worldwide call on Brazil to back off censorship as global elite call for more - "With U.S. authorities' silence on Brazil's Supreme Court upholding a nationwide ban on X and $9,000 fines for users who circumvent technical blocks – and the Democratic vice presidential nominee claiming the First Amendment doesn't protect "hate speech" or "misinformation" – foreign leaders elsewhere are stepping up to defend free speech in Latin America and globally. Former U.K. Prime Minister Liz Truss, three members of its House of Lords, Chilean presidential runner-up José Antonio Kast, current and former lawmakers from Mexico to South America and the European Parliament, five Republican state attorneys general and prominent journalists and academics joined an open letter organized by Alliance Defending Freedom International. "This situation extends far beyond Brazil, serving as a striking example of a growing trend of censorship by government officials, who are becoming increasingly aggressive in suppressing speech they find objectionable," the 100-plus signatories told Brazil's Federal Senate and Chamber of Deputies. Brazil's actions "could set a dangerous precedent that quickly spreads." American and European elites, from philanthropist Bill Gates and former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert Reich to Truss's predecessor Tony Blair, are increasingly speaking favorably of suppressing challenges to official government narratives, even preemptively. Reich may have gone the furthest, laying out a six-point roadmap in the U.K Guardian to "rein in" X owner Elon Musk through economic boycotts, canceled government contracts and arrest for "disseminating lies and hate" wherever the Donald Trump-endorsing billionaire travels, approvingly citing France's arrest of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov. "I certainly see a position where the world's going to have to come together and agree to some rules around social media platforms," Blair told "Leading Britain's Conversation" last week when asked directly if the U.K. "may have to follow Brazil's lead" on punishing platforms for disinformation in light of the country's own recent protests against unchecked immigration. As for "what the answer is and what the right system of regulation is, I'm not sure," but "there's got to be" something because "people can provoke, you know, hostility and hatred," Blair said. "Fascists," Musk responded Thursday to new Australian legislation to fine platforms up to 5% of their global revenue for not preventing the spread of purported misinformation... Artificial intelligence is serving as both the justification for censorship and a tool for protecting the public from purported misinformation, as tracked by civil liberties group Reclaim the Net. California lawmakers recently passed several AI-related bills, which Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom has said he supports, including a ban on content "materially deceptive related to elections in California" that plausibly covers satirical memes. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently apologized for his platform censoring such content. "We should have free speech, but you're inciting violence, if you're causing people not to take vaccines, where are those boundaries?" Gates asked rhetorically in a CNBC interview on his new Netflix series "What's Next?" A major vaccine funder, Gates himself spurred vaccine hesitancy by criticizing the lackluster performance of COVID-19 vaccines. He speculated the U.S. could enforce "rules" through "some AI that encodes those rules, because you have billions of activity [sic] and if you catch it a day later, the harm is done." Reclaim the Net noted Gates didn't say who would enforce those rules. Gates incorrectly stated U.S. legal precedent by claiming that "yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater" isn't protected by the First Amendment... Using the "pretext of combatting disinformation and fake news" – the latter not even defined in the country's law – Brazil has "targeted conservative voices for censorship" going back six years, including by blocking pro-life advocacy against the "pro-abortion" position of then-election candidate Lula da Silva in 2022, the letter says. It cited a 2023 survey that found most Brazilians felt chilled by these actions, which include "criminal proceedings against individuals, journalists and influencers" for sharing opinions, claiming they violated Article 41 of the convention. "The situation, severe and endemic in Brazil, has not even been included by the Rapporteur [for Freedom of Expression] and the Commission in their annual reports!" ADF International said. Court actions violate Brazil's own constitution, Universal Declaration of Human Rights and International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the new open letter to Brazil's lawmakers says. "Freedom of expression is not negotiable, nor is it a privilege – it is the cornerstone of every democratic society." Other signatories include Twitter Files journalist Michael Shellenberger, who exposed the efforts of Moraes to criminalize dissent and censor supporters of ex-President Jair Bolsonaro, former ACLU President Nadine Strossen and cofounder Melissa Chen of Ideas Beyond Borders, which translates and digitally distributes "vital, but often banned information" in authoritarian countries. Current and former U.S. elected officials include Sam Brownback, the former GOP senator from Kansas and ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, and the Attorneys General for Missouri, Kansas, Louisiana, Utah and Tennessee. High-profile academics include Princeton's Robert George and Ayaan Hirsi Ali at Stanford's Hoover Institution."
Meme - James Kirkpatrick @VDAREJamesK: "Again, the biggest change in my lifetime is that within a decade, purely because Trump won, support for free speech went from universally accepted as a core democratic value to being a fringe, far-right position."
Byrne Hobart @ByrneHobart: "It’s pretty mind-blowing that a prominent American academic is willing to say this publicly. A disturbing shift in the Overton window. (I’m genuinely taken aback—have Reich’s colleagues/employer commented on this stuff?)"
"3. Regulators around the world should threaten Musk with arrest if he doesn't stop disseminating lies and hate on X.
Global regulators may be on the way to doing this, as evidenced by the 24 August arrest in France of Pavel Durov, who founded the online communications tool Telegram, which French authorities have found complicit in hate crimes and disinformation. Like Musk, Durov has styled himself as a free speech absolutist."
@amuse on X - "Last week Neil deGrasse Tyson, America’s top “science communicator”, repeated the latest Democrat talking point that @elonmusk’s space efforts aren’t impressive or viable. The left hates Elon almost as much as they hate success."
Megan McArdle on X - "Elon Musk's twitter is worse in some ways--I see a lot more spam and occasional bigotry. But the changes to the moderation policy, and the resulting exodus of the most censorious people to other platforms, have also made it exponentially harder to assemble a cancellation mob,"
