Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 0xDEAFBEAD | Hacker News Reader

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I'd respect Elon critics more if they frequently noted that they grade Elon more harshly due to his high level of influence, but I rarely see them do that.

Ultimately in a democracy, everyone is entitled to their opinion. There are lots of people who think the way Elon does, but most of them aren't as prominent about it as Elon is. Seems to me that in a healthy democracy, we shouldn't be particularly upset if an opinion that's common among the general population also has some representation among the elites. https://today.yougov.com/topics/economy/explore/public_figur...

Indeed, if this weren't the case, and elites had wildly different opinions than common people (and also more influence), you could make the case that we were living in a plutocracy or an oligarchy, not a democracy. So Elon's willingness to say aloud what many common people think privately is pushing us away from that plutocracy/oligarchy failure mode.

I think Elon has made major mistakes -- funding of OpenAI being the biggest, from the point of view of humanity's survival. But the hate he gets rarely seems well-justified or rational. Here's my theory for what's going on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38046411

No idea about the others, I do grade Elon as harsh as I'd grade everyone else who does the same things. I only know about his attics the other peoples because of his public profile.

The danger I see, because already happened more than once, is that once certain opinions are publicly acceptable, those opinions risk becoming policy. And once those policies get enacted, as history showed, a lot of inncent people suffer.

And with Musks outsized crowd of fanboys, he is even more dangerous than he would be simply controlling Twitter.

>The danger I see, because already happened more than once, is that once certain opinions are publicly acceptable, those opinions risk becoming policy. And once those policies get enacted, as history showed, a lot of inncent people suffer.

This sort of reasoning doesn't help us identify correct opinions or good policies. I could just as easily say: "If critics are silenced, the people silencing critics may be allowed to dictate policy. And once the people who silence critics get their policies enacted, as history showed, a lot of innocent people suffer."

In a theocracy, the dictator can make arguing for atheism a crime, on the grounds that: "Arguing for atheism causes people to go to hell. A lot of innocent people will suffer. Therefore, we throw atheists in jail, in order to save innocents."

My basic position is: If your ideas are strong, you should be competent to argue with those who disagree. If your ideas are weak, you should not bully others into submission so you can enforce weak ideas.

Insimply explained why I argue against right wing opinions everywhere I encounter them. And I am all for having those arguements. Not being American, I see the reasoning behind certain limits of free speech, advocating for hate and violence for example. It should be up to the courts to act on those limits, censorship of opinions has to be avoided. I have zero issue with opinions having consequences so.

And yes, we have seen time and again that, as soon as othering people becomes policy, really bad things happen. That othering starts with words, and the political right are those using those words, and ideologies, far more often than the political left. And it is the right who does that othering on things like ethnicity, sexe, religion, skin color... The left tends to other based on opinion, which while still bad, is a far cry from actually argueing for interning said others in camps, excluding them from voting, access to health care...

>That othering starts with words, and the political right are those using those words, and ideologies, far more often than the political left.

That's not obvious. Here is one US college professor (well-known open borders libertarian) on what he sees on campus: https://betonit.substack.com/p/orwellian-othering

>The left tends to other based on opinion, which while still bad, is a far cry from actually argueing for interning said others in camps, excluding them from voting, access to health care...

An editor for Huffington Post South Africa defended a post she published arguing that white men shouldn't be allowed to vote, saying: "[The] underlying analysis about the uneven distribution of wealth and power in the world is pretty standard for feminist theory". https://qz.com/africa/966763/huffington-post-south-africa-ed... What does that tell you about feminist theory?

In any case, the most important point is: I've never seen Elon Musk argue for interning others in camps, excluding people from voting, or excluding people from access to health care. In my eyes, your argument makes about as much sense as me saying that you should be banned from Hacker News because you sound vaguely communist, and Joseph Stalin killed a lot of people.

I never argued for banning Musks opinion, and I wont. Regarding the radical feminist in South Africa, call.me again when she has a realistic shot at becoming President there Sure, Musk didn' propose camps as far as I can tell. He is, squarely by his own words, in the right leaning political camp in the US. Amd the current front runner for the presidencial candidacy of that camp called for all of those things, publicly, during a rally on Veterans Day.

Also, one opinion piece regarding the rescriction of voting, which is just a nut job idea, is quite different from gerryandering, reducing poling places and planning to impeach judges wjo said they don'z like gerrymandering (which actually is a thing, multiple courts in the US threw out district maps because of it). Actions weigh heavier than words, always.

Funny that you think I'm leaning communist, were I live my political opinion is somewhere left / social liberal of the center but a far cry from the left extreme of the political spectrum. No surprise so, it just shows the difference between the US and Europe.

>He is, squarely by his own words, in the right leaning political camp in the US.

I remember him tweeting a meme to the effect of: "My political opinions have stayed the same while the left has gotten more and more radical"

>Amd the current front runner for the presidencial candidacy of that camp called for all of those things, publicly, during a rally on Veterans Day.

Has Musk ever endorsed Trump?

>Also, one opinion piece regarding the rescriction of voting, which is just a nut job idea, is quite different from gerryandering, reducing poling places and planning to impeach judges wjo said they don'z like gerrymandering (which actually is a thing, multiple courts in the US threw out district maps because of it). Actions weigh heavier than words, always.

I'm against these illiberal ideas in the same way that I'm against illiberal ideas from the left. I haven't seen Elon Musk show any support for them either.

>Funny that you think I'm leaning communist, were I live my political opinion is somewhere left / social liberal of the center but a far cry from the left extreme of the political spectrum. No surprise so, it just shows the difference between the US and Europe.

I don't think you're a communist. From my perspective, the mistake you're making is akin to the mistake of blaming social democrats for the actions of communists. I was trying to explain that to you in a way that you'd understand.

After all, squarely by your own words, "my political opinion is somewhere left / social liberal of the center". Need I say more? :-)

I think it's worth noting how the right sees things:

Many on the right would say the left others people based on ethnicity, orientation and sex (primarily against straight white men).

They would also say that leftists have far higher levels of support for using violence in response to words ("punch a nazi").

They also see a symmetry in banning support for "hate and violence" and banning support for abortion. "Surely saying "transwomen aren't women!" isn't worse than advocating for the murder of hundreds of millions of babies?!"

-----

In general it is extremely hard to come up with rules for what you can and can't say without already presupposing a particular political viewpoint is the right one. Which is putting the cart before the horse really.

Exclusively against white men would be more like it, one has to love the self-victimization of the most priviledged group of people in human history.

Historically speaking, it is common to argue that a group of people is super privileged in order to create the justification for atrocities. Just look at 20th century totalitarian leaders.

I prefer the liberal-democratic approach of ensuring rights for all instead of making decisions based on who is most privileged. There's no way to calculate privilege objectively, and the idea is inevitably wielded for political purposes.

Fully agree on the liberal-democratic approach. Hell, if you extent, just to pick a really controversial topic, adoption and full marriage rights to gay couples, rights I have myself, you are not taking anything away from me.

The important difference is so between calling a group priviledged and a geoup being priviledged. And men held power for most of human history, white men in particular since European colonialism became a thing. Women' right to vote is a fairly recent thing, the 1970s in Switzerland for example. Or bot requiring the husbands approval to take a job in Germany. The list goes on and on. White men habe been, and still are but less so, priviledged. Some men have a problem with loosing some of those priviledges so, a sentiment easily abused by demagogoes and populists (I put Musk in the latter group, more of an industrial / capitalist populist but a populist none the less).

In a sense the youngen falling into right wing extremism and islamistic extrimism have a lot in common, more than either of those groups like. But we digress, I think.

Regarding Starship, good for them to launch again. Good on the FAA to insist on high standards. Now we'll see how the launch on Friday goes.

> calling a group priviledged and a geoup being priviledged.

Group based reasoning is ambiguous in English.

When you say a group is privileged are you talking about the mean? The median? The peak? Every member?

Because you could easily have a situation where every person in power is a member of X group while the median member of X group has less power than the population as a whole.

There's also proportion of the total population to consider. If there were a group that only has 1% of the positions of power but every single member is in a position of power then is this group privileged or not? They can't control policy...

And there's also to what extent people in power actually push for the interests of the groups they are supposedly members of as opposed to the interests of the subgroup they're part of.

Ah, yet another discussion nased on semantics! As I don't want to use neither a dictionary nor linguistics, you win.

I'm not trying to "win", I'm trying to introduce readers to a useful tool to add to their toolkit for reasoning. A reminder that there's a class of potentially important ambiguities around groups in our language.

If it matters, this tool is also pretty useful for dismantling racism.

By most metrics Jews are more privileged (wealth, income, education, rate of murder, representation in positions in power) than white people in the West. And yet there is also genuine discrimination and hatred towards them.

(Also, you are somewhat out of date, e.g. white British boys currently have worse educational outcomes than girls or immigrants)

Anyway, you're very much missing the point by focusing on one example.

OP stated that many of the rigjt see discrimination, based in race and sexe, against white men. As I ahve yet to call those same people out discrimination against anyone else, I started with "Exclusively...".

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