Elon is a narcissistic man-child with too much influence. But he's not a Nazi, and I'm really sick of Americans throwing that word around without a modicum of thought.
Nazis are why my great-grandfather fled Poland at 17 after losing his brother and both parents. He evaded the Germans across Europe, joined the Polish government in exile in Scotland, and never returned. He married a Scottish woman while he had no fixed address in 1947, found some kind of peace working as a coal miner for 37 years in the worst conditions imaginable, and didn't see his sisters again for decades. He didn't even know if they were alive.
Millions were displaced like this, millions more had their family lines ended entirely. You trivialise that when you slap "Nazi" on every arsehole with a platform.
Money and power are not the same thing. You just make it true by believing it. The boss of IKEA's political opinions don't matter here in Sweden because he can't actually do anything (He’s an actual documented Nazi sympathiser btw). The institutions won't let him. If yours will, that's a problem with your institutions, not a reason to call someone a Nazi.
How much of your headspace is Musk renting? He does not matter as much as you think. And if he did, you'd be better off explaining why what he says is dangerous rather than screaming "Nazi" into the void.
Dismissing someone isn't the same as defeating them. You want bad ideas to not take root? Dispel them. Make the argument. Show why it's wrong. That changes minds, or at least puts enough out there that the ideas don't land with someone else (which is why the rise of the right is happening). Shouting "Nazi" and walking off doesn't make the problem go away. It just moves it somewhere you can't see it, and it'll come back for you, probably wearing a stupid red hat when it does.
Ok so make that case. What specifically is he doing, what mechanisms is he using, what does the trajectory look like? Because that’s an argument worth having and I’d probably agree with a lot of it. But “this is a Nazi before he gets into his stride” is still just the label doing the work instead of the argument. That’s my entire point.
I’ll grant you he’s a Nazi sympathiser, there’s enough evidence for that and its easy to lay it out. But that’s the argument you should be making, with specifics, not just calling him a Nazi and leaving it there. Because the specifics are what actually alarm people. The label just lets them dismiss you.
Wide reaching propaganda that advocates for a white ethnostate (this alone is enough), explicit displays of Nazism with the heil, financial support to white supremacist parties in the US and abroad.
See, this is what I’m asking for. You’re making an actual argument now and I don’t even disagree with most of it. The AfD support and the white solidarity stuff is indefensible. I’d call him a Nazi sympathiser based on the evidence.
But that’s not what the original comment said. It said “he’s a Nazi and there’s nothing to debate.” There’s a world of difference between building the case you just built and just slapping the label on and shutting down the conversation. One of those persuades people. The other one lets them dismiss you.
> If we turn our back on the voting population you have to accept that someone else who reaches out to them gets their vote.
So you need to start spreading fairy tales too?
A bunch of those votes are from people that don't like what's going on. But if you ask them what they do want, you get blank stares. It's easy to, mostly with hindsight, say what things were bad decisions. It's much harder to be in favor of something because that makes you 'vulnerable'.
To keep it US centric, some person campaigned on cost of living issues and how he would fix them all. He got plenty of votes for that and just doesn't care (paraphrasing).
I can campaign on lower taxes, better healthcare, better schools, higher wages and more jobs.... But unless I have a way to actually get there, accounting for political realities, that doesn't really mean anything...
Hilary's Basket of Depolrables speech 2 months before voting
> you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. (Laughter/applause) Right? (Laughter/applause) They're racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic – you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people – now have 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks – they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.
She's talking about more than 30 million voters there. She's actively rejecting them, and criticising Trump for engaging with them.
> She's talking about more than 30 million voters there. She's actively rejecting them, and criticising Trump for engaging with them.
Ok, but let's say there are 5M xenophobic people. What's your proposed solution for bringing them back into the fold?
It used to be that there was a shared basis of facts. Numbers don't lie, you can explain them any way you want though.
In the past 10 years, America has really just lost it's ability to look at numbers. Partially because of them being explained differently by both sides but mostly I think because of actively discrediting them by one side that doesn't want to talk numbers, but feelings.
Trump wants to address feelings, he'll lose any other debate. He doesn't know his facts, he doesn't care about them, he's basically built his life on selling a brand. And a brand is whatever you think it is today.
"losing by default" on elmu's "X" is actually totally okay
> If we turn our back on the voting population
I don't see how refusing to patronize 1 nazi is "turning your back on the voting population". Especially when the voting population doesn't like nazis. It's more like embracing the voting population.
But if far right parties are gaining votes - then some voting population is giving votes to them. Or are you saying that far right parties are not Nazis?
Which votes are those again? In the USA, which we're talking about here.
If refusing to patronize 1 nazi means the far right gets more voters, we would expect to see that in USA election results over the last year or so.
Fortunately, this hypothesis is not borne out in the data. In fact, I'd say your purported correlation is inverted, but I suspect there is a deeper, correlated variable: "doesn't like nazis" -> ( "doesn't vote for nazis", "doesn't patronize nazis" ).
We must be looking at different data. Most of Europe has seen a significant increase in far right support. Italy, France, Germany. And in the US, like it or not, there are people who feel represented by the MAGA movement. And last I checked - they managed to elect a president who invented this acronym.
Pretending these people don't exist might feel nice but ignore them at your peril. If this is what "Nazis don't vote" looks like - what would it look like when they start?
That’s a strawman. The real reason is the ridiculous amount of unchecked hate that is allowed to run amok on the internet that it’s becoming normalized. Everyone is susceptible to propaganda and no one has a chance when you’re constantly bombarded by it. Having a “debate” doesn’t work with fascism, that’s what they “engage” in while they are implementing their plans.
