Adventures of the Longest Muskrat

[Thad]

it would be cool if this text were text instead of a picture of text but to the part about how being unable to guarantee ads won't appear next to offensive content means the automated tools are stupid:

computers aren't magic and we need to stop expecting them to be able to accurately determine whether a given block of text falls into the category of "nazi" or "not nazi". Of course the fucking automated tools can't make that determination; you can fairly argue that makes them "garbage" but if it does then every other such algorithm is garbage, too. They're not HAL 9000, they're a slightly more sophisticated version of that filter that replaces curse words with fruits.

The problem here isn't that the automated tools are unusually bad, it's that the people running the site are. The way you reduce the likelihood of ads appearing next to objectionable content is with an army of moderators and a mechanism for favoring trusted accounts that are likely to post content that falls within acceptable parameters. Musk has gutted both those things, and also he's a fucking nazi.

The screenshot of text arrives at the correct conclusion, but that digression to talk about automated filters like anyone should expect them to work reliably in the first damn place is magical-thinking nonsense. Everyone's automated filters suck; it's just that other companies (and pre-Musk Twitter) have trust and safety teams to monitor their sites for offensive content. They don't always do a great job either! But Twitter's given us a demonstration of what happens when you don't have them (and, and once again this is the most important part, where the owner of the company has made an active decision not to discourage nazi content because he is a nazi).

[KingRoyal]

Musk has decided to go ahead with a lawsuit against MM, backed by a similar lawsuit from Texas State festering boil Ken Paxton

Strongly doubt Musk is gonna get anywhere with a fraud lawsuit in which he already admitted MM didn't lie. Basic claim is that MM created an account, followed some hate speech accounts that exist on the site, then got ads next to hate speech, which does not seem like an unlikely scenario tbh

Assumption is that he's trying to do what Thiel did to Gawker, and his best option is probably just to file motions to try and drag it out long enough to bleed them dry

[Thad]

Mike Masnick (who has some experience with vexatious suits by guys who've taken money from Peter Thiel) has a rundown on the deficiences in the claim: Congrats To Elon Musk: I Didn’t Think You Had It In You To File A Lawsuit This Stupid. But, You Crazy Bastard, You Did It!

[Thad]

And via the comments, Kathryn Tewson's lawsplainer thread on Musk v. Media Matters, et al., using only the ten hundred words people use most often (Nitter mirror).

Elon Musk asked the people who have the power to decide right and wrong to make Media Matters pay him because he said they hurt him.

Almost everything about his asking is stupid and wrong. It is so stupid and wrong that his entire asking is broken.

Elon says that the people who pay him to show their words to other people stopped paying him because they were mad that their words were shown next to Bad Mean Hate Words, and that since this is a lie, Media Matters should pay him.

Then he very carefully explains that X Corp really did show those paying people’s words next to Bad Mean Hate Words. So it was not a lie at all. It was a true thing that he wants to not be true.

[Mongrel]

And all for that glorious $5 in ad revenue.

[Thad]

And all for that glorious $5 in ad revenue.

Eh. Like Royal implied, it's not really about the claims in the suit; the real goal here is to harass, intimidate, and chill critics.

Course, that's only going to work on the little guys. Media Matters is one thing, but this shit ain't gonna work on, say, the Washington Post.

[Mongrel]

Well, we know that, I'm just highlighting one more absurdity of Musk's lawmonkeysuit.

[Brantly B.]

You know.

On nights like this, when I get blindsided multiple times by the things that set me off regardless of myself, because the internet has made it its mission to ensure that such things are completely unavoidable no matter where you go, I end up spending untold hours wrestling with my mind trying to get it to stop spiraling into violent and paranoid revenge fantasies. It's a lot of fun! You really should try it sometime.

And then sometimes on such nights while I'm grappling with the dark I get to see that the richest most successfullest person ever, who once, I must reiterate, lost more money that any other human being in the history of planet Earth ever had and was still only the third richest person in the world, temporarily goes and posts shit like this, on the public forum that he's the sole owner and steward of, you know, that thing I refuse to do any more because of the level of social management expected of you.



And I have to ask the question I always try not to ask myself: Am I just insisting on being incredibly dumb for even trying?

[Mongrel]

I believe in due process, but in Muskie's case I sincerely believe that there's enough evidence in the public domain - most of it his own words - along with his continued existence as a clear, present, and immediate danger to, oh I dunno, the entire world, that we don't need the ceremony of a trial. Just drag that fucker to the town square and Get It Done.



Which is to say, there is nothing wrong with feeling the way you do about him. Maybe I shouldn't say any of this*, but you are not alone.


EDIT: I think I should clarify that I don't at all think this would be a just resolution for Elon Musk as a person. A just outcome would be something like total destitution. Not homeless, but living in a small one-room flat in a shitty building, with rent due weekly or even daily.

But this would only possible with a measure of anonymity. The reality is that, having once held the title of "The richest man in the world" he will always have supporters. Nor will he suddenly develop any sort of moral limits. Even if his fortune is destroyed, Musk has more than enough sycophants clamouring for his beatification that he will never again face a day of true want, and like Trump and the other assorted used-car Keyser Sozes, Musk will always be compelled to victimize anyone who crosses his path. The same phenomenon is why we bury monsters in unmarked graves in unknown locations.

Our society simply does not have the ability or tools to cope with this problem, not right now; people like this are necrotizing fasciitis in a human suit, and lacking real treatment options, amputation will have to do.
*Hush, Thad

[Brantly B.]

Yes I know. The world is moved primarily by people who have had that argument with themselves, and lost.

[Mongrel]

On the bright side, the memes are already flowing. Because, dear god, any levity is welcome.

[Brantly B.]

Not that it's wrong, but it's also discouraging to know that becoming the richest person in the history of the world will only get you internet bullied harder.

Siddhartha was right. Smoke pot and masturbate until you die.

[Mongrel]

Not that it's wrong, but it's also discouraging to know that becoming the richest person in the history of the world will only get you internet bullied harder.

I don't know, Bezos is richer and he still gets kid gloves, and even in Musk's case, the "Masterful move, sir!" crowd was far louder for far longer. It takes a LOT of effort to overcome the pervasive "Well he wouldn't be so rich if he didn't earn it... right? Right?" rationalization most people use to accept the existence of mammon-bred greedmonsters.

More importantly, he's still getting his way more often than not - if he's going to bully people with petty lawsuits (or by buying the highest-profile social media site in the world) - never mind threatening to have people killed! - pushback is absolutely fair game. You basically cannot punch any farther up than Muskie.

Siddhartha was right. Smoke pot and masturbate until you die.

EDIT: Added a bit to the guillotine post.

[KingRoyal]

there's just someone untoward about bragging about your prowess at winning lawsuits on the website you own because you lost a lawsuit trying not to buy it

[Thad]

I don't know, Bezos is richer and he still gets kid gloves

We've talked about this before, but Musk gets more attention because he calls attention to himself. He's not just a billionaire, he's a celebrity. Wants to be in Iron Man and The Simpsons and Rick and Morty and host SNL and shit.

And for all that, I'd say people were mostly pretty positive about him up until the nazi shit.

Guys like Bezos and Thiel mostly avoid that kind of scrutiny because they're not actively inviting it. Koch and Murdoch are pretty despised figures but they insulate themselves from it, and even seem to enjoy that people hate them but can't do anything about it. Gates went the charity route and was extremely successful in rehabilitating his image; really his only miscalculation was assuming powerful men would get away with sex crimes, and I have to admit he was playing the odds on that one.

The clearest comparison to Musk is Trump. It's not enough for him that he's rich and powerful; he's desperately insecure and wants everyone to think he's cool. And also he's a nazi.

[Brantly B.]

And also he's a nazi.

Now that's just uncalled for.

Nazis, at least, are motivated by economic insecurity.

[Büge]

say what you will about the tenets of national socialism, etc etc

[Mongrel]

There's a question to have a pointless yet amusing quibble about: Is it objectively worse to be a nazi or to be a sad nazi-wannabe?

(It's not a question which one of those is more pathetic than the other, of course).

[Brantly B.]

Okay, but really, like:

The clearest comparison to Musk is Trump.

I think they were both born under the same specific kind of monkey paw: The Gift-Curse of the Second-Generation Billionaire.

These guys are not self-made, as everybody will happily remind them. And under the circumstances, they can never really be self-made like their progenitors were; that avenue of achievement was and always will be closed to them.

But at the same time, these guys are very much - and they will be again reminded of this constantly - very much not Old Money. They are not recognized nobles, not the Roosevelts, the Du Ponts, the Anheusers or the Busches... hell, they're not even the Bushes. There's a very different kind of "rich" you're born into if your daddy's* a billionaire versus if your entire family tree is. At the end of the day, Trump and Musk still have to pay their lawyers actual money, despite their every attempt to do otherwise. Old Money doesn't have to pay in actual money, which is why they don't play the net worth game. Old Money pays in influence, and that's a currency that these deminouveaus are always desperately mining for. Trump especially spends a lot of time on the golf courses and not as much time in the golf clubhouses as he's probably hoping for.

And then there's the other problem: A lifetime of public isolation. Do you think Donald Trump or Elon Musk have ever had a friend? Like, a real friend, that legitimately just cares about their wellbeing and would put their own interests aside to help them if needed for no good god damn other reason than because that's just what friends do? Fuck no. They can't. It's impossible to be that rich and have an interaction with a human being that doesn't want something from you. Even your financial peers are only evaluating you on the basis on what your continued wellbeing, or lack thereof, means to their own. These guys don't know how to act like normal human beings because they've never been one and have never even met one. As far as Musk is concerned, Iron Man is as much of a real person as your next door neighbor.

So everything these guys do is half-motivated by deep-seated and incurable insecurities. Oh, the other half? Cocaine. So much cocaine.

Like seriously everybody's always like "I was so stupid for trusting Elon Musk years ago but now I see what his true colors are" and those aren't exactly false statements but you all need to stop kicking yourself. Musk was a... functionally-functional human being for most of his career. Then Joe Rogan had him do drugs in public as a bit and then Grimes introduced him to the hard stuff and pretty god damn quickly he turned into... this... guy. And no, this isn't some conspiracy theory; he and Yoko are documented going full Scarface in front of journalists on purpose. These guys really really want to believe and/or prove that they're as invulnerable as they feel entitled to by birthright.

Trump, of course, has been tweaking constantly in our faces for most of a decade now, and a moderately experienced DEA agent could probably chart the exact mg he's been dosing over time just from observing him.

"So what," I'm pretending you're asking yourself because you're probably actually trying to figure out how to get me back on internet leave. "Do you feel sorry for these guys, or what?" Ehhhh. Eh. A little. But they're not only children, either, so clearly you don't have to be a douchenozzle if you were born moderately wealthy.

Siddhartha was right, again. If you have so much that it's never enough, then you need to chuck it all until you figure yourself out. And I mean really chuck it all. The deminouveau community gets it, but then their solution is to spend a few hundred thousand dollars to have an air conditioned tent in the desert and easy access to even more drugs because they are stupid fucking assholes from Western Culture. Do I feel sorry for these guys? No.

Do I want them to suffer more?

No.

But it's not for their sake, because I'm not their friend either. I'm just tired of living in a society that's losing an Opium War with its own god damned self.


If you've got a rebuttal, that's great! Do not post it, and if you were tempted to at all, delete this post immediately.



* And/or your mommy.

[Upthorn]

I have my own pet theory about Trump/Musk types.
When you grow up sheltered from all consequences, you never learn that your actions actually matter.
And if your actions don't actually matter, then there's no reason not to just do whatever benefits you all the time.

How thick of steel do you need for a space capsule to survive launch? Shave that in half. Why spend double the money on materials cost when it doesn't actually matter?

And since your actions don't have any consequences, any backlash you face from them is totally unexpected and unpredictable.