When people tell you who they are, believe them
I was never expecting a savior but what’s happening now is actually worse: people are calling Musk a king.
Oh wait – they’re literally calling him a king because he legally filed a title change with the SEC to rename his position “Techno King.”
See for yourself: https://youtube.com/shorts/2pDhCcav_6I?feature=share Oh how human beings love being ruled, love monarchy, and looooooove anyone they can throw the label benevolent on. Like throwing velcro at plexiglass.
Elon Musk is a human being. And when human beings tell you who they are, believe them.
Now, I don’t completely agree with Tom Molloy’s take below but let’s definitely analyze Musk’s argument, which, from a philosophical/logical analysis, appears to “beg the question.”
Lots to unpack here but let’s stick with just the carry-on. Very quickly, there’s an assumption in line 3 (a false premise) that people ask their governments to pass laws. It’s totally bizarre (illogical). People barely give a shit about voting (in the United States, less than half the eligible population shows up on election day – and that’s IF it’s a Presidential election!) to say even less about the DIY wisdom tooth extraction people act like you’re asking them to perform when you suggest they pick up a telephone and call their legislator to ask them to vote a certain way on a given bill. LMAO – what the hell are you talking about, Elon???
Then in line 4 he says, “going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.” But for that to be true, “staying within the law is consistent with the will of the people” would have to also be true. That’s quite the assumption, and he offers no evidence to back up such a broad claim. In contrast, the writers of the US Constitution specifically delineated their desire to avoid direct democracy (i.e. the will of the people) in order to prevent the “tyranny of the majority.” Representative government (in the US, our democratic republic, also known as a constitutional republic) might lead to laws being passed that are consistent with the will of the people. And other times, definitely will not. By design! By the founding fathers’ strategic pre-meditated design.
Ok, so are we to infer that he’s totally on board with censoring speech as long as it’s within the law? Yes, read line 2 again.
What happened??? OMFG!
They got to him. (Remember when Bernie said, “if I ever tell you to vote for Hillary Clinton, don’t believe me”? And then he endorsed her?)
Who’s “they”? The EU. To wit:
Ah. I see. Mr Musk knows this well. (He does now.)
And who is telling Musk that he WILL comply with the EU’s Digital Services Act (which specifically outlaws freedom of speech) whether he likes it or not?
A censorship czar.
Now, people change … but not much, as wise PsyD and author Dr. Neal Clark Warren says. When people say something really wackjobial (here, the job in wackjobial is pronounced like the eponymous book of the bible), so wackjobial as to be completely out of character, something has indeed changed. But not the person’s personality preferences.
Six Possible Reasons people could say or do something out of character (here we refer to people over the age of 25 whose prefrontal cortex has finished growing so that their personality is fully “set” so to speak):
Head injury
NLP
Blackmail
They are being held a gunpoint
The person(s) they love most is being held at gunpoint
Bribery
Take your pick! It’s so SO easy to get people to move. Soooooo easy. Right, Terry? And lest you doubt that Elon Musk ever truly was a free speech absolutist, here is a small sampling of times he said he was.
… And …
Well, butter my buns and call me a biscuit! I guess Elon Musk had a change of heart! He traded his devotion to absolute free speech (this is anything except shouting fire in a theater and calling for imminent violence, such as tweeting, “let’s go set this crowded theater on fire right now”) for “speech which matches the law.” Yep, the law will be quite different in the EU from what it is in the United States, Elon. Terry made that CRYSTAL clear.
Gee, I wonder which of the Six Reasons people say or do something out of character applied in this particular instance?
In England, the law is even more restrictive — and capricious as it is dependent on the whims of whoever happens to occupy their Secretary of State office (see the middle column, second paragraph).
But Musk’s cray free speech tweet was not even the impetus behind my composing this substack. This tweet about the “encrypted communication” app Signal was:
Here are both the times he has tweeted about Signal so far:
Lol!! This is hilarious! Signal is a government op. No, seriously. As Yasha Levine, author of Surveillance Valley: The Secret Military History of the Internet writes in his substack:
Exactly how much cash Signal got from the U.S. government is hard to gauge, as Moxie and Open Whisper System have been opaque about the sources of Signal’s funding. But if you tally up the information that’s been publicly released by the Open Technology Fund, the Radio Free Asia conduit that funded Signal, we know that Moxie’s outfit received at least $3 million over the span of four years — from 2013 through 2016. That’s the minimum Signal got from the feds.
Three mil might not seem like much these days, especially because Signal recently got a huge infusion of WhatsApp oligarch cash to keep its operation going. But it’s important to know that without this early U.S. government seed money, there would be no Signal today. And that makes you think: If Signal’s super crypto tech truly posed a threat to the feds and to our oligarchy’s power, why would the feds bankroll its creation? And why would Facebook and Google rush to adopt its super-secure protocols? H’mmmmm…
As I put it succinctly in 2021 after both Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk started pimping the app (coincidentally, just after the January 6 Live Action Role Play at the Capitol), Signal was first promoted for journalists and then later for everyone else because it was created as a dragnet for all communications sent specifically with the intention of hiding them from the government (same with TOR).
Hint: if one branch of the government literally gathers/collects (SURVEILS) communications which they affectionately term “Signals Intelligence” and then one day you are mysteriously encouraged to send communications using an app coincidentally NAMED Signal, they’re telling you (teasing you, laughing at you, etc.) up front — right out in the open — that they have categorized in advance all of those texts as signals. And you know what happens next, right?
To end on a bright note, (not that you need it, you human rock of resiliency), check this math: only 22% of Americans even use twitter! Ha! After the margin of error, basically 1 in 5. It has no power to sway elections. Hillary didn’t lose because of Wikileaks any more than Trump “lost” because the Hunter Biden laptop story was censored. Twitter is an insane asylum echo chamber which is probably why the new owner is walking around mumbling to himself so we all can hear.
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Messages to Millennials 