November 26, 2022

Elon Musk consults the people: "What do you think of the culture war?"

35 comments:

planetgeo said...

Here's a non-cartoonish question...why is Elon Musk the only person of any significance seriously working to get our freedom of speech back? Some of us don't find that one bit funny.

exhelodrvr1 said...

If he is pissing off the left, his shots are hitting the target, or coming very close. May need to adjust slightly due to the drop in elevation.

Big Mike said...

The wealthy geezer in the first cartoon looks remarkably like George Soros, the Jew who assisted the Nazis as a teenager in World War II. Hence it is accurate. The “fixed” version less so.

Ann Althouse said...

The cartoons are very well drawn, but who is the artist?

Mark said...

Well, as people have had success linking bootlegged movies to tweets this week and chief twit Melon Husk has a history of posting images without attribution, I doubt we will ever know who these artists are.

Gusty Winds said...

“I am rubber, you are glue. What bounces off me, sticks to you.”

Well drawn, but the cartoon is bullshit. Musk is now a fighter in the culture war. Not an outside observing manipulator. If we’re at the point where the argument becomes, “Musk is no better than the rest of them” he’s hammering the right nerves.

More profound than the “I know you are but what am I” cartoon is one of Musk’s truthful replies in the thread to someone pointing out the right needs to fund more artists and entertainers, not just politicians.

“I am neither conventionally right nor left, but I agree with your point. The woke mind virus has thoroughly penetrated entertainment and is pushing civilization towards suicide. There needs to be a counter-narrative.”

He’s right. That’s what really matters.

Dave Begley said...

We’re losing and the results will be disastrous if we can’t rally here in the fourth quarter.

Gahrie said...

Melon Husk

Take the richest, most successful self-made man in history and reduce him to a meaningless, infantile school yard insult... all because he threatens Democratic power.

You guys are truly pathetic.

rhhardin said...

Thurber "The War between Man and Women" is the definitive series, for some reason not present online as a full series. Consult your LOA Thurber.

Gusty Winds said...

Musk didn’t manipulate, lie, and spread propaganda like the global elitist in the top hat. He is not trying to keep the masses divided in order to conquer, and keep his own power.

Musk is fighting the guy in the top hat.

Sadly, the cartoon artist misses the entire point of what’s going on.

Swing and a miss. The left can’t meme.

Achilles said...

Big Mike said...

The wealthy geezer in the first cartoon looks remarkably like George Soros, the Jew who assisted the Nazis as a teenager in World War II. Hence it is accurate. The “fixed” version less so.

The second version is quite accurate and when coupled with the first version shows the motivations involved.

Musk and the Oligarch Soros stand in have very different reactions to the people fighting in the fish tank.

Musk realizes that the poor people in the tank have many things in common and need to get over the stupid stuff and focus on the things that are important.

He knows that the Oligarchs are throwing out distractions and bullshit to keep us divided. Most gay people are not interested in the Grooming bullshit in schools or the culture war in general. They would like to be left alone too.

But they know that there are people who refuse to grow up and will lump all individuals into a group identity.

Mr. Forward said...

"I'm still confused why people are bothered by Elon Musk running Twitter. Did you all forget the Chinese Communist Party owns Tik Tok?"

Katie Arrington on Twitter

rehajm said...

Dave Begley said...
We’re losing and the results will be disastrous if we can’t rally here in the fourth quarter


Don’t bet on it…

Mark said...

Gahrie, now do 'Brandon'

Don't worry, I know you never will apply your same rules to your side.

Just keep your head bobbing and Melon won't complain.

Gusty Winds said...

I'm trying to think of another platform I know like Twitter run by an intelligent free speech advocate. The free exchange of ideas is allowed, and bots, haters, and violence are filtered out. Some people use their real names while contributing, and other use pseudonyms. People from all around the country and the world contribute. Some choose not to contribute and enter the terrarium like Thunderdome, others just choose freely to read and observe. Politics seems to drive the most traffic, but subject matter also includes the arts, philosophy, science, nature, and many other aspects of our human existence.

I never really thought of the owner and publisher as a manipulator of the masses, even though it might be somewhat lucrative and self-fulfilling, and self-entertaining.

Can anyone help me??? I'm a little foggy this morning.

stlcdr said...

Both are true - for different reasons.

Mike Sylwester said...

Mark at 5:52 AM
people have had success linking bootlegged movies to tweets

Mark, did this begin after Musk bought Twitter?

Or have people been linking bootlegged movies to tweets for many, many years?

Gahrie said...

Gahrie, now do 'Brandon'

Originally it was Fuck Joe Biden. This was begun by a bunch of drunk college kids at football games. When the media tried to cover that up by claiming it was Let's go Brandon, people began using that instead to be more polite and to needle the MSM at the same time.

The idea that Biden is either successful or self-made is risible.

Mark said...

Mike Sylvester, it is new

Saint Croix said...

Well drawn, but the cartoon is bullshit.

Actually I think the cartoon makes a fairly strong point that certain industries -- the media industry being a major one -- profit from a cultural war and want to incite more and more of it.

The newspaper industry has long abhorred peace and quiet. "If it bleeds, it leads." Or another famous line, "You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war." (Attributed to William Randolph Hearst, who built a castle for himself and was mocked in Citizen Kane).

Journalists focus on the highly unusual events in our world -- crime, for instance -- and ignore the usual, boring, safe, day-to-day. And the internet just makes this phenomenon even stronger.

If you lived on Twitter you might think, for instance, that the transition in our society from the Obama administration to the Trump administration would have been a catastrophic, heart-pounding event. "Oh no! The world is falling apart!"

Did it? I would be willing to bet that if somebody videotaped a day of your life in 2016, and a day of your life in 2017, that you would not be able to tell which day was in which year. Despite our rhetoric and our internet wars, any real world shifts were gradual, slight, and almost unnoticeable in our daily lives.

This is not to suggest that elections are irrelevant. Only that we dramatically exaggerate the rate of change and how big a disaster an election can be. Democracies survive a bad election by course-correcting in the next election.

Saint Croix said...

Musk is now a fighter in the culture war. Not an outside observing manipulator.

Obviously billionaires do want to own the means of communication. It's one way to exercise power and attempt to rule a society. And Hearst was not the only rich guy to notice that. See also Jeff Bezos, Rupert Murdoch, George Soros and Elon Musk. And of course billionaires like money and want to make more money. So their media mouthpieces will continue to report on, and create, strife in order to excite interest and make money.

But there is one part of our "cultural war" which is very important. That's the twin concepts of free speech and democracy. Our right to speak and our right to vote is critically important. Attempts to destroy free speech, or the process of voting, are very dangerous. And that's one thing I've noticed, is that people on the left have become more and more hostile to free speech. And many of them have veered into other fascist ideas as well. I daresay many people on the left believe that Donald Trump should not be allowed to run for president. And these are the same people who loathe voter ID rules, or any attempts to protect election integrity. And Musk's takeover of Twitter infuriates them precisely because more Americans will be allowed to speak on that platform.

n.n said...

War of the worlds. Men, women, and "our Posterity" are from Earth. Feminists are from Venus. Masculinists are from Mars. Social progressives are from Uranus.

Enigma said...

Who is the most stereotypical billionaire manipulator / potential Bond Villian? Cast your vote for George Soros or Klaus Schwab.

Klaus, who's father immigrated from Nazi Germany to Switzerland, says:

"I respect China's achievements … over the last forty years," Schwab continued, referring to them as "tremendous." He suggested that China could act as a "role model for many countries," admitting that in the end, each country should be left to make its own decision regarding the system it wants to adopt.

"We should be very careful in imposing systems," he concluded, "but the Chinese model is certainly a very attractive model for quite a number of countries."



This is the same man who said that in 10 years from 2020: "You'll own nothing -- and be happy about it."


https://www.humanevents.com/2022/11/23/wef-founder-klaus-schwab-says-china-is-role-model-for-many-countries
https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/conspiracy/klaus-schwab-says-you-will-own-nothing-in-10-years/

Gahrie said...

Don't worry, I know you never will apply your same rules to your side.

The broader point is that both Trump and Elon used to be on your side. Then they became a threat to Democratic power.

Mike Sylwester said...

Mark at 9:22 AM
It is new

Thanks for your answer.

I never have used Twitter.

I write a blog about the movie Dirty Dancing, where I link to a lot of YouTube videos. Therefore, I know that for many, many years, people have been linking to bootlegged copies of that movie.

It seems rather odd that this has not been happening also at Twitter. Why not?

rcocean said...

I'm all in favor of Free Speech and the Free market. But i think elon musk owning Twitter is a bridge too far. And Faux News is a threat to Democracy. And so is the New York Post. And the bablyon Bee. We simply can't have HATE and plaforms that make us UNSAFE.

But otherwise, I'm all for free speech. And hearing all points of view.

PS I'm keeping Althouse under survillance.

Mike Sylwester said...

Following up my own comment at 10:35 AM

On YouTube I see, all the time, links to bootleg copies of the movie Dirty Dancing.

However, YouTube removes such links quickly, within just a couple of days. I assume they are removed in response to the movie's owners complaining to YouTube about copywrite violations.

I don't know much about Twitter, but I assume the situation there is similar. Links to bootleg movies appear for a short time, but then are removed.

My impression from Mark's comments is that such links to bootleg movies never have appeared at all, until after Must bought Twitter.

Rabel said...

"The cartoons are very well drawn, but who is the artist?'

Well, if you say so.

Jace Avery as saddrawingsbyjace.

Bruce Hayden said...

“ Musk is now a fighter in the culture war. Not an outside observing manipulator”

We had a discussion last night - or at least I had a tirade on the subject, of Musk versus AntiFA. Seems he has been banning some of them as pedos. That’s apparently a big hot button with him. Maybe his biggest. Among other things they are going after Tesla. And, as we found with the Kyle Rittenhouse case in Kenosha, there really are pedophiles in their midsts (he shot one or two of them). So, they are now protesting his banning of some of their Twitter groups on the grounds of being pedo supporters. They showed up in black masks, helmets, and shields, with matching Hammer and Sickle emblems on their shields (AntiFA has, from its founding, been a communist front organization, initially to violently contest control of German socialism with Hitler’s Brown Shirts). AntiFA was initially a Soviet front organization, but with the fall of the Soviet Union, their allegiance has naturally shifted to the CCP - coincidentally, the party and country that gave us COVID-19.

It’s an inconvenient time for the Democrats for AntiFA to resurface, now we’ll trained and well equipped and armed. You can probably thank Musk for that. Inconvenient because the Dems are in power nationally, and last time around, they used BLM as cover for their violence (there is evidence that they were often the ones to set off the looting by breaking the windows of businesses, then walking away as the looting got started). I don’t think that the Black (Dem) establishment wants a repeat right now of their communities being burned down by AntiFA/BLM. And the Black political elite are the ones who put FJB in the WH, and they all know that.

This may be an opportune time to isolate AntiFA from the Dem mainstream. It should be interesting.

n.n said...

Or have people been linking bootlegged movies to tweets for many, many years?

It's not new. It's a common practice done through redirection. Nothing has changed. Like abortion of human life, Diversity (Inequity, and Exclusion), redistributive change, etc., it will be done in plain sight with the State's religious sanction, or in darkness when they can get away with it.

Saint Croix said...

YouTube removes such links quickly, within just a couple of days. I assume they are removed in response to the movie's owners complaining to YouTube about copywrite violations.

That reminds of a joke.

If you ever shoot a homemade porno, be sure to play Disney music on the soundtrack. That way you never have to worry about internet distribution, because the Disney lawyers will get the movie yanked right away.

FullMoon said...

Life much simplerer when we were all united in hating Russia and Microsoft.

Saint Croix said...

Also, if the Republican party actually wants to fight a cultural war -- which is an open question as our party is filled with people whose favorite political motto is "do nothing" -- obviously the way to fight it is to fight for kids and their education.

Whenever leftists prattle about how "pro-choice" they are, we should say, "I love school choice, what do you think about that?" Empower working class and poor parents who want a better life for their kids. Destroy the teacher unions with monopoly-busting gusto.

Woke ideology is filled with insane lies that are taught to impressionable kids that are too young to know it is asinine bullshit. Unborn babies are not people. Women don't exist in biology. The world is ending.

These Woke monsters have been indoctrinated by the left. Many otherwise sane people think the world is ending because of climate change. Killing unwanted babies has expanded into ugly surgeries that ensure young kids will be sterile -- and likely candidates for suicide.

Of course many people grow up to escape this conditioning. People used to say that "conservative" was a process of growing older and more cautious. That may be true. But in our culture I think "conservative" is a process of outgrowing the stupid lies you were fed as a child. One day you wake up and you realize, "oh, Republicans aren't Nazis, why did I think they were Nazis?"

School choice is an imperfect solution, of course. The people who remain in the worst schools will still receive a bad education. But at least it opens the door for people who actually care about their children and want a better life for them. I suspect there are large numbers of parents who abhor the Woke agenda but don't have the money to escape it. The Republican party needs to fight for those people, and win their votes.

Quaestor said...

NYPost headline: Chris Hayes frets his 'worst fears' have been realized since Elon Musk acquired Twitter

Oh, if that were only true...

Lurker21 said...

So all Musk had to do to be above criticism was to emulate Jeff Bezos?

The problem with the cartoon and with so much of the talk about "culture wars" is that the billionaires who fund foundations supporting major changes in society are not depicted as "culture warriors." It's the people who object to such changes. There's no "culture war" if no one objects, so the onus is put on the dissenters.

Also, I'm wondering just who the evil billionaires are pitting against each other. Isn't it Black and White and Hispanic working people? As things are now, the bullying professional-managerial elites and the government are naturally against them and want them divided, distrustful, and at each other's throats. A different, maybe a better, cartoon would show the blue collars fighting each other while the 10% look on and enjoy the spectacle. The 1% feel pretty insulated from the conflict, knowing that it's unlikely to affect them (until it does).