"Whatever the truth of the matter, whatever right-leaning tendencies he may have had before a couple years ago appear to have been latent or unformed. Now the transformation is almost complete. He’s done with general 'free speech' grievance and springing for alternative viewpoints. He’s routinely pushing all the far right storylines from woke groomers to great replacement. One particularly notable hint about the future came in a fractious interaction on Wednesday when Musk rolled out his own antic Dolchstoßlegende manque. In exchange about advertiser departures and alleged media bias, Musk claimed that he had cut a with [sic] civil rights groups to create a 'moderation council' but that they had broken the deal. Perhaps needless to say, this did not happen. The reference is to a chaotic meeting Musk held with a group of leaders of prominent civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the ADL, on November 2nd. Musk actually announced the 'moderation council' days earlier. We’re hardly four weeks into the Elon era on Twitter and he’s already cueing up a storyline in which he tried to placate the Blacks and the Jews and the gays but they betrayed him and set out to 'kill Twitter.' Not pretty...."
Writes Josh Marshall in "Elon Musk and the Narcissism/Radicalization Maelstrom" (TPM).
I'm not vouching for any of that, and it doesn't reflect my opinion of what Musk is doing with Twitter. I just think it's an important viewpoint that ought to be out in the sunlight.
By the way, who first said "Sunlight is the best disinfectant"? Was it Justice Brandeis?
Here's Quote Investigator:
In 1860 the well-known transcendentalist philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson... wrote:
As gas-light is found to be the best nocturnal police, so the universe protects itself by pitiless publicity.
That's gaslight, not sunlight, but Emerson has the analogy that works in the free-speech context.
In 1879 the journal “The Laws of Health” edited by Robert Walter published a short article without a byline about “Disinfectants” which included the following excerpt:
Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Malaria, for instance, which is one of the most difficult things to contend against, is dissipated when the sun shines, and exerts its pernicious influence at night.
But that wasn't an analogy. It was literally about germs. Other journals in the late 1800s made similar statements. It seems to have become common wisdom, in the non-metaphorical sense, before Brandeis connected it back to Emerson's metaphor:
In 1913 “Harper’s Weekly” published “What Publicity Can Do” by Louis D. Brandeis which began with the following words:
Publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman. And publicity has already played an important part in the struggle against the Money Trust....
So, when you're talking about wanting to get bad ideas out in the open so we can destroy them, you can say you got "Sunlight is the best disinfectant" from Justice Brandeis. But if you're, say, recommending hanging laundry outside on a clothesline, there's zero need to complicate matters by crediting a Supreme Court Justice.
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79 comments:
Hard right?
Hardly.
Then again- free speech is opposite of leftist.
If you dare leave the thought-police left, you are quickly labeled a heretic.... by the hard left.
'...he tried to placate the Blacks and the Jews and the gays...'
He should never have tried in the first place.
You can't make peace with people who want to destroy you...
"Gays, blacks Jews"??? NO - Elon wants free speech.
He is kicking off leftwing Violent-terroist Antifa Nazis. So - that's good. But the left are going to lose their minds over that, too.
Why not just ask him instead of all this guessing?
He's not turning right, he's simply realizing the extent to which the left has gone insane, and are blowing up everything of value.
It's not surprising that Josh Marshall is casting about for a right-wing explanation for Musk's behavior. Musk isn't playing the left's games and so must be othered, must be removed from polite society. Excuses must be made for why people like Josh Marshal decline to engage with Musk on an intellectual level.
As a wise woman once wondered, "Did the censorship they enjoyed only make them soft and fearful and stunt their capacity to debate?"
The much-examined "turn to the right" vs. the rarely-discussed "turn to the left."
This reads like a classic hit piece on someone that the author feels needs to be taken out. I don't recall Musk ever saying anything about the "great replacement," much less endorsing it. Plus, I don't see Musk as "far right." I see him as a right-leaning moderate.
BTW, the reason that sunlight is a good disinfectant is that it is high in ultra violet light. Someone said, the other day, that Disney had a problem with mold in the fountain maintenance areas in World Of Color at Disneyland's California Adventure. The solution was to install UV lighting in the damp areas to kill the mold.
More and more when I encounter a news story, it seems like Dispatches from Another World. Most Musk stories are like this. Hard right turn? Twitter in chaos? Must be in the Dopplegangerland.
""There are various theories purporting to explain Musk’s hard right turn: …"
I always wonder if these writers are so sheltered they believe their "hard right" assertions or if it's done knowingly to keep their readers in the fold.
And, of course, the statement about malaria is factually incorrect. But maybe "mosquitoes hide from sunlight" would only make the metaphor better.
John 3:20 KJV: For every one that doeth evil hateth the light, neither cometh to the light, lest his deeds should be reproved.
(I knew that one from Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land)
Josh Marshall is a fucking idiot and a liar. There is some sunshine for you.
He's manufacturing the best-looking, most popular electric car - AN ELECTRIC CAR - but that's not good enough. He has to hate Trump, not talk to Rogan, allow over-staffing and never say 'free speech' because free speech is hate speech. That's the whole story right there. So basta with the pipe-puffing 'theories'.
One particularly notable hint about the future came in a fractious interaction on Wednesday when Musk rolled out his own antic Dolchstoßlegende manque.
Dear Lord... and people said *I* was a silly tw@t.
Thanks for letting us see what a complete leftist moron Josh Marshall is. Never heard of him before, so wouldn't have been aware of this wanker.
Elon is the great entertainer of our time and Josh has his part to play.
Musk's never, IMO, been a 'leftist'.
He's a pragmatist.
Does X get the results he wants? Then he'll do X. If it doesn't work, he won't do it or continue to do it.
His deciding criteria is "Does it work?"
Liberalism, as practiced by our ever-so-elite political 'betters' doesn't work for the vast majority. It DOES work for a very small minority, who's very enthusiastic about maintaining it the way that works for them.
Musk sees it doesn't work, isn't afraid to say so, and has both enough money to change the things he doesn't like and enough independence that he's not going to be controlled by the people who want to maintain the status quo.
Musk needs to make good on his commitment to publish the internal Twitter discussions on censoring the Hunter laptop story. Assuming they're in line with expectations, I look forward to watching the left explain them.
I’d suggest that both Musk and Bill Maher didn’t go right so much as the left outed itself as majorly authoritarian. Both Musk and Maher are more socially libertarian and liberal. But they aren’t authoritarian. The American Left, probably backed by China and Russia, exposing their authoritarianism. That either means they think they’ve won and no longer car OR that the left has made a major mistake. I hope it’s the latter.
Of course, as "I am Science" Dr. Fauci discovered in 2020, we now know that masking the face is the only effective disinfectant. And by analogy, censorship is the only remedy for disinformation according to all the experts.
As a Jew, I was offended by Marshall's comment. The ADL is not "the Jews". It's a particular liberal organization, which does not representr me.
"Perhaps needless to say, this did not happen. The reference is..." Perhaps needless to say, you have no idea what you are talking about. Perhaps the reference is to something you don't know about. Classical fallacy: WYSIATI https://www.google.com/search?q=What+You+See+Is+All+There+Is+daniel+kahneman&client=opera&hs=kOj&biw=1229&bih=578&sxsrf=ALiCzsbawIya3tZiwhN7geKYNwT33jpGtA%3A1669408162507&ei=oiWBY83IHpPl5NoP-_ivQA&ved=0ahUKEwjNoYuElsr7AhWTMlkFHXv8CwgQ4dUDCA8&uact=5&oq=What+You+See+Is+All+There+Is+daniel+kahneman&gs_lcp=Cgxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAQAzIECAAQHjIFCAAQhgMyBQgAEIYDMgUIABCGAzIFCAAQhgNKBAhBGABKBAhGGABQAFgAYJkHaABwAXgAgAFRiAFRkgEBMZgBAKABAqABAcABAQ&sclient=gws-wiz-serp
This take on Musk is part of a strategy to minimize the fallout to the ruling elite from the loss of Twitter. Whether the writer has originated this position as part of that strategy, or whether he is simply a victim in a bubble of propaganda where this baseless position is taken as gospel, almost doesn't matter. This is one of those opinions that is assigned to the believers by higher authorities, who probably have a deeper understanding of reality, which is cynical to the point of sociopathy.
"Welcome my son,
Welcome to the machine.
What did you dream.,
It's all right, we told you what to dream." - Pink Floyd.
Josh Marshall could use a little… okay, a lot of disinfecting sunshine.
Hard Right?
I’m guessing there must be another term now for Clarence Thomas, Kavunagh, et all ..
WRT mosquitos and sunlight. The malaria vector, the anopheles mosquito, lays its eggs in standing, unshaded water. In the tropics, if there's enough water to be standing, not moving, permanently, vegetation will grow to shade it.
However, slash&burn agriculture provides plenty of sunlight for whatever standing water there may be, agriculture needing that kind of climate or microclimate, too.
To even things up, the fly which causes river blindness needs moving, oxygenated water. That means streams with obstacles to stir things up. Every time you put in a bridge or dam with a spillway or some kind of water-lifter, you provide for disturbing, which is to say, oxygenating the moving water. The more the merrier.
Democrats only exist to get more power. That is all. Everything they do is in pursuit of more power.
Only someone who wanted unlimited power would say that free speech is right wing.
Elon, just like Trump, was a darling of the Left when everyone assumed they were on the Left. Now that they have wandered off the plantation, they must be destroyed, both for their ideas and because they escaped.
It's crucial that Musk be made an example of. If they can put him in the thought gulag, everyone (or almost everyone) will see their power and quietly accept their definition of the bounds of acceptable dialogue.
Based on where they've chosen to position themselves, for lots of people, the only possible direction to move is to the right.
Existential struggles don't come with three months severance pay. Musk has made the lives of the woke at Twitter more difficult, but they'll land on their feet or in some government programs.....It still remains to be seen who will inflict the most damage on the other. This article is an example of the bad press that Musk is getting. Musk strikes me as reasonable and moderate, but who can survive endless hit pieces? He probably won't make any money with Twitter and his other businesses will also take a hit.....Other billionaires will take note. The left may have already won a tactical victory already. Bezos or Zuckerberg or Gates are not going to be expressing any views on the Ferguson events any time soon.
Can you avoid godwinning yourself if you put it in German?
Pornhub marshall says what?
Churchill had it all figured out:
‘If You Are Not a Liberal When You Are Young, You Have No Heart, and If You Are Not a Conservative When Old, You Have No Brain’
I understand Churchill may not have said this but it rings true from my experience.
How would Marshall explain his own mindless, squishy fascism? Did he get ass-fucked in high school without a reacharound? Maybe he got hold of some bad cheese in a bodega south of the border? It's a puzzle. If I cared, I guess I could research the matter. Or just opine frivolously, like he does.
Local Home Depot is near railroad loading area, about ten miles from Tesla Fremont Operation.
ALWAYs see carcarriers with Teslas heading to the tracks. Usually two or three trucks in a row.
Coincidentally, location was once Ford plant.
if we are promoting hygiene in any sphere intellectual material or physical, we first need to develop a standard to assist define and make explicit what is wellness, disease and the cure / sanitation.
'left' and 'right' could be very different in this regard.
Now politics that leans right is a "latent tendency", a suppressed mental disorder.
When you are extremely left, anything in the center appears to be hard right.
Plus, I don't see Musk as "far right." I see him as a right-leaning moderate.
Freedom of speech has been decidedly "far right" for some time now.
Actually, everything in the Constitution became "far right" the minute people noticed it was written by a bunch of white men.
Musk in his replies to inquiries is stating the algorithms meant to throttle threats of violence, exploitation of children etc...were used to project SF and Berkeley, CA politics to the world, and paint it as the norm. He is publicly stating it’s worse than imagined.
Now Musk plans on using those Twitter algorithms for their intended purpose, and not for political purposes. Just because he let censored voices back in the room doesn’t make it “hard right”. Out of the gate it’s going to look chaotic. Price of Freedom, right?
Pardon me as I modernize a famous Ronald Regan quote. “The trouble with our ‘leftist’ friends is not that they are ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”
Disappointment with his personal life turned Musk into a conservative?
So, how do we explain Hunter Biden?
In my experience, liberals have the worst personal life.
Anyone notice the unspoken assumption that if Musk has become more conservative, something's wrong with him upstairs?
Why not? We’ve heard from Matty I already this holiday week. Why not fellow juicebox mafia member Joshua Micah Marshal and his thumbsucking observational stylings?
I didn’t know anyone was still listening to Josh Marshall. Musk already explained himself.
I wonder if and/or when the left will recognize calling free speech a 'hard right' concept isn't a good look for them.
I mean, they're defining themselves and it ain't pretty.
Maybe they don't care.
Apartheid to mitigate the progress of a conflict between Mandela's Xhosa and Zulu, which reopened with ascendance in an "open" society with private abortions, torture, really, in the wings, backed by transnationalist fervor motivated by resource sharing.
Both Musk and Maher are more socially libertarian and liberal. But they aren’t authoritarian. The American Left, probably backed by China and Russia, exposing their authoritarianism.
Before they got hung up on drugs, libertarians were all about freedom and being left alone. Klaus Schwab now asserts his choice of governing models: China. The Democrats are all about authoritarianism. Woodrow Wilson started it.
A nice description of the WEF agenda by Conrad Black.
The first rule of progressive liberal club is take a knee, beg, "donate", good boy... roll over.
To modernize a great Ronald Regan quote, “The trouble with our ‘Leftist’ friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”
Like in so many instances JM makes his argument through tenuous connections and gross rationalization. Why are non-Leftist consistently required to defend themselves against arguments they are not making and causes they do not support?
To modernize a great Ronald Regan quote, “The trouble with our ‘Leftist’ friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”
Like in so many instances JM makes his argument through tenuous connections and gross rationalization. Why are non-Leftist consistently required to defend themselves against arguments they are not making and causes they do not support?
Musk can work Twitte for a year or two, get its software developers tuned up to perform customer services rather than censorship, demonstrate to adverstisers that the platform has less crazies than purported, less bots than before, and more human people users, and have the public use it in the runup to 2024, showing profitabiity, then take it public again for more than he's put into it.
As a business ihe is using users to generate free content that is inherently easy to data mine for the advertisers, and it is selling well-analyzed eyeballs to those advertisers. He already shows a willingness to avoid censoring half the population of potential users. He might give users a larger cut of ad revenue than YouTube. He might have better analytics on users than Facebook. Advertisers may be shy right now, but they will not remain so in the face of such lucrative advertising targets.
I bet Musk will take it public a week before the 2024 election and move on to the next big project with a full bank account and a cash cow in his barn.
when Musk rolled out his own antic Dolchstoßlegende manque
That is quite a stretch to work in a Nazi comparison. Can you really trust anybody who goes that far out of the way to invoke Hitler in an argument?
I thought the reductive amateur psychoanalyzing of opponents was passé. It makes people wonder what experiences made the amateur psychoanalyst think and feel as he or she does. It undercuts serious argument the real issues.
There's a zany left (drag queens in the children's section in public libraries), a hard left (CRT, DIE) and a left-behind left. The first two coagulated and ascended to power; the last is left behind, groping for a party and a leader. The Left-behind left cannot stand the thought of supporting "ugh" Republicans or of being on the right. In my opinion they are majority of the Dem party but they are hiding their BadThink, until someone - a right-thinking lefty, so to speak - emerges. Elon Musk simply sees what is and has refused to be bullied any more somewhat sooner than the rest. I do not think he would be behaving as he is if he did not have the support a vital core of Twitter employees and if he did not know that he has opened a huge untapped Twitter market, namely, the American right. He's advertising to that market and very successfully.
It is because he's African-American, a Person of Color, a peach American.
‘If You Are Not a Liberal When You Are Young
Divergence. Rebellion. A god unto yourself.
If You Are Not a Conservative When Old[er], You Have No Brain’
Principles. Moderation. Diversity of individuals, minority of one. Reconciliation.
Maybe Musk took the red pill and then saw things as they really are..
Way to many in the far left side are blind to everything but their utopia dream.
So it is "hard right" to notice that the Left is putting porn in elementary school libraries, complete with drawings of sex between children, and drag queen story hours? What is one to call that except grooming? No of course not every library, but it needs to be opposed wherever it occurs. It is "hard right" to allow all speech? wow. Babylon Bee and libsoftiktok are hard right? The language they use is meant to "other" conservatives who truly have very moderate positions. The only people talking about segregation, for example, is the left (on campus mainly) not the right.
The Democrats were amused when Trump ran the first time and they enjoyed his nomination thinking that he'd be sure to lose, but he was never seriously thought to be a leftist. The Clintons got along with him in the old days, but that was celebrity stuff, not politics.
"Sunlight is the best disinfectant" makes me think of Port Sunlight, the model village created by the soap-making Lever Brothers, but is it really true? Is sunlight really as effective as commercial chemical products?
He lost me at "hard right turn." I just won't go past a blatantly false premise anymore. I don't have time for it.
Assigning political significance to everything and everyone, prioritizing that significance as paramount, gives government unfathomable power.
It’s the worst thing I imagine we can do to ourselves. It’s highly disenfranchising, to use the left’s own lingo.
What drivel! Musk didn't take a "hard right turn". The democrats took a hard left turn, thus leaving Musk somewhere in the middle. He is a strong proponent of free speech, something the left used to advocate as well. Musk remained where he was on the issue as the left abandoned those principles and decided that anything they disagreed with was "hate speech" and should not be allowed.
The lefties know that if they just keep up the volume and frequency of their BS attacks against Musk that they will get the squishiest of the middle of the roaders and the McConnell-tards to rapidly abandon Musk in desperate search of a more "peaceful", less drama-filled existence where everyone knows their place.
A fun game would be to come up with the required elements to achieve 'hard right, and hard left' labels.
I'll start with the hard left.
Disdain for the Constitution. This has been going on since FDR was shut down early by SCOTUS because Dems were wanting to do things they lacked the enumerated powers required. Been getting worse since Obama (the constitution fails because negative right?) and Biden is just mindless place holder for more Biden. But the core of the Dem agenda is in direct conflict with the Constitution.
I think he's possessed by the devil himself - what else could explain why he's not a liberal?
Josh Marshall is reckless and stupid with his language here. Maybe he is just reckless and stupid.
Is it just me? Or have libtards suddenly gotten about 30 percent more vile, stupid, and toxic since Elon bought Twitter?
Was the King's English "stab in the back" too lower class for Marshall? I guess so.
It is positively amazing how Musk owns the libs now. He's an arrogant billionaire alright. But at least unlike SBF with all his one-time Democratic admirers (was Marshall one?), at least Elon's rockets both go up flawlessly and come back down to land safely.
The only other thing is I have to laugh at this? "prominent civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the ADL." Is it possible Marshall does not realize how thoroughly the ADL has departed from its once worthy goal of actually protecting Jews?
Churchill actually said if you are not conservative by a certain age you have no 'mind' not no 'brain'. He was not saying that older liberals were stupid. He was saying that they were crazy--out of their minds. I think that's still a valid observation.
"Perhaps needless to say, this did not happen."
Coming from the serially preposterous lying groper-for-attention Josh Marshall of the spin/bullshit/opinion screenrag that advertises its bullshittery in its name, "Talking Points Memo", this is really, really rich. Why, with his high-falutin' prose, one might even think he was there.
And by "there", I mean, between the synapses in Musk's brain when he was having the convo with the guys in whose stringent interest it is to deny that it ever happened, and who happen to write the checks that pay Joshie-boi's overly-compensatory salary.
It's not really an "important viewpoint that needs to be in the open"; rather, it's just more predictable, boring spin from the old-guard establishment. All those wankers are interchangeable in their b'anality.
"Elon Musk has an informed opinion - Gays, Blacks, Jews hardest hit."
Is it just me? Or have libtards suddenly gotten about 30 percent more vile, stupid, and toxic since Elon bought Twitter?
@Jason, we disagree only in the percentage estimate. Still, for all her protestations they seem to have sucked Althouse herself in, at least initially. So it’s been working with people much closer to the center than Marshall.
"just getting the idea out there" without weighing in on its accuracy is lame.
Musk: Define the problem. Think up a solution. Implement the solution. All in a day or two.
" ... a group of leaders of prominent civil rights groups ... ": Well, lets think about this for a while ... have a few meetings in different cities and states ... bring it before a steering committee ... take a vote ... think about it some more ... " All in a year or two.
For anyone who's willing to jump through the hoops to get the article, does "Babylon Bee" appear there anywhere?
Musk's becoming "hard right" only if you define "moderate left" as "supporting the censorship of anyone who disagree's with us, on anything. Esp/ if they have a sense of humor!"
But I guess josh is just to blind to see the behavior's of the left that are pushing all sane people away from the Left
In exchange about advertiser departures and alleged media bias, Musk claimed that he had cut a with [sic] civil rights groups to create a 'moderation council' but that they had broken the deal. Perhaps needless to say, this did not happen. The reference is to a chaotic meeting Musk held with a group of leaders of prominent civil rights groups, including the NAACP and the ADL, on November 2nd. Musk actually announced the 'moderation council' days earlier.
Yes, he did
Then he talked with those groups heads.
Did he then tell them that their influence required an agreement not to attack Twitter? did they agree?
I note Josh doesn't address any of this
I did not know that para military arm of the Democrat party,(antifa), was composed of pedophiles.
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