A philosophy is being "piped to Earth," and "It's a death cult... They are propagating the extinction of humanity and civilization."

Said Elon Musk:

Listen to the whole context. He's responding to Joe's prompt to tell us why he bought Twitter, and —warning that it would sound melodramatic — he says he thought that Twitter had taken the mindset of the San Francisco area and amplified it and made it dominant to the point where all life on Earth was in danger. There's quite a lot of talk of the "Extinctionist" movement, and the phrase "death cult" is used repeatedly. 

"If you take environmentalism to an extreme," Musk says, "You start to view humanity as a plague on the surface of the earth, like a mold or something." He asserts that the Earth could do well with 10 times as many people as we have now.

ADDED: Musk goes on to talk about AI: "If AI gets programmed by the Extinctionists, it's utility function will be the extinction of humanity."

AND: He asserts that Twitter had become "an arm of the government" — "a state publication." But: "Old Twitter was completely controlled by the far left." I think I see his point, but those statements don't fit together. The government is not the far left, so both can't be in complete control. 

ALSO: "San Francisco/Berkeley is a niche ideology.... Is there a place that's more far left?... From their standpoint, everything is to the right...," Musk says. Twitter was an "accidental far-left information weapon" because the technology happened to develop in that geographic area, and then people who couldn't have created the "weapon" were nevertheless there — "co-located" — where they could pick up the weapon and make it their own. 

That made me think of the old adage attributed to Napoleon: "The tools belong to the man who can use them." That seems applicable here. And then there's also the old Audre Lorde line which seems to say the opposite of what was happing at Old Twitter: "The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house."

BUT: "The tools belong to the man who can use them," but here, the tool that was once called Twitter belonged to the far-left denizens of San Francisco/Berkeley, but Musk arrived on the scene with enough money to buy it from them.

"In the past, I would simply have shut down inappropriate discussions, but I’m no longer legally allowed to do so....

"My question, then, is whether it’s ethical to continue to teach material I know will expose students to bigoted, racist speech from their classmates, with whom they will then be expected to maintain a collegial working relationship. In a nutshell, if teaching the poet and activist Audre Lorde means forcing Black, queer and female students to endure racist, homophobic, misogynistic comments from their classmates, is it still ethical to teach Audre Lorde?"

A question to the NYT "Ethicist," Kwame Anthony Appiah, in "How Can I Teach When I’m Not Allowed to Shut Down Trolls?/The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on how to navigate new state laws restricting classroom discussions."

"A veto-proof majority of the Minneapolis City Council pledged on Sunday to dismantle the city’s Police Department."

The NYT reports.

Saying that the city’s current policing system could not be reformed, the council members stood before hundreds of people who gathered late in the day on a grassy hill, and signed a pledge to begin the process of taking apart the Police Department as it now exists.

I don't see how this can possibly be done. It sounds like madness. There is some ray of rationality in "to begin the process" and "taking apart the Police Department as it now exists."

Maybe it's a slow process and they take it apart but they put it back together again in a form that's just different from the way it now exists. Maybe it's just a new way to say reform.

Council members said in interviews on Sunday that they did not have specific plans to announce for what a new public safety system for the city would look like. They promised to develop plans by working with the community, and said they would draw on past studies, consent decrees and reforms to policing across the nation and the world.

So they have no plan or even a general idea of what it is, but they pledge to do it. I imagine a lot of Minneapolis people are alarmed and anxious but won't say too much about all this.

ADDED: "Dismantle" is an interesting word. Especially in this context, it makes me think of the famous essay title "The Master's Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master's House." And did you know that the original meaning of the word is "to divest of a mantle or cloak; to uncloak" (OED)? The extended meaning is "To render (fortifications, or the like) useless for their purpose; to pull down, take to pieces, destroy, raze."

"The specter of Dickens’s ranting spinster — spurned and embittered in her crumbling wedding dress, plotting her elaborate revenge — casts a long shadow over every woman who dares to get mad."

Writes Leslie Jamison — in "I Used to Insist I Didn’t Get Angry. Not Anymore. On female rage" (NYT) — invoking Hillary Clinton:

In “What Happened,” her account of the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton describes the pressure not to come across as angry during the course of her entire political career — “a lot of people recoil from an angry woman,” she writes — as well as her own desire not to be consumed by anger after she lost the race, “so that the rest of my life wouldn’t be spent like Miss Havisham from Charles Dickens’s ‘Great Expectations,’ rattling around my house obsessing over what might have been.”

Miss Havisham was "rattling around" over a marriage that never happened, so it's irksome to see her used as Hillary Clinton's point of reference. Hillary Clinton is all about a marriage that did take place, and it would be interesting to know what she would have been without Bill.

But the topic here is female anger.

If an angry woman makes people uneasy, then her more palatable counterpart, the sad woman, summons sympathy more readily. She often looks beautiful in her suffering: ennobled, transfigured, elegant. Angry women are messier. Their pain threatens to cause more collateral damage. It’s as if the prospect of a woman’s anger harming other people threatens to rob her of the social capital she has gained by being wronged. We are most comfortable with female anger when it promises to regulate itself, to refrain from recklessness, to stay civilized.

That's the discipline. If you're set on looking beautiful and commanding empathy, you've accepted the subordination and made yourself small. I think this is an important topic, and I like the photo illustrations at the link, but the essay is not to my taste. Quoting Hillary. Quoting this wretched nonsense from Audre Lorde: "I have suckled the wolf’s lip of anger and I have used it for illumination, laughter, protection, fire in places where there was no light, no food, no sisters, no quarter." Wolf's lip??

Here's the whole Lorde essay, in case you think more context will help.

Wait a minute! I googled "wolf's lip" and got some major help from Urban Dictionary ("Picture the side of a dog's mouth, the back part with wrinkly skin and folds of dark moist flesh"). Did the NYT understand what it was quoting?!

IN THE COMMENTS: Rob said:

"[T]he sad woman, summons sympathy more readily. She often looks beautiful in her suffering: ennobled, transfigured, elegant." Now we know why Cory Booker publicly anguished about hurting and having tears in his eyes.

From last night's Cory Booker comments thread, Hoodlum Doodlum says "This one goes out to Corey and T-Bone" and points us here:



You might be asking, yes, but who's T-Bone. Answer: "Cory Booker’s Imaginary Friend" (National Review).

The aphorism in the abortion clinic: "Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge."

Here's CNN's article "Texas filibuster on abortion bill rivets online" — about state senator Wendy Davis's effort to stop a bill that would ban abortions after the 20th week of pregnancy and the tweeting it inspired, including President Obama's "Something special is happening in Austin tonight."

There's also a video, and I'm inspired to write about an aphorism you can see at 1:57: a shot of a room in a clinic — presumably a room where abortions are performed. The label on the door reads "Audre," and on the wall, in large capital letters, there's a quote and the name "Audre Lorde." The quote reads "Our feelings are our most genuine paths to knowledge."

Audre Lorde was a Caribbean-American writer (1934-1992) who is a source of some popular feminist aphorisms, notably "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." The one painted on the wall shown in the video suggests an argument about abortion that resonates with abortion rights doctrine, that the woman finds her own meaning. The Supreme Court's cases depict the woman engaging in a philosophical/theological/scientific inquiry into the significance of the entity she may choose either to nurture within or to extricate. The Lorde quote seems like a feminist paraphrase, where the mental process runs along a path of feelings.

The woman entering the room is invited into an awareness of her feelings. Feelings are the most genuine way to your decision. Perhaps the woman entering the room thinks: I don't feel this is anything like a baby or that I am murdering anyone. Or: I hear my future child begging for life. The quote — to my eye — calls you to experience your conscience, and it doesn't let you off the hook. The painted letters seem to be the only decoration in the room. It's the place to focus your eyes throughout the procedure.

I wonder what women's names appear on the other doors. Do the names take the place of room numbers and are the rooms referred to by name in an effort to give warmth to the place? You're a name not a number.

I wonder what are the other aphorisms in the other rooms. Are they all so neutral and open-ended as to the woman's right to choose?