Elon Musk Twitter Trainwreck Mega-Thread

[Jacob Morres]

Can't believe twitter got this fked

I wonder what it's stock price would be if it was still public

[Oeaohoo]

Reflecting on it, what I wrote about Musk representing some kind of counter-elite is almost certainly too sympathetic. We always have to remember that the primary function of democracy is to hold together a society of people who have very little in common. Rather than letting these people fight amongst each other, as they really want to do, an abstracted form of conflict is ritually played out every couple of years in the form of an election. As the democratic society becomes increasingly strained under the chaos of diversity, increasingly regular bouts of this abstracted conflict are required just to hold things together. The whole mechanism is little more than a way to divert conflict into controlled and contained channels, so that the mediocrity and decadence may flow on into the night of civilisation itself, and the “enemy party” is the secularised form of the ritual “Scapegoat” which René Girard spoke about in his books. Musk is just the right-wing form of this regime containment. At best, he will dial down the Woke messaging a little bit and make Twitter a less “anal-retentive” dominant space. Nothing will really change and Clown World will keep on Honking, until eventually it collapses under the weight of its own absurdity. Nothing to see here.

[Topspin715]

On 11/8/2022 at 1:57 PM, LordFall said:

I have a bit of faith in their hustler's university program though, that seems like an honest product with honest value. 

We really need to have a national debate on the US about the purpose of 'free speech' and what legal exceptions we should impose on it.  there already are a handful of restrictions although the US is less strict than other advanced countries).

Beyond that, what are the obligations of private entitles to uphold these laws and maybe even privately enforce these violations.  Few things are clear with the internet.

As a common matter of human decency, I think internet speech should be moderated but that is a personal value of mine.  I don't think there is any reason in a civil context to engage in racist or hateful speech.  As civil society breaks down, so will civil discourse, and vice versa.  Private business owners and operators do not have a legal responsibility in the US to protect civil discourse or speech but it would be nice if we had more people who recognized the grave importance of it.

[Leo Gura]

On 12/5/2022 at 3:10 PM, Oeaohoo said:

That's not an agenda. That's just the level of development of Silicon Valley and the tech world. Techy people are quite socially liberal and pluralistic. That's not a bug, that's a feature.

It's the same situation in academia. It's not that academia is corrupt or biased, it's that academia attracts more intelligent people, which tend to have higher stages of development and therefore vote more liberal. This is a natural development asymmetry.

Higher stages of development are not symmetrical with lower. People in power will have higher stages of development and will be more liberal than the population they have power over. This is not a mistake. Leadership and high-functioning requires higher stages of development. You cannot run a company like Google or Microsoft at a stage Red or Blue level of development. Google & Microsoft are at minimum stage Orange+ companies. If they were less, they couldn't be as successful and big as they are. Which is why you don't see companies like Google in Iran or even Alabama.

It's not an accident that the biggest tech companies were founded in the most liberal parts of the world, like California and Washington. Yeah, people who live in California are very progressive. This should surprise no one. But pluralism is exactly what's necessary for a healthy social media platform.

Edited December 7, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Oeaohoo]

5 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

That's not an agenda.

Not in itself. The agenda is the force-feeding of these values onto everybody else.

5 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

That's just the level of development of Silicon Valley and the tech world. Techy people are quite socially liberal and pluralistic. That's not a bug, that's a feature.

I suspected that someone would say this. It is the logical deduction from viewing everything in terms of linearly ascending stages of development. Looking through history, I see no evidence for this view. Instead, it is clear that development eventually becomes the downfall of human societies. The pluralistic values that you speak of have existed many times before. The trouble is that every time a civilisation has become excessively liberal and cosmopolitan, it has collapsed. The Tower of Babel and all that jazz. Liberalism is largely parasitic upon decadence.

4 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

It's the same situation in academia. It's not that academia is corrupt or biased, it's that academia attracts more intelligent people, which tend to have higher stages of development and therefore vote more liberal. This is a natural development asymmetry.

This is naive. As an example, I recently read that Sociology was created under the Nazi party: ‘It was under Hitler’s regime that statistically based sociology and social history got their start at Leipzig and other German universities. It is an irony bordering on the absurd that such a discipline was repackaged as a decisive break from the Nazi-tainted German past when it was promoted in the postwar period. In the late 1940s this relatively new discipline was brought back counterfactually or mistakenly as an effort to “overcome the German past.”‘

In a very short time, Sociology went from being a vehicle for the refinement of Nazi ideas to a vehicle for the likes of Adorno and Marcuse to express their Freudian-Marxist lamentations. This shows how quickly and radically the ideological agenda of an academic discipline can change. Many of the Nazis were extremely intelligent and capable scholars, and yet they were still “undeveloped” enough to follow Hitler off of a cliff, like you spoke about in your recent episode.

5 hours ago, Leo Gura said:

Higher stages of development are not symmetrical with lower. People in power will have higher stages of development and will be more liberal than the population they have power over. This is not a mistake. Leadership and high-functioning requires higher stages of development.

By this point I probably sound needlessly argumentative, but this also rings false. Leadership requires intelligence, organisation and an intensity of vision. You can have these at any “stage of development”. If a leader is too far beyond the people he is leading, they won’t resonate with him, which is precisely what is happening in the tech world. There are many times in history where a leader has even taken people “backwards”. Isn’t that what you Americans fear with somebody like Trump?

The short version of everything that I have said above is that development is a circle and not a straight line. 

[something_else]

1 hour ago, Oeaohoo said:

The short version of everything that I have said above is that development is a circle and not a straight line. 

You actually (unknowingly I think) uncovered an important aspect of 'spiral' dynamics with this sentence. There's a reason it's spiral dynamics and not line dynamics. It combines a line + circle model of development into a spiral model

[Danioover9000]

@something_else

11 minutes ago, something_else said:

You actually (unknowingly I think) uncovered an important aspect of 'spiral' dynamics with this sentence. There's a reason it's spiral dynamics and not line dynamics. It combines a line + circle model of development into a spiral model

   What a shocking insight, never knew that lines + circles of development equal curly swirlies of evolution. Chaos theory and butterfly effect proven!

[Oeaohoo]

14 minutes ago, something_else said:

You actually (unknowingly I think) uncovered an important aspect of 'spiral' dynamics with this sentence. There's a reason it's spiral dynamics and not line dynamics. It combines a line + circle model of development into a spiral model

But which way is the spiral going? 

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold”!

This seems closer to the truth…

[Oeaohoo]

To illustrate the key point: By the 5th Century AD, the Roman Empire had grown to encompass all of Western Europe, North Africa and the Middle East. An extremely pluralistic society, religious cults and cultural customs from all across the empire were tolerated. In amidst all of this, the North African bishop St. Augustine launched a polemical assault, The City of God Against the Pagans, on the abject decadence which surrounded him:

Quote

But the worshippers and admirers of these gods delight in imitating their scandalous iniquities, and are nowise concerned that the republic be less depraved and licentious. Only let it remain undefeated, they say, only let it flourish and abound in resources; let it be glorious by its victories, or still better, secure in peace; and what matters it to us? This is our concern, that every man be able to increase his wealth so as to supply his daily prodigalities, and so that the powerful may subject the weak for their own purposes. Let the poor court the rich for a living, and that under their protection they may enjoy a sluggish tranquillity; and let the rich abuse the poor as their dependants, to minister to their pride. Let the people applaud not those who protect their interests, but those who provide them with pleasure. Let no severe duty be commanded, no impurity forbidden. Let kings estimate their prosperity, not by the righteousness, but by the servility of their subjects. Let the provinces stand loyal to the kings, not as moral guides, but as lords of their possessions and purveyors of their pleasures; not with a hearty reverence, but a crooked and servile fear. Let the laws take cognisance rather of the injury done to another man's property, than of that done to one's own person. If a man be a nuisance to his neighbor, or injure his property, family, or person, let him be actionable; but in his own affairs let everyone with impunity do what he will in company with his own family, and with those who willingly join him. Let there be a plentiful supply of public prostitutes for every one who wishes to use them, but specially for those who are too poor to keep one for their private use. Let there be erected houses of the largest and most ornate description: in these let there be provided the most sumptuous banquets, where every one who pleases may, by day or night, play, drink, vomit, dissipate. Let there be everywhere heard the rustling of dancers, the loud, immodest laughter of the theatre; let a succession of the most cruel and the most voluptuous pleasures maintain a perpetual excitement. If such happiness is distasteful to any, let him be branded as a public enemy; and if any attempt to modify or put an end to it let him be silenced, banished, put an end to. Let these be reckoned the true gods, who procure for the people this condition of things, and preserve it when once possessed. Let them be worshipped as they wish; let them demand whatever games they please, from or with their own worshippers; only let them secure that such felicity be not imperilled by foe, plague, or disaster of any kind.

This fiery polemic applies word for word to our own time... And what happened in the end? Did the pluralistic and liberal empire keep on spiralling upwards forever? No! The empire was ravaged, they were conquered by barbarians and, out of the ashes of their decline, emerged Christendom.

Edited December 7, 2022 by Oeaohoo

[Raze]

 

Edited December 9, 2022 by Raze

[Oeaohoo]

Why don’t these people just come out and say it? They want to live in a post-liberal one-party democracy where everyone is forced at flower-gun point to comply to the progressive agenda.

Oh, my mistake, we mustn’t call it an agenda, that might give it away! It is the entirely beneficent guiding of us undeveloped lambs towards the light by the Shepherd of our souls, those “most developed folks in the world” over at Silicon Valley of the Shadow of Death.

The Right must stop appealing to “freedom of speech” because the age of “freedom” is already over. Liberalism was only ever a brief respite between two forms of illiberalism: the enforcement of Truth, and the enforcement of lies.

[Leo Gura]

Blacklisting and shadow-banning is concerning and should be investigated.

The problem is that blacklisting and shadow-banning will still happen under Elon Musk. He himself said that trolls & racists will get downranked in the algorithms.

He is not going to be able to reinvent this wheel. But he will give right-wingers a sorts of things to cry about.

The ranking algirthims of these companies where never about free speech, they were always skewed by financial motive. When you search Google, the results it serves up to you is all stuff that it thinks will benefit its users the most. It's not trying to be "fair".

Edited December 9, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Oeaohoo]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

The ranking algirthims of these companies where never about free speech, they were always skewed by financial motive. When you search Google, the results it serves up to you is all stuff that it thinks will benefit its users the most. It's not trying to be "fair".

This was at least nominally a “free market”, so that it is always self-described Classic Liberals who make the most noise about free speech. In the 21st Century, freedom is subordinated to Safety. This is typical decadence as the feminisation of culture, though I know it is supposed to be “Stage Green” growing out of “Stage Orange”.

Not that the “free market” was much better..! It is a peculiar phenomenon that this Safety is simultaneously the logical conclusion and the inversion of liberal values. Extreme liberalism as anti-liberalism.

Edited December 9, 2022 by Oeaohoo

[Oeaohoo]

The press today is an army with carefully organized weapons, the journalists its officers, the readers its soldiers. But here, as in every army, the soldier obeys blindly, and war-aims and operation-plans change without his knowledge. The reader neither knows, nor is allowed to know, the purposes for which he is used, nor even the role that he is to play. A more appalling caricature of freedom of thought cannot be imagined. Formerly a man did not dare to think freely. Now he dares, but cannot; his will to think is only a willingness to think to order, and this is what he feels as his liberty.’

Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West.

My conception of freedom. — The value of a thing sometimes does not lie in that which one attains by it, but in what one pays for it — what it costs us. I shall give an example. Liberal institutions cease to be liberal as soon as they are attained: later on, there are no worse and no more thorough injurers of freedom than liberal institutions. Their effects are known well enough: they undermine the will to power; they level mountain and valley, and call that morality; they make men small, cowardly, and hedonistic — every time it is the herd animal that triumphs with them. Liberalism: in other words, herd-animalization.

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Twilight of the Idols.

[Leo Gura]

6 hours ago, Oeaohoo said:

This was at least nominally a “free market”, so that it is always self-described Classic Liberals who make the most noise about free speech. In the 21st Century, freedom is subordinated to Safety. This is typical decadence as the feminisation of culture, though I know it is supposed to be “Stage Green” growing out of “Stage Orange”.

Not that the “free market” was much better..! It is a peculiar phenomenon that this Safety is simultaneously the logical conclusion and the inversion of liberal values. Extreme liberalism as anti-liberalism.

Dude, these are capitalist corportations. Their #1 priority is not safety but money. That's your free market at work. Hard to make money when Nazis swarm over your biz platform.

Yeah, protecting people from disinformation is femininizing culture. 

Edited December 9, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Jake Chambers]

22 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

Dude, these are capitalist corportations. Their #1 priority is not safety but money. That's your free market at work. Hard to make money when Nazis swarm over your biz platform.

Yeah, protecting people from disinformation is femininizing culture. 

Although correct, and Elon musk being far worse than the previous twitter leadership, the previous leadership was also way too biased towards the left. They were very strict with deleting disinformation from the right while disinformation from the left, which also exists albeit less than on the right, was all allowed to be on. No matter how you want to phrase it this is a lack of integrity. They should have deleted all disinformation and not just look one way. I don't really understand how this is not obvious to you, how you are almost partisan to the previous twitter corporations way of handling things. Like I said Elon is a lot worse and unhinged but I really don't get why you are defending the previous board so hard. They were obviously in cahoots with democrats and the european union. I understand why, since a degree of that is necessary to combat nazis and disinformation, but to just allow leftists disinformation and hate is way too far of a reasonable track. The twitter board was very biased just like Elon musk, It's just that Elon musk's way of mishandling is a lot more explicit and the consequences more dire because nazi trolls and hate outweigh leftists trolls and hate. 

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, Jake Chambers said:

They were very strict with deleting disinformation from the right while disinformation from the left, which also exists albeit less than on the right, was all allowed to be on. No matter how you want to phrase it this is a lack of integrity. They should have deleted all disinformation and not just look one way. I don't really understand how this is not obvious to you,

1) It is not at all clear that disinformation from left was less removed than from the right. This is just an assumption you have. It has not been validated.

2) You must keep in mind that disinformation from right and left is not symmetrical. The right spread a lot more disinformation so under a just system they would get more removal. Covid denial was largely right wing. Most conspiracy theories are also right wing. The left does not have people like Alex Jones or Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity or Nick Fuentes or Kanye West.

3) It is impossible for a platform to delete all misinformation perfectly. You are living in a dream.

4) Moderation mistakes will always exist, just like police mistakes will exist.

5) Any group of moderators will have bias. You think Elon Musk and his team will not be biased? You are kidding yourself.

6) The notion that Twitter will go unmoderated is complete nonsense. It will always be heavily moderated, the question is merely in which ways and by who?

7) You must evaluate each moderation decision on a case by case basis. You cannot just assume the moderation was unwarranted. Many of these peoplr who got downranked probably posted plenty of bad stuff, disinform, racism, hate, trolling, etc. They are not innocent politcal actors, they are professional propagandists.

Edited December 9, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Jake Chambers]

Of course misinformation antics were vastly disproportionate on the right side. Twitter was right to stand against it. However I don’t like how it just allows them to act on their leftist agenda without shame, even though that is 5x less problematic than Elon musk, it’s still dumb and infuriating because it is a bunch of people together at twitter dictating what is true and what is hate. For example outright banning Jordan Peterson for deadnaming Elliot Page. Yes his comment was distasteful but it’s simply not hatespeech. Peterson actively goes against  Nazis and antisemitism. The far right hates him. It shows how seething people at twitter were at Peterson for simply having a strong opinion on trans people. It was not hate and should have been allowed on the platform. Peterson is basically gatekeeping right-leaning youngsters from becoming full blown nazis. But twitter banned him like he was a nazi. That and their lies about shadowbanning outright shows their problematic lack of integrity.

Again Elon is way worse, but this lack of acceptance and pushing away of right leaning people just makes a lot of people more nazis. It’s like the left simply can’t accept that there are moderate right wingers. All right wingers are disgusting and evil people in their eyes. 
 

Silicon valley loves to spout leftist cultural values while they are basically the epitome of late stage capitalism and almost demonic technical consumerism. They disallow and hate Andrew Tate while promoting the Kylie Jenners and Dan Bilzerians. Even though the influence of those characters is what led people to be so shallow and like Tate in the first place.

 They gave generation Z social media without any restriction from a young age without any regard for collective mental health. All the people who designed their systems literally put their kids on schools where phones and social media are not allowed etc. Social media has truly messed up a lot of things and people.

1/6 of youngsters in my first world country are seriously considering suicide. I think social media is the main one to blame.

They should have just not allowed politics on social media in the first place. No trump, no nazis, no liberals, no conservatives, no communists. Just leave them on their forums and just have twitter for fun things. It’s not like there is any proper political discussion on twitter anyway, just echo chambers. 

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, Jake Chambers said:

For example outright banning Jordan Peterson for deadnaming Elliot Page. Yes his comment was distasteful but it’s simply not hatespeech.

1) JP was not outright banned. He was simply told to delete his trolling tweet and he would have full account access. He refused. He said, "I would rather DIE than delete that tweet." He choose the ban for himself.

2) His deliberate deadnaming of Page was a violation of objective Twitter terms of use. This wasn't even a grey area. He was given a clear reason for his strike.

3) If JP wasn't being an asshole, no one would censor him for his views.

Quote

They disallow and hate Andrew Tate while promoting the Kylie Jenners and Dan Bilzerians. Even though the influence of those characters is what led people to be so shallow and like Tate in the first place.

You have to look at whether people are actually violating terms of use of the platform. That's usually what people get banned for. People do not get banned just for being unlikable. Someone can be unlikable and simply not get banned because they don't tweet anything that violates terms of use.

Hitler would be allowed on Twitter as long as he didn't post anything violating terms of use. And this is not a mistake. Just like with policing, the police should not arrest you unless you break a clear law. They should not arrest people just for being unlikable in some vague general sense. Nor should Twitter.

You cannot judge these things in the abstract. You must look at the actual things these people are posting and see what violates terms of use. If someone is posting Hunter Biden's dick pics or denying that vaccines work, that violates terms of use regardless of who they are.

Quote

1/6 of youngsters in my first world country are seriously considering suicide. I think social media is the main one to blame.

That's a very complex issue.

Edited December 9, 2022 by Leo Gura

[Raze]

 

Edited December 10, 2022 by Raze