Front line rescue workers and first responders are famously required to be polite to looky lou's wanting to make tragic events all about themselves and their dumb PR stunts.
Musk offered money and the services of his crack engineering team. Now, he probably went about it the wrong way, but dismissing it as a looky lou is a bit unfair.
Musk has also done dumb PR things like provide free Starlink service to people cut off after the hurricane.
"Bet ya a signed dollar it's true." - Musk's follow-up
It went so, so far beyond a schoolyard taunt. All of my friends and I remember the debacle clearly, and it's the moment we all went from childhood idolizers of Musk to feeling pretty sick about the dude.
Months after he apologized for the initial false "pedo" claim, Musk claimed in an email to Buzzfeed that Unsworth (the rescue diver) was "a child rapist" who "moved to Chiang Rai for a child bride who was 12 years old at the time."
Musk hired a private investigator to confirm the pedophile allegations (which failed, of course).
Try again kiddo. Absolutely pathetic. Defending this shit is a moral failure for you too.
> Writing in an email to Buzzfeed reporter Ryan Mac, Mr Musk went further. He told the reporter to "call people you know in Thailand, find out what's actually going on and stop defending child rapists".
> He alleged that Mr Unsworth, 63, had spent decades visiting and living in Thailand and had recently moved to Chiang Rai in northern Thailand "for a child bride who was about 12 years old at the time".
I don't consider "pedo boy" to be slander any more than someone in the west calling another a "motherfucker". It's not actionable, and the lawsuit alleging it to be libel failed for that reason.
>I don't consider "pedo boy" to be slander any more than someone in the west calling another a "motherfucker".
'motherfucker' is a common phrase even outside of strictly english - speaking countries , and very few people go on to explain how the person had sex with a mother.
'pedo boy' is impossibly uncommon, regardless of what the singular defending belligerent claims, and furthermore he went on to publicly accuse the person of actual pedophilia.
yeah : i'm sure it didn't fail in court due to unlimited deep pockets and lawyers on retainer.
is there anything beyond willful ignorance ? You and I have had differences of opinion before, but yeesh -- talk about a hill to die on, defending elons' shite behavior during that phase.
1. Musk calling him "pedo boy" isn't Musk actually calling him a pedophile, and there's nothing wrong with a grown man using insults (against an aid worker risking his own life to save children) that 14-year olds in the 80s in South Africa allegedly used on playgrounds
2. Musk telling Buzzfeed that the same exact guy is actually a pedophile (specifically a child rapist) who took a 12 year old bride was totally unrelated to the prior "pedo boy" comment, and you would never defend such an action
Fascinating pretzel you've folded yourself into. Not sure who you think you're fooling, hope it's not you though!
To be clear, I don't think anyone here is suggesting Musk should be held legally accountable for anything. Not sure why you keep falling back to this "libelous" standard. No one cares and defamation suits are virtually impossible in the US.
Your original snarky question was what is reprehensible about him. You are now defending his clearly reprehensible moral character, through some convoluted "didn't mean it but it was okay but also he totally did say the same thing in clearer terms weeks later and I would never defend that."
Interesting to note your own motte-and-bailey retreat on this point too though.
Neither of them are saints, and neither are "reprehensible" people. The jury in the lawsuit called it right by deliberating for one hour and then dismissing the lawsuit.
And insulting someone and engaging in libel is not the same thing, and is not a "retreat".
P.S. It's fine to write your own interpretation of my remarks, but it is not fine to put them in quotes suggesting I wrote them.
I don't know what point you keep trying to make about Musk winning a defamation suit in the US lol. It's virtually impossible to successfully sue someone for defamation here. The outcome of a defamation suit has quite literally zero bearing on the morality of the actions in question.
Anyway I just sent a note into a few publications to let them know that WalterBright is a pedophile child rapist.
That's apparently not even reprehensible under your moral framework.
Could you let me know the contact info of your local newspaper so I can give them this info as well?
Musk did hire the private investigator after the rescue worker sued him for $195 million. I agree Musk shouldn't have done that despite being angry about being sued.
And after Musk publicly apologized, he sent an email to Buzzfeed accusing the rescuer of being a child rapist and moving to Thailand to take a 12 year old bride.
What's authentic/"not phony" about literally making shit up about another person?
I'm genuinely confused so please explain step by step.
Do you think everyone around you is just brimming with unevidenced allegations of pedophilia to fling around at strangers, and finally we have the One True Authentic™ to just bravely say the big words out loud?
Haha nothing funnier than grown adults (??) who are so infatuated with big wockets that they seem to forget basic concepts like "moral character" if there are big wockets anywhere in the vicinity. So smart.
If he meant it to be a nazi salute, why did he do it in conjunction with saying "I give my heart to you"?
Currently on TV is a WW2 documentary narrated by Tom Hanks. It's pretty good, with significant coverage of nazis. I recommend watching it. I'm a bit of a history wonk, and have read extensively about WW2. I'm afraid I don't see any parallels between the nazis and Musk.
And responding to the backlash by posting Nazi-related puns seems like a bad way of clearing your name or trying to distance yourself from the accusation.
Congrats, you baited me into watching the video again. Definitely a nazi salute. Twice. Crisp enough to identify as a nazi salute even if the context hadn't been a far-right industrialist celebrating a far-right victory. But that was the context, giving us two layers of unambiguity.
He's done "I give my heart to you" on video, too, and it looks nothing like the nazi salute that he clearly did at the inauguration, twice, in celebration of the victory of far-right populist politics in the USA.
The rhetorical parallels between Musk, his affiliates, and the nazis should be clear to anyone with remedial knowledge of history, let alone someone who calls themselves a wonk: scapegoating racial outgroups isn't a subtle strategy and Musk's pursuit of the strategy is not subtle.
WW2 is the end of nazi politics, not the beginning. In the unlikely case that you missed the parallels in good faith, I recommend the Richard Evans books to learn about the beginning and middle of the nazi movement.
This whole comment chain is so baffling to me. HN is relatively intelligent, but we have people here seriously believing Musk did a Nazi salute on stage and that he's an actual Nazi. I don't know what to make of it.
I have to imagine it's motivated reasoning, because of the people who say it was a Nazi salute, approximately 100% of them already hated the guy. I've seen no one suddenly swayed. Fwiw I have no strong feelings about Musk either way, but to my eyes he is obviously not a Nazi.
Then your eyes are excellent at ignoring everything he said in the last 4 years on Twitter and did last year in the white house. Not to mention the salute itself. Or themself -- there were two, back to back, in case you missed the first one.
I have assessed your post history and it is literally 100% political argumentation, which aligns with my biases about what kind of people would write this sort of comment. That is not what HN is for.
So, there is little question about the type of gestures that Musk made, but I'm deeply curious about where it was directed.
Because we who read history all know that the "Nazi salute" or even the very American "Bellamy salute", and the Roman salutes before them, were directed to the leader, or a flag. And the Nazis in conjunction with saying "hail" to their leader. So far, so good?
But Musk was standing at a podium and looking out upon a crowd of people...voters...delegates... and he did not, in my view, try and face President Trump, or any leader standing at another podium, when he directed his salute outwards from the podium: outwards toward the crowd, opposite the camera angle.
So if Musk was not saluting President Trump: was he saluting a flag? Or the citizens? Because if he was saluting the citizens in this way, it gives a very, very different interpretation to the entire gesture, and if he was not saluting the president, or some leader, I do not see how this could be interpreted in the same way as the traditional salute of any type.
Caesar has been dead for 2000 years. The Bellamy Salute has been dead for 80. It's the Hitler salute now. Even your 90 year old father got the memo. Elon was not confused.
I can: thinking that a far-right industrialist at a far-right victory celebration making a far-right hand gesture, with perfect form, in duplicate, didn't mean it.
There were a lot of people on the left noting that a totenkopf was a big red flag warning of others lurking. The centrist consultants tried to push past it, as they often do, and that's one of the big issues I have with the Dem establishment.
That's insane revisionism. The center Democrats do not support the progressive wing of the party. The DSA types were all in on him and willing to look past just about everything. It wasn't until the actual rape allegations that Bernie Sanders withdrew his endorsement.
Double Sieg Heil at a US inauguration, buying twitter to boost nazis, sabotaging his US competitors by pulling up the subsidy ladder he just finished climbing, gleefully dumpstering the peanut butter rations for the starving African kids. "Favorite" isn't the word.
Snark aside, I’m curious: what about the comment you replied to is a “Reddit lie?” Pretty much everything act mentioned is well documented. Do you disagree with the assumptions made about motivations for the acts?
