Maybe this is somehow enlightening to someone who has never considered someone they (morally, religiously, ethically, politically) oppose human, but I am aware of all this and recognise that Elon Musk is still a piece of shit whose bigotry has made him hated in public and his private life. Over and over he makes the choice to be a dog turd, and that’s not somehow the fault of wokies, even when they’re misguided. He’s not a 4 year old that just needs to be gentle parented. He’s a full-grown adult that needs to stop perpetually throwing temper tantrums when someone disagrees with him.
Comment on Elon Musk’s Grok Twitter AI Is Actually ‘Woke,’ Hilarity Ensues
tias@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months agoThese terms tend to get abused by jerks so much that they start to mean something else. I have seen too many people identifying as “woke” who use bullying as a method of getting their way, lack compassion for anyone who doesn’t share their views, shaming others, and are generally tribalistic.
Basic human decency would be to see the person behind a political view and understand that they have fears and pains, to be curious about them and try to understand where they’re coming from. And then talk with them from a place of compassion. We’re all a product of our genes and experiences, and everybody is a hero in their own story.
Necronomicommunist@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
tias@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
But he’s not going to do that. Stop thinking in terms of whose fault it is and instead think about what is effective. Yes, the racist is a bigot but hes also right: the treatment he was subjected to did result in him becoming more racist. So if you truly want fewer racists in the world, look for another strategy that is preferably supported by science.
ram@bookwormstory.social 9 months ago
I should add that I reject the idea of anyone making a choice. Neuroscience is pretty confident that choice is not an actual thing; it’s all cause and effect. The behavior we are seeing from Elon Musk now is caused by his genes, how he was brought up, and how people are treating him. We can control one of these three things to get the effect we want.
Is this how you excuse any wrongdoing of any person who’s ever existed? Holding people accountable, both in private and public, is a part of that influence upon who he is. At this point, I’m comfortable saying Elon Musk is a lost cause, and the best thing we can do is make him less capable of harming society yet further.
Not everyone gets a redemption arc, that’s only a thing in novels. Elon Musk has no desire to understand normal people, and that’s something is simply impossible to contend with.
tias@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
Tigers are dangerous animals that sometimes eat people. They have brains, they make “choices” in the sense that there is a decision process going on in their brains. When a tiger eats a human we can call that tiger “evil”, maybe try to get back at it by torturing it to teach it a lesson.
If I tell you that this is just in the nature of tigers, and torturing the tiger does little to prevent tigers from eating humans in the future, then that’s not an “excuse”. The word is kind of meaningless in this context. If we don’t want to get eaten by tigers we can stay away from tigers, or keep them locked up, or possibly kill all of them (not as “revenge” but as a preventative measure).
So I disagree with your categorization of this as an excuse. I’m not excusing anything, and I’m not promoting a redemption - that too is a concept steeped in the idea that people have choices. But I agree with you that holding people accountable can be an effective way to influence people. We have a justice system both to rehabilitate people from repeating crimes, and to discourage people from committing crimes in the first place. The key is to think rationally about how to influence people in an effective way. I’d argue that the prison system in the US, for example, has not been effective in preventing crime because it forgets about the rehabilitation part.
Elon may very well be a lost cause as you say. Even so, I believe chastising him on social media is making things worse, not better, so the people who do that are not acting rationally. The adult approach is to think about an effective way to prevent him from doing more damage while not giving the wrong signals to the rest of society. He has a tail of followers so care needs to be taken that he doesn’t become a martyr for them.
Necronomicommunist@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
So, he doesn’t have the choice to be better, it is our responsibility to make him better. We do have the choice, yet he doesn’t?
tias@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
No, choice is universally an illusion. The things I am saying here are also the effect of past events, as is the fact that you responded. The point I’m trying to get across is that moralizing and saying things like “he’s an adult, he should change his behavior on his own” is wishful thinking and neglects a rational approach to what will actually achieve what you want.
dojan@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Neuroscience is pretty confident that choice is not an actual thing We can control one of these three things to get the effect we want.
Bullshit.
djsoren19@yiffit.net 9 months ago
I can confirm it’s bullshit, because neuro being confident of anything is bullshit.
The human brain is an enigma we know nearly nothing about. Whether or not free will exists is still a pretty massive unanswered question. This person is at best an idiot, more likely a troll, and at worst a Nazi trying to excuse others bad behavior.
CileTheSane@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
I should add that I reject the idea of anyone making a choice. Neuroscience is pretty confident that choice is not an actual thing; it’s all cause and effect. The behavior we are seeing from Elon Musk now is caused by his genes, how he was brought up, and how people are treating him. We can control one of these three things to get the effect we want.
We can’t control any of these three things because I am unable to make a choice in how I treat him. My behavior in how I treat Elon Musk is caused by my genes, how I was brought up, and how people are treating me.
So with that in mind: Elon Musk is an idiot causing actual harm to the world and people need to stop enabling this piece of shit. The world would be a better place if he lost all his money and was a poor man with no platform to spread his hateful ideas.
gila@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Bollocks. I don’t believe you have seen too many people identifying as woke. People that hold the beliefs you’re talking about don’t generally identify as woke. You’re talking about attitudes attributed to wokedom entirely by conservatives trying to rile up their base. They’re using moral panic via the culture war to politically destabilise in an environment where they have no policy to bring to the table that anyone wants, and you’ve fallen for it. Go consume some actual leftist content and try to critique it the way you are now in good faith. You won’t be able to.
tias@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
I don’t consume much right-wing content, this is mostly from interacting with people online who have a right wing/woke agenda.
gila@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Have you considered that those aren’t the best places to get a good sense of the rational argument behind increased awareness of social inequalities? All the described platforms skew toward younger audiences and ineffective moderation - you were likely talking to literal children trying to come to terms with their inability to reconcile their morality with their environment, especially from areas that skew conservative.
When I said actual leftist content I meant, pick an example of a person identifying as woke whose view you don’t share, then vet your position by investigating the opposing argument and reflect on whether that person was offering a fair and balanced representation of that argument. If it isn’t, then you can’t attribute their slant to the school of thought they claim to represent solely based on your experience reading comments on social media.
ram@bookwormstory.social 9 months ago
There’s no reason to believe this.
An explanation as to why someone’s a bad person doesn’t make them less bad.
He’s autistic. Most autistic people aren’t narcissistic megalomaniacs, and if they are, they should be called out for it.
A moot point, he will not accept anything but the yes men he grew up around and lived the last 52 years being applauded by.
I do understand his vision, and the vision is broken and harmful.
He has? Like his racially segregated factories? Or the monkeys he experiments on the brains of?
This is ineffective with people in such a power position.
Agreed.
Ultimately, Elon Musk is a genuinely harmful and bad person, who is both uncritically malicious to those who dare criticize him, and is incredibly foolish at every endeavour he involves himself in. “His” successes come as a result of people he hired walling him off in his companies so that he continues to invest in technologies while being blind to any important part of production he might find interesting enough to meddle in.
Your take on him is one I can empathize with, and I even held myself for a while, but at the end of the day, it’s a benefit of the doubt he expressly does not deserve.
captainlezbian@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Yeah I want to believe everyone including him is actively a moral actor trying to make the best world they can, but I know better. His motivations aren’t subtle. He desperately wants to be admired and seen as cool and smart. That’s fine when handled responsibly, but he isn’t. He left his wife once he became rich. He went on a crusade against trans people when his daughter came out as trans and said she hates billionaires. He’s become 4chan because when he says shitty right wing bullshit they praise him. He’s probably still seeing himself as a bullied nerd getting picked on by people cooler than him, or maybe he sees it as he’s getting his nerds revenge. But either way, it’s clear he’s more concerned with being the underdog hero of his favorite type of story than building a world worth living in.