So Elon Musk, a white dude born and raised in South Africa, has bought Twitter — which means that right-wing Twitterers are flooding the platform with the same witless joke.
There are more of these — oh, so many more — but I think you’ve probably gotten the point by now.
Consider this an open thread for discussion of all things “Elon Musk Buys Twitter.”
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If this causes Twitter to collapse, I will see it as a net positive.
To hell with the intellectually bankrupt right-wing, Elon Musk, and Twitter.
What’s really disgusting is equating being a white South African who benefited from apartheid, with Black Americans. Who not only suffered under America’s own version of that and slavery, but are still suffering the after effects to this day. Utterly shameful behavior from so-called adults.
Anyone that thinks Musk is in favor of free speech, hasn’t followed him. He breaks Unions, doxes people promoting that his company is going bankrupt, pettily cancels orders for bad reviews, accuses people of being pedophiles for rescuing children from a cave and upstaging his self-aggrandizing solution, announced he was going private with Tesla at the juvenile 420 (no idea how he didn’t get in huge trouble with the SEC for that one), has a self-driving product implicated in many deaths and accidents, harassed people for releasing information on battery defects, and his solar roof ended up being a not ready for prime time product. He is somewhere between a con artist and a super villain and a massive narcissist that over works his employees and delivers flawed products. Hell, there were even rumors he was abusing his partner. This is going to end badly.
Weird, I thought his name was PedoGuy.
@ Kamosa
Agreed. But when it comes to the abuse allegations which partner? I don’t follow the lives of rich people but I have, through that weird process where you find out things without ever trying, discovered he’s had children with several. He loves having children, though oddly enough his kids all seem to live with their mums . . .
As for Twitter, I don’t use it so I’m again going on the kind of information that you somehow aquire without trying, but I don’t think his ownership will improve it, and it will likely make it a worse amplifier of mis infomation.
Of course, such greeted the transfer of power in South Africa a couple of decades back with complete equanimity, it being unnoteworthily from one group of Africans to another.
“To hell with the intellectually bankrupt right-wing, Elon Musk, and Twitter.”
True, but Elon Musk isn’t necessarily right wing.
Funny how those who mock the term “African-American” never do so with the terms “Irish-American” or “Italian-American”.
Their anti-blackness is noted.
Whilst I like what Space X is doing, I can’t honestly say I’m a fan of Mr Musk.
He’s just an annoying cockwomble generally; but then there’s also stuff like this.
https://www.pcrm.org/news/news-releases/physicians-group-files-state-lawsuit-and-federal-complaint-against-uc-davis
@JCK
Maybe not necessarily, but he is
As small children say “So funny I forgot to laugh”.
Musk is also cheerfully racist against Black people. I know, hard to believe from a rich white South African, right?
I have never seen anyone driving a Tesla who wasn’t an utter techbro douchebag. Everyone knows to give them a wide berth on the roads, because they all think they’re him. Worse than drivers of fancy European sports cars.
I’m sure Jorts the Cat has some words about it.
I wonder if he will unban Trump. I have no doubt that there will be implicit repression of left-wing free speech, including disproportionate attention to left-wing criticism and a lack of attention to right-wing hate mobs. Because informal free speech norms are something that the weak are supposed to practice for the sake of the strong.
@kamosa: But that is supporting free speech in the eyes of many people. Free speech is something powerful people are supposed to have.
@JCK: I kind of wish he was more overtly right-wing. It’d stop his nonsense from contaminating a lot of well-meaning liberals.
Honestly, I’m not a troll. I’ve subscribed to this site for several months and I would appreciate a serious answer.
If Musk was born in South Africa, and South Africa is located in, well, Africa, why is he not African-American? Because he’s white? White people are born in Africa for a variety of reasons.
When I was an undergrad, the politically correct were infuriated when a white South African student called herself African-American since she emigrated from that country with her family when she was a preteen. She honestly didn’t understand why some other students vehemently insisted that she not describe herself that way.
Again, I would appreciate a serious answer. Thank you.
Addenda:
Yes, I think the jokes are silly and tiresome. And possibly racist considering the jokers.
No, I personally don’t give a damn about Mr Musk. About his purchasing Twitter, I’ll wait and see what happens.
I’m genuinely curious about why he is not supposed to describe himself as African-American. That’s all.
@ginger
While I’m missing too much of the context to accurately answer the question regarding your classmate, I can try to address the rest.
I will note there is a difference between other people calling Elon Musk African-American, and him calling himself that. As far as I know, he has never described himself in that manner, and I don’t think his South-African heritage is something he brings up a lot.
Your observations regarding the term African-American are, I think, part of the reason I rarely hear people use it anymore. Most people I know say ‘Black American’ or just ‘Black’. Person of color also applies, though it’s more broad.
As you note, there are white people born in Africa who move to the US. Their experiences, however, are quite different from those of Black people living in the US. So it’s just not terribly useful as a descriptive phrase.
@ginger: In one sense, he is indeed African-American. He came from South Africa and is an American citizen. But what these commenters are doing is to deliberately conflate meanings…
Which is that what we all mean by “African-American” is “a black American”. As Wikipedia puts it, “African Americans are an ethnic group consisting of Americans with partial or total ancestry from any of the black racial groups of Africa”. And that’s what these commenters are referring to and would mean in any other context besides trivializing the importance of diversity and equity with a dumb joke.
Of course, part of the point is that Musk is descended from, you know, colonialists. Rather than people who moved to Africa peacefully and coexisted. So “African” here doesn’t just mean “someone who was in Africa at some point” or even necessarily “someone born in Africa”.
It’s like a 13 year old saying they’re a taxpayer because they pay sales tax. It is very literally true if you break apart the parts of the word, but is false by the definition everyone is using. It’s silly pedantry.
Since they didn’t want to buy but sold out for a large enough check I think the bird twitter should rebrand as ‘Musk’s Rat’ – I like your blog! I used this article in one of my own at the haunted typewriter – check it out!
On Twitter: I don’t have an account there, but there are a few people where I occasionally check their… timelines? feeds? history? whatever you call their tweet list… which is far more attention than I pay to the likes of, say, Facebook, or Instagram, or just about any of the other big social media platforms. (The only things I engage in more than twitter are Reddit and Fetlife, and that’s not saying much.) So if they abandon it due to rampant bullying and/or abuse in the name of “free speech”, then maybe I’ll follow them wherever they go next, maybe I won’t, but it’s no big loss for me or anyone I know well.
Or, you know, maybe Musk just wants to silence the critics of himself, his companies, and his associates, but will leave things unchanged otherwise. Who even knows at this point.
On Musk himself: I’m going to echo Alan in that I’m a fan of what SpaceX is doing, but Elon Musk… eesh, sometimes.
He’s trying to “build the future” or at least the technological aspects of it. His vision seems to be based heavily on utopian “hard” sci-fi, particularly those from the 1950s through 1970s. Which is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but…
The kind of works which seem to have influenced him most (speculating, as I don’t know most of the things he’s read) are very much the visions of middle-class, white, cishet, tech-focused people, whose focus on social issues (if any) were seen from that narrow lens. The poor and minorities don’t really exist or are glossed over. Musk seems to be aware that his technological aims are largely middle-class focused at least, but seems to have a concept of a “comfortable” middle class which is largely based on pre-1980s white people. This isn’t a realistic take on how anyone is today, and his own companies’ practices aren’t very conductive to restoring that concept. Maybe he’s really out of touch, maybe he’s “dealing with the realities of the current market” (and isn’t self-aware enough to notice the flaws in that line of thinking), maybe he’s just a hypocrite. Or some mix of the three.
In the end, it comes down to “utopia for who?” Because no vision of the future is suitable for everyone. On one hand, it’s far from the worst out there; part of his vision involves hedging civilization against nuclear (or worse) apocalypse, Skynet or similar, or Orwellian Neo-feudalism (a bit ironic, since he’s kind of setting himself up to be an aristocrat of sorts) which people with any real degree of power rarely take into account. On the other, there’s a significant risk of recreating that era in some ways, where you’d have a highly visible, “comfortable” (more comfortable than even back then) 30% middle class to wealthy population and an “invisible” (to that 30%) 70% who constantly suffered and struggled to survive, and virtually no economic or social mobility, with the division being less along racial lines than the past but even more sharply divided otherwise. As far as I’ve seen, he’s either not aware or doesn’t consider that to be his concern. Really, he barely seems aware of poor people at all. At least he’s not the only one trying to “build the future” and doesn’t have ultimate say on anything.
What Elon Musk is is a “South African American”. “Africa” is not a country.
Exactly. As I understand it, the non-specificity of the term “African-American” is precisely because modern African-Americans generally have no way of knowing exactly where in Africa their kidnapped and enslaved ancestors came from.
Modern immigrants from Africa, on the other hand, are called “Ugandan-American”, “Tunisian-American”, etc., including, as you say, “South African-American”, depending on their country of origin.
The fact that right-wingers try to appropriate this historically significant term for white South Africans and their descendants whose families directly benefited from centuries of harsh racial oppression is (a) beyond disgusting and (b) completely unsurprising.
@Kimstu:
Exactly. As I understand it, the non-specificity of the term “African-American” is precisely because modern African-Americans generally have no way of knowing exactly where in Africa their kidnapped and enslaved ancestors came from.
And that’s why a lot of African-Americans are seeking DNA testing: to get some idea of a family history that didn’t begin with and isn’t defined by white people’s disruption of their lives.
So much of right wing humor is based on gleefully misunderstanding things. It’s like watching a kid try to shoot a rubberband at you, but it backfires and hits him in the face. Congratulations on being ignorant, I guess?
As for Twitter, it’s not like it was a hippie hangout before. After all, they gave Trump a platform for years to spread lies and hatred. It’s just going from already bad to worse.
@JCK
There’s a reason for the comma. It’s because I classify Musk separately from the right-wing. I didn’t call him right-wing. Same goes for Twitter. It’s in it’s own category in my statement. Not least of which because a lot of Twitter users and such aren’t right-wing. That’s why all 3 things are mentioned separately, because they’re separate things. Just nominally related in this case.
@Alan
I am not surprised at all that UC Davis was not providing adequate care to the monkeys.
However, given that I am 100% sure that it was veterinary students providing the care, it may not strictly be their fault. It may be, as usual, the fault of abusive moneygrubbers above the low-levels at the bottom. I personally know a veterinary student that was forced to stay awake for 48 hours of hospital shifts with only 2 available hours to nap, and while that was the most extreme sleep-deprived care provision, it was by no means uncommon. 24-36 hours was more usual. It’s a culture of trying to wreck students, just because previous students/professors were wrecked, and there’s money in it. Basically like medical students used to be, before there were laws because too many people died to sleep-deprived medical students.
Extremely successfully self-perpetuating too. I have known UC Davis vets to abandon their pets like it was nothing and hoard animals until they die in catastrophic ways, so… not a great place with the animal welfare, UC Davis.