Elon Musk

Congratulations to Elon Musk, Who Earns a Golden “Bite Me!”

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

The “Bite Me!” Award that Ethics Alarms hereby bestows on Elon Musk is the honorable and admirable version of the schizophrenic designation as opposed to the alternative handed to Ann Althouse in this recent post. To alleviate confusion, I will henceforth describe what Musk has earned with his tweet above as The Golden “Bite Me!,” which will be awarded here when an individual displays an inspiring level of defiance“in response to being bullied, pressured and threatened into submissiveness” by sending the unambiguous and fearless message, “Do your worst. I believe in what I am doing, and I don’t grovel to mobs.”

Continue reading →

An Ethics Alarms 2-Post Mash-Up! “Stop Making Me Defend Donald Trump Especially When He Just Barely Deserves To Be Defended!” Meets “Ethics Quiz: The RBG Awards”

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

A dissent from a well-respected contributor here spawned this post. The mainstream media is still pushing the Big Lie (discussed in this post)that Donald Trump promised to unleash a “bloodbath” if he lost the upcoming election (MSNBC mentioned it several times this morning). As I was pondering the argument (prompted by this post) that Elon Musk does not deserve the RBG Leadership Award for rescuing Twitter, now “X” from the Left-wing biased and censorious cabal that had captured it, I encountered the sequence below on the platform. Musk’s version of Twitter does not ban the progressives from spreading their “misinformation,” and he allows the crucial opportunity for countering the news media that is on display. This is undeniably a good thing. And I believe the the Notorious R.B.G. would agree.

Continue reading →

Ethics Hero Elon Musk vs. Ethics Villain Disney

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Elon Musk is weird, impulsive, sometimes hypocritical and often infuriating. He is also a national treasure: a true Ethics Hero in the culture wars.

Back in 2021, Disney fired Gina Carano, one of the stars of the Disney+ series “The Mandalorian” because her social media posts were insufficiently supportive of the progressive cant Disney is obsessed with (to its financial and cultural sorrow). The triggering tweet was one in which Carano, a conservative (can’t have that in Hollywood!) compared Nazi Germany’s anti-Jewish propaganda to efforts by the political left to demonize people based on their political beliefs. Proving her point, Disney canned her, explaining, falsely, that her “social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

Carano is now suing Disney and Lucasfilms. Her complaint can be read here. She is suing under California law, which states that
“No employer shall make, adopt, or enforce any rule, regulation, or policy: (a) Forbidding or preventing employees from engaging or participating in politics or from becoming candidates for public office. (b) Controlling or directing, or tending to control or direct the political activities or affiliations of employees.”

Continue reading →

The Elon Musk Car On The Hamas-Israel Ethics Train Wreck

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

This will take some explaining.

Chapter I: The inarticulate tweet.

On November 15, someone called “The Artist Formerly Known as Eric” on X put up the tweet above. It is, like so many tweets, poorly written and inarticulate, because it was probably composed in about 5 second. When it became famous, and I read it for the first time, I finally concluded that the comment was a shot across the bow of the segment of the liberal Jewish community which had closely allied itself with with the full panoply of minority victim-mongerers, particularly the black activists who have morphed from the days of the civil rights marches into anti-white bigots. These, as we have seen in the past two months, allied themselves with the Palestinians and their terrorist supporters while placing Jews in the roles of white oppressors. His message, then, though distorted by the hyperbolic “don’t give a shit” rhetoric, was “you should have seen this coming” and “your great pals and allies have turned on you, and that’s your thanks for supporting Black Lives Matter and the rest.”

But who knows? It is, as I say, a badly conceived tweet. However, as I read it, his general point has validity. The black community has always contained an excessive number of anti-Semites who do regard the Jews as “white” (as they are), and the support the civil rights movement has received from the Jewish community didn’t substantially change that animus. Thus Black Lives Matters chapters have been announcing their support for Hamas.

My conclusion: It was not an anti-Semitic tweet, just a sloppy one. Eric was clearer in a follow-up tweet, in which he wrote, “I support Jewish people’s right to self defense literally and ideologically. But I also, as a white person, have to acknowledge that it’s been depressing to see Jewish communities not take a stronger stance against anti white dialecticism that is basically just repurposed antisemitism.”

Continue reading →

From The Res Ipsa Loquitur Files…Ethics Hero: Elon Musk (Again)

/ Jack Marshall / 1 Comment

(See: “It’s Come To This: “Liking” A Politically Incorrect, Bad Taste Joke On Social Media Can Get You Suspended In The United States Of America”)

Bravo.

Good Elon, Bad Elon: Round And Round And Round Twitter Goes And Where It Stops, Nobody Knows…

/ Jack Marshall / 33 Comments

I’m still hoping for the best with Elon Musk’s brave though chaotic attempt to rescue Twitter from the agents of progressive and Democrat propaganda….but I’m not going to spend a lot of time ramping up Ethics Alarms new presence on the platform until I am confident that I won’t have to quit in disgust again.

This week so far there have been two Twitter-related events that I view as ethically encouraging:

1. Musk tweaked National Public Radio as it so richly deserves by labeling it “state-affiliated media” on the platform. Trying to be nice, Musk changed the label to “government-funded media,” causing NPR promptly to throw a fit and quit Twitter, announcing that it would “no longer post fresh content to its 52 official Twitter feeds, becoming the first major news organization to go silent on the social media platform.” (Well, except for the New York Post when Twitter silenced it to keep the Hunter Biden laptop story from hurting Joe Biden at the polls.)

Amusingly, NPR puffed itself up with hot air, huffing that the network is protecting its credibility and its ability to produce journalism without “a shadow of negativity.” “The downside, whatever the downside, doesn’t change that fact,” NPR CEO John Lansing said, “I would never have our content go anywhere that would risk our credibility.”

I guess he means “other than NPR,” whose partisan toadying is legendary.

Lansing continued the hilarity by writing, “It would be a disservice to the serious work you all do here to continue to share it on a platform that is associating the federal charter for public media with an abandoning of editorial independence or standards.” Standards? Hmmm...I can’t recall the last NPR ethics story EA has posted; let’s see…HA! Just a week ago: NPR Wonders If Transgender Athletes Have A Physical Advantage Over Female Competitors. Before that: NPR Says There Are “Pros And Cons” Of A Candidate For Governor Calling Someone “Motherfucker” During A Speech…

Care to guess the party affiliation of the candidate NPR was defending? Tough one! Why, it was Beto O’Roarke, the Democratic candidate to unseat GOP Texas Governor Abbott. NPR described O’Rourke’s gutter language as a “snappy interjection,” though the snappy interjection was somehow not fit to print. The NPR headline used “f-bomb” while the text employed “motherf*****”. We pay taxes for this garbage “analysis”?

The indignant NPR excuse for objecting to “government funded” is also self-indicting. NPR’s own news story says,

Continue reading →

The Elon Musk-Twitter Ethics Roller-Coaster Ride Continues

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

(I hate roller-coasters.)

The last week has demonstrated clearly, I think we can all agree, that 1) there is an urgent need for Twitter to be de-politicized, stripped of partisan censorship, and become a trustworthy platform for the unfettered distribution of news, information and opinion to the public, and 2) Elon Musk is too much of a loose cannon to be the manager of Twitter’s reform.

Yesterday almost qualified as a meltdown, or a tantrum, or something. Maybe a joke. Who knows with him? He teased his withdrawal from the daily management of the reeling social media giant. He hinted that the company was teetering on bankruptcy. He put his continued tenure as CEO up for a vote, pledging to abide by the results.

Chaos. Musk is quite a bit like Donald Trump, which shouldn’t be surprising: the successful entrepreneur/ CEO/ autocrat/narcissist is a well-understood personality type, and management by chaos is a management style that can be very effective for the short term in a private company (but not the U.S. government). I worked for a chaos manager for seven years, and he was brilliant at it, but I decided then and there that I could never operate that way. It is hard on subordinates, employees and stake-holders; only the chaotic manager enjoys the pressure. It is a non-Golden Rule management style that relies entirely on utilitarianism as its ethical justification. Yes, the methods causes breakdowns, anxiety and constant crisis, but if it “works,” it’s worth the pain. That’s what Musk has been doing.

Continue reading →

Still More Twitter Ethics: Musk’s Cynical Poll And Another”Twitter Files” Summary

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Ugh. The 6th installment of the “Twitter Files,” this one tweeted out by Matt Taibbi (your host just had to copy and paste 31 damn tweets together to be readable, always what I love doing before a cup of coffee on a Saturday morning. This might have something to do with why I just spilled orange juice on my modem…You’re welcome.). It is the most alarming of the installments so far. I can’t wait to read how the Washington Post and the other complicity proto-totalitarians in the news media try to spin this one as a “nothingburger.” It is a given that the main methodolgy will involve simply not reporting on it, as has been the primary response to the earlier “Twitter Files” revelations via substack’s rebel journalists. Let’s see: I haven’t checked today’s digital Times yet: Any mention?….

NO!

The only mentions of Twitter involve Musk’s suspension of journalists (BAD Musk!) discussed here yesterday. The embargo on the Twitter revelations are at least as sinister and outrageous as the Hunter Biden laptop media/social media conspiracy; I confess that I’m surprised at the audacity of the Times and the rest (almost everyone but Fox News and the New York Post, and the conservative websites. Well, the ethics blogs, of course)

A few observations before you commence your assignment as an informed citizen:

  • Musk cagily backtracked on the suspensions using the “poll” devise he employed to justify restoring Trump’s tweeting privileges. He was facing threats by the EU (it was going to be expensive and time-consuming to tell the Europeans “bite me,” though that’s what they deserved and it may have occured to him that Ethics Alarms was right: the banning of so many progressive reporters looked like payback even if it were justifiable. Musk can’t run Twitter by poll, though, if he is truly devoted to promoting free and open public discourse.
  • The past seven years (or more) make the conclusion unavoidable that the FBI is untrustworthy, partisan, corrupt,dangerous, and a threat to undermine the Republic. That is not a news that easy to process or accept, but it can’t be ignored or shrugged off any more.

  • In a complete reversal of positions from what was routine in my youth, Republicans are targeting the FBI for criticism and investigation while Democrats appear to be saying by their silence, “What’s the big deal?” The Republican House Judiciary Committee account tweeted, “Does anyone still trust the FBI?” (“republicans pounce!”)  Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo), speculated that  the FBI’s alleged interactions with Twitter could suggest they were working with Google and Facebook as well. Gee, yah think?

  • Again, because it can’t be over-stated, the mainstream media is deliberately trying to keep the public in the dark about all of it.
  • But the major effect of this seems to be only the further erosion of public trust in the news media. The truth is out there, as Mulder and Scully would say, and it’s sinking in. The December Harvard CAPS / Harris Poll  finds that nearly two-thirds of voters believe Twitter shadow-banned users and engaged in political censorship during the 2020 election. Seventy percent of voters want new national laws protecting users from corporate censorship.
  • What is described below is, in fact, the U.S. government violating the First Amendment by proxy:

Continue reading →

Ethics Observations On Musk’s Blitzkrieg Twitter Account Bans

/ Jack Marshall / 20 Comments

Interesting.

Twitter (aka Elon Musk) suspended the accounts of journalists from CNN, the New York Times, The Washington Post and other news sources yesterday, without warning and initially without giving any explanation.

Later last night, Musk tweeted, “Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info. Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok.”

This morning, however, there was still confusion over whether all of those suspended had engaged in doxxing.

Observations:

Continue reading →

Ethics Dunce: Elon Musk

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

I’ve never seen this before: the Ethics Alarms Ethics Hero of the Year making an Ethics Dunce of himself the same month I awarded him the honor. Depressing. Not entirely surprising in Elon Musk’s case, but depressing.

In the catalyzing development, Kanje West (or “Ye”) has set out to also make Ethics Alarms look foolish by awarding Donald Trump its 2022 “Asshole of the Year” award. West, who is disqualified from that distinction because he is clearly mentally ill, decided to visit Alex Jones and babble on about how much he liked Hitler, who had done some “good things.” Being roundly condemned for this revolting opinion wasn’t enough for the allegedly genius rapper: he then posted the design above on his recently restored Twitter account, a Nazi swastika entwined with the Star of Israel.

Quick like a bunny, Musk tweeted,

“I tried my best. Despite that, he again violated our rule against incitement to violence. Account will be suspended.”

I assume that Musk’s reaction was impulsive, because he constantly is impulsive. However, he had stated that he is a free-speech absolutist within reasonable parameters, and condemned the arbitrary, left-biased moderation policies of the previous Twitter regime. He did not “try his best”; Musk’s principles broke down the first time they were seriously challenged. West did not violate the rule against incitement to violence; in fact, I would not be surprised if he posted the ambiguous symbol to see if Musk could control himself. Continue reading →