Elon Musk

Unethical Quote of the Month (and Ethics Villain): Sen. Chris Murphy (D.-Conn)

/ Jack Marshall / 34 Comments

“What do you think about Trump’s most visible advisor, Elon Musk, performing a Nazi salute?”

—-Sen. Chris Murphy, Democrat from Connecticut and based on this question, a completely unscrupulous one, questioning Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik in her confirmation hearing to be confirmed as U.N. ambassador

Yecchh, ick, ptui, gag, retch! I’m sure it’s theoretically possible to stoop lower than Murphy, but I don’t want to think about what that would be. Urinating on the nominee perhaps?

This is pure Trump hate translated into slander. Musk, while gesticulating yesterday, ended up with one arm outstretched briefly with the palm down, and the still frantically desperate Axis, including PBS, began circulating the absurd Big Lie that Musk gave a Nazi salute for some reason. Oh! I get it! It’s because Trump is a Nazi!

I still can’t get my head around the reality that a U.S. Senator would try to join in on this gang smearing of Musk. CNN’s Scott Jennings X’d, “The only good thing about the Elon salute stupidity is that it adds to the list of people in public life who should never, ever, ever be taken seriously ever again by anyone ever.” Good point, and well said. Now, I’m ahead of Jennings, because I never took Murphy seriously anyway, except that he’s a serious jerk. Murphy is one of the worst of the worst in Congress, and missed my pre-election blacklist only because he wasn’t running. Yet even I, who regard him as an ongoing embarrassment to the Senate and the nation, didn’t see him resorting to this.

The question wasn’t even relevant to Stefanik, though she answered it with appropriate contempt, saying, “That is simply not the case. To say so – the American people see through it. They support Elon Musk.” I wish she had added, “And they are not the morons you seem to think they are. They know he didn’t give any Nazi salute.”

I find it hard to believe that the Democrats and the Trump-hating news media are really going to escalate their craziness as they try to destroy Trump for another term. Is it possible? Do they have a death wish? Are they that deluded? Is their learning curve not just flat, but upside-down? Jennings is not exaggerating. Bias makes you stupid, and hysterical bias makes you ridiculous.

(That’s Superman giving his “Nazi salute” above, courtesy of the Babylon Bee.)

Ethics Dunce: Elon Musk

/ Jack Marshall / 7 Comments

Ugh.

Elon, Elon, Elon….

Elon Musk apparently became annoyed at some Republican critics for criticizing him over his endorsement of H-1B visas, a work program that allows U.S companies to hire highly skilled non-Americans. So he stripped them of their “blue check” verification on their Twitter/”X” profiles

Laura Loomer, New York Young Republican Club president Gavin Wax, InfoWars host Owen Shroyer, and other far-right figures found that their verification badges had vanished on December 27 after they knocked Musk (and his DOGE co-captain Vivek Ramaswamy) for supporting the hiring of foreign-born engineers over their U.S. counterparts.

Former GOP Congressman and NeverTrumper Adam Kinzinger wrote in part, “So @elonmusk stripped the blue check because someone hurt his feelings?…If you love him great, but don’t pretend he’s for free speech.”

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Ethics Quiz: Musk Bans a “Journalist”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

I quit Twitter with all my accumulated thousands of followers after it became clear to me that the platform was a progressive propaganda organ that censored users and tweets it didn’t like, notably President Trump. I returned (here) as a show of support for Elon Musk, who bought the platform and (largely) eliminated its tendency to content-based censorship. This Ethics Quiz has special interest for me.

X, as Twitter is now called ( I miss the little birdie logo) suspended left- “journalist” Ken Klippenstein when he linked to an article of his that contained a hacked document with negative, private and otherwise provocative information about Vice Presidential candidate J.D. Vance. Klippenstein used to write for the crypto-Communist The Nation, and was a senior investigative reporter for the far-Left online news program “The Young Turks.” Needless to say, he has an agenda.

The 271-page dossier on Vance has been traced to a hack by Iran. Most media outlets refused to publish it, but Klippenstein, who has a substack to sell, grabbed the opportunity. Musk took to his own platform to decry the document as “one of the most egregious, evil doxxing actions we’ve ever seen.” He went on, “Presidential candidates are not speculatively in danger – there have already been two attempts on @realDonaldTrump’s life. Moreover, the doxxing included detailed information on the addresses of their children.” X explained that Klippenstein violated its policy against posting “unredacted private personal information,” including Vance’s physical addresses and part of his social security number.

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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.”

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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.

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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.”

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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.”

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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,

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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.

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