“Americans are just A-OK with being led by a White Supremacist”
Welcome back, @Sam .
I went ahead and signed up for the SamHarris free-plan access but it only allowed me to read three paragraphs. Could you summarize what is behind the paywall? (It ended where he started to challenge the “good people on both sides” controversy.)
Thanks. But probably won’t stay long.
I just look in once in a while when prompted by an email with " This summary is sent from Peaceful Science when we haven’t seen you in a while.
Seeing a comment such as “Americans are just A-OK with being led by a White Supremacist” was too beautiful to let pass.
Sam Harris, being as anti God, as many here might get a listen that any counterpoint by a God botherer would have summarily dismissed if they made the identical point.
Here is the relevant quote with a paragraph on either side,
"I do not think that former President Trump is Orange Hitler, but I have little doubt that he and his conspiracy-addled cult pose a threat to our system of government and to many of our most important institutions. The spectacle of a sitting president refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power, culminating in an attack on the Capitol, remains the most shocking violation of political norms to occur in my lifetime. And the fact that some Republicans in Congress declined to impeach President Trump because they feared that they or members of their families might be murdered if they did, reveals how deeply Republican politics have been corrupted already.
However, as bad as Trump and Trumpism are, at least one of the most widely believed and damaging criticisms of the former president is based on a lie. I am referring to the allegation that, in the aftermath of the infamous “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, President Trump came to the defense of white supremacists and neo-Nazis, declaring that there were “very fine people on both sides.”
I know from direct experience how harmful malicious quotation can be to a person’s reputation. In fact, many of my statements about Trump are routinely taken out of context to make me look crazy or unprincipled—and even culpable for the recent attempt on his life. I have been off Twitter/X for nearly two years, and yet Elon Musk still responds to (and thereby amplifies) posts that deliberately misrepresent my views. This is just a special case of a nearly ubiquitous problem: most people have neither the time nor the inclination to understand what their political opponents say in context. Rather, they are content to hold them accountable for the worst interpretation of their words that seems semantically possible. Many of the figures we despise for the terrible things they’ve said, did not actually say those things in context."
He knew exactly what he was doing at the inauguration. A former friend of his has this take on why he did it.
I have known Elon Musk at a deep level for 14 years, well before he was a household name. We used to text frequently. He would come to my birthday party and invite me to his parties. He would tell me everything about his women problems. As sons of highly accomplished men who married venuses, were violent and lost their fortunes, and who were bullied in high school, we had a number of things in common most people cannot relate to. We would hang out together late in Los Angeles. He would visit my San Diego lab. He invested in my company.
Elon is not a Nazi, per se.
He is something much better, or much worse, depending on how you look at it.
Nazis believed that an entire race was above everyone else.
Elon believes he is above everyone else. He used to think he worked on the most important problems. When I met him, he did not presume to be a technical person — he would be the first to say that he lacked the expertise to understand certain data. That happened later. Now, he acts as if he has all the solutions.
All his talk about getting to Mars to “maintain the light of consciousness” or about “free speech absolutism” is actually BS Elon knowingly feeds people to manipulate them. Everything Elon does is about acquiring and consolidating power. That is why he likes far right parties, because they are easier to control. That is also why he gave himself $56 Billion which could have gone to the people actually doing the work and innovations he is taking credit for at Tesla (the reason he does not do patents is because he would not be listed as an inventor as putting a fake inventor on a patent would kill it and moreover it would reveal the superstars behind the work). His lust for power is also why he did xAI and Neuralink, to attempt to compete with OpenAI and NeuroVigil, respectively, despite being affiliated with them. Unlike Tesla and Twitter, he was unable to conquer those companies and tried to create rivals. He announced Neuralink just after I invited his ex-wife, which she and I notified him about, to a fundraising dinner for Hebrew University in London (The fact that she tried to kiss me — I immediately pushed her away — while taking a photo at that event, even if playfully, clearly may have added to the alienation and possible emasculation he may have felt when she spoke to me in a pool at a party when they were together and she was naked. To not be disrespectful to her or to him, I stayed but looked at the sky whilst talking to her). I fired him with cause in December 2021 when he tried to undermine NV. It is ironic that years later, he clearly tried to undermine Twitter before buying it, and in my view, blowing it up and using it to manipulate the masses to lean to the far right in country after country, including the USA.
[Here is more detail as some people asked. After he received a press release draft confirming NV never took a penny from the US Government, he asked to be removed from the Business Advisory Board, but then tried to give the stock he bought back, including for no money, which could have completely crashed NV’s stock price. I told him he was fired from the BAB, with cause, as he admitted he had not been participating. That also meant he had no ability to exercise his stock options (years prior, despite not being allowed to discuss his investment because of a solid NDA, he/his people leaked to the press that he had invested twice as much in NV as he actually did, as if the stock options had been counted as stock). This is the email I sent him around that time:
“Elon,
Only one of us apparently knows the difference between Science and PR, and between friendship and phonies, and unfortunately you ain’t it.
Let’s cut ties here.
Your NV stock is not being transferred, and if you try to transfer it without my consent, in contravention of your stock purchase agreement, I will have to shove my boots so deep up your derrière, legally, that your pissing contest with Bezos will seem like it was from another life, one you want to get back to.
Good luck with your implants, all of them, and with building Pottersville on Mars.
Seriously, don’t fuck with me.”
Elon has less than 0.05% of NV and was never a principal or principal investor in NV as was falsely reported by some. I own between 80 and 90%. NV is the most valuable neurotech company in the world and does not regard Neuralink as a competitor because we have an arsenal of patents and introduced our technology to customers in 2009 and furthermore do not view their implantable technology as scalable. Moreover, the company is apparently under investigation regarding statements Elon made to investors and most of Neuralink’s co-founders ditched Elon and the company.]
Elon did two Nazi salutes.
He did them for five main reasons:
He was concerned that the “Nazi wing” of the MAGA movement, under the influence of Steve Bannon, would drive him away from Trump, somewhere in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, rather than in the West Wing which is where he wants to be. He was already feeling raw over the fact that Trump did not follow his recommendation for Treasury Secretary and that the Senate also did not pick his first choice;
He was upset that he had had to go to Israel and Auschwitz to make up for agreeing with a Nazi sympathizer online and wanted to reclaim his “power” just like when he told advertisers to “go fuck yourself”. This has nothing to do with Asperger’s;
There are some Jews he actually hates: Sam Altman is amongst them;
He enjoys a good thrill and knew exactly what he was doing;
His narcissistic self was hoping the audience would reflect his abject gesture back to him, thereby showing complete control and dominion over it, and increasing his leverage over Trump. That did not happen.
Bottom line: Elon is not a Nazi but he did give two Nazi Salutes, which is completely unacceptable.
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Can you quote the part where Sam Harris shows that this was a misinterpretation of Trump’s words? Because he did in fact say that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the march. He clarified that he did not believe there were only white supremacists and neo-Nazis (“You had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists”), whom he said should be “condemned totally”, on one side of the march.
But the fact is that there were only neo-Nazis and white supremacists on that side. If someone was at that march and wasn’t a white supremacist, they would have gotten the hell out of there as soon as people were marching with swastikas and shouting “Jews will not replace us.” By saying that some of those people were “very fine” and not recognizing them as fascists, he implicitly created a moral equivalence between some fascists and anti-fascists.
Edit: It’s probably best not to focus on the old things Trump said, though. He said so many ridiculous things that we’d be debating them forever and never get anything done. Instead we should focus on what he’s doing now.
Yeah and this will then become his out, and we now have to debate the theoretical possibility that some blind-deaf oaf and his headless friend was walking around high as a kite in the crowd of Nazies, completely oblivious to their surroundings, and that were the guys Trump was referring to.
They’re fine people, the best. Can’t see or hear anything, either of them.
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If my position that “a plurality of Americans are just A-OK with being led by a White Supremacist” was based on that one statement Trump made after the Charlottesville rally, you might have a point in quoting that passage. But as things stand, I don’t see your point.
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Never mind that among the “very fine people” that Trump explicitly mentioned were people protesting the removal of monuments honoring figures in the Confederate Army. IOW, these “very fine people” were also racist pieces of shit who deserve to be punched in the face no less than do the card-carrying Nazis .
At least I can agree with Trump’s threatened “Columbia sanctions.” The Ivy League schools are waaaaaaay too arrogant and need taken down a notch.
(Every morning when I read the latest news from Washington, I think of the very old joke: “You don’t have to be crazy to work here—but it certainly helps.”)
POSTSCRIPT: For those who remember the old TV commercials for Colombian coffee, I think there’s probably a political cartoon out there somewhere featuring Juan Valdez getting nabbed in a Hollywood studio raid by an ICE SWAT team.
(Of course, soon after that TV commercial campaign, Juan Valdez switched to raising coca due to much better pay.)
I don’t know precisely what you want me to post. It almost seems that you are asking me to post comments that you assume he (Sam) made while apparently not having read the piece. But it is a lengthy publication. Do you want me to post it in its entirety? I’m not sure if that would transgress some copyright issue. But here is another segment (from Sam’s piece) that may go some distance toward an answer to your question,
“Notwithstanding that fact that there are credible accusations of racism against former President Trump (unfortunately, the most credible I know of remain private), and that he often appears to “dog-whistle” to (or accept support from) the lunatic fringe on the far right, the “very fine people on both sides” charge is simply false. And yet, it continues to resurface in the pages of the New York Times and other mainstream publications, and in both the prepared and extemporaneous remarks of Democrats. It would be refreshingly ethical, and also politically wise, for Vice President Harris to retire this calumny once and for all.”
I would add that not only did this “resurface in the pages of the New York Times and other mainstream publications”, but also during the campaign from the lips of Kamala Harris, Barak Obama, and Joe Biden.
But rather than me pointing to where,
unless you consider taking comments out of context to be less than a misdemeanor or more specifically, a distortion of someone’s actual views, you illustrate yourself how it was a misrepresentation of Trump’s stated opinion with your,
Here is another quote from Sam’s bit that may be helpfully illustrative,
"I have often used the following cartoon example to clarify the point:
Imagine that I had once spoken or written the following sentences: “Black people are apes. White people are apes. We’re all apes. Racism doesn’t make any sense.”
The problem for anyone who writes or speaks on controversial topics these days is that the Internet is filled with unscrupulous people who will not hesitate to reduce the above to the following meme: “Black people are apes. — Sam Harris”"
That will go uncontested - I totally agree.
But does that entail ignoring exculpatory statements. Trump’s [quote=“Faizal_Ali, post:10, topic:17016”]
White Supremacist
[/quote]
views hardly seems to be on display here,
I’d ask you to go over your last comment with sober hindsight and in the mindset of being a Peaceful scientist ask how it falls short.
Reminiscent of Dan Quayle and Potato-Gate… 
So your point seems to me that if someone says something complementary about a person of colour at any point in his life, he cannot be a White Supremacist. A point so ridiculous if requires no further comment.
Meanwhile, here is what this guy has been saying, right now, today:
Trump Blames FAA Diversity Hiring Following Crash—Without Evidence
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Who were the “fine people” at that march, then, who were happy to march with neo-Nazis and white nationalists without being that themselves? Who could Trump be referring to? Just curious.
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16 posts were split to a new topic: Side comments: Trump declares USA exit from World Health Organization
So, with exactly which part of my claim do you disagree? That Trump is a White Supremacist? Or that a a plurality of Americans are A-OK with being led by him? Or both?
While we’re at it. maybe let us know how you intend to determine whether your “dissenting view” has not even been considered by anyone. As opposed to being duly considered and then dismissed or disagreed with.
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I remember a time in this country when everyone would have gasped at such a callous and ridiculous statement by ANY government official, let alone a president.
I blurred this response to half-heartedly self-censor myself:
I think there should be an investigation into how a “low IQ DEI hire” [to fill a cognitively-declining orange-people quota] might explain the country’s new chief executive.
I normally don’t like to see political topics arise in science forums but I am deeply concerned that we are seeing the kinds of deeply destructive processes underway in our nation’s governance which have obvious parallels to 1930’s Germany (e.g. the 1933 amnesty of hundreds of violent felons who supported the new government.) And I say that as someone who considered himself “conservative” for most of his life and even attended a Republican convention a half-century ago. Now, in my deeply MAGA zip code, I am under considerable pressure to remain silent but don’t feel that it is right to do so. Our nation is on a dangerous path.
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The second seems difficult to determine since only a quarter of USAns voted for him.
I think that’s why Faizal said “plurality” and not “majority.”
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