Durdy trix
A new front is opened in Musk’s war on all of us. Nick Cohen explains:
If you follow the tech news, you will know that Elon Musk has gone to war against Substack. He wants to punish it for launching a feature called Notes, which he fears may compete with his increasingly rickety Twitter platform.
Yesterday morning I found that no one could retweet Substack links to my pieces. By the evening, Musk had lifted the ban. But if Twitter users clicked on a link, they received a warning that made it sound as if they were about to enter the dark web.
It’s true. I tried it and sure enough I got the warning. Furthermore, I was unable to reply to Nick’s tweet telling him so. I had to send him a DM to tell him Musk appears to have blocked replies to him. What a shit that man is.
The friendly staff down at my local sewerage farm would probably call him a ‘floater;’ prone to giving them a certain amount of bother. That is, until they turn into more normal ‘sinkers.’
Fucking Musk. He’s not even a good coder. He’s a sad little rich boy whose only real achievement is squandering his inheritance and ruining a successful company.
So an intelligent and searchingly critical writer like Nick Cohen has fallen foul of that infantile narcissist, Musk. It doesn’t surprise me. Nor does it surprise me that it was in connexion with a tweet about a piece of Cohen’s that talks about the fascist nature of Putin’s regime – quite rightly considering the kind of thinking that has influenced Putin & his pals. I don’t know if anyone here has listened to Aleksandr Dugin on Youtube, or read anything of his. I don’t recommend it, since it is utterly depressing, and mostly derivative of Heidegger & Carl Schmitt (the latter, though, is at times a not uninteresting thinker); but it is good to know your enemies.
It is odd how narcissists, which Putin certainly is, attract narcissists like Trump and Musk, as well as those who have have been seduced by libertarian ideas, and whose reading appears to have been confined to the thought of Ayn Rand (another narcissist),
And in connexion with Musk, I recommend watching the interview Matt Taibbi did with Mehdi Hasan on MSNBC the other day – Taibbi’s relationship with Musk came up. Taibbi was left floundering and furious – apparently he later unleashed a twitterstorm against MSNBC to relieve his hurt feelings, after admitting to at least some of the mistakes or misrepresentations that MH called him out on. I used to admire Taibbi, but certainly do not now. It was the most peculiar interview, with stammering evasions and vagueness on Taibbi’s part, and I began to wonder if there was not something mentally wrong with him.
@Tim – Yes, I once thought that Taibbi had some integrity, but like Greenwald has turned out to value self-interest and self-promotion over actual journalism. That whole Twitter files release party turned out to be a yawner.
Yes, Greenwald, too. At the beginning intelligent, if rather too morally fervent, and then a descent into conspiracy theories, and an ever greater insistence on his moral rectitude even as he behaves dishonestly and sloppily. Is it to a certain type of person that this sort of thing happens?
Techdirt have a good article about the article about the Taibbi interview as well. They had previously been critical of the Twitter files. I see Taibbi and Musk have now fallen out over the ban on Substack links (since that’s where Taibbi makes most of his money).
Thank you, Rob. Well-written and interesting, and, above all, honest.
Thanks Tim, unlike my comment above. I mean, I’d just got home after a lot of driving and I was tired and typing on my phone, but man “…a good article about the article about the Taibbi interview…”. I’m sure I could have done better than that. Apologies all…
All forgiven, Rob! As a matter of fact, I read your comment so quickly that I hadn’t even noticed the unneeded extras.
There is a good article by Cathy Young on the sensibly conservative website The Bulwark:
‘So Much for ‘Elon Musk, Free Speech Warrior.’
Thanks Tim! I have to admit I’ve been listening to Bulwark podcasts recently, just to try and get some understanding of where the moderate non-trump conservatives sit these days. I do think many of them downplay the role they themselves had in the evolution of the modern GOP. Sometimes there is a bit of ‘well yeah we were there at the time, but…’ kind of thing. At least they are generally conservatives I clan listen to without automatically starting to yell at my computer.