Elon Musk needs his own thread because he's in every damn thing/positive Elon Musk

Man, I think we would all love to believe that's not the case.

 

Say the Elon / Bosonaro fan boi.....

 

This is a good video about Neuralink and how their technology is probably a dead end and how a Neuralink founder left early on and is lapping them in his new company, just without the fanfare.



tldw: Neuralink sticks probes into the brain, which inherently causes damage and eventually scar tissue that weakens the connection. They try to lessen the impact by making the probes impossibly thin and flexible, but that leads to another problem - they tend to work themselves out of the brain. The newer approach is to have sensors that sit between the skill and the brain but don't enter the brain. It's already been in more brains than Neuralink.

 

Sorry. I'm not sure how valid an argument this is. The US courts also had a proud record of independence until they didn't.

 

Speaking of brain damage. There’s a Trump grievance orgy in my town today, a few hundred yards from our farmers market.

And the Musk connection? I saw a cyber truck parked in a school’s parking lot with a boot on it. Heh heh.

 

Lawfare!!!

 

I'm not familiar with Brazil's judiciary, so I'll definitely lean on your knowledge over mine, but is he in the wrong here? Or, at least, acting outside of Brazil's constitution. It is my understanding that the rulings up to this point have been in line with Brazil's laws regarding disinformation and the responsibility of the media in regards to this.

Also, is 20 days a long time based on similar situations? I think you are applying a conspiratorial explanation for something that could be normal without looking at other explanations as to why it took 20 days. Again, going with the US's court system, getting an in person hearing onto the court's schedule in less than 20 days would be amazing.

Of course, in the US, it probably wouldn't have required an in-person hearing as it likely would have been handled via filings and the case being dismissed due to compliance.

 

Brazil: another country that put up with decades of a repressive military regime thanks to an American engineered coup against a democratically elected government.

 

Well technically X was shut down because they didn't have a legal representative in the country right? Which all foreign companies are forced to do under the civil code.

 

And there are plenty saying he was acting within his power and that it was Twitter that was misbehaving by shutting down its operations in Brazil and firing all legal counsel.

Accounts aren't people and it isn't necessarily required that due process be followed to block the accounts, depending on how the laws are written. If the government were filing charges against the people behind the accounts for disinformation that's one thing, but they aren't, so that part is largely moot.

An example of what I'm talking about is the DMCA in the US. The DMCA requires ISPs to have a policy with regards to complying with those copyright laws. If an account violates the copyright policy, they are to be blocked in compliance with those policies. If the ISP fails to comply with the DMCA, then the ISP can be sued.

 

Two points to make...

1, If there are articles in English you should be able to link them so we can all see what they said and who said it.
2. I get what you're saying about due process but, on the other hand, maybe the Brazilian government realises the dangers of right-wing interference in it's democracy, (often from abroad), and is prepared to do what's necessary to stop it... UNLIKE a lot of other government, (including the US and, to a lesser extent, my own, it has to be said).

IOW whether they did something that hadn't been done before, (a subject about which I have no information), maybe they SHOULD have done it anyway.

I must admit, I find the attitude of a lot of western democracies totally half-baked regarding the danger to democracy from social media, in particular, and even from the the rest of the mainstream media, particularly things like faux news.

They seemed to have bought into this old idea of, 'It couldn't happen here', to a quite ludicrous extent. They're almost childlike in their level of naivety.

I remember reading an article some years back about a news organisation in the states, (it may have been Fox News... I can't remember). Anyway, as I understood it, they wanted the law changed so they couldn't be sued for, basically, saying things that aren't true. The article said this would have been a step even beyond the scrapping of the fairness doctrine. That occurred in the mid to late 80's IIRC.

It would have that meant that Fox could argue, for instance, that the Dominion voting machines were being used to steal the election and nobody could do anything about it, even Dominion themselves, because, (the argument went), Fox news was part of the entertainment business and had no responsibility to tell the truth.

This was in the mid noughties IIRC and it turned out to be a degree of mendacity that even the US political system was unwilling to accept.

But as I look at things now, how is it THAT much different to what's happening?

Clearly Dominion could sue Fox News and win but they're a private company. The US government did nothing about the situation even though the US democratic system, (and thus the nation as a whole), was also damaged enormously by what was said.

It's like America has to actually BECOME a fascist dictatorship before people will realise that, MAYBE it might be a good idea to stop people telling bald-faced lies in public about public bodies, private individual, public individuals, foreign states, etc. etc.

 

In which case it's not 'unconstitutional', is it?

 

brazil_legal@x.com probably has a poop emoji auto reply.

 

Elon thought the demands were unconstitutional?

Funny he had no problem pulling hundreds of accounts related to Erdogan's opponents or 221k anti-government accounts in India.

 

The length and the extent that some will go to try to defend Elon or "rationalize:" his abhorrent behaviors and antidemocratic practices will never cease to amaze me.

 

At this stage, calling Elon "an asshole and an overgrown baby" sound like a compliment. The ************************ is a white nationalist, a conspiracy theorist, a wannabe fascist and is literally sabotaging US democracy among other places....But yeah, he is an overgrown baby.....WTF?

 

Can we stick some electrodes on Elon's brain and set them to Not An Fing Ahole mode?

 

I didn't read the whole article but the byline at the top caught my eye...

Can one go too far to fight the far right?​

That, to me, seems to be completely missing the point. It's not about fighting the far right, although they're the main danger now. It's about fighting people who are trying to end our democracies. Theoretically, they could JUST as easily come from the left, from some extreme religious sect or from anywhere else.

Once you allow people to tell lies consistently which harm private individuals, public bodies, public individuals, the institutions of state or anyone else then democracy is at risk and, bluntly, the law is pretty much the only way of protecting those things. So whether it's politicians enacting laws to stop or the law invoking those laws, someone has to do something.

Then maybe they should change the law so it IS illegal to tell lies about certain things that harm our democracy?

 

The thing you have to bear in mind is that Brazil is pretty new to this whole 'democracy' lark. It's like some of the eastern European states that have elections but are sometimes a bit shaky about the details, including he institutions needed to maintain it. That's how they ended up with Orban in Hungary and the guy in Poland, (Kaczynski??? Something like that).

Of course, we have right-wing parties in the rest of Europe, (including the UK for 14 years ), but they're not actually going to overthrow democracy itself.