🔴@[email protected]🐝 #ZeroCovid, but smart

Your regularly reminder that Musk has done nothing to show that he's defending FREE-SPEECH; so far, he's been defending RIGHT-WING-SPEECH. Yes, right-wing speech is being censored by platforms, and yes, removing such censorship on Twitter is a good thing. But defending right-wing-speech doesn't prove you care about the principles of free-speech. Principles are the things you defend even when it does you no good, even when it helps the adversary/enemy. An example of defending free-speech is the ACLU defending the right of neoNazis to march in Skokie, Illinois. The ACLU obviously hates Nazis, hates their speech, but nonetheless stands for the PRINCIPLE of free-speech. Musk likewise defends the speech on Twitter of those called "Nazis", but that's obviously because he likes their speech. I'm being intentionally vague here. The "woke" call a lot of people Nazis unjustly, it's just become a lazy slur. I don't think Musk is a Nazi, or that he like's Nazi ideas. But there are certainly those on the "Nazi spectrum" ("almost but not quite Nazi") who, with their objectionable stuff, also say more reasonable stuff that we can pretend isn't racist at all. Musk likes that speech, and promotes it. Musk has gone full Trumpist. There's little distinguishing Trumpism and Muskism except for the fact that Musk views Trump as worthless little toad. Objectively, they are both "right-wing populists". Musk may be the first populist leader in history that doesn't actually intend to run as the leader of this country (at least, not until the 61st amendment is passed). In many respects, he's already more powerful than the president. He's completely reinvented the automobile industry, the space launch industry, and the satellite Internet industry. (Yes, he deserves the credit for this). If he really cared about free-speech, he's not showing it. For example, when Brazil government went after the free-speech of a former right-wing president, Musk very publicly stood up to defend that speech. But when the right-wing despot of Turkey restricted the speech of opposition, Musk meekly complied. nitter.cf/GlobalAffairs/st… The word "сіs" is primarily used by the "woke" to describe themselves (I'm "сіs-het", for example). Sometimes it's used in angry speech, such as the "сіs patriarchy", but that's simply to identify them, not to disparage them. Yet, in Musk's war on "wokeness", he's decided to label it a slur that gets censored on Twitter: nitter.cf/elonmusk/status/… Free-speech doesn't exist alone, but is instead part of "classical liberalism" that developed in the 1700s by thinkers like Voltaire, Locke, Hobbes, Hume, Rousseau, Adam Smith, etc. It stresses "free-speech", but also civil-rights, due-process, rule-of-law, economic freedom, democracy, pluralism, tolerance, etc. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classi… en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libera… It's hard to discuss because of the weird way the United States has flipped the word "liberal" to mean the left-wing Democrats. Throughout the rest of the world, it's seen as "center-right". It's more of the middle way between the socialists/communists on the left and those that want an effective aristocracy on the right. Musk is right that there is something wrong with the "woke mind virus", but except pointing to a few examples (like "cancel culture"), he hasn't adequately explained what's wrong with "wokism". The answer is that "wokism" is illiberal, against the "classical liberalism" described above. But then, Muskism is also illiberal. Free-speech aside, Musk opposes fundamental concepts of the classically liberal "enlightenment". A good example is "transparency" and "due process". He makes arbitrary decisions to censor people on Twitter, like censoring the person who was tracking his airplane. He gives a plausible reason for "moderating" the account, which is fine, which is why I didn't list it above as an example of "censorship". The problem was that it's ARBITRARY, he did it because he wanted. There's no "due process" for making such determinations other than arbitrary decisions of a despot. Likewise, there's no visibility into what Musks claims to be doing defending free-speech around the world. The old Twitter has a transparency page that documents their efforts: transparency.twitter.com/ But other than changing the name "Twitter" to "𝕏", Musk has made no effort to continue the transparency tradition. Maybe he's just as active defending Twitter users from bad government attempts to censor citizens, maybe not. He claims he is. But we have no way of knowing, because there's no transparency. Muskism is just "populism". He's not espousing any PRINCIPLE other than the fact that the "powerful" are corrupt, and he's leading the fight against the powerful. We know what "populism" looks like, and we know where it leads, to the destruction of society. Musks's populism is every much as illiberal as the "wokeism" that he fights. The point is simply this: Musk is not defending "free-speech", he appears not even to be aware of what the principle of "free-speech" means -- or any principle, really. Instead, he's just defending speech he likes -- which is any speech, no matter how crappy, that serves his purpose of challenging the powerful "woke".