Links 39: Donald Trump Inauguration Edition
things I found interesting
Musk's Hitler salute
Did Elon Musk make a Hitler salute at the Trump inauguration?
Tech billionaire Elon Musk has come under fire after making back-to-back hand gestures resembling the Nazi salute during a speech celebrating the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump.
Addressing Trump supporters hours after the Republican was inaugurated as the 47th US president on Monday, Musk hailed the outcome of the US presidential election on November 4 as “no ordinary victory”.
“This was a fork in the road of human civilization,” Musk said at the Capital One Arena in Washington, DC.
Elon Musk did not give a Nazi salute
Andrew Doyle says Musk didn't give a Nazi salute:
‘Elon Musk accused of giving “Nazi salute” at Trump inauguration celebration’ says the Independent. The activist media are positively priapic with glee that Donald Trump’s most powerful ally just publicly endorsed Hitler live at his inauguration.
Except of course that didn’t happen. And we know it didn’t happen because we do not have cabbages for heads. Let’s just hypothetically suppose for one moment that Musk is a clandestine fascist, one so ingenious and Machiavellian that he has managed to inveigle his way into the White House and is now poised to initiate the Fourth Reich. Does any sentient human being suppose for one moment that such an evil genius would now accidentally reveal his scheme to millions of people live on television?
Some people say Musk did a Hitler salute. Some people say he didn't.
I think there's a third possibility: maybe he wanted to make a gesture that's both plausibly deniable and would anger his enemies. Because who doesn't want to make their enemies seethe with impotent rage?
Would that be petty? Yes, but sometimes people are petty.
Europe’s holiday from history is over
Europe’s holiday from history is now over, says Finland's President Alexander Stubb:
Stubb goes on to say Europe must spend more on defence, due to hostile acts from Russia and China.
Bastani contra Europe's elites
Aaron Bastani says:
Europe’s liberal elite despises Elon Musk.
That’s partly because his cultural reach & political influence underscores how they’ve gotten everything wrong.
In a world of apex predators - Russia, China and Trump’s U.S. - they’ve left us with no power to shape the future.
This is true. We therefore need to Make Europe Dangerous Again.
Chinese Invasion Barges
H I Sutton reports that China is building a fleet of invasion barges, which is exactly what it would be doing if it was planning an amphibious assault on Taiwan:
Fukuyama on social media
Francis Fukuyama says social media is replacing traditional media in how people get news:
Social media is rapidly displacing legacy media as the primary way Americans get information. No one should pretend that they are neutral town squares; rather, they are political actors that can influence the outcome of elections. The real problem is that they are too big and powerful. So were the three over-the-air TV networks in their heyday, but their political influence was checked by the FCC and old-fashioned norms about media neutrality. No such constraints exist today for the large platforms in online space.
To fix this, Fukuyama sees middleware as the solution:
That power needs to be diminished, and the only feasible way I see to do that is through the proliferation of middleware that would essentially take away their editorial power. The middleware idea was the subject of a study group I led at Stanford in 2020, and has been elaborated recently in an excellent new report by the Foundation for American Innovation that you can access here.
By middleware they mean requiring social media to be interoperable so that people can build on one or more social media feeds to make something new:
Middleware’s primary benefit is that it dilutes the enormous control that dominant platforms have in organizing the news and opinion that consumers see. Decisions over whether to institute fact-checking, remove hate speech, filter misinformation, and monitor political interference will not be made by a single CEO but will instead be controlled by a variety of informed and diverse intermediaries. Additionally, middleware facilitates competition. It offers a new and distinct layer of potential competition for consumer loyalties and opens a pathway for innovations in managing information, including commercial information that might benefit firms otherwise disadvantaged by the platforms’ business models
This is basically the same idea of federation and the ActivityPub protocol.
The paper then gives examples of middleware services:
replacements or enhancements for platform-controlled content curation and recommendation algorithms.
A market of middleware providers specializing in curation could empower users to select among feed-ranking algorithms, perhaps subscribing to multiple and toggling between them, allowing users to fine-tune content preferences, avoid unwanted or irrelevant material, or shape their online experiences according to their tastes, interests, and moods.
Users or independent middleware providers could potentially create their own feeds, then share them with the platform community so that others can subscribe.
Future middleware-based agent services might enable users to delegate curation to branded providers of their choosing—for example, subscribing to feeds assembled by the New York Times, Fox News, Sports Illustrated, or their local church or community center.
For moderation, especially of "lawful but awful" content such as spam, hate speech, porn, gore, bots, etc they suggest:
community moderation, in which governance is handled by members of the community rather than by professional moderators. This approach is often perceived as more legitimate by the community.
This could be very simply implemented. E.g. I follow 700 people on BlueSky, and if a certain proportion (say 5%) mark a post as lawful-but-awful, then the system could be set up so I wouldn't see it, unless I specifically asked to see lawful-but-awful stuff.
Risk, Donald Trump Edition
There's no rules and everyone's a loser:
Trump won because woke is unpopular
In an article entitled "I Can’t Believe That Free Speech, Color Blindness, and Meritocracy Became Right-Wing Issues", Jeff Maurer quotes Trump's inauguration speech:
After years and years of illegal and unconstitutional federal efforts to restrict free expression, I will also sign an executive order to immediately stop all government censorship and bring back free speech to America.
[...] This week, I will also end the government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life. We will force a society that is colorblind and merit-based.
And comments:
Those sentences hurt not because I disagree, but because I can’t believe that the left has fucked things up so badly that free speech, color blindness, and meritocracy are now issues that the right feels they own. In fact, those issues are so right-coded that they made the list of Things To Throw In Democrats’ Faces At The Inauguration Speech. A little more than a decade ago, those were bedrock liberal ideals. How did we screw this up?
The answer, of course, is that radical leftists pushed a bunch of shit-for-brains ideas, and liberals were too dickless to say “what you’re saying is dumb and wrong”.
He's right of course. I've been saying for years that the left would eventually regret making opposition to free speech a core tenet of their ideology.