I thought the sarcasm was obvious.
I showed this to somebody who immediately claimed âthe left will find a picture of anybody extending their hand to call them a Nazi.â I asked him to watch the video and he refused. So I showed him the statement the church released after firing him within a day:
Statement from the Anglican Catholic Church
At approximately 3:00 pm today (1/29) members of the College of Bishops of the ACC were made aware of a post made on X showing the end of a speech made by Calvin Robinson at the National Pro-Life Summit in Washington, DC. In it, he closed his comments with a gesture that many have interpreted as a pro-Nazi salute.
While we cannot say what was in Mr. Robinsonâs heart when he did this, his action appears to have been an attempt to curry favor with certain elements of the American political right by provoking its opposition. Mr. Robinson had been warned that online trolling and other such actions (whether in service of the left or right) are incompatible with a priestly vocation and was told to desist. Clearly, he has not, and as such, his license in this Church has been revoked. He is no longer serving as a priest in the ACC.
Furthermore, we understand that this is not just an administrative matter. The Holocaust was an episode of unspeakable horror, enacted by a regime of evil men. We condemn Nazi ideology and anti-Semitism in all its forms. And we believe that those who mimic the Nazi salute, even as a joke or an attempt to troll their opponents, trivialize the horror of the Holocaust and diminish the sacrifice of those who fought against its perpetrators. Such actions are harmful, divisive, and contrary to the tenets of Christian charity.
Finally, we pray that God will give us grace to lay aside our unhappy divisions, and we commend our nation and ourselves to his Almighty protection.
He hasnât said anything back.
If he does, it will likely be something about how the ACC is woke.
Yes, the church that split from the Episcopal church over the ordination of women is obviously a beacon of left-wing wokeness. (That said, my understanding is that the priest is openly gay, so I guess they are a little bit woke.)
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they donât even allow Nazis!
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From Phillip Lowâs verified Facebook account (per Snopes, which says they canât confirm the actual claims he makes.)
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 â 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 âmaintain the light of consciousnessâ or about âfree speech absolutismâ 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 his name is on so few patents is because 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 â I immediately pushed her away â 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 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 NVâs 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:
âElon,
Only one of us apparently knows the difference between Science and PR, and between friendship and phonies, and unfortunately you ainât it.
Letâs 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, donât fuck with me.â
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 Neuralinkâs co-founders ditched Elon and the company.]
Elon did two Nazi salutes.
He did them for five main reasons:
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He was concerned that the âNazi wingâ 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;
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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 âpowerâ just like when he told advertisers to âgo fuck yourselfâ. This has nothing to do with Aspergerâs;
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There are some Jews he actually hates: Sam Altman is amongst them;
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He enjoys a good thrill and knew exactly what he was doing;
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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.
ââââââââââââââââââââââââââ-
N.B. For the few whining about my post âsans connaissance the causeâ and either trembling about my having shattered their illusions about their cult leader or thinking I am defending Elon:
I. My point is that he is transactional rather than ideological;
II. That being said, I am not defending him or his actions, just explaining them and confirming that he did, in fact, do two Nazi Salutes if anyone had doubts or believed the doctored footage of Taylor Swift doing the same thing to normalize what Elon did;
III. At some point, it matters to few people if one is a Nazi or if one acts like one. My father was a Holocaust Survivor. 32 out of 35 of his family members were murdered by Nazis. My motherâs grandparents were murdered in Auschwitz;
IV. After Elon tried to manipulate NVâs stock in 2021, I fired him with cause, and he was unable to exercise his stock options. In the aftermath of the Nazi Salutes, I told both him and his wealth manager to fuck off. Any remaining friendship between us ended with the Nazi Salutes. He is blocked on my end and I am pretty sure I am blocked on his;
V. I did not share what he told me in confidence. I just happen to know him extremely well, the person, the aspirations and the Musk Mask;
VI. I know who I am, have no desire to be famous and give exceedingly few media interviews. I prefer to work in obscurity and let the work speak for itself. I am certainly not envious and would definitely not want Elonâs life, including living in a bubble and having to make one outlandish claim after another and manipulate the public, elections and governments to shore up my stock and prevent the bubble from bursting. Unlike Elon, I am an actual scientist and inventor and I am not pretending to be someone I am not, like a fellow who got his BA in Econ at 26 all of a sudden pretending to be an expert in mechanical engineering, chemistry, rocket science, neuroscience and AI and keeping the people actually doing the work hidden and paying people to play online games in his name to appear smart and feed his so-called âSupergeniusâ Personality Cult â the âImperatorâ has no clothes, and he knows it. I am just very disappointed in what happened to someone I had a lot of deep admiration for and the first person to find out about my concerns about his behavior was always him;
VII. He is the one who betrayed a number of his friends, including Sergey, and, given his actions, many other people who believed him and believed in him. I have no sympathy for this behavior, and at some point, after having repeatedly confronted it in private, I believe the ethical thing to do is to speak out, forcefully and unapologetically, whatever the risks may be, so as to not be part of the timid flock remaining silent while evil is being done, including propping up far right governments around the world in part to deregulate his companies and become the first trillionaire and otherwise to ârule the planetâ â he knows Mars wonât be terraformed in his lifetime and he really wants his planet. No joke⌠Ethics matter. People matter. The truth matters.
I took down Descartes (through the Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness) and I am definitely not afraid of a so-called inventor whose greatest invention is his image.
I will not be silent. You should not be either. I am a sovereign individual, and so are you. I stood up to bullies, and am stepping out of the dark to do it again.
Stop working for him and being exploited by him. Sell your Tesla and dump your Tesla stock. Nikola Tesla was a great, creative and courageous man who led with ethics and by example and he would not have wanted for his good name to have been used by him and would agree with my principled stance. Sign off of âXâ which is boosting far right propaganda, and of your Starlink as well. He is a complete cunt (British slang not meant to be offensive to women) who doesnât give a shit about you â only about power. Just ask Reid Hoffman. He only wants to control, dominate and use you â donât let him and cut him and his businesses out of your and your loved onesâ lives entirely. Remember he is a total miserable self-loathing poser, and unless you happen to be one too, he will be much more afraid of you than you should ever be of him.
He will probably come after me, and I am completely fine with that. I am a self-made multibillionaire with an armada of lawyers â literally â and most importantly, I know who I am and who I stand for, the people and their freedoms, whatever happens. He can send his dumb Proud Boys and Oath Keepers after me and they will be butchered on sight. Either way, I would rather die with honor than live as a coward.
âSilence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.â â Elie Wiesel, Holocaust Survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate
PS. Days after this post went viral, Elon got a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize, after other efforts to restore his made-up image (including an intervention by Bibi Netanyahu who does not want Elon against him when negotiating with Trump) all failed. Unless he is able to successfully manipulate the Nobel Committee, it is highly unlikely that it would award the Prize to anyone interfering with free elections, promoting hate speech, sympathizing with Nazis and doing Nazi Salutes.
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He keeps his lawyers on boats?
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pics or it didnât happen
In this timeline?
My views were broadly aligned with that analysis (which was very good)
Musk is way too smart to be a Nazi. But he is smart enough to manipulate those that choose ideology over rational thought. He is doing the same with with Trump, but with Trump he is dealing with a highly unstable individual so the potential damage to him is much higher.
I would posit that this is a high-stakes gamble for Musk: he could either lose vast amounts of his life fortune if Trump turns on him, or be made wealthy and powerful beyond his wildest dreams if Trump favours him. I think he is following this pathway because its really the only way he will beat out all the other Billionaires in the long-run (and so far this has indeed paid off handsomely for him).
His whole persona revolves around this - but it was very interesting to read comments from someone who knew him well during his formative childhood years (where the source of most behavioral issues in adulthood can be traced back to).
Why doesnât his dad just give him a hug and tell him he did good enough in life or something
Then he wouldnât be such a prick
His father was a violent and abusive man.
AlsoâŚTrumpâs father was also a highly abusive man.
Its almost like abusive childhoods create dysfunctional adult personalitiesâŚ
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Trump and Musk both seem to enjoy people throwing themselves at them. They require loyalty and canât handle any criticism directed at them. This is how they found the far right - people who cheer them on where the loved the attention even if they didnât quite agree with their own messages, at least initially. Well, maybe Trump believed this version of things on some topics where he is fundamentally very racist, but the both have tested the waters with various views repeatedly over and over againâŚit is the far right that latched on to some of their messages that drove them further in that direction.
They are both transactional, they used money to measure their successes, because that is how they were raised. But that money doesnât give them happiness. Trump buys himself beautiful women to show off, Musk seems interested in buying and owning technology to show off. Those things donât make them happy either.
But the attention they get - Trump through traditional media and Musk through social media, is what they have found gives them a sense of purpose. As it was noted, the far right is very easily to manipulate. I donât think its because they are stupid, but more because they have been shunned historically. So suddenly, you have leaders with money that have broken through all that, and they just bow down to them, which just encourages them both to do more of that.
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iâve read along and think i understand a lot of it. a locale and the people inhabiting it have a way about them and it brings comfort, identity, and other things. most of them positive (or at worst neutral).
what I quoted is the part where the challenge is.
the french wanted to spread their local way of doing things (including language and culture) to other parts of canada. and from the way you frame it, thatâs seen as a good thing.
but instead others brought their way of doing things to the location that was historically (vast) majority french canadian. and that is framed as a bad thing.
but in each direction, it is someone bringing their culture somewhere else. the cultures intersect and blend (yes, losing the purity each once had). you describe one as good and the other as bad.
do you think if the french community had a thriving foothold suddenly in Calgary, that in 100 years that community in Calgary would be no different from a French dominated city in Quebec? I donât - it wouldnât feel purely like that is my guess. something would be off bc of the Calgary-ness seeping around it.
if you are asking if something is being lost (the purity of that community and culture) I agree that the change does bring about a loss of a kind. If you are asking if that feels like what was previously there is being marginalized some, I see that.
The effort to preserve the purity is where, historically, a lot of bad ideas get brought up IMO. Mostly, the new people are just regular people coming in and trying to live like regular people among the existing people. (Excluding colonialism and the old worldâs view of the savages that lived in the new places.)
I think the historic culture can be preserved (not anything just out of touch with modern world view - e.g., see âslavery in the southâ) but it will not be s not the dominant and obvious âonlyâ culture. We are all changing, every day.
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I think he is, in some sorts, for now.
I think heâs got the capability to change things, on earth and beyond, for the better. And I believe he will, again, for now.
How much American culture has seeped into British culture? I always had a feeling that British culture was actually being exported and quite strong.
The immigrants that come here can integrate into the new culture. Of course the culture always evolves, thatâs fine. But it canât deviate significantly or get lost through multiculturalism. Multiculturalism says that you can bring your own culture into a new country. So if the demographics are driven by immigration and immigrants simply keep their own culture then the existing culture doesnât evolve but simply dies.
There are two key components of Quebec culture: secularism and French. I think that even if the culture evolves, those two components can be preserved forever. Our immigration policy is aimed at attracting french speaking immigrants and they tend to be Muslim. So there is an integration challenge due to secularism.
I was talking about âconsumer cultureâ which I think is a fair characterization of the common culture in the United States. The United States is not multicultural in the same way as Canada. Itâs a melting pot. There is definitely a common culture in the United States that revolves around consumption:
Consumer culture describes a lifestyle hyper-focused on spending money to buy material or goods. It is often attributed to, but not limited to, the capitalist economy of the United States. During the 20th century, market goods came to dominate American life, and for the first time in history, consumerism had no practical limits. Consumer culture has provided affluent societies with alternatives to tribalism and class war.
The American Dream has long been associated with consumerism.[27][28] According to Sierra Clubâs Dave Tilford, "With less than 5 percent of world population, the U.S. uses one-third of the worldâs paper, a quarter of the worldâs oil, 23 percent of the coal, 27 percent of the aluminum, and 19 percent of the copper.
My view is that there is a pull towards this type of culture in the absence of an effort to preserve a culture.
I am sure the people of the First Nations feel badly about Quebec culture losing 400 years of dominance and relevance.
In north america i try to stay grounded about how long the history is.
That said, i do recognize that it would feel like something lost to those holding it