Censorship or incompetence?

I don’t have the information to decide, but this is just a random example that signals the norm of what can be observed, not the exception.

Just a random post, really (and very, very stupid replies, but the content is not the topic here).

https://x.com/BuzzPatterson/status/1881927690028286416

The attention goes to this one, that shows 141 replies.

Yet, only three are shown. There’s a button at the top of the page that many don’t even know exists, but you can sort these replies by “relevancy”, “latest” or “likes”. No matter what you select, only these three replies are shown.

(You can see one of the posts here has another 9 replies to itself listed. You can open that too. There is only one single direct reply. But also more follow it. Even when you expand every single one, the total number of nested replies is only six.)

It could be a simple server hiccup, but I tested a few of these by bookmarking them and checking again after a few days, and the same behavior is shown. It could STILL be a server hiccup that doesn’t get addressed.

It is also again the norm.

The point is obvious. Is this “free speech”? In this case it’s not even merely an algorithm that decides what to boost and what to suppress. This is complete omission. Posts that are supposedly written and no one can actually see and read (or, these are just fake inflated random numbers).

(The more plausible guess is that the network is organized in bigger clusters that only occasionally sync to each other, and only for certain flagged segments, considering that the situation is stable across weeks. Which means that only certain people have access to the real public town square, while most of everyone is limited to an arbitrary limited slice, depending on where you live and who you are. That once again confirms why Musk is so focused on the matter of “merit” while hating the concept of “equality.” It’s all part of the manipulative game. Securing for oneself more opportunities so to boast about the merits of the results. Like Capitalism, it self feeds, it proves itself right by securing the context of the observation. A self preserving machine. Just like cancer.)

But there’s an even more general consideration to make. If this is the worldwide “public town square”, what’s scary is that the rules are UNKNOWN. The rules that explicitly regulate “free speech” are not simply a private property, but regulated with hidden mechanisms that you have to trust. Imagine participating to a sports match, and the rules are only known to the referee, but unknown to the players.

Yes, other social platforms also have the same problems, but they also do not claim explicitly to represent free speech, nor to be the source of correct information with the intention of replacing all other media, and even less declared to represent the absolute “truth.”

It should be obvious, without differentiation of judgement or political affiliation, that this is not free speech, nor correct or fair information.

On BlueSky, the number of replies listed is the number of replies you find.

EDIT: I’m checking the same link several hours later. I can still see the one reply with the other nine count under it, but the other two replies in the picture above are now missing. And I see a brand new one. So now the total count of visible comments has gone from three down to two, the shown count is instead now 142. The Schrödinger social, what you write both exists and not.

Clarifying, picking up some things I wrote on a forum.

If you saw the Nazi salute and thought “he did that because he identifies himself as Nazi”, then you’d be wrong. I don’t think he subscribes to the ideology.

“Reducing” it to fascism would be an oversimplification because that’s not the intent. But one part of the intent was to anticipate that it would be interpreted that way, and exploit it. The true intention was for that salute to be a BAIT.

The problem with Nazi is that they aren’t a secret society with secret gesture to signal each other, but that they are proudly so. Musk doesn’t need to send some kind of hidden signal, it would have no purpose. If you follow what the narrative is right now you can see it’s all about laughing at those who interpreted the gesture as a Nazi salute. Again, if it WAS a Nazi salute then he wouldn’t need to disguise it. Because Nazis aren’t shy about their intentions.

The reason why I have no doubts about this is because it follows PRECISELY a well known pattern. There’s nothing smart and new about any of this.

This has been going on for months, reposted by Musk himself countless times. All the slogan about “legacy media fake news”, all the Trump Derangement Syndrome. It’s all perfectly codified and reiterated OVER AND OVER. It’s THE playbook.

It has a wikipedia page.

“The term has mainly been used by Trump supporters to discredit criticism of him, as a way of reframing the discussion by suggesting that his opponents are incapable of accurately perceiving the world.”

Incapable of accurately perceiving the world here means that his gesture CLEARLY means “from my heart, I thank you”. If you see in that a Nazi gesture, it’s because YOUR MIND GOT DERANGED, by the also well known Woke Mind Virus.

You see Nazi EVERYWHERE. Because YOU ARE CRAZY.

The “Proud Boys” example is an especially explicit one. Trump says something, it’s immediately picked up as a proof to accuse Trump of openly supporting Nazi, only for Trump side to interpret it in a different way.

It’s pure, well tried, gaslighting.

You have to realize how many times these types of “double” messages have been reposted on X by Musk in the past weeks.

The Nazi gesture is precisely his own way of fabricating THE SAME THING. The same thing HE KNEW would be interpreted in a way by one side, and in another by his own. He precisely planned his own “proud boys” moment.

The point in all this is that if you accuse Elon Musk of being a Nazi, then you accuse him in a way that DOES NO HARM. Because he doesn’t believe himself so and because you’re firing a toy gun he himself pushed into your hand. The whole “gamer” thing is instead something that got out of his hands and actually HURT him. Ironically if you think about it. Ironically if you think how Asmongold himself laughs at the fact of having “feelings” about being or not “good at videogames.” Something so ludicrous you wouldn’t expect this hurting anyone. Yet it hurts Musk, because HE BELIEVES he’s good at games. That’s part of his own INTERNAL identity, that he also projects. As I said, you would be wrong thinking he projects a lie, because he instead projects something he truly believes.

Elon Musk and Trump are similar in this aspect. Back in 2020, before the election, when Trump was asked if he would recognize Biden’s victory if it were to happen, he didn’t say “yes”, or “no.” He said “we shall see.” If he then had won that election, nothing weird would have happened, as if there are two alternative time lines going on in parallel, where you “repurpose” the past as you see fit. After he realizes he lost the election, he picks up the phone to tell his minions go find proofs of voter fraud. This is not to “fabricate” those proofs. This is not to start a lie of manipulation, accusing Democrats of wrongdoings. In his mind the idea of himself losing to a guy like Biden is IMPOSSIBLE. So, in reality, either he wins, or there has to be a fraud if he loses. There’s no third alternative. If he wins, then reality is conformed to his mind shape. Fine. If he loses then it’s immediately PROVEN that Democrats have cheated. He BELIEVES that they cheated because there’s no other rational option on the table (of his mind). When he picks up the phone to tell his minions to go do their job, it’s because he BELIEVES there HAVE TO BE PROOFS of that cheating, since the cheating happened beyond a shadow of a doubt.

The problem with these deranged people isn’t that they are cynical liars, but that THEY BELIEVE THE LIES THEY TELL.

EDIT: There’s a video that explains all this really well and eloquently, but it’s in Italian and I’m not sure the automated subtitles would be enough. He goes by quoting Hannah Arendt on fascism, saying that it becomes irrelevant what’s true or not. In this case the “truth” behind the salute is completely irrelevant because its function is to “measure Musk’s strength.” It was a test of his strength and control over his people. Musks himself says how you should “read” that gesture, therefore the function becomes drawing a line between who supports him and who’s against him. Doing so, he reinforces the identity of his side. His people are called to defend him, so emptying out internal debate and finding unity in opposition to the enemy. The goal is sending the signal, declaring what it means, and then measuring the response as an act of fealty: you are with me now, you are my people.

EDIT2: Considering, up to this point, the weak, sullen reaction from Musk on X, I’m now less certain that it was something deliberate and planned ahead. But I still can’t make a real rational case on how it could not have been.

And here we are again, sigh…

This time too I have another excuse. This is again not directly about Elon Musk, but all of you out there, paying attention to the obvious, irrelevant part, and ignoring the important one. This is why “they” keep winning, and why their opposition continues to fall clumsily into traps that should otherwise be obvious.

From my point of view there’s no chance that “the salute” was the result of some autistic or “socially awkward” behavior. You don’t go to those kind of events improvising. I think Elon Musk played in his mind that exact moment many, many times. To the point of obsession. And if you followed, like I’ve done, his behavior online for the past few months, you’d understand that he’s sent plenty of “dog-whistling” types of messages. Way, way too many times, and always perfectly targeted to be a product of randomness and mistaken intention.

But in the exact same way, you’d be WRONG thinking that one was a FASCIST salute, intended that way. This is where you fall in the trap and react precisely in the way he predicted you would. If out there the debate is wholly about the act being or not intentional, what I’m saying is that the act IS intentional, but only to drive you then to the wrong conclusion. You slip right into the trap he deliberately set up.

Same as everything he has done up to this point, including the recent “Kekius Maximus”, that salute is meant as a pure act of trolling. That’s what it is. You can see how he deliberately emphasized the gesture as coming from his “heart”, because he was first and foremost sending a signal to his own party. To set the context and anticipate the outrage. On the other hand the deliberate gesture has the sole effect of ENRAGING his enemies. Because that’s what happens in his mind. He has calculated that the gesture would cause no harm on his side, no new enemies because he drove explicitly the meaning by “preparing” the alternative reading. He set the stage, a trap triggering ONLY for the haters. And yet he knew how much he would PISS OFF all those who were already against him.

So the moment you get pissed off, is the precise moment when he starts laughing because he predicted your behavior, all wrapped up in an event that will have no other consequence than driving more support to him. You just got gamed. You all got angry and unable to do a thing about it. The pure essence of trolling.

There is a regularity in what he’s doing, or at least a descent down the same pattern: a complete erasure of scruples as long he gets closer to his goal. This lets him once again focus everything on himself and distract from other recent controversies. Enrage the haters so that he can reinforce his own tribe with a renewed sense of unity. He’s drawing more and more the core matter to pure belief: either you are with him, or against him. In or out. That salute works perfectly because of its obvious double face and function: those on his side will read it positively, and those against him get successfully trolled. A complete win.

Those like Elon Musk don’t look at Mussolini and Hitler out of a desire to bring back fascism. Because those like him don’t want to live in the shadow of another man. If he looks at fascism it is because he wants to SURPASS IT. To go beyond.

And this is the part that even makes sense. Because if you clean the table of all morals and scruples, and your intention is solely make humanity multi-planetary, no matter the costs or the rationality of it, it may well be true that a fascist state is the shortest path to that goal. Why not.

I said I was done writing about Elon Musk but this is too funny and also closing on the previous.

There has been a chain of “community noted” posts by Elon Musk. If I said that he controls the platform and uses it to his own ends, how it is possible he allows this to happen, when it is clearly against himself? As I already said, he controls the flow of information, not the information itself. The hand stays hidden in order to further the lie. But when there’s an OVERWHELMING mass moving, then it cannot be suppressed without direct intervention. And when this happens, he thinks it would be superfluous. It’s better to ignore and let it wash over. As it happened with this whole PoE2 controversy and everyone now accusing him of being a “fake gamer” after the video by Quin (one of the links above has a link to it already).

It’s funny because the great majority out there now knows Elon is a fake gamer, not because of what he said and did, but because of one (eloquent) video. It’s again another proof of information manipulation, in this case completely OUT of Elon Musk’s hands, and again a very distant relative of “truth.” Which is why I’ll “defend” Elon Musk later in this post.

Here’s the recent part:

(I’ve removed checkmarks and other shit through css editing because I got annoyed, there are no other spurious edits)
(through all the other controversy that the internet loves but it’s completely stupid and irrelevant, like Dittmann supposedly being Elon’s sockpuppet, someone suggested even Ian Miles Cheong might be one of them. You can clearly see through these types of interactions he isn’t.)

So I was saying, why does he let it happen?

Because of this:

It happens when an influencer’s platform collides with another influencer’s platform. Asmongold can rally enough people to create a wave large enough to affect the high level shaping of the message that Elon Musk does on his platform.

And yet, the whole thing is irrelevant and juvenile. No one cares about what Asmongold or Musk’s achievements are in a game. But nope, apparently we all do?

This is on ALL OF YOU. Do you really need that kind of proof to understand the lie that is Elon Musk? That he trips and falls on PoE2, of all things?

It is indeed a big deal because it shows the weapon that is rhetoric, and how little of truth is left in this world.

What is the truth, then? That Elon Musk is definitely not a “fake gamer.”

When he posts this, he is simply saying that alongside the one video where it is shown how incompetent he is at playing PoE2, there are also tons of other videos showing him competently (I assume) playing Diablo 2.

So where is the “truth”? Is he a fake gamer or not?

As with all things, and why I’m writing this, you can either understand something, or judge it. The judgemental part PREVENTS understanding.

Do you want to understand Elon Musk? If so, you won’t be able to judge him. Otherwise, you would be already part of everyone out there, happy to point the accusing finger. Contented because of the “GOTCHA!” Ha-ah! We caught you! You’re a LIAR! …and of course you won’t understand a thing.

This whole story is a “gotcha!” and because of it, quite pointless, if not to observe the accuser rather than the accused. It’s a story about us, rather than him. About the rhetorical grasp that we cannot escape.

What’s the truth about him, instead? That he’s not trying to fool anyone because he is the fool. If you want to understand Elon Musk you cannot think of the way you see him, to “expose” him, but you need to understand his own mind. The way he sees himself, rather than the idea projected. And the important element with egomaniacs is that they BELIEVE the idea they project. He IS NOT a fake gamer.

When he posts that last image above, with the link to that video, he is DISMAYED: how can you accuse me of not knowing how to play when clearly it is not the case?

That’s him piloting. If we agree he plays well, then he’s not fake. (I have no idea, nor care, I haven’t opened that video)

So, now you need to think like he does, in order to understand. One of the basis of this whole PoE2 debacle, and Diablo 2 before of it, is that it takes a lot of time even to be able to collect that kind of build. Not skill, time. It’s also obvious that Elon Musk doesn’t have that time. Because no one does. Literally. In the case of PoE2, the game is simply too recent to make a PLAUSIBLE case where that type of build is legit. Already at this stage you don’t need any other proof, because only streamers and similar types of players, who started from the first hour and play on average 12 to 16 hours a day are able to get their hands on that. No matter how little Elon Musk “sleeps” or how efficiently he may play, he just CANNOT obtain that build on his own. It’s not a matter of SKILL.

And that’s the whole point. It’s not a matter of skill.

Again, you need to understand how he THINKS.

What he thinks, being a legit “gamer” same as any one of us, is that these games are 95% made of GRIND. What is grind? Essentially a waste of time. And he’s a successful businessman, time’s precious. He’s not anymore a basement-dwelling kid who can play all day long without giving a single fuck about anything else. And that’s WHY all his game-“things” are all fake and “achieved” by other people. It’s OBVIOUS. You don’t need proofs for something THIS obvious. No convenient gotchas.

All that means that he sees the game made of two parts, the pointless grind, and the interesting challenge at the end. Paying someone to replace the grindy part, and not disclose it, it’s like waving away what’s irrelevant to his own mind. It’s not HIDING the trick, it’s simply smoothing the story. A simple matter of presentation, not of essence. Yes, that’s not his own earned loot, but this says nothing of how good a player he is. It only speaks of time invested, and it doesn’t hold anything meaningful to him. It doesn’t hold an idea of efficiency, but of time wasted. Appropriating that part would be counterproductive, admitting of WASTING time.

He doesn’t see himself as a time waster. The idea he projects is the idea he believes. Therefore the internal narrative has to be set straight. It can’t be a lie. In his mind, being consigned a pre-set character with a pre-set build is akin to a sports pilot who’s participating to an official competition. He’s the Lewis Hamilton. He’s not the engineer who built the car, he’s the fucking PILOT! He comes in for the race. When the race’s over, the team takes care of the rest.

He comes on stage for the show, the show that is his own life, to himself. Not to us, TO HIMSELF.

His mind is so deeply caught into this process that when “gamers” get their gotchas he can only react with DISBELIEF: yeah, none of those items were acquired by me, wasn’t that obvious? I’m rich, I can pay people that do the boring part so that I can show all of you the good one. My own skills are reserved for the part of the game that requires them.

And of course no one is an expert at PoE2, the game’s too new. He’s trying it out, like everyone else. And of course he’s trying out the only part of the game that he sees relevant: the endgame.

It should be obvious that his interest in games is not fake, that he’s just another nerd like “us.” What is fake, to a certain extent, is the “achiever.” The story to sell rather than the story he believes. But that part is in itself utter idiocy. Look above at that part listing Asmongold’s “achievements.” Who fucking cares?

This story, again, speaks more of us, than him. About the pettiness of the easily handed out “gotchas.” Of the judgemental us, extending the “if he lied about this, then he could have lied about everything else!” As if you needed this as a fallacious “proof.”

Yes, of course. Same as all of us. We’ve proven once again our own stupidity, and it would be a waste not taking advantage of it. That’s why we’re here.

(The reason why the Trumps and Musks keep coming up to plague our collective lives is precisely because of this. Because we are satisfied by the gotchas! that do no harm. Because we’re smug about the superfluous, as long it is self serving. We fire a toy weapon that was given, believing it an act of rebellion. Because we’re just like “them”, but ended up on the unlucky side.)

EDIT: going to address this too. Apparently Musk removed Asmongold blue checkmark on X, that I couldn’t notice because as I said I’ve removed some pieces of the UI a while ago when the interface started to became a bloated mess. Anyway, this is again another “weapon given.” Attacking Musk for free speech, using this as an example, is ineffective. Musk has already said this:

To him, removing Asmongold’s checkmark is the same as removing revenue. The fake mantra he repeats, “you are the media now”, simply means that literally: Elon Musk is your boss and editor when you post on his network. Just the same as it happens on a newspaper, with the only difference that he can wash his hands of responsibility for the bad stuff. And the message to Asmongold is simple: your’re fired.

On the personal, behind the scenes, level, instead, the story is more like this. (the video is just another of those emphatic gotchas, again, but the sample message from Covid era are quite coherent with the stupid shit Musk was posting publicly at that time)

EDIT2: Yeah, fuck you :) You’ve made abundantly clear you’re garbage and are just attempting at juggling your own farce.

My “coverage” of Elon Musk, I think, ends here.

I kept observing as a way of taking the pulse on the deteriorating state of democracy, politics and all plays about seizing power and manipulate truth for personal interests. But at this point I don’t think anymore Musk is following some kind of master plan. He’s just out of his fucking mind, out of his own control, and with a serious mental health problem that is first and foremost self-destructive. Of course this doesn’t mean that on the way out he won’t keep causing enormous damage.

So we start from usual, signature fascism:

To the call for immediate public executions with no trials or anything:

To the random and casual 3 years old toddler insults:

To call the invasion of another country (that isn’t his dear Russia):

This stops being an important, interesting pattern on the state of human culture, and it becomes just a health problem of a single man. I am indeed suffering of “suicidal empathy”, because I do believe Elon Musk needs some serious help. These types of things don’t usually heal on their own and only get worse over time.