Sunday, May 26, 2024

What is something brutally honest that needs to be said?

Profile photo for Jean-Marie Valheur

Good piece by my friend Parth Dutt. Elon Musk really is a piece of work… he didn’t “save” or even improve Twitter, he’s merely a man biased in another direction. I don’t get why some people continue to hail him as the Second Coming.

Long rant ahead.

I’m just gonna say that Elon Musk is a lying piece of shit when it comes to his claim of promoting free speech on X (formerly Twitter), because what he promotes isn’t free speech but unadulterated hate speech and misinformation that has real-life repercussions for people. On the other hand, when it comes to anything he doesn’t like, howsoever factual, he gets that censored, deleted or even banned.

Let me start with one incident that happened very recently.

Just yesterday, the user who goes by the name “Pagliacci the hated” having the handle “@Slatzism” circulated a video showing an Indian student studying in Canada allegedly abusing their welfare system by availing free groceries from food banks meant for the homeless and poor:

Pay attention to the part “You don’t hate them enough”.

Hours later, she makes another post claiming that she wrote to his employer and got him fired:

Her posts went viral and people on X as well as on reddit made comments/responses racially abusing him as well as Indians (as usual), calling us all thieves, “pajeets”, “street-shitters”, rapists, scammers, and all other usual racial slurs.

However, here’s the neat part: She’s lying.

The guy in question didn’t take/steal food from any food bank or charity meant for the homeless. In fact, he availed a legitimate facility at his college, the Wilfrid Laurier University, that offers free groceries too all students of that college regardless of whether they’re domestic or international. Their website says the following:

LSPIRG and Martin Luther University College welcome you to our Free Weekly Distro program to combat food insecurity on campus. We provide free groceries and other essentials for Laurier and Luther students who need them.

It says that you need to be a student of the college and possess a proper identification to avail this.

This guy had made that video to make fellow students aware of this program as he himself works there, and the university wanted him to make that video.

But the damage is done and there’s nothing stopping it. To make it worse, the guy has been receiving hateful direct messages from racists threatening him with consequences, telling him to be careful because they’ll track him down and that he should go back to his country. 

As for him having been fired, he doesn’t work at that bank. Instead, he had only been an intern there and his internship ended in 2023. So, yeah, another fake news spread by “Pagliacci”. Also, it’s not the first time she has done it. If you check her account, it’s dedicated to spreading hate against Indians. I mean, look at this:

She also repeatedly takes some obscure news from India which might have happened years ago and paints a narrative generalizing us Indians as uncivilized sub humans. She’s a full-blown Nazi when it comes to Indians. Not only that, she’s also a raging homophobe and a transphobe.

As for those wondering, she’s not some no-name Twitter troll. This woman is very much a real person. She writes for “Rebel News”, the Canadian equivalent of Breitbart and is associated with the people like Gavin McInness, the founder of Proud Boys,

 and also with Lauren Southern, a white supremacist who promotes the “Great Replacement”conspiracy theory.

She’s not the only one, btw. There’s also this guy named Owen Benjamin:

This guy is a white supremacist pig and a so-called “stand-up comedian” who also espouses the flat-earth conspiracy theory. He was banned from Twitter before Elon took over but when Musk gained control, he reinstated his account and now this KKKlown is back spewing venom. Oh, and he once called Obama the n-word.

Speaking of venom, I hope you remember the recent Baltimore bridge collapse. What happened was that as soon as it came to the Internet’s notice that the crew on the ship was Indian, bigots on X openly started spreading fake news about and racially abusing Indians. One of them was Lauren Witzke, a republicunt who was also a senate nominee from Delaware in 2020:

Not only did she and the likes of her are blaming the Indian crew for what happened, she also uses the slur “Pajeet”.

Speaking of the accident, it’s quite known that when a ship enters a port in the US, it is the local maritime pilots who take control of the vessel, which is exactly what happened this time too. The Indian crew had nothing to do with the crash. In fact, they were hailed by even Joe Biden as heroes for timely alerting the authorities and minimizing casualties.

But nah, Musk’s twitter openly promotes such misinformation without any curbs.

Now you’ll ask me why I blame Musk for all this. Well, not only does the algorithm boost posts with hate speech a lot more since he took over, he himself has directly promoted hate speech and conspiracy theories by making positive responses to them or retweeting them, not just against Indians, but against others as well, be it Jewish folks, black people, or even LGBTQ+ people.

Here’s him agreeing with anti-semitic nonsense:

Mocks Native Americans:

Racism against black people:

There are also posts of him attacking trans people and also supporting long-debunked scientific racism.

But but…. free speech! Right?

Wrong!

Here’s what happens when you post something he doesn’t like:

This man-child gets triggered over the term “cisgender”. And look at the irony. X censored a post made in response to a post by Mollusk claiming that X supports free speech. Not only that, he also bans people who mock him or post anything he doesn’t like.

Free speech, my foot.

In India, we have this idiom “A monkey getting hold of a razor” which describes any situation where an utterly incompetent moron gets in possession of something he can’t handle and ends up hurting both himself as well as others. This is exactly what has happened with Elon and Twitter. Not only has he destroyed his own credibility (look at how advertisers, most recently Hyundai, are leaving Twitter and Tesla’s stocks keep crashing because of his unhinged crap), but has also harmed other people (like in my first example where the student in question is getting threats).

And people once compared him with Tony Stark, lol. He’s worse than even Lex Luthor.

Footnotes

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