> This is what he said he wants, but is not consistent with his actions which is why is he being called out about it or 'vilified'.
Have you ever run a non-trivial forum? I have, dating back to before the civilian internet was a thing. It isn't easy, at all.
It is by now clear that the Twitter innards has some putrid components that must be dealt with. This isn't easy. This isn't clean. This is going to be chaotic, nasty, difficult, controversial, unpleasant and more.
The only people complaining about Musk's Twitter path not being nice and linear are those who have never done or attempted to do anything even remotely approximating this level of difficulty.
It is also those who refuse to be ideologically consistent and honest, which is the case for the majority of people regardless of their ideological bend. It's just human nature. Some of us are able to step out of such cognitive confinement and make an attempt to see the world with some degree of ideological neutrality.
I'll give you a simple example of this.
If we found that 98% of <insert large company name> employees anglo white men people would be up in arms about it. And rightly so. Large-scale racial uniformity does not lead to good outcomes.
We know that somewhere around 98% of political donations from Twitter employees donated to the Democratic party. Not both parties, a single party.
This is no different in terms of bad outcomes from racial uniformity. Ideological uniformity is a component of racism and racist and other behavior.
When overwhelming ideological uniformity takes hold of an organization, it becomes, in many forms, racist. For example, if you apply for a job at a Christian organization having come from a university such as Berkeley, chances are you will be very low in the selection set. Apply at an ideologically leftist organization having come from a Christian organization and the outcome will be similar. Don't want to call it "racism"? Fine. Pick a word. Ideological, bigotry comes to mind.
Social bigotry has the same component. An organization that is 98% devoid of LGBTQ elements will likely behave in a bigoted way with regards to adding LGBTQ members to their ranks.
Everyone will quickly highlight and, in some cases, get angry about such things as racially-uniform and exclusionary organizations. However, when it comes to ideological uniformity, for some reason, people turn their brains down to 0 RPM and stop thinking. Maybe it is that they don't want to admit being wrong. That's very human as well.
This is how our universities have hateful become leftist organizations with, in some cases, violently militant professors and students. How is this different from having a 100% white Nazi university. It isn't. It's the same thing along a different vector.
The sooner we understand that ideological uniformity --REGARDLESS OF WHICH IDEOLOGY-- is massively bad for society and actively endeavor to not allow it, the sooner we will come to a point where we can start talking to each other again and get valuable things done. Until the, enjoy throwing feces at each other while accomplishing exactly nothing.
If what you said was what he was doing then people would be fine with it. It isn't. There are plenty examples of ideological uniformity on the right in media, politics, and large institutions, but I don't see him (or you) criticizing any of them or calling for change.
Make a lists of social networks, tv networks and universities. For each list, sort them into three columns based on ideology: Left, independent/balanced, Right.
If you were intellectually honest about this, the number of entities on the Left will dwarf those in the other columns. That’s reality.
When someone flips through channels on TV and 90% to 99% of the content is ideologically aligned to one side, that is damaging to a society.
Your example is nothing less than ridiculous. Use race and gender instead of ideology and it might become obvious to you. For some reason people think of ideology in different terms. There is no difference. You do not want racial domination of institutions (by any race) any more than ideological (by any ideology).
Another possibility here is that you're own perspective may be biased more than you appreciate. 99% of media content is left leaning? Really? You would really have to do some work redefining the left/right spectrum for that to be anything close to true. What about financial institutions, police forces, energy companies and other mega corporations. Where do they list in your rankings? Are you worried about ideological uniformity there and advocate that they work to be more representative of leftist ideals in the same way you want tv networks to do for conservative principles? When employees at starbucks or amazon get harrassed or fired by their employers for engaging in constitutionally protected activities like organizing a union, where was the right in saying that although they may not agree with them that they will defend their rights and that they don't support cancelling people for expressing their ideals. Was the right there on the side of railway workers who keep the economy running supporting their rights to strike or did they try and cancel them by forcefully taking those rights away? Which side was the media on? The gender and race thing gets a lot of air time on Tucker Carlson and Ben Shapiros shows, but there is a hell of lot more to the world than that.
This article, about five years old, opened my eyes as to some of the mechanisms, root cause and effects of the kind of polarization seen in the media.
And you are totally wrong about me. I am a Classical Liberal, maybe even on the side of Libertarian. It sounds like I might be right wing-leaning because it just so happens that the egregious acts, today, are overwhelmingly coming from the left. Right wingers did not spend a year burning down business districts and right wing politicians inciting people to behave like animals. You criticize that which is overwhelmingly wrong. In the last few years the bulk of it has been coming from the left, from Democrats.
I have seen this tune play out in other countries where I lived when I was younger (in Latin America). What the left is doing here in the US today has been done before, multiple times. It is nothing less than evil. It is wrong. And it does not lead to good outcomes. This is a historical fact across multiple cultures all over the world.
Take a very simple example of this: The bulk of the media, due to it's leftist alignment, has done very little reporting on the horrors of what is going on at the southern border. Right-wing outfits like Fox to full-tilt and talk about it all the time, which is to be expected. However, a huge portion of the audience has far more exposure to left-leaning media. Which means people, for the most part, have no idea what's going on.
They are talking about it now because various affected states decided to load people on buses and send them to places living in denial.
What's the reality?
Our normal legal immigration quota is in the order of 1.5 million people per year.
Over five million people have illegally entered the nation. We think it's more. There are folks who are not caught and counted, so, no way to know. We have no idea who these people are.
During "normal" times (horrible concept), human trafficking for sex and other slavery across the same border amounted to somewhere between 20K and 40K people per year, mostly women and children. There is no way to know how much worse that got.
We think 2023 could explode this number to as many as eight million people.
These people, 100% of them, are, by definition, unemployed. Yet US unemployment statistics do not reflect this fact. They lie.
Even worse, they consume vast resources at a time when the economy isn't doing well.
Last I checked, we have not created five million NEW jobs --in addition to what existed before-- in order to be able to employ an additional five to eight million people. Those jobs do not exist --and one could argue will never exist-- which means these people will either remain unemployed or live under the shadows and be exploited.
Then there's the drug trafficking, which goes hand-in-hand with human trafficking. It's off the charts. It is causing a path of illicit drug deaths throughout the nation that is hard to quantify.
This has been going on for two years. And yet, the media has done nearly zero front-page reporting on this all this time. I have had conversations with people who only watch outfits like CNN. They had no clue. No idea. At all. They were horrified to discover it once they opened their minds to consuming a variety of news sources.
Today they are starting to report it because it the problem has grown to such proportions that the truth is impossible to ignore. Now, slowly, people are getting some of the story.
Yet, for two years, they actively shelved the news to protect this administration. That's the problem. You don't want media aligned with ANY IDEOLOGICAL SIDE and, worse, actively acting to protect and mold the narrative in their favor.
I don't know why that is so hard to comprehend for some. I know it is human nature to defend your "tribe". Intelligent people capable of critical thinking can understand that such tribalism isn't good for anyone in the long run. Nations have gone full tilt from one extreme to the opposite, with horrible results. Imagine a reality where, in, say, fifty years, the ideological right takes control of all that is in the hands of the left in the US today. That would be horrible, just as bad as where we are headed today. I have been consistent about stating this. We do not want ideological domination by any faction. That's the change we need.
So when it comes to broad social issues that are not being dealt with well, I'm on side with you 100%. However, the idea that somehow democrats or 'the left' is solely or even mostly responsible is nuts. Not saying they don't take any blame, but that the right is in no way free of sin.
Immigration problems for example is a long standing issue going back many decades and multiple changes in administrations. Both sides of the isle may have different talking points about it, but they don't do much substantive change once in power (the changes they do make are mostly theatre). This is because the elites on both sides like the status quo. They both profit from immigrant labor whether legally in the form of h1 visas for tech workers like twitter, or the illegal immigrants that work in agriculture like Tyson foods. Immigrant labor can be more fully exploited than citizen labor - which is the goal.
Also speaking of evil, I happen to think the Trump admin policy of separating young immigrant children from their parents falls in that category. Where the children were then also exposed to the unchecked abuses of CBP personnel. Horrific and dehumanizing.
> You don't want media aligned with ANY IDEOLOGICAL SIDE and, worse, actively acting to protect and mold the narrative in their favor.
This goes back to the original thread. My two comments about this is that unbiased media can't and won't exist any more than unbiased HN commenters (you and me included). And, even if it did and the unbiased truth happens to counter the narrative of a given side, then that side would still accuse it of being biased! The second is that if the actual goal is to criticize political alignment of media than you must also do the same of right media as well. Fox News certainly has some guilt in "actively acting to protect and mold the narrative in their favor", call them out on it too. If you think only the left leaning media needs to change, but the right is doing fine, then you what you're actually asking for is more ideological uniformity.
This is what he said he wants, but is not consistent with his actions which is why is he being called out about it or 'vilified'.
He also said he wanted to build a hyperloop in california, but it turns out he wasn't being honest about that either. The list goes on.