Well, the ministry of propaganda says this is la creme de la creme and we can trust their handling of government data blindly. So showing that DOGE is unable to even secure their website is a good exercise of hacker activism.
The times are mature to rediscover where the word hacker came from. It never rhymed with billionaire but it seems this website tried hard to change that narrative.
The same kids who have now access to vital US systems.
Better people learn about their lack of experience fro a hacked doge site than a hacked paxment system. The ones who will hack that won't be as friendly.
Many people who are not in tech circles think Elon is a brilliant expert in everything from artificial intelligence to space travel. People who largely think of technology fields as magic hail him as like the modern Galileo who cannot be wrong.
Many people in tech circles also think this. People in tech are no smarter or no more resistant to grift and propaganda. See this entire comment section.
We got here because wealthy ideologues spent half a century creating a biased media ecosystem and attacking the idea that objective truth exists. Calling someone a Nazi because they made a Nazi salute isn’t causative, it’s just recognizing a problem which should have been tackled more aggressively 20 years ago.
What value do you think comes from trying to finely parse whether the “I was racist before it was cool” guy calling for a “eugenic immigration policy”, who “would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth” has a slightly different self-identity than his boss who threw the Nazi salutes? “Anti-Semitic bigot who at the very least doesn’t mind being around people who throw Nazi salutes” is longer but doesn’t seem very different in terms of how decent people would view them.
The same value as finely parsing whether you are the same person as Stalin or whatever. You are viewing your enemy not as a bunch of flawed or even mentally ill people, but as some movie villain or even not-reall-humans. This is a problem. That's how you start down the path of justifying genocide. When the right becomes crazier, the solution is not for the left to become even crazier and starting some arms race of who can be most insane.
Not really. If you're open about it you don't have to hint at it and never say it openly. You know, actually being open about it.
Also, neo-nazis. Not nazis. Nazis were a very real political group. Some are even still alive. None of these teenagers were even born. Their PARENTS weren't even born.
Does that make a difference? Their views check every mark in the description of a Nazi, and they identify themselves as such. If someone walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, in a world where any sane person would do their best to not even appear a duck, they're ducks.
Wasn't one of them reported as saying he was racist before it was cool? The whole problem is that the people around Trump (and even more so Musk) do genuinely appear to have Nazi ish beliefs. This is why their attacks on key parts of the state are making such an impact.
The person in question published it openly on the internet (Twitter). Not gonna bother digging up the proof again because it's been widely reported and not denied - just minimized as some cheeky edgelord humor.
Don't lie to carry the water for Nazis. It empties you of all integrity.
How about blaming the people who are actually acting like Nazis, and also the actual self described Nazis who are supporting them and cheering them on and recruiting off of Musk platforming and promoting them, of emptying the word of all meaning, among other much worse things.
The Nazis are pretty successful to have convinced you to debase yourself by sticking up for them and criticizing anti-fascists for simply calling a spade a spade.
So who do you consider worse: the actual Nazis, or people who you believe are emptying the word Nazi of all meaning (boo hoo hoo)? Because you're siding with and defending the actual Nazis from being called what they are. Is there a word for what that makes you?
BEING nazi/bigot/transphobic/etc is what ATTRACTED every bigot and self admitted Nazi to the Republicans, and there you go, standing up for and defending them by denying reality.
If not yet, then at what point exactly would allow anyone to exercise their own free speech by calling Musk, a self described "free speech absolutist", transphobic? What more would he have to do, than to actually publicly attack and verbally abuse and humiliate and deadname and misgender and lie about his own child?
How about policing the actual Nazis and bigots and transphobes instead of the people like his daughter who rightfully call him what he obviously is by his very own words and deeds?
Elon Musk’s Transgender Daughter Says He Was ‘Cruel’ and ‘Uncaring’:
> BEING nazi/bigot/transphobic/etc is what ATTRACTED every bigot and self admitted Nazi to the Republicans
If that's the case, you have already lost anyway. Because if that's true you have so many nazis in the US now that the historical Nazis are a rounding error. Do you truly believe that?
> How about policing the actual Nazis and bigots and transphobes instead of the people like his daughter who rightfully call him what he obviously is by his very own words and deeds?
You can't police shit if you are the minority. That's absurd. You can't become the majority by being an ass to everyone on the fence. That's what the left has been doing and driving everyone away.
The left has to take responsibility for the failed tactic of going around screaming at people for wearing sombreros or whatever. After you do that enough, everyone who has been screamed at will want to vote for anyone who are against that crap. And yea, that was Trump.
Or maybe I'm wrong and you really do have 77,302,580 nazis in the US right now. I don't buy that. I have a much higher opinion of the American people.
Nope. I would have voted against Trump if I had voting rights in the US. Again, you're interpreting my statement of "we shouldn't lie about our enemies" as me supporting those enemies.
That was true at one point--I used to make the same objection--but it's 2025 and the threshold has been crossed.
If you wait for unassailable academic applicability, when you finally deploy it your prison guards won't care.
A quick sampling off the top of my head: The First Consigliere throws double Nazi salutes on national TV and smirks in ambiguity when questioned whether he intended it, the President defends a Nazi march as "very fine people", violent private groups serving their political ends have been placed above any (federal) prosecution, and the administration is actively boasting that they will remove undesirables by creating the largest deportation in the entire history of the nation using the same laws abused for the WWII Japanese internment camps.
The label may be rude, but it's not unreasonable... and the more reasonable it is, the better it is to be rude!
I agree with you, but I think it’s important to present facts as facts the best we can. There’s enough terrible things out there both Trump and Musk have said and done, there’s no need to have any shred of mischaracterization.
Is there really any point in being careful with the facts? It seems like the way to win is to convince people of low interest and/or intelligence, which is all about rhetoric and narrativizing anyways. What’s the utility in truth here?
Fair point. But I would argue if the goal is to really change minds then you have to remove little things that allow people to dismiss everything else you said. Low interest/intelligence supporters have probably been shown the rest of the video at this point, so they will label you as a lier and their side as telling the truth and move on. Is it an unfair standard? Yes! There's also so many other events to use hopefully to better effect.
This is not how you change minds in 2025. They are going to dismiss everything you say to change their minds.
You aren't having a debate, its a mental street fight, and you gain respect by proving you know how they think and meeting them there.
Its why I say the dems are always wrong. I know that the only converastion is from using their own facts and then their own values.
The dems are always wrong, they do corruption badly. Trump pardoned 1600 people, and made 2 billion or something from 2 meme coins right before he was inagurated.
What do the dems have to show for it? 6 pardons?
So the Repubs are up 1594 pardons and billions in meme coins?
Did Trump do anything illegal? no! He exercised his powers. See! the dems can't even be corrupt or serve their own self interests effectively.
You might be interested in this YouTube series, where the author tries to deconstruct and explain the rhetoric patterns of--and countermeasures against--"The Alt-Right Playbook."
I innately want to believe that a comprehensive refutation grounded and logic and citations will win the day, but that doesn't seem to be how it plays out.
To charitably-interpret the parent-poster, they didn't say that.
More like... Truth is important to convey, lies are not permitted, but meticulous and detailed truth simply doesn't work against lies with better marketing.
You shouldn't surround your truth with a bodyguard of lies, but just throwing on more Truth as a raw ingredient doesn't advance the cause of people actually adopting Truth.
Even in a world of perfect transmission, people are highly irrational when faced with ideas challenging their priors. We don’t have perfect transmission, we have, and always have had, systems which elevate attention-drawing, profitable, and easily digestible ideas to the top while filtering out ideas too far from the status quo or threatening to governance. This is almost a matter of nature. How can a news platform exist if it only publishes complicated things beyond the public, what good would that even do? How can it exist if it doesn’t draw attention to its newspapers, or its website. We remove the explicit government control of media but we leave so many back-alleys for influence, and is the government even the locus of power now, or is it the moneyed interests that aren’t even barred from controlling media? And again, even if we woke up tomorrow with perfect, unbiased communication, we haven’t been raised to deal with it. We’d instantly repurpose the platform into a slop-distribution machine and sell advertisements on it and so on.
I don’t believe in giving up on that ideal, but I think it’s a fiction in the sense that actually achieving any semblance of a “free marketplace of ideas” is a vastly complex problem we have no capacity to solve right now. Humans aren’t a collection of simple, isolated units, we’re a vast colonial fungus. We struggle to understand individual biological organisms, but we assume that all of humanity talking to itself will be a system transparent to study, that it operates on simple principles. Ask a skilled marketer if he or she believes in the free marketplace of ideas.
Solving the problem would involve building a completely different social system from the ground up. Since we can’t do that, and nobody knows how to start, what I’m suggesting is that people try to study the communication networks as they are now and the memetics people are responsive to and build, carefully and cleverly, narratives which will actually have the practical consequence of bettering people’s lives, and that they use the truth to figure out how to do that and what that narrative should be. It’s not really lies or the truth, I’m calling for a pragmatic attempt to use the extremely flawed communication channels at our disposal to do the best we can.
The times are mature to rediscover where the word hacker came from. It never rhymed with billionaire but it seems this website tried hard to change that narrative.