What’s great about this, and Stephen Fry is brilliant, is not that he’s absolving Musk, or that he’s criticizing Tesla, but that it is an argument likely leading to Elon Musk protesting,

‘No, my cars are good enough that I can be a Nazi!’

  • kanata@lemmy.ca
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    3 hours ago

    Hes a great friend of Israel. If any thing, hes anti-woke, the salute is more of an anti-woke salute than its a nazi-salute. The group most upset about it are the left and friends.

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    22 hours ago

    If Elon isn’t a full-blown Nazi, he’s at minimum a Nazi sympathizer. His actions at the inauguration proved where his allegiances lie.

  • RangerJosey@lemmy.ml
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    1 day ago

    I’d imagine Jeremy Clarkson might have said this on old top gear before he outed himself as a massive asshole.

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    2 days ago

    Not apologizing and then immediately giving a speech to AfD about not being ashamed of “cultural purity” beg to differ. Either way, him being an actual Nazi is irrelevant. There are 2 options:

    1. He is an actual Nazi and believes in the ideology, which makes him a fucking Nazi. It should be noted that his grandfather was an extremely anti-semitic politician who moved to South Africa because he admired Apartheid…

    2. He did it as a troll. In which case, at a POTUS inauguration he decided to behave like a teenage boy as the richest man in the world and make light of something that saw 6 million Jews slaughtered and remains as a threat to the security of Jews around the world to this day. Which makes him a colossal piece of shit.

  • comfy@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    Headlines are being headlines, I get it, but Fry was repeating a joke:

    “I heard a very good joke yesterday,” the QI host, 67, told Stig Abell on Times Radio on Thursday.

    “Someone said, ‘Musk is not a Nazi… Nazis made really good cars,’” he went on, before bursting out laughing.

  • droplet6585@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    Hur hur. I’d wish people would stop assigning hyper-competence to Nazis. They never were. Hitler was a drug addict and the trains didn’t run on time.

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      2 days ago

      That’s just ignoring history. There are plenty of good reasons to hate the Nazis without needing to do that.

      In the similar way, it’s not necessary to dismiss Soviet Union’s early modernization successes in order to blame them for their crimes against humanity.

      • droplet6585@lemmy.ml
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        1 day ago

        Dismiss what? Fascism is catabolic. They can’t build anything. They can only loot until they run out of victims.

        The projections of hyper competence and secret knowledge are part of their branding.

        Stop being a fascist apologist.

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          15 hours ago

          Honestly, this shit needs to stop. Acknowledging that some fascists have been good at something at some point does not detract in any way from being anti-fascist.

          If you claim that fascist are dumb, stupid and can achieve nothing, what do you think the masses will think about your message when the fascists turn out to be competent? They will wonder what other things you are wrong about.

          So I say to you: stop being a fascist enabler.

          • droplet6585@lemmy.ml
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            11 hours ago

            claim that fascist are dumb, stupid and can achieve nothing

            I seem to have struck a nerve. I wonder why this bothers you so much?

            Fascists are great at: bullshitting, terrorizing and thieving. Fascism is catabolic. It is organized crime with the aesthetic of a political movement.

            Obviously that’s not the image they present to population of the regions they take. But you knew what I was claiming they are incompetent at.

    • Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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      2 days ago

      A small country took on the ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD (TWICE) and very nearly won. The second time with a lunatic at the helm.

      What does it take to impress you? To what would you assign their disturbing success?

      • Count Regal Inkwell@pawb.social
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        2 days ago

        Incredible. Literally everything you just said was wrong.

        Germany wasn’t “a small country”. They were an industrialised, highly productive and heavily armed global power. They were slightly battered by post ww1 humiliation regulations pressed on them by the winners (because they ALSO lost that one!). But the instant they told the Allies to eat shit and started using what they had, any claim to “smallness” went out the window.

        And they didn’t “almost win”. They got their asses kicked.

        Every single thing the Nazis wanted to achieve, they failed hard. They wanted to prove the genetic superiority of the German people in the Olympics, instead they were soundly beat. They wanted to expand their territory, they got as far as fucking Poland and France and then stalled for years until a double whammy of Americans and Russians basically curb-stomped them, with the last few years of the Reich consisting of lots of propaganda coping hard about how their soon to come wonder weapons would turn the tide, which never happened because said wonder weapons were stupid ideas that only succeeded at getting more Nazis killed when they failed in testing. They wanted to stop the spread of communism, instead half their country became Soviet domain.

        And then their “strongman” leader blasted his own brains out rather than face the fact that he was a loser in every way one can be a loser.

      • droplet6585@lemmy.ml
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        2 days ago

        Small country? They were a highly industrialized, highly educated and still quite materially wealthy colonial power going into the wars. They didn’t need to be competent. Enough people went along with them and there was plenty of residual wealth to burn on the war machine.

        You don’t need to be an architect to burn down a building.

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          2 days ago

          Germany didn’t really have much wealth after WW1 due to the restrictions placed on them from the western powers.

          Most of the reason the Nazi party was popular early on was them championing a number of socialist policies designed to bring the country out an economic morass.

          This is a really good book on the subject (and part of a really good trilogy of books about understanding Nazi Germany): https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/319473.The_Coming_of_the_Third_Reich

          • droplet6585@lemmy.ml
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            1 day ago

            I get what you’re trying to get at. But I’m talking the developed material wealth of a region. Actual physical infrastructure like rails, mines, factories, universities and everyone with the required education and training to run all of it.

            If the victors of the first war received the dividends of that real infrastructure- that matters right up until the moment that they don’t anymore.

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              23 hours ago

              You do realize Germany lost 48% of it’s industrial territory in the treaty of Versailles, right?

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        2 days ago

        Um it did not take the entire world, for a lot of their early success most of the fighting was against countries that were unprepared and devastated after ww1.

      • Eugene V. Debs' Ghost@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        2 days ago

        Nazis took on world in one war, and lost.

        “WE ARE THE GREATEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD! THE PUREST OF THE PURE! STRONGEST OF THE STRONG!”

        [Fights one (1) war]

        “Guess we’ll shoot ourselves in a bunker and lose in a big lopsided defeat.”

        • Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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          1 day ago

          I was arguing that there was a terrible war, and the enemy was dangerous and capable. Many of our and other country’s soldiers died to destroy them, and it wasn’t easy.

          They weren’t “Colonel Klink” from “Hogan’s Heroes”, they were efficient at killing, rounding up and killing millions while fighting on a number of fronts.

          My grandfather fought in World war I, and my uncles fought in World war II. From what I heard the Germans were not incompetent bumbling idiots. They were a very competent and difficult enemy.

          I don’t know what history everybody’s been reading, but there sure as heck are some major changes to history interpretation that have taken place in the last 40-50 years. Probably peer-to-peer instruction, rather than accounts from those who endured it

          • Unruffled [he/him]@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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            1 day ago

            Ok fair enough, I accept the explanation you provided. Folks are taking issue with the following comment in particular.

            What does it take to impress you? To what would you assign their disturbing success?

            In isolation, this sounds a little too close to admiration for the Nazis, which is why we got some reports about it. It seems to me it’s just unfortunate phrasing, because together with the explanation you just provided, it sounds like a reasonable take for you not to want to paint them like some hapless foe that was easily defeated, because that discounts the difficulties faced by those who fought the bastards.

            • Melatonin@lemmy.dbzer0.comOP
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              1 day ago

              I wanted to clarify, but there were so many comments coming in, I didn’t see how I could do it effectively. And not seem like I was what some people thought I was

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        2 days ago

        Do Japan and Italy just not count as part of the world? I mean Japan took over half of Asia and the Pasific while Italy took the Mediterranean countries. Germany took over part of northern Europe and helped a bit of North Africa.

  • soumerd_retardataire@lemmygrad.ml
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    17 hours ago

    One day he’s criticized for saying that Hitler was a communist, the other for apparently assuming his love of nazis.
    There’s an old series of books by Terry Goodkind that i’ve read as a child, named the Sword of Truth, each book has a wizard’s rule, and here’s the first one :

    People are stupid. They believe things mainly because they either want them to be true or fear them to be true.

    I’m not particularly fond of these books nor do i agree with this rule, but if you’re political then you’re judging real political actions, such as enacted laws, like adults do, or you’re eventually discussing assumed theories, but not unfair little excerpts regretted afterwards by the one who did them, and we can hopefully both agree that we should not explain our worldview or vote based on the latter, its ‘just for fun’/‘not serious’.
    At least most journalists know that it’s only about influencing his future decisions, but you don’t if you believe it was ‘a coming out’/‘something to be discussed seriously’.
    That’s just my two cents, thanks for reading my insults towards ~you, and let’s continue not changing.

  • hedhoncho@lemm.ee
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    1 day ago

    Amazing that during bidens regime all i had to do was date a bdsm guy from austria and get labeled a nazi by even work. I dont know how they found out cause he was half a state away and it was a long distance relationship. I still get called it even with elon prancing about. IDGAF musk is a n*zi. Let those karens on toktok get fired.