Archives for posts with tag: Elon Musk

The letter and the spirit

August 25, 2026 //
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Being free
and feeling free
are not necessarily the same thing

What if they are both right? Simultaneously?

After all, it’s never about the law itself! And always about how far those putting the law into practice are willing to ‘stretch’ the letters. Do they remain inside the spirit of the law or go as far as they feel entitled to? Entitled to go…

Same thing happens with empathy.
Empathy as something you feel. Each of you differently. Intensity-wise. Relative to different aspects of life. And so on.
And empathy as something you ‘trade in’. Show off, window dressing, expected good will gestures…

A society whose members no longer feel enough empathy towards their peers is ‘loose’. ‘Loose’ enough to be ‘about to be lost’.
A society needs to function like an organism. To live. If it is to survive… And no society remains healthy enough, aka ‘functional’, while failing to generate a ‘healthy’ amount of empathy. Of bona-fides empathy…
On the other hand, a society which fakes empathy to the tune of forgetting what the real deal looks like becomes weak. Weaker and weaker as the empathy it exudes becomes faker and faker…

Same thing regarding ‘freedom’.
Which is first and foremost a concept. Coined and minted by thinkers. Who have tried to understand history and human evolution.
Who have noticed that societies which have allowed/created the conditions for their members, as many of their members as possible in any given set of circumstances, to feel ‘free’ fared better, a lot better, than the equivalent societies which have kept their members, too many of their members, in servitude.
In abject servitude, for all servitude is abject.

Societies practicing agriculture, have freed those toiling the fields from ‘need’.
Settled, food growing societies, used to, and continue to, be more resilient than the hunter-foragers before them. For as long as they took good/respectful care of their fields.
Settled, industrialized, societies have freed their members from ‘want’. Their members live longer and more comfortable lives than the subsistence agriculturalists before them.
Settled, post-capitalist societies have freed their members from the ‘harsh reality’. While a vast majority of those living in the capitalist/democratic countries of yesterday felt free, nowadays post capitalist societies are fractured. Both sides removed from the real reality. Both sides living in a ‘virtual’ reality.
One built by ‘man’. By ‘human’, actually. ‘Gender specific’ arguments have no place here.
One side feels trapped and the other feels entitled. The trapped ones feel as being held back by a glass ceiling. The entitled feel pulled back by having to take care of the ‘trapped’ ones. And each of the both sides blame the other one for their predicament.

Not exactly sustainable, don’t you think?
Meanwhile, neither of the two sides realize none of them can survive alone. Without the expertise of the other side.


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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game, teleology

Political Cartoon

April 30, 2022 //
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Isn’t the other party always the guilty one?

Or, otherwise put, Musk – who in 2008 was left of center, currently finds himself in a moderate conservative position because the woke progressives have displaced the center. To the left of where Musk was in 2008. And where he still is…

This might have not been uttered by Churchill but nevertheless rises some questions…

‘If you’re not a liberal when you’re 25, you have no heart.
If you’re not a conservative by the time you’re 35, you have no brain.’

What? The cartoon wasn’t Musk’s to share in the first place? He had just ‘borrowed’ it from somebody else?!?

And here’s what ‘Big Data’ has to say about the whole thing.

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Categories awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, democracy, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, Mutual Respect, Politically induced fragility, Psychology, skin in the game, teleology

When are we going to learn?

April 26, 2022 //
4

To make sense of that we have already passed through?

What does ‘worst’ mean in this circumstances?
Until now, I was under the impression that ‘critics’ were good.
That in a democratic setting, the critics are those who pull at our sleeves when we go astray.
That the critics are those who bring us back to the straight and narrow.
How can ‘critics’ become ‘bad’? Let alone “worst”…

“”Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of mankind are debated” said Mr. Musk. “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by…””

As many of you already know, I grew up under a communist regime. In Ceausescu’s Romania.
That was were I learned to decipher messages transmitted using the ‘wooden language’.
Or, in Orwell’s parlance, “newspeak”…

Here’s what I make of Elon Musk’s words:

‘From now on, the “digital town square where matters vital to the future of mankind are debated” is mine. Mine to make what I see fit of it. To “make better” under my own terms. And if you don’t like it, keep ‘barking’. There’s nothing you can do to me. I’m going to make Twitter ‘private’. A.k.a. free from any ‘market interference’. Furthermore, your ‘barking’ will only increase the traffic. Hence the money I’ll be making on the back of your ‘free speech’.’

Twenty four years ago, in 1998, I spent a fortnight visiting Tunisia. I still remember the discussions I had with my wife. In our native Romania, we – the country, not the two of us – already had a couple of malls – which were quite new for us.
Each time that we entered a Tunisian suk – also known as a bazaar, we felt like strolling through a mall.

In the Middle Ages, a suk was the property of the local sheik. Even if each ‘stall’ was operated as an individual business, the whole thing was run at the whim of the local ruler.
According to the laws of the land, but still at the mercy of the landlord.

Each mall, the building, is owned by a company. And, the business, operated by another. Usually by a chain. Hence the ‘freedom’ of the individual businesses ‘housed’ by each mall is ‘defined’ by the rules put in place by the owners and the operators. Under the laws and by laws valid for the physical location of the building but still at the ‘mercy’ of those who own/operate the mall.

From now on, the “digital town square where matters vital to the future of the mankind” are ‘freely debated’ by us will be owned and operated by yet another one of Elon Musk’s enterprises.
Who, for now at least, promises to welcome his “worst” critics, whatever that might mean.

And an after thought.
A way shorter translation of Musk’s words might be: ‘Freedom of speech means being able to say ‘those who criticize me are bad people”. With the corollary that some are worse than others…

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, awareness, Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, democracy, effective communication, evolution, In English, man as a measure for all things, man induced fragility, Mutual Respect, skin in the game, Trust