Whatever you hear as an explanation for this, Musk knew how this would be seen/received and made a show of doing it.
If I suspend all possible disbelief, the best scenario is a rich white kid raised in Apartheid South Africa giving "Roman Salutes" to troll people for his own personal LOLs?
I tried, watching the video a few times. I can't believe that he didn't know what he was doing.
At best, he wants to demonstrate that he can make one of the worst gestures anyone can do in this position and suffer no consequences. Some kind of demonstration of power.
He will do anything so that his biggest fans love him even more. They think this was so based and now he's a god among men for doing this so all is well
the boyz we tell to work the mines, like their fathers before and all be well while the world is going to hell. We do make it pretty easy to sell ideology atm and musk is just selling facism (and hope) faster than the natural growth rate of socialism
"... commonly considered a symbol of fascism that had been based on a custom popularly attributed to ancient Rome.[1] However, no Roman text gives this description, and the Roman works of art that display salutational gestures bear little resemblance to the modern so-called "Roman" salute."
What are you trying to accomplish with this comment, protecting the reputation of the ancient Romans? The article you linked says, in the first line: "The Roman salute, also known as the Fascist salute"
While (ancient) Romans may have not done this salute, the salute is commonly referred to as Roman salute nonetheless
Trolling in the most idiotic, childish way possible is exactly what he's doing. He's done this forever. This is the guy who literally publicly trolled the SEC on Twitter when they charged him with fraud in 2018. The same guy who named the car models of his $1 Trillion company to spell "S3XY". He clearly has some kind of unresolved complex originating from his childhood that has stopped him from progressing to the mentality of a normal adult. What he fears most is being ignored. He needs everyone to be talking about him all the time.
I mean, it changes nothing on one hand, but it also crosses another line. From a European perspective (my perspective), this has burned all his credibility in Europe outside of fringe groups, there is no ambiguity.
As a person with a strong track record of criticizing Elon Musk, I feel extremely confident asserting that this was not a Nazi salute. Elon Musk is a friend to the Jews. This is a man with Aspergers exuberantly throwing his heart to the crowd. We don't need to invent outrage.
He braces himself, makes an aggressive facial expression and stiffens his arm (not a thank you loving face), his palm facing down, elbow stiff, fingers locked together (not how one throws their heart), does it a second time, then comments that 'the future of civilization is assured'. Go Google images and look from multiple angles. Of BOTH salutes. Try not to puke at the smiles/cheers in the crowd.
Subtle Elon used the Fraktur font on his MAGA hat. Elon supports the AFD. Elon intentionally does a Nazi salute twice. Elon likes/responds possitively to Nazi's and white supremacists on X. Elon talks about 'declining birth rates and immigration policies' as closely as he can get away with to 'race replacement theory'.
Somehow we are just misunderstanding him. Nah bro. Stop. At some point we have to stop err'ing on the side of 'he's just an accidental unintentional Nazi'. Guess what, still a Nazi.
Why is this flagged? Surely one of the most influential people in the tech space (and the richest man in the world) doing a nazi salute is pertinent to Hacker News?
And you don't actually "hear" people discussing in threads you don't click on. I don't want to hear about Apple, ever, nothing they do or make interests me, or ever will. Yet I wouldn't dream of curtailing others discussing that stuff.
Past experience with this kind of thing by you-know-who does not lend itself to the idea of a substantive discussion.
HN isn't "about the tech industry" per se - its mandate is to discuss topics of intellectual curiosity. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Celebrity troll moves (or whatever this is) don't fit that bill, so in this case I'm inclined to agree with the users who flagged the story.
There are plenty of authors and writers who could discuss political controversies as intellectually profound learning examples, etc. That is a norm in academia, for example. It reflects more on online forums and basic limitations of forum structure and demographics, rather than anything intrinsic about a given topic.
A story about Musk being unable to explain X/Twitter's stack and immediatly attacking the person asking him about it has been not only flagged but completely removed.
I hate Musk, and he doesn't seem to have a clue about the Twitter stack.
But in this link that you shared, those who ask the questions are being disrespectful first. From my point of view, this recording has no value at all.
There must have been a breakdown somewhere in our objective view of reality when doing fascist salutes at the inauguration of the largest tech-business bearing country in the world, by the wealthiest tech CEO in the world, are whittled down to "Celebrity troll moves". I don't know if HN is beyond saving, but it does feel like it tows the line when it comes to techno-fascism.
I wonder if there were any concerned engineers at IBM who tried to raise their voices over the tabulating machines being sold to Nazi Germany? If there were, I bet they heard similar things as today when they were brushed off.
I would like to see a discussions on about ethics and symbolism. The hand on heart, and then a gesture of throwing it outwards towards the public while saying "My heart goes out to you" is a very different symbolic gesture compared to a salute were a person execute it by extending the right arm stiff to an upward 45° angle and then straightening the hand so that it is parallel to the arm. In term of symbolism, what create the difference in interpretation? How much does the context of the speech and speaker influence how the symbolic gesture get interpreted?
In terms of ethics, if the intention is to generate outrage in order to generate views and media coverage, does media coverage help or harm? Research on violence has has reached a fairly strong consensus that symbolism and displaying of cultural values is a major contributor for continued violence and conflicts. What should be the most effective (and ethical) strategy in reducing such display?
Watch this at 00:35. Debunks your entire point about "the look" with Hitler doing the salute exactly as Musk did it.
I'm from Switzerland / Swiss German and maybe we just watched way more WW2 docs in high school and had more exposure to the various ways a Nazi salute can be done, but across the German speaking sphere we all saw this as a Nazi salute. In this variation it was often done with hand on breast during "Sieg!" and then the extension with "Heil!".
If the goal here is the show that intellectual curiosity can be had by a discussions on ethics and symbolism, I would recommend reading the comment in the best light possible and find the strongest arguments to talk about. Comments like "Debunks your entire point" does not do that and only closes the discussion. For the purpose of this thread that started with the question of "Why is this flagged", I would like to see if its possible to have that discussion.
The many published ww2 documentaries do indeed shows some variability in the Nazi salute, just like that youtube video you linked. The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_salute) definition and their linked sources do not include the "hand on heart" part, which may indicate how common different versions are. The added "My heart goes out to you" statement to it is also seems like an very uncommon addition. A question we could ask is what people in the rally interpreted the gesture as in the context of the whole speech. Did they see it as an variable form of the Nazi salute, or did they interpret it as a gesture of gratitude?
Gestures has a natural ambitiousness in them. A person taking a knee in front of a king is different from a person taking a knee in front of a significant other and asking their hand in for marriage. The context and additional variability (like saying "do you want to marry me") changes the meaning of the gesture. In order for it to be one or the other the whole picture, context and gesture, need to align.
If the discussions is about ethics and symbolism we should also look at the ethics part. Political rallies are seemingly about displaying symbols and generating boundaries between in-groups and out-groups. If the gesture was intended to be an ambiguous Nazi salute in order to ignite controversy, we can look at what the consequences are. The in-group feels attacked, while the out-group becomes a threat for which the in-group can rally against. This strengthen the bonds of the in-group. It also increases political violence and instability, with both group "othering" each other. By instantly and publicly distance himself from the others interpretation, there is a gain of presenting themselves as the "true" anti-nazi and friends to Israel, especially now in the context of the current war in Gaza. This kind of political maneuvering is not that uncommon in far left and far right. Political researchers and analysts often remark that this create a problem of actually identity what the movement actually believes in, since the message is not in the actually words (or gestures), but rather in the intended outcome. The ambiguousness also create an environment that invites more extreme members which can be used to gain votes, or to kick out when there is political points to be gained.
Thank you for keeping this inflammatory garbage to a minimum. If photographers followed anyone around for a day, they could catch you do any number of silly poses.
Nono, you don't understand. He is autistic so he didn't know what he was doing, in fact he is giving money to far right/nazi parties throughout the whole europe because he loves free speech and democracy
More importantly, the issue isn't whether people are boo or yay; it's that both the boo comments and the yay comments are repetitive, nasty, and boring...keeping in mind that something can be both boring and intense at the same time. Since that's what we're trying to avoid here, we should avoid it in this case as well.
I 100% agree with your opinion that the top level comments would all be of a similar nature, but I think youre not considering how the thread comments would allow people to have a place to discuss what comes next, both for the nation and for the troll. It's a stunt clearly done to keep the executive orders out of the light, but unlike many of their previlus troll actions that had a similar goal, it's a stunt that will have long term implications.
The only other place to discuss it are the one million threads on reddit, where all the top level comments are bots. Again I agree with your points, but not your conclusion.
There will be other articles that provide a better foundation to discuss that (i.e. "what comes next").
On HN the idea is we want some, but not too much, discussion of such issues, and for the discussion to be intellectually curious rather than flamingly indignant. For the first point to work, we can't have too many threads; and for the second to work, the threads we do have need to be based on more substantive articles (and events).
Do you consider this interpretation of the topic interesting and 'curious' enough for hackernews?
One of the main reasons that I come here is to interact with people in the tech industry and I think that the opinions of the people who work for the man or who have worked for the man about this event are important to hear.
The problem is that there's a finite number of writers of substantive articles; the strategy used by these trolls-in-chief is to overload these writers by conducting a blitzkrieg of events. By preventing substantive articles from being created for each event, they benefit the lack of public discourse that occurs for each singular event.
Thus I feel like youre right in everything youve said, but your decision is exactly what the trolls were hoping for. I think part of it is the design of hackernews threads; I think the old internet 1.0 forum style would be better suited for today's discourse. Having a dozen stickied threads for each of the executive orders inside of a sub forum for "news and events", for example.
The old 1.0 forums went by the wayside for good reasons, but the current upvote style has been in place for a long enough time now for bad actors to learn the strategies that manipulate the upvote system. IMO there's a need for a new forum style to replace the upvote/article based system.
What "users flagged it" tells you is that it wasn't moderators who flagged it. That's important because many readers assume otherwise.
Re that link: I turned off the flags on it earlier, but it isn't a great story for HN. The way it is written is as tendentious as it gets; at minimum, we would need a more neutral source.
Beyond that, there are endless stories about weird patterns showing up in someone's limited set of data points on the internet. I can tell you from personal experience running one of these sites* that sometimes these turn out to just be people seeing patterns in randomness, as humans do; sometimes they are actually happening, but people are misinterpreting and jumping to dramatic conclusions about them; and sometimes (though rarely) they turn out to be an interesting story. What that means is that the existence of a post like this isn't enough of a signal to make for a good HN thread. At minimum there would need to be more information. This is the case regardless of what side of any political fence a post or an author happens to be on.
* a tiny one compared to the big fish! but big enough to observe all these phenomena, which show up increasingly at scale
Re that link: I turned off the flags on it earlier, but it isn't a great story for HN. The way it is written is as tendentious as it gets; at minimum, we would need a more neutral source.
Yeah I get that, the link itself wasn't much. What made that thread interesting IMO was people reporting what hashtags work or don't work for them in what country, pondering possible explanations, etc. At least from my perspective, and this goes back to sites like slashdot, it's not always about what TFA can do for us, but what we can do for TFA, if you know what I mean.
This has been happening for quite some time. For example, a popular news item that is critical of Musk is published by many news organisations across the web. The item will then be submitted to HN by various users, sourced from various news organisation websites. Sometimes _each and every submission_ reporting the same story gets flagged. It would be helpful to see which users are flagging these submissions.
He uses bots (or some PR agencies) everywhere to promote his image, I see it personally on Facebook, on Reddit, but it is on all social media. This is how everyone think he is an engineer, a genius and turns even his failures (like hyperloop) as a successes.
I wouldn't be surprised that they would have few here too.
Nearly all stories about His Muskness get flagged, especially the sensational ones, for reasons that are not hard for anyone who has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html to understand. (Edit: if it helps at all, I would expect that positive cases get even more flagged than negative cases.)
The underlying issue isn't boo-$celebrity vs. yay-$celebrity, it's that HN doesn't function well under indignation or repetition, and that topic maximizes both.
With that one, it was hard to tell how much the story was just about a rename vs. how much was about substantive changes. I've belatedly turned off the flags though.
I doubt this is meant as a nazi salute at all. This is click and outrage bait. I did not flag this article, but I believe many question the honesty here.
Because people are tired of hearing about Trump and Musk literally all day long and every day. It's almost impossible not to hear about them. And most likely, it will last at least 4 years. Seriously, at that stage, I think everybody had already a well forged opinion on this whole situation and no new information can change it.
I'll flag any post that contains Trump or Musk in the title.
Gather 'round while I sing you of Wernher von Braun
A man whose allegiance
Is ruled by expedience
Call him a Nazi, he won't even frown
"Ha, Nazi, Schmazi" says Wernher von Braun
Don't say that he's hypocritical
Say rather that he's apolitical
"Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That's not my department" says Wernher von Braun
I strongly encourage people to read Operation Paperclip which tells the story about how the US smuggled Von Braun and many other german scientists into the US post-war, housed them, and gave them resources to develop ballistic missles. It also documents in detail how the Nazis used Jews and others as slave labor to build V-2.
(BTW; Von Braun cared greatly about "where they came down")
The case for this not being flagged: this is an intellectually curious forum and the mods have a proven ability to adequately moderate other contentious threads and allow politically-charged posts.
If what Pres. Biden said about a growing oligarchy holds true, more posts like this should be expected in the future (especially given the attendees from the tech sector at today’s inauguration), and it’s far better to have a trustworthy place to discuss these types of stories, given HN’s readership, than places like BlueSky or Reddit (read: content optimized for algorithms); the amount of intellect here could lead to positive outcomes. Additionally, given the amount of industrywide impact the actions of CEOs have, and a large percentage of us are founders, it would be more valuable than not to have the discussion.
So to the mods: please consider updating the site’s ToS to allow posts and discussions like this. It’s valuable to have these discussions, and quasi-favoritism like allowing pg’s DEI screed while flagging this, shows clear editorial bias.
Yes. 4chan had this unfortunate effect of turning “ironic” use of Nazi memes into full blown embrace of the Nazi movement.
I’ve seen the same thing happen in my own life by listening to Vaporwave. Vaporwave’s ironic use of 90s smooth jazz has given way to me seeking out the depths of Kenny G’s discography. I actually love Pat Metheny Group now.
Be careful out there. You become the memes you consume.
This guy is so fucking weird. Everything about him elicits intense feelings of cringe. It really amazes me that he has the level of success that he does, because he's definitely not all there.
It doesn't really say anything about what side HN and YC has chosen. It just means a few users clicked flag. The flagging system is not very well designed.
In fairness to Musk he explains the gesture as 'my heart goes out to you', and the general vibe is not really fascist. Very cheerful about sending people to Mars. For comparison here's Hitler - all anger https://youtu.be/FJ3N_2r6R-o
That said I'm sure Musk knew what he was doing. He seems to be going a little nuts these days.
How do you not unflag this? This is a historic moment with the whole country watching. Not separate from technology intellectual curiosity or the world. What does it say that this discussion is being suppressed?
It is amazing what HN mods choose to step in an unflag. Really speaks to the performative ethos around “intellectual curiosity”. Elon making a nazi salute is not interesting but Graham speaking about wokeness is interesting and should be discussed.
Uh oh, Zion Don's going to have a very upset reception at Ben Gurion international...
You jest but Zionism and Nazism are two sides of the same coin. Netanhayu/Ben Gvir/Smotrich won't bat an eye at this.
You can tell because the ADL basically shrugged it off.
Whatever you hear as an explanation for this, Musk knew how this would be seen/received and made a show of doing it.
If I suspend all possible disbelief, the best scenario is a rich white kid raised in Apartheid South Africa giving "Roman Salutes" to troll people for his own personal LOLs?
I tried, watching the video a few times. I can't believe that he didn't know what he was doing.
At best, he wants to demonstrate that he can make one of the worst gestures anyone can do in this position and suffer no consequences. Some kind of demonstration of power.
He will do anything so that his biggest fans love him even more. They think this was so based and now he's a god among men for doing this so all is well
s/men/edgy twelve-year old boys/g
the boyz we tell to work the mines, like their fathers before and all be well while the world is going to hell. We do make it pretty easy to sell ideology atm and musk is just selling facism (and hope) faster than the natural growth rate of socialism
He is rich because of Tesla. Stop buying Tesla's. Then his debt collateral is gone and his loans get called in.
Not at all. Tesla, all included, is just 39% of his wealth. 175 of his 449 billions USD.
Source: https://www.bloomberg.com/billionaires/profiles/elon-r-musk/
And he isn't leverage. In the end, he sold Tesla share and bought Twitter with cash, contrary to what most newspaper wrote (and never corrected).
Or since this is HN, stop working for his companies!
Tesla has consistently had a stock valuation that is completely disconnected from reality.
Tesla stock doesn't seem tied to how well Tesla is doing, if you haven't noticed.
That is not "Roman Salute" in first place.
"... commonly considered a symbol of fascism that had been based on a custom popularly attributed to ancient Rome.[1] However, no Roman text gives this description, and the Roman works of art that display salutational gestures bear little resemblance to the modern so-called "Roman" salute."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_salute
What are you trying to accomplish with this comment, protecting the reputation of the ancient Romans? The article you linked says, in the first line: "The Roman salute, also known as the Fascist salute"
While (ancient) Romans may have not done this salute, the salute is commonly referred to as Roman salute nonetheless
It was certainly done in Rome, but 80 years ago isn't ancient.
Trolling in the most idiotic, childish way possible is exactly what he's doing. He's done this forever. This is the guy who literally publicly trolled the SEC on Twitter when they charged him with fraud in 2018. The same guy who named the car models of his $1 Trillion company to spell "S3XY". He clearly has some kind of unresolved complex originating from his childhood that has stopped him from progressing to the mentality of a normal adult. What he fears most is being ignored. He needs everyone to be talking about him all the time.
From heart to Mars
This is, unfortunately, not one of those cases where the full video makes it any better.
No, it really doesn't...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=joV-9FFoA3Q
They way he was biting his lower lip suggests to me he knew EXACTLY what he was doing.
And what specifically did Musk "biting his lower lip" suggest to you?
it means "keep a straight face, cuz here we go"
That he knew exactly what he was doing.
Couldn't agree more. His facial expression screams commitment to his impulse.
This is problematic.
I mean, it changes nothing on one hand, but it also crosses another line. From a European perspective (my perspective), this has burned all his credibility in Europe outside of fringe groups, there is no ambiguity.
Not fair. His autism made him do it. Don't you know, Autism is like Tourettes but for Nazi salutes instead of ticks/swearing?
You may jest, but
https://x.com/bungarsargon/status/1881439445523775961
"Opinion editor of Newsweek", 150k followers.
He braces himself, makes an aggressive facial expression and stiffens his arm (not a thank you loving face), his palm facing down, elbow stiff, fingers locked together (not how one throws their heart), does it a second time, then comments that 'the future of civilization is assured'. Go Google images and look from multiple angles. Of BOTH salutes. Try not to puke at the smiles/cheers in the crowd.
Subtle Elon used the Fraktur font on his MAGA hat. Elon supports the AFD. Elon intentionally does a Nazi salute twice. Elon likes/responds possitively to Nazi's and white supremacists on X. Elon talks about 'declining birth rates and immigration policies' as closely as he can get away with to 'race replacement theory'.
Somehow we are just misunderstanding him. Nah bro. Stop. At some point we have to stop err'ing on the side of 'he's just an accidental unintentional Nazi'. Guess what, still a Nazi.
I'm supposed to give this guy good faith:
https://nypost.com/2024/03/06/us-news/elon-musk-wont-donate-...
Yes yes yes, but is he an ironic nazi or a nazi nazi? /s
He did the salute a third time on the walkway
So the smartest guy in the world doesn't know that flashing a Nazi salute is bad?
Also, he's not an aspy. I worked with him. He's an Asshat.
The hypocrisy of this social shaming shit is ridiculous.
Respect my neurodivergence! Fuck your woke mind virus infected existence!
I swear Doctor Strangelove was his biopic.
Why is this flagged? Surely one of the most influential people in the tech space (and the richest man in the world) doing a nazi salute is pertinent to Hacker News?
Mostly like because of the comments likely to (and already) ensue
Also people just don't want to hear about it on HN when it is all over the media already
Everybody has excuses.
And you don't actually "hear" people discussing in threads you don't click on. I don't want to hear about Apple, ever, nothing they do or make interests me, or ever will. Yet I wouldn't dream of curtailing others discussing that stuff.
HN is community moderated and generally aims to keep an amount of decorum.
Look at all the comments here. If a story leads to the comments here, it almost always gets flagged to discourage further unproductive commentary
Regardless, this should be EVERYWHERE.
We used to hang these guys.
Users flagged it.
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42775519 for more
Can you unflag it? What Musk has done is not a small thing.
If Hacker News is about the tech industry then we need to see the tech industry clearly, warts and all.
We cannot run away from it. We cannot memory hole it.
Past experience with this kind of thing by you-know-who does not lend itself to the idea of a substantive discussion.
HN isn't "about the tech industry" per se - its mandate is to discuss topics of intellectual curiosity. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. Celebrity troll moves (or whatever this is) don't fit that bill, so in this case I'm inclined to agree with the users who flagged the story.
The end result of that is that Musk will be lionized by Hacker News but never criticized.
Your policy settings are wrong.
You need only look at any thread involving His Muskness from the past several years to satisfy yourself that is not the case.
There are plenty of authors and writers who could discuss political controversies as intellectually profound learning examples, etc. That is a norm in academia, for example. It reflects more on online forums and basic limitations of forum structure and demographics, rather than anything intrinsic about a given topic.
I totally agree. There's a long and superb tradition of that. But the Brownian motion of a large internet forum can't produce it.
A story about Musk being unable to explain X/Twitter's stack and immediatly attacking the person asking him about it has been not only flagged but completely removed.
Source: https://old.reddit.com/r/PublicFreakout/comments/1i53nzv/elo...
Flagged + deleted HN story: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42775528
I hate Musk, and he doesn't seem to have a clue about the Twitter stack.
But in this link that you shared, those who ask the questions are being disrespectful first. From my point of view, this recording has no value at all.
That post wasn't deleted. If you turn 'showdead' on in your profile, you'll see it. (This is in the FAQ: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.)
We never delete a post outright except when the author asks us to (and not necessarily then, either, for example if it got replies).
How does a discussion about ethics and symbolism not fall under intellectual curiosity?
There must have been a breakdown somewhere in our objective view of reality when doing fascist salutes at the inauguration of the largest tech-business bearing country in the world, by the wealthiest tech CEO in the world, are whittled down to "Celebrity troll moves". I don't know if HN is beyond saving, but it does feel like it tows the line when it comes to techno-fascism.
A discussion worth having, if we could.
I wonder if there were any concerned engineers at IBM who tried to raise their voices over the tabulating machines being sold to Nazi Germany? If there were, I bet they heard similar things as today when they were brushed off.
Yes. This is beyond surreal. Is this normalized now? Since when? I don't understand.
I would like to see a discussions on about ethics and symbolism. The hand on heart, and then a gesture of throwing it outwards towards the public while saying "My heart goes out to you" is a very different symbolic gesture compared to a salute were a person execute it by extending the right arm stiff to an upward 45° angle and then straightening the hand so that it is parallel to the arm. In term of symbolism, what create the difference in interpretation? How much does the context of the speech and speaker influence how the symbolic gesture get interpreted?
In terms of ethics, if the intention is to generate outrage in order to generate views and media coverage, does media coverage help or harm? Research on violence has has reached a fairly strong consensus that symbolism and displaying of cultural values is a major contributor for continued violence and conflicts. What should be the most effective (and ethical) strategy in reducing such display?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=qDRYi1IYI2o&t=35s&pp=2AEjkAIB
Watch this at 00:35. Debunks your entire point about "the look" with Hitler doing the salute exactly as Musk did it.
I'm from Switzerland / Swiss German and maybe we just watched way more WW2 docs in high school and had more exposure to the various ways a Nazi salute can be done, but across the German speaking sphere we all saw this as a Nazi salute. In this variation it was often done with hand on breast during "Sieg!" and then the extension with "Heil!".
If the goal here is the show that intellectual curiosity can be had by a discussions on ethics and symbolism, I would recommend reading the comment in the best light possible and find the strongest arguments to talk about. Comments like "Debunks your entire point" does not do that and only closes the discussion. For the purpose of this thread that started with the question of "Why is this flagged", I would like to see if its possible to have that discussion.
The many published ww2 documentaries do indeed shows some variability in the Nazi salute, just like that youtube video you linked. The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_salute) definition and their linked sources do not include the "hand on heart" part, which may indicate how common different versions are. The added "My heart goes out to you" statement to it is also seems like an very uncommon addition. A question we could ask is what people in the rally interpreted the gesture as in the context of the whole speech. Did they see it as an variable form of the Nazi salute, or did they interpret it as a gesture of gratitude?
Gestures has a natural ambitiousness in them. A person taking a knee in front of a king is different from a person taking a knee in front of a significant other and asking their hand in for marriage. The context and additional variability (like saying "do you want to marry me") changes the meaning of the gesture. In order for it to be one or the other the whole picture, context and gesture, need to align.
If the discussions is about ethics and symbolism we should also look at the ethics part. Political rallies are seemingly about displaying symbols and generating boundaries between in-groups and out-groups. If the gesture was intended to be an ambiguous Nazi salute in order to ignite controversy, we can look at what the consequences are. The in-group feels attacked, while the out-group becomes a threat for which the in-group can rally against. This strengthen the bonds of the in-group. It also increases political violence and instability, with both group "othering" each other. By instantly and publicly distance himself from the others interpretation, there is a gain of presenting themselves as the "true" anti-nazi and friends to Israel, especially now in the context of the current war in Gaza. This kind of political maneuvering is not that uncommon in far left and far right. Political researchers and analysts often remark that this create a problem of actually identity what the movement actually believes in, since the message is not in the actually words (or gestures), but rather in the intended outcome. The ambiguousness also create an environment that invites more extreme members which can be used to gain votes, or to kick out when there is political points to be gained.
Thank you for keeping this inflammatory garbage to a minimum. If photographers followed anyone around for a day, they could catch you do any number of silly poses.
Especially when you're speaking at a political rally and you perform two fascist salutes.
Nono, you don't understand. He is autistic so he didn't know what he was doing, in fact he is giving money to far right/nazi parties throughout the whole europe because he loves free speech and democracy
A large fraction of the folks here need this to be memory holed. Otherwise people will know how individuals on this forum stand on this issue.
HN commenters definitely aren't pro you-know-who on the whole; quite the opposite. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42776448)
More importantly, the issue isn't whether people are boo or yay; it's that both the boo comments and the yay comments are repetitive, nasty, and boring...keeping in mind that something can be both boring and intense at the same time. Since that's what we're trying to avoid here, we should avoid it in this case as well.
Is "you-know-who" Trump?
If so, why not just say his name?
I meant the Muskian variety.
Some combination of being playful, superstitious, squeamish, and hoping not to trigger a headless chicken effect, I suppose.
Anyone who says the name of you-know-who is now a Nazi.
I 100% agree with your opinion that the top level comments would all be of a similar nature, but I think youre not considering how the thread comments would allow people to have a place to discuss what comes next, both for the nation and for the troll. It's a stunt clearly done to keep the executive orders out of the light, but unlike many of their previlus troll actions that had a similar goal, it's a stunt that will have long term implications.
The only other place to discuss it are the one million threads on reddit, where all the top level comments are bots. Again I agree with your points, but not your conclusion.
There will be other articles that provide a better foundation to discuss that (i.e. "what comes next").
On HN the idea is we want some, but not too much, discussion of such issues, and for the discussion to be intellectually curious rather than flamingly indignant. For the first point to work, we can't have too many threads; and for the second to work, the threads we do have need to be based on more substantive articles (and events).
I'd like to see a thread on hackernews that is something like this: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1i6brqw/employee...
Do you consider this interpretation of the topic interesting and 'curious' enough for hackernews?
One of the main reasons that I come here is to interact with people in the tech industry and I think that the opinions of the people who work for the man or who have worked for the man about this event are important to hear.
The problem is that there's a finite number of writers of substantive articles; the strategy used by these trolls-in-chief is to overload these writers by conducting a blitzkrieg of events. By preventing substantive articles from being created for each event, they benefit the lack of public discourse that occurs for each singular event.
Thus I feel like youre right in everything youve said, but your decision is exactly what the trolls were hoping for. I think part of it is the design of hackernews threads; I think the old internet 1.0 forum style would be better suited for today's discourse. Having a dozen stickied threads for each of the executive orders inside of a sub forum for "news and events", for example.
The old 1.0 forums went by the wayside for good reasons, but the current upvote style has been in place for a long enough time now for bad actors to learn the strategies that manipulate the upvote system. IMO there's a need for a new forum style to replace the upvote/article based system.
Elon Musk makes the Nazi salute twice in a row. HN: Nothing to see here.
Anyone can be a user, so that tells us nothing.
There's clearly forces flagging all the remotely important things, just take this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42777938
What "users flagged it" tells you is that it wasn't moderators who flagged it. That's important because many readers assume otherwise.
Re that link: I turned off the flags on it earlier, but it isn't a great story for HN. The way it is written is as tendentious as it gets; at minimum, we would need a more neutral source.
Beyond that, there are endless stories about weird patterns showing up in someone's limited set of data points on the internet. I can tell you from personal experience running one of these sites* that sometimes these turn out to just be people seeing patterns in randomness, as humans do; sometimes they are actually happening, but people are misinterpreting and jumping to dramatic conclusions about them; and sometimes (though rarely) they turn out to be an interesting story. What that means is that the existence of a post like this isn't enough of a signal to make for a good HN thread. At minimum there would need to be more information. This is the case regardless of what side of any political fence a post or an author happens to be on.
* a tiny one compared to the big fish! but big enough to observe all these phenomena, which show up increasingly at scale
Yeah I get that, the link itself wasn't much. What made that thread interesting IMO was people reporting what hashtags work or don't work for them in what country, pondering possible explanations, etc. At least from my perspective, and this goes back to sites like slashdot, it's not always about what TFA can do for us, but what we can do for TFA, if you know what I mean.
That makes total sense. Do you know if it is still an issue? If so, maybe other articles have appeared about it?
I don't use Instagram so I don't really know, but from the last articles I could find "Meta is working to resolve it".
https://www.forbes.com/sites/esatdedezade/2025/01/21/meta-fa...
https://www.techspot.com/news/106464-meta-denies-forcing-acc...
I’ve noticed that recent posts critical of Musk are getting flagged. This can’t be a coincidence.
This has been happening for quite some time. For example, a popular news item that is critical of Musk is published by many news organisations across the web. The item will then be submitted to HN by various users, sourced from various news organisation websites. Sometimes _each and every submission_ reporting the same story gets flagged. It would be helpful to see which users are flagging these submissions.
He uses bots (or some PR agencies) everywhere to promote his image, I see it personally on Facebook, on Reddit, but it is on all social media. This is how everyone think he is an engineer, a genius and turns even his failures (like hyperloop) as a successes.
I wouldn't be surprised that they would have few here too.
Nearly all stories about His Muskness get flagged, especially the sensational ones, for reasons that are not hard for anyone who has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html to understand. (Edit: if it helps at all, I would expect that positive cases get even more flagged than negative cases.)
The underlying issue isn't boo-$celebrity vs. yay-$celebrity, it's that HN doesn't function well under indignation or repetition, and that topic maximizes both.
Fair enough. And this one in particular fits in that category of pro/anti Elon.
But the DOGE ones also being flagged[0] don't fit that category and are highly relevant and impactful, IMO.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42775684
With that one, it was hard to tell how much the story was just about a rename vs. how much was about substantive changes. I've belatedly turned off the flags though.
I doubt this is meant as a nazi salute at all. This is click and outrage bait. I did not flag this article, but I believe many question the honesty here.
Same thing happened with my post about Sam Altman's alleged sister abuse, the tech bros just look out for each other.
Well, this was reposted by Garry Tan: https://x.com/TiffanyFong_/status/1881476982103523531
It seems, YC and HN made their decision.
Weird how he calls people "retard"
All the people with filth welling up inside them all these years are overjoyed to finally let it out.
He did not directly call anyone "retard". But he reposted it. And in this case it was obviously ment as endorsement.
Because people are tired of hearing about Trump and Musk literally all day long and every day. It's almost impossible not to hear about them. And most likely, it will last at least 4 years. Seriously, at that stage, I think everybody had already a well forged opinion on this whole situation and no new information can change it.
I'll flag any post that contains Trump or Musk in the title.
Oops, is that our favorite oligarch doing a nazi salute? Sorry we don't do politics here, flagged.
...
I usually try to avoid politically charged content here but if you think this wont affect you, you are out of touch.
This is a disturbing thing to me when people want to discuss the tech but without the politics (and the rocket launches but not the fallout).
I strongly encourage people to read Operation Paperclip which tells the story about how the US smuggled Von Braun and many other german scientists into the US post-war, housed them, and gave them resources to develop ballistic missles. It also documents in detail how the Nazis used Jews and others as slave labor to build V-2.
(BTW; Von Braun cared greatly about "where they came down")
"I always shot for the moon, but sometimes I hit London"
Anyone who has payed attention to his Twitter feed will not be surprised by this.
Usually normal people don't have twitter anymore.
Most normal people never had twitter.
Now would be a good time to delete that account and the app.
Tesla had already suffered global brand damage due to Musk:
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/would-...
https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2024-08-22/tesla-reputat...
https://nltimes.nl/2025/01/19/tesla-owners-react-elon-musks-...
This will not help it.
Poor JD Vance. It’s like he’s not vice president
—who?
DJ Once
The case for this not being flagged: this is an intellectually curious forum and the mods have a proven ability to adequately moderate other contentious threads and allow politically-charged posts.
If what Pres. Biden said about a growing oligarchy holds true, more posts like this should be expected in the future (especially given the attendees from the tech sector at today’s inauguration), and it’s far better to have a trustworthy place to discuss these types of stories, given HN’s readership, than places like BlueSky or Reddit (read: content optimized for algorithms); the amount of intellect here could lead to positive outcomes. Additionally, given the amount of industrywide impact the actions of CEOs have, and a large percentage of us are founders, it would be more valuable than not to have the discussion.
So to the mods: please consider updating the site’s ToS to allow posts and discussions like this. It’s valuable to have these discussions, and quasi-favoritism like allowing pg’s DEI screed while flagging this, shows clear editorial bias.
There was an interesting youtube "Is Elon Musk Heir To Nazi Dream of World Conquest? w/ Jim Stewartson" the other day. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y-erGt0LsU
Not sure how accurate it is but it was an interesting watch.
So, when does it become acceptable to discuss this behaviour?
on HN? never.
still wondering why OP's post is still up
Not once, but twice: https://i.imgur.com/E4POKCK.gif
(mirror: https://files.catbox.moe/icky5m.mp4 )
Twice
Three times actually, one on the walkway
It makes me worried when he is making the gesture and saying things like this. This is truly history in the making.
“It is thanks to you that the future of civilization is assured,” Musk said.
Similar past use by Hitler.
“Only the Aryan can secure the future of civilization through his creative and organizing power.”
https://efiretemple.com/analyzing-adolf-hitlers-use-of-the-t...
Elon Musk could have been such a great man, if he just had kept off 4chan. What a waste of talent.
Yes. 4chan had this unfortunate effect of turning “ironic” use of Nazi memes into full blown embrace of the Nazi movement.
I’ve seen the same thing happen in my own life by listening to Vaporwave. Vaporwave’s ironic use of 90s smooth jazz has given way to me seeking out the depths of Kenny G’s discography. I actually love Pat Metheny Group now.
Be careful out there. You become the memes you consume.
This guy is so fucking weird. Everything about him elicits intense feelings of cringe. It really amazes me that he has the level of success that he does, because he's definitely not all there.
HN flagging this says all that needs to be said about what side HN and YC has chosen.
I'm leaving.
It doesn't really say anything about what side HN and YC has chosen. It just means a few users clicked flag. The flagging system is not very well designed.
Dang or whoever the f can unflag if they choose.
Does anybody know a good ETF without Tesla stock?
Musk to Bannon: I can prove that I'm more rightwing than you are!
The full speech https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w3EM0G0qh0Q
In fairness to Musk he explains the gesture as 'my heart goes out to you', and the general vibe is not really fascist. Very cheerful about sending people to Mars. For comparison here's Hitler - all anger https://youtu.be/FJ3N_2r6R-o
That said I'm sure Musk knew what he was doing. He seems to be going a little nuts these days.
I don't like Elon. But I think it's pretty clear he was awkward (same as the weird jump he did months ago)
He’s smart enough to know how people will interpret such a gesture.
I'm not into calling everyone a nazi, but he has been promoting AfD...
How do you not unflag this? This is a historic moment with the whole country watching. Not separate from technology intellectual curiosity or the world. What does it say that this discussion is being suppressed?
It is amazing what HN mods choose to step in an unflag. Really speaks to the performative ethos around “intellectual curiosity”. Elon making a nazi salute is not interesting but Graham speaking about wokeness is interesting and should be discussed.