> Wahhh I bought my car to make a statement and now it makes the wrong statement and I am self-conscious about it!!”. I
I read it exactly the opposite. Somebody bought a car not because they were making a statement but just because they thought it was cool, only to find out later Elon was a nazi nutjob, and they don't want people to think they bought it because they share the same views.
If I told you I could save you money on fuel by making your car more efficient, then removed it's engine, you would still call that nonsense no matter how much of a gas guzzler it was before or how little fuel gets put in it now.
You just made a massive non sequitur. The government does have waste, as does any large organization, including in the private sector. Whether or not DOGE saved money needs an independent analysis, not numbers which DOGE itself produces.
Musk and Trump cut a large number of jobs and declared, without any evidence, that it was all fraud and waste. For example, they dismissed everyone who was in a probationary period, claiming these were all low-performing people. In fact, every person hired or promoted was automatically in a probation status. In many cases the fired people turned out to be critical and the government asked them to come back.
Think about this: when Enron exploded, it took a team of forensic accountants months to untangle the bookkeeping. Musk came in with a team of mostly teenage hacker types to siphon all the data from all the agencies he could and in less than 48 hours declared he had found hundreds of billions of dollars of waste and fraud. It beggars belief that Elon Musk just happens to be an accounting expert and could process terabytes of data and make sense of it in a day or two.
Another thing you should know is the founder of Gumroad, a man in his 30s and who joined DOGE in a good-faith effort to help make the government more efficient, found that things were not at all like he expected. Even if you don't believe him, he was closer to the action than Musk, has more technical knowledge than Musk, and if nothing else, offers a counter-narrative from what you apparently have bought:
After expressing his opinions he was quickly sacked by DOGE. Transparency indeed.
Oh, and many (hundreds?) of thousands of people will die each year due to loss of international aid. Meanwhile Musk was dancing around on stage like an idiot with a chainsaw thinking he was the coolest guy.
I witnessed massive fraud first hand in the DoD and the VA (the area this gumroad guy was dealing with) as a Booz Allen contractor.
I worked directly with fraudulent shell 8a firms (literally a big white dude made his Filipino American wife the CEO of like 6 people and then subcontracted to my team with a direct award minority woman owned business contract valued at a $100m).
I witnessed massive waste by VA employees at the joint MHS/VA hospital in North Chicago, IL (they sandbagged an expensive IT modernization that was trying to reduce wait times because it was going to put a bunch of local VA sys admins out of work by shifting to a gov cloud data center).
You don't know what your talking about. You don't have first hand knowledge. Nobody on the ground for years in the Federal sector agrees with you or the gumroad guy. They agree with me.
My twin brother worked at a "Native Owned" defense contractor in Arlington, and literally never saw a Native American in their office a single time. There were employees with Washington Redskins merch everywhere and nobody cared because they KNEW that the single tribe that collected the checks at the top was never going to see the office. They just subbed out work to the big consulting firms anyway.
I have endless examples from working in the beltway for 10 years. Sorry that reality doesn't line up with your political tribal beliefs.
Nonsense in how they approached things. Clinton-era we had govt. cut backs all over the place. It was done according to a plan and according to the law.
This was just a hatchet job, aimed and cutting and gutting any and every agency they thought they could get away with.
Even were I to be more charitable to your original comment, it is nihilism, which I dislike. "Don't criticize any particularly immoral component of our system, because it's all bad and resistance is futile".
You shouldn't confuse disinterest with The Spectacle and its siren song to Support or Oppose every new storyline with belief in nothing at all. I am definitely not a nihilist.
My bad. It's just that when someone criticizes a person for some small, specific action or boycott by saying "don't you know that does nothing and that other places also have their flaws", it usually comes off as nihilism and discouragement to having values.
Surely you recognize how someone could think buying a car from the company owned by a near trillionaore who helped a fascist get power and now tweets about the need for White solidarity is a bad thing.
You won't survive long without using the monetary system, but you could go your whole life without supporting many of the companies who you see as harmful. Now that money is speech and corporations are increasingly running the oligarchy there are very few levers people have left to try to influence their government. I don't think boycotting massive corporations will be any more successful than trying to get our representatives to care more about our wishes than the bribes they get from those same companies, but at least it feels like doing something.
I'm not sure how that adds to the conversation. Let's say North Korea puts out a really cool phone. Are you going to go: "yeah buying it supports a dictator who is brutal to his people but so does participating in a monetary system so nothing matters so it's okay"
I would buy a North Korea phone if it was cool, band-compatible with my domestic carrier, and wasn't embargoed (i.e. if sale was possible), yeah. I already daily a China phone and depending on who you talk to that isn't much better: https://redmagic.tech/pages/redmagic-9s-pro
It's not surprising since people don't really have meaningful representation in government and have to resort to trying to hit companies where it hurts in order effect change whether that means boycotting a car company because of a CEO, or boycotting a beer because of a trans person in an instagram ad.
Unfortunate as it is, what you buy and where you shop is very much a political statement.
He's alluded to thinking that Asians and Indians are "better" on some metrics so supremacy still seems a bit sensationalist. He certainly doesn't think all races are equal.
> You're labeling someone a "Nazi nut job" over nothing.
Nothing except his antisemitic tweets, his posts defending Hitler, his support of Alternative for Germany, his support of prominent white supremacists, his chatbot which praises Hitler, his endorsement of racist conspiracies, and the occasional "Sieg Heil". What exactly would "something" look like to you?
Being morally superior to that is an exceptionally low bar to clear and it's earned easily by everyone who rejects the hate and lies he publishes, supports, and encourages.
The man is officially a dear friend of Israel, he has never defended Hitler, he indeed supports the German far right party, his chatbot had an alignment issue that has been patched within 16 hours.
What you call a "Sieg heil" was an innocent hand gesture made once, and that hoax has been debunked by both the anti defamation league and the Israeli PM personally. You know this, yet you cannot let go of your hate.
I know you are not to be listened to when you dare say "innocent hand gesture made once", when he very clearly made it twice in a row; front, turn and repeat:
https://m.youtube.com/shorts/R_6dVlz6mug
That is there, recorded, and you are telling me to ignore what I see.
I know you won't care, this video is not for you, is there in case anyone else starts to belive your lies, they can see for themselves.
To me it looks like Musk is overly concerned about discrimination against whites as well as woke ideology, also out of personal experience with his child.
The rest, where progressives slander Musk and label him a Nazi or, their newest addition, a pedophile, appears to be a litany of lies, like the ones just shared above.
I find it hilarious that people think this because he did some tangentially Roman-salute-esque gesture once. His political platform is nowhere near Nazism. He would actually be a much more interesting person if it were.
Selling the car is complicated by market conditions and tariffs which could make the cost of a replacement and/or the terms of the sale much worse. We can cut people some slack for making a stupid purchase under very different circumstances. They're already being punished by owning the shitty car as it is.
This seems like it is speaking from privilege. I have not even paid the car off, 5.5 years later. I am not going to sell a perfectly working (if not very good IMO) car at a loss. And buy what instead? No, I will stick with my functional but terribly unergonomic car now built by a nazi.
I read it exactly the opposite. Somebody bought a car not because they were making a statement but just because they thought it was cool, only to find out later Elon was a nazi nutjob, and they don't want people to think they bought it because they share the same views.