For those saying it wasn't real since he went off to the side instead of straight out.
He did it to the side because old out of shape people have trouble lifting their hands above their head so he needed to tilt his body to get the proper angle.
"Built like an autopsy" still rings in my head every time I see Elon anywhere. "Apartheid Clyde" is a close second.
This is what irrationally annoys me. I could take a Nazi seriously (but still hate them, obviously) that does the salute "properly", but his face, the exaggerated chest clutch, the way he tilts his body... The militaristic firmness of the salute is part of the presentation as strong, but his imitation of it is so pathetic and weak that the only thing he has in common with the guy he's trying to copy is the massively overinflated ego.
I hate what he stands for, but I also hate that I can't take him as seriously as I probably should.
Musk or Hitler?
Probably both, but I meant Musk.
I hate that we even need to think about if it was straight out or from the side. Like, don't fucking do the arm out at an angle thing at all. Anything that's ambiguous should be dropped from common practice.
Someone should make a collection of all of these.
I mean, Musk could have ended this whole thing by twitting: "My apologies to anyone who thought it was a Nazi salute. It wasn't intended to be, I'm not a Nazi and I absolutely condemn the far right."
But he hasn't.
Right. Instead he tweeted some bad Nazi puns.
The best and only response to disingenuous assholes pretending it was just fine:
"Ok then. YOU do the gesture. Go ahead."
In a statement to The Inquirer, Smith said the video has been “greatly mischaracterized.” On Facebook, she said she made the post “to stir the pot. Because I can.”
I’m probably one of the few people here who isn’t emotionally invested in this. I don’t hate Musk, though I don’t particularly like him either. I’ve often defended him against false accusations (like the Starlink incident), but in this case, there’s nothing to defend. I’d give it about a 5% chance that he genuinely didn’t intend it as a Nazi salute. After all, I’m not a mind reader - I can’t possibly know what he was thinking and unlike the haters, I don’t pretend to know either. I have no dog in this fight.
This "my heart goes out to you" salute isn’t a thing. It’s not something Musk has done before, nor is it a trend among anyone else. All the excuses about how he supposedly meant something else come across exactly as they sound: excuses. I’ve also seen picture montages circulating on social media showing Democratic leaders appearing to make the same gesture, but when you look at the full context, it’s clear these were just unfortunately timed photos. In Musk’s case, it looks like a Nazi salute even in full context.
Now, one reason I give this a slim 5% chance of not being intentional is simply that doing something like this while the entire world is watching is so spectacularly stupid that it’s hard to imagine even Musk not realizing this. He may be edgy and definitely on the spectrum, but that’s not an excuse here. Even a 5-year-old would know better.
Not sure if it's just me but all the posts from lemmy world aren't loading this picture of what I assume is of Musk doing the Nazi salute.
IMO anything even close to it is a no-go. If you're thinking up a new hand sign, pick something that has no ambiguity with a Nazi salute please.
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