Bad faith

I recently wrote that people shouldn’t be canceled for having good faith opinions that differ from the mainstream.

I’m less convinced that Elon Musk is making good faith arguments.

Musk is a man in the Trumpian mold who believes he’s an expert on anything and whose vanity knows no limits. It’s hard to know whether his whole meltdown over Ukraine was a publicity stunt, somehow was meant to manipulate market, some backroom deal to get access to Russian raw materials (the Lithium and palladium required for his batteries are abundant in territories Moscow controls) or just wanting to be the center of attention.

Meanwhile, after advocating for Chinese occupation of Taiwan, Musk immediately received a massive tax break in Mainland China. (source) Things like this make me for less inclined to see Musk as a benign dilettante and someone who is always on the hustle for extra buck regardless of the human cost.

Edward Snowden is another person, whom I no longer is acting in good faith and I wonder if he ever was. The new and patriotic citizen of Russia is curiously silent on the atrocities that his country commits daily, while steadily praising pro-Kremlin politicians in the West and spouting the typical Chomskian imperialist “anti-war” line.

These types aren’t arguing in good faith. I can’t find anything from Snowden, Greenwald or Assange condemning Iran for supplying Russia with arms that are being used to kill Ukrainian civilians. Nor have I seen anything condemning Iran for exporting weapons throughout the region. Iran, Russia and China are supplying a lot of the weapons being used in wars and to prop up dictatorships. Silence.

I believe there’s a true, good-faith argument to be had about how far Western support for Ukraine should go. But it’s not worth having this with sycophants of dictators and hucksters.