Showing posts with label Elon Musk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Elon Musk. Show all posts

November 7, 2022

HUFFPOST article gave me a chance for shameless promotion of my blog


By Hal Brown

I had nothing in mind to write about this morning until I looked at HUFFPOST and read their lead article:

Days After Laying Off Half The Company, Twitter Asks Some Employees To Come Back

Twitter is reportedly trying to reverse course and hire back dozens of workers it just laid off – continuing the chaos Elon Musk has brought since taking over.



These are the comments I put on HUFFPOST hoping to promote my blog:

As someone who practiced as a psychotherapist for 40 years Musk has intrigued me so I wrote a lot about him on my blog. I can't say this has made me famous but if you do a Google search of Elon Musk and my name my blog comes up as number one. Thank you Elon.

I know this is shameless self promotion, but you are reading this blog so I hope you appreciate my stories. I trust you don't mind my trying to promote it. I like writing and don't think there's anything wrong with having a healthy desire to want to increase the readership.

If do the same search on DuckDuckGo and my blog dominates the top results. In all modesty I have sent Elon priceless therapeutic advice through my comic strip Mired in Muskland but unfortunately for him he hasn't seen it let alone heeded it.

I didn't want to put a direct link in the HUFFPOST comments section because I am not sure whether or not that would violate their rules. I did include two images from the Google and DuckDuckGo searches.

Click the images below to enlarge them.


Most Internet users, about 80%, use Google as their primary search engine but DuckDuckGo which doesn't track your activity to send to advertisers is becoming more popular. If you do the same search there this blog dominates the results. DuckDuckGo is currently advertising on television. 


The search engine market is highly competitive. You can read about the most popular ones here.

Here's how the same search came out on those besides Google and DuckDuckGo among the others on the top six.

Bing is the number two search engine and this blog does very well there at number one and number three.


The blog tops the page there and included a "Mired in Muskland" story.


The Russian search engine has the blog at number one:


I couldn't find the blog on the Chinese search engine. The search blocks pro-democracy websites so that may be the reason. 

14 readers this past week logged onto the blog from China. If any of them are reading this I really like to hear from you. You can use the comment section o the bottom of the page. Of course this goes for the 95 readers in Russia. 

Related:

A Musk tweet and my reply:

November 4, 2022

Mired in Muskland - 7 - Elon creates poll for trolls

 Mired in Muskland - 7 - Elon creates poll for trolls

By Hal Brown

Look, Elon made a poll for us.



The poll Elon Musk posted was supposed to influence advertisers. Really?  Unless this is an example of Musk's warped sense of humor this is a lousy poll. For someone so smart he demonstrates that he can be not so smart in certain areas. One of them is how to construct a poll.

Do reputable advertisers really want to focus their ads on members of the group who checked the second options instead of the first?

Of course phrasing the choice as being between freedom of speech and political correctness is the height of a slanted choice of terms. 

Musk has no way of knowing who checked the second choice. Some, perhaps most, of them could be trolls who get a thrill be being provocative.



Previous comics






November 3, 2022

Mired in Muskland - 6 - Whither Trump

 Mired in Muskland - 6

Whither Trump?

by Hal Brown


There is a general consensus that once the election in over Elon Musk will allow Donald Trump to tweet on Twitter again. While I expect the prognosticators are correct in this I am not sure Trump will necessarily start tweeting again even if Musk approves this for several reasons.

One is that he is a man who is loathe to appear to beg for anything, let alone accept something whicht he knows will be perceived in his MAGA base as his currying favor with the richest man in the world.

In their collective cultish mind this will be viewed as Musk winning and Trump losing.

Another is that if he goes back to tweeting it would be an admission that his Truth Social website failed to make a dent in the social media world. It would be tantamount to saying he was wrong and we know this is something Trump never does.

Trump wants to control all aspects of his messaging and he can only do that on Truth Social. While it doesn't get many clicks when he posts something outrageous or newsworthy there the media is likely to republish it.

For example this made the news yesterday:

Clicking above will engage but not go to Truth Social

A mere 4,300 people sent it on and 16,967 gave it a heart but journalists picked it up.

Yet an additional reason he'd eschew tweeting, perhaps a primary one, and stay on Truth Social is that he can generate revenue from the platform in the form of donations.

No doubt he or his tech savvy crew are following who the Truth Social readers are and they know they are hard-core MAGAs and susceptible to his grift. They must have a way of tracking where the donations came from.

Click here to read the statistica Truth Social Statistics

Meanwhile for those who don't look at Elon's tweets, here's some of what he's been up to:

Yes Elon, we know you know about neurons. As far as scientists have been able to determine a single neuron in an instant of time is not self-aware but linked to other neurons in the brain we have a functioning mind. 
  • The total number of neurons in the brain of a human is around a hundred billion. I don't think you can double this for Musk just based on his personal worth.



 Is Twitter like a neuron having billions of some kind of interactions over time making Twitter being a collective cybernetic super-intelligence?

Elon is super-intelligent. He may be able to develop Twitter into a collective cybernetic super-intelligence. The concern I have, along with many others, is who will program ethics, morality, truth, and common decency into the cybernetic super-intelligence. I don't think he can depend on the so-called collective to do this.



I found the AOC sweatshirt on her website here. He encircled the cost. As far as cotton sweatshirts go $58 may seem excessive, but I assume part of the profit goes to her campaign in some way or another. Consider that The Trump store charges a whopping $185:
So why did Elon use AOC instead of Trump?

Notice he didn't use this from her mech store which is also $58.




Maybe Musk will set his own example and sell some more reasonably priced Twitter merchandise at a discount for those who subscribe and throw in a free t-shirt if your sign up for a year.


Elon makes a good point. Twitter may be the most interesting place on the Internet. You are reading the tweets because you elected to read my blog but possibly don't ever go to Twitter since I don't put links to it here.

He may be revealing more about himself in the tweet about hw interesting Twitter is. He was managed to make himself in around a week to be the most interesting person on the Internet unceremoniously taking the position from Donald Trump who I found interesting because he is the poster child for malignant sociopathic narcissism.

As a therapist I have been intrigued by Musk whose narcissism may be indicative of his having a narcissistic personality disorder but crucially without the sociopathy we see in Trump.

  • Grandiosity with expectations of superior treatment from other people
  • Fixated on fantasies of power, success, intelligence, attractiveness, etc.
  • Self-perception of being unique, superior, and associated with high-status people and institutions
  • Needing continual admiration from others
  • Sense of entitlement to special treatment and to obedience from others
  • Exploitative of others to achieve personal gain
  • Unwilling to empathize with the feelings, wishes, and needs of other people
  • Intensely envious of others, and the belief that others are equally envious of them
  • Pompous and arrogant demeanor

I wondered if he made the cartoon faces himself thinking he might have a talent as a cartoonist. I did a Google Image search and discovered were he found them.
Click to enlarge


About me

November 2, 2022

Mired in Muskland - 5

 Mired in Muskland - 5

By Hal Brown

click each image below to enlarge






Reported on TechCrunch (below) and being discussed on Morning Joe as I composed this edition.
Joe said we are seeing him unwind on Twitter before our eyes. Is Musk unwinding, frequently in red tie via his tweets, before our eyes? It is hard to say unless we define "unwinding" exactly. There are times he is impulsive but that doesn't mean he is losing control. 

What caught my eye wasn't Musk explaining via tweets the idea of charging $8 a month for extras, hell, I might even pay it. 

This didn't strike me as unexpected. What "caught my eye" was his tweet saying that Twitter speaks to the inner masochist in all of us. 

He verged from floating a business idea to bringing in the idea of saying all complainers should keep complaining (at a fee of $8 a month) perhaps dare I say as if he enjoyed reading them, to an hour later tweeting his inner masochist tweet.

Most people throw around the term masochism more or less accurately. Here's how The Britannica defines it:

Masochism, psychosexual disorder in which eroticrelease is achieved through having pain inflicted on oneself. The term derives from the name of Chevalier Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, an Austrian who wrote extensively about the satisfaction he gained by being beaten and subjugated. The amount of pain involved can vary from ritual humiliation with little violence to severe whipping or beating; generally the masochist retains some control over the situation and will end the abusive behaviour before becoming seriously injured. While pain may cause a certain amount of sexual excitement in many persons, for the masochist it becomes the chief end of sexual activity. The term is frequently used in a looser social context in which masochism is defined as the behaviour of one who seeks out and enjoys situations of humiliation or abuse.


Masochism as an isolated trait is fairly rare. More commonly, the association of pain with sexual pleasure takes the form of both masochism and sadism (q.v.), the obtaining of sexual pleasure through inflicting pain on others. Often, an individual will alternate roles, becoming aroused through the experience of pain in one instance and through the infliction of pain in another.

This is from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • 1) noun The deriving of sexual gratification, or the tendency to derive sexual gratification, from being physically or emotionally abused.
  • 2) noun The deriving of pleasure, or the tendency to derive pleasure, from being humiliated or mistreated, either by another or by oneself.
  • 3) noun A willingness or tendency to subject oneself to unpleasant or trying experiences.
I'd have to literally be Elon's therapist to know whether definition one, above, applies to him, but wonder about numbers two and three. It is better I'm not his shrink since if I was doctor-patient confidentiality would apply.

Update:

I know some people, ordinary Twitterers, even those who never tweeted, have gone off the platform. Not me. In fact, I just Followed Musk. 


Musk is engaging back and forth with a number of tweeters today. For example the tweets below. Clicking will enlarge but not go to Twitter.








Recent blog editions

November 1, 2022

Mired in Muskland, Edition 4

 

Mired in Muskland
Edition 4
by Hal Brown

If you liked 4 you'll like 5, maybe


Scroll down for

There is no longer a "We the People of The United States"


Click above to enlarge.


Getting Ye back on Twitter would bring along his zillions of followers but it would also benefit him because  a sequel "Watch the Throne 2" album has just been announced.
This is Musk's new personal Twitter page illustration. Gone is his photo of carrying a sink into headquarters.


Note he has dubbed himself Twitter Complaint Hotline Operator. I assume this is a reference to him as a child on a toy telephone. I give him credit for his attempts at humor though they sometimes fail dismally. "If at first you don't succeed," I'd tell him, "learn from what went wrong and try try again." As far as I know there is no Twitter hotline though if he wants to share his number with me that's fine. He has a photo tweeted from Halloween:





 

October 31, 2022

Mired in Muskland, Third Edition


 Mired In Muskland
by Hal Brown

Click to enlarge
Twitter got off to a rocky start that Musk caused himself when he retweeted a horrible lie about Paul Pelosi and didn't delete it for hours. He could have anticipated the five-fold increase in racist  tweets and done something to remove them too.


I am still recovering from pneumonia and find that I don't have the mental energy to write anything about politics. I'm trying to amuse myself by developing a comic series about Elon Musk. Who knows, maybe it will get his attention. Through the character Head Twit Bot (really me trying to be both his conscience and his therapist - I was a therapist for 40 years) I am trying to send Chief Twit (below right) a message. 

Although the comic has only two characters at present if I keep this up I anticipate adding new ones either as guests or regulars. For example, this guy:


I thought of today's comic strip when I went to sleep last night and put it together when I woke at 2 AM with an intense pain under my ribs so to divert my attention. I spent more than two hours making it. Of course I posted it on Twitter. It will be interesting if I'm banned because of it.

Two examples of Musk doing what I assume is his best to be funny:









Excerpts from Musk's letter to advertisers

The reason I acquired Twitter is because it is
important to the future of civilization to have
a common digital town square, where a wide
range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy
manner, without resorting to violence. There
is currently great danger that social media
will splinter into far right wing and far left
wing echo chambers that generate more
hate and divide our society.
In the relentless pursuit of clicks, much of
traditional media has fueled and catered to
those polarized extremes, as they believe
that is what brings in the money, but, in doing
so, the opportunity for dialogue is lost.

That is why I bought Twitter. I didn't do it
because it would be easy. I didn't do it to
make more money. I did it to try to help
humanity, whom I love. And I do so with
humility, recognizing that failure in pursuing
this goal, despite our best efforts, is a very
real possibility.

That said, Twitter obviously cannot become a
free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be
said with no consequences!
Fundamentally, Twitter aspires to be the
most respected advertising platform in the
world that strengthens your brand and grows
your enterprise. To everyone who has
partnered with us, I thank you. Let us build
something extraordinary together.
It all sounds great, which rhymes with hate, which apparently will have no place on the new Twitter according to Chief Twit. 

It is more than a cliche since this is a both legal and a generally accepted exception to free speech:
When there actually is a fire, shouting fire could cause a panic, so properly notifying theater management is the appropriate way to handle it if you are the first to smell smoke.

Neither I nor my alter ego, Head Twit Bot, should have to explain to Elon how hate speech, conspiracy theories, and lies which can incite people to act violently is an exception to free speech. 

Obama's quote for the day and my comment (not about Elon Musk):

During a weekend campaign rally in Georgia, Obama acknowledged Walker's status as a great football player but questioned what other qualities he had that made him worthy of being a United States senator.

"Some of you may not remember, but Herschel Walker was a heck of a football player... does that make him the best person to represent you?" Obama asked the crowd. "Let's say you're at the airport and you see Walker and you say, 'Hey, there's Herschel, Heisman winner. Let's have him fly the plane!'"

I wouldn't be so sure that one of Walker's alter personalities - he's admitted to having had about a dozen - has developed so he can actually fly an airplane. Either that of he has an honorary pilot license. 

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