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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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I've seen people expressing bafflement that the average midwit on Reddit might think they could run Musk's assets better than Musk if they had the same luck/unscrupulousness to have the same resources. I ask, after seeing Musk apparently fail to understand Wikipedia costs money to provide, who wouldn't?

The most charitable read here is that Musk thinks Wikipedia deserves less money, not no money, and, like, ok Elon, I think you deserve less money and if you don't care about that opinion, why should they?

  • -24

I ask, after seeing Musk apparently fail to understand Wikipedia costs money to provide, who wouldn't?

The most charitable read here is that Musk thinks Wikipedia deserves less money, not no money

The link goes to a screenshot of Musk's Tweet, whose first sentence is (emphasis added):

Have you ever wondered why the Wikimedia foundation wants so much money?

Note the bolded "so much," which was not "any." As such, it actually isn't the most charitable read here that Musk thinks Wikimedia deserves less money, not no money, it's the obvious and straightforward read. And it's a highly uncharitable, to such an extent as to be just plain wrong read to say that this indicates a failure to understand that Wikipedia costs any money to provide.

To address the actual question of the post, I think it's notable that even midwits (I hate this term, but whatever, it's the original term used here and it conveys the meaning well enough) tend to look down on people who infer the broad competence of someone in some general endeavor based on a highly uncharitable and downright twisted interpretation of a single Tweet made by that person. Such an inference is so obviously unjustified and so obviously reflective of the interpreter's mentality rather than that of the person making the Tweet that it takes very little intelligence to understand that.