I Remain Confused By The Ruling On Elon Musk’s Compensation Package
from the it's-a-crazy-plan,-but-not-nefariously-so dept
There are a number of people, both those who agree with me and those who disagree with me, who seem to think I have some sort of personal dislike of Elon Musk. That’s not true. I find it amazing that he gets away with some of the stuff he gets away with, and I am perplexed at why anyone thinks he “supports free speech,” when he clearly does not. I also have pointed out the many times he seems to make counterproductive decisions at ExTwitter.
But most of that is because I wish he wasn’t making those mistakes. I wish he actually would improve ExTwitter and fix many of the problems the old Twitter obviously had. I also think that while his role in his various other companies has been exaggerated at times, he absolutely deserves some amount of credit for jumpstarting the electric vehicle market, as well as the private space flight market (I’m a bit less sure about his role changing the “underground tunnel” market or the “brain implant market” but we’ll see).
And while I’ve seen a bunch of folks cheering on the Delaware Court of Chancery decision that may deprive him of $55.8 billion worth of his wealth… I’m somewhat confused by the ruling.
The ruling is an astounding 200 pages (exactly) and I didn’t write about it immediately because I wanted to read the whole thing (and because I believe in the value of “slow news” and taking our time to understand things). So I read the whole thing and… I’m left scratching my head. It doesn’t make sense to me.
Now, lots of people can have reasonable opinions on excessive CEO compensation, and I don’t disagree with any of that. And people can have reasonable opinions that no one human being should be paid $55.8 billion for anything. And I also might agree with that. But I still don’t see what was particularly egregious in this compensation package in a manner that harmed anyone.
The case was brought by Richard Tornetta — who every news org has to tell you is a thrash metal drummer who only held nine shares of Tesla stock. So the argument that he was harmed by Musk’s compensation package seems questionable.
On top of that, much of the opinion revolves around the fact that Tesla’s board is very, very closely tied to Musk and unlikely and unwilling to be adversarial to him. From the very opening of the ruling:
The process leading to the approval of Musk’s compensation plan was deeply flawed. Musk had extensive ties with the persons tasked with negotiating on Tesla’s behalf. He had a 15-year relationship with the compensation committee chair, Ira Ehrenpreis. The other compensation committee member placed on the working group, Antonio Gracias, had business relationships with Musk dating back over 20 years, as well as the sort of personal relationship that had him vacationing with Musk’s family on a regular basis. The working group included management members who were beholden to Musk, such as General Counsel Todd Maron who was Musk’s former divorce attorney and whose admiration for Musk moved him to tears during his deposition. In fact, Maron was a primary gobetween Musk and the committee, and it is unclear on whose side Maron viewed himself. Yet many of the documents cited by the defendants as proof of a fair process were drafted by Maron.
Given the collection of people tasked with negotiating on Tesla’s behalf, it is unsurprising that there was no meaningful negotiation over any of the terms of the plan. Ehrenpreis testified that he did not view the negotiation as an adversarial process. He said: “We were not on different sides of things.” Maron explained that he viewed the process as “cooperative” with Musk. Gracias admitted that there was no “positional negotiation.” This testimony came as close to admitting a controlled mindset as it gets. And consistent with this specific-to-Musk approach, the committee avoided using objective benchmarking data that would have revealed the unprecedented nature of the compensation plan.
In credit to these witnesses, their testimony was truthful. They did not take a position “on the other side” of Musk. It was a cooperative venture. There were no positional negotiations. Musk proposed a grant size and structure, and that proposal supplied the terms considered by the compensation committee and the board until Musk unilaterally lowered his ask six months later. Musk did not seem to care much about the other details. They got ironed out.
But… none of this was particularly secret. It’s widely known, and widely discussed publicly, that the board of Tesla are a bunch of Elon cronies who, basically, are happy to grant him whatever he wants. There are plenty of news articles about this going back years. Here’s a Barron’s piece from 2017. And a CBS piece from 2018. There are lots more.
The point is: if you were investing in Tesla, you should have done some pretty basic due diligence to know that the board was close to Musk, and if you didn’t like it… don’t invest?
The fact that the negotiation over the compensation package wasn’t that adversarial… doesn’t seem like a bad thing either. Yes, the board should be looking out for the interests of the shareholders, but that includes not making the relationship between the board and the CEO untenable. And it’s not like they just handed out a bunch of cash to Musk, rather they created a plan that was incredibly ambitious. To hit the targets that freed up that $55.8 billion, it required him to increase the value of the company from around $50 billion to $650 billion, and hit other growth milestones as well.
In defense of the historically unprecedented compensation plan, the defendants urged the court to compare what Tesla “gave” against what Tesla “got.” This structure set up the defendants’ argument that the compensation plan was “all upside” for the stockholders. The defendants asserted that the board’s primary objective with the compensation plan was to position Tesla to achieve transformative growth, and that Tesla accomplished this by securing Musk’s continued leadership. The defendants offered Musk an opportunity to increase his Tesla ownership by about 6% (from about 21.9% to at most 28.3%) if, and only if, he increased Tesla’s market capitalization from approximately $50 billion to $650 billion, while also hitting the operational milestones tied to Tesla’s top-line (revenue) or bottom-line (adjusted EBITDA) growth. According to the defendants, the deal was “6% for $600 billion of growth in stockholder value.”
And the company hit those targets under his leadership. Say whatever you want about Musk or Tesla (or its cars), but that’s just impressive. There certainly was no guarantee that Tesla would hit any of those milestones, and many people believe that the company remains massively overvalued. But the company did hit those milestones.
Reading through the entire opinion, there’s nothing in there that really suggests nefariousness, or even self-dealing. As silly as it may be, the board really did (and mostly still does) seem to believe that Musk is some sort of uber genius and super important to the future of Tesla. And they wanted him compensated accordingly. And it appears all of that went into the thinking behind the compensation package and how it was presented to shareholders.
While there were some worries early on about the speed with which Musk was pushing to ink the compensation plan, things actually slowed down at Musk’s request, where he admitted he wanted to spend more time focused on getting the Model 3 shipping to scale. Later on Musk himself noted (correctly!) that the proposal “should come across as an ultra bullish view of the future, given that this comp package is worth nothing if ‘all’ I do is almost double Tesla’s market cap.” And… that’s true.
Over and over throughout the negotiations, the discussion and considerations being reviewed seemed… pretty normal, once you get past the size. They were looking at rewarding Musk (who it could rightly be said was a big part of promoting Tesla to the world) for massively growing the company at a moment when it wasn’t at all clear the company would (or even could) grow to match those numbers.
It’s also not like there weren’t credible and public critics of the plan, which should have alerted shareholders to concerns about it:
The two largest proxy advisors, ISS and Glass Lewis, both recommended voting against the 2018 Grant.
Glass Lewis expressed concern with the size and potential dilutive effect of the grant, noting that “any relative comparison of the grant’s size would be akin to stacking nickels against dollars[]”and that “the lower tiers of the goals are relatively much more attainable given the time periods in question, potentially allowing for sizable payments without commensurately exceptional achievement.”
ISS described the grant value as “staggering” and concluded that even the “challenging” and “far-reaching performance goals do not justify the extraordinary grant magnitude[.]” In an internal email, ISS noted that it “steered clear of getting too deep into this[]” because “making that argument essentially puts us in the situation of saying Tesla’s board is not strong enough to stand up to Musk[.]”
Also, both recommendations expressed concern with Musk’s non-Tesla interests, although Glass Lewis stated that “Musk’s extracurricular exploits undoubtedly contribute to his value to the Company[.]”
Stockholders also criticized the Grant, noting that Musk’s Tesla equity provided sufficient motivation for Musk to perform, the Grant’s size and dilutive effects were excessive, the EBITDA milestones were too low, and that linear milestones were inappropriate for an “exponential company” like Tesla.
Again, all of this suggests to me that shareholders who didn’t like the compensation plan should have been fully aware of the concerns, and could have voted against it, or, if the plan was approved, could easily sell their shares and move on.
Separately, the opinion has some odd paragraphs, such as this one:
Events relevant to evaluating the fairness of the Grant occurred after stockholders approved the Grant. Namely, Tesla disclosed that several Grant milestones were greater than 70% probable of achievement, nearly all the tranches vested, Musk got in trouble with the SEC, named himself Technoking, and acquired Twitter, Inc.
While it’s true that having the grant milestones be probable seems relevant, I’m not at all clear why any of the other things are relevant to the Tesla compensation package. While they all do represent ways in which he did some crazy shit that could impact Tesla, if it impacted Tesla negatively, it seems that it would be reflected in not reaching the milestones in the compensation agreement, and thus, it shouldn’t be an issue.
And so, in the end, while the process seems a bit sleazy, there’s nothing that I can see indicating that any shareholders were mislead in a material way that damaged their own interests. Indeed, given the very high bars Tesla needed to reach (including in terms of overall valuation), it seems that the shareholders have done very well, even if their equity was slightly diluted by Musk getting more shares.
Either way, I have no idea where any of this goes, as Musk will appeal it. Musk also is making himself look a bit foolish in pretending that this is somehow a “Delaware” issue. The whole reason such a huge percentage of companies incorporate in Delaware is because the state (and the Court of Chancery) are somewhat infamously friendly to companies. I mean, this is just silly whining:
Of course, since then Musk has actually started to make moves to transfer Tesla’s incorporation to Texas. And we’ll see what happens. If investors are truly upset about the compensation package, they can reject it. If they’re not and they agree to move it to Texas, it again raises questions as to how harmful this package really was to shareholders?
Again, there are lots of things that I think Musk does wrong, and lots of decisions he makes that I think are highly questionable. But reading through all of the details, I’m surprised at the outcome of this case, and don’t see how any actual Tesla shareholders were materially misled or harmed.
Filed Under: board, compensation, delaware, delaware court of chancery, elon musk, shareholders
Companies: tesla
Comments on “I Remain Confused By The Ruling On Elon Musk’s Compensation Package”
IANAL but I have been told by people who are that the reason this is unfair to shareholders is (basically) because the compensation itself was meant to devalue everyone’s shares in order to pay Musk in the devaluation cost. Maybe they were wrong tho. I certainly am not prepared to read a 200 page ruling myself…
The problem is that they lied.
It is entirely probable that if they’d just told the truth, they would have gotten the same result, but that doesn’t make the lying part okay.
Snarky Robot in the Ars Technica comments says,
You acknowledge that there are several legal issues with how he was given his compensation and your suggested remedy is for the disagreeing parties to sell?
They shouldn’t be forced to sell off their shares now and forgo a possibly higher value in a future without his ill gotten compensation.
If Musk has a problem with Delaware, it’s a self-own. If it really is a problem, Musk is in deep:
SpaceX is incorporated in Delaware. X Holdings, Delaware.
Unjust compensation ???
With respect to the article, Mike, and Thad and HighGuard’s comments…
Not a bad gig if you can get it. He has it. He’s going to get the money. If you don’t like it you can sell your shares. You’re not required to. They are as worth[less] now as they were yesterday or will be the day before. You just have to gamble that some stupid[er] sucker will come along later and buy them for more.
Feel free to substitute “bitcoin” for TSLA above if it helps explain the situation.
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Not necessarily. Lots of people sell investments for the simple reason that they need some money. That’s kind of the basis of retirement (whether handled individually or by a pension/fund manager).
Musk pay decision
I found it puzzling too. I substacked on it today.
https://ericrasmusen.substack.com/p/the-shareholders-suit-over-teslas
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I am perplexed by why you claim you support free speech, when clearly you do not. You support a very constricted form of free speech, that of not letting the government silence speech. But when private parties silence speech you hate, you are happy about it, and make excuses about it being good for business, or creating more free speech because more people will be speak the things you like when there are no people to oppose them.
Supporting free speech means supporting the ability of all people to speak all viewpoints on generic speech platforms, not praising legal ways to silence speech you hate.
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There are no “generic speech platforms”. Each platform out there is run by people who have a first amendment right to associate (or not) with whomever they choose, for any reason or no reason. Why do you hate the right of association?
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A generic speech platform is one that is not restricted to particular topics. X, Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok are generic speech platforms.
Private platforms have the right to censor as they wish. But a supporter of free speech should be critical of platforms who do that. Instead, the site owner praises such platforms when they censor views he hates, and denigrates ones who actually support free speech (such as by claiming that they will become “Nazi Bars”).
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For what reason, then, does that make them more obligated to host speech they otherwise wouldn’t host? I mean, the Masto instance I’m on would be a “generic speech platform” under your definition of a term that you made up (or stole from a right-wing forum), so explain to me why that instance should have any kind of obligation to host (as per the site’s rules) “hate speech or bigotry, including dogwhistles (implicit but deliberate discrimination through coded language)”—up to and including pro-Nazi speech—despite its decision to say “no, we’re not going to host that speech”. Then explain why your idea of what that instance’s obligations should be is an objective fact and not a subjective opinion that can safely be ignored as some fascist-ass bullshit. I’ll wait.
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Large private generic speech platforms are the new public square where people gather to speak on every topic imaginable. These platforms are hosted in a nation that has freedom of speech as a foundational value, and should therefore support that value by not censoring opinions based on viewpoint. You didn’t have to agree with that, and I don’t have to care what you think.
I assume your little walled garden is the place where you pearl-clutchers fled when faced with robust opposition to your wrong ideas on the large private generic platforms. By that token, it is not a generic speech platform because its members don’t want it to be – they hate freedom of speech and want opinions censored based on viewpoint – and so they can have that without my objection.
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Just because a lot of people gather on an online platform doesn’t mean that it’s a public space where private property rights don’t apply.
Why should your proclivity to say stupid shit trump a privately owned platform’s foundational right to associate(or not) with the people or speech they want?
If you want to create a platform where people can say what they want and no “censorship” happens, you’re free to do so. Just don’t be surprised when the user count drops because few people are interested in platforms filled with assholes, trolls and bigots.
Hell, even 4chan could be said to moderate based on viewpoint, at least a bit. What does that say about your position?
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And that value means that the government will not stop you publishing at your own expense. It does not mean that you can compel or shame other people into associating with viewpoints that they do not want to support. Also it does not mean anybody has to offer, or be compelled to help you spread your speech to an audience.
You have shown that what you really want is the ability to harass and silence any opinion with which you disagree, and have concocted you version of freedom of speech as as argument as to why you should be allowed to do that.
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Every time you repeat this stupidity you show that you haven’t got a clue about the foundational values or the history of this country. Typical of fascist wannabees, rewriting history to fit their arguments.
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I have met nobody more insecure than the overly confident “alpha male” who announces his inferiority by openly declaring his superiority. It’s not the left having widespread panic over a pop singer. The GOP collectively lost its shit over Swift to the point actual GOP leaders had to point out their party was reading as insane by everybody outside it and to calm down their paranoid rantings if they wanted to win in the fall.
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Anyone who says they’re an “alpha male” isn’t.
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My preferred context is “alpha” as in software, not animals. The guy who came up with the “alpha” in wolf packs has later retracted and said his research was faulty. But, in software, “alpha” usually means unstable, not suitable for public use, incomplete and prone to unexpected bad behaviour, best to be left until something better comes along unless you have a specific need for that version or unless you’re testing. That’s a pretty good description for these people, I think.
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Guess you no longer feel unsafe commenting here, Sir, eh?
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One subject is fine to moderate, but two or more is not? That just both weird and dumb.
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Here is a hint for you, If people do not want to listen to your opinions it means that they are not as popular or acceptable as you think they should be. Indeed they are likely to drive other people from the platform, and then from whatever platform you follow the to. You are the one who wants to censor other people by repeatable telling them how wrong they are.
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Everything you just said is insane.
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Being told to go and find a receptive audience for your speech is not censorship, it is telling you to fuck off because you are annoying people or disrupting their conversation by heckling them.
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And all your bullshit amounts to one thing you simply refuse to accept. I’ll give you a hint, asshole.
Imagine a world where we only ever allow popular opinions
You’re not entitled to your opinion being popular or not. If your opinions suck, or others don’t like them, fuck off and cry harder. You’re just an asshole that people don’t like. That’s a ‘you’ problem, and important to you comprehending your problem, and addressing it.
No one is censoring anyone else by saying things they don’t like.
And no one choosing to not associate with an asshole doesn’t infringe on your non-existent right to not be ignored, shunned, or just plain told to go fuck yourself. Your opinion popularity is also a ‘you’ problem. Again, that’s important, so try to keep up.
That the owners of a platform want to ban certain opinions is actually no indication at all that those opinions are unpopular, not that that should matter, see points 1&2
That the owners of a platform want to ban certain opinions can depend on whatever fucking reason they want. So stop acting like an entitled asshole. <– Once again, important point here.
I’m sure being a clueless dickhead is popular among other assholes like you (see what I did there?). But in the end, popularity isn’t the question. Not wanting to associate with assholes is your problem, since you’re an asshole.
Try to understand that you’re not a victim because your opinions are unpopular. You’re a victim of your own stupidity by continuing to be the asshole that no one likes and whining about it, instead of fixing your asshole problem.
I hope this helps, asshole.
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Alternatively, imagine a world where people adjusted their speech for the appropriate place. The fact that you got kicked out for describing your favourite porn at a 6 year old’s birthday party does not mean that you can’t discuss it in a more appropriate place.
Nor are the censoring by telling you that you’re being a dick. “GTFO my bar because you just told my trans friend they deserve to die” is not the same as “you are not allowed to speak in any bar”, online or offline.
Nor is the fact that some random asshole wants to state unpopular opinions a reason that anyone has to let them on your private property.
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This is an arbitrary, non-legal definition you made up. You have no enforcement authority or consensus from anyone else, so all these assertions are just as useless as asserting that you’re the king of the universe. You have the freedom of speech to not be silenced by the government to say whatever weird shit you want, but nobody else is obligated to entertain your whacky bullshit.
No, a supporter of free speech would recognize that a private platform moderating is free speech in exercise. You’re just saying platform owners have fewer free speech rights than users. There’s no legal or even moral basis for this claim.
[citation needed]
Except those people don’t actually support free speech (that includes you), they support the violation of the free speech rights of others by literally championing silencing critics and letting them turn platforms into Nazi bars, which is a real thing that actually happens. You’re literally here criticizing Mike for not turning TD into a Nazi bar. And the fact that Mike lets you continue to post here and criticize him for not letting it become a Nazi bar is proof that your claims are false. Any other platform would have banned you outright. Your ability to speak here at all undermines all your arguments. By speaking here, you are tacitly admitting you’re wrong.
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That’s actually goddamn hilarious. If he had taken the L of effectively having his account banned from posting (since Mike directed all his posts to the spamfilter when he was using the account) and gone away to literally any other website still willing to have him, he could’ve whined about how Techdirt was “censoring dissent” and “silencing” his voice and whatnot. But since he resorted to using anonymous posting to harass this site, he can’t even argue that he’s being “censored” because his posts still manage to get through filters (and moderation review).
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Social media companies are not private organizations like country clubs. They are heavily financed and supported by the federal government, so they are public domains, unlike someone’s own individual social media page or blog that is operated by specific individuals.
Musk said that he believes that people should have freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach, in other words, free to be shadow banned, silenced, gas-lit, and psy-opped. That is in line with the government and corporate America’s and other governments and corporations around the world. They want o continue the raping, pilaging and corruption and they want to “manufacture consent.” Nobody consents to it. Nobody ever will.
May as well just rename the internet Goebbels media. It is all hyped up BS.
As far as the ruling on Musk’s compensation package, the judicial system has bevome a shakedown racket as America descends into insolvency. Any time the government needs money, they shake down corporations with enormous fines. They rarely prosecute them, but just keep them in business for subsequent shakedowns that they claim viokate the rights of others, even though the actual victims of the offenses that the governments charge them with receive nothing for it. It started with the tobacco settlement. The opioid epidemic, J&J Baby Powder cancer, BofA, and social media company heists are prominent examples of regular shakedowns by the governments and judicial system. Trump thinks that it is just him. Trump said that he thought that the government shoukd do more civil asset forfeiture. His wish came true. They are forfeiting his assets.
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…hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
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Your argument, if one even remotely thinks about it, requires extending the entirety of the restrictions outlined in the constitution and all amendments to all businesses an individuals. That’s…insane. If you read the constitution, and it’s quite clear you haven’t, there’s no rational reason to think any of those requirements are appropriate or even beneficial to hold private parties to the same standard.
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No. Not all businesses are generic speech platforms. In fact, very few are. But the ones who are should embrace the moral obligation to support the foundational value of free speech and not censor opinions based on viewpoint. This is especially true for the large private generic speech platforms, because those are the places that have become the public square, where all people gather to render their opinions. If the platforms keep censoring, they should be urged, criticized, shamed, or bought to try to get them to change their behavior.
The Bill of Rights, while enjoining the government from taking certain actions, is also a statement of values. Those values are why the amendments were made part of the Constitution, which would not have been ratified without them. As such, those values should not to be worked around with legalisms. They should be embraced even by parties not legally obligated to embrace them.
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Is that the “value” of deciding what speech they will and will not associate themselves with, or is that the “value” of hosting all legal speech (even if they would otherwise refuse to host it) out of the fear of being harassed, sued, and/or physically attacked?
Only in a colloquial “this is where a shitload of people talk to one another” sense, not in a legal “this is public property” sense.
And per many, many years of free speech–related jurisprudence, one of those values is “the state can’t force someone to associate themselves with the speech and actions of another”. No matter how much you might want Twitter or Facebook or a 10-person forum for Mongolian basket-weaving to host certain kinds of speech from certain kinds of people, none of those platforms have any actual obligation to host that speech or those people.
You mean “legalisms” like “the freedom of association”, as mentioned above?
If I were to open a Masto instance, I’d ban pro-Nazi speech regardless of how hard you would try to convince me—by way of lawsuits, long-term targeted harassment, actual physical violence, or any threats thereof—that I must live up to your idea of what I have an obligation to host on my property. Nobody has any obligation to act the way you want them to act—not trans people, not social media service owners, and sure as shit not me. Don’t like it? Go elect a violent dictator, join his army, and pray the leopards never think your face looks like a tasty meal. Otherwise: Fuck all the way off with your fascist-ass bullshit.
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Yeah, you don’t believe in ‘freedom of association” tho, cuz you want to force people to bake you the cake. No, no there’s no commerce exception to that, people just pretended that there was.
Not that that would you stop you, I’m sure if there was was a private club that wouldn’t let you in (there isn’t, anymore, they’ve all been sued out of existence) you’d howl day and night.
You literally want to force someone to bake a cake, you moron.
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You’re literally arguing you want to violate the first amendment for companies because you don’t like their choices, you moron.
What’s wanted is use of a service tendered, with the terms and conditions shared and understood, without concern for “Hey I don’t like you because you’re gay, fuck off.” Meanwhile, you disingenuous assholes whine about being punished for breaking said terms and conditions, that you agreed to to use the platform,
PUNISHED AT A LESSER RATE THAN YOUR POLITICAL OPPONENTS, MIND YOU
and you want to sit there whining that they’re the same thing? No. You’re not some freedom fighter for speech, you’re just a child crying the saltiest tears because you and your friends got reprimanded.
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If fascist morons wanted to not bake a cake for gay people, they had two easy ways out. One was to just reject the order for a different reason other than one in direct violation of discrimination laws. The other was to offer the service as a private or religious club that wasn’t open to the general public. Unfortunately, like most hateful morons, they wanted all the rights and none of the responsibilities of living in a society.
All that’s happening here is that you’re angry that your choice to be a bigot isn’t treated the same as a person’s gender, race or other quality that they can’t choose. Then, the fact that the freedom of speech that other people have enables them to tell you to GTFO from their property, even if they’re way more popular than your hate group.
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Nothing is a ‘generic speech platform’.
Nothing.
No regulations define it.
No term of art describes it.
No case law reference it.
No codes regulate it.
No laws restrict it.
There is no colloquial use of the term.
It means nothing, and as such does not have any implied or stated moral, ethical or legal requirements for anyone.
The suggestion that a critical mas of people allow us to seize the platform is straight up marxism.
And no, the constitution isn’t shared values, it’s the minimum required in of the government. You and I will never have shared values because you’re a bigoted shitstain and I will never debase myself by aligning with your grotesque interpretation of the US constitution.
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Just want to say how pathetic and cowardly it is for readers to mass-flag your posts to suppress your commentary here.
There’s literally nothing objectionable about what you’ve written that should merit flagging, but it challenges the censorship-worship of the majority of the commentariat and the site owner.
I sincerely hope you keep commenting, as your insights are a pleasant change from the rot here BtL (at least until they’re mass-reported & suppressed).
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You have just spoken out in support of someone who think harassing people is just fine, that think that he is entitled to use other peoples property against their wishes, that he has the right to force himself upon others.
So, either you are new here and outed yourself as an idiot or you are just another asshole.
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…hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
Re: Re: Re:4
Pretending that Toom’s standard replies to stupidity applies to that post just makes you look even dumber.
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…hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
Re: Re: Re:6
[BDAC Projects facts contrary to extensive evidence]
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…hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
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…hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
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If right wing paranoia was put to useful purposes cancer would have been solved a few decades ago.
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But the ones who are should embrace the moral obligation to support the foundational value of free speech and not censor opinions based on viewpoint.
Moral obligation? What fucking country have you lived in for the last 7 years? I’m unclear as to what you mean by ‘moral obligation…’
Are those who call for the elimination of a certain protected class of people ‘moral’? And do your morals tell you that it’s a perfectly fine view to associate yourself with? Conflating ‘moral’ and ‘legal’ has got to be one of the stupider arguments from you people. Are you new or did one of the regular idiots call out?
Companies exist to make money. Remember, capitalism = good, communism/socialism = bad. If allowing assholes to use their platforms causes a loss of revenue from people who don’t like you assholes, that’s typically ‘bad.’
It’s business 101. And ‘asshole’ isn’t a protected class. If you want to argue that it should be, based on some immutable characteristic (such as untreatable mental illness), that’s an entirely different path you should be heading down.
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Hyman.
Kindly please shut the fuck up and take a long walk off a short pier.
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Also, there’s no such thing as a ‘generic speech platform’. And if there is, there’s no rational to believe it would be treated any different than any other business.
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“Supporting free speech means supporting the ability of all people to speak all viewpoints on generic speech platforms, not praising legal ways to silence speech you hate.”
This is your opinion and you are free to have it, others may disagree due to their own opinions that they are allowed to have. You continue to repeat your opinions that everyone has already heard and dismissed, the continual repetition of the failed attempt to change the minds of others is noted, perhaps it is a mental issue?
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Re: Re:
When people continue to be wrong, they continue to need to be corrected. I know that I cannot convince the stubbornly wrong, but it remains important to demonstrate to them that their opinions do not go unopposed.
Re: Re: Re:
Translation: “I’m going to keep harassing people until they behave in the way I believe is ‘proper’, which is surely the objective word of God and not some subjective bullshit that feeds my fascist fantasies of eradicating queers.”
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Re: Re: Re:2
I don’t respond to people other-wording me. Oh, wait, that’s you. I’m just fine with it. But it’s cute when you do it too after complaining that it’s done to you.
So, yes, I’m going to continue pointing out when people are wrong or behaving badly for as long as they are wrong or behaving badly, even when those people don’t like having their errors or bad behavior continually criticized, and even when those people claim to be harassed by such criticism. The right to speak and behave as one wishes is not a right to be from criticism for such speech and behavior.
Re: Re: Re:3
Translation: “I’m going to keep harassing people until they behave in the way I believe is ‘proper’, which is surely the objective word of God and not some subjective bullshit that feeds my fascist fantasies of eradicating queers.”
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Re: Re: Re:4
Translation: “How dare people say something I disagree with?”
That’s literally all you mean. He’s willing to call you out (you call this “harassing”), you want whatever institutions available, to ban him for disagreeing with you.
Re: Re: Re:5
Ooh, double-teaming. Now hit him with the chair!
Re: Re: Re:5
No, Hyman has expressed in the past a desire to endlessly harass trans people for daring to exist in public (but especially for trying to use the toilet in the “wrong” restroom). That he has also expressed a desire to endlessly badger the owners of social media services to stop banning speech he wants to see unbanned on said services means I can infer that his desire to see what he calls “proper behavior” from trans people and social media service owners alike coincides with a desire to endlessly harass those people until they behave in such a way that his harassment will end. See also: His refusal to take the hint here when Mike started sending all of Hyman’s posts to the spamfilter while Hyman was using his account. Hyman thinks that treatment is “harassment”, even though he’s the one who has been told by the site owner (multiple times!) to fuck off and who has refused to leave despite that message. So no, this is not about Hyman “calling me out”—lots of people disagree with me on a regular basis here, and that’s fine. This is about Hyman expressing a desire, directly or otherwise, to harass people until they behave in a way that assuages his self-comfort and massages his ego. This is about Hyman believing that his idea of everyone else’s “moral obligation” obliges him to consequence-free harassment of people who aren’t living up to those “obligations”. This is about Hyman being an asshole because he thinks he’s God or something close to it—and if you don’t see anything wrong with that, that’s your fucking problem.
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Re: Re: Re:6
“Trans people” should be ostracized, mocked, and encouraged to self-terminate if they’re unwilling to stop denying biological reality.
Re: Re: Re:7
And nutters like you should be ostracized and mocked for suggesting that certain groups should kill themselves because their sexual expression doesn’t conform to your ideals.
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Re: Re: Re:8
…hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
Re: Re: Re:9
Tell us more about your complete and utter failure at understanding context, low-grade bot.
Re: Re: Re:7
…said no human, ever.
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Re: Re: Re:6
Look, man, even if I were to be otherwise sympathetic, considering the degree of lying, race-baiting, just general victimhood hood I’ve seen from you, I would believe the other guy.
You have to be assumed to be lying by default, that’s how much you’ve lied.
Congrats, you, personally, have made the opposite of “ally” now, I guess.
Re: Re: Re:7
Pot, kettle.
Re: Re: Re:7
Bratty Matty, the idiot and king liar has shown up.
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Re: Re: Re:6
Glad to see I have permanent residency in your head.
“Exist in public” is not synonymous with “force their way into single-sex spaces for which their bodies disqualify them”. Normal men are also not allowed in women’s single-sex spaces, and that does not prevent them from existing in public.
Public-facing entities are always subject to criticism for their actions. That is what it means to live in a country where freedom of speech is a foundational value. The fact that people may not want to face criticism does not impose any requirements on the critics to silence themselves, and does not impose any time limits on how long the criticism will endure.
The site owner is free to delete my comments. He does not do so because he wants to maintain his facade of believing in free speech, even though he subjects me to low-level harassment by delaying my signed-in posts in the moderation queue for long periods. There is no reason for this other than harassment, since I can simply post the same things as AC and they generally appear immediately. He hopes doing this and yelling and cursing at me will get me to leave “voluntarily” and he can tell himself that he has not censored me.
Re: Re: Re:7
Maybe not to you, but to your anti-queer allies, it can sure as hell mean that.
Criticism is not long-term harassment designed to “correct” someone into “behaving properly”, which is what you keep promising to do to people who don’t exhibit what you believe is “proper behavior”.
That he hasn’t makes you lucky as fuck. I’d have set up filters to catch all your workshopped-as-fuck copypasta bullshit months ago.
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Re: Re: Re:8
I do not have “allies”. There are other people who share some of my views and not others. If you do not like their beliefs, you can go argue with them.
Criticism is precisely for the purpose of getting people to change their behavior, whether those people like to hear it or not.
As for the site owner, cognitive dissonance for the win!
Re: Re: Re:9
And you sick fucks are allied towards a common cause (the eradication of trans people). I’m sorry if you don’t like being associated with anti-trans shitbags who are more extreme than you, but you put yourself out there as an anti-trans shitbag—the association with violent anti-trans extremists is the consequence of your public profession of being on their side.
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Re: Re: Re:10
You can associate me with whomever you like. I simply point out that arguing with me over views held by someone else is useless. I’m not going to change my mind about things that I believe just because someone else who holds those opinions also holds others with which I disagree. And the other people aren’t going to know you disagree with them if you don’t talk with them.
Re: Re: Re:11
I never expected to change your mind. I’m only informing you that your anti-trans positions put you in association—implicit or otherwise—with the kind of people who would, if given the chance, take their positions further with actual physical violence (up to and including murder). Those same people would also apply those same positions and that same violence to other marginalized groups without hesitation.
What you do with that information is up to you. I would hope you’d take about ten minutes to yourself for some deep introspection and wonder how the hell you ended up having someone tell you that you’re in league with violent anti-queer fascists with a thirst for blood. (I recommend a readable and enjoyable ebook about introspection for help with that.) I’d also hope you would find an equal or greater amount of time to figure out exactly how and why you got so angry about trans people existing, why you’re so willing to endlessly harass them about their genitals, and why you’re so unable to consider them to be people worthy of existing in the public sphere without the constant need for your approval of their behavior (and their genitals).
But I don’t trust to hope—especially not with someone who has made abundantly clear that they have no problem whatsoever with queer people dying because cishet people either killed them or drove them to die by suicide. So alls I can do is say “you’re aligning yourself with violent fascists” and let you do what you feel you must with that information. But lemme tell ya: Life is much better when you’re trying to uplift marginalized people into the light instead of trying to keep them in the shadows or push them into the grave.
Re: Re: Re:7
The former is reality.
The latter exists solely as the hallucinations of the deranged and evil.
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Re: Re: Re:4
…hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
Re: Re: Re:3
I’m going to set up shop in your house where I will loudly and offkey sing posts from Threads and when you call the police to complain I am trespassing and harassing you I will declare I am expressing my freedom of speech and that if you are a decent human being you will support my rights to free speech and not try to have me dragged off with nonsense legalisms like this is your property and you have a right to manage it as you see fit because my freedom of speech trumps your right of owning property because your property is a tertiary adjunct emolument while my free speech is a primary empanelment of unexplicit facts. Such epic big boy pants bravery and big boy brain thinking will make your mommy so proud of your independence and your daddy will buy you some misogynistic animated T Swift AI porn for showing them thar pearl clutching liberals what’s what.
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Re: Re: Re:4
I live in a castle doctrine state, Sir, so I wouldn’t even bother calling the police before I liquidated you.
Re: Re: Re:3
The right to speak and behave as one wishes is not a right to be from criticism for such speech and behavior.
That’s right, asshole. It isn’t.
Re: Re: Re:
‘Wrong’ implies there’s a measure of ‘Correct’ that is not arbitrary. This measure must also be external to you, and if not absolute there must be some general consensus of relative correctness.
But that doesn’t exist.
No final court ruling agrees with you.
In fact, there are no cases that make this argument at all.
There is no significant legal doctrine holds this same opinion.
No credible legal scholar or expert makes the same claim.
It is literally an invention made, in whole cloth, by someone who is regularly and conspicuously in error about the law as a matter of course.
The closest that I can find of anyone arguing the merits of a “generic speech platform” is a single line in a moot court teams entry for a competition in which both first and second place were won this year by Liberty University. Cuck College.
You have no basis to correct a god damned thing, you ignorant condescending prick.
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Re: Re: Re:2
I will state my viewpoint regardless of what you think of it, and you are free to criticize it as you see fit. That’s how free speech is supposed to work. The way it’s not supposed to work is having censors prevent certain viewpoints from appearing.
Re: Re: Re:3
Sure, feel free to state your opinion, but don’t pretend is grounded on anything but your tender feels.
No facts in existence support your claims. Private parties are absolutely free, and expected, to discriminate.
Re: Re: Re:3
I will state my viewpoint regardless of what you think of it, and you are free to criticize it as you see fit.
You’re an ignorant, simple-minded douchebag, hellbent on being the biggest asshole you can be – an endeavor of people like you everywhere, perpetual victims of your own assholery.
If you didn’t have something to whine, bitch, and do nothing to correct your existence would be as meaningless as it is already.
Re: Re: Re:
“When people continue to be wrong, they continue to need to be corrected. I know that I cannot convince the stubbornly wrong, but it remains important to demonstrate to them that their opinions do not go unopposed.”
In your opinion, you are correct and the facts do not matter in this determination.
Other people, in their opinions, attempt to address what the facts may be pointing towards in an effort to more accurately describe reality.
There is a huge difference between the two .. in my opinion.
Re:
That’s one of the only two tenets of free speech that matters: With rare and sensible exceptions, no government entity should have the right to interfere with your ability to express youself—even if the government dislikes you or your speech. As for the other tenet…
…that one goes like this: No one can be (or should be) forced to express ideas and speech with which they disagree, host such speech, or listen to/read such speech. By your definition of “censorship”, someone blocking you on social media is a censor because they “silenced” your speech from being in their timeline/social media experience.
No. No, it does not. Twitter has as much of an obligation—ethical, moral, and especially legal—to host speech that praises Nazis as it does to host speech that decries and mocks Nazis: none whatsoever. The same goes for…whatever the hell else you would call a “generic speech platform”, in that no platform is obligated to host any given viewpoint or the people who might express it. Or do you really want to go on the record as saying that a queer-friendly Mastodon instance should be forced—either through the law or through coercive tactics such as long-term harassment or threats of violence—to host (and possibly even promote) propaganda for violent acts of anti-queer torture that their proponents call “conversion ‘therapy’ ”?
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Re: Re:
As always, you want to construe moral suasion as use of force, because the law prevents use of force but does not prevent moral suasion.
Trans-deluded people should be treated to learn to be comfortable with the only body they will ever have, with the only sex it will ever have. That is a much better alternative than mutilating them, but neither of these treatments should be undertaken by force. It is woke ideologues who attempt to outlaw therapy sought by people who want to change their discomfort with themselves or to whom they are attracted. Presumably you are in support of men who are attracted to children but do not want to be, to seek therapy to change or tamp down that attraction. Yet you find it an unconscionable crime for men who are attracted to other men but don’t want to be, to seek the same sort of therapy.
X and other large private generic speech platforms really do have a moral obligation to allow people to speak pro-Nazi viewpoints. That’s what it means to live in a country where free speech is a foundational value. Even repulsive speech should not be censored.
Re: Re: Re:
You’ve literally said that you would, if given the opportunity, harass people into behaving how you demand they behave for the sake of assuaging your own personal comfort—whether that’s trans people existing in public or social media service owners deciding to ban certain kinds of speech. That your harassment would turn violent may be improbable, but on a long enough timeline, it’s absolutely possible.
If an adult wants to voluntarily allow some priest with access to electrodes and a pamphlet from an anti-queer website commit psychological and physical torture against that adult so said adult will (falsely) believe that they’re not gay, that’s their fucking business. But children shouldn’t be tortured into being something they’re not for the sake of a bigoted parent’s self-serving belief that their child is their proprety and a gay child is a “broken” child that needs “fixing”. That besides, “conversion ‘therapy’ ” has been discredited by every major medical association as ineffective, and numerous survivors of “conversion ‘therapy’ ” will tell you that some of them were effectively kidnapped and placed into that “therapy” against their will by their own parents. Shit, man, the people who perform and advocate for that “therapy” believe someone killing themselves during the course of their “treatment” is a success story. I want you to tell me what other form of therapy, if any, considers someone being tortured into dying by suicide to be a “successful” result.
Torture isn’t therapy. Try to convince me otherwise and I’ll repeat that statement.
What is the objective, factual, can’t-argue-with-that basis for this moral obligation—and who came up with it? Because anything you refer to as a “moral obligation” is ultimately subjective. “Thou shalt not kill” can be considered a moral obligation, but if someone is trying to kill you and the only way to prevent that from happening is to kill that person, chances are good that the people who are taught “thou shalt not kill” will fight their ass off to stay alive—even if they must violate that “rule”.
You’re not a god, so any talk about your idea of what someone else’s moral obligations are holds no weight. Nobody has an obligation to live up to what you think they should be for the sake of massaging your ego/assuaging your sense of self-comfort. Or do you really think I have a moral obligation to stop being queer because you and your anti-trans allies have a big fucking problem with queer people in general? I mean, y’all are the people who support torturing queer people into the closet or the grave and calling it “therapy”, so…yeah…
Re: Re: Re:2 Torturing queers
STS:
That is the most cogent comment I’ve read on this topic in a while. If it’s okay to quote you I’ll do so repeatedly. Well said.
As for AC. Sure, you’re able to post anonymously. It’s hard to separate one AC from all the other dumbshit ACs. I mean, seriously, can’t you at least go by AC8675309 or “Jenny”?
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Re: Re: Re:2
This is funny cuz electroshock therapy has been shown, incontrovertibly, to work and therefore be thereaputic in some cases. It is still used to this day.
It is not pleasant.
Whether any other treatment that you’re opposed to is “torture” or not has not been shown or even argued, only that you don’t like it, presumably on political grounds.
But inarguably it being “torture” does not preclude it being therapeutic. Indeed one could argue a whole LOT of therapy is not pleasant. (including both physical rehabilitation as well as basically all substance abuse treatment)
Re: Re: Re:3
Not only is electroshock therapy not the sole physical act associated with “conversion ‘therapy’ ”, you can’t produce a single credible study that says “conversion ‘therapy’ ” in any form is a safe and effective “treatment” for the “affliction” of existing as queer.
I’m all for therapy for people whose internatlized queerphobia (as well as external queerphobia from trusted friends and family members) conflicts with their actual queerness and affects their mental well-being. And as I said earlier, if an adult wants to voluntarily subject themselves to “conversion ‘therapy’ ”—to literal psychological and physical torture often performed with a religious bent and sometimes carried out by religious clergy—as a way to deal with being queer, that’s their fucking issue. But every major medical association worth a good god’s damn that has studied “conversion ‘therapy’ ” to any extent agrees that it is an ineffective form of “therapy” regardless of whatever form it takes and the name under which it bills itself (e.g., “sexual orientation change efforts”).
We’re not talking about physical therapy after a broken bone or a torn muscle. We’re not talking about psychological therapy to help people deal with trauma or eating disorders. We’re talking about queer people being tortured—sometimes against their own will with the blessing of family members!—into not being queer. “Conversion ‘therapy’ ” is about fundamentally breaking down someone’s entire sense of identity and rebuilding it in the image of what someone else wants that person to be, which is “not queer”. That numerous victims of this “therapy” have died by suicide as a result of their “treatment” is a tragedy; that the proponents of “conversion ‘therapy’ ” see those deaths as success stories because it means fewer queer people in the world is a callous disregard for human life that borders on sociopathy.
I don’t like you, Matt. You’re a right-wing dickhead who is clearly on the side of the kind of conservative Christian shitheels who traveled to Uganda to help the leaders of that country create its “kill the gays” laws. You disappearing from these comments sections for the rest of your life would be nothing but a net benefit for everyone—including you. I think so little of you that I flag posts by that dipshit who took your name, changed the middle initial, and thought posting like you would be effective “satire”. You are little more than a nuisance of a person who I would not miss in any way if you went away.
And yet, I would still refuse to wish upon you the fate of having to experience what the victims of “conversion ‘therapy’ ”—living or dead—experienced as victims of that torture. That is how poorly I think of “conversion ‘therapy’ ”: Even an anti-queer shitbird like you doesn’t deserve to go through that shit.
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Re: Re: Re:4
Not even vaguely what I said. Hell, I didn’t even know electroshock was commonly part of “conversion therapy” (I’m not sure it is, and I would not believe you if you told me it was without a link from some non-activist source, not that it’s even relevant).
I was just pointing out the absolute ludicrous of “Torture isn’t therapy.” That that the statement was so dumb, it it impinged everything else you said.
But not only are you too dumb to understand that simple point, but you followed on with your usually crazy strawman to argue with a buncha stuff I didn’t say.
I’m gonna ignore (didn’t even read) the rest of it since it obviously had little to do with me.
All sorts of very legitimate therapy, including “electroshock”, is not pleasant, maybe even most of it, and could be called “torture” in the colloquial sense.
You addled ranty slippy-sock.
Re: Re: Re:5
Some therapy can feel like torture to the person undergoing said therapy but not actually be torture. “Conversion ‘therapy’ ” is literally the torture of queer people with no actual theraputic endgame besides “make queer people stop being queer”—which is why every major medical organization with even the slightest shred of credibility has denounced “conversion ‘therapy’ ”.
Show me any form of legitimate therapy where the therapist considers a patient’s death by suicide to be a success story—because “conversion ‘therapy’ ” adherents have done that shit, and if you’re going to defend “conversion ‘therapy’ ”, you’ll have to defend that shit too.
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Re: Re: Re:6
Sure, buddy, whatever. By which you mean “That which I agree with is effective and worth it and that which I don’t is ‘ineffective torture'” — it’s just naked political bias give pseudo-scientific veneer.
I just think its funny how exposed you are.
Re: Re: Re:7
No, I don’t. Some therapies may be ineffective for some people; that doesn’t mean those therapies are torture. But “conversion ‘therapy’ ” is literally all about torturing queer people psychologically and (often) physically in ways designed to annihilate their sense of identity and self so they can be “rebuilt” by religious freaks whose only goal is to eradicate queer people. That’s what I’m talking about when I say that a not-zero number of “conversion ‘therapy’ ” adherents consider the suicides of a “patient” to be a success story: That person’s death means one less queer person exists.
As I said before, I have no problem with actual therapy designed to help people with conflicting emotions about being queer work through those emotions. But I have every problem with “therapy” that is designed and intended only to hurt people for no legitimate theraputic endgame—especially when the major proponents of that “therapy” are religious freaks who want nothing more than to hurt queer people in the name of their god.
No, that’s “conversion ‘therapy’ ”—its adherents want the “practice” to be seen as scientific even though it is literally about torturing queer people to make them stop being queer…or stop being alive. Y’know, whichever comes first.
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Re: Re: Re:8
I’ll be honest, I’ve stopped reading, it just seems like the usual shit where you’re convinced religious people are out to “get you” somehow — and none of it has anything to do with how insane your statement “Torture can’t be therapy was”.
Yeah, yeah, and you’re being personally attacked by not being able to show porn to minors. We get it, man.
Re: Re: Re:9
Not only have I never said (or so much as implied) “I want to show porn to minors”, that you went there in a discussion that doesn’t even involve book bans, books with queer content/by queer authors, and/or pornography of any kind? Shit like that is why “every accusation, a confession” is a thing.
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Re: Re: Re:10
Yeah man, cuz you’re very one note.
Re: Re: Re:11
By all means, please show me where I have openly advocated for displaying pornography of any kind to minors. Go ahead, Mr. “I’m Right All The Time”—show me the evidence of my own guilt. Or is this like every other time you’ve been asked to prove a claim of fact, where you’ll demand I do your work for you so you can duck out of putting your Monopoly money where your mouth is?
Re: Re: Re:11
Poor Bratty Matty, did you run out of disingenuous shit to say? That kinda happens when you are a stupid fucker.
Re: Re: Re:9
…projects the admitted CSAM supporter.
Re: Re: Re:7
I take it you’ve never grieved the death of a loved one, or the pain of betrayal from someone you trusted, or ever self-reflected on a traumatic moment in your life.
Maybe you should go to therapy for your lack of empathy.
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Re: Re: Re:8
right…..not buying into your or Stephen’s drug fueled insanity means that I obviously I have both never known loss, nor have empathy.
Alternatively, I think yor constant crying about false victimhood demeans all the real, actual loses people have had, rather than what you imagined.
Re: Re: Re:9
Who said anything about false victimhood? Or drugs for that matter?
You’re the one who chose to deride the idea that therapy can feel torturous for those in therapy without it actually being torture.
I just countered with examples of thing that are painful to work through that people actually go to therapy for.
Your own reply further shows your lack of empathy.
Re: Re: Re:4
Only Uganda?
Thier cancerous ideology has spread to many places, including Uganda.
Re: Re: Re:3
Denying a core aspect of oneself isn’t therapeutic in any sense of the word. There’s a reason churches are littered with groomers and gay bars aren’t and it’s because one shames people for their sexuality and the other embraces people regardless of their sexuality.
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Re: Re: Re:4
No one is encouraging trans-identifying people to deny the mental illness on which their core identity rests, Sir.
Re: Re: Re:5
Lots of people are encouraging that by passing or advocating for laws that ban any legal recognition of non-binary gender identities. Some of those people are also trying to ban transgender healthcare for trans people of all ages. But sure, tell me again how the same people trying to legislate trans people out of existence (and only because killing them is still illegal) are actually fine and dandy with the mere idea of trans people actually being transgender, never mind the idea of trans people openly participating in society.
Re: Re: Re:6
Please explain why you think gender identity should be a protected classification.
Re: Re: Re:7
No person should be denied their civil rights, or be discriminated against, because of how someone else perceives an individual person’s gender identity. Example: A cisgender lesbian who (to some anti-trans dipshit) doesn’t dress and look like “a real woman” could face discrimination—or even actual physical violence—because of the dipshit’s perception that said cisgender lesbian is actually transgender.
That besides, gender identity is also tied to sexual orientation in re: discrimination. An openly gay man with a husband could face discrimination in the workplace because his boss believes men should only ever be with women—a belief which attacks both sexual orientation and gender identity, since the gay man doing something perceived as “abnormal” or “wrong” for his gender/sex (e.g., marrying a man) would go unpunished if a woman did it.
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Re: Re: Re:2
You ideologues pass laws to prevent such therapy from being offered in the places where you have captured local government. Medical and psychological associations have been entirely captured by this ideology, so their claims that it cannot work are not to be believed. And your yelling and screaming about torture and suicide reveals nothing more than terror that such therapy might actually work.
You “queer” people (a meaningless term, because the various non-heteronormative forms of being aren’t particularly related to each other) adopted the “born this way” paradigm as a way of fighting against the notion that you could be straight if you only wanted to be, not because it is actually impossible for people to change. But people are allowed to be satisfied with whomever they are attracted to and not want to change even if change is possible. But also, those people who are satisfied should not be allowed to stop those people who are not from trying to change.
A moral obligation is an obligation felt by people. It’s an emotion. You are not required to share it, but that will not stop those who have it from criticizing those who don’t. As for your sexual orientation, I don’t care in the slightest into which slot B you would like to stick your tab A. But bodies are what they are regardless of what their inhabitants would like them to be.
Re: Re: Re:3
And which ideology is that—the one that agrees that gay people are people instead of subhuman filth and therefore deserve to be treated like every other person instead of being tortured into the closet or the grave?
Actual survivors of “conversion ‘therapy’ ” have called it torture and spoken on its ineffectiveness. That includes people who once claimed to have been “cured” by that “therapy”. Those who underwent that “therapy” and died by suicide…well, I think that speaks to the only kind of effectiveness that “conversion ‘therapy’ ” has, especially since the religious freaks who near-exclusively promote and perform that shit see the death of a queer person as a moral victory.
Yes, and that’s the point of “queer”: It’s a catch-all term for anyone who isn’t cishet. Gay, bi, pan, transgender, asexual, whatever—if you’re not cisgender and heterosexual, you’re queer, at least as far as I’m concerned. And yes, I’m aware that some LGBTQ+ people don’t like the term, even as some try to reclaim it from being a slur. That’s why I use it to describe myself and the queer population as a whole, but will gladly defer to using the specific labels that someone wants used for themselves.
Plenty of gay people tried hard to not be gay back when being gay would get them beaten damn near to death. But all they did was act like they weren’t gay—they didn’t stop being gay. You can’t will a entire integral part of your identity away like that no matter how hard you try. And as I’ve already mentioned, torturing someone into believing they’re something that they’re not doesn’t work. I mean, shit, American Dad did an episode where the “I learned something today” moment was Stan trying his hardest to be gay by kissing a gay guy only to realize that no, being gay is not a choice. If a goddamn Seth MacFarlane cartoon can get it right, why the fuck can’t you.
And yet, you’ll gladly defend a form of pseudoscientific “therapy” where “patients” have literally been kidnapped by (or on orders from) their own parents and forced into that “therapy” against their will.
If an adult wants to voluntarily commit themselves to a course of “conversion ‘therapy’ ”, that’s their (stupid-ass) decision. But no child of any age should ever undergo that “therapy”, regardless of any desire to do so, because said “therapy” has literally been described as torture and deemed ineffective (not to mention unethical) by every major medical association worth a damn. “Conversion ‘therapy’ ” can make someone stop acting gay, but it can’t make them stop being gay. Actual therapy, on the other hand, can help someone who struggles with being gay come to terms with their being gay despite the internalized homophobia that was instilled into them by years of external homophobia from family, friends, and culture.
Then it’s subjective bullshit, because no “moral obligation” is an objective rule of life or law. You can say I’m supposed to feel a moral obligation to host all speech on my hypothetical Mastodon instance, but I’m not going to feel that obligation no matter how much you would plan to harass me into feeling it. Your moral obligations are your own; trying to enforce them on anyone else through lawsuits, harassment, violence, or threats thereof is you being a fascist prick. Not that you seem to have a problem with being seen as a fascist, since you’re already anti-queer.
The fact that you care about which people have a slot and which people have a tab to the point where you’ve openly admitted a desire to harass people (including children, you sick fuck) over their genitalia combined with your support for “conversion ‘therapy’ ” suggests otherwise.
Re: Re: Re:
What kind of backwater, redneck, chicken fucking, ignorance is this fresh shit?
Do you read the shit you write? Are you incompetent, or do you think we are? This dumbass argument doesn’t even pass the sniff test for credibility if you know anything about modern medicine from, say, 1850 on? Like even reddit fucking incels aren’t this fucking dumb.
But, because you seem to be pursuing stupidity as an Olympic sport, let me provide some examples to illustrate who fucking dumb you sound:
No glasses for bad vision, because you should learn to be comfortable with the only body they will ever have.
No appendectomy to remove the bust appendix, because you should learn to be comfortable with the only body they will ever have.
No Viagra for the limp as fuck Republican dicks, because you should learn to be comfortable with the only body they will ever have.
No fillings to fix the cavities in your revolting face, because you should learn to be comfortable with the only body they will ever have.
Do you finally see how fucking DUMB you look?
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Re: Re: Re:2
Well, look, I look forward to our transhumanist future, but the fact of the matter is that atm any “Sex reassignment” surgeries are in fact in remarkably poor, and can neither give you real functional penis nor a terribly appealing vagina. It seems better to avoid bottom surgery entirely. On the upside hormones can make very convincing short “men” (absent penis), the reverse is not true.
But drugs can cure ED quite well, appendectomy is ironically probably overprescribed in cases that resolve without issue (but yea also saveslives when it’s not!) and modern denistry is amazing but largly a cosmetic issue.
SO basically, none of those things are like sex-transition which frankly, just doesn’t work that well and more often seems like mutilation.
Again, I look forward to our transhumanist future…..and we are no where near there yet.
Re: Re: Re:3
Careful, you opened a “but” and now an asshole is showing.
Re: Re: Re:3
So now it’s measure of quality outcomes that you’re moving the target to? This is such a dramatic shift form your original point that it’s clear you’ve conceded it was an incredibly fucking dumb thing to have thought, let alone written down.
Also, you have no fucking clue about the quality of bottom surgeries, so that’s effectively a pointless area to begin. Evidence shows that the satisfaction rate is significantly higher than every other surgery. At or near 100%. So, by your own argument…every other surgery shouldn’t be allowed until they reach this level of exceptional performance.
Further, you don’t get to decide what’s adequate for others.
But again, for arguments sake, let take your metric and apply it for literally anything else:
Reconstruction from facial burns? NONE FOR YOU, if it’s not PERFECT.
No replantation of traumatic amputations because it’s not going to look pretty enough for Mathew Mouthbreather Bennett.
Need massive heart surgery? Well, you can no longer climb Mount Everest, so you’re gonna fucking die.
Also, I said burst appendix you dipshit. Nobody with a fucking clue contends surgeries for those are over prescribed.
And calling modern dentistry ‘largely cosmetic’ makes me wonder if you’re an actual human.
What a fuck head
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Re: Re: Re:4
Men can never be women, regardless of the body modifications they pursue. They can never menstruate, can never be pregnant, can never breast feed, will never be subject to the fear of breast and ovarian cancer, and will never experience menopause. They will continue to be subject to male pattern baldness, enlarged prostates, prostate cancer, and beer bellies.
You would like to compare the changes wrought by cosmetic surgery and medical treatment through surgery to trying to change a feature that is expressed in literally every cell of the body. Men can only be men. Women can only be women. And no one is required to accept someone who claims to be different from their body at their word.
Re: Re: Re:5
There are plenty of women who can’t die those things you fuck nozzle.
Women who have had had uterectomies or ablations don’t menstruate nor get pregnant.
Men ABSOLUTELY can get breast cancer, how fucking ignorant are you?
People, of both genders, go bald.
You clearly know so very little about the human body, how about you educate yourself on the fundamentals before having an opinion.
Re: Re: Re:5
Could you stop being a violent, anti-intellectual scumbag, Hyman?
No one cares about your petty feud with Mike just because you chose to harass him, just like you harassed those fine Republican sites you used to visit, even after you were told to either knock it off or leave.
Decorum dictates I don’t use death threats and the like (and other related language or methods the community and siteowner frown on) to harass you off the site. Decorum means I stay as civil as the community allows to express my right to not associate with your Nazi ass.
Decorum does not mean you get to harass the siteowner and the community when you’ve been told to fuck off.
So kindly do so. Because we’ve all said you’re infringing on our right to NOT ASSOCIATE WITH YOU.
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Re: Re: Re:4
Literally, except for pulling rotten teeth and a few other things, it’s classified as cosmetic under most laws and insurance, which is why dental insurance is almost always it’s own, separate thing.
See, the problem with people like you is that you don’t like the facts as they are, and get really mad at anyone who tries to explain those facts to you.
This is, in a nutshell, why shitlibs are largely useless people.
100% of anorexics think they are too fat. You’re feeding into the dysphoria, there’s a cult-like social craze around the phenomena, and who could admit they made such a life-altering, irreversible mistake?
None of that changes that the results are shitty. Probably less than 10% of transgenders (the range I found was 5-13%) get bottom surgery, with good reason. They just don’t work well.
Re: Re: Re:3
“modern denistry is amazing but largly a cosmetic issue.”
A cavity can lead to eventual death, but this is largely cosmetic in nature according to our very own doctor of dentistry.
Re: Re: Re:
I understand why you hate trans people when nobody considers you a man and nobody would want you to be a woman, which makes you so desperate to appear like a human but you’ll never pass as one because you always spill the tea when you open your mouth.
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Are you aware of what website you are on?
This is the same website that covered the legal importance of the 303 Creative v. Elenis verdict as upholding precedent regarding free speech while making the opinion that though they didn’t support the bigotry that led to the case existing, a verdict going the other way would be worse in the long term.
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Platforms don’t owe you a platform. Also, being the off-topic asshole is the sort of thing that can get you moderated in lots of communities. Not here, tho’, so you can stick your hilarious claims somewhere internal.
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…hallucinated nobody mentally competent, ever.
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And I am perplexed as to why you brought this up when it has absolutely nothing to do with the topic. Were you so desperate to hear your own voice again that you couldn’t just wait for an article on social media platforms to come up? You just had to randomly shit on this one? What an insufferably arrogant asshole you are.
One of the reasons x is so bad is most of the staff that did basic moderation of content have been sacked the amount of extreme content and misinformation by extreme conservatives has increased this has resulted in adveristers leaving x
USA law allows services to moderate content or ban users that post content that may be illegal or offensive or racist
There’s no such thing as generic free speech rules that can be applied to every website
If one were to go by basic economic principals Elon musk has not proved to be a good CEO in regard to twitter, X
as it’s lost alot of its value
Many users have left X to post on other social media services
I agree with the post eg shareholders would likely know that the members of the board were close to Elon eg not totally independent or neutral
Matt Levine - Everything is securities fraud.
I think this might fall into the realm of Matt Levine’s maxim, “Everything is securities fraud.” The shareholders are upset about the dilution. They want recourse from the courts. Unfortunately, the only charge against a corporation that sticks nowadays is securities fraud.
I know securities fraud may not be explicitly mentioned, but the only party that can sue a corporation and win is the shareholders and the only charge that goes against current corporate morality is securities fraud, lying to the shareholders.
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Oh, you probably hate Musk less than you liked OldTwitter Censorship
Which yes, was ruled by a court, and shown in court documents, to have been directed by federal gov agencies, in violation of the 1A.
The 5th circuit court, since you so stupidly asked.
And since you’re really upset Musk took your favorite dystopian viewpoint discrimination away (cuz it was often also that, even when not directed by government) and you lied about it for a little over a year now, you’re super testy about the whole thing.
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Why are you so stupid?
Re:
I could do a long, drawn-out reply to this post, but it’s frankly easier to insult your intelligence. I mean, you already insult everyone else’s intelligence by posting here.
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Re: Re:
Ah, buddy, you didn’t have anything valuable to say, or even witty rebuttal. You could’ve just said that.
Indeed, since your usual [long] replies are filled with strawmen, goalpost moving, and logical inconsistencies, I’ll read the lack at of effort at aggressive cognitive inconsistencies as basically admitting I’m right.
Re: Re: Re:
Nah, I’m just saving my energy for Hyman, at least in this comments section. You want long replies, go back to that other article and keep trying to prove shit about men being objectively better than women at chess because of the accident of their birth. Now that’ll get you some shit. Otherwise: What the hell do I have to say to you now that wouldn’t just boil down to calling you a fucking moron?
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Re: Re: Re:2
Men are objectively better than women at chess because they win more games. Only one woman has ever even made top ten. The following article, from 2020, says that there was only one woman then currently in the top one hundred, ranked 88.
https://www.euronews.com/2020/11/27/the-queen-s-gambit-why-there-has-never-been-a-female-chess-world-champion
Naturally, as always, woke ideologues deny reality if it conflicts with their ideology.
Re: Re: Re:3
Rather, I should say that the best men are much better at chess than the best women. I don’t know whether this imbalance holds all the way down.
Re: Re: Re:3
“Men are objectively better than women at chess because they win more games. ”
Logic fail.
“Naturally, as always, woke ideologues deny reality if it conflicts with their ideology.”
The word ‘woke’ sorta means that one woke up to reality, but you claim it means denying reality?
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Re: Re: Re:2
Anon is right, men are objectively better at chess.
Even if the difference is chalked up to just that way more men play chess. (Doubtful, also why?) It means letting men play in the women’s league would erase the women’s league. It’s something wokies have been trying to explain away for decades.
But it more points to your Hilarious misunderstanding of my comparison of AIs playing human chess players to males playing females at physical sports as I think men would wipe women at chess….which yes, is also exactly the case, but beside the point.
At some point, Stephen, you are gonna have to admit you don’t know anything about anything.
Re: Re: Re:3
I really could just rip you and Hyman up there to shreds, but something jumped out at me:
Man, you…you really do wanna use a racial slur so bad that you’ll use a meaningless word that rhymes with a well-known racial slur for Black people as a way to attack me, huh. I guess that is something you can do, I suppose.
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Re: Re: Re:4
“Wokies”, “People who are woke”. Sometimes I also say “you people”, and no, no physical characteristics are denoted therin beyond perhaps overly-dyed hair.
You are so ffffing desperate to call those who disagree with you some form of bigot it is almost tangibly sad.
Admit it…that’s all you got. You have no argument. You have no facts. All you can do is scream “BIGOT!” ’til you’re horse.
We believe in being colorblind over here, which you, of course, tell us is being racist. YOU want affirmative action, and “Equity” instead of “Equality”, it is YOU who are obsessed with what color everyone is and their exact genetic makeup….and you want to pretend “Wokies” is a stand-in for some racial slur…I’m actually not sure which one, even.
That’s amazing. Sad, but amazing.
Re: Re: Re:5
It’s still a word that makes you look like a dipshit for using it, and it’s still a word that rhymes with a well-known racial slur that…well, I obviously can’t know for sure, but I’d bet on you having using said slur at least a few times in your life.
I’m really not. Plenty of people here have disagreed with me, and I’ve never called most of them names of any kind. But when you’re siding with people who have proven themselves to be bigots, and you’re openly espousing support for bigoted ideas and beliefs (e.g., antisemitic George Soros conspiracy theories), I can only draw the obvious conclusion from the evidence you’ve given me.
…says the guy who refuses to provide evidence that backs up his own claims of fact.
HEY!
My current fursona-in-the-works is a mouse, thank you very much.
“I’m in an interracial marriage, and I’ve learned a lot I would have never known. I one time told Brandi, ‘I don’t have a racist bone’—I said, ‘I don’t see color.’ And she said, ‘Well then, you don’t see my experience.’ And I thought, ‘Oh, that’s…you’re right. I can’t just say that.’ You need to be able to see that experience and at least understand it.” — Cody Rhodes
Every accusation, a confession.
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Re: Re: Re:6
I googled “Pokies”, the only thing that came to mind, and all I got was girls with thin shirts and no bra.
I actually have no idea what you you’re getting at, and I’ve yet AGAIN come away with the sense you are way more racist than I am, you damn wokie.
Not on are you, it’s basically your only tool in your arsenal. I don’t even know what slur you think “wokie” sounds like nor do I think it would be terribly important if I did.
You’re a race baiter. (that’s not accurate, you will also OFTEN accuse people of hating gays or trans, there’s just no such all inclusive term beyond “bigot-baiter”)
See, that’s the funny bit, I can only BARELY tell this is a joke, and if I made the same, you would not credit me with it being mine.
Yeah, cool, I don’t care, we believe in being colorblind over here, and you call us racist for it.
We call you racist for NOT being color blind, and unlike you the the law is on our side.
Buddy, you’re racist, anti-cis, anti-religous, you show yourself basically every post you make
Re:
So you you admit not a single court of law with qualified judges support your delusions.
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Re: Re:
Awww, buddy, losing is hard.
Gonna say the same thing SCOTUS rules the same?
Are we gonna get to call you an insurrectionist for daring to do so when that happens?
Re: Re: Re:
None of us support a party that tried to violently disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, asshole.
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Re: Re: Re:2
Neither do I.
But you sure do support a part that ignores the constitution!
Student debt relief – president had no power for that.
Vaccine mandates for companies 100+ employees – president had no power for that.
Eviction moratorium – president had no power to do that.
Eviction moratorium THE SECOND TIME — president had no power to do that, and was also just ignoring standing SCTOUS order.
DACA (Obama, not Biden) – President had no power to do that.
So you guys are ALL about violating constitutional order, with force.
Biden should be impeached 10 times over, and that’s not even counting the $25M+ in bribes.
And you guys wanna start a civil war cuz that Trump said something, maybe, if you squinted and made some things up, encouraged a riot. Amazing.
Re: Re: Re:3
The only people who are currently talking as if they want to start a civil war are right-wing shitbirds. No leftist/liberal/progressive that I know of wants a civil war, least of all the liberal sitting in the Oval Office.
Re: Re: Re:3
None of this makes rational sense, at all.
Where is there force in there?
And yes, insurrections are significantly more worrisome than overturned executive orders. Much more.
Finally, there were no bribes show. At all. Not a bit.
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Re: Re: Re:4
About $25 M so far.
This is how I know you’re just a partisan liar.
What “insurrections”? Like, a stolen podium? You think that’s more worrisome than just directly IGNORING the SCOTUS?
Cuz yeah, I don’t kinda the opposite, actually. I rate an “insurrection” that never happened as immaterial, but ignoring SCOTUS as an insurrection itself, certainly directly impeachable.
Re: Re: Re:5
No man, there is no evidence of that at all…which is why you haven’t posted any. It’s a number made up by liars and repeated by fools.
Biden didn’t ignore the SC, but republicans are actively saying Abbot should ignore the SC right now. B
It wasn’t just a stolen podium. Ashley rabbit died trying to assault congress and stop the peaceful and legal transfer of power. But once that happened, the pussies broke and ran like the chicken shit coward they are.
Talk about a partisan liar: Hundreds of people are in jail to prove you wrong about the insurrection. And you don’t even have a single thing to support your claim.
Re: Re: Re:5
No there isn’t. You’d have proof of there was. But you don’t.
Re: Re: Re:5
About $25 M so far.
I’m sure we can count on articles of impeachment any day now. I mean MTG has been working on this slam-dunk since 2021. That dumb bitch has been working on that for nearly 3 years. Must be that top-notch Georgia education slowing things down, amirite?
This is how I know you’re just a partisan liar.
Yeah, because seeing nothing happen by those who keep saying it will is partisan. You’ve got the House, and no fucking excuses.
So what’s the goddamn problem, apart from your own incompetence?
Re: Re: Re:5
If it’s impeachable, why do you guys never present evidence to a court – even those where the judges were hired by Trump personally? I mean, I can definitely see why an attempt to violently prevent the transfer of power based on false pretences that avoided assassination only by a few fortunate actions might be considered an insurrection, and that’s why so many people are going to jail over it. But, I’m not sure why you guys never present evidence beyond innuendo from people who can’t even pronounce the words in their legal documents.
Re: Re: Re:3
Biden should be impeached 10 times over, and that’s not even counting the $25M+ in bribes.
And the dumbfucks you installed in the house are still working on that? If it was such a slam dunk, you’d think they’d be working harder on it, especially during an election year…so what’s the holdup? They’re not negotiating for the imminent, country-destroying crisis at the border until after the election, so it’s not like they don’t have free time.
Incompetence? (that’s the most believable, based on past & current performance)
No ‘there’ there?
Still trying to find a credible witness?
Waiting for Rudi and his cybersquad to analyze Hunter’s hard drive?
I’m sure this will go the way of everything else you managed to not accomplish.
So keep going with believing that you know more than everyone else and it’s any day now that the shit’s gonna hit the fan. Given on how the only thing you people can count on is someone you know getting humiliated, arrested or hospitalized for doing something stupid at the head idiot’s request, I’ll give your prediction the consideration it deserves.
And you guys wanna start a civil war cuz that Trump said something
It’s a ‘national divorce’ idiot. Try to stay up-to-date on the vernacular (which is admittedly difficult given MTG’s lack of overall coherence). And understand that the only ‘civil warring’ will be the same shit you failed at before. No one’s worried about a bunch of uneducated hicks doing anything more than making asses out of themselves.
The inevitable complaining when they end up in jail because they recorded themselves (so that their stupidity would be memorialized for all generations to learn from), will rear its ugly head again.
And are you sure the civil warring wing of you idiots have a plan on how to pay the utilities for the trailer when your employers tell you that you don’t have enough PTO days to cosplay?
Re:
It’s as if everything you write is incorrect.
I don’t know why you continue to misrepresent my position on this, but at this point, you’ve been informed multiple times, so I can only chalk it up to you deliberately lying or you having such a significant brain injury that your short term memory is faulty.
I did not support “old twitter censorship.” Indeed, I regularly and repeatedly criticized it, and proposed the Bluesky protocols approach which would have taken Twitter out of the entire process of moderation.
That’s not something someone who “liked” how they moderated would do.
So why do you lie?
Again, I have never denied that the 5th Circuit said that the White House violated the 1st Amendment. I simply asked you to support your false statement that the FBI and CDC told Twitter who to censor. I asked for proof for that specific statement, which the lawsuit did not show.
You refused to show me any additional evidence, and we all concluded it was because it does not exist, except maybe in your fantasyland.
Again, I did not support the old moderation regime, and pushed them to get out of that business entirely (which they were doing, and Musk cut off that process).
The only one lying here is you Matthew. What we have not yet determined is if it’s because you are simply too stupid to understand things, or if you’re doing so deliberately.
I have my suspicions.
Did you actually read the opinion? It goes to great lengths to show that in fact yes, Musk was in effect self-dealing by being in effect in control of the board while claiming to shareholders there were acting independently. It even goes so far to point out that even Musk said something to the effect he was negotiating with himself.
There’s a lot about the procedure and legal standards in the opinion, but the basic gist is you can’t lie or mislead shareholders. Besides the self-dealing at arriving at the compensation package, a number of the milestones were presented as ‘hard’ goals despite that internal projections showed it was something like 70% likely they’d be hit.
The lawsuit was filed long before all the improvements happened with the stock, but even if you want to subscribe to ‘no harm, no foul’, the problem is because Musk (and the board) didn’t follow the law, we actually don’t know if there was no harm. If the board was truly independent, might they have been able to negotiate a cheaper compensation package with Musk with the same results? That would result in less dilution of shares, so shareholders would have made out better.
But as others point out, it wasn’t the amount of money that was the problem, but the process. Literally every other public corporation out there manages to play by the rules. For some reason, it’s only Tesla and Musk that seems to have problems.
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I did. All 200 pages.
Yes, but that statement, put in context does not suggest what you imply here. He was talking about he was discussing why he chose to propose a lower compensation than was currently being debated by the board. It wasn’t him saying that the board was really representing his interests. He was noting that they hadn’t yet pushed back on his initial proposal, and he was already proposing to lower it. That’s what “negotiating against myself” meant, which was not an implication that the board wasn’t truly independent.
Indeed, while the ruling details personal and professional connections between Musk and the board, it also details many parts of the discussion where the compensation committee was, in fact, raising questions about the structure of the package. There was no indication of a rubber stamp.
Again, I saw little evidence of misleading the shareholders. I kept waiting for it in the opinion, but… I just don’t see it. And the 70% thing, again, you appear to have misread it.
There were 12 milestones in the comp plan. The details show that Tesla believes that a few of them were “70% probable” within the first year. That… isn’t that surprising? Given the nature of the compensation plan, and the desire to spread it out over time, you would naturally have some that have a lower bar, that are more achievable, and others that are harder to reach.
As someone who has been on multiple boards… that is consistent with how I’ve seen things done in the past. You don’t want all the milestones to be crazy hard to reach.
Yes, I understand this claim, but I honestly don’t see how the process was problematic. There was a negotiation. There was a plan. It was presented to the shareholders, and as far as I can tell, done so pretty clearly and fairly.
If they had truly misrepresented the comp plan, I’d feel differently. I just don’t see it.
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Re: Re:
Yeah, I believe you, but the 5th circuit still ruled that the federal gov told various SM who to censor, there are numerous documents to that effect, and it was so stupid of you to ask I can only presume you were drunk when you did.
Do you drunk post on your own site? You can admit it here, this is a safe space!
Re: Re: Re:
Every accusation, a confession.
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Re: Re: Re:2
Oh, I totally drunk post, it’s not MY job.
But I didn’t say something dumb like “show me which cour!” and when confronted with the very obvious answer try to hem and haw and quibble about it.
The 5th. The 5th circuit did. Likely to be held up by SCOTUS, in fact.
Re: Re: Re:
Hanging you’re hat on the 5th circuit is hilarious, considering how often the SC rules against their ruling.
How about this, since you’re so confident, agree to go the fuck away if you’re proven wrong.
Re: Re: Re:
You clearly do since you don’t seem to realize the topic Mike is discussing.
Legal obligation
The part you seem to be ignoring is the board is there to protect shareholders not Elon Musk. In fact it’s illegal for them to favor musk over the shareholders.
The fiction of the process
Musk’s tantrum and noisemaking about fleeing to Texas, I think, highlights the bit that should minimize your confusion.
Your stance (lack of harm) mimics Trump’s civil fraud defense in New York: If it all worked out, nobody has a right to complain. I don’t mean that insultingly – it’s reasonable, especially when someone like you makes it without self-interest. Delaware is so popular among corporations because its stance mimics James’ and Engoron’s in New York: A violation of the process (whether it’s failed disclosures in DE or fraudulent sq footage listing in NY) is harm in and of itself because an individual shareholder (or bank, or consumer, etc) shouldn’t be expected to investigate whether processes were accurately followed before making each choice. Enrichment at the hands of a violated process is then inherently unjust. It’s why even a captured board can still have comp dictated to it so long as things are properly disclosed.
Texas courts lean more towards the ‘might makes right’ stance that Elon’s favored for decades. Most corporations shy away because there’s always a bigger fish in the sea and they’re willing to trade predictability (and a process that’s unintelligible for most individuals seeking recourse but second nature to corporate counsel) for the chance to throw their weight around. If Musk’s divorce attorney had the competence and desire to follow a pretty simple process, this’d have been turfed immediately. That he didn’t makes it all a bit tautological.
Re:
That said:
There’s a dark irony to Tesla’s shareholders being protected by regulations given the profit they’ve made from Musk’s constant disregard for all things regulatory.
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Actually, Delaware is popular because it’s laws, fees, taxes, are all very minimal, by design, to attract exactly that.
This is just lawfare, a liberal judicial activist judge taking things out on what she sees as a right-wing (Musk is not that) target. It is no different than Trump’s case in that it is wholly unhinged from both reality and case law and has vanishing little chance of surfing appeal.
But it IS hilarious that you attempt to see virtue in prosecution of non-crimes based on political biases.
Re: Re:
>implying Musk isn’t right-wing
Sure, he promotes replacement theory believers and antisemites, he plays on the fringes of being antisemitic himself (when he can get away with it), he bends over backwards to give right-wing hacks who call themselves “journalists” access to information about Twitter in exchange for coverage that paints him favorably, and he has either personally unbanned or ordered the unbanning of several right-wing accounts over his time as the owner of Twitter (including one account that literally posted CSAM on its public timeline), but none of that makes him a right-winger!
…and if you believe that, I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you.
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OOOhh, “replacement theory”! You mean “demographics is destiny”? That democratic strategists have been crowing about the last 20+ years at least, how white people will eventually be the minority? It’s literally the same thing.
It hasn’t worked out that neatly, mostly because hispanics have turned out to be considerably more conservative that you planned, but you can’t call it a “conspiracy theory” when you’ve been all very public about it.
“”How dare you accuse me of the thing I’ve been bragging about!?!” That’s too cute by half.
Nor has Musk said anything anti-semitic. What he said was that Jewish groups pushed DEI initiatives that ultimately fed into anti-israel actions (cuz someone how, Jew are “white” in this calculus). I think that’s ultimately correct.
No, Musk was a liberal in good standing until he realized y’all were both anit-business and anti-free speech. And he’s not right wing now, just not nutty-left, but anyone who protests left-wing nonsense is a nazi, that’s how it works.
But go ahead, man, tell yourself that the budlite boycott which holy crap has not stopped has some secret organizer, despite absolutely no evidence of it, while you ignore all the Soros fueled crap. (go ahead, call me an anti-semite cuz I mentioned Soros, who I had no idea was Jewish until I hated him already, you race baiter freak)
You’re a joke.
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No, I don’t.
That’s less a theory and more a statistical probability. Given population trends over the past few decades, if those trends continue, white people will eventually become a majority minority—still the majority racial group in the United States, but no longer the majority of people in the United States.
Political alignment has nothing to do with population trends in re: race. But it does have everything to do with white supremacist assholes talking about “the browning of America” as if “white people no longer being the majority of people in the United States will somehow lead to the country’s ultimate downfall” is a certifiable objective fact instead of a bigoted-ass opinion spread by bigoted-ass dipshits like Tucker Carlson (who happens to be someone Elon Musk courted as part of Twitter’s new “pivot to video” initiative).
The evidence says otherwise.
He was someone who wanted the approval of liberals, then pivoted to wanting (and receiving) the approval of conservatives when he couldn’t the approval of liberals. His expressing conservative views and sliding into the conservative media world with the ease of a snake didn’t come out of nowhere—this is who he was all along, but he was better able to hide that when he wasn’t doing drugs and trying to be the center of attention all day. The ego of Elon Musk caused the mask to slip; now we see him for who he really is…
…and he can’t really blame other people for his decision to finally reveal himself. Liberals didn’t make believe in right-wing nonsense. He did that by and to himself.
It doesn’t, but I’d bet that the primary drivers of the boycott were well-funded right-wing organizations with deep access to right-wing media figures and such instead of purely grassroots campaigns.
Two things.
Still funnier than you.
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Oh yes, you do, you just don’t want to admit it. It’s literally the same thing. No, that doesn’t change when you write a wiki article about it.
Aided greatly by a completely open border, ~2 million a year changes the statistics quite a bit, actually, these are not small numbers.
It has a great deal with both Obama and Biden trying to refuse illegal immigration is even a thing, however.
You don’t have to be a white supremacist to recognize that democrats are very transparently trying to flood the voter pool. The joke is it isn’t really working, cuz they’re way more conservative than liberals thought, but the intent was still clear. Which is why the political alignment matters a great deal, actually.
But mark this as the 2769th time liberals were way more racists while accusing conservatives of same. I’ll take my point.
I”m sorry, linking to a CNN opinion article as “evidence” is HILAIOROUS.
But no, it wasn’t anti-semitic no matter how much a DNC mouthpiece wants to tell you it was.
Right, cuz you’re race baiting piece of shit.
But no, in the early years (like 8 years ago?) he was referred to as a “Greek billionaire” and my first knowledge that he was Jewish was one of you jackasses calling me “Anti-semitic” (hell, coulda even been you!)
You have NO IDEA how much you dumbasses obsess about race and we don’t
Right, cuz you’re a race baiting piece of shit. It’s also not a “theory”…he’s funded all sorts of bad actors, which mostly entails fff’d up AGs but also various protest groups.
Facts can’t be racist, asshole.
You linked a CNN opinion piece as “evidence”. I doubt it.
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Haven’t House Republicans refused to consider any measure on the border crisis because Dear Leader doesn’t want Biden to have a victory on that issue in an election year? I mean, yeah, Democrats aren’t innocent bystanders in this issue, but clearly the Republicans are the ones who would rather complain about the border crisis than, y’know, actually do anything meaningful about the border crisis.
You kinda do, though. Undocumented immigrants can’t vote, and referring to legal immigrants registering to vote in “natural disaster” terms doesn’t make your argument sound less racist.
Like I said: funnier than you. Also, I don’t see you disproving the facts presented in that article.
Fam, I’ve heard about Soros conspiracy theories for about that long, and one of the first things I learned about Soros is that he’s Jewish. You’re asking me to believe that up until a few months ago, you had no idea that he was Jewish despite his Jewish-ness being one of the primary reasons for all the conspiracy theories surrounding his wealth and his political activity. If I wanted to believe you, I’d have to huff enough paint to recolor my entire room—but I’m not that stupid and you’re not that convincing.
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Are you high? Trump had the border largely solved. Biden CHOOSE to reverse all those policies. There’s nothing that any “border deal” will fix, the core problem is that Biden is ignoring the law, as written, no new law, no new funding, can change that.
The ONLY purpose to such “border deals” is to blame GOP for not signing them, when nothing will change if they are signed. (But money will be spent!)
Yeah, man, democrats TOTALLY want illegals to vote (they count to census regardless) and their children will.
Stop calling us racist for you doing what you’re saying you’re doing. It’s so stupid.
Trump did something about the border crisis (which was like 1/10th as much a “crisis” when he was in charge) you called him racist, incessantly, remember?
THERE WERE NO “FACTS” TO “disprove” YOU MORON
Years ago, not months, and buddy, exactly my point, you retards obsessedd with race and we aren’t. We hate Soros cuz he supports AGs that refuse to prosecute crimes, mostly.
I don’t know what you don’t get but THIS ISN’T A THING, IT’S JUST SOMETHING LEFTISTS REALLY WANT TO BE A THING.
YOU REALLY WANT US TO HATE HIM CUZ HE’S JEWISH AND NOT CUZ HE’S EVIL AND DESTROYING SOCIETY.
But the fact is he’s evil and destroying society, and I first knew of him as “Greek”. I support Israel 1000x more than you, and no, not cuz I randomly hate Palestinians for some reason. You and everyone you know is waaaaaayyyy more anti-semitc than me, you stupid fuck.
You sound fucking ridiculous, pretending that biggest reason we hate Soros is cuz he’s Jewish. That is something made up by you wokies, for wokies.
If Soros was Dutch descended South-African you’d pretend I was anti-african.
YOU’RE JUST A RACE BAITING SHITHEAD.
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That’s simply false, Matt. For instance, Delaware has the 8th highest marginal corporate tax rate, in addition to taxing on gross receipts (per the decidedly not lib Tax Foundation).
Both this ruling and the Trump civil fraud ruling are well set to hang ten while surviving appeal, and it can be seen in the weakness of the opposition arguments. “But it didn’t matter” plays well for PR and the general grievance messaging that had become so popular these days. Sadly, the same flaw that dooms the initial defense remains fatal at the next level: There’s no legal foundation to it. The state has a genuine, legitimate, and compelling interest in honest markets.
It’s less “judicial activist judge”s and more that you personally disagree with the rulings and either don’t or won’t understand why the law supports each judges’ decision. Which is fine, I suppose, just terribly uninteresting.
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“laws, fees, taxes, are all very minimal”
Jesus wept, it’s not just the one thing, but rest assured delaware is DESIGNED to have companies incorporate there. You didn’t even get that one thing right…marginal tax is not the same as tax rate paid.
If you don’t understand that….well, you don’t understand the topic at all, and should refrain from commenting on the topic further.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/76951/why-are-so-many-us-companies-incorporated-delaware
Also…we’re not on a first name basis. Partly because we don’t know each other but mostly you contradicted someone on a subject you knew nothing about.
Actually yes! Which is why almost every other state law cares about damages, first and foremost.
We’ve all established that you you don’t know how this works. There is no precedent. They’re lawfare, and just because you don’t understand any of the background and have a bias, doesn’t change that.
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Also…we’re not on a first name basis.
That might matter if you were in a position to demand compliance but you’re not, Matt.
IOW, it’s a demand that you’re in no position to make, Matt.
Got that, Matt?
Understand how it works, Matt?
Matt?
I don’t care if it makes you unhappy, Matt.
Fuck your feelings, Matt.
Ever hear of the ‘law of unintended consequences’, Matt?
I appreciate you scoffing at someone linking CNN in the same thread you cite mentalfloss — my personal favorite site for both reputable incorporation strategy punditry and lists of ten child stars from the nineties who aged poorly (you won’t believe #5!) — especially as they acknowledge how integral the Court of Chancery is Delaware’s corporate-friendly reputation. Which makes sense, given that Texas, South Dakota, and others have successfully undercut Delaware on costs (not hard, when they’re merely the 16th cheapest state to incorporate in), taxes, and regulation yet failed to dethrone Delaware.
The lack of juries and voluminous caselaw make corporare litigation extremely predictable in Delaware, which in turn reduces litigation (settling is easier when both parties share an understanding of outcomes and probabilities) and also makes appeals more predictable. Which is why the overwhelming opinion is Musk’ll be in for yet another L if he even bothers to appeal.
Musk found himself in this trial because his divorce attorney either couldn’t understand the clear rules in Delaware or wouldn’t tell his boss that the board and “negotiation”‘s structure required conflict disclosure (or, at barest minimum, not describing them as independent). He lost the trial because he was too busy inventing plaintiff arguments (“Plaintiff’s allegations boil down to the position that Musk should be happy to work for free.”) to followup on the unenviable task of proving the unprecedented grant was entirely fair (fair in both process and price). He lost his grant — for the time being — because he failed to give the Chancellor any alternative other than recission to the status quo ante.
Where along that chain did the Chancellor err? Handwaving at “almost every other state law” won’t cut it, what was McCormick’s reversible error? In what way was her ruling so unhinged that it’ll obligate Delaware’s Supreme Court to step in?
Resume
I’ve been reading TD for #include
This is the first thread in over half a decade that has so many people riled up. Ignoring ACs (who have a TD-granted right to post) and focusing on facts we get essentially three.
Here’s where I could number them, but it’s like arguinw with magas as to which color red is the best color for a cap that says “I’m an inbred a-hole” Choose your color of red. You’re still that same guy. Different color cap.
If you don’t like the US legal system (aka “justice” system, regardless of how that has never worked out) that’s your right. Don’t assume everyone opining is of the same bent.
As for LGBTQ+ people… (sorry, Texans) the second word is “people” so they have rights, inalianble rights, and those can not must not will not shall not be taken from the absent due process. So if you think they don’t have rights or if you think they should be stripped then GOOD JOB FOR THINKING without understanding. If you ACT to strip them of those rights or support that, then step off.
We live in one of the top ten countries in which people can express themselves. What a waste it is when STUPID IDIOTS want to CENSURE, CENSOR, STOP, or KILL those they disagree with.
The 1am covers everyone. Even stupid piece of maga shit.
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They should be given the chance to repent, and if they decline…de-person them.
LGBTQ+ are almost all irredeemably evil. They prey upon children and seek to destroy the nuclear family. That you support protecting them suggests you’re a neo-Marxist.
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This is fucking pathetic even for you, dude. “De-person”, are you fucking shitting me here—you don’t even have the fucking balls to fucking say “kill” or “murder”? If you’re going to fucking post like you’re a fucking MAGA variant of the fucking Joker, at least have the fucking courage to fucking talk like you’re not on fucking TikTok, you fucking fuck.
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You mad bro?
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Not fuckin’ really, bro.
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You sound fucking deranged. Get help.
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They should be given the chance to repent, and if they decline…de-person them.
Sit down and eat your jello, Boomer. Repenting is for sheep who like to show their subservience to someone who insists they call the shots. That ain’t you, granpa.
what is relevant
I dont think the final total $ amount is really relevant. What is relevant is that he got 6% of the company. Did the shareholders know he was getting 6% of the company when they agreed to the deal? I also dont buy the idea that it was clear the company would make those gains before they did. No one knows the future. The appeal will be interesting.
You’ve claimed elon’s compensation was based on astounding results.
According to the trial, Tesla disagrees that these milestones were ambitious. Perphas I missed where you addressed this, im sure someone can point me to where I missed it, but at trial it was revealed that Tesla told bankers to expect most of the ‘ambitious’ milestones in the normal course of business.
This sets up a situation where Tesla lied to Banks or to shareholders. The milestones were expected or ambitious, they can’t be both. The court has found that the milestones were expected, and not ambitious targets justifying bonus compensation (indeed, Tesla hit those milestones without significant Musk involvement). I also expect a fact finding the other way exposes Tesla to serious criminal legal liability, thereby leaving ‘Tesla lied to shareholders’ as the only reasonable conclusion if Tesla is operating in a rational manner as they would need to be to accept that the award of this pay package was reasonable.
I am confused that you Mike would come away from that finding and continue to hold water for musk’s claim that Tesla’s milestones were ambitious.
Tesla is a public company
That means it has t0 satisfy a number of laws that private companies are exempt from. This is to protect the rights of shareholders. If you’re private, you don’t have any shareholders.
One of these laws is that executive salary negotiations must be arms-length transactions, not deals between cronies. The evidence showed that Musk wrote his compensation package and the board rubber stamped it. That isn’t arms length.
Is anyone harmed? Well, money that doesn’t go to Musk goes to shareholders, and that seems like harm when you take it away. Even if that were not the case, the Trump argument that yes, I broke the law but no one was harmed is not a thing in law. You break the law and there are consequences.
Imagine I try to rob a bank but a teller sets the alarm off and I panic and run from the police, taking no money. No one is harmed. So no crime, right?
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A ptivae company can have share holders, its just there can be limitations on selling those shares, and they are not listed or traded on any stock exchange.
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Microchips implanted in living organisms can only result in biological cellular destruction and not repair any cellular structure. This is very elementary biology and science.
98% of people that have been aparalyzed regain partial or full mobility with traditional physical and occupational therapy and time that damaged repairs cells.
I have met people that recovered from paralysis from strokes, polio, and motor cycle accidents.
The BRAIN Initiative is a sick, creepy, sadistic Dr. Frankenstein scam by healthcare, mental healthcare, tech, academia, media, military, DARPA, UN, WHO, and World Bank.
There is no legitimate reason for implanting anyone with microchips. They belong in federal pennitentiaries for doing it to people. It is extremely sick Joseph Mengele junk
science.
They could claim that they heal paralyzed people with magic crystals, and that they have a 98% success rate curing paralyzed people with magic crystals.
They are doing it to people without informing them, and without their consent.
Shown here by anesthesiologist Dr. John R. Hall from Austin Texas on his website International Center Against Abuse of Covert Technology:
http://www.ICAACT.org
The phrase “under his leadership” might be carrying a lot of weight here. I’ve worked in several organizations that saw growth and successful projects in spite of a CEO’s leadership rather than because of that person’s leadership. Musk seems primarily to be a liability in his behavior as a leader. I’d need to see verified, but anonymously protected testimony from the engineers, workers, and mid-level management about how much Musk’s leadership was actually responsible for that growth and I’d need to see a comparison to a comparable corporation as a control sample that didn’t grow as well to show that it was in fact Musk’s leadership that was responsible for the growth.
And even if you could convince me of that, I’d still contend that CEO compensation shouldn’t be more than a billion, and even that is overly generous. If the workers didn’t do their work, no amount of “leadership” would have any positive impact on the growth of the company. Generally, pretending one person alone is responsible for anything of that size of an undertaking is just self-serving megalomania.
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Then of course, the thing everyone is ignoring, That Tesla did not see these targets as impressive in its interal metrics or the metrics it gave the bank. These metrics were chosen, as found by the court, to specifically be expected for musk to hit.
I have a personal dislike of Elon Musk, but it’s mostly because the dude thinks he’s still in 1980s South Africa.
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1960s South Africa, but with electric cars.
TBH, Musk does support free speech in a way, it’s just that it’s the free speech of himself and his supporters only.
Its a private company
It’s his (Elons) company and the board actually voted for the compensation.
A judge had no business sticking his nose in a private companies affairs.