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Ordinary Men: Elon Musk and the court biographer (thepointmag.com)
6 points by FigurativeVoid on Jan 12, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 4 comments


Good read, but only really gets going at this point:

> Isaacson was appointed CEO at CNN in July 2001. During the first phase of the war in Afghanistan, he sent his staff a memo, warning them not “to focus too much on the casualties or hardship in Afghanistan.” Every mention of people being vaporized in their homes by U.S. bombers had to be “balanced” with reminders that these were the people responsible for 9/11. “You want to make sure people understand that when they see civilian suffering there, it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.” Later, he told PBS that he wasn’t really so jingoistic: CNN initially tried reporting on the casualties in Afghanistan, but then they received some pushback. “You would get phone calls,” he said. “Big people in corporations were calling up and saying, you’re being anti-American here.” So he caved.


"Walter Isaacson is the perfect writer for the biographies of our times because he appears to be a born sycophant, and fate decreed that he would be in the right position, at the right moment, to spread as much propagandistic bullshit as possible."


Look whatever Elon Has done, using the title "Ordinary Men" which is a book that is an exploration of how an police battalion in Nazi Germany became accustomed to and learned to enjoy killing Jews is a bit over the top.

https://www.amazon.com/Ordinary-Men-Reserve-Battalion-Soluti...


Same goes for his first sentence and it only goes down from there. Its badly written and reads like someone had a really exciting one night stand with their thesaurus while writing it.

>> Everywhere Musk sets foot, the result is this rubble of human language, this ruin of its expressive powers, this entropic dissolution of all poetic forms. sic.




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