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Danni Levy's avatar

I wrote this to a friend after he posted something on FB regarding the gesture.

“Good morning Simon! Since we are real friends in the real world I am writing to you here. I saw your post on Elon Musk. I have no absolute truths, just 2 observations. Believe me I am on no side, just the love for humanity one. 1. That people (following the media, they are training us well) toxically interpret everything nowadays. It is what we do. And we feel so comfortable doing it on social media. 2. Whatever this is (like every other piece of news that goes suddenly viral), it is a distraction from bigger things happening. During these distractions, important issues/decisions are ignored by the public eye. They want us to be so fired up over something small and they succeed. Look at how much response this post received compared to your normal ones. Good food, animal attivism, a happy message, my book... Everyone is talking about it. Everyone has sides. It divides. Division. People are fighting on social media. It is doing exactly what it has been put out to do. Us feeding it (often innocently) by posting and talking about it. An easy topic for those who know less about the world to get into a discussion. Also, people like you said, are unfriending people for a point of view. For thinking differently. Again, they do their job well.

I am writing you here so that I do not feed the media and system and instead nourish our relationship. Again, this is just for reflection. You do not have to agree with any of this for my friendship. It is for forever. Have a wonderful day!"

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John Lawrie's avatar

One thing you say here that I think is very important is that we do not know what was going on in Elon's mind. I have seen all kinds of takes on this from all kinds of different people with often very different conclusions.

One commonality I see is that everybody seems to be absolutely positive they know what was going on in his mind. And when we assume we know what is going on in the mind of another person, we are highly prone to making mistakes. We all view the world through our own lens and are primed to see certain things.

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