Stephen Fry released a statement: "Elon Musk is not a Nazi. Nazis make really good cars."

Just like his grifts.

He punched a guy in 2015 over available food options, which got him fired from BBC. His popularity didn't take that much of a hit from this incident despite him clearly being in the wrong (Hammond and May both left BBC with him and they started a new show The Grand Tour, which wasn't as popular as Top Gear, but was still popular.

Then, in 2022, he wrote an opinion piece for the Sun about how much he hates Megan Merkle and included a bit where he said she should be paraded naked through the town. Amazon decided to not start any new projects with him after this, though they continued with the plans to wind down The Grand Tour which had already been established.

He's got a farming show now, so he wasn't cancelled over this, despite burning some bridges.

Nobody really remembers, it was so long ago.

Wasn't the king tiger notorious for breaking down constantly? Or was that a different German WW2 tank?

I wonder where she is now....

Awww. She's all grown up, and seemingly successful.

Why? What did fry do?

Wrong, but you do you.

My Oma survived WWII and the bastard Nazis. Opa , was a Wehrmacht Landser, survived the Eastern Front, including Stalingrad, and was later KIA at Monte Cassino. He warned Oma, while on leave from the Eastern Front, that we are going to lose war and you better head west when the Russians enter Germany. She was 3-days ahead of them, just missed the Dresden bombings and somehow survived the Battle of Berlin. Now the USA has the same incompetent blowhards running the USA straight into the ground. She warned me it could happen anywhere and she was 100% correct.

It's hard to convince people that they've been had by a bunch of morons.

The strength of the Germans was that I.) they had a really good industrial base, and ii.) the traditions within the army meant they had extremely well trained soldiers. Both of these predate nazi-rule. For instance, Germans also arguably had the best (equipped) army in WW1.

I blame all the WWII video games and movies that played up the myth to have more interesting villains than the sleazy shit stains that they actually were.

I guess Wolfenstein being banned for glorifying Nazis actually had some merit.

At least you didn't rip up your railways. We barely even have trains here in the US.

Still better than Canadian rail. That shit is regularly late. Significantly late.

Dismiss what? Fascism is catabolic. They can't build anything. They can only loot until they run out of victims.

The projections of hyper competence and secret knowledge are part of their branding.

Stop being a fascist apologist.

Minor clarifications aren't the end of the world. The left is fine. Stop being sensitive

Small country? They were a highly industrialized, highly educated and still quite materially wealthy colonial power going into the wars. They didn't need to be competent. Enough people went along with them and there was plenty of residual wealth to burn on the war machine.

You don't need to be an architect to burn down a building.

Incredible. Literally everything you just said was wrong.

Germany wasn't "a small country". They were an industrialised, highly productive and heavily armed global power. They were slightly battered by post ww1 humiliation regulations pressed on them by the winners (because they ALSO lost that one!). But the instant they told the Allies to eat shit and started using what they had, any claim to "smallness" went out the window.

And they didn't "almost win". They got their asses kicked.

Every single thing the Nazis wanted to achieve, they failed hard. They wanted to prove the genetic superiority of the German people in the Olympics, instead they were soundly beat. They wanted to expand their territory, they got as far as fucking Poland and France and then stalled for years until a double whammy of Americans and Russians basically curb-stomped them, with the last few years of the Reich consisting of lots of propaganda coping hard about how their soon to come wonder weapons would turn the tide, which never happened because said wonder weapons were stupid ideas that only succeeded at getting more Nazis killed when they failed in testing. They wanted to stop the spread of communism, instead half their country became Soviet domain.

And then their "strongman" leader blasted his own brains out rather than face the fact that he was a loser in every way one can be a loser.

Nazis took on world in one war, and lost.

"WE ARE THE GREATEST COUNTRY IN THE WORLD! THE PUREST OF THE PURE! STRONGEST OF THE STRONG!"

[Fights one (1) war]

"Guess we'll shoot ourselves in a bunker and lose in a big lopsided defeat."

Um it did not take the entire world, for a lot of their early success most of the fighting was against countries that were unprepared and devastated after ww1.

and very nearly won.

What the actual fuck are you talking about?

At no point did they "nearly win" against the world. In World War 1 they made desperate attempts to break out of trench warfare because the blockade was obliterating their wartime economy. In World War 2 they were cooked the second they invaded the USSR and the USA landed in the UK. Those were unwinnable areas for them. Even if they eventually managed to wear down the British, the Americans were right behind them manufacturing 100 tanks a day and 15 Aircraft Carriers in 1943 alone. Which means all of those tanks are getting to the European theater.

And once the USSR got it's production under way the Germans were on the defensive all the way back to Berlin.

To what would you assign their disturbing success?

I have to ask: What success? They did typical fascist bullshit: They had an economy so bad they had to invade new countries just to loot them to pay for their horrific economy. They picked fight after fight of the smallest kids in the neighbourhood they could find until they met those kids big brothers and sisters. They required fucking slave labour to try to meet their wartime goals because they grossly underestimated just about every single facet of running a country. They privatized state-owned industries, crippling longterm wealth for their people, they instituted tariffs (sound familiar?). Pay remained as bad as they it had been in the depression because while their wages were raised, they were forced to constantly work overtime for no additional pay. Their military was the majority of their economic spending, and they used deficit spending because they were going to literally plunder the countries around them to pay for it. Sound like solid long-term planning? They killed or jailed anyone in the trade unions, and due to their insane tariffs and you know, generally being the worst people in history, lacked incoming trade so things like poultry or clothing was in short supply for the average person.

Then it took thirty five days for the Nazi German army, along with the Serbian and Soviet armies, to conquer Poland. For every success in the early war they had embarrassing fumbles. They lost entirely because of how fascists work: they need to invade more countries to pay for their insane military spending, make bigger and bigger enemies, then get beat by those enemies, then later people claim they 'could have if...'

Yeah, they could have done just fine if they hadn't been fascist. All of their failings fall to being fascist.

And the first world war, are you kidding me? Are you seriously suggesting their insistence on investing in overseas colonies while fighting against the British was a brilliant plan? In both wars they were led by colossal morons who constantly underestimated their opponents, while in the second world war in particular having the worst spy agency of any nation. Their insistence on torturing, raping, and murdering everyone they came into contact with meant they just got the answers they wanted to hear, instead of the actual truth, and were constantly on the back foot. Their evil, cruel, and twisted nature was their own downfall; the insistence of their superiority, as you are doing now, is the very reason they failed.

Not even close dumb fuck and fucking Nazis betrayed the German people with their bullshit.

What is this, the Übermensch Expanded Universe? Maybe actually learn history.

"Very nearly winning" is called losing.

What point are you trying to make here @[email protected]?

Ohhhh so Edison?

Nah, I'm sure Cybertruck was the example of him messing around in a 3d modeling software and then saying to Tesla engineers "make a car out of this". There's no other excuse for the lack of thought in its outer design.

There's also no reason to take anything I said as an "excuse".

I don't think he's trying to excuse it. I think he's saying you'd view an autistic Nazi walmart greeter more differently than you'd view an autistic Nazi whose already the wealthiest man in the world, and society's values are letting that wealth have a huge platform and allowing him to basically run the country unilaterally.

An autistic Nazi plebian doesn't have that kind of influence. Many people would probably pity them. An autistic Nazi being given the world is probably a bad thing.

Yeah I guess we're not allowed to talk about this guy clinically at all. Has to be about good vs evil.

It's worse than that, in my opinion. It's ableism. Leaving behind the fact that we only have his word to go on that he has "Asperger's Syndrome," people with high-functioning ASD do not have a problem telling right from wrong. ASD does not make you racist and it sure as fuck doesn't make you throw a Nazi salute without knowing exactly what that means.

And the fact that he has yet to say he didn't throw a Nazi salute doesn't even seem to faze such people.

I would say your friend's actions need to be watched and controlled because they're dangerous, and that the friend as a person needs help.

I used the term autism because it's the term used by my wife, a special ed professional for 40 years who has gone out of her way to study brain development and all kinds of disorders. According to her Musk is autistic, regardless of whether he's been diagnosed. People keep using the word "excuse" - apparently it's not okay to wonder WHY people do evil things. It reminds me of people who only want to throw drug addicts in prison and not think about what causes addiction.