[didntcheck]

I feel similarly. I agree Musk doesn't belong in the RS, but I'd have said the same in 2018 (I missed the news). It's concerning that the author has only come to this realization now that Musk vocally disagrees with her political views. I don't consider that principled at all

[shafyy]

It's not about that Musk disagrees with her political views, it's that he is being anti-scientific, pushing wrong scientific facts and so on to further his personal agenda, which happens to involve a lot of politics.

[a-french-anon]

I took the time to read those Guardian links (sigh) and that's just misrepresentation.

Vaccines: almost nobody refutes the scientific basis behind vaccines (not even talking about mRNA vs traditional), but trusting vaccine admission means trusting powers that have historically been quite evil (cf Tuskegee syphilis study, MKUltra, contaminated blood scandals in Europe and Japan, etc...). Elon's "meme" isn't about said science and this article/post conflates the two.

Climate: I read the 2024 article and extracts from a mostly informal interview like

  “If we were to stop using oil and gas right now, we would all be starving and the economy would collapse,” said Musk, who is also chief executive of the electric car company Tesla. “We do over time want to move to a sustainable energy economy because eventually you do run out of oil and gas.

  “We still have quite a bit of time … we don’t need to rush and we don’t need to like, you know, stop farmers from farming or, you know, prevent people from having steaks or basic stuff like that. Like, leave the farmers alone.”

, while not without faults, don't seem anti-scientific in any way to me. Trump's side seemed way more unhinged, from the few cherry-picked quotes in the article.

Misinformation on X: the usual "calling the other side fake news/disinformation/conspiracy theories and touting threat to democracy", not interesting in the least. Also, why is someone writing about that in the British Medical Journal??

tl;dr this is an ideological blog post amongst thousand of others.

[n4r9]

The video that Musk posted with the vaccine efficacy numbers dropping from 100 to 50 is clickbait nonsense. As is the "shouldn't all the unvaccinated be dead" meme. On the myocarditis topic he consistently focused on the relatively tiny risks and brought up vaccines in the context of Bronny James for no reason other than to bait outrage. None of this befits a serious scientist such as the FRS aims to include in its ranks.

[a-french-anon]

No, I agree with most of it, but that's what should have been written in the blog post and not by someone else on HN after the fact.

The meme, though, I wonder... I live in a country that wasn't as hardcore as some of the Commonwealth on the "forced vaccination" front so I don't identify with it, but there was certainly a lot of propaganda surrounding it in the wide world; on how people who refused were almost traitors shirking their civic duties.

[n4r9]

> how people who refused were almost traitors shirking their civic duties

I wasn't quite that hardcore, but I did (and still do) find it difficult to accept refusals to vaccinate for seemingly little reason. It felt like some people were being stubbornly complicit in drawing out the pandemic and putting their contacts at higher risk. I guess it's a question of degree - how many lives does a collective behaviour need to save, before it becomes justified to mandate it?

[shafyy]

Everything is ideological. But reading the excerpts from the RS Code of Conduct she posted, Musk's behavior does seem to go against it.

Also, you cannot deny that Musk has been amplifying conspiracy theories. Does not matter if he believes in them or just does it for the "lolz".

[a-french-anon]

A conspiracy theory for one side is undeniable truth for the other. Not falling into relativist garbage, there's a difference between "conspiracy theories about everything from vaccines to race replacement theory to misogyny" and flat earth.