Ich fühle mit Ihnen

According to Glosbe, the top translation into German for “My heart goes out to you” is Ich fühle mit Ihnen. I think this is more in the sense of “I feel for you” than an expression of thanks - so it’s perhaps not the best translation to use for Elon Eichmann’s Musk’s words.

I rather like it, though, because I think one can only profess profound sympathy for the astonishing lack of intellectual capacity demonstrated by those who genuinely believe Musk did the whole “Sieg Heil” thing at the inauguration.

These people would lose a game of noughts and crosses to a potato.

I feel for them.

Musk’s mistake, if indeed he made any, was to say the words before and after the gestures. If he’d said the words whilst making the gesture it would have been much harder to try to claim he did a Nazi. Alternatively, he might have done a Fascism - the distinction in wokespeak is not often very clear.

To anyone with an IQ marginally above that of a potato it was entirely clear that Musk was making a sweet gesture of heartfelt thanks - with the words coming before and after the gesture.

Here’s how it went

And I just want to say thank you for making it happen. Thank you.
(gestures)
Thank you. My heart goes out to you

His gesture looked like he was symbolically throwing his heart out to the crowd. Unfortunately it also looked a bit like the whole “Adolf, your moustache is so sexy” thing that was in vogue in Germany nearly a century ago.

Being of a scientist sort of persuasion, I decided to do an experiment. You can try this at home, too. I stood in front of a mirror and tried to see how various forms of a symbolic gesture of this kind would look. There are basically four main variants. Palm raised. Palm in line with the arm. Palm sort of at a 45 degree angle. Palm upturned.

Try it, and see which one looks most like the kind of thanks Musk was trying to convey.

For me, the raised palm version looks the best to convey this feeling, but you might decide otherwise.

There are basically two options here. The people who are claiming this was a Nazi salute are either being thoroughly disingenuous and deliberately smearing Musk, or they are routinely outsmarted by a Maris Piper.

It rather begs the question. Is there any way to raise one’s arm as a gesture of acknowledgment or thanks and for it not to look like a Nazi salute?

Should we simply make raising one’s arm in the red danger zone in the picture above illegal? That would be awkward. If you were putting your hand up to ask a question you’d have to remember not to traverse this naughty zone and just thrust straight up.

But really, as it so often is when encountering the modern professionally outraged tit, my first thought is “what is actually wrong with these people?”

These are the kind of people who wanted to remove the word field from education (as in fieldwork) because enslaved black people worked in fields and so it was disrespectful (or sumfin) to use this word. And, yes, this actually happened. Really. I know, I know - hard to fathom, isn’t it?

Although the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ don’t seem to mean what they used to quite as much these days, there are definitely a lot of Maris Piper heads populating what we might call “the left”.

And that’s OK. After all, as embarrassing as it is to admit, there are times when I’ve been dumber than a plate of mash. The thing is, though, most normal people are a little embarrassed when they realize they’ve been a bit of a tit. Not so the woke (or the ‘left’, or whatever). They seem to keep on losing those games of noughts and crosses to whatever variety of potato is put in front of them and show no signs of embarrassment whatsoever.

And we put those potato heads in charge of things. They’re the ones running all those ‘diversity’ courses and wotnot. They get listened to as if their words are actually something more than the vacuous drivel it is in reality.

It’s interesting that tolerance is held to be a great virtue by people who seem to have no tolerance whatsoever for actual humans. Humans who can, at times, phrase things badly, be a bit awkward, or have one or two dubious ideas amongst a lot of good ideas. There’s no give at all in many of these ‘tolerant’ people.

Now, I don’t think we need to defend Musk by appealing to his alleged awkwardness or autism as some have done - in truth there’s nothing here to actually defend anyway, because he did absolutely nothing wrong. But, surely, a truly tolerant person would be seeking to find such an interpretation? A truly tolerant person would always try to give the benefit of the doubt where possible.

And there you have it. Not only are many of the vocal ‘woke’ incapable of winning a debate with a potato, they’re also amongst the least tolerant and sympathetic people imaginable (apart from actual Nazis, that is - they’re pretty shitty folk).

My dad used to say to me “if you can’t say something good about someone, then don’t say anything at all”. Now I get that such aphorisms are not always universally valid or appropriate, but one thing the recall of this phrase does is to remind me, and encourage me, to seek the good in people over the bad. And Lord knows we all have some bad mixed in there amongst the good.

Which is a bit paradoxical in a piece where I’ve basically been slagging off the potato-woke. So I suppose one must accept that they try their best to be good and virtuous. Unfortunately they get it hopelessly wrong.

Wer also unter euch ohne Sünde ist, der werfe den ersten Stein