Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

They’re not red states to be hated; they are voter suppression states to be fixed.

You don’t get to peddle hatred on saturday and offer condolences on sunday.

Usually wrong but never in doubt

After roe, women are no longer free.

Perhaps you mistook them for somebody who gives a damn.

Whatever happens next week, the fight doesn’t end.

We are builders in a constant struggle with destroyers. let’s win this.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.

The republican caucus is already covering themselves with something, and it’s not glory.

Impressively dumb. Congratulations.

Conservatism: there are some people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Nancy smash is sick of your bullshit.

And we’re all out of bubblegum.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Let’s not be the monsters we hate.

No offense, but this thread hasn’t been about you for quite a while.

If you are still in the GOP, you are an extremist.

A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals

A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Good lord, these people are nuts.

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Excellent Links / Wednesday Evening Open Thread: Over-Social Media

Wednesday Evening Open Thread: Over-Social Media

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I literally LOL’d, because it’s not *just* Twitter…

2/ That statement is not meant to attack people with clinical personality issues, which we need to destigmatize.

3/ Also, I don’t mean to imply there are “normal sentences,” which could be seen to “other” people with dyslexia and other sensory processing issues.

4/ I also don’t mean to disrespect to vital work of consciousness building through Twitter critique, which makes us all better. The beauty of this app is it’s all made us aware of other people’s perspectives.

5/ I also don’t want to imply that there is a thing as “too much time on Twitter.” I know that social media addiction is a real thing, and one that psychological professionals are finding ways to treat.

I know I’m not a professional and cannot judge.

6/ I’m sorry to imply that “writing” is the default, as I know people with disabilities need alternate ways of inputting text. I’ve publicly supported work of Apple to increase accessibility options, and have lobbied tech companies to be more robust with speech-to-text options.

7/ I do apologize if the above caveats could be seen as “sarcastic,” or “a joke.” I know that these issues are serious and need to be acted upon.

8/ Anyway, you can tell when someone has spent too much time on Twitter because it breaks their ability to express ideas clearly.

Reader Interactions

63Comments

  1. 1.

    Baud

    Americans’ satisfaction with “the way things are going in U.S.” is near a 40-year low. Americans’ satisfaction with “the way things are going in personal life” is near a 40-year high.

    I see the Dems made it safe for people to vote Republican again.

    Also, too, that chart confirms that the Supreme Court choose poorly in 2000.

  3. 3.

    Baud

    ask yourself how an asshole could interpret it in bad faith and use it to attack your reputation publicly.

    I keep my reputation in the toilet to avoid this problem.

  5. 5.

    Cermet

    I’m certainly happy how things are going. My car (350,000 miles) refused to start – got five error codes and one is a ‘fatal’ error code about the transmission module. A new one $817 (& $40 labor); a used, junk yard one: $40 (w/tax and shipping.) Thanks to USPS I got it in three days, took all of five minutes to install and the car runs just fine, and no error codes at all. May all one’s problems be so easy to know and fix at little cost or trouble (at least for electro-mechanical devices … .)

  6. 6.

    OzarkHillbilly

    I don’t have time to read all of this post and understand everything it is about, but I have read enough to invoke Jim Wright’s

    Emergency Not All
    ____________________

    …not all…
    _____________________

    Break glass and insert “not all” into any tweet where I’ve used a general label to generally describe a general group, sex, ideology, religion, or population.

  12. 12.

    Miki

    @SiubhanDuinne: The second link, too? I tried to link directly to Sack’s page instead of to my share.

    Shoot me. It shouldn’t be this hard no matter how much wine I’ve had.

  13. 13.

    Other MJS

    I literally LOL’d

    I sometimes write LLOL, but I’m afraid of ruining it. Then we’d need LLLOL, etc.

  15. 15.

    SiubhanDuinne

    @Miki:

    Second link wants me to log in to FB. I have no idea what my 12-year-old password is, so I’m just going to take your word that it’s a great cartoon

    :-)

  17. 17.

    MagdaInBlack

    @Miki: It’s ok, I can’t post a link here to save my life, so I quit trying. But I see the cartoon at the second link you posted.

  21. 21.

    Steeplejack

    @Miki:

    Some “subscription” sites present linking issues, because they presume that you are a “member” if you arrive at one of their pages. If you’re not a member you may or may not get a blocking/​error message.

    Your link-fu was okay. The problem was with Facebook’s gatekeeping.

  23. 23.

    Geminid

    Mangy Jay made some perceptive and funny comments about Twitter last month. The standards applied on the site, said Ms. Jay,

    would cause all communication to break down in real life. In a quest for one-upmanship, the ability to make inferences and other linguistic reasoning just melts right out of people’s ears.

    My new favorite phenomenon is the policing of modal verbs, e.g “will,” “can,” “may.”

    Someone to me: “I would replace ‘may’ in this tweet with ‘can.’ Perhaps delete ‘may’ altogether.”

    Me: “I would put your head in a toilet, but we can’t always get what we want, can we?”

  24. 24.

    Gin & Tonic

    Ukraine not seeing evidence of the Russian troop withdrawals widely (credulously?) reported this morning. FYI.

  25. 25.

    Sure Lurkalot

    @MomSense: @Baud:

    I see the Dems made it safe for people to vote Republican again

    Fuck.  Inconvenient and fucking brutal truth.

    The yo-yo memory of the American electorate is really something. Even a kid learns which house hands out the best Halloween candy.

  27. 27.

    Roger Moore

    @Sure Lurkalot:

    It’s not that people don’t learn; it’s that they want contradictory things.  On the one hand, they want the country to recover from recession.  They seem to either understand that the Democrats offer a better chance of that, or at least they get fed up with the people in charge and vote in someone else, and it just coincidentally happens that the Republicans are in charge when everything goes to hell.  On the other hand, they want to stay ahead of Those People, and they know the Republicans are much better on that score than the Democrats.

  28. 28.

    RSA

    I take this to be an extended riff, but on this point…

    I’m sorry to imply that “writing” is the default, as I know people with disabilities need alternate ways of inputting text.

    I’ve worked with persons with vision impairment (to use a common technical term), friends who used screen readers that translated text into audio.  They called the process “reading” and I had no reason to think of it as anything else.  (In fact, a couple of friends can read with a screen reader significantly faster than I can read with my eyes.)

    I don’t know anyone who uses speech-to-text as their main modality for text input, but I’m wondering whether they might describe it simply as “writing” as well.  By analogy, the distinction between typing and longhand writing has largely gone away when we talk about writing.

  29. 29.

    Sure Lurkalot

    @Roger Moore:

    On the other hand, they want to stay ahead of Those People, and they know the Republicans are much better on that score than the Democrats.

    True that, but you can only bite your nose off to spite your face so many times before you can’t breathe.

  37. 37.

    BruceFromOhio

    Anyway, you can tell when someone has spent too much time on Twitter because it breaks their ability to express ideas clearly.

    And you don’t even have to produce any twats, either. You can just scroll and scroll and scroll that shit, no end to it.

  38. 38.

    Another Scott

    Meanwhile, … GovExec:

    Congressional Democrats are looking to remove a major piece of fodder contributing to legislative brinkmanship, saying at a hearing on Wednesday the debt ceiling no longer serves its purpose and unnecessarily creates fights that risk economic calamity.

    Lawmakers should not even flirt with the unprecedented disruptions for federal agencies that would take place under a debt default, Democrats and witnesses said at the House Budget Committee hearing, calling for decision making on raising the limit to be shifted to the executive branch. The Debt Ceiling Reform Act (S. 3654)—introduced in both chambers this week—would allow the Treasury Department secretary to issue new debt, as long as the president notifies Congress of the need to do so. Lawmakers would retain the ability to vote to block the administration from raising the cap on debt.

    “It would not eliminate the debt ceiling,” Rep. Brendan Boyle, D-Penn., who introduced the bill in the House, said at Wednesday’s hearing. “It would take it away from this increasing dysfunction we see in Congress.” He added his proposal was not liberal or conservative, as Treasury secretaries in both parties would eventually have the authority and that would create a “responsible mechanism far better than the one we have.”

    […]

    The text of the bill is not on Congress.gov yet.

    Ending grandstanding and threats to the world economy is good, but it would be good to see the details. What happens if a RWNJ wins and refuses to raise the limit? What happens if a Democrat nominates someone for Treasury Secretary but the Senate refuses to hold confirmation hearings?

    The trouble with bomb-throwers and people who want to break the government and who ignore norms is that there are never enough rules to constrain them. This is probably a decent interim step, given the insanity of the GQP, but the best solution is to go back to the Gephardt Rule and “deem and pass” the ceiling increase and stop this nonsense forever.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  39. 39.

    Lyrebird

    @RSA: Yeah I figure the tweeter was going over the top to prove a point, but what you say certainly fits with my limited experience working with colleagues who are blind.

    Years ago I got to see a really well done movie, The Ten Commandments of Communicating With People With Disabilities.. oh hey they have a summary version, though not as entertaining as the video:

    Don’t be embarrassed if you happen to use common expressions such as “See you later” or “Did you hear about this?” that seems to relate to a person’s disability.

    I usually loathe corporate training.  The movie really was good!

  40. 40.

    laura

    @Cermet: My gawd, you’ve told a positive story of success and overcoming adversity, and I appreciate it? I had a catastrophic transmission failure on the Bay Bridge in a storm with a coworker on our way to the airport for a business trip to Hollywood FL in time for an iguana-dropping cold snap in late January 2020. Since then, anytime I see transmission, “Slowly I Turned, step by step.”

  44. 44.

    Citizen Alan

    This actually applies to me. Personally, things are as good for me right now as they’ve ever been. And yet I’ve never felt so despairing of the nation as a whole. I think it probably has something to do with sharing a country with 72 million fascist death cultists. I would not be at all surprised to see America having a real life Purge in another ten years or so.

  45. 45.

    Geminid

    @Roger Moore: I think a factor in the low number of people satisfied with the direction of the country is Democratic PTSD. For example, people on this site are virtually all Democrats and it’s gloomy as hell here. I would expect Republicans to be dissatisfied, but many Democrats assume that while we may be out of the frying pan, we’re surely headed into the fire.

    Not that they couldn’t be right. But I don’t recall this level of pessimism a year into Clinton’s or Obamas first terms, and I think this may depress the poll number.

  46. 46.

    Jeffro

    It’s funny…actually I mean ‘odd’…that yeah, for most of us life is good and getting better by the week, yet we keep seeing crazy shit on social media and our wacky-ass “news” channels that makes us believe the world’s just a hair away from going to complete shit.

    “I love my life!  But dammit, I’m about to lose everything to these crazy GQP loons/the stock markets/yet another f-ing weird virus/Putin/etc!”

    I think I need to go back to:

    1. just posting fun stuff once or twice a week on Facebook, for family and friends.
    2. hyping work stuff and good news on Twitter whenever I have something good to share.

    Also, America: READ A *REAL * NEWSPAPER EVERY DAY, even if it’s That Horrible NYC Paper.  Anything but reading whatever FB puts in front of you.

  47. 47.

    topclimber

    I have long liked the idea that brevity is the soul of wit. Twitter lacks such soul more often than not. PLUS somebody came up with the threading thing.

  49. 49.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Geminid: For example, people on this site are virtually all Democrats and it’s gloomy as hell here.

    and some people seem to get angry if you express any optimism. I wouldn’t even describe myself as “optimistic”, more “grimly determined to cling to the possibility that we can still set things right’

  50. 50.

    Geminid

    @Citizen Alan: If you personally are happier now, at least you are better able to have a positive effect on the world. Even small ones are important.

    Speaking of positive effects, have you seen New York Harbor from the Staten Island Ferry yet? That had a positive effect on me when I rode it.

  51. 51.

    RSA

    @Lyrebird:

    ‘Don’t be embarrassed if you happen to use common expressions such as “See you later” or “Did you hear about this?” that seems to relate to a person’s disability.’

    It’s funny you mention that, because I remember having just that feeling using idiomatic phrases.  I can’t remember what they were now, but we do use  variations on “seeing” in a lot of metaphorical ways.

  53. 53.

    satby

    @Baud:  “dissatisfied with how the country is going” is not a default good for Republicans. The majority of people on this here blog are pretty dissatisfied with a lot of the ways things are going, but none of us would vote Republican because we blame them for it.

  56. 56.

    mrmoshpotato

    @Jeffro:

    Also, America: READ A *REAL * NEWSPAPER EVERY DAY, even if it’s That Horrible NYC Paper. Anything but reading whatever FB puts in front of you. 

    So easy without a FaceBastard account.

  57. 57.

    Martin

    That split makes sense to me. Things are pretty good for me, and I think the government is doing a good job, but I think the GOP is going to throw us into violence. That’s not captured by the questions.

  58. 58.

    Jager

    Off-topic, but there may be trouble ahead for Elon Musk, in the first road test of the Mercedes all-electric EQE, the tester said, “This car makes a Tesla S feel like an antique.” And it’s cheaper.

  59. 59.

    Dopey-o

    @Cermet: My car (350,000 miles) refused to start – got five error codes and one is a ‘fatal’ error code about the transmission module.

    what are you driving that has lasted 350,000? I may need to get your advice offline.

  60. 60.

    the pollyanna from hell

    Let the death march pause for a picnic. (But not today. Denver is socked in.) Let’s say, let it pause for a cup of hot cocoa.

  61. 61.

    Jager

    @Dopey-o:

    A friend of my wife has a 73 Dart convertible (her mother bought it new) with 320k on it, the drive train has never been rebuilt, just regular maintenance and three convertible tops, shocks, tires, and brakes. Looks like shit but runs good, and no it’s not her daily driver. My yard guys have an ancient Toyota pickup, 289k on it. It’s had about 5 owners and regular maintenance.

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