It seems like a lot of us follow Teri Kanefield here, so you may already know that she recently put up a very interesting post about Social Media.
Much of what the article contains information we already know, but she pulls it together neatly, all in one place. As she usually does!
- Democracy Needs a Functioning Public Sphere
- Social Media Can (and Often Does) Serve a Public Good
- Social Media In Its Current Form Amplifies and Enables Demagoguery
- Angry Divisive Content Gets More Engagement
- Twitter Algorithms Help Large Accounts Grow Larger, Further Incentivizing Rage-Inducing Material
- Pros and Cons of Post.news and Mastodon and How They Function
She defines she calls the Trust Building Technique, which is quite effective, even though it’s terribly dishonest. And she includes examples such as the Internet Research Agency and Cambridge Analytica.
Internet Research Agency (IRA) agents, posing as Americans, built trust in their American audience, then deployed payload content. Here’s an example of how it works: IRA agents posted Biblical verses on a page designed to attract White Evangelicals. White Evangelicals who were attracted to the site believed they were interacting with like-minded Americans. After building their trust, the IRA agents posted lies about Hillary Clinton.
To take another example, IRA agents carried on conversations that other users could see, pretending to be Americans discussing politics. In the lead-up to the 2016 elections, IRA agents pretended to be Black Americans explaining to each other why Black Americans should stay home and not vote.
Of most interest to me – because that information was new to me – were her other Trust Building examples.
Person #1 gained a huge following on Twitter in 2015 as a staunch Democrat tweeting things like “Vote Blue No Matter Who.” After Trump was elected, his following increased when he declared himself a leader of the Democratic “resistance” on Twitter: A large loosely-organized group that opposed Trump. Person #1 was a compelling Tweeter and effectively dunked on Trump. As a result, his following grew to more than 350,000. He began monetizing his feed with podcasts and a Patreon account.
Then, about halfway through Trump’s term, he turned on Pelosi. He called Democrats “corporatists” and accused them of corruption. He encouraged his followers to abandon the Democratic Party. Because he had a large, influential account and was now Tweeting rage-inducing material, his account drew even more attention, thus driving the algorithms and increasing his reach.
Whether he deliberately built trust in his target audience with the goal of turning them against the Democratic Party, or whether he entirely changed his political views after building his audience, we’ll never know.
He continues monetizing his feed, now milking former Democrats who he has turned into angry, disaffected Democrats.
🐇
Person #2 did the same. She has a Ph.D. in anthropology (she is not a professor) and positioned herself as the single person who predicted Trump’s rise as an authoritarian. She amassed a large following on social media. (There were actual professors at major universities who had been predicting the rise of Trump as an authoritarian, but they were not on social media so she took all the credit.) Because she so effectively attacked Trump, Democrats loved her. She was invited onto TV shows.
Then she turned against the Democrats.
Personal encounter: When she turned on Nancy Pelosi in 2018 and accused Pelosi of taking Russian money, people on Twitter kept telling her she should read my feed because I had a different view of Pelosi. (I never talked to her or about her.) She responded by telling her hundreds of thousands of followers that I was a “faux expert” and a racist (she posted a screenshot of a tweet of mine out of context) and said I was in league with Stephen Miller.
She now tells her almost 600,000 followers that Merrick Garland is corrupt and compromised and is a “mafia state enabler.” She keeps her followers terrified, monetizes her feed, and turns on anyone who questions her. (I always felt there was an irony in the fact that she positions herself as an expert on authoritarianism.)
🐇
Person #3: About a year ago, a well-known fiction writer without any background in law or government began tweeting furiously that Merrick Garland was “refusing” to indict Trump. He now has more than 800,000 followers who repeat his assertions as if they are facts. (One time I tried to point out a factual error in one of his tweets. He responded by blocking me.)
The entire article is worth the read.
Those of you who follow twitter more closely than I do, can you tell the rest of us who persons #1, #2, and #3 are? I understand why Teri Kanefield chose not to name names in her article, but I think we can surely name names, share more of the backstory, and call them out here.
Open thread.
Pet Calendar: One More Time for the Just Weekday BJ Peeps
pika
#2 is Kendzior–who has pretty much proven to be the Eric Feigl-Ding of politics.
mvr
#3 might be Don Winslow, but I don’t know this for sure. I do know that he writes good books, used to tweet in ways I thought were good, and then sort of became tiresome and he seems to have blocked me so I can’t read what he is up to these days.
Scout211
Since I am not on Twitter, I would be curious about these three, too. I googled #3 with all the details she provided. Google search came up with Don Winslow. Is that accurate?
WaterGirl
@pika:
Can you say more about that? I understand all the words except the names that are capitalized. :-) I don’t know who those are.
edit: I googled and I still don’t understand the Eric Feigl-Ding reference. But I did wonder if Sarah K (who I think of re: the rise of authoritarians.
WaterGirl
@Scout211: I had no idea that he wrote books. Does he have 800,000 followers?
Starfish
I agree with @pika on person #2. Sarah Kendzior is an anthropology Ph.D. from the midwest. She studies authoritarianism, and there was a lot of stuff related to the rise of authoritarianism that was relevant during the Trump administration, but there is a deep cynicism and opposition to Democrats there too. Part of that could be that Democrats are not doing much for rural midwestern folks.
There were a lot of us turned off by the “Vote Blue No Matter Who” messaging. It is empty.
This appeals to maybe an unthinking audience of people who were going to vote this way. It just signals to other Democrats that you are a Democrat.
Republicans get away with this fall-in-line nonsense, but that is not generally how Democrats work at all.
mvr
@WaterGirl: I think it is over 900K.
sab
@WaterGirl: Kendzior writes on politics and obsesses about Russian influence ( I think rightly.) Eric Feigl-Ding thinks Covid will kills us all, no matter what the science or public health people are saying today.
Scout211
Currently 904k.
pika
@WaterGirl: I followed Sarah Kendzior in the run-up to 2016, and she got in my *mood* and contributed to the crushing depression I felt after the election about so much of the “resistance.” I didn’t understand it for a long time, but knowing how I wasn’t immune to that kind of stuff helped me a) quit Twitter three years ago and b) be more ready with skepticism when medical Twitterers like Eric Feigl-Ding (he of the HOLY MOTHER OF GOD pandemic tweets still) flooded the zone with clout-seeking, cherry-picked, out-of-context COVID misinformation
mvr
So who is #1?
pika
@mvr: I don’t know! My only guess was David Sirota, but I think that’s probably off…
sab
Who is #3?
ETA Don Winslow? I never read his books. Who retires from writing?
WaterGirl
@sab:
Thank you, that was not readily available on google!
Marmot
From what I can tell, our lack of solidarity is our major weakness. I’m always pounding on it, but not on Twitter.
What is it about “vote blue no matter who” stuff that’s empty? I can see how people pushing it might just sidestep policy talk for dipshit sports-team thinking. That what you mean?
WaterGirl
@pika:
That’s what they call a teachable moment.
Keithly
I posit that all three are different aspects of @Glem.
WaterGirl
@Marmot: @Starfish: I don’t see a thing wrong with Vote Blue No Matter Who. What’s the problem with that?
WaterGirl
@Keithly: I thought @Glem was a good guy who mocks GG?
Jerry
A thought about Person 1: maybe the original account holder sold it off to a group for 80 tons of cash? I know people can get radicalized and change their messaging, but others get rich selling their social media success. Just a thought
sab
@WaterGirl: Snark tags needed? //
zhena gogolia
@pika: Yes, Kendzior is the only one I recognize.
Starfish
@Marmot: Yes. There are some very blue areas that have had the same politicians forever, and they are running the party badly. Politicians who have no competition become complacent. We need people who will do good work.
WaterGirl
Did anyone read her article? I thought it was a good summary of where things stand, and I appreciated her information about Post.news and Mastadon.
For my part, I won’t be surprised if someone ends up buying Twitter from Musk – surely the board could tell him he has to choose between Twitter and Tesla – and righting the ship.
sab
@pika: He certainly isn’t vote blue no matter who, since he spends a lot of energy attacking Democrats.
WaterGirl
@sab: That wasn’t snark. I googled him, read his little bio, and didn’t see anything to explain the reference.
Sure, could i have googled some more and found his twitter account, and and and…
So, to clarify, that was intended as a serious thank you.
Marmot
@Starfish: Ah. I dream about having that problem!
sab
@WaterGirl: I read it last night, and I wondered who her # 1,2,3 people were.
mvr
@sab:
Winslow still writes as he has a book coming out. I’ve enjoyed quite a few of them over the years though they have gotten a bit over the top in some ways. Still good the last ones I read. I think he is #3 as I stated above.
Scout211
Using the google method with some of what the author mentioned, google tells me that #1 could be Christopher Bouzy. Since I don’t know this person, is this accurate?
mvr
@pika:
Yeah, I get what you mean, but he showed troublesome signs well before mid-Trump.
Roger Moore
Another really important aspect of social media is the way it serves to reputation wash dubious sources. People treat shared articles as if they come from the person who shared them rather than the original source. That allows very dubious original information to pick up credibility as it is shared. IMO, it’s one of the reasons it’s a terrible idea to share screenshots and the like instead of links back to the original article. It disconnects people from the original source so they can’t judge the whole thing in context, including the credibility of that original source.
WaterGirl
@Starfish: Right, but everyone is “blue” in the Democratic primaries, so I think “vote blue no matter who” is relevant to the general elections.
So I still think vote blue no matter who is a fine choice, and I still don’t understand the issue with it.
sab
@WaterGirl: I see your point.
oatler
Scott Adams or Orson Scott Card.
ARoomWithAMoose
@WaterGirl: Gg used to have Google alerts for people that used his name, sock puppets of his or fanboys would show up and troll threads on various media, and it’d also contribute to various social media algorithms and search engines prioritizing his writings and comments, it became common in certain spaces to use the name “glem” to refer to him to to try to defeat that.
WaterGirl
@Scout211: I thought folks here like Christopher Bouzy. ??
lowtechcyclist
@pika: Agreed. My vague recollection is that 2015 was way too late for Sirota to be presenting himself as a staunch Dem.
No idea who it might be, but then I wouldn’t. I just read the feeds of a few people on Twitter that I’m fans of; I only look at my own timeline by total accident. So all that stuff that people complain about on Twitter, I never see.
That’s what I’ve appreciated about Twitter as compared with Facebook. I can use Twitter in a way that avoids all the shit that people dislike about it. I’ve never figured out how to do the same with Facebook, so I avoid it like the plague.
WaterGirl
@oatler: For which one? #1 or #3?
sab
@mvr: Something on the internet ( which is always right) said he was retired. Glad he hasn’t.
CaseyL
@WaterGirl: I don’t assume Musk will sell Twitter. He’s having too much fun being a fascist collaborator: he’s relevant in areas (politics) that he’s never been before, and to a narcissist, that’s better than. money (when you already have more than you can spend in a lifetime).
Plus I can’t think of anyone who would buy Twitter now, except for another fascist collaborator. Who wants to spend billions of dollars for the dubious privilege of cleaning out the Augean Stables?
WaterGirl
@ARoomWithAMoose: Ah, sounds like what used to happen to us before we stared using “Wilmer”.
zhena gogolia
Re Kendzior, spot on:
WaterGirl
@CaseyL: I think the board will make him choose. The “Musk” brand is synonymous with his companies and he is dragging them down.
It’s all about the benjamins. It always is with these people.
Jerry
For Person #2: I thought she was referring to Amanda Marcotte. Not too long ago, her and Marcy Wheeler (@emptywheel) got into big time on Twitter concerning Merrick Garland.
Another Scott
@sab: Expertise in one area can be a curse. One of my favorite examples is Paul Krugman. He understands economics very well and can explain it very well. But he really doesn’t seem to understand how difficult politics is (e.g. during the Great Recession). I don’t know if he’s gotten better (I haven’t read him since he was locked-up behind the FTFNYT paywall).
Being a young expert is even worse – you can see how things might and ought to be, and it’s obviously only the old corrupt geezers in the way of making everything so much better!!11
Ask me how I know. ;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
WaterGirl
@Jerry: Your comment sent me back to the description of #2 above, and I googled “mafia state enabler”.
From the google results, that one is definitely Sarah K.
Marmot
@WaterGirl: I read it, and pronounce it good.
I’ve been obsessing about this stuff for awhile now, so I read it last night after seeing it in comments.
Whatever Twitter’s strengths, it’s shot through with flaws that keep it from being a good public square. Mostly, top-down moderation can never keep up on that scale, particularly with pre-planned efforts. (Which she really lays out well!)
I’m probably equal parts idealistic and ignorant, but I’ve been hoping Twitter’s failure—and the clear failure of Friendface, AOL, etc. to serve as the public square—will force better options to arise.
I dunno if that’s Mastodon. Maybe just a step in the right direction?
lowtechcyclist
@WaterGirl:
Is there still a board? AFAIK, there doesn’t have to be one, now that Twitter’s not publicly traded.
karen marie
@pika: The whole “resist” thing has always gotten under my skin. Why it was adopted when “persist” was right there, I’ll never understand.
Resisting is acting from an accepted position of weakness. Persistance never concedes the actor is weak.
I refused and refuse to be a “resister.” I will always and forever persist.
Jerry
Yep, I see it now. Thanks for the heads up. Unfortunately, I am not able to share the Twitter argument between Wheeler and Marcotte because the latter person dumped her account. She was spouting pretty much the same nonsense as Sarah K and Wheeler kept showing her facts. I must admit to being a fan of Marcy Wheeler, though, and maybe that clouds my opinion here.
Betty Cracker
I’m suspicious of all accounts that constantly demand useless acts of social media engagement, i.e., relentlessly encouraging readers to “retweet to agree blah blah blah.” I call them “resistance grifters,” and when I get sick of seeing their entreaties repeatedly in my timeline, I block them. I blocked Winslow for that reason ages ago, so if #3 is him, his anti-Garland shtick is news to me.
That said, I think reasonable people can disagree on issues like whether AG Garland is effective or not, so examples in that vein muddy Kanefield’s thesis, IMO. I can see why she glommed onto it — she’s a go-to pro-Garland source on Twitter, so she would have experienced anti-Garland fury firsthand.
But I don’t think even inaccurate criticism of a politician or official is in the same universe as actions like IRA agents’ calculated deception of voters on behalf of state actors to swing an election. The latter is election interference. The former is human dumb-fuckery, and good luck eradicating that.
The Moar You Know
@WaterGirl: the issue is that it’s a formula for Democratic success. That’s a problem for a lot of folks.
Much like “vote every election” and “pay some goddamn attention to the judicial races”
Shantanu Saha
@lowtechcyclist: it’s Tesla’s board he has to worry about.
Marmot
Spot on. This is possibly the most vexing problem with peer to peer information sharing of all kinds. At least when major news organizations had a stranglehold, they usually checked facts.
Funny story—I used to work with engineers a lot, and I’d ask them for statistics about common pitfalls in the manufacturing industry. “With primary sources,” I’d say. Never happened, not once. It was always, “I heard it from this guy (or company), and they wouldn’t lie.”
It was always false or distorted, always.
TaMara
@mvr: I agree that sounds about right. Unfollowed him soon after he went all politics and “retired’ from writing.
WaterGirl
@Marmot:
Speaking about Twitter pre-the-last-few-Musk-weeks… maybe it’s like democracy. Twitter was the worst electronic square, except for all the others!
There’s no use in comparing Twitter to a great theoretical public square. But it was the best one out there.
I, too, hope that whatever comes from this debacle, that the next public square – whether that’s a rolled-back Twitter or something new – will move in the direction of a better public square.
WaterGirl
@lowtechcyclist: I assume, perhaps wrongly, that all big companies have a board of directors.
Marmot
@WaterGirl: Holy carp! That’s why y’all are always saying “Wilmer”? Finally I know.
MattF
For a different (and negative) view of Post, see Jamie Zawinski. Zawinski is a famously brilliant programmer who now is the owner of a SF nightclub. A curmudgeon.
WaterGirl
@Shantanu Saha: Yes, the Telsa board is the entity that is going to yank M*** back from the brink and give him a choice.
Tesla or Twitter. Pick one.
schrodingers_cat
No idea who #1 is (One of the Krassensteins or
Louise Mensch?)#2 Is Doomzior
#3 Is Don Winslow
Since that’s a him.
I don’t know #1 since I have been posting on Twitter only since mid 2019. I only lurked before
FWIW Eloncalypse has not affected my Twitter feed much. I have blocked both Husk and Frump from it as words and the accounts as well. Plus white supremacists bots don’t write in Marathi or Hindi (Modi Bhakts do) for that matter.
Scout211
@WaterGirl: when Musk and his investors bought the company, it became privately owned and Musk disbanded the board of directors.
Miss Bianca
@Marmot: I remember why we called him “Wilmer”, what I *don’t* remember is where the name “Wilmer” came from!
WaterGirl
@Roger Moore:
Totally agree on this part. Very smart.
Completely disagree on this part, at least until/unless linking to the original awful thing adds to the “engagement” rating on twitter, which means that more people see the original awful thing.
Calouste
@lowtechcyclist: I guess he was talking about Tesla’s board, but one of those board members is another Musk, and another one is Murdoch jr. Unlikely they are going to do anything.
Basilisc
Kendzior can be pretty heavy, and unfair to some figures that don’t deserve it. But I follow her anyway because she offers a welcome antidote for times when I get too polyanna-ish. Her main point is that Trump & associates aren’t (just) racist sexist buffoons, but, and more importantly, criminals – and, arguably, part of a long-running organized crime scheme with Russian backing that goes back to the ’80s. And that people like Pelosi and Garland are part of the problem to the extent they think Trump & Trumpism can be addressed by “normal” political & legal means. And that any delay in bringing high-level prosecutions just makes the problem worse. Kanefield is on the side that argues that the DOJ needs an absolutely flawless case against Trump & Co before they bring charges, and that the “delay” since 1/21 is understandable – maybe even desirable – if it is needed to build that case.
I go back and forth between these two sides. But I think they both are valid points of view.
WaterGirl
@Miss Bianca: I don’t remember either! But I do know we have talked about that multiple times in the comments, and I think that might be covered in the BJ Lexicon.
WaterGirl
@Scout211: That is the Twitter board. My point is that I think the Tesla board will make M*** choose – it’s either Twitter or Tesla, pick one.
Because M*** sure as shit is dragging Tesla down with him. And money talks.
Cameron
@CaseyL: The Elonian Stables……
Marmot
Yeah, I concede that one. Still, this social media crap is still brand-new, and my (possibly way optimistic) feeling is that there’s plenty of room for improvement.
I like her example of the early printing press contributing to the wars over the Protestant Reformation.
And I’ve long meant to dig into the history of partisan newspapers in this country, and how the admittedly flawed “objectivity” model took over. It was an improvement, so I’ve been led to believe.
different-church-lady
@mvr: “You are Number Six”
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: The Mueller team actually indicted some of the IRA agents for election interference. This included their paymaster Victor Prigozhin, the now-infamous head of the Wagner group. The indictments included a lot of detail regarding specific activities.
This might have been a bigger story had it been released separately. It was part of the larger Mueller Report, though, and was overshadowed by the news that Mueller had failed to prove Trump’s collusion.
different-church-lady
KILL YOUR
TELEVISIONSMARTPHONESoprano2
@Betty Cracker: I have a friend who constantly shares “Occupy Democrats” feed, and it drives me nuts! Those people are useless!
KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager))
@Scout211: I don’t think #1 is Chris Bouzy, no. I think it’s a young freelance “journalist” whose name I can’t remember, who is from a wealthy family but who pretended to be struggling until after the election, when he got all “disillusioned.” Ken something I think? Maybe not
ETA #2 Sarah Kendzior & #3 Don Winslow are my guesses
Miss Bianca
@Basilisc: And where I think Kendzior is full of shit – to the extent that I think about her at all – is that I don’t get what she thinks Pelosi, Garland et al. are supposed to do differently than what they are doing. Because what is the actual *alternative* to following the rule of law to the letter in regard to prosecuting political criminals? The belittling of due process in favor of bellowing “SEIZE HIM!” (as someone else on this here blog characterized it) starts to sound an awful lot like…the sort of authoritarianism that Kendzior claims to be against.
different-church-lady
So we’re all just gonna keep doing this “social media is more good than bad” thing because we can no longer imagine life without the constant dopamine hits?
Cameron
@karen marie: Desist from ‘resist.’ Insist on ‘persist.’
Marmot
@different-church-lady: Ha! Nice.
Fair Economist
@WaterGirl:
That’s the best option for Twitter, and for Musk (since he loses less money) but he’ll lose a tremendous amount on Twitter- it was worth half what he paid for it, and probably less now. His ego will never allow him to admit a mistake and he’ll ride Twitter to its bankruptcy. I suppose the Tesla board could try to force him out but I’m thinking Tesla has too many Musk fanboy stockholders for that to be possible.
different-church-lady
@Cameron: There’s a lot of time left on the clock, but as far as winning today’s Balloon Juice you’re leading in a rout.
WaterGirl
@KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager)):
Not “our” Ken here on BJ, I hope! :-)
schrodingers_cat
@Basilisc: Doomzior does not just have policy disagreements with Pelosi, she alluded that Pelosi might be on the Russian payroll because she didn’t bring the Orange Error on impeachment charges according her (Sarah’s) timetable
WaterGirl
@Fair Economist: I bet most of the M*** fanboys totally jump ship because they are losing a boatload of $$.
edit: And M*** is a total embarrassment at this point, so the board and everyone associated with him are losing not just money, but status.
Marmot
@different-church-lady: For what it’s worth, I’m in camp “more bad than good.”
But I actually notice how Twitter affects my mood—while doing fuck-all to help me improve things. Surely we can do better.
Cameron
@different-church-lady: Must have been the cannabis syrup on my Wheaties….
Fair Economist
@Soprano2:
I don’t think so: they’re making money by endlessly talking up Democrats and talking down Republicans. Right now we have a lot of media doing the reverse and it’s a big benefit for the Republicans, even though none of their media actually “do anything” other than talk. Having at least one of the top 10 shares on Facebook be pro-Democratic is better than having none.
schrodingers_cat
@Cameron: That’s EW’s slogan isn’t it.
Geminid
@Miss Bianca: I think part of the emphasis some critics give to the “feckless Garland” narrative is opportunistic. When Jack Smith gets a grand jury to indict the Orange Churl, the critics will just pick a different another “feckless Democrat” pinata to whack on.
Bex
Alex Berenson could be #3. He wrote a series of entertaining thrillers in the last ten years or so. I noticed that his new book from last spring/summer flopped. He is also a vaccine denier and all-around conspiracy nut.
eldorado
social media is useful in the way that global warming is useful, i.e. only for a limited set of local conditions
different-church-lady
@Cameron: I never thought I’d live in a country where pot was legal but abortion wasn’t.
Cameron
@schrodingers_cat: That’s nuts. That’s the kind of insight people get when aliens start talking to them through their dental work.
Scout211
@Fair Economist: The board is currently being sued by a stock holder for the huge compensation package that Musk received from the company. He (Musk) appears to have many friends on the board. We’ll see if that changes after the trial is over.
Geminid
@WaterGirl: Ken Klippenstein? I’ve never followed him, just see him retweeted a lot.
different-church-lady
@Geminid: Psst: it’s all opportunistic, always.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Soprano2: I tell myself we need people like that too. I just don’t waste my time reading them.
I see the computer repairman who “found” Hunter Biden’s laptop says he’ll testify but only if he’s allowed to wear his kilt. That will certainly add to his credibility. He’s not odd. Oh no.
Betty Cracker
@Soprano2: Same.
@Fair Economist: It would be better if they could trash Republicans without being grifty content thieves. They get busted all the time for stealing people’s photos and captions without attribution.
Cameron
@schrodingers_cat: Could be – wasn’t “nevertheless she persisted” something applied to HRC? Weird that I’m so foggy over sayings and events that have happened less than 10 years ago.
RaflW
I was also a Kendzior follower and got turned of right about the time she spiraled into depressing hopelessness + Nancy/Dem bashing. I have no way of knowing, but at least in he case I think she’s more just an unstable and selfish person than an influence op (like the IRA example above in Kanefield’s piece).
I would have hoped her tedious eeyorism would have turned off more of her fans. But some folks like to wallow.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Cameron: No, Elizabeth Warren. She kept talking about something after McConnell told her to stop. He said “nevertheless, she persisted” and gave her a time out. Republicans in charge.
ETA: I wear my “nevertheless, she persisted” T-shirt to my zumba class. I have to go change into it soon.
Fair Economist
Being on Mastodon is showing me both the advantages and disadvantages of the feed algorithm. I almost immediately felt that Mastodon isn’t trying to get me upset and that is really lowering my opinion of Twitter, even beyond what Musk is doing. OTOH there’s a tremendous amount of uninteresting material to plow through. It would be nice to have bots that construct feeds for you; I imagine they exist but I haven’t found them yet.
Alison Rose
I was thinking #1 might be Brandon Straka, the dude who started the Walk Away campaign bullshit, but I don’t think he had that big of a Twitter following during the Trump years.
different-church-lady
@RaflW:
But isn’t the whole purpose of the Twiiter/Facebook/TikTok Complex to turn the first thing into the second?
Cameron
@different-church-lady: Thank you – you just fired up a train of thought for me for my next play (for whenever Florida Studio Theatre starts offering its Playwriting Roundtable again).
schrodingers_cat
@Cameron: She has been nuttier than a fruitcake for a while now. She does hawk books and her Patreon account she has many followers. Apparently doom sells.
different-church-lady
@RaflW:
WHO ARE YOU LOOKING AT??
Fair Economist
@RaflW: Kendzior is claiming Pelosi is a Russian operative. That’s beyond a little unstable; that’s absurd. Either Kendzior is an active Russian agent or she’s totally in thrall to somebody who is.
Geminid
@Cameron: Mitch McConnell made “nevertheless she persisted” a famous phrase when he used it to justify squelching Elizabeth Warren. It became a rallying cry for Democrats in general and Warren fans in particular.
Cameron
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Thanks. These things shouldn’t be that hard to remember. I’m lucky that I’ve got the cognitive chops to spit out “person-woman-man-camera-TV” without hesitation.
ETA: @Geminid: Thank you, too.
Baud
Who was the idiot going on about the Marshall of the Supreme Court in the early Trump days? Was that SK?
Brachiator
Coming late to the thread and have to leave for work soon. These people should be named.
These stories emphasize how easily social media can be subverted. I suppose that traditional media can also be as bad, but the immediacy and building of followers on the Internet amplifies the problem.
I have run across a couple of entertainment YouTube channels that swerved into oddly repugnant political areas. It is disheartening to see this happening in real time.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Louise Mensch
Baud
@Brachiator:
May have been the intent all along. I recall reading a while ago about propagandists roping people in with non-political content and then using that to influence their political views.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat: Thanks.
schrodingers_cat
@Brachiator: Check my reply
I am fairly confident who #2 and #3 are. Not sure about #1.
Soprano2
@Fair Economist: You may be right, but I find the constant “share if you agree with this point” grating. Maybe it’s just my personality.
Marmot
@Fair Economist: Heh. “Pelosi’s not a Russian agent, you’re a Russian agent!”
Scout211
@KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager)): I really don’t know Christopher Bouzy since I’m not on Twitter, but google picked up his former support for all Dems that turned to criticizing Nancy Pelosi, the number of his followers and his current Patreon account. So, maybe.
SiubhanDuinne
@Water Girl:
In the OP, why are there bunnies separating the block-quoted sections?
Dorothy A. Winsor
OT but I see Mauna Loa erupted for the first time in something like 40 years. Maybe Max will report in
Dorothy A. Winsor
@SiubhanDuinne: Bunnies? By god, so there are.
Shalimar
@WaterGirl: Twitter’s board is currently just Musk acting as sole director, but Tesla does have a board of Musk sycophants so any pushback would have to come from them.
Marmot
@Baud: If you can remember where else you read about that, I’d love to read it too.
KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager))
@Geminid: “The Mueller team actually indicted some of the IRA agents for election interference.”
These indictments actually were announced separately from, and much earlier than, the report. They were announced in the fall after the Mueller team was formed, when those earliest indictments were announced.
lowtechcyclist
@Marmot:
Yeah, I had to ask about that a few years ago, when usage of that handle was more common here. I could think of some Wilmers, but one was a cartoon character, and another, while having lent his name to a powerhouse law firm, has been dead for eons. So I was mystified until I asked.
And on a similar note, today I finally found out why it’s called Rose Twitter.
KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager))
@WaterGirl: “Not “our” Ken here on BJ, I hope! :-)”
Never!
lowtechcyclist
@WaterGirl:
Well, he’s dragging down the market price of Tesla shares. But they’ve been so incredibly overinflated that I’m sure they’re still way overvalued. But still, actionable by a board that’s willing to take him on over it.
I bet, though, that his paying so much attention to Twitter is probably a relief to the people who are doing the actual work at Tesla. They’ll probably be able to be more productive and make better decisions if Elmu’s mind is somewhere else.
Soprano2
I can’t find anywhere online where someone has guessed who #1 is. I have no idea unless it’s someone like Matt Bai, but I don’t know enough about his history to know if what she says fits or not. She does say “he”, so it’s a man.
dww44
@Marmot: I’m with you. We’re long past the time of Democratic campaigns that focus on policy to the exclusion of all else. We’ve been out gamed at the state and local levels which explains why we don’t make enough progress at the national level. Republicans appeal to the basest instincts of voters. We go high when they go low. That can only take us so far. It doesn’t give us the level of victories that we need to become a real majority party. I like the “vote blue no matter what” meme.
Soprano2
@lowtechcyclist: Did you read the stuff written by an intern at SpaceX? He said there were whole groups of people whose job was to protect the people who actually did stuff from Musk so that the company could actually accomplish its mission. He says you’re seeing now what happens when people actually listen to Musk’s terrible ideas.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
As opposed to the decades of bullshit about Hillary Clinton that these very same self proclaimed “good and true Christians” were making up about her? We’re talking about the same political movement that tried to force threw teaching the Flinstons scientific fact in the schools during the GW Bush admin. In retrospect, it should be no surprise that two groups of lying sacks of shit like the Russian and the American Religious Right, ended up together.
So basically Twitter is survival of the most stupid. As it’s been pointed out one can’t post stupid bullshit 24/7 with out becoming a stupid bullshitter themselves. See the Flat Earther movement were the jokesters who started it ended up believing their own lies.
This is just more proof that Twitter always was doomed to end up in the hands of some rich loon whose addicted to it like Musk. Again, look at the speed the Twitter BOD jumped on Musk’s flippant offer to buy Twitter, the investors knew this from the get go and had an eye out for an idiot like him.
KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager))
@WaterGirl: “I bet most of the M*** fanboys totally jump ship because they are losing a boatload of $$.”
My impression of the M*** fanboys I see on Twitter is that they don’t have a boatload of $$. They’re poor schmuck wannabees who are under the impression that M*** walks on water and worship him because he’s a ruthless, vicious asshole, not in spite of it.
cain
@Betty Cracker: It’s one of the nice things about Mastodon – that behavior of retweeting is not encouraged. In fact, you can’t even look at a post to see how many times it is boosted by other people.
Soprano2
@dww44: I agree, I get frustrated with the people who say “I’d vote for that Democrat except he/she isn’t perfectly in line with everything I believe, so I guess I’ll just stay home” or who want every candidate to be inspiring like Obama was. Most politicians are not like Obama, which is why he stood out so much! How can they not get this?
different-church-lady
You can’t subvert something that’s already fucked up by design.
msdc
Person #1 is almost certainly Ryan Knight, who went from resistance grifter to hammer-and-sickle-emoji-guy in record time. But there are a lot of candidates.
2 and 3 are definitely Kendzior and Winslow.
Soprano2
@KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager)): I found out I work with one of these. When I brought up that Musk was going to turn Twitter into 4chan he said “So you think conservatives shouldn’t be on Twitter?” I said no, that’s not what I said at all, I think Nazis and white supremacists shouldn’t be on Twitter! I also told him that no advertiser wants their ad to be next to awful, hateful content and that as more of it appears on Twitter more and more advertisers will flee. He seemed to believe Musk would have some kind of super secret plan to overcome all of that, so I decided it was useless to talk to him about it anymore.
Barbara
@schrodingers_cat: Kendzior is tedious, as is Don Winslow. I don’t “follow” either but somehow I always see them through retweets or suggested content. If I were more facile with Twitter I could probably figure out how to block them entirely.
I only really use Twitter when I am actively trying to follow something, like the OK trial or a debate or a select few and trusted election analysts , like Simon Rosenberg or Al Giordano. In general, I loathe RTs, as well as people who seem to be shamelessly trolling for more followers by promising to follow you too! I don’t care about followers, I don’t want any, I don’t have any, I almost never reply, and I NEVER create affirmative content.
I unfollow as much as I follow if someone is too apt to push RTs or other content I don’t like.
J R in WV
@schrodingers_cat:
Yet I recall two different impeachments of Orange Monster …
different-church-lady
@Soprano2:
You didn’t hear about the merger?
Citizen Alan
@Miss Bianca: The dirty little secret of the far left in this country is that at heart they are every bit the same authoritarian cultists as the tea beggars and the Maga crowd. They simply disagree on what they want the dictator to do once he takes office.
schrodingers_cat
@J R in WV: Not good enough for Sister Sarah.
KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager))
@Dorothy A. Winsor: “Elizabeth Warren. She kept talking about something after McConnell told her to stop.”
She was talking about Coretta Scott King’s testimony against Jeff Sessions’ nomination for a judgeship, I believe. At any rate, the nomination of some segregationist. And yes, ole’ Turtleface shut her down
ETA: And, yes, whenever I wear my tee shirt I get compliments. Especially when I wear it to fabric stores, for some reason.
dp
@oatler: I don’t think either of them ever posed as a liberal on anything.
Barbara
@KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager)): I don’t know about the fanbois but my estimation of those who bankrolled him has gone down a lot. This is a space I know something about — that is, investing/loaning money to facilitate the purchase of a company. It almost always comes with strings attached, sometimes even board seats and veto rights over certain material changes to business operations. Whether their loans or other commitments were “collateralized” with Tesla stock (quite likely) they seem not to have considered that Musk was more than willing to incinerate both Twitter and Tesla. Personally, at this point, I think the Twitter saga has become pretty dull. I do appreciate the need for a public sphere but I also think that we have lost perspective of our here and now relative to our once upon a time. It’s always been an imperfect, evolving landscape geared towards harnessing emotion more effectively than rational thought.
Soprano2
@different-church-lady: LOL, point taken. However, for the sake of the discussion we were having I wanted to make the point that I only objected to the nasty content, not conservatives promoting conservative ideas.
cain
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
I’ve also noticed that it attracts the clinically depressed who use twitter as a platform for both good and evil.
different-church-lady
@Barbara:
Exactement! And that gearing is the reason it will always be more bad than good.
karen marie
@schrodingers_cat: It depends how you define “her slogan.”
Vocal Warren haters claimed it is but that’s pure bullshit. It came to prominence from a situation with Warren in the senate but she neither promoted it nor made it about herself.
Do yourself a favor and read the link for background.
Roger Moore
@WaterGirl:
It seems very unlikely with the current Tesla board. The board- and the major stockholders, for that matter- is stocked with his cronies and sycophants. For an example, look at the current shareholder lawsuit over executive compensation. The board all but gave him something like $50 billion in Tesla shares. Nothing is going to change at Tesla without some kind of drastic wakeup call, apparently one bigger than having its stock price halve in the past year.
UncleEbeneezer
@Betty Cracker: When you select for people with actual experience in DOJ/US Attorneys/FBI etc. (tossing aside right-wing shitheads like Jon Turley and Greenwald, obviously), there really aren’t many who are Garland/DOJ-haters.
John Dean, Barb McQuade, Joyce White Vance, Jill Wine-Banks, Asha Rangappa, Andrew Weissman, Daniel Goldman, Renato Mariotti, Karen Friedman Agnifilo, Peter Strzok, Michael Popok, Teri Kanefield, etc.
They all quibble with details and have some criticisms here and there, but the consensus is generally that DOJ has been extremely impressive securing 900+ convictions (and some key cooperation agreements) without losing a jury. trial, obtaining the first Seditious Conspiracy convictions in ages, having multiple Grand Juries open investigating Trump and his minions etc. Some like Wine-Banks, Tribe etc., have been skeptical from the start but get more and more confident in DOJ every time we find out more about court filings and have made public statements that they are reassured by recent activity.
Most of the prominent people who are hyper-critical of Garland tend to be:
1.) journalists and laypeople, not attorneys
2.) academics with no criminal practice experience and
3.) attorneys but ones with no experience in Federal, criminal/appellate law.
The loudest Garland-critics I can think of are: Elie Mystal (litigator but no experience in Fed, criminal law), Paul Campos (academia, no criminal justice experience), and Brian Beutler (journalist, no criminal law experience).
I know personally I value the opinions of people with experience and understanding of how DOJ and appeals courts operate much more than those without that experience/expertise. I don’t think it’s reasonable to give the latter equal weight.
KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager))
@msdc: “Ryan Knight”
YES! That’s who I was thinking of, not Ken something (at least there’s a K in his name). Definitely Ryan Knight is #1.
Armadillo
@msdc:
I agree that Person #1 is Ryan Knight aka ProudSocialist. Bouzy has a similar number of followers, but does not have a Patreon in his bio. Also Bouzy’s coverage of the midterms was mostly dabbling in election forecasting and predicting that the Dems would hold both House and Senate. Whereas Knight is all about attacking Dems last I checked.
Eric Feigl-Ding is not just bad because he posts doom all the time. He poses as a pandemic expert because he has a degree from Harvard. In Nutrition. He doesn’t really understand what he is writing about, puts alarmist spins on things, etc.
I feel like Feigl-Ding’s issues are similar to many issues you see in the OSINT space, where people may or may not have credentials. But whether or not they have credentials they often veer into posting things beyond their knowledge, jumping to the most inflammatory conclusions, etc.
Warren Senders
#1 is that asshole Ryan whatever-his-name-is. His trajectory is described exactly.
Miss Bianca
@Roger Moore: Maybe losing all its market share *and* stock prices continuing to plummet? I mean, a girl can dream…
brantl
@oatler: Neither of those 2 have been Democrats in a very long time. Card went crazy right after 9/11. Scott Adams was a Trumpette since well before the election.
ian
@Marmot: The corollary to “vote blue no matter who” is what Republicans do. They vote red no matter who. That is why they all (well 95% of them) lined up behind Trump. Liberals refuse to think like this about politics. If by some miracle (pact with Satan?) Tulsi Gabbard got the Democratic nomination for president, there would be massive fall off. I don’t know the % of Democratic voters who would swallow their bile and vote for Gabbard, but I can say with certainty it would be a lot lower than 95%.
“Vote blue no matter who” is a fine slogan until you think about how we would deal with a Trump-like figure winning a Democratic primary. Liberal mindsets just don’t work that way. We can’t be mentally coerced into supporting a candidate we think is awful, not in the same numbers as conservatives. If that is a strength or a weakness I leave open to your interpretation, but it simply isn’t how liberal ideology works.
Roger Moore
@Fair Economist:
One of the nice things about Twitter is that it allows you to skip the algorithm and just see a chronological list of tweets (and retweets) by the people you follow. They’ve tried to discourage people from viewing it that way, but they’ve never turned it off completely.
Chief Oshkosh
@Miss Bianca: One thing that Adam Schiff has said about what Garland should have done differently is that Garland simply wasn’t focused on Trump until the January 6th committee started showing how involved Trump was in the insurrection. Schiff (and other elected Democrats) felt that DOJ should have been leading this, not somewhat sluggishly following what the Congressional committee was discovering. Schiff seems to maintain that Garland still is not providing enough focus and resources to investigating Trump. I haven’t seen Schiff’s response to the appointment of Jack Smith, though he’s probably stated it.
Overall, I don’t think that the people who are frustrated with Garland’s performance on this are suggesting that he not follow the rule of law, though I know that that’s a convenient straw-man argument for many people here at BJ. I think, like Schiff, the frustration comes from there being at least an perception of lack of focus on the part of DOJ and Garland and a lack of aggressively following or applying the rule of law.
And yes, Wheeler and others have done a great job of explaining the timeline of DOJ’s activities and placed them in the context of the presumed goals and the challenges that have arisen in meeting those goals. However, even DOJ admitted to being surprised at the level of Trump’s involvement in the insurrection that was revealed by the J6 Congressional investigation. DOJ should not have been surprised.
Almost all of it is water under the bridge now, though.
schrodingers_cat
@karen marie: EW is selling T-shirts with that slogan
Mr. Bemused Senior
@different-church-lady:
The Prisoner and the Bobs! You win the thread as far as I am concerned.
KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager))
@Barbara: Much of his money to purchase Twitter came from foreign sources; a large chunk came from UAE. Their interest doesn’t seem to be so much in financial investment as in, say, social media database/social media control aspects.
As to why any large, responsible financial institution would lend him money, well, that’s a question I couldn’t answer.
schrodingers_cat
@Warren Senders: I probably started tweeting well after this crook’s heyday so I missed him.
Steeplejack
@Scout211:
I don’t think #1 is Christopher Bouzy. He runs Bot Sentinel, which is a very good anti-bot and anti-troll (hence anti-GQP) outfit. I haven’t read his Twitter stream much, but I haven’t seen him be anti-Democrats.
I agree with someone upthread who said #1 is that young “journalist” who was outed as a trust-fund wanker. I can’t remember his name either.
jonas
@CaseyL: I don’t know how Twitter — or any potential buyer — can service the debt he’s loaded it up with. My guess is he eventually has to declare bankruptcy and simply close it up. Jenn White on 1A the other day had on one of his funders ( I forget who) and it quickly became clear that the people who gave Musk billions for this venture are 1. utterly deluded by his genius techbro aura and 2. going to lose all their money.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@jonas: they like Bitcoin too. I predict Musk will not be the world’s richest man much longer.
Renie
I’ve noticed lately on Twitter that you have to look through a lot of garbage now to find anything that’s interesting. Accounts have been losing followers and no one knows why. There’s a lot more hate posting. And people looking for other people to join accounts as resisters is all over the place. The more serious journalist, historians and politicians I follow I barely see their postings anymore. It’s a town square that turned into the town dump.
schrodingers_cat
Okay I checked Ryan Knight on Twitter, turns out I blocked him a long time ago. My Twitter feed is set to latest tweets. I think the default is whatever is trending, you can change that.
schrodingers_cat
@Renie: You still have the ability to curate your feed. You can block and mute accounts and words too. And set your timeline setting to the latest tweets instead of trending tweets.
I have lost some followers, about 20 but other than that I haven’t seen much of what others are complaining about.
schrodingers_cat
@Mr. Bemused Senior: I am wondering when Tesla’s board is going to kick him off the CEO perch.
Bevstersf
#1 could be Ryan Knight, proud resister.
Steeplejack
@Miss Bianca:
A commenter made it up. I’ve got the “origin” link at home; I’ll post it later.
cain
@Roger Moore: Yeah it’s called competition – the other car manufacturers are going to be very quickly going to come up to speed.
It’s very likely at the end Tesla is going to be bought by one of them when Tesla’s fortunes tumble because of Musk.
Miss Bianca
@Chief Oshkosh: a “perception of lack of focus” on January 6 does not mean that there WAS or IS a lack of focus, imho. Unless a call for budgeting for 131 more lawyers to continue investigation is somehow to be perceived as a “lack of focus”. Garland doesn’t blab, doesn’t push himself in front of the microphones, and goes out of his way to avoid a perception of further politicizing an already politicized investigation. To me, that’s not a “perception of a lack of focus”: it’s a sign of a professional doing his job professionally.
I respect Adam Schiff immensely, but I think in this particular case, airing his personal frustrations was a misstep.
Captain C
@KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager)):
Maybe you’re thinking of Walker Bragman, of the Hamptons Bragmen[sic]?
oklahomo
@schrodingers_cat:
I have noticed an increase in the only fans semi-naked lady bots, which had almost died out after a summer spike; also getting weird spam DMs.
Captain C
@UncleEbeneezer:
Don’t forget noted LGM pessimist.
Roger Moore
@lowtechcyclist:
This. One thing I’m not clear about, though, is whether the Board is some of the people who understand Musk is a net drag on Tesla or the ones who think his farts smell like perfume. I assume it’s the latter, since they’ve done stupid things like offer him an insane compensation package and let him get away with clearly inappropriate behavior, like using Tesla programmers to help his takeover of Twitter. Given that, I don’t think they’ll actually fire him, but I also think they’re unlikely to stop him from dividing his time between his companies because they’re convinced what a genius he is.
schrodingers_cat
@oklahomo: I got followed by two such accounts. I blocked them.
Geminid
@KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager)): Thank you for the correction!
Tom Q
@Miss Bianca: In case no one has informed you: Wilmer is the name of the character played by Elisha Cook Jr. In The Maltese Falcon. As I recall, when the discussion arose about finding a euphemism (so as to discourage fanatic followers from swarming every time the name was mentioned), the Falcon movie was running on someone’s TV, and they offered Wilmer to fill the bill. It just stuck.
FelonyGovt
@WaterGirl: Agreed. I’m what they used to call a yellow dog Democrat- I would rather vote for a yellow dog than a Republican. (My Democratic friend from Texas said it funnier- a yellaaa dawg!)
Cheryl
@msdc: that’s the name I was trying to dredge out of my memory. Total D cheerleader then turned on a dime against Elizabeth Warren and it was all downhill after that
different-church-lady
@brantl:
Adams is a complete mystery to me. How can anyone not see the similarities between Trump and the pointy-haired boss?
Carlo Graziani
@Enhanced Voting Techniques:
The IRA’s MO was to look for existing fissures and points of political stress, and amplify them, rather than attempt to generate new ones. They were actually rather clever and effective in how they went about screwing around with US politics. The Lawfare Podcast had an extended discussion of their operations. They also featured prominently in the Muller Report, which Lawfare also brought memorably and vividly to life in their podcast series.
This is one of the reasons to take a bit of satisfaction, as a US citizen, in the calamities befalling Putin’s war effort in Ukraine these days with US assistance. Some scores left open from 2016 all the way to January 6 2021 are being settled now. Payback with interest, and to the extent that one can set aside the tragedy inflicted on Ukrainians, it feels pretty good.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@different-church-lady: Dilbert is amusing as a cartoon, but if you read Scott Adams’ “serious ” writing you’ll see.
The Moar You Know
@different-church-lady: That, and it’s too hard to go out and do your own research, reporting, and writing.
“The media” would be out of business tomorrow if Twitter went dark.
WaterGirl
@Baud: Yes! There have been warnings about some of the cute pet twitter sites.
From the article:
Geminid
@J R in WV: “Too little, too late” the critics would say.
I was always sceptical of the “Impeach early and often” position, especially when conviction by the Senate was next to impossible. I thought Democrats would start looking like Wiley Coyote, and Trump could look more like Roadrunner.
different-church-lady
@Tom Q: And then (just to fill in a bit more BJ history) we had to have an utterly moronic debate with a bro’ about whether we were queer bashing because there are supposedly coded hints in the film that the character was gay.
God all fuckin’ mightly those were dumb times.
WaterGirl
@SiubhanDuinne: That is a 2-part question!
The first part is why is there a separator? That’s because WordPress will make them one big block quote if you don’t have a separator.
I choose the bunny because it’s nondescript and not *distracting; that it’s a cute bunny is just a bonus.
*or so I thought
WaterGirl
@Shalimar:
With their money, prestige, and reputations being burned and then flushed down the toilet… I expect that to change.
If I’m right, when they turn on him it’s going to be ugly.
edit: If I’m wrong, it will just be another day ending in Y. :-)
EmbraceYourInnerCrone
@Fair Economist: why would anyone buy Twitter, and its debt? Especially now that it’s a shell of what it was?
bmcchgo
@pika: Person #1 I’m convinced is Ryan Knight aka @ProudSocialist on Twitter
JML
Ribbon-cutting ceremony today for the reopening of the campus food pantry (expanded! bigger! better! yay!). Literally everyone gets recognized for their support and help except…my department.
Every member of the advisory council thanked by name…except me.
Tens of thousands of dollars raised by my department from alumni and friends, especially during the pandemic to keep operations going and make sure they had what they needed. not mentioned.
I should be used to it by now, but I am furious
WaterGirl
@lowtechcyclist:
hahaha
The people who are actually doing the work are NEVER on the board!
Dorothy A. Winsor
@JML: Holy cow. Can I ask what your department is?
WaterGirl
@KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager)):
I was responding to the comment about M*** having fanboys on the board of directors. Those people most definitely do have money.
Soprano2
@jonas: Oh yeah, I was on their FB literally all-capping questions for that idiot Musk fanboi. He deserves to lose all of his money.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@different-church-lady: I wasn’t here for that conversation, but not coded. Look up gunsel.
JaySinWA
It has a brand name (somewhat tarnished now) and a tech platform that has some value. OTOH I think it will likely be bankrupt attempting to service the debt but end up restructured in bankruptcy rather than shut down. Either that or it will survive somehow after the M*sk restructure.
lowtechcyclist
@SiubhanDuinne:
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
“Tell me again about the rabbits, George.”
Deputinize Eurasia from the Kuriles to St Petersburg
I’ve never been a Warren fan (I hate her pattern and tone of speaking – it’s a personal preference thing), but I thought the “yet she persisted” slogan was a winner as an activist piece because it was so dismissive as to be insulting – and Warren kept right on talking.
Now, the “I Dissent” RBG slogan is another thing entirely. It is afflicted with loser stench and implies nothing of power or strength. It means “you lost”.
dc
I only use the chronological option on Twitter. I don’t like it any other way and it surprises me that the majority prefer otherwise. My Twitter feed is not a dumpster fire because I’ve blocked accounts that are purveyors of garbage and worse. I stop following accounts that focus too much on certain purveyors of garbage as well. I also proactively read certain accounts when I’m interested in a topic, Ukraine, for example. I am using Mastodon more and more and Twitter less and less. It’s unfortunate that one person can cause so much destruction. Another argument to make being a billionaire impossible.
Miss Bianca
@Tom Q: *Now* I remember! Thank you for that!
Geminid
@bmcchgo: With 367,000 followers, Ryan Knight would fit for #1. I was a little surprised he had that many, but I shouldn’t have been. There is a big audience of soreheads for a “proud socialist” who demands that others “take off their blindfolds and see that there is no difference” between the Democratic and Republican parties.
Knight’s also a grifter, raising money for unaccounted projects. When Knight went off on the Democrats for hiring more IRS agents I wondered if this was a case of a hit dog hollering. Jimmy Dore was similarly incensed.
Josie
@FelonyGovt:
My 2nd generation Texas father was not that delicate. He used to say he would vote for a “red-assed baboon if he was a Democrat.”
JML
@Dorothy A. Winsor: I work in Advancement & Alumni Engagement.
lowtechcyclist
@Soprano2:
Yeah, I read that – I’ve seen it pop up several places, including here of course. I was definitely riffing off that.
different-church-lady
@Mr. Bemused Senior:
Did I use the past tense in that last comment? My mistake.
Stacy
@mvr: I think #1 is Peter Dauo. He was unabashedly pro Clinton and then became viscously anti-Dem after 2018 I believe.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@different-church-lady: forgive me
JaySinWA
@JaySinWA: To revise and extend my remarks, I doubt Twitter/M*** will go through a legal bankruptcy.
If the rumors about his funding/backers are true, this is less about the money and interest than it is about influence. And if it is about the money to some or all of them, there are plenty of state actors and individuals that would like to control Twitter and who have money to burn
If Twitter dies it likely will die from an extended outage that can’t be fixed in a short enough time to keep the user base. There still is a non-trivial chance of that.
bmcchgo
@Geminid: thanks for the added context!
WaterGirl
@JML: I’m sorry, I’m sure it’s even more maddening because it’s not the first time.
Kathleen
@schrodingers_cat: I have seen complaints on Twitter about HoarseWhisperer and a handle BrooklynDad that track but I don’t know. I knew SK though!
lowtechcyclist
@WaterGirl:
Tru dat. Also, nothing less than a legion of well-off fanboys could have pushed Tesla stock to the incredibly inflated price it was at for a while. So even aside from the board, they’re not all poor schmuck wannabes.
I remember seeing a graphic showing that Tesla at one point had a higher market cap than the next nine largest car manufacturers, combined. Which is obviously way more than Tesla’s actual worth.
Gravenstone
@Fair Economist: I suspect the only people who might have the wherewithal to buy Twitter now are the sorts whom might make us pine for the halcyon days of Musk’s tenure (eg. various bored Saudi princelings, maybe Murdoch if he’s feeling particularly malign).
JML
@WaterGirl: I can live without the personal recognition (though it would have been nice, considering I have a new VP and a little positivity in front of the president and my new VP never hurts) but the casual passing over of the work my department does, again and again, makes me want to scream.
lowtechcyclist
@Soprano2:
I think the Dems need to keep that Tim Ryan ad in their back pocket, the one where he and his wife break out the wine if they have a day where they agree on almost everything. That was such a great response to that sort of thinking.
Geminid
@JaySinWA: I wonder if there is substance to these rumors. Accounts I have read* say that Musk put up $25 billion of his own money, $17 billion from sales of Tesla stock in April and October this year. Seven big banks lent him $13 billion. The remainder was accounted for by private investors. Of those, a Saudi Prince investing Saudi sovereign fund money rolled over a $2 billion stake in the old company into the new one, but that was still only about 4% of the purchase price. The Qatari sovereign wealth fund invested a lesser amount.
*including CNBC, October 28- “The Elon Musk/Twitter purchase- who is financing the deal?”
Darkrose
@karen marie: “Resist” echoes movements throughout history, most notably the French Resistance. It’s an active word that carries the connotation of fighting back against tyranny, oppression, and occupation.
lowtechcyclist
@schrodingers_cat: How dare she take advantage of that opportunity!
Darkrose
@JML: Ugh. I’m sorry. That sucks.
Ruckus
@Starfish:
Some or Many Politicians who have no competition become complacent.
Not all of them do, I give you Nancy Pelosi, there are others. But the gist of your statement is correct, I’d use the word humans over politicians but the reality is as you say.
Darkrose
@brantl: I don’t think Card was ever a Democrat, and he didn’t lose it after 9/11–he was always on the right. People tended not to notice until he became increasingly vocal about his homophobia.
I read deconstructions of Ender’s Game and Speaker for the Dead recently. I had forgotten how much absolute bullshit was in both of them, especially the latter.
JML
appreciate the support, jackals. was a little surprised at how angry this made me!
Geminid
@lowtechcyclist: The commenter was just responding to an assertion that Warren had not adopted the slogan and that it was pushed by Warren haters.
Steeplejack
@Miss Bianca:
The origin of “Wilmer” (Jim, Foolish Literalist, December 16, 2016).
My stock explainer.
@Tom Q:
Wrong! Jim, Foolish Literalist, who introduced the term, never made that connection. Former commenter Applejinx was the one who (belatedly) brought up the supposed Maltese Falcon connection and the supposed homophobic slur on Sanders (because Wilmer in the movie was a “gunsel”), which of course, as different-church-lady pointed out, led to an idiotic and seemingly endless debate here.
Roger Moore
@Miss Bianca:
I think both those things are likely to happen. Tesla is standing on the edge of a crumbling cliff a third of the way up a mountain proudly proclaiming how great it is for climbing to the top.
Tesla has done a bunch of really good stuff as far as figuring out the basics of how to build a good EV and in building out their charger network to solve the chicken and egg problem of people not wanting to buy an electric car they couldn’t take on road trips. At the same time, they’ve had a big deficit in terms of getting the car side of electric cars right.
Their big problem is the major car manufacturers are catching up in the electric side much faster than they’re catching up in the car side. The big car companies are almost all now selling electric cars that are very close to Tesla in the powertrain while taking advantage of their decades of experience getting building cars. Fans should be very afraid indeed that Ford has beaten Tesla to market with the F150 Lightning. Once people realize that Tesla isn’t going to replace the legacy car companies, the stock price is going to crater.
Baud
@Steeplejack:
Nominated!
Geminid
@Steeplejack: An idiotic and seemingly endless debate? Here!?
Show pics or it didn’t happen.
Mr. Bemused Senior
@Baud: seconded
Captain C
@Stacy: I was thinking that too, but couldn’t remember his name. He took a pronounced Clinton->Sanders turn well after the 2016 election IIRC (or maybe right around it?).
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
What if your options to vote blue was one of the 3 people you wrote about or say Adam Kinzinger?
Choice often matters and I agree that blue is almost always better, but what if it isn’t? Now as far as I know I’ve never actually come across this dilemma but is it possible, and if it is what does one do then?
Chief Oshkosh
@Miss Bianca: And having been around for the OKC bombing and seeing how Garland investigated and got convictions on that, I immensely respect Garland. It was pretty personal for me.
But, Schiff was not alone among elected officials in his frustrations with Garland, so whether he was just airing personal frustrations is open for discussion. And even if he was the only person who had those concerns, let’s recall that he was an AUSA for six years (and got significant convictions) and that he did successfully impeach a President. It may be that his personal frustrations should carry some weight.
That aside, on reflection, I think that there are actually two straw men that keep surfacing here at BJ wrt this topic. The first is the one that I previously alluded to, that being that people who are Garland-frustrated are demanding that Garland do something outside the rule of law in pursuing Trump. I don’t know anyone who says that (but then, I don’t know a lot people). The second straw man is that the people who are Garland-frustrated simply don’t recognize or understand that Garland is tight-lipped, “doesn’t blab.” It sometimes seems that many here assume that Garland was focused on Trump as instigator, but just didn’t blab about it. Lacking the correct focus AND not blabbing are not mutually exclusive. I believe Garland admitted to being surprised at the level of Trump’s involvement, so it sounds like he really wasn’t focused on pursuing Trump until J6 revelations were made. He didn’t blab about focusing on Trump because he hadn’t been focusing on Trump. :)
To be clear, I think Garland and DOJ have done a great job pursuing investigations and convictions of many of the insurgents. It sure hasn’t been easy, in my uniformed opinion. And going after the small fry in order to get them to rat out the big fish (to mix species) is a useful strategy, but it’s not clear that that was what Garland was doing wrt Trump.
Again, it’s all water under the bridge (but whinging on and on is what I do on political blogs, I guess). We and Garland can’t go back in time, and it sounds like Jack Smith is an excellent choice going forward.
surfk9
@Roger Moore: Tesla should be afraid. Ford and Gm have bunch of new EV offerings coming out starting Spring of next year. Most are based on current popular models. When consumers start seeing that, they will respond well to something familiar rather than something different.
Barbara
@KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager)): Much is not all. I understand that Morgan Stanley bankrolled $3 billion. That’s a lot of moolah to light on fire. The others, yeah, I assume that their interests are all about control, but as per usual it will probably be shocking to them to see how relatively easy it is for us to generate alternatives. Painful, annoying, yes, but possible, definitely. It’s not that they are stupid, not at all, but it’s hard for them to understand how freewheeling the US is, so they continually underestimate how easily binned a social media site can become. I lived for a long time without Twitter, even after Twitter became easy to use for people like me.
RSA
Among science fiction writers, Dan Simmons (Hyperion) lost it after 9/11, if I remember correctly.
Betty Cracker
@UncleEbeneezer: The point is that even inaccurate criticism of Garland isn’t in the same league as state actors setting up influence operations to try to swing elections. The first is just people being wrong. The second is election interference. Conflating the two isn’t helpful, IMO.
Brachiator
@surfk9:
The first auto companies had to learn to stop making cars that resembled horse drawn carriages. EV makers will need to learn how to make electric vehicles that resemble conventional autos. Ford has an EV that is based on a standard vehicle. It’s probably cheaper to use a current body type. But it also has a phony air intake grill and phony exhaust pipes, totally irrelevant to an EV.
Geminid
@KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager)): Did a large chunk of rhe money that bought Twitter really come from the UAE? I have seen reports of $2 billion from a Saudi source connected to that nation’s wealth fund, and a lesser amount from the Qatari sovereign fund. I don’t think I’ve seen reports of any UAE money, although they certainly could account for some of the money invested by outfits like Sequoia Capital. But the private investors in total accounted for less than 20% of the purchase price.
Seven large banks put up almost 25%, or $13 billion. They made their commitments to Musk in April. This was a “hung deal,” though. Musk got cold feet but eventually and perhaps grudgingly closed the deal in October, and in a less favorable economic climate. I don’t know if the banks could have wriggled put of their loan commitments.
I bet they wish they had, though. Those loans won’t take them down as institutions, but executive heads might roll.
Ruckus
@Shantanu Saha:
Depends on the lender agreements. Did they lend him the money to purchase twitter, or are they part owners. I’d say part owners because I find it very unusual that they would have paid him to purchase it by personally lending him something like $19 Billion.
As much as they might think he’s a great guy, it’s their money they were putting into this and that means they want their percentage of any income. Of course that also means they might be responsible for any loss. Although given this purchase and his supposed wealth they might have done the buddy thing and just loaned him the money. But I’m skeptical of that. They know who they are, they know who he is and they likely don’t trust very many people like themselves.
Dadadadadadada
@oatler: Neither of those has been even remotely pro-Democratic in decades.
Dadadadadadada
@KayInMD (formerly Kay (not the front-pager)): That sounds like Nathan J. Robinson.
Miss Bianca
@Chief Oshkosh: Definitely agree on the last paragraph! :)
I don’t think it’s a straw man argument, however, to push back against the Do Something crowd by saying, “what exactly is it that you (not Schiff, necessarily) want Garland to *do*?” Because in a lot of cases it seems like what they want (what they really really want) is just to see Trump in an orange jumpsuit being perp-walked with more chains on him than Marley’s Ghost. Not that that’s not a pleasing image, but it reminds me of Underpants Gnome logic – there’s a step or two missing in the chain. They don’t know how to get from here to there, they just know that SOMEONE knows how to do it for them, and the only reason SOMEONE (Garland, Mueller) just isnt doing it is because of a lack of will or Insert Bad Faith BS Reasoning Here.
Ruckus
@Cameron:
Weird that I’m so foggy over sayings and events that have happened less than 10 years ago.
Really? Weird? Seems with the amount of info being flung in every direction it seems quite amazing that we all aren’t just standing on street corners babbling till the sun goes down. Most days it can be tough to make some/any sense of the amount/direction of all the babbling that one can see/listen to.
Matt McIrvin
@Jerry: #2 is definitely Kendzior. The claim that Nancy Pelosi was taking Russian money to protect Trump was the moment I realized Kendzior had gone completely around the bend.
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
As I understand it, they lent him the money with Tesla stock as collateral. As is typical with loans where the collateral is something that can vary a lot in price, he has to put up more stock if the price falls. It’s possible the lenders are hoping for Twitter to fail so they can seize the collateral.
Tdjr
@Steeplejack: Wilmer reminds me of the young gunsel in Maltese Falcon. The conspirators were going to pin all the crimes on him.
Matt McIrvin
@Darkrose: Card presented as some kind of liberal in the early 1980s. But what made it increasingly untenable was his Mormon Church-induced homophobia. I know that by the early 1990s, that Card was a homophobe was common knowledge on Usenet and a source of great sadness, since a fair number of LGBT people had, shall we say, picked up on vibes in Card’s work that they thought identified him as at least an ally. (It was kind of a similar dynamic to Rowling and trans people.)
Matt McIrvin
@RSA: Simmons posted a short-short story about being visited by a time traveler from the future, who warned him about how the world was about to be conquered by hordes of radical Islamist immigrants who bred like rabbits. It was both gross and ludicrous and got him a lot of derision, which caused him to double down. And at that point people started picking at his earlier work and noticing signs of the tendency, as one does.
Matt McIrvin
…About Orson Scott Card, I should add that around the same time as people were realizing how homophobic he was, there was a weird essay claiming that Ender’s Game was nothing less than a coded apologia for Adolf Hitler. I always thought that was a big stretch. But I do think the “there was no alternative whatsoever to murder/genocide, and a child savior had to do it” theme that comes up over and over in that book hints at strange things going on in Card’s head.
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
@Roger Moore: A decline of more than half a billion dollars in value ought to wake a few shareholders up.
But maybe the losses are worth staying asleep (wouldn’t want to be “woke”, after all…)
Omnes Omnibus
@Ruckus: You can always find an exception. Is it a good general rule or not?
J R in WV
@FelonyGovt:
Wife and I are both Yellow Dog Democrats!
I usually say it as “I would rather vote for that yellow dawg asleep under the porch than any Republican.” We used to have a yellow dog, was a wonderful big pupper…
Matt McIrvin
@Basilisc: Kendzior didn’t just argue that Pelosi was “part of the problem,” she argued that Pelosi was a paid Russian agent actively trying to protect Donald Trump from impeachment (this was before Trump got impeached for the first time).
WaterGirl
@Ruckus: I would still vote blue at this point. I would literally vote for a Democrat who is as awful as Walker, because that’s a problem that can be fixed after we have control of the chamber.
Because except for on saving democracy Adam K. would be voting republican and would be one more vote for control of the House.
Zippity
@schrodingers_cat: I’m pretty sure that #1 is Ryan Knight.
Áine
@CaseyL: Millions at this point LOL
Roger Moore
@Matt McIrvin:
The really weird thing about it is that even within the story, the need for murder/genocide was false. The Buggers* gave up on attacking humans after the second invasion. That made the genocidal human response unnecessary. All the kill-or-be-killed situations Ender found himself in throughout the story were engineered by human leaders looking for a commander willing to commit genocide, so they were unnecessary, too.
*That Card called the enemy this is possibly a sign of those homophobic tendencies.
Mart
Read about Cambridge Analytica. Something about 44 Facebook data points and they know who you are. An example given was CA targeting and flooding Miami Haitians with news of the Clinton Foundation ripping of Haitians after their disasters in the run-up to the 2016 election. We used to get beer and pizza at a joint owned by a Haitian expat. When Trump won we went in and told him how sad we were that the fool won. He said you don’t know my politics. I could never vote for that bitch after her charity stole from my impoverished people. Then I remembered reading about Cambridge Analytica, Haitians, and the Clinton Foundation – and thought holy fuck, it is real.
Roger Moore
@Formerly disgruntled in Oregon:
Just to pick a nit, but that’s actually half a trillion dollars in value, not half a billion. That said, by any reasonable measure, the company is still massively overvalued, and I don’t think any CEO, no matter how brilliant, could have maintained that overvalued share price indefinitely.
Matt McIrvin
@Ruckus: The closest thing to that situation I’ve seen up close was the 1990 Massachusetts governor’s race. While the Republican candidate, Bill Weld, had several awful Republican tendencies, he was culturally way to the left of the theatrically bigoted and obnoxious Democratic candidate, John Silber, who kept going out of his way to bash immigrants, gay people and feminists. His pronouncements were called “Silber shockers” in the media, who ate them up like Trump’s tweets.
I was not actually registered to vote in MA at the time, but had I been, I probably would have voted for Weld. But “Weld” vs., say, “abstain/vote third party” was actually a tough choice.
Massachusetts Democrats like Silber are a vanished breed in statewide office. But, lately, so are Republicans like Weld.
And, I should add, governor’s races are a different thing strategically from Congressional seats, where party control of the chamber is at issue and you largely care about how reliable a vote the member is.
kalakal
@schrodingers_cat: Louise Mensch is quite the case. She was a very successful author of Chick-Lit novels under her maiden name of Louise Bagshaw who became a Tory MP ( Cameron boosted her as a celeb candidate). She seems to have felt that she should have gotten a top job straight away rather than pay her dues & work up through the ranks which is the way British parties work. In 2012 she was on the committee on the News of the World phone hacking scandal and used it as a job audition for Murdoch and a year or so later quit to work for Uncle Rupe in New York. She’s Alex Jones batshit crazy, her only saving grace is she loathes Russia and Steve Bannon ( she thinks Putin had Andrew Breitbart murdered so Bannon could take over) . Amongst her predictions in 2017 was that Trump, Pence Paul Ryan would be arrested for being Russian agents & Orrin Hatch would become President. According to her other Russian agents are Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Theil, Benjamin Netanyahu and most of Mossad.
Ruckus
@EmbraceYourInnerCrone:
I’d bet that elon wanted to buy twitter for the prestige of what he thought he could make it into, him being so smart and all……
Of course he didn’t do his homework or understand producing a world wide website with millions of people all over the world commenting on it would be different than assembling a car, as if he actually understands that, he’s ELON! He’s top of the world, it doesn’t get any better than him – as long as you measure intelligence and competence by the billions.
Ruckus
@Omnes Omnibus:
@WaterGirl:
@Matt McIrvin:
It was a theoretical question, I’ve seen, a long time ago some local conservative/republican politicians who were better politicians as far as being human than some democrats. IOW there could be a time/place, as Matt pointed out, that voting for the better candidate despite party might be necessary. But given today’s conservative party or the far, far left, which isn’t overall much better than SFB and his ilk, voting for any conservative is about as positive as stabbing one’s self in the groin are with a very large, very sharp knife.
Downpuppy
Careful! Winslow & Kendzior may be catching on!
https://twitter.com/donwinslow/status/1596664709213999104
RSA
@Matt McIrvin: That’s exactly what I was remembering. What a disappointment it was.
Tim Ellis
@pika: number one immediately made me think of Ryan Knight:
https://twitter.com/ProudSocialist?t=UNTsTlwEzRrauJCPxJCrBw&s=09
I watched that arc happen in real time during the primary. His story matches every detail in the description here. He was part of what prompted me to write a piece about the need to stop being shitty to Democrats on social media (I was a Bernie staffer at the time, though that article was not part of my job).
I think he is more grifter than agent, but the results can be very similar.
Tim Ellis
@Omnes Omnibus: It is a good general, but I think the better question is: is it effective messaging?
I lean heavy progressive/socialist (though for my peer group I’m the centrist lol) but I will generally vote blue no matter who (exceptions include e.g. I didn’t vote for Cuomo, who was in no danger of losing but who I thought, correctly it turns out, was a terrible human). So I spend a fair bit of effort convincing my left-ier friends to vote blue, too. And that phrase really sets them off, because it reads as “you’ll take what we give you and you’ll like it”. I find way more success by focusing on A) Dem successes (IRA, ending Afghanistan, etc) and differences (trans rights, abortion), and B) the overt fascism on the other side. With a bonus assist by pointing out that voting is, like, five minutes and requires no obligation to love the person.
So yes, vote blue no matter who, but know your audience when you say it that way because it immediately gets the hackles up on otherwise persuadable voters.
WaterGirl
@Tim Ellis: It sounds like maybe you hang with the “you’re not the boss of me!” crowd?
Tim Ellis
@WaterGirl: Well, less than I used to – I went hard for Biden in 2020 (for reasons that are obvious to everyone on this blog) and lost a few buddies lol. But yeah I tend towards the further left segments; there is definitely a strand of “not the boss of me” with some of them, but I think the bigger issue is that there’s also just a lack of trust, partly due to interference (e.g. Russian ops) and partly due to generational differences as they tend younger, but also partly due to what I see as legitimate grievances (e.g. the voting restrictions in the 2016 primary in New York were like cartoon villain bad).
I view a big part of my role now as helping people see the reality, see the need for a unified Democratic party. and cut through the propaganda stuff by highlighting the ways Biden is delivering for progressive/socialist values (which he really is!) to help them stay plugged in. Doesn’t always work, but I think it’s worth doing and it does work sometimes!