Not paying bills is not a "cost-cutting" strategy. The costs have been incurred, they exist. It's a "theft through litigation" strategy, and the people who use it are either bankrupts or crooks.
— David Frum (@davidfrum) December 14, 2022
The Apartheid Princeling Bitchboy has the emotional maturity of a spoilt twelve-year-old. Back last April, he made what his cronies assured him was a very kewl joke about buying Twitter, but then the mean lawyers insisted that saying Can’t you people take a joke? didn’t void his signed contract with Twitter’s board. It wasn’t convenient to find the actual funds for the purchase, once he was forced into it, so he allowed a bunch of acquaintances (the Saudis, the Chinese government, et al) to loan him ready cash. Now (it can be presumed) they’re being inexplicably demanding about ‘value for money’, even though he’s explained he’ll be good for it later, when he gets his allowance. Meanwhile, all the Poors who hang around outside his gilded estate are being VERY MEAN AND RUDE.
All he can do, to salve his self-respect, is resist giving his ‘enemies’ what they want. WE CAN’T MAKE HIM. He can do what he likes with his money…
Axios, “Elon Musk’s Twitter isn’t paying its bills”:
Twitter has stopped paying the rent on some of its office leases and hasn’t paid numerous other vendors since Elon Musk acquired the company in late October, Axios has learned from multiple sources.
Why it matters: One of the world’s richest men isn’t honoring financial obligations made to those with far fewer resources.
What to know: Twitter had offices all over the world before Musk acquired it, and many of them remain in use. But it leases the space, rather than owns it.
Since Musk took over, the monthly bills haven’t been getting paid…
One major issue seems to be that many of the landlords’ contacts at Twitter have either been fired or quit, leaving behind junior staffers who are trying to catch up.
But the delinquency is so widespread that some believe it’s de facto policy under Musk, as suggested in a New York Times report about how the company’s new owner is seeking to cut costs…
*His* company!
“The Twitter nightmare continues as Musk uses Tesla as his own ATM machine to keep funding the red ink at Twitter which gets worse by the day as more advertisers flee the platform with controversy increasingly driven by Musk.” https://t.co/O3HCXntO7J
— Nick Riccardi (@NickRiccardi) December 15, 2022
shitpost rich, cash poor
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) December 15, 2022
*His* charity!
So, about that $5.7 billion in Tesla stock that Elon Musk gave to charity last year… it went to his own charity, Bloomberg reports: https://t.co/LBxq5CbTl1
— Laura J. Nelson 🦅 (@laura_nelson) December 12, 2022
I guess the tweets and unbannings themselves are "on the cheap" but this whole venture has been extremely expensive for Musk and is not cost-effective as a way to influence US-China policy https://t.co/OTMqsxoTYa pic.twitter.com/pH5pq5KsvD
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) December 12, 2022
The Chinese government, now: They understand how an Apartheid Princeling should be treated. None of this ‘woke mind virus’ b*llshit from them — the elites do as they will, and the workers suffer as they must. What are the Americans gonna do in retaliation, drop a bomb?…
… Tesla’s largest factory is located in China, and his car business requires cooperation from that country’s government. The Chinese Communist Party is notoriously rigid about policing the speech habits of any businesses it permits to operate.
Musk, accordingly, has reliably toed the Communist Party line. He has proposed that China be handed control of Taiwan. He has praised the Communist regime as superior to American democracy: “China rocks in my opinion. The energy in China is great. People there — there’s, like, a lot of smart, hardworking people. And they’re really — they’re not entitled; they’re not complacent. Whereas I see in the United States increasingly much more complacency and entitlement, especially in places like the Bay Area and L.A. and New York.” Before his Twitter feed became a Tucker Carlson knockoff, it was a conduit for Chinese Communist Party propaganda…
Musk’s need to stay in Beijing’s good graces puts him in a tricky spot. Both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have recently unified around a nationalist economic response to China, enacting a combination of subsidies and controls to onshore strategically important production and push back on China’s global influence. “Musk faces the possibility that eventually Washington could erect hurdles that will obstruct his China plans,” noted Michael Schuman.
As Matthew Yglesias has pointed out, Musk’s ownership of Twitter poses an especially stark national security risk. China has a track record of pressuring firms it deals with to censor criticism of its government. Musk’s evident subservience to — or, at least, refusal to contradict — the Chinese Communist Party line raises the obvious risk that he would give China leverage over Twitter’s content-moderation regime.
Conservatives don’t seem to care about any of this as long as Musk is owning the libs. If you wish to credit Musk with strategic forethought, this is exactly the point: He is buying right-wing support on the cheap with some shitposting and unbanning a handful of right-wing trolls, thus neutralizing a potentially huge threat to his much larger automobile business.
If you think he’s just a red-pilled billionaire, he has wandered conveniently into a stance that makes no sense. He believes Fauci caused the pandemic by funding researchers who share none of his guilt. He thinks the “woke mind virus” might destroy civilization but that Chinese communism is an admirable model. Musk is at worst a cynical tool of authoritarianism and at best an idiot savant. Either way, the conservative celebration of his newfound persona — and total refusal to question his curious blind spot for the CCP — reveals a complete lack of principle.
the whole "the woke mind virus must be stopped to save civilization" basically feels to me like cope about having made such a bad financial investment… convincing himself he's saving the world
— Josh Barro (@jbarro) December 12, 2022
“Musk is at worst a cynical tool of authoritarianism and at best an idiot savant.” Why not both?
I think the thing you have to understand about twitter is there is an entire heavily monetized ecosystem that has kept itself fueled up for years on the self-fulfilling prophesy that they’re perpetually victimized by every conceivable entity in the world, and that’s elon’s market
— kilgore trout, death to putiner (@KT_So_It_Goes) December 9, 2022
and so once he barbecued all his normal revenue opportunities by barging through the wall like the koolaid man smeared in cat turds and covered in giant rubber dildos, he needs SOMETHING to go his way. so here you go folks, you thought twitter victimized you? GUESS WHAT
all the other revenue streams can be throttled by external forces acting on them, like, for example, people being weirded out by weird ass shit and thereby unappealing to advertisers. but this new thing he’s got cooked up is entirely self-contained
no one on the outside can touch it. that market is fully insulated from stuff like “being weirded out” because it is itself the weirdest internet poisoned freak show on earth
so what if it doesn’t actually make a tenth as much money as, say, pharma ads. it makes him feel good, and he got so woodchippered by a month of being perpetual main character that he needs user cat turd 2 to give him a sponge bath instead of the other way around
anyway, that’s why it doesn’t matter if there’s no there there. it’s not about a “thing”. it’s about elon making his fee fees feel better about things by packaging up right wing freak twitter’s opinions and selling them back to themselves
BR
For folks who have moved over to mastodon, a recommendation: click the links of news stories — all of them — you see posted on mastodon, especially from the bigger outlets. They are surely paying attention to where they are getting clicks from, and the only way they will abandon twitter is if they see they’re getting interest from mastodon users.
piratedan
well…. with Musk banning a good 70% of his journo content creators, AL is gonna have to start culling three different platforms for news now… gonna have to lobby Cole for a raise for you AL… ;-)
LeftCoastYankee
Technology doesn’t die in the human sense of sudden endings, it’s more an endless withering as it is pushed further back in the closet (i.e. some undead server somewhere).
Twitter ate it’s last meal and has begun the long withering.
On the other hand, car companies can burn quickly and totally, just like Tesla’s cars!
Origuy
NATO soldiers sing Carol of the Bells, aka Щедрик
guachi
On Twitter mobile, I stopped seeing ads a few weeks ago. No ad blocker, but I did block advertisers I did see. Then… poof! No more ads.
Amir Khalid
I’m not so sure myself that Elon is an idiot savant. All I see is the kind of petulant little brat who does things like this.
Geminid
@Amir Khalid:
Ayn Rand: “Who is John Galt?”
Elon Musk: “Me! Me!”
Tony Jay
@Amir Khalid:
He should have just herded those journalist accounts into a specifically constructed part of Twitter (maybe calling it the Absolute Free Speech Zone) where their tweets would be pre-moderated while legions of trolls could earn special Red Ticks by bombarding them with insults and death-threats.
MSM journamalists love that kind of thing. They’d probably have paid for the privilege.
hilts
@Amir Khalid:
How about just a plain idiot?
Chetan Murthy
@Amir Khalid: “idiot savant” who couldn’t manage to complete a degree, and for sure not in physics or some STEM subject, but instead got his investors to beg Wharton for a degree for him so he didn’t get deported. No, he’s no idiot savant. Just a whiny needy spoiled manchild.
HumboldtBlue
Think of poor, DougJ.
What is Twitter without a headline?
Death.
(if that’s a poem or some shit, I want credit)
Frankensteinbeck
I mean… yes? That’s how it works. It’s why they use the term. Once you start down that road, your whole world view rearranges in a way that makes no sense to other people.
Internet trolls like Musk fall into it easily, because it strokes their ego for being mean little shits. As Twitter crashes and burns from mismanagement, it’s the only explanation that fits the facts. Even some scheme to deliberately break Twitter would involve less public humiliation and destruction of his wealth. Narcissist Musk got high on owning the libs who he resents for criticizing him. It’s making him increasingly crazy and stupid, like we see in public figures all the time.
Yes, he chose the red pill. That’s exactly what happened.
Layer8Problem
A pleasure to see everyone here on this insomnia-laden morning, including our far-flung correspondents Amir Khalid and Tony Jay. Predictably there’s been a spike in new Mastodon users.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Frankensteinbeck: And note that the creators of the proverbial “red pill”, the Wachowskis, specifically call out the alt-right’s characterization of the “red pill” as
fundamentally flaweddead wrong.It’s a symbol chosen by the Wachowskis because of its similarity to hormone treatments for trans people, and it’s supposed to symbolize a new-found ability to see yourself and the world around you as you and it actually are. Which is the exact opposite of what the right-wing “red-pillers” are doing.
The Thin Black Duke
If there’s one thing that we should be grateful for is how Musk has single-handedly destroyed the myth of zillionaires being better than the rest of humanity. The Moneyed Megalomanic of South Africa has proven to be no different than the asshole boss at Mickey D’s giving his crew a hard time. Musk imagines himself as Gordon Gekko, when he’s really Patrick Bateman.
prostratedragon
A December 16 essential: music of Beethoven
opiejeanne
@prostratedragon: Happy birthday, Ludwig
Mai Naem mobile
@Chetan Murthy: i thought he got the degree from the liberal arts college part of Penn not Wharton? I know it’s the same school but Wharton has more cachet than just Penn. BTW TFG did the same thing. The similarities between the two are hard not to miss. TFG also didn’t like paying his bills and could get away with it because he owed his bankers so much money he had leverage.
lowtechcyclist
With rare exceptions (e.g. guns), issues only have meaning to them in terms of their lib-owning potential.
Do they care about Chinese Communism? No, not really. Unless some issue related to the People’s Republic of China gives them an opening to ‘own the libs.’ At which time they’ll take whatever stance seems to give them the best opportunity to do that.
Ascap_scab
I hope one of the front pagers will put up a ‘Where are you going after Twitter implodes?’ post.
Since I’m now retired, I can go under my real name. Post.news/MattAWillett
HeartlandLiberal
@guachi: I still read Twitter on my cell phone app, and I am deluged with sports betting ads, and now an explosion of obvious low quality products, and probable scam ads. I have not seen an ad for a major product or advertiser in some time.
I keep posting insults to @elonmusk, in hopes he will put me out of my Twitter misery, and ban my account, which I will forever wear as a badge of honor.
Betty Cracker
According to numerous reports on Mastodon, Twitter suspended a bunch of journo accounts last night, including Aaron Rupar and folks who write for WaPo, NYT, NBC, etc., allegedly for doxing Musk by linking to the @ElonJet guy (who posts publicly available info on the location of Musk’s private jet), who was also suspended.
That seems like a really stupid business decision because one of the main things that allowed Twitter to punch above its weight as a social media platform is the near-universal participation of journalists. But I suppose it’s no dumber than rebranding a car company that sells high-end EVs to environmentally conscious liberals in such a way as to transform said vehicles into rolling $100K MAGA hats.
mrmoshpotato
What’s the etiquette here – do we point and then laugh, or laugh and then point at this apartheid sack of shit?
Chetan Murthy
@Mai Naem mobile: Here’s where I saw this: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/17/2136976/-Blockbuster-CapitolHunters-claim-with-evidence-that-Musk-has-no-STEM-degree-of-any-kind?utm_campaign=recent
Also …. well, many people might differ as to whether an undergrad degree from Wharton confers any prestige *grin*.
Mai Naem mobile
@Betty Cracker: have you seen this? https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/southeast/2022/12/14/699370.htm
I hope these insurance companies pay some massive fines and the execs do some time.
Betty Cracker
@Mai Naem mobile: Nope, that’s news to me. What a scam.
Another Scott
That struck me as well, but at worst he’s actually worse. Popehat at post.news said:
Melno is a narcissistic troll. Yes, he wants to help China. Yes, he wants to help VVP. But more than that he wants attention and praise. He wants to break things and wants control of what remains. He has agency and is much more than an inanimate “tool”.
Too much of the press that covers the MotUs seems to have trouble recognizing the bigger picture – that money doesn’t make these guys smart, or hapless, or misguided, or whatever. It reveals who they really are when the barriers are removed.
Grr…,
Scott.
lowtechcyclist
You know how one of Twitter’s big pulls is that it’s where a lot of reporters and pundits hang out?
Kiss that goodbye: Elmo’s suspended a bunch of them just in the past day.
Aaron Rupar, Keith Olbermann, the WaPo’s Drew Harwell, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, Voice of America’s Steve Herman, Mashable’s Matt Binder, NYT’s Ryan Mac (?), and I’m sure I’ve missed a few.
I’m sure most of the rest are looking for the exits.
Only thing I’m doing over there anymore is reading Josh Marshall’s tweets.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Another Scott: That is such a good point
Betty
@Ascap_scab: I will look for you on Post. So far it seems much more cumbersome than Twitter, but I will keep trying to find my people. It’s infuriating that that idiot had to come in and wreck the place.
New Deal democrat
@Betty Cracker: This highlights that all of us can do our own little part to help Twitter die.
Look to see if the accounts you follow have started posting or at least cross-posting on Mastodon or Post. About half of those I typically read have done so. As a result, each day I read less and less at Twitter.
Ironically, the journalists seemed among the most reluctant to switch. By forcing them out, he is helping Mastodon attain critical mass. Now if the political partisans would do so as well, Twitter can well and truly enter its death spiral.
it’s exactly like voting – voting with your feet. You may think that your one choice means nothing, but cumulatively such votes are decisive.
New Deal democrat
@lowtechcyclist: Josh Marshall is also on Mastodon. Read him there.
YY_Sima Qian
Most of these tech CEO are not allies of the Liberal-Left. Mark Zuckerberg was buttering up Xi Jinping a few years ago when he thought there was still a chance China might allow FB to operate there again. Sundar Pinchai was also sounding conciliatory toward the Chinese government while he had a Google team try to developed a censored version of the search engine for the market. Now they testify to Congress shouting the dangers of Chinese platforms, to kill the competition (TikTok). FB especially has not been shy about hiring GOP operatives to high level positions.
The US’ problem is not really the individual techbro, but the broader politics. There is no momentum to address data privacy issues w/ any of the social media platforms, banning TikTok will not solve those issues, & vectors for Russian election interference were US social media platforms themselves. The rest of the world is starting to move, from the EU, to India, South Korea, even China (which of course, does not include privacy from the CCP regime if you are deemed a threat). The US tech giants are now the new monopolistic leviathans that need to be cut down to size & tightly regulated. Instead, the only bipartisan consensus is to ban Chinese companies, which is rather beside the point.
The danger of the new ownerships of Twitter is not in Elon Musk’s tweets, they are not that influential. The danger is the collapse of content moderation & labeling policies that will enable bad actors of all stripes to spread misinformation, whether due to neglect or design.
Betty Cracker
@New Deal democrat: I’ve only been at Mastodon for a week or so, but every time I visit the site, I’m seeing more familiar accounts, including some journos I followed on Twitter and other mutuals. TBH, I wish Musk would spiral into oblivion instead of turning the platform I valued into Gab. I understand why people are reluctant to give up on Twitter, especially if they have tons of followers. That community will splinter, even if a lot of folks land on Mastodon, which seems to be happening. But it’s sad that this is all occurring due to the whims of one egocentric fool, but that fact does bolster the case for Mastodon’s decentralized approach.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Betty: I’m on both Post and Mastodon. Post seems simple. With Mastodon, I can’t even understand the explanations people write for me. Frankly, I don’t think I’ll ever get back the reach I had for both reading and posting on twitter. I think I’m too old to start over
Kay
Antiwokeness, as a concept, never made any sense. There were always going to be decisions made about who got access to platforms and what was permitted on those platforms- there has to be. Twitter’s moderation team didn’t subtract value for users- it added value. Musk can’t impliment this half baked, dumb ass philosophy because no one could- it doesn’t make sense.
Kay
Bari Weiss is right now, today, making editorial decisions about who gets hired for her new media company and who gets published. She’s a moderator, an intermediary, picking and choosing, and in the next MONTH that will become clear because it has to become clear- their dumb, lazy “philosophy” of “no rules, anyone can say anything” doesn’t work, at all, in real life.
Bari Weiss and Glenn Greenwald wern’t mad that there were rules. They were mad that they were no longer making all the rules.
Kay
Can I just say it is AMAZING how conservatives ruin everything? Everything they buy or somehow get control of just goes to shit; becomes cheaper, meaner, uglier, has less value. Name one fucking thing these people improved- the BEST case scenario with them is they do nothing – people manage to fight them and maintain the status quo.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: I feel like I have a better understanding of Greenwald’s (and Sullivan’s, etc.) transformation into a hard-right crank since he was an early blogger, so I’ve been aware of him longer. I don’t know anything about Weiss. Maybe someday I’ll be curious enough to look into her story, but not this day! ;-)
Kay
It’s just so perfect you couldn’t make it up- the “marketplace of ideas” marketeers literally ban competition.
Dorothy A. Winsor
The week, a guy I like a lot tried to tell me that Musk was fixing twitter because according to Bari Weiss, twitter was censoring posts. I’m afraid I rudely shouted, “I don’t care!” At that point, the guy running the meeting got hold of it and we settled down to business. It was depressing.
Gin & Tonic
@Layer8Problem: When I see the phrase far-flung, I can’t help thinking of the far-flung Isles of Langerhans.
MattF
@Dorothy A. Winsor: It’s taken a series of small steps for me to get entertained on Mastodon. Find a server (Mathstodon.xyz). Figure out how to follow someone ( more complicated because decentralized). Figure out how to read a thread (bad UX). Figure out how to post. Follow a bunch of interesting accounts (in progress).
Dorothy A. Winsor
@MattF: There’s a lot of “figuring out” required in there. I think that’s too high a barrier for a lot of people which means it’s going to have trouble attracting masses of users. OTOH, what do I know? A ton of people figure out how to make an entertaining video and post it on TikTok, though I guess most people just watch.
Frankensteinbeck
@Kay:
“Nothing is allowed to make white conservative bigotry look bad.” makes sense to me. It’s an asshole attitude that creates practical as well as moral disasters, but it’s not nonsense.
Even the reasoning to get there makes sense. They’re good, so criticizing them is bad. They are the definition of normal, so any representation of others is forcing corruption into the public square. Because they are normal, catering to their bigotry will be overwhelmingly popular and successful. It’s wrong in every way, but not nonsense.
Kay
The absolute best thing anyone could do to Musk is voluntarily abandon Twitter. Make a market failure. Liberals absolutely have the power to make Twitter fail – it sucks if all the liberals go- and there isn’t a thing Elon Musk or his fan club can do about it.
Anne Laurie
Basically, she’s done a speed-run on the Greenwald/Taibbi model. Went from being a hardcore ‘Israel for the Jews, and ONLY the Jews’ pest at her prestigious prep school, to a cushy NYTimes op-ed sinecure complaining about the horrors of wokeness. Quit *that* gig in a public huff, because the vile rude NYT subscribers wouldn’t stop criticizing her — but not until she’d gotten a six- or seven-figure ‘signing bonus’ from SubStack to serve as a flagship contributor there. Then she started the whole ‘University of Texas at Austin’ grift, for independent conservative minds; not gonna dig up the links right now, but I did mock them in at least a couple posts here.
Now, as I understand it, she’s starting an online ‘Free Press’ (blog), sponsored by the Semafor moneybags. Barring an improvement in the elite media average IQ, you’ll have many, many chances to hear from her in the future.
Another thing she has in common with Greenwald: she’s a lesbian, and always available to serve as the Some of my best friends… figurehead for hardcore conservatives who’d just as happily firebomb her apartment if they thought they could get away with it.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: A mass exodus would also perhaps make local, state and federal accounts find another platform or at least start posting on alternative platforms too. Not sure how likely that is. It sounds like Musk plans to implement a tiered system for paying vs. free accounts, so maybe that will hasten the end of Twitter as a quasi-public utility.
Betty Cracker
@Anne Laurie: Thank you — that explains everything! I do vaguely recall her whiny NYT resignation letter, and now that you mention it, I remember discussions here about the university grift.
Ken
@Betty Cracker: @lowtechcyclist: It will be interesting to see what the non-banned journalists do. As I recall*, their behavior has been a little inconsistent in the similar case where the White House has de-credentialed a journalist. I guess in the end they will each weigh their principles against the exposure and audience their twitter platform provides.
* My recollection being that the WH press corps howled as one when the Obama administration pulled the credentials of a journalist, but there was just the sound of crickets when the Trump admin did the same. I suspect that was because they feared TFG would go on to ban anyone who protested the decision; Musk is obviously in the same category, except it’s absolutely clear he will ban anyone who offends him.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Ken: At the moment, multiple non-banned journalists are tweeting about the ban. Doug J is also pitchbotting it. We should welcome him home to BJ when he gets booted off
Paul in KY
@Amir Khalid: I think he looks at all the shit TFG has gotten away with & is like: Why can’t I get away with that too?
Anyway
@Anne Laurie:ho
Amazing how Right Wing grifters never run out of sugar daddies. Bari Weiss has made out like a bandit on the right wing gravy train — and the content she puts out isn’t anything special.
Kay
@Betty Cracker:
I don’t use it for local news- our local agencies are resistant to change so they still all use Facebook :)
As I have said a million times though, I liked Twitter and I see its value for people in repressive regimes/war zones. I’m sorry he ruined it.
When my daughter was little one of my trashy male relatives came over uninvited and pitched a fit on Christmas. He’s horrible so no surprise, but she was accustomed to pleasant holidays without the worst family elements so she was an outraged six year old. She sputtered out to him “you..are..a RUINER”
Right wingers are ruiners.
Paul in KY
@Anne Laurie: Seems like a typical Likud-loving wealthy person.
Ken
Actually it gets a lot easier once you understand that Mastodon servers are homeomorphic endofunctors mapping submanifolds of a Hilbert space.
Shamelessly stolen from Bruce Lawson; the original was “git is a lot easier once you understand that branches are yada yada“. He was playing on how git (a version control system) is treated by its users. There’s a relatively small group of users who get really intensely into the theory of it and understanding what it does under the covers. But the vast majority (in my experience, and including myself) just learn a few dozen commands that let them use it to do their work.
Maybe you can treat Mastodon the same way. The majority of users surely just need to know “I type in this box, and click the Post button when it’s ready.” Then there will be some really intense people who discuss distributed federations and cross-server authentication and eventually-consistent replicated databases.
Betty Cracker
@Kay: LOL! I’ve got ruiners in my family too, so I can relate. All right-wingers too!
Layer8Problem
@Gin & Tonic: I shall refrain from priseing off the lid of my limited supply of Firesign Theatre references and reply that that puts me in mind of my favorite Harlan Ellison title, “Adrift Just Off the Islets of Langerhans: Latitude 38° 54′ N, Longitude 77° 00′ 13″ W”.
pajaro
@Betty Cracker:
Just a couple of additions on Bari Weiss. She attracted the interest of the NY Times while she was a student at Columbia. While there, she led a charge to keep a Prof. from getting tenure, because she thought he was too anti-Israel. She managed almost immediately to package herself as a free speech warrior against cancel culture, which really does redefine chutzpah. Her leave-taking at the Times occurred in part because of pushback from fellow newsroom colleagues. You may remember a Tom Cotton editorial during the BLM protests where he argued argued for bringing in active duty military to put the demonstrations down. There was a newsroom meeting criticizing the decision to run the oped, and Bari tweeted about how censorious her colleagues were–the colleagues then reported that she was lying about what was going on, which she found deeply unfair. She resigned, and she added that resignation to a better paying gig as another example of her victimization by cancel culture. In the last several years she has been able to burnish her brand by her endless appearances on Bill Maher’s show, where they commiserate to their nationally televised audience about how they are being cancelled.
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Ken: Sigh. I probably should force myself to try at least once a day. Thanks
Another Scott
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Thanks. I wish I could say it was my invention – It’s riffing on Obama.
Michelle.
;-)
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@Anne Laurie:
Sorry, I gotta fix the typo!
(My J went to UT Austin for grad school. Weiss’s grift is very different.)
Thanks for all you do.
Cheers,
Scott.
Another Scott
@Betty Cracker: Made me look.
Defense, Energy, and Transportation don’t have Mastodon or Post.news accounts listed yet. I do see that Transportation is on Medium, which surprised me a little but
BuddahjudgeButtigieg is always a little farther out front than many.I figure it’s coming, but the government moves slowly.
Cheers,
Scott.
New Deal democrat
@Dorothy A. Winsor: DougJ a/k/a Pitchbot now has it in his Twitter intro that he will be migrating to another platform after the holidays.
As a result of which, I suspect it will be involuntarily sooner than that!
Kirk Spencer
fwiw I figure “easy use” tools for Mastodon are on the way. Because I remember Fidonet back in the day (among so many others) and how it eventually got easier to crosspost because even though it was created and spread and set up by computer geeks it was used by other geeks.
Somebody with the skill to say “Hey I can fix that” is listening to someone like @Dorothy A. Winsor . It’s just a matter of how long it takes for their fix to spread to the rest of us.
different-church-lady
@Kay:
Actually they were mad that the rules were going against their friends instead of their enemies.
different-church-lady
@Betty Cracker:
MAGA: “Electric vehicles are for dumb hippies, I’ll never drive one.”
TESLA: “Here’s a super expensive EV made by a fascist wannabe.”
MAGA: “SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY!!!!”
different-church-lady
@Layer8Problem: They make a lid for those things?
lowtechcyclist
@Gin & Tonic:
“And we took to them! And they took to us! And what do you think they took?”
Layer8Problem
@different-church-lady: Yes, which I had left in the car, but I lost the key, while I was singing . . . I’ll come in again.
Librarian
I’m on Mastodon, and I had almost no trouble with it. I looked at the various instances and decided that I didn’t want to be on a big one, so I found a small one that fit my interests. I’ve found that whatever instance one is on, one can post and follow and be followed just like twitter. I have interacted with more people than I ever did on twitter.
BenCisco 🇺🇸🎖️🖥️♦️
@Betty Cracker: I get it – I lost (access to) a couple of thousand. Locked the account so it wouldn’t get spoofed. Sometimes you gotta make a call. Much like you, I’ve seen mutuals pop up (including you – great to see you there!) – hope more turn up.
Daoud bin Daoud
@pajaro: “I’m being canceled!” screams the woman on TV
Origuy
I tried to embed a post from Mastodon, but no luck . Copying by hand.
https://www.semafor.com/article/12/16/2022/newsrooms-are-scrambling-to-counter-elon-musks-bans
H-Bob
@The Thin Black Duke: “how Musk has single-handedly destroyed the myth of zillionaires being better than the rest of humanity” … Sorry, it’s not even a flesh wound and, unfortunately, that myth will soon be resurrected.
Ruckus
@Paul in KY:
Is it possible he looked at what SFB has gotten away with and said to himself “I can get away with more! All I have to do is buy twitter and I can be a bigger asshole that SFB.” Sure it’s cost him a bundle but even if his overall valuation dropped in half he’d still be worth more than SFB. What I’m saying is – is it possible that he’s just trying to out do SFB, especially given that SFB has no where near the valuation that em does?
This is rich asshole bagel hockey.