Don’t leave Twitter bc you think you’re creating value for Musk. Stay at Twitter bc you’re here for free while he loses billions. Maybe his actions will end it for all of us. But it would be great if us people who do what makes Twitter great outlast him & have the final word
— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) December 14, 2022
Aaron Rupar, and at least some of his fellow banned journalists, are back on Twitter. The news organizations they work for tweeted right through yesterday’s controversy… because, at this particular moment, Twitter is not replaceable for them. And, apparently, Twitter can’t do without them!
Freedom of speech according to Elon… pic.twitter.com/WhzlU2PxTe
— $8 buck Chuck♻️💙❤️🩹☮️🥏 (@TheRealCarlozV) December 17, 2022
Dave Roth, at Defector, always excellent:
… Online reactionary politics is a fan community before it is anything else; as with Donald Trump, the way to tell that Musk is an active participant is how obviously starstruck he is by the corny dingbats that make up its firmament. Where Trump lived for the approval of Fox News’s glitching poreless on-air goblins, Musk has been queasily quick with an “exactly” in the mentions of various reactionary influencers: the anti-trans activist that solicits bomb threats to children’s hospitals, or the one fellow from the Koch-backed Turning Point USA organization whose face seems to be shrinking, or Cat Turd 2. If it is embarrassing to know who these people are—and it is extremely embarrassing to know who those people are—it is more embarrassing still to have mistaken these relentlessly self-serving grifters for friends.
What all of that decidedly is not, however, is mysterious. Musk’s politics, however heterodox he himself might secretly be, appear very much to be those of an extremely wealthy 51-year-old man with an entirely commonplace conservative media diet. There are only so many interesting ways and even fewer interesting reasons to adopt these politics; the most common one, which again is the one that Musk seems to have chosen, is to simply let the combined inertia of your circumstances and incuriosity back you into them. That he is now someplace so strange—winking at QAnon shit, already—seems mostly to reflect how conservative politics have moved in that direction; Musk, typically, seems not to have given any of it much thought. The extremities of his wealth and strange upbringing, and his personal peculiarities and the limits of his capacities for empathy or insight all probably played some role, but this is true of every other butthead that ever aged into reactionary politics. In time, these people realize what they actually believed all along and embrace what has always mattered most to them. In this sense, too, Musk’s little blurts of umbrage and upset are just like those of all the other reactionary pilgrims on their own lonely journeys. Separately but in unison, they slough off everything and everyone that is not them, either out of principle or pique or just because they find themselves losing interest; instead of talking to the people they used to talk to, they just shout at everyone. Twitter has always been a good place for that.
The novelty, if there is any, is that Musk is a little young for this. But Generation X, which came of age in a moment of political stagnation and cynicism and drift—and, for Musk and his cohort, came into mind-bending wealth through hitting it big on some technologies that have not on balance changed humanity for the better—has been spiking to the right for reasons that seem to go beyond the normal trend in that direction as people age. Forged amid a dead consensus of center-right managed decline, they did not really have much chance to participate in public life at a level above the affective, or theatrical. There was still politics—there is always politics—but it unfolded along a meaningless Coke/Pepsi binary.
Socialism and barbarism are now both back on the menu, and each on the ascent. But for members of a generation who saw their politics as inseparable from themselves without ever thinking nearly as hard about the former as they did about the latter, this is all still a matter of performance. Such politics are easy to change because they were never really anchored to any actual system of belief. An obliterating narcissism and sawed-off selfishness is latent in American culture like lead in contaminated water; in the absence of countervailing principles, it will naturally make its presence felt over time. If your politics is just about Opposing Authority, for instance, with no regard for or sense of the structural and material realities of actual power, then remaining true to those politics is just a matter of propping up new authority figures to rage against.
Any idiot can do that, and many idiots have. If you believe your anger is inherently righteous simply because it is yours, you might find some strange righteousnesses. The landlord is oppressed by some stranger’s preferred pronouns; the car dealership heir stands firm against the panhandler; the famous comedian is so dismayed by the mere existence of trans people that he cannot write a joke, and writes a sermon instead; the iconoclast-made-good takes up for a rich patron against critics he finds annoying; the billionaire narcissist smears his former employees and withholds their pay—because it is time someone stuck it to the elites…
…[I]t is all just right there, the wild philistinism and the bullying and the offhand cruelty, the compulsive self-aggrandizement and the giddy vengeful sadism toward everyone he believes he can get away with treating that way—all of it so oafishly performed that it could not possibly be mistaken for anything but what it is. There’s no principle to find here beyond spite and distaste; the speech is just noise cast out into the chaos by someone eager to mistake the echo for an answer. And then, even though the fact of it is so plain—and, again, so embarrassing and so implicating in its thudding overage—the mistake gets made anyway. “Maybe,” the tech podcaster Kara Swisher mused on Monday, Musk is a few steps ahead of us all, and at work “building a new kind of media company.” Leaving aside the characteristic mistake of assuming that “new” means “better,” I suppose it’s possible that what looks like flailing impulsivity and familiar old cruelties is in fact something finer and more reasoned. But it might just be what it looks like.
wtf, I was outside touching grass when some rich asshole bought it all up and turned it into a parking lot
— Yurok Around The Clock (@HellcatBruce) December 17, 2022
Twitter is modern mass communication infrastructure. It’s like someone bought a bridge and then laughs at you for not taking another way around while they pull down their pants and crap on it.
— Yurok Around The Clock (@HellcatBruce) December 17, 2022
I have another theory: this has always been who he was and he was lying before. https://t.co/oO9PaXGlXI
— Jean-Michel Connard (@torriangray) December 14, 2022
WaterGirl
oops. Just noticed that Anne Laurie had this scheduled for 10:15. Anyway, it’s up now!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
I saw this in my feed, and I chuckled it reminded me of Jack Donaghy explaining to Liz Lemon how Don Geiss held on to power at the Scheinhart International Wig Corporation (mysterious parent company of NBC) “The most reliable collection of sycophantic yes-men this side of an Al Franken book signing. He’s packed the board with golf cronies, unemployable relatives, his old army buddies, and his favorite hunting dogs”
schrodingers_cat
My take: Boer Husk has always been like this. Trump’s election made all these supposedly “centrist” folks reveal themselves.
SiubhanDuinne
¿¿ What happened to my comment ??
MagdaInBlack
” You know, in some parts of the world journalists get murdered…”
Fuck him and his authoritarian bs.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Mr Vampire-Squid-I-Was-Just-Kidding-About-The-Underage-Girls is now going full Q
different-church-lady
Maybe the journalism profession will have learned something from all of this, and in the future will think twice about the wisdom of outsourcing all the required effort into a single digital basket.
Heh, I crack myself up.
different-church-lady
@schrodingers_cat: He’s always been like this, but now he’s even more ‘like this’.
different-church-lady
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
Ah, so there’s still a chance smarter heads will prevail.
dmsilev
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: The thing is, even at $150 per share Tesla is still wildly overvalued by any sane “fundamentals” measure of reasonable stock price. Let it get down to $50 or so and then it will be vaguely sanely priced. That additional $100 per share is the “I still admire Elon Musk” cult premium.
MattF
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: Tesla’s Price/Earnings ratio has always been ridiculous— i.e., now at more than double Apple’s. The fact that it is cratering now rather than descending gently later is due to you-know-who’s stupidity.
Dorothy A. Winsor
Are we supposed to be grateful he’s not murdering Aaron Rupar or Charlie Pierce?
different-church-lady
Sorry folks, it’s his party now, and if you don’t like Nazi-flavored punch you can just fuck off.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Oh come on. Musk is perfectly happy with going out on the town in SF and is the CEO of a company that makes electric cars in one of the deepest Blue voting districts in the country. My bet is he just corporate conservative, with a small c, just like so many Silicon Valley CEOs, but the main thing that drives this guy is the desperate need to be seen as the smartest, coolest guy in the room and about the pandemic he realized the Left was never going to give Musk that because there are too many Liberal skeptics, but the hard right will, because they are nothing but cultist looking for a cult leader.
MattF
@Dorothy A. Winsor: Sub-contracting the job has turned out to be harder than expected.
rikyrah
Texas Maternal Mortality statistics
As horrible as you might guess😠😠
Of course, they delayed in releasing this until AFTER the election😠😠😠😠
https://vm.tiktok.com/ZTRV72jaQ/
BruceFromOhio
Fucking rich assholes that claim “free speech” while banning journalists? Hey, asshole, in some parts of the world rich fuckheads like you get pushed off a balcony.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: So when does it come out that Tabbi as guest at Epsiten’s island?
Starfish
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Musk moved the headquarters of Tesla from California to Texas. He started some place where he could get government tax subsidies. Then he moved to a place where he doesn’t have to pay taxes.
different-church-lady
OT: Why does every Smiths song sound like every other Smiths song, with the lone exception of “How Soon Is Now?”
Steeplejack
Basic, one-stop guide to getting started with Mastodon from the Post (gift article).
bjacques
That cynical “Coke/Pepsi” characterization of politics in the 1990s was always the prerogative of white people, mostly guys. The GOP was busy fighting culture wars against the arts, people of color, and LGBTQ+, who had plenty to lose then as now, kneecapping Democrats at the national level with the Contract On America and the K Street Project, while systematically gutting Roe v Wade and taking over governments at the state level.
I regret voting for Ralph Nader in 2000, over Gore picking Joe Fucking Lieberman, the only Democrat who’d tried to run Clinton out of office. As much as Bill was of his time, I’d vote for him again in a heartbeat over any GOP challenger even today.
Fuck Emo Skum.
And I used to read Exile.ru. It really was crass, from when Moscow was a bro playground.
schrodingers_cat
Apartheid Clyde (h/t Black Twitter) is a bigot. Color me surprised. Not.
Alison Rose
Now there’s a rotating tag for you.
NotMax
Sic transit gloria Muski.
//
schrodingers_cat
BTW I am so old that I remember the time when BJ FPers were fan bois of Taibbi and Greenwald. Like many leftie blogs I might add. Rolling Stone too, printed his innumerate nonsense about Goldman Sachs.
Gin & Tonic
@MagdaInBlack: Yeah, I’m sure journalists in Ukraine are yukking it up about that comment.
dmsilev
Some sad news from my neck of the woods: RIP P-22
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Starfish: and he is currently living in the Twitter building in SF. Does that sound like Musk is problem is he watches to much Fox News?
Go watch a video of Musk’s product presentations for Tesla. People cheering a new semi like it’s cure for cancer, it’s not normal. It’s cult. If Musk was a Boomer and this was the 80s the cops would be picking threw the bodies at the Musk compound in Northern California after the mass suicide, but it’s not, so he got into Green tech and promising Star Trek.
EdIT: Why do you think Musk banned the group doing privet jet flight tracking? Maybe because Musk didn’t want his latest group he is inducting into his cult of personality to realize that Musk spends most of his time with the Libertards?
ian
When I read this, Big Yellow Taxi by Counting Crows was playing on the radio.
I was a little freaked out.
Anoniminous
Elon has decided to stop paying rent and vendors. He is reportedly considering not paying severance packages. Twitter is in violation of a FTC Consent Decree. The company is in danger of losing its Ireland’s ‘One Stop Shop’ for its EU operations. Twitter is probably in violation of EU Labor Laws. Twitter moving to share user data with advertisers is a direct violation of EU Privacy Laws such as forcing users to reveal their location for targeted ads. Twitter is facing a number of discriminatory lawsuits in various African countries.
Users are fleeing the service.
Reports circulating former employees are coming together to form Spill, “a real-time conversational platform that puts culture first.” They expect that the platform will launch in about six to eight weeks” according to TechCrunch
Twitter’s ad revenue is plummeting.
When last heard Banks were offering Twitter at 60 cents to the dollar with no takers. Now they are taking a financial hit by writing off the debt so they won’t take a massive hit down the road.
Twitter is in the classic SiliconValley Death Spiral.
schrodingers_cat
@dmsilev: I thought you were near DC.
Gin & Tonic
@schrodingers_cat: I think there may have been a brief moment in the distant past when Glem had a smidgen of redeeming social value. Can’t say the same about Taibbi.
Omnes Omnibus
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: through, not threw ffs. Sorry, not sorry.
dmsilev
@schrodingers_cat: No, the closest I’ve come to that was grad school in Baltimore, which was (cough) years ago.
WaterGirl
@SiubhanDuinne: I don’t see anything in moderation, in trash, or in spam.
Alison Rose
Okay, how could I possibly NOT click on this one:
Guy’s Turtle of 24 Years is Flower Girl At His Wedding
So unexpectedly adorable and sweet. I just feel like a dude who loves a turtle that much has to be a good guy.
Ken
I really think Zuckerberg should send Musk a nice fruit basket for Christmas — or even a fruit-of-the-month subscription — because without Musk’s very public face-plants, the tech world’s main topic of conversation would be Meta’s failures.
NotMax
@schrodingers_cat
If being true to its roots, shouldn’t that be Apartheid Wade?
/pedant
Anoniminous
@Ken:
Oh, there’s plenty of pointing and laughing at Zuck’s silliness in the Tech press. Hard to resist when someone is pouring a billion a MONTH into a black hole commonly known as Meta.
WV Blondie
I read somewhere recently – and now I can’t remember where, I spend so much time reading – that a big part of our RWNJ problems (MTG, for example) spring from ennui basically. That life is sufficiently comfortable that it’s b..o..r..i..n..g for people with enough money and no intellect, and they think they’re worthy of much more attention.
Did anyone else read that (and remember where)?
M31
I almost shorted Tesla last week, but couldn’t stomach the risk, but damn I should have. Probably still a good bet though.
But seriously, what a piece of shit. Why not go buy a villa in Tuscany, sip wine, fill it to the brim with strippers, and have plenty left to solve world hunger.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Yes lol, The CEO of X-Box was opinion that Meta’s virtual world looks like conference room and I was talking to a gamer friend who tried it and she replied “more like a very badly done, conference room”
MattF
@WV Blondie: Also read it, also don’t remember where…
M31
@Anoniminous: lol Meta blowing a billion a month, and Elmo is like “hold my beer”
M31
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: lol I’m imagining opening a drawer and finding some name tags, a ream of printer paper, and some coffee stirrers and little sugar packets
BlueGuitarist
@Alison Rose:
thanks!
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@WV Blondie: that’s one of Tom Nichols’ hobby-horses, one of the main arguments of his book Our Own Worst Enemy (I haven’t read the book, but he says it frequently in his magazine pieces, too)
Certainly seems to fit Marge Greene.
MagdaInBlack
@WV Blondie: I read it too, and also cannot remember where. Something to do with all that “stuff” and still their lives have no “meaning and purpose.”
Surprise surprise. Poor babies.
kalakal
@Alison Rose: How very sweet. A man who definitely believes that a pet is for life, not just Christmas
trollhattan
Love the “TRE45ON” rotating tag.
vbreakwater
@MagdaInBlack: It was in The Atlantic. Behind a paywall, but . . .
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2023/01/marjorie-taylor-greene-congress-georgia-election-background/672229/
WaterGirl
@trollhattan: Me, too. Thank you!
WaterGirl
@MagdaInBlack: Idle hands are the devils something-or-other.
SiubhanDuinne
Digby calls him “Space Karen.”
LOL
MagdaInBlack
@vbreakwater: Thank you !
Geoduck
@ian: Just for the record, while Counting Crows covered it, Joni Mitchell originally wrote and performed Big Yellow Taxi.
And I wonder if Colors the turtle will indeed outlive her human dad, some of them live quite a long time.
ian
@SiubhanDuinne: I’ve never cared for the Karen meme. I know to many Karens who are thoughtful, caring, and overall the opposite of what we perceive as the stereotype of “Karen”.
I am curious as to where this meme originated from. Does anyone have any ideas?
@Geoduck: interesting. Off to Youtube to hear that version.
SiubhanDuinne
@Alison Rose:
What a delightful story!
MagdaInBlack
@WaterGirl: Not to mention all those idle brain cells. 😉
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@ian: known some fine Karens in my day too, but that meme of Elmo with a photo shopped “I need to speak to your manager” (as my sister calls it) hair do cracks me up
raven
@ian:
raven
@ian:
Alison Rose
@kalakal: @SiubhanDuinne: he’s such a cinnamon roll, and I’m glad he found a partner who was like “hell yes, I love this turtle too”
Jay
@ian:
A more pointed explanation, which involves race, is the expression originating among Black people to refer to unreasonable white women.[8][15] The term was popularized on Black Twitter as a meme used to describe white women who “tattle on black kids’ lemonade stands”[8] or who unleash the “violent history of white womanhood”.[6] Bitch magazine described Karen as a term that originated with Black women but was co-opted by white men.[16] In an article on high profile incidents in the U.S. of white women calling the police on Black people, The Guardian called 2020 “the year of Karen”.[5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_(slang)
Jay
stuck in moderation @64
Alison Rose
@ian: I’ve known a few Karens who were nice people, and because they are nice people, they realize that the colloquial sense of the word is not applied to them. I’ve also known plenty of Beckys who had no problem with Sir Mix-a-Lot. It’s a “if it’s not about you, don’t make it about you” kind of thing, I think.
Uncle Cosmo
What decade? And what were you studying at The Hop – which I’ve lived a (longish) walk from for (checks watch) 42 years? :^D
sab
@bjacques: Gore picking Joe Lieberman was difficult for many of us. I think Gore would have been a sub-optimal (less than mediocre) president, but we probably would of stopped 9/11, and he certainly wouldn’t have invaded Iraq. I don’t think he was competent. But it killed me to vote for Lieberman as VP. How could Gore not know that?
Hillary would have failed for other reasons not her fault, but it wouldn’t have been catastrophic like Trump. It would have been she didn’t accomplish as much as she planned.
dmsilev
@Uncle Cosmo: Late 90s, studying physics at the Homewood campus.
sab
@Alison Rose: Very sweet but did that turtle want to be in the wedding? It might have been scary.
My spouse thinks I am being a jerk. I worry about the turtle.
Steeplejack
@sab:
The story goes into the concerns for the turtle and the evidence that it was not freaked out at all.
sab
@Steeplejack: That is good. So turtle is very much a family member. So now I am thrilled. No // here. If turtle is safe I am on board.
Ruckus
Jean-Michel said – “I have another theory: this has always been who he was and he was lying before.”
His money, such as it is, most of it locked up in stocks that there aren’t enough people to buy so it’s all performance economy money, got him attention, and now those paying any are finding out that this is who and what he’s always been.
sab
We are having a family event here. Cleveland ( that is us) v Ravens ( our owner moved the team!!!!!)
So family gathering to watch this. I hate the Ravens ( I do live in Ohio) and I cheer for the Browns.So onward guys.
Suzanne
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Exactly right. Musk is a raving asshole, and that is more of a driver of his personality than his politics.
MattF
Gifted Petri on Musk.
Martin
Jesus, what dipshit thinks that?
The most robust of tech leaders has been Apple since 2007, and nobody is even competing for that spot right now. 1.5 billion people buying their hardware is pretty stable/robust. Competitors that can’t easily break through their various service/software ecosystem moats.
Tesla is a car company. They swapped out the drive train. Their build quality is hot garbage. They’re objectively bad at making cars.
different-church-lady
@Alison Rose:
seconded, if it hasn’t been already.
WaterGirl
@Jay: For roughly one zillion links. :-)
All better now.
WaterGirl
@MattF: Petri never disappoints, does she?
sab
Wilow will be disappointed to leave White House, but will not miss handlers worrying about upholstery.
I don’ t know the Bidens, but I do know cats.
Dangerman
@MagdaInBlack: “You know, in some parts of the world”, rich MoFo’s get dead in some curious ways. Tripping and falling out of high rise windows, drinking polonium tea, etc.; I don’t get Elon’s point. We aren’t the rest of the world, perhaps luckily for him.
James E Powell
@Alison Rose:
I’m definitely appropriating it.
zhena gogolia
@sab: You don’t think Gore was competent?
zhena gogolia
@sab: And Hillary would have “failed” if she didn’t accomplish everything she wanted? What president ever has? Even Lincoln?
zhena gogolia
@Dangerman: Yeah, he should ask Boris Berezovsky about that.
PAM Dirac
@dmsilev: Oh a youngster. I was at Homewood in chemistry 75-77 undergraduate and 79-84 graduate.
trollhattan
@Jay: My recollection is the Karen meme got launched into public view with the Central Park Birdwatcher Incident, ironically, by an Amy.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/central-park-karen-who-called-cops-on-black-bird-watcher-continues-to-play-victim_n_610addaee4b0e882ab663a03
different-church-lady
@ian:
Can’t link you up, but I’ve read Karen was a real woman. Her ex-husband hung out on (Reddit?) and would tell tales of how she behaved, and it blossomed out from there.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
The world would be a better place if Musk, Zuckerberg, Trump & kids, My Pillow guy, Mercers, Kochs, Murdochs, Stone, West, Jones, and associated ilk were all living like the Roses in Schitt’s Creek.
trollhattan
@dmsilev: Awww.
Incidentally, since the CA hunting ban the mountain lion population has recovered and we have plenty of the critters, in case anybody was worried.
LA can’t be easy, though, even if the coyotes seem to love the joint.
trollhattan
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: I vote get that billionaire Mars mission off the ground with all those bastards on board. Should be a fun two-ish years as they scrap over the freezedried caviar.
PJ
@sab:
Gore, sadly, made some poor decisions in that campaign. The first was running away from Bill Clinton’s legacy – Clinton was quite popular by the time he left the White House, and no one thought that Gore was going to be indulging in under the table treats from interns.
The second was picking Lieberman.
He also didn’t seem to have much interest in running for or being President – it was like it was just what he had been raised to do, so he was doing it.
James E Powell
@sab:
Maybe we don’t have time or energy for the debate, but I’m of the opposite mind on Al Gore as president. I think he would have been closer to a Joe Biden presidency than an Obama presidency. My basis is that he was a creature of Washington while Clinton & Obama were not. And it showed.
Gore was smart & knowledgeable about how Washington DC works & doesn’t work.
I despised Joe Lieberman, but I didn’t really care who the VP was. I certainly did not think it was a good reason to put a Republican in the White House. I’ve always wondered what the impact of a Jewish person on the ticket was, but never saw any research. My initial reaction was that it almost won Florida.
I don’t know why people say that Gore would have stopped or avoided 9/11, but a lot of people do.
Hillary Clinton would have struggled in the presidency because the political press, led by the FTFNYT, absolutely hates her. And a significant number of Democrats also like taking cheap shots at her. The fact that she lost rather than won in a landslide is evidence of how fucked up large portions of this nation are.
Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony
@trollhattan: That would be pretty entertaining at first. I expect it would take a pretty dark turn. Given the nature of that crowd, there would be at least one murder before they made it back to Earth.
MattF
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: More like a billionaire’s Donner Party.
ian
@James E Powell:
It is a hypothetical we will never know, but the Clinton Administration was fairly focused on terrorism towards the end of his term. Many members of Clinton’s NatSec team likely would have been in Gore’s as well. Meanwhile, the security people left memos like this for the Shrub; which his administration proceeded to ignore.
trollhattan
@Sister Machine Gun of Quiet Harmony: {Psst, there’s no return trip. Mum’s the word.}
Meanwhile, the mullahs keep shooting themselves in the holy dick.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Richard Clarke and others with their “hair on fire”, the 8/15 PDB memo, less of a personal fixation on Iraq, etc. All counterfactuals is bunk, but there’s an argument to be made.
I think the differences between the Clinton, Obama and Biden presidencies has less to do with the POTUS in question than with the Congress and electorate and national picture they faced. One of the reasons Obama picked Biden was to be that ambassador to Capitol Hill, and as I recall he couldn’t cut more ice than Obama with the likes of Blanche Lincoln, Evan Bayh, Mark Begich and the Dakota twins, Dorgan and Conrad. Clinton had Republicans like Jim Jeffords and William Cohen, and Democrats like Zell Miller (ETA: refreshed my memory and Miller was only in the Senate for the last six months of Clinton’s term, I’ll replace him with Ben Nighthorse-Campbell), John Breaux and the legendarily overrated legend, Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
trollhattan
@ian: IIRC Bush closed the Bin Laden desk and that fucking Bin Laden memo Condi and Bush ignored/mocked might, just might have led them to the flight schools and other hot trails.
We shall never know.
Also, even with 9/11 we sure as fuck do not invade Iraq. If we went into Afghanistan, it would not have been on the cheap and maybe we get Bin Laden at Torabora.
Again, we’ll never know. Thanks, Scalia.
Alison Rose
@sab: Trust me, I’m a big softie and that was my first thought. “Wasn’t she scared???” But yeah, sounds like this turtle is a real social butterfly :P
Every time I see anyone with a turtle, I want one of my own. But I feel like it would not be right to have something like that in a tiny apartment with a cat. Especially my cat who is EXCEEDINGLY CURIOUS about literally anything, including inanimate objects. If there was a turtle moseying around, I’m pretty sure she’d see it as prey.
SiubhanDuinne
@James E Powell:
I agree with all the rest of your points.
Elizabelle
@dmsilev: I know. Rest with Pumas, P-22.
Have followed that beautiful cat via the LA Times for years now. I knew this might be the outcome once they announced “all options are on the table.”
P-22 did not want to be feeble and injured, and small dogs and their owners/walkers can breathe easier now.
ian
@ian: And how did I forget this part?
David ⛄ 🎅The Establishment🎄 🦌 🕎 Koch
Vikings!
Brachiator
@PJ:
An interesting point. Bush and Gore were both in the family business. Bush was less reflective about it, more at ease with family expectations.
By some of his decisions, rejecting Clinton, etc., Gore put obstacles in his own path. I wonder if he was somewhat relieved to have lost.
trollhattan
@Elizabelle: Somewhere in the region is an adolescent male looking to establish his territory (after getting booted out of where he served his cubhood). We get visits.
Seanly
@Alison Rose:
Awww, for all the horrible news and all the horrible people who just won’t f**king die (lookin at you, Kissinger), that’s a very heart warming story.
trollhattan
@ian: That’s the clincher for me. Peak Bush takes his job seriouser. Jerk.
Also, damn you Donald Trump for so quickly replacing Bush as Worst Possible President.
frosty
I hate to be a pedant but it’s through, not threw. It throws me off reading your text every time.
That’s all
zhena gogolia
@ian: That is the most famous part.
Elizabelle
@trollhattan: Cool!
I see that construction is underway on a wildlife bridge over the freeways, thank dog. Will have to find out precisely where. Hear that it crosses 10 lanes.
zhena gogolia
@Brachiator: I saw him on a plane in 2018 and I said, “I wish you’d been president.” He said, “So do I!”
So I have it on good authority.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
The minimization of how bad Bush was, including how he helped pave the way for trump by destroying trust in institutions, is one of the worst thing about trump absorbing all the outrage.
Also (getting yet another hobbyhorse out of the stable) trump couldn’t have been and couldn’t be trump without Mitch McConnell protecting him, from 2017 right up to the second impeachment vote.
Alison Rose
@Seanly: LOL, just before Covid really took hold in the US, John Oliver did a segment on it and was talking about how public health officials were saying it was a matter of not if but when, and he said that was’t a very comforting thing to hear about something so deadly, and added, “It’s only comforting if you’re talking about whether Saoirse Ronan will win an Oscar or whether Henry Kissinger will ever die.” He’s actually made a number of digs at the dude’s life expectancy, and it’s always funny, and I always feel a little evil for laughing.
Brachiator
@trollhattan:
This is good news. Unfortunately, people insist on expanding communities into mountain lion territory.
Coyotes have adapted to having their territory overlap human communities. I used to see coyotes in the morning hanging out in the green space of the industrial park where I worked. You just had to give them their space.
Shana
@different-church-lady: Because, and I know this is not a popular opinion, they weren’t great songwriters.
Barbara
@WV Blondie:
It’s the thesis of Tom Nichols, in The Atlantic. I don’t buy it — most political involvement is by people wealthy enough to have free time and/or funds to participate in a non-remunerative social activity that demands a lot of both to be successful. That does not explain the direction in which their political activity bends.
I also think that Nichols overlooks the real possibility that, though affluent or even wealthy, many people look at their politics through the lens of maintaining relative advantage — and their mindset is often one of zero sum thinking, that they are hurt by anything that helps someone else not like themselves. And that’s all before we get to how racial attitudes intensify that reaction.
frosty
@Uncle Cosmo: Hmmm, you might have passed by us on your walks. We were living in Remington near the Art Museum in the 80s; JHU campus was a great place to walk our dogs. Our German Shepherd regularly dove into the shrubbery and emerged with a lacrosse ball.
cain
I believe people thought he was a robot – cold and unemotional. Then after the campaign everyone wondered how the hell this person who cared so much about the environment didn’t show up for the presidential campaign.
Once again, someone gave the man bad advice and picking Lieberman was bullshit idea. He was an ass and is still an ass.
The Moar You Know
@Martin: the panel gap on his cars is the killer for me. The panel gap around the trunk on every single Model 3 is fucked up the same way: far more space on the right side than the left. All of them. It reminds me of 1970s GMs. Absolute shit.
frosty
@sab: Damn, they’re playing today and I’m missing it? I hate the Colts the way you hate the Ravens.
ETA: Baltimore sports trivia. What was the name of the two major league teams before they moved to Baltimore?
Browns
James E Powell
@different-church-lady:
The source of this quote is no longer in my memory, but I read somewhere that “people don’t change, they just become more so.”
MrKite
@WV Blondie
I think I read it in a Tom Nichols thread on Twit. I thought it was insightful. Previously had little use for the neocon, but he seems to have changed over the tfg debacle.
Barbara
@Dangerman: Going from promising a completely free speech zone to declaring people lucky not to be killed for saying things I don’t like in less than six weeks is quite the transformation.
Anyway
@schrodingers_cat:
*One minor reason I was so happy when Fetterman won the PA senate race was not having to see “I-told-you-so”s on BJ for ten years and more
Alison Rose
@Shana: Morrissey was too busy being racist to think up good lyrics.
Miss Bianca
@Barbara: Less of a transformation than a revelation, seems to me.
WaterGirl
@trollhattan: I do not know how anyone in Iran is brave enough to risk their lives speaking out. I feel certain that I would not be.
sab
@zhena gogolia: She being a woman would have failed. A guy just would have done less than expected.
James E Powell
@SiubhanDuinne:
A three million vote margin is not a landslide. A landslide makes the electoral college irrelevant. 1972 was a landslide. Should have been like that because Hillary Clinton was & is that much better than Trump.
narya
One major way that Gore would have been an improvement is that he definitely had his hair on fire about climate change. All of the above speculation about 9/11 makes some good points, for sure, but the decades we lost around climate change have to be part of the mix.
Geminid
@James E Powell: A friend and I were on a roadtrip recently and we got to yakking about Musk. We discussed the stories that he’s taking designer pharmaceuticals, souped up Adderalls or Ambiens so to speak. We thought it was a plausible theory.
Barbara
@schrodingers_cat: I remember when Greenwald was at Slate, specifically, annoyed at people making pretty openly misogynist comments about Sonia Sotomayor. I have no idea how he got from there to where he is now. Taibbi has always been a flame thrower, and the key to his view of political life, I think, is that he views things like consensus and compassion as negative traits. On the other hand, he definitely seems to center his sense of self in being an iconoclast. I think there was a time when Democratic angst briefly coincided with his targeted criticism, and he gained an undeserved reputation as someone willing to tear down sacred tropes, like the war on terror. Really, he just wants to tear things down generally and he doesn’t seem to have a principled core.
Anne Laurie
It’s Tom Nichols’ thesis, but you probably read it right here on this blog!
!
Barbara
@Miss Bianca: Well, yeah, but, I mean, is anyone really surprised?
Sure Lurkalot
@Dangerman:
“My own platform”. That’s the world he bought for 44B. Where he can “murder” people he decides he doesn’t like by removing them from a forum, separating them from their employment without rationale or severance, making them sue to pay what is legally owed, exposing them to dangerous nutters.
He amassed the largest fortune that mankind has ever known (albeit on paper) and yet his lasting achievement will be to be known as a vindictive manchild bereft of joy or light. Imagine being a person about whom so many think, “I hope he’s as miserable as he seems.”
We deprive the world of billions by indulging and celebrating this level of wealth hoarding.
Frank Wilhoit
@sab: The pull of the center is the pull of a vacuum. It attracts unmoored things and people because there is nothing and no one there.
sab
@zhena gogolia: No I don’t. Radio stations. Medical residencies. He phucked up everything he touched even before he picked Lieberman.
Geo Wilcox
Musk is like the little kid who gets a new toy and proceeds to trash it. He’ll get bored and move on to something else leaving the mess for someone else to clean up.
frosty
@Anne Laurie: Nice! You’re right on top of things as usual. Without your posts I’d actually have to look for the news.
brantl
@schrodingers_cat: Taibbi wasn’t wrong about Goldman Sachs.
MagdaInBlack
@Dangerman: It’s abuser talk: “You’re lucky that’s all that happened, other men beat their wives”
Frank Wilhoit
@The Moar You Know: That’s because he knows people aren’t buying the cars. They’re buying him, or the touch upon the hem of his garment.
zhena gogolia
@sab: I thought you meant from your perspective she would have failed.
sab
@sab: Sell off radio stations. We lost our 40 year old classical music station to an out of state talk poison politics station.
Thanks Al.
zhena gogolia
@narya: YES!
Same goes for Carter term 2.
zhena gogolia
@Geminid: It just hit me — he’s a character on The White Lotus! Mike White dreamed him up!
trollhattan
@brantl: Too bad the vampire squid thing was peak Taibbi. Wow, did he ever crater fast and hard. Couldda been a contendah.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@Elizabelle: It is over the 101 west of the Valley(near Lost Hills Rd.). So just one. P-22’s range was in Griffith Park which is surrounded by freeways(the 101, the 134, and the 5).
sab
@zhena gogolia: From MSM she would have failed. From my perspective she would have done the best she could.
Biden did astronomically better. Nothing against her. Same goals, different results.
zhena gogolia
@sab: I knew nothing about that. But does that imply he would have been a worse president than GWB?
sab
@zhena gogolia: Absoulutely not. George Bush took us to war for no reason, and meanwhile he dismantled the government and wiped out information.
We think Bush did nothing at home and he did a lot of damage.
We need to remember that as we adulate Liz Cheney.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
John Roberts is one of the principle villains of Ari Berman’s Give Us the Ballot, and he was appointed to do things like gut the VRA long before trump discovered birtherism and “build the wall”.
CaseyL
@dmsilev: That’s so sad. There was a famous photo of a cougar in the Hollywood Hills, and I think that was P-22. RIP, fabulous cat.
Sister Golden Bear
@different-church-lady: Johnny Mare’s musical and technical genius creating the multi-layer guitar sound.
🐾BillinGlendaleCA
@CaseyL: Yup, P-22 was that cat.
sab
@sab: When Gore was “streamling government” under Clinton he did huge damage. Gore and both Clintons were on board. I am still angry because I see the damage that was done.
Fake Irishman
@trollhattan:
My kid asked me about panthers, so I did some explaining and tried to find a video for her. Couldn’t find anything good searching under “panther” or “mountain lion” so I did a video search for “wild cougars”
it was quite educational, just not in the way I had intended.
that’s rather OT, but since you suggested that LA retains quite a large population of cougars/mountain lions/pumas, I recalled my dad fail and thought this group would appreciate it.
kindness
Yea….I don’t know. If you are using Twitter in any capacity, you are creating value for the company just by adding eyeballs. One can either help Elon in his time of crazy or not.
Gin & Tonic
Some years back a mountain lion was struck and killed by a motor vehicle on the Merritt Parkway in CT. Post-mortem testing of some sort (can’t recall what) determined it had come from South Dakota. So they get around.
Hoppie
@Uncle Cosmo: Late to the party, but International Relations at Homewood, SAIS Mass Ave & Bologna in the 70’s here.
(Also too, enjoying the Clash vibe from the twit machine habitues right now)
Omnes Omnibus
@different-church-lady:
Morrissey let Johnny Marr drive on How Soon Is Now.
Fake Irishman
@sab:
Al Gore is hardly the only one or really even the primary one responsible for the telecommunications act of 1996 that relaxed ownership rules. And that act probably looks different with a Democratic-controlled congress.
Glory b
@WV Blondie: I read that from Tom Nichols Twitter page. That theory lives ate too easy and they long for more purpose.
schrodingers_cat
deleted
schrodingers_cat
@brantl: He was wrong about the details, his numbers didn’t add up. But because he said what the left blogs wanted to hear they gave him a pass for a lot of nonsense.
Steve in the ATL
@different-church-lady: (1) Morrisey’s vocals, and (2) Johnny Marr’s guitar.
Bonnie
Looks like I will end 2022 without a kitty. I have been so lonely for a kitty; but, will start a search for just exactly what I want in a kitty on Jan 2, 2023. My last three cats have been rescue cats. I want one that will be mine from the beginning. Now, the most difficult project is “what the heck do I get my twin sister for Christmas?” She hates anything I give her even if I give it great and serious thought. I know it’s bit early but just in case I lose my way to Balloon Juice: Have a very Merry Christmas!!!!!
JAFD
@vbreakwater: In most cases, including, up to now, the Atlantic, if you left-clink on a link or URL, then right-click on ‘Save Link As’, you’ll find that article in your ‘Downloads’ folder. though possibly with a name that is a random selection of letters and digits.
JAFD
@Geoduck:
Methinks ’twas on her Ladies of the Canyon album, the vinyl (“What’s a ‘ceedee’ ?”) of which I purchased in ’69 …
IIRC, ’twas another group had a hit with BYT in the intervening decades …
sab
@Bonnie: So sorry for you. My cat loves me. My husband’s cat can barely stand to be in house with me. She is a touchy girl.
James E Powell
@narya:
For me the biggest difference would have been no Roberts, no Alito.
Fake Irishman
@James E Powell:
and any number horrible judges at the district and appellate levels.
Also no first round of destructive tax cuts.
Steeplejack
@Bonnie:
Give your sister a gift card to a store that (you think) she likes.
Good luck on the kitty search!
schrodingers_cat
@Bonnie: I too am searching for a kitty or two. My beautiful ginger girl passed away last year on the 23rd of December.
Looking for a bonded pair.
Darkrose
@cain: I know it’s late, but everyone seems to be forgetting that the main reasons Al Gore lost were:
The first one was why it was close enough for the second to matter. Gore sighing, the lie that he claimed to have invented the internet, the earth tones…as far as the press was concerned he couldn’t do anything right. He was the nerdy kid that they all decided to hate in favor of the asshole frat boy who they could feel smarter than.
brantl
Because all it would have taken was paying attention to what the intelligence people were telling them, REPEATEDLY.