The Parking department at the University where I worked used to put out an incredibly thick planning document, and we used to joke that they should shorten it – just a cover page titled Our Goal to Make Parking Such a Pain in the Ass That Most of You Will Quit Driving to Work.
After this latest from Twitter, I’m thinking they should shorten theirs to Open Season on Almost Everyone (if you’re not white and male).
Or possibly this:
Hate Has No Home Here Hate Most Definitely Has a Home Here. It’s definitely open season on transgender folks now on twitter, even more than before.
Twitter removes policy against deadnaming transgender people
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Twitter has quietly removed a policy against the “targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals,” raising concerns that the Elon Musk-owned platform is becoming less safe for marginalized groups.
Twitter enacted the policy against dead-naming, or using a transgender person’s name before they transitioned, as well as purposefully using the wrong gender for someone as a form of harassment, in 2018.
On Monday, Twitter also said it will only put warning labels on some tweets that are “potentially” in violation of its rules against hateful conduct. Previously, the tweets were removed.
It was in this policy update that Twitter appears to have deleted the line against deadnaming from its rules.
“Twitter’s decision to covertly roll back its longtime policy is the latest example of just how unsafe the company is for users and advertisers alike,” said Sarah Kate Ellis, the president and CEO of the advocacy group GLAAD. “This decision to roll back LGBTQ safety pulls Twitter even more out of step with TikTok, Pinterest, and Meta, which all maintain similar policies to protect their transgender users at a time when anti-transgender rhetoric online is leading to real world discrimination and violence.”
Twitter did not immediately respond to a message for comment Tuesday.
Open thread.
lowtechcyclist
I’ve stayed on Twitter up to now basically out of inertia, and because the other people I read are still there.
But if they’re gonna do shit like this, I’m gone.
Baud
I suspect this is just the beginning of content (im)moderation.
In better news
ETA: Woke is the new Groot.
JCJ
@Baud:
I am Woke
I am Groot
Can Rocket understand someone who only says “I am Woke”?
lowtechcyclist
@Baud: Well, it’s big.
WaterGirl
And the new Notes thing on Substack is open to Nazis. I still read twitter because that’s where most of the people still are, but I’m sticking with Spoutible. Their focus is on making it a safe space.
I don’t blame anyone for staying on twitter at this point because that’s still where most of the actions. But one of these days we’ll reach a tipping point.
I totally do not even begin to understand Musk’s endgame there.
WaterGirl
@Baud: What the hell is root?
Eolirin
@WaterGirl: Guardians of the Galaxy character. He can only say “I am Groot” but the rest of the cast can somehow make sense of that meaning many other things.
JCJ
@WaterGirl:
Groot. A character in Guardians of the Galaxy. All he says is “I am Groot”
The Moar You Know
That’s cool, front-pagers will still keep pasting links to that hellsite until someone makes them stop.
Dahlia
In related Twitter news: https://variety.com/2023/digital/news/twitter-removes-legacy-blue-check-marks-celebrities-1235589174/#recipient_hashed=400a0173bc383cc58f49e2c0e9bf76ead0f8b918df7dee128525ac6e1f2eb82b&recipient_salt=af18eb5209b701ac2e6e7ca347baf7681740929faa0d7461429cfa8c7614fcbd&utm_medium=email&utm_source=exacttarget&utm_campaign=newsalert&utm_content=429098_04-20-2023&utm_term=11373341
dc
I still have my account in Twitter, but I open twitter less and less and less as the days go by. Eventually, I’m going to close my account, I’m using Mastodon mostly these days. I have other accounts on other new platforms. We’ll see how it all shakes out in the end.
Eolirin
@WaterGirl: I don’t think he has one. The Twitter purchase was entirely grievance driven, and people are still making fun of him, so he’s going to lash out at everyone that’s part of a group that tends to disagree with him until the place burns down around his head.
The Moar You Know
@WaterGirl: He just wants to burn everything down and hurt as many defenseless untermenchen as he can along the way, because he enjoys that.
He’s not a complex guy. He just plays one for the public.
Raoul Paste
DeSantis’ “war on woke” shows that he is mimicking Trump again. Short three syllable phrases that even the stupidest people can remember, ala Stop the Steal
What contempt he must have for his voters
bjacques
On Hitler’s birthday, no less. Color me surprised.
NotMax
@Baud
A noun, a verb, and woke.
//
pacem appellant
Are people still on Twitter? How quaint.
In all seriousness, please stay off hate platforms. Twitter is the most egregious, but Meta is on my shitlist as well.
UncleEbeneezer
Damn. I just reported some Transphobic asshole, for misgendering someone the other day and Twitter suspended their account. And I thought “well at least there is still some good policies in place…”
JoyceH
@The Moar You Know: My thought on the subject is – Musk took over Twitter because he thought it would be easy. You see this a lot on the right, people with a couple vague concepts on how to do something better, with no clue at all about the basic underlying structures and level of understanding and the intricate hard work that goes on in the background.
This is how the Bush administration thought they could fling some Federalist Society interns into Iraq with a mission to create capitalism and a Jeffersonian democracy. It’s how Jim Jordan, watching the J6 Hearings and with not a clue in the world about all the spade work that went on in the background, thought he could hold some public hearings and Change The Narrative.
Baud
Sounds like you all need another speech about living in Pity City.
UncleEbeneezer
@Dahlia: How does this work with the whole “impersonating an officer” laws? Also, I can’t imagine large corporations won’t sue the f*** out of Twitter for allowing users to misrepresent their brands.
Tenar Arha
@pacem appellant: I logged out a few weeks ago & I’ve only logged back in twice, & then logged out again. It was making me too sad and angry. I’m not deleting, yet, but I’ve been noticing I don’t feel like I “need” it between Mastodon, Tumblr, & here.
Suzanne
Time for Chris Christie to make himself useful and humiliate Puddin’ Cup.
Christie sucks, but I will always be grateful for what he did to Marco Rubio.
CaseyL
Along with the Anthropocene Epoch, where humans burn the biosphere down in pursuit of profit and convenience, this era will be known as the Asshole Epoch, where a high percentage of the population just decides to be as much of an asshole as (humanly) possible.
I used to wonder why none of our space probes found sapient life anywhere else in the cosmos.
I don’t wonder anymore.
Sapience is a death sentence… for everyone.
RaflW
Well, this got me to log in to my Mastodon account for the first time in a while.
Anonymous At Work
@The Moar You Know: More that “impulse buy” means something a lot different when you had $200 billion in the bank than when you have $2,000 in the bank. Public promises by either person can be held against them, but it’s only worth the legal bills to hold the rich person to their word, typically. Elonia Muskette posted that he was buying Twitter, Twitter said “Fine by us”, and then sicced their lawyers on Elonia to hold him to his promise. Buyer’s remorse from an egomaniac ever since.
kindness
Musk’s motivations? Well I figure Musk has chosen his ‘in’ crowd he wants to be part of & we’re not in it.
Roger Moore
@Eolirin:
Musk also has specific grievances against trans people:
That said, turning a company into a way of expressing the owner’s grievances is not the way to profitability.
JoyceH
In another example of righties thinking this stuff is easy, Mike Lindell claimed to have ‘proof’ of Chinese tampering in the 2020 elections and offered a five million dollar reward for anyone who can prove him wrong. A computer forensics expert entered the challenge, was denied and took the case to the binding arbitration as outlined in the challenge rules – Lindell has been ordered to pay up.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2023/04/20/mike-lindell-prove-wrong-contest/
Gin & Tonic
@The Moar You Know: There is, unfortunately, important content there, especially about non-US countries, that is not available elsewhere. If that bothers you, then don’t read it.
lowtechcyclist
@WaterGirl:
Dutch for ‘big’ or ‘great’
waspuppet
Fixed.
trollhattan
I’m all for it, but only if he does so in his best Elmer Fudd voice. “These woke wascally wabbits want woke vewwy vewwy fwequently fowced onto the pubwic, while I demand it cawfully be wisked away into the woke wastebin of histowy!”
Suzanne
@JoyceH:
Lots of people seem to think that other people’s jobs are easy. 98% of the time, that person saying that doesn’t know shit about shit.
Jackie
@Baud: Floridians were rudely awakened with an “Emergency Alert” TEST @ 4:45 a.m. this morning. Lots of complaints and apologies. One FL legislator wants to create a Bill he’s calling the “Stop WAKE Act”😂
patrick II
@WaterGirl:
As others have said, Groot is a character from “guardians of the Galaxy” with a limited vocabulary. Since you were asking about tv shows/movies a few days ago, I will add it is my favorite of the Marvel moies. The characters are, maybe not 3-dimensional, but a strong 2. The writing is clever, and the graphic designers of the special effects go beyond craftsmanship and into artistry. If you have Disney, you can see it for free, $3.99 at Prime.
Princess
Twitter is a Nazi Bar now.
Jackie
@JoyceH: I bet a lot of folks are kicking themselves for not taking up Lindell’s challenge!
trollhattan
Popcorn time.
UncleEbeneezer
@Gin & Tonic: Also, there are Transgender people for whom Twitter is still the best way to reach a broad audience (much bigger than Post/Mastodon/Spoutible etc.) to support their work and literally help them pay their bills.
JoyceH
@Jackie:
I wonder if Lindell even HAS five million dollars anymore. All this heavy-duty election denying stuff he’s been doing for two years must be putting quite a strain on that little pillow company.
lowtechcyclist
@Jackie:
This was the first I’d heard of it, dammit
West of the Rockies
@CaseyL:
I’ve been thinking of a throwaway line from Star Trek TOS where Kirk explains (Capsplains) that humanity “learned to overcome our differences.”
We are either approaching that point or are about to flush the whole durn human comedy.
Glidwrith
@Baud: A noun, a verb and “woke”.
RaflW
@Raoul Paste: As Ron plummets, but the press still hopes he’ll catch on, I can’t shake the feeling we’re being told that the Our Family Diet Cola on the bottom shelf of the IGA is “every bit as tasty and refreshing” as genuine Diet Coke.
But everyone else knows its crap.
mrmoshpotato
@JCJ:
Groot
Ruckus
@lowtechcyclist:
But if they’re gonna do shit like this, I’m gone.
There with you.
Glidwrith
@Glidwrith: Damn, NotMax beat me to it.
West of the Cascades
@Eolirin: Heh – good day to associate Mush and things burning down or exploding. I love how “as long as it didn’t explode on the launch pad it was a success” was used to redefine down the utter failure of the Starship to operate as intended for more than four minutes.
Come to think of it, that’s a fair analogy to Twitter, post-Mush.
CaseyL
@West of the Rockies:
There’s a ST tie-in novel, where one of the characters cites a Vulcan adage about nuclear weapons: a sapient species’ timespan either ends 50 years after discovering fission, or goes on indefinitely. Meaning, either said species figures its shit out, or doomsday bombs itself out of existence.
I’m not sure any Trek grappled entirely with climate change, though. There may have been a few references to global pollution and unbreathable air, but nothing that I recall about destroying the entire planetary ecosystem – except, again, as consequence of a nuclear holocaust; not as a deliberate economic policy.
RobArt
@dc: I am also mostly on Mastodon these days, https://mastodon.art/@rmiddleton
But I have kept my account at Twitter and check it occasionally for news. After reading this post I hopped over there and posted for the first time in a while that I was making my way to the exit & I changed my profile pic to the word Goodbye.
¯\(ツ)/¯
I am just one account with 650 followers, but maybe I can inspire others to leave. Musk must be made irrelevant. It is dangerous for him to hold the keys to a public gathering place. Also for the record I am gay. Very tired of constant attacks on my community’s existence.
Geminid
@JoyceH: Lindell’s big store retailers have left him, and with a saturated market I suspect a lot of individual buyers have as well. Lindell might be singing like Jackie Wilson now:
“My heart is crying, cryng! Lonely tear drops,
My Pillow never dries of, lo-o-nly tear drops…”
Llelldorin
Renaming Twitter “The Aristocrats!”
He’s become a Wokémon?
West of the Rockies
@Llelldorin:
Yes, he is Stinkachu.
Betty Cracker
@trollhattan: I sure hope all the “you don’t mess with Big Mouse” talk is justified. So far, I’ve seen Disney do exactly one impressive thing in this fight: the outgoing board nullifying the power of the incoming board stocked with DeSantis cronies.
Now, that was a big one, and it was humiliating for DeSantis, so I enjoyed it immensely. But throwing lobbyists at the state legislature? Let’s just hope there are some long sporks attached to that action that weren’t covered in the CNBC article.
Dirty pool is what’s needed here.
Baud
@Betty Cracker:
In fairness, DeSantis has been mostly all talk too.
WaterGirl
@patrick II: I was trying to figure out why Groot sounded familiar. Now that you mention Guardians of the Galaxy, I recall that it was The Flash where Groot was a problem for awhile.
thank you! I could not figure out why/how that sounded familiar.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: Fair point.
Baud
@WaterGirl:
I believe that’s Grod.
WaterGirl
@Baud: Tell that to all the women in the south whose only for an abortion now is to get one before they know they are pregnant.
WaterGirl
@Baud: Oh, you’re right. Dammit!
Baud
@WaterGirl: I was referring to his battle with Disney.
Quaker in a Basement
Not even a poop emoji?
WaterGirl
@Baud: I thought you might be, but this sentence, without qualification, made me see red.
And yes, I am still furious that apparently the right of self-determination no longer exists for women in this country.
sdhays
@JoyceH: Musk took over Twitter because a court was going to force him to after he offered a ridiculous amount of money for it and waved due diligence. The ink was barely dry and he then realized that buying Twitter was a stupid idea and then went on a failed tirade trying to break out of the contract he just signed.
Now, why he did he make that stupid offer and sign the contract without any due diligence? He’s a pathetic person who basically lives on Twitter, and he didn’t like how it was treating him and some of his favorite other posters. So he decided to buy it so that he and his friends would be treated the way they wanted to be treated.
It’s as simple, and stupid, as that. It’s pretty clear there was never any “business” thinking going on that went into this deal; any “business” thoughts are after the fact as he rolls around in his own shit trying to convince himself and others that he has rapidly converted $44B into pennies. I hope everyone who helped finance the deal, especially the banks, finds their loss extremely painful.
sdhays
Apparently, traffic at Twitter has been down at least 7% for the last few months, year over year. That’s…not a good trend for him, and this won’t help. And in news that should shock no one, there are only a few hundred thousand subscriptions for Twitter Blue, so that’s not working out as a revenue stream. And the new charges for API usage have disrupted government agencies which will not be able to pay the exorbitant rates he intends to charge, so there’s another critical source of content that either will go bye-bye or will continue to not directly pay Musk money.
Dan B
@CaseyL: And with El Nino returning we may have the hottest year on record this year or next. Crop destruction, in addition to extreme flooding, weather, and fire, could spark violence.
Sister Golden Bear
The Catch-22 for trans activists, and trans people like myself, is that Trans Twitter still remains by far to know about what Republicans are doing, know what’s happening on the ground with trans people, know when trans people are murdered, etc.
Yes, I know there’s other platforms out there (and use them), but none of them have the breadth and reach of Twitter.
japa21
Just as an FYI, Groot is also a large garbage collection and recycling company in the Chicago area.
Baud
@Sister Golden Bear: Boycotts aside, I wouldn’t necessarily count on Twitter remaining operational or habitable indefinitely. The time to start looking for alternatives is now
ETA: Companies have had to sell their high-priced acquisitions at fire sale prices many times in the past. If Musk can get over his ego, that’s what he should do and just take the loss.
Betty Cracker
@sdhays: At first I feared there was more to it than that, i.e., that Musk and his far-right pals would take advantage of Twitter serendipitously becoming a default platform that is almost universally used by MSM outlets, major brands and powerful institutions.
I figured Musk and his henchmen might manipulate algorithms in subtle, insidious ways to poison the discourse and inject disinformation into the body politic more effectively than Fox News ever dreamed because it was such a widely used platform instead of a closed bubble.
But nope — it’s the pettiest bullshit imaginable, as you said. In a sense, that’s a relief.
Roger Moore
@Sister Golden Bear:
This is exactly what a lot of us hate about social media in general. There’s a very strong network effect, where you want to be on the platform everyone else is on. The best i can suggest is to try to exist on more than one social media platform at the same time, e.g. try to get an account on one of the lgbtq Fediverse servers. That way you can start building up an alternative network and will have a place to jump to if Twitter gets intolerable.
Frankensteinbeck
You have all heard Musk make comments about making Twitter ‘safe for comedy’ again, yes? He specifically meant transphobia, misgendering, and deadnaming. The Babylon Bee was kicked off Twitter for doing that shit while going “Just a joke!” The first account he brought back was the Babylon Bee. Musk’s transphobia and his desire to make Twitter a safe place for trans hate has been a major element of this from the beginning, and it’s why I left and don’t intend to go back.
sdhays
@West of the Cascades: I don’t follow SpaceX that closely, but I did read something about Starship a couple of weeks ago, and to be fair, they were hoping for, but not expecting total success. They have a bunch of Starship rockets ready to try again once they figure out what went wrong.
Fanboys are still ridiculous.
Geminid
@Betty Cracker: I was checking out Florida Politics to see exactly what these bills were that Disney’s lobbyists are fighting, but I was distracted by a couple of other DeSantis stories. One was from today:
And another recent article:
This is a view of DeSantis I had not taken before, but Rove may have a point.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Dan B: There was no winter in Philly this year, and we have seen 87 degrees already last week. We’re a little worried about what the summer may bring.
Also we noticed that some of the fruit in early spring (peaches and mangoes at least), which I think was imported from Chile and/or Peru, was of unusually poor quality. We wondered if that was climate related. The off-season South American fruit is usually outstanding.
sdhays
@Betty Cracker: Same. I already had a pretty low opinion of Musk at that point, but even I didn’t appreciate at the time just how petty and just silly he could be throwing billions around like that. I thought he must have some larger (awful) goal, but nope.
Ceci n est pas mon nym
@Geminid: Yep, if there’s anyone I figure would know about warm and fuzzy, that would be Karl Rove. “Warm and fuzzy” always makes me think first of Republican toads.
Baud
@Geminid:
You thought he was warm and fuzzy?
Dan B
@Frankensteinbeck: My partner’s brother has a sadistic sense of humor. He laughs when people squirm at his demeaning “jokes”. I wonder if Musk is the same.
Roger Moore
@sdhays:
No matter how terrible someone is, they can find a way to be worse. Musk is living proof.
Ohio Mom
Ohio Dad just came back from driving his mother to her doctor. He’s rather dejected because she went on about Biden being too old to run again, she knows how old people decline. It’s what she heard on NPR and everyone knows they’re liberal.
I told him not to worry yet, she might be dead by the time Biden is on the ballot — she’s 91 now and will be almost 93 in November 2024. Such happy thoughts we surround ourselves with.
On the topic of the post, I will miss twitter. The places I visit all have alternative spots staked out, mostly on Mastodon, but I loathe having to learn a new way of doing things. But I guess I will.
Sister Golden Bear
@Sister Golden Bear: “By far the best way to know”
Damn post-Covid spaciness
@Baud:
No disagreement, and I already have. But as someone else mentioned, for those whose coverage of trans issues and/or trans advocacy relies on donations, the other platforms don’t sufficiently help pay their bills.
Roger Moore
@Dan B:
I think he probably is trying to be funny; it’s just that only awful people appreciate his sense of humor.
Dan B
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: The western 7S was cold. The Jet Stream was heading south near the Pacific coast into Southern California and Phoenix then north all the way to Montreal and even further north. This allowed Arctic air into the western US and air from the Gulf into the east. El Nino tends to reverse this pattern. It makes the west hot and the east cold. I’m not looking forward to it.
Geminid
@Baud: No, I just never thought that the lack of warmth and fuzziness was a dealbreaker for those Florida Representatives.
I suspect Rove is being diplomatic, though. He did not want to say that these Reps know DeSantis well enough to understand he’s a shitty person and a shitty candidate.
sdhays
@Ohio Mom: The way things are going, it’s going to be Biden vs. Trump again. I don’t want to believe that anyone will be persuaded that Trump, because he’s a couple years or whatever younger than Biden, is a better choice.
Dan B
@Roger Moore: He and his wife gave us an Obama Chia Pet for Christmas one year. They laughed. We did not. Racist assholes.
Sister Golden Bear
@Dan B: Musk is all about punching down, preferably sadistically. Whether by humor or otherwise.
As are many of his followers. After the ban was lift, entire lists of anti-trans people created lengthy threads saying “X is a man, Y is a man.” Not even making a pretense at humor, just misgendering for the hurt they imagined it would cause the people named.
The Thin Black Duke
@Sister Golden Bear: As the great Terry Pratchett said, “Punching down isn’t funny. It’s bullying.”
Geoduck
A GOP rep in Tennessee has resigned after facing sexual harassment allegations. And yes, he voted to kick three of his ex-colleagues out of the legislature after they protested gun violence.
Ksmiami
@CaseyL: Enrico Fermi would like a word…
Geminid
@Ceci n est pas mon nym: Rove’s position interests me because he knows his party well, and I’m pretty sure he thinks Trump is a certain loser in the 2024 general election. I think he’d be right, but there is little Rove can do to stop Trump. He and other Republicans just do not have a strong candidate to oppose Trump
My guess is that Rove and his colleagues will approach 2024 as a damage control operation. They’ll try to limit destruction in the nomination process, divert resources to Senate and House races, and hope for the best.
sdhays
@Geminid: I keep coming back to that astonishing rollout piece a few months ago where his supportive press were congratulating him for actually mingling with his super-donors at a fundraising dinner, going to each table, thanking them for support, chit-chatting, etc.. Those were all things he hates doing and hasn’t had to do before…
So, yeah. He hates his donors, his supporters, basically everyone. I don’t really understand how the special politics knowers who have been trying to push him nationally for the past couple years managed to miss that detail.
misterpuff
@Geminid: They are pledging allegiance to TFG.
It ain’t about “warm and fuzzies”, its about King of The Hill (Shitpile) and Meatball Ron is up to his eyes in the muck and sinking fast. (I hope the white booties can take it.)
Sister Golden Bear
@The Thin Black Duke: Absolutely agree.
It’s bullying in a way that let’s them play the gaslighting “I was just joking” card.
Jacqueline Squid Onassis
Musk has been, if not a fascist, a fascist enabler since at least 2016. This move is all of a piece with reinstating banned nazis, fascists, bigots and abusers and is no surprise at all.
I’ve never used Twitter because, although the platform was perfect for my style of commentary, it was clearly a place where monsters dwell right from the beginning. As someone with no stake in the platform it’s easy for me to encourage people to try to find an alternative. It’s much harder to find an alternative but it’s clear that the place will be a horror show for non-fascists in the very near future.
sdhays
@misterpuff: If Ron was more likable and had spent the time being buddies with the Republican Florida delegation, they would at least hold off endorsing at this stage. He’s such an asshole he can’t even reliably fake liking people he needs to some degree. Trump needs adulation, which makes him more personable than our Ronnie.
eversor
@JoyceH:
Nah Bush was worse than that. I’d know! I invaded Iraq!
Federalist society would have been better. What happened was mind blowing. They pulled a bunch of people from private Christian colleges into senior leadership. Not only were these schools jokes, none these shmucks had any sort of military, intelligence, or diplomatic background. Which is sort of the background you should have for you know, launching a war!
So there was this odd notion that we were going to turn them all Christian, establish a free market paradise, and also bring them democracy. Of course this did not work, and people like me were left scooping up the field mice and bopping them on the head (targeted killing programs).
There were no shit 22 year old virgins from Liberty University showing up late to meetings and barking orders at us who’s only qualification was Jesus. We’d blast the Jesus out of things and then not fix it and team Jesus would wonder why they kept bombing us. Meanwhile my team kept scooping up the mice and booping them on the head. It was insane.
When the war opened up one of these morons was giving us advice on the storming of off shore oil platforms. Which falls into “were you in the Navy, if not then you know shit about shit when it comes to this so shut the fuck up and go sit in the corner”. But for some stupid ass reason there they were in TFCC “observing”, which again, why are you here?
People running about talking about their chastity rings! They drew a black X on their hands to show they didn’t drink or do drugs. The military may have problems but fear of fucking and booze is not among them, again why are you here?
Bush was a disaster. We should never have invaded Iraq but this could have gone better had it not been put in the hands of 20 year old evangelical school graduates, which again, why the fuck are you here? I know why I’m here. I’ve got the uniform to prove it. Far as I can tell you’re a liberal arts major who got put in charge of a water project.
Roger Moore
@sdhays:
They don’t care. Their job is to convince someone like DeSantis to try for higher office so they can act as campaign advisors. If he succeeds, they’re the new political geniuses and can coast on that reputation for the rest of their lives. If they fail but manage to shift the blame, they can try over again in 4 years. No matter what, they can siphon money from his campaign. They’re basically like those parasites that manipulate their host’s brain to make them more susceptible to parasitism.
Betty Cracker
@sdhays: The age thing is exactly why I hope Repubs, when presented with the prospect of a platter of fried pig anuses (Trump) and a plate of minced weasel dicks (DeSantis), go with menu A.
No matter how hard we wish it weren’t so, lots of people think Biden is too old to serve a second term. If it’s DeSantis or some other younger fascist vs. Biden, I suspect the media will harp on the age thing non-stop.
Geminid
@sdhays: The elites pushing DeSantis probably made too much of his big reelection margin last year. They are also kind of desperate about beating Trump, so they may have just seen in DeSantis what they wanted to see.
I’m starting to think Republicans are screwed no matter what. Either Trump will win the nomination, or he’ll make the nomination worthless to whomever beats him. Trump’s one vindictive guy, with a lot of vindictive followers who have no more allegiance to the party than he does. It would take a really strong candidate to surmount that handicap, and I don’t see one.
Geminid
@eversor: Have you read Bernard Trainor and Michael Gordon’s book on the Iraq War, Cobra II? It was published in 2006. You might appreciate it.
Trainor is a retired Marine Corps general, while Gordon was national security correspondent for the New York Times.
schrodingers_cat
@Gin & Tonic: Agreed. With independent media under the gun in the BJP dominated India, Twitter is one way I keep up with the news from the grass-roots of various parties and what remains of on the ground reporting that has not yet sold out/or is running scared.
Twitter in languages other than English has not been impacted as much after the Musk takeover. Although Twitter seems to be pushing RSS propaganda into my feed under the For You tab which I then promptly block.
Ruckus
@Llelldorin:
Musk’s end game is money. He was born and grew up a rather wealthy white boy in South Africa. He’d have to make or have made a pretty large turn to become human. He’s not that old but SA has never been a world leader in radical politics like equality. As I understand it, it is far better than it was half a century ago but most places are, including this country. Better is better but not often good enough. In racism, better is not close to good enough. But a lot of humanity likely will take generations to get even close to good enough. It doesn’t have to but then – humans.
sstarr
People used to have an issue with Kareem Abdul Jabbar and Mohammed Ali’s new names.
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
I think it says something about Musk and his family that they left South Africa about when Apartheid was ending.
Ruckus
@WaterGirl:
I totally do not even begin to understand Musk’s endgame there.
I’m pretty sure he doesn’t either. Here’s a guy who doubled the asking price for twitter, because of course he’s the world’s richest man and then had to scrounge for the cash when twitter said hell yeah, it’s yours! I’m thinking he’s not exactly the next Albert Einstein. he’s more like Scrooge McDuck, but with half the !Q.
sdhays
@Betty Cracker: At this point, it’s 50-50 whether Republican voters will even get an opportunity to choose minced weasel dicks. All the signs are pointing to DeSantic 2024 “not gonna happen”, so it will come down to how much humiliation Ronnie is willing to stand.
My bet is “not much” since he really isn’t up to running an insurgent campaign, but maybe Tacky O will force him to keep trying.
prostratedragon
@CaseyL: The problem of the 21st century is the problem of the asshole.
sdhays
@eversor: Something I appreciate about Atrios is that he’ll periodically remind people how awful Bush was (and is). The whole turd polishing about how “Bush was so much better than Trump” was nauseating.
Bush invaded an entire country for shits and giggles. And that’s just one of the many awful things he did.
Matt Smith
@UncleEbeneezer: Same here. Just in the last few days, I started noticing people on Twitter misgendering trans folks hard, so I started reporting. I’m sickened that everything I just reported is suddenly considered fair play.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
And he would be a teen or in his early 20s when that happened. Most of all the bigotry baked in. Now he might not have been a racist, we don’t know for sure, or he might not actually be one now, but he is, at least on the books, a very wealthy man. Can live in extreme comfort the rest of his life. Seems like that might be nice but I’m not actually sure it ever actually works out reasonably. I’ve met some people with a fair amount of money, nothing like his level, and I don’t think I was as impressed about that as they were.
prostratedragon
@trollhattan: Mistaken pattern recognizer: What is “roke?”
Ruckus
@prostratedragon:
All of us have assholes. Not all of us act like their asshole is the pivot point of the entire world, or worse, the entire universe.
Roger Moore
@sdhays:
I assume some candidates are going to stay in the running on the off chance they can be the one there to pick up the pieces when Trump self-destructs, is sentenced to prison, or dies. It seems like a low probability, high reward strategy. Staying in the race might also be a smart strategy for someone thinking ahead to 2028. If they can position themselves as second place, they might be able to win the next nomination on the “his turn” theory.
Roger Moore
@sdhays:
Almost everything awful Trump did, Bush (or someone in his orbit) did first. Bush just didn’t attract the same amount of derision for it in the media because he knew how to play act respectability. Admittedly, Trump did do far worse on nepotism, and his handling of COVID-19 far surpassed Bush’s incompetence on Katrina.
Betty Cracker
@sdhays: Yeah. I never say never, but DeSantis sure seems to be flaming out like a Musk-built rocket. At this point, I don’t know if there’s anyone who can dislodge Trump. Like Geminid said at #102, Trump will either win the nomination or make it worthless to whoever does.
If party bosses still ran shit, they could torpedo that loser Trump and get behind a horrible Repub who doesn’t have a reputation as an extremist, a Sununu type maybe. Someone like might have a shot at winning. But the party bosses don’t control things, so they’re shit out of luck.
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
At the very least least Tesla has been racist AF. It’s hard for me to believe that stuff happened without Musk giving it at least his tacit approval.
prostratedragon
@Ruckus: Or endow them with the power of speech.
gwangung
@Ruckus: Nah, he’s a racist. No ifs, ands or buts.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
Either upper management doesn’t know this is going on – which seems very, very unlikely at the volume it sounds like, or em has been told and at the very least doesn’t give a fuck – likely leading to “Don’t spend any time on this BS.” Or – he’s in charge and really, really doesn’t give any minuscule part of a fuck. No level of which is in any way good.
mwing
The parking Department at a University where I worked long ago charged like over $1,000 per year for a parking permit, with no guarantee that there would actually be any spaces available.
And on Red Sox game days they (BU) converted all the spaces near Fenway to regular commercial parking, for game attendees.
When asked about it, they openly said that their main purpose was to maximize revenue, not to provide actual parking for actual employees.
I worked in a library with several underpaid part-time librarians for whom that cost was a real issue, They were paying thru the nose for something that they only needed 2 or 3 days a week, and they weren’t even necessarily getting it on those days.
Of course it was the management school library.
Oicks! We were producing the very people who would go on to make just those sorts of policy decisions.
Ruckus
@gwangung:
No argument from me. I just like to give the possibility that he’s just a shitty manager rather than who he very, very likely is. I mean it is a minuscule possibility but still…..
Ruckus
@prostratedragon:
Mine makes noise. I imagine that so does everyone else’s on occasion. Oh, you meant any level of intellectual speech…..
Bill Arnold
It appears that all bluechecks on twitter now are $Paid.
(I’m using the “Eight Dollars” plugin.)
Smaller accounts that I knew to be legacy verified previous have lost their blue check.
So it is now block-blue-checks-at-will time on twitter, for those still using it.
Also, the Pope lost his blue check. Any over-under on the number of Fake Popes we’ll see? “@realPope” account is suspended; don’t know how old it is.
Roger Moore
@Ruckus:
Upper management has been informed of what is going on; that is one of the functions of lawsuits. They still don’t seem to have done anything, which shows complicity.
trollhattan
Pretty much encapsulates Putin’s approach to Ukraine. “If I can’t have it I’ll make sure it’s broken for everybody.”
TriassicSands
I’m not on Twitter and never have been, but it seems like, from what I’ve seen and read about Musk it’s simply his toy and he’ll decide who plays and what the rules are. For every decent person who finally has had enough of Musk’s Twitter, there is probably someone more to Musk’s liking out there to join.
Don’t you think Musk would prefer it if trans people simply left Twitter altogether? That’s what it seems like to me. He’s not concerned so much with whether it is a safe or unsafe space for trans people. He’d simply prefer they didn’t exist at all.
I understand that decent people have found and find Twitter useful, even important. It’s up to them to decide when enough is enough. On balance, my life would probably be, at a minimum, incrementally improved if Twitter ceased to exist, but I can’t tell others how to feel or what to do.
On the other hand, I think all our lives here on Bj would be improved if Musk ceased to exist or at least took his much needed one-way trip to Mars.
TriassicSands
@Roger Moore:
Well, it’s just in keeping with the originalist intent of the Framers. Musk is just another patriot.
Manyakitty
@Geoduck: very nice. More like this.
TriassicSands
@trollhattan:
Agreed. Which pretty much encapsulates the Republican’s approach to the entire country. They’d rather be the rulers of disease-ridden landfill than mere citizens in a “City on the Hill” (as much as I dislike the original source of that phrase).
Geminid
@trollhattan: That was also Netanyahu’s posture to the previous Israeli government. It worked, at least in the short term.
TriassicSands
@Betty Cracker:
Betty, I understand the depth of your hatred of DeSantis (i feel the same way even if I don’t live in Florida), but how would you feel if he were to get the nomination and Trump, refusing to allow anyone else to “win” but himself, ran as a third party spoiler. Wouldn’t that be the best possible scenario?
TriassicSands
@Geminid:
I think you’ve identified a common attribute of fascists.
Manyakitty
@Roger Moore: the difference between them is that trump is intentionally malevolent in his decision making. Bush had his religious freakazoid disasters, he also sold his soul to the Saudis, etc, but I don’t believe he actively hates our country.
Geminid
@TriassicSands: Trump likes the limelight, so he might run 3rd Party. But he doesn’t need to in order to take down the Republican nominee. He can demoralize the Republican electorate just fine from Mar-a-Loco.
schrodingers_cat
@WaterGirl: All his actions indicate that he wants to break Twitter as a place where the not so famous and not so important could call out bigotry and highhandedness of the TPTB.
Geminid
@TriassicSands: Netanyahu also had a personal interest at play: he wanted to derail his prosecution on 3 corruption charges. That required him to regain power by any means neccesary.