Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

“And when the Committee says to “report your income,” that could mean anything!

Historically it was a little unusual for the president to be an incoherent babbling moron.

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

Is it irresponsible to speculate? It is irresponsible not to.

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

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

… pundit janitors mopping up after the GOP

Let me eat cake. The rest of you could stand to lose some weight, frankly.

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

This really is a full service blog.

Black Jesus loves a paper trail.

This has so much WTF written all over it that it is hard to comprehend.

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

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

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

People are complicated. Love is not.

“Jesus paying for the sins of everyone is an insult to those who paid for their own sins.”

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

Republicans in disarray!

You can’t love your country only when you win.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Their freedom requires your slavery.

In short, I come down firmly on all sides of the issue.

I did not have this on my fuck 2022 bingo card.

You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / Late Night Open Thread: Warlords of the Checkmark Realm

Late Night Open Thread: Warlords of the Checkmark Realm

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Cranky conservative, expert on the former Soviet union:

If your goal is to spread your agenda, you want the venue to be respected, full of dependable sources, so that your influence operations can be one more among those sources. If you’re putting out bullshit, you want it on the same rack as the NYT and WaPo, not tabloids. /2

You also want to use your influence with the owner so that when you slip pollution into the info stream, it doesn’t get lost. There are things regimes want to communicate. You want to create sources that *look* dependable and real. /3

Now, I get it that there’s a theory that what you really want is to create a shitstorm so chaotic that no one knows what’s what, but that’s not nearly as a useful and you’re not gonna spend billions just to let a child troll everyone. /4

My point is that what you’re seeing right now doesn’t help bad regimes. Musk is now giving gold badges to established media, but the rest of the site (where influence ops would need some stability and reliability) is now much less useful. /5

For the people who read tabloids and believe anything anyway, nothing here will make a difference. But the ability to impact a reasonable number of reasonable people is reduced when everything is a “look at me” pants-drop from Musk. /6

So, as usual, I’m suggesting that all this is not a plot, but merely that Musk has no idea what he’s doing, and this is a lot of panic and chaos because he can’t figure out (1) why people won’t do what he’s ordering them to do and (s) why he can’t make money out of this site. /7x

like, men and women (but, let’s get real, mostly men) who just have absolutely no concept of why their wealth and power demand some degree level of maturity and responsibility, or, at the very least, public restraint.

150 years ago, men like him would’ve shipped off to serve as some meaningless military figurehead for awhile, where they’d at least have to *pretend* that gravitas and seriousness were important, if only to maintain the respect of their peers.

the main thing that separates this era from that one is that he can’t realistically go out and buy a private army now, but don’t think he hasn’t considered it, and he may yet try.

there are plenty of more modern failures and fuckups you can cite, but his wealth relative to even other very wealthy people is what really pushes it way further back in time.

like, “late hapsburg with hair transplants” level of fuckup.

Reader Interactions

34Comments

  3. 3.

    Yutsano

    150 years ago, men like him would’ve shipped off to serve as some meaningless military figurehead for awhile

    To be fair, we really have no idea why he stopped being a scion of an apartheid emerald mine to come to the US. I mean, he was so ridiculously wealthy back there as it was. Was it just to pass up his dad? Mission accomplished Elmu. Go home.

  4. 4.

    West of the Rockies

    By what measures can Twitter’s collapse be measured?  Presumably the estimated value of the site is greatly reduced.   But are there millions fewer users?  Is ad revenue down?

    We heard people say the platform would crumble quickly with so many layoffs, but it still is up and running.  Is its collapse wishful thinking?

  5. 5.

    Splitting Image

    I don’t think you have to go all the way back to the feudal era to find somebody as rich, vapid, and incompetent as Musk.

    Consider Leopold of Belgium for example. He persuaded the government of Belgium to hand over Congo, including all of its land, minerals, and people, to him as his personal property. That adds up to a heck of a lot of money. Leopold’s plans for turning Congo into a paradise ended up being only partially fulfilled. (He got as far as reducing the entire population to slavery to farm rubber for export and support his paradise-making bureaucracy.)

    A little further back you get to Versailles. Marie Antoinette was probably as stupid and vapid as popular imagination suggests, but the more I study the era, the more I think that she might have been the most intelligent person in the entire nobility. Half of them were undermining the royals for their own intrigues, including members of Louis XVI’s immediate family. Nothing bad could come of that, right?

  6. 6.

    NotMax

    @West of the Rockies

    Here ya go. From the end of March

    Twitter advertising dollars have plunged 89% since billionaire Elon Musk bought the social media platform in October, Bloomberg reported, and as a result, revenue has dropped by half.

    Twitter has seen a slight uptick in daily users since early 2022, the report said, but advertisers have not returned to the site amid the ongoing upheaval at the company. Since Musk took over Twitter in October, he’s slashed jobs by about 75%, leaving the company with less than 2,000 employees, and most of the content management team gone.

    Last week, Musk valued the company at just $20 billion, less than half of what he paid for it.

    Citing data from Pathmatics, Bloomberg said that from September to October of last year, the top 10 advertisers on Twitter spent $71 million on ads. In the past two months, the total was just $7.6 million, a decline of 89%, the research firm said. Source

  7. 7.

    AlaskaReader

    Musk can pound sand.

    Instead of feeding that, ….I’ve got good news:

    In a landmark decision, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled Friday that partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional under the Alaska Constitution’s equal protection doctrine.

    “For the first time the Alaska Supreme Court has interpreted the equal protection doctrine to prohibit gerrymandering for partisan purposes. This decision will put vital sideboards on the redistricting process to prevent political abuse of the process in the future.”

    The blatant Republican orchestrated gerrymandering that led up to this decision wasn’t even attempted to be disguised by the wholly dishonest wingers who carried out the injustice. Binkley and his sidekicks didn’t even put up any pretense to what they were about.

    Read the whole thing.

    There’s value in this decision that can benefit activists fighting gerrymandering and voter suppression in other states.  

    “We expressly recognize that partisan gerrymandering is unconstitutional under the Alaska Constitution,” the court’s opinion says on page 91.

    (…working now to prevent Marcum’s confirmation to the University of Alaska Board of Regents)

  8. 8.

    Anne Laurie

    @Yutsano: To be fair, we really have no idea why he stopped being a scion of an apartheid emerald mine to come to the US. I mean, he was so ridiculously wealthy back there as it was. Was it just to pass up his dad?

    If you believe Dear Ol’ Dad (exercise left to the reader), Elon was ‘too depressed’ to survive in post-apartheid South Africa; he got shipped off to another colony (Canada), where there wouldn’t be so many scary… troublemakers.  (Such is the way of the soutpiel.)

    We also got Peter Thiel and David Sacks under the same rules.  Toughening immigration rules against White South Africans raised under apartheid is a change I could *absolutely* get behind.

    Someday, theses will be written about whether Elon is the way he is because his old man rejected him (and his mom, in consequence, fiercely defended his every flaw)… or whether Errol rejected his firstborn for being, as the Anglo-aristocracy would phrase it, not quite right from the start.

  10. 10.

    Splitting Image

    @eclare:

    King Leopold’s Ghost was a very sad but important story of what happened in Congo. Highly recommended book.

    Thanks. I have put it on my to-read list.

  11. 11.

    rikyrah

    The thing is..Musk has done everything he could to damage what made Twitter special. Ruined every good part of the app🙄

  12. 12.

    OzarkHillbilly

    @Anne Laurie: theses will be written about whether Elon is the way he is

    I can do without reading those psychoanalyses, thank you very much.

  14. 14.

    different-church-lady

    @Anne Laurie: I’d rather see a thesis on why “Be asshole, win prizes” seems to have become our society’s only operating principle.

  15. 15.

    OzarkHillbilly

    About three weeks after the US supreme court last year struck down the federal right to abortion, Greg Williams, a volunteer pilot for a group that provides free flights to people who need to travel for medical care, posted a Facebook message.

    “If any women need to make an unexpected trip from the south to, say, Illinois or New Mexico or Virginia for reasons that are none of my business, I can provide safe, private air transport that would get you where you need to go and back the same day at a price that will work for you,” Williams wrote, on 28 June 2022.

    Williams acknowledges the message mentioned an area which has largely outlawed abortion and three states which have acted to preserve access. The post did not explicitly mention abortion – because Williams’s day job was teaching Greek and Latin at a college for prospective Catholic priests near New Orleans.

    The Benedictine-run St Joseph Seminary College has a policy against publicly expressing beliefs contrary to the established teachings of the Catholic church, which stridently opposes abortion. Despite the fact that a majority of Americans believe abortion should be legal in most or all cases, according to recent polling, Williams wanted to comply with school policy. It didn’t matter. The school fired him a week later.

    “Your Facebook post publicly and deliberately advocated a position contrary to the official teaching of the Catholic Church,” said the termination letter that St Joseph’s rector, Gregory Boquet, gave Williams on 5 July. “The decision is to terminate your employment … effective immediately.”

    And there you have it. It is Catholic doctrine that women should not be allowed to travel.

    He said he found the college hypocritical, because it is part of a church which spent decades trying to suppress information about child sexual abuse by its clerics. The archdiocese which includes St Joseph, and which serves about half a million Catholics, has identified more than 80 priests and deacons strongly suspected of abusing minors.

    “It’s a hell of a thing to have [the church] have an official letter addressed to me saying I’m doing heinous evil,” Williams said. “It’s like – what are you talking about?”

    Yah, I kinda have to agree.

  25. 25.

    evodevo

    @Yutsano: ​
      How about the era of deKlerk and Mandela? given Elon’s favoritism for white supremacy, I’d say that played a big part in his emigration…

  26. 26.

    eldorado

    elon has accomplished a major, if not the primary goal of making twitter unusable for left leaning users and has diminished their reach and influence . it doesn’t have to be an effective tool for the newly boosted authoritarians because they have plenty of other outlets for that

    but hey, the nazi bar thrives on attention so maybe a few more posts a day and we can get it back into the top 10

  27. 27.

    Shalimar

    @eldorado: It will be a long wait before DeSantis launches his Star Wars Cantina-inspired “Nazi Bar”, the prime attraction in his new theme park next to Disney World.  Twitter is the only place we can point and laugh right now.

  28. 28.

    The Moar You Know

    The two “dog people” sites I frequent both decided last week that their main source of income/clicks, Twitter, is on the way out and have both fired up their old email distro lists.

    Finally!

    But in seriousness Twitter’s demise, which I have no personal problem with whatsoever as every form of social media is part of the problem in America today, is going to ruin some decent people financially and will really hurt/impede the work of quite a few animal rescue organizations, among others.  I acknowledge that; but will still be cheering as Elon’s Nazi Bar burns to the fucking ground.

  29. 29.

    catmandid

    The biggest mystery is how anyone still believes that Melon is playing some kind of 4-D chess when he’s clearly trying to play Monopoly on a Hi-Ho! Cherry-O board.

  30. 30.

    Ruckus

    @West of the Rockies:

    A lot of the people who invest(ed) time and effort at/in twit are still there, like kilgore trout or golikehellmachine. But a lot of people don’t show up any more. They still have accounts, (like me) but have stopped showing up, (like me). Since elon started destroying the place I’ve gone from 30-60 minutes a day to maybe 10 minutes per week and often zero. Sure there are still a lot of people using the site but the number keeps dropping. Especially because he keeps screwing up, making it even less useful but more his own toy. 44 billion is a lot to pay for a toy that he breaks a little/lot more every time he tries to do whatever the hell it is that he’s trying to do. He’s making it in his own shadow. And it shows. And the funny part? No one expected any different from the spoiled rich kid.

  31. 31.

    Ruckus

    @Splitting Image:

    It might be the old adage of the ages. Money is good, too much money is anything but. I’d say most people with lots of money – and I met a few when I worked in professional sports – are spoiled brats who think even their shit smells like money. And the thing is, it does. That does not make it smell good. It just smells like rich shit. What’s the old saying – Money corrupts, too much money corrupts absolutely. Or something like that.

  32. 32.

    Ruckus

    @different-church-lady:

    It is absolutely nothing new. They become those assholes because they came into money. Especially if they did nothing but be born into it, like elon. Sure he’s made more with what he started with but he started with a lot, born with a diamond spoon.

  33. 33.

    kmax

    A Twit thread used to bring in 300+ comments.

    Now 30+.

    Ads also down 90%.

    A measure of where the Tweet shop is headed?  or are they already there?

    The snark was fun for a while but now it just seems sad (and somewhat boring).

  34. 34.

    GibberJack

    you’re not gonna spend billions just to let a child troll everyone

    Oh dear, that’s a gonna prick an apartheid princeling’s notoriously thin skin…

    It’s as if having billions of dollars also reveals who you really are.

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