Wednesday, December 14, 2022

The Mad Titan

 


I know what you're thinking, 'cause right now I'm thinking the same thing. Actually, I've been thinking it ever since I got here: Why oh why didn't I take the blue pill?
-- Cypher, The Matrix

 

Elon Musk is doing us all a favor.

We should probably thank him for it. 



No, no, we really should. We should thank Elon Musk. 

Oh, you know, not for destroying a platform that some of us, like Yours Truly here for example, have invested over a decade in, slowly building an audience, writing the content people actually come to Twitter for. 

I don't mean we should thank him for vaporizing that effort, because that's infuriating. 

No. Not that.

I mean we should thank Elon Musk for firing most of Twitter's employees, then using his massive platform to ridicule and harass them and send hordes of his drooling violent sycophants to destroy their lives. Thanks, Elon!

We should thank him for the Twitter Files. For releasing the internal corporate emails of his predecessor, the ones any rational person would interpret as nothing other than people doing their jobs. But we no longer live in a rational nation, and thanks to Elon Musk, the conspiracy nuts, the foreign agents bent to our destruction, and those determined to burn everything to the ground now have more fuel for the fire. 

Oh yes, we should thank Musk for giving voice to the absolute worst elements of our society, the mean little trolls, the racists, the bigots, the misogynists, the violent nationalists, the self-proclaimed Nazis, the Ultra MAGAs, the proudly stupid, the deliberately ignorant, the bullies, the chaos agents, those who hate for hate's sake, the conspiracy nuts, the antivaxxers, the religious lunatics, the seditionists and insurrectionists and the violent howling mob of unhinged bomb throwers. Thanks to Elon Musk, they now not only have a voice, they have full command of the narrative and can spin themselves as victims and martyrs, just as their kind always has to justify their violent hate. 

We should thank Elon for raising up the knuckle-draggers, the Brown Shirts, the goons, the barbarians who would gleefully tear down the fundamental institutions of civilization, civil rights, national infrastructure, equality under the law, education, social safety nets, justice, science, et al, and who would cast doubt on the integrity of democracy and the very worth of civilization itself in order to replace it all with selfish libertarianism, fanatical religion, and violent anarchy. 

It's freedom of speech, not freedom of reach, says Musk. 

Clever. Catchy. And completely arbitrary

And so, we should thank Musk for his random autocratic style of unfettered capitalist greed where you never know what's going to get your voice promoted, or more likely suspended, de-platformed, ruined, starved, and/or made into a target of the violent furious mob for some billionaire's amusement. 

Twitter 2.0 has become the twisted fantasyland of a capricious mad god. 

There are no rules, no appeal, no possible way to know what might offend, or amuse, Elon Musk from one moment to the next, a man who by his own admission finds most social interaction incomprehensible -- and there's the definition of irony if ever there was one. 

Every day on Twitter under Musk is a minefield of dog turds and cat vomit that you must navigate in the dark, barefoot and off balance, ass backwards into the unknown. 

Musk tells us that social media is the town square of democracy, that Twitter is about freedom of speech, and it is -- so long as you are willing to pay for that right, so long as you can afford to give a billionaire your money each month for the privilege of eating out of his garbage can, and so long as you don't make him mad or give offense to the wealthy. Because if you can't or you are unwilling to pay and bend the knee, well, then your voice no longer matters.

Freedom of speech and freedom of reach for $8 a month. What a bargain. 

In a world run by the rich, only those who can pay are worth listening to. 

Yes. Yes, indeed, we should all thank Musk for that, for showing us that world. 


Twitter has become a Second Life simulation of that dystopian America.


Ironically, that's exactly what the Constitution was designed to protect us from. 

The Constitution was literally designed to protect Americans from the capricious impulses of arbitrary power and to prevent some foreign-born despot from ruling over the nation.

Yet, again ironically, those most vocal in their fanatical sycophantic support of this new Twitter and its rule of self-declared absolutism are those who most vocally define themselves as Constitutionalists

Of course, Twitter isn't the government and the Constitution doesn't apply to global social media platforms run by the world's richest man.

(Or second richest man, or whatever his status is today. The exact degree of his wealth and power hardly matters down among us pig shit covered peasants). 

You see, Twitter is a bellwether for what an America, a world, run at the mercurial whims of fickle immoral unrestrained oligarchs would look like. 

And it looks exactly like what our founders were most afraid of. 



Anyone else find it particularly ironic that those self-styled "Alpha Men" who have spent most of their miserable pinch-faced lives bullying those born biologically male as betas, cucks, sissies, fags, queers, gay, girly, pussies...

... and demeaning those born biologically female as butch, dyke, tomboy, masculine, et al...

...are now somehow mad because they are being asked to call LGBTQ people by their preferred pronouns


Musk's complaint is daily echoed by petulant conservative politicians who are right now on his platform decrying wokism. They seem to think the basic common courtesy of calling someone by their preferred address, be it their name or a pronoun, is some terrible form of oppression of the sort where you have to press #1 for English. 

I am particularly boggled at the part where a man whose entire vast fortune was derived almost entirely from the work of science and engineering in the service of capitalism, now turns to unhinged conspiracy theories in an attack on science. That's what he's doing here, you know, by going after Dr. Fauci. That "gain-of-function" dog whistle. Musk knows, couldn't help but know, that gain-of-function is a common tool of virology and medical science, used by science the world over to prepare for and anticipate possible harmful viral mutations of common diseases. Without gain-of-function testing, and loss-of-function, you wouldn't have many common vaccines, or at least not in time to do any good -- and the military would be without a method of protecting its troops from possible weaponization of things like small pox and anthrax. 

There's simply no evidence of the accusations perpetuated by Musk in the second paragraph above. 

In fact, the evidence shows just the opposite, i.e. that Dr Fauci and those scientists like him have quite literally saved the lives of billions.

But blaming experts, the "elites" for some imagined crime combined with the idea that common basic courtesy and respect for others is somehow something something gazpacho OMG NAZIS! is exactly the sort of thing the Nazis themselves actually did to justify their own sense of victimization. 

Musk knows it. Republicans know it. 

They do. Because you notice they never actually provide any specifics. 

Oh no! We're being oppressed by pronouns!

Under the Nazis, Jews and others deemed undesirable, such as LGBTQ people, were murdered wholesale in the camps. 

Under the Soviets, those arbitrarily deemed criminals, such as again LGBTQ people, were sent to the Siberian gulags to die.

In North Korea, they publicly execute people with antiaircraft guns at the whim of Kim Jong Un.

Under Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge murdered so many of their own people, the skulls of the dead were stacked in pyramids as high as a 3-story building.

In East Germany, the Stasi infiltrated every layer of society, turning paranoia into an artform where brother informed on brother and children on parents and people were disappeared into the brutal national security apparatus and never seen again. 

In Argentina, they threw people out of airplanes for fun. 

We still have no idea how many of his own citizens Idi Amin Dada murdered. Or Baby Doc Duvalier. Or Saddam Hussein for that matter. 

Here in America, we once kidnapped Africans from their homeland and turned them into farm equipment, literally made them into livestock and forced them to work in the fields. And the genocide of Native Americans, well, we really have no idea how many died and we really didn't care as our government herded the destroyed ragged remnants of their civilization onto forgotten reservations -- until we needed the resources of that land, I mean. 

But all of that horror pales in comparison to the oppression of ... pronouns. 

The "woke mind virus" as Musk calls it. 

Woke. "The belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them." That's woke, as defined by lawyers representing Florida State Governor, Ron DeSantis, who is right now in court defending his administration's authority to apparently perpetuate that very systematic injustice instead of correcting it. 

The belief that there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them. 

To quote Morpheus, huh

I mean, the same people complaining about "woke," about "cancel culture," are the very people complaining on Twitter about how they are personally being systematically persecuted by American society and "cancelled" due to their beliefs. 

I hate to keep using the word "irony," but there's a degree of perverse hilarity when a man who feels pronouns are oppression named his own most recent offspring "X Æ A Xii" which Musk says should be pronounced "X Ash A Twelve." 

Not to mention that for a guy who is often referred to as being "redpilled" both by himself and by his conservative anti-woke fans...


... there's a stunning lack of self-awareness, given that the term "redpilled" itself entered the anti-woke vocabulary via a film literally written and directed by Lana and Lilly Wachowski -- who are perhaps two of the most prominent and influential trans women in history.

As I said, repeatedly, ironic. 

And sad.

And more than just a bit bizarre. 

Of course, for Musk, it's personal. 


And what of those caught in the middle? 

Those like me. 

Like most of you. 

The ones who actually create the actual content of social media?

The ones currently losing followers and being driven off the platform? 

Musk's business model makes zero sense -- and I'm being charitable by assuming there is such a thing as an actual model or any sense to his behavior whatsoever. 

I mean, what is Musk's end goal? 

He says he wants to make money, that Twitter must be profitable. 

Okay. I can see that. The guy spent $44 billion buying the place, he probably needs to make that back at some point, if only to pay off his creditors. But, instead of building a platform where content creators attract more users, and thus advertisers, and thus profit, he's turning Twitter into a wasteland that attracts only a particular sort of self-abuse.

Musk is gambling that reinstating Donald Trump, James Woods, Laura Loomer, et al, will attract users.

And maybe it will. 

But that is a very limited pool and those aren't the sorts of users who mainstream advertisers are willing to engage. 

And if those who make and sell art, actors who make movies, manufactures who sell soap and frozen pizzas and gewgaws you can't get on Amazon, bloggers, YouTubers, writers, comics, cartoonists, buskers, donut makes and small business owners, and those who don't give a damn about American politics (oh, you forgot about that, didn't you? That a significant number of Twitter's users aren't Americans), or even just people who want to grow a following by tweeting cat pictures, i.e. users who can no longer build a business on the platform because they can't depend on Twitter to establish and obey its own rules, to be reliable, to be supportive, to be responsive to their needs, then they won't build a business on that platform. 

And thus that platform will never be profitable. Q.E.D. 

And what does that leave Musk? 

Because platforms of anti-woke angry users already exist. Parler. Gab. Truth Social. And they're not the sort of places that grow much beyond a certain point, or attract advertisers, or turn a profit. They become a toxic stew of hate and spammers so vile that even the most fanatical MAGA hat loses interest and wanders back to mainstream platforms specifically because there are liberal voices there to scream at. 

And those places, those platforms of anti-wokism, are hardly bastions of free speech. 

In fact, they become incubators of the very oppression Musk says he fears above all else. 

Owning the libs turns out to be a terrible business model. 

And once again, as a metaphor, it's a lousy way to run America. 


We've survived by hiding from them, by running from them. But they are the gatekeepers. They are guarding all the doors, they are holding all the keys. Which means that sooner or later, someone is going to have to fight them.
-- Morpheus, The Matrix

Saturday, December 3, 2022

A Republic If You Can Tweet It!

 


GIVE ME HUNTER BIDEN DICK PICS OR GIVE ME DEATH!
-- Patrick Henry, MAGA, probably





As I noted elsewhere: I feel like the American education system has failed me.

It's true. 

Failed. Utterly failed. 

Because I honestly had no idea allowing washed up actor James Woods to post unlimited Hunter Biden dick pics to Twitter was the cornerstone of democracy. 

Had. No. Idea. 

None. 

It literally never came up once between kindergarten and a couple of college degrees.

So, I totally didn't know that. 

Imagine how embarrassed I am. 


Dick pictures, key to freedom, Folks!

Also, I spent 20 years in the US military. I took the oath as an enlisted man and later as an officer countless times. 

That oath comes from the Constitution. 

The Constitution. That's as American as it gets, right? 

And I totally can't believe the powdered wig wearing idiots who founded this country completely left out the part where the Republic will completely collapse unless we get advice on how to run civilization from self-proclaimed Nazis, White Supremacists, Confederates, seditionists, washed up actors, Incels, and Russian trolls in the town square.

I mean, what the hell, George Washington?

Hide the stuff that matters? 

You mean like Hunter Biden's dick? 

If his wang was that important to democracy, you'd think the Founding Fathers would have put a dong clause in the Constitution, right? 

At least mentioned it in passing? Carved it into Mount Rushmore or the Lincoln Memorial or something, right? 

Post more dick pics! For freeeeeeedom!

What? 

What's that? 

Oh, I see. The Lincoln Memorial didn't exist when America was founded by Jesus? 

Yeah, and Joe Biden wasn't president when his campaign asked Twitter to abide by their own rules, but that doesn't mean he shouldn't be impeached for abusing the office he wasn't occupying at the time either dammit! 

Or something. 

I'm not really a Constitutional expert -- except on the internet, like everyone else. 


You're welcome.

Thanks to you for not serving. 

Whatever, look, here's the bottom line: even for a bunch of folks who thought women were livestock and black people were only 3/5s of a human being, it really does seem like a glaring oversight on the part of the Founding Fathers is what I'm saying here. 

Anyway...


You know, for a group that does nothing but complain about "groomers" these people sure do think about dick a lot. 

I hope they eventually find one that makes them happy. 

Moving on.

 


It's not about penis! It's much BIGGER! Wake up before you LOSE IT! 

Stop laughing you guys! 

It's like the tallywacker scene from Porky's


You know, at first I was a little disappointed Republicans took the House in the recent election.

No, no, I was. A little disappointed. A bit. 

But now? 

I gotta be honest: I'm excited Kevin McCarthy is going to be Speaker. 

I am. Excited. I really am. 

Because I am so looking forward to the House Special Select Committee To Investigate Hunter Biden's Dick Pictures. 

I wonder who they'll appoint as "Special Master?"

It'll have to be a real master debater...

Okay, that was a cheap shot, I know. I don't want to debase a debate run by people talking about dicks, how much they love Hitler, and currently supporting a candidate for congress who thinks the most pressing issue of freedom is whether it's better to be a vampire or a werewolf. 


Anyway, I imagine when it comes to investigating dick pictures, the list of Republican "expert witnesses" is going to be pretty extensive.

Kevin McCarthy be like: Okay, settle down! We're putting together a task force to investigate a major threat to National Security. And we're going to be looking at a lot -- a lot -- of pictures of male genitals on the Internet. Now, which one of you, yes, YES, I see you Congressman Gaetz, put your hand down, you too Congressman Jordan, besides those two, who else considers themselves an exper... Whoa, that many huh?

They'll probably have to set aside at least 3 days for Lauren Boebert's testimony alone.


First, they came for the dick pics, and I did not speak out -- because I was too busy watching Tucker Carlson and thinking about Hunter Biden's laptop

Then they came for vaccine deniers spreading misinformation, and I did not speak out -- because I was rage tweeting about Drag Queen Story Hour

Then they came for the election fraud conspiracy theorists, and I did not speak out -- because I was marching in the street with actual Nazis shouting Jews will not replace us and waving a Swastika flag

Then they came for me -- ha ha, just kidding, I'm a white allegedly straight Christian male in America, no one ever comes for me and in fact billionaires like Elon Musk buy social media platforms and give me a place to spew my bile and they call it free speech!













Thursday, December 1, 2022

Flawed


I am flawed as a human. I am flawed as a person. As a man I am flawed.
-- Kanye West


We have apparently reached the Nazis Weren't So Bad portion of the MAGA movement. 

(And if you read MAGA movement in the same internal voice as bowel movement, well, then I've done my job as a writer)

The artist formerly known as Kanye West, Ye as he's currently calling himself, on Alex Jones' show yesterday: 

"I see good things about Hitler also. I love everyone" (followed by five minutes of West explaining in detail why he really, really doesn't love Jewish people so much).

And 

"They (the Nazis) did good things too, we've got to stop dissing the Nazis all the time."

And 

"Well, I see good things about Hitler also. Every human being has value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler."

Especially Hitler. Oooh, boy. 

Ye also carefully explained how Adolf Hitler was "born a Christian." 

(Yes, I did indeed listen to Alex Jones' whole damn show. And if you want to know how unpleasant that was, Dear Reader, you may imagine it for yourself) 

Speaking of Jones, you know the guy who spent literally years attacking the bereaved families of children murdered by gun violence and promoting thinly veiled anti-Semitism (the globalists! the globalists!), yeah, that guy, even he was taken more than a bit aback by Ye's virulent anti-Semitism and repeated admiration of Hitler -- though I'm not really sure what he thought was going to happen when he invited proud anti-Semites Nick Fuentes and Kanye West onto his show. Maybe he thought they were going to talk about puppies and Christmas cookie recipes. Hitler loved dogs and cookies, I guess.  

Ironic, this love of Hitler, given how Nazis would have treated Ye himself. 

I mean, it takes a huge degree of self-delusion for a black American rapper to embrace Adolf Hitler. 

Nevertheless, such is the state of our nation and here we are. 

Of course, if it was just Nick Fuentes, just Kanye West, just another deluded anti-Semite with a fascism fetish, it wouldn't be noteworthy. 

But it's not just them. 

The former President of the United States invited this ideology to dinner at Mar-a-Lago because this is what MAGA has always been about -- despite Trump's feeble protestations that he didn't know who Kanye West and Nick Fuentes actually were. 

Meanwhile, outside the gates of Mar-a-Lago, in Ron DeSantis Florida, Americans literally wearing Nazis uniforms and waving Nazi Swastika flags are marching in the streets shouting "Jews will not replace us!" 

And Donald Trump, the man who declares himself the smartest man in the world, who says he knows more about everything than literally everyone else, claims he didn't know. 

Yeah. 

Maybe Trump really is that naïve, I doubt it but maybe. But his supporters? They know. 

Oh, they know. 

Sixty-Two million of these goosestepping assholes voted for exactly this in 2016.


They'd love to do so again in 2024. 


Here's the thing: We spent most of the last century asking ourselves, why didn't someone -- anyone -- stop the Nazis before they destroyed half the planet and murdered 12 million people? 

Well, you're looking right at it. 

No one stopped them because their hate and their violence was normalized. 

There were a million warning signs -- just like those above. 

There were tens of thousands of moments where they could have been defeated, stopped, sent back into the sewers from which they crawled. 

Why didn't anyone stop them? 

For the same reason no one is stopping them now

I'm gonna give you a little somethin' you can't take off!
-- Lt. Aldo Raine, Inglorious Basterds (2009)