Elon Musk just bought Twitter. Pending the inevitable legal wrangling the dude will own it, lock, stock, and barrel. Since everyone is apparently required to have an opinion, I’ll offer mine.
Bwa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha….
Now don’t get me wrong, for some people this is a big deal. The thought that Elon Musk will own Twitter is simply terrifying to them. Thus, I offer my sympath… Bwa ha ha ha… I just can’t say it with a straight face. I have absolutely no sympathy. Hate Musk? Build your own media outlet. Can’t do that? Learn to code bitches!
I don’t give a fuck about anything that ever happened on Twitter. It’s the land of woke bullshit and is (as far as I can tell) irredeemable. I don’t care if Elon reforms it, rebuilds it, improves it, or takes a dump on it.
Any forum that cancels a sitting president and not Isis has gone past the batshit event horizon. I’d no more expect reason from its fans than I’d expect a carrot to understand geometry.
Their misery is self-selected, self-inflicted, and pretty much imaginary. Which really means it’s hilarious. “Oh no, I won’t be able to have a social media outlet that carefully eliminates all people with whom I disagree!” Really? What kind of adult thinks like that?
Anyone who’s desperately invested in a particular form of Twitter is a person who’s utterly irrelevant. The silver lining is this; maybe a few of the lost ones will come to their senses. This is their best chance to set down the keyboard, let go of the tactical Twinkie, lever their ass out of their basement, and go for a walk. Walk… outdoors. Rejoin reality. Maybe get a real job, or at least plant a garden. As my grandmother often said; “It’s good for what ails ya!”
The map isn’t the terrain. The finger isn’t the moon. Twitter isn’t even remotely relevant to a life well lived. It’s a place where dumb people say snarky things to manipulate dumber people.
We all knew that years ago. I don’t have a Twitter account. I never did. Most Americans don’t have a Twitter account. Because we’re not fuckin’ idiots.
Twitter started pointless and became destructive. Any concept constrained within Twitter’s specifications and censorship is shallow, oversimplified, without nuance, and… lets be honest here… retarded.
Twitter was built from the ground up to be the home planet of confirmation bias. A small herd of people telling each other the bullshit they wish was true in the hopes that a large thundering mass of dumbasses will follow them off the cliff. The fact that large thundering herds of dumbasses mainlined bullshit straight to their cerebral cortex, like a hive mind of clueless bots, is not news to anyone who’s paying attention. If you’ve read history, experienced college, or interacted with the purple haired harpy at the Karen convention, you already knew all about it.
The Twitterari claim superiority to us unwashed masses but it’s a claim without substance. A bluff propagated by human marshmallows.
Great swaths of humanity are immune to their crap. They get information in a better form than a pre-digested woke-paste regurgitated by a big blue momma-bird and puked down our neck. We have depth. We have reason. We have experiences, skills, knowledge, and (this is important) humanity. We engage with the actual universe in which we live. Crucially, we observe results rather than getting in a lather about intentions. We know what “unexpected consequences” means because we care about consequences. We build stuff, fix things, manage our own affairs, and many of us even do silly things like read books.
The left is losing its shit as Elon strolls up just one hill in their mountain range of stupid. They’ve a plethora of options to stroke their needy egos. That should be sufficient. Yet they freak out at the challenge to a single one of their treasured pacifiers? The woke control damn near every form of social media in creation, along with just about every institution from the Church to the the Military to the Press to Netflix… all of which degrade under their childish mismanagement. They still flip their shit over a single source of external validation! How brittle can you get? Apparently that brittle.
On a more thoughtful level, the Z-Man weighs in:
“Gab has been up and running since 2016 and it offers what conservatives claim they want in a platform. Even better, it is free from the deranged lunatics that have ruined other platforms. Conservatives dismiss it because they say it is an echo chamber, by which they mean it lacks the people they claim to hate. They avoid alternatives to Twitter because they want to beg lefty for forgiveness and those platforms do not provide it.”
Remember when I said I didn’t have a Twitter account? I do have a Gab account (not in my blog’s name). There’s plenty of bullshit on Gab too but it’s not a relentless crap tornado. With a little less censorship, I get a lighthearted mix of opinions (kooks and thoughtful alike). Plus a bit of humor. Some good, some bad, as with all human things. It’s better than Twitter which is singularly inhuman. Twitter demands groveling (as Z-Man wisely describes) as part of its experience of miserable joyless Kafkaesque woke bludgeoning.
The other good news is that I’m absolutely loving the spectacle of feces flinging monkeys going into apoplectic fits. They’re raging over the slightest risk to their little kindergarten-level sandbox. There are chihuahuas on meth who are less frantic than Twitter spastics. Who knows, a few might learn from this. They could pull out of the dipshit spiral and become more interesting people? Nah… if they had that level of self awareness, they wouldn’t care about Twitter in the first place. 
Of course Babylon Bee is spot on. Plus the ‘net is awash in delightful memes. Enjoy them! Having survived Biden’s winter of death, we could use a good laugh.
Take it away NPC:
Robert Reich had something to say; which is to say Mr. Reich said something stupid. He’s the only man on planet earth with a worse track record of being correct than that galactic dipshit Paul Krugman. If Reich says it, it’s dumb. Lay your wisdom on me Rob:
Now that the bludgeon is in the other hand, the woke are suddenly less happy with bludgeons. Of course, nothing will come of it but Captain Circle Back has mentioned a baby step in the right direction. Tell me about misinformation sweetheart! You know I like it when you talk dirty:
You know… this is just one of dozens of bright signs of life out there. The last 15 months… the last 5 years… the last… whatever unit of time you prefer to call it, has had lots of disappointments. Sometimes it felt unbearably dark. The center cannot hold. The ratchet tightens. The flame smolders and starts to go out. Wisdom ebbs and witch hunters rise. Society re-enacts failures of other eras. Mobs run amok. They persecute the innocent and build pedestals for the demented. They destroy without building and hate without healing. They eat the seed corn and salt the fields.
But the story isn’t over yet. It’s never truly over. And it isn’t all dark. There is hope. Hope feels like it’s growing. Elon doesn’t mean shit, but the woke going into spasms over such a minor tribulation tells us they’re already hollow. Their monster is a construct. It is without substance and lacks persistence. It is a house of cards. The world can’t bow in submission. It’s not made that way. Even if it wished to, the world cannot remake itself in the service of… nullity.
That which cannot continue, won’t. The woke got every fucking thing they want. More or less complete control everywhere; not just nationally but across Western Civilization. And they’re miserable. They seated a meat puppet, the economy corrodes, they can’t even keep Disney from self immolation. We didn’t push them off the ledge, they jumped. We might as well enjoy the show.
PJ O’Rourke had a great line that applies to this:
“The left builds this big monster truck of government (or twitter) and gets upset when someone else gets behind the wheel and tries to run them over with it”
Y’know, AC… sometimes these things just have to run their course. I remember back in the day when they were banging on about defunding the police departments. There was no reasoning with them – they thought you could just talk crackheads, gangbangers and drunks down with some nice warm fuzzy soothing words – from a social worker. When you run into lunacy and deliberate stupidity like that… maybe you SHOULD defund the police departments, and let them find out the hard way. Maybe we SHOULD forgive all student debt. Maybe we SHOULD put more affirmative action winners in the cockpits of huge passenger jets.
And when Darwin and Murphy come calling… maybe we SHOUD say, “I told ya so…”
I had a twitter account once…long ago and I used it for exactly 3 days. I was going to the NRA convention with a bunch of other gun bloggers and we all decided to use twitter to communicate while we were out and about. We all joined a “twitter group” (I don’t even know if that’s still a thing) so we’d all see each others twits, or tweets or whatever.
It actually worked quite well for that singular purpose. Someone would see something interesting on the floor and tweet the location to the group, or one of the bloggers would meet someone interesting, ask if they were up for a group meet and tweet to the rest of us when and where to meet them.
This would have been in 2008 I guess…it was in Louisville, KY. Twitter was still fairly new and I never really understood the purpose of it but for that specific situation, it was great. ;I kept my account for a few years and actually set it up so that it would automatically create a tweet whenever I posted something to my blog, but that feature was disable several years ago and I closed my account after that. My account was closed voluntarily before the current trend of “ban all wrong-think” took hold.
Anyway, I guess my point is that a communication media like twitter does have it’s usefulness, it’s just very limited in my opinion. The way most people use it is astonishing to me. Does anyone really care about what Sally ate for breakfast today or what John thinks of the latest episode of whatever mindless drivel is being put out on the networks these days? I find the vast majority of it very tedious. I prefer real life.
I agree that communication media (even twitter) once was darned handy and now it’s pretty shitty. Circles and discussion groups are a natural fit for modern times and now they’re faded. I’d like to seen more true honest communication and not less. It feels like things were better when communication was more primitive. It’s hard (impossible?) for most people to remember that there was a time when social media was fun instead of manipulative and invasive. I’m my lifetime I’ve seen computers go from something like CB Radio to something like the Eye of Sauron. We lost forums and discussions with free exchange of ideas and humor when everything turned into groupthink, dopamine hits, and censorship.
I think it doesn’t have to be that way. I think there are other methods equal to the “good old days” before the internet became the monster it is now. Right now they’re not getting traction but it might not always be that way. Probably that’s because the internet is incredibly easy. People (myself included) will put up with a whole lot of shit if the alternative is a hassle.
Just for “you can’t stop the signal” optimism , I’ll mention some communication that’s not quite so suffocating as Twitter and the like. I carry a SpotX when I’m alone in the wilderness. It works anywhere on earth if I need help. I turn it off most of the time so I have peace. I keep my cell phone off much of the time. I sometimes travel without it. I cram it in a faraday envelope when I wish and generally treat it like the viper it can become. I listen to shortwave radio and there’s no way any government anywhere can know if I did or didn’t listen to it. I get one blog delivered as a cd in envelopes. My vpn is never off, I am loyal to no software, and I switch between computers of any OS. You’re harder to cage if your computer is just a tool. Plus there’s HAM which is a whole different world. I have a few people I can only reach via F***book and I honestly communicate with them very rarely… thinking of them as prisoners in an ugly place. Of course I never used Twitter.
I’m not saying anyone has to live like a hermit but just turning the damn things off once in a while does wonders. Maybe awesome free-ish methods will become more common… at least among the cognizant.