Twit

or, "What Did you Do In The Twitter War, Daddy?"

So.

On Twitter I've got a page. 

Somewhere (I don't really know where it is or what's on it...). 

Through it I follow an odd assortment of people and places, funny oddities like The Scamperbeasts (John Scalzi's pets blog), soccer journalists like Chris Henderson and Meg Linehan, several graphic artists (including some very smutty ones, since I respect all Internet traditions and as we know The Internet Is FOR Porn), a couple of political writers like Roy Edroso and Jamelle Bouie, and the Portland soccer teams.

I certainly don't use "my" Twitter homepage to say anything - that's here - and I certainly don't read the news or get general information from it; that's for places like the Beeb or my news and political blogs. So this post over at Lawyers, Guns, & Money says (and better than I could) pretty much how the Blue Bird is working for me:

"In any case, my experience on Twitter is about the same as it’s ever been, minus some of the people I’ve followed who’ve given it up, plus far too much about Musk. My “For You” feed shows only people I follow anyway, with their tweets mixed up in time, not the string of Musk tweets others are reporting."

And I note that, again, since I don't ever look at my Twitter homepage I don't see the "For You" nonsense so I don't get all musky, regardless of how it's set. In fact, I haven't seen anything from the Afrikaner scamp at all, the more luck to me.

So.

While I get that lots of people are angry that Elmo is stanning Nazis and @catturd2 and Trump, I don't see it and that, in turn, kind of drives home the point that unless you're a target for these idiots - and I'm sorry if you are, that syucks - you don't have to see or hear them if you don't look for them.

Which kind of makes the point; this hasnt made Twitter into some sort of Svengaliesque mass hypnosis that's turning decent, kind, intelligent people into raging MAGA nitwits.

The people who are diving into this shit are people who WANT to dive into it.

I don't, so I can go peek in and don't run into MAGAts or Nazis. You gotta want to look for and find MAGAts and NAzis.

Which kind of brings us back around to the whole idea of getting "radicalized".

Supposedly listening to Rushbo and reading QAnon and watching FOX is what turned the supposedly douce suburban Republicans into raving race-hating antivaxx fascist nutballs.

But I listened to Rush back in the day.

I've watched FOX. Yeah, mostly to scoff, but I've watched it.

I have a pretty deep trough of historical knowledge about this country, so it's kinda hard to bullshit me about Critical Race Theory.

And I'm pretty easygoing about "morality", sex, and gender, so it's kinda hard to get me spun up about a ladyboy in a cocktail frock reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar to porch monkeys.

But I'm not some sort of geopolitical genius or social media savant.

If I can see through this bullshit, if I can look at cats on Twitter without freaking out about balloons or soy milk, so can you and so can all these other douchenozzles.

As Jim Wright says; if you want a better nation, you gotta be better citizens.

Oh, and speaking of balloons, this wins the Internet for today for the Star Wars riff:

Yes. It is.

(And, speaking as a parent of a former Star Wars kiddo, it never made sense to me that the Separatist Rebellion in SW was called "The Clone Wars". I mean, yes, the fictional Republic used cloned soldiers. But the Seps used robots - "droids" - so why not "The Droid Wars"? Or "The Clone-Droid Wars"? Or, shit, "The Separatist Rebellion"? My guess is that George Lucas hadn't actually thought out his prequels during the Seventies and just thought "The Clone Wars" sounded cool. That's lame, but that's as Lucas-y a thing as I can think of. You gotta be you, George...)