Doge eat doge

I talked about this earlier, but I thought about it again the other day when I went to one of the people I follow on Twitter (Arielle Dror, who does a terrific job with National Women's Soccer League stats...) and this smirking idiot popped up:

Apparently the mutt has something to do with Elmo and his repping for one of those crypto scams ("Dogecoin") and for some bizarre reason the weirdo Afrikaaner has slapped it on his site, possibly to remind people that if you "invest" in cryptocurrency you're the word that fills in the blank in the phrase "A ______ and his money are soon parted."

It's irritating, because it's a reminder of this over-moneyed nitwit, and because I don't use the site for things like news, or to visit anyone other than pundits, sportswriters, and artists I enjoy I don't often have to be reminded of the sorts of scumbags that populate the Dark Intellectual Horsepaste Web or whatever they're calling the MAGAt/"alt-Right"/freikorps-o-sphere these days.

(And while I'm on the subject of "Twitter people I enjoy" I'd be totally remiss in not repping Ironlily for her adorable "Ordo Medaire" Twitter waifus...

Cute 14th Century warrior nuns? Sure! Bring it!

Plus one of her tweets made me find the "Combat of the Thirty", which has to be the fucking hands-down most utterly whack 14th Century chivalric thing EVAH. If you like them, too, stroll over to her Patreon and drop a buck in the collection box. I'm sure the sisters will send an Ave Maria your way.)

Anyway.

Point is...while I yield to no one in my contempt for Elmo and his wingnut horde, the sound and fury is still offstage for me. Don't see or hear it unless I run across someone else who has.

But that's kind of how it is living in a blue city in a blue part of the state while working inside a blue Internet. I don't go looking for these assholes, and I moderate stuff like replies to this blog, so I can hunt them down and kill them if they come looking for me.

I can't imagine what it must be like for people like me in places like Mississippi or Tennessee, though, and that's kind of the point. For them it's Elmo's doggie's ass in their faces 24/7. Everywhere. All the time.

Which is why I don't want anyone to have to live there, either.

But short of doing a Bill Sherman?

I can't do anything any more than I can whip Elmo's doge to kennel. The brach gets to sit by the fire and stink.

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...)

In passing

I've been working all week (You: but...but you're retired, right? WTF? Me: Ummm. Hang on, I'll get there...) and I've been getting up at 4am to get there, so I'm gonna do the old retired guy thing and take a fucking nap.

But first, I wanted to drop in here and throw out some passing thoughts.

So...retired.

Yeah, well. I didn't want to just drop into the rocking chair and find myself dead of some sort of aneurysm six months from now like every other retired dude. I asked around among some friends still in the biz to give me a call if they needed a hand with anything. One did, so I'm dirt-nannying a job up outside the tiny no-longer-a-real-town of Goble up in Columbia County.

It's irritating, like all this dirt-nanny work, but, hey...it helps pay the bills, and it's only for a month or two.

But that wasn't what reminded me of "working". 

It was an e-mail from my last chief engineer, from where I just retired out of.

He said he wanted to talk; specifically about my last annual "bonus" from the outfit we work(ed) for.

I assume if you've worked for any sort of big business you know what I'm talking about. At the end of the calendar year corporate masters hand out an envelope with some extra jack in it.

Or not; if business has been bad there may be nothing. My first workplace, David Newton Associates, tended to have fat years and lean years and the year-end kick tended to vary depending on how fat or how lean. 

One of the lean years our "bonus" was a fucking frozen turkey.

But this last outfit has a peculiar addition to that tradition; your immediate boss is supposed to "tell you about" your bonus - hence the e-mail from the former CE needing to have a FTF with me about this bonus.

What it reminded me was how I hated that little talk with the heat of a million suns.

What it always did was remind me how much my corporate masters seemed to think what a huge fucking favor they were doing me by handing me this cash bolus which my work earned for them in the first place.

It was a sort of 21st Century largesse, the coins tossed into the crowd of grubby proles by the noble on horseback, and the little talk that came with it irked me more every year I heard it.

Didn't matter if the speaker was someone I liked or, as this guy, was someone I wasn't particularly fond of.

It got to the point where I had to bite my tongue to respond with something biting. One thing I did early on was stop thanking the person. 

Why? Why thank them? How in any way was this a gift? I worked, and worked well, for it. I earned it, it wasn't largesse, it was a measure of my value.

But the corporate requirement to present it as a gift, to "talk" about it as such, made the company's rep come off like they were handing it down as a favor that they should be thanked for, and this time - he finally caught me on the phone - was no different.

I didn't thank him; I agreed it was a nice kick, we talked a bit about work, and he buggered off. 

That was my last one of those little talks - I'm no longer a salaried employee, and I'm no longer eligible for the thing.

Good. We may be in the Second Gilded Age. But I don't need an annual reminder that the coal barons still want to shove us back into company towns, thanks.

The other thing that I wanted to mention was the continued Twitter tsuris.

Jim Wright at Stonekettle has a long post about his thoughts - which, as usual, are fairly well-reasoned and to the point - about this flaming trainwreck, but my own perspective on the issue is a peculiar one.

I read a lot of politics and a lot of political blogs, so I hear a lot about the nonsense. And I can see how it is entirely within the bounds of possibility that a high-function autistic, obscenely rich white boy marinated in the toxic shitbrew of apartheid South Africa could, indeed, be an unhinged shitposting MAGA nutball who is turning a social media platform into a fairly accurate resemblance to his own freakish internal headspace.

But the thing is...I don't get my news off the platform. 

I don't use it to communicate with others. 

I pretty much just read; read the content generated by people who write about soccer, or art, or history. I do read some lefty political accounts, like Roy Edroso, but I don't engage with anyone there other than that.

Some, or all, of the people I follow may be taking incoming MAGAt fire...but I'm not in the beaten zone, so I have no idea what the hell that looks like or is.

So...what's kind of weird is that while I know about this shit, I don't really...know it. 

It's like I'm sitting quietly while a knockdown brawl is going on in the next apartment. I hear the thumping and screaming through the walls, raise a brow, cock my head, mutter "Hmmm...", and carry on.

So while Twitter may be just another part of this country overrun with wannabee Blackshirts, looney anti-vaxx 14th Century cosplayers, and Donald Fucking Trump...I'm luckily enough to be in another part of the country.

And I'm fine with that.

Okay. Got to go finish up the paperwork from today's nannying.

But I'll be back in a bit. I've got some more stuff on my mind.

See ya then.

Put a bird on it

 

The whole "Elon Musk takes over Twitter and immediately pilots the bird in controlled flight into terrain" thing is remotely fascinating. 

To me, anyway.

I really don't have much of a fighting-dog on that particular flight. I don't use the app personally (I'm here, still blogging away like the refugee from the Nineties I am, or on Facebook - largely only because I still have long-distance friends that the Metaverse lets me stay in touch with...) so whether it lives or dies in a spectacular collapse is kind of a matter of indifference to me.

So the interest here at the Fire Direction Center is purely academic and out of curiosity.

But I am fascinated, in a sort of bemused way, watching a whole bunch of things very "21st Century America" slam into each other in this Twitter crash.

1. The whole tech-"genius"-worship thing.

I've never "got" the Musk-fanboi. The guy owns a company that builds...ohmigoadSpaceRockets!

Yeah, well, so did that old Nazi Werner von Braun.

But somehow this seems to have created a club that looks at this joker as some sort of culmination of The Buddha, Johnny "The Wadd" Holmes, and Croesus. Mostly because of the space rocket thing.

(There seems to be a subset of fans of his cars, but the rockets seem like the big draw).

But...c'mon. 

Einstein's Wall means that manned space flight is a nonsensical macguffin best left to science fiction, and since the end of the big NASA programs the inevitable consequence of letting plutocrats take over - space tourism - turns the whole Right Stuff legacy into WTF? Stuff. 

The fact that the USG has let this fuckstick take over the launch of communications satellites is infuriating, mind you. It's the astronautic equivalent of what we've let Republicans and greedy privatizing bastard (but I repeat myself) do to the Post Office; turn what should be a public good - communicating with each other - into a cashbox held by a greedy bastard.

Turns out that you don't really have to be that much of a "genius" to own a rocket company. You can be a greedy bastard and clueless outside your lane so long as you start by being a rich greedy bastard. Turns out that the best way to make millions is to start with millions. Who knew!?

2. Tech.

We're Americans. We're enthralled by shit that goes fast, makes noise, or beeps when you push its buttons. Twitter is just another tech gimmick, albeit a fairly useful one for talking to other people.

The notion that it's something "important" seems a fairly accurate metric of the sort of thing that the American public finds "important", and runs concurrent in my estimation with the amount of time that the recently-concluded election spent talking about "transgender".

There are such things as transgender people.

They're a tiny subset of the set "people", and they - like all people - just want to live their lives. Some happily and productively and sensibly, some madly and dramatically, some...well, just like everyone else.

In a sensible world, we, the "rest" of us, would mind our own fucking business and let them mind theirs.

Instead, because of a bunch of nitwit wingnuts, we've wasted an immense about of time, money, and intellectual throw-weight fretting about them.

It's the same with tech.

Twitter is a postcard. Facebook is a letter. TikTok is...sort of a postcard with moving cat pictures.

The platform is just another way of talking to one another. The "how" may be gee-whizzical. But the "what" is the same old-same-old that Sumerians did with clay tablets.

Which is to say, if not Twitter? Something else will be there to talk through.

Clay tablets, maybe. Whatever.

If we were willing to think of it that way, we'd realize that what's important is what we say and show and do, rather than the how.

And that brings me to...

3. "Free speech"

Supposedly the whole nonsense began because a) Musk was baked, and b) pissed off because one of his favorite right-wing assholes had been STFU by The Bird, so he c) did some dumb things that forced him into paying way more for this thing than he should have, so here we are.

Supposedly this all started because Musk (who may have been baked, remember...) wanted to "Free the Bird".

And yes, all the wingnuts have been raving for a long time about "freedom" and "their freedoms".

Those "freedoms", so far as I can tell, are largely the "freedom" to fuck around and not get kicked in the ass for it. To do rude, stupid, destructive-to-the-commons stuff and then not have to hear the non-rude, non-stupid, and/or non-destructive bystanders tell them they're being rude and stupid.

(kinda looks back at the whole "transgender" thing here...)

The "open-carry" fucknuts? The "rolling coal" d-bags? The sorts of people who want to pry into your bedroom, or your uterus? The white-is-right open racists, the "wimmens-is-stupid" misogynists?

Yeah, all those assholes.

They're cranky because they were told to sit down, shut up, and stop being rude stupid assholes.

Y'see, I grew up in the Sixties, when ALL that rude, stupid stuff was just "how Americans are". 

I remember hearing and using the expression "Jew him down" for bargaining; it wasn't "racism", it was "how Americans talked". 

I remember hearing my Chinese friend described as a "slope" and not immediately pounding the speaker senseless because that was "how Americans talked".

I remember seeing how badly the black kids in my school were treated, how girls "did this not that", how there were one set of rules for rich and powerful and another for everyone else, and that ws just "how America is".

Then, slowly, painfully, sometimes violently, incompletely, some "Americans" started pushing back against that rude, stupid shit.

It started to become unacceptable to call people playground names, because, well, that IS rude and stupid. 

It became less-acceptable (if not completely UN-acceptable) to treat people like shit because of their skin color, or their gender, or because of who they liked or loved.

And the rude and stupid people haaaaated that. So they fought back.

They found a natural ally in "conservative" groups - since most of the "conservative" groups believed, like them, that "bitches" and "faggots" were icky and that the Good Old Days when you could just call them "bitches" and "faggots" and beat them up were Good - and turned their rude stupidity into "free speech" so they could push back the pressure on them to be less-rude-and-less-stupid by slamming it as "woke" and "politically correct".

So all these rude, stupid wingnuts have been foaming at the mouth in anticipation of Musk turning his new Twitter toy into a place where everyone can be rude and stupid to the people that wingnuts hate.

And that seems to be happening.

And if that's not "America 2022" I don't know what is.

A rich, greedy rude (and, it now seems, pretty stupid) "genius" makes a dumb move while baked because his rude and stupid fanbois are fapping to him making the dumb move, and in the process takes something that other non-rude, non-stupid people find useful to communicate and makes it ruder, stupider, and worse.

The fucking Post Office?

Medical care?

Politics?

It seems like there's nothing that 21st Century America can't find a way to let - or encourage - rich, greedy, stupid douchenozzles to make ruder, stupider, and worse.

So.

I'm hopeful that the good (not-rude, not-stupid) people I visit on Twitter (hi, Arielle Dror! Hi, Mark Hertling! Hi, Scamperbeasts!) don't go away if (when?) the Bird hits the window.

Perhaps that's the most irritating part about all this, and what makes me less "fascinated" and more "irked with the antics of greedy rich bastard"; that all these good people (and cats...) are going to take it in the shorts because some baked knucklehead has a bunch of rude stupid asshole fanbois.

But people, eh?

As one of my old platoon sergeants summed it up:

"Some fuckin' people could fuck up a wet dream."

Probably as pithy an epigram for the damned human race as was ever coined, and so, since I can't add anything, here's another cat picture.

I gotta go gas up the Prius. But I'll be back later with more less-rude less-stupidity.