I thought WW3 would start with Putin striking at Poland or the Baltic states, but I guess it could happen this way, too. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This week’s great online freakout involves [shakes Magic 8-Ball, shuffles deck, reads tea leaves] the possibility that polarizing weirdo billionaire Elon Musk might buy a controlling interest in Twitter. The people who’ve spent the past few years responding to free speech controversies by saying private companies have a right to control their content as they see fit are now melting down over the possibility that Musk might take over this private company and control its content as he sees fit.
Jarvis has been getting a lot of heat for making the Nazi comparison, but I dunno. Twitter really does feel a lot like Weimar Germany.
It has always felt like Weimar Germany, with modern day equivalents of the Nazis and the Communists battling each other and both ganging up on the centrists when the time is right. Every social media (and even “legacy” media) has its good and bad points, but no platform is so conducive to online mobbing, bullying and misinformation as Twitter. In my opinion even Facebook, which takes most of the heat from politicians and journalists who want to control it for their own purposes and kneccap a major competitor for web traffic stop the spread of misinformation and save democracy, isn’t as bad.1
I am not worried about Musk taking over Twitter for several reasons, not least of which is that I will shed no tears if he does run it into the ground, and also because it’s already a cesspool of hate in which the content moderation rules are unevenly applied. (Jesse Singal, for one, has some stories he could tell you about graphic personalized threats of violence on Twitter.)
Of course everyone is worried that Musk might allow you-know-who to have his blue-check Twitter account again. Personally, I’ve come around to the idea that banning Trump from Twitter and Facebook rebounded to his benefit, because his crazy bullshit isn’t front and center anymore. (In response to the suggestion that this is because he’s out of office, I’d argue that his Tweets set the news agenda for many months before he took office.) Yeah, he still has rallies and some news interviews, but it’s just not the same when you can’t immediately reply to and quote-tweet him.
Now there’s more focus on the Biden Administration and the Democrats, and while I think ol’ Joe is mostly doing a good job - his relatively skillful handling of the Ukraine crisis somewhat makes up for his disastrously executed pullout from Afghanistan, the moment when his popularity ratings collapsed - most Americans disagree. His approval rating these days is about the same as Hepatitis C, and by some measures even lower than Trump’s (which is about as popular as Hepatitis A).
Just as some of the factors that were expected to torpedo Marine Le Pen’s campaign ended up making her stronger, banning Trump from social media has backfired badly. William Goldman was right.
Plus, if Musk buys Twitter and allows Trump to rejoin, that’s the final nail in the coffin for Troof Social and the other right-wing Twitter clones. (Gab, which openly caters to the hardcore white-supremacist stuff, will endure like the stuff in the back of your office refrigerator.) I don’t normally like seeing companies fail, but I make an exception for blatant grifters. If you’re still investing in anything Trump-related now, that’s on you.
Meanwhile, /r/im14andthisisdeep in human form is getting some attention by telling Ukrainians to just lay down their arms and take one for the team:
So I’m not criticizing Zelensky; he’s an honorable person and has shown great courage. You can sympathize with his positions. But you can also pay attention to the reality of the world. And that’s what it implies. I’ll go back to what I said before: there are basically two options. One option is to pursue the policy we are now following, to quote Ambassador Freeman again, to fight Russia to the last Ukrainian. And yes, we can pursue that policy with the possibility of nuclear war. Or we can face the reality that the only alternative is a diplomatic settlement, which will be ugly—it will give Putin and his narrow circle an escape hatch. It will say, Here’s how you can get out without destroying Ukraine and going on to destroy the world.
We know the basic framework is neutralization of Ukraine, some kind of accommodation for the Donbas region, with a high level of autonomy, maybe within some federal structure in Ukraine, and recognizing that, like it or not, Crimea is not on the table. You may not like it, you may not like the fact that there’s a hurricane coming tomorrow, but you can’t stop it by saying, “I don’t like hurricanes,” or “I don’t recognize hurricanes.” That doesn’t do any good. And the fact of the matter is, every rational analyst knows that Crimea is, for now, off the table. That’s the alternative to the destruction of Ukraine and nuclear war. You can make heroic statements, if you’d like, about not liking hurricanes, or not liking the solution. But that’s not doing anyone any good.
I was going to say this is like telling Czechoslovakia it can’t win and to just give up on the Sudetenland. But that happened before August 23, 1939, so Chomsky might not have agreed with that one.
In the Reddit thread, people note that this is a very different position than the one Chomsky takes when the United States is the superior power being resisted. But there’s not really anything inconsistent about it.
In family law the principle of “the best interests of the child” overrides pretty much everything else. Similarly, for the nationalist, “my country above all else” is the guiding principle, and everything else is a distant second at best.
Chomsky is kind of a “reverse nationalist,” whose lodestar is his own country being the source of all evil in the world (with an occasional assist from its allies, especially the one in the Middle East with the six-pointed star on its flag) against which any and all resistance is justified.
You can at least sort of understand it when the resistance comes from a Communist regime promising a new model for a fairer, more equitable society. In 2022, it means running interference for a far-right nationalist regime which is propped up almost entirely by the very fossil fuels you insist are destroying the planet.
There’s being anti-fascist, and then there’s being so devoutly anti-fascist that you…find yourself apologizing for actual fascists.
I have actually taken a break from Facebook these past few days, and I recommend it to everyone. I have no plans to delete my account, but an indefinite hiatus might do us all some good.
Twitter schmitter...if Musk wants it, welcome to it. Hell, if Trump were as smart as he thinks he is, he would've figured out a way to pony up a gob of OPM and just bought the damned thing himself per his usual business M.O. Might not have worked out too badly either...keep all the crackpots in one place, more or less.
Title and lead of your post pretty much says all that's actually relevant about Twitter.