Okay, Musk is paranoid, capricious, vengeful, and thoughtlessly cruel to anyone who gets in the way of his objectives. Got it. I don’t use Twitter. It’s a shame he’s cancelling journalists and rapidly destroying whatever utility Twitter has had. Having stated my small and unoriginal opinion, I hereby declare that I am tuning out on what’s going on with Elon Musk except as he may be found to be directly funding an authoritarian takeover.
it's pretty remarkable how consistently it's true that the people who want most desperately to be in the headlines EVERY DAY are the ones with virtually nothing of any value to say (that is, when what they're saying isn't disgusting or dangerous or both, which is WORSE than nothing). think about it...Musk, Kanye West, MTG, anyone in any way connected to TFF et al.
So true. I like your variant on "TFG". TFF could be The Former Fool, The Former Fraud, The Fraudulent Fool, The Former Fathead, and that's not to even get into the saltier possibilities.
That Musk is fearful of he or his family being put at risk because of someone's free speech (i.e., nefarious response, use of information unfiltered by miscreants who are just looking to do harm) seems to provide the best case for soft, objective, equally applied "regulations" for this platform and for other ones like Facebook or Truth Social, etc. I don't like what some people say (about me) or put my family at risk or I know you are wrong are not reasons to drop a customer. Those are personal reactions, not a corporate or social policy. Regulating is filled with problems, ethical and fair, the design shouldn't start with lashing out by the owner. These platforms, if they are to promote civil and free speech, need tall leaders, not small minds of frightened narcissists. A learning opportunity, here, for Musk.
In order to learn from one's mistakes, one must admit error. The narcissist just blows past the mistake and on to the next one. The negative reactions of others plays no role.
Learning from mistakes is part of humility. Another feature absent from Muck's cruel and selfish personality.
Have no idea that I "Reported" your comment. Thought I was responding. Sorry. Besides my response disappeared,
I am in agreement with your point. Further, that given that Musk may not learn from this opportunity, we might want to revisit whether a public good like Twitter should be owned privately. I think a narcissist should neither be leader of a public good nor government.
Fred and Jeri - you are on to something. Perhaps there should be a BBC version of social media that functions as Twitter was originally designed. But there we go..."taxing and spending". I'll say it now, I trust the government more than I trust any private company or sprawling corporation run by a privileged wing nut. I can vote out the government, but I can;t vote out Koch or Mercer, etc.
There's a $100 trillion in the hands of a few people like Muck. Tax the Hell out of them!
you're absolutely right, except for the fact that your last sentence implies that you take an actual interest in this asshole's opportunities for self-improvement. or were you just making a rhetorical point?
Oh, I am an optomist. Especially, as Musk owns Twitter and will for a long time. He has an ego the size of ... whatever. And he does love to make money. The battle to turn these Public Goods away from being potentially the lair nest of evil disguised as something with a potential is going to outlive me.
One more drama Queen, attention whore . . . Sounds no different than tRump making his rounds in NYC with the local radio hosts back in the day. Bore, bore, bore . . .
“Unreconstructed Afrkaner” - love it! As a Virginian taught the lost cause at my mother’s knee, and currently working hard at overcoming it (much like Ty Sedule *Robert E. Lee and Me*), I’m going to use this phrase regularly when referring to muck. 👍
Musk is like the spoiled, entitled rich kid that brings his new toy to play with other kids, but gets miffed when the other kids have fun with it, so he takes his toy and goes home. I never had anything to do with Twitter and won’t miss it if it goes belly up or Elon gets tired of his shiny toy and sells it to another rich brat, by which time it will be tarnished and broken, hardly worth the hefty price Musk ponied up for it.
Elon, a kid of indeterminate age, obviously likes to take his ball and go home when the results of the game don't suit him. Problem is, the ornery little son of a bitch won't stay there and just keeps coming back. Would someone please, please piss the little jerk off enough that he takes his ball and skulks off once and for all so we can all talk about someone / something else?? I'd almost pay good money for that. Not "I won't dox your airplane money", but I'd scratch up something.
But there's an even better way to piss him off more than anything else would, and it wouldn't cost a dime. Sadly, it would never happen, but if everyone actually stopped talking about the snarky bastard, he really might actually leave and stay gone, at least for a while. Depending on the going rate for buying the internet and how long it would take the weasel to come up with the dough.
Would suggest the same as the solution to a former high office holder who likes to make up the rules as he goes as well. There's surely no danger of him coming up with the dough, new fungus tokens notwithstanding, and it just might piss him off enough to produce the Big Mac effect a little ahead of schedule, which would be a permanent answer to all his ugly noise as well.
Bill Watterson is probably laughing hysterically, or would be if he read this. Very well done, and one more reason why I don't understand the angst on the part of people who see Twitter falling apart. He's nuts, and deserves what he'll get when the banks realize he's running his collateral into the ground.
I wonder if he's canceled the accounts of everyone who contributed to that trending post. That would be a ton of folks if it's a "trending" post! I am so glad I quit that platform.
If not Muck, it'll be someone else until public utilities, as you say, or the pubic commons is adequately regulated or fixed in another way. The question is how to combat the privatization of the commons.
Old English saying from the 18th Century: "The man who stole the goose from the Commons was transported to America while the man who stole the Commons from the goose was transported to Parliament." from the Enclosure Movement, an activity to increase their wealth by the English aristocracy that resulted in many of our ancestors (including the "Thomas" in my name) arriving here.
That's one of the big questions, isn't it, and thanks for bringing it up. The trend is increasingly headed the other way with the privatization of charter schools, prisons, residential mental health facilities. It is about money, of course, but it's worse even than that. It's about money made by managing the vulnerable or ostracized among us--prisoners, children, the mentally ill. It's horrible, and today it America. We need to fight it on every front, but I don't know quite how that would look. For the first time in a very long time, maybe ever, I can't come up with a single idea.
Thanks for your further clarification of the privatization platform of anti democracy actors. This is what movement conservativism and authoritarianism look like.
I imagine many of us in our teenage/college years remember that something was amiss with the shrinking of the middle class, as you detail. Yet it was hard to pinpoint and our parents didn't see it or get it because they were doing fine. I'd say to my parents, It's not right (about pretty much everything unchecked capitalism and social justice related). I would be called a socialist by my father at 12 years old. I fear that we now know that our hunches were correct.
Oh, Wendy, you are so right when you say our hunches were correct, but even then I was unsure about any kind of accuracy, much too caught up in the passion of what felt like tectonic shifts in the direction those hunches were pointing me--but all too vague, like some will-o-the-wisp. And, Lord, we were all so young. It sounds like you're a bit younger than I am, but old enough to remember the certainty on the one hand and the utter confusion of parents who obviously weren't noticing (or were running from noticing) anything unusual. My regret or sadness is for all my adult years, doing life after the intensity of the 60s and early 70s, the willful blindness of my whole generation as the economic gap widened, as Ronald Reagan locked into place the foundation of the brutal capitalism that today is America's identity. Where was my mind? How could we not have been paying attention? Of course, as a friend often says to me-I need to give up trying to make a better yesterday. But what if we allowed too much damage to be done? And, there, in a nutshell, is a demonstration of how to get depressed on a Saturday afternoon. Sorry about that. It is good just to be able to say. it.
As I recall, after the intensity of the 60's and early 70's, we were really busy, with real jobs and kids and responsibilities. The most I could do was yell at the television set, "Don"t believe that f%$#ging cowboy" as I nursed a baby at 4 a.m.
Permit me to add, no internet, no hate mongers on radio in the ‘early’ days! The most ‘radical’ radio personality I heard was Carlton Fredricks who focused on trying get us to eat healthy, non processed, food!
I loved Calvin and Hobbs back in the day. It is still my favorite comic strip ever. Both of my sons have ADHD; Calvin and Hobbs was a window into our life, trying to cope with all the small and HUGE challenges of our daily life. My boys, now adults, both love Calvin and Hobbs also. It was a sad day when the strip stopped publishing.
Muck and tRump are children of privilege, who were never disciplined. They are both poster boys for arrested development, if I ever saw one. They have absolutely no business controlling anything that impacts the common good. That also goes for other billionaires like Charles Koch, Peter Thiel,etc.
P.S. I took child development in college and taught preschool. Those cartoons depicting tRump and Muck as babies are spot on.
Thank you, might check out Mastadon. Muck has already pulled the plug on Twitter. I enjoyed it once upon a time, but they didn’t like me calling chump a wannabe Nazi.
A lot of us, former Twitter and now Mastodon users have utterly given up on Mr. Musk. Some of us are even journalists. The world continues to revolve. The hashtag #twitterisdead is a thing. When last I checked there were 800000+ users on Mastodon, more each day, and the Fediverse has absorbed us with surprisingly little disruption or hoo-ha.
Okay, Musk is paranoid, capricious, vengeful, and thoughtlessly cruel to anyone who gets in the way of his objectives. Got it. I don’t use Twitter. It’s a shame he’s cancelling journalists and rapidly destroying whatever utility Twitter has had. Having stated my small and unoriginal opinion, I hereby declare that I am tuning out on what’s going on with Elon Musk except as he may be found to be directly funding an authoritarian takeover.
That's on my agenda too, except people I know keep getting caught in the crossfire.
it's pretty remarkable how consistently it's true that the people who want most desperately to be in the headlines EVERY DAY are the ones with virtually nothing of any value to say (that is, when what they're saying isn't disgusting or dangerous or both, which is WORSE than nothing). think about it...Musk, Kanye West, MTG, anyone in any way connected to TFF et al.
So true. I like your variant on "TFG". TFF could be The Former Fool, The Former Fraud, The Fraudulent Fool, The Former Fathead, and that's not to even get into the saltier possibilities.
Good start there, Elizabeth.
:D
That Musk is fearful of he or his family being put at risk because of someone's free speech (i.e., nefarious response, use of information unfiltered by miscreants who are just looking to do harm) seems to provide the best case for soft, objective, equally applied "regulations" for this platform and for other ones like Facebook or Truth Social, etc. I don't like what some people say (about me) or put my family at risk or I know you are wrong are not reasons to drop a customer. Those are personal reactions, not a corporate or social policy. Regulating is filled with problems, ethical and fair, the design shouldn't start with lashing out by the owner. These platforms, if they are to promote civil and free speech, need tall leaders, not small minds of frightened narcissists. A learning opportunity, here, for Musk.
In order to learn from one's mistakes, one must admit error. The narcissist just blows past the mistake and on to the next one. The negative reactions of others plays no role.
Learning from mistakes is part of humility. Another feature absent from Muck's cruel and selfish personality.
Have no idea that I "Reported" your comment. Thought I was responding. Sorry. Besides my response disappeared,
I am in agreement with your point. Further, that given that Musk may not learn from this opportunity, we might want to revisit whether a public good like Twitter should be owned privately. I think a narcissist should neither be leader of a public good nor government.
Fred and Jeri - you are on to something. Perhaps there should be a BBC version of social media that functions as Twitter was originally designed. But there we go..."taxing and spending". I'll say it now, I trust the government more than I trust any private company or sprawling corporation run by a privileged wing nut. I can vote out the government, but I can;t vote out Koch or Mercer, etc.
There's a $100 trillion in the hands of a few people like Muck. Tax the Hell out of them!
Amen
It had sort of become a public utility, needs to become just that
Learn, of what you speak
you're absolutely right, except for the fact that your last sentence implies that you take an actual interest in this asshole's opportunities for self-improvement. or were you just making a rhetorical point?
Oh, I am an optomist. Especially, as Musk owns Twitter and will for a long time. He has an ego the size of ... whatever. And he does love to make money. The battle to turn these Public Goods away from being potentially the lair nest of evil disguised as something with a potential is going to outlive me.
You're also a realist.
As I read this I also thought of the cast from Bloom County, but couldn't decide whether Musk would be Bill the Cat, Opus, or Steve Dallas. https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwj1s7O77oP8AhUzlIkEHaSgB30QFnoECBAQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gocomics.com%2Fbloomcounty&usg=AOvVaw2k03Z69sPbyGP2LrWXsqMu
Steve Dallas.
One more drama Queen, attention whore . . . Sounds no different than tRump making his rounds in NYC with the local radio hosts back in the day. Bore, bore, bore . . .
yup, yup, yup...
“Unreconstructed Afrkaner” - love it! As a Virginian taught the lost cause at my mother’s knee, and currently working hard at overcoming it (much like Ty Sedule *Robert E. Lee and Me*), I’m going to use this phrase regularly when referring to muck. 👍
Welcome to the Club of Those Overcoming. We didn't all have to come from the South to have "Southernism" to deal with.
Musk is like the spoiled, entitled rich kid that brings his new toy to play with other kids, but gets miffed when the other kids have fun with it, so he takes his toy and goes home. I never had anything to do with Twitter and won’t miss it if it goes belly up or Elon gets tired of his shiny toy and sells it to another rich brat, by which time it will be tarnished and broken, hardly worth the hefty price Musk ponied up for it.
not "like." IS.
Elon, a kid of indeterminate age, obviously likes to take his ball and go home when the results of the game don't suit him. Problem is, the ornery little son of a bitch won't stay there and just keeps coming back. Would someone please, please piss the little jerk off enough that he takes his ball and skulks off once and for all so we can all talk about someone / something else?? I'd almost pay good money for that. Not "I won't dox your airplane money", but I'd scratch up something.
But there's an even better way to piss him off more than anything else would, and it wouldn't cost a dime. Sadly, it would never happen, but if everyone actually stopped talking about the snarky bastard, he really might actually leave and stay gone, at least for a while. Depending on the going rate for buying the internet and how long it would take the weasel to come up with the dough.
Would suggest the same as the solution to a former high office holder who likes to make up the rules as he goes as well. There's surely no danger of him coming up with the dough, new fungus tokens notwithstanding, and it just might piss him off enough to produce the Big Mac effect a little ahead of schedule, which would be a permanent answer to all his ugly noise as well.
Like chump, ignoring won’t work. They both know it and are prepared to up the ante til the buffalo cries…
Wow, TC, you can write faster than I can skim-read! And it came out a fun read.
I do remember Calvin and Hobbes.
Bill Watterson is probably laughing hysterically, or would be if he read this. Very well done, and one more reason why I don't understand the angst on the part of people who see Twitter falling apart. He's nuts, and deserves what he'll get when the banks realize he's running his collateral into the ground.
I wonder if he's canceled the accounts of everyone who contributed to that trending post. That would be a ton of folks if it's a "trending" post! I am so glad I quit that platform.
If not Muck, it'll be someone else until public utilities, as you say, or the pubic commons is adequately regulated or fixed in another way. The question is how to combat the privatization of the commons.
Old English saying from the 18th Century: "The man who stole the goose from the Commons was transported to America while the man who stole the Commons from the goose was transported to Parliament." from the Enclosure Movement, an activity to increase their wealth by the English aristocracy that resulted in many of our ancestors (including the "Thomas" in my name) arriving here.
That's one of the big questions, isn't it, and thanks for bringing it up. The trend is increasingly headed the other way with the privatization of charter schools, prisons, residential mental health facilities. It is about money, of course, but it's worse even than that. It's about money made by managing the vulnerable or ostracized among us--prisoners, children, the mentally ill. It's horrible, and today it America. We need to fight it on every front, but I don't know quite how that would look. For the first time in a very long time, maybe ever, I can't come up with a single idea.
Thanks for your further clarification of the privatization platform of anti democracy actors. This is what movement conservativism and authoritarianism look like.
I imagine many of us in our teenage/college years remember that something was amiss with the shrinking of the middle class, as you detail. Yet it was hard to pinpoint and our parents didn't see it or get it because they were doing fine. I'd say to my parents, It's not right (about pretty much everything unchecked capitalism and social justice related). I would be called a socialist by my father at 12 years old. I fear that we now know that our hunches were correct.
Oh, Wendy, you are so right when you say our hunches were correct, but even then I was unsure about any kind of accuracy, much too caught up in the passion of what felt like tectonic shifts in the direction those hunches were pointing me--but all too vague, like some will-o-the-wisp. And, Lord, we were all so young. It sounds like you're a bit younger than I am, but old enough to remember the certainty on the one hand and the utter confusion of parents who obviously weren't noticing (or were running from noticing) anything unusual. My regret or sadness is for all my adult years, doing life after the intensity of the 60s and early 70s, the willful blindness of my whole generation as the economic gap widened, as Ronald Reagan locked into place the foundation of the brutal capitalism that today is America's identity. Where was my mind? How could we not have been paying attention? Of course, as a friend often says to me-I need to give up trying to make a better yesterday. But what if we allowed too much damage to be done? And, there, in a nutshell, is a demonstration of how to get depressed on a Saturday afternoon. Sorry about that. It is good just to be able to say. it.
As I recall, after the intensity of the 60's and early 70's, we were really busy, with real jobs and kids and responsibilities. The most I could do was yell at the television set, "Don"t believe that f%$#ging cowboy" as I nursed a baby at 4 a.m.
Permit me to add, no internet, no hate mongers on radio in the ‘early’ days! The most ‘radical’ radio personality I heard was Carlton Fredricks who focused on trying get us to eat healthy, non processed, food!
I loved Calvin and Hobbs back in the day. It is still my favorite comic strip ever. Both of my sons have ADHD; Calvin and Hobbs was a window into our life, trying to cope with all the small and HUGE challenges of our daily life. My boys, now adults, both love Calvin and Hobbs also. It was a sad day when the strip stopped publishing.
Muck and tRump are children of privilege, who were never disciplined. They are both poster boys for arrested development, if I ever saw one. They have absolutely no business controlling anything that impacts the common good. That also goes for other billionaires like Charles Koch, Peter Thiel,etc.
P.S. I took child development in college and taught preschool. Those cartoons depicting tRump and Muck as babies are spot on.
I thought of Bloom County as I read TC
https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=&ved=2ahUKEwj1s7O77oP8AhUzlIkEHaSgB30QFnoECBAQAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gocomics.com%2Fbloomcounty&usg=AOvVaw2k03Z69sPbyGP2LrWXsqMu
Thank you, might check out Mastadon. Muck has already pulled the plug on Twitter. I enjoyed it once upon a time, but they didn’t like me calling chump a wannabe Nazi.
A lot of us, former Twitter and now Mastodon users have utterly given up on Mr. Musk. Some of us are even journalists. The world continues to revolve. The hashtag #twitterisdead is a thing. When last I checked there were 800000+ users on Mastodon, more each day, and the Fediverse has absorbed us with surprisingly little disruption or hoo-ha.