By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Bird Song of the Day
Northern Mockingbird, 350 South Madison Avenue, Pasadena, Los Angeles, California, United States. With droning airplane.
Patient readers, I am in the process of wrestling the latest HICPAC meeting into submission; disappointingly but unsurprisingly, they plan to stick with their baggy blues. So this is an open thread. However, let me describe my recent experience with social media–
On Twitter (“X”), I forgot the cardinal rule that the moderators (or the moderating algorithms) don’t understand hyperbole, especially when it involves violent rhetoric, and got banned until I removed the offending, hyperbolic post. When I went to do that, I got caught up in an endless captcha look — VPN? Cookies? — and got really banned for trying the captcha too many times (appearing to Twitter’s version of Skynet, no doubt, like a bot).
So I thought I would try BlueSky (as opposed to Threads, which is The Zuckerberg™, ick, no). As readers may know, there’s a good deal of triumphalism from liberal Democrats about leaving Twitter and moving to BlueSky, which they hope will cause Twitter’s demise (a little premature, given that BlueSky’s global user base is — to the extent the numbers are any good at all — 20 million, while Twitter’s is 611 million).
So I created a Blue Sky account, whereupon BlueSky presented me with a timeline, and asked me to “like” seven posts, to train their algorithm (there is indeed a second timeline for posts only from accounts I followed, but I hadn’t followed any yet).
The first poster for me to like, at the top of the timeline: AOC.
I scroll down a little: Taylor Swift.
Oh.
BlueSky, eh?
Anyhow, I went through the process, and actually found some accounts I could follow (e.g., Trisha Greenhalgh), so I wasn’t off social media entirely. (I also have a Mastodon account, but at least on the reader I use, the threading is just impossible, so it’s hard to use.)
In a week, Twitter decided my captcha count was below the bot threshold, and so I logged in, and, chastened, removed the offending post.
And I must say, I’m glad to be back; I have some quiet little neighborhoods on Twitter I couldn’t rebuild anywhere else. Moreover, if you’re a professional doomscroller, as I suppose I am, Twitter is the far superior platform (not that platforms are good, they’re bad). Twitter is a firehose; BlueSky is a garden hose. The “hellsite,” as its users fondly call it, is like a world city, like Manhattan; BlueSky is like a provincial town (and I don’t mean like an “under-rated destination”). Even if Twitter is owned and run by a ranting thirteen-year-old tech boy billionaire hopped up on whatever it is he’s hopped up on. Of course, if you want your mellow unharshed, BlueSky is the place to be.
Adding, when BlueSky numbers level off, as they will, we will have a good-ish proxy for the actual size of the TDS-afflicted population; a million so far. An interesting result! (I predict that, once again, the PMC will find that they simply lack the class power to achieve their political goals.)
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Israel’s song, to the tune of Alanis Morissette’s “You Oughta Know”. (Best appreciated if you first listen to the original song, linked below, because 1) It’s a great song! – 1996 Grammy winner, 2) It helps to know the original lyrics, the meter, and the staccato cadence)
YOU OUGHTA GO
We want you to know
This isn’t personal
We sure wish you well
Because in fact you’re….
…An older version of us
Sorry to kick up a fuss
But we’ve come down on you in War Theater.
We’re sure you’ll find a new home
Maybe in London or Rome
We’ll recommend a really excellent Realtor
Cuz the land
Where you’ve lived
Wasn’t yours
It was giv-
-en to us
By the God
That we heard
In our heads
In a burning bush.
And every time
We call His name
Don’t you know
That He tells us
Again and again
That it’s time to push
It’s time to push
Cuz you’re still around!
And we’re here
To remind you
Even though
Long ago
That we went away
The Nakba
Was a kinder
Event than what’s next
If you try to stay
You
You
You
Oughta go.
You had a good run
For many years
We had some problems
We thought you should know.
Did you forget about us?
There isn’t much to discuss.
Sorry we came in the middle of dinner.
Germany wasn’t too kind
A new home we’d look to find
And your home really looked like a winner.
Cuz the land
Where you’ve lived
Wasn’t yours
It was giv-
-en to us
By the God
That we heard
In our heads
In a burning bush.
And every time
We call His name
Don’t you know
That He tells us
Again and again
That it’s time to push
It’s time to push
Cuz you’re still around!
And we’re here
To remind you
Even though
Long ago
That we went away
The Nakba
Was a kinder
Event than what’s next
If you try to stay
You
You
You
Oughta go.
Cuz the joke
Hitler spoke
Wasn’t cool
It was cruel
And we longed
For a state
Just for us
Anywhere.
We got invitations.
But every time,
We scratched our heads
‘Bout offers that we had
We thought, “Let’s force our way in.
“To your Palestine.”
So we’re here
To remind you
Even though
Long ago
That we went away
The Nakba
Was a kinder
Event than what’s next
If you try to stay
You
You
You
Oughta go.
We’re here
To remind you
Even though
Long ago
That we went away
The Nakba
Was a kinder
Event than what’s next
If you try to stay
You
You
You
Oughta go.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPcyTyilmYY
Blue Pill, Red Pill, or Jagged Little Pill?
Good choice.
My favorite:
Alanis Morissette – You Oughta Know (Live at David Letterman, 8/17/1995)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TS3oLs1JF50
With a young Taylor Hawkins on drums.
Great clip! I pulled this from the comments:
“I was in the audience for this. We had no idea who Alanis Morissette was (I don’t think anyone did at this point), and I remember being terrified by the intensity on stage. It was loud, angry, and passionate as can be, and watching this now, I realize I witnessed an epic musical performance. This is awesome, and I wish I had been able to appreciate it at the time, but I’m not sure Alanis wanted it that way. I think she wanted to scare us. She did.”
Same as happened to me but until now I’d assumed the broken captcha page was due to my legacy browser. No VPN here. Quite honestly, you have to wonder if this isn’t a form of soft banning which Twitter had a history of. Not as sure about X but I’m also not sure Musk is as in charge as he’d like to be.
This bit is hilarious:
“So I created a Blue Sky account, whereupon BlueSky presented me with a timeline, and asked me to “like” seven posts, to train their algorithm (there is indeed a second timeline for posts only from accounts I followed, but I hadn’t followed any yet).”
Bluesky is already at its inception messing with any real data stats. Too funny. But sure, I’d trust them. / ;)
Shorter: we only feed people what they tell us they want to see, no critical thinking required. (The poor dears.) / ;)
A 300 character version of Kos!
But AOC and Taylor Swift? I can understand why AOC as she will always carry water for the Democrats, no matter how vile some of that water can be. Taylor Swift backed Harris in the elections so she had better be careful that the Democrats do not try to directly recruit her for their cause. She’ll have nothing to gain and everything to lose.
Wasn’t part of her motive for backing Harris to render discipline unto Trump for lying about Swift backing Trump?
If Trump hadn’t posted that fake endorsement, would Swift have made any endorsement at all?
The rumor has followed her for years. I think Team Blue just became so desperate they beat down her door.
My gut is she’s a nose to the grindstone type. When asked, she’s on the side of angels, but bouncing around, she like most people barely registers the world around her.
The wife has had a Twitter account for ages, she used to get a lot of comments and engagement, follows. It’s a literary account, non-pol. Over the last year, all that has fallen to ZERO.
As in: ZERROOOOOO
She met a friend in R/L who follows her, Wife mentioned her recent posts.
“You’re still posting? I haven’t seen them!”
She’s on B, and guess what? Getting engagement, follows, which are kind of important as they drive visitors to her lit. podcast. I started an account, following plenty of lefty (not TDS) people.
I was never on T, so don’t miss what I never had.
Anyway, have fun in Elon’s sandpit. I prefer the site where my feed is chronological not boosting whatever some libertarian mad king thinks is ‘important’.
Tried the challenge again for old times sake and got in!
Can’t post, can’t message, can’t change settings but I’m free to read anything anyone else tweets on that most perfect of all perfect platforms.
Still have no clue why I was suspended.
My bad. I can go to Twitter but after one brief moment of seeing other tweets I got a message telling me I’d seen all I was going to get to see and that I was suspended but I could buy a premium membership to see more.
They wanted me to give them money, but with no assurances I’d be allowed to see content. This is corporate top>down thinking. No one lower down the food chain would think this wise. Also hard for me not to note that Lambert publishing his experience and my commenting seemed to be the catalyst for my getting back “in.” Last time I was banned for a year, I got back in the same day Matt Taibbi testified before Congress. I do think X monitors what people say about Twitter!
I would like to see Julie Kelly’s tweets but that’s all I miss from Twitter. Chat’s nice but I can argue with myself about almost anything and if that doesn’t work, I’ll try arguing with the neighbors again (they’re very resistant, would rather get along ; (
It could be buggy code. I notice what works and doesn’t – including which browsers it will run on – changes frequently. They laid off a lot of their engineer staff so things may be a bit shaky behind the scenes. I have to go through eight clicks to change the display to ‘default’ every time I log in.
There have been multiple events where Twitter posts were appearing with timestamp: Jan 1, 1970.
Oh how people laughed. But they shouldn’t. That’s Unix ‘zero day’, means some very high level server is doing something it should not. A foreshock of a serious lapse in the technology. If you want to trust this platform with, let’s say, your personal DMs to other people, go ahead.
I won’t.
Oh, and the failure of tech sites to really make note of this doesn’t inspire confidence in them either.
I got temporarily banned for suggesting that the CDC director is gonna get what she’s got coming by not masking. I’m now much less direct when suggesting someone ought to have a bill coming due.
A lady in my church just emailed to say she couldn’t do the homeless shelter task she had promised because she had learned her brother had just died unexpectedly. He was in his 60s and had very recently had a bad case of covid. I know hope springs eternal but covid is not over.
I had to call the company that installed our drainage system to fix a problem.
It took a day or two for someone to get back to me.
A woman called and apologized that she had not been able to return phone calls because she had been out of town for a funeral, the owner had suffered a stroke, and the owner’s son (age 53) had died suddenly.
I don’t know if any of these incidents were covid-related. I just thought the whole situation weird.
I don’t remember people dying suddenly at age 53 when I was growing up. And I don’t remember all that many strokes; actually I don’t remember any but of course there were some. Yes, it is weird.
Speaking of The Swift, I just browsed the magazine section at Barnes & Noble and counted at least 25 periodicals featuring that esteemed personage on the cover. I wonder what the articles can find to say about her/it.
> Twitter is a firehose; BlueSky is a garden hose.
BlueSky is Paul George; Twitter is Kawhi.
(TikT alternate.)
I think X is a great site to read if you find good accounts to follow and ignore the “For You” tab. I do sample that too when the mood strikes, for the occasional nugget that appears.
People who flee X calling it too toxic would benefit, in my opinion, by sampling journalism from the early days of the country. From the time when Jefferson said that given a choice, he’d rather have newspapers with no government than government with no newspapers.
They don’t want to benefit, they want to live in a bubble. My PMC friends have been talking about this for about a week now. They told me “the Trumpers have their echo chamber like Fox News, Newsmax, Twitter, Parlor, why can’t we have one too.”
It seems what they really want is to hide. They hate Musk about as much as they hate Trump. The ones I know think Musk will use Twitter to find them so they can become targets for Trump and his army. They think they are in danger and might be arrested or killed. One said he has already contacted attorneys because he’s afraid they are coming after him due to what he said about Trump’s NIH pick on Twitter.
I know that sounds nuts, but that’s what they believe. This is all Project 2025 stuff that has been pounded into their heads to scare the living shit out of them by various so-called news people and DC democrats who they love and worship.
If you run into one, don’t try to talk to them. They are an unhappy and sour bunch who are not pleasant to anyone not under their umbrella. I told them they were doing the digital equivalent of stuffing their heads up their behind which isn’t the best way to find the truth. I was admonished, and I’m being kind when I use that word. I won’t attempt to talk to them again.
Adding: these are the same people who believe Jan 6 was a coup against the United States, they really were going to hang Pence, the vaccines were/are sterilizing, Russia/Putin is controlling Trump and half the GOP, Dr. Fauci has done more for humanity than any other human being, Rachel Maddow is a top-notch journalist, and Adam Schiff would be a great president, even though they would prefer Michelle Obama.
Isn’t it amazing Screwball?
I’m assuming your some kind-of progressive, perhaps even a liberal of sorts, or a leftist… something. Yet despite being on paper mostly matching policies with our fellow ‘loving’ liberals, were probably considered deplorable degenerates in their eyes. So they happily burn their bridges.
The PMC culture will kill the Democratic party and I’m not sure if they can course correct in time. That reputation of being elitist is sticking and not going away. Once enough of the middle, working class bleeds out of the party, they are finished.
If that is what will happen, then New Deal wannabe-Revivalists should begin creating their party-movement now in order to have it ready to go if/when the PMCs put the DemParty into terminal bleedout.
Such a party-movement would need a very powerful Intelligence-CounterIntelligence Bureau to discover and exclude or expel any post-New Deal-type Democrat as soon as it is detected trying to infiltrate the Newish Dealish party-movement.
re: ” The ones I know think Musk will use Twitter to find them so they can become targets for Trump and his army. They think they are in danger and might be arrested or killed.”
Is this an ultimate narcissim response or an ultimate nonsense? They, what, pride themselves as targets? Oh man. What’s the phrase, ‘get a grip’? Yeah, the self importants, get a grip.
When you think about it, we have people in this country who think this way, and for some reason. I think things are pretty screwed up, but not to this extent. It is truly sad.
Too funny. Of course the only reason sites like Parlor exist is because so many of the liberal goodthinkers had everyone that didn’t agree with them banned because they can’t tolerate disagreement. Just a stupendous lack of self awareness with these bluesky types. Maybe one day they’ll come to the realization they’d be better off without any social media at all.
My feed is fucking great because I’ve been following whoever Lambert and Yves link to!
“ the PMC will find that they simply lack the class power to achieve their political goals…”
What would those “goals” be, again?
Looks to me that, other than the own goal of Ex-Harris and both houses of Congress, the PMC still serves the ruling elite, happily bolsters genocide and the MICIMAC, and sends its scions off to the Ivy League for a nice turd polishing. And wealth continues to flow, faster, upward and inward.
My question exactly, JT! To Lambert’s assessment of the TDS-afflicted population, if we assume there is significant overlap with the PMC more generally, the 1m BlueSky users are an undercount. A few years back, I looked through BEA and BLS data to try and see if I could get an estimate of what percentage of working Americans were employed in really necessary functions – you know, like food, water systems, infrastructure maintainence, that sort of thing – as opposed to either Graeber’s BS jobs or purely extractive positions. The number of people in PMC jobs is staggering, using Erenriech’s definition of “salaried mental workers who do not own the means of production”; I may go back to that work and look specifically for the laptop jobs of the MSNBC crowd. Their class power is not a power in itself, as I think you’re pointing to, JT, but comes from alignment with their employers and their employers media.
Re intro–all Greek to me. NC–a classy crew–the preferred social medium around here. And of course there’s always RL.
Sorry, what/who is RL?
Probably Real Life.
“Some people say real life is the thing, but I prefer books”
Variously attributed
Latest ShoeOnHead- Downfall of The Democrats | The Truth About The 2024 Election (37:04): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UkUkEvf7Ma4
Thank you.
Basically, a young person, clearly an amateur, who give the most comprehensive evaluation of the Kamala loss than I have heard anywhere. Especially the news media. The media is so doomed.
My favorite little factoid that came early on – New York at 55.6% Kamala was closer to becoming red than Florida at 56.1% Trump was to becoming blue. That about sums it up.
Drive by Z-rep. (Zeitgeist report.)
I was out and about yesterday shopping for Turkey-day and found, in four retail establishments, that I was the only one masking. This does not bode well for America’s population.
Also, I have noticed a series of evictions of “low rent” renters of late. Something wicked this way comes?
Mastodon has been much better for me than Twitter……..
My Twitter feed is all Trumpers complaining about his Surgeon General pick. And Musk. Who posts 30 times a day about random nonsense, apparently not busy running his 17 companies that hoover up billions in government subsidies. I rarely see the COVID posts I used to follow. I haven’t bothered to curate my own feed, this is all under the for-you tab. My mistake, probably.
You do need to choose to follow. I follow some anti-Covid people, a lot of MMT types, business news accounts, Ukraine skeptic and Palestine supporting commentators, and I get nothing like that.
But even so, under “For you” I get tons of animal videos and some news, and not right wing slanted at that.
I don’t spend a large amount of time on X, but I’ve always found that content I don’t want is perfectly avoidable. My biggest problem with it is Musk’s throttling of pro-Palestinian content.
I see that Alan Dershowitz has crawled out from under a rock with this opinion piece in the Journal, “I’m Putting Together a Legal Dream Team to Defend Israel”. Heh heh heh. You will want to make sure there are no fragile objects or virgin ears nearby when you read it.
To avoid liability, here is an antidote from the Guardian, “Police track down unlikely shoe thief from Japanese kindergarten”. Turns out the little weasel was just that.
These perfectly normal people, assuming they are indeed human, should be relentlessly ridiculed for the imbecilic tools that they are.
Ratman Andy has a nice ring to it now that I think about it…
If he had any perception, Dershowitz would build a team to defend Israel from the Zionists. Then that country might have a chance. As it is, I foresee the State of Israel going the way of the previous Crusader States that used to rule the region.
One must recall that the term “legal dream team” and Dershowitz’s association with it, comes from his time on the OJ Simpson defense team.
A defense lawyer’s monetary value should rise when they can prevent a prominent and wealthy client from serving time, especially when widely viewed as guilty.
Good brand management by Dershowitz, keeping his name in the news.