…sometimes…well…sometimes things don’t go the way they did in your head

A Youtuber faces a lengthy jail term after claiming he had a bomb at an airport.

This week Garard Ndela was arrested at Newcastle Airport after recording himself in the terminal building claiming to have an explosive device.

The video was intended for his YouTube channel.
1/3 pic.twitter.com/irokyeFzyj

— Northumbria Police (@northumbriapol) July 7, 2023

…& other times…even when you try to stick to the rules…like only asking questions to which you know the answers…sometimes the game changes up on you

20 years ago today, #TheWire Season 2 Ep6: “All Prologue” premiered on HBO. (7/6/03)

“It's all in the game, though, right?” -Omar pic.twitter.com/AWSDB4GW4n

— Ziggy_Sobotka (@Ziggys_Duck) July 6, 2023

…& sometimes…whether as a bid for the role of devil’s advocate…or knee-jerk contrarianism bound to malign purpose…the parts you imply…even by omission…speak to motives that know to try to stay out of sight…& love a good distraction

Democrats have been lambasting the Supreme Court and questioning its legitimacy because, as they argue, its conservative majority is shamelessly partisan.

That’s laughable. The court’s Democratic-appointed justices are clearly more partisan than their Republican-appointed counterparts.
[…]
It is very rare for Democratic-appointed justices to break ranks in a major, politically charged case to rule against the Democratic Party’s preferred outcome. After asking my colleague Ed Whelan at the Ethics & Public Policy Center, an ardent court-watcher, to come up with an example, the best he could come up with was National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, the 2012 case in which two of the four Democratic justices joined the majority to rule that Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion was unconstitutional.
[…]
The fact that Democratic justices are demonstrably more predictable when it comes to endorsing the preferences of their political party does not end the debate about the court’s behavior. Republicans and conservatives have complained for decades that justices have pursued their own policy agendas at the expense of the Constitution. Now that Democrats can taste some of their own medicine, perhaps it’s time for everyone — regardless of their party affiliation — to reconsider what the courts ought to be deciding.

…& you know what? …if you need to take a disingenuous route to meet up with those of us who’ll be waiting when you’re done with your detour & you’ve backed your way into the vicinity of what actually needs to be addressed…it’d probably be a good idea to remember they all took a shorter route…so they’ve had time to go over the receipts they’re holding while they waited for you taking the slow road

We need more EU workers, admits leading Tory Brexiter [Guardian]

…& when you’re looking at the current supreme court…the shamelessly partisan aspects have less to do with the ways the judges align with the political components of a two horse race than they do the insane fucking liberties being taken with the usurpation of authority on the basis of pretexts that are as illegitimate as the ends they serve…& by the transitive property alone for all I care…the same goes for the ones pursuing the cause of making life worse in ways it doesn’t have to be

We will not return to that original understanding, nor should we necessarily want to. But there must be a happy medium between a court that refuses to apply the Constitution to settle disputes and one that is eager to trump politics from the bench. Democrats and Republicans will likely disagree as to what that medium consists of, but seeking it out would be better than treating the court as a primarily political branch of government.

With Trump in trouble, Republicans step up assault on DoJ and FBI

…& while some might be more immediately concerned with the court of public opinion than any genuine attempt at good faith jurisprudence

Elon is so mad, he's suing the lawyers that forced him to buy Twitter. pic.twitter.com/m1yX4HhDka

— Alejandra Caraballo (@Esqueer_) July 7, 2023

…willfully feigning ignorance of the part where you know you aren’t as ignorant of the point you’re just as willfully straining credulity to miss

Outrage as Republican says 1921 Tulsa [Race] massacre not motivated by race [Guardian]

…makes you part of that problem

In the meantime, if Democrats want the court to be less partisan, maybe they should encourage their justices to act less so on the bench. Just a thought.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/07/07/supreme-court-liberal-justices-partisan/

…sometimes…people can just stop tuning in

Views for "Tucker Carlson on Twitter" posts (assume the number of people who actually viewed the videos is much much lower).

Announcement: 137.1M
Ep. 1: 120M
Ep. 2: 60.6M
Ep. 3 (Trump indicted): 104.1M
Ep. 4: 32.4M
Ep. 5: 17.3M
Ep. 6: 32M
Ep. 7: 15.4M
Ep. 8: 8.6M

😬😬😬 pic.twitter.com/qd9Ox2WiFx

— Matthew Gertz (@MattGertz) July 7, 2023

…sometimes all it takes is a traffic cone

A group of San Franciscans realized that they can disable Waymo and Cruise robotaxis by placing a traffic cone on the vehicle's hood.

They're now encouraging others to do it: "Hell no, we do not consent to this." pic.twitter.com/ZrYhy4OATy

— David Zipper (@DavidZipper) July 6, 2023

…& who amongst us hasn’t at some point had cause to wonder if the universe just leaves those places you find them in the morning like presents from a drunk santa

https://www.reddit.com/r/funny/comments/1xfzfj/red_dwarf_doesnt_get_enough_love/

…some folks think the solution is to outsource the solving to things we’re better at making than understanding on the understanding they’re smarter than us & can be trusted

Robots say they have no plans to steal jobs or rebel against humans [Guardian]

…some folks think…it matters when somebody shits the bed

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/jul/08/future-of-deep-sea-mining-hangs-in-balance-as-opposition-grows

…while others only think it matters if anybody sees

White nationalist publisher’s data exposed in Amazon cloud leak [Guardian]

…some folks like to deal in abstract hypotheticals

Five ways AI might destroy the world: ‘Everyone on Earth could fall over dead in the same second’ [Guardian]

…or magical thinking

The End of the Magic World’s 50-Year Grudge [NYT]

…but…we all live in the real world, really

Earth is at its hottest in thousands of years. Here’s how we know. [WaPo]

Heat Records Are Broken Around the Globe as Earth Warms, Fast [NYT]

Climate denialism has burnt to a crisp [WaPo]

…& for some people the stakes are about as high as it gets even when they mostly talk for a living

What’s it like to have a bounty on your head for supporting democracy? [NBC]

…not least when it comes to having conversations nobody really wants to but at the end of the day everybody kinda has to come around to at some point

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/former-us-officials-secret-ukraine-talks-russians-war-ukraine

…& usually about here I’d go off on some tangent about seigfreid sassoon or something…& the capacity of open letters to be every bit the red badge of courage…but…not today…which is either good news or bad news depending on the reader, I suppose…but then…is it the currency that matters

The U.S. dollar is, in a real sense, the money of moneys — that is, in many ways it is to other national currencies what money in general is to other goods and assets. […]

How much does this special role matter? It’s important for the global economy that there be some currency that is widely accepted the way the dollar is. It’s much less clear that America derives large advantages from the fact that our currency happens to be the chosen one. I’ve tried elsewhere to debunk some of the myths about the centrality of dollar dominance to U.S. power. In general, one’s belief in the crucial importance of the dollar’s international role tends to be inversely proportional to how much you actually know about the subject.

…or the value of the transaction

Still, is the special role of the dollar declining? There’s a lot of buzz to that effect. Every hint that some international transactions might bypass the dollar, like Saudi Arabia’s suggestion that it might accept Chinese yuan in payment for oil, receives tremendous hype. Elon Musk has endorsed the view that by “weaponizing” the dollar against Vladimir Putin, America has guaranteed rapid de-dollarization, because of course he has.

But how about bringing some actual data to bear? A new report from the Federal Reserve examines several measures of dollar dominance[…]

Furthermore, official reserve holdings are a small part of the dollar’s international dominance. Its role in private business — as the currency in which exports are invoiced, bank claims and liabilities are denominated and so on — is much more important. One of my favorite indicators is the share of dollars in foreign exchange transactions, which has been stable at around 88 percent[…]

Note, by the way, that there are always two sides to such transactions, so the various currency shares add up to 200 percent. So what this is telling us is that seven out of eight foreign exchange transactions involve dollars.
[…]
Why is the dollar so dominant, and why is this dominance so persistent? I like the example of foreign exchange transactions, which is relatively easy to explain. Imagine that you want to exchange two relatively small currencies — say, convert Bolivian bolivianos into Malaysian ringgit. Will you search for a counterparty who wants to make the reverse transaction? That might take a long time. Far simpler and cheaper to convert bolivianos into dollars, then use those dollars to buy ringgit.

And the dollar’s role in such transactions is self-reinforcing: The more transactions people do in dollars, the more liquid dollar markets become, adding to their advantage. Similar self-reinforcing effects promote and perpetuate the dollar’s dominance in other roles.

…or something underlying

The M.I.T. economist Charles Kindleberger once wrote a great essay comparing the international role of the dollar with the international role of English. In their home countries, most people communicate in their native languages and do business in their national currencies. But when doing business abroad, they generally speak English and use dollars, because that’s what everyone else does.

This analogy may, among other things, throw some cold water on the notion that the Chinese yuan may soon pose a serious threat to the dollar. Yes, China is a bona fide economic superpower, which exports more than we do and whose G.D.P. is by some measures bigger than ours. But how soon do you imagine that Mandarin, which has relatively few second-language speakers compared with English, will become the dominant language of international commerce? Well, not many people outside China use its currency, so yuan internationalization faces similar barriers.
[…]
And for that matter, while you might want to learn Mandarin to do business in China, how much business do you want to do in a country that seems increasingly willing to arrest foreigners on charges of espionage?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/07/opinion/dollar-strength-reserve-currency.html

…&…sure…I can think of one guy who wants to do a whole lot…& has some stuff in common with the place

Why China Has a Giant Pile of Debt [NYT]

…&…you know…he’s pissed at a peer who looks to be trying to piss on his leg & tell him it’s raining

The rivalry between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk went into overdrive this week after Meta rolled out Threads, a Twitter rival that on its first day became the most rapidly downloaded app ever.

[…] Threads “sets two antitrust instincts against each other,” Tim Wu, an architect of the Biden administration’s antitrust policy and now a professor at Columbia Law School, told DealBook.

Challenging Twitter’s dominance is positive. “Generally, we’d like the big companies to be taking each other on, not just sitting in their little bubbles raking in the cash,” Mr. Wu said. By contrast, Meta already dominates the social media landscape through Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp. Expanding that empire and enabling it to accumulate more data, he said, “is hard to be that cheerful about.”

…it’s what the r/AITA crowd would dub an ESH situation

Threads is integrated into Instagram, giving it potential access to roughly two billion monthly active users. Another sticky issue: Users have to delete their Instagram account to cancel their Threads account. (It’s unclear how the Federal Trade Commission, which has vowed to crack down on firms that make opting out of a service too onerous, might view this arrangement.)

…but…that’s only part of the equation

“The key is network effects,” said Doug Melamed, a Stanford Law School professor and former antitrust official at the Justice Department. The utility of Meta’s products to consumers increases as more users sign up. Leveraging them to enhance the quality of Threads would not in and of itself violate antitrust laws, Mr. Melamed said.

“There’s a narrative out there that anything a tech company does is bad,” said Daniel Francis, who teaches law at New York University and is a former deputy director of the F.T.C.’s Bureau of Competition. He argues that consumer unhappiness with changes to Twitter drove people to find an alternative. “The Threads example shows that big tech companies can also be valuable entrants, bringing new competitive pressure,” Mr. Francis said. — Ephrat Livni

…a lot of which remains…to put it mildly…open to interpretation

The Biden administration is ordered to limit communication with social media companies. A judge in Louisiana ruled that a number of government agencies could not communicate with the platforms about taking down “content containing protected free speech.” The ruling may curtail efforts to combat false and misleading narratives about the coronavirus pandemic and other issues. The Justice Department has appealed.
[…]
[…this one goes on & you might be interested in the part about this guy & how things went for him & his]
Desmond Shum was one of China’s best-connected businessmen. He and his former wife, Duan Weihong used their relationships with top government officials to build a multibillion-dollar property company during a golden age for entrepreneurs starting in the mid-1990s.
[…]
Mr. Shum left China in 2015 as Xi Jinping, the country’s leader, asserted greater state control over the country and its businesses. But Duan, also known as Whitney, disappeared two years later. (It is believed that Communist Party officials detained her after a high-ranking political ally was held on suspicion of corruption.)

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/08/business/dealbook/zuckerberg-meta-threads-antitrust.html

…so…maybe you’d be more interested in some supposed authority when it comes to matters of interpretation

In 2007, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the majority opinion in Parents Involved v. Seattle School District No. 1, which struck down race-based “tiebreakers” in school admissions programs in Seattle and Louisville, Ky. “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race,” Roberts famously wrote, “is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Last week, in his opinion for the majority in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which ended race-based affirmative action in college admissions, Roberts echoed his earlier self with a similar assertion which I also discussed in my column on Friday: “Eliminating racial discrimination means eliminating all of it.”

Both lines encapsulate Roberts’s view that the Constitution is colorblind and sees no racial distinctions.

One thing I noticed, reading both opinions, is that while Roberts may mention “race,” “discrimination based on race” and “racial discrimination,” he doesn’t discuss racism. In both opinions, Roberts underpins his argument with the court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
[…]
The issue here is that Brown v. Board of Education was not about states making distinctions based on race. The question before the court was whether state governments could use racial classifications to separate Black Americans from white Americans in order to deny rights to the former and extend privileges to the latter. The question, in other words, was whether racism was a legitimate state interest.

…there’s different ways to parse the parcel

I want to highlight Chief Justice Roberts’s avoidance of racism as a prime example of “racecraft,” the term coined by the historians Karen and Barbara Fields to describe the transmutation of a set of actions (racism) into a set of qualities or characteristics (race).

Racecraft, the Fieldses write in “Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in America,” “transforms racism, something an aggressor does, into race, something the target is, in a sleight of hand that is easy to miss.” They offer a useful and pertinent example:

Consider the statement “black Southerners were segregated because of their skin color”— a perfectly natural sentence to the ears of most Americans, who tend to overlook its weird causality. But in that sentence, segregation disappears as the doing of segregationists, and then, in a puff of smoke — paff — reappears as a trait of only one part of the segregated whole.

This, you might say, is the Roberts two-step. He takes racism, a system of subjugation and social control, and removes the racists. What’s left is the mark of racism, that is, race. A landmark case about the legitimacy of race hierarchy — Brown v. Board of Education — becomes, in Roberts’s hands, a case about the use of race in school placement.

To remove racism and racists from the equation is to pretend that there’s no social force to push against — no inequality to rectify. Instead, there is only a quality, race, that Roberts says the Constitution cannot recognize.

The result is a society that continues to reinforce and reconstitute these previous patterns of domination, except hierarchy is now hidden from law, and what is a feature of society becomes, instead, a quality of the people afflicted.

The John Roberts Two-Step [NYT]

…& some would have you believe the next step is to carry on regardless…same as it ever was

Edward Blum has been working toward the end of race-based admissions in higher education for years. He first brought the issue of affirmative action before the Supreme Court in 2012, with Fisher v. University of Texas — a case he ended up losing. Since then, the 71-year-old legal activist has founded a group called Students for Fair Admissions, which just won at the Supreme Court against Harvard and the University of North Carolina, in a decision that effectively ended race-based affirmative action policies in American college admissions.

Now, with a legal victory in hand, Mr. Blum is thinking about what’s next in his work to remove the consideration of race from other parts of American life and law. In a wide-ranging discussion, he told me about how he’ll be watching to make sure elite institutions of higher learning abide by the court’s recent decision, and why he thinks corporate America will be facing scrutiny next. This interview has been condensed and edited for length and clarity.

He Worked for Years to Overturn Affirmative Action and Finally Won. He’s Not Done. [NYT]

…the problem with those people, though…is that a lot of them are assholes…& in a great many cases scumbags to boot…& sometimes it’s important to say so

Lower-court judges are bound to follow the law as decreed by the Supreme Court. They aren’t bound to like it. And so, lost amid the end-of-term flurry at the high court, came another remarkable ruling by U.S. District Judge Carlton W. Reeves of Mississippi.

Reeves declared that the court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment compels the unfortunate conclusion that laws prohibiting felons from having guns violate the Second Amendment. He took a swipe at the conservative justices’ zealous protection of gun rights even as they diminish other constitutional guarantees. And, for good measure, he trashed originalism, now “the dominant mode of constitutional interpretation” of the Supreme Court’s conservative majority. “This Court is not so sure it should be,” Reeves ventured, but the more he wrote about originalism, the more dubious he sounded about it.

You might recall Reeves from his 2020 case pleading with the Supreme Court to fix the injustices inflicted by its invented doctrine of “qualified immunity” for police and other law enforcement officials who engage in egregious, and unconstitutional, behavior.

You might recall him from an earlier phase of the case just decided, when he asked the parties whether he should appoint a historian to serve as expert witness, given the high court’s 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen finding that the constitutionality of gun laws depends on whether they are consistent with the “history and tradition” of restrictions in place at the time the Constitution was written.

“This Court is not a trained historian,” observed Reeves, a Barack Obama appointee. “The Justices of the Supreme Court, as distinguished as they may be, are not trained historians. … And we are not experts in what white, wealthy, and male property owners thought about firearms regulation in 1791. Yet we are now expected to play historian in the name of constitutional adjudication.”

…& sometimes…not least when talking about the people who get to have the last word on whether or not people known to victimize people with whom they are in intimate relationships should also get to consider the means to take them from the rest of us to be among their inalienable & enumerated rights…it’s important that there are people staying abreast of whatever guide to their future performance their past form looks to be

In District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 case finding that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms, the court asserted that “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on long-standing prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill.” In concurring opinions in Bruen, Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Brett M. Kavanaugh made similar assurances.
[…]
Among the issues judges will now have to decide, Reeves noted: Does the ban on felons possessing firearms cover all felonies in the modern penal code or just those that existed at the founding? Does the felon ban cover all felonies or just crimes involving violence? Is it temporary or does it last a lifetime? In other words: Bruen has created quite the mess. The justices might launch the cleanup — or make things even messier — next term; on the final day of this term, they agreed to hear a challenge to another part of federal gun law, preventing those subject to domestic violence restraining orders from having guns.
[…]
“We have one Constitution. All of it is law. It has been enforced today as best as this Judge can discern the Bruen Court’s holding and reasoning. And, one hopes, a future Supreme Court will not rest until it honors the rest of the Constitution as zealously as it now interprets the Second Amendment.”

Then he turned to originalism, questioning whether “founding-era Americans collectively agreed that for time immemorial, their descendants would be bound by the founding generation’s views on how the Constitution should be read” and whether “ceding this much power to the dead hand of the past is so wise.”
[…]
“Change is unstoppable,” Reeves concluded. “And to the extent Bruen and decisions like it try to stop that change, they will not last long. The only question is how long the People will let them remain.”

A U.S. district judge calls the Supreme Court’s bluff on guns [WaPo]

…some balls can snowball if you drop ’em

Here’s the inside story of how Congress failed to rein in Big Tech [WaPo]

…&…well…when you have that much snow…& a lot of loud voices…avalanches can be a thing

To the uninitiated, this update might have seemed like Trump’s platform hyping a feud between two of Truth Social’s competitors (in the sense that the cola offered at a Brooklyn vegan restaurant is a competitor to Coke and Pepsi). But most Truth Social posts are about politics, and so was this one — as surely as was a prior one noting that Threads “attempts to warn users from following Donald Trump Jr.,” which was preceded by a siren emoji.

What’s interesting isn’t that Twitter is feuding with Threads with Truth Social looking on. It’s that the Twitter worldview is now in conflict with the Threads worldview. It’s that the splintering that created two universes in the traditional media has spilled over into the social media world, too.

…I mean…sure…it sounds histrionic…but…however much we wish we didn’t have to care

I finally joined Twitter – and Threads – to see what all the fuss was about…and discovered a hall of mirrors. Can the 70 million who signed up in two days last week to Mark Zuckerberg’s new social media have got it wrong? [Guardian]

…this stuff does matter…& avoiding addressing it…doesn’t make it matter less…pretty much the opposite, really

A long time ago, before an increasingly large percentage of Americans was born, there were only a few sources of information: broadcast news stations and local newspapers. These were imperfect, but they had the advantage of limiting the spread of obviously false information from either motivated actors or misinformed ones.

That era was first eroded by the advent of cable television, which provided space for more viewpoints, and then by the internet. This was useful for increasing the spread of information since newspapers have only so many pages and network news has only so many minutes. The web is near-infinite and cable news networks need to fill 24 hours. But a lot of that information was junk of the sort that would be excluded from newspapers and Walter Cronkite’s show for good reason. A lot of it was also just spin.

Conservatives had long argued that the media was biased in favor of the left. There were certainly isolated examples that bolstered that viewpoint, but elevating these allegations was also seen as a good way to get the media to self-police, to overweight conservative viewpoints at the outset. The web — particularly when combined with the distribution power of social media — made this less necessary. Why worry about what The Washington Post is writing when you can simply have a friendly website present your argument?

You know what happened next. A media multiverse emerged, anchored on one end by a robust, energized right-wing media ecosystem and on the other by traditional media outlets still committed to self-correction and accurate presentation of information. (There’s a left-wing universe, too, but nonconservatives tend to place more confidence in — and grant more readership/viewership to — traditional outlets.) Those who viewed the mainstream media as dishonest for not framing things favorably to the right got a whole galaxy of places in which to find more palatable offerings. The new struggle was to see how far they’d go: Were Jeb Bush and Fox News far enough, or did we need to go to Donald Trump and Breitbart?

[…]By 2015 or so, there were two primary sharing platforms: Facebook and Twitter.[…]

They didn’t want to become news organizations, by any stretch. But they also didn’t want to be willing conduits of false information, spooking advertisers. So they stumbled their way toward a position similar to that held by traditional news outlets, developing systems to evaluate and check what they were presenting.
[…]
A number of right-wing competitors to Twitter (in particular) emerged in the Trump era, including Parler, Gettr and Gab. While the triggers weren’t always the same, the idea was: Facebook and Twitter were muffling right-wing speech and these would be platforms where it could thrive. This argument that misinformation or abuse constituted “free speech” wasn’t wrong in a constitutional sense, but assertions that the platforms were obligated to necessarily host any such speech were wrong in a legal one. It was mostly just a sales pitch — Come to Gab, where you can say anything you want! — but it guided how the platforms operated.
[…]
Here, the stories divide. There was this guy named Elon Musk, you see, who shared both Trump’s personality and his dislike for the way in which Twitter tried to moderate its content. Unlike Trump, though, he was enormously wealthy and not banned from Twitter, so, instead of making his own thing, he decided to try to take over Twitter. (As Trump learned when running for president in 2016, seeking power through established institutions is easier than doing it from the outside.) Musk made a wildly overvalued bid for Twitter and Twitter, understandably, accepted.

Since assuming control of the platform, Musk has upended the way it used to work. He inverted the site’s verification system, a tool once designed to ensure that information was trustworthy and now, if anything, suggests that it isn’t. He reinstated enormous numbers of users who had been banned for abuse or for spreading misinformation. He reoriented the site around his own right-wing worldview as much as possible. And he did so under the mantra of “free speech,” shrugging at the occasions in which his own actions betrayed that ideal.
[…]
So Meta (Facebook’s parent company) rolled out Threads, an as-yet less-functional version of Twitter. Users verified on Instagram, including many in the media, were verified on Threads, too, so you already knew who you were dealing with. And Meta also cautioned users against following people who in the past had been flagged as purveyors of misinformation, including Donald Trump Jr.

This is oversimplified, certainly. Musk wasn’t just taking a position in the polarized fight over sharing misinformation but also upending a social platform popular with journalists he loathes. His fight with Meta is about the very real threat to Twitter that Threads poses — though this reinforces his interest in making it a partisan fight as well.

What’s odd about the Twitter-Threads fight, though, is that the right theoretically got what it wanted from Twitter. It has an owner who is amenable to their arguments and who refuses to curtail misinformation. Quite the opposite. So why do they want to go on Threads in the first place? It’s as though Sean Hannity was mad that NBC wasn’t letting him have a segment on the “Today” show. Just say your thing on Fox News!

The difference is that, for many of these users, the fight is the point. Musk said it himself in a tweet disparaging Meta: “It is infinitely preferable to be attacked by strangers on Twitter, than indulge in the false happiness of hide-the-pain Instagram.” It’s an intensely weird thing to say, particularly as the proprietor of a social media platform that is ostensibly centered on encouraging use. Actually, Musk insists, having a bad time is good.

But this is what he wants from social media. It is what Trump wants and what many others on the right want. The appeal of Twitter in general was that it allowed everyone the chance to interact with famous people. The appeal for many on the right was that it also offered the opportunity for them to lash out at those strangers (and less famous ones). If they all leave, what’s the point? Maybe Musk thinks it’s preferable to be attacked by strangers, but I suspect, say, Katie Couric doesn’t.

Social media has now splintered in the same way the traditional media did, with unclear long-term effects. It means that while Truth Social and Twitter are competitors, it’s largely only in the same way that Breitbart and One America News are. There is one central difference, though: The right’s use of social media is not only about presenting competing information in the political war but in using the platforms themselves as battlefields.

And why? Because being banned for abuse or being called out for misinformation happens publicly — allowing it to be reframed as left-wing censorship efforts and, therefore, small victories in their own right. It’s the recent pattern of right-wing political actors publishing emails from journalists as though something nefarious is afoot, but at scale.

The politics undergirding the social media fight [WaPo]

…so

Good, stay out. pic.twitter.com/RR94NheNPr

— Alejandra Caraballo (@Esqueer_) July 7, 2023

…here’s to the people who hold the line…even when the goalposts move

A eulogy for Twitter: the place us journalists loved, for better or worse [Guardian]

…because…that matters, too

Watching Elon Musk destroying Twitter has the same creepy fascination that one experienced during the 44 days in 2022 when Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng were busily employed tanking the British economy. There was, however, one important difference between the two spectacles: Musk actually owns Twitter, whereas Truss and Kwarteng were merely the temporary custodians of the national economy.
[…]
Eventually – and inevitably – these chickens have been coming home to roost. Decimating the company’s technical team was foolish in the extreme, and over the succeeding months, users have noticed that the platform is more fragile than it used to be. In response to a recent series of server emergencies, Musk decided to limit how many tweets a user was allowed to view and how they could view them. This was, wrote the journalist Charlie Warzel, a long-term critic of Musk, “the social media equivalent of Costco implementing a 10-items-or-fewer rule, or a 24-hour diner closing at 7 pm – a baffling, antithetical business decision for a platform that depends on engaging users (and showing them ads) as much as possible”.
[…]
Coupled to this is the fact that increasing chaos on the platform has led to an exodus to a range of services such as Mastodon, Reddit, Discord, LinkedIn, Substack’s Notes and the invite-only Bluesky Social, a Twitter-like platform developed by Jack Dorsey (a co-founder of Twitter) – and, from last week, Instagram Threads, courtesy of Meta. It goes without saying that all these alternatives have pros and cons: all have some Twitter-like features, but none of them looks to me like a proper replacement for it. And Meta’s product comes with the company’s usual comprehensive surveillance.

In that respect, the most significant thing about the exodus is that there is one particular class of user who doesn’t seem to have joined it – professional journalists and politicians, for whom Twitter seems to remain an absolutely must-have service.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/08/if-threads-is-the-final-nail-in-twitters-coffin-where-will-the-journalists-and-politicos-go

…safe to say it ain’t for everyone, though…&…well…there’s reasons for that, too…which I doubt I’ve left us time for today…but…I imagine the broad strokes of the thing are probably pretty clear given the sheer profusion of examples even a cursory examination of recent history would provide

…but…some indicators…might be false…maybe it’s just a coincidence that the author of that weak sauce I led off with signed off with “it’s just a thought”…but…I know where that led my thoughts…even if there could be a strong case the way that leaves me side-eyeing them might just be…whaddya call it…ummm…I know this one

…just like it could be a coincidence that that other guy talking about the social media landscape used a cola analogy

…maybe it’s just one of those “great minds think alike” things…but…then again…maybe it isn’t…& any which way but loose…even if the monkey on your back turns out to be called clyde & specialize in right turns

…one thing I do know…though I’d probably put it a little different…is that for someone who can be mistaken for optimistic…to whom that condition does not come naturally…sometimes not giving the bastards the satisfaction…not to mention refusing to cede the commons…can be as much the better choice as it is the harder one

…so…take heart folks…we’ve come to the end of this particular line…& there’s plenty of time in the days to come to actually do the work

…but until then

…it’s time to face the music

…&

…naturally

…whatever anyone else would care to take time out of their day of rest to add

…for the love of the game?