…so…confession time…I’m sorry…really & truly…this gives me no pleasure & there’s plenty else I could be boring you with

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/04/12/trump-fundraising-fraud-special-counsel/

A Texas county that was ordered to return banned books to its shelves is set to consider shutting down its library system [CNN]

Judicial Watch’s move to align with Trump against the Electronic Registration Information Center has been called ‘pure politics’ [Guardian]

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.flsd.645291/gov.uscourts.flsd.645291.1.0_2.pdf

Judge Imposes Sanction on Fox for Withholding Evidence in Defamation Case [NYT]

https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-lawyers-appeal-order-pence-testify-special-counsels/

https://www.reuters.com/legal/trump-sues-his-former-lawyer-michael-cohen-more-than-500-million-2023-04-12/

…or freaking you out about

Is it from this company? https://t.co/5v2AUcTCUX

— Wear your masks (@tonyver45) April 11, 2023

…& full-disclosure…it’s not like I’m running any shorter on links in the proverbial back pocket than I usually am when I sit down to one of these…harriot got a piece in the guardian for example…& plenty else was worth a read..but…here’s the thing…you know how a time or two I’ve made out all the damn ellipses & the cavalcade of links & block-quotes is the short version?

NEWS: Twitter is now X Corp. Twitter Inc. no longer exists. pic.twitter.com/G76PClL0xg

— T(w)itter Daily News  (@TitterDaily) April 11, 2023

The merger had been effective as of March 15th. pic.twitter.com/GCUrMeglhA

— T(w)itter Daily News  (@TitterDaily) April 11, 2023

…well…even without the part that usually passes for the long version this is liable to be the threatening-to-be-the-long-version

“When we are presented with a human rights violation … if you’re not willing to stand up against that, then you shouldn’t be in elected office.”

— Nebraska State Sen. @senatormachaela (D) tells @gracewein why she’s been filibustering an anti-trans bill for nearly two months pic.twitter.com/A68RUChQPS

— The Recount (@therecount) April 10, 2023

Nebraska State Sen. @senatormachaela (D) says she’s not worried that Republicans will follow her lead and filibuster to block liberal priorities:

“It is really, really hard. It is exhausting, physically and mentally … I don’t foresee people using this tactic lightly.” pic.twitter.com/lEo89jDmIs

— The Recount (@therecount) April 10, 2023

…so the bad news is…still a whole mess of these things…but…there’s a hard clock on the play…so no full sentences because it still isn’t going to be more than a foothill in the mountain range I could make out of this tectonic marvel of shifting sands…but…& it’s important to bear this in mind if you wade through the rest of this…if I had the time…& this sort of provocation…I’m pretty sure I could make a full-time job & a daily exercise of this sort of routine if it weren’t for the residual constraints of a lifetime’s worth of absorbing the quaint sort of social mores that treat with such fancies as the fond delusion that courtesy is common…so

…nobody needs to call anyone…or prescribe medication…or pack me off to some sort of retreat where you don’t get keyboards…& the walls are maybe a tad…bouncy?

…quite apart from anything else…I have wonko the sane levels of confidence that I’m not the person in this story who’s mad…in either sense of the word

“It seemed to me,’ said Wonko the Sane, ‘that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks, was no longer a civilization in which I could live and stay sane.”

…you see…even though I didn’t make it to whatever the extra time shit in the longer twitter streamed version ran to…which from reading stuff from people who did…like the poor sod stuck on the BBC live feed seemed to have to…was more of the same but worse because he was picking his own questions…from the kind of people you’d imagine he’d look to for his preferred brand of external validation… because it took me…maybe 12hrs or thereabouts in the end…to inch my way through the lesser evil of the hour that damn interview yesterday ran to on the BBC stream…like some sort of obscure purgatorial rite of passage

Well that was quite the interview! If you listened in on spaces, stay tuned to @BBCWorld for video of the chat between @JamesClayton5 and @elonmusk later today (UK) tomorrow here in the US ✌🏻 pic.twitter.com/qO0lAa77my

— Ben Derico (@ben_derico) April 12, 2023

…because I could only watch a moment or two without having to take a break just to come off the boil & down to a manageable simmer on account of how entirely fucking incensed the whole thing made me

…which might be an over-reaction

…might be…but…to fully explain my case for why it isn’t I’d need probably another full day…& I…& doubtless you…have shit to do…places to be…people to get tetchy with in person…you know…regular everyday shit

Begin each day by telling yourself: 

Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness – all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil. 

But for my part I have long perceived the nature of good and its nobility, the nature of evil and its meanness, and also the nature of the culprit himself, who is my brother (not in the physical sense, but as a fellow creature similarly endowed with reason and a share of the divine); therefore none of those things can injure me, for nobody can implicate me in what is degrading. 

Neither can I be angry with my brother or fall foul of him; for he and I were born to work together, like a man’s two hands, feet or eyelids, or the upper and lower rows of his teeth. 
To obstruct each other is against Nature’s law – and what is irritation or aversion but a form of obstruction.

Marcus Aurelius – Meditations

…& they were wise words then…& don’t look to have dated that I can tell…but as it goes he ain’t the only long-dead mediterranean dude who’d’ve seen through musk in a heartbeat…if, as marvel had it (andrew, the poet – not the comicbook lot) “I had world enough, & time” I could go a full concordance with footnotes detailing how aristotle’s rhetoric alone provides everything you need to detail chapter & verse on just what a disingenuous pile of reeking bunkum the whole kit & caboodle was composed of

…but…& this is where the sorry comes in…if I don’t at least try with what time I do have to get across some part of why it managed to wind me the fuck up…it’s gonna keep fucking with me…&…well…I can’t afford that…there’s the aforementioned shit-to-do skulking about like a dime-store sword of damocles…so…maybe think of this like an exorcism…or…a twisted homage to the princess bride

…it’s not a “good parts” version…because there were no good parts…just less bad moments…there are no winners here, ladies & gentlemen…for the abyss is staring back…& it is one vacant-looking motherfucker…seriously…that sucker is dead behind the eyes…ok…not dead…but for something reputedly that old & powerful…it sure does do a fine impression of something that at best has a mental & emotional age in single digits

…that’s not a dig at elon’s flat affect…I’m not here to take pot-shots at someone who might be somewhere on the autistic spectrum because they don’t emote to my satisfaction…but here’s the thing…being on the spectrum doesn’t mean you can’t also be an immature asshole & a clear-cut case of stunted intellectual capacities & malformed thinking…we ain’t talking that saga norén lady from the bridge here…we’re talking the version of the movie big that you’d get if you were native to the upside down from stranger things…no…that’s unfair…the mirror universe from star trek…you get the idea…or maybe you don’t…& that’s why I’m still typing, for my sins

…though if there’s a god…only you & them know if you’re still reading this…because myo don’t play those kinds of analytics on you hereabouts…but that’s a whole other stinking kettle of phish cookies & I already bit off more than I can chew this time…& I get that I sound like the unhinged one…but…a dude who tragically made himself an early exit from this mortal coil once wrote

This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another-word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second’s flash of thoughts and connections, etc. — and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English (or whatever language our native country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to other people what we’re thinking and to find out what they’re thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows it’s a charade and they’re just going through the motions.

What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant. The internal head-speed or whatever of these ideas, memories, realizations, emotions and so on is even faster, by the way — exponentially faster, unimaginably faster — when you’re dying, meaning during that vanishingly tiny nanosecond between when you technically die and when the next thing happens, so that in reality the cliché about people’s whole life flashing before their eyes as they’re dying isn’t all that far off — although the whole life here isn’t really a sequential thing where first you’re born and then you’re in the crib and then you’re up at the plate in Legion ball, etc., which it turns out that that’s what people usually mean when they say ‘my whole life,’ meaning a discrete, chronological series of moments that they add up and call their lifetime.

It’s not really like that. The best way I can think of to try to say it is that it all happens at once, but that at once doesn’t really mean a finite moment of sequential time the way we think of time while we’re alive, plus that what turns out to be the meaning of the term my life isn’t even close to what we think we’re talking about when we say ‘my life.’

Words and chronological time create all these total misunderstandings of what’s really going on at the most basic level. And yet at the same time English is all we have to try to understand it and try to form anything larger or more meaningful and true with anybody else, which is yet another paradox.

…& maybe you’d rather go read a guardian blog that quotes that & talks about him instead

…but that’s how I felt watching this damn interview…the number of ways in which he was so damn full of shit…& simultaneously so damn full of himself…were so legion it would take hours to fully explore all of them…hell, maybe days if you wanted to properly cite your sources & you were only the one person…but double-digit man hours…minimum…on the other hand…in the same story that foster-wallace guy also said 

The truth is you already know what it’s like. You already know the difference between the size and speed of everything that flashes through you and the tiny inadequate bit of it all you can ever let anyone know. As though inside you is this enormous room full of what seems like everything in the whole universe at one time or another and yet the only parts that get out have to somehow squeeze out through one of those tiny keyholes you see under the knob in older doors. As if we are all trying to see each other through these tiny keyholes.

But it does have a knob, the door can open. But not in the way you think. But what if you could? Think for a second — what if all the infinitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your life turned out now to be somehow fully open and expressible afterward, after what you think of as you has died, because what if afterward now each moment itself is an infinite sea or span or passage of time in which to express it or convey it, and you don’t even need any organized English, you can as they say open the door and be in anyone else’s room in all your own multiform forms and ideas and facets? Because listen — we don’t have much time, here’s where Lily Cache slopes slightly down and the banks start getting steep, and you can just make out the outlines of the unlit sign for the farmstand that’s never open anymore, the last sign before the bridge — so listen: What exactly do you think you are? The millions and trillions of thoughts, memories, juxtapositions — even crazy ones like this, you’re thinking — that flash through your head and disappear? Some sum or remainder of these?Your history? Do you know how long it’s been since I told you I was a fraud? Do you remember you were looking at the respicem watch hanging from the rearview and seeing the time, 9:17? What are you looking at right now? Coincidence? What if no time has passed at all?

The truth is you’ve already heard this. That this is what it’s like. That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless in-bent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this, and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part. Who wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it’s why it feels so good to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in Bengali — it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole.

So cry all you want, I won’t tell anybody.

…& I’m not looking to set off any tears before bedtime…& I for sure ain’t claiming to be able to tell you for any useful value of certain all of what exactly goes on in his mind…but I can tell you if the way it looks on the inside is how it comes off in that interview he ain’t waving…he’s drowning…he is in so far over his head he thinks he’s aquatic & the hypoxia is kicking in…there wasn’t a single moment of the whole hour where if he’d burst out sobbing…full-on ugly crying…it wouldn’t have seemed more natural than the shit he actually pulled

…but I guaran-damn-tee that there is a not-so-small army of people out there right this very minute feverishly typing away about how he showed the mainstream media who was the alpha & he’s a hero & a genius & please-please-elon-daddy-please-notice-me-senpai

In the 80s A&W tried to compete with McDonald’s rival Quarter Pounder
by selling a 1/3lb burger at a lower price point.
The product failed because most customers thought the 1/4lb was bigger.

This is why I don’t argue online.

anon…but clearly a modern day guru on a par with the dude himself…long may we all abide

…honestly, though…I may not be walter levels of unstable…but I lack the dude’s zen-master-levels of chill…it galls me at a visceral level that I can’t make a full-time job of corralling the sort of AI bot army of musk’s nightmares into brigades of accounts with ship names from iain m banks books that could swamp their pre-adolescent bullshit with an endless supply of cogent rebuttals until this gem ceased to make sense the way neitzsche talked about moving beyond good & evil

…but I can’t…so instead…for at least as much of it as I can get to before I run out the clock & have to “go do something less boring instead“…here is…not the good parts version…but the…you-absolute-fucking-parody-of-a-joke-of-a-man-how-in-god’s-name-did-anyone-ever-take-your-shit-seriously version…it’s not a full explanation kind of a deal…but I would bet real-actual-cash-money-I-need & not paper-billions-I-claim-not-to-care-about that it’s a sufficient explanation for my purposes…& requires nothing I’d consider to be conjecture I couldn’t adequately back up given the necessary time & resources

…& yes…that’s not the first reference to needing more than one of me to do this properly at the pace required…that’s why…if it were a real interview with a subject who didn’t need to stack the deck & load the dice just to have a shot at the edited highlights not showing his whole ass…it would have been in a studio…where a team off camera could have supplied those kinds of examples & references in real-time right in his interviewer’s ear via a decent producer with some chops & that worthy could have drop-kicked his sorry act clear into next week…where my guess is it would have landed around…oh…next tuesday…if there’s any kind of a god & they know their euphemisms, anyway

[n.b. …this isn’t necessarily in any kind of chronological order…I’m not going through that again…& I lack a transcript…so this is more of an order of things that starts off with me being pissed about it in the abstract because of how it’ll come across in scores of ways in scores of different snippets in scores of more & less reputable places…& follows an arc best described as a series of &-that-reminds-me to &-another-thing & back again…& you know what…I still don’t think I have a shot at doing as wretched a job as the anti-mekon when it comes to the result not being more full of holes than a colander…or a net…or…say…a tangled web he’d weav’d]

…where to begin…let’s see…things said without discernible attempts at intentional irony that…if irony had an atomic weight…would constitute critical mass…number…oh…probably a dozen or two at the point it came up…but

if your compensation is tied to user-growth then you’re not going to look too closely at some of your users

…meet the new boss…not like the old boss(es)…way, way higher levels of cognitive dissonance…like…off-the-fucking-charts…here-be-dragons levels of off-the-charts, at that…the implied wall partitioning this speaker from genuine self-awareness is like that thing they built in game of thrones because winter is coming…in context he said that shit with a straight face as a criticism of what twitter was like under the guidance of people he elsewhere describes as running the thing like a non-profit…whilst by his own admission he is in dire need of every scrap of revenue he can wring out of the skeleton of the thing he’s trying to hold together by plastering the cracks with the likes (& more importantly $8/month pay-to-play-verified dues) of catturd2 & the rest of the hate-mongering festering pustules whose various excrescences he seems to consider the lipstick on this pig…but he’d have you believe the criticism implied in that quote is a charge he is blissfully immune to…the very thought that what he’s doing is grade-A prime

…don’t take my word for it…he tells it better himself…& the way he tells it…there were so many bots on twitter before he bought it that only a man with a court holding a figurative gun to his head would have gone through with his deal to buy it…a metaphor he employed as a matched pair with the cyanide he likened to the poison pill the board originally responded to his offer with…between paroxysms of forced laughter to display i) how very am-I-bovvered? he is about the whole thing & ii) how those people are the butt of the joke…because they went from we’d rather eat cyanide than sell to you to holding a gun to his head to make him sign away more than he knew the thing to be worth…which was all their doing & a rotten trick to pull but isn’t he a saint to be so good humored about it…anyway…the bots were the problem, see…& he felt they couldn’t be trusted with this town square thing he claims to be in the business of protecting & fostering like some sort of…I dunno…mother hen? …creepy uncle you think maybe might have a rap sheet & a stint or two in pokey under their belt? …you pays your money & you takes your choice…or…well…some of your money…I’ll come back to that…but importantly a shit ton of other people’s

…so here’s some things mr musk would like people to really think about…some insights into why these last few months have been so difficult for an overburdened soul just trying to hold the last, best hopes of humanity aloft single-handedly like a modern day atlas…but somehow still terminally online in the mentions of the intellectual dregs he’s but recently implored to come be his opposite numbers in the beavis & butthead routine that substack piece the other day was talking about

…the stupid thicky can’t business for toffee hippie losers who were running the joint like a non-profit…were pulling down about $4.5billion p.a. when the sale went down…& spending…about $4.5billion p.a. …in what he described as “a normal year”…which, in a business that for pretty much its entire existence had been experiencing exponential growth…until it started looking like he might really buy it, anyway…begs the question of how much lifting “normal” is doing in that sentence…but…never mind the attractive distractor…moving on 

…somehow these feckless hippies still managed to hand over the keys with about a billion bucks in the bank…but…by then the business was on track to lose about $3billion over the year…for a few reasons…some of which he’d like to you remember are/were “cyclic in nature”…since other big tech concerns took a haircut in the advertising revenue department too…which is…not wrong…but…WILLFULLY MISSING THE WHOLE DAMN POINT LIKE THAT STEVE CARELL CHARACTER IN ANCHORMAN WHO YELLS “LAMP”…god-damn it…& that’s just the tip of just this one iceberg of the entire family of the fucking things he calved in the space of an interminable hour

…see…when the reins hit his hands…after he only went through with it because a court was gonna make him if he didn’t bite that bullet “willingly”…the revenue was in the middle of dropping precipitously…like tesla stock…on account of how everyone misconstrued the way he sold a butt-load of that shit

…because it’s only right that “companies should be allowed to operate on their own recognizance” (& not because of, I dunno…the SEC…or the spirit of the law or any hippy bullshit that isn’t I-do-what-I-want) so there’s only certain windows when the poor man can flog tesla stock at all…& he didn’t want to…he had to…to save twitter…because he’s a hero…& not like the mean stupid people who interpreted that as him losing faith in tesla…which is the only possible explanation for the price cratering that way

…not…say…because by then it was obvious he was…against all likelihood…immature & solipsistic enough to have run his mouth & not engaged his brain until he had to scramble to put billions upon billions of dollars where that mouth had gotten him…& no one with functional faculties wanted that kind of unraveling liability even tangentially associated with a real, grown up balance sheet they were exposed to by so much as the most limited liability any more than they wanted to burn down their own house next time the wind picked up…nah…couldn’t be that…not a tru player like ya boi

…anyway…so…losing $3billion a year…revenue circling the drain…only a billion bucks in the piggy bank…so far so worlds-smallest-violin, right? …oh, you sweet summer chile…we’re about to warp some numbers here…see…forget the on-course-to-lose-$3billion…sure it was cash-flow-negative o’clock…but that advertising hit wasn’t that bad…it only shaved about 1/3rd off of revenue…so…actually pulling in $3billion p.a. after the first tranche of the idiot tax down-payment

…here’s the kicker…the other shoe you’ve been wondering why I’m taking so long to get to…though you’d be waiting forever for a follow up question about any of this or the reasons for it to surface in that fucking interview…just this part…you gotta factor in the extra $1.5billion to service the debt for the billions he had to source by means other than parting with his precious tesla stock he didn’t want to sell…but sold as much as he could before being legally enjoined from selling any more by a clause in his paperwork about not entirely sinking the whole mostly-innocent thing for no reason other than his own self-imposed but still for tax-year & SEC reporting purposes sudden-onset need for extreme volumes of liquid capital to inject into his most pressing addiction as a way to self-medicate his way through breaking up with his baby mama…the one where the kid has the unpronounceable name…not the one he serially misgenders…that’s another kid entirely with a totally different & less famous mother…but the same asshole dad that’s always on that bullshit

…so the equation in full runs approximately thus…to save a company pulling in & spending the dizzying sum of $4.5billion a year…while socking away another billion bucks along the way…from…checks notes…bankruptcy

…not because they don’t like the people that think he’s smart & funny & laugh at his jokes & don’t make him feel bad about himself…no…it was a noble deed…he insists it was so it must be…because he’s such a fucking world-class genius & all…in his little vetruvian man t-shirt…making jokes about how his dog has a turtleneck like elizabeth holmes so what else do you need in a billion-dollar tech co. CEO…no delusions he’s a modern da vinci for this ultra-modern renaissance man…surely issac newton would be a better fit, anyway…remember how he dealt with those pesky forgers & coin-cutters when they gave him the mint…& definitely figured out calculus before that damn german…hate those guys…& how they sue your ass for maybe more than twitter’s worth when you don’t adequately police the hate-speech on your platform that they have good reasons for enforcing their quite particular laws about

…but I’m getting ahead of myself…we aren’t through with the show me the money…once that not-going-bankrupt corporate ship…& the nigh 8,000 who sailed in, rather than on, her…was bobbing away entirely above the waterline without a hole or an iceberg in sight worth mentioning…except for a dude who insists his dad never owned an emerald mine…but again…that’s for later…if we have time to dunk on the logic of the more-with-less moderation argument…for extra not-credit

…anyway…on the jolly ship “the building owner won’t even let us take the W off the sign”…like some kind of bootleg knock-off jack sparrow…with his hand on tiller…that $4.5billion coming in looks like a mere 3…& going the other way…well, that $4.5billion is swole 6…& that, friends…is a $3billion dollar hole created almost entirely out of nothing but overweening pride, a loud mouth doing a lot of running…including running up a bill requiring a check it literally couldn’t cash…but thanks to a masterful negotiating strategy known to initiates as due-dilligence-is-for-losers…left itself no choice but to cover…a $3billion/yr sucking maw of hubris, if you will…belonging quite entirely to just one very specific man with more money than sense…though some asshole like petey thiel or his pal bonesaw maybe egged him on beyond the tipping point somewhere along the way…who can say for sure…but it sure would be true to form for either of those assholes

…so…you see…we should have some empathy…what would you do if you’re on a sacred mission to save something you just gut-shot for no reason other than what in a toddler is called “acting out”…huh? …& we’re not at home to any answer taking the form of “I wouldn’t be up that creek after throwing away a perfectly good paddle because I’m a fucking child & really quite astonishingly fucking cretinous the way you did you absolute utter unmitigated travesty of a human being”…AKA the obvious answer

…your patient has four months to live…which is his florid metaphor of choice…so as to lend a tacit life or death stakes flavor…& implicitly cast him as the life-saving physician wielding the scalpel &…well…bonesaw…considering how much healthy tissue he has to amputate to save the poor beast…that he personally shot in the street like ol’ yella…because he had to…for the sake of humanity…it’s just basic utilitarianism, you see…except it fucking ain’t that, neither…& bentham would be turning in his grave faster than the spinny bits in a tesla that hasn’t spontaneously combusted at the mere association of his philosophy with this fatuous cretin’s desperate attempt to obfuscate how entirely this disaster is of his own personal doing…& a result of a staggering series of self-owns the like of which the world may never see again…but who has time to think about that…there are lives & livelihoods at stake & he’s been in “constant combat” on these very real (like the fact this is an actual metaphor he also used with no intentional irony) front lines…late in the game when we get to the things that have been hard on the poor wee mite…on the famously hard streets of SF…where he’d like to clumsily remind you one of his near-peers recently got stabbed to death…on the streets…those mean streets of myth & legend…”dangerous neck of the woods around here”…so something ought to be done about it…just like they should make that mean building owner…or ownership group or whatever…let him turn the spare office next door that he’s fired too many people to have a use for…into a homeless shelter

…oh, yeah…how selfless is that…or…would that be…if there was any trace of even some scribbles on the back of a napkin to suggest he ever gave it a second thought? …rather than…as he described it to the poor dude from the BBC who must even now be recovering from surgery to roll his eyes back down to point the normal direction again…when he asked what that plan would have looked like

“I dunno – we could just let people stay there…bring their stuff…their tent or whatever” [quoth a dumbass]
“right…& it’d be a roof over their heads” [sayeth the paid-to-be-here-guy-who-knows-that’s-for-the-birds]
“yeah” [says man who mere moments ago said S.F. needs to do something about people getting hurt on the streets play-acting like he’d be fine working next door to a high rise insta-slum with zero oversight/regulation/resources/residential zoning prerequisites or suitability & wants a cookie for talking a talk he made good & god-damned sure there was no risk of anyone being out of their mind enough to make him match with even the first step of a walk]

…there’s 1,500 souls left aboard now…& admittedly mistakes were made…like that data centre they closed

…maybe you forgot…or never cared…like you maybe never knew how this bit is cute…because elon’s on the record saying he likes in job interviews to ask what the biggest problems people have dealt with were…on account of people that solve problems always know all the details of how they did it…& this was what he cited as his biggest difficulty…technically…not emotionally…that was a toss up between having other people fire about 6,000 people from the company they were happily working for until he saved™ it…& the “constant combat” scenario where people are endlessly mean to/about him…because he constantly fucking begs for that response like it’s some sort of freakish pavlovian fetish

…anyway…they had three data centres…& only a fool would believe at least one wasn’t entirely redundant…elon’s heard of RAID 3…he knows all about redundancies…thousands of the bastards…everywhere you look…bound to be true of the third wheel of data centres…stands to reason…so…naturally he shut that shit down like a boss

…the data centre it turns out a bunch of stuff was hard-coded to specifically in ways he hadn’t kept anyone around capable of knowing…much less warning him about…so that was…in his own words…”quite catastrophic”…”we lost a lot of functionality”

…the important part of that question when he was the one doing the interviewing is how they solved the problem though…so I bet he did something really smart…bound to have, really…wanna know what?

“really rushed to put it back”

…uh-huh…so…lemme get this straight…you “solved” the biggest crisis since you disastrously took control of this multi-billion dollar tech company by…checks notes…walking back a bone-headed, short-sighted problem you caused yourself by not knowing what the fuck you were doing or talking about & firing anyone you even potentially could have listened to when they told you it was a dumb fucking idea in the first place?

…if elon interviewed elon…even elon wouldn’t give him the fucking job he has at twitter…FFS

…& you know what?

…those aren’t even the parts that pissed me off the most…nor were the multiple instances of laughing at his own jokes…& not in the it’s-ok-to-laugh-I-can-take-being-the-punchline way…in the so-you-know-that-was-a-joke-since-you-seem-not-to-have-realized-the-way-my-real-friends-like-catturd2-do way…all forced & borderline-incipient-hysteria-ish…like a busted carnival automaton or something equally creepy…or the part I said I’d swing back to about how…ackshully…any social media company not adopting a strategy of pay-to-play-verified will inevitably succumb to hordes of AI bots…so ditching legacy verification as of 4/20…yes, really…the BBC guy said “I get the joke”…musk said “it’ll never leave me”…dude comes back with “cost you a lot of money”…but, says the smug-but-shouldn’t be sack o’ stupid…”fortunately it didn’t in the trial”…’cause he’s got jokes…& japes…& is totally a funny guy

…not even when he claims that in fact…”community notes” & all his anti-bot pro-platforming-shitposting-hate-mongering-assholes work are better than your too-basic-to-be-countenanced actual moderation…because the secret genius of the pay-to-play-verified model is that it “massively raises the cost” & will thus be an insurmountable barrier to all bad actors…but is simultaneously at best a “fairly small” revenue stream compared to advertising…& also…when it comes to news orgs who’d refuse to pay as a point of principle…”a small amount of money so I don’t know what their problem is”…no…not even when the very thing he touts as an excellent tool for crowd-sourced free-to-me fact-checking…he claims is bullshit when it fact-checked his claim his daddy never owned no mine…but bulls through it to get to the part where he says he’s going to “treat everyone equally so there’s no special anointed class” […motherfucker explain to me again what the fucking tick deal is about…& use small words…because I must be missing something] “that are journalists” […oh, I ain’t missed shit…I see] “who get to tell everyone what to think”

…no…since I’m pressed for time…& more than likely well past the point of pressing on way too long with this to make anyone happy about it…I’ll even give him an undeserved pass for the manifest lack of understanding of what…much less why…people who study journalism might know about how to bring receipts without sowing chaos…or indeed what the hell a journalist even is…along with a freebie on the part where he spuriously conflates a genuine phenomenon whereby reading articles about things you know about in depth highlights their inherent flaws with a groundless assertion that “even if an article is completely accurate & fully comprehensive there’s still – in writing that article, the media’s choosing that narrative…they’re deciding what to write an article about” as though somehow when twitter works his way that wouldn’t be applicable to the emerging narrative he claims would be chosen instead by “the people”…the “right” is apparently silent because that’s transparently a crock of shite in ways that shouldn’t need to be explained…it’d be wasted on him anyway…he didn’t even blink when he uttered this brain-fart

“I don’t care about the money, really […] I want a source of truth I can count on, that’s real-time [zero-irony intended but a lot of that’s-a-feature] immediate source of truth […] that gets more accurate over time”

…the most aggravating shit wasn’t even when he responded to a question about whether taking down stuff about a BBC documentary in india was at the behest of the indian government…”I’m not aware of that particular situation”…”so you’re just…you’re not sure?”…<stammers>”I dunno…I don’t know about that…what exactly happened with some content situation in india – the rules in india about what can appear on social media are quite strict & we can’t go beyond the laws of a country”

…wonder what that sounds like in german…in a court of law?

…& god love him the BBC guy tried (for the umpteenth time) to join up those dots for the special boy…”but do you get that if you do that you’ve simply incentivised countries around the world to pass more draconian laws?”…”no – look, if we have a choice of either our people go to prison or we comply with the laws, we’ll comply with the laws”

…glad we got that straight…you insensate mass of gas-baggery…but don’t worry…he still couldn’t see the irony…no…he doesn’t get the part where that makes a stronger case out of the thing he thinks it refutes…he’s too busy patting himself on the back while saying “same goes for the BBC”…like him & the beeb are the same, really…when you “think” about it…& he clearly had…especially how he could “turn the tables” & put some power moves on the random correspondent as though he, elon, was in fact demanding answers of the BBC

“This is not an interview about the BBC”

“Oh, you thought it wasn’t?”

“I see now why you’ve done twitter spaces…I am not a representative of the BBC’s editorial policy – I want to make that clear…let’s talk about something else”

“I’m interviewing you, too […] you weren’t expecting that”

…still not his dumbest shit

…see…that part came after a bona fide, loose in the wild, gen-u-ine “what about?”…that was hot on the heels of the bit that still pisses me off just to think about…which was a riff about covid misinformation replete with more dog-whistles than it could support

“you’ve changed the covid-misinformation rules”

“has the BBC changed it’s covid misinformation?” [n.b. no rules involved in that query]

“the BBC does not set the rules on twitter, so I’m asking you…”[gets interrupted]

“no, I’m talking about the BBC’s misinformation about covid”

“I’m just asking you about – you changed the covid-misinformation labels…there used to be a policy, then…it disappeared…why do that?”

“covid is no longer an issue [that’s a direct quote, by the way, as is this bit] does the BBC hold itself responsible for misinformation regarding masking & side-effects of the vaccinations…& not reporting on that at all…& what about [emphasis mine] when the BBC was put under pressure by the british government to change the editorial policy, are you aware of it?”

Few have captured that sentiment better than @MattBors with his Mister Gotcha cartoon. https://t.co/FQjpi1ILDK pic.twitter.com/pJZDnlVsTS

— DHH (@dhh) February 26, 2019

…the misinformation thing just kept cropping up

“on a serious note, it could inflame misinformation, again, if you have “verified” accounts that are from anyone who can pay money – potentially they go up to the top of feeds…they get more action on twitter…& traditional media that may not pay for verification doesn’t – do you see how that could potentially be a driver of misinformation?”

<chin-stroke>”well, I think the media is much more a driver of misinformation than the media would like to admit that they are”

“that’s a different question”

“yeah…uh…but you’re saying, like…who knows best…the average citizen or someone who’s…y’know…a journalist…& I think in a lot of cases it’s the average citizen who knows more than the journalist”

[…average citizen…like your buddy catturd2?]

“you want that? news organisations that won’t pay get swamped?”

“that’s up to them”

…check…& indeed mate, liberals…you poor unwitting fools

…this “average citizen” would like to remind mr musk…& any lawyers his likes-to-dish-it-out-but-can’t-take-it, thin-skinned, penny-ante petty-panties-all-in-a-bunch ass might get to give this a once-over…that he said very clearly that getting negative feedback is vital…& that

“free speech is meaningless unless allow people you don’t like to say things you don’t like”

…& ain’t nobody paid to write these posts any more than anyone’s paid to read them…which odds are can’t be said of his tweets…so…to get to the main event…there’s a bunch of stuff I haven’t addressed that’d make any sane person spitting mad…but this was clearly hands down the top spot on the sizzle reel this whole thing played as in his head…& it’s a doozy…he got all cocky after the part where raising the topic of reintroducing the qanon types…or andrew tates…or a.n. other member of the tribe of hate-speech-rights…might not be as clever as all that…because they’re all besides the point…because the point…selon elon…is

“who’s to say? who’s the arbiter? is it the BBC?”

…oooh…how very “gotcha” of you…you must be so proud

<BBC dude points out that on twitter the answer is “you”>

[…I’m maybe paraphrasing a little, here…but this is genuinely the gist of it]

“you accept that misinformation can be dangerous…that it can cause real-world harms?”

“yes – the point I’m trying to make is the BBC has at times published things that are false…so…you agree that that has occurred?”

“I’m quite sure that the BBC have said things before that turned out not to be true…at some point in its…”<gets interrupted>
“cor-rect”
“…whatever it is…100 year history, yes”

“yes, even if you aspire to be accurate there are times when you will not be”

…& that’s exactly the same as hate-speech running rampant on my platform ergo I am clearly beyond reproach from the likes of you or them

…the “coup de grace”, though…that was about how all that shit has got worse since he’s been in charge…on which topic his killer argument turned on…& I shit thee not…if you can’t give me anecdata it’s fake news

“what hate-speech are you talking about? <adopts faux-reasonable tone> look – you use twitter, do you see a rise in hate-speech? just a personal anecdote…do you? I don’t?”

…which begs some sizeable questions given the follows & replies a guy who said buying twitter & pulling this shit would be “sickkk” (sic) (& sick)

“compared to [the before times] I get more of that stuff – personally – I’m not going to talk for the rest of twitter”

“you see more hate-speech personally?”

“I’d say I see more hateful content”

“content you don’t like? or hateful? I dunno…describe a hateful thing…”

“I dunno, like, yeah, I mean, y’know…just content that will solicit a reaction…something that may include something that might be racist or slightly sexist…those kinds of things”

“so you think if something is ‘slightly sexist’ it should be banned?”

“no?”

“is that what you’re saying?”

“I’m not saying anything”

“oh, I’m just curious…I’m just trying to understand what you’re saying”

…for the record…his attempt to contort the phrase “specific examples” into some sort of primary-source-analogue way beyond the design specs of any part of the stuff supposed to support that steaming load…as a justification for this transparent bullshit…is out & out fucking insulting to the intelligence of anyone exposed to it…so…although it’s clearly way the hell too late for that…I’ll remind you I apologized profusely way the hell back in the dim & distant mists of the long-forgotten opening paragraphs of this god-forsaken post

“can you name on example?”

“you can’t name a single example?”

“I’ll tell you why – because I don’t actually use the For You feed anymore because I just don’t particularly like it”

[…or to put it another way…as plenty of people have…on & off twitter…you turned it into a hosepipe of nasty-ass unsolicited shit people actively avoid like the plague you seem hell-bent on turning the whole platform over to a specialized vector for]

<but let me stroke my chin in victory & revel in the reflected glory of the part where>

“you said you can’t come up with an example – not even one”

“I haven’t used that feed in three or four weeks”

“then how did you see the hateful content?”

[…does the dude look a month old to your insane ass? …or do you just assume we were all born fucking yesterday?]

“then I say, sir, that you do not know what you’re talking about”

…oh, he went on a tear…no examples = that’s false = you lied QED wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am time to take a bow

“what I said was there are many organisations [including the BBC itself & at least one other the guy name-checked at one point that somehow still didn’t count for enough to de-rail the premature victory lap] that say that kind of information is on the rise”

“give me one example – literally can’t give me one…<performative sigh>”

“strategic dialogue, for example”

ISD’s research on hate speech and extremism on Twitter was referenced in @JamesClayton5’s interview with @ElonMusk. A thread on our findings and others'🧵

— Institute for Strategic Dialogue (@ISDglobal) April 12, 2023

“you can’t name one…you literally said you’ve seen more hateful content & then can’t name a single example – that’s absurd”

“let’s move on – we only have a certain amount of time”

“wow”

“covid misinformation…”

“amazing”

…apparently the holy grail is maximizing non-regretted user-minutes…which is approximately the opposite of what I’ve clearly gone & done…so…do me a solid…put some of those in the comments…or…hell…someone run off an alt-DOT on spec…I promise I won’t take it personally?

…damn…I swear…if I had a mic…I’d drop that shit…but not out the sort of sheer exhaustion I imagine all that scrolling will have caused you…not even out of any kind of exhaustion, believe it or not…even after letting off that much steam…just sheer exasperation…& that shit-to-do thing…I swear there’s no shortage of more where that came from from where I’m sitting