Twitter! It’s like being stalked by committee!
—David Tennant
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Category Archives: Main Stream Social Media
President Trump Tweets
John Hinderacker has a post over at PowerLine called Why Trump Tweets. He points out that the
Main Stream MediaDemocrats with By-lines have been force to cover certain aspects of the 2016 election story in order to “explain” those tweets.But until now, wild horses couldn’t have pulled the facts that have been steadily emerging about the real scandals of the 2016 election out of the AP. Why does the AP grudgingly cover them now? Because they were tweeted by President Trump. Democratic Party outlets like the Associated Press know that millions of people understand quite a bit about the brewing Obama FBI/CIA/Fusion GPS/Clinton campaign/FISA scandal–not just the eggheads who read National Review, but the great many who follow the president on Twitter, or see accounts of his tweets elsewhere. More than anyone else, it is President Trump who has stood up to the swamp in the person of Bob Mueller, and is forcing the Democratic Party press to begin covering the real story of the 2016 election.
BTW, the first comment is the money quote:
The Tweetings shall continue until the media improves.
—Ritchie The Riveter
Read the whole thing.
I’m Not Making This Up, You Know
And now someone is upset about Apu being an “offensive stereotype.”
Umm … well, yes … Apu is an offensive stereotype. So are almost all of the characters on The Simpsons.
Meanwhile, Hank Azaria, the actor who voices Apu, has got woke and has said that it might be time to change the character.
D’oh!
The Future Isn’t What It Used To Be
2001: A Space Odyssey was released 50 years ago, and we haven’t been back to the Moon for over 40 years.
OTOH, social media companies are developing AI systems to watch over us.
School Shooter Control
Yesterday evening, a discussion of “universal” background checks appeared in my Twitter timeline in response to a tweet that had include an @ mention of me. After several hundred tweets went by, I hopped in to ask the person advocating for federal mandated background checks for private gun sales if he had any data to support that background checks on private sales were actually beneficial in reducing crime. I noted that Maryland had not seen any benefit.
He cited the improvement in crime statistics in New York from 2013 to 2016. I asked what other states, and he said something about it not being possible to sort out the effect of background checks from all the “improved” gun control over that period. I spent a few minutes with the FBI Uniform Crime Reports for 2013 and 2016 and found that crime got worse in the most states with “universal” background checks during that period. Of course, crime got worse all across the country (this was the era of Ferguson and Baltimore), but, on average, the states with “universal” background checks began the period with crime rates worse than the national average and ended the period with crime rates worse than the national average. The repeatable results from running the experiments in those laboratories of democracy show that “universal” background checks are ineffective at best and probably a failed policy.
The Gentle Reader will probably not be surprised to learn that such a reasoned argument did not impress my interlocutor. At least, he didn’t go on about high-capacity magazines, perhaps because it has come out that the recent shooter used 10-round mags.
Which leads me to another point: The recent school shooter supposedly said that he wanted to be a “professional school shooter.” How did he learn that there was such a thing? Surely, he learned through press coverage of previous shootings.
<sarc>It may be that the time has come to rein in such coverage in order to protect our children. As part of that, we need to seriously consider a ban on high-capacity magazines. After all, no one has a legitimate need for a copy of Time, Mother Jones, or Marie Claire with more than 10 pages. I can already hear the complaints saying that such publications are protected by the First Amendment. Piffle. Even if we grant the writers’ the right to have such dangerous publications in their own homes, they don’t belong in public spaces. The Founding Fathers—including Benjamin Franklin, a printer and inventor—could never have imagined such publications. If it saves just one child, …</sarc>
Smugness, Civility, and the Revolution
While drinking my second cup of coffee this morning, I read three posts that touch in one way or another on the way political discourse is being conducted in America.
Katherine Mangu-Ward (who is editor-in-chief at Reason) has a piece at the NYT called When Smug Liberals Met Conservative Trolls.
Modern American political discourse can seem disjointed to the point of absurdism. But the problem isn’t just filter bubbles, echo chambers or alternative facts. It’s tone: When the loudest voices on the left talk about people on the right as either beyond the pale or dupes of their betters, it is with an air of barely concealed smugness. Right-wingers, for their part, increasingly respond with a churlish “Oh, yeah? Hold my beer,” and then double down on whatever politically incorrect sentiment brought on the disdain in the first place.
David French has a post at NRO titled Civility Isn’t Surrender.
Consider how often our political discourse is wildly out of proportion to the actual stakes of any given controversy. Tax cuts kill. Conservatism is fascism. There’s a “war on women.” Every single election is “the most important in the nation’s history.” There’s so much hysteria and nonsense in public debate that it can be difficult to discern actual emergencies when they genuinely arise.
When you combine humility, conviction, and a sense of proportion, civility is the typical result. And that form of civility is anything but surrender. In fact, I’d argue that in the long run it’s the path to ideological expansion, not retreat. It’s the path to becoming a reliable, trustworthy communicator. It’s the best way to get a hearing outside your tribe, and it still leaves room for righteous, necessary anger — while choosing its targets carefully.
Sarah Hoyt has a post at According to Hoyt called Come the Revolution.
But then the revolution came, and it wasn’t what the left expected.
And …
It’s going to get very very bad. The people who spend their lives in the beatific hope that “come the revolution” they’d be on top, are getting old, and they haven’t got their shiny red wagon. In fact, it’s becoming obvious they never will.
They’re going to try to grab for the silver
ringrattle as hard as they can. It might even mean the cold civil war goes hot.
Read all three.
It would be interesting to find an effective balance between these three points of view. The comment section is open for discussion.
Stacy McCain Gulaged Again
This time it’s the social media site medium dot com. Stacy had been posting there since the middle of 2016, but he and several other right and libertarian writers were thrown of that platform today.
Of course, Stacy still has his own blog, and you can read his comments about Medium there.
