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Thursday, May 28, 2020

Of Mice and Maniacs

There is something deeply, ludicrously ironic in the spectacle of Big Pussy using his favorite superpower to try to strong-arm Twitter into letting his lies go unchecked. It's as if it doesn't occur to him that such an action frees up people even more to respond in kind about him.

Not just the stuff we know is absolutely true and well-documented, but the things that are probably true or highly likely, like those Taj Mahal execs he had lawn-darted in a chartered helicopter, or the well-known fact that "executive time" is when he jerks off to photos of his eldest daughter. That sort of thing.

We've been conditioned by decades of entertainment tropes to a default setting of seeing tech dweebs like Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk as basically extras from Silicon Valley -- charmless but essentially harmless dorks whose lack of social skills pushed them, like blind people who compensate with superhuman hearing, to greater heights with their natural skill sets. That narrative has blinded us to the notion that maybe these guys are just creeps and assholes and opportunistic weirdos, not really all that different from Stephen Miller or Stephen Bannon, or any of the other barnacles and remorae clinging to the side of this whale carcass.

Like Big Pussy and his crew of human colostomy bags, the tech weasels have not tried to hide any of this at all. Zuckerberg contradicts himself with each appearance before a congressional panel or media interlocutor, his waxy, uncanny-valley visage and spun-to-the-gills eyes conveying a, to put it mildly, conflicted inner dialogue. Best case scenario with Zuck is that he really just doesn't give a fuck, he'll be glad to sell out his country to these monsters for a piece of that sweet campaign action.

Twitter is a bit of a different nut to crack, and Dorsey is caught between having to play ball with Big Pussy's idiotic whining, and not getting dumped by his own board and replaced with an even more pliant CEO. Dorsey probably realized some time ago that he should have done something about Trump's poisonous bullshit way back when he was pushing birther conspiracies and other lies. Too late, hoss, you waited too long, and now here we are.

The big tell here is that Trump could just, you know, stop posting on Twitter altogether, start up a new personal account on Parler or Gab or whatever gutter these turds are rolling in this week, and instantly take over. The reason he doesn't just do that is because this is another test run for future mayhem. People keep saying that the EO can't supersede the written law, as if they haven't been watching this motherless fuck wipe his ass with the fucking Constitution every goddamned day for the past four years. Who's gonna stop him? Chuck Schumer? Ruth Bader Ginsburg?

He's laying groundwork, with Bill Barr's evil guidance, so that if he manages to steal the election, he can go full hog and start taking down critics for the next four years.

This presents a real moral dilemma for me, personally -- while there's obviously a lot of repulsive garbage on Twitter, there's also a lot of excellent writing to be found. It would be great if they all jumped en masse over to Counter Social, but I get why they might be loath to suddenly ditch the quarter-million followers they spent years building and curating.

But this can't go on this way for much longer. Something has to give. If the social media weasels aren't going to push back against these aggressive encroachments, their users will have to, or Big Baby and his big-igloo fail-children are just going to take it over for good.

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