I’m from Washington State so I’m somewhat South Canadian.
We’re four miles from the border.
And people were doing this way back in the late 60s/early 70s. I knew some of them.
Michael Flynn as in ex-General, now a traitor, Michael Flynn?
No. And I confirmed this with Harry, quoted on the cover.
MelonElmoProsecute just banned Mastodon:
The line between ex-general and traitor can be surprisingly thin. Not that it should be, or that the thinness excuses Traitor Flynn in any way. But he is far from the first gray crewcut to sing that sordid tune. Though certainly one of the more memorable overt actors.
…Aaron Rupar, a relatively uncontroversial independent journalist, had his account suspended just now, one of a number of suspensions today in the latest Twitter phase that I will now call “The Purge.”
…two more journalists down in The Purge (along with some anti-facist sites), Donnie O’Sullivan from CNN and Drew Harwell from the Washington Post.
AND…Ryan Mac from the NYT is gone. Damn. He was a great follow.
So what’s Elmo’s endgame here? He acquired the platform supposedly to make it some kind of absolutist free speech paradise, but now he’s going to burn it to the ground because his fee-fees keep getting hurt?
Fair point!
…not gonna keep updating but the purge really is in full effect now. Matt Binder has just been suspended, I suspect they’ve been compiling a list of people that have been critical of Musk and are just going through it and getting rid of them. Totally adult behaviour. The ultimate in “free speech absolutistism.”
Apparently Elmo is banning anyone who reported on the elonjet kid or his banning of Mastodon.
So much for “free speech absolutism”.
A modest proposal:
I wonder if, starting from just a few dozen “influencers” we could incite the entire twitter userbase worldwide over the course of a few hours to each tweet (not re-tweet) “Long live free speech!” just once.
Somewhere along about the 50 millionth independent posting of the same content Musk might, just might, get the idea he was being massively trolled. And then he’ll ban the entire userbase.
Sure, it’s crazy. But it’s amongst all the other craziness, this might be just crazy enough to work.
I was thinking of walking into Twitter HQ, singing a bar of Alice’s Restaurant, and walking out.
If Elmo had bought Twitter to immediately shut it down, I would have grudgingly respected that. Instead we all have to watch it slowly circle the drain like an acquaintance we weren’t overly fond of but don’t want to see suffer.
But like watching a really bad beating, after a while you start rooting for the bully, not the victim. I hope Musk tortures this thing to death. And he’ll wear that history like an albatross for the rest of his now-pitiful life.
Comparing this with Trump’s* latest move, it’s like we’re watching a real version of The Bonfire of the Vanities. Both these guys goofs are self-immolating in a raging BLEVE of pure ego. In sync.
It’s not synchronized swimming; it’s synchronized sinking.
* I honestly typo-ed his name as "Turmp's" and almost left it that way. Ref the whining about name-calling upthread, I'm not a big fan of name-calling either. But I think "Turmp" (which makes me think of "turnip" and of the Russian language might be a very nice nickname for a certain criminal and traitorous Putin-stooge.
Elon has suspended the account of several journalists who were reporting on his suspension of the ElonJet account.
That’s the excuse that’s being given, but some of those banned journalists reported on neither the elonjet account or the Mastodon banning.
It really does seem to be simply journalists-with-enough-followers who have criticized Musk in any way.
Apparently Musk’s theory, here, is that gaining a reputation as a massively-insecure guy will ‘create buzz’…???
“Aaron Rupar”, “free speech”, “Elon’s Jet”, and “Mastodon” are all among the top trends right now, so I guess we can add the Streisand Effect to the list of things Elon doesn’t understand.