CarnalK, it’s not just you. I brought up Twitter a few months back, and the majority of responses sounded Luddite to me.
You say you don’t like the “format”, but Twitter is now such the pervasive ether politicos swim in, that if you don’t, you are just a tourist from my perspective. This is the SDMB, where we value expertise, so the Elections board should be a serious, political junkie type zone. And it’s simply impossible to be a serious political junkie in 2016 without regular, expert-level use of Twitter. Everyone else who is serious about politics is in there, so if you are not, you are just not marinating in that wavelength.
I am pretty confident that if you took my advice, after a couple weeks you would be like “ahhhhh…” and feel sheepish to look back on this conversation.
Nice try, but I’m compelled to point out that the Pony Express was the passing fad; I find it hard to imagine that anyone had gotten nostalgically attached to it until it had been out of service for quite a long time. Twitter’s positively stodgy and conservative compared to the nineteen months the Pony Express existed.
All of the Establishment love Cruz is getting amuses me greatly. Cruz is what happens when the insane Perennial Candidate actually wins; he’s too shrill and strident to actually listen to anyone, let alone govern, and he’s damned proud of it. Trump, at least, is running as a deal-maker and his policies are, overall, much more moderate than what Cruz and the rest of the Real Republicans champion.
Don’t get me wrong. They’d both be disastrous Presidents. However, there’s a meaningful difference between Stupid Nixon (Trump) and Ayatollah Kochmani (Cruz).
I look at the first four letters of the word, and that’s about all I need to know. There are plenty of other, less diluted sources for political news and subjects than the populist home of Honey Boo Boo and Justin Bieber. Matter of fact, most of those places will post appropriate tweets if revelant anyway.
There’s some deep analysis. I suppose this board must be just a bunch of Cheech and Chong dopeheads then. :rolleyes:
As I said upthread, my politics VIP list includes many of the top political reporters and pundits in the business. Lots of Ivy League degrees represented, no Honey Boo-Boo or Justin Bieber anywhere to be seen.
Heh right…as if you have to be a stoner to know where to find good political analysis and objective reporting without resorting to knowing what your favorite pundit had for breakfast. Nice try, though.
I think you got whooshed there. I was referring to the fact that this board is called the Straight Dope, meaning that someone analyzing it on the level you did of Twitter could dismiss it as just about weed.
And I challenge you to find any mention of breakfast menus among the political pundits I follow. This is a weird stereotype of Twitter from a decade ago; perhaps it was true then. It is certainly not now. To say things like this makes a person sound laughably out of touch.
Out of touch? I’ve forgotten more about computers, networks, and the internet than you’ll ever know.
Really, I don’t need to know what somebody posted on Twitter within the last 30 seconds to be informed on political issues. Any attempt to paint it otherwise, and to suggest that Twitter is the be-all, end-all of political information, is not only elitist but completely wrong. How old are you, anyway?
Of the 857 folks I follow, maybe one is a Hollywood celebrity. And she mostly posts on science or foreign affairs.
I simply don’t see much of that. To honest, I haven’t see any of that. None of it. Zilch. I suppose I might one day - I mean I’ve heard of that behavior, in a Doonesbury cartoon series a decade ago for example. But I didn’t really follow twitter back then anyway.
But that’s not the problem I’m hearing for the most part. It has a silly name, it’s nothing but celebrity gossip and irrelevant minutae about one’s breakfast, etc. Rick’s point is unquestionably valid.
And the thing is, characterizing Twitter as a whole as any certain thing is absurd. Twitter is at least somewhat different for every user, and is vastly different between me and probably the vast majority of users you could sample. There are, I’m sure, message boards that use the same basic architecture as the SDMB, but which discuss completely different topics and have a very different user base.
Fundamentally, Twitter is where experts in a variety of fields gather and bounce ideas off each other. At least, I know this is true about politics, and about film and TV criticism. I have lists for each, and the journalists in each camp not only put ideas out there and link to their articles, they engage in ongoing discussions, bouncing ideas off each other. Watching those conversations develop can be more illuminating than any article you could read. It’s like an ongoing, neverending seminar filled with the preeminent experts in the field contributing from disparate locations. We should be thrilled to watch this kind of “group mind” (or, if that’s too creepy or far-fetched, the “wisdom of the crowd”) develop, rather then trashing it or dismissing it.
Heck, for a deep dive into the number crunching of turnout, demographics, etc., you could do a lot worse than checking Ron Brownstein’s Twitter feed once a day (including the “replies” tab if you’re on a desktop):
Honestly, that has not been my experience. My feed is more like a water cooler filled with preeminent experts and comedians dropping a few partially baked one liners before they get back to their actual work. Also hobbyists. Also folks with a professional interest in social media promotion.
Thinking back, I suppose I have seen a couple of tweets about these folks’ personal lives. But frankly there are orders of magnitude more of that on this message board. (Not that this is a bad thing necessarily.) Paul Krugman, who just started tweeting last month, does this on occasion. Sort of. I see that Neil Gaiman tweeted a pic of his wife and kid in the past week. But most of the material I see isn’t like that.
Why is a Twitter feed from Jose A. DelReal the source for an official statement from Donald J. Trump? Oh, looking at his Twitter page, I see he is a political reporter from The Washington Post. Okay, I guess it makes sense he would be getting an official statement and relaying it through the fastest format available.
When the point of the tweet is just to give a link to another article or blog, why use the intermediary? If the point of the tweet is content from that author, then citing that tweet is fine.
I can find it believable that an independent person has a strong interest in sinking Trump, so creates a PAC to take him down, and generates an ad campaign without consulting Cruz’s camp. Sure, it’s possible there is backdoor collusion too, but it isn’t unreasonable that they aren’t connected. Given how sleazy Cruz has been in this campaign (saying that Carson was dropping out when he wasn’t, his campaign flyers, etc), however, it is not unlikely that his campaign does have some connection.
However, I find it less than credible that Trump has no connection to the National Enquirer piece. His denials are every bit as believable as anything else out of his mouth, as well. “I’ve been hearing rumors, I don’t know if they’re true, but it’s possible Cruz isn’t even a citizen. And Rubio, too. Heck, it sounds like maybe Ben Carson is really not a citizen, either. At least, that’s what I’ve heard, I don’t know.” It’s ironic that Trump calls Cruz “Lyin’ Ted” when he’s a much bigger spinner of falsehoods than Cruz ever hopes to be.
I can’t tell if Cruz or Trump is the Democrat’s biggest boon in this race. One way or the other, it really feels like the Rupublican party is headed for a splinter.
