Posts Tagged ‘Twitter’
Zen Tiger Blocked by Helen Clark on Twitter
This tweet led to his downfall.
Screenshot, just in case Twitter refuses to show Helen Clark’s original tweet:
Helen Clark really doesn’t like people disagreeing with her.
I was blocked by Helen for some minor offense last year. Not sure what it was, and it could even have been as innocuous as liking a comment that she disagreed with! At this rate, only sycophants will be able to see her tweets.
Cam Slater might have a similar problem. Though maybe it’s because Helen Clark doesn’t like to be called “H1”, a nickname that was popular for her during her Prime Minister days.
A Message from the owner of Twitter
That’s not hyperbole. From the active suppression of right-wing customers on multiple issues (but especially trans-news), to the FBI’s involvement with “Russiagate” starting in 2016 to their coverup of the Hunter Biden story in 2020, and now to the suppression of debate on C-19, it turns out that every suspicious claim made about what Twitter was doing to people’s free speech, was true.
In keeping with the policy of a blog being about analysis rather than news, I’ve ignored these stories because they’re still developing – including the interactions between Twitter and the US government, where the latter has clearly used the former to control public information in what looks to me like clear breaches of the 1st Amendment of the US Constitution. The so-called “Twitter files” have also initially launched on Twitter itself and its structure makes lengthy reports difficult to follow, although I can see why Musk would insist the release start there so as to boost viewer and user numbers, which seems to have worked.
But I feel comfortable ignoring it for the moment since the good old MSM has also – because it doesn’t put them in a good light either. Their responses have been to variously ignore the actual facts revealed in the so-called “Twitter files”, cling to any story they can find about how Twitter (and Musk) will soon fail, or pretend that “everybody already knew all this anyway, so it’s not a story.” Over at the Powerline blog they have a good example of this using one of their blogger’s local papers, the Minnesota Star Tribune: note that it’s almost all repeats of press service reports anyway.
It’s also becoming obvious from the Twitter revelations that the same stuff was already being pulled at other social media and Web businesses like Facebook, Google, and Apple, which have much larger footprints than Twitter, plus a host of smaller ones like Reddit and Pinterest (which is a photography site!!)
The group-think exhibited by all this, between the organs of the State, the MSM and now the Big Tech companies, does not demonstrate a healthy democratic society but an increasingly frightening one that fits the description provided in 1991 by the Peruvian Nobel laureate writer, Mario Vargas Llosa, live on Mexican television when he called Mexico “the perfect dictatorship.” That interview actually had a political impact, in that the Institutional Revolutionary Party finally lost power in 2000 after 71 years.
Will the Twitter revelations have a similar impact on The Establishment in the USA, and across the West? Not judging by this piece of video from Britain, where a solo anti-abortion woman was arrested for silently praying across the street from an abortion clinic.
Full Court Press
If you’ve ever watched American basketball you’ll be familiar with the term “Full Court Press”, which is where a team basically attacks the other team in every part of the court.
The tactic is usually done by marking up each individual opposition player in every part of the court – as opposed to clustering around their own basket while their opponents lazily drift towards them with ball (the usual) and/or targeting a couple of key players.
What is being done to Elon Musk and Twitter now by the Left is the type of online Full Court Press they specialise in:
Understand that as you read each of those near-identical messages that these “people” are not re-tweeting another’s message. These are, supposedly, their own thoughts expressed on Twitter about how it’s:
Kinda weird how @elonmusk gets to decide how like a half-billion people communicate. Way too much power for one erratic individual to wield, don’t you think?
You have actually seen this before, but in another context:
And then there’s the government who are being asked, by that ever fair and balanced MSM, if they’re worried about us being at “critical moment” where a consistent narrative must be maintained. Understand that this question is coming from a member of the fucking MSM, openly advocating for the silencing for everybody but themselves and other members of the Establishment™.
Including dealing with the assholes known as Apple.
That’s how they shut down the starting app of Parler thanks to their massive duopoly with Google. “Free market” supporters take note, and see also that Apple had no problems selling the Facebook and Twitter apps even as the former were used to organise the January 6 “Insurrection”, while the latter has been filled with Iranian, Russian, North Korean and Taliban propaganda since its inception. It is only when Musk allows conservatives to speak more freely on Twitter that suddenly there is a huge problem. The Burn Loot Murder and Antifa assholes used used both Twitter and Facebook to coordinate the destruction of American cities in 2020, but that also was fine with Apple. But a conservative speaking on Twitter is a threat to democracy itself.
Then there’s this.
Ok, so that’s just the Bee having their usual satirical fun. But as always with “Fake News That You Can Trust”, there’s a truth behind it.
Apple has restricted AirDrop file sharing, the very method the demonstrators have been using to communicate privately out of earshot of their totalitarian masters. Was this on advice from the communist regime or did Apple just figure out for themselves what was in their best interest to do? It wouldn’t have been hard.
I should add I’d been hugely impressed by their tech since first using it at varsity in the mid-1980s’, shunning it only due to the cost, but finally giving in around 2003, since when we’ve been largely an Apple household. Which makes this all the worse.
Can’t let that huge Chinese market revolt, or that prison camp called the FoxConn factory where most iPhones are made, go down the tube, right Apple? Apple have come a long way – I should say fallen a long way – from their famous TV Superbowl commercial in 1984.
Note also that there is no word yet from Google about their pulling the Twitter app from selling to their huge Android OS community.
Both of those companies promote TikTok and profit off it. And nobody seriously questions that TikTok is an actual danger to both national security and to the mental health of children. US government officials are literally saying that. It is Chinese spyware – and used by people at both the White House and Pentagon.
Did I say richest man in the world? Despite his wealth not comparing to the glittering prize of the Chinese market, it would seem that Elon knows which testicles to squeeze and how, by releasing information like this:
Apple threatened at least one developer with banishment from the company’s lucrative App Store if they didn’t remove all search engine returns regarding COVID-19 from their library application.
LBRY bills itself as “an open, free, and fair network for digital content,” designed to circumvent social media and government controls. But the company told Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk on Monday that, “During Covid, Apple demanded our apps filter some search terms from being returned. If we did not filter the terms, our apps would not be allowed in the store.”
And this letter from Senator Josh Hawley(R) to Tim Cooke may also have helped produce the following result today.
I always crack up at Musk’s dry humour: “misunderstanding” indeed. He knew exactly what the pressure campaign of the Left was all about.
But the fight goes on.
Housecleaning
Elon Musk just decided to bring the worst people on the internet back to Twitter. (The Verge)
Oh noes. How terrible.
You can click on the link if you wish but I assure you it’s just more of the same screaming that you’ve been hearing for weeks now from the MSM and the sites that their like-minded comrades still control. People like the … creature at the bottom of this post, where it has been placed because it’s Sunday morning.
First, let’s take a look at people who weren’t banned from Twitter under the previous management:
- Chinese genocide apologists
- Hitler-worshiping Hindu nationalists
- Iran’s terrorist leadership
- Antifa goons actively planning assaults
- Pedophiles
- People illegally distributing puberty blockers to children (who were also pedophiles, strange coincidence there)
- People running mass-reporting schemes (who were – yes – also pedophiles)
People who were banned from Twitter previously:
- The New York Post for news stories inconvenient to Democrats
- James Lindsay and the Babylon Bee for accurately identifying an adult male
- Nick Rekieta for being the victim of a mass-reporting scheme
- Libs of TikTok (off/on since she only ever showed what insane Leftists were posting themselves on TikTok).
- Trump for being Trump
And it’s only with those people being reinstated that the news media, which is all MSM and Social Media together and who are intensely pro-censorship, is getting itself worked up about.
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NOW HEAR THIS! NOW HEAR THIS!
Please ensure you have digested your breakfast and finished your coffee before looking at the following photo of an ex-Twitter “worker”.
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Begun, the Twitter Wars have
The Twitter wars are actually just heating up, as it is becoming apparent that the Left regarded it as “their” platform in pushing Lefty talking points (propaganda).
Actually it’s been apparent for a long time, but in the past any criticisms of them by the Right were met with their cynical smirks of “It’s a private company and can do what it wants – isn’t that what the Right have always said?”
But with Elon Musk now in charge of a privately-owned Twitter the Left have dropped that mask and come right out in the open in their demands for government censorship to replace the censorship they’d been applying behind the scenes via the hive-mind of Twitter employees who were ideologically-like-minded to the Left – or even more so.
But all of these companies are, in fact, monopolies, and thus exist in a precarious legal state — presently tolerated, but open to government harassment and persecution any time they do not follow the government’s commands.
As proof of that, Democrats are now demanding that the Federal Trade Commission investigate Elon Musk for “undermining Twitter.” By which they mean — they want him investigated for abandoning the censorship scheme they demanded the old regime imposed.
…
“In recent weeks, Twitter’s new Chief Executive Officer, Elon Musk, has taken alarming steps that have undermined the integrity and safety of the platform, and announced new features despite clear warnings those changes would be abused for fraud, scams, and dangerous impersonation,” the lawmakers said in a letter to FTC Chair Lina Khan
Dangerous impersonation? Of who? Oh right….
Senator Ed Markey went so far as to participate in a hoax in which he colluded with a Washington Post reported so that that Post reporter would pay for blue tick status and then impersonate him (Ed Markey).
And then, having contrived this case of impersonation, Ed Markey screamed about it and demanded the FTC investigate Musk for permitting the impersonation.
It seems only fair that Twitter ban Markey from the platform for engaging in this fraud. 🙂 After all, that’s what’s going to happen to other “accounts” pulling similar – if vastly more amusing – stunts. Musk won’t of course, having brought back the Babylon Bee…
… and Trump, or at least his account. Musk also understands the game being played here by the Administrative State and their six ways from Sunday of getting back at you.
Aside from the censorship fight there is also another interesting Twitter battle going on inside the company as thousands have found themselves out of a job – for the very good reason that they were useless drones. This Twitter thread explains what he’s doing, which is Whaling and Culling:
First, the “Whaling”: It’s a common refrain that you’ve probably heard at some point or another “10% of people do 90% of the work.” That’s what that tight 2 week deadline for Twitter Blue was for; he was perfectly aware that it was an unrealistic time frame. It was a test.
…
Hence, Elon was looking for the whales at the company. The heavy hitting, actually producing and hard people who have been there for a while. When the whales don’t have to carry dead weight, they perform like the equivalent of 10 people.
There are larger questions being raised here given the layoffs of more thousands of workers at Facebook and Amazon (can Google be far behind?), and those questions are addressed in this article, The Email Caste’s Last Stand, by Malcom Kyeyune:
The abrupt firing of thousands of employees solicited a new wave of outrage from Musk’s haters. But even if you remove him from the equation, Twitter couldn’t have gone much longer without massive layoffs. The same thing is happening across Silicon Valley. Last week, the online-payments company Stripe announced it would cut 14 percent of its workforce, as did the rideshare giant Lyft; Facebook parent company Meta looks poised to do the same. Like Wile E. Coyote, tech companies ran off the cliff long ago; only now is economic gravity starting to assert itself.
The article makes the point that when venture capital funding seemed to be unlimited, it not only encouraged all these Big Tech startups and established players to hire useless people, it basically developed a class of people not unlike the French aristocracy just prior to the 1789 revolution:
The problem was that France now had a large class of impoverished nobles, for which some sort of exclusive jobs program was absolutely necessary. They didn’t have diversified business interests like the court nobility at Versailles; all they had was their noble privilege, and if the French state abolished the last areas where that privilege meant something, they would truly be lost.
A similar dynamic is operative in America today. The people who worked “on climate” at Twitter, now being given the ax by the perfidious Elon Musk, are openly complaining that they won’t be able to find jobs anywhere else in this economy. They are, of course, right to worry.
Which is why reforms of things like the French Army went nowhere and why “reforming” Twitter and other companies to actually make money will require firing lots of these useless eaters.
However, the article goes even further in pushing this question out into the society beyond the world of Big Tech. You can see the connection between this and the increasing debates about things like UBI (Universal Basic Income), including – here in NZ – debates about WFF and the whole raft of tax credits and income supplements that now constitute what used to be called “social welfare”. I recommend the excellent series of posts on this subject at Kiwiblog by one “PaulL”, Effective Marginal Tax Rates, which goes into some detail about the changes that might be made to shift people from welfare to work.
Kyeyune raises the larger question of what “work” may actually mean nowadays, particularly for our class of credentialed (but not educated) drones:
In my own country, Sweden, the state picks up a lot of the slack. Here, small municipalities hire dozens or hundreds of communicators, consultants, and other plainly nonproductive personnel, and attempts to do something about it run into a very simple question: Where else are these people supposed to work? Who else would hire them? Though few will say it openly, the city of Uppsala’s nearly 100 communicators have nothing to do with communication, and everything to do with preserving social stability. It is, in essence, just part of a massive jobs program.
When I look at the thousands of people that the Labour government has hired into its myriad government departments, ministries, quangos, commissions, etc, I have to think that’s what’s also happening here in NZ. And like Twitter and those other tech firms, the question is how much longer can we afford to hire such people?
“To understand events around the world today, one must think in terms of the class struggle.”
But the New Class isn’t limited to communist countries, really. Around the world in the postwar era, power was taken up by unelected professional and managerial elites. To understand what’s going on with President Donald Trump and his opposition, and in other countries as diverse as France, Hungary, Italy and Brazil, it’s important to realize that the post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very well under those arrangements. And, like all elites who are doing very well, they don’t want that to change.
In My Time of Dying
From beauty to horror. Rumour has it that 82-year old Nancy Pelosi is not going to step aside as Democrat House leader even if they lose control of the House.
She’s probably inspired by the election of Senator Fetterman. Electing two vegetables in succession probably means Nancy can stay even as a corpse
Sure, you’ll never embarrass a Democrat by pointing at them and charging them with hypocrisy and double standards – but as Ron DeSantis knows, even if they don’t care, others will
Just a reminder that simply because the Democrats didn’t do as badly as expected that doesn’t mean that the knives won’t be out for Biden as 2024 approaches. Taylor Lorenz is a truly horrible POS “journalist” with her doxxing and crybully tactics, but to see that toxicity turned on Biden is not unenjoyable.
Further fallout from the Branch Covidian revolution as the backlash continues to calls for a “Pandemic Amnesty”
Trust – but verify
That was Reagan’s famous phrase from the 1980’s when arguments were at their peak about nuclear weapon treaties with the USSR.
The phrase itself was a rhyming proverb lifted from Russian history (Доверяй, но проверяй), and Reagan learned of it via discussions with an American historian of Russia.
But it’s a phrase that is universal, in the sense of being applicable across all societies, and across many areas of life.
Elon Musk is having to rapidly learn this lesson as the new owner of Twitter, where he’s attempting to get the company to actually make profits, first by massive layoffs of staff, and also by asking users to pay for extra stuff like the famous Blue Checkmark that signifies that a Twitter user has been “verified” as the real thing, rather than a robot or “bot”, of which Twitter has apparently had more than it’s previous owners and managers were willing to admit.
Musk’s idea was that users who want the Blue Checkmark should pay $8 per month. Unfortunately as you can see from the following hilarious examples, this is not going well.
(AIPAC) American Israel Public Affairs Committee
But the following one, while being funny, has also caused damage in the form of drops in the stock price of the company targeted by the humour. The market will no doubt correct this fast, but you have to wonder if Twitter might find itself open to lawsuits – although good old section 230 will probably prevent that, and in any case, it would not be the first time that rumours swirling in the media about a company have caused damage.
A day in the life
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to learn to code.
I worked in the IT industry around the world for three decades.
I don’t recall seeing anything as useless as the following, even inside the large corporate disaster areas that I was called in to try and fix.
This is supposed to be the very different world of high tech, Big Tech, Silicon Valley entrepreneurship. The world funded to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars by angel investors hoping to strike it rich with share values that multiply a dozen-fold or a hundred-fold when they go public. A world of people who supposedly work their guts out in pursuit of that wealth. The world that is (it thinks) well on the way to establishing a new order of business, economy – and culture.
But if this is your workday then it explains why so many of these people apparently could live like they were still in university – having hysterical meltdowns over politics and now with the power to enforce their will on the Right-wingers they so hate even as they suckled at the teat of one of the most extreme hotbeds of capitalism in the world today.
I’ve put the snarky sub-title in below the post headline because I’m beginning to wonder how many of these people who are working for this IT company can actually code?
I also wonder how many of these clowns will be left holding stock options that they can’t execute?
There seems to be little difference between Twitter employee and much of the MSM.
Musk Twitter Shift
Times are a changing. Rather than feeling happy that there has been a massive shift, I am worried. I haven’t been able to post much recently as I’ve been trying to work out what to say as the ground rapidly changes. Anyway, this tweet caught my eye:
The tweet by Dave Rubin above highlights two major thought crimes on Twitter pre-Musk. There are more, of course.
The danger is in the backlash, and the quality of the people that will be directed that backlash and what their aims are – that’s what I’m worried about.
UPDATE
When I saw the name, I thought she was the one interviewed by one of the Disinformation Project people. And yes, confirmed by Te_taipo.
No Minister 