Twitter C/D

I was waiting to hear where this marine was from. Was he a new yorker? A tourist? Apparently he's from West Islip. Long Island. Which makes me think, as I often do, of the article I read some time ago talking about how the people who are the most scared of the city are those who live close to it but not in it. The slightly further out suburbs.

People are cheering this on and no one's even said what this guy supposedly *did* beyond being loud, "menacing"(??) and throwing a jacket.

Like what are you exactly cheering for if there's no discernable motive for someone to strangle a man to death beyond making a subway ride uncomfortable

Like at least Bernie Goetz fans went through the motions of pretending he was being robbed. This is just like straight up "Someday, a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets."

The whole thing hurts my heart like nothing I can remember in recent memory

homeless & poor people, the genocide both sides can get behind

It weirdly reminds me of how suddenly torture became something we could debate and have pro or con opinions about after 9/11. I found that so unsettling and disquieting (still do). So now it seems like we're in a "maybe it's OK to kill people who annoy your or ring your doorbell or whatever" moment with vigilante violence. The right has always been there, obviously, depending on who the vigilantes are, but it feels like a real mainstreaming going on.

It’s also a 180 from what the liberal consensus seemed to be in 2020. This is what is giving me whiplash.

well, I was always a bit skeptical about the permanence of the movement in 2020 regarding less progressive folks.

but I feel like homeless people have gotten short shrift in this country form all sides no matter what societal changes have been going on. I find self-identified 'liberal' folk still feel very comfortable making derogatory comments about homeless people. i always challenge anybody who does it but it gets tiring because it almost always becomes a "you're being insensitive to ME" DARVO type thing

It seems erratic. One day “defund the police” is a mainstream slogan, the next day “murder the homeless” is an argument that is acceptable in polite company. Perhaps it is just different people getting the microphone at different times, but for a social media user the shift is very jarring and insane.

Your last sentence gets it right. It's not so much that "the discussion has shifted"; it's "Who the fuck let all these lunatics in the room?" and the answer is, of course, Elon Musk.

seems like kind of a natural outgrowth of calling anyone who doesn't share your viewpoint an NPC

The Young Turks started lashing out at homeless people awhile back, and hatred of the homeless seemed to have something to do with the celeb support for Rick Caruso in the LA Mayoral race.

Scapegoating the vulnerable

uhhh are these good numbers for a subscription service

Over half of Twitter Blue's earliest subscribers are no longer subscribed

Out of about 150,000 of the first subscribers to Twitter Blue, only 68,157 have stuck around and maintained a paid subscription. https://t.co/Mtvgca79EB

— Travis Akers (@travisakers) May 5, 2023

more like Twitter Brown

Like at least Bernie Goetz fans went through the motions of pretending he was being robbed. This is just like straight up "Someday, a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets."

that is exactly what this is. we are living in some shitty times that took a long time to make, but they are 100% here imo.

we also just had two Black siblings who were shot at after pulling into the wrong driveway, where the shooter actually shot at them as they drove away, and the local cops said they had no reason to believe they did anything illegal. but we know why they really didn't arrest the guy and that wasn't it.

vigilante justice is sanctioned but only for one race

they found "no reason to believe the guy who shot at them did anything illegal", to be clear.

I was absolutely convinced that right wing blue checkmark people were getting amplified to be the first replies to the few people I follow, enough so that I brought it up with my wife. But she just looked at her own account and didn't see anything like that, and when I opened my computer to look, suddenly the replies seemed more normal once again, too. Maybe the dummies at Twitter flipped the switch back, because it was backfiring?

block post

"not interested in science?"

block post

"not interested in authors?"

it's more that i can't read Turkish and those posts were both in Turkish

looking at who Elon is replying/boosting this week, might be time to stop posting if you’re still on there

hes going full nazi

He’s going full nazi

I feel like people are posting things now as honey traps to lure the blue checks out of their holes so sane people can mute/block them. I saw a photo of Tom Morello playing guitar in front of a graphic reading NAZI LIVES DON'T MATTER and immediately muted every blue-check account in the comments — without exception, it was a parade of whatabouts (mostly having to do with Ukraine) and hit dogs hollering.

Could be a good time to stop posting

on Twitter.

posting on ILX is lucrative and recommended

time to stop posting

It turns out @elonmusk is a straight up white supremacist. pic.twitter.com/Z6huv0hLox

— Max Berger (@maxberger) May 6, 2023

I never tweeted much and totally stopped (and deleted my personal account) shortly after Musk bought it. But I can’t delete my professional account because I need to be able to follow the people I cover as long as they’re on there. I imagine a lot of reporters are in that situation.

it's rare that someone has both the will and the means to show the world every micron of their ass

i wish it was more rare

keep account if necessary, no need to post. that's what i've been doing

last person to post on twitter is the grossest turd

lmao jack just posted a “skeet” that was just this link jfc

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/rfk-jr-podcast/id1552000243?i=1000604704669

MrBeast just followed me

Probably heard I was worth $191M (23 yrs old) pic.twitter.com/UAhsVUzkwn

— Hassan | NEW MONEY (@MrOverpaid) May 6, 2023

Blue checks lying about being followed by Mr. Beast for clout.

When me and my rstshit anarchist friends were yelling that these types of people were straight up fascists intent on destroying the most interesting parts of cities to build playgrounds for themselves and their shitty ideas, no one listened because we sounded insane— but we were right! A lot of this stuff is easy to suss out! No judgment, just sayin’. I am mostly sad about it.

xpost only reason to do that is to impress 8-year-olds, someone should check his hard drive

Xp I suspected elon was into something “harder” than mischievous anti-PC contrarianism after Grimes liked that genocidal tweet—probably by accident, in that it has been conjectured that she operates white supremacist alt accounts. If you look at the kind of “transhumanist” and “techno-utopian” thinkers they interact with, you can see that these people are eugenecists. Musk’s decision to buy Twitter was likely not a business decision. It also wasn’t about “free speech.” It was likely an attempt to shift the discourse to normalize *this* kind of thought. Not “anti-woke,” not “libertarian,” but racist and authoritarian.

https://www.bylinesupplement.com/p/the-far-right-eugenics-mindset-behind

Posted this before but it seems very critical to understanding this stuff. Meanwhile his companies are getting billions of dollars in federal subsidies.

Meanwhile his companies are getting billions of dollars in federal subsidies.

where's the contradiction *rimshot of despair*

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FvjJjXqWcAIY65J?format=jpg&name=medium

There's literally not one crime anyone's admitted to this guy doing on the subway, I feel like I'm losing my mind

Like it got devoured so quickly into culture war stuff that no one stopped to even ask what happened, just completely skipping that step and jumping right into "he's homeless and has a criminal record? ah, well he deserved to die I guess."

yeah thats what they believe

facts are malleable. narrative is truth..

Yeah I haven't read a single account of the event that explains what the guy was supposedly doing to warrant strangling. Asking for money? Dancing? Yelling?

I think Nick Sandmann and Kyle Rittenhouse were kind of warm ups for this in that the media and social media immediately sensationalized them as grist for the culture war mill. Then ultimately, the other shoe drops, more info comes out and you realize the original reports/reactions were actually a little sensationalized. The right gets to pull their "See, I told you" game and the cycle repeats. It's just that this time, they're running the playbook without even making a case

I don't know a single person not disgusted by the subway murder, but I have had multiple people in the past few weeks comment on at least a general feeling of a post-pandemic lawlessness here, from rampant smoking on the trains to speeding drivers ignoring stop signs and traffic signals to more acute stuff like carjackings and random shootings. There's only so much you can tell someone "but things were a lot worse in the '90s" or whatever. Of course, to the right wingers and gun nuts and survivalists, in their mind this is probably their worst overinflated fears and predictions come to pass. To a lot of regular people it perhaps encapsulates a certain kind of helplessness, things out of their control, stuff that many of us have ignored for too long that can't be overlooked any longer. I dunno.

Musk’s decision to buy Twitter was likely not a business decision. It also wasn’t about “free speech.” It was likely an attempt to shift the discourse to normalize *this* kind of thought. Not “anti-woke,” not “libertarian,” but racist and authoritarian.

― treeship., Saturday, May 6, 2023 6:15 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I think this implies some kind of savviness or sense of cunning that I think Elon just does not have. remember he desperately tried to back out of the deal and has attempted an emergency reversal of 75% of the decisions he's made after buying the company. it doesn't really feel like Twitter has had the power to drive the public discourse since Trump got banned. certainly one could argue that he's been trying to do that now that he was forced to go through with the deal but he turned the site into an joke on Day 1. in a few years I can't imagine the site being any more influential than Truth Social

To a lot of regular people it perhaps encapsulates a certain kind of helplessness, things out of their control, stuff that many of us have ignored for too long that can't be overlooked any longer. I dunno.

― Josh in Chicago, Sunday, May 7, 2023 4:47 PM (seventeen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

perfect case study of the liberal brain