Skip to main content

Twitter

I used to blog a bit on Facebook and Twitter. They're not really blog applications but I used them that way, practicing writing about things both silly and serious. 

I withdrew from Facebook after the umpteenth time it was reported that they had lied about promoting controversial and false posts to drive more hits and to be paid by foreign sources to do so. On a personal level my mother suffers from dementia and she started believing more in her Facebook feed than reality; I just couldn't be a part of that system anymore.

I had used Twitter more to practice my jokes to be honest. The comedian Steven Wright has been a big influence on me over the years; his gift has been to craft terse jokes such as "I wouldn't want everything; where would you put it?" and I wanted to use the word limit on Twitter to hone my ability to turn a phrase. When Trump won the Republican nomination for president in 2016 by encouraging people to hate people of color, etc. I lost a lot of my sense of humor and stopped posting on Twitter, eventually closing the account to stop it from being hacked.

I don't like to try to guess people's motives from a distance; I don't believe in telepathy. I stand in amazement at Elon Musk's destruction of Twitter at a cost of billions of dollars. A different person might have used that money to help people; I know that at some point he bragged that he would use his wealth to end world hunger, and so that still rings in my ears as he takes down Twitter.

Twitter could be a place for hate speech but I have fond memories of its ability during the Arab Spring to support free speech as well. With proper management and moderation it would certainly continue to have that ability. Musk has fired enough people that kept Twitter functioning that I, like many others, expect it to shut down this calendar year.

I do hope people stop putting their faith in Musk. He's either incompetent or evil, perhaps both.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Betrayal

I caught a student cheating on a final exam this morning. I had a line of sight on them and watched for ten minutes as they took their cellphone out of their pocket, kept it below their table, typed into it, read it, put it away, then wrote on the exam, repeating this cycle over and over again.  I was a bit surprised as the exam was open notes but this student had not attended many of our classes, just stopping by for exams, and I conjecture that they had no notes to open. I confronted the student who admitted that they had done wrong in an inarticulate non-confessional way. By the afternoon they had signed off on the honor code violation report to avoid further investigation and possible sanctions beyond failing the exam.  Is anger the right emotion to feel now? I had a working relationship with the student, although they had not contributed much to it. They had deceived me in order to gain unwarranted advantage over their peers in the class and that is not right. I don't wan...
1 comment
Read more

Standing Your Corner

I'm a long-term David Simon fan ever since I read his book "Homicide", detailing a year-long embedding with Baltimore homicide detectives. It was clear-eyed about all of the strengths and weaknesses, good reflexes and prejudices of everyone that he met.  I enjoyed the television show that followed that he wrote for, and then of course "The Wire" on HBO and a number of his other shows---only limited by my access to streaming services.  There was a histrionic moment in a later season of "Homicide" where he just let a character vent; a homicide detective who was part-owner of a bar frequented by cops watched a particularly violent drug criminal, responsible for many unsolved homicides, come into his bar with his associates, violating the detective's territory. The detective came around the bar holding a billy club in his hand and loudly discussed his first year as a patrol officer walking a beat. His supervising officer told him that he had a corner a...
Post a Comment
Read more

Car Accident

I was in a car accident a few days ago. There was a stopped car in the interstate and I didn't see it in advance; the car in front of me swerved into another lane and then there it was in front of me. I also swerved but damaged my commuter car, which is old and had many miles on it. The insurance company declared it a total loss.  The damage was where I scraped along the passenger side of my car (and the driver side of the stopped car). I had no deployment of airbags and no damage from my seat belt; no glass on either car broke, so it was a glancing blow if that makes sense. The front passenger wheel was damaged and I could not drive the car very far.  I pulled over to the shoulder and dialed 911. A state trooper made sure I was alright and proceeded to take care of the situation. I was moving slowly, aware that I had had a shock to my system and trying not to do anything to worsen the situation (stepping into traffic when I exited my vehicle, etc.) The trooper took my informa...
2 comments
Read more