The Stench of Musk

When Elon Musk took over Twitter, a lot of people wondered if he'd let Donald Trump back on.  Many more wondered why he let Kanye West back on.  I simply wanted to know if and when Musk would make it possible to edit previously posted tweets or when he'd expand the maximum number of characters in tweets by another 140 to 420.

Instead, Musk - long celebrated as the first American automaker to successfully challenge Detroit's Big Three since the heyday of the AMC Pacer - endorsed a bogus homophobic theory surrounding the circumstances of the attack on Paul Pelosi, the Speaker of the House's husband.  

In response to a story Hillary Clinton tweeted a link to about the right-wing conspiracy theories Paul Pelosi's attacker spread online, Musk cited a story in the Santa Monica Observer about a possible homsosxual realtionship between Paul Pelosi and the assailant and how the incident at the Pelosi home in San Francisco was a lover's tiff. "There is a tiny possibility there might be more to this story than meets the eye," Musk wrote.

There wasn't, and Musk deleted the tweet later on.  He should have done his homework before he tweeted; the Santa Monica Observer is known for fake stories like The Onion is, with one key difference - the Santa Monica Observer is not a satirical publication. A media watchdog group cited the online paper for "the routine publication of false and misleading information and the use of poor sources."

Musk said that he wanted to promote free speech on Twitter when he bought it, and he vowed to keep it from becoming a hellscape, but so far he's been making a hellscape of it himself since he took possession of Twitter.  He's trolled the New York Times by insisting that he did not "tweet out" the Santa Monica Observer link to the Times directly and dismissed The Guardian as a "far left wing propaganda machine."

Oh yeah, hate speech has increased fivefold on Twitter since Musk took it over.

So what can I do about this?  Apart from promising not to buy a Tesla, nothing, really.  I mostly use Twitter to post links to two of my blogs, including this one, and the only other social media site I post links on is LinkedIn.  Facebook still - still - won't let me publish links to my two blogs on the grounds that they're spam, and my attempts to have the ban reversed have amounted to nothing.

Maybe I should play the Powerball lottery and buy Facebook if I win the jackpot.  Then I can reverse the ban on links to my blogs and delete my Twitter account.  Oh yeah, and buy a Lucid.  

It's a thought.

No More Political Endorsements

We're a week away from Election Day, and I encourage you to vote, either early or on November 8.  However, I have decided that I, as the author of this blog, will no longer endorse political candidates effective immediately, though I could endorse a specific candidate in future elections . . . and I just might.  

Why am I suspending endorsements of political campaigns?  Two reasons.  First, my endorsements in the past have increasingly skewed Democratic so reliably and issues have become so nationalized that, given my Humphreyesque liberal politics (I have more in common with HHH than AOC), I can just give a blanket endorsement to all Democratic candidates and all independent candidates endorsed by Democrats, which is a very lazy action.  I'd rather not say that I endorse Democrat Candidate X because he/she endorses Policy Y and Z while his/her Republican opponent supports Policy F and then fill in the blanks for the offices I choose to focus on.  You know who I'm going to vote for already based on my opinions on this blog, so why bother going through an endorsement charade?

The second reason is what happened in California.  Last week, Nancy Pelosi's husband Paul was attacked in the Pelosis' home in San Francisco by a right-wing assailant who was hoping to assassinate or at least severely maim the Speaker of the House.  Soon after that a Pennsylvania man pleaded guilty to threatening to kill another California House Democrat, Representative Eric Swalwell, and members of his staff.  This all should make us focus our energies on going out to vote if only to show the democracy still works and that we can resolve our differences without having to resort to violence.  If House members and the Speaker's husband are both fair game for right-wingers, what can we expect in a Republican House come January 2023?   Will some leftist militant like the one who shot House Republican Whip Steve Scalise in 2017 attack Judy McCarthy at her home in Bakersfield in the hope of getting to her husband Kevin?  And by the way, why has Kevin McCarthy never been held accountable for his own August 2021 statement that "it'd be hard not to hit Nancy Pelosi with a gavel" - and while he did condemn the man who hit Paul Pelosi with a hammer, why didn't he make a statement disavowing all forms of violence against Democrats and progressives?

In light of all this, handing out political endorsements on this blog like Halloween candy doesn't make sense anymore.  So I'm going to stop, just as I stopped publishing end-of-year winners and losers lists that were just as meaningless, if not more so. 

Now go and vote, like I did.

See you 'round the clubs.