US Politics, January 2022 — a pro-God, pro-family, pro-bitcoin state

sure, because that shit was pathetic and weird and, in a dark sense, hilarious.

Nowadays he'd be lucky to get three seasons

I dunno sounds like the media learned it for this event?

― A Pile of Ants (Boring, Maryland), Wednesday, January 5, 2022 11:01 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

also sounds like Trump stuff doesn't really get the hateclicks it used to. maybe conservatives still see him as their leader but everyone else is free to just tune him out now

I posted that for one and one reason only: "the airing of the grievances."

If he performed a feat of strength it would be news

Fukuyama not happy:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/05/opinion/jan-6-global-democracy.html

He just can't help himself:

On the eve of Jan 6 anniversary, Trump in a new statement calls on "MAGA nation" to "rise up and oppose this egregious federal government overreach" citing "talk" of potential vaccine mandates for students

— Will Steakin (@wsteaks) January 5, 2022

people are indeed talking about the "potential" school covid vaccine mandates (that already exist).

Oh, and warning, DeSantis content, but boy

Here is a second angle of Ron DeSantis struggling with breathing problems during his event today. The longer this clip goes on, the worse it gets. pic.twitter.com/J9Jr55x8Py

— MeidasTouch.com (@MeidasTouch) January 5, 2022

Well that "ignoring him" thing lasted just long enough for him to whip up another batshit statement to get the attention back. And it seems to be working.

Hah didn't he say at a rally recently that people should have the vaccines and he was so pleased to have invented them? He did get booed so I guess now he's back to being anti vaxx

His blathering and whining and complaining should be ignored. His commands to his followers and minions to "rise up" should, imo, not.

From a thing on Biden’s disapproval ratings

Additionally, 46 percent of respondents said the stock market is doing “not so good” or “poor” despite one of the market's best years in decades, according to CNBC, as the S&P 500 completed the year up 26.89 percent.

Well yeah but it’s not the BEST YEAR EVER.

C'mon, man!

maybe the phony stats he recites made DeSantis cry.

Maybe people with a portfolio of zero see that big goose egg and wonder if things are so good then why is it still zero. Probably Biden.

i think if america would repent they'd be paid back 10 fold

maybe the phony stats he recites made DeSantis cry.

he is fully vaxxed

I don't know about the booster.

If you don't have the booster, you ain't fully vaxxed though

From a thing on Biden’s disapproval ratings

idk how you take a poll like that though - presumably many of those 46% are conservatives just answering "strongly disagree" to everything, and many others might just say "poor" because of inflation or whatever. the stock market affects very little in the day to day lives of the 99% but when one party crows about it all the time it creates those dumb biases.

Every 'how we doin' poll is filtered so strongly by the broader culture war that it's meaningless (or just repeats the partisan divide we can see by the vote totals we can see every four years), that one's just funny because it's not an abstraction about "how is the economy doing." You can see the line go up but based on which side of the culture war the respondent identifies with today the line is actually going down.

I'm only posting this for the screenshot.

Greene says she was banned after tweeting at Dan Crenshaw. She suggests some sort of collusion between Crenshaw and a billionaire to get her banned. She says she is talking to attorneys about a potential lawsuit pic.twitter.com/EBBY80DEeD

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 5, 2022

Amazing to me the amount of entitlement conservatives feel in regard to their right to use social media in any way they like, regardless of the corporate policies governing their access, which they agreed to abide by. If a Chik-Fil-A posted a sign "No Shoes. No Shirt. No Service." they'd rush to defend its right to eject those 'dirty hippies' who ignored the sign.

they should support nationalizing big tech

“Haha read the terms of service, their platform their rules” is not a gotcha because there can be and is a bunch of other relevant statute, ie it’s not generally true.

And to the extent it is true, a document designed to serve and protect a private company that is enforced in a completely inscrutable way is not actually great imo.

(Especially when those companies play a central role in civic society haha fml)

Ugh I spent way more minutes than it was worth knocking down misrepresentations of Section 230 the other day, 95 percent of the people talking shit about it have no idea what it actually says or does. My favorite was a guy who said it was part of the DMCA and so the "Fairness Doctrine" applied, which is wrong in at least three different ways.

If MTG can convince a judge in court, with with discovery of the relevant facts, and Twitter's lawyers making their company's case, then that's fair enough. I happen to think the policy she breached was not inscrutable and was designed to protect more than the corporate interest. Especially when those companies play a central role in civic society! You appear to disagree.

I’m not saying anything about Twitter (my employer btw) banning MTG.

I’m saying your “read the TOS” gotcha is feeble and that’s a good thing.

Why won't she just join Trumpster or whatever it's gonna be called, they'll never ban her

I think the fundamental confusion a lot of these jerks (and others) have is that just because social media has further democratized politics (and other fields), for good and for ill, giving a broad platform to big-mouth nobody would-bes that's big enough to help win elections, does not mean that these social media platforms are an actual tool of our erstwhile democracy. That is, Twitter etc. helps Greene (et al.) inflate her self-worth and get elected, amplifying this particular asshole into a national supervillain, but people like her confuse the platform for a lever of power they wield when in fact they are the one lending power to the platform. If you don't know what the product is then you are the product, and so on.

Has anyone successfully sued a social media company for banning them?

woah caek have u met Jack??

Are you trying to lure caek into saying he doesn't know Jack? Because that would be a feeble gotcha.

xp I have met zero employees irl on account of the novel coronavirus!

ahh I'm the same at my job I started a year and a half ago

Kamala is just not very good at this

January 6 will be remembered by history as a momentous date because it is sir rowan atkinson's birthday. wishing a happy 67th to mr. bean

— lauren (@NotABigJerk) January 6, 2022

Anyone see any caravans massing at the border lately? Asking for a friend.

Twitter seems to largely have liked Biden's just-delivered speech, but I'll feel better when there are more arrests of big names than big names giving speeches.

Biden remembers the violent imagery of Jan 6, including the first time a Confederate flag was waved in the Capitol. (Biden is currently standing about 30 feet from a statue of Alexander Stephens, the vice president of the confederacy.)

— Grace Segers (@Grace_Segers) January 6, 2022

America mang

Trump derided the members of the House select committee on Jan. 6 as “totally partisan political hacks” and suggested that their focus should be on his claims — not based in fact — that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

“In actuality the Big Lie was the Election itself,” Trump claimed.

the fake lie is big news

this Michael Harriot piece is really great putting this in historical perspective

https://thegrio.com/2022/01/06/in-this-country-mobs-rule/

i haven't really seen too many arguments countering the "don't amplify trump" consensus on the left. i don't think i agree with josh marshall here. it's worth grappling with even if we disagree.

...
This prompts a broader question. It’s become doctrine for many right-thinking people that people shouldn’t “amplify” what Trump is saying. That only does his work for him, we’re told. This is the logic that got him booted off social media. But if what Benjy says is right, this state of affairs, which has clearly driven Trump to distraction, has also proved almost the best of all possible worlds for him. Trump’s supporters hear his message loud and clear: through NewsMax, OANN, talk radio, Facebook and to a significant degree on Fox News. But for the rest of the political world it’s muffled. So the horror and craziness of Trumpism recedes from public consciousness while people are focused on the day to day imperfection of the Biden presidency.

This hasn’t made Trump any weaker. His hold over the institutional and electoral GOP has only intensified since leaving office. The very small number of elected officials who refused to support the Big Lie have mostly been drummed out of the party. Trump’s Big Lie propaganda has become unassailable in heavily state-legislative-gerrymandered states where it will matter most. In short, the “don’t amplify” doctrine has allowed Trump to speak freely to his supporters and intensify his hold over the GOP, while keeping the incendiary messages that mobilize a majority of the country against him largely off mainstream airwaves.

All of the upside and none of the down.

...

At it’s worst, this “don’t amplify” doctrine is part of a species of liberal myopia which posits that the American right only exists as an outgrowth or effect of decisions made by or within mainstream or progressive media. If it is not acknowledged, “amplified” if you will, it all but doesn’t exist. Or, if it does exist it is without enough substance or sustenance to avoid dying on the vine. This is all the most risible folly.

I’m not saying we should rush to get Trump back on Twitter or other social media or that networks should cover every speech live. Journalism is about making choices. Private companies are responsible for the speech they carry on their platforms. But most of “don’t amplify” doctrine is based on myopia, a feel-good if well-meaning misunderstanding of how both journalism and political power work.

...

Look what we got by not amplifying Trump

Good piece, thanks.

Remember when “fake news” meant something else for a week, when it referred to all the actual fake news about Hillary Clinton that was floating around Facebook and elderly email forwards?

Yes, I got whiplash from how fast that was turned around.

This hasn’t made Trump any weaker.

Reporting Trump's every brain fart in the MSM and all over Twitter didn't make Trump noticeably weaker either. The support of the entire conservative political apparatus, comprised of the wealthy and all their foundations, think tanks, FOX, OANN, hundreds of AM talk radio blatherers, lobbyists and spin doctors, and huge donations to candidates at every level, combined with the highly politicized evangelical churches and quasi-religious organizations like Focus on the Family are the backbone of Trump's power.

The MSM and liberal punditry keep trying to figure out how to bring Trump down through the means at their disposal. Those means are not powerful enough so long as Trump keeps his own power centers in line behind him. They exist in a parallel world of their own, wholly apart from the rest of us.

the entire "mob attacking the institutions of democracy and our police friends" point is 0.0000000% persuasive with conservatives because their honest, true, first reaction is "why didn't you say anything when black lives matter was doing that everyday across the country", and the conversation immediately blows up because they will not believe a single thing you say, no matter how you do it or what your sources. because they all just KNOW that BLM was so violent and that the cops were so decent and fair. it's like sticking your finger into a stargate portal

sorry, that was out of context - i was watching biden's speech, the part where he's talking about the horror of watching people assault the cops and the capital and all that