TwitFace Leviathan. (Sounds like a band name, doesn't it? Sadly, it's not.)

Posted here, rather than on the TwitFace, in response to one of the people I admire most, contemplating leaving Facebook for privacy concerns.

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Personally, I am very sympathetic to the opinion that the TwitFace is simply a result of Establishment players successfully and intentionally squatting on the shoulders of the blog phenomenon: historically, if blogs represented an unanticipated move toward open, decentralized (TPTB translate that to "dangerous") freedom and away from the tightly controlled, pre-Internet Establishment media outlets, then social media as we know it now is pretty easy to view as simply a means of re-capturing that monopoly control into a virtualized (and neatly toolkitted) variant of what pre-Internet media had before.

It's frustrating and disheartening, of course, to see how effective and rapid the squatting and marginalizing of the more open, freer frameworks has been; and of course at a personal level nobody likes to be snooped on, even (especially) for his own good. But if we can be appalled at the monopolists happily monopolizing, we can hardly claim surprise.

Yeah, they've got your data--mine too. Ultimately, we gave it to them. Now what? At this point it's not possible to "get it back".

The participation psychology is pretty scary, too, when you think about it. The TwitFace's primary function is to be the place to go not to care about something, but to be seen caring about something, a phenomenon which has now taken on its own name: virtue-signaling. Increasingly social media also seems to have the secondary function of acting as a court of wrongthink. And now we are starting to see the emergence of this latter idea, weaponized, being used as a deliberate political tactic. Scary freakin' stuff.

So, should everyone drop Facebook? Well, arguably yes. It won't get your data back, but delegitimizing the whole horrid idea of a centralized social network may well be the only way to stop it from metastasizing further. Otherwise it's just like an election: we keep participating, so we must be consenting somehow, right?

And yet most of us are already more hard-wired into social media than we care to admit; simply dropping it isn't a trivial step, even beyond the very real phenomenon of I-was-so-disgusted-I-was-just-about-to-drop-it-entirely-when-I-saw-this-post-from-someone-I-haven't-heard-from-in-years-and-I-remembered-why-I-joined-in-the-first-place.

I wrestle with it, but (QED) I'm still here too, just in a darker mode than several years ago. I post just once in a blue moon now (what little I write tends to go to blogs instead), and comment even less, and for the most part I'm a bit fatalistic about what data "they" have on me. Unfollowing nearly everything helps a lot with the outrage fatigue from the newsfeed, but some people are so committed to minding my business that even that can't stop it all.

For me at least, we'll see where it goes from here. The backbreaker may well be this use of the medium as an actual political weapon. If that shit escalates without sane people stopping it, then I've gotta be out--because No. Oh, hell no.

Not holding my breath, either. Instead, I'm trying to spend more time in meatspace. Most people are much more human-like there, than here.

Achieving what is possible, free of the shackles of shame.

Hat tip to Gun Free Zone, via Joel.

Hey Mom!  Look, I haz a dumb.

(Things like this make me miss Will Grigg terribly.  I'd have loved to hear him roast this one.)

Okay, kid, I'll go out on a limb and venture a guess that you don't know Thermopylae from a fever tester.

That level of irony is almost worthy of someone trolling it.  Somehow, though, I don't think I'll hold my breath on the hopes that this person is either trolling directly, or making a more obscure comment about NRA being skippered by pre-emptive surrender monkeys.  Possible, I suppose, in a quantum sort of way (and it would actually be pretty awesome if it was), but not...exactly...likely.

Actually, though, when I saw the picture, the very first thing that went through my mind was this:




Actually, the whole scene is worth a bookmark.  I do remember enjoying that film.




Almost spooky, isn't it?

Maybe the real question, since we know that so much of this (current) feeding frenzy is pure Astroturf, is whether the idea for the kid's unintentionally hilarious sweatshirt originally came from Team Tide Pod*, or from the handlers.  (Frankly, I'm not sure who I'd root for, there, either.  The handlers more richly deserve the egg on the face, but they're just plain not going to heed the lesson no matter what:  ironically the kids stand a much better chance of actually learning something from it all.)


Give the bag to Bozo, kid;  you've taken being played for a fool to a whole new level of achievement.  And in that vein, here's a piece of free advice for the future:  never enter a battle of wits unarmed.


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* Probably, of course, it's just a school mascot sweatshirt, and we're just witnessing a truly amusing karmic coincidence.  But I'd not be surprised, if word of this double-facepalm-fail actually gets around the way it should, to see schools across the nation drop Spartan mascots like the proverbial ton of bricks, for being too inconvenient to the narrative.  (Because the narrative, after all, just wants to go home at the end of its shift.  :-)

A thought struck me...

...you know, in and among this latest top-down push shove from the Hive Mind to impose forcible prior restraint upon tens of millions of people who (s'prise!) didn't harm anyone this time either.  The ongoing Trump Derangement Syndrome spectacle* is tiresome enough (the Manic Progressive crowd having utterly destroyed any remaining humor value left in their transparently aggressive adventures in open misanthropy--do you appreciate how hard that is to do?), without having to add on this next-level muckraking Astroturfery from the professional victim-disarmament set.

But these are crusaders, here, and they do (le sigh) persist.

And actually, that's what prompted the observation:  their commitment to doing whatever it takes, to achieve their social engineering goals, no matter what the inconvenient little people may actually want.

Think about this for a moment:

• They're going to get what they want (in this case, gun control), and that's all there is to it.  They are smart and you are stupid, and they're more than willing to bet your life on the outcome, so they absolutely will not stop coming, will not be turned away, for any reason:  they will get what they want--what they want, they take, and they deserve to take, because they're smart and they just want it to be this way so bad.  Nootch.
• We already know from long history that the Force!Defenselessness!Now! crowd is willing to resort to procedural shenanigans, deception, outright fabrication and lying, and agitprop to dominate their moral and intellectual lessers.  (Actually, that's an interesting question:  has any gun control ever passed without procedural chicanery to end-run around the inconvenient lack of popular support?)
• They habitually (and loudly) claim the moral high ground, not because they actually hold it, but because in a victimization society that is a known safe haven for concealing one's own moral turpitude.
• They habitually slut-shame the targets of their domination attempts to make and keep them subservient, or at least ineffectual.  (What else would you call repeatedly suggesting that any sort of dissent from the Hive's currently-proffered snake oil product, is prima facie evidence that nutjob redneck ammosexual overcompensators would obviously cook and eat their own children rather than give up what is obviously nothing more than a prurient hobby?) 
• They habitually enlist both institutional and freelance wingmen to enable their depredations and schemes.  (Outcome-predetermined "research" from transparently ideological think tanks, Establishment media for both unlimited free marketing and hitpieces on demand, talking heads and policy wonks, "under the radar" propaganda manufactury, and ambulance-chasing litigation and soapboxery, just for starters) 
• And now we can see that they will openly exploit traumatized schoolkids to make their hard-sell for them, where they have failed themselves to snow over enough people enough of the time, in a manner for which you or I would be utterly and rightly destroyed for "abuse of power by a person in a position of authority".  The kids may drink various amounts of the Kool-Aid Flavor-Aid on their own, or they may believe they can go along to get along, or they may not understand their position as pawns in the opportunists' game, but what they do not really have in the matter is a real choice:  they will serve the purpose assigned to them and that is that.
• Finally, the Hive Mind crusaders threaten any who stand in their way.  They do it in advance, to ensure compliance;  they do it in arrears, to keep inconvenient accounts and reports under control.  They do it openly, and behind the scenes.   But above all they do it constantly, so that everyone is clear that what the Hive wants, the Hive will have, and dissent is simply not tolerated.

So...hm...domination under the cruel illusion of choice, cynical and deliberate abuse of power, political strongarmery and wingmen, conveniently cloaked in whatever facile sanctimony is currently popular with the all-hat-no-cattle set?

See, it's not like old Harvey is somehow back.  

No.  With these people, he never actually left in the first place.

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* It should go without saying that calling out TDS for what it is, in no way constitutes any sort of support for that pathetic impostor of a human being.