WHEN THE FUCK IS SOMEBODY GONNA GO TO JAIL OVER THIS SHIT oh wait Steve Bannon is four months is a joke though.

Here we fucking go :mad::

Clarence Thomas freezes order for Lindsey Graham to testify before Georgia grand jury investigating 2020 election

HOW IS THAT FUCKER ALLOWED TO RULE ON THIS GODDAMMIT oh wait it's the U.S. of A. (<-- the greatest country in the world!).

God bless America.

If Mehmet Quack wins PA I'm moving to another country. Wait, I'm already in another country... I mean I'm moving... psychologically...

M'kay, so I don't know what Elena Kagan was thinking here, the whole world's gone bonkers:

Supreme Court temporarily blocks Jan. 6 committee subpoena for Kelli Ward phone records
The panel wants wants to examine Arizona GOP Chair Kelli Ward's contacts in the weeks leading up to the attack on the Capitol.

Well this didn't take long:


Racist tweets quickly surface after Musk closes Twitter deal

A wide range of anonymous Twitter accounts celebrated Musk’s takeover and argued it meant the old rules against bigotry no longer applied

By Drew Harwell, Taylor Lorenz and Cat Zakrzewski
Updated October 28, 2022 at 6:36 p.m. EDT|Published October 28, 2022 at 9:27 a.m. EDT

An emboldened cast of anonymous trolls spewed racist slurs and Nazi memes onto Twitter in the hours after billionaire industrialist Elon Musk took over the social network, raising fears of how his pledge of unrestricted free speech could fuel a new wave of online hate.

The flood of racist posts was among the most prominent signs of how Twitter had changed in the first hours of Musk’s ownership. But those who were expecting even bigger changes, such as the restoration of former president Donald Trump’s account and the layoff of hundreds if not thousands of Twitter employees, will likely have to wait longer.

Musk on Friday tweeted that he would make “no major content decisions or account reinstatements” until the convening of a new “moderation council.” He promised that council would have “widely diverse viewpoints,” but offered no other information on who would be on it, how its members would be selected, what authority it would have or whether its views would be binding on the company.

Musk’s social media rival Mark Zuckerberg, chief of Facebook’s parent company Meta, also turned to an outside group known as the Oversight Board to pass judgment on the company’s social media moderation actions after years of public criticism of its decisions. But whether Musk has a similar arrangement in mind was unknown.

Paul M. Barrett, the deputy director of New York University’s Center for Business and Human Rights, said such a council under Musk would face even more skepticism because of Musk’s “notoriously erratic and imperious personality.”

“To make an advisory body work, he would have to give it some degree of independence and make it very transparent,” Barrett said. “Frankly, I am not that optimistic, but as the whole Musk-Twitter saga has illustrated, he is full of surprises.”

Musk also did not meet with Twitter’s employees, something that had been widely expected — or, in some cases, dreaded. Rumors of widespread layoffs have roiled Twitter’s workforce since The Washington Post revealed last week that Musk had told potential investors that he foresaw cutting Twitter’s staff by nearly 75 percent. No layoffs were announced Friday, and Twitter workers at its headquarters in downtown San Francisco reported they heard nothing from senior managers during the day.

Twitter did hear from one major advertiser, however, the auto manufacturer General Motors, which told CNBC that it was temporarily suspending advertising on the platform until the direction of the company under Musk becomes clearer. On Thursday, Musk had tried to assuage advertiser worries in a tweeted letter in which he promised that the site would not become a “hellscape” or a “free-for-all” and pledged the app would remain “warm and welcoming to all.”

The reality of those worries became clear in the hours after Musk closed the $44 billion deal, however, becoming Twitter’s owner and firing the CEO, CFO, chief policy officer and the general counsel.

Within hours, Musk’s portrayal of himself as a “free speech absolutist” and his fierce criticism of the company’s previous leaders as overly rigid and suppressive seemed to have encouraged a wide range of anonymous Twitter accounts to act as if Musk’s takeover meant the old rules against bigotry no longer applied.

“Elon now controls twitter. Unleash the racial slurs. K---S AND N-----S,” said one account, using slurs for Jews and Black people. “I can freely express how much I hate n-----s … now, thank you elon,” another said.

Racial slurs were posted rampantly. One single-word tweet, showing a single racial slur in all capital letters, was retweeted more than 700 times and liked more than 5,000 times. It was tweeted Thursday night and remained online more than 16 hours later.

One account, created this month, included a Nazi swastika as its profile picture and retweeted quotes from Musk alongside antisemitic memes. Another tweet, showing a video montage glorifying Nazi Germany with the comment, “I hear that there have been some changes around here,” was liked more than 400 times.

The Network Contagion Research Institute, a research group that analyzes hundreds of millions of messages across social media, said use of the n-word on the app spiked nearly 500 percent over the 12 hours after Musk’s deal was finalized.

By Friday afternoon, misogynistic and anti-LGBTQ messages had become increasingly prominent, including from accounts calling for the harassment and misnaming of transgender people or the use of terms, like “groomer,” to insinuate that they sexually recruited children.

“Almost immediately I noticed an increase in anti-trans harassment, it’s very visible,” said Erin Reed, a trans activist and legislative researcher. “I’m seeing more people in comments with explicit threats, more misgendering, more harmful slurs. I’ve gotten pictures of me getting shot by a shotgun. It’s a pretty scary environment on Twitter right now.”

Some anti-LGBTQ Twitter users began running “tests” of Twitter’s new rules by posting the previous names, known as “dead names,” of prominent trans media figures and by misgendering high-profile trans women.

Some accounts, including conservative commentator Matt Walsh, celebrated Musk’s takeover as helping supercharge opposition to “the trans agenda.” The “liberation of Twitter couldn’t have come at a more opportune time,” he tweeted to his more than 1 million followers. “Now we can ramp up our efforts even more.”

The Human Rights Campaign, a LGBTQ civil rights group, said in a statement Friday that it was “very concerned” about Musk’s ownership. “Twitter has a right, and a responsibility, to keep its platform from being exploited to fuel a dangerous media environment,” the group said. “This isn’t about censorship or discrimination of ideas — it is about what kind of company they want to be and what kind of world they want to shape.”

Some of the Twitter influx was organized on other platforms, including on the anything-goes message board 4chan and the pro-Trump forum TheDonald, where its top posts Friday showed tweets celebrating lies about Trump’s 2020 election loss and memes criticizing transgender people under the headline “When you can’t get banned on Twitter anymore.”

“Cold Meme War, [Twitter] Defenses Down, Fire Away,” another poster said, attaching an image of a soldier with a rifle and a “Make America Great Again” hat.

Alex Goldenberg, NCRI’s lead intelligence analyst, said the swarm of racial slurs organized on anonymous forums such as 4chan had the intention “to make as big a mess as possible for Twitter’s new management.”

“Online trolls regularly test the limits of moderation,” Goldenberg said. Rather than a “paradigm change” of the company, he said, the spike could show that these groups “are seeking to give Elon Musk all he can handle.”

Musk’s acquisition and almost-instant firing of its top executives was also widely celebrated in Telegram groups devoted to QAnon, the jumble of pro-Trump conspiracy theories. “Sometimes it takes a while, but the good guys win,” one QAnon influencer wrote.

Some Twitter rules, however, still appeared to apply. Stew Peters, a far-right conspiracy theorist and radio host who was banned from Twitter, created a new account Thursday night and posted, “I’m BAAAAAAAAAAACK.” By Friday morning, however, the account had been suspended.

But Musk’s takeover is still fresh. After a right-wing influencer tweeted that he was still “shadowbanned, ghostbanned [and] searchbanned” on the platform, Musk tweeted Friday morning that he would “be digging in more today.” (After Musk’s reply, the account tweeted about “liberal tears” and celebrated gaining more than 40,000 followers.)

[continues...]

[...cont'd]


Musk’s takeover also led some prominent Twitter users associated with Russian and Chinese state-backed media outlets to call for Twitter to remove labels identifying their accounts as propaganda.

Twitter and other social networks have used the labels since the 2016 election to defend against foreign election interference and misinformation.

Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of the Russian government-backed broadcaster RT, called for Musk to remove the “shadow ban” from her account and appealed to Musk’s stated commitments to “free speech.”

But European regulators reminded Musk Friday that they’d be closely scrutinizing any changes he made to the platform, 75 percent of whose users live outside the United States. A sweeping new law set to come into force in the European Union would force Twitter and other tech companies to fight misinformation and limit the spread of illegal content. E.U. officials said during a news conference on Friday that they will be watching to make sure Twitter complies with these new regulations, known as the Digital Services Act.

“In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules,” Thierry Breton, an E.U. commissioner who has helped oversee tech policy, tweeted Friday, a reference to Twitter’s bird logo. Musk earlier had tweeted that the bird had been uncaged.

Alex Stamos, a former Facebook chief security officer who now leads the Stanford Internet Observatory, said the pitfalls and complexities of online content moderation will quickly become apparent to Musk, whose other business ventures, such as Tesla and SpaceX, could require interaction with foreign governments seeking to gain influence over Twitter’s reach.

With so much “at stake in China,” Stamos tweeted, “what is Musk going to do with these public requests to lift labeling on state propagandists and private asks to stop looking for covert influence campaigns?”

One person who remained noticeably absent from Twitter on Friday was Trump, whose account was indefinitely suspended due to fears of violent incitement after a crowd of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Musk has said he would end lifetime bans, including Trump’s, on the basis that they weaken Twitter’s role as a platform for free expression. Trump, however, told Fox News on Friday that he would stay on his own company’s smaller Twitter clone, Truth Social, even if he was invited back, adding, “I don’t think Twitter can be successful without me.”

Trump’s Truth Social account has roughly 4 million followers, a small fraction of the 88 million followers he had at his Twitter peak.

What a piece of fucking shit, this guy:

Lindsey Graham says there are 'going to be people jumping off bridges in San Francisco by the thousands' if Jim Jordan becomes chair of the House Judiciary Committee

Lula won, Bolsonaro OUT. (Now comes the part in which the latter sends a mob to kill people and keep him in power, etc.)

usa, brace for fascism...

Musk is a fucking asshole.

I've often wondered, is Trump Jr even dumber than his dad?

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-brief...pelosi-attack/

Parker and Stone are gonna make mincemeat out of this fuck.

ETA: By the way, he's not necessarily dumber, but dude, the coke...

Hey kids, Bibi's back! Just what the world needed... :mad:

If Congress falls I'm unplugging myself from the matrix. No more news, only tunes.

this is the epicurean response

I suppose it is, but it's also, mainly, the mad as hell already response.

no no that is out of control. that is not epicurean, that is madness.

the enemy, actually, feeds off that.

for mental survival it's either epicureanism or stoicism (as i've been telling skuj for years)

not many can do stoicism well. but a walled garden is achievable for the aesthetically inclined.

i'm not talking of contemporary mindless excesses understood by that label btw but the true & classical philosophy.

Trevor Noah Reveals How Elon Musk Can Make Twitter Profitable

"Charge white people to say the N-word. Twitter will be the most profitable company in history. Racists will be taking out loans."

Oprah just endorsed Fetterman. A little fucking late; believe it or not, some people on the fence would finally be convinced of Oz's quackness when told about it by the star who had him as "her" doctor for five lamentable seasons... Let's hope it's not TOO motherfucking late.

Well, if the polls are correct, The Insane Party is about to win again.

America is fucking lost.

Newsom has it right. WHERE IS THE OUTRAGE??? I blame Biden for this. He really is "too nice" in these extraordinary times. (He's too fucking old!!!)

But anyway, I live in Canada.

"If the Bible is right, the world will explode..."

FiveThirtyEight had the Kansas Amendment 2 vote wrong by... 20 points! :eek: I'm clinging to things like that, although, unfortunately, not every poll can be that wrong.

So what happened to free speech absolutism?

Musk recommends voting GOP, suspends Twitter accounts for ‘impersonation’

The social media company experienced a chaotic weekend under its new ownership.

(That's impersonation of him, you follow...)

Have I mentioned that Musk is a fucking asshole lately?

A beer can was thrown at Ted Cruz while the senator was riding in the Houston Astros World Series parade, as he's faced repeated fan animosity in recent weeks.

The senator was also booed at a New York Yankees game in October.

Political violence? Nah, more like instant karma. It's Ted motherfucking Cruz for chrissakes.

I've been letting my guard down, as the Twitter addict here I should've been ranting.

the fucker really has ruined things there. i used twitter as a news alert aggregator from unlikely sources, but now it's all about him and his cult of personality and his tantrums. fuck him.

i'm currently looking for an alternative. there really aren't a lot of options out there, but i'm sure something else will appear because this can't continue in its current state.

Twitter was always a social cesspool though.

of course, but now it's 100x the cesspool with no adults in charge.

the problem is that there is no other text-based microblogging platform like this right now, and everyone in the public square is currently in it.

i used it like the old rss feeds to hear from serious sources, and it was good in this form.

during brexit, for example, instead of waiting for tv or newspapers to report things hours later i would follow https://twitter.com/houseofcommons

(and labourwhips and so forth)

anyway of course you can go even deeper and watch stuff happen live right here: https://www.parliamentlive.tv/Commons but now it becomes a collection of websites instead of a centralized funnel.

...

thinking this through out loud, i think the way to go for me is to start collecting bookmarks. but see, bookmarks don't have push notifications, so now i have to start scanning. unless of course i can find a script that scans for me... but it's still not a network.

I've never tweeted anything, and I quit facebook 2 years ago. Trust me - life is better without social media.

(Yes I know, this is a forum....but it's different.)

So, when the Repukes do well today, will any of them be talking about rigged elections? Or will it be crickets?

Every cycle is "the most consequential ever", but this one really is! How many Big Liars will win, and be in power to fuck up the 2024 election?

Imagine if McCarthy was House Speaker instead of Pelosi last time around.

It's sickening to even think about, but I think we know how this is going to go tonight.

Good luck, America. You are going to fucking need it.

i haven't tweeted either (it's stupid)

but i think you missed the point about getting info "from the horse's mouth," which for me provided a real value

sounds like the demonrats (lol) have managed to partially stem the bleeding. good!

the maga promotion strategy was playing with fire/flirting with disaster, but i'm glad someone in the democratic party had both the balls & brains to go with it, because repukes are corrupted to the core and will enable trumpians shamelessly. just look at how they crucified darth cheney's spawn. so this was very good judo. nevertherless, borderline or deeply irresponsible depending on how you look at it. i have no opinion.

anyway the reason i did not go hysterical through all of this fucked ordeal was that because unlike outside observers commenting on another country i have to live through this shit and can't afford to be a *gynormous* pussy about it.

we have dodged half a bullet. the other half is still flying. we're on the same side, but please quit it with the fucking tears, it's not just embarrassing but actually demoralizing, and if these were trenches you'd be shot for it.

From Paul Krugman's NYT newsletter (1/2):

(2/2):

the biggest economic risk of a republican hijack of the budget is not falling short of fiscal goals, but the monetary result of dangerous flirtations with the debt ceiling which push the dollar further towards losing its status as *the* reserve currency of the world. this status is already under pressure from the rise of china as a global power, the reaction of authoritarian governments against western economic sanctions, etc.

this reserve status is what right now protects americans from feeling the full effects of inflation induced by global supply shocks and other risks. we get cheaper imports than anybody else with the dollar at historic highs so we don't feel the punch. and we can outbid anyone for what we need, while others can't. we have in fact exported inflation to the rest of the world.

the reserve status is also why the size of the national debt is not such a terrible burden. to see what happens when you destroy confidence in a currency look at the short lived government of liz truss.

biden's fiscal policy goals are already in place and are massive, even after the manchin/synema reductions. we now have an industrial policy codified within the inflation reduction act etc. that will play out over the next decade and beyond.

just because democrats are terrible communicators who can't properly tout their achievements it doesn't mean the industrial policy is not there. here are 2 polar opposite views of it: https://www.americanprogress.org/art...-quality-jobs/ https://reason.com/2022/10/17/bidens...-always-fails/ and here the more evenhanded and reasonable take: https://www.economist.com/united-sta...ith-difficulty

a short one (from reuters)

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones must pay $473 million in punitive damages on top of a nearly $1 billion verdict handed down last month for his defamatory claims about the 2012 Sandy Hook mass shooting, a Connecticut judge ruled Monday.

Georgia On My Mind again, huh. Remember the big bearded dumb fuck in Superman II? Basically, that alien subcreature, minus the powers, is Herschel Walker. Even though the dipshit cannot speak he got enough votes to take Warnock to a runoff election, on which EVERYTHING depends now.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFm-U8WIrNg