Love the responses from the influencers. They’re all silent about it until Johnson claims that he’s a “victim,” then there’s this sudden rush of “Yeah… yeah - that’s it. Me too! I’m a victim too!”

Uh huh…

So… Meta’s “plan” is to dodge responsibility?

Gee whiz… I sure never saw that coming…

People on every single relatively small forum ever in the history of the internet have gotten frustrated and angry when other people do that, because it’s spammy.

Do you not know the history of the term “spam?”

It’s from a Monty Python skit

That’s what the front page of a forum (or the inbox of an email account) looks like when someone “spams” it - like “spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam.”

The part that really gets me is the news media taking him seriously.

I keep waiting for a moment when some reporter is going to start talking about Trump’s latest, then just stop in the middle and say, “You know? That’s it. I just cant do it any more. This guy is a blithering lunatic and I’m done pretending he’s not.”

Not like I actually expect that - I’m much more cynical than that. Still though…

This is an example of a thing I’ve said repeatedly about Trump - I’m willing to bet that he’s 100% sincere about this. He’s not dissembling or diverting - he actually, sincerely believes that he had every right to interfere in whatever ways he wanted.

Why?

Because he’s a near-total sociopath. I don’t think that concepts of truth and falsehood or right and wrong are even coherent to him. I think his entire measure of everything is wholly personal - if he wants it, then it’s right and if he doesn’t, then it’s wrong, and if he believes it, then it’s true, and if he doesn’t, then it’s false. And it really is that simple. It’s not that he lies, but that he lives in a fantasy world in which whatever he believes is true and whatever he wants is right.

If he’s trying to say “Biden wanted this but Trump already started it”

Which “he?”

Zuckerberg blames it exclusively and entirely on the Biden administration.

that tells me BOTH parties requested it. Hence, if you don’t like Biden because of this, you don’t want Trump either. And of course, vice versa. In short, this policy is not unique to either party or administration.

Exactly, but that’s explicitly not what Zuckerberg is saying. He’s saying that it was entirely and exclusively Biden, which is a lie.

Why did Zuckerberg choose now to make this announcement and publicly reveal the inside play?

There’s actually a tidbit that the author notes that points at the obvious reason for it.

In his letter to Congressional investigators, he flat-out said what everyone else has been saying for years now.

In 2021, senior officials from the Biden Administration, including the White House, repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor certain COVID-19 content…

The author then goes on to say though:

A few clarifications. The censorship began much earlier than that, from March 2020 at the very least if not earlier.

What’s significant about that? Trump was president then.

So Zuckerberg is rather obviously trying to pin entirely on the Biden administration a set of policies that were already in place under Trump.

To what end? Obviously to do the same thing he did in 2016 and 2020 - to overtly promote Trump.

This particular one certainly not coincidentally plays into the whole Republican narrative that the Democrats are oppressive and dishonest, which in turn is meant to provide a context for their intention to dispute the election results when Trump loses. Zuckerberg is simply doing his part to further that narrative.

Just the opposite. I’m the one who goes off to do something else at family gatherings because they just talk and talk and talk.

Though it’s not so much that they talk so much as that it’s just the same stuff over and over - alternately, my brother slavishly regurgitating right-wing techbro quasi-libertarian bullshit and my mom reciting in excruciating detail some anecdote that’s maybe vaguely related to the topic at hand and that she’s told countless times already, because it’s her go-to every time something in that vicinity comes up.

And what I wouldn’t give to know them less well…

Why do you people RANDOMLY scatter ALL caps words through EVERYTHING you write?

Is it SOME sort of Pavlovian THING? Like you see a SENTENCE with a random assortment OF all caps words, and THAT says to you that IT’S the kind of FAKE truth you PREFER?

Airbnb is a fine example of a sort of variation on enshittification.

The way it works is a new company with a new and notably cost-effective way of doing things comes along and is unsurprisingly wildly successful. And then, inevitably, that leads to them hiring a whole raft of executive parasites who all have to be paid obscene salaries for doing nothing of any real value, which means the company needs to raise prices and cut back on services in order to generate more profit to pay those salaries. And meanwhile, the new executives, with nothing of any note that they actually need to or even can do, but with a need to create some illusion that they’re necessary, have pointless meetings in which they propose and wrangle about and eventually approve and implement new policies and new plans that are generally awful.

And pretty quickly and not coincidentally the new company ends up at least as bloated, mismanaged, overpriced and under-performing as the companies they so recently replaced.

See also: Uber, DoorDash and the entire streaming industry.

And by imposing the partition plan instead of holding a plebiscite, the UN overtly violated its own charter.

It strikes me that what we have here is basically the plot of Frankenstein, played out over 80 years of world history…

Amusingly ironic that the UN is the entire reason that Israel exists in the first place…

Funny - at this point, when I see an article that sort of backhandedly promotes Trump or undermines Harris - just enough careful bias to be recognizable but not enough to be objectionable (like serving the Trump campaign’s interests and their obvious desired PR spin by helping them distance themselves from Project 2025 while also downplaying its very real threat by characterizing it merely as “a conservative initiative seized on by Democrats”), I just immediately assume that it’s the NYT. And it inevitably is.

Edit to add - I should’ve made clear - it’s not their bias that bothers me so much as their cowardice.

Oh yeah - I get your point, and agree as far as that goes.

I just think that a system that has to actually have laws in place to limit the abuses carried out by psychopaths in positions of power is self-evidently a failure. A society should have standards in place that either prevent psychopaths from gaining power or strip them of their power should they gain it.

The world as a whole is not insane. Insanity is concentrated among those in positions of power. And we ignore it. We spend so much time and energy arguning back and forth about policy and ideology, and treating things as givens so all we can do is choose the next step in a series of events, when the reality is that the entire situation exists solely because the people with decision-making authority have led us to this situation, and that because they’re deeply mentally ill.

I think we should be calling out the mental illness - putting the spotlight on that.

So, for instance, any executive who would sign off on Disney trying to dodge responsibility for a death their negligence obviously caused is self-evidently mentally ill. It can only be the case that they have a lack of empathy, compassion and remorse that is pathological and therefore shouldn’t even be allowed to hold a position of public responsibility.

That’s the way I see it. It just makes no sense at all, as a society, to allow people who are demonstrably willing to act in ways that cause suffering to have access to power over others. They should be removed from influential positions, and potentially removed from society as a whole, and should be under the care of mental health professionals rather than running loose, warping society to accommodate their own mental illness.

That makes my observation no less true.

Much is periodically made of public mental health issues, most often depression. But far and away the most significant mental health issue humanity faces, and quite likely the most significant issue, period, is psychopaths in positions of power.

Fucking psychopaths.

Yes - that’s exactly what it is. Vichy Twitter is to historical Twitter as Vichy France was to historical France.

I stole it myself, so you’re welcome to it.

I have no idea who originated it, but from the first time I saw it, I haven’t used anything else. It just so perfectly sums it up.

So there are only two possibilities - either Vichy Twitter is such a poorly run site that it crashed on its own, or it’s such a poorly run site that it’s not prepared to deal with being DDOSed.

Well, it’s sort of like picking out the most enthusiastic of a group of gang rapists and focusing exclusively on him, but I guess it’s better than the standard US government strategy of just ignoring them entirely, so that’s something.