POTUS on Twitter... joking about Twitter...

... I don't believe in Twitter.

"I don't believe in Twitter."

The post title is a quote from me from that clip. This morning � the day after the dialogue � I'm contemplating the line to the tune of the old John Lennon song: "I don't believe in I-ching/I don't believe in Bible/I don't believe in Tarot..." etc., etc. "The dream is over...."

"It�s hard to pinpoint the moment when New York and also technology started to feel like such a chore."

"Maybe it was when I urinated in a slim-fit adult diaper while waiting in line for the iPhone 4 for ninety-three hours and pronounced the experience 'worth it,' or when I found myself testing out tweets on my wife during foreplay, or when a rat scurried across my face and into my mouth while I was checking Facebook and waiting for a C train that never arrived. But a few weeks ago, on a gray April day, as I ambled by the Duane Reade where my favorite dive bar McHurlihan�s once stood, while joylessly scrolling through my Twitter feed in between reading a saved Instapaper article about how to live in the moment, I realized I had to leave New York and stop using the Internet for a while."

The first paragraph of an essay by Benjamin Hart titled "Leaving New York and Also Technology/Why I left New York and also technology." And I love love love the implicit mocking of the requirement that articles have subtitles. I <hart> Benjamin Hart.

Trolling methodology: buying Twitter ads.

Using "promoted tweets," a white supremacist not only avoids getting blocked by various Twitter users, but he is also able to target the very people who don't want to have to hear him:

Though [Andrew "weev"] Auernheimer didn't say exactly which users/groups he chose to target in his trolling campaign, he listed examples that appeared to jive with the sample of angry responses that followed: people who are active in Democratic political campaigns or animal rights groups; women who shop for fine jewelry; followers of known feminist sites like Jezebel and Feministing.

There is a limit to how much can be done:

When asked about Auernheimer's promoted tweets, a Twitter spokesperson pointed out that the tweets in question had been deleted because they violated the service's hate/sensitive ads policy. The representative declined to comment on whether the promoted tweets service would be tweaked or altered in light of Auernheimer's targeted trolling stunt.

But: should this be dismissed as a "trolling stunt"? It could be compared to the way � in the walking-around world � protesters go to a place they want to protest or, say, right-to-lifers seek to engage with women who are walking into abortion clinics. On line, there's the danger that people will set things up so they only hear the speech of those they want to allow into the comfortable space of their closed minds. Maybe it's good to have a way to override these barriers, to pierce the on-line cocoon.

Presumably, Twitter will do what serves its interests, but what is that? I see that "Twitter [is] at the Crossroads/The company knows it�s in trouble. And its options are bleak."

People are only there to be targeted if they like to hang out on Twitter, and if the atmosphere doesn't please them, they'll leave. I mean, you don't even leave Twitter, do you? You just don't show up so often... and at some point, you notice you don't go there anymore.

"Facebook has so much data on its users, 'you could actually target a premium credit card to a businessman you know is traveling all the time'..."

"... said Bryan Wiener, chairman of 360i, a digital marketing agency that works with brands like Capital One, NBCUniversal, Spotify, Oreo and Oscar Mayer. 'That�s the kind of information that�s missing from Twitter... There�s not this rich history of your holistic life.' As a result, he said, many brands are unwilling to commit big money to Twitter ad campaigns."

From a NYT article titled "Twitter Troubles Lie in Marketers� Reluctance to Buy New Kind of Ad."

This rich history of your holistic life... I don't know if that phrase is ludicrous or horribly disturbing. Neither... I guess... because I'm not laughing or quaking. I have a distanced amusement and vague dread. I'll put it that way.

"Martin O'Malley, the former governor of Maryland and possible Democratic presidential candidate, is speaking out on the violence in Baltimore. O'Malley's rival, Hillary Clinton, is not."

Says the Weekly Standard, noting yesterday's tweets from the 2 candidates.

In fairness to Hillary, she was not the governor of the state that is having terrible trouble right now. She was not the mayor of Baltimore. O'Malley, if he is to be a plausible alternative to Hillary, needs to be able to flaunt his achievements as governor and mayor.

He's tweeting things like: "We must come together as one City to transform this moment of loss & pain into a safer & more just future for all of Baltimore's people." I wouldn't give him much credit for self-interested, anodyne statements like that. Baltimore is really hurting him. The man was mayor of Baltimore or Governor of Maryland from 1999 to just this past January. If Baltimore has big problems, he's responsible for them! His expressions of sorrow and hope for the future are fundamentally ridiculous.

Meanwhile, it might be nice if Hillary would show up and contribute something to the national political debate.

"I beg the Lord to grant us more politicians who are genuinely disturbed by the state of society, the people, the lives of the poor."

"As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation, and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world's problems or, for that matter, to any problems."

Said the Pope.

That was back in 2013. I'm noticing it today reading the Twitter feed #ResistCapitalism.

"But what exactly is civility�and is it a prerequisite for a vibrant intellectual climate?"

Asks Joan W. Scott in "The New Thought Police/Why are campus administrators invoking civility to silence critical speech?"

As with all polemic, tweets can be satirical, ironic, blasphemous, outrageous. To read them literally is often to misread them, as was the case with one of the tweets most often invoked to indict [Steven] Salaita as an anti-Semite...

The medium of Twitter is complicated because it provides a public space for private, personal expression. In one sense, it is no different from a speaker�s rostrum at an antiwar rally or any other highly charged political event....

Twitter disrupts this careful separation of the hidden and the acceptable, blurring the boundaries by offering a public forum for venting private feelings. In so doing, it makes the hidden visible and seems to reveal the �true� nature of the tweeter�the reality ordinarily concealed by the rules of decorum and politesse. They may not realize it, but those... who take tweets to be indicators of the �real� nature of the tweeter (and so the ultimate proof of his or her unfitness as a teacher and colleague) are also acknowledging the limits, if not the inauthenticity, of civility as a form not only of political but also of intellectual exchange. For some members of the UIUC faculty, as for the chancellor, the tweets exposed the underlying premises of Salaita�s scholarly work, the hidden transcript of his articles and books. The tweets became not an easily compartmentalized instance of extramural speech (and so of the First Amendment right of the scholar as citizen), but the key to the entire body of his work and to the unacceptability of the politics that informed it....

Much more at the link (which goes to The Nation).

"Good stand-up comedy cannot be safe; it must shock or surprise an audience."

"Some comics can do it magnificently with insights about socks, but the best do it with bracing commentary about the stuff that really matters to us. Sex, race, politics and religion have been the source of some of the best comedy I�ve seen, but the process of figuring out how to talk about difficult issues is going to involve errors that are potentially painful for people in the audience."

Writes the comedian Guy Branum, trying to help Trevor Noah off the hook for all the non-PC stuff in his Twitter archive.

By the way, "insights about socks" is a reference to Jerry Seinfeld. Many, many comedians over the years have observed that socks get lost in the laundry. But this is how you do it "magnificently":



ADDED: By the way, if Trevor Noah can be brushed off and set aright, can we bring back Michael Richards?

"Welcome to the new, Twitterized kausfiles.com. Tweets and blog items in the same stream."

"Why do this? 1) I spend a lot of time and energy on Twitter. 2) Twitter was and is killing blogging. What used to be the fun short blog items are now tweets, leaving only the duller, long items for blogs � a drift toward dreariness accelerated by the need to attract links by writing Important Posts, and by Google�s apparent decision to favor longer posts in its search results (on the highly questionable theory that short posts are inherently less informative). I always thought readers preferred shorter items. The hell with Google. This new format should, in theory, put the fun items back on the blog...."

I'm glad to see that Mickey Kaus is thinking about format, after his rift with The Daily Caller, which has just about the ugliest format of any website that I visit (or used to visit, when Mickey was there).

I'm sorry I read about Google favoring longer posts. I put effort into making posts short and tend to write posts that are around 300 words or less, and Mickey links to a place that says you get better Google ranking if you go over 500 words and that 1500 words is ideal. In other words, blog posts should look like newspaper op-eds. It's easy to pad things out like that. But machines must be programmed to find what machines can find, and then writers program themselves to do what the machines will value. How dismal!
Click for more �

Scott Walker hires a strategist who supports same-sex marriage and abortion rights and tweets with obscenities.

Jessie Opoien writes in The Capital Times:

In a party that's still ironing out its approach on social issues, [Liz] Mair is a rarity in her support of same-sex marriage and (with some exceptions) keeping abortion legal. Walker has taken some heat from social conservatives for hiring pro-choice staffers in the past.

As for the tweeting language:

After Walker's breakout Jan. 24 speech at the Iowa Freedom Summit, Mair tweeted (language edits courtesy of the Cap Times, not Mair): "Also, political reporters: As a general rule, Walker doesn't use notes, teleprompters, etc. He actually knows what the f--k he's saying."

Days later, on Jan. 30: "I f--king told you people Mitt Romney won't run for President again. #dontbelievethehype."...

"I f--king ran much of the oppo v Obama in 2008 and I've never voted for him, nor would I," she added....

Just a few days ago, Mair tweeted about presumed Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton's email scandal, "Hillary may have a higher IQ than Bill and objectively be smarter, but man when it comes to optics and basic politics, she's pretty dumb."

Asked to explain, she added this: "The f--king press conference today and her whole handling of this email stuff? Are you paying any attention?"

Opoien amusingly relates this to Walker's ultra-bland Twitter style. She gives a few examples like: "Church, hot ham & rolls, then off with Matt to get some new dress shoes" and "Got hot ham & rolls at Fattoni's deli after church. Now watching playoff game (Wish Packers were playing)."

"[Y]ou think you can take it all, like, 'oh my god, that�s so funny, somebody called me a fat cow who deserves to be dragged through the street,' but it does affect you internally."

Said Lena Dunham, about everybody who uses Twitter � "whether you have a million followers or whether you have seven followers, because we all deal with the complexity of people being able to say things to you anonymously from behind the veil of the internet."

"I was like �the spelling�s so bad, I�m not taking these people seriously; they have eggs for avatars, I don�t care!� And you walk through the day and these horrible phrases are being repeated through your head� There are things that affect me; I�m weird, I�m affected by violence, threats of rape, I�m a mess!"

Her solution is not to look at Twitter at all. She writes her own tweets (she says), but sends them to someone else to post for her and to let her "know if there�s an important response."

This corresponds to what I was saying to that philosophy professor, quoted in in the NYT, who was dismayed about the insults she read about herself on Yik Yak. Don't look at it! Stop mentally engaging with it.

And this is a cue to quote 2 of my mother's favorite expressions: 1. "You're only encouraging them," and 2. "He's just trying to get a rise out of you."

"Isis supporters have threatened Twitter employees... with death over the social network�s practice of blocking accounts associated with the group."

"In an Arabic post uploaded to the image-sharing site JustPaste.it, the group told Twitter that 'your virtual war on us will cause a real war on you.' It warned that [Twitter co-founder] Jack Dorsey and Twitter employees have 'become a target for the soldiers of the Caliphate and supporters scattered among your midst!'"

�You started this failed war � We told you from the beginning it�s not your war, but you didn�t get it and kept closing our accounts on Twitter, but we always come back. But when our lions come and take your breath, you will never come back to life.�

"Is Leonard Nimoy the first example of a 'famous last tweet?' If not, what are some others?"

A question on Reddit. Nimoy's last tweet was: "A life is like a garden, Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory." I don't see how you can call that "famous" when he just died. Would you remember that 10 years from now?

Among the answers: "The last tweet of that poor Notre Dame student who died on the scissor lift filming football practice was... 'Gust of wind up to 60mph ... I guess I've lived long enough.'" That's the other meaning of the phrase "famous last words." There, stress belongs on last, not famous. It's something a person who isn't planning to die says that, in retrospect, speaks to the circumstances of the death.

Another answer is Roger Ebert's "So on this day of reflection I say again, thank you for going on this journey with me. I'll see you at the movies." That's like Nimoy's. Someone who is planning to die frames an apt statement on the way out.

Let's not mix up the 2 kinds of famous last words. Or are there more than 2?

ADDED: The expression "famous last words" is most useful as something to say to a living person who has just said something that you're picturing could be something that is said right before doing something deadly.

AND: The fire extinguisher's empty. Get the hairspray!

The word that got Keith Olbermann in trouble: "pitiful."

Keith Olbermann got suspended from his ESPN show for tweeting "Pitiful." He was responding to a tweet by a Penn State graduate who'd tweeted "We are!" (linking to an article about raising $13 million for charity). Olbermann proceeded to tweet "PSU students are pitiful because they�re PSU students � period."

"Pitiful" is a strange word. When we see it alone, as in Olbermann's tweet, we assume it conveys contempt. The 4th meaning in the OED is: "Evoking pitying contempt; very small, poor, or meagre; paltry; inadequate, insignificant; despicable, contemptible." $13 million is very small if the idea is to balance the harm that was done to Penn State's reputation in the recent scandal, and Olbermann has been a critic of the settlement.

"Pitiful" can mean "Full of or characterized by pity; compassionate, merciful, tender." You'd think that literal meaning would predominate in the absence of context, but it doesn't. "Pathetic" works the same way. We assume the sarcastic version: "Miserably inadequate; of such a low standard as to be ridiculous or contemptible." The older, more literal meaning � "Arousing sadness, compassion, or sympathy, esp. through vulnerability or sadness; pitiable" � is overshadowed to the point where you can't even use it without explaining yourself.

And you can't explain yourself on Twitter.