The liberal ideology of "net good" is another bad myth that serves to construct, enable, and selectively launder evil. We can be happy that the, er, some Twitter files have been released without affecting our judgment of the moral agent who did it. A sardonic gold star is all the moral celebration the ownership classes deserve. Frankly, it's all most of us can afford these days.
Would you kindly not imply I'm a liberal, please? If I were, then I would have checked the box for Biden on my absentee ballot and driven like a madman to the closest place I could mail it. That's not what I did. I wrote in Nina Turner, although considering how she turned out I even regret *that*.
I know all about what you're referring to because I've criticized it myself, and it seems to me that you're missing a key difference here.
In an election, if I say to myself "Oh, I HAVE to vote for this person I don't like, because if I don't then things will be even WORSE!" then I am taking an action. I am actively supporting somebody who is going to harm the world more than he helps it, and by a very wide margin.
Since the question of who runs Twitter isn't something that I can vote on, I am taking NO action whatsoever.
If I had voted for Biden, then I feel I would deserve part of the blame for Biden's subsequent crimes against humanity. Even if that blame were split hundreds of millions of ways, that's still not okay with me.
Whereas with Twitter, if I'm sick and tired of seeing good people censored and banned, and then Elon comes along and says "I'm going to stop this", and I say to myself "You know, I hope he DOES buy Twitter! There's no way I can help it happen, it either happens or it doesn't, but it can't possibly be any worse than it is, right?"
So I got my wish, even though I would much rather have, say, Jeremy Corbyn in charge of Twitter. One of the few politicians I still have faith in, although considering that he's been smeared to hell and back already I doubt he would want to be in Musk's current shoes getting smeared even more.
Now, if he's only going to fire that one FBI lawyer (not because he's FBI, but because he actually tried to alter the documents that the journalists doing the Twitter Files received) while leaving lots of other spooks inside the company, that's bad. And that's how things are right now.
If he goes on to say that he's generally pro-FBI, which he did, then that's worse. The most charitable way to read that statement by him is that he's ignorant AF about what the FBI does.
If he does propaganda for the US Empire by making sure pro-Ukraine/anti-Russia stuff trends and that the opposite is suppressed, then in that respect he's no different from the people he's replaced.
If he's not going to unban Scott Ritter, Robert Malone, and all the others who were banned unjustly for wrongthink on Ukraine or Covid or whatever, then he's no better when it comes to that either.
I could go on but I hope that you're convinced you are NOT talking to a shitlib by now.
And okay, his thought process behind even the Twitter Files dump might have gone something like "OK, I'll show everybody how the previous people censored them, I'll provide the indisputable proof of what everybody suspected all along. And then I'll shake my head, and say 'Tsk tsk, what assholes those people are. Look at all the censorship they did! I'm different. If I weren't, I wouldn't be showing you all of this and saying it's bad, would I?' Then, everybody will think I'm different, and nobody will suspect me of censoring just like they did. It's good PR for me."
Even taking all of that into account I am, in fact, savoring the Great Musk Panic as Mr. Taibbi advised me to do here:
I fucking LOVE that the very same journalists who wanted everybody to the right of Rachel Maddow and to the left of Rachel Maddow to get banned are now getting banned themselves.
I fucking LOVE that they're getting a taste of their own medicine.
I fucking LOVE that the people who begged for more censorship are now at the mercy of this guy who is--unless they're all putting on a hell of an act--enraging them and censoring the people they agree with, which will hopefully teach them a lesson but probably won't, so I'll just enjoy the schadenfreude of it all if you don't mind.
I want these motherfuckers to suffer, all right? I don't care who makes them suffer. And I don't think that "suffer" is too strong a word to use considering how thin-skinned the likes of Taylor Lorenz are. If a bad person is making bad people suffer, that's fine with me! As for the bad person who's making the other bad people suffer, well, hopefully somebody else can make him suffer as well later on. At the moment I just want to watch the show and eat my popcorn.
Now, if you think that me feeling this way and saying so somehow benefits Elon Musk and the Empire which he still serves (and which, if he should ever choose to stop serving, has enough leverage to keep him in their service since they can ruin his bottom line if they want), well, you're entitled to your opinion.
I beg to differ. It's two scorpions in a jar fighting, and when bad people fight each other, bad people get hurt, and I am SO here for that.
If that's something which is beyond your comprehension and if you feel that I'm obligated to loathe every last action Elon Musk takes, whether he's sending equipment to Ukraine that prolongs the proxy war or whether he's pouring himself a cup of coffee...well, I'd say that I'm sorry to disappoint you, but that would be a lie.
I didn't accuse you, sir. Broadly socialist ideologies have been an active target of liberal recuperation and infiltration before Marx was even cold. See how many socialists out there talk about "inequality", an affirmative liberal theory of maldistribution based on consumption-based conceptions of class, rather than Marx-derived class as a theory of material relations. For that matter, look at how often democratic socialists and adjacents put Smith's LTV into the mouth of Marx who in fact sought to critique it along with the rest of capitalism. Much socialist thought is mined that way.
It has been said that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. Therefore, I accused the ideology of cognitive commerce that offers symbolic redemption for material crimes against members of subordinate classes, with no requirement for specific, material restitution. It serves the same function as fines against corporations, merely inaugurating a cost structure for a continuing criminal enterprise.
Ultimately, *he who decides* who gets access to the emails also decides the overall shape of the message that comes out of this media event. Because of that editorial control, we actually have a mass shaping operation presented in the robes of a truth and reconciliation commission, which it most certainly is not. It only makes sense to fete him as a free speech victor if you concur with his actions vis-a-vis left-libertarian groups such as @CrimethINC. Otherwise, it's more reasonable to treat him as a reinforcer of the bipartisan order, and think what you will about that.
Well, you sure impressed everybody who doubted you had a big vocabulary there.
Sure, it makes your comment incomprehensible to anybody who has no idea of what phrases like "affirmative liberal theory of maldistribution" mean, but as long as you *sound* smart...
The liberal ideology of "net good" is another bad myth that serves to construct, enable, and selectively launder evil. We can be happy that the, er, some Twitter files have been released without affecting our judgment of the moral agent who did it. A sardonic gold star is all the moral celebration the ownership classes deserve. Frankly, it's all most of us can afford these days.
Would you kindly not imply I'm a liberal, please? If I were, then I would have checked the box for Biden on my absentee ballot and driven like a madman to the closest place I could mail it. That's not what I did. I wrote in Nina Turner, although considering how she turned out I even regret *that*.
I know all about what you're referring to because I've criticized it myself, and it seems to me that you're missing a key difference here.
In an election, if I say to myself "Oh, I HAVE to vote for this person I don't like, because if I don't then things will be even WORSE!" then I am taking an action. I am actively supporting somebody who is going to harm the world more than he helps it, and by a very wide margin.
Since the question of who runs Twitter isn't something that I can vote on, I am taking NO action whatsoever.
If I had voted for Biden, then I feel I would deserve part of the blame for Biden's subsequent crimes against humanity. Even if that blame were split hundreds of millions of ways, that's still not okay with me.
Whereas with Twitter, if I'm sick and tired of seeing good people censored and banned, and then Elon comes along and says "I'm going to stop this", and I say to myself "You know, I hope he DOES buy Twitter! There's no way I can help it happen, it either happens or it doesn't, but it can't possibly be any worse than it is, right?"
So I got my wish, even though I would much rather have, say, Jeremy Corbyn in charge of Twitter. One of the few politicians I still have faith in, although considering that he's been smeared to hell and back already I doubt he would want to be in Musk's current shoes getting smeared even more.
Now, if he's only going to fire that one FBI lawyer (not because he's FBI, but because he actually tried to alter the documents that the journalists doing the Twitter Files received) while leaving lots of other spooks inside the company, that's bad. And that's how things are right now.
If he goes on to say that he's generally pro-FBI, which he did, then that's worse. The most charitable way to read that statement by him is that he's ignorant AF about what the FBI does.
If he does propaganda for the US Empire by making sure pro-Ukraine/anti-Russia stuff trends and that the opposite is suppressed, then in that respect he's no different from the people he's replaced.
If he's not going to unban Scott Ritter, Robert Malone, and all the others who were banned unjustly for wrongthink on Ukraine or Covid or whatever, then he's no better when it comes to that either.
I could go on but I hope that you're convinced you are NOT talking to a shitlib by now.
And okay, his thought process behind even the Twitter Files dump might have gone something like "OK, I'll show everybody how the previous people censored them, I'll provide the indisputable proof of what everybody suspected all along. And then I'll shake my head, and say 'Tsk tsk, what assholes those people are. Look at all the censorship they did! I'm different. If I weren't, I wouldn't be showing you all of this and saying it's bad, would I?' Then, everybody will think I'm different, and nobody will suspect me of censoring just like they did. It's good PR for me."
Even taking all of that into account I am, in fact, savoring the Great Musk Panic as Mr. Taibbi advised me to do here:
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/savor-the-great-musk-panic
I fucking LOVE that the very same journalists who wanted everybody to the right of Rachel Maddow and to the left of Rachel Maddow to get banned are now getting banned themselves.
I fucking LOVE that they're getting a taste of their own medicine.
I fucking LOVE that the people who begged for more censorship are now at the mercy of this guy who is--unless they're all putting on a hell of an act--enraging them and censoring the people they agree with, which will hopefully teach them a lesson but probably won't, so I'll just enjoy the schadenfreude of it all if you don't mind.
I want these motherfuckers to suffer, all right? I don't care who makes them suffer. And I don't think that "suffer" is too strong a word to use considering how thin-skinned the likes of Taylor Lorenz are. If a bad person is making bad people suffer, that's fine with me! As for the bad person who's making the other bad people suffer, well, hopefully somebody else can make him suffer as well later on. At the moment I just want to watch the show and eat my popcorn.
Now, if you think that me feeling this way and saying so somehow benefits Elon Musk and the Empire which he still serves (and which, if he should ever choose to stop serving, has enough leverage to keep him in their service since they can ruin his bottom line if they want), well, you're entitled to your opinion.
I beg to differ. It's two scorpions in a jar fighting, and when bad people fight each other, bad people get hurt, and I am SO here for that.
If that's something which is beyond your comprehension and if you feel that I'm obligated to loathe every last action Elon Musk takes, whether he's sending equipment to Ukraine that prolongs the proxy war or whether he's pouring himself a cup of coffee...well, I'd say that I'm sorry to disappoint you, but that would be a lie.
I didn't accuse you, sir. Broadly socialist ideologies have been an active target of liberal recuperation and infiltration before Marx was even cold. See how many socialists out there talk about "inequality", an affirmative liberal theory of maldistribution based on consumption-based conceptions of class, rather than Marx-derived class as a theory of material relations. For that matter, look at how often democratic socialists and adjacents put Smith's LTV into the mouth of Marx who in fact sought to critique it along with the rest of capitalism. Much socialist thought is mined that way.
It has been said that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. Therefore, I accused the ideology of cognitive commerce that offers symbolic redemption for material crimes against members of subordinate classes, with no requirement for specific, material restitution. It serves the same function as fines against corporations, merely inaugurating a cost structure for a continuing criminal enterprise.
Ultimately, *he who decides* who gets access to the emails also decides the overall shape of the message that comes out of this media event. Because of that editorial control, we actually have a mass shaping operation presented in the robes of a truth and reconciliation commission, which it most certainly is not. It only makes sense to fete him as a free speech victor if you concur with his actions vis-a-vis left-libertarian groups such as @CrimethINC. Otherwise, it's more reasonable to treat him as a reinforcer of the bipartisan order, and think what you will about that.
https://crimethinc.com/2022/11/25/elon-musk-bans-crimethinc-from-twitter-on-request-from-far-right-troll
https://mwi.usma.edu/we-should-treat-disinformation-as-a-shaping-operation-because-it-is/
Well, you sure impressed everybody who doubted you had a big vocabulary there.
Sure, it makes your comment incomprehensible to anybody who has no idea of what phrases like "affirmative liberal theory of maldistribution" mean, but as long as you *sound* smart...