#rsrh Hey, a Democratic koan! Which is like a regular koan…

…except that instead of being a seemingly-nonsensical and paradoxical statement designed to produce deeper philosophical, neurolinguistic, and or ethical insights, it’s an actual nonsensical and paradoxical statement designed to kill brain cells when you look at it too closely.  Our example tonight comes from the Ask Democrats Twitter feed:

“Not on Twitter, but interested in asking a Q for House Dems today? Email AskDems@mail.house.gov”

@freddoso called that tweet the dumbest of the day: I think that he’s understating the extent to which it wins that particular contest.

Moe Lane

PS: Think about it.  Just not for long enough to suffer permanent neural damage.

#rsrh Presumably, the Lefty divestment from Twitter will now begin.

Real quick background.  Apparently a Saudi prince that you’ve likely never heard of owns a portion of Fox News – as if anybody reading this actually freaking cares – and this had Media Matters for America… all in a tizzy?  Yeah, I didn’t notice, either.  Anyway, the Usual Suspects on the Left are all freaking out about this – largely in arenas where their particular shrieking can’t be heard over the din – with the general theme of ‘people shouldn’t support anything* owned by Saudi princes.’ So since that same prince has now bought a piece of Twitter, you can expect all those people to quit that service themselves, right?

Rhetorical question, of course.

(Via @RBPundit)

Moe Lane

PS: Of course this is the first that you’ve heard of the whole situation.  Media Matters for America, remember?  The only reason that they’re not mocked more is because we know that if they collapse as a group MMFA will likely be replaced by a group that’s more competent.

*No, this doesn’t mean that the Left now supports the Keystone ethical oil pipeline.  Don’t be silly.

#rsrh Normally, I’d say something like “Don’t drink and tweet”…

…after seeing something like this, but let’s be honest: Drinking and Tweeting is absolutely awesome.  When it’s not your side doing the drinking/tweeting, at least.

Not that I can prove that “alcohol may have been involved.”  It’s just a reasonably safe way to bet*.

Moe Lane

*(singing) “Pub-lic fi-gure doc-trine!”  I figure that if Alec Baldwin can say that Cheney/Rumsfeld should be put on trial for murder, I can suggest that Baldwin might have been drunk when he wrote that.

Since when is Twitter public property?

As I understand this stalking case, the guy’s facing criminal charges for cyberstalking, which in this case seems to be somewhere between ‘being a relentless jerk’ and ‘there may be actual worms in his head.’  I understand free-speech concerns, but Twitter isn’t actually public space: it’s a private forum where people are permitted to register and participate without paying a fee.  And I’m not being pedantic, here: it’s that distinction that allows site moderators to moderate sites*.

Which is not to say that, say, Eugene Volokh is wrong to question the law itself.  The defendant seems to have avoided sufficiently explicit and credible threats of violence, at least from a legal point of view (warning: I am not a lawyer); and I favor a high bar for that sort of thing.  But I think that it makes more sense for Twitter to seek legal redress against somebody who is deliberately abusing their communications network to harass other people.  For that matter, isn’t this sort of thing more properly a case for the civil court system anyway?

Moe Lane

*This is, as I can attest personally, a distinction that is lost on a lot of ‘libertarians.’

How the Daily Kos did NOT sanitize its Weinergate coverage.

And why you should care.

It all started when I decided to drink some of the pain of the Activist Left.

I was reading Mickey Kaus – who himself is no slouch when it comes to despising the activists that have essentially destroyed his current and my former party – when he linked to this in-retrospect-unfortunate Tweet by Kos referencing dKos’ rather embarrassingly wrong conspiracy theory about what was going on with Anthony Weiner and pictures of his genitalia*. Tasty, tasty spinning of what was in the end a straightforward, if sordid situation involving a Congressman with too much of a sense of entitlement… but I kind of wanted to see some more wrongheadedness. I freely admit it: there is schadenfreude involved here; I’m not yet a Buddha.

Fortunately, thanks to the miracle of tags you can do things like search for related stories, so I clicked on the #twitterhoax tag. No entries show up. So I scroll down to the search function, punch in ‘twitterhoax,’ and discover that ‘#twitterhoax’ brings back 14 entries, and ‘twitterhoax‘ brings back 1. But none of the ‘#twitterhoax’ entries can actually be called up, while the ‘twitterhoax’ one can be. In other words, an entire set of (embarrassingly wrong) stories just happen to have had their tags not working. Continue reading How the Daily Kos did NOT sanitize its Weinergate coverage.

Slate, twitter, and strange questions.

It’s always fascinating to see how non-political people treat Twitter.  There are people out there who don’t use it as a trusted-source to trusted-source communications network that can’t be jammed by one’s enemies*?

Weird.

Via @keder.

Moe Lane

PS: By the way… damn straight it’s not rude to ignore a Tweet sent at you.  Particularly when it’s sent by one of those aforementioned would-be jammers.

*God knows the Online Left keeps trying; unfortunately, they’re critically hampered by their hierarchical, top-down worldview.  In retrospect, the slow gelding of the Left-blogosphere by the Democratic establishment was probably not to benefit of either, if only because it is worse than useless to even try to impose groupthink on what is rapidly becoming a true Cloud.

#Weinergate, Part 2? New Anthony Weiner pictures, emails allegedly surfacing.

Never mind on that Part 2 of the Weinergate endgame that I promised quite yet: via Ace comes this report from Big Journalism on Rep. Anthony Weiner that “suggests that the Brooklyn- and Queens-based representative and the young woman in question were involved in an online, consensual relationship involving the mutual exchange of intimate photographs.” They’ll be dribbling out their evidence for this suggestion over the day, and any hope by the Left that this will not be covered by the media will probably be neatly scuppered by this promise: “we will not be releasing all of the material because some of it is of an extreme, graphic nature.”

Yup. Statements like that are catnip for journalists – and, admittedly, for bloggers. Continue reading #Weinergate, Part 2? New Anthony Weiner pictures, emails allegedly surfacing.

#rsrh Hi, @jesseclee44! Enjoying my tax money?

Of course you are: you’re a Democrat.

Anyway, I’m given to understand that your job with the federal government is going to be to wander the Internet looking for people who are willing to say in public* that your boss President Barack Obama is a petulant man-child with delusions of adequacy and a profession skill set incapable of organizing an orgy in a bordello; presumably at that point you will quote-unquote ‘do battle’ with them, a la Terminator style.  Speaking as one of the @RedState folks, I’m sure that my posts will result in you engaging in highly entertaining flailing about… Continue reading #rsrh Hi, @jesseclee44! Enjoying my tax money?

Jake Tapper illustrates the use of Twitter.

Somebody in the regular media was whining about what the point of Twitter was, a few days ago.  The answer?

Rerouting around obstacles.

hey Chinese government – i found a way to sneak around your firewall on my laptop to get to twitter. Dont fear freedom, Chinese government.

He’s also commenting on the ChiComs’ attempt to stop American media from interviewing students. Sounds like there may be some juicy stuff on ABC tonight.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to RedState.

Let me be the first to suggest that Twitter’s DDOS woes are… geopolitical.

I have no absolutely evidence along those lines, but frankly I wouldn’t put it past the Iranian regime at all to pay somebody to cyber-bomb Twitter.  It’s certainly been comprehensive enough to fit the enhanced requirements of a nation-state.

…HAH!  It literally went up just as I wrote that!  Clearly, someone was monitoring my post.