On January 21 Twitter can ban private citizen Donald Trump for chronically and flagrantly violating its clearly stated rules, and will probably do so. The only reason Twitter has not done so is that Trump is the President of the United States. But suddenly he’ll be just another foul mouthed, lying schmuck. They’ll warn him to cool it. He’ll dare them to do something about it. They will. And why not, there will be no downside to banning him for life. Just think of all the howls of misspelled protest we’ll never hear. The threats and rage and insults with nowhere to put them. The great big empty space where Donald Trump used to be. Imagine the silence.
Tag Archives: Twitter
Memes
The George Bush chimp meme set off the meme wars, if only because he was president when Facebook took off in a big way. As soon as Obama was elected the Right–especially the Tea Party–went nuts with their own vicious memes. And now with Trump we return the favor. And it’ll keep happening because each side holds the other side to rules that they themselves do not abide by. Which is nothing new, the pamphlets and newspapers in the 18th and 19th century were incredibly offensive and insulting and just as low brow as anything you see on your iPhone today. And both sides back then raged the same way we are all raging now, mortally offended by what the other side posts and finding all sorts of excuses for posting their own. Calls for censorship abounded, like they abound now, though the First Amendment prevented that for the most part. Now, though, with Facebook and Twitter essentially privatizing communication in ways that Ronald Reagan never imagined, wholesale censorship is possible in social media because the internet is somehow not considered to exist in the same heady constitutional air as the airwaves. Funny seeing the conservative stance on the internet suddenly condemned by outraged conservatives bewildered by the First Amendment. And funny too watching progressives defend social media as privately owned and free from those First Amendment restrictions. Meanwhile memes are fading, replaced by furious bursts of words. Not particularly intelligent words, necessarily, but words nonetheless. We’re getting oddly literate in the Age of Trump, even as Trump himself can barely tweet a coherent sentence.
Modern day presidential poetry
My use of social media is not Presidential – it’s MODERN DAY PRESIDENTIAL. Make America Great Again!
We will always take care of our GREAT VETERANS. You have shed your blood, poured your love, and bared your soul, in defense of our country.
Damn. The prez is a modern day presidential freakin’ poet.
Trump. The Donald. T. The Verse-o-nator in Chief. The modern day presidential Shakespeare, not some Fake Shakespeare in the Park.
Dig:
You have shed your blood, poured your love, and bared your soul, in defense of our country.
That extra comma, it blows my mind. It grooves thunkishly. It shudders like a fucked up carburetor. Or an unexpected belch: Mama mia that was a spicey meat ball.
Perhaps he’s channeling Captain Kirk’s speech patterns:
No blah, blah, blah!
That’s modern day presidential poetry, baby,
the blood,
the love,
the soul,
the comma.
Fingers snap, saxophones play.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by tweets,
starving hysterical naked,
sad.
Twittering
Why William Kristol is on my Twitter feed I have no idea. Has Donald Trump brought together liberals and neocons? Has it at last gotten to that? Like commies and capitalists uniting against Hitler? Or good and evil scientists against Godzilla? Has some rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouched toward Bethlehem, Pennsylvania to be born? Trump did win there. He won the whole damn Lehigh Valley, in fact, and there went Pennsylvania and, tumbling like southeast Asian dominos, Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Minnesota teetered and held. Oh joy. An angry little progressive, twittering like an indignant bird, tells me that Michigan is too close to call. He sees a way out. Chemtrails chemtrails chemtrails. But getting back to William Kristol. One of the brilliant minds of neoconservatism. There he is, on my Twitterfeed, being clever. Oh so clever. You have to hand it to those old neocons. If politics were the Catskills, they’d be a laff riot. Funnier than most progressives, a particularly humorless lot lately. A few old George Carlin memes. Make a joke and you’re a Republican. But there is William Kristol, a conceptual architect of our Iraqi war, cracking wise. There’s John Podhoretz, saying fuck in inappropriate places. And there, on the far left end of the room, is Ralph Nader, no, there isn’t Ralph Nader. Can you blame him? Steve Bannon is a no show, too. Is he even on Twitter? I must look. I have a soft spot for spoilers and renegade nazis.
The revolution will not be twitterized either, apparently
Was just looking at Dr. Cornel West’s twitter page to see how he is pushing along Bernie’s drive for black votes. Turns out Dr. West does not tweet. Well he tweets, but apparently only when he’s in the mood. He’s almost never in the mood. The last time he was in the mood was September 8, when he tweeted briefly about it being John Coltrane’s birthday. Before then he released a whole flurry of tweets on August 24, the day he endorsed Bernie Sanders, in what is basically a long essay broken up into little tweets. And that is all that Dr. Cornel West has done on Twitter to help Bernie Sanders. That’s it. Instead of a torrent of tweets on Bernie’s behalf and attacking Hillary, Dr. West can’t be bothered to do a fucking thing. And this is the man who will turn Bernie’s standing in the African-American community in the South around.
No wonder there were nobody but white people at those rallies in the Carolinas. They were probably the only ones who even knew about them.
You cannot fundamentally reform the nation if your campaign staff can’t even do some basic advance work for a few campaign appearances.
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Brick's Politics 