Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing.
But nobody can handle that other trip – the possibility than any freak with $1.98 can walk over into the Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.
-Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas
The big super-important story in the news last week was that Elon Musk, after over a week of playing games with the board at Twitter, finally decided to buy the social media outlet outright. And if I seem blase’ about how important this actually is, well, yeah. I seem to notice that the people who are most upset (or elated) about how important this change actually is are the same people who are most invested in spending time on that indulgence.
Of course a lot of the implicit and explicit fear (and elation) is the idea that once Elon Musk comes in to restore “free speech” to a site that actually started taking its own user rules and policies seriously after January 6, he’s going to let Donald Trump, the once and future Viceroy of Russian North America, back on. But in reaction to the news, the Sovereign of Subnormal told everybody that he wouldn’t go back on Twitter even then, cause he’s got this brand new site called… Truf Censhal. Yeah, that’s it.
My take, which I have gone over at least once, is that Twitter’s format is deliberately intended to blast unconsidered opinions and emotional hot takes, that this is the very nature of the format which Musk’s liberal critics are patronizing and posting on and using as a professional community, and if they have a problem with that potential, then they have a problem with the site itself, because that “abuse” of the medium is the very nature of the medium. People like Donald Trump were the ones using the Twitter format in the manner that it best works. And if liberals have a problem with someone buying out the site so that it can be used in such a way, their problem is with the site itself, and if you want a private actor to buy it out, or want the government to regulate it, you might as well have a private actor or the government shut it down altogether, because that is the only way to solve the problem.
But the fact that I don’t loathe Musk doesn’t mean that I’m a huge fan either. I liked the one take I saw recently where somebody called him “Tony Stark without the redemption arc.” One of the other whines about this whole deal is that (supposedly) Musk had pledged to the World Food Programme that he would pledge almost $6 billion dollars to end world hunger if they presented a plan to do it, and he didn’t follow through. I don’t think this is so much because he cares less about world hunger than about letting Trump and Nazis back on Twitter, it’s just that he seems to have the priorities of a fruit fly. At least to judge from his last few tweets where he said he would next buy out McDonald’s to fix the shake machines, buy out Doritos to make sure the chip bags are actually full, and buy out Coca-Cola to put the cocaine back in the cola, all three of which are goals I would support more than buying out Twitter.
And yet while liberals were panicking about the unaccountable decisions of a super-billionaire and “conservatives” assume that said unaccountable rich person is defending free speech, there’s another big story which shows how quickly the script changes when you switch the sides.
Over the last few months, Florida’s Republican Governor Ron “Mini-Trump” DeSantis has been trying to one up his former mentor in his appeals to the MAGA cult in what might be a serious effort to get the Republican presidential nomination in 2024. It’s doubtful Trump will just roll over and let him take it, after all, he needs the potential of being president again to stay out of jail. But it’s not like DeSantis can sit around and wait for Trump to die, either. My guess is Trump will die of natural causes in three years then spend the rest of the century as a lich while he’s in litigation with God.
For instance, DeSantis’ administration decided to ban a set of math textbooks that supposedly included questionable ideas. Not that they gave any details. Apparently Arabic numerals are part of a Muslim conspiracy against Christianity.
But the most controversial and consequential act of mini-MAGA was where DeSantis signed what liberals call the “Don’t Say Gay” bill, which prevents public schools from holding discussions on sexual orientation and gender identity, stating that lessons “may not occur in kindergarten through grade 3 or in a manner that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards”. This law also allows parents to sue school districts on those grounds. If you’re wondering how the Right is defending free speech here, well so am I.
The Disney corporation, which just happens to own a massive chunk of real estate in Florida, had at first tried to remain out of the debate, but the leadership ended up siding with “progressives” due to massive public pressure. Well, of course the modern Republican Party is focused on making sure that government is never subject to public pressure again, so DeSantis decided to declare war on Disney. On April 19, DeSantis extended what was already a special session so that Republican legislators could sponsor a bill removing the Reedy Creek Improvement District which the state had outright given the Disney company in 1967 to build Walt Disney World, so as to take away its special privileges and tax status. On April 22, DeSantis signed the bill into law, and admitted that this would cause Disney to pay more taxes as a result.
Let us stand back and commemorate the moment in which a Republican politician actually said that raising taxes on a corporation was a GOOD thing. Y’know, as if this were a principle that “conservatives” would actually hold to even if it inconvenienced their patrons, as opposed to a needledick bugfucker move to punish any deviation from right-wing political correctness.
But as it turns out, the special district arrangement meant that Disney was paying all the infrastructure costs for Reedy Creek and removing their authority would mean that the state or the county take over those costs. Now you know why they agreed to that deal in the first place. Which probably doesn’t concern DeSantis because in his epic quest to impregnate a molecule, the neighboring counties are Democrat-majority. However, “The resort complex’s governing board says that when Florida created the Reedy Creek Improvement District decades ago, the state pledged to protect the district’s debt holders — and not to alter its status unless all debts are paid off.”
In another post, I’d also said that it would not be a good thing if Elon Musk could just buy the 1-15 roadway and start charging tolls for himself, “But on the other hand, if he did that, there might actually be road maintenance.” Well, as it turns out, something like that was already happening in Florida.
Both libertarians and liberals think (in theory, anyway) that we shouldn’t be giving businesses too many breaks, and on that level it seems like a good idea to take away a corporation’s legal authority over a territory. If liberals and libertarians agree on anything, it is that government has a monopoly on force. That is the defining feature of government. It cannot have final authority otherwise. In a way the idea of whether one man should have all that power over Twitter is the same issue as one company having so much control of a public infrastructure.
Do we seriously want the Disney corporation to have more power in Florida than the Florida state government? In a way, the question is moot: the controversy arose because, in fact, Disney DOES have more power in the special district than the state of Florida, and the state of Florida finally decided to object.
Nobody in the state even questioned whether it was a good idea for Disney to be in charge of the Reedy District, because (in contradiction to normal cheapass corporate policy) they actually spend money to get the best work, because they know that the work reflects on them. The only reason anything changed is because the state government decided to punish what counts as heresy this week. And that ought to be a lesson to any liberal who is hoping the Federal government will look at Twitter and save them from capitalism and freedom of choice.
Why, it’s almost as if all the people wailing about “the rule of law” just meant it as “the way we’re accustomed to doing things”. And almost as if liberals mean “free speech” in exactly the way conservatives do: It only means the stuff they like.
It all comes down to the fact that libertarianism is limited and yet everything still comes back to libertarianism. Libertarianism is the only political philosophy which does not hold that government exists a priori – because existentially, nothing else does. As I say: A collective without its individual components is an empty set. A government cannot exist without individuals. Individuals CAN exist without a government. Yes, they would exist on the level of cavemen and wolves, but they would exist. The Constitution was not handed down by Jesus or Moses (no matter what some professional Christians think), it was a product of its time, and while it’s still superior to a lot of the alternatives presented, we are seeing that it has problems because not every decision the Founders made could be perfect, and every decision has consequences. This means, among other things, that government doesn’t HAVE to do everything we can imagine, and a lot of the duties we ask of it were only applied recently because we only recently thought they were government’s purview. It doesn’t have to grant a huge corporation its own real estate to privately manage, nor does it have to take that territory back. Nor does it have to regulate a “free speech” site that has been unregulated by government precisely because we had not had a precedent in social media to do so.
People keep calling Twitter the modern equivalent of a “town square.” Would you be allowed to go to the town square in your community and scream the things in person that people do every day on Twitter? Christ, this is a site that is too rude and profane for ME. Such restrictions that it has on free speech were put in place mainly by user demand. Half of the reason Viceroy Trump was cut off from twitting is that the Twitter staff might have revolted if he wasn’t. It remains to be seen how well the staff will put up with Musk. And then there’s the point that the site never has been profitable, which is why Musk had to put up so much of his own stock to finance the deal. Given that the site is both too big to buy and not turning a profit, certain bankers surmised that when Twitter resisted Musk’s initial offers to enter into partnership, they put out feelers to every other potential buyer and got turned down because it wasn’t worth the deal. Which might be why that Tesla stock took a double-digit plunge in the week after the sale announcement.
As a financial investment, Twitter isn’t worth it. It doesn’t charge for subscriptions. Its advertiser base might not cover expenses. It only matters because of its base of users. Fact is, the social media mavens and other liberals who made Twitter what it is made it huge, and became dependent on it in the process, because they wanted the same freedom that Trumpniks did: The freedom to spout catty, mean-girl opinions to other people without getting punched out like they would for mouthing off to the same people face to face.
Look, as galaxy-shattering catastrophes go, Elon Musk buying out Twitter is less of a problem than Republicans buying out state government, because liberals can give up on Twitter, even if apparently they don’t want to. They can’t give up on government, even if apparently they have.