Here we were thinking the first Trump presidency was full of weirdness; but the American public decided to just see how much weirder it could get, and man, are they being rewarded.
Trump's Reckless Choices for National Leadership
Donald Trump has demonstrated his lack of fitness for the presidency in countless ways, but one of the clearest is in the company he keeps, surrounding himself with fringe figures, conspiracy theorists and sycophants who put fealty to him above all else. This week, a series of cabinet nominations by Mr. Trump showed the potential dangers posed by his reliance on his inner circle in the starkest way possible.
For three of the nation’s highest-ranking and most vital positions, Mr. Trump said he would appoint loyalists with no discernible qualifications for their jobs, people manifestly inappropriate for crucial positions of leadership in law enforcement and national security.
But even away from Trump, this seems pretty weird too, doesn't it?:
The Onion wins auction to take control of Alex Jones’s InfowarsAnd a random one:
Human in Bear Suit Was Used to Defraud Insurance Companies, Officials Say
Footage of a bear rifling through luxury cars was submitted to insurance companies, which paid out $140,000. But something seemed off.
But here is some decent news:
Liberals are fleeing X again — this time for BlueskyYes - I can confirm that BlueSky is looking pretty good - for whatever reason, I finally seem to have managed to stop the weird overrun of my "Discover" feed by cat photo and amateur anime art accounts. (It took a fair bit of blocking accounts for the first week or two - or maybe they changed something else in the algorithm - I really don't know.)
But it is now feeling somewhat like old Twitter: pretty much a micro-blogging site with a liberal bent, although still without the quick and often witty community input, because the numbers aren't there yet. At least a lot of journalists, commentators and scientists who I like to follow have made the move recently, and I like it. (The thing I miss about old Twitter was that its popularity meant it was actually good for breaking news in your own area - if a big storm was happening, say, you could search "Brisbane storm" and find a lot of contributions to how bad it was in other parts of the city.)
5 comments:
If the Americans don’t go full steam ahead with the Musk plan to get rid of most of the 450 government departments, that is the end of Republican government.
Democracies and Tepublics are Ponzi schemes that almost never pay their debts. Notable exceptions are with Andrew Jackson, and also Peter Costello almost paid the Federal debt. If you don’t get this problem solved then history leaves you behind.
Reagan didn’t close down even one government department. Neither did Trump in his first term. But they either will get this problem solved this time or a few years later they will fall harder than the Soviet Union did.
One can only predict that the tribal progressivism on Bluesky will be much worse than that which used to be on Twitter - given the results of the recent US election, and the inevitable limitations of microblogging.
Possibly the fact that Bluesky will, on best estimates, struggle for decades to get comparable numbers and influence to Twitter will magnify this problem significantly.
Sorry, that was me - TimT
Hi Tim. While I can agree that overly zealous moderation on a micro-blogging site can certainly happen, the thing about Twitter was that it used to sent you tweets in the "For you" thread that make some sense compared to what accounts it knew I was following (or perhaps tweets I had sometimes liked.) Then Musk came along, spammed it with his own support for right wing conspiracies, and started elevating content from the Right that I had no interest in and saw as a part of the MAGA disinformation world.
He deserves to be commercially punished, and if the end result is more "silo-ing" of political opinion - well, as it stands, yes the American Right does not deserve being taken seriously and listened to while it supports Trump, so I have no problem with it.
It seems likely the result would simply be more political extremism though, no space for a sensible centre to discuss political problems and hatred on both sides.
I don't say that attempts to engage with the Trump crazies would help and I don't say that the isolation of each side from the other can be stopped. I'm just pointing at the problem in my unhelpful way and saying, well, that's a problem!
But it is an unfortunate symptom of the US's current dire political sickness. I hope they find a cure.
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