This cartoon is by me and Nadine Scholtes.
Did you catch the interactions between the animals? That was entirely made up by Nadine, and I love it.
Donald Trump’s board game – and yes, that is a thing that exists – has this motto on the cover: “It takes brains to make millions. It takes Trump to make billions.” The implication being that Trump is like, even smarter than smart people, and we can tell this because he’s rich.
(The real secret to Donald Trump’s wealth is that his father gave him more than $400 million over the years; and also, his success as a game show host).
Unfortunately, it’s not just the Trump board game – real people believe this. I listened to an interview with an undecided voter, who explained that Trump’s wealth means he’s smart and competent.
And it’s not just Trump. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has publicly made a fool of himself paying $44 billion for Twitter and then dropped Twitter’s – pardon me, X’s – value over 70% through a mix of sheer managerial incompetence and believing his own hype about him being a genius.
If someone is a billionaire, they must be a genius. But there are serious reasons to doubt that claim. Wealth is not normally distributed, like height. While there’s never going to be someone who is even 3x shorter or 3x taller than you, Elon Musk is about three million times richer than the average American. That means that the super-rich are extreme outliers, and that creates some major statistical irregularities that are not tied to talent. […]
Some billionaires are smart. All have been extremely lucky.
As Klaas says, this all ties into the myth that we live in a meritocracy. We’ve all seen examples of smart people doing well; it follows that if someone’s mind-bogglingly rich, they must have a bogglingly great mind.
It also ties into the myth that there’s such a thing as “intelligence,” by which I mean a single number or measure of how smart someone is. That’s not how it works. People can be wonderfully adept and smart at some things while being shockingly stupid in other areas.
Bobby Fischer was undeniably a genius at chess, and he was a Holocaust denier. Ben Carson was by most accounts a brilliant neurosurgeon, and also doesn’t believe evolution is real and dismisses the Big Bang a s a “fairy tale.” Aristotle famously wrote that women have fewer teeth than men.
Elon Musk is talented at some things, but running a social media company isn’t one of them. In fact, because Musk thinks of himself as a visionary super-genius, he doesn’t doubt his own ideas or listen to people who know what they’re talking about, which means he’s effectively much stupider than an ordinary person could be.
If I sound extra bitter about Musk, it’s only because I’ve sort of built a career around being able to find new readers by putting my cartoons on Twitter, and now this rich doofus has spent $44 million ruining Twitter because he wanted to troll the libs or something. It feels very frustrating and random.
Ah, well: Even if Twitter (X) never recovers, probably something else will come along. And if not, I can still have fun listening to “Que Sara Sara” on repeat.
Thanks so much for supporting these cartoons! Elon Musk sucks, but you all are awesome.
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has four panels.
PANEL 1
A man wearing a brown jacket over jeans and a v-neck t-shirt is sitting on a park bench, staring at something in his hands with great concentration. Let’s call him JACKET.
A red-headed man in a red smiley face t-shirt is on the path in front of the bench, looking at the first man with a dubious expression. Let’s call him REDHEAD.
REDHEAD: Er… Excuse me. What are you doing?
JACKET: A lot of my genius ideas get lost when I lose focus.
PANEL 2
A close-up on Jacket shows that his hands are filled with a stick, lumpy, gooey, dripping mess of green-gray ooze. He continues to stare at it with great concentration.
JACKET: So I invented “the idea net” by smooshing rubber cement, peanut butter, and used chewing gum. This way I’ll catch ideas before they escape.
PANEL 3
Redhead is responding, with a rather grumpy expression. Jacket doesn’t even glance at Redhead, continuing to study the mess in his hands.
REDHEAD: That’s gotta be the stupidest idea I’ve ever–
JACKET: I’m a billionaire.
PANEL 4
The scene has changed to an apartment. Redhead is seated on a sofa, mixing up some sticky goo in his hands. On the coffee table in front of him we can see an open peanut butter jar, an open bottle of rubber cement, and a bunch of little crumpled pieces of paper (presumably gum wrappers). He is staring at the mess in his hands and smiling.
Behind him, a blonde woman is watching what’s he’s doing with a very doubtful expression on her face.
REDHEAD: I know it looks stupid, but he’s a billionaire! His ideas must be good!
CHICKEN FAT WATCH
Chicken fat is an old cartoonists’ expression for meaningless but fun details in a cartoon.
In panel one, hidden from the humans by a bush, a squirrel in a slouch hat and trenchcoat is standing next to a magpie with a bag of nuts. The magpie and the squirrel have their backs to each other and are studious ignoring each other.
In panel three, we can see that the squirrel and magpie are looking at each other. The squirrel has opened his trenchcoat to reveal a small bag labeled “catnip.” The magpie is holding out the bag of nuts to the squirrel.
In panel four, in the background, there is an open window. The magpie has landed on the windowsill, holding the bag of catnip. Below the windowsill, a gray housecat is making the “shh” gesture with one paw, and with the other paw is offering the magpie a shiny necklace.
Also in panel four, there are a couple of framed pictures on the wall. One of them is of the blonde woman; the other one is of the cat.
Gotta leave that classic Vonnegut quote here:
“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, ‘It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.’ It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: ‘if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?’ There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.
Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.”
The mind can fix a problem created by the mind so this would be placebo.
Watch AdamSomething’s channel if you have no idea about stupid ideas billionaires come up with.
Seidnon, truth!
Doug, thanks for posting that quote, it’s perfect.
‘It also ties into the myth that there’s such a thing as “intelligence,”’
Dungeons and Dragons has a lot to answer for
I’m not going to argue for billionaire intelligence, I’m not going to pretend that Musk was playing 4D wunderwater chess and what I’m about to describe was intentional, but I will argue that what Musk did to Twitter is a net positive, and defend it.
I think that the reason Twitter is “failing” more than anything else, is related to the same basic pattern that happened after Trump was elected: Progressives hate to lose. And enough of them are so ungraceful in loss that they can’t recognize olive branches when they’re offered and end up making things worse for themselves. I think the mindset can be summed up as: “I’m disappointed I didn’t get exactly what I wanted, and anything less than exactly what I wanted is the worst thing possible.”
From a conservative standpoint, there was a very real fear on the right that Donald Trump, a New York Liberal his entire life, twice divorced, who didn’t even pay lip service to faith, recently converted to Republicanism over fiscal policy, might be one of the most socially progressive Republican candidates ever. He made some signals towards that, things like inviting Caitlyn Jenner to use the women’s facilities in Trump Tower after the Arizona bathroom bill. You might think this a very low bar, but regardless of what you think of his record, he is probably one of the most pro-LGBT Republican presidents ever. And post election, he kept messaging that he was willing to make deals. I know there’s a lot in Trump to hate, but could you imagine what it would have looked like, how much better it might have been, had there been enough people willing to play ball to coax that oaf into more centrist policies?
But Democrats who felt like the Clinton coronation had been stolen from her were rabid out of the gate, and Trump is nothing if not vindictive: He took the unwillingness to work with him extremely personally, cementing him as one of the most hardline Republican politicians in my lifetime. You can mock the idea that “they were mean to me so I took all the opposing positions out of spite” because it demonstrates a lack of principles, but Trump isn’t exactly famous for his principles. I don’t think progressives are equipped to understand the breadth of the opportunity they blundered.
Regardless: With Twitter. I’d like to posit that Twitter isn’t ruined. Oh, don’t get me wrong: Some of the new engagement bait meta is annoying, and I have some complaints. But it’s not like Twitter isn’t useable now, it’s not like it doesn’t do all the things it used to, what’s different are the people.
A whole lot of people that had been banned off Twitter are back, and a whole lot of conservatives saw the platform as being welcoming enough again to give it a second shot, changing the balance from something that obviously skewed progressive to something that feels, at least to me, as more balanced. To give weight to that idea: The community notes feature, which I think is actually pretty good. Not perfect, but good. I’ve signed up to edit them, and so I get to see all the petty toxicity of the suggested notes that don’t get to see the light of day. What gets approved isn’t as simple as “right wing = correct”, more often than not I feel like the best cited, most accurate note actually rises to the top, regardless of politics, which I don’t think you would get if the platform were rabidly partisan.
Many progressives, registering the sale and subsequent realignment as a loss, decided that it was irredeemable and cut themselves off from the larger internet to chase the newest fad: Bluesky, Mastodon, Threads. I think you’re feeling it because that’s your audience. But all it would take for that to reverse would be for your audience to engage back with the market.
In the meanwhile, because progressives aren’t nearly as connected as they used to be, it feels like they’ve lost some of the collective gravitas that was required to ruin people… People aren’t paying as much attention to Twitter as they used to. I can’t think of a cancellation that wasn’t entirely in-group driven over the last year… Which actually feels kind of healthier than what we used to have.
And if all that cost us was 30 billion of Elon’s dollars…. I’m ok with that.
Unlike Republicans, who are famously great at accepting defeat gracefully… wait, remind me who tried to storm the Capitol?
What olive branches? I am entirely serious. Can you give an example of a single attempt by Trump and his team to compromise with Democrats? Any attempt at actually working together or even pretending to take their concerns seriously? I am talking about policy here, not publicity stunts without any actual consequences.
A lot of people who were so brazen in their lies and/ or so aggressive in their violation of anti- hate speach / harassement – rules (that were already very weak) that they were actually banned came back, and a whole lot of people who thought that insisting on a minimum of factuality and basic decency equaled hostility aggainst all conservatives felt welcome to try it again, because they were no longer being forced to deal with the reality that everybody is not actually entitled to their own facts and could once again spew hatred to their hearts content, changing the balance from a forum in which actual progressives (as opposed to centist labeled a progressives by ultra right-wing idealogues) could occasionaly gain an audience to one in which the loudest spewers of propaganda and disinformation can once again enjoy their free platforms, secure in the knowledge that detractors who insist on annoying things like fact checks will be buried under an avalanche of racist, misoginist, queerphobic and otherwise bigoted attacks. And because they are not officially disallowing those with opposing viewpoints from posting but instead letting them be driven away by exausting attacks, people get to pretend that a platform full of extreme right-wing conservatives and mainstream centrists represents a balanced representation of the political spectrum.
Seriously, you cannot look at all the people reporting an incredible increase in harassment as soon as Twitter stopped enforcing the minimum basic rules and blame their decision to leave the platform on “progressives being unable to deal with a loss.”.
Which, once again, is a fascinating claim to make about the party that hasn’t spent the past couple years lying about stolen elections and hasn’t made denial of reality a prerequisite for anybody working with their hailed leader and savior.
All of that aside, it is difficult to blame progressives and their supposed unique inability to lose with grace for genius ideas like the paid blue check mark (without any actual checking), firing key staff members and using the platform to cater to individual vanity, and Musk’s inferiority complex by faking interaction stats when he wasn’t on top.
Lauren @6
Even if I were interested in both-sidesing this and I took what you said at face value, what you said doesn’t really dispute anything.
We didn’t get that far. One of the first things I remember from Trump’s administration was a debt ceiling crisis where the government managed barely to avoid a shutdown. My recollection is that there weren’t enough Republican votes in the senate, and even some of the house votes weren’t assured, so Trump approached the Democrats, and Pelosi and Schumer refused to even meet him.
And I wouldn’t discount “publicity stunts without actual consequences”, Trump’s following is culty, and his base tends to lack principled reasons for a lot of what they think. I really do believe that if progressives had worked with him, he could have dragged at least his base along culturally… And politics are downstream of culture.
I feel like this is as indicative as anything. We had very different experiences. The rules were vague and capriciously enforced. When people were banned, they often wouldn’t get an explanation of what words or behavior were actionable, and while it was absolutely possible for a progressive to fall afoul of it, I don’t think that anyone was particularly confused as to the political bent of the people making appeal decisions. For years, we were told the rules were clear (even if the people saying so couldn’t explain them) and that if we didn’t like it, we could leave. Which… A lot of people did. I understand why this was relatively comfortable for progressives, and I understand why losing it was uncomfortable, but those people coming back represented a long overdue correction, and while, yeah… I won’t even try to deny that some very shitty people took that as open season on progressives, it wasn’t long before the people that came back to harass people were banned all over again.
Take the history aside for a moment…. People on Twitter currently: Does it feel more or less angry now than it did before Elon took over? More or less toxic? I guess your mileage may vary, but I think it feels better. How much harassment are you getting? And if the answer is less, less and not much, how would more progressives in the space make things worse?
“I think that the reason Twitter is “failing” more than anything else, is related to the same basic pattern that happened after Trump was elected: Progressives hate to lose. ”
Ah yes of course, it´s all because of those damn woke progressives.
I don´t know how I missed it!
I put “failing” in quotes for a reason – It depends what people mean.
The common parlance would suggest financially, but I don’t know that’s actually true. Twitter was never profitable. Elon paid $54.20 per share for the company, which was generally considered overpriced, and the share price is currently $51.50. I don’t know that Twitter is doing any better or worse financially than it ever was, but if you look at the last year’s history, it seems to be gaining.
I think, and I could be wrong, but I think when people say that Twitter is “failing” in the context we’re talking about, it’s failing to live up to their expectations, or it’s failing to work for them. I was alluding to what Barry said about his bitterment that it’s harder to find new readers on Twitter than it used to be.
And my point is that that is kind of a progressive problem – I don’t think it would matter how great Twitter got, I think progressives are thoroughly soured on it.
I think, and I could be wrong´´…
You are wrong
Actually, what’s happened to me on Twitter is that sometime after Elon took over, I was, to use the popular term, shadowbanned.
Specifically, any post I post with media is automatically marked as “mature,” which makes it much less likely (or impossible? I’m not sure) that a search will find it, and also means that anyone who hasn’t set their Twitter account to show them mature content can’t see it. (The default is that it doesn’t show “mature” content.)
What probably happened is that some random right-wingers decided to bulk-report me as posting porn, and Twitter responded by marking all my media posts (i.e., my political cartoons) as if they were porn. But there’s no way for me to know for sure; nor is there any way to appeal, because Twitter’s management is really shitty at what they do. (Maybe it was like that before Elon took over.)
If right-wingers did lie about my content to harm my livelihood, I’m sure you’d say those people aren’t responsible for their own freely chosen acts; it was my own fault for angering them. (That was sarcasm, I don’t literally think you’d say that.)
Fidelity – hardly a lefty group – says that Twitter has lost over 70% of its value since Elon took over. I’m not interested enough to dive down this research hole, however.
I do agree that the community notes are good. (Launched by Dorsey, not by Musk.)
Your recollection is objectively false.
What happened is that Pelosi and Schumer and Trump were talking frequently and apparently productively in September – there were a bunch of newspaper articles about how Trump and P/S were getting along much better than Trump got along with Republicans. (Example.)
By November, it fell apart. The day of a scheduled meeting, Trump tweeted that there wasn’t a deal to be made with Schumer and Pelosi because (he said) “they want illegal immigrants flooding into our Country unchecked, are weak on Crime and want to substantially RAISE Taxes.” That’s when S/P cancelled the meeting and said they’d instead negotiate directly with Senate Republicans.
We could argue about if it was reasonable of them to cancel a meeting with someone who publicly insulted them and said there was no deal to be had shortly before the scheduled meeting. I think they justifiably felt that they had to respond to a public insult, and cancelling that meeting was a proportionate response. (Plus, they were probably pissed off and meeting while pissed off is seldom productive.)
(They didn’t refuse to meet permanently; they were meeting with Trump again by December, which led to Trump having a memorable public meltdown after Trump blindsided Pelosi, Schumer, and his own staff by inviting reporters into what was supposed to be a private meeting.
To describe all that as Trump was willing and eager to deal but those stubborn progressives refused from the start to even meet with him is, as I said, objectively false. And it shows how biased and partisan your recollections are.
By the way, do you not distinguish between centrist Dems – like Pelosi and Schumer – and progressives? Pelosi hasn’t been a member of the House Progressive caucus since 2003.
From the title I expected a critique of standardized tests. But this is good too.
That’s the point, though. You really cannot both-side this. Democrats protested peacefully against Trump’s policies. Republican Trumpists tried to violently overturn the election.
I really don’t think that’s an unbiased report of hat happened. But even if it were, I don’t think it makes sense to pretend this was the beginning of the relationship between Trump and Democrats. Everything that Trump did during his campaign for office influenced the way he was seen by Democrats. He had made it very, very clear that he opposed every single progressive viewpoint.
It’s interesting to me that some politicians, after winning elections, will be called on to represent all their constituents and consider this their duty. And they will get blamed when they cannot build bridges. Trump, on the other hand, has never once tried to bridge the gap. And his base celebrates him for it. Considering all this, I do find it rather ironic to blame Democrats for Trump’s horrible politics and the increased radicalization of the electorate and the US in general. As if it were their job to reign him in. As if he wasn’t an actual adult, responsibe for his own choices. As if there weren’t a whole bunch of GOP politicians who, if we accept the fact that Trump is incapable of acting rationally, could have stepped in. They didn’t have to confirm his judges. They didn’t have to pass his tax cuts for the rich. They did. They could have opposed his policies. They didn’t.
To now blame the ones who did oppose him and tried to protect democratic institutions for what he left in his wake seems rather disingenuous.
I actually agree that the rules were enforced very inconsistently. I just do not agree that this was something that mostly happened to conservatives. Many trans activists, for example, were accused of harassment simply for objecting to extremely transphobic posts. They got banned, sometimes without warning or explanation. False accusations of rule-breaking were systematically used against progressive activists and led to restrictions and outright bans.
I think one of the key issues here is the definition of “progressive.” Because while many Fox-followers love to accuse mainstream media of being horribly biased against conservatives, this only rings true if you accept the framing that “everybody to the left of us is a horrible progressive.” But because of the extreme rightward drift of the Republican Party, this now includes centrists and even center-right Democrats. As well as all those without particularly strong political alliances.
I would argue that those groups represented the majority of Twitter users, who may or may not have been comfortable with how things were going. Actual progressives, as far as I witnessed, were hardly having an easy time, precisely because the protections against harassment were unclear and often arbitrarily enforced (the rules about blatant misinformation, less so). And the decisionmakers, who after all represented corporate interests above all, were not doing those progressives any favors. It wasn’t great before the takeover. It just got even worse after.
Unfortunately, after Musk took over, only one of the far-from-center groups was welcomed back. The actual leftists, socialists, anti-racism activists, prison abolitionists, etc. were harassed in high numbers. And even if they stuck it out, a lot of their readers didn’t, because they didn’t want to be forced to constantly read that shit instead of having constructive conversations.
When I read people talking about Twitter failing, they mean Musk’s loss of advertisers, the exodus of users, and the platforms reduced influence. They talk about costly mistakes he made (thinking binding agreements didn’t apply to him, firing essential workers who had been with the company for years, the stock price, etc.)..
Now, dissatisfaction with the user experience these days is definitely part of the reason why some people rather enjoy their own schadenfreude about those mess-ups. But “Twitter sucks so much more now” and “Twitter is worth so much less now” can coexist. Only the second, however, is driving the narrative of the platform failing, as far as I can tell.
I will freely admit that I haven’t followed that particular discourse in a while now, so it is entirely possible the company is recovering. But those are the failures that people are usually talking about when they are pointing out that just because Musk made billions by investing in the right technology at the right time and may or may not have some truly visionary ideas, that doesn’t mean he is incredibly smart in general.
Which is precisely the point of the cartoon, I thought. Rich people being considered smart and capable in every field, and their ideas given great consideration simply because they are rich, not because of any achievements or expertise in a specific field.
Why else would rich people keep finding investors for their different ventures even after repeated failures, so long as they managed to protect their personal wealth from the fallout?
BCB, glad you liked it!
Yes, that’s what I consider the point of the cartoon, too.
Amp –
Just to reinforce: If that’s what happened, that’s genuinely shitty.
That’s not what I said. I think you need to benchmark these things – Reaching out like Trump did, as flawed as anything he ever does, was unusual. It signaled, I think, a willingness to work across party lines. You can disagree with me on this if you want, but I think that there are a whole lot of alternate universes out there where Trump managed to make deals.
To an extent. The entire Democrat caucus, save two, has basically voted in lock-step for the last seven years. I’m sure that there are policy differences between Democrats, and I’m sure the backdoor conversations are lively and interesting, but I’m not sure those differences make it into the voting record. Specifically on social issues… What do you think the differences are between a Democrat like Pelosi and a Progressive like Jayapal?
Okay, but this is what you said:
That’s a ridiculous and false claim. Why are you so resistant to saying “whoops, my mistake?” You sometimes seem very unwilling to admit even clear errors.
Please try to occasionally put in supporting links for your factual claims.
Looking at the Bipartisan Index for the Senate in 2021 (most recent year released), a measure of how often Senators participate in bipartisan sponsoring of legislation, it’s apparent that Republicans legislate far more in lockstep than Democrats. 7 out of the 10 most bipartisan Senators are Democrats; 10 out of the 10 least bipartisan are Republicans. It’s the same in the House – 7/10 of the most bipartisan are Democrats, 10/10 of the least bipartisan are Republicans.
To a degree, voting in lockstep is a good thing – without some ideological/policy agreement, parties would be meaningless, which would be a problem since I suspect most of the time what party a politician is in is the main information voters have. OTOH, although a degree of ideological harmony is good, absolute lockstep probably wouldn’t be ideal.
Pelosi is a weird case, because she was the House leader. At least when she’s majority leader, her primary way of killing legislation she doesn’t agree with wasn’t to vote against it, it was to make sure it didn’t get a vote at all, which makes comparing what she and anyone else voted for a little fraught.
I’d say that I’d expect Pelosi and Jayapal to agree on most issues – they’re both in the same party, after all. Both are pro-choice, both are pro-minimum wage, etc.. They disagree more at the margins, and legislation reflecting the margins is less likely to ever reach the floor and be voted on.
However, Jayapal is more willing to consider large moves against the status quo, while Pelosi is going to protect the status quo. So for example, as chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, Jayapal endorsed legislation to expand the Supreme Court by four seats; Pelosi responded by saying she wouldn’t allow it to reach the floor.
Another example: Pelosi just this week signed a letter calling for a halt in weapon transfers to Israel – a big change of position for Pelosi, and one that her staff implied wouldn’t have happened at all without the deaths of the World Central Kitchen. In contrast, Jayapal has been calling for the US to get tougher with Israel for months. Another example: Jayapal was a strong supporter of “Medicare for All,” which Pelosi opposed.
In short, the differences are that they’re both Democrats, but Jayapal is willing to split with the Democrats when progressives are further left than the Dems in general are.
Amp @ 17
Because I didn’t. The problem I have interacting with this crowd, and I’m not saying you’re doing this consciously, but I think you fall into a kind of debate-bro mentality, where you know (or at least suspect) that I have a point, and interacting with that point might be uncomfortable, and so you ignore the point being made to focus in on some minutiae you can “debunk”.
My point was that I think progressives bungled an opportunity to use Trump as a lever to drag culture to the left. My example of that was that Trump seemed unusually willing immediately post-election to make deals, and I don’t think Democrats capitalized.
Regardless of how well it worked out, regardless of who’s job it is to build bridges, regardless of all the other responses… I’m just saying the opportunity was there. Someone could do themselves real harm by climbing up to Trump’s ego and falling to his IQ, it would take work, it would take a suspension of one’s own ego, and I’m not saying that it was anyone’s job to do that work and take that abuse, but the opportunity was there.
Your take away is that P&S only walked away and refused to meet after already meeting Trump and after he made some stupid public comments. Sure, context! Your guys aren’t as bad as I made them sound. But what I said wasn’t wrong, and the context you’ve added really doesn’t refute anything. The claim was neither “ridiculous” nor “false”, it was “incomplete”, as basically every point made online ever is because we generally don’t invest chapters of text backing up every datapoint we write, and I don’t see a great reason to make your points for you, particularly on bits of data that are secondary to the argument.
I’ll try, but I didn’t think that would be contentious.
I also want to point out:
The question was: Do you differentiate between Progressive Democrats and Centrist Democrats?
My answer was: To a limited extent, because they basically vote in lock step and have for years. I’m sure there are interesting conversations at the margins, but they never make it to the floor in any material way.
And then I asked: Specifically on social issues, where do you think they differ?
Your response in order:
Paragraph 1: “But Republicans are even more in lock step than Democrats.”
Which… Sure. I wouldn’t differentiate much on the right except on the margins either, particularly where policy is concerned.
Paragraph 2: “And voting in lock step is good”
Which… Sure, but it makes for a pretty homogenous voting record.
Paragraph 3: “Pelosi is weird”
I know you didn’t mean it like that, but you’ll get no argument from me in that the majority or minority leader is a special case, but I don’t think the answer would have changed much if we’d picked out Debbie Wasserman Schultz.
Paragraphs 4-7: “They basically vote the same, but they have disagreements on the margins, and every now and again Jayapal will break to the left”
Which I think was supposed to answer my question about where they differ on Social issues, which was my mistake: I was unclear, and a lot of things I don’t consider social issues progressives do. I meant the kids of “family values” social issues that I think Trump was uniquely positioned to be malleable with.
“Trump approached the Democrats, and Pelosi and Schumer refused to even meet him.” is an objectively false description of what happened, Corso.
If you can’t even admit that, then you’re not willing to base what you say in reality, and there’s no point continuing this discussion with you.
it’s my recollection that members of Trump’s transition team steadfastly refused to meet Obama’s administration for handoff planning etc, which was certainly a violation of / departure from established norms of the peaceful transfer of power (and not, ah, the last departure on that front)
regarding Twitter, to me the changes in verification have rendered it useless for getting news quickly, since it’s now impossible to tell if an account is attached to a reputable journalist or news organization, someone who has paid their own way, or an imposter
“I think you fall into a kind of debate-bro mentality, where you know (or at least suspect) that I have a point, and interacting with that point might be uncomfortable”
Jesus christ you couldn´t make this stuff up if you tried.
Is that why you engage here Corso? Because you believe people´s disbelief at your ridiculous arguments is somehow a reaction to how brilliant they are?
Amp @ 19
To be fair; I prefaced that with “as I recall”, because it was seven years ago, and for some reason I thought they moved much faster to never-talking-to-him territory. I accept your correction.
But I’m still not sure why you made it into the main character. It’s an inaccuracy on an example of a thing that does not change the nature of the example. Couple you please actually engage with the point?
Dragon @ 20
I’m going to pull an Amp and ask for a citation… I don’t think this is true at all… Christie ran the transition team and work started before the electoral college even finalized their votes, and when he was let go, Pence ran the transition team. Like everything he did, my impression is that the transition was messy, but relatively in line with normalcy. His departure and transition to Biden was a shitshow, but that’s not the example you used.
Avvaaa @ 21
It’s not why I engage, no. But it is how I reconcile the people who don’t answer direct questions, or squirrel off into tangents. Famously, I’ve been told that people here don’t owe me responses, and that’s obviously true: Of course you don’t. But if someone chooses to engage, ignores the point being made, and refuses to answer despite multiple re-engagements, I don’t know what they expect me to think. At some point I feel like it’s obvious that the point is being purposefully avoided, and if no one wants to explain why, then that’s my internal narrative.
Your point, as I understand it, was that Trump sent out signs that he was willing to cut deals with Progressives, and that Progressives rejected those overtures because they were sore losers. You know going into this discussion that most commenters on this blog are going to disagree. So you need to bring some evidence to the table.
Namely, to take this assertion seriously, I need you to demonstrate that Trump did, in fact, extend olive branches and that Progressives did, in fact reject them. In your original post you cited only one so-called olive branch – that Trump invited Caitlyn Jenner, a wealthy, conservative potential donor, to use the bathrooms in Trump tower even though she is trans. You never specified what the Progressive response to this magnanimous gesture was, and I don’t recall the incident at all. What do you think the Progressive response should have been?
Then when pressed to expand on what olive branches, you responded:
@7
This is the only example of an olive branch extended and then rejected, but Amp ably demonstrated that your memory was faulty on this point @11, which you acknowledged @22.
So, we disagree with your assertion, and you have provided no evidence to support it.
The terrible burden of always being correct at the same time as being the only one to argue in good faith while addressing, without fail, the points made by one’s opponents must be heavy, indeed.
I’m not replying to your (Corso’s) most recent reply to me, because Kate’s comment covers everything I would have said. Thanks, Kate!
Oh, except, yes, you did say “as I recall.” Which is honest of you, which is good; it means that although what you said is objectively false, it wasn’t a lie. I don’t think I did call it a lie, but if I did, I withdraw that.
“. But if someone chooses to engage, ignores the point being made, and refuses to answer despite multiple re-engagements, I don’t know what they expect me to think.”
Maybe you should question whether your points actually merit a serious response.
Personally, I ditched Xitter because I don’t want to support a platform run by a guy who not only platforms Nazis but publicly agrees with them and gives them extra reach. It wasn’t about whether I liked or didn’t like the information I could access there, or whom I could choose to engage with. I didn’t want to be part of continuing to help Xitter be dominant if its owner and head was going to engage in antisemitic, anti-Muslim, transantagonistic rhetoric because I don’t want to be any part of that brand.
Elusis, honest question: Do you mind that I post my cartoons on Twitter?
I ditched Twitter because I couldn’t stand the constant ads and the endless nasty tweets from people who were clearly not credible sources.
I didn’t go to Twitter to have fights, but to see what was going on in the world. You can’t get that from Twitter now, or at least not without wading through a lot of ugliness and hate, so I’ve migrated to BlueSky.
I took one look at Twitter in 2006 and said “nah”. I stand by that choice.
Amp, honest answer? I wish you wouldn’t. Do I “mind”? I’m not going to boycott you over it (obviously) but I’d prefer you leave and join Bluesky which is where I migrated to, and I’d prefer to see other folks I like and admire do the same.
I’m curious whether you’re still seeing much engagement there though – John Scalzi says he’s getting so little engagement-to-follower ratio over there compared to what he gets on Bluesky that it made it easier for him to leave, but he’s also got the weight of an extremely unusually successful career cushioning whatever social media choices he makes, I realize.
Oh, I do wonder why you’re still running the Xitter sidebar on each page, particularly since it doesn’t update any more….
It would be lovely to see it become a Bluesky sidebar!
Twitter was completely left-wing with strong censorship of the right.
Now it’s a free and open website.
That seems like a huge right-wing tilt to you, because you only post and read in your bubble.
I have really tried not to do that. Whether you know it or not, this site is a huge left-wing-protected bubble. But I read here, and very occasionally post here, because I want to see what you people are thinking. There are some things here I never thought about before. There are things here that have realigned my thinking as — basically — a right-winger.
You will never know that joy if you just want to stay in the protected bubble of like-minded thinkers, never being exposed to other thinkers, never having to change your thinking slightly, and never having to understand why half the population think differently than you, instead of just condemning them all as purely evil racists and deplorables.
Elusis: I don’t usually look at “Alas” from the front page; I just frequently check the “comments” section of the admin’s view. It’s an efficient way for me to keep up with new comments, but it means that if there’s something broken in the sidebar, I tend to not know until someone tells me.
I’ve removed the twitter thingy. And I’ve been on BlueSky a while. :-)
I’m definitely thinking of leaving Twitter altogether. I’ve lost engagement there, and I doubt I’ll recover. I don’t yet get much engagement on Bluesky; Daily Kos and Reddit are currently the only social sites I get frequent engagement on.
Celeste, I just tried adding my BlueSky to the sidebar and results are… kind of ugly, as you can see. There’s no plugin for people who are stupid with computers, as far as I can find. Plus, the options are limited for other backend ways that I won’t describe now because boring.
Karen: I don’t understand your seeming assumption that because I run a left-wing blog, I therefore must be cloistered and never read or engage with smart people to my right. Wherever it comes from, your assumption is mistaken.
If you believe this, then you must be firmly embedded in your own bubble. There are many, many examples of Xitter censoring views it doesn’t disagree with.
If someone who understands this stuff wants to help me put in a bluesky sidebar as described here, and can describe it for me step by step like I’m a first grader, that would be helpful. Or just give me the exact code I should paste into an html widget in the sidebar. :-D
Amp I cannot help you with the sidebar, but I forgot you were on Bluesky and turns out I already follow you! And can try to remember to reskeet you there to help drive engagement, not that I have much following myself. :)
Am I following you back? If not, let me know your Bluesername.
“Twitter was completely left-wing with strong censorship of the right.”
Great username/comment synergy.