As I might have mentioned, I recently started playing around with Twitter. Sweet Jesus, it's a unique environment. With only 140 characters to play with, it's like swimming in a crowded whirlpool, and having people grab you, yell something in your ear, and get pulled away by the tide.
I'm noticing some various trends among users. I find a lot of them fall into several categories.
There's the celebrities, of course. People famous for being on TV, or in movies, or writing books or whatever. I've heard that 1% of Twitter users are celebrities, but 99% of the other users follow them. Which might be accurate; I don't know. Some celebrities just tweet about their lives. Others try to use their celebrity to promote the things that are important to them, like causes. Or... instagram filters.
Here's a little fact nobody mentions: if you're looking to get more jokes on your feed, comedians are a weird bunch. Many of them will try out jokes on Twitter, but a lot don't seem to want to "waste" them like that - and, really, that's understandable. When you make your living having people pay to hear your jokes, you don't want to give them away for free.
So sometimes you end up with streams from comedians like Iliza Shlesinger (@iliza), who seems to mostly tweet pictures from her Instagram feed. But most often, you get a lot of tweets like "Had a great time tonight, @HeliumComedy in Philly! Thanks for coming out!" or "I'll be headlining at the #ItchyKitty in Reseda tonight! Be sure to stop by! Tickets at the door!"
There are a lot of people who apparently don't have anything to say. All they do is read their stream, and occasionally retweet ("RT") something somebody else has written. They don't tend to add anything to the discussion. But then, just to keep things exciting, I guess, they'll find somebody who looks interesting and poke through their feed. Then they'll favorite or RT a long string of things from that same person, and then, after that brief flurry of activity, I guess they just go back to grazing through their Twitter stream passively, like bipolar cattle.
Trivia: "starbang" is to favorite a lot of tweets in a row (because the symbol for "favorite" is a star, see?). There's probably a similar term for obsessively retweeting somebody else's words, but I haven't run across it yet.
There's also a weird subclass of Twitter users (or maybe even superusers) that seem to have allowed Twitter to take over their lives. They tend to tweet or retweet constantly, and I'm not entirely clear that they do anything else throughout the day.
I mean, I'll tweet some random, semi-funny line every so often, but these people spew unrelated jokes every 15-20 minutes. And then regurgitate a string of retweets, and then back to spewing their own "humor." I guess it's easier than getting a life...
I'm coming to realize that for a good 99% of users, if you follow them, it's best to just turn off the ability to see their retweets. It's just a good policy.
You know all those mindless idiots who believe everything Fox "News" and Sarah Palin spew? Yeah, a lot of them have Twitter accounts. They can be fun for a while - they tend to block you before too long, though. (I wonder if I've been blocked more often than I've been retweeted? That's an interesting question; somebody's got to have an app that'll show those stats...)
There's also a collection of what must be bots out there - programs that just spew whatever tweets they're designed for. There are "users" who just tweet ads for random ezines (I'm looking at you, funnient.com); I'm starting to suspect that the entire ad department for a lot of these ezines is a Twitter user sending out promos for their latest slideshow.
Also, if you answer somebody with a quote, you'll suddenly find yourself followed by quotebots (everybody from Gandhi to Marilyn Monroe) - it's weird. (Also, some of these things that claim to be quotebots are just adbots. Go figure.
It's a strange world out there. I'm just sayin'...
What is it about the office of state attorney general that attracts autocratic social controllers who will violate your civil liberties and impose their ideas of:
What you can think?
What you can say?
What kind of person you ought to be?
Who is entitled to equal rights under law?
What constitutes academic freedom?
With whom you can sleep?
Who will be prosecuted and persecuted?
Here is my gallery of rogue state attorneys general who think the office confers a right to enforce dogma and social conformity and tyrannize over decent citizens:
Andrew Shirvell. The assistant attorney general in the State of Michigan has launched a personal vendetta against a gay student at the University of Michigan. Shirvell singled out Chris Armstrong, the first openly gay student to win election as president of the student assembly. In Shirvell’s twisted mind, winning a student election means Armstrong has become a public figure and a legitimate political target; and Shirvell thinks he is justified in superimposing Nazi swastikas over Armstrong’s photograph, in visiting Armstrong’s house at 1:30 AM, in smearing Armstrong’s parents and friends. Here is Anderson Cooper's interview of Shirvell:
This CNN interview affords us a clear and disturbing example of what mental health professionals call reaction formation. It is a fancy term for insisting that the pot is not a pot, at least in public, by adamantly persecuting the kettle. Here are other examples:
The anti-gay family values senator from Idaho whose ‘wide stance’ in a public restroom got him arrested in Minneapolis (Larry Craig);
The anti-gay cofounder of the Family Research Council who was caught with a male prostitute at Miami airport (George Rekers);
The former Speaker of the House who lead the impeachment of President Clinton over an affair with an intern while the Speaker himself was having an affair with an intern as his wife lay hospitalized and dying of cancer (Newt Gingrich).
Does Shirvell have reasons to be jealous? Meanwhile Shirvell’s boss, Michigan State Attorney General Michael Cox, thinks defamation, harassment, intimidation, and stalking are legitimate forms of free speech … if the victim happens to be gay and the perpetrator is an ally and colleague.
Next …
Kenneth T. Cuccinelli. Scarcely two weeks in office, AG Cuccinelli continued to represent a private client in court … thus committing a violation of professional ethics. Cuccinelli is all too willing to abuse his official powers to advance a radically ideological agenda that includes, among other things, a visceral hatred of environmental science. Drawing upon tactics reminiscent of the McCarthy era:
Cuccinelli filed what amounts to a subpoena ordering the University of Virginia to hand over … all available documents, computer code and data relating to Mann's research on the five grants. He also demanded all correspondence, including e-mails — from 1999 to the present — between Mann, now at Pennsylvania State University in University Park, and dozens of climate scientists worldwide, as well as some climate sceptics. The order stated that Cuccinelli was investigating Mann's possible violation of the 2002 Virginia Fraud Against Taxpayers Act — although no evidence of wrongdoing was given to explain invoking the law, which is intended to prosecute individuals who make false claims in order to access government funds.
Cuccinelli has filed briefs in federal court challenging EPA jurisdiction over greenhouse gas emissions and fuel efficiency standards for cars and trucks. "We cannot allow unelected bureaucrats with political agendas to use falsified data [my bold] to regulate American industry and drive our economy into the ground,” he insists. His extremist agenda includes opposition to abortion, sex education, gay rights, and the recently enacted healthcare reform bill, which he has challenged in Federal court. Finally, Cuccinelli is a Birther.
Next ….
Tom Corbett. As Attorney General of the State of Pennsylvania, Corbett seems to have an exceptionally thin skin - especially when accused of hypocrisy and misfeasance in office. To question Corbett’s integrity is tantamount to violating state law. Earlier this year, Corbett subpoenaed Twitter:
… to provide “any and all subscriber information” of the person(s) behind two accounts – @bfbarbie and @CasaBlancaPA – who have been anonymously criticizing [Attorney General Tom Corbett] …
The information that Twitter is ordered to provide includes “name, address, contact information, creation date, creation Internet Protocol address and any and all log in Internet Protocol address”.
Here are the Tweets that caused Corbett to issue his subpoena:
”Is it wrong to mix campaign work with taxpayer business? Apparently not when Tom Corbett does it - bonusgate #pagovrace”
“Quiz! Who sputters with indignation over failure to recuse from cases involving contributors? - #bonusgate #pagovrace”
These Twitter subscribers accuse Corbett of duplicity, hypocrisy, and conflict of interest in prosecuting political opponents for the same offenses committed by Corbett:
Sandy Segal said he didn’t know what to think when he received the letter this week.
The envelope, labeled as coming from “Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett,” bore the message: “Please give me your immediate attention.”
He opened it to find Corbett was seeking a contribution in his run for governor. Corbett is seeking the Republican nomination.
“It looked like a pretty official kind of letter to me, at least the envelope,” said Segal, 62, of Susquehanna Twp.
Segal, who said he is a Democrat, later saw small print at the bottom of the envelope that read, “Not Paid For At Government Expense.” On the back, the envelope says, “Corbett for Governor.”
As Corbett has led an investigation of lawmakers accused of using taxpayer money and resources to bolster election campaigns, he is increasingly taking criticism from Democrats on his campaign activities.
As a former lobbyist for Waste Management, Inc., Corbett has blocked community efforts to enforce environmental ordinances. Along with Cuccinelli, Corbett is also challenging the healthcare reform bill in Federal court.
Next …
Bill McCollum. The following is a true account of my personal experience with Florida’s Attorney General. On Wednesday, May 19, 2010, at approximately 2:30 PM, there was a loud knock on my front door; not the customary ‘tap, tap’ of a delivery person bearing packages, but a determined ‘bang, bang.’ When I looked through the security peephole, there was a fisheye image of two men standing outside. When I opened the door, they flashed badges and demanded answers to “a few questions” starting with: “Did you send an electronic message to Attorney General Bill McCollum?” For readers unfamiliar with Bill McCollum and the nature of my “electronic message,” let us recall the story of George Rekers and the infamous rent boy scandal that broke earlier this year (with commentaries by our own Bloggingdino and Captain Fogg). George Rekers is the disgraced neuropsychiatrist and Christian Fundamentalist cofounder of the Family Research Council who went on a European junket with a rent boy and was ‘outed’ by a Miami newspaper reporter. After the story broke, a liberal nonprofit group known as Progress Florida circulated this petition:
Tell Bill McCollum’ “We Want Our” Money Back!
Attorney General Bill McCollum gave $120,000 of our money to a discredited, anti-gay hypocrite named George Rekers. The courts had already deemed Rekers' "expertise’ junk science, and McCollum insisted on doubling Reker's pay to $120,000 from $60,000, ignoring the terms of a written agreement between Rekers and the cash-strapped Department of Children and Families. Finally, Rekers' anti-gay credentials were naturally called into question after he was caught traveling with a gay escort who advertised his services on a porn site. Bill McCollum wasted our tax dollars on a bigoted, ideological crusade that keeps children away from loving homes. Sign our petition below and tell McCollum: We want our money back!
Your intrepid Octopus went a step further. I linked to the website of the Florida Attorney General and used this online contact form to file a complaint against Bill McCollum ... accusing him of defrauding Florida taxpayers. Weeks later, in retaliation, McCollum dispatched two officers to my door with orders to tell me to STFU.
We might be inclined to view Messrs. Shirvell (slant rhymes with ‘gerbil’), Cuccinelli, Corbett, and McCollum as comical if there were no injustices, i.e. if no Americans were harmed by their brand of wedge politics. Regrettably, these AGs are ruthless social conservatives whose standard operating procedure includes bullying, harassment, and oppression.
Here is a grim statistic: The suicide rate among gay teenagers is 3 to 4 times higher than other youth – attributable to discrimination, bullying, and social ostracism at an emotionally fragile time in their lives. And here is my Charles Dickens prediction for a dystopian future if social conservatives and their rabid rabble gain control of our government:
Wedge politics, designed to demoralize and polarize the electorate, will lead to a sharp increase in bias crimes;
The repeal of Roe v. Wade will mean victims of rape and incest will be forced to bear the children of sexual predators;
If a woman has a naturally spontaneous miscarriage, she will be automatically suspected of murdering the fetus;
Women with expired or anencephalic fetuses will be forced carry them to full term, thus endangering their lives;
Victims of domestic violence will not be able to divorce their tormenters;
Poverty and violence will fill the streets.
I refuse to be intimidated or silenced by rogue politicians. If Messrs. Cox, Cuccinelli, Corbett, or McCollum object to the language of this post (and my surly attitude), I dare them to subpoena Blogger or Twitter and discover my true identity. I double dare them to dispatch henchmen to my door and harass me. At my station in life, what do I have to lose? If I chose martyrdom, the cause is worthy. In the end, bad actors on the political stage do not get to write the final drama, and historians do not treat demagogues and despots kindly.
