Saving Democracy One Hashtag At A Time

By SJWNY, a Trail Mix Contributor

Listening to the radio, the report given was sourced from the President-Elect’s tweets. #SweetJesusHelpUsWhatHaveWeBecome

Tweets are the perfect answer to someone who wants to both control the message & the messenger. #MuteIfImPissed #BlockIfImAngry

This  seems petty to some but the media holds uber responsibility to this mentally ill unfit man’s success. #Access #FaceTime

hash-tagAt first this man was treated as a joke, horrible though he may be, a passing fancy, nothing to see here. #Lololol

As crowds grew, the Press got “penned” yet said man got time on this/that show, access open. #ThrowYourColleaguesUnderTheBus

Election night comes, predictions swirl down the commode. Uh-Oh. The worst scenario is reality. #IBetterMakeNicey #Access

Stream of media types beckoned to The Tower. Newsflash: if you were called, if you went, eff your integrity. #Enabler

Twitter was instrumental in the Arab Spring, Occupy, Wiunion. It was the tyrant’s foe, the people’s friend. #KissThatGoodbye

Our Government, Our Democracy reduced to 140 characters or less. The people’s foe, the tyrant’s friend. #Resist

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41 thoughts on “Saving Democracy One Hashtag At A Time”

  2. happy december oneth!  and only 1511 days left of having to read/see/hear the TOTUS (twit of the u.s.)

     

    last month, ny times mag: #InPraiseOfTheHashtag

    …we’ve arrived at a strange moment for the hashtag. The people at Twitter are fond of saying that the hashtag is the new URL — and it’s true that you’re just as likely to see the former as the latter these days on-screen at the end of a movie trailer.
    Yet the rise of the hashtag’s commercial possibilities shouldn’t lead us to overlook what is truly remarkable about it. This bit of utilitarian Web ephemera, invented with functionality squarely in mind, has blossomed into a marvelous and underappreciated literary device.
    [….]
    But the hashtag, for the dexterous user, is a versatile tool — one that can be deployed in a host of linguistically complex ways. In addition to serving as metadata (#whatthetweetisabout), the hashtag gives the writer the opportunity to comment on his own emotional state, to sarcastically undercut his own tweet, to construct an extra layer of irony, to offer a flash of evocative imagery or to deliver metaphors with striking economy. It’s a device that allows the best writers to operate in multiple registers at once, in a compressed space. It’s the Tuvan throat singing of the Internet.
    [….]
    These are the hashtags we must celebrate. The poets and wags of Twitter are still out there. The art form persists. We just have to venture forth and find it, exploit it and perfect it. #Letathousandhashtagsbloom.

  3. patd,

    My own tweets have slowed to a trickle after the #FeelTheBern #ImWithHer wars last Spring. Lowest point was watching (in real time) two grown men I like devolve into name calling ending with mutual blocks. My reaction: I don’t need this, life’s too short. The Sane Party’s murder/suicide on social media was a harbinger of things to come. #AhHindsight

    Today’s topic came about because I heard a respected news organization basing a story on the President-Elect’s tweets. This was the info they had. All they had. President-Elect’s Press Secretary is a blue bird & America’s ending up with the fail-whale. Not a harbinger, the new reality. Unfortunately we have no Delete button to solve this problem. #IcebergDeadAhead

     

  4. SJWNY

    Brilliant commentary and absolutely true.  Twitter is just one more piece of evidence in a culture that gives as much if not more value to opinion as it does to fact.  This has always been true within geographic and social groups with your crazy uncle spouting at Thanksgiving.  No harm done, we don’t need to see him for another year.  Talk radio was a hateful cesspool but even its reach was just repeated to the true believers.  Newspapers had circulations, but only a few went beyond the city limits.  Unfortunately Twitter has handed your crazy uncle a global 24/7 access to billions as the followers retweet ad nauseam while the facts actually require reading the linked articles which are often way to long for a steady Twitter users attention span.

    If you like Twitter and I do, salvation of sanity is in the lists.  Mine are set up for Friends, The Arts, Politics, and News.  The general mess gets a passing perusal to see what the hashtags and trends have wrought, but the people I really want to read are in the lists or just in the long breaks where there are honest to goodness books to read ….

     

  5.   He ate and
    drank the
    precious Words –
    His Spirit grew
    robust –
      He knew no more
    that he was poor;
    Nor that his
    frame was
    Dust –
      He danced
    along the dingy
    Days
    And this Bequest
    of Wings
      Was but a Book –
    What Liberty
    A loosened Spirit
    brings –

    ~ Emily Dickinson

  6. patd, that is so much more eloquent than what we’ve come to expect from TEOTUS. (Twit-Elect…)

  7. nytimes:
    Clinton’s lead in popular vote passes 2.5 million.
    To some it is just trivia: Hillary Clinton’s popular–vote lead over Mr. Trump reached 2,526,184 — five times Al Gore’s lead over George W. Bush in 2000. At 1.9 percentage points, her lead is now larger than those of 10 presidents, and it is approaching Jimmy Carter’s margin over Gerald Ford in 1976.
    So what?
    Well, her lead is close to what the final polls before Election Day had shown, pointing to a geographic concentration of Democratic voters and a daunting disadvantage in the Electoral College. Do Democratic presidential candidates now need to build a four percentage-point lead to assure victory?

  8. if, as mccrory says, there were voting irregularities in nc then doesn’t that put in doubt the twit’s win there?

    cnn: North Carolina governor’s race: Partial recount ordered

    North Carolina voters cast ballots for their next governor three weeks ago. But still, somehow, a winner has yet to be declared and neither candidate has conceded.
    Roy Cooper, the state’s Democratic attorney general, has seen a narrow lead grow during that time. According to his campaign, he’s now 10,000 votes ahead.

    Meanwhile, Gov. Pat McCrory, the embattled Republican incumbent who faced fallout this year for supporting the state’s controversial “bathroom bill,” has refused to concede the race because he wants a recount.
    The reason, he’s said, is voting irregularities that could change the final outcome of the race.

  9. “The billionaire of the people ordered young garlic soup with thyme and sautéed frogs legs. I thought he said he was going to drain the swamp, not eat its contents.”

  12. Talk about selling your soul cheap.  You would think Mitt would have held out for a plane ride to California and dinner at The French Laundry.

  14. speaking of jeb! and given mitt as sos, maybe he’ll be the next ambassador to mexico and untrusTED ambassador to cuba… halfgov to Russia since she can see it right outside her house.

  15. noun, plural kakistocracies.
    Government by the worst persons; a form of government in which the worst persons are in power

    Word Origin and History for kakistocracyExpand

    n.

    1829, “government by the worst element of a society,” coined on analogy of its opposite, aristocracy, from Greek kakistos “worst,” superlative ofkakos “bad” (which perhaps is related to the general IE word for “defecate” see caco- ) + -cracy.
    At which point after the election and watching the forming incoming cabinet we get to say, “Oh S***”

  16. I don’t do twitter….   don’t spend half the time I used to on this machine.  Yup…  life is short and I ain’t spending hours staring at some screen.  But if it gives you jollies….  go for it!

  19. Renee

    One of the first things we learned in the military was that we were not ambassadors for our country’s politicians nor did we have any business commenting about our host country’s politics to residents of that country.

    The young lady would have been better off had she taken her stint overseas in her junior year; not only would she be more mature, the elections would have been history.

  21. ap story Lawyers: Trump has to sell DC hotel before taking office 

    It’s a glittering jewel in Donald Trump’s hotel empire. Securing the rights to use the government-owned building where it is housed took him more than a year of negotiating. The resulting lease itself runs hundreds of pages, complicated and dreadfully dull.

    Dull save for clause 37.19 on top of page 103, which has suddenly become the subject of great discussion among experts on government contracting law, and not a few Trump critics.

    If some of the experts are correct — a big if — the first 43 words of this clause could force Trump to relinquish his equity stake in the Trump International Hotel just down the street from the White House. The key part: No “elected official of the Government of the United States” shall be “admitted to any share or part of this Lease.”

    “He’s going to have to divest himself of the hotel,” said John Sindelar, a former senior adviser to the head of the General Services Administration, the government agency that negotiated the lease three years ago. Sindelar left the agency in 2007.

    Other contracting experts agreed, though not all of them. David Drabkin, once the GSA’s senior procurement officer, said he thinks the clause doesn’t apply to Trump because it only prohibits adding elected officials to the lease after it was signed, not banning original parties to it who subsequently get elected to office. He adds, though, that a president leasing the building is “absolutely untenable” because of other conflicts of interest issues.

    The Trump Organization did not respond to emails asking for comment.

  22. deadbeat trump, paul manafort, steve bannon, jeff sessions, and willard romney : the elite of the kakistocracy.

  23. Flatus…   she is a wonderful young lady who was offered a wonderful experience and she took it.  To live one’s life as seen through the lens of politics only isn’t the route I’d choose.

  24. Today’s Popular Vote Count with Hillary more that 2.5 million more than Trump:

     

    State
    Clinton (D)
    Trump (R)
    Difference

    U.S. Total
    65,152,310
    62,626,216
    2,526,094

    13 Swing States
    21,388,355
    22,217,174
    828,819

    Non-Swing States
    43,763,955
    40,409,042
    3,354,913

  25. So I guess we can say drumpf could get to Pennsylvania Ave one way or the other – but not both?

  26. Renee, like you I’ve cut back.  I’m still looking at the screen all day but I’m able to bill for most of it.

    And for those who give a crap, Tiger is back on the links and seems to be doing OK after being off the competitive golf scene for over a year.

  27. Great post Granny.

    We are all playing by Trump rules now

    The choices we face public schools versus private for profit schools the public schools need a pr campaign

    Someone needs to make the cartoon version of privatization and its failure in delivering essential public services

  30. Despite the overwhelming evidence that “for profit” should not be a factor in the delivery of public services – a lot of people seem to think it’s a good idea.

    For profit in the delivery of public safety services leads to more deaths.  For the pro-life party their attitude about what is an acceptable level of death as a result of public institutions is pretty amazing.  Ambulance service –whoops — we were out on another call.  Your house burned down on Easter Sunday – we couldn’t afford triple time, your child died in jail waiting trial due to lack of proper medical attention

    As for educatiion – the pro privates lie about their successes it’s just an excuse to bring back segregation

  32. don’t miss keith o’s #7 on being hacked.  if short of time at least be sure to catch the part starting at 3:30 in.

  33. Jamie, thanks for the vote tallies and the 282 promises. They fine weapons for The Resistance.

    Pat, thanks for the Olbermann videos. America needs more brawling Truthers like him.

  37. Need someone who knows how to do such things to put together clips of all the Presidents since FDR speaking.  Trump is so obviously defective, the comparison might wake up at least a few people.

     

  39. Alas, Jamie, those presidents would include leslie king dba gerry ford, verbless bush, and usurper bush, not exactly the glaring comparison one would wish for.

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