The Marketplace of Bad Ideas

It has been brought to my attention that in a minor oversight yesterday, I never actually said what the Twitter Files was. Fortunately Defector’s Tom Ley picked up that cross and dragged it up Golgotha for all of us. The extremely short summary is:

Speaking of stupid, Conor Friedersdorf’s whole schtick is “libertarian guy who pretends he doesn’t know anything,” but today I actually believe him because no one who knows anything about moderation could write a whole column arguing that there’s no way to tell whether it will be good or bad to invite all the Nazis back on to Twitter. We already know that normal people aren’t interested in defeating Nazis in the “marketplace of ideas,” having long ago defeated them in the “marketplace of bullets.” In 2022 the only people interested in debating the validity of Nazi ideas are Nazis, which leads to the well known “Nazi-bar principle” that Nazis on your platform will eventually displace non-Nazis. The fact that he seems not to understand this makes me wonder what kind of bars Conor hangs out in. Meanwhile Elon Musk is fully out there tweeting Pepe memes, so who can tell whether he’s on the level or not.

Anyway here’s a horny camera company:

It’s also a huge day for Mastodon, which is seeing what some sources believe is the platform’s first true Main Character, the Raspberry Pi Surveillance Cop-in-Residence:

If you’re having trouble loading that toot and thinking “what is this, hosted on a Raspberry Pi?” I have bad news:

The Raspberry Pi Cop seems like he’s very creative at, uh, “miniaturized custom technology projects,” and I’m sure you can imagine how well this is being received by the company’s formerly devoted community of anti-authoritarian hacker types. But most importantly for our purposes:

Death Cab for Cutie and The Postal Service are co-headlining the perfect tour for your most annoying friend. Tesla has a semi, but did Musk lie about his performance? Max Tani reports that New York Times White House reporter and blank slate of both opinion and talent Peter Baker and his wealth-oriented colleague Michael Shear are both doing scab work today, while most Times NewsGuild employees are on a one-day walkout. “Unrest in the Wordle Mines” is a pretty good tagline. And in Dirt, Paul McAdory worked Art Basel as an art handler and all he got was this urinary tract infection (and some money).

Today in Language: Gretchen McCulloch wonders how you spell the colloquial shortened version of “usual?” I think it’s “yoozh,” personally, but I don’t love any of them. And Rachel Connolly is mad about goblin mode. Tell me you don’t have any friends in goblin mode without telling me you don’t have any friends in goblin mode, right?

Today in Too Long: Peter Kiefer posted more than eight thousand words in The Ankler about serially untruthful “Grey’s Anatomy” ex-writer Elisabeth Finch.

Today’s Song: Sleigh Bells, “Comeback Kid”

Yes, I know we did a whole Sleigh Bells thing yesterday but this is today’s song, I can’t help that. Every day I go out in the woods to the gnarled and lightning-struck Today’s Song tree and look under the rock at its foot and whatever the unspeakable Tabs Music Editor wrote on the bottom of the rock is today’s song. That’s the deal. I don’t know what would happen if I broke the deal, but I considered it once and something under my bed growled “don’t.”