Tag: Twitter

Satirical Accounts: why I like them

I admit that I enjoy certain types of satire accounts.

My favorite is an academic one; one that openly lampoons the absurd aspects of higher education:

She has 121.2 K followers. Her posts are often met with “you MUST be at our university”; her posts are just so on point.

I like Titania McGrath who makes fun of excessive wokeness: (this thread is hilarious)

“She” has 710.8 K followers.

Here is one that lampoons conservatives of a certain type:

Walter has 142 K followers.

And there is a way followers react to his post: we copy his diction and themes …and for the offended liberal that doesn’t get the joke but reacts with umbrage: we call that “being Waltered.”

Then there is 3yearletterman:

Hey plays the part of an ignorant person who peaked in high school and boasts about mundane things (“I have a 4 figure checking account” “so many youth football championship rings that I cannot turn door handles”)

But the best part: he spouts absolutely ridiculous gibberish…and sometimes even a genuine celebrity will play along! (e. g. Jim Palmer, former Oriole pitching great).

But the best part is when some clueless, sanctimonious scold will come in to tell us what a bunch of idiots we are…that is when we pounce with “bet you don’t have a reserved table at Beef O’Brady’s” etc. (these are things that “Coach” routinely brags about)

Sometimes, they eventually get the joke. But it is hilarious when they don’t; it is kind of fun to watch the sanctimonious know-it-alls work themselves into a froth over what should have been obvious to see.

He has 301K followers. And he has been quoted by Newsweek! (who eventually realized their error)

My favorite twitter follows

I’ve excluded most who I would consider to be “follow because they are friends” accounts.

The inability to discuss anything non-technical on twitter…

I found this thread on the Steele dossier to be useful:

The TL;DR: this was raw intelligence, which included stuff that is unlikely to be true for many reasons, and extracting information from it requires competent analysis, and by “competent” I mean “skilled in this type of intelligence”. Being smart and having “common sense” is insufficient.

OF COURSE, the author was attacked to supporting Trump, not going by Rachel Maddow’s “connect the dots” analysis because she is a woman, etc.

Now, this is technical, but RadiofreeTom was attempting to explain the situation to non-experts. Good luck with that.

Other stuff:

It is common to try for success in your dream field/profession and to come up shorter than you had hoped you would. That leaves this interesting question:

Yes, aptitude matters. I’ve seen people fail out of stem programs because they lacked the sufficient aptitude to attain the level of success that they wanted. You might even said that was true of me; after all, I am not full professor at MIT (and shouldn’t be). And I certainly failed spectacularly at sports.

Now, of course, one can get into this whole aptitude thing: are we talking about genetic aptitude (yes, it exists), or aptitude due to environmental factors (e.g. fetal alcohol syndrome people, or some sort of physically or mentally debilitating injury, or lack of development due to illness, poor early nutrition, or perhaps retarded development due to early environmental factors…) Yes, it is very complicated.

Still…interesting issue, and no, I have zero desire to discuss this with a woke.

Football
The Big Ten and SEC teams are starting play and let the excuses and rationalizations begin:

Is Twitter good for me?

Workout notes: weights only; rotator cuff, pull ups: 15-15-10-10-5, incline: 10 x 135, 3 x 155 (ran out of gas), decline: 7 x 170, military: 8 x 50 standing, 10 x 45, 10 x 45, rows (machine) 3 sets of 10 x 110. plank, side plank (MUCH easier with shoes), head stand, knee stretches, crow (got 35 seconds at the house), headstand.

That’s enough for today.

Twitter: I wonder if using this social media platform is making me shallow and sloppy. There is this study, as well as our decreasing amount of empathy (the ability to see things from the point of view of someone else) and this video (yes, it is from Templeton)

The desire for “Twitter likes”, “follows” and just general approval sometimes leads one to attempt to make that pithy remark that one’s friends approve of rather than to attempt anything resembling a fair and detailed intellectual analysis. This issue came up during the discussion of Twitter’s “like” button. And there is the dreaded “being ratioed” which means that one gets a lot of comments but few “likes” or “retweets” (“being ratioed” is supposed to be a punishment of sorts)

Personally, I like the access to articles. But I’ve found Facebook to be a better platform from which to discuss things as one has more space to make one’s argument.

A couple of comments:
Evidently Trump is calling “impeachment” a “dirty word”. he didn’t always have such qualms.

Steven Pinker He is one of my favorite public intellectuals. And his intellectual honesty just drives some of the “woke crowd” nuts.