☕️ BREVITY AND WITLESSNESS ☙ Tuesday, December 17, 2024 ☙ C&C NEWS 🦠

Supreme Court justice dances her way through woke Broadway musical; progressives flee to BlueSky and discover restless indigenous people; Trump surprise press conference tees up Golden Age; more.

Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! As the week gets rolling, your roundup includes: loquacious Justice Broadway debut is either a grotesque travesty of judicial conflict or a heart-warming story of fulfilled dreams; revolution stirs in progressive social media utopia; Trump delivers surprise press conference and delivers wide-ranging and important comments on many high-profile issues, in stark contrast to Joe Biden’s lack of any comprehensible press conferences.

🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍

Yesterday, NPR ran a story to warm liberal hearts headlined, “Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a longtime theater lover, makes her Broadway debut.” Ketanji Jackson, who plays a Justice on the Supreme Court, played a one-night, strategically ambiguous cameo role on Saturday night in a tedious, woke Romeo and Juliet remake.

CLIP: A taste of a Supreme Court Justice’s female empowerment (1:20).

Of the many delighted corporate media articles describing Justice Brown’s “dream come true,” an opportunity we do not begrudge Justice Brown, but who did not earn the unidentified role by merit but was invited by producers (motivated, no doubt, by an embarrassingly urgent need to sell tickets). In other words, she got the part based on who she was rather than on her acting talents.

This is especially ironic since some people —not me, of course— suspect similar considerations motivated the invitation she received for her other role.

In Hamlet —the original, not the woke remake featuring a cast of only native Hawaiian drag queens— Lord Polonius famously observed, “Brevity is the soul of wit.” Thus it is worth noting that, according to data analyzer Empirical SCOTUS, even among the female justices, Justice Brown is the Supreme Court’s wordiest judge:

I’m not saying logorrheic Justice Brown is the least intelligent Justice, or even implying she was a DEI hire. Shakespeare said and implied that. Look at the order of justices on Empirical SCOTUS’s word counts list, then consider just how right Lord Polonius was.

Justice Brown’s debut in her unidentified Broadway cameo was in a Tony-nominated “romantic comedy” titled ‘& Juliet,’ a progressive re-imagining of Shakespeare’s boring, patriarchal, racist codswallop. NPR described the new-and-improved production as “a modern take on Shakespeare's tragedy that imagines what would have happened if the female protagonist survived and took control of her own life.”

Pro tip: “modern take” means they couldn’t afford period costumes. That and NPR’s brief description is probably all you need to know to avoid the awful production, but here’s a little more. The play begins with Shakespeare’s “playfully reimagined” third-wave feminist wife, Anne Hathaway, creeping into the Bard’s writing room and rewriting his play’s ending, thereby rescuing the two lovers from death’s clutches and awarding them both new love interests.

Romeo, for example, is paired with a non-binary, cross-dressing man.

I mention these eye-rolling details to make a point about Justice Brown’s judgment. Progressives complained bitterly when a conservative justice’s wife flew a Christian flag. But they think this, Justice Brown pretend-acting in a trans-Shakespeare remake while the court is considering a transgender case is a terrific idea. Also NPR, just two weeks ago:

Relish all the joy.

📉📉📉

Uh oh! Remember the French Revolution? It’s starting again. Yesterday, Inc. Magazine ran a thoughtful op-ed titled, “I Give Bluesky Six Months Before It Implodes.” The author, a tech founder who started one of the early social media networks (Intrepid Media), later clobbered by Facebook and Twitter, said BlueSky is collapsing under the unbearable weight of its woke brand.

The author takes several paragraphs to disclose the development that spurred his gloomy scribblings about BlueSky’s limited prospects. What finally did it was Friday’s article on TechCrunch, headlined “Bluesky at a crossroads as users petition to ban Jesse Singal over anti-trans views, harassment.”

In other words, Big Trouble in Little Portland.

BlueSky was the progressive immune response to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. It was initially seeded with the most delicate woke snowflakes, all seeking a safe, fully moderated social media environment free from any criticism of their deplorable sexual habits or the logical fallacies inherent in their worldviews. Indeed, they sought solace with their co-adventurers in progressivism, mutually applauding their brave life choices and bilaterally appreciating their constant virtue signaling in a deafening woke echo chamber.

It went okay for a while. But its user rolls really exploded after Trump’s election, when apoplectic liberals spluttered that, instead of leaving the U.S. as they’d promised, they would symbolically depart by removing the inextinguishable radiance of their progressive presences from Twitter and setting up shop with the early progressive pioneers on BlueSky. Buh bye, suckers!

The problems started right away. Unfortunately, departing progressives made a little too much of a song about it on their way out Twitter’s digital doors. The vacuum created by their sudden departure sucked with it a bunch of conservative trolls and trouble-makers, curious about the opportunity to develop a whole new, unblemished wilderness of wokeness (many lakeside parcels remain available!).

BlueSky’s long-timers (i.e., roughly two years), who until now had been happily and peacefully enjoying their carefully curated, conservative-free community, were appalled and outraged by the newcomers. They demanded BlueSky’s management do something to stop these intolerant interlopers. And like it was hit by a Russian Poseidon nuclear tsunami missile, the exploding conflict washed over the fledgling platform in an all-hands discussion over free speech versus muscular moderation.

It became obvious that, over the two years since its formation, presumably adjusting to market forces, BlueSky had quietly de-emphasized outright banning people and strengthened its individual tools for blocking undesired folks. In other words, one user can block another and never again have to see the blocked user’s posts, or vice-versa. It is the digital equivalent of ghosting a relative who voted for Trump.

BlueSky has heavily invested in its blocking technology. For example, BlueSky lets users upload files containing long lists of accounts to block people en masse, and users can block entire categories of accounts in their account settings. This has led to BlueSky users enthusiastically swapping ‘block lists’ and tips for fine-tuning their personal feed settings to ensure no conservative ideas penetrate their bubbles of peaceful, progressive fantasy.

But sadly, as the Inc. article’s author noted, what with the new, post-election conservative invasion, blocking is no longer good enough for BlueSky’s progressives. Blocking is insufficiently punitive.

That is why BlueSky’s managers are now grappling with their first Change.org petition, with over 25,000 signatures, signed by ‘celebrities’ like Lizzo, demanding that BlueSky perma-ban an anti-trans influencer, by flat deleting his account and blacklisting him to make sure he can never re-join under any other name or email address.

But there’s a problem for BlueSky’s managers, as the Inc. article pointed out. Social media platforms aren’t social clubs. They are social media businesses. The industry noticed that Elon Musk grabbed an opportunity, when he realized that free speech is the best social media business model, the one that attracts the most customers.

BlueSky is now caught between the razor-sharp horns of a difficult dilemma. On the one hand, it wants to grow, but wholesale banning customers for wrongthink is a poor growth model. On the other hand, its most passionate, most loyal, original user base demands wholesale bans.

What to do? There is no good answer. Or at least, there is no obvious answer. That is why the author —who once tried and failed to get his own social media platform off the ground— gave BlueSky six months, tops.

Socialism always destroys itself. The French Revolution lasted just long enough for General Napoleon to overthrow the revolutionary government and become France’s dictator. BlueSky is like a miniature digital Portland, and the winds of revolution are blowing.

🔥🔥🔥

Yesterday, in a wide-ranging Mar-a-Lago press conference, President Trump delivered perhaps his most important comments since the election. The Hill covered it in a story headlined, “5 takeaways from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago press conference.”

Ostensibly, the press conference was arranged to announce a trade deal the President-Elect has already negotiated with Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank Group, a Japanese conglomerate that has invested in major tech brands like Uber, DoorDash, and TikTok.

An enthusiastic Mr. Son told dour reporters that, after Trump’s election, “My confidence level in the economy of the United States has tremendously increased with his victory.” The two men announced a deal where SoftBank will invest $100 billion inside America. Hilariously, during the announcement, Trump surprised Mr. Son with the question, “Would you double it? Would you make it $200 billion?”

Son, finding himself right on the proverbial spot, good-naturedly sputtered a little and finally agreed that, with Trump’s support, he would try to make it happen. So Trump said, “Alright! Two hundred. A two-hundred billion investment.”

Son, obviously amused, chuckled with Trump, exclaiming “he’s a great negotiator!” That is a fact. Trump is one of the all-time greats. Watch the fun here: CLIP: SoftBank CEO—I will try to make it happen (0:44).

Estimates for this one SoftBank deal —just at the lower $100 billion level—are that it will create 100,000 new, well-paying American jobs. It was a big deal, and I know I keep saying this, but Trump hasn’t even been inaugurated yet.

🔥 During his first term, Trump fueled an economic recovery by requiring three regulations to be retired for every new federal rule. This weekend, the President-Elect announced an expansion of that requirement: a ten-to-one ratio for retirements-to-rules. For every new rule that agencies implement, ten regulations must be retired. Watch here: CLIP: Ten-to-one regulatory retirement rule (1:13).

🛸 A reporter asked Trump what he thought about the New Jersey mystery drones. Trump said he thinks the government is lying:

Then the reporter asked Trump if he’d received a classified briefing on the drones. Trump said he’d rather not comment.

The “what are the drones” discussion is a universe of hot takes multiplied by the fog of war. I have nothing to add to that already vibrant but fruitless discussion. No theory seems to fit all the facts, and it isn’t clear that all the facts are true. So good luck.

The government could help clear up a lot of this confusion by, as Trump suggested, telling us what they know. If they really can’t figure it out, then give us the data from the radars, the satellites, and whatever else. But for whatever reason, the government isn’t saying jack. By not saying, by not disclosing even the raw data they surely have, the government is actually inflaming a conspiratorial cycle of doubt and disbelief.

The much more interesting development is the clear consensus that nobody believes the government. Over and over, federal officials have downplayed the drones, trotting out the tired old UFO playbook and claiming people are just seeing commercial aircraft flying out of normal traffic routes, weather balloons decorated for Christmas, flocks of birds carrying landing lights, and other perfectly innocent explanations.

It’s you, not us.

But nobody, not the local police, the state officials, or even corporate media reporters, seems to believe the federal explanation. That signals a massive loss of trust in general, which is a big problem for government. Governments not trusted by the majority of their citizens don’t last.

🚀 Trump talked about the Proxy War in terms that no Western leader has yet used: the cost of human life and the suffering of real people. “We're trying to get the war stopped,” Trump began, continuing “it's a nasty one. People are being killed at levels that nobody's ever seen.”

President Trump pointed out that Ukraine is one of the world’s very few global “bread baskets” (another is in the American midwest). But that feature, a beneficient blessing that has guaranteed Ukraine a history of bloody conflict, also makes war quite deadly there. The ground is nearly perfectly flat. Thus, as Trump repeatedly pointed out, “there's nothing to stop a bullet but a human body.”

He called it a “horrible, horrible war.” Citing weekly reports, Trump said “nobody’s seen anything like it; the number of soldiers being killed on both sides is astronomical.”

Contrast Trump’s comments to the rhetoric of neocons like Lindsay Graham, who appallingly once called the Proxy War “the best money we ever spent.” Real leaders recognize war’s human toll, they don’t avoid talking about it. In three years, not a single Western leader, not in America or Europe, has talked this way. In short, the West has no real leaders.

Watch: CLIP: Trump deplores the levels of killing in the Proxy War (1:47).

🔥 Maybe most importantly, with reporters sneeringly asking whether he planned to “ban all vaccines,” Trump pledged to get to the bottom of the autism epidemic. CLIP: Trump talks about vaccines and pledges to get to the bottom of the autism epidemic (0:49).

🔥 Trump announced the Golden Age of America has begun: CLIP: Trump announces start of America’s Golden Age (0:36).

You can’t fault him for underpromising. “This will be the most exciting and successful period of reform and renewal in all of American history, maybe of global history. The Golden Age of America, I call it, has begun.”

Trump also delivered what sounded like a threat to certain unnamed parties. He said, “And we hope we don’t have any intervening problems, because things happen. Like out of nowhere came the China virus. Out of nowhere came other things. We hope that won’t happen.”

Well, speaking just for myself, after what we’ve been through over the last four years, I’m ready for a Golden Age. I’d even take a Golden Mini-Age. How about you?

Have a terrific Tuesday! Meet back here tomorrow morning for another installment of essential news and commentary in the Wednesday roundup.

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