Elon Musk’s Twitter

private

I was an early user of Twitter – May 2007. It is not as fun as it used to be and there is a tremendous amount of noise, but it is a useful medium especially for news and commentary. Back during 2015 – 2016 during the explosion of popularity of neo-fascist and neo-Nazi Charlottesville-type accounts, it was heartening that Twitter began to moderate its platform to prevent threats of violence, m/disinformation and hate speech. While it was flawed and pockmarked with loopholes and poor enforcement, at least it existed.

Conservatives, whose current political ethos is partly reliant on feigned victimhood and grievance, naturally saw themselves as somehow a target of bans on hate speech, violent rhetoric, and other platform rules. Ordinarily, they would have relished the opportunity to prove how well markets work and set up a competing platform that did everything Twitter does, but with – I don’t know, more Nazis? First came Gab, the virulently anti-Semitic home of the Pittsburgh Synagogue mass murder. Then came Parler, which couldn’t figure out its own tech. Then came Gettr, which is a nothing, and then Truth Social, which Trump owns and is his platform of choice.

Shockingly, none of these Twitter alternatives ever caught fire and conservatives continue to whine incessantly about Twitter bans that they earned or “shadowbans” and other nonsense.

I harbor no illusions that the people who owned Twitter in the past were somehow paragons of virtue, or that the people who own any tech platform are better than anyone else, but I think that Elon Musk is nothing more than a modern-day Barnum. He’s invented very little but gotten very rich off of others’ work. He is a rich techbro who just wants to be loved and to be thought of as funny. He’s a fraud. His gigafactory in South Buffalo makes practically nothing and has done little except redistribute NY tax money to a private corporation. His cars may have done a lot to help usher in consumer acceptance of EVs, but because of his public antics I would never want to buy one. His repetition of Russian anti-Ukrainian propaganda has eclipsed whatever good he did giving UA access to Starlink, his satellite-based internet service.

I realize that people are usually more complicated than some binary “good” or “evil”, but to the extent that my consumer choice and my dollar mirrors my values, I do not choose to give Elon Musk my money, no matter how good his product.

Turning then to Twitter, it is driven by advertisements, and the content is the product. That means every Twitter user was a @Jack product once, then a $TWTR product, but now is an Elon Musk product.

I didn’t feel strongly about Jack Dorsey or the Twitter board. But I don’t really want to be an Elon Musk product.

I’m sure he’s going to un-ban all the toxic banned accounts, and that will cause Twitter to devolve into something nastier than it already is or was. I don’t hold out a lot of hope about what it will become as a platform – whether it was fun or informative or intellectually interesting.

So, I probably won’t delete my account, per se – I’ve deleted all my old Tweets, however. I may delete the app from my devices. I had already greatly reduced my presence there over the last 2 years but I really don’t want to be Elon Musk’s product or part of some unfunny experiment of his. I do not see him as a force for good in the world any more than Peter Thiel or any other reflexively anti-woke, right-wing character. They’re all trying to out-Joe Rogan or out-Jordan Petersen each other.

A long time ago, I made the conscious decision to avoid talking-head cable news like I was allergic to it. News should be news and not a few think tankers and ex-pols yelling talking points at an anchor. I don’t care if it’s Rachel Maddow or Tucker Carlson – it is uninteresting to me. The local paper is a shadow of its former self. Twitter had been a good substitute for gaining information from myriad sources as it happened, and completely supplanted blogs and RSS feeds for me by about a decade ago.

I’m interested to find out what the next thing will be. More cat videos, I suppose.

Lying Liar Jul Thompson

WNY Tea Party: Objectively Pro-Horse Porn

The tea party have decided to come after me. Probably because Jul Thompson is friends with the woman who is running the effort to kill Clarence schools. That’s the only explanation for bringing up 5 and 6 year old lies.

Remember: Jul Thompson is a liar. 

Have you ever known someone who leaves a wake of destruction behind them? Case in point, Alan Bedenko, liberal blogger, formerly wrote for ArtVoice, then left with Jeff Kelly and other staff to write for The Public, another liberal rag.

*Geoff Kelly. But never mind.

I sat with a friend today and shared with her my frustrations over my inability to persuade Carl Paladino’s Campaign for Governor in 2010 to answer the ridiculous charge that he was a racist, which were predicated upon emails Bedenko fabricated to “take him out” of the race against Andrew “2nd-Amendment-be-damned” Cuomo. As I attempted to provide her with some documentation to that effect, I found this little gem below, that I had never seen before. I had, at the time, shared the article from the Niagara Falls Reporter in which Bedenko had admitted to having fabricated some emails to sully the reputation of then (real) Mayor of Buffalo Steve Casey.

Let’s be 100% clear here.

I have never fabricated any emails to sully the reputation of Steve Casey, or of Byron Brown. I have never fabricated any emails to anyone, anywhere, and I have never fabricated any emails about – or from – Carl Paladino.  Anyone suggesting that I did (or that I would) is a liar. 

I don’t know the author but he is spot-on.

[I omitted here a lengthy paean to Carl Paladino, the savior and messiah of the Buffalo School system].

If I had a million dollars… I would sue the pants off of Alan Bedenko, challenge him to take a lie detector test and let him perjure himself in a court of law. Carl Paladino is one of the finest men I’ve ever known, and he, students and families of the Buffalo Public Schools and the people of New York deserve far better than being lied to by a nutcase on a liberal jihad and held hostage by the race-baiters of the School Board and the Buffalo Teachers Union. It’s a rare bird with “intestinal fortitude” that would subject himself to the outrageous and unrelenting bogus accusations of racism. We who know Carl, know that he is making an enormous sacrifice committing himself to this otherwise impossible task. He has given up his precious time, reputation and personal comfort because he cares so deeply for raising the level of achievement and providing a better future for the residents and families of the City of Buffalo.

Jul Thompson
Founder, TEA New York

Jul: Presumably Uncle Carl can provide you with the filing fee to sue me. I mean, you wouldn’t have standing to sue me, and Carl’s well past the statute of limitations to do so.

If I had fabricated those emails – you know, the racist, pornographic emails that Carl had sent and forwarded, including the one showing a horse having anal sex with a human female – why didn’t Carl go ahead and sue me back in 2010? 2011? 2012? 2013? Go ask any of Carl’s bigshot buddies whether he sent them. Ask Jamie Moses. Ask Larry Quinn. I can give you more names, if you want – names of people who might not necessarily be public figures. Email me at buffalopundit[at]gmail.com and I will give you a list of the names of people who received the pornographic and racist emails that Carl sent. Any time. 

The reason why Carl never sued me? He sent them. They’re his. Now, let’s take a look at the nonsense that Jul Thompson (the wife of Rus Thompson) has found:


Could some of the Paladino e-mails been forgeries?

This, and other questions, that the Albany press refuses to ask
by Jerry Myrle Fuller
Sunday, April 18, 2010

(Note: Most of you know that I am not a reporter by trade or training, and that my area of expertise is meteorology, so if this reads like a first-person journal entry, that is part of the reason. It seems to flow a little better that way.)

By now, most of you have heard about the e-mail leak from a liberal blog known as wnymedia.net that purports, in big letters, to be displaying the scandalous “racist and sexist e-mails” put forth by Buffalo developer and Republican gubernatorial candidate Carl P. Paladino. Immediately I became suspicious. The article asserted that the e-mails were real with all the authority of a Facebook chain message. So, I did some research.

Initially, this article was going to be a plain old rant about how this state seems to treat upstate politicians with a lot less respect than downstaters, pointing out the curious parallel between this and Chris Collins’s alleged “lap dance” comments that were unverifiable and blown way out of proportion, killing his proposed campaign for governor. It is no coincidence that both came from Buffalo, and it is also no coincidence that it has been decades since the state of New York has had a governor from the upstate region. However, I began to notice something: while for a few days, it appeared that Paladino’s campaign would indeed go down in flames, as would-be supporters ranging from Curtis Sliwa to Mark Williams disavowed him over the controversy, something funny happened: Paladino’s die-hard supporters rallied around him harder than ever. Paladino has a strong cult following, with passionate and outspoken supporters– something I really don’t see outside the political class for Lazio or Levy. They began to see the outrage over the e-mails as over the top. This led to wnymedia.net trying to push its rebuttal and insist that Carl Paladino was a dirty racist unfit for the office of governor of New York.

So, I looked into wnymedia.net– specifically Alan Bedenko, the man who portrays himself as “buffalopundit–” to see who this guy was. To put it bluntly, he’s an ambulance chaser (i.e., an auto injury attorney) who joined the Democratic Party in 2003. Having sporadically read his commentary, he’s always been fairly strongly liberal. This was relatively mundane information, but then I stumbled on a little item from the Niagara Falls Reporter (a local alternative tabloid in the Niagara Falls area) that had something eerily familiar. The article dates to February 2009 and stems from an unrelated e-mail feud between Sam Hoyt and Buffalo City Hall (my emphasis added):

Well, let’s get one thing clear. The author admits that he’s no reporter, and boy is he right. I defend people against whom lawsuits have been brought. I am not an “ambulance chaser”, and haven’t done plaintiff’s personal injury work since 2001.

Big catfight in Buffalo last week between amateur bloggers Alan Bedenko of Buffalo Pundit and Glenn Gramigna of New WNY Politics, precipitated by the self-important Bedenko’s decision to publish what he even said was a series of fraudulent e-mails purporting to have been sent between some top aides to Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown last summer. Clearly, the e-mails were meant to slander and defame the people at Buffalo City Hall. Why Bedenko, who is an attorney in real life, chose to publish them is anyone’s guess. Enter Gramigna, who openly speculated that — since Bedenko was the only one to publish the lurid e-mails — perhaps Bedenko in fact had been their author. Actually, the theory makes a lot of sense. The e-mails were shopped to various news outlets last summer, and my impression was that they were created in response to the publication by the Niagara Falls Reporter of another series of e-mails between the married state Rep. Sam Hoyt and a young and comely Albany intern he was carrying on with. The Hoyt camp openly accused Brown’s first deputy mayor, Steve Casey, of being behind the leaking of the Hoyt e-mails — which were genuine — and Casey, perhaps coincidentally, figures prominently in the admittedly fraudulent e-mails published by Bedenko. Also perhaps coincidentally, Bedenko was a strong supporter of Hoyt during the last election cycle, has been a consistent critic of the Brown administration and was, after all, the only one to publish the garbage. Anyway, he phoned Gramigna “in a rage” and, being a lawyer, claimed his rival to be guilty of defamation. For his part, Gramigna is every bit the clueless lump comedians make fun of when discussing bloggers, and immediately posted a retraction. One question remains: Who did write the slanderous and potentially damaging e-mails Gramigna ascribed to Bedenko? Bedenko vehemently denies he wrote them, of course, but who knows?

Glenn Gramigna was being paid by one Syaed Ali, who is widely rumored to have been the author of the emails in question, and had no proof other than “open speculation” that I wrote the emails, because I published them. Makes perfect sense, right? It’s logic for idiots!

Alan Bedenko has a history of questionable e-mail “leaks” that pre-dates the Paladino e-mail flap. As I understood it, reporters are supposed to check the reliability of their sources before quoting their allegations as fact– something that did not appear to happen when these e-mails were leaked and subsequently went viral. Considering that I’m pretty sure wnymedia.net isn’t on most of the Albany press members’ must-read lists (their articles rarely show up on the major blogs), I’d venture to say there was also some shopping going around with the Paladino story as well.

What “history of questionable e-mail “leaks”? The Syaed Ali stuff? Hell, you can go right here and read all about that, from that time. Here is the article I wrote about Gramigna immediately after he published his “speculation”, and I expressly threatened to sue him. From that article:

UPDATED: Gramigna has retracted what he wrote, and what his source told him. That’s appreciated, but still horseshit.

Apart from this morning, when I called him in a rage, I can honestly say that I’ve never exchanged a single word with Gramigna, despite having helped him promote his dreck-laden site when he started it. His business model is: get local politicians to buy ads, print positive crap about them and negative crap about their opponents. Look for an alternative to completely decimate that business model, coming soon.

If I had written the offending emails – which I didn’t – I would have reprinted them last summer, when they were originally sent. They are alleged to have been sent by Mr. Gramigna’s newest advertising client, Syaed Ali. But I didn’t print them last summer. Indeed, I alluded to them a couple of times only in an off-handed manner. I had theories as to who might have been sending them, but someone in law enforcement somehow landed on Mr. Ali, and he alleges that he was subsequently placed into custody and that his belongings have been confiscated. I’ve gone on record saying that, if what Ali said is true, it’s a grave injustice.

Furthermore, if I had sent them, I wouldn’t have pimped them to mainstream media – I would have posted them on my site contemporaneously so that the TV and other reporters would give me linkage and credit.

But I didn’t write them, I wouldn’t have written them, I have nothing to gain from writing them, and never in my wildest dreams would ever conceive of writing something like that about anyone, much less an elected official.

For Gramigna, acting apparently as a conduit for the flailing Ali, to even suggestthat I was behind those emails is a disgrace – and a defamatory one, at that.

I have my disagreements with the Brown administration – I don’t like their secrecy, I don’t like their sense of entitlement, I don’t like their Machiavellian machinations to try and upset ECDC and its endorsed candidates, and I don’t necessarily think that they do the best job for Buffalo. That doesn’t mean I would ever stoop so low as to spread vicious, defamatory rumors about him or his officials.

I am not trying to claim that the entire thing is an absolute hoax. Paladino himself has acknowledged that at least some of the e-mails in question were in fact authentic. Many of them, knowing Paladino’s public persona and admitted racial insensitivity, aren’t even all that surprising. However, there is the question that if Paladino in fact did not author some of these alleged e-mails, why did he not come out and deny them? The best answer that I can give is that Michael Caputo didn’t even try to do so. Caputo, after the e-mail controversy broke, stated repeatedly that “We’re not sure about the authenticity of the emails, and we don’t care. I’m not even going to comment on the emails. It’s not something I care to look at.” He has characterized the leak as a “liberal Democrat blog smear” and has declined to delve into the details.

Carl is a fucking lawyer. It doesn’t matter what Caputo did or didn’t say. Carl had two and a half years to go ahead and sue the shit out of me. I’m just a middle-class lawyer/blogger and he’s a multimillionaire. Why didn’t he just sue me if it was false?

There could be lots of reasons. The biggest is that they’re provably genuine. Next would be that bringing that lawsuit would have opened up Carl’s own reputation to scrutiny. He knows better than to subject his reputation to the discovery process. Lots of reasons.

As for Syaed Ali, the idea that I wrote emails accusing Byron Brown of being gay is so palpably riduculous and false that Gramigna himself retracted the allegation. Mike Hudson didn’t because Mike Hudson knows how to write a story without crossing over the lines of libel, and didn’t directly accuse me of anything.

Jul Thompson is a liar. 

Best of 2013

http://www.flickr.com/photos/masinka/11498001503/in/pool-buffalominute/player/

For me, the best thing of 2013 was, hands down, a good result from a horrible health scare in the family. Everything else pales in comparison. 

So, I asked people on Twitter to give me their best of 2013. Here’s what they said. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A protected user suggested: “BCAT opened, Start-UP NY announced, Harbor Center development, Riverbend project, and BNE made a Buffalo video people liked!”

 

 

 

Last – minute entries: 

– Bills stay (for a time).  Yeah, they lose, but we’d miss them if they were gone.

– Sabres change leadership.  No place to go but up

– Dinosaur Barbeque comes to Buffalo.  2014 will taste better than 2013

– Trader Joes comes to Amherst.  Ditto

– Unemployment rate in WNY dropping.  Good.  “nuff said.

– The Stock Market is UP.  Not bad for a Kenya – born socialist. 

– The Tea Party is DOWN.  Only took the near-bankruptcy of the US Government to do this, but hey – count your blessings.

And: 

Long Live TOY – Defending Children’s Theatre in the Nickel City is one of the most positive stories to come out of this region in years- which is why we decided to try and tell it in Documentary form.

Meg Quinn, TOY’s Creative Director and Co-founder along with others from the arts community fight the Collin’s 2010-2011 Cultural funding cuts in the midst of their 40th season.  The community rallied against Collins to help remove him from office and restore the funding.

Through the prism of a unique non-profit children’s theatre we see the impact and importance of cultural assets.

The film won two audience awards at Buffalo International Film Festival, and many were moved to tears at Sunday’s screening at the Dipson Market Arcade.

A positive story that few will probably see because it’s “just children’s theatre”.

Austin McLoughlin
Mary Beth Murray
Long Live TOY Producers

[vimeo 67359471 w=500 h=281]

Long Live TOY – Defending Children’s Theatre in the Nickel City – (Preview Trailer) from AP McLoughlin on Vimeo.

I wish you all a happy, healthy, peaceful, and prosperous 2014. If you’re going to be outside tonight for the festivities, please stay warm and safe. 

(The slideshow above displays photographs that talented WNYers have added to the AV Daily Flickr Group.)

The One Thing Podcast on Trending Buffalo

By way of reminder, about twice per week – usually on Mondays and Wednesdays – Chris Smith and I meet up with Brad Riter to record a podcast for Brad’s new venture, Trending Buffalo.  It’s usually about 25 minutes long, and it’s almost always about “one thing”. If you’ve missed the last couple, they’re posted below, but you can subscribe to its feed using iTunes, and keep track of it here

Books: 7/12/12

[audio:http://www.trendingbuffalo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/TBOneThing07-11-12.mp3]

Food: 7/10/12

[audio:http://www.trendingbuffalo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/TBOneThing07-09-12.mp3]

Chris Collins: 7/5/12

[audio:http://www.trendingbuffalo.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/TBOneThing07-05-12.mp3]

Chris Charvella: His Path to Atheism

Because he proposed the ultimate, NSFW title he used for this introspective series on faith, and I suggested that he use that very title on Facebook and promised to link to it when he did, I now link to it and suggest that you read it

Chris is a former colleague of mine from WNYMedia.net, living and working in Batavia and providing news and views from a rural Democrat’s perspective. Please add his blog to your readers. 

Announcement: Archived Posts UPDATED

Chris and I wrote for WNYMedia.net between about 2005 and November 2011, when we moved here to Artvoice. After we left, WNYMedia have gone through some changes, one of which rendered our archives unsearchable, difficult to find and access, and, unfortunately, useless. That’s six years’ worth of work that we couldn’t access. 

I occasionally like to write about issues that are chronic problems, or revisit ideas or decisions or plans that have come up in the past. That’s been impossible since late November.  But on top of that, it sucks to be unable to access six years’ worth of my own work – my own belongings – in any meaningful or logical way. 

That changes today. Chris, Brian Castner (whose Doubleday book “The Long Walk” will be published July 10th) , and I retained the services of Chris Van Patten to take a database backup of our entire WNYMedia archive (including images, but not including embedded video) into a chronological and searchable blog. So, if you’re looking for any old articles, head over to www.buffalorecord.com, the repository of my blog posts from 2005 – 2011. 

(I’m told the redirect via buffalorecord.com might not be fully operational for everyone yet. In the meantime, follow this link.)

Predictions 2011 Revisited

In the current issue of Artvoice, notable locals give their predictions for 2012. I blew the deadline, but I found my predictions from last year, and thought now would be a good time to review them.

In 2011, nothing will change significantly.

• As in every year, Buffalo and Western New York will take two leaps backwards for every tentative step forwards—in all things. Incremental change (or more accurately, window dressing that masquerades as change) will take place here and there as the community’s attention turns to unproductive arguments over the Peace Bridge, the inner and outer harbors, casinos, and other longtime development projects.

• Chris Collins will rudely run roughshod over friend and foe alike in his re-election campaign, and a Democratic challenger will be far more competitive than in 2007. The Legislature will be downsized, and Collins will attempt to dictate the outcome.

• As Carl Paladino’s 15 minutes of fame elongates like Stretch Armstrong’s appendages, he will attempt to generate political buzz every few months by insulting people. A compliant local media will transcribe his every vendetta-fueled outburst and treat it as “news,” whilst asking its readers to weigh in through idiotic online polls. However, without Michael Caputo in charge of messaging, “clever” will be replaced by “disturbing.”

• In late 2011, the Erie County Legislature will again turn into a three-ringed circus whereby local cultural organizations do battle with Republicans over 0.1 percent of the total budget.

• The Statler will become a flashpoint for a civic discussion (re: blood feud) regarding buildings that have outlived their current usefulness, are historically significant, but unreasonably expensive to do anything with. This will become particularly acute when the preservationist conference comes to the renovated-but-still-just-awful Convention Center.

The last two didn’t exactly turn out that way, as Mark Croce pulled together an investment group to save the Statler and begin what appear to be earnest redevelopment efforts, and the 2012 budget didn’t become a circus because Collins lost and let Poloncarz step in with his priorities for funding. The preservationist conference gave Buffalo a boost of self-congratulation, as the local nostalgia industry continues apace.

Other than that, it was pretty damn spot-on.

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