So the main thing going Thursday wasn't so much Independence Day so much as it was Donald Trump's petulant and masturbatory salute to himself in Washington, DC. This was a day that was rightly both dreaded and ridiculed. You would think that with a situation like this, especially an event that many people have known about for some time, Twitter (or at least tweeters) would tee up things that are both inflammatory and wrong. And I would have liked to have not fallen for such deceptions, but I did -- several times.
I don't know which one was first, but the most twisted and upsetting one concerns a tweet (I'm not going to embed them here, partly because I don't want to help any possible disinformation and partly because I'm too lazy to find the tweet) with a photo of a woman, sitting in a lawn chair, smiling while holding up a sign that says "CAUTION," with a drawing of that father and daughter, latter in the shirt of the former, found dead face down in the Rio Grande. Since this "parade" would attract MAGAt zombies to the Lincoln Memorial, I and many others in the Twitterverse were so aghast at the appalling sadism by this ... well, bitch that many of them wanted her "doxxed," or outed. I did my moral duty and both liked and retweeted the picture and the doxxing request.
Later did I realize I was played for a fool. A few hours later I see the same picture of that woman. But this time it was in a re-tweet of a tweet by an actual reporter in Washington, DC. This journalist actually recorded a quick interview with the woman -- who says she is actually anti-Trump, is there counter-protesting, and often fundraises for Democratic causes such as assisting the refugees in those concentration camps in the southern border. The frozen images in our head, along with the heated and hateful environment in which this took place, along with our (well-deserved, I might add) preconceived notion of the captive audience, led us to believe something that was, once a person actually, you know, did some work, totally opposite. The harassment and doxxing, as far as I know, hasn't stopped, but it's clear that those trolls and bullies are now coming from "our" side.
I got fooled again by the size of the crowd of Trump's wankfest. I had followed coverage of it through Twitter most of the day because I had heard that there was going to be rain and even thunderstorms that might cancel the event. (They delayed it but didn't cancel.) Partly because of that and, in my most fragile corners of my heart, partly because I wanted to see that asshole get his comeuppance, I was following along with tweet after tweet of rain pouring on DC and the sparse MAGA crowd that had yet to descend on and defile the Reflecting Pool. The more I saw these pictures, the more I believed that this was going to be an epic fail. And I wanted it to be.
And so when Trump finally started talking about American colonists taking over airports, I swore that that he was doing so in front of dozens of people. There was one guy (probably a bot) which tweeted out a photo claiming to be the crowd listening to him when it was, in fact, last year's March For Our Lives. (The lack of leaves on the trees was a dead giveaway.) But there other shots of the crowd coming from other sources -- and these were really. And unfortunately, it shows a huge crowd listening to that prick Trump. It may be (and I'm not joking) a bigger crowd than the one at his inauguration. But #Resisters, who swore that there could not be such a huge audience after seeing the pathetic numbers in the hours leading up to it, wouldn't believe it and in fact tried to call the photos fake the people tweeting them bots. Hey, I don't want it to be real. And I'm still not sure how in the hell so many people swarmed the place when there was no one in the hours before. (You should not put anything dirty past these Republicans.) But I have to face it: A lot of people were there. (See Trump boast about this and accuse Democrats of lying. We should just bring up the inauguration again.)
Oh, and another controversy -- not about Trump's fake-ass parade, but the shitstorm over a non-white Ariel! When Disney announced that they were casting some, uh, black tween for their live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, some Republicans got all bent out of shape and took to Twitter to rant about how, uh, mermaids are losing their white identity. Of course we all starting to clap back and ridicule these Republican snowflakes ... until one person looked into what purports to be the loudest on the anti-black Ariel side and determined that she was, in fact, a bot. If that's the case (and I think it is), isn't it prudent to ask how much of a Twitter storm casting a black girl as Ariel really is making? Isn't this all bullshit stirred up by Russian bots or bored Macedonian teenagers?
So, triply humbled, I have had to check myself before I wreck myself. As heated as I can be, and as I think we still need to be in the face of Republican authoritarianism, I was tricked by people. I let preconceived notions of what I think people are to cloud my judgement, decide false things are true, and get good people into a lot of trouble. I don't want to do that anymore. So I'm going to pull back on yet another picture I saw around Twitter. This one apparently is of Melania Trump, presumably after his husband's piece of crap verbal onanism. It's a shot of her, smiling, wearing a white dress ... with her nipples showing through that dress. A lot of Democratic tweeters are making fun of her, and a lot more are calling her a slut. But no, I'm not buying it. The photo would have had to have been taken on the same dais as Donald Trump, and that photographer is somehow zooming in on the First Lady? Besides, a lot of things on the picture are off. Her breasts are bigger, for example, than I think they are. I'm staying away from that, even though I don't see any Twitter pushback on this doctored photo.
Don't believe everything you see, folks. Twitter can be shit sometimes ... no, a lot of the time.
I don't know which one was first, but the most twisted and upsetting one concerns a tweet (I'm not going to embed them here, partly because I don't want to help any possible disinformation and partly because I'm too lazy to find the tweet) with a photo of a woman, sitting in a lawn chair, smiling while holding up a sign that says "CAUTION," with a drawing of that father and daughter, latter in the shirt of the former, found dead face down in the Rio Grande. Since this "parade" would attract MAGAt zombies to the Lincoln Memorial, I and many others in the Twitterverse were so aghast at the appalling sadism by this ... well, bitch that many of them wanted her "doxxed," or outed. I did my moral duty and both liked and retweeted the picture and the doxxing request.
Later did I realize I was played for a fool. A few hours later I see the same picture of that woman. But this time it was in a re-tweet of a tweet by an actual reporter in Washington, DC. This journalist actually recorded a quick interview with the woman -- who says she is actually anti-Trump, is there counter-protesting, and often fundraises for Democratic causes such as assisting the refugees in those concentration camps in the southern border. The frozen images in our head, along with the heated and hateful environment in which this took place, along with our (well-deserved, I might add) preconceived notion of the captive audience, led us to believe something that was, once a person actually, you know, did some work, totally opposite. The harassment and doxxing, as far as I know, hasn't stopped, but it's clear that those trolls and bullies are now coming from "our" side.
I got fooled again by the size of the crowd of Trump's wankfest. I had followed coverage of it through Twitter most of the day because I had heard that there was going to be rain and even thunderstorms that might cancel the event. (They delayed it but didn't cancel.) Partly because of that and, in my most fragile corners of my heart, partly because I wanted to see that asshole get his comeuppance, I was following along with tweet after tweet of rain pouring on DC and the sparse MAGA crowd that had yet to descend on and defile the Reflecting Pool. The more I saw these pictures, the more I believed that this was going to be an epic fail. And I wanted it to be.
And so when Trump finally started talking about American colonists taking over airports, I swore that that he was doing so in front of dozens of people. There was one guy (probably a bot) which tweeted out a photo claiming to be the crowd listening to him when it was, in fact, last year's March For Our Lives. (The lack of leaves on the trees was a dead giveaway.) But there other shots of the crowd coming from other sources -- and these were really. And unfortunately, it shows a huge crowd listening to that prick Trump. It may be (and I'm not joking) a bigger crowd than the one at his inauguration. But #Resisters, who swore that there could not be such a huge audience after seeing the pathetic numbers in the hours leading up to it, wouldn't believe it and in fact tried to call the photos fake the people tweeting them bots. Hey, I don't want it to be real. And I'm still not sure how in the hell so many people swarmed the place when there was no one in the hours before. (You should not put anything dirty past these Republicans.) But I have to face it: A lot of people were there. (See Trump boast about this and accuse Democrats of lying. We should just bring up the inauguration again.)
Oh, and another controversy -- not about Trump's fake-ass parade, but the shitstorm over a non-white Ariel! When Disney announced that they were casting some, uh, black tween for their live-action remake of The Little Mermaid, some Republicans got all bent out of shape and took to Twitter to rant about how, uh, mermaids are losing their white identity. Of course we all starting to clap back and ridicule these Republican snowflakes ... until one person looked into what purports to be the loudest on the anti-black Ariel side and determined that she was, in fact, a bot. If that's the case (and I think it is), isn't it prudent to ask how much of a Twitter storm casting a black girl as Ariel really is making? Isn't this all bullshit stirred up by Russian bots or bored Macedonian teenagers?
So, triply humbled, I have had to check myself before I wreck myself. As heated as I can be, and as I think we still need to be in the face of Republican authoritarianism, I was tricked by people. I let preconceived notions of what I think people are to cloud my judgement, decide false things are true, and get good people into a lot of trouble. I don't want to do that anymore. So I'm going to pull back on yet another picture I saw around Twitter. This one apparently is of Melania Trump, presumably after his husband's piece of crap verbal onanism. It's a shot of her, smiling, wearing a white dress ... with her nipples showing through that dress. A lot of Democratic tweeters are making fun of her, and a lot more are calling her a slut. But no, I'm not buying it. The photo would have had to have been taken on the same dais as Donald Trump, and that photographer is somehow zooming in on the First Lady? Besides, a lot of things on the picture are off. Her breasts are bigger, for example, than I think they are. I'm staying away from that, even though I don't see any Twitter pushback on this doctored photo.
Don't believe everything you see, folks. Twitter can be shit sometimes ... no, a lot of the time.
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