Blocking people on Twitter is usually a trivial thing and often a necessary thing. I do it all the time -- it almost always involves 10-follower MAGA whatabots (whatabout + bot) (tm) who want to shart Republican talking points at me. Hardly worth mentioning.
But sometimes the context of the act is itself so hilariously revealing that it deserves special mention.
Hence the Blocker Awards.
Today, we brave all eleven members of the Broward County wingnut mob to count your ballots and determine the winner in the Blocker Award How Greenwald Was My Valley category.
Several years ago -- as Glenn Greenwald was alternating his weekly hot oil massages on MSNBC with screeds about what a dump MSNBC was and how the Obot-stooge media refused to give him a platform to express his opinion -- a non-trivial fraction of Mr. Greenwald's orthodoxy enforcement squad (dubbed by one wag as the Spleenwald Horde) lost their shit when I started pointing out that Glenn Greenwald sometimes flat-out lied, frequently argued in excruciatingly bad faith, bent any tragedy he could lay his hands on to serve his political agenda and routinely went from zero to spittle-flecked ad hominem attack mode in under four seconds.
They also did not like me pointing out that his habit of reacting to any criticism from anyone with full nuclear hysterics was having the effect of taking attention away from (translation: shitting on) whatever actual story he was trying to report. I was practically ordered to recant my heresies and ignore Mr. Greenwald's hysterics if I wanted to stay on good paper with some in the Liberal High Command.
I have never been to Liberal High Command, nor materially supported by them in any way, nor have I ever been invited to take part in any of their rituals or festivals, so the threat was somewhat barren.
As this was happening, many of my former dear Liberals fair-weather allies either dove for cover and/or blocked me and/or hunkered down in my comment section to tell me what a bad Liberal I was. At several once-prominent-now-extinct "Obama Is Worse Than Boosh!" Liberal blogs which had never before acknowledged my existence in any way, I was suddenly a poster boy for Jackbooted, Obot Traitors to Greenwald's Glorious Revolution.
It was, taken all in all, hilarious, and provided an ample field of nominees for the How Greenwald Was My Valley category.
But then a funny thing happened.
As the Rise of Donald Trump and Trump/Russia blew all of his Purity bullshit to flinders, Glenn did what Glenn was bound to do all along. He damn near Thelma and Louised the fancy, quarter-billion-dollar media supercar that Pete Omidyar bought him.
He crawled right into Putin's snuggle sack. He started making regular guest appearances on Fox News as Tucker Carlson's wacky "Liberal" sidekick. All while escalating his endless fusillade of mad tirades directed at anyone who questioned the inerrancy of his wisdom.
And then he noticed me tap dancing in my "I Told You So" shoes just long enough to block me.
Then ol' Glenn -- who boldly called people "cowards" for deleting their past Tweets -- deleted 27,000 of his past Tweets lest they ever be used by his drooling, jackbooted critics to point out that driftglass was right about Glenn and his Spleenwald Horde all along.
So today, with all the ballots counted, the winner of the Blocker Award in the How Greenwald Was My Valley category is the man for whom the category was named: Glenn Greenwald. Who is shown here telling Democrats that the only honorable way to advance a progressive agenda is to deliberately let Republican Party stab them in the heart, over and over again.
Spoken like a man whose never needs to worry about health care because all of his expenses are being picked up an internet billionaire.
Vote Here! (Just kidding. It's my Tip Jar.)
3 comments:
I am always surprised (though really, I really shouldn't be, really) by how people with whom I thought I agreed will turn on me in a heartbeat when I veer off of their official ideological line.
I mean, it's disappointing, lightning fast, and I never see it coming. I think, "Wow! What led to this? I agree with this person!"
Then I remember, yet again, how the internet encourages the same kinds of behavior out of everyone, and that one's side of an imaginary line doesn't determine whether one is subject to the same bad behaviors.
I've never wanted to be a moderate. I'm probably not now. But man, the online left is angry and bitter.
(Oh, and as a note on my last comment: I didn't mean for that to sound like what you call Both Siderism. It's not. It's more than that. I could post a picture of my cat on twitter and get 13 bitterly insulting replies from assorted people.
I appreciate the perspective on Greenwald, who was sort of an icon on the left for a while during the Bush years.)
Olbermann is everything spleenwald thinks he is and wishes he was
Post a Comment