Big-name journalists are going full Hunger Games on one another on their new home away from Twitter. There’s even a transphobic network server involved, I swear to you. That’s the big crazy on today’s Insanity Wrap — an entire week’s worth of lefty nuttiness wrapped up in one easy-to-swallow medicated news capsule.
Plus:
- Profile in Courage: CBS News stands firm for nearly hours
- Welcome to the gerontocracy
- The EPA wants to quietly tax gasoline (and you) into oblivion
Before we get to today’s big story, here’s a short video to make you lose whatever little faith you might still have in humanity.
This Is Not a Sane World, Exhibit #1,000,006
This person doesn’t identify as a human but as an inanimate object so “it” uses it/it’s pronouns pic.twitter.com/dQlAkKp92E
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) November 21, 2022
Won’t somebody please explain to this sad and confused young woman the logical fallacy of identifying as an inanimate object?
Woke Journalists and the Transphobic Mastodon Server
Big-name journalists — and many you’ve never heard of — loved their gatekeeping role on Twitter. They decided what you were permitted to know, and Twitter played along, happy to enforce the Mean Girls’ rules on their behalf.
But freedom of speech has returned to Twitter under Elon Musk, and journos are desperate for a new digital meeting place where they’re the Mean Girls clique once more.
So they turned to Mastodon, a totally Woke (and decentralized) social media platform, where NPR’s Adam Davidson set up the journa.host server for like-minded wokesters. According to NYT, there are something like 2,000 members who have to prove who they are in order to join. “Journa.host received $12,000 in funding from the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY’s Tow-Knight Center, which has been used so far to pay server and domain registration fees,” reported the Times.
“Indeed, at times, journa.host looks a lot like Twitter, just without all the non-journalists and most of the nastiness.”
Oh yeah?
🧵Journalists signing up on mastodon at the journa[.]host server should know that through no deliberate fault (that i can tell), the server has quickly gained a reputation for transphobia and has been widely banned/blocked.
— Aja Romano (@ajaromano) November 20, 2022
So journa.host is getting blocked by other Mastodon servers, effectively trapping our would-be gatekeepers behind a gate of their own.
It’s all very technical, but Vox’s Aja Romano (from the Twitter thread above) noted that New York radio host “Mike Pesca, fired from slate[.com] for defending his right to use the N-word, posted a transphobic NYT article and allegedly the first thing the journa[.]host mods did was ban another user for complaining that they hadn’t banned Pesca.”
Mastodon is so touchy that it somehow managed to find an NYT article transphobic if you can wrap your head around that.
Wokest of the woke, Parker Molloy (who blocked li’l ol’ me on Twitter ages ago), somehow got herself suspended from journa.host.
There was digital shouting involved, with Molloy calling Pesca an “utter hack.”
How any of this somehow turned a server transphobic is beyond my ken. Maybe Skynet is achieving self-awareness, and it doesn’t approve of Drag Queen Story Hour. Maybe this is just the natural and unavoidable result of putting insanely powerful digital tools in the hands of overprivileged Karens with the manners of hangry toddlers.
But the upshot is that a whole bunch of woke journalists, in trying to flee Musk’s “oppressive” Twitter, somehow got their server labeled transphobic, and now they’re fighting one another like it’s the Hunger Games, and may the odds be never in your favor.
Meanwhile, traffic and user interaction are way up, according to Musk, on the very Twitter service that those screeching journos are trying to replace.
Who wants to join me in a celebratory Bloody Mary this morning?
Recommended: Disney Fired Their Woke CEO but Will Anything Change?
Before We Continue, Here’s a Short Video to Restore Your Faith in Everything…
Dog teaches puppy how to use the dog door pic.twitter.com/rFAkJmUxGt
— B&S (@_B___S) November 20, 2022
Gooder and Harder, America
EPA floats sharply increased social cost of carbon
This story gets a little technical, but I’ll give you the TL;DR after this quick excerpt:
EPA has proposed a new estimate for the social cost of carbon emissions, nearly quadrupling an interim figure that has already drawn legal challenges from a host of Republican-led states.
The Biden administration has been using the Interagency Working Group’s interim value of $51 per metric ton of CO2. But earlier this month, EPA quietly proposed increasing that number to $190.
Meteorologist Ryan Maue sums it up thusly: “This would correspond to about $6/gallon gas tax.”
Not $6 gas, but another $6 in taxes on each gallon. Others say it might be as “low” as an additional $2 tax on each gallon — oh, joy.
The EPA wants to kill the middle class, and “Middle-Class Joe” might just help them do it.
Quote(s) of the Week
Take a look at those time stamps — courage!
Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss totally, publicly contradicting and humiliating yourself.
It’s Official: We Live in a Gerontocracy
Nancy Pelosi Embodied America’s Gerontocracy Problem
Takeaway line: “The average American is now a full two decades younger than the average member of Congress — who, at age 59, is a full two decades younger than the president and outgoing speaker of the House.”
I have nothing against older people, particularly since I find myself becoming one.
But for all this talk about a “government that looks like America,” it looks like a bunch of aging bitter-clingers who won’t let go of power.
Hunger Games Part III: Mocking Laughter
The bid for Mastodon is failing. Woke refugees fleeing Twitter over @elonmusk's takeover have turned to Hive, which seems to have a fictitious origin story and a 20y/o creator. Despite the obvious dangers of information gathering, tech journos are telling people to install it.
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) November 22, 2022
Mastodon is not the end of the story, because it looks like our refugee journos are also trying Hive, which looks like it might just be the FTX of social media platforms.
It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.
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One More Thing…
I caught a glimpse of the price sticker on our turkey when Melissa brought it home on Monday, and I really wish I hadn’t.
Seriously, though: However you celebrate Thanksgiving, please make it a happy and thankful one.
That’s a Wrap for this week.
Come back next week for another Insanity Wrap…
…assuming we make it that long.
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