I can only get so worked up about whatever bullshit Catturd blathers on about because I know a few subtle changes to my personal history and I probably would be him!
Besides his fascist, MAGA polemical elements, one a personal basis he seems like just a dude who has figured out how to serve an audience. And, really, that’s what all writers want to do.
But I will note that one thing I find really annoying about Catturd is his, “Oh, little old me?” bullshit. He is so sincere in his support of what is a very fucked up, racist, misogynistic fascist political movement that is very grating on my nerves.
I have a least one person in my own life like him and that person really pissed me off, too. Anyway, in the end, Catturd will probably be seen as a quirk of our antebellum world.
In a growing sign of how surreal the modern world is, and how difficult it is sometimes to get through news headlines with a straight face — Elon Musk has blocked Catturd on “X.”
This comes after Space Karen made a big deal about how he wants to eliminate the ability to “block” someone on X. (I still have to do a double take whenever I write out “X” instead of “Twitter.”)
Anyway, the whole thing is bonkers. Both that Musk would block Catturd and the idea that Musk would do away with Blocking in favor of “enhanced Mute.” For someone so smart, Musk totally misses what is going on with social media at the moment.
If I was Musk, I would be a lot more focused on dragging X into AI era than I would screwing around with basic, existing features like Block. It is very easy to imagine a scenario whereby you could organically make an AI prompt a central feature of the text-based X.
And, yet, here we are, yelling at each other about the “who shot John” specifics of being blocked or even having the ability to block someone. We are living through the twilight of social media and Space Karen would be smart to leverage the user base of X in preparation for the next technological era, rather than worrying about dumb feature issues.
But, then, it’s not like I had $42 billion on hand to buy Twitter, only to drive into the ground.
While the earnest, well-meaning nature of MAGA “thought leader” Catturd enrages me, I saw a description of him that gave me pause for thought. I’m really self-conscious about my current loser lot in life and the way some smug Twitter liberals were describing Catturd could very well be pretty much applied to me.
And, I hate to admit it, in some ways at this specific moment Catturd is actually on a personal basis a lot better off than me. And, in fact, I suspect there’s at least one smug liberal out there who uses her encounter with me in Seoul many moons ago as something of a cocktail party joke.
I’m talking, of course, of Jennifer 8. Lee.
Many moons ago, back in Seoul, Lee came to Seoul to work on a book about fortune cookies. And while she was polite to my face, I think she and her friend Tomoko thought I was completely fucking bonkers — a total fucking loser. And, occasionally, I will see in my Webstats random poking around about my various write ups over the years of that event from my point of view.
I can just imagine how much glee she gets in talking about the crazy, loser expat she met in Seoul. Her friend Tomoko, who was working for the Asian Wall Street Journal at the time, I think, really, really did not think much of me. So much so, that to this day it kind of rattles my personal self-perception.
And, going forward, if I should manage to write the Great American Pop Thriller, I think I’m going to have to prepare myself things not to be as great and wonderful as I want them to be. Any inspection of my personal life over the last 20-odd years will leave Normal Smug Wealthy Liberal Elites aghast at what a fucking loser I’ve been.
But I can’t change how old I am and I can’t change the past. All I can do is just try to write a good a novel as I possibly can.
Now that I’ve gotten that out my system, we have to take Catturd ™ seriously because it’s very easy to imagine a situation in the near future where there’s a severe political crisis and Catturd ™ uses his ability to trend MAGA-themed topics in a way that helps establish a MAGA New Right-friendly media narrative.
I don’t make the rules, that’s just what we have to worry about.
And if you think I’m being “hysterical,” I “don’t have a sense of humor” or I just think “orange man bad” PLEASE EAT SHIT AND FUCK OFF.
You must be logged in to post a comment.