HELP! Call the Twitter Police!

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Typical of conservatives, the minute their values are impacted—the moment THEY are personally impacted—the first thing they do is dive for the cover of victim status, and DEMAND someone (government?) DO SOMETHING!

Pastebin Document by #Tcot Warrior @GregWHoward

Twitter bills itself as “without a doubt the best way to share and discover what is  happening right now.” However, it is rapidly becoming the best place to cyberbully,  post pornography, and engage in the nastiest and most vulgar speech possible, all  with impunity. Despite growing protests from long-established users, Twitter  continues to officially turn a deaf ear to the growing outrage.

Read every delicious drop of hysteria  from this "White" knight

It is not that there are not valid concerns some might have about content—particularly where children are present on the net. But it's the sheer cluelessness in his screed about an entire history of censorship, liberties, and the slippery slopes that are ensured the very moment we start talking about anyone deciding what is and isn't appropriate.  Such "TOS" rules were always ruinous on most services, and it's the very freedom of twitter—even it's anarchic freedoms—that we were just praising last year in Iran (and many are trying to crush in China).

What's he's asking for is the 2001 version of AOL:  An army of tweet nanny's in Mumbai, who will decide what little Muffy and Conner can hear today. And a few of them might even stop liberals from calling him a wussy.  

Most of the time, this guy is running around Twitter spewing arch conservative Beckisms that just make me cringe.  But he's really outdone himself here.  And it's so typical of what these modern angry conservative men are about. Control. Of everyone and every thing but their own wretched little lives.

We Stand on the Cusp of one of Humanity’s Most Dangerous Moments

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Chris Hedges is one of our most important writers because he's not afraid to see that bad people produce bad outcomes, and good people wanting good outcomes have virtually no guarantee of winning in the long run of history. They're just fond of thinking that they might.

There are about 100 excerpts I could post here to entice you to read on, but this one caught my eye:

We live in a culture characterized by what Benjamin DeMott called “junk politics.” Junk politics does not demand justice or the reparation of rights. It always personalizes issues rather than clarifying them. It eschews real debate for manufactured scandals, celebrity gossip and spectacles. It trumpets eternal optimism, endlessly praises our moral strength and character, and communicates in a feel-your-pain language. The result of junk politics is that nothing changes, “meaning zero interruption in the processes and practices that strengthen existing, interlocking systems of socioeconomic advantage.”

Ok,here's one more..

The cultural belief that we can make things happen by thinking, by visualizing, by wanting them, by tapping into our inner strength or by understanding that we are truly exceptional is magical thinking. We can always make more money, meet new quotas, consume more products and advance our career if we have enough faith. This magical thinking, preached to us across the political spectrum by Oprah, sports celebrities, Hollywood, self-help gurus and Christian demagogues, is largely responsible for our economic and environmental collapse, since any Cassandra who saw it coming was dismissed as “negative.”

Read the Essay

Rumors With a View About David Shuster

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UPDATE1 (4/4/2010):  I have it from a pretty reliable source that David Shuster has NOT been fired (as of this writing, anyway).  And his bio has NOT been removed, as some had claimed. His "blog" may have been removed, but that could have been due to some unrelated issue.  His MSNBC bio page is still there.

 

With a few notable exceptions, I've always been a fan of David Shuster.  I like his boyish enthusiasm as he tears into the leg of any guest he knows is full of shit.  After some exchanges with him over the past few months, I can't say I'd be very surprised if he was in fact on the way out at MSNBC, but I've yet to see any hard evidence that this actually happened. 

It's mostly a lot of supposition based on this New York Observer story.

Inside the CNN Stockroom: Network Recently Shot Pilot Staring MSNBC's Shuster and NPR's Martin

Recently, according to CNN sources, the network's in-house team shot a pilot for a news show featuring David Shuster of MSNBC and Michel Martin of NPR as co-anchors.

The NY Times Brian Stelter gets on board, and adds..

“If true, this is unacceptable and David will be punished appropriately,” an MSNBC spokesman, Jeremy Gaines, said Friday afternoon"

Then Mediaite steps up to fan the gossip wires

And in the short term – he’s not anchoring at 3pmET. Shuster has already been trouble with MSNBC for his inappropriate tweeting, and hasn’t used Twitter for months. … An NBC insider tells Mediaite, “Shuster has never been a major player at MSNBC.”

Bringing up the rear, the ever faithful Wingnut Daily, Newsbusters, couldn't pass up a chance to bust General Soros for trying to buy another foot soldier for his Communist News Network (owned by one of the largest media conglomerates on the planet).

Shuster's Twitter account has been silent since January 27, when NewsBusters and other center-right blogs documented his blatant conflict of interest in covering O'Keefe's arrest. Ironically, his last Tweet cites a post from the far-left group Media Matters. Need we say more?

An uncertain period of time after the Observer story dropped, Shuster's website at MSNBC up and vanished.  Hmmm….

So there we have it. On the surface, a lot of hearsay and supposition based on an anonymous "CNN source" that reported a "pilot" that may or may not have happened; that Shuster missed his shows; that there had been prior friction between Shuster and MSNBC; and that a web page disappeared. 

But that's all we know. It's certainly a compelling sequence, but hardly conclusive. It's mostly interesting to me because it illustrates how our new blogger-centric world can play a story in incremental steps, from many bloggers, each with their own world (and industry) view.  

Perhaps David is toast, or perhaps his dog got hit by a car and someone edited his page and broke it. Nobody has made any statements on the record—or supplied any evidence—that says anything to the contrary.

My gut says it's probably true. But mostly because I'd like it to be true. Especially that part about NPR's Michel Martin going to CNN. 

In my view, she's one of the best broadcast journalists working today. If CNN wants me as a viewer again, she'd bring me over in any time slot.

Good luck, Shuster, wherever you are, and wherever you go (or not).