Tag: political left

Threads vs. Twitter – The Jury’s In

I’ve been wanting to write this post for at least the last six months, so the jury’s been in for quite a while.

When Elon Musk bought Twitter, I was sceptical. I heard tales that he was compelling the remaining staff there to work extremely long days – introducing an extremely brutal culture. I don’t know how true this information was, and I don’t know how true it is now – maybe Musk has taken his foot off the pedal a bit – but I am very against this kind of culture at technology companies, and didn’t want to use a platform that was built by it. I had no intention of deleting my account – that makes it possible for someone else to take your username and impersonate you – I was just going to leave it there and not tweet very much.

Conversely, when Threads was created I was very optimistic. Being an author, I am naturally more inclined to social media platforms that are word-based, rather than those that are image-based, like Instagram, or video-based, like YouTube, and I hoped that Threads could be all of the things that Twitter hadn’t been over the years.

It is almost two years since Threads was released, and the jury is in. Threads is absolutely shit, while Twitter has become possibly the best social media platform on the internet.

Even within the first few days of Threads being released, I could see that those people who were famous, or who already had large followings elsewhere, were able to get much further ahead on the site than anyone else, replicating and reinforcing the kind of celebrity-non-celebrity class structure that existed on Twitter prior to Musk buying it. What’s the point of starting a new social media site if you’re just going to do that again?

But that was far from the worst of it. One of the worst things about Threads is that it appears to be filled with absolutely insufferable cunts. Sometimes I will post something incredibly mild – almost banal – and I will get random people from across Threads – people I don’t know, people I’ve never interacted with, people I don’t even have common interests with – going on a crusade against it. And the most obnoxious instances of these are when they decide to ‘quote’ (or whatever it’s called on Threads) the post, complaining about it, rather than saying anything directly in response – as though to say ‘Look!!! See this disGUSTing thing this person has said!!! What a disGUSTing person!!!!!’.

It’s difficult to decide which aspect of this is most obnoxious. When I see a post online that I disagree with, if it’s by someone I don’t know or someone who isn’t generally well-known, I just ignore it and move on. It’s the refrain that sane people have been saying since the start of the internet: ‘You can always just not watch it / not read it.’. Why is Threads filled with people without this ability? But just as obnoxious is that it is an insane way to interact with someone you don’t know and have never interacted with before. You would never do this in real life.

Related to this is that Threads seems to be filled with people who are surprised that they will be blocked if they are cunts. If someone is acting high-and-mighty, and rather cancel-y, over a very mild post, I will block them. And yet endlessly these people say ‘uGH!!! I can’t beLIEVE that OP blocked me?!?!?! i GuEsS tHaT sHoWs ThAt He DoEsN’t ReAlLy HaVe An ArGuMeNt!!!1’ – no, it’s because you’re being a cunt – and you’re still being a cunt by discounting the possibility that your very obviously cunty behaviour might make people think that you’re a cunt.

But possibly even more annoying about Threads is that the algorithm has a very obvious left-wing bias. I mean it’s more than that – it’s a woke bias. If you post woke shit on Threads, you will do well; if you post anti-woke stuff, you will not do well. You can see how many views a post gets on Threads, and I can tell, before posting something, whether the algorithm will like it and boost it, and how high that view count will be. Oh, you used a swear word? Demote. Oh, you referred to something from traditional culture? Demote. Oh, you talked about how you didn’t like something? Disliking things is hatred, and we don’t allow hatred in our hugbox. Demote. Oh, you suggested that there’s a right and a wrong way to do something? That makes people feeeEeEel bad. Demote. Meanwhile it will push the sloppiest slop from content farms in Vietnam to millions of people.

Twitter, on the other hand, has gone from strength to strength. There is endless self-congratulatory consternation from mainstream media types and Leftists these days about how Twitter is ‘oooooh it’s … it’s a very dark place now … it’s … there’s … there’s a lot of “””hateful””” stuff on there’. Quite frankly anyone who says this has either become so used to their mind being numbed by the fluffy, microfibre cushions of moderation that exist on other sites, or they don’t use Twitter.

Are there some awful people and awful opinions on Twitter? Yeah. D’you know what you do about it? You just ignore it. You keep scrolling. You don’t, in fact, have to absorb every opinion you see. If you think otherwise, that suggests that you are lacking in a vital cognitive ability – and your lack of ability to form your own thoughts is not a justification to limit what the rest of us can do.

Twitter is the Wild West. You’ll find crazy people there, idiots, and some people who are just downright evil. But guess what? You find all of that on Threads too, but it’ll only be the crazy, idiotic, and evil from the political left. What you’ll also find on Twitter is some of the greatest insight and in-depth discussion you’ll find almost anywhere on the internet. You won’t find that on Threads, or Instagram, or Facebook, or Reddit, or BlueSky, or in YouTube comments – all of which are heavily policed by wokescolds and whingelords – be they biological or electronic ones.

You can tweet on Twitter knowing that it won’t receive more or less attention just because it has the ‘wrong’ ideological bias. You can see the analytics for a tweet on Twitter too – and Twitter shows you far more than Threads does – and you can easily see that the algorithm does not wildly vary how much attention it gives a tweet based on whether some super-Sharon thinks it has the right ‘tone’.

I was sceptical about the change to ‘verification’ on Twitter – making it so that anyone could buy it. But actually this change has been brilliant. The old system – where verification was for journalists, celebrities, and politicians – created a class structure on the site. If you were in the ‘verified’ class, you could actually use Twitter to promote things. If you were in the ‘unverified’ class, you were just the audience – you would never have any reach or say or influence – you were there simply to applaud and cheer on the exalted few. The new system is actually far more meritocratic.

I have also been impressed by how Twitter now will pay you to tweet, if you have a premium account. It was absurd that, for so long, Twitter and so many sites like it would make money off of your content without paying you. We do not accept this from YouTube, so why do we accept this from other social media sites?

Twitter is actually enjoyable to use. Threads is not. Threads is suffocating. You cannot do well unless you resign yourself to pushing endless multicoloured slop – but even if you did that, there would be no benefit anyway, since you don’t get paid, and you can’t put links out to other things on the internet because Threads will pummel those posts into the ground too. And at any moment, a haughty non-person may decide to make complaining about you to their three followers their life’s purpose just because you asked a question about the origin of a word.

So here we are, two years later. Threads is vile. It has no reason to exist. Twitter remains the champion.

The Harry Potter Television Show – Dead Before Arrival

They’re making a Harry Potter television show – you might’ve heard. Specifically, it’s a reboot – they’re just going to redo the entire film series as a television series.

Most people, when this information and idea is thrust upon them, just respond ‘Why?’. What’s the point of making a television show of the series? The films were pretty much perfect. Sure, they had a few issues with them, but what film doesn’t? The issues with the series are quite minor, and overall the films are very good. They’re even better when you consider that most attempts at an eight-film series fail (most don’t even get to the third one without going horribly wrong), and the Harry Potter films are remarkably consistent in style.

So why? Why bother making a television series? Some have suggested that it will allow them to include elements from the books that weren’t included in the films. Films tend to be less than 2 ½ hours, and they often aim for 1 ½ hours, so there are just things you can’t include from a book as long as The Goblet of Fire. The total runtime of a television series is, of course, much longer – particularly if it’s one of those 24-episode series’ that the US likes to do.

But the problem is, the films are iconic. Even if you manage to include all of the elements of the book that were missed out from the films, you are never going to beat the music of the films. You are never going to beat the music of John Williams. You are never going to beat the aesthetic of the films. You are never going to beat the perfect casting – there just isn’t better casting than Richard Harris, Dame Maggie Smith, Robbie Coltrane, Richard Griffiths, Fiona Shaw, Jason Isaacs, Gary Oldman, Timothy Spall, Kenneth Branagh – it’s not just that Hollywood is unable to cast such talented actors anymore, such good actors don’t even really exist anymore – there isn’t a new generation of actors that have come along that can match the last one.

The films were also all made before Hollywood went insane. We’re in a post-Last-Jedi world, where every film and television show to come out of America seems to have been written and directed by demented sociology professors. ‘There is no good or evil; there is only power’ is a line spoken by Voldemort in the first film – how can Hollywood possibly make a television show with this guy as the primary villain when so many of them actually believe this idea to be true? Are we going to get told that Voldemort isn’t actually evil, he’s just misunderstood? Is he only evil because ‘society made him that way’? Is he going to be made ‘morally grey’? Hollywood cannot adapt a story it does not understand. Hollywood will be unable to match the charm of the films. Almost every line from the first two films is memorable – I predict that none from the television show will be.

So there is no point. There is no point to making this television show. It cannot possibly outmatch or even just match the films.

If this wasn’t enough to render the show a waste of time and money, the few details that have been revealed about the show so far have been an absolute car crash.

Among these is the casting of John Lithgow as Albus Dumbledore. Now don’t get me wrong – Lithgow is a brilliant actor. But he’s American. For the films, I recall that J. K. Rowling had insisted on only casting British actors for the British parts. At the time I instinctively understood the reason for this. American actors act with a different style to British actors. It is, much like the Americans themselves, more brash, more over-the-top, and overconfident. These are not qualities that British people themselves typically have, and so when Americans try to play British roles, they stand out like bird shit on a chip. Also, American actors are rarely able to do a British accent well.

Now, John Lithgow neither has this brashness to his acting style nor an inability to do a British accent – his rendition of Churchill in The Crown was fantastic. He may even do quite well as Dumbledore. But I think the principle of not having American actors playing British parts is still a good one to follow. Every American cast will have an obstacle to get past which is their lack of familiarity with the British way of being. They will stand out in a story that is quintessentially British.

By far the most tweet-worthy detail to have been released, however, is the casting of a person named Paapa Essiedu – a Ghanaian actor who grew up in London – in the role of Severus Snape, played iconically in the films by Alan Rickman.

Essiedu is not the same ethnicity as Severus Snape, and this is yet another example of ‘blackwashing’ from Hollywood – changing the ethnicity of characters from a European ethnicity to an African or Middle Eastern ethnicity.

Hollywood keeps doing this. And it’s infuriating because all of the Leftoids who scream bloody murder when ‘whitewashing’ occurs (even though that’s usually done just to put a big-money celebrity in the main role) are completely silent when it’s done the other way round – or even worse, they egg it on. It’s also infuriating because, as I’ve mentioned when Russell T. Davies did this in Doctor Who, it is always done for ideological reasons. Hollywood, like much of the political left today, has a deep hatred of Europeans – most of all the British, most of all the English. The reason why Hollywood does this is because they truly hate what they call ‘white’ people (a deeply flawed term) and want to see them erased from both history and art. Hollywood would call it ‘Anti-Racism’ – but it’s the deep irony of the ideology of ‘Anti-Racism’ that it is actually just racism with a different name.

Why would I watch a show about a classic British story when the makers of the show are indicating that they subscribe to an ideology that hates everything that is British?

So this show is dead on arrival – dead before arrival. There is simply no reason to watch it – it can do nothing but fail.

I’m not sure why J. K. Rowling keeps greenlighting these projects. I think she should be more concerned with the failed Fantastic Beasts series. That series was cut short at three films – it was supposed to be five. The three films we got weren’t very good. It just wasn’t a good story – nothing on par with the story of Harry Potter. In fact it didn’t even feel like they took place in the same universe. Rowling should have written that story as a book series first, and then allowed them to be adapted into films. And if she wants that story to exist as anything other than a failure, she should go back, write it as a book series, ignoring everything that was done in the films. That is probably more important and worthwhile than supervising another adaptation of the original books.

Obsessed with dying on hills? You’re an orothanatomaniac.

I have noticed in the last two or three years that there are increasingly people who seem desperate to die on whatever (political, social, or moral) hill they see. Whatever issue or cause comes along, they immediately make it their entire personality – everything about them is devoted to it. They will spend hours and hours of their life fighting imagined mortal enemies online over their new cause. And then a few days or weeks later, another issue or cause – or even just vague concept – will come along, and that is now their new personality – the one thing in all of time that they must dedicate their life to.

It’s a phenomenon I see more on the political left than the political right.

I found I needed a word for such people: perhaps orothanatomaniac. Oro- is an English prefix of Greek origin meaning ‘mountain’ or ‘hill’. Orography or orology is the study of mountains and their formation. Orogenesis is the process of mountain formation. An oronym is the name of a mountain.

Thanato- is an English prefix of Greek origin meaning ‘death’. Thanatology is the study of death. And -mania is an English prefix of Greek origin meaning ‘madness’ or ‘obsession’. So orothanatomania is the obsession with dying on hills – in this case metaphorical ones. An orothanatomaniac is someone who exhibits this obsession.