Where the Sun Does Shine

Arguably the most prolific antisemitic organization operating in America today, Goyim TV, is decamping from its Bay Area base and moving to Florida. Notorious for distributing flyers and dropping banners blaming Jews for everything from COVID restrictions to the Ukraine war, Goyim TV's leader, Jon Minadeo, has indicated that he is tired of his negative treatment in California and thinks Florida will be more hospitable to him and his message:

Despite his close family ties and following in Northern California, Minadeo had increasingly felt besieged by negative press and by criticism of his behavior by authorities. Minadeo’s family owns the historic Valley Ford restaurant Dinucci’s Italian Dinners, a popular road stop en route to the Sonoma Coast, and a source close to Minadeo said the 39-year-old once worked as a waiter at the restaurant, one of his last real jobs.

Yet he had developed a dismal reputation in the North Bay after a flood of media attention on his provocative antisemitic propaganda operation in J., the San Francisco Chronicle, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and other outlets.

[...]

Minadeo hopes Florida will be more hospitable to him and his worldview, and he may have reason to believe that to be true. A recent report from the ADL described an upward trend of extremist and antisemitic activity in the Sunshine State, driven in part by new white supremacist groups including White Lives Matter, Sunshine State Nationalists, NatSoc Florida and Florida Nationalists. 

It is, of course, notable that one of America's most vicious antisemites looked across the country for more hospitable terrain and said "Florida -- that's the ticket". There is absolutely a straight line between the "anti-woke" neo-fascism promoted by Gov. DeSantis and the belief by the likes of Minadeo that Florida will be a welcoming home for his brand of hate. In fairness, Minadeo released a video targeting Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis for signing a bill targeting antisemitism and for visiting Israel; it's not that Minadeo views DeSantis as directly an ally. But the ideological consanguinity is real, to the point that I'm genuinely curious what would happen if an enterprising journalist asked the following question of some DeSantis press flack:

Jon Minadeo, proprietor of the prominent "Goyim TV" outlet, has announced he's moving his base of operations from California to Florida due to the former's ideological inhospitality and overall "woke" atmosphere. Do you credit Gov. DeSantis' policies for facilitating this sort of move, and do expect similar organizations to likewise flee states like California for Florida going forward?

I bet at least half of the press team on DeSantis' crew would give an answer praising the move and bragging about it. It'll be followed up by a clarifying disavowal, of course, but still, it'd be A+ trolling and I want someone to try it.

Testing a IFTTT Cross-Posting App

Apropos this post, this is a test to see if the IFTTT recipe I just created (with helpful guidance from the Boley Law Library!) works.

This block quote is simply to pad out the text of the post, though it does explain why I'm doing this:

For example: I use IFTTT to autopost links to my blog onto my Twitter account. This is incredibly important for me, as I'm pretty sure at this point virtually my entire readership comes from Twitter links. But as best I can tell, neither Post nor Mastodon has anything (whether via IFTTT or otherwise) that provides similar functionality. At the moment, I'm getting there sideways by an app which autoposts my Tweets to Mastodon (so my blog autoposts to Twitter, which then autoposts to Mastodon). But I've found no equivalent at all for Post. In general, cross-posting functionality is really important especially in the transition period where I want to be using both Twitter and its alternatives.

Wish me luck! 

UPDATE: It didn't work.

Why Is Biden Exceeding Expectations as a Progressive President?

Scott Lemieux makes the following observation explaining why Joe Biden has been a much, much better president than many progressives had predicted:

For those of us who lived through the 90s, pragmatism on the part of prominent Democrats was inherently suspect because it was generally used to justify feints to the right, sometimes plausibly rooted in public opinion but other times much more rooted in elite prejudices. For Biden, though, having a sense of public opinion isn’t just a pretext for moving to the right — sometimes it means sensing that the public is with you and going to be more with you and acting accordingly. 

[...]

Biden’s value as a president was going to be heavily context dependent — but, then, if LBJ had magically become president in 1952 or 1992 nobody would remember him as a great liberal on domestic policy either.

I don't disagree with this, but I'll add to it: Biden a good progressive president because he's a consummate party man in a situation where the Democratic Party has institutionally moved in a substantially progressive direction.

When I talked about what I liked about Biden back in the 2020 primary, one area I ranked him highly on is on the "staff positions with good people" metric, and that is part of this. Biden understands very well where the political center of gravity is both nationally and within the Democratic coalition, and acts accordingly. He is going to surround himself with smart, capable individuals who are roughly aligned with median Democratic Party opinion.  And under circumstances where the Democratic center of gravity is in a generally progressive place -- neither captured by bomb-throwing extremists nor slavishly adherent to chin-stroking centrism -- that's a recipe for happy outcomes for progressives.

Help Me Leave Bird App!

Speaking of off-ramps, I am trying to transition my main microblogging app off of Twitter and onto an alternative. But so far, the two sites I have accounts on -- Mastodon (@schraubd@mastodon.lawprofs.org) and Post (@schraubd) -- aren't fully meeting my needs, and each have problems that significantly deter their ability to fully serve as a Twitter replacement.

For example: I use IFTTT to autopost links to my blog onto my Twitter account. This is incredibly important for me, as I'm pretty sure at this point virtually my entire readership comes from Twitter links. But as best I can tell, neither Post nor Mastodon has anything (whether via IFTTT or otherwise) that provides similar functionality. At the moment, I'm getting there sideways by an app which autoposts my Tweets to Mastodon (so my blog autoposts to Twitter, which then autoposts to Mastodon). But I've found no equivalent at all for Post. In general, cross-posting functionality is really important especially in the transition period where I want to be using both Twitter and its alternatives.

I'm also finding it incredibly difficult to find people to follow, especially on Mastodon but to a lesser extent on Post as well. You can get some people via those sites that trawl through Twitter to see who has posted their new social handles online, but that's been limited so far in my experience. The easiest thing (albeit perhaps the most worrisome from a data privacy standpoint) would be one of those widgets where you plug in your email and it tells you all the accounts which are associated with emails in your contacts. I don't think exists yet for either site, and maybe it shouldn't for privacy reasons. The next best move is to go to the people you're already friends with and see who they're following. But Mastodon, in particular, makes this impossibly unwieldy by refusing to show followers from other servers. You can get there via the scenic route if you go to each profile on its own server, but then you can't just click a button to follow (since you're not logged into that server). It's slow and clunky and needlessly frustrating. And I'll note that even Mastodon's basic search bar functionality has, in my experience, been shaky.

Finally, while comparatively minor Post has some user interface problems that are just outright annoying. Defaulting to the "explore" tab, which is not my feed but the feed of a (presumably curated) section of randos, is not what I want and I resent having to swap over to my personal feed every time I go to the site. Also, Post might suffer from having too generic of a name -- good luck finding an answer to any question you have about its functionality online (imagine Googling "how do I cross-post on post")

So what I want is basically (1) ability to cross-post across platforms, especially autolinking to my Blogger posts, and (2) a relatively easy and straightforward way to find and follow my contacts if and when they join the new sites. Whichever site (Mastodon, Post. or something else) perfects that cocktail may well be my winner.

Can We Convince Elon Musk To Declare Victory and Go Home?

It is clear, even to Elon Musk (one has to think), that Musk's acquisition of Twitter has been a disaster.

It is equally clear that Musk is far too much of a narcissistic egomaniac to ever admit it.

And while it would be nice to leave Twitter outright and hit greener pastures, the current main alternatives to Twitter -- sites like Mastodon or Post -- are not even close to primetime ready. The ideal outcome is Twitter being put back in the hands of the at least semi-reasonable before the site detonates outright.

What Musk needs is an off-ramp -- some way for him to get out of Twitter while still claiming it as a victory.

To be clear: No reasonable observer has to actually think Musk has accomplished anything or that this excuse be anything but a flimsy façade. Much like the US and Vietnam, every rational human will understand it as pure political dissembling -- "saving face" here means only an excuse that will satisfy Musk's most sycophantic fanboys. Fortunately, that cadre is the only group Musk seems to listen to anyway.

He's never going to be able to unload it for a profit -- that's out. But is there some other narrative he could spin ("It was never about the money!") where he retroactively will have "accomplished what he set out to accomplish" and can leave while saving face? Maybe he can say the "Twitter Files" exposed the dirty heart of old Twitter but now he's successfully cleaned house. Maybe he can triple down on the random staffers he's thrown under the bus as the "real problem" and now that they're gone, all is well (none of us have to believe it; again, this is all about spinning a yarn that will successfully soothe a narcissistic manchild who can't possibly admit he screwed everything up).

I don't know. It's weird to try to come up with "pathetic lie for Elon Musk to tell himself so he leaves the rest of us alone." But that's the best exit strategy we have right now, I think. Suggestions welcome.