The Perils of Twitter

The Perils of Twitter
By Happy Hiram 

Okay so I am sitting here with my phone service stalling as it always seems to be when I am not on the highway somewhere, thinking about the state that the idiocy of Twitter has gotten me into.

First, why bother then? My friends and I have a normal interchange and then I go on twitter and they say things that they would never dream of passing off in any other form of communication. So I feel compelled to respond... And then I get stuck on the stupid format.

My friend, my reasonable friend, retweets things that say "Islam is a violent religion" and site ISIS as an exemplar. I wish I could find the sequence of posts but twitter is like the Atlantic Ocean and each post is like that one hypodermic swimming around. You respond to being poked and the poke and response end up on opposite ends of the coast.

Anyway I respond by saying "ISIS and Islam do not equate." Except somehow I can't fit equate in 140 characters (after all the names of the retweeters) so it goes in as = WHICH IS NOT THE SAME THING. It's okay, they'll tell ya, its Twitter shorthand. No, it is not okay to sacrifice sense to mere speech. That is why I am responding in the first place. Because what was SAID was ridiculous IF MEANT, but of course when you separate MEANING from communication you don't have any IDEA what was meant. 

So my friend replies "I take ISIS at their word. WTF does that have to do with the question? How do you functionally say "what you are saying is a non-sequitur and has no merit to the subject at hand which is that the conflation of a hate group with a WHOLE SERIES of cultures makes the respondent a hate group instead of just having an opinion." Even if you could BASTARDIZE that into 140 wrds you have to take out for the names you are RESPONDING TO.

So then my friend retweets "a white person is 250% more likely to get assaulted by a black person than a black person by a white."

If I have eight friends and one of them is a red-head, if I swing a cat and throw it I have a slim chance of hitting a red-head. If HE SWINGS a cat at US, he has a 100% chance of hitting a non-redhead. That alone makes him 12 times more likely to hit me. Black on black crime is higher than black on white crime, so see, poverty and ghettoization WORKS! Add the super high rate of drugs in the ghetto and you have a formula for 250%.

On average, most black Americans have less wealth than white Americans. So I post that I should have been robbing poor people instead of people with money because I was messing the statistics up completely.

No response. Is that good or bad? How do I know if anybody even read what I wrote? On blogger I get stats. On twitter I get piecemeal promos like "7 people were interested in your tweet" Six months from now that seven number will be meaningless. I won't even know what week it was.

So in response to the ISIS "take them at their word" canard I reply "ISIS is not Islam" to which I get "They say they are... I'll take them at their word."

To which I reply, "The Black Panthers say they represent the black community, so does that make all blacks black panthers?"

Now, I know my friend, he is a good guy, not out to entrap me or make me look foolish or anything. He responds: "if you said all black panthers were black, I'd agree with you..."

Does he mean:

A) you wrote your argument wrong ways round (ignorance?)

B) I am willfully pretending to not understand you (arrogance? Not really his style) 

C), well, I can't really think of a C. The point is that now I don't know if I am being fucked with or my smart friend can't read.

So I respond "saying 'all A's are B' is not the same as saying 'all B's are A' but by the time I mangle that into a tweet it has lost all sense of meaning.

"I don't know what you are saying." He replies. Wow, you think?

I reply (of course you can't cut and paste out of the twitter app so this is long form) "'If Nation of Islam members are black and ISIS represents Islam, then all black people are terrorists' is the kind of logic you are proposing." You can just imagine how distorted THAT gets in 140 (minus the sendees) wrds.

So is communication by twitter possible? I think not. I mean who is ever gonna read this article? It has WAY MORE THAN 140 CHARACTERS!

The response will quote where I am misquoting (due to lack of access) the original tweets, or their sequence. Well I can't ACCESS the original tweets nor copy them if I could. So if you think I am somehow wrong, it is twitters fault again. Don't blame me.