In other Earth-rumbling news,

Twitter is struggling. Its disappointing financial results, mass layoffs and declining user experience show things aren’t well for the little blue bird. And now this: the replacement of the beloved “fav” star with a heart.

Dark days.

The hearts are the final straw: it’s time to nationalise Twitter.

Yes, it’s the Guardian. How did you guess? Specifically, the musings of Mr Osman Faruqi, a “Sydney-based writer and activist” who wants someone else – apparently, taxpayers on the other side of the world – to pay for his leisure activities.

It’s infrastructure for basic communication, which is why people are so upset over the change to hearts: imagine if, instead of saying “OK” on the phone to a relative stranger, you were forced to say “I love you.” It’s that basic.

Such are the horrors facing today’s Twitter user. It’s New Coke all over again.

So how do you monetise an intangible combination of excitement and trepidation sparked by the overwhelming awe of talking to the whole world?

Or perhaps more likely, a vanishingly tiny part of it. With almost half of “users” having never sent a Tweet, and the overwhelming majority of those who have boasting fewer than 200 followers, with the majority of their tweets, around 70%, attracting no acknowledgment whatsoever. However, the stakes are high and according to Mr Faruqi, “casual social interaction,” which is good, is “anathema to the desire for profit,” which is bad, obviously. This is, after all, the Guardian. And as Twitter’s modishness is, it seems, fading, it therefore must be nationalised and paid for by the taxpayer. To keep it hip and happening, and to prevent more icon changes. Until the next thing comes along. And then, presumably, we must nationalise that too.

On Twitter, Mr Faruqi is currently struggling with the news that many readers had assumed his article was “taking the piss.” Apparently, this failure to appreciate his seriousness and insight merely “shows how right-wing our political debate has become.”

Update, via the comments:

Janice Fiamengo on feminist narratives and unmentioned history: 

After 1832, about one in five men had the right to vote. Almost half of adult males, though, were still not eligible to vote when they accepted the call to fight and die for their country in the First World War. It wasn’t until 1918 that the right to vote was extended, not only to women – which of course we hear a great deal about – but to all men. So how can this be – that this part of the story is almost completely unknown? How come when we celebrate the extension of the franchise to women, we don’t talk about its extension to poor and working class men?

Via sk60, Jonathan Foreman on the Tim Hunt “sexism” drama and the dishonesty and malevolence of certain key players: 

The most generous interpretation of Connie St Louis’s bizarre behaviour is that she was too intellectually limited to recognise irony that was somehow obvious to an audience composed mostly of people who spoke English as a second language. A leak of the unedited version of her “Stop Defending Tim Hunt” piece for the Guardian is so garbled and incoherent that this actually seems plausible, though it also makes you wonder how and why she came to be teaching journalism even at a third-rate institution like London’s City University.

And Peter Hasson on ‘progressive’ educators and predetermined conclusions: 

Multiple professors at Washington State University have explicitly told students their grades will suffer if they use terms such as “illegal alien,” “male,” and “female,” or if they fail to “defer” to non-white students. According to the syllabus for Selena Lester Breikss’ “Women & Popular Culture” class, students risk a failing grade if they use any common descriptors that Breikss considers “oppressive and hateful language.” […] Students taking Professor Rebecca Fowler’s “Introduction to Comparative Ethnic Studies” course will see their grades suffer if they use the term “illegal alien” in their assigned writing.[…] White students in Professor John Streamas’s “Introduction to Multicultural Literature” class are expected to “defer” to non-white students, among other community guidelines, if they want “to do well in this class.”

Imagine what such ‘thinkers’ might do if granted real power. 

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for. 

Neo-Neocon on leftist narratives and post-Ferguson policing: 

One effect of the “hands up, don’t shoot” lie is to tell would-be perpetrators that they’re better off defying a cop than surrendering, because it won’t help them to put their hands up since the cop will shoot them anyway. So the covert message is that they may as well try to attack the police officer (or run), who would just as soon shoot them as not, no matter what they do.

Somewhat related, Salon’s Scott Eric Kaufman insists that black males “shouldn’t have to” comply with lawful instructions from the police. Which sounds like exactly the kind of attitude that gets people hurt. Presumably, Mr Kaufman is untroubled by such details.

Christopher Snowdon on obesity as “incurable” and the rigorous journalism of Mr George Monbiot: 

[Monbiot’s] second piece of evidence is a recently published study which found that only 3,500 of a cohort of 176,000 obese Britons tracked in 2004 had returned to a healthy weight by 2014. A success rate of two per cent would have been disappointing if this was a clinical trial, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t a trial at all and no attempt was made to ‘cure’ the people involved. The researchers never met them, didn’t know their names, didn’t attempt any intervention and there is no evidence that they were even trying to lose weight. 

And this, from Thomas Sowell: 

Despite an old saying that taxes are the price we pay for civilisation, an absolute majority of the record-breaking tax money collected by the federal government today is simply transferred by politicians from people who are not likely to vote for them to people who are more likely to vote for them.

Feel free to share your own links and snippets in the comments. It’s what these posts are for.

What we’re trying to show you is that this bad reporting comes from a particular historical, political and social milieu… There’s no way to explain why somebody isn’t a good person, doesn’t behave professionally, doesn’t behave ethically at their job [as a journalist] unless you understand their motivations.

Those of you who’ve been following the GamerGate saga may find the video below of interest. It’s an abridged version of a debate held over the weekend at the Society of Professional Journalists’ Airplay event in Miami, in which assorted journalists, gamers and game developers tried to communicate with each other, with varying degrees of success. I was watching it via livestream on Saturday evening. It’s the first time I’d seen a bomb threat announced live, twice. Even if it’s not your thing, it may be worth listening to Christina Hoff Sommers’ “huge boobs” anecdote around 6:46.

An unedited recording can be found in two parts here and here. 

New York Times, December 8, 1985:  

For the most part, the portable computer is a dream machine for the few… On the whole, people don’t want to lug a computer with them to the beach or on a train to while away hours they would rather spend reading the sports or business section of the newspaper. Somehow, the microcomputer industry has assumed that everyone would love to have a keyboard grafted on as an extension of their fingers. It just is not so.

In 1985, the New York Times claimed a weekday circulation of just over one million copies. Specifically, 1,013,211 on March 31. In 2015, when most Americans have computers in their pockets (and even use them at the beach and on trains), print sales of the New York Times have fallen to around half that figure, and the paper is chiefly read via the kind of devices once dismissed as implausible. Rather than “whiling away the hours reading the sports or business section,” the majority of readers are now “flybys,” their stays lasting for an average of four minutes, generally to read something linked via email and social media. And browsing one article isn’t quite the same thing as reading a newspaper.  

Via Kevin D Williamson.