The Bluesky Experience (so far)

LAST night (Monday where I am) I signed up for Bluesky. I've been hearing about for some time, but did not give it much thought; the experience with a couple of "Twitter substitutes" (such as Mastodon) after the Malignant Yarpie took over that platform was unsatisfactory, so I dropped social media completely for a couple of years. 

But a brief news item posted on YouTube by the BBC got me thinking about it again. The gist of that story was that Bluesky was experiencing explosive growth, and turning into a site for Twitter refugees; the thing that made an impression the description of the number of corporate, institutional, and otherwise "big" accounts that were abandoning Twitter entirely (I will never refer to it as "X", you go to hell, Leon, you piece of human garbage) entirely for the new platform. 

I mentioned this to my 19-year-old daughter, and she divulged that she and almost all of her artist friends had already ditched Twitter for Bluesky, or were about to; some were doing it because of Twitter's neo-fascist bigotry vibe (these kids, daughter included, are mostly hyper-left, gay, trans, or gender-fluid types), but mostly because they have had it up to here with not being able to stop Twitter from scraping their artwork to train large language models, and apparently that is something a user can control on Bluesky. 

I'm a writer, not an artist, but I can certainly relate to that -- I'll be damned if I'll let an AI program snatch so much as a punctuation mark from any of my work, if there's any way I can stop it. And, though I would sooner shave my ass and sit in a pan of gin than spend a single nanosecond supporting the existence of that simpering little shitbag Musk, whose face and voice enrages me to the point where I creatively visualize punching him in the jaw so hard it flies off, I actually did miss Twitter. Facebook is just...weird, and I dropped that years ago. TikTok is Chinese government spy software, and Instagram makes me want to barf. But Twitter was my speed, not only a good outlet to interact with people on the scale and in a context I find comfortable, but a great newsfeed, and a big help to my work. 

So, I decided to give Bluesky a try. And though I am only two days into it, I think I'm hooked. It's like Twitter used to be, only better, because it does have better tools to control what I see. And even when I do just let the algorithm do its thing, it seems friendly, and at least tries (successfully, for the most part) to show me things I may like, rather than what the people behind the curtain want me to see. 

I hope it grows, and I hope the team behind it can avoid ruining the experience. I am not naive; at some point, it is going to have to make some money, and there will be some changes, probably some I will not like. That's just business. But it doesn't have to be awful -- the people who are using Bluesky now seem to be doing their part to ensure that it is not, so I hope the company won't let them down. 

If you'd like to connect, you can find a link to do so over there in the right-hand column >>>

Evil clown gets called on the carpet

OVER the past couple of months, the House of Representatives and the Senate here have conducted several series of hearings on salacious topics. They started with hearings on the POGOs – Philippine Offshore Gaming Operations – which are, or were (they’ve since been banned) Chinese-owned and operated internet gambling enterprises that allowed Chinese citizens to circumvent the strict gambling bans in their own country. Most of the POGOs diversified into online scams, human trafficking, and money laundering, which is why President Marcos issued an executive order to kick them out of the country. The state-owned gaming operator and regulator PAGCOR whined about it, but the ejection is proceeding quickly, with very little public dissent. Most Filipinos, who are otherwise energetic gamblers, view POGOs as a scourge and are happy to see them go.

The legislative hearings have morphed from the topic of POGOs to the drug war under former president Rodrigo Duterte. The only real connection between the two is Duterte himself; he encouraged the explosive growth of POGOs between 2016 and the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. It is likely that some POGO operations were also fronts for drug trafficking, although that has not really come out in the various hearings.

The driving force behind Congress’ sudden interest in the massacre carried out by police and vigilantes on Duterte’s orders is pure politics. Duterte’s daughter Sara, who was the ersatz running mate of Marcos and elected Vice President, started running for president (the election is in 2028) the instant she took office, and the Marcos faction is not okay with that. Sara Duterte hooked herself to Marcos for the purposes of winning the election in 2022; the Vice President is elected independently, which often leads to the two top elected officials in the country being political opponents, as has happened in this case. It’s a weird system. The Marcos supporters want to bury her so that current Speaker of the House (and cousin of the president) Martin Romualdez can win the presidency in 2028, so they went after her, and in the last two weeks, her still very popular father.

The thing is, the Duterte clan – former president father, vice president daughter, one son as mayor of their hometown of Davao, another in Congress – are a bunch of trailer trash hoodlums, and make it easy for their opponents to rake them over the coals. Sara Duterte, who has no apparent qualifications other than being a political nepo baby, is accused of massive embezzlement of government funds from the Office of the Vice President and the Department of Education, where she served a brief and thoroughly unimpressive term as Secretary. Evidence and testimony presented so far, largely through budget hearings, seem to indicate that the allegations are at least partly true, and so she is probably done.

Rodrigo Duterte, who surprisingly agreed to testify before committees in both the Senate and the House, is an ill-tempered sociopath, a man of middling intelligence and talents who made a name for himself by formally organizing a “death squad” when he was mayor of Davao to solve the crime problem by just killing anyone suspected of a crime. When he was elected president, he applied the same model to the whole country, which resulted in something on the order of 6,500 people killed – some claim the number is much higher, but evidence for that is scant. The “drug war” took a toll on the police as well; about 170 were killed in action, almost a thousand injured, and about 200 were charged with various criminal offenses ranging from murder to kidnapping to extortion.

In 2017, the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced that it intended to act on complaints that it had received, and investigate Duterte for crimes related to state-sponsored killing. Duterte responded by promptly withdrawing the Philippines from the Rome Statute and announcing that any ICC investigators who showed up in the Philippines would be very unwelcome.

Fast forward to November 2024, and Duterte has been called on the carpet by his own country’s Congress. His performance in both the Senate and the House hearings has been dramatically childish (the man is 78 years old), but essentially he has admitted that, yes, in fact he did have an organized murder system to try to rid the country of the drug scourge (it didn’t work; in fact, drugs seemed to become a bigger problem), and that anyone who didn’t like it could kiss his ass, even if that meant he spent the hopefully few remaining years of his life in prison.

For its part, the current government has said that it would not stop Duterte from turning himself over to the ICC (something he threatened to do at one point in his testimony, which was dramatic emoting that no one took seriously anyway), but would not otherwise cooperate with the international court. However, the government also pointed out that should Interpol get involved and issue a warrant for Duterte, it would be bound to assist in his arrest.

Duterte’s fanatic supporters, of which there are not a few, including one of our own columnists at The Manila Times, who just sounds stupid every time he writes about Duterte, have tried to spin the circus in the legislative hearings as some sort of triumph for Duterte, but it’s been a real comeuppance for him. Instead of coming across as the tough “man of the people” he imagines himself to be, he has been exposed for what he really is, a cranky old sociopath with the temper and problem-solving skills of a concussed badger, a hillbilly from the provinces whose ascension to the national stage was probably an accident.

It's encouraging that, whatever the ulterior motives behind the effort, the country may soon rid itself of this bunch of trolls. Duterte was at best a mediocre president who tried to govern the entire country as a mayor, because that’s all he knows how to do. While there were some advances, such as an expansion of infrastructure development (a trope of would-be authoritarians), most of his term is utterly forgettable, save for the murder spree, the unusual number of complete clowns he appointed to Cabinet posts, and the ham-fisted way in which his administration handled the pandemic. His kids have all demonstrated that they are equally unsuited for any sort of leadership positions; while the elder Duterte is apparently not personally corrupt – apart from the whole murder thing – the kids seem to be, which is something this corruption-riddled country could do without. The Philippines does not often do the right thing when it comes to making choices about its leaders, but flushing the Duterte clan is a rare exception. 

(Image: Duterte in Congress on November 13. The Manila Times/John Orven Verdote)

 

Enough with the typhoons already

 

Since last night I've been doomscrolling the weather websites, watching the progress of Typhoon Pepito (international name Man-Yi), which is expected to cross Luzon just north of the Metro Manila area on Sunday (tomorrow) as a Category 3 or 4 storm. It will be the fifth storm to make landfall here and the sixth to affect the country in less than a month -- 27 days to be exact -- and it will arrive just two days after the last one. 

As you can see from the graphic from AFP, the storms have an apparently arbitrary collection of names. One thing the national weather bureau (the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical, and Astronomical Services Administration, or PAGASA) does that I appreciate is to name the storms in alphabetical order. Thus, Tropical Storm Trami became Kristine, as it was the 11th storm this year, and it was followed by Leon, Marce, Nika, Ofel, and now Pepito. Metro Manila took a beating from Kristine, which also caused an incredible amount of damage and killed about 160 people in the provinces south of us, even though the storm crossed Luzon far to the north of us. The city has dodged the bullets with the four storms after Kristine, but our luck has run out -- Typhoon Pepito will clobber us. 

As far as I know from the records I was able to find online, in the country's history there has not been a period where so many storms formed in such a short time, until now. There was a recent study that quantified the impact of climate change on weather events in the past 20 years -- I made it the subject of The Manila Times' editorial on Wednesday ("New weather study can help improve calamity response," Nov. 13) -- and I would be interested to see if anyone will do the same sort of analysis on this series of storms. 

The Philippines' typhoon season is actually year-round, although it's usually described as running from March through October, since most storms appear then. But late season storms are not unusual; almost every year, there will be one just before Christmas, somewhere in the country, and these usually cause an incredible amount of damage. But to have six storms that almost overlap is astonishing, and a bit frightening. The thought that this may be a new norm due to global warming is even more frightening. 

Typhoons are also a stark reminder of my privilege. My daughter and I live on the 18th floor of a secure building. I'll go to the grocery store in a little while and pick up a few necessities, such as coffee, a fresh bottle of fine Benchmark bourbon, the poison of choice in this household, and some fruits and vegetables. Then I'll fix a pot of goulash -- good food for rainy weather -- get a refill for my drinking water dispenser, and just hole up at home until the storm passes. 90 or 95 percent of the people in the Philippines do not live that way, and for them an approaching typhoon is a real threat to life and limb. That's why I make it a point to help out in a small way afterwards -- donate some food, clothing, hygiene items -- but it doesn't quite even things out. 

Will COP29 accomplish anything?

Will COP29 accomplish anything? -- My Manila Times column for Tuesday, November 12, 2024. 

This is another of those commentaries that gets me tagged as a contrarian by people with a certain point of view, but that troubles me not in the slightest: I want effective climate action as much as anyone can, I just happen to believe that pragmatic realism is probably a much better way to achieve it than hopes and wishes. Wish in one hand, piss in the other, see which one fills up first. 

Optimism, however unwarranted, is nevertheless understandable. The world could certainly use some good news for a change. I doubt COP29 will be where it emerges, but I would welcome a surprise. 

(Image: The COP29 venue in Baku, from the COP29 website)
 

Not what anyone needed, wanted, or expected

Not what anyone needed, wanted, or expected -- My Manila Times column for Sunday, November 10, 2024. 

This was written in the wee hours of the morning on Thursday, November 7, and then filed for a few days. As I told my everything person at the time, after writing this I felt that I had satisfactorily processed the election, though not made peace with it; as such, it is the last commentary I will make on that disaster. We can move on to talking about the consequences, once those chickens start coming home to roost.
 

A message to the 'liberal media'

TWO nights ago (Wednesday, so early morning Wednesday in the US, as I live in the future), I watched a short video on David Pakman’s YouTube channel, in which he expressed profound alarm – was rather frantic, actually – at having woken up the morning after the election to discover that he had lost about 5,000 subscribers. He said that he contacted a few other commentators in that ecosystem – mentioned Farron Cousins, Jesse Dollemore, and a few others – and that everyone had experienced the same sudden exodus of subscribers, both the free ones on YouTube and paid subscribers.

The essential message was, “Please don’t abandon us,” because doing so would cede the space to the right-wingers, due to the way algorithms work; the liberal pundits’ channels would be derated because a drop in subscriber numbers tells the algorithm that the content is not as interesting to the users. I understand that; algorithms in social media are one of the worst things Mankind has ever invented, and they are brutal.

On a broader scale, the implication of so many people “tuning out,” so to speak, is that people on the left are giving up on participating in the political process altogether. That is bad, of course, because you can’t win a battle you don’t even show up for.

I’m going to make a couple of comments that are going to sound extremely harsh, but I hope they are taken in the spirit of constructive criticism.

First of all, I think the most-often expressed sentiment by the people who commented on that video – various versions of “we are mentally and spiritually exhausted” – is a completely understandable human reaction, and needs to be given its space. It has been more than 9 years of hearing this asshole’s name every goddamn day, and 2 years of this presidential campaign alone. People need to rest just from all of that, and most of us aren’t ready to embrace the reality that there is going to be 4 more years of this, and the very good chance that it will never end. We can’t take any more, at least not right now, and unfortunately, the same algorithm that punishes you punishes us, too; if we don’t unsubscribe, that which we desperately need to tune out for a while continues to be pushed at us.

Second, and this is the really harsh part, but all of you within the liberal media need to address the catastrophic damage to your credibility from the events of this past week. You were not just wrong, you were a spectacular amount of wrong, and the least any of your departed audience must be feeling is terribly let down.

You guys are an echo chamber, and you know it...otherwise, you wouldn’t have already accepted without challenge the “liberal media” tag. And for those of you who may actually be laboring under the pretense that you’re somehow providing a valuable source of substantial information for the benefit of increasing the knowledge of those who haven’t made up their minds which side to take, stop it. No one needs you to tell us that Donald Trump is a vicious asshat surrounded by comic-book villains; your audience comes to you because we already know that. Or have formed that belief; that’s probably a better way to put it, because the belief that Trump is not a vicious asshat is what drives the right-wing echo chamber’s audience to them.

It’s perfectly okay to be an echo chamber, that’s what people want; we want our feeling that we are on the right side of things confirmed. And most of us are smart enough to need that confirmation to be based on evidence and a rational interpretation of events. And you got it very, very wrong. Not intentionally, I am sure, and I am sure that every one of you feels just as personally crushed by the turn of events as every one of us in subscriber-land. But please understand that, for us, it is a natural thought that “I might not be feeling this way if I hadn’t listened to them,” and that putting our trust in you, risking feeling that way again, is a big ask.

So what now? Take the L, try to figure out where you went wrong, where your blind spots are, what you missed, and try to do a better job. What else can you do? If it’s any consolation to you, I think it’ll be easier now that the contest has been decided. I hope so.   

Some reality begins to creep into nuclear aspirations

Some reality begins to creep into nuclear aspirations -- My Manila Times column for Tuesday, November 5, 2024. 

This was the last column before the election catastrophe in the US. My column for Thursday (today) was about the election, and my editors seemed to think it was better than I thought it was, because it was a little higher on the homepage than usual. It was written while said catastrophe was underway, so I was terribly distracted; it's not that it's actually a bad piece, it's just that it contains incomplete thoughts. So I may folder that one and forget about it. 

My column for this coming Sunday, however, I will share later, because it was my exercise in catharsis. And that will be my last commentary on this dreadful election, save for one other hopefully brief post on some observations about the liberal media -- not the election per se. What's done is done, and I'm done with it, too.