Reflections From a Murky Pond

Yes, Twitter is good. It’s popularity is well-deserved. What’s very much not good, however, is #hashtaggery, which for the purposes of this post I define as using twitter hashtags as some means of political or societal protest medium. This recent and growing phenomenon is not good. In fact, it is worse than useless.

Domestically, where it might be though to have some value, it devolves to people seeing or hearing of something they don’t like, such as specific crimes, and tweeting about it using a hashtag as an identifier. Sometimes this causes a trend and rises in popularity and visibility. Yet, at the end of the day, it doesn’t go beyond Twitter. Nothing comes of it, in part because people feel that they’ve done something about the problem.

#Hashtaggery At Home

You really want to #StandWithHer or be #United4Her? You want to #DoSomething? Get off your ass and do something real. Don’t stand with her, stand before her in full readiness to do whatever it takes to stop what is about to happen.

The only way your #hashtags are going to have any effect upon the real world is if you carve them into carcasses of the offenders that you’ve exterminated or left it at the remains of one of their nests that’ve burned down or blown up.

And foreign policy and relations? Please! Does anyone really believe that twitter bombing a foreign government or group of terrorists is going to do anything at all? Apparently so. The ability of people to descend into self-serving self-delusion seems to know no bounds.

#Hashtaggery Abroad

Carve #FreeOurGirls into the carcasses of Nigerian Muslim boys that have been exterminated in reprisal for Boko Haram’s action and you might get results. Burn your hashtag in the mutilated corpses of Sudanese Muslims and you might #FreeMeriamIbrahim. Cut into the bodies of Mexicans and you might help #FreeOurMarine.

Alternately, wave your hashtag as a banner when you storm and take the foreign nations’ consulates or embassies and put their personnel to death.

Anything else is just useless #Hashtaggery and serves only to make yourself feel good without actually having to or risk anything, especially your precious comforts.

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It’s an old axiom that a sufficiently advanced science is indistinguishable from magic. A corollary to this would be that a sufficiently advanced scientist is indistinguishable from a magician or other magical entity.

There are, in the latter case, ways to distinguish the scientist from the magician or other magical entity…
 

Yep! The only magic scientists and researchers have is mendicant magic in that many of them do seem to be able to conjure funding out of the aether…as long as they are practicing orthodox, “white magic” at least. Those following a purer path don’t do so well at all.

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So…Two Special Agents from the FBI showed up at my door earlier today. They wanted to talk with me about some of the things I’ve posted online.

Yep. I’m betting that you can see where this is going. Wrong! They and the FBI in general have no issues with anything that I’ve posted here or elsewhere. They just wanted the provenance of an image I tweeted to make sure that there was nothing they needed to investigate.

I suppose that, if you look at it a certain way – and many would – my ego should be bruised. Here I am, a political blogger and commentator in direct and very overt opposition to the current regime and the FBI didn’t care at all about me, just where an image came from so that they would know if there was something they needed to investigate.

In all actuality, the two FBI agents were very pleasant and extremely polite. The only painful part of our discussion was the fact that they kept reiterating time and time again that I was well and fully within my rights to publish everything that I’ve published and that I apparently had a very solid understanding of the legal limitations of such speech.

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