On bullshit

Luther M. Siler

I was, for reasons that I can’t quite reconstruct at the moment, looking through my blog for everything I’ve ever written about Joe Biden the other day, and then this tweet came across my feed:

This irritated me at the time, and I snarked at the tweet, and for some reason it’s still on my mind a couple of days later so I’m going to piss on it again. This chart is bullshit, orchestrated by a media that is absolutely desperate to manufacture some drama about this upcoming election and whether Biden will be the nominee, which he absolutely will if he is still alive. First of all, let’s look at the actual claim: that Biden has the second-lowest “ninth quarter,” which as we all know is a super important fucking metric, of post-WWII presidents. Second-lowest? Yeah, Reagan’s was worse.

You may not be old enough to remember the 1984 election. I am, though. It looked like this:

So this is already a bullshit statistic, because the worst “ninth quarter” performance by a president since WWII led to a fucking ass-whupping in 1984 unseen since, what, fucking FDR? (EDIT: Yep. I looked it up.) Mondale won his home state and Washington DC, and he only won Minnesota by eighteen hundredths of a point. It was 49.72% to 49.54%. Less than four thousand fucking votes. A bad storm in Minneapolis that day and he’d have lost.

That’s already fucked up, but it gets worse. The next two worst results also lost, but the two after that were Clinton and Obama, both under 50%, and both of whom won reelection comfortably. And the highest approval rating on that chart is George H.W. Bush, who lost. Humiliatingly, frankly.

I’m not quite pissed enough to run the statistics and figure out how related “ninth-quarter approval” is to reelection, but that’s at least partially because it’s obviously not. OpinionToday needs to shut the entire fuck up, and I really need to kill my Twitter account.

Just a quick thought

Luther M. Siler2 Comments

I think at this point it’s safe to say that I have rid myself of Twitter. The blog is still cross posting there and I check in once a day but I’m not posting there any longer.

What, do you think, will it take to be quit of TikTok?

Oh, sure

Luther M. Siler4 Comments

The richest man in the world can buy a social network relied upon by millions of people and reduce it to a flaming wreck in two weeks for the lulz, but if you publicly express the entirely reasonable hope that he dies broke, this happens:

LOL, fuck Elon Musk. The awesome thing is that this will auto-post to Twitter and the image will show up anyway.

Station Identification, Nov. 5 2022

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

This used to be a whole thing that I did every week, and I got out of the habit several years ago, when it stopped being as important to me that everyone who follows me here also follows me everywhere else. However, I figure that what with the entire social media universe in complete upheaval at the moment, it’s probably useful to start doing it again at least occasionally.

Note that my Linktree has convenient links to literally every single one of these places if you’d like to just click on that and save yourself trouble, but I’m going to go through everything anyway.

  • The big one is my blog, infinitefreetime.com, and you’re already here unless you’re looking at this through some sort of RSS thing, and I don’t even know if you can do that. The blog turns 10 next year, I own it, and while I go through periods of more and less frequent posting, I’m not going anywhere, and coming here will be the most reliable place to find me for the foreseeable future.
  • Second most-active is my YouTube gaming channel, lutherplaysgames.com. I almost shut this down once and then decided against it, and right now I’m back to having fun with it. It’s also the account that I’m most interested in growing, so if you aren’t subscribed you really should go click on it. You’ve got a YouTube account already even if you’re not using it so you may as well subscribe to me. 🙂
  • I still have ten thousand followers on Twitter and still post there regularly, although that follower count has dropped by a few hundred this week due to Shenanigans. Be aware that my Twitter is considerably more profane and more political than my presence here, if that’s something that might bother you, although I also do a lot of book discovery over there. I will genuinely miss Twitter if it dies.
  • I don’t post on TikTok as often as I used to but I’m still reasonably active over there and it’s still a huge Goddamn time sink.
  • Everyone should follow me on Goodreads even though I don’t use the social features there at all. Just, like, do it. I have 712 friends over there and they all found me. I don’t know anywhere near 712 people.
  • I just started a Discord server today, just for the hell of it. There’s really nothing there at the moment but that link will allow anyone to join if they want, assuming I set it up correctly.
  • OKAY THIS ONE I’M SERIOUS ABOUT: I just started playing with Duolingo recently and while it’s not quite a social media network, if you’re using it I’d love some more friends. Right now I’m doing Spanish, Japanese, Arabic and Welsh simultaneously and I’m enjoying the hell out of myself.
  • I have also started accounts on Mastodon and Tribel, and right now I don’t know a Goddamn thing about either of them and Tribel in particular looks like it’s going to be something I quickly walk away from, but those seem to be the two most common destinations for Twitter refugees at the moment so I’m giving them a shot. If you’re over there, hit me up.

So. Yeah. Follow me! On all the things! And if there are other places I should be checking out, let me know!

So this happened

Luther M. Siler1 Comment

Will I ever be free of this Tweet? No. No, I will not:

To be clear, this isn’t a former student; I don’t know this kid– they just made the realization that I was still online and so checked in with me to see what I meant with the Tweet.

I’m adding “my writing has been studied in high school Language Arts classes” to my resume.