🔗 Bullet Points: “We’re in Danger” edition - by Dave Karpf:

The intra-MAGA drama is akin to the fanbase of a hit show, loudly griping about the season 6 finale online. It’s like an outraged fanbase, insisting they are done with this team for good now after a disappointing draft pick.

It’s all performative. None of it has staying power. In the long term, none of it is real.

Exactly. Anyone who thinks that some issue like this is going to fracture or peel away the MAGA base is fooling themselves. Stop wishcasting and fantasizing about this stuff; get out and do something instead.

“Here is an endless stream of posts about why you should give up hope and stop trying” is a pattern I am pretty tired of.

Like, am I supposed to be impressed at how cynical you are?

And I can’t help but notice how often this sort of stuff is coming from white dudes that have never had to face any actual challenges. It’s like they go from “I can fix anything!” straight to “WE ARE ALL DOOMED and you’re stupid for trying!”

Yeah, of course I’ll watch the last season of Stranger Things, but I still think they should have done a time-jump (like “10 years later” or some such) between the third and fourth seasons. I mostly enjoyed season four, but it was really difficult to ignore the fact that all of the cast were clearly at least a decade older than the kids they were playing.

I suppose the problem with doing a time jump like that is that it would have forced them out of the 1980s setting that has been such a huge part of the show’s look and feel, as well as of its appeal. I can understand why they might be reluctant to move on from that.

While out for my run this morning, I was listening to a recent episode of Aaron Ross Powell’s podcast in which he talks with Mike Masnick. The conversation was all about decentralizing the internet, mostly focused Bluesky (Masnick sits on Bluesky’s board of directors).

I am not interested in an ideological fight over Bluesky v. Mastodon. I have a Bluesky account and it seems fine, although I personally prefer the community on Mastodon. I have some underlying questions about the company’s long-term business prospects, but at a tech protocol level, they mostly seem fine. I also have no beef with Masnick; I think he writes really good stuff at Techdirt and I agree with most everything he has to say about what has gone wrong with the internet and how we might start undoing that and making it better.