Why Twitter is for Sammiches and not Politics
Twitter is littered with stuff from every faction in politics with stuff like this:
tommorris No government = no universities. No universities = no Stanford = no Google = no traffic for your shitty libertarian blog. Your turn.
140 characters isn’t a lot. Its enough to tell people what kind of sandwich you’re eating, maybe some incredibly basic directions to an ostrich convention, but not political discourse. Why? Politics and similar subjects are an ethereal science that combine human philosophy dating back to the epoch of history to now and containing all said history in between. This means that there’s a lot that could be said that has already been said.
If a point has been made before, that also means there has been some counter-points made, and those would also need to be addressed to defend your point. The only way to fit that into a tweet is by leaving out any supporting evidence to prove your stance isn’t bullshit, at which point your tweet can only* serve to provide a sense of purely emotional social support for people that already agree with it and personal alienation from anyone that doesn’t, further decreasing the chances of exposure to a counter-argument until everyone believes they have the final word and can’t be wrong. The fact that no one can offer a counter-argument that isn’t as oversimplified doesn’t help, so I’m making mine a tad longer.
Let’s take a look at what wasn’t said in Tom’s tweet. I was invited to a turn, after all:
No government = no universities. No universities = no Stanford
The present state of reality contains universities that are not established or even funded by any government. Thus the term “private university.” I graduated from one. Either this point is flatly wrong or my education happened in the Matrix. One could only arrive to this very generalized point by ignoring contradictory facts that would fly in the face of a pre-determined conclusion and focusing on a generalization, like state universities, which not all universities are.
On an interesting side note, Leland Stanford, a Republican, founded the university he’s named after by making a fortune in a vastly private railroad industry. Stanford University was not started by an act of government but instead by a capitalist baron doing something people can do when they’re allowed to keep their money.
no Stanford = no Google
Stanford did not create Google. Two of its students did, and having read up on their story in creating Google, I think they would have done so at any university, or even without one at all. There is nothing specific about Stanford that would have led Larry Page and Sergey Brin to create their search engine, at least nothing so simple that it could be explained in 140 characters, but the correlation is made anyway, because the fail train needs all its cars connected to work.
no Google = no traffic for your shitty libertarian blog
Did you reach this blog via Google? If not, then I guess that derails this caboose, doesn’t it?
* It is possible to win the hearts and minds of the opposition within 140 characters if they have no instinct for critical thinking and will simply believe you on the basis of who’s saying what rather than what’s being said.
