Losing My Perspicacity January 23, 2025

Good morning and Happy Thursday. I’m glad you’re here, and I hope you’re hanging in there.

I went to X for the last time yesterday, and I told my friends and family on Facebook and Insta that I’ll be leaving those platforms soon, as well. I hate having to make this decision, and I hate Mark Zuckerberg for not being a decent enough person to make me want to stay. The bar isn’t that high.

Around 2005, sports blogs were just getting going. I was miserable in my day job as a lawyer, and I spent a fair amount of time hanging out on various Chicago Cubs blogs, which was all I wanted to talk about all day, anyway. I was able to parlay the readers I had on Cubs’ blogs into a following on Twitter and Facebook. And it was because of that following that I was able to get my foot in the door in the sports media world. I owe a lot to my social media followers, though many of them left the most egregious platforms months, if not years, ago. Social media was also where my heart was regularly broken, usually by men I’d never met who got something out of being cruel to a stranger on the internet.

It’s a weird feeling to give up on two places that have been so important to my career trajectory. I still have something like 32k followers on X, and 11k on my Facebook page, and it’s hard to leave those communities behind. That said, there’s not much to be gained by staying there, either. Algorithms on both X and Facebook deprioritize links to “news” articles to the point that there’s not much value in writers using them anymore. That reality, plus Zuckerberg’s supervillain-esque behavior, makes the decision to go a pretty easy one.

I often wish I wasn’t like this — that I was one of those people who goes about their day and doesn’t care what their business is funding or who their dollars enrich. Sadly, I’ve been this way since I joined Amnesty International in high school, and I imagine it’s the result of some kind of obsessive thinking related to my ADHD. Or something.

I’m not naive enough to think that my leaving will have any real impact. I know I’m just one person and, even if everyone on Bluesky divested from X, Facebook, and Instagram, it would still be tricky to make a dent in as many billions as those guys have. Even so, after watching Brooke Harrington on The Daily Show, I took to heart what she said about consumers being the only ones who can truly affect the broligarchy. And anyway, all I’ve been doing on Facebook as of late is screaming at my friends and family about Trump.

All of this is a long way of saying that, if you follow me on X, Facebook, or Instagram, I hope you’ll follow me over to Bluesky. While it’s not perfect, Bluesky already feels safer for me, personally, than X or Facebook has in years. I hope to see you there.

Today: What Trump’s dismantling of DEI means for marginalized groups; Life begins at erection; The NFL clearly hasn’t checking in on X for a while; Meta is censoring abortion content, and The High Note.

Let’s do this thing.

Trump’s anti-DEI executive order is worse than we thought

I’m not sure what it says about me that, even though I know there is no bottom when it comes to Trump, I never cease being shocked by his actions. Some part of me that was born in the 1980s and died during George W. Bush’s first term still expects some sort of normalcy.

Reminds me of this, which I keep meaning to share.

foushy

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(I realize that using Instagram to share a video, given everything I said about Meta above, is somewhat hypocritical. Bear with me; I’m doing my best to untangle myself from Zuckerberg and still share content! Bluesky can’t get that photo app up quickly enough.)

Now that the text of Trump’s executive orders has made the rounds, it’s become apparent how broad and vague they are. Both of those things are bad when it comes to legislation and its loser brother, executive orders, because it’s difficult to tell who the rules apply to and when.

Here’s what Trump’s latest executive order on DEI says:

If all of that seems too dense to comprehend, that’s by design. But here’s how the AP described the order:

Let’s get the obvious out of the way first: This order is unfathomably cruel and gives discrimination on the basis of protected classifications (age, gender, race, sexuality, etc) legal sanction. What it also does is allow federal agencies (and the private companies that work with them) the freedom to go back to assuming that straight, white, cis-gender men are always the most qualified candidates, and everyone else is a “DEI hire.”

However, there are always two ways to evaluate a law/executive order. First, what does it say it wants to accomplish? And secondly, what affect does it actually have on people? While the law purports to apply to “DEI workers” (which means what? Those who work on DEI initiatives? Those who identify as part of a protected group of people? How about Sue in accounting, who runs a support group for Black women in her office once a month?), the effect is already being seen across the country.

I’m disgusted and I hope you are, too. If you want to feel worse, the feds are also encouraging people to snitch on their coworkers.

I’m not even sure what that letter is supposed to mean, but it feels entirely too Nazi-adjacent. There’s even a dedicated snitch line where people can turn in their friends and colleagues. Thankfully, the good people of Missouri have given us a playbook on how to handle said snitching.

Gosh, that’s a real shame. Some people are so immature.

I sure hope the same thing doesn’t happen to the federal tip line. That would be terrible.

I hope it goes without saying that snitching on your colleagues and friends is diabolically evil. Spamming government websites, however, is a joyful act of civil disobedience.

Life begins at erection, dammit!

In the spirit of causing good trouble, I give you Mississippi State Senator Bradford Blackmon, who believes that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander. Blackmon has introduced a bill that makes it as dangerous for men to “discharge” genetic material” without the intent to conceive as it is for women to secure an abortion.

That bill is aces and Sen. Bradford Blackmon is the cat’s pajamas in my book. What a rockstar.

The NFL has obviously been asleep for the last 18 months

The NFL is not allowing teams to post on Bluesky, as it’s not an “approved” social media platform. Elon Musk’s vanity project, otherwise known as X, is, however, an approved platform.

This is hilarious, as NFL ads been showing up on X in close proximity to white nationalist, antisemitic, and other horribly problematic accounts. Here’s the report from Media Matters, which Elon Musk is suing them over.

I’m not sure what Musk’s basis for this lawsuit is, because I talked to Media Matters about this at the time their story came out, and I saw those ads with my own eyes.

The bottom line here is that the NFL, who has a content agreement with X, is less concerned about white nationalist propaganda appearing in close proximity to their product than they are with teams being on Bluesky. What a time to be alive.

Instagram is censoring abortion content

From Jessica Valenti’s excellent newsletter, Abortion Everyday, which you should subscribe to.

Yeah, that tracks. You suck, Zuckerberg.

The High Note

Each day, I do my best to leave you with a smile on your face and a song in your heart, or at least less rage than you arrived here with. I also like to give you important information when I can. For example, here are some tips for good mental health.

ozzythecavalierkingcharles

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The energy I’m taking into the weekend.

Survive and advance today, kids. Don’t let the bastards get you down.