Lesson in Liberalism

This morn­ing, I was drawn into quite an inter­est­ing debate with two lib­eral Twits…ones that appar­ently can’t think for them­selves.  Read the exchange below (copied directly from Twit­ter) and see who’s drink­ing their kool-aid, one glass right after another.  The first post, which started the whole thing, was by a LibTwit named @clairecelsi (@‘s omit­ted for clarity):

@clairecelsi:  Get­ting sick of read­ing about all the peo­ple who don’t believe Obama is an Amer­i­can cit­i­zen. It’s proven, get over it, move on.

Me (@ericleeus):  How has it been proven? Have you seen his Birth Cer­tifi­cate? Do you have a copy? If not, then it hasn’t.

@clairecelsi:   The doc­u­ment is in stor­age in Hawaii. The guy in charge of it says its authen­tic. That’s good enough for me. YOU go see it.

@ericleeus:  So I sup­pose if Obama told you the sky was pink, you would just believe it right? Sorry, not good enough.

@clairecelsi:  Chang­ing the sub­ject? Typ­i­cal stu­pid­ity. I’m on to your tactics.

@ericleeus:  No, it’s not chang­ing the sub­ject. It’s called illus­tra­tive comparison.

@ericleeus:  And you’re call­ing me “stu­pid”? That’s a typ­i­cal Demo­c­rat for you — call names if you can’t debate..I’m on to YOUR tactics.

And here’s where the sec­ond LibTwit chimes in…

@glynnwilcox:  actu­ally call­ing names is a tired [sic] and true GOP tac­tic. Mostly call­ing some­one unamer­i­can and the like ( :: ) send a bandaid 4 #hc

@ericleeus:  You have your par­ties con­fused — It’s the Democ­rats that have been call­ing peo­ple “Un-American.” I can give examples.

@ericleeus:  Tom Hanks, Nancy Pelosi, “Chucky” Shumer, Patrick Leahy, etc. — want me to go on?

@glynnwilcox:  so let me get this straight. After 8 years of any­time there was opo­si­tion any­one was called unamer­i­can. Ohhh okay so now it’s dif[ferent]

@ericleeus:  I don’t think so, bub…It was the DEMOCRATS call­ing the Repub­li­cans Anti-American & and war crim­i­nals for 8 years.

@glynnwilcox:  so water­board­ing = good Amer­i­can value? Really?

@ericleeus (I re-tweeted his asi­nine state­ment):  RT @glyn­nwilcox @eri­cleeus so water­board­ing = good Amer­i­can value? Really? ME: If it saves Amer­i­can lives, then YES! (It’s NOT torture.)

@ericleeus:  Way to change the sub­ject there, bub.

And that’s where the exchange ended…As you can see, when their argu­ment fell apart, one LibTwit resorted to name-calling and the other resorted to re-hashing a com­pletely off-topic debate — one that doesn’t “hold water”…he really did change the subject.

So class, the les­son here is — stick to facts when debat­ing lib­er­als.  They can’t stand it, and they can’t stand toe-to-toe with you.  You’ll win the debate every time.

No Twitter for You!

Appar­ently that’s what Biz Stone, co-founder of the most pop­u­lar microblog­ging site (which I use, by the way), said.  He told Bar­bara Wal­ters this dur­ing an inter­view on “The View”.

When host Bar­bara Wal­ters — men­tion­ing rumors that Google Inc, Microsoft Corp and Apple Inc might be inter­ested in acquir­ing the com­pany — asked whether Twit­ter is for sale, Stone answered, “no.”

I truly hope that they never cave to pres­sure to “sell out” to the “big” guys.  That’s what makes Twit­ter so unique and so pop­u­lar in my opin­ion.  It is its own island in a large ocean of social media.  Big­ger is not always bet­ter.  I feel that if Twit­ter were to sell out to Microsoft, Google, or Apple, we might start to see large adver­tise­ments pop­ping up in the header, side­bars, and footer of the page, slow­ing down the per­for­mance of the site.  I don’t know about you, but that would prob­a­bly cause me to stop using the service.

Appar­ently Twit­ter does plan to mon­e­tize its ser­vice this year.   I’m not sure what that will entail, but hope­fully it won’t involve huge ban­ner ads.  Sure, I know that com­pa­nies need to make money, and I hope the founders of Twit­ter are mak­ing lots of money.  But I digress…

Good answer, Biz Stone.  I’m glad you’re not sell­ing.  I’m anx­ious to see what changes will be com­ing and ser­vices you’re plan­ning to offer, and I look for­ward to see­ing what the future holds for Twitter.

Source:  Reuters

WordCamp Birmingham Wrap-Up, Part 1 of 2

Nachos ordered at Jim 'N Nicks

The first Word­Camp in the South­east was a suc­cess. Andre Natta of Birmingham’s The Ter­mi­nal, as well as oth­ers whose names are escap­ing me at the moment, did a won­der­ful job of putting this uncon­fer­ence together.  I’ll recap some of the high­lights of Word­Camp B’ham.  In this post I’ll cover the meetup and day one of WordCamp.

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