Pay No Attention To That Man Behind The Internet Curtain..

92 Percent of Newt Gingrich's 1.3 Million Twitter Followers Are Fake  Big fuckin' surprise coming from a big fuckin' douche, no?  Excerpts:

More than 90% of presidential candidate Newt Gingrich's approximately 1.3 million Twitter followers are either spambots or accounts not demonstrably connected to real people, an analysis by the web firm PeekYou found.

Gingrich boasted recently that his substantial number of followers eclipsed his rivals for the Republican nomination, a surprising feat for a man whose campaign appeared to be collapsing as prominent aides and fundraisers fled en masse. Gawker followed up on the story with a former Gingrich staffer who charged that Gingrich had employed various web agencies to purchase inactive or decoy accounts and build an illusion of a massive online following.

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..PeekYou had, by coincidence, been conducting a project on measuring Twitter audiences that included crunching data on presidential candidates. The Gawker post led researchers to reexamine data they had compiled on Gingrich and find that "a huge majority of his followers are either completely anonymous people who have no other web presence, or they are spambots," according to general manager of business and product development Josh Mackey.

This dude practically shits Family Values.  I'm sorry he won't get the nomination, but I'm really hoping that he's still got enough lies in him to finance his "candidacy" through December.  2011 needs more laffs, and Gingrich is the man to deliver those laffs.

This Is Why I Intensely Dislike, And Won't Participate On, Twitter

Some respond to Japan earthquake by pointing to global warming  From The Daily Caller.  Throwaway article about a Twitter fight from the idiot believers of Global Warming(Clarification:  I am not calling Global Warming out as idiocy.  The term "idiot believers" applies to followers of this, or any theory, who have based their beliefs on little to no actual knowledge.  This is not a comment for or against Global Warming.  Rather, Twitter is the subject, and the article is the jumping off point..).  Maybe they sought to connect the damage from the tsunami to rising sea levels, or some theoretical link that might takes pages to explain, or maybe they were just wrong:  Global Warming doesn't cause earthquakes.  We won't ever know their full motivation or comprehension of the concept and implications of what they post, as they've chosen a forum that limits them to 140 characters!  You cannot, Can NOT have any worthy, nuanced, multi-level, developed discussion regarding the merits of Global Warming, or any other complex issue, on Twitter.  It is, by design, impossible.

If you can encapsulate your thoughts into 140 characters at any given time;  I'm pretty much assured not to care what those thoughts might be.  They're trivial.  Dumb.  Ham-Handed.  They're blunt, inaccurately descriptive, under-developed, annihilated grammatically, shallow, one dimensional, or meant as comedy, which is the one exception.  Twitter promotes lazy thought and rewards short attention spans, which exacerbates the rampant lack of critical thought already contagion here in year 2011. 

It feels as if this trend of verbal acceleration and condensation has negatively effected our collective emotional response.  We are bored with what doesn't immediately grab our attention, or that that holds our attention too long.  We don't have to think; so we choose not to.  And we extend that courtesy to those around us.  We have chosen shallow and easy.  We'd prefer not to.  We want 140 characters as opposed to a full explanation.  Twitter is just the symptom. 

And that is why, ultimately, we are doomed.  Provided we don't rip apart, first..