All of us? Or all except you?

Twitter speaks to the inner masochist in all of us

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 2, 2022

I think this is his theory of why we're going to want to pay $8 a month to use Twitter. But maybe not. Maybe he deplores our love of pain and aims to lead us out of our lowly condition. Or is it meaningless chatter — alluringly enigmatic?

ADDED: I created the tag "masochism" for this post, then added it retrospectively to many posts in the archive. I found a few interesting things, and I'll excerpt them here, because it may shed some light on today's Muskism or spark some creative thinking:

November 25, 2008: Christopher Hitchens accused Obama of "foolhardiness and masochism" for selecting Hillary Clinton — "the unscrupulous female" — as Secretary of State.

January 19, 2011: My commenters were redesigning the Gadsden flag and Dr. Weevil — quipping "Here's my submission" — came up with this: 

          

November 1, 2013: I found what I called "a frisson of masochism" in something Ana Marie Cox attributed to Hillary Clinton.

May 28, 2015: I quoted Bernie Sanders, writing in 1972: "Many women seem to be walking a tightrope now. Their qualities of love, openness, and gentleness were too deeply enmeshed with qualities of dependency, subservience, and masochism." 

February 2, 2018: I quoted William Safire, writing in 1970: "A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals." 

October 30, 2018 — a study showed that Republicans and Democrats have different sexual fantasies: "The largest Democrat-Republican divide on the BDSM spectrum was in masochism...."

"Can someone do an image of the Gadsden flag with the words 'Don't Meddle With Me'?"

I asked, in the comments this morning's post about Trump's all-caps tweet, which ends with me saying "Meddling. We openly meddle and yet demand not to be meddled with."

The commenter Rob came through:



Thanks!

A rainbow Gadsden flag with the words "#ShootBack" appears all over West Hollywood in L.A.

"We are disturbed by them. We don’t believe in an eye for an eye, and we advocate against gun violence."

Said West Hollywood Mayor Lauren Meister.

"I understand the sentiment behind them and 1st Amendment rights, but it’s a bad message.... I hope it’s just people venting that they could do this, and I’m hoping their calmness will take over. It’s our job to keep you safe.... I understand that people want to fight back after Orlando... But there are ways to do that without a gun."

Said Capt. Holly Perez of the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department West Hollywood Station.

"[T]he best way to shoot back is to enact serious change to our gun policy.... We need an outright ban on all assault weapons and better protections to keep all guns away from bad people."

Said David Cooley, who owns the Abbey Food & Bar, which the L.A. Times calls "a well-known gay lounge" (and long-time readers of this blog may remember as the location of a meet-up with commenters in 2008).

I agree that it would be great to "keep all guns away from bad people," but where do you draw the good/bad line when it comes to human beings, how could the government figure out who goes on which side of that line, and how do you ensure that the government's process isn't an intrusion worse than any incremental improvement that could be achieved?

Here's the flag. Let's analyze it:



"Shoot back" refers to self-defense, and — despite Perez's "I’m hoping their calmness will take over" — it could be interpreted as already calm. The rattlesnake in the original Gadsden flag said "Don't tread on me." That is, I'm prepared to respond to an attack. Is there not calmness in knowing you are prepared?

Here's how the hashtag looks on Twitter. And that got me to this:

A street artist in Los Angeles who said he is a spokesman for the group responsible for the posters spoke exclusively to PJ Media on Thursday. Sabo, who was behind the tattooed "Blacklisted and Lovin' It" Ted Cruz posters that appeared in Hollywood back in 2014, said... "it's important that people know that this image came out of the gay community"... "Continuing to deny where the threat is coming from will not help keep this community safe.... The gay community needs to realize that the police are there to respond, not protect.... It is all of our responsibilities to be able to protect ourselves and our families. We can not do that if our elected officials disarm us"....

"Obama Trolls Tea Party With Bumper Sticker"/"Scalia's Past Haunts Him On Birth Control."

2 teasers from the top of the front page at Talking Points Memo:



Both go to articles written by Sahil Kapur, whose name I first noticed in connection with the Scalia piece yesterday. I didn't blog about that because the legal stupidity of it annoyed me but also bored me too much to explain. I happened to see Kapur's name again this morning as I clicked on a link at Drudge that read "LIMBAUGH RIPS MEDIA": 'PIG IGNORANT'..." Limbaugh excoriates the media for not understanding that self-employed persons — such as Matt Drudge — have to pay quarterly installments on their taxes, so Drudge was not lying when he said he was already paying the penalty for declining to buy health insurance.

The individual mandate went into effect Jan. 1 of this year, and most people paying their taxes right now are paying taxes for 2013. 'Dude, there's no penalty until next yr,' Sahil Kapur of the left-wing Talking Points Memo tweeted.  Kapur's colleague at TPM Dylan Scott wrote a full story with a headline alleging Drudge was 'probably lying.' 'Americans don't pay a penalty for not having health insurance until they file their 2014 taxes -- in 2015,' Scott wrote.

Now I see Kapur's name on that piece about the bumper sticker, which, at the inside page, is headlined "Obama Co-Opts Tea Party Slogan For Obamacare Bumper Sticker." We talked about that bumper sticker last night. My favorite comment on my post is from Carl Pham, who says:

Love it. An effeminate l'il toothless snake, slim 'n' trim from his regular yoga class, sipping chai latte and curling up with his iPad to do a little Facebooking on the back of a lime-green Prius. I'm guessing the same design team that came up with Pajama Boy?

I also like Dr. Weevil:

Unlike the Gadsden flag snake, this one doesn't seem to be a rattlesnake. The point of the original flag is that the snake-warrior doesn't strike first, doesn't go in search of people to bite, but if you step on him, he will bite back and hurt you worse than you hurt him. The Obamacare snake just bites people.

Yeah, and also, if you tread on a stethoscope, it doesn't attack you. You can quite successfully survive stomping all over a stethoscope. And why would they want to portray that stethoscope as being like a rattlesnake? The message seems to be that Obamacare is threatening you and can kill you.

Anyway, I have no problem with TPM noting that Obama has appropriated the old Gadsden flag, which has of late been strongly associated with the Tea Party. And it's not Kapur who called Obama a troll. I just found all that interesting and was surprised to see Kapur's name again.

It's that Scalia piece that is so irritating. Kapur is not responsible for the photo of Scalia coming out of the darkness with his hands in the "Boo!" position under the word "Haunts." But he is responsible for writing such a nitwit explanation of a legal problem. Scalia wrote the majority opinion in the case that most clearly explains what the Free Exercise Clause means — which is that there's no constitutional right to exemptions from neutral, generally applicable laws. The case that's currently before the Supreme Court (Hobby Lobby) is based on the statute — the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — that Congress passed after the Court decided that Free Exercise case, so now there is a statutory right to exemptions. There's nothing haunting about this. There's the Constitution, which needed interpretation, and there are statutes, which can extend more rights than the Constitution provides. These are different texts and they require independent interpretation.

It's dumb (or disingenuous) to portray Scalia as somehow troubled by needing to apply a statute that requires courts to protect religion more than the Constitution requires. In fact, if anything, I could see him being especially deferential to Congress's choice to trump a judicial opinion with a clearly stated statutory entitlement. The problem to be argued before the Court today is about 2 statutes and the way they interact. It's Congress, not Scalia, that is "haunted" by the past. Congress enacted the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, a clear text, and it had the power to put text in the Affordable Care Act that would exclude the application of the RFRA. It didn't!

I've explained this before, by the way, back in November when the Supreme Court granted cert. in the Hobby Lobby case:

This is about statutes and the politicos who produce them, not the judges who stand back and let them trip all over themselves pandering to everyone. If the Congress that passed the Affordable Care Act had wanted to exempt it from the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, it could have done so explicitly. It did not. Why should the Court cut back Congress's absurdly broad RFRA to help it out with what it failed to bother to do with the ACA?

"Show the world you're proud of health care reform."

"Simply connect with OFA on Facebook, and we'll send you a brand-new bumper sticker free of charge."



Email from Organizing for American sent me there, and I am a tad freaked out that the bumpersticker is displayed on exactly the car model and color I used to own (AKA "Li'l Greenie").

Palladian's Gadsden flag redesign.

Here's my original challenge to redesign the Gadsden flag. Click here to collect all the responses.

More variations on the Gadsden flag: "It's For The Children" and "Shovel Ready."

From Omaha1:





(Click here to see all the Gadsden flag redesigns.)

"Pwease Don't Twead on Me."

Hazy Dave tweaks his Gadsden flag design. (For all the Gadsden redesigns, click here.)

"Tread on me, please, I'm a masochist!"

Dr. Weevil adapts Hazy Dave's version of the Gadsden flag.


 

You can collect all the entries in my "Redesign the Gadsden flag" enterprise by clicking here.

Powerline picked up "It's OK to Tread on Me Now/I Have Health Insurance" for a post about Obamacare.

ADDED: I like Dr. Weevil's quip: "Here’s my submission."

Another "civility flag."

That one is from Hazy Dave, who says he "fooled around with putting a baby rattle on the tail a bit, but didn't think the complication was necessary."

"It's okay to tread on me now. I have health insurance."

You remember my challenge to redesign the Gadsden flag to reflect the new civility. That one is from Chip Cannon.

I've got more to come, and I'm still accepting entries. The idea is that the old threatening snake is inappropriate and must be toned down, lest unstable individuals take it the wrong way. You can go off the civility message, however. Just use the Gadsden flag and be interesting or amusing or something.

Another reimagining of the Gadsden flag snake.

Another entry in the "For civility's sake, let's change 'Don't Tread on Me'" challenge. This one, from Mateo, reworks the snake into the 2 snakes of the caduceus and changes the phrase into the physician's precept.

Here's a discussion point for the comments: Is "First, do no harm" a good conservative principle, making this flag something other than mockery of the liberal's call to civility? Or does the presentation of government as medicine work as a critique of liberalism?

Now, let's dance!

Chip Ahoy gives us another entry in the "For civility's sake, let's change 'Don't Tread on Me'" challenge.

All we are saying...

is...



Another entry in the "For civility's sake, let's change 'Don't Tread on Me'" challenge. This one is from WestVirginiaRebel.

For civility's sake, let's change "Don't Tread on Me"... Part 3.

Awesome Printer takes up my challenge to make the snake friendlier and adopts my rewrite of "Don't Tread on Me":



And Henry (the commenter) comes up with these variations:

For civility's sake, let's change "Don't Tread on Me"... Part 2.

Chip Ahoy responds to my request for a redesigned Gadsden flag:

For civility's sake, let's change "Don't Tread on Me" to "Please, Don't Tread on Me."

Or, "Please, when you tread on me, walk gently, but don't worry I won't bite. I'm quite a gentle fellow really. I just have some modest reforms I would like to propose."

Oh, but the snake still looks so awfully angry, with his mouth open, his tongue out, and his tail curved slightly up. Please, help redraw the flag with a friendlier snake — a good citizen snake — and a kindlier message.

"Tread on me, I'll be your friend, we all need somebody to tread on."