However I think there can be a good case made that “Longlegs” is actually the perfect name for this movie, for several reasons.

One of them is that it’s difficult to take Longlegs seriously. There’s a distinct lack of anything that’s really threatening there. This guy’s a loser, always was, always will be. He’s just this puffy-looking guy who seems to be about a year away from dying himself.

Now part of the threat he represents is the “normal” level of threat that people like me — straight white cis guys — don’t usually experience. It’s coming under the attention of some weirdo. And that’s something that has to be recognized.

But I think there’s a more pernicious dynamic at play here.

There’s an obvious source for killer’s monicker. It’s “daddy longlegs”, an insect (not a spider! this will be relevant later!) which tends to live in unseen parts of your habitat. I mean, these things are harmless. Contrary to all the silly urban legends you may have heard they effectively have no venom and cannot hurt any reasonably mobile human being.

And that’s the assumption that is essential to Longlegs’s success. He looks, acts and talks like a dingbat.

But the scary thing is, it apparently didn’t take much more than that to keep the FBI fooled back in the mid-90s. I mean, there are plot holes here that could encompass the entire LA area. There are obvious pitfalls for crime fighters back then who were still essentially working by phones (only recently made mobile!). There’s no internet. There’s no huge pool of data from which one could have made inferences. Although part of that is due to mind control — Lee Harker is clearly held back until her doll is destroyed — there are also a number of unforgiveable, almost comedic blunders. I mean, the murders are all connected to one particular birthday, and it didn’t occur to anyone to check what Harker’s DOB was? Or, for that matter, her boss’s daughter’s DOB? REALLY?!?

But that’s exactly the situation in which the viewer is put, in part by the very name. Daddy longlegs aren’t a threat. They’re not even proper spiders (whose bodies have two segments). They have 8 legs but that’s about it. Frankly a single house centipede would easily win a battle of fright with anyone over that goofy thing.

But therein lies the rub. Those little critters are just allowed to thrive, and they do, in attics and crawlspaces, frankly you probably don’t even know that you have them most of the time.

And likewise Longlegs literally lives in Lee Harker’s mom’s basement.

But that’s how evil propagates. It doesn’t do big political rallies. It is a way of life for so many people, just by being the “normal thing”. It just quietly drives wedges between people. Even between investigators. At the FBI. Who clearly should have been taken off the case were it not for some hidden force that has kept them there.

All of it was really easy to see, once you have the power of that force no longer bearing down on your judgement.

There’s a lesson in there somewhere.

First of all, Trump being the GOP nominee is nothing short of insane.  The guy is literally a convicted felon out on bail, running for President. He has been adjudicated responsible for a rape and keeps boasting that he was able to stack the Supreme Court just enough (including by the appointment of a guy who was credibly accused of sexual assault — who only squeaked by because Trump literally interfered with the FBI investigation into the assault allegation). And somehow some women want to vote for him. Also he literally led an insurrection where participants raided the US Capitol in order to stop the official recognition of the 2020 election AND TRY TO PHYSICALLY SEIZE THE VICE-PRESIDENT IN ORDER TO HANG HIM. But somehow none of this disqualifies him from becoming President. You literally would not be allowed to volunteer to chaperone schoolchildren with a record like that, but apparently you could end up having the nuclear launch codes.

The question that’s been on my mind all year.
This photo courtesy of the Whiskey River Soap Co.  (not an affiliate link)

So that’s one factor. But, like a green teenager getting ready to watch his first horror film, let’s put the “unbelievableness” (to coin a phrase) of the situation aside and accept the Donald Trump candidacy as just what it is. Because to Americans it makes sense somehow.

Seriously, I believe that “it is what is it” is the most sensical explanation we’re going to get for that.

What is harder to accept at this point in history is the treatment Trump has received this year in the American news media. It’s frankly been so startling that a new term has been invented specifically to describe it. Journalists have been sanewashing the Donald Trump candidacy.

What is “sanewashing”, you ask? Think of it this way, when a company tries to manufacture some ecological credentials for itself that it does not deserve, it’s known as “greenwashing”. When another goes through some performative display of putting a little LGBTQ+ flag on the front door but also supports anti-queer initiatives, that’s known as “rainbow-washing”. And when Donald Trump delivers a pointless, rambling series of non-sequiturs in front of an audience, for example telling us how he’d rather be electrocuted than eaten by sharks (literally he did that during a campaign rally), and the press completely fails to point out how utterly insane his speech was, that’s called “sanewashing”.

Sadly this term was invented too late to be included in Webster’s annual list of new words for 2024. But boy, did the American corporate news media ever make that new word necessary. Because Trump’s campaign appearances have steadily been growing in sheer madness. The shark vs battery story was probably the mildest example of insanity in Trump’s 2024 speeches.  On one notable occasion he started talking about Hannibal Lecter from Manhunter/Silence of the Lambs/Hannibal  (movie and TV). He now desperately tries to make people believe that it’s a reference to people who come into the USA, but the first time he brought it up  what he was saying was “The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’s a wonderful man. He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner… But Hannibal Lecter. Congratulations. The late, great Hannibal Lecter.”

And how was that covered in the mainstream press? As much as they could the corporate press ignored that part of the speech. That Hannibal speech was on May 11th, and this was the headline of the New York Times article on that rally the next day: “Away From the Confines of a Courtroom, Trump Rallies Beachside at the Jersey Shore”.

Although this phenomenon can be seen happening throughout the corporate press in 2024, it must be noted that in the eyes of many the New York Times is the biggest offender when it comes to sanewashing. For some reason I cannot fathom, Times publisher A. G. Sulzberger has consistently been attempting to pick fights with the Democratic party in general this year, and really has done as much as it can to make Donald Trump look like a man who’s not in the throes of frontotemporal dementia. Or senility. Or tertiary syphilis. I mean, Trump still steadfastly refuses to provide his medical records so it’s really impossible to tell exactly what the fsck is wrong with him. Of course this also means that no condition can reasonably be excluded to explain his bizarre behavior.

The most egregious single example of sanewashing I’ve seen was after Trump’s speech on October 7th in which he literally said that immigrants were bringing bad genes to America. If you don’t know, that’s literally what the Nazis were saying in the 1930s. How did the New York Times cover it? “Trump’s Long Fascination With Genes and Bloodlines Gets New Scrutiny”. I sh*t you not. That being said, this headline was so wildly inappropriate to describe what had gone on at the rally that it started a wave of backlash against the sanewashing phenomenon. And it forced a lot of people to take a long, hard look at Trump’s performance at his rallies. Not coincidentally, Trump has visibly been declining steadily since that time. Even Republicans can’t entirely sidestep the question “wtf is wrong with Donald” anymore — except the MAGA cultists of course —  and it’s leading to bizarre moments.

Like just a couple of days ago when, during a Q&A hosted by noted puppy murder enthusiast Kristi Noem (Governor of South Dakota), Donald decided that he no longer felt like answering questions, or giving a speech. So he had his sound guy play some tunes while he just stood there attempting to dance with moves that sometimes looked more like he was about to fall over. There were a couple of people in his audience who had heat-related emergencies, but Trump was just on stage “dancing” for almost FORTY MINUTES. And then he just left.

The New York Times headline? “Trump Bobs His Head to Music for 30 Minutes in Odd Town Hall Detour”. Yes, an “odd town hall detour”. That’s kinda like saying that the “meat”  in Jeffrey Dahmer’s fridge “raised questions”. Or, to craft a headline going back to the Lincoln thing, “Showing of ‘Our American Cousin’ ends early due to commotion in the audience”.

I could go on and on about this, but chances are if you’re reading this you’re well aware of many examples already. The real question is, why is the press doing this? The answer may surprise you! (or not, it all depends).

I post at Bluesky, it’s been my go-to social network since Elon took Twitter in the direction of full Nazi. Skeeters (Bluesky users) have the not unreasonable view that media outlets engage in sanewashing because they like Donald Trump and want him to win.

I think it’s not that simple, although I can see many of the arguments in favor of that opinion.

In my humble opinion, this is a byproduct of the corporate obsession with audience engagement.

Have you recently noticed how much Google search sucks nowadays compared with how it was about 10 years ago? You’re not alone. Journalist (and skeeter) Ed Zitron looked into what happened in the past few years at Google. According to him, the search experts were reaching a pretty extreme level of efficiency, which you would think is a good thing. But that’s because you’re not Google CEO Sundar Pichai. You see, Google’s actual money-maker is ads. So, if you’re a tech CEO with a serious case of consultant brain, you can only reach one conclusion — that if the user finds what they’re looking for on the first try, that’s a bad thing. There’s only one ad impression there. But if you have to make the user make several queries using increasing precision, then you’ve served 3, 4, 5 impressions. Isn’t that better? Let that sink in. This is Sundar Pichai’s legacy at Google — fscking up your search results so they can show you more ads and charge more to the companies that use Google ads. This is considered “greater engagement”. I am absolutely serious.

Remember when they warned you about social media: if you’re being offered something for free, then what you’re getting is not the end product. You are the end product. And you’re the one being sold by one party to another. That’s how social media companies make money.

Why am I bringing this up? Because media companies, including the news media, are doing the same thing. From a business point of view, they are using “engagement” to sell their brand to the public, and to sell ad impressions.

Ok you ask, how is that related to sanewashing Trump’s campaign? As with every election year in the USA, 2024 is seeing a huge boost in people watching news stations (OTA or on cable) and visiting news sites, many doing so several times a day, That’s great news for these outlets. They get to sell more ads, they get to keep their brands within viewers’ attention spans. But this only works as long as the Presidential race remains tight. Or, more realistically, as long as the Presidential race *appears* to remain tight. If one candidate is running away with the lead, the suspense disappears. People tune out of the news cycle. Engagement drops. Publishers are now unhappy. Revenues decline.

But given the premise of an improbably tight race, viewers will flock to their information sources, hit the refresh button like it owes them money, the brand remains uppermost in their minds, and lots of ad impressions are delivered. Publishers are now free to get back on the champagne while lighting large cigars with flaming Benjamins. And that’s why we’re being sold this idea of a an impossibly tight horse race. Sure, very rich owners (and upper management) of media companies probably stand to gain more in terms of tax cuts from a Trump presidency, but otherwise it’s really hard to make a case as to why media outlets somehow love Trump. The guy is talking about mobilizing troops against Americans just for disagreeing with him, and historically that eventually includes everyone who isn’t Donald Trump. Being in Donald’s good graces is something that’s as fleeting as an erection at a strip club when you’re really drunk. And while I was tempted to say that Trump is an entertaining character — a carnival barker in fact — and that journalists see coverage potential in that, the fact that they’re downplaying his “being entertaining” shows that they’re about as sick of it as the rest of us.

I think we’re being sold a lie. I don’t think the Presidential race is that close at all. I think that Harris will overwhelmingly win the popular vote, for a start, and that Trump will maybe get 40% of the vote. Certainly not significantly more than that. I believe that REAL polls — the private ones conducted for the political campaigns — reflect this, which is why Donald Trump is looking more like a corpse with every passing day. But American news organizations can’t tell us the truth at this time, because as with retailers at Christmas and pumpkin growers in October, news orgs rely on this time to make as much engagement as possible happen. There’s no chance of achieving that when the race is a blowout.

As a bonus, there is also a good and virtuous reason for the news media to make the race appear closer than it really is. In an election situation, if you feel that your side is winning big, you will simply not be motivated to go vote. After all, why bother with that when “your side” is going to win? However if the race is razor thin, which is what we’re being sold right now, there is an increased feeling that yes, one vote can make a difference, and it’s definitely worth taking time in your day to go to the polls. It’s certainly not a major motivation for news orgs, but it’s a silver lining to keep in mind as you keep looking at what has been a very frustrating year in news coverage for those of us in the reality-based community.

Anyway that was as close to a TED talk as I’m ever likely to give, if you’re still reading I trust y’all enjoyed that, and I hope you see the sense of what I’m saying.

Funny how that happened. The man dedicated the last few years of his life to exposing problems that put the entire flying public at risk, and just when the issues he warned about are making headlines, suddenly, he “commits suicide”. Come on people. Sure, he died of a gunshot wound, but I would stake a large amount of money to say that he was not the one to pull the trigger.

The Charleston County coroner ruled the wound was self-inflicted, but when you think about the amount of pull that a huge employer like Boeing have on a place the size of Charleston you realize how the wheels of justice are sometimes greased just enough by major economic players into “being team players”.

Here is a video on the man and the major safety issues he tried to warn the public about.

This is obvious *not* quite what’s taking place at Twitter right now.

@elonmusk‘s offer was so much over the realistic valuation of the company that the shareholders just saw $$$$ and went with it. However Twitter isn’t a traditional company. Twitter is a social network. Its technology stack is robust but it’s not particularly outstanding. It works, it doesn’t have a huge lot of features, but it can handle the traffic. Its real value is in the users and the connections it brings to the party. To remain at its baseline of “value” compared to before the takeover, it has to retain its userbase. If users leave, the site’s value is diminished. And this is something that @elonmusk
doesn’t grok.

While he doesn’t get it, users do get it. And their response to Musk’s “comedy of errors” tenure ever since he took over the site is to look elsewhere for a new social network to spend time on, because it’s become clear that Musk wants to take this site and turn it into his personal sandbox. I wouldn’t pay $44 billion for a sandbox, but then I don’t have the sort of detachment from reality that being the world’s richest man engenders.

However for a couple of weeks now we’ve had a look at what @elonmusk considers entertainment for himself, and we’re all pretty much horrified, from Nazi imagery to petty personal fighting to non-stop lying by Musk himself. And that’s why, sadly, now is the time to ditch this platform. Because remaining a part of it at this point is to risk immeasurable personal reputational damage. Think the repercussions in your life if it came out that you were a user of “stormfront” (or whatever KKK-affiliated web site exists out there). This is what Twitter will turn into in the hands of a spoilt man-child with highly questionable morals and a reputation as a con man who has no board to answer to and in time is growing more and more embittered that he can’t just buy a positive image for himself. Or friends.

And if that sounds like I’m describing Donald Trump, it’s not a coincidence; both Trump and Musk are trust fund babies whose lives are led by their malignant narcissism. 

So there’s an understandable urge to leave a platform that’s devolving into a giant cesspit of xenophobia in all its diseased forms, because users don’t want the taint of it.

It’s probably a bad idea to deactivate one’s account, however. All this will do is leave your handle open to a malignant actor taking it over and attempting impersonation. A much better approach is this: make sure you set multi-factor authentication on your account, and then log off. This way no one can use your handle, and you are protecting your reputation.

There are many alternate social networks out there that don’t belong to snake-oil-selling egomaniac billionaires, such as mastodon, counter.social and tribel. Check them out and give them your time and eyeballs instead of watching someone who should know better tank a platform to flatter his own malignant ego.

Hmm… let’s go to video, that’s the Newsmax feed. Newsmax was one of very few stations to broadcast this event. Even Fox News gave it a miss. Check out the second video in this tweet:

this is one of the most bizarre things I've seen at a Trump rally. All it is missing is passing around Kool-Aid right after. pic.twitter.com/BmPOztb7kA

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 18, 2022

It’s not just Trump either, this video was taken at a rally for the Republican candidate for governor of Pennsylvania held on the next day:

Don’t be naive. They know what they’re doing. pic.twitter.com/QaJbC8mGxt

— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) September 19, 2022

This is getting pretty creepy.

For those who don’t know about this story, @vikileaks30 was an anonymous account launched on Wednesday which broadcasted certain salacious details about Vic Toews, including parts of affidavits from his 2007 divorce — largely his ex-wife’s testimony — and many interesting details of expense claims by Mr. Toews as a government minister.

Soon after the novelty twitter account appeared on the scene Ottawa Citizen tech news reporter Vito Pilieci came up with an interesting plan to figure out who was posting on it and came up with the idea to send the twitterer a web site link which was unique for that particular user. There’s nothing wrong with that technique, I’ve used it myself a couple of times, and twitter’s use of URL shorteners makes that technique discoverable only with some difficulty. The IP address which was used to visit the link turned out to have been one connected with the Parliament buildings. That much can be reliably established.

What I find a little more difficult to understand is the way that the story was reported both by Pilieci himself and Postmedia flagship paper the National Post. Starting with the title, which was surely written by a higher-up: “Vikileaks Twitter account on Vic Toews linked to ‘pro-NDP†address in House of Commons”. Indeed the original Ottawa Citizen story used the considerably less “inciteful” (if you will) “Vikileaks30 linked to House of Commons IP address”. But this is only the start of the smear. In the story itself we see this paragraph:

Aside from being used to administer the Vikileaks30 Twitter feed, the address has been used frequently to update Wikipedia articles — often giving them what appears to be a pro-NDP bias, actions that have attracted the attention of numerous Internet observers in recent months.

I’ve taken the liberty here to put in bold type the second instance of the smear. Note the use of “weasel language” here — the author (almost undoubtedly Pilieci himself) double-qualifies the statement so as to obviate the necessity of backing that statement with actual evidence, which he indeed does not provide.

So, that’s interesting. Without any more specifics this certainly looks like an attempt to smear the party that currently holds the position of Official Opposition in the House of Commons. Now why would someone do that and be this specific about it?

Well, the Ottawa Citizen, which currently employs Pilieci, is owned by the Postmedia Network, which is a group encompassing several newspapers, including my hometown’s The Gazette newspaper and Canada’s second national daily, the National Post (which should be no surprise to you as the link shown above goes to a NatPo story). The National Post, pretty much since its inception, is regularly accused of running a pro-Conservative slant on the political stories it covers, which clearly explains why they chose to edit Pilieci’s story  from the rather more neutral “Vikileaks Twitter account traced to House of Commons” (the title of the story on Thursday) to the, well, deliberately less equivocal title they chose to run on Friday. Am I supposed to think that this is just some kind of “oversight” or absent-minded error? Maybe others can think so, but I’m not that gullible. The smear is clear and deliberate.

OK, so maybe you think, this is a one-off thing… well, no. On Friday the Citizen ran this Stephen Maher editorial, this time with a neutral, toned-down title: “Maher: Toews made himself Twitter target with ‘pornographers’ crack” about how the @vikileaks30 story started. Read the story, though, and the ugly smear rears its head again in connection with the IP address:

That IP address also was linked to some Wikipedia pages where someone had written pro-NDP comments, which the Citizen reported.

Actually I do wish that Postmedia hired better editors because what Maher is saying now is not quite the same as what Pilieci was saying earlier, but this seems to me little but a barely-disguised attempt at repeating the smear. And then not content with doing it once, Maher pipes up again soon after:

It may be that that person is a secret NDP supporter, and enemy of Vic Toews, or it may be that there is some confusion over the IP address.

Does Maher think we’re all blind here?.. this is getting pretty blatant. Again, note the use of the weasel phrase “it may be”. Overall the article is pretty weak stuff by a national  Postmedia correspondent. In Canadian print journalism this is as senior as it gets without getting bumped up to a position involving more management duties, this isn’t the young guy who writes the computer column (that would be Pilieci, who is a staff member at the Ottawa Citizen and not really staff with the Postmedia “mothership”).

But that article isn’t what really rang a bell for me on the smear question — rather, what made me see the big picture was the follow-up by Pilieci following the @vikileaks30 poster’s announcement that the account was now retired. See if you can spot the difference from the (youthful?) exhuberance of his former column:

A further look into the IP address associated with Vikileaks30 found the address had been used in a range of online activities, including to edit several entries on the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia ranging on topics from the history of ice hockey to a biography of Whitney Houston, as well as to alter content on a variety of politically charged topics that span the political spectrum. It does not appear the poster was targeting any specific political party or affiliation.

This went to publishing after it was clear that the NDP slur had failed to gain any traction in the House of Commons or indeed with public sentiment. What a difference a day makes, I say.

It still remains a good question as to whether there was a concerted effort by the Tory-friendly Postmedia to deliberately steer hostility towards the NDP at a time when the Conservative Party was in a bit of a crisis. The coverage in the first story mentioned actually lead to quite a few angry words in the House of Commons, mostly coming (as the second story reports) from rather easily-influenced Tory attack dog John Baird:

“Not only have they stooped to the lowest of the lows, but they have been running this nasty Internet dirty-trick campaign with taxpayers’ money,” he said.

That’s the head of Canadian diplomacy shooting himself in the foot there, taking Pilieci’s story as gospel truth (his was the main story that included the smear). Oh dear.

I for one will be following further developments regarding this aspect of the C-30 story, and I certainly hope that others will start asking questions about the possibility of spin or even possible fabrications by the newspaper conglomerate that bills itself as “the largest publisher by circulation of paid English-language daily newspapers in Canada”.

Either that, or they need to take a serious look at who they keep on staff.

Note: in order to avoid any confusion if any of the three aforementioned stories should be edited or somehow deleted, I have taken screen captures of all 4:

1. The original IP address story as it appeared on the National Post web site on 2/16
2. The same story as it appeared on the Ottawa Citizen web site
3. The Stephen Maher story as it appeared on the Ottawa Citizen web site on 2/17
4. The later story by Pilieci as it appeared on the Ottawa Citizen web site on 2/17

According to Ottawa U Law professor Michael Geist, it’s going to create a panopticon society where online privacy essentially no longer exists and is replaced with a sort of Big Brother. Which is pretty funny when you consider that the Tories are also about to introduce their bill to scrap the long gun registry and proactively delete any and all data therein. Apparently guns don’t kill people, but the freedom to go about one’s own business does… that pretty much tells you what you need to know about Stephen Harper and his cronies.

And then there’s the issue of cost, which is entirely offloaded onto the ISPs themselves, who will now have to keep a record of everything you do online — well, everything you do online taking the direct route via your ISP, making it trivial to circumvent — for 90 days. I rather pity the ISPs who are going to be stuck storing all that data at their own expense. You can be certain that they’ll be glad to pass the savings onto you, of course.

So what’s the justification for this garbage? Mr. Toews, never one to shy away from stooping to scrape the bottom of the barrel, claims that either you are with him or you are siding with “the child pornographers”. Never mind that there have been a number of child porn busts recently which have not required any of the new police state powers Mr. Toews insists are absolutely crucial to fight that crime. Personally I’ve always thought that it was illegal, but apparently by senile old Vic’s reckoning it was impossible to fight this crime before! Of course it wasn’t. Mr. Toews is just pulling his Maud Flanders act, and it sells out very well out West, where evidently people ignorant or mad enough to vote for the insane old codger think “internet” is a kind of potato blight.

But why should we let Vic the impaler set the terms? I say, unless you are against this so-called “lawful access” bill, you are siding with the fascists. I guess the Conservative Party has yet another self-renaming in the works.

Clearly this is double-plus-ungood. Really, Americans, do you think anyone’s taking you seriously on that one?