Thread by @drcrouchback

So yesterday was interesting. It shone an interesting light on how very online people like Owen Jones work.
A thread 🧵 1/

I make no apologies for the offending post. I still think OJ’s response to an octogenarian with cancer is unhinged but it bears further inspection 2/

He’s a journalist, allegedly, so he knows Biden will never face trial for anything. No court would allow a man with evident cognitive failure and cancer face trial never mind send him to prison. So his expressed wish is a sadistic fantasy. It’s performative and he knows it. 3/

So posting such an outlandish fantasy doesn’t inform or instruct, it’s pure rhetoric for his audience of sycophants, and boy do they deliver. They clap along like performing seals. 4/

And then comes the really interesting part. He quote tweets to his 1M followers. Their ensuing purity spiral and struggle session sees a mounting frenzy of people trying to outdo each other in the extremity of their commitment to The Cause. 5/

It’s a sad state of affairs. I can only presume OJ gets some perverse kick out of it. Like the school bully he looks on Stebson-like as his acolytes pile on

@SarahDuggers @irgarner & @CL_Meadows got the same treatment

6/

It speaks to the emptiness of this sort of online existence. OJ seems a poor soul. He’s left the class he came from who he hates anyway for their treachery in voting Brexit or Tory or Reform 7/

He idealises and romanticises in an almost orientalist way people who would happily throw him off one of the few remaining roofs in Gaza. Most of the battles around sexuality have been concluded so he grubs around in the dead end of gender, alienating women on the way 8/

He rarely speaks of meaningful personal relationships. He has no children and has never built anything and is in an increasingly precarious world as what St Augustine called a ‘vendor of words’. His words will be pulped or sit unread on a server somewhere. 9/

So I can only presume he’s left with the cheap thrill of the dopamine rush of a Twitter pile on. But like every cheap thrill, it’ll need a bigger dose or more frequent hits or the desperate measure of dragging a cancer-ridden old man forward as an Aunt Sally for his acolytes 10/

So if you’re reading this Owen, and I suspect you are as we’ve established you search for your own name on here, get help. Your current online behaviour won’t fill the void. 11/11