The Republican brand: incompetence and ideology


Ron DeSantis announced his presidential run yesterday, with Elon Musk at his side, using that technological marvel called Twitter. It did not go well.

Twitter’s livestream event with Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis crashed and was delayed on Wednesday as hundreds of thousands of users logged on to hear DeSantis announce his bid for the White House.

Sound from the livestream event — which was held on Twitter Spaces and hosted by owner Elon Musk and tech entrepreneur David Sacks — cut in and out in the first minutes after starting.

“We’ve got so many people here that we are kind of melting the servers,” Sacks said at one point.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis at his election night party in Tampa, Florida, in November 2022.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis announces he’s running for president in 2024
More than 500,000 Twitter users joined the event, which was ultimately ended and then restarted, delaying DeSantis’ announcement by nearly half an hour. When the event was relaunched using Sacks’ account, only around 250,000 users ultimately listened in.

Twitter has faced a variety of outages and technical issues since Musk took over the platform late last year. Shortly after acquiring the company, Musk laid off large numbers of technical and other staff and reduced Twitter’s server capacity in an effort to cut costs.

Oh please oh please oh please. May the right wing continue to rely on Elon Musk on technical issues. It’s like a perfect model of how Republican policies work. Errm, don’t work, that is.

Comments

  1. StevoR says

    Sack good people, suck up to bad people, be surprised by what results?

    A strange super-man who has journeyed towards pretty much siding with nazis and a charisma-less one-trick hater whose whole ethos and schtick is hating on being awake (woke) as that means he’s going to make his dreams come true.

    A dying “breed?” Hope so.

  2. birgerjohansson says

    Not incompetent enough. They need to import former Brit government ministers for a consistent low quality.

  3. StevoR says

    @ 1. A strange super-rich man that is… Sigh. Just when you think you’ve fixed all the typos..

    PS. Mano Singham has had some good posts on DeathSantisés run for the POTUS-cy :

    I must admit that I am a little puzzled by his strategy, mainly the one of timing. Why challenge Trump for the 2024 nomination? DeSantis is setting himself up for a brutal battle and Trump has already started lashing out at him in his typical style, giving him nicknames and mocking him. Since DeSantis and Trump are competing for largely the same culture war-loving voters, and those people tend to be loyal to Trump, how can he win over those voters without attacking Trump? He seems to think that he can be Trump without all the Trump baggage, trying to obliquely bring up the latter’s legal woes by mentioning the issue of him paying hush money to a porn star.

    Source : https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2023/03/28/the-puzzling-strategy-of-ron-desantis/

    Plus :

    The governor of Florida Ron DeSantis is a prime example, if you needed one, that having elite educational credentials (he attended Yale as an undergraduate and then Harvard Law School) does not mean that you are smart. ..(snip).. Further evidence that his political skills are sub-par comes from the fight he picked with the Disney corporation, escalating it to such ridiculous levels that it risks backfiring on him. DeSantis seems to think that running on an ‘anti-woke’ platform will be his key to success in outflanking Trump on the culture war grievance issues. He has bragged that ‘Florida is where woke goes to die’. The word ‘woke’ is conveniently undefined, meaning that one can claim to be anti-woke by seizing on any aspect of the culture wars and opposing any moves that seek to make society more egalitarian by promoting acceptance of marginalized groups.

    Source : https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2023/04/20/how-harry-and-meghans-child-became-part-of-the-disney-desantis-feud/

    As well as here – the last bit here esp :

    I have said before that DeSantis does not strike me a particularly smart person and also has poor political instincts. His recent missteps just add support to my view.

    He must have thought that taking on Disney would burnish his anti-woke profile. It has, but not in the way he might have hoped. It may be best for DeSantis if he decides that the situation is hopeless and quietly drops his bid for the 2024 nomination and, to save face, claim that he never sought it in the first place. But given his recent record of blunders, it is quite possible that he continues his futile quest and suffers further ignominy.

    Source : https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2023/04/27/disney-decides-to-play-hardball-with-desantis/#more-70950

  4. birgerjohansson says

    Like the old Chinese warlords DeSantis is neglecting the needs of the
    territory he is holding, merely using it as a platform to launch a bid for national control.
    Cost for housing and for energy have gone up more in Florida than elsewhere during his stint as a governor. He has to use culture wars, he cannot run on his record.

  5. says

    From what I’ve heard, it was 500K present for that fiasco. That’s not a giant number, compared to the amount of Twitter users. I thought Elon had a guy who could have fixed all of that…oh wait. Elon fired that guy. 🤣

  6. specialffrog says

    Maybe DeSantis is counting on Trump being dead or in prison by the time the convention rolls around. Neither seems like a particularly safe bet.

  7. gijoel says

    Meanwhile Georgia says “hold my beer.”

    Again, if they want to prove the world is flat then why don’t they just go to the edge of the world, lean over and take a photo of the fucking turtle.

  8. says

    It’s amazing what an ego can do to a person. The base still loves his fascist makeover of Florida but the Hamberdler has made him look weak. He can’t go toe-to-toe with the sex offender’s bullying and his silence isn’t making him seem above it to them.

    Then there is the Republican bubble (which is weird how the “centrists” never tell the right-wing they have to get out of) where they’re convinced that the “silent majority” agrees with his government’s hostility to minorities and the marginalized and don’t realize what a giant sucking charisma vacuum he is.

    The scary thing is that the states with Republican governments but went for Biden in 2020 working to ensure that they can rig the electoral college so there’s still a good chance either one of them could end up as the next president in 2024.

  9. jaytheostrich says

    Heh, imagine how badly it would have gone if DeScaryman had done his announcement in Mike Lindell’s studio! That would have been even more hilarious.

  10. says

    Not incompetent enough. They need to import former Brit government ministers for a consistent low quality.

    You mean Liz Truss AND a head of lettuce?

  11. wzrd1 says

    “I think it crashed because when you multiply a half-million people in a room by an account with over 100 million followers, which is Elon’s account, I think that creates just a scalability level that was unprecedented,” Sacks said.

    Uh huh, half million connections to a multicast session equals a half million connections, later reduced to a quarter million connections when restarted.

    Sacks said: “You know you’re breaking new ground when there’s bugs and scaling issues.”

    So, multicast IP is new ground? I imagine he’ll next claim that a broadcast address is also new. As a mint, multicast routing goes back to 1986. The problem is, Spaces never left prototype and was pressed into production, to multicast bullshit by incompetent idiots, who made the attempt with insufficient personnel to support their duck taped prototype on insufficient hardware, as it was supposed to leverage Amazon cloud services for scalability in real time (which they never did get working before they all got laid off).
    Hopefully, they enjoyed their maiden voyage on the HMS Twitanic, it’s all downhill from there.

    @3, indeed, a finer example of a mediocre softball player in a hardball game has yet to be displayed.

    @5, half million for the first attempt. It failed, so they relaunched it after a delay that lost half, with only 250k viewers. He then blamed total followers, most of whom are inactive, somehow mythically loading down what effectively was a multicast routing session, trying to pawn it off as new technology. Multicast being invented in 1986 and all.

    @9, it wasn’t? I guess it was just processed by his pillows then. Pity he wasn’t available to hand them out, listeners could’ve used them during the abortive sessions.

    Gotta love his competence. It’s right up there with Hitler destroying Siemens at the onset of WWII, which literally would’ve shut down the largest supplier to their war machine. I guess the Nazis want their very own Titanic, because the Hindenburg wasn’t enough of a disaster (seriously, they painted the dirigible with what essentially remains today rocket fuel!). Maybe a followup emulating Chernobyl?

  12. says

    I have a friend who made this comment: I think Ron hadn’t seen how casually Elon Musk accepts crashes & explosions as part of the cost of doing business.”

  13. Rich Woods says

    @birgerjohansson #2:

    I hear that Dominic Raaaaab is seeking a new career.

  14. Rich Woods says

    @wzrd1 #11:

    Awful. Appalling. Your statement is egregiously wrong: it’s RMS Twitanic.

  15. says

    Sometimes we get lucky and they hire idiots.
    Like when the Nixon campaign hired incompetent crooks who couldn’t get a bug to work and didn’t know how to properly tape a door to prevent it from locking.
    Love how they blame it on Elon having too many followers, though. Shades of Kent Brockman–“This reporter places the blame squarely on you, the viewer.”

  16. Pierce R. Butler says

    The headline understates the actual situation.

    How about: The Republican Brand: Bigotry and Corruption?

    We could use up a whole thesaurus of negative terms and still not do justice to the reality.

  17. says

    It is fitting that those that run and participate in twitter are ignorant TWITS! They are so incompetent they didn’t even have standby servers to handle the traffic. The elongated muskrat and deathsantis are just running a deadly, powerful clown circus.

  18. robro says

    Pierce R. Butler @ #16 — Why don’t we just use “Republican” as the code word for this array of incapabilities and self-serving corruption.

  19. robro says

    OT: Speaking of stupid and incompetent, just saw that headline that Stewart Rhodes, the eye patch guy and founder of the Oath Keepers, was just sentenced to 18 years in prison. He’s currently 56/57 so that means he’ll be 70 when he gets out if he serves the full term. Of course, he won’t have to serve 18 years…maybe 5 to 10. Or, once Trump is reelected and pardons all the January 6th folks.

  20. tacitus says

    @19:robro
    If not pardoned, it depends whether the judge has set a minimum term. If not, then he must serve at least 30% of his sentence before the chance of parole, but if there’s a minimum set then it’s 90% of that, I believe. Of course, to receive parole, you have to show remorse for your actions, and currently, Rhodes isn’t planning on doing that any time soon, so the odds are high he’ll serve most of his sentence.

  21. rietpluim says

    You are not comforting me. All the Republican’s incompetence did not prevent them from seizing power.

  22. Steve Morrison says

    @3: I’m not so sure, actually. Musk seems very much like a superhero to me—assuming, of course, that you consider Florida Man an example of a superhero.

  23. birgerjohansson says

    Rich Woods @ 13: Dominic Raab is a talentless bully, he will fit right in.

    Raging Bee @ 10: The head of lettuce has rotted enough to fit in, Liz Truss has not quite, yet.

    Jacob Rees-Mogg (the idiot with a top hat that dreams about the era of Victoria and Charles Dickens as the optimal time in history)…. he is an obvious pick for “chief ideologist”.

  24. macallan says

    @18

    Why don’t we just use “Republican” as the code word for this array of incapabilities and self-serving corruption.

    There is already a perfectly good word for that – tory.

  25. wzrd1 says

    macallan @ 27, no long knives here in the US, only lots and lots of long guns that they don’t know how to properly use.
    They are given pause when threatening such things when I calmly reply that I’m good to around 1.5 klicks, courtesy of the US taxpayer. My reach exceeding my sight with artillery.

    Rob Grigjanis @ 28, yeah, but that origin was largely in reference to “outlaw papists”. Although, we did have religious warfare between protestants and catholics in the streets of Philadelphia in 1844 and some protestants celebrated for religious reasons when JFK was assassinated.