Slashdot Mirror
An Algorithm To Prevent Twitter Hashtag Degeneration
As demonstrations and looting took place in Ferguson, some friends of mine and many public commentators expressed disgust with some of the most prejudiced comments tweeted with the #ferguson hashtag. A few high-profile cases led to incidents such as security concerns at one high school and a teacher being fired from another, but most of my friends paying attention said it was more about the steady drumbeat of subtly racist, ignorant, or epically point-missing tweets limping past, often larded with passive-aggressive sarcasm. (Typical example that I just pulled from #ferguson, courtesy of "Wayne Dupree Show": "Liberal Logic 101: Blacks don't commit crimes, Police are just racist. It's sad but that's the narrative being pushed #ferguson #ericgarner". But on the other side, hashtag names like "#BlackLivesMatter" are pretty passive-aggressive too.)
It reminded me of the corruption of the original #GamerGate tag, which today is infamously known for crude sexist trolling, but in its original incarnation (as coined by actor Alec Baldwin), the hashtag apparently referred to some somewhat reasonable questions being raised about ethics in gaming journalism and the statements of one (female) indie game developer. Regardless of what you think of the original arguments or the people making them -- even if you accept, for the sake of argument, that everything they were saying was wrong -- they didn't deserve for the hashtag to be associated with sexist piggishness that became synonymous with #GamerGate, to the exclusion of any discussion of the original points.
Whether a hashtag is corrupted by opponents (#ferguson) or by Neanderthals who nominally claim to be supporting you (#GamerGate), in either case it's possible for a sufficiently large mob to effectively ruin the discussion for many of the participants. In the case of #GamerGate, the point of the original discussion was drowned out completely; in the case of #ferguson, a high proportion of tweets are still aligned with the original point, but a reader is still going to quit reading if each victim-blaming tweet depresses them so much that the next 10 decent tweets won't make up for it.
So, what can you do? You could follow only the people you trust to say something thoughtful (or, at least, not proudly ignorant), and filter their posts for the #ferguson hashtag, but then you'd miss the overwhelming majority of other people's tweets on the subject, even the good ones. You can follow all posts with the hashtag and block the most egregious repeat "offenders", but that won't help much when the problematic messages come from so many different accounts.
What Twitter could do, on the other hand, would be to set up a system for browsing tweets under a given hashtag that would reward the tweets that are given the highest rating by other users following the same hashtag. That would not replace the current Twitter default of strict reverse chronological order for tweets, which hardcore Twitter fans consider sacrosanct. But it could be an alternative model for browsing the tweets grouped under a given hashtag.
Similar to the system I suggested for Twitter to adjudicate abuse reports, a tweet under a given hashtag could initially be shown to a random subset of, say, 100 users who are following that hashtag, and rated as to whether the tweet is funny, informative, interesting, etc. (sound familiar)? Then if the average rating is high enough, the tweet would be shown to users who are browsing the "highest rated" tweets on a given topic.
(The simpler and more obvious solution would be to display tweets as "highest rated" if they had been favorited or retweeted by lots of people. However, this is problematic because it allows a person to game the system by having all of their friends -- or sockpuppet accounts -- "like" a tweet in order to drive it to the top of the pile. By having the ratings come from a random subset of users, this resists attempts to game the system, because there's no way for a user to ensure that their friends will be among the random subset that is selected to rate the tweet.)
This is, essentially, the same algorithm that I've recommended for many other similar problems, even including, say, ways to identify the best new songs in a given genre (so that trance fans can rate the best new trance songs, country fans can rate the best new country songs, and in both cases, the new songs with the highest average rating get the widest promotion to all self-declared fans of that genre). However, there's a signficant twist in the case of rating tweets under a political hashtag. Fans of trance music can be reasonably sure that country music fans are not going to sign up to rate trance songs and given upvotes to the stupidest trance music. But on the other hand, if you create the #ferguson hashtag to discuss reforms to the justice system, there's a good chance that plenty of trolls will sign up to follow the #ferguson hashtag if it gives them the opportunity to upvote racist and victim-blaming tweets that defeat the purpose of the original discussion. Even if you assume that the racists and victim-blamers constitute a minority of users following the hashtag, it might also be the case that they will have a higher response rate whenever they happen to part of a random sample which is asked to "rate" a given tweet to determine whether that tweet is promoted to a wider audience. The trolls might end up constituting a majority of votes cast, which would defeat the purpose.
So perhaps a modified version of the algorithm could work better. As before, new tweets under a given hashtag would be rated by a random subset of users following that hashtag. However, for some random subset of those tweets, the tweets would also be rated by a random subset of all Twitter users. (How to solicit ratings from the general population of Twitter users is a good question. If you simply displayed those tweets to random Twitter users in a sidebar and asked, "Please rate this tweet, even though it's for a hashtag that you're not following," the response rate would likely be very low. But whatever the low rate was, if you display the tweet and the rating request to enough users, eventually you will get a sample of ratings that is statistically significant.) If the system determines that, in many cases, the rating of the tweet's quality from average Twitter users is significantly far apart from the rating from users following that hashtag, then that hashtag can be considered "compromised" (i.e., the majority of people following tweets on that hashtag are probably trolls, or at the least, voting far differently from how average Twitter users vote). And then, perhaps, the highest-rated tweets under that hashtag could be displayed with a disclaimer saying that the ratings have probably been manipulated and are not reliable (but here are the highest-rated tweets anyway, in case you want to read them).
This does raise a philosophical question: What if some subset of Twitter users -- whether skinheads, or communists, or Beliebers -- want to engage in a discussion where posts are rated according to their appeal to members of that in-group, without regard for those posts' appeal to the rest of the user base? Isn't that a perfectly valid form of discussion? My sympathies lie against that point of view. Apart from the fact that the group obviously has the legal right to engage in whatever in-group discussion they want to have, I don't think it's healthy to engage only with like-minded people whose mindset is radically different from almost everyone else's. (In any case, the system could still display the highest-rated tweets, just with the ever-present reminder that those ratings are wildly different from the average ratings given by users who are not following the hashtag. Unfortunately that might just embolden members of the in-group who take pride in the fact that their philosophy sets them apart from most of the rest of the world.)
Unfortunately a "deference to the majority" also means that the protocol wouldn't do much good in cases where the majority really is wrong. If Twitter had existed 60 years ago and had implemented something like what I'm describing, then Twitter discussions of homosexuality or interracial marriage might never have gotten off the ground, because the majority probably would have downvoted anything advocating or even tolerating those lifestyle options. (What year would you guess was the first year in which surveys showed that a majority of Americans supported interracial marriage? 1997.) Peer review, even in the random-sample, non-gameable fashion that I'm talking about, doesn't do much good to advance the discussion when we are the trolls, oblivious to the things we're bigoted and ignorant about that we'll look back and shake our heads at in another fifty years.
Halfway through the summary I thought, "Trying to apply this to Twitter is the dumbest idea ever. Wait, this must be another Bennett post!" Lo and behold.
I thought only Timothy indulged Bennett's ramblings.
Is Bennett Haselton singlehandedly financing Slashdot now? Is it his personal blog? Fuck slashdot. I'm gone.
I'm just curious as to who this guy actually is, and what he did to get this ability to use slashdot as his blog. Any ideas or factual information on this topic?
Last I heard, the big benefit of twitter is that they didn't censor or hide things, they were uncurated, and gave people exactly what the general public was saying. And you want to CHANGE that?
He knows all about angry mobs.
I sure wish #BennettHaselton and his pointless #stories and #fluffpieces would stop getting posted on the front page of #Slashdot by #timothy and #samzenpus as #clickbait because they're #lame, #pointless, and the work of someone with an #inflatedego who thinks he has the #solution to all of our #problems.
#RolandPiquepaille had nothing on this guy.
Seriously, #STFU, or at least give us the ability to filter this #clown.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
How badly I don't want to see unpopular opinions and things I don't agree with on the Internet.
Do Timothy and Samzenpus suck Bennett Haselton's cock individually or tag team it???
TL;DR: Bennett talks about something.
Just went into anyone saying anything bad about this "article".
Best use of mods ever.
Down with Hasselton.
I read the first paragraph, where he confused ALEC Baldwin with ADAM Baldwin. Bennett is ignorant on every topic on which he opines.
I understand that Twitter gets a lot of use but hash tags and 140 word messages aren't helping any argument. Listening to anything that comes through twitter is like saying you agree with the opinions of 12 year old girls gossiping. Twitter, and the tiny attention spam 140 word messages, are not the place to have a proper conversation on crime in the black community and the way it's addressed by police.
figures out the algorithm. The problem here is that the mob has figured out how to abuse hashtags. So how long would it take for the mob to also figure out that they can take over the hashtag by making "thoughtful" ratings on the mobs favorite meme. The mob can iterate this process faster than the tweet masters can fix it.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
Twitter, and all of its type of brethren are lame.. .. ...
you know its a slow news day when.............
IRC is where its at, where it has been all along, and where it will be moving forward into the future.
take a moment to see what types of services still use the "irc" infrastructure, suprised??
Twitter, whats their business model again?
wow silence u can hear a pin drop..
#IRC
have a thoroughly positive thought provoking day as you ponder this notion,
Benett discovers moderation. Speaking of which, the corruption of Slashdot demonstrates how vulnerable the "editor" system is to being swamped by "weirdos with verbal diarrhea." An alternative algorithm could be created that allows readers to rate whole stories, and vote Bennett into oblivion.
with quality ranking of posts by other users.
Wow!! Brilliant. Genius! So iNnovative with a capital-N !
And it must be coloured green, so others will be envious of it!!!
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Now, if only Slashdot had some sort of a system whereby submitted stories could be rated "thoughtful", or perhaps "not written by Bennett Haselton", thus preventing the front page from degenerating due to stupid, or offensive, or offensively stupid contributions.
Seriously - what is this, some sort of test to see how many screen-inches can be filled with the random bleatings of one jackass, before it impacts readership numbers? Like slashdot's version of the "cinnamon challenge"?
An Algorithm To Prevent Slashdot's Bennett-Haselton-Degeneration...
Yeah, we need one...
Just say no to Jon Katz 2.0
I fight internet censorship for a living.
I also think we need a way to stop all those tweets with unpopular options, or by misogynist gamers from ever being seen, by anyone, ever.
There are no posts from this jackass over at Soylent News.
There are many reasons I now prefer that site over /., but a lack of Bennett Haselton is definitely one of them.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
Pfft, piss off. No it wasn't.
It was a vocal minority that were doing all the trolling in gamergate, being exploded in to HUGE cases by a bunch of whiny people because "I am so like, totally a victim yeah!", not to mention those same people using their pull in "news" websites all pushing the SAME STORY on the SAME DAY to try discredit them before gamergate exploded in to headline news.
Those same people claiming everyone was trolling, then after those people post picture proof, being called race traitors, liars, photoshops and sex traitors.
No, no it wasn't. Gamergate was hijacked by the people it was attacking, nothing else.
This whole post is priceless, filled with so many glaring errors it is hilarious.
That name confusion is the best part.
It is like you don't know a damn thing about the topic at hand.
Never post things here again. Take your uninformed drivel elsewhere.
Hashtags work exactly like they are supposed to.
Can we please please PLEASE PLEASE have a system in place like this to hide posts by Bennett Haselton?
That way everybody can down-rate them to oblivion and remove them from the front page.
And you want to CHANGE that?
Yes, they want to make the world soft and furry, you know, safe for democrats...
(posting as AC for reasons detailed below)
As everybody who does not take what the mainstream media says at face value should know, #gamergate is not, was not and never will be about harassment and misogyny.
Not even a little.
It is as much about being a jerk and hating women as Matt Taylors shirt was about sexism.
In both cases rabid Social Justice Warriors pounced on the opportunity to fight and imaginary evil.
In both cases it was the very same people doing so.
Not only were the threats against women highly suspicious (perfect grammar, within 140 character limit, taken only seconds after they were posted etc...) but most were not even linked in any form to gamergate.
Time and time again those involved in this consumer revolt have gone out of their way to remove any traces of bullying and harassment:
- They formed harassment patrols on twitter to report any hateful tweets
- They went out of their way to out a troll that had made threats against some game critic (it turned out to be some guy in Brazil, yet they were not able to press charges against him as, by Brazilian law, only the person threatened has the right to do so. "Coincidentally" said person refuses to do so to this very day)
- They raised over 60000$ for a feminist charity. So much money that in fact they got to name one character for a game that was going to be developed with the money.
- They created a counter-hashtag #notyourshield to prove that they were not in fact all virgin white acne-ridden men living in their mom's basement.
- They started a mailing campaign to actually improve ethics in videogame journalism, a core issue of this revolt.
- When the SJW pounced on a game creator (a woman by the way) and attempted to stop her game from being greenlit on Steam (her crime was not rejecting gamergate) gamergate stepped in and got it greenlit in a matter of days. The game in question is called "Seedscape" that should make it easier to verify what I claim.
And yet it seems that it was all for nothing sometimes.
They keep getting harassed themselves, people lose their jobs over being outed as supportive to this cause, many have been doxxed, some even sent dead animals, knives and syringes with unknown fluids in them to their homes.
The wikipedia article is so biased that Jim Wales himself called out some administrators out for their behaviour. (see the Talk page)
If you compare the article about Gamergate and those about the Nazis, the Communists or the Red Khmer, some cant help but feel that those people have received a more balanced treatments than gamers.
If Bennett Haselton is indeed, as his Wikipedia page claims, fighting against censorship, then the anti-gamergate movement might be a very good place to start!
What is there is no clear majority on what is "right" and "wrong." If 50% of people find "Edward Snowden is a hero #snowden" to be offensive and 50% of people find "Edward Snowden hurt US security #snowden" to be offensive, then who is right? Does the first group to make use of #snowden get to become the "authority"?
I could see this type of system negatively impacting polarizing political debate where the current prospective is close to 50/50. It could even end up swinging a close political race where one side gets to silence the other as being offensive.
Having to read a #text full of #hashtags is #painfull. That's why we invented a much better alternative years ago. Twitter is a regression on so many aspects, I can't wait for it to join My Space.
I wonder, if #PantsUpDontLoot was among the "prejudice"...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Gamergate was degenerated from the beginning, there was no helping that one.
Because the URLs to images and full articles that easily fit within the 140 character limits is absolutely worthless to the discussion...
The haters had everything in motion before the hashtag was created, they were looking for some sort of celeb endorsement, and were ready to take advantage of it.
It seems that just when the Bennett-whining begins to cool down after a week or two from his latest writing, he pops up with a new full story.
This guy is like Murdoc.
Thought it was over? Well, Mr. MacGyver, I hope you enjoy being trapped in my new hashtag degeneration prevention system. Keep reading to see what Bennett has to say.
This sounds almost like something that could be addressed with (a corrupted version of) Cory Doctorow's ("Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom") concept of Whuffie.
The original idea was, Whuffie was a nearly-involuntary ratings system. Left-handed Whuffie was a measure of dickishness, and right-handed Whuffie was a measure of coolness/interest -- and it was registered based on your neurological responses to stimuli.
Unfortunately, we've seen that we cannot treat everything as "just one big happy family". We've always known that trolls exist, and Reddit has shown us that we need to figure out a way to address "vote brigades" -- that is, external groups that decide to vote up or vote down things without necessarily following the discussions involved.
So, it might be time to start looking at the social graphs of the participants, and the reply graphs of the messages/tweets. Unfortunately, this might suggest that any given account can only really participate in one particular version of the hashtag involved. However, with the availability of multiple accounts, IF the people participating in the same hashtag in multiple variants keep their accounts hygienic, then the account/hashtag tuple might become a more-useful selector for an algorithm like this.
And then, you could just focus on the conversations linked and strongly reputed by the reputation cloud associated with those tuples.
Why not simply use a weighted combination of rating and age (well, youth) for the ordering algorithm? Turn the knob for rating down to nearly zero and you get nearly the same behavior as Twitter has today. Then you can slowly turn it up if you want a slightly different kind of community. This is basically the approach taken by Reddit, Hacker News, and many other aggregation sites -- they may differ on the exact formula, but it's always some weighted combination of age and rating.
How about the next time a Bennett Haselton story gets posted, everyone just simply posts the reply, "Fuck off Bennett". Just that. Nothing else. It'd make quite a funny thread, no?
It really would be nice to not see these less-than-stellar pieces from Bennett that contain long-winded, half-baked ideas. His ideas are neither particularly good, nor nearly as insightful as he appears to think, especially when it comes to algorithms. Moreover, they always seem to contain some bit of nearsightedness when it comes to human behavior.
Please, someone, come up with a way of blocking his posts.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
delete from dbo.FIREHOSE where submitted_by = "Bennett Haselton" ; ; ;
delete from dbo.USERS where username = "Bennett Haselton"
insert into dbo.banned (username, duration) select "Bennett Haselton", -1
Is this "algorithm" manage the lines of people waiting to get ice in desert better? Would it cure world hunger too?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This issue is common to collective storytelling, which I shall summarize thusly: "Everything is fine until someone gets butthurt, then Godzilla shows up and destroys everything." It seems to be a fundamental issue at the intersection of pure democracy and the human condition. The only functional solution appears to be active moderation.
You just described the primary reason why Twitter is popular. It really only allows vacuous shouting so it attracts people incapable of forming coherent ideas but still want to blurt out their opinions without having to worry about them being challenged by meaningful discussion.
It is also good for making fun of people. So it at least can be amusing watching the dynamics of these two incompatible groups of people interacting.
SlashCode is Perl.
$dbh->do('..')
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Just because a person creates a hashtag and they get people using it to express thoughts from a like minded point of view doesn't mean they should control it. If others later use it to speak from an alternate point of view whether productive or not, that is just what you get. If you want to hear public commentary, part of that is hearing how many in the public really feel, which isn't always pretty. I guess they'll just have to figure out how to censor tweets from people who aren't politically correct. It's OK people don't actually like open discourse, they like to talk to like minded people who can reenforce how right they are about the issues.
That's my take on it too. It sounds like a proposal to guarantee one-sided arguments.
I just peeked in to see what the comments said (obvious concept of moderation applied to hashtags is obvious) and see that most of the comments already covered what I was going to say. Bravo, folks.
Hey, Slashdot! Are you suffering from the heartbreak of ... Bennett-itis? Then take a tip from Mr. Paul Anka! ... [winks]
To stop thoseHhassles(ton), one-two-three,
Here's a fresh new way that's trouble-free,
It's got Paul Anka's guarantee
Guarantee void in Tennessee.
Just don't look! Just don't look!
Just don't look! Just don't look!
Just don't look! Just don't look!
#shutupbennett
My first post to a Bennett post:
Quoting Bennett:
(The simpler and more obvious solution would be to display tweets as "highest rated" if they had been favorited or retweeted by lots of people. However, this is problematic because it allows a person to game the system by having all of their friends -- or sockpuppet accounts -- "like" a tweet in order to drive it to the top of the pile. By having the ratings come from a random subset of users, this resists attempts to game the system, because there's no way for a user to ensure that their friends will be among the random subset that is selected to rate the tweet.)
End Quoting Bennett:
Bennett, perhaps if you were to click a trending hashtag, you would see that they list either 'Top Tweets' or 'All,' and you would note that those that were retweeted or favorited would be on the Top Tweet list, just like your recommendation. Except this has been there for years.
My god, it must be a thousand words to point out existing functionality of an inanely simple concept that has already been executed. I now see what the hullabaloo is all about.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
Slashdotters unwilling to blindly swallow Bennett Haselton's #Gamergate revisionism here should familiarise themselves with the actual history of #Gamergate
Early Gamergate Timeline
Recent Events + Info
And anyone unfamiliar with the entire debate should remember one thing. The two parties in the dispute are gamers, and games journalists --- journalists who buy ink by the barrel. Not that I am suggesting that Mr Haselton is a journalist, but his views are based on an awful lot of spilled ink. And as so much has been spilled, you can safely consider the first record of #Gamergate history to have been spin-doctored.
#IOnlyWantToReadOpinionsIAlreadyAgreeWith #MuhFeels
There is no benefit to twitter. At. ALL
This problem sounds suspiciously familiar... queue obligatory XKCD reference in 3... 2... 1...
http://xkcd.com/810/
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
Twitter is censored. C'mon, this is America.
safe for democrats
Shit like this would be funnier if it wasn't for the republicans lining up to force everyone else to stop anything that might offend their sky daddy.
1. #banbennett
2. 127.0.0.1 beta.slashdot.org
3. there is no step 3.
Copyright (c) 1990 - 2014 Dice. All rights reserved. Use of this comment is subject to certain Terms and Conditions.
I hate Bennett. His posts are drivel.
I have to post this comment because otherwise Slashdot mods might think I clicked in to actually read said drivel. I did not. I only read Bennett posts for the funny comments.
#Hashtags should be for soley for viral marketing, and not to illustrate social causes, and help people connect with social causes. Heck, they might ever gather in public places and promote social change. This could work out real bad for the corporate sponsors. We need to nip this in the bud.
I wouldn't hesitate tagging every single @haselton post as #thoughtful. They are full of thought. Bennett obviously puts a lot of thought into his ramblings. He can't stop thinking. The thinking goes on and on. But maybe #thoughtful isn't the same as Insightful?
> Halfway through the summary I thought,
How'd you get past the very first words, "Bennett Haselton writes"?
Is there an Algorithm To Prevent Twitter Language Degeneration?
The majority of people seem to think that "#" means "Hashtag", and not understand that in "#fucktwitter", "#" means "Hash" and "fucktwitter" is the "tag".
That's why examples like #Ferguson and #Gamergate reveal what they really want to do is stifle the opinions of those who disagree with them.
A miracle occurs every time he posts about Gamergate. Both pro-GG and anti-GG posters lay down their arms just long enough to tell Bennett to go fuck himself and leave /. alone.
Seriously he knows nothing about anything that he posts about. He is detached from reality. He posts things that have no meaningful purpose. These posts degrade the quality of slashdot significantly. Ban him. I do not want to see this crap on slashdot. Why would anyone allow this crap to be posted? This is not news for nerds and it does not matter. Worst of all he thinks he knows stuff but he's a fucking idiot. yes i swore and i never have before when posting as AC. Stop stoking his ego by posting his shit and making him think his opinions matter. THEY DON'T! If i was stuck on a long flight with this guy and he started one of these rants i'd probably fucking kill myself. At least net I can avoid. But Still it get's fsking irritating.
blah blah blah partisan bs blah blah blah
Yawn to both of yahs.
What discussion is happening when people are throwing pictures and articles by other people at each other?
Well Dan, in this article in says Obama is a muslim you see.
Well Steve, in this article it says he's not, and that you're a racist.
Well Dan, here's a picture of Obama bowing to a Saudi Prince.
Well Steve, #diplomacy.
Real riveting conversation there.
well, I see I'm not alone.
Stop commenting. Want it to stop? Ignore it completely. I think an obligatory "first post" is fine, and maybe a "I'd like to subscribe your newsletter" (combine the two for uber-points), but that's it.
Leave it alone, don't feed the creature.
BlameBillCosby.com
The original intent of Twitter was to be able to send and view the whole tweet on mobile platforms. 140 characters plus 20 for the username is the typical SMS limit of 160 characters.
If they converted the hash tag into a href={link} with angle brackets, one character becomes 16. As it is, the pound, hash, or number sign still represents a link, but in compressed form.
You are thinking about viewing on a web platform. The creators were thinking about transfer over SMS. Two entirely different platforms and problems. Without considering the original problem, you may find a different solution, because you are solving a different problem.
Now that you know, how would you solve the problem? When you convert a hashtag to a link you drop the hash? How then do you differentiate between actual links, hashtag links, and username links? By hovering? I don't have hover on my phone, and link shortening doesn't tell you where something will end up.
I like the shorthand of knowing if I'm clicking on a user (@) or tag (#) or user-supplied link (normal hyperlink). The last one works on the twitter app, and on the web, and in normal text messages.
If you cannot handle listening to uncensored democracy style discourse then maybe you can just stop listening instead of trying to censor everything you do not like.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
How hard is it to convert hyperlinks to # when sending over legacy protocols such as SMS? Different kind of links could have different colors or font. Not a real problem. The worse possible solution would be to add characters making text less readable.
The only shit that looks good in beta is Bennett.
Basically if the hashtag is #KKK they don't want an angry mob ruining their thoughtful discussion about the whites sale at Macy's.
This guy made me pay attention to the posting commenter. I did not look very often before.
You don't get it. The republicans work for the democrats. Their sole purpose is to diffuse blame across moving 'opposing' targets. It is the ultimate shell game.. And three or more can play with similar results. There is factional bickering, but *all the ships must sail in the same direction*