February 27, 2015

One Perfect Tweet Explains the Ultimate Lesson of #TheDress


Twitter erupted into craziness Thursday night after a dress went viral. What color was the dress? Some thought it was gold and white; some thought it was blue and black. People had fun. Fun was had! Had was fun! It was a good time and times were good. But this being the world we live in some Serious Cops had to flash their lights and start ticketing people for having fun.

There are a lot of cops on the internet. Everyone’s got a set of cuffs and a gun—and whatever crime they think you’ve committed, well, they’re ready to slap those cuffs on you and sentence you to 20 years hard internet. A lot of commenters on this site are cops. Journalism Cops. I’m sure a bunch of people will comment on this post saying, “why is this news?”

Anyway, no one likes Internet Cops. Internet Cops is probably the only police procedural CBS has ever passed on.

The lesson of #TheDress? Put your gun down, Barney Fife. Your services aren’t needed.

P.S. The dress is blue. 

Disclaimer: Nick Baumann is a Senior Editor at Mother Jones. I gave him fair warning I was about to blog his tweet.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

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