Quotulatiousness

March 23, 2020

The world of woke crossword-puzzlers – a place of horrible, unintentional microaggressions

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

David Thompson takes us on a scary trip to the heart of the woke crossword world:

The world of woke crossword-puzzlers — because that’s a thing that exists — is one in which enthusiasts, via social media, grumble about white men, bemoan the insufficient prominence of “queer or POC colloquialisms,” share “off-colour jokes about hypothetical titles for a Melania Trump memoir,” and fret about the exact ratio of male and female names used as clues. Because a lack of “gender parity” in crossword puzzle clues constitutes one of “the systemic forces that threaten women.”

Crossword puzzles can do that, apparently.

The list of possible crossword-puzzle wrongdoings is, of course, extensive, ever-growing and not entirely straightforward.

Transgressions include clues for ILLEGAL (“One caught by border patrol”); MEN (“Exasperated comment from a feminist”); and HOOD (“Place with homies”).

I’ll give you a moment to steady yourselves, to recover from all that gasping.

A New York Times puzzle triggered agitation with the clue “Pitch to the head, informally,” the solution to which was “beaner.” Given sufficient effort, said word could also, it seems, be construed as a mild and antiquated racial slur, albeit one that had escaped me and which I had to look up. Inevitably, apologies and public prostration ensued, despite both the puzzler-writer and editor confessing their own ignorance and intending no harm. Needless to say, the apology immediately resulted in further hissing and rending of garments by people whose Twitter bios include preferred pronouns and the words liberal and feminist.

Unlike almost every other site on the web, I do encourage you to read the comments at David’s blog … he has a great group of regular commenters (commentators? commentistas? Whatevs…)

February 13, 2020

“Titania McGrath thinks you’re scum. That is because of how tolerant she is.”

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Politics — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Spencer Klavan interviews the mind behind the Twitter legend that is Titania McGrath:

In April 2018, Oxford-educated comedian and journalist Andrew Doyle created a satirical Twitter persona, an “activist,” “healer,” and “radical intersectionalist poet” who self-identifies as “selfless and brave.” Titania, an imaginary amalgam of all the worst excesses in the modern social justice movement, fancies herself a voice for minorities of all kinds (whether they know they agree with her or not). What she lacks in self-awareness, she makes up for in conviction.

There are other parody accounts in a vein similar to Titania’s: Jarvis Dupont of the Spectator USA, for example, or Wrightly Willowleaf (who moved to Williamsburg before it was cool). But none of them has achieved Titania’s notoriety, or her reach (418.4K followers). Doyle attributes some of this success to a much-publicized Twitter ban. But that’s perhaps too modest: Titania is a note-perfect creation, as frighteningly accurate as she is screamingly funny. “[Y]ou need to understand that which you are critiquing,” Doyle told me: more than anything, his tweets as Titania demonstrate an incisive grasp of how radical progressivism functions and why woke politics commands such hypnotic power over the 21st-century Western psyche.

Doyle is among a growing number of classical liberals who have simply had enough: witty, thoughtful, and profoundly humane, he is the kind of eloquent sophisticate who would have been quite uncontroversial as a cultural critic and public intellectual in a less turbulent era. But that wasn’t his fate. Comedy and culture have been so strangled by political correctness that he is “at that point where I feel that it would be morally wrong to be silent” about the crisis of free public discourse in the West. Still, there is much more to Doyle than politics and polemic. I spoke to him at some length about his philosophical outlook, his academic interests, and his career beyond Titania.

[…]

S.K. Yes, something you capture really well with Titania is the complete lack of self-awareness, the oblivion of people to their own racism even as they criticize racism in others.

Let’s talk about that moment when Titania got banned: you’ve written elsewhere that “those in power cannot tolerate being ridiculed.” That was a theme when we interviewed Kyle Mann of the Babylon Bee as well: why do you think ridicule gets woke people so angry?

A.D. Because it’s an effective way to expose their folly. There’s something very instinctive that we all have as human beings: we don’t like being laughed at. And that makes sense: it feels like a form of humiliation. But I also think that’s why it’s a good way to puncture and deflate those kinds of pretensions. And they absolutely don’t like it — I mean, tyrants throughout history have locked up and killed satirists. We had the Bishop’s Ban on any satirical work in Great Britain, and that was in 1599. You’ve got president Erdogan in Turkey who will lock up satirists and call for their arrest — so it’s a pretty standard feature of history.

Of course, with Titania, the misinterpretation of what she’s doing is that she’s punching down, she’s attacking minorities. That’s not the point at all: it’s attacking the social justice movement, which is very very powerful but doesn’t perceive itself to be powerful. That’s why they claim victimhood: so that they can say mocking social justice is mocking the weak. It’s not, of course. It’s mocking those who are in power.

S.K. You’re absolutely right that persecution of satire by the powerful is as old as satire itself — goes back to the court of Ptolemy II, probably further. So let’s talk about power.

Based on what you’ve written it seems as if you feel that wokeness wields a kind of soft power — a cultural power more than a legal or a political power. I’m reminded a bit of Shelley’s argument that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.” How is it that you think the woke and the social justice movement came to acquire the overwhelming degree of cultural power they now have?

A.D. I think it’s because the woke movement is largely driven by people who are independently wealthy and privately educated. Just to give you an example from the U.K.: 7% of our country is educated privately. So those are the richest people, but those 7% dominate the arts, and the media, and journalism, and the law, and education, and the government. So what you have is a very small coterie of very powerful people who disproportionately control the direction of culture.

The BBC is a good example of an institution that is overly dominated by privately educated people, and it’s very very woke. So there seems to be a correlation. And similarly, the universities where they have the most woke students, and the most people wanting to de-platform and censor — which comes hand-in-hand, obviously, with woke culture — there is a clear correlation between the economic privilege of students and how woke they are. So the worst examples you’ll find are in places like Oxford University, Cambridge University, Yale, and Harvard. Those will be the ones where you get the most egregious examples of censorial wokeness. And of course those are the kids who come from the most privileged backgrounds.

It is no surprise to me that those with the most would like to claim to have the least and to be the most oppressed. There was a survey in the Atlantic about political correctness, and by a long way, the people who resent political correctness the most are the ones whom it purports to defend: the ethnic minorities and the sexual minorities and so on. And the people who support political correctness the most tend to be rich white liberals, by a long way. I think there’s something quite strategic about holding on to power by claiming to be oppressed or claiming to stand up for the oppressed. It’s something which I think is unprecedented in history: those who claim to be the victims also seize the power. It’s very unusual.

February 5, 2020

Free speech and social media

Filed under: Britain, Liberty, Technology — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In Spiked, Brendan O’Neill says that even people who say racist things should not be censored on social media:

Katie Hopkins is a racist. Anyone who hadn’t already gleaned that from her dalliances with the vile race-baiters of Generation Identity types or her use of the word “cockroaches” in a column about immigrants will surely see it now following the speech she made at a phoney awards ceremony in Prague. Internet pranksters invited Hopkins to accept the Campaign to Unite the Nation Trophy (CUNT), during which Hopkins made a speech filled with racist epithets. She mocked Pakistani speech patterns. She compared Asians to epileptics. She described Muslims as retards who rape their mothers. She said that if you shout “Mohammed” in a British playground, thousands of “fucking” kids will come running, and “you don’t want any of them”. Vile, hateful stuff.

And yet Hopkins should not be banned. She should not be thrown off social media. Censorship is not the right solution to any problem, including prejudicial or hateful commentary. Last week, Hopkins, to the delight of the illiberal liberals who make up the commentariat and cultural elite in the UK, had her Twitter account suspended. Reportedly at the behest of Countdown host and campaigner against anti-Semitism Rachel Riley, and the chief exec of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, Imran Ahmed, Twitter erased all of Hopkins’ tweets and prevented her from accessing her account. People are celebrating this as a victory of decency over hatred; in truth, it is a victory of corporate power over freedom of speech.

[…]

That’s the thing: once you empower Twitter and other capitalist-founded platforms to decree who may speak and who may not, you are green-lighting a sweeping, global system of censorship. Both right-wing libertarians and left-wing radicals, ironically, say the same thing in response to this concern. They say, “Well, Twitter and the rest are private companies, so surely they have the right to say who can and cannot use their services”. It is predictable that the myopic libertarian right would so cavalierly elevate powerful corporations’ property rights over the free-speech rights of individuals – but to hear leftists do that is alarming. Clearly, their woke intolerance, their urge to censor everyone they disagree with, has now gone so far that they will happily empower unaccountable capitalists over ordinary people and give a nod of approval to the corporate control of public discussion.

And then there is the more difficult part of this discussion. Even if Hopkins had said genuinely racist things on Twitter – as she did in her Prague speech and has also done elsewhere – still she should not be censored. One of the many great things about freedom of speech is that it allows us to see what people really think. And that is empowering. It means that the rest of us – the potential audience to an individual’s speech – can use our intelligence and our principle to counter that speech, to criticise it, to ridicule it, to prove it wrong. Freedom of speech doesn’t only empower the speaker. It also empowers the audience. It allows us to exercise our moral judgement. Censorship, in contrast – whether it’s state censorship or corporate censorship – is fundamentally infantilising. It insults us and demeans us by blocking words and images on our behalf, as if we were children. It weakens our moral muscles and intellectual savvy by discouraging us from ever thinking for ourselves. Well, why should we, when wise people in government or Silicon Valley will think for us?

Katie Hopkins should be reinstated on Twitter. Not because she has anything of value to say, but for these three reasons. 1) Everyone, even objectionable people, must have the right to express themselves. That is the entire nature of freedom of speech. If we limit free speech, for any reason whatsoever, then it isn’t free speech at all. It is licensed speech, something gifted to us by officialdom or capitalism so long as we say things they find acceptable. 2) We, the audience, must have the right to hear all ideas and to decide for ourselves if they are good or bad. Anything else is just pure, foul paternalism that turns us from thinking citizens into overgrown children who must be protected from difficult ideas. 3) Corporate censorship is as bad as state censorship. Calling on powerful people or rich people to police the parameters of acceptable thought, and to expel anyone who says something bad, is a catastrophically erroneous thing to do. Trust people, not power; prefer freedom over control.

December 21, 2019

J.K. Rowling falls afoul of the woke zeitgeist on Twitter

Filed under: Books, Britain, Politics — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

The author of the immensely popular Harry Potter books suddenly finds herself on the wrong side of a Twitter firing squad:

The persecution of women who question transgenderism has got to stop.

Standing up for women’s rights is a risky business these days. Just ask JK Rowling. She has had merry hell rained down upon her over the past 24 hours. She has been called a stupid cunt, a bitch, trash, an old woman and so fucking ugly by an army of tweeting sexists. Her crime? She defended the right of a woman to express her opinion about sex and gender without losing her job.

The witch-hunting of JK Rowling, the ceaseless online abuse of her over the past day and night, exposes how unhinged, hateful and outright misogynistic the transgender movement has become. Rowling’s sin was to tweet in defence of Maya Forstater, the charity worker who was sacked for her belief that there are two sexes and that sex is immutable. That is, a man cannot become a woman, and vice versa. This week, an employment tribunal outrageously upheld Ms Forstater’s sacking and in the process it decreed what it is acceptable for people in the workplace to think and say. The judge said the kind of views held by Forstater are “not worthy of respect in a democratic society”. This essentially gives a green light to the harassment, isolation and expulsion from the workplace of anyone who questions the transgender ideology.

Not surprisingly, this chilling diktat, this judge-led effort to outline what opinions we are allowed to hold, alarmed people who care about freedom of conscience and freedom of speech and who think that women should not be punished for holding particular opinions. There is a foul, pre-modern vibe to the idea that women should keep their filthy opinions to themselves and if they don’t they should be expelled from polite society. Trans-sceptical feminists in academia and the cultural sphere responded to the censorious persecution of Ms Forstater by tweeting their backing of her – #IStandWithMaya – and calling for freedom of speech for women who think biological sex is an actual thing. Rowling joined in. The bile she has since received perfectly illustrates the problem at hand – that it has become tantamount to a speechcrime to say there are two sexes.

[…]

There is a powerfully Orwellian streak in the punishment of people for expressing obvious truths. That you can now be sacked and demonised for saying men are men and women are women confirms that the trans tyranny is out of control. This is why Rowling’s intervention was so important. The only way this woke censorship and persecution of disobedient women will be countered is if more individuals and institutions stand up to it. Everyone must now say what has, surreally, become unsayable: that sex is real, that sex is immutable, and that if you are born male, you will die male, regardless of what you do to yourself.

December 16, 2019

“The near-homogeneity of Silicon Valley political beliefs has gone from wry punchline to national crisis in the United States”

Filed under: Books, Business, Media, Politics, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Jason Morgan reviews Michael Rectenwald’s new book Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom:

The near-homogeneity of Silicon Valley political beliefs has gone from wry punchline to national crisis in the United States. The monoculture of virtue signaling and high- and heavy-handed woke corporate leftism at places like Google, Twitter, and Facebook was once a source of chagrin for those who found themselves shut out of various internet sites for deviating from the orthodoxies of the Palo Alto elites. After the 2016 presidential election, however, it became obvious that the digitalistas were doing a lot more than just making examples of a few handpicked “extremists.” From the shadow banning of non-leftist sites and views to full-complement political propagandizing, Bay Area leftists have been so aggressive in bending the national psyche to their will that there is talk in the papers and on the cable “news” channels of “existential threats to our democracy.”

It is tempting to see this as a function of political correctness. Americans, and others around the world, who have found themselves on the “wrong side of history” (as determined by the cultural elite in an endless cycle of epistemological door closing) have long been shut out of conversations, their views deemed beyond the pale of acceptable discourse in enlightened modern societies. Google, Facebook, Twitter — are these corporations, and their uber-woke CEOs, just cranking the PC up to eleven and imposing their schoolmarmish proclivities on the billions of people who want to scrawl messages on their electronic chalkboards?

Not so, says reformed leftist — and current PC target — Michael Rectenwald. The truth of Stanford and Harvard alumni’s death grip on global discourse is much more complicated than just PC run amok. It is not that the Silicon Valley giants are agents of mass surveillance and censorship (although mass surveillance and censorship are precisely the business they’re in). It’s that the very system they have designed is, structurally, the same as the systems of oppression that blanketed and smothered free expression in so much of the world during the previous century. In his latest book, Google Archipelago, Rectenwald outlines how this system works, why leftism is synonymous with oppression, and how the Google Archipelago’s regime of “simulated reality” “must be countered, not only with real knowledge, but with a metaphysics of truth.”

Google Archipelago is divided into eight chapters and is rooted in both Rectenwald’s encyclopedic knowledge of the history of science and corporate control of culture, as well as in his own experiences. Before retiring, Rectenwald had been a professor at New York University, where he was thoroughly entrenched in the PC episteme that squelches real thought at universities across North America and beyond. Gradually, Rectenwald began to realize that PC was not a philosophy, but the enemy of open inquiry. For this reason, and because Rectenwald is an expert in the so-called digital humanities and the long history of scientific (and pseudo-scientific) thinking that feeds into it, Google Archipelago is not just a dry monograph about a social issue. By turns memoir, Kafkaesque dream sequence, trenchant rebuke of leftist censorship, and intellectual history of woke corporate political correctness, Google Archipelago is a welcoming window into a mind working happily in overdrive.

October 19, 2019

Remy: Horrifying Tweets Resurface

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

ReasonTV
Published 17 Oct 2019

Remy returns to the news desk to bring you what passes for journalism these days.

Written and Performed by Remy.
Music tracks mastered by Ben Karlstrom.
Produced and Edited by Austin Bragg.

LYRICS:

Trudeau denies the report. Ed?
A rough week for Canada’s first black prime minister. Thanks, Tim.

A problem long posed, now finally an answer
A cure has been found to a rare form of cancer.
We’ll tell you who found it, what he thinks this means,
And dig up some tweets from his early teens.

Plus the Good Samaritan, whose quickness and breadth
Saved a family of four from a fiery death.
We’ll ask how he did it, how he made it in time,
And why he tweeted this back in 2009.

Uh, Ed? Yes, Tim. Forgive the defiance
But I think we should focus on the news part, the science
And not what they tweeted back when they were 10
The science, hmm. I’ll try it again.

Archaeologists have unearthed a series of tweets
Made by this local hero when he was 13.
Will this middle-school tweet soon mean his demise?
Our report might just win the Pulitzer Prize.

Pulitzer Prize? In what? Scrolling down?
We found immature things immature people wrote down.
Our country’s at war and that’s the story we sought?
War coverage, yes—I’ll give it a shot.

This Navy SEAL unit is now under fire
For a series of tweets, we’ll take our magnifier
And pay no attention to how their recent life’s been
And tell you what you should think that says about them.

Says about them? What’s it say about us?
That the first thing we do after someone’s discussed
Is comb through their childhood looking for dirt.
OK, I can do this, I assure you I’m cured.

Well she’s the first woman to serve on the board
Of our town’s city council—and she just signed an accord.
We’ll comb through the details of what she did write
And through years of her tweets in hopes of wrecking her life.

OK, see, I hate this, this is just what we do
Make things controversial for clicks and for views.
When we’re covering news, should our first thought each time
Be “Let’s find what they tweeted back when they were nine”?

Finally, millions can now walk thanks to his prosthesis
But a hateful hand signal when he was a fetus
Leads many to now question what he promotes.
We’ll toss him in a well and see if he floats.

August 30, 2019

Academia and social media create a toxic, abusive environment

Filed under: Economics, History — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Phillip Magness recounts his experiences on Twitter when he pointed out that a major work that the New York Times used in their 1619 Project suffers from some significant statistical problems:

About a week ago I began scrutinizing how the New York Times‘ 1619 Project relied upon the work of the controversial “New History of Capitalism” genre of historical scholarship to advance a sweeping indictment of free markets over the historical evils of slavery. The problems with this literature are many, and prominent among them is its use of shoddy statistical work by Cornell University historian Ed Baptist to grossly exaggerate the historical effect of slave-produced cotton on American economic development. Baptist’s unusual rehabilitation of the old Confederacy-linked “King Cotton” thesis is unsupported by evidence and widely rejected by economic historians. His book The Half Has Never Been Told has nonetheless acquired a vocal following among historians and journalists, including providing the basis of a feature article in the Times series on slavery.

Curious about the following Baptist’s work had acquired despite its clear problems, I presented several questions on Twitter for its enthusiasts in the academy.

Were they aware that Baptist’s statistics, including his estimate of slavery’s share of the antebellum economy, arose from a documented mathematical error? Did they know his thesis had been scrutinized by leading economic historians, who found problems of misrepresented evidence and citations to documents that did not support what Baptist claimed? Had Baptist made any effort to respond to his critics? Or, more importantly, had he corrected his statistical mistakes, which continue to be cited in the press, in academic works, and even in congressional hearings on the legacy of slavery despite their inaccuracy?

Unless you’re new to the social media cesspit, you won’t be surprised to find out that his inquiries generated a lot of heated responses, including some academics indulging in “keyboard warrior” tactics to discredit him while avoiding engaging with the points he was attempting to raise.

Social media brings with it a mixed bag of everything from intellectual exchange to juvenile antics to a corrosive undermining of basic discourse, as my colleague Max Gulker recently catalogued. But there also seems to be something about Twitter that brings out the very worst in academics.

A quick foray onto the site and a few minutes of reading will provide ample evidence that Araujo’s outburst is not atypical among the regulars of History Twitter. Or Econ Twitter. Or English, Philosophy, and Sociology Twitter. Politics are often, though not always, the occasion, which in practice translates into distinguished professors at elite institutions striving their hardest to reduce themselves to intellectual parity with a certain presidential account’s own notorious stream of insults and derision.

The more disturbing examples come from the medium’s effects on scholarly discussion though.

In theory, a functional academic Twitter community would permit intellectuals to instantaneously present their ideas before peers all over the world and receive real-time feedback on research discoveries or scholarly challenges to controversial ideas. They could tap the expertise of others for suggestions on roadblocks in the processes of scholarly production. They could solicit constructive criticism from opponents. Or they could challenge problematic arguments in the existing literature, prompting scholars to examine the strengths and weaknesses of each. Imagine a global conference or seminar room where you can not only find academic peers working on common interests, but also solicit their advice — or push back against contested areas of their work.

July 8, 2019

Ottawa defends intrusive impaired driving rules against Maxime Bernier’s criticism

Filed under: Cancon, Law, Liberty — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Ali Taghva reports on the contretemps over federal impaired driving rules that PPC leader Maxime Bernier slagged on Twitter:

Earlier today the official Twitter account for the Department of Justice had to issue a clarification after Maxime Bernier, the leader of the People’s Party of Canada, called the organization out for posting a worrying public announcement in both English and French.

In their original announcement, the Justice Canada account clearly stated that you could be arrested if you were to enjoy a drink after driving. The statement seemed to include summer time drinking on your own patio, noting that “It’s summertime and the living is easy! Whether you’re sitting on a patio or having a backyard #BBQ, remember it’s against the #law to have a blood alcohol concentration over prohibited levels within two hours of driving.”

The clarification posted since then pointed to a section in the law that prohibits conviction for those who decide to drink after arriving home safely.

I’d laugh at the awkward tweets if the actual law and the potential repercussions weren’t so damn serious.

While Justice Canada has issued a clarification, their mistake only highlights the tip of the iceberg when it comes to problems with the recent legal changes brought forward through the adoption of Bill C-46 and its cousin C-45.

July 4, 2019

QotD: Updating traditional curses

Filed under: Humour, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Ancient Gypsy curse: may you get what you wish for
Modern Gypsy curse: may you one day trend on Twitter

David “Iowahawk” Burge, Twitter, 2016-08-16.

June 29, 2019

QotD: Blogging versus social media

Filed under: Media, Quotations, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Even the “blogosphere” of the early 21st century, in which independently run blog sites posted items on news and responded both to Big Media stories and to each other was more like traditional media in some respects than like Usenet or social media. To read content on blogs, readers had to go there. To interact, bloggers had to read each other’s sites and decide to post a response, generally with a link back to the post they were replying to. If you didn’t like a blog you could just ignore it. A story that spread like wildfire through the blogosphere still did so over the better part of a day, not over minutes, and it was typically pretty easy to find the original item and get context, something the culture of blogging encouraged… In addition, a story’s spreading required at least a modicum of actual thought and consideration on the part of bloggers, who were also constrained, to a greater or lesser degree, by considerations of reputation. Some blogs served as trusted nodes on the blogosphere, and many other bloggers would be reluctant to run with a story that the trusted nodes didn’t believe. In engineering parlance, the early blogosphere was a “loosely coupled” system, one where changes in one part were not immediately or directly transmitted to others. Loosely coupled systems tend to be resilient, and not very subject to systemic failures, because what happens in one part of the system affects other parts only weakly and slowly. Tightly coupled systems, on the other hand, where changes affecting one node swiftly affect others, are prone to cascading failures… [On Twitter,] little to no thought is required, and in practice very few people even follow the link (if there is one) to “read the whole thing”.

Glenn “Instapundit” Reynolds, The Social Media Upheaval, 2019. (link goes to Althouse, who posted this quote based on the Kindle edition)

June 26, 2019

Social media giants can be publisher or platform, but not both

Filed under: Business, Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

At Ace of Spades H.Q., Ace explains why Facebook, Google, and the other social media companies have been playing fast and loose with the rules, sometimes using the rules that apply to publishers and sometimes the ones that apply to platforms, depending on their whim:

Only a speaker or publisher of claimed defamatory content can be sued.

Not being a speaker or publisher of a defamatory statement gives you total immunity from suit. You’re just a guy, you had nothing to do with the tort alleged.

Section 230 [of the Community Decency Act] specifically says that “neutral content platforms” shall not be deemed to be the “speaker or publisher” of a claimed defamatory statement made by a third party using their service — hence, the complete immunity from suit. You can’t be sued for something someone else said, obviously.

Now newspapers can be sued for the defamatory remarks of, say, an interview subject. They are publishers of that defamatory statement — they chose to publish it. The interview subject made the statement, but then they chose to publish it themselves, becoming another “speaker” of the defamation.

Now, “neutral content platforms” are never considered “speakers” of third-party defamations (or any third-party crime involving speech, such as offering to sell contraband or conspiring to commit a crime). But a newspaper or media company — or this blog — could be.

The corporate cucks claim that you cannot put restrictions on Google, Facebook, or Twitter as regards their right to censor opinions they disagree with because that constitutes “compelled speech.” You’re compelling them to speak things they do not believe, the cucks’ argument goes.

But… section 230 states that, as a legal matter, they are not considered the “speakers” of any statement made on their “neutral content platforms.”

So which is it? Are they the speakers of these words — in which case, like a newspaper or tv station, they’d have every right to exercise editorial judgment and decide what they wish their company to say — or are they not the speakers of these words, which is their claim whenever someone tries to sue them?

As it stands, they are speakers when it comes to their power to block people from speaking on their platforms — and thus can indulge in the vice of censorship — but not speakers when it comes to people suing them for what other people said on their platforms.

Choose one or the other: Either you are a speaker of other people’s words or you’re not. You can’t forever choose one and then the other when it’s in your interest to have the Clown Nose On or the Clown Nose Off.

May 12, 2019

A handy list for your next band name

Filed under: Humour, Media — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

An amusing Twitter thread from a few days ago threw up some entertaining band name suggestions:




I’m pretty sure that Multiaxial System opened for Estrus Peak at the El Mocambo in ’94.

March 8, 2019

Wokescolds, rejoice! Titania McGrath has been unmasked!

Filed under: Britain, Humour, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

After the woke wolfpack finally dragged down and destroyed the great Twitter troll Godfrey Elfwick (RIP), the satirical void was eventually filled by the ultra-woke poet Titania McGrath. All good things must come to an end, apparently, because we recently discovered that noble Titania is actually — gasp! — just another Twitter troll:

When a former Oxford University postgraduate student set up a satirical Twitter account in April 2018 under the name of Titania McGrath, he had no idea of the social media storm that was to follow.

Aiming to poke fun at the “identitarian left” who use “vicious tactics to push identity politics above all else”, the parody account quickly amassed over 180,000 social media followers.

After months of speculation, the individual behind it can finally be revealed – as a 40-year-old former private school teacher with a doctorate in Early Renaissance Poetry from Wadham College, Oxford.

Dr Andrew Doyle created the account to mock today’s “woke culture” that is obsessed with gender fluidity, identity politics and hates freedom of speech.

Describing Titania McGrath as “a militant vegan who thinks she is a better poet than William Shakespeare”, Mr Doyle told The Telegraph: “Woke is the concept that everything must be inclusive, inoffensive, that you always use the correct language and that you must be hyper aware of other people’s sensitivities.

“This social justice movement is full of people who are arrogant, narcissistic and very certain in themselves. The very idea that they could be wrong doesn’t even cross their mind. That to me is incredibly funny. I thought Titania could embody all of that.

“The majority of people are desperate for this culture to be mocked. The account has become so popular because people are sick of feeling that they can’t say what they want. It used to be the case that if someone spoke out of turn, you would say that’s a bit much, apologise and everyone would move on. Now you post a screenshot on Twitter and try to get someone fired.

“Titania is staying the stuff that most people want to say.”

March 4, 2019

Twitter’s vast latifundia of techno-serfs

Filed under: Business, Media, Technology — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In Quillette, Alec Cameron Orrell debunks the notion that the average Twitter user derives much benefit from time spent on the site:

Researchers of social media both in the Academy and in Silicon Valley have apprehended for a long time that social media prey on the dopamine rewards system of the brain. Some have used this knowledge to exploit users; others have used it to warn the public of a digital narcotic epidemic. The frisson of delightfully outraged purpose that courses through a user’s nerves as he reads or responds to a post arises from the same brain system that rewards a human being for consuming a healthy meal or organizing his sock drawer. The Hollywood actors who have done mighty work to support the Bolivian cocaine trade in the past can’t put Twitter down now, and that’s no accident.

Digital abolitionists grow more and more strident and numerous these days. Many — including early Facebook investor McNamee — hail from inside Silicon Valley. A raft of articles over the last few years have documented the wave of Silicon Valley techno-elites who, like savvy drug cartel bosses, forbid their own children from using the devices and social media platforms they build, while they encourage their employees to spend frequent periods “unplugged.” They know social media and mobile devices create users, and some have been brave enough to lobby the public for a shift in consciousness.

The slave reaps no substantial or real-world payment for his labor. Chemical slaves to drugs get nothing but misery and poverty in the end. Social media users subsist in an analogous trap, subtle and harder to spot. When it comes to social media, 99.9 percent of users will never see any substantial return on what stacks up to be an enormous longterm investment of time. Users will experience some fleeting stimulant sensations and a smattering of poorly organized — or incorrect—information. “I find out what’s happening on Twitter!” or “I get to promote myself on Twitter!” amounts to self-delusion on par with the vile Antebellum plantation saw that “Slaves get paid in the satisfaction of a hard day’s work and some are even taught how to read!” Such apologetics leverage false but presentable ends to cover horribly exploitive means — means the real ends of which are too embarrassing to admit. The average Twitter user might make the odd connection or get some attention for his business on Twitter, if he keeps at it day after day. In contrast, Jack Dorsey always gets paid handsomely for the user’s time on-site month after month by advertisers. The users work the platform with their attention, and Master Jack goes home with the check.

Unless already famous, the chances of reaping substantial reward from Twitter — such as income or significant growth of attention from others — roughly equal the chances of winning the lottery. And like the lottery, millions of average users chip in and hope, while just a few luck out and get a payout. Those few average users who get a mediocre reward — and even fewer who get famous with a lucky tweet or some such — keep the millions of average users coming back to try their luck every day. The little blue bird runs on the principle of the one-armed bandit and Powerball.

Virtually all users end up losing in the long-term. Most lose hours and hours scrolling through quips and posting burns, sifting through nonsense to find the odd bit of useful information, but mostly for distraction. Like their casino cousins cursed by fate with a gambling addiction, an unlucky minority of Twitter users lose everything on the platform without meaning to. A particularly ill-considered tweet brings down on their heads digital lynching, infamy, disgrace, loss of employment, loss of a spouse, libel lawsuits, and in some countries, criminal indictment for hate speech or threatening behavior. Uncounted thousands of users have operated their mobile devices under the influence of Twitter on the information superhighway, only to wind up with a digital DUI or in an online 25-car pileup.

December 15, 2018

Twitter cannot hold her back – Titania McGrath speaks!

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Despite the patriarchal oppression of a Twitter permanent suspension, Titania McGrath will be heard:

My name is Titania McGrath. I am a radical intersectionalist poet committed to feminism, social justice, and armed peaceful protest. In April of this year, I decided to become more industrious on social media. I was inspired by other activists who had made use of their online platforms in order to spread their message and explain to people why they are wrong about everything.

This week the powers-that-be at Twitter hit my account with a “permanent suspension” (a semantic contradiction, but then I suppose bigots aren’t known for their grammatical prowess). This was the latest in a series of suspensions, all of which were imposed because I had been too woke. The final straw appeared to be a tweet in which I informed my followers that I would be attending a pro-Brexit march so that I could punch a few UKIP supporters in the name of tolerance.

Don’t get me wrong. I have always supported censorship. Major social media platforms have a responsibility to ensure that we are expressing the correct sort of free speech. Twitter’s decision to suspend Alex Jones, host of American website InfoWars, set the right kind of precedent. I fully supported this action because Jones is known for disseminating fake news and wild conspiracy theories. But the fact that I was also banned makes me think that Twitter were being secretly controlled by InfoWars from the very start.

Indeed, Twitter’s modus operandi appears to involve routinely silencing those who defend social justice and enabling those who spread hate. In my short time on the platform, I have regularly come across hate speech from the sort of unreconstructed bigots who believe that there are only two genders, or that Islam is not a race. It’s got to the point where if someone doesn’t have “anti-fascist” in their bio, it’s safest to assume that they’re a fascist.

The permanent suspension only lasted for a day, but the experience was traumatic and lasting. I now understand how Nelson Mandela felt. If anything, my ordeal was even more damaging. Mandela may have had to endure 27 years of incarceration, but at least his male privilege protected him from ever having to put up with mansplaining, or being subject to wolf-whistling by grubby proles on a building site.

They may have silenced the great Godfrey Elfwick, but thank goodness Titania McGrath can continue to point out the absurdities and inconsistencies of the wider world.

« Newer Posts — Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress