Here we go again. A whining conservative at Breitbart is complaining about How Authoritarian Activists Are Censoring Twitter because they use filtering software.
Unfortunately, unrestricted free speech will always have its malcontents. Authoritarian activists using Twitter’s API have found a way to install themselves as de facto moderators for thousands of users. Twitter’s reputation for openness and free discourse may now be under threat.
The past two years have seen the rise of ‘autoblockers’ – shared lists of pre-blocked Twitter users that others can sign up to. The ostensible purposes of these lists is to block ‘abusers and trolls’ so that subscribers do not need to encounter them. However, as we shall see, this is typically a mask for politically-motivated blacklisting.
Oooh, he makes it sound so nefarious! “Authoritarian activists…have found a way to install themselves as de facto moderators for thousands of users” — like they’ve stealthily snuck in and imposed their will on people. Those thousands of users — out of the millions on twitter — have voluntarily signed up for a service that reduces the cacophony on twitter.
Let’s make this simple, with a physical world analog. There are two objects: gags and earplugs.
If I get a gag and stuff it in your mouth, I am violating your right of free speech. That is bad. It would restrict your free speech. I wouldn’t do that.
If you are yammering at me and being generally annoying, for any reason whatsoever, and I get a pair of earplugs and stuff them in my ears, I am not restricting your right of free speech in any way. In fact, it would be an imposition on my autonomy if you insisted that I don’t have a right to use earplugs.
It is also not authoritarian if someone comes along with a big bag of earplugs and hands them out for free to anyone who is tired of hearing, for instance, ranting libertarian assholes.
The various blockbots are not gags. They are earplugs.
I know. The people who are complaining the loudest about the easy availability of internet earplugs tend also to be on the libertarian side of the spectrum, which makes their complaints both hypocritical (What? You mean I don’t have the liberty to not listen to you?) and self-serving, since the largest group of people eager to use these kinds of services are those who are fed up with selfish, obtuse, obnoxious conservative jerks…exactly like the people complaining.
Right now I’m NOT watching TV. I’m violating the free speech of TV producers worldwide. And even if I did, I’d choose which programm to watch. Imagine the horrors!
Another conservative who thinks free speech means: “You must listen to me.”
And even if you did watch TV, it probably wouldn’t be Fox News. That’s !
“earplugs” was my first thought, reading this, before I got to PZ mentioning the equivalency. And then I think that it is a bad thing to plug one’s ears so as not to hear what the other side is saying. Not recommended by me. There is a balance there, somewhere, between “NOT listening to opposing views” and “REFUSING to listen”. Refusing to listen is nowhere near refusing to let them speak. However, there is a squiggle here with publishing lists that people might sign up to given a single name on the list they don;t want to hear, then being denied being able to listen to a whole list of other voices. Maybe that’s what the complaint is about: not plugging one’s ears at an individual voice, but cramming whole bunch of voices into the Silent Room, without examining the entire list.
People aren’t listening to my insane ranting! Help, help, I’m being repressed!
Bleah, these over opinionated assholes just won’t get it. I don’t have to listen to you. I can walk away any time you are talking. If you try to follow me, that is stalking/harassment on your part. I can choose who I listen to. You can’t impose upon me who I listen to.
I ignore liberturds. They are super arrogant, and utterly and totally stupid, with evidenceless political slogans that don’t have historical data to back up that they work. In fact, history says the opposite. They don’t work as claimed.
Faux News is never on in Casa la Pelirroja. That is our choice.
I remember the hot, desperate feeling of not being listened to. It’s a pinch and heat between my eyebrows and a tightness in the chest. Quite unpleasant. I was 8 years old, and ripped the fingers out of another little boy’s ears and then shrieked at him that he HAD to listen to me. If I had to play at being psychic, I would guess this is the same urge, just matured and self-justified by age. Yet it’s the same petty shriek.
The era in which the world owed me its ears never existed, not when I was 8 and not now, and all things being equal, it doesn’t exist for anyone else despite the unpleasantness of the feeling of not being listened to.
Wow, the comments on that article. I usually try to stay away from comments in most mainstream articles, but I couldn’t help but look – that one’s a fetid stew of everything awful that’s bubbling away in the internet. I imagine the comments there are probably pretty mild compared to more direct articles, but still. The cross-over between men’s rights activists, gamer-gators, libertarians and authoritarians really comes to the fore – they really are the same people, aren’t they? I’d be interested in seeing a Venn diagram.
Given that people have argued in all seriousness that wearing earphones (and listening to music/whatever) in public is a violation of their right to free speech, I don’t think this distinction between gags and earplugs is going to get much traction. In that case, it was men complaining that they can’t pick up women in public wearing them, but the motivation and reasoning was the same (“You will give me the attention I believe I deserve. What you want is irrelevant.”).
At the moment, since I’m still chiseling this important insight and haven’t released the
Post Commentgenie, no-one is reading this! That’s censorship, mean, and won’t play with you anymore!!The speech is only free if it belongs to them. We who don’t want to listen to them, or want to talk about something else, have no rights. Funny how that works.
I think most of Ol’ Blocky’s “critics” are the sort of people who don’t have much luck attracting audiences offline, usually for very good reason. They think of the internet as the solution to being ignored, and so get enraged at becoming just as ignorable online as offline.
Also, I’m starting to wonder if there is an intentional effort to poison the meaning of the word “authoritarian” among RW circles. So many words have had their meanings destroyed by them that it is becoming more difficult to express things. It’s not directly 1984 Newspeak, but the effect has become the same.
I AM A MAN! YOU WILL HEAR MY MIGHTY ROAR!
Pathetic.
justified with an example of a single instance of someone wearing earphones getting hit by a car cuz they couldn’t hear the car coming.
AS IF that is so common, that everyone wearing earphones is about to get hit by a car. Nevermind the driver’s responsibility, etc etc yada yada. “risk” is a word completely incomprehensible to the Freeze Peach Brigade, as in: when it serves their purpose they will exaggerate it unreasonably, and when not in their favor, will totally disregard it. [but that’s just my “opinion” of the Freeze Peaches. Listen. I says I’m right, so you gots to listen; or you deny me my right to freeze peach]
@#13, ck, the Irate Lump:
IIRC, back in the 1990s, Newt Gingrich’s office was caught distributing a memo in which they suggested deliberately creating confusion about the meaning of a lot of politically-charged words, so you may be correct.
Wait until he realizes that this is a feature inherent in the internet. There are billions of webpages out there, but all our software is constructed in such a way, that each user only accesses a tiny fraction of them.
I demand that browsers have the address line removed and instead just load all available pages simultaneously. Freedom!
The Vicar (via Freethoughtblogs) wrote:
If you’re talking about the 1996 GOPAC memo, “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control” (despite the supervillain title), it didn’t quite go that far. It was more of a list of good words to describe themselves, and bad words to apply to your opponents (with “liberal” sitting next to phrases like “lie” and “traitor”). It was a perfect distillation of attack politics, but probably not much more than that.
While I’m sure there isn’t actually a deliberate, coordinated effort to dilute the meanings of these words, the way they swarm onto them is amazing and the fact it eventually ends up redefining them in popular culture as merely another synonym for “bad” is infuriating.
But that’s the thing: they sign up for it. For the block lists I’ve seen, it is made very clear that blocking includes the entire list, and the list is available so that anyone can see who is on the block list. You can’t participate in it without knowing that you’re blocking a lot of people, and without being able to see who you are blocking.
You know, in the neighbourhood I live in, I can navigate by sound. There are individual cars passing, so keeping my ears open allows me to judge whether I have to pay extra attention, point a car out to the kids, etc.
As soon as I reach the main road, this is fucking useless. Trying to talk to anybody is fucking useless because the traffic is godsdamn L-O-U-D. I don’t see how earphones would make a difference.
@savant #8:
I wouldn’t want to see it. It’d look like several overlapping puddles of vomit.
Rich Woods @ 21;
A kaleidoscope of awful! like looking down a microscope onto a slide of e. coli. Probably requiring similar biohazard protection as well!
Once again the freeze peach brigade confuses the right to free speech with their imagined right to a captive audience. Trying to explain the difference to them is pointless, since while they try to argue that we have no right to ignore them, they somehow seem to retain the right to ignore everyone and everything but the sound of their own vocies.
Must be magic or something….
It may come as a shock to some, but no matter who you are, or what your message, most of the people in the world are not listening to you. Even worse, some of those who are are doing so because they think you are an idiot and they are waiting for that schadenfreude moment when you stick your foot in it.
So my junk-mail filter is a denial of free speech to people selling penis-enlargement methods, Nigerian heirs, knock-off viagra sellers, and a street-evangelist from Kent?
Me an’ my tyrannical tendencies. I’m such a bad person.
I see they keep using the word “Authoritarian” in that article. Seems like a major case of projection to me.
#25 Although it’s largely died down now, that was in fact an argument being made early in the public Internet’s lifetime.
And I’m somewhat dubious that someone is going to be warned away from being hit by a car by a Twitter mention.
#5 Microraptor,
I think you mean: Help, help! People won’t let me bully them online! I’m being repressed!
#13 ck, The Irate Lump,
I’d wondered about the use of that word. You can’t solve a problem without clarity of thought and speech.
#21/#22 Rich Wood/savant
(LOL) I was up for a Venn Diagram but you guys have a point.
Never mind, then.
I hope none of those guys are hypocrites who use ad-blockers or spam filters. Because: free speech!!!
Seriously: trolls = spam. Sealions = spam. We’re done here.
I don’t go to church sermons and I don’t open my door to Jesus Freaks, or if I mistakenly do I slam it shut. I guess I am violating their right to free speech.
I actually was hit by a car once. Spent weeks in the hospital.
Wasn’t too nice.
Was definitely preferable, though, to the subsequent decades of listening to Libertarians.
If the Libertarians handed out Demerol like the hospital did, it might ease the pain a little.
I could see even a voluntary blocklist being problematic in some circumstances, like if they were made opt-out by service providers (the way spam filters are) or weren’t transparent about who they were blocking and why. Those circumstances of course don’t apply here.
I object to blocking bots simply because they are lazy, how hard is it to simply skim over unwanted posts, and are dangerously close to erasing people and giving up on them.
No, they are not the same as wearing earplugs or not answering a door. In both of those cases the you are ignoring their contribution but still are aware of their presence and humanity. The blocking bots are so effective at erasing people from a person’s awareness that there is no trace left. You have not just ignored their message, as is your right, you have also effectively reduced a person with an obnoxious message to a non-entity. They no longer register. Once done there is little or no chance that the block will ever be removed because the issue disappears along with the person.
Ignoring the existence, or the humanity, of anyone, no matter how wrong and obnoxious they may be, is never good.
#33, I think that the experience of being the target of a threatening, abusive Twitterstorm might give you a different perspective on this.
And I really don’t think that people have an inherent right to make their presence known to you.
And if the blocking is done because of threats and harassment, where they aren’t treating you as human? That is what caused the block bots in the first place.
You haven’t thought this through. Anybody can be ignored at any time. Nobody should have the authority to say “you must pay attention to me. That is bad manners on their part. And you can reject their bad manners.
Hey! I have some vague ideas that I can’t really put into words or justify in any way. If you aren’t over here with a team of experts bribing me to speak and collating my every utterance, posting it on your site and defending it full time, you are infringing on my free speech.
Oh for fuck’s fucking sake. Lorn again decides to play contrarian on this subject.
You should be allowed to give up on people. You should be allowed to “erase” people from your own fucking feeds and searches. It IS hard to wade through the bilge. Even that aside, you are tempted to respond to the assholes and get pulled into the muck.
And no, ignoring someone is not robbing them of their humanity, do you seriously believe that fucking nonsense lorn? Or is that your newest post hoc rationalization for your opposition to Block Bot?
How is ignoring someone denying their humanity? That i believe someone has nothing to say that I’m interested in hearing has nothing to do with their humanity.
lorn,
The person disappears from where? Everywhere?
No trace of the person left where? Everywhere?
Non-entity with respect to where? Everywhere?
They no longer register where? Everywhere?
Ignoring the existence of someone who you think will harass is a good thing.
lorn #33:
If by ‘lazy’ you mean ‘time-saving, yep. But then, I hope you don’t use a microwave oven, wheeled transport or a TV remote. ’cause that’d be sort of hypocritical, wouldn’t it.
You do realise that you would actually have to look at the damn things before knowing if they’re wanted or not, yes?
‘Erasing.’ Right. If you are ignoring the existence of a family member or close acquaintance, then yes, such behaviour could be described as erasing them. It’s pointed, obvious, and—because there is emotional investment in the relationship—hurtful. Some random bod on the internet, not so much. And if said random bod is a total fucking wanker, it is completely reasonable to give up on them without three weeks fasting in the desert whilst wrestling with the moral consequences of your oh-so-deeply-hurtful decision to do so.
With over seven billion people on the planet, most of whose existences I will never be aware of in any meaningful way, I fail to see how this is any real problem.
Well yes. That’s why it’s called ‘giving up’ on a person. Maybe they should have tried not being a ranting, abusive arsehole. And again, unless this person is a close relative, it really makes little difference in the greater scheme of things, if they turn into non-ranting non-abusive non-arseholes, and I happen not to read their non-rants.
How did their humanity come into this? I don’t claim you’re non-human. Just that you’re an arsehole who is wrong. What a shame we no longer have the kill-file, eh.
Jafafa Hots @31,
The propertarians won’t be handing anything out for free, but when they get the government out of the way, you’ll be rich enough and free enough to buy all the Demerol you want! Win-win!
; )
Jesus fuck.
I’ve currently got gamergaters and terfs and the wretched scum from the slymepit YELLING at me constantly. I’ve got the Irish wanker and his cronies sea-lioning at me. #NECSS is going on right now so all these skeptics are having a conversation in my stream. Old friends pop in and say hello. There are funny people telling jokes. Of course everyone is groaning over Rand Paul and moaning despairingly about Hillary Clinton.
There are interesting conversations I like to follow mixed in with a bunch of raving fucking morons who are trying to drown everyone else out. OF COURSE I HAVE FILTERS UP THE WAZOO. What is wrong with you that you should have so little awareness of what’s going on on social media and simultaneously think you can advise people who are in the thick of it on how they should manage the chaos?
Damn right. There are some people who waste my time and say incredible stupid, useless things and also believe they have a right to regulate my interactions on the internet. I chuck ’em out because I must, or the whole utility of the discourse goes down the toilet.
That’s why I’m banning lorn for his extraordinary obtuseness. Bye. Don’t come back.
@lorn, #33:
Okay, we all know that the idea that you’ve erased someone is ludicrous. You don’t **notice** their messages. It’s not that you notice the messages and consciously choose to ignore them; you simply never notice them in the first place.
That is a difference, the failing to notice the messages in the first place, as opposed to noticing and making a conscious decision to ignore.
You say this is unlike earplugs. Really, I’m kind of baffled by that, because it has the same effect – you don’t hear the message in the first place, there’s no need to consciously choose to ignore.
But okay, you insist that failing to notice the message is erasing of the PERSON and not merely the MESSAGE.
So, you oppose wearing noise-cancelling headphones on the subway and immersing yourself in a really good book?
Or, hell, for those like me with the talent, just immersing yourself in a really good book, headphones or not, while on the subway is sufficient for me to reach a place where I simply fail to notice the people around me. Not merely their messages, the people. You oppose this, correct?
should have refreshed.
But I’m not sad, this isn’t the first time lorn has done this. And this part:
is frickin’ classic.
Nicely done, PZ.
I have heard of this Vox Day guy, but I have never read his blog and have never read one of his books,
I have therefore erased his existence.
You can thank me with chocolate.
Incidentally, when I was using twitter I never used the blockbot. but now, I simply do not use twitter at all.
I am ignoring the humanity of hundreds of millions, including all of you who tweet.
It’s like internet genocide.
Today, I erased, to the first-order approximation, the entire human race.
And, sorry to anyone wishing to take revenge, but I placed a deflector shield around the thermal exhaust port.
I think this is probably the strongest argument against blockbot. It can be a bad thing to isolate yourself inside a subcultural bubble. When your information about other groups comes only from people within your group, you’re at a greater risk of internalizing hateful ideas about them. And if toxic ideas are prevalent or become prevalent in your isolated subculture, you don’t have as easy access to outside help. With the mass connectivity of the internet, automated mass blocking is one of the few effective ways at making such isolation feasible.
Twitter is not the entire internet.
And the people making use of it are doing so because they are being targeted with toxic abuse precisely because they are taking note of, and criticising, people outside their group.
#48: DUDE. Read #33. Then read #42. Then THINK.
Man, this is a dumb argument. Let’s say I use a blockbot that zaps a thousand people out of my timeline. You do realize that there are almost three hundred fucking million other Twitter accounts?
しかたがない。
so it goes
Jacob Schmidt wrote:
That is pretty much completely wrong. If you want to create an isolated subculture (i.e. “echo chamber”) where dissent is blocked, you do so not by using blacklists that otherwise default to allow but with whitelists that default to block.
I didn’t call it the entire internet, nor did I contradict the motives and behaviours of blockbot’s users.
Nothing I wrote has anything to do with “erasing people by ignoring them,” and I don’t dispute the usefulness of automated mass blocking.
I can’t control twitter. I can’t turn it into a whitelist system like Tumblr. I can distribute a block list, though. True, it isn’t as effective as a whitelist at blocking out people you don’t like, but it’s hardly negligible. If it were, I doubt blockbot would be as popular as it is.
@48, Jacob Schmidt
It probably is indeed the strongest argument against blockbot (against using it? against it being allowed to exist?). And it’s still a very poor argument.
The two activities, blocking people on lists other people created, and getting to know other perspectives, are not mutually exclusive activities. I’m not even sure there’s a correlation between such blocking and increased ignorance of opposing views. Nor whether getting rid of such blocking would significantly improve one’s exposure to opposing views (especially ones that are worth listening to).
This isn’t just “blocking people with opposing views”. It’s useful for blocking people who make no useful contribution to discussions at all, or who continue to say things you’ve heard countless times before.
The final absurdity I have to point out is too big to easily articulate, but I’ll try: we can do private texts, private emails, and all kinds of private (or closed) conversations with like minded people. The comment section on my facebook pictures are only open to my friends (and sometimes only even more specific lists of people if I choose). I don’t give out my email or phone number to everyone on the planet. It’s ok to regulate your communication channels, they don’t need to be a forum for the entire world to comment on 24/7! None of this has ever been the end of the world, or authoritarian, or intellectually bad, or whatever.
The point refuted a thousand times raised by Jacob Schmidt about the isolation of self-imposed echo chambers falls utterly flat based on the simple fact that Twitter following is not the same as Twitter blocking; to isolate yourself so thoroughly requires restricting who you follow in addition to blocking; and applying the same principle to every other social medium and every real-life interaction too. Get real! (Apparently the main message I have missed out on hearing today is that as an admin for the block bot, I am a “fascist leader”, which is amusing but untrue. The trains refuse to run on time at my command.)
Finger find the button marked “Erase”
Jacob Schmidt,
Do you read blogs written by MRAs, racist xenophobes and creationists?
Or do you hang around FTB, maybe atheist channel on Patheos and some other fairly liberal blogs?
We all only have 24 hours in a day, and the time we have to inform or entertain ourselves usually has to be rationed. If I watch a movie tonight, I won’t have as much time to read FTB. If I follow a couple of interesting threads on FTB, I probably won’t have time to catch up with posts on Love, Joy, Feminism. Every time you open a tab in your browser, you decide what is worth your time and what isn’t. I don’t want to waste my time reading hateful screeds against women just to find evidence #95235723567 that misogyny is still a thing.
While you do have a point, I don’t see how it’s a point against something like blockbot. Twitter can blast you with a huge amount of content forced into tiny little messages. You can’t get anything worthwhile from it unless you follow the links in those tweets or search for more information otherwise. And that you can do whether you’re reading a “Fuck you you stupid c*nt [insert link]” or “”MRAs are at it again [insert link]”.
And obviously, you won’t follow every link, but you if you’re aiming to be informed, you need to go out and get the information. If PZ’s post interests me, I can just read what he wrote and hate on someone.. or I can follow links, read some more and then still hate on that someone because they usually really are a disgusting bigot, as advertised.
Anyway, I think blockbots don’t cast one in a protective bubble, they just balance the noise to information ratio a bit and protect you somewhat from the worst abuse.
I agree that it’s not a good idea to “isolate yourself inside a subcultural bubble”, but if blockbot is supposed to contribute to that it’s doing a bad job.
“lorn”:
Guess what. Everybody, yes, even you, is completely unware of thousands of entire internet communities. Not only are you erasing the humanity of people, you are erasing any awareness of entire communities!
Your choice to not read thousands of internet communities DWARFS the blocking of a few thousand trolls. You’re a giant hypocrite.
So, who’s deciding whom to block in this system? Some sort of flagging system with votes or a set of trusted super users who decide for the subscribers what to block?
[Slymepitters are never tolerated here. Banned. –pzm]
I know of two block systems and four block bots…
1. @TheBlockBot, takes recommendations from a group of moderators. @Xanthe_Cat is an admin for that one, you can see the list of who has access to add to it here -> http://www.theblockbot.com/?page_id=2#13
2. Blocktogether.org, this one allows you to share a Twitter accounts block list. So your personal one or in the case of the next two systems a particular accounts block list that is generated to target a particular group. It provides a method of creating block bots..
3. GGAutoBlocker, http://blog.randi.io/good-game-auto-blocker/. This uses blocktogether.org under the covers, Randi has some code that identifies GamerGate’ers by who follows some seed accounts and some other rules and applies blocks to her ebooks account. The GGAutoBlocker is then that accounts blocklist shared via blocktogether
4. The, err, WombleBot… https://sjwomble.wordpress.com/2015/03/29/the-gamergate-womblebot-no-one-ggautoblocker-to-rule-them-all/ … Copies Randi’s model but rather than use a set of seed accounts it reads the ids of everyone who posts in #GamerGate in the last week. So if they stop posting they get unblocked. Seems to be more of a joke/demo bot to show GG they cannot stop bots via legal threats, but it seems there have been changes to it to add a white list as people started using it. As there are some “SJWs” posting in GamerGate you might not want to block, like me!
I don’t know of any others, but as a bot collector I’d like to hear about them :)
PS… Coming, the new @TheBlockBot written by CQT will allow multiple groups to create moderated blocklists. So making TBB more like blocktogether.org, the problem with blocktogether being lack of moderation and false positives. Someones personal blocklist will have some people you wouldn’t want to block. So this means, in theory, you could sign up to an MRA list from one group of feminists, or a TERF list from trans activists. Exclude blocks from a particular moderator/blocker … etc, etc. Solving some of the problems with the block bot. You can contribute to their effort here -> https://www.patreon.com/CollectQT
David Jones
So the repeated transphobia and whorephobia by the two I highlighted (and just to make it clear, I only highlighted those two because I saw their transphobia and whorephobia) should not qualify them for being blocked by a tool that strives to provide a save Twitter experience for sexworkers and trans*women?
Yeah, I know, for many cis white feminists (especially of the male variety) those people are not problematic because they are not affected by the stances they hold. That doesn’t mean those people are NOT problematic.
IMO it’s one of the strengthes of the Blockbot: it protects those most vulnerable without making exceptions for people who are nominally on the side of women.
I just read an exchange where a modestly famous white woman called a black woman nasty and vile and claimed that she hated women because she had dared to criticise a friend of hers.
The thing about Graham Lineham is, of course, total bullshit. I noticed he was talking about someone being blocked months ago and forwarded him to the unblocking tool – > https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CBLaUElXIAA9il1.png
Of course the blocks stayed on his account when he disabled the application! How is it supposed to remove them when the applications access to his account has been revoked? For someone with some Twitter API knowledge David exhibits a surprising amount of ignorance, presumably wilful.
The unblocker is available to anyone to use, either to remove the blocks applied by the block bot or to remove ALL blocks on your account. http://www.theblockbot.com/theunblocker/connect.php
It’s been a while since the bot account tweeted about it, I’ll ask an admin to send a tweet from the bot account linking to it again.
Yeah, I see enough of the Slymepit and their apologists over in the comments of other blogs I follow like Ashley Miller’s. I don’t need to see them on Twitter, so I like that there’s something where I don’t have to search for each pitter by name to block them.
And I definitely don’t want to see shit from people who are for “women’s rights” who don’t include women of color and trans women in the category of “women”.
I don’t think that means I’m isolating myself in an echo chamber (isn’t that what you mean with “subcultural bubble”?) I encounter enough of this shit in my day to day life away from the internet that I sure as shit don’t need a constant reminder of the shit people like to throw in the limited time I have online.
David Jones,
I’m sure the Irish wanker has interesting things to say about subjects other than “PZ must apologize for being rude to Michael Shermer and me” but his obsession with PZ has turned me off. Therefore I ignore the Irish Wanker. Sorry if this is disturbing to you.
Milinovich insists that transwomen are actually male. That’s not “a shade different from the party line” (FTBorg hurr durr), it’s on the opposite side of the color wheel. It’s also in direct contradiction with demonstrable reality.
She aggressively misgenders people, and reacts to criticism like the Food Babe. Not only that, but, as the linked articles demonstrate, her views on transpeople are both opposed to reality and internally inconsistent. Neither is a characteristic of a reasonable stance. I think people are perfectly justified in keeping ignorant challenges to a basic aspect of their humanity off of their Twitter feeds.
A mindreader, are we?
David Jones, when did “wanker” become a slur? Exactly which oppressed group does it refer to? Do you have any evidence that anyone has ever been added to the Block Bot for calling someone a “wanker”?
Wait, David Jones… you’re saying that people can choose to use the blockbot, and then if they find out they don’t like it, they can choose to STOP using it?
My God, that IS horrible!
David Jones
Not really.
Yeah, with someone who thinks Irish wanker is racist slur, but denying transwomen their humanity is not toeing the party line.
Buh bye.
Fixed that for you lying troll.
Except nobody wants to talk to you bully. You haven’t made good chat. You want to continue your bullying…Good riddance to bad trash.
I explained how “not quite the right party line” is a gross understatement of Milinovich’s ignorant views about transpeople. That you have no response is noted.
You also ignored the thrust of my issue with calling “wanker” a slur, which applies equally to the “Irish” prefix: neither is an oppressed group. As viciously as Irish people were oppressed in the past, they just aren’t any more.
David Jones (“Metaburbia”) is a long-time harasser and slymepitter. If he skulks back on, just ignore him, because all of his comments will be eventually deleted.
I regard block bots as something akin to movie reviewers. When I find a movie reviewer whose views I respect I put my trust in him or her and can base my decisions on which movies to see on subsequent reviews from that person. When I find a block bot with a methodology I approve of I can subscribe to it and benefit from its actions.
Of course it’s totally unreasonable that trans* people might not want to read tweets that, while being impersonal, question their very existence. It’s unreasonable of them to want a Twitter experience where they don’t have to actively remove content that is dehumanising. We can’t be having that!
The irony that is forever lost on the pitters is that most of the feminists they point out as being oh so horribly maligned by the bot would probably have some strong words to say about the pit, their harassment, photoshops, rape jokes and apologism.
The fucking neocons who complain about their fucking freeze pears simply don’t like it when control is wrestled from their grubby neocon hands. You’ll have the fucking neocon vultures swooping in now. I’m literally fucking with rage right now.
The neocons simply love fucking crying when you block then on Twitter. I got blocked by neocon Maajid Nawaz for posting Nafeez Ahmed’s piece. Did I fucking cry? Nope. Do they fucking cry? Yup.
Twitter should be a fucking neocon-free zone.
This is the Mother’s Day Card that Gia Milinovich made for this year. Note that it plays off of the essay that Katha Pollitt wrote about not wanting to use inclusive language when talking about abortions. Gia Milinovich makes a big deal about how her view of trans women is based on science, which is “penis is male”. And her husband, the physicist Brian Cox, has publicly supported her on this.
This, along with regularly interacting with TERFs in the agreement that trans women can men who just want to silence the voices of women show the lie that David Jones was trying to say here. It is not just a shade different from the FtB view of trans women. (As if FtB is the place where the official view of trans experiences originates.) Most trans people do not like Gia Milinovich nor the “slightly differently shaded” view of being trans nor does Gia Milinovich much like trans women. (Yes, I am blocked from her account.)
But it was so nice of David Jones to come in and support people who argue that people like Caitie, Xanthe, Crip Dyke and me should not attempt to live our lives the we see fit. It was also kind of David Jones to offer to have a calm and rational discussion about our rights.
And I say to David Jones; blow it out your ass.
I am so stealing that gag/earplug analogy.
Why is it that so many Libertarians think that “Freedom of Speech” means “I must be allowed to say whatever I like, whenever I like, wherever I like, and you all have to listen”?
Janine #80
Oh :( This makes me sad. Why, Brian; why?
@82: probably because, (a) nice as Brian Cox is, he is privilege incarnate (that’s not his fault, it’s just his situation) and has not given any thought to the implications of a transphobic stance; and (b) “support your wife in public” is usually a default for people who want to stay married.
Fair points, sawells, but it is never the less disappointing from someone I otherwise like and admire.
@84: well, that’s been a familiar sensation for a lot of people around here lately, hasn’t it? I’m becoming very cautious about admiring people as opposed to admiring specific pieces of work people have done.
Just to be clear, I wasn’t trying to defend Cox in my @83, just reflecting on causes. Tout comprendre n’est pas tout pardonner.
Yes.
I’ve been thinking about how the internet compares to meat space and how that frustrates people who normally find themselves able to speak over others and be heard over others irl.
Where I live I will get shouted down if I disparage Faux News, climate change denial or Jesus. My MIL once lost it on me for saying that vaccines do not cause autism. You can say that abortion is a blessing so long as you know those are literally fight’n words. (and we have 3 guns to every one person) You sure don’t say them anywhere you want to work.
It is right and natural for privileged bigots to be heard. It is rude and dangerous blasphemy if anyone else is. I’m on the fringe here and disregarded as unsaved and corrupted by liberalism (and probably teh Gay). I’m considered extremely stupid for believing in evolution and racism. People who are accustomed to being loudly racist, sexist and LGBTQ-phobic (and in denial of all of those things) would think they were in hell if you dropped them in a place where people shouted back or shunned them for a change. After all, they are on the side of light. Progressives and atheists are creatures who belong in the outer darkness.
We’re dealing with similarly privileged people when we deal with people who think you not reading what they write is harming them, not that their harassment is harming you. There’s them and then there are the rapists and abusers that have found a way to turn the internet into a place where they can expand their abuse to a form of terrorism. Just as minorities have found a way to communicate and organize online, so have the people who hate them. Just as rape survivors have found a way to support o another, so have the rapists. It is naive to pretend that quite a few of the people sending rape and death threats aren’t getting off on it. Why terrorize women online? For the same reason we order from Amazon instead of going to the mall. It’s easy. The thrill of abusing a woman is just a click away and there are no repercussions. What a delight for them that must be. How horrible it must be for them to have that fun threatened.
Whatever they want to do to blacks, Mexicans, women, gayz etc, they should be able to do for no other reason than they deserve to be happy at the minorities expense. Everything about our culture has told them that is so. That’s why some of them honestly believe they are fighting for their rights.
I did not mean for that to be a link to @mazon . com. That’s spooky. I didn’t know WordPress did that.
If you can, go read some of the anti-segregation propaganda that was being circulated throughout the south. White racist fuckwads pleaded with other white racist fuckwads to stand up for their right to not have to be around black folks. Segregation was forcing poor little white kids to sit next to (gasp) little black kids. The people murdering and burning crosses thought they were the good guys. Shitheads almost always do.
For those people who knew they were racist fuckwads and that they didn’t truly have the right to segregate, the truth didn’t matter. Unwarranted outrage and fear of the loss of privilege worked in their favor.
In the digital age, nothing has changed except the medium. Every time there is progress, there is pushback. The internet gave minorities voices and faces. What we are seeing now is merely a part of that pushback.
Jackie the social justice WIZZARD!!! #88:
It’s not WordPress. It’s some third-party advertising shite called Skimwords.
Daz,
Thanks.
in ref to Jackie@89, re: “The people murdering and burning crosses thought they were the good guys. “
Just watched a talk by Seth Andrews of The Thinking Atheist, who said some pretty similar things which are entirely true. He said (paraphrased) “We’re going to be the bad guys for awhile. It’s going to be tough, and we’re going to have to grin and bear it to stand up for what’s right.” I really think that the atheist movement needs to organize more of a safety net for people who come out as atheists and stand up against theocracy. Parallel, I think that we progressives need to organize more of a safety network for feminists who stand against misogynists, LGBTQ who stand up against homophobes and trans*phobes, etc. I’m watching organizations like Crash Override and the like to see how they develop, because that sort of 21st century service is becoming really, really important. They’ve produced some good articles, have helped some people, and it looks like they’re already starting to work with some government officials to try to push for anti-hate legislation (preventing SWATting and the like). So, good signs!
It’s tough – the anonymity provided by the internet is dangerous as hell and there’s no good way to counteract it comprehensively. We’re going to have to come up with something though, and it’s organizations like that which will be leading the charge.
I’ve lived in the same sort of retrograde environment as you’re in now, Jackie. :\ You have my utmost sympathy.
@ Jackie in 87 & 89.
Those comments need to be on front pages somewhere. It is so horribly true how those with power to abuse feel so normalized in their actions and beliefs.
@Jackie- off topic, but if you’re seeing links to places like Amazon get embedded in WordPress posts without meaning to place them, you should probably run a program like Malware Bytes on your computer to get rid of it.
microraptor #94:
Far as I can tell (and I spent an hour or so the other day on it, on google) it’s ‘legitimate’ advertising via a service which I can only assume FTB signed up for.
It can be blocked with Adblock. Open ‘blockable items’ and filter for ‘skim,’ then block all items with ‘skimresources’ in the name.
(See also here if you don’t want to block it but do want to be able to differentiate such links from intentional ones.)
Hmm. I got hit with a malware about a year ago that went right through my adblocking software that installed some stuff on my hard drive. “Legit” advertisements and malware are entirely too similar to each other now.