It’s Time: Nail Youtube’s Ass to the Wall

People have been talking about how Youtube‘s reliance on traffic-driving recommendation algorithms has turned the site into an engine for extreme right wing recruitment.  We’ve been talking about it, but this looks like the perfect moment to really press the issue.

The latest white supremacist terrorist name dropped a youtube goon right before killing people. It may seem venal to use a moment like this to push a political agenda, but that’s only if your brain is back in 1995 treating politics like opinions. This is life and death. Breaking this messed up machine can save your children from becoming killers, or from being killed.

Youtube. I can tell you exactly why this happened. Hate sells. It drives excitement, which drives clicks and page views and view time. So your blind robots see a neo-nazi channel and it just looks popular, looks commercially successful, and tries to send as many people that way as possible. I see less of that stuff on your front page than I used to, so I suspect you’re doing a little damage control. But it isn’t enough.

You need to de-platform these people. Anyone who talks about white genocide, about immigrants as invaders, and so on. If you can program robots to copyright block anyone who accidentally produces the wrong chord progression, you can figure out a way to block hate speech.

You built the nerd-to-nazi pipeline. It’s high time you tore it down.

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Islamophobia – Still Real, Still Deadly

CW: Mass murder, islamophobia

Mass murder in New Zealand. I’m really glad there isn’t anyone on the blogroll here anymore in overt denial of the reality of islamophobia. I’d like to encourage any readers that still have any question about that in their head to really really interrogate themselves about it.

You don’t have to come as far as I have, to seeing the mainstream atheist movement as a major catalyst of it, but at least see. Look at the rhetoric about islam, the way people treat it as a unique and special force for violent extremism in the world. Look at the way that makes good old boys feel the need to weapon up and take it down to the mosque. Look at the body counts and the coordination of the newest attacks and just accept the evidence of your eyes.

Islamophobia is real and it’s really fucked up that a lot of people who think of themselves as progressives still don’t accept that. The government of New Zealand is far from perfect, but at least I think they might take this as the impetus to start tackling white terrorism, whereas that wouldn’t happen over a mountain of bodies here. But it’s still a fucking grim situation.

Also be careful what pictures and videos you’re exposed to on the internet for a while because one of these terrorist shitlords filmed and distributed video of his actions, and you know damn well channers and encyclopedia dramatica types are going to be planting that shit everywhere like rickrolls.

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The Doppelpocalypse is Nigh

Content Warning: Cinematic Horror

Jordan Peele’s new movie “Us” is coming out in a few days and by rights this movie should just demolish the box office. Maybe it will, but it’s starting at a big disadvantage. When I went to buy tickets, there were no showings before 7 PM anywhere. Most theaters are only showing it once or twice a night. Why? What the fuck is that?

This movie has – no exaggeration – the best trailer I’ve seen in decades. It’s exciting as hell. I’m vibrating with anticipation for it. I’m not going to get a chance to see it until the 21st, but I got it locked in. I’m going. A borderline agoraphobic dude is braving a movie theater for the first time in nine years to see it with me. If you like horror at all – especially action-oriented horror like zombie movies – you better go too.

The original trailer is way better than the cut that aired for the super bowl. If you missed it when it dropped, drink it in here and now babies. Feel it. Jordan Peele came up with a concept similar to Invasion of the Body Snatchers but with so much more electric potential.

He’s created a new type of apocalyptic monster scenario, which the world has been in desperate need of since zombies got squeezed bone dry by every trendchasing loser in hollywood. I want there to be instagram filters to make people look like these doppelgängers. I want every artist dork on the internet to be scribbling up their doppelsonas. I want the fanfic sites to get creepy with it.

I’ve got a bunch of speculation I could get into, like you can find on youtube easily enough. But that might feel spoilerish to some of you, so I’ll leave it be. But I do want to mention something other internet heads have missed. I think the rabbits in the hall may be, in part, a small homage to a Japanese movie called Suicide Circle. Toward the end of that movie, there is a scene of surreal horror taking place in a small brightly lit space, with tiny yellow chicks running all over the floor. That movie is far from a favorite, but if I’m right, that would show the breadth of the horror content Jordan Peele has consumed on his way to becoming a master.

The Doppelpocalypse is nigh. Be there for it.

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Chelsea Manning is in Jail Again

Chelsea Manning is back in jail and I can’t link to an article about it. Why? Tons of them, including the top google results, are including images of her pre-transition. You know damn well they’re doing it to try and make her look like a criminal too. Fuck the media for its transmisogyny, its bias, its willingness to support fascism without any prodding from the state at all.

Here’s a link to the fundraiser for her legal defense.
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Blog Blog Blog Bloggity Blog

I am on rare occasion given cause to wonder if I should be doing this blogging, if the damage I cause in a reckless moment outweighs anything positive I contribute when I write something well. But I’m not just doing this for self-aggrandizement. My whole life has been balanced on the edge of a knife – financial ruin, which can drag down the people around me, the people I love. And there’s at least a slight possibility this blog will be a launching point for doing something that brings financial success. It’s good to be adjacent to people who get clicks. So here I am.

I’m in the middle of my work week. Got two more days of unpleasant labors before I can rest. I have irons in fires, gonna spend my mid-week weekend doing tests and arranging interviews for (hopefully) better things. It’s getting late. My next shift starts in like eight hours and I still have some chores to do. But I haven’t been blogging enough lately. Gotta keep up my FtB points. What to write about?

Role-playing, sure. Been thinking about that lately.
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Born in the Right Time

My brother took one of those gene tests. Think he got a three-fer deal because they were checking out his adopted baby’s wayback past. The results were kind of darkly hilarious in their banality.

The family tales of a Native American great-whatever on mom’s side? Pure bullshit, of course. Relation to anyone famous they had in the database? Absolute ignominy. Earliest common relative with anyone famous was over five thousand years ago. I have as much relationship to, say, Darwin as I do to every white person in the United States.

The weirdest thing was just how white I am. The spiciest my ancestry gets is 25% Iberian European, so, like, one of my grandmas was secretly Spanish or Portuguese, maybe? No spice.

Why is that weird? Think about it. We all have exponentially increasing numbers of ancestors. Every generation it doubles. Go back a few hundred years and you can have over a thousand people who contributed in some small way to modern you.

Descendants of Attila the Hun have turned up in England. There were so many black folks in Elizabethan England that her Racist Majesty couldn’t feasibly kick them all out. The British Isles also had Jewish and Romani people living there for a long time. During the Victorian era there were enough Indonesians living in London to have a riot.

And I’m related to none of that? Not even a little? Out of tens of thousands of my ancestors, not one of them got with a not-completely-honky person? Not even a Sephardic Jew that converted to Catholicism during the Reconquista to avoid exile or death? Nothing at all?

I’m made out of thousands and thousands and thousands of racists. Oh, but I’m the end of the line. No babies, the buck stops here.

Socially speaking, we’re products of our times. Some people say they wish they were born in a classier looking era. Putting aside Renn Faire types and steampunks, even laundry machines looked sexier in the thirties than they do now. But who would you actually be back then, surrounded by lovely design and people in cool fashions? I can tell who I’d be. Don’t like it. I’m glad I’m alive right now.

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Report on Transphobia in Health Services Silenced?

You’ve probably read the article by the two-fisted reportress Siobhan O’Leary about a crusty transphobe with some authority over transgender people’s health care up in Canadia. Important stuff, and I’m unqualified to add to it.

But given revelations that crypto-transphobe slimebag Jesse Singal was having private discussions with other journalists about how trans people shouldn’t be allowed to write articles about trans issues, and given that article prompted a twitstorm of creeps defending creeps in journalism…

One wonders if the cancellation of this article is punishment for Shiv’s involvement in that debate, and advocacy for trans journalists. That’s all we get to do. Wonder.

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Reasons to Live Are Good

I rarely get music news from Japan. I love a few bands, but for some reason they don’t cross my mind every day, I can lose track. But I found out several years ago Kaori from Yellow Machinegun started another band called Suzisuzi, which means “vein” in Japanese. They are old school thrash punks, not young people, but exactly what you would hope to see in rock stalwarts. They crush it. And added bonus, one of these tracks is a retail worker anthem:

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Watch Your Heart – Islamophobia and Antisemitism

I don’t have anything definitive to say on the issue of Israel and Palestine for a good reason: It’s a complicated situation and I haven’t done the homework. Even saying that, someone will come in the comments and try to tell me it’s really totally simple. Yes, aspects of it are simple. Massacres and apartheid and terrorism are bad, specific incidents and blatantly evil systems and institutions can be unequivocally condemned.

But taking a side in this conflict can lure you into affirming and amplifying your prejudices. Right now, creepy officials in the US are trying to force people to pledge loyalty oaths to Israel. That’s bad for us, bad for peace. France’s Emmanuel Macron has sad that rejecting Israel’s political will is inherently antisemitic. Again, compelling people to mindlessly support a state’s right to oppress an ethnic group. That’s bad stuff.

But all you have to do is raise the issue to see the antisemites and islamophobes crawl out of the woodwork – and to see people you’re normally inclined to like and respect start showing shades of those character flaws. Look at the phrasing of the comments on the Pharyngula post about this. Sometimes it’s subtle, but it’s telling.

The antisemitically inclined will list bad adjectives, then the word “jewish” among them. Maybe they aren’t antisemitic, but the way they phrased their comment unintentionally equates being jewish with being a fascist. Or maybe the outsized influence of the Israel lobby in the US provokes latent antisemitic feelings in them, about how jews secretly control the world.

The islamophobically inclined will say their feeling is that Israel will be more peacefully inclined and trustworthy than Palestine. They’ll remember the many instances of antisemitic rhetoric and actions being taken by Palestinians or people using them as a political cause, but forget all the islamophobic stew we’ve been swimming in since the damn 1960s.

If you are going to comment on the conflict in that region, do your homework first. That’s the reason I don’t comment on it – because I don’t have the time to take that step properly. And more than that, watch your heart. I’m inclined to trust the politically lefty to have the well-being of all people in their heart as they approach a situation, BUT I know damn well we are culturally cultivated to be antisemitic and many of us are just thoughtless enough to let that get out of control, get away from us.

All I want is for you to think before you speak, to search your feelings for prejudice. It may seem hypocritical of the guy with whose average post is tweet length, but bear with me. And good luck.

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