But Seriously...

I don't understand how a person can be worth two billion dollars and still volunteer to be any idiot's bitch:



Dorsey, you own Twitter and have more money than you can ever spend. Stop PRETENDING you care about this shit.

I truly hope Wikileaks makes due on their threat and creates an uncensored social media platform to compete with Twitter. The pussy bias of that site is reaching near-unreal levels.

 

Larger than any one particular social media site is the simple fact that all of our "public" spaces on the internet are in fact private spaces. In the real world you can meet up in the town square and foment at any time, but on the internet, all the "town squares" are actually privately owned parks from which you can be evicted at any time for any reason. On a site by site basis, there is nothing wrong with this, as they are privately owned and operated businesses, but taken a whole, I think it's a significant problem that there are no true public spaces on the internet (not that I know how such would be created). When we talk about how instrumental twitter and facebook were in things like the Arab Spring, it becomes clear that they operate a critical position in the public discourse that goes far beyond a typical private enterprise.

 

Yup, still there, just kinda in placeholder mode. Inactive; if the board ever decides to make another push to expand in the future it's always an opportunity to re-explore. In order for something to take off on a small board it needs to have the support of everyone on the board, further, with social media there's always this critical mass point that nett referenced where it spills over and is kinda self-sustaining. Jeff Bezos, the amazon dude, has some quote on not regretting failure but instead regretting the act of not trying. In my opinion a lot of what has made this board so cool and consistently informative over the years has been its (meaning, the heads of state) ability and willingness to change and adapt and try new things and see what works.

Which, leads me into the Milo thing. They took out the wrong dude.

In my opinion, should have left both of them alone. Everyone can have opinions, no one's lives was ruined, that's just part of what you get being a public figure. If it didn't happen on there it would have happened on another website or E-mail or somewhere else.

Who they should target and moderate, though, are the SJWs. The ones Jon Ronson references in his book "So You've Been Publicly Shamed." Twitter is a powerful tool, as we saw in Egypt and the Arab Spring. It's an incredible resource for reporting and gathering content (this NBA free agency was fun to watch unfold live on my twitter stream). But twitter also has the ability to ruin lives, as Ronson shows a lot better than I could ever explain in a post short enough anyone would read.

And eventually, someone is gonna sue the fuck out of twitter for said live ruining. And they're gonna win. Because twitter provides the platform, while taking it away from "trolls" like milo. All they're doing right now is giving some future attorney a lot of evidence.

 

The thing about his Twitter ban is they have no transparency in who gets banned and for what. And then when you ask them why, they don't actually tell you.

Twitter is an interesting platform for getting instant information, but the selective moderation is some real commie bullshit.

 

You get to be likened to a gorilla and lambasted with racist shit from total strangers because you decided to be an actress? Why the hell is that socially acceptable?

I'll be honest, every time the subject of race gets raised around here, I hang back because let's be honest - we're a bunch of white people writing about how minorities should feel. It's so fucking arrogant on our part and completely out of touch.

What I will tell you is that my mom was born in China. She was called a chink all through her schooling here, was mocked and ridiculed for her accent and the shape of her eyes, was called awful things, was beaten up by her classmates and until she left school, her life was pretty much a daily hell for no other reason than her parents moved their family here for a better life. A better fucking life. To this day, she keeps her eyes down in crowds of white people. It all happened fifty years ago, but that shit is still in her head. It will never go away.

And now we live in a world where people behind monitors and screens say vile horrible shit to strangers, and we protect their "right" to be the most awful forms of human society while telling victims of their bigotry to just buck up and block them. Fuck that. Fuck it hard. Before social media, you had to say your crap to someone's face and acknowledge the hurt in their eyes when you called them something cruel. Now? It's a freeforall of trash upon trash upon trash for the few laughs you get at someone's expense. It's not intended as a joke or a little jibe, it's intended to hurt. Viciously.

I'll get off this horse now, but honestly, some of the "everyone is entitled to say what they want to say" folks need to put themselves in the shoes of someone who isn't:
a) white,
b) male,
c) middle-to-upper class,
d) decently educated,
e) wealthy enough to be able to afford the basic necessities of life, or
f) any combination of the above.

 

Like most things involving celebrity 'scandals', I can't help but think it's all a marketing strategy/publicity stunt. It's common knowledge that the only way to deter trolls is to ignore, not engage them. Someone photoshopped a racist pic? Better retweet it so they don't do it again! I don't believe Jones didn't know this, which makes me think it was all intentional, even heavily recommended by studio execs to drum up press to get people to see the movie, a plan that seems to be failing.

In the larger sense, excluding online teenage bullying, anyone who gets riled up over what some adult posted online is being foolish, to put it nicely. It all reeks of first world privilege to me, something SJW's supposedly want to police.

It isn't, and I don't think anyone is saying it is. But it is reality. These people exist. But do you think engaging, then banning them or someone they admire is going to change their minds? How is it not a Band-Aid solution to allow people to pretend the problem doesn't exist?

Isn't that a huge difference? Your mom couldn't avoid that abuse. That is fucked up, and I certainly don't have an answer as to how to stop it. But she could avoid it online. Besides the hilarious double standard of allowing ISIS members and supporters, while banning a gay man whom they would literally kill if they had the chance, isn't the only way to stop people from using Twitter to hurl abuse...to shut down Twitter entirely?

 

It shouldn't be her job to avoid it.

 

Exactly. We are pussifying our children in schools and bringing up a culture that knows no consequences to their negative actions, and instead of thinking "holy shit, look at the monsters we've made", we let them hide behind their "right to free speech" without telling them to shut the fuck up and learn to be kind people.

 

Everybody all on board with taking in large numbers of "Syrian refugees?"

I think we all agree that they are not all bad people but I think we can also all agree that there is no effective way to screen them to ensure they aren't radicals. I think it is also understood that the people flooding Europe aren't all actually Syrian as well.

So, how do we balance the urge to do something with protecting our society from this type of event which is happening more frequently every year?

EDIT:
To bring twitter into this for a moment. I think it is good that ISIS is allowed to continue on twitter unabated. Everyone should see it and understand it. They hate you and would kill you for no other reason than you are a part of western society and they are at war with it. Don't forget who your enemies actually are.

 

Is this opposite day?

 

I'm curious to know the numbers though.

As in, how many "risks" can we expect per, say, thousand refugees? How often does this truly Happen? Is it one guy in a hundred thousand or one in a million? That makes a difference.

Same thing goes with mass killings in the US. It's the whole argument of is it a matter of guns or a matter of the media focusing on it? Or something else?

I remember a while back when there were all these horrible tornados in Texas and Oklahoma and everyone was freaking out about the climate and everything. And then the actual scientists got to the mainstream media and convinced them to run the (logical) explanation that whereas an F5 used to touch down on empty farm land, now it's statistically more likely to hit people thanks to population growth and expansion of cities both big and small.

People always hang onto the easiest answer because that helps them sleep at night. But the way the world works is rarely easily explained.

 

How is it a job to ignore something? Isn't it a lot more work to reply and retweet and then do interviews talking about how you replied to and retweeted a bunch of assholes?

I'd say we've pussified our children to the point that, even when they're adults, their only response to verbal abuse is to go tattle to an authority (or scream at the authority for not doing more, in the case of some college campuses), instead of telling the perpetrators to shut the fuck up, like you suggest, or ignore them, like I suggest.

 

Is the pussification because we've made them soft, or is it because we never taught them to fight back?

One of the most defining moments in my elementary years was when I punched that dickbag Brian in the nose on the school bus. He was a notorious bully, and made a point to dump my backpack, pull my hair, trip me, kick me, throw things at me, etc. Typical school bus stuff.
One day I had enough and I slugged him.

We got called to the principal's office the next morning and I was ready to defend myself to my last breath, but instead Mrs. K told me she understood, and Brian got swats for being an asshole.


Never. Happen. in 2016.
So our kids who pick on other kids are enabled assholes by a system that will not allow a victim to stand up for him/herself and punch a motherfucker in the nose.