The problem is that the result of such an approach is probably going to be people living in bubbles, siloed off from any information that they find uncomfortable. While you can bubble yourself off in the virtual world in the real world you have to get along with people who live in the same country who have radically different views than your own.
Secondly, let us suppose that an internet company decides that they want to try a maximalist approach. Instead of only catering to half the population, liberals or conservatives, they decide that they will simply allow anything and everything on their service n an attempt to get as large of a customer base as possible. What's wrong with that? If you don't like it why can't you just find another platform?
The practical effect of suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story, the Covid origin story, etc. is to drive the development of alternative services and further fragment society.
Um, can you clarify? Is "love basing" like "debasing"? What exactly is it that you claim you did to Freddie? Or is "based Freddie" an alternate version of Freddie, like black Spiderman...?
"But if the Supreme Court hands down a firm decision saying the constitution prohibits affirmative discrimination on the basis of race, albatross gone."
California and Michigan have both proved that affirmative action bans don't end affirmative action. California in particular uses race in UC admissions.
Had a big impact on all the campuses, but they changed the rules to weight grades more so that they could still commit a form of affirmative action and bring in as many blacks and Hispanics as possible. Their admissions process involved reading essays and weighting black/Hispanic ones more than Asian. And then, when all that wasn't enough, they changed the rules to end the use of tests entirely.
He makes some good points, but he gives away the game by claiming Twitter is doing a great job and concerns about egregious censorship on the platform are baseless.
That exact same article was written about cars and batteries and ML vision systems and rockets and satellites. Now maybe Elon will fail spectacularly at this, but we really shouldn't be judging too hard yet based off a few conversations and lots of twitter trolling.
For what it's worth, I Might Be Wrong made the impish but sincere suggestion that Trump returning to Twitter would actually be good, or at least more entertaining than harmful:
It's called "message discipline" and it's important for political movements.
Certain groups who lack message discipline claim it doesn't matter, but that's because they don't have it. "ARGH are you ignoring the good policy because someone else said something bad?"
I agree, but the problem is that Trump's tweets were quoted everywhere, not just on Twitter. Like every dumb thought that pops into that moron's head is not something I need reported by the New York Times, you know?
Before "but the harm" became popular every time someone would complain to me about Trump's tweets I'd always ask "why do you follow him then?" Man people will twist themselves in knots to be able to feel outrage.
All the journalists moaning that Trump might come back will be touching themselves when he does. They live for Trump-related histrionics. Churn out dire takes, get likes, feel dopamine for 2 seconds then crash...they can't stop.
My guess is the number one reason Trump was elected was NAFTA. There is an entire other group of people who believe it's because of his Twitter account.
I thought it was excellent. I made the mistake of reading reactions on twitter. I won't do that again. I think these people feed on self-righteous schadenfreude. They are ugly intellectuals.
Calling them intellectuals is too generous, I think. They only care about *appearing* intellectual, but in practice, their stances are deeply anti-intellectual.
I don't really have a bone to pick in the censorship battle but fuck man, twitter during the Trump era was really not fun and that sucked because twitter used to be a lot of fun in the pre-Trump era. I was happy when he was booted off just so I didn't have to see journalists talking non-stop about whatever dumbass thing he said.
The main reason I don't want him to run in 2024 is I don't think I can take another election cycle and/or 4 years of everyone in my online social circle obsessing over and losing their shit at the guy.
I feel ya, but please bear in mind how incredibly convenient it was for the reporters. They could cite and comment on a Trump tweet without even getting out of their pajamas, let alone trying to approach strangers at a crime scene or the site of a disaster and persuade them to talk to you candidly.
"You know how that movie goes: what they consider literal fascism just grew over time, so that things that were perfectly common conservative positions 10 years ago now fall under that umbrella, and whatever simplicity and limitation that rule contained is gone."
Did anyone see that horrific Jon Stewart panel? Andrew Sullivan was accused of white supremacy for fairly moderate positions you'd hear from John McWhorter.
I never loved him but I did like his movie "Irresistable." It was surprisingly balanced given his current philosophical turn. He used to be an old-school liberal. My, how times have changed.
That panel really bummed me out. I'm surprised Sullivan took it so well after the fact. I was actually quite depressed about it for an hour or two after I read about it and watched clips, and then I went outside and felt better.
Not that I think Sullivan is right about everything. But these positions seemed very good fodder for a probing political and philosophical discussion, instead of just trying to jump up and down on Sullivan's corpse.
I remember the time Briahna Joy Gray went on his podcast and just absolutely kicked his ass when he passed her Reagan/Clinton talking points about black fathers and black-on-black crime, and then a month later he went on her podcast to keep discussing similar topics!!
The horrible thing about the Jon Stewart panel was just how un-self-aware it is. They spent the first few minutes of the episode pointing out how Black Lives Matter collapsed into people renaming stuff with no substantial change…then the panel just decided people need to Think About Their Role Upholding White Supremacy.
It was kind of stunning since during the recycling episode they pointed out the folly of turning systemic issues into matters of private morality. But for one of the greatest systemic evils of the age? Totally, everyone just has to sit around being emotionally aware and adopting some private guilt with no connection to material issues.
I actually think that people taking more of an inventory of how our white experiences are different from Black experiences is a good thing! That said, I find that it's useful as a way of improving empathy, which seems to be missing entirely from these conversations.
But I'm sure making people feel shame and guilt will work wonders anyday now. It's the same reason no Catholics masturbate.
I agree with that. Privilege, as a form of epistemic humility and a reminder of what factors might make us less aware of some factors of the world and how we could try to learn more, is a valuable concept.
But privilege isn’t epistemic humility. The people who sling that around as an accusation lack epistemic humility themselves. E.g. you have privilege because you’re a cis white male, ergo [whatever]. Oh really? What about the autism, the poverty, the childhood abuse, etc.? [That’s a hypothetical, I’m not talking about myself.]
in other words if you’re going to judge people and pretend to understand their experience, and you content yourself with the bluntest instrument available, maybe you shouldn’t be the one making those judgments.
That's not privilege, that's some pathological oppression olympics nonsense.
As a young asexual growing up in a fundamentalist church, I literally had no idea why 'just don't have sex' was hard or objectionable. I don't know how to describe this but 'ace privilege'. The systems of the world local to me happened to fit my circumstances and inclinations well enough it was not obvious to me how they harmed other people.
If someone's trying to claim that this or that person's life is easy or anything they say can be discounted or thinks privilege is the reciprocal of oppression or something, they're just engaging in fashionable nonsense.
I agree with this to some extent, Dan. But I think we sometimes forget how many different white or black experiences there can be depending on so much...income, education, geography, family of origin, etc. I hope we can move away from race essentialism and be curious about all kinds of people whose experiences and backgrounds differ from our own.
There's something so twisted about making Race the top ranking categorical signifier that determines affinity or division. It's lazy and error-prone, Moreover, the inability to recognize the inherent weaknesses of the Woke "critical race" unified theory explanation- even when continually confronted with evidence that undercuts that exclusive focus- undercuts whatever valid points the adherent to Wokist orthodoxy might manage to assert.
I'm an Army brat; as a rule, it's easier for me to identify with and bond with someone else who grew up in a career military family, with the same perspective of a rootless tumbling tumbleweed and a daily life influenced by in common by the background ethos and signature sign-specific traits found within the institution of the American military service, than with a child of civilians who grew up as a "local"- in the same place all through their school years, with the same group of friends from age five through high school graduation (or maybe with one change of household location, prior to their teenage years.)
For me, compared to the common experience of an upbringing in the military life, the matter of someone's particular ethnic ancestry is comparatively insignificant. In my experience, military kids tend to be more familiar and at ease with travel and novelty- including multicultural exposure and a background of multiethnic acquaintances and friendships- than Americans who spent their youth growing up in one place, living like...civilians. And we service brats often share the same problem box, related to rootlessness, and long stretches of time with a parent absent, and saying a lot of goodbyes, losing touch, ghosting and getting ghosted. And being the new kid in town, again, trying to do like the local kids do. And grappling with the impacts of values instilled by the military profession, in our parents and ourselves, and in our peers. Some of which are positive, but often also to some extent insular. And some of which can be troublesome to examine.
So it's weird to find myself lectured at with a barrage of cliched assumptions about the limits of my life experience based solely on inferences drawn from my ethnic ancestry, by people with political cadre mentalities whose uncritical acceptance of a whole passel of nonsensically hokey sweeping generalizations is plainly the consequence of their own personal limitations of cultural upbringing and exposure. Not only do they lack a clue as to how narrow-minded they sound, they aren't interested in getting a clue, either.
Yeah, I read that and thought it was excellent. I’m surprised Sullivan went to so much trouble, given that his interlocutors don’t GAF. But yeah, I think this is part of a flailing rebrand on Jon Stewart’s part. Him calling Sullivan “motherfucker” – a walk-of-shame moment.
"Do you think people are going to go to Twitter to treat it like Stormfront, find themselves censored, and just give up?"
I've said it elsewhere in discussion threads on this topic, but I really think there's an entire generation of activists/commentators who lack object permanence, like they all missed a crucial developmental milestone in infancy. The level of thinking here really is that if they make the bad thing unseeable that it will, in some real way, cease to exist.
But are they political opponents? The whole point for me is a lot of these people are not my political opponents, but their own “logic” somehow makes me their enemy.
The critique is directed at the intellectual indiscipline and self-indulgence of some political observers, not at any particular set of political views that they might happen to hold.
"The insistence that the universe is obligated to provide us with morally simplistic answers is the kind of thinking that brings us religious fundamentalism, driven by a child’s anger that the world won’t capitulate and be simple for us."
episodenull isn't the only one to notice the peculiar childish mindset of the woke set and comment on it.
And, frankly, it applies to the Right as well; e.g. if they legislate against gay people, homosexuality will go away. I just find it more notable – and infuriating – on the liberal-left side.
I like this. I've often mused that the underpinnings of woke ideology stem from a combination of badly conceived philosophy and childish mentalities. This wouldn't be so bad if there were some adults in the room to curb the more toxic tendencies.
Great post. I always loved how the ACLU fought for the Nazis to have free speech. I don't need Nazis speaking near me or near Holocaust survivors, but it is better for our society than silencing them
They fought to prevent the government from blocking their right to protest. The didn’t fight to force The NY Times to publish articles from Der Stormer.
I think the problem is that there’s no way to even keep them from inviting themselves in to your house. Post about something banal and you’re all of a sudden waking up to a storm of abuse.
Yeah, but are you aware of the politics of the ACLU these days? Not a chance they would be doing anything other than demonstrating violently in Skokie to keep the Nazis from marching. In another example of institutional takeover, the worksters have infiltrated and turned the ACLU upside down.
Yes, they moved far away from that. Still, it represents the best of what America could be. What we have now is far worse. The ACLU is just another tool of the Democratic establishment.
I don't know who Collins is, so I can't speak to the rest of his body of work, but from this thread alone it doesn't seem like he's talking about simply silencing voice of the right. The first tweet makes it seem like that's where he's going, but his stated concerns after that are:
- "death threats, racial slurs and fake recipes for play doh that produce napalm"
- more ads
- selling user data
- prevalence of botnets.
Those all sound like legitimate concerns to me, none of which involve censorship. (I suppose if one is a true free speech maximalist you would permit the threats and napalm, but I wouldn't.). These things are not necessarily unique to a far-right extremist site, of course. You could prevent those things from happening while also permitting far right participants.
You're ignoring the basic claim of this piece: twitter's moderation policies don't prevent those things from being routinely traded online. They just keep them out of sight, out of mind.
4chan has moderation, every board has janitors that ban porn and the like. I think 4chan is actually a successful example of how little moderation is actually needed. The safe for work boards on 4chan are tame and stay almost entirely on topic without much work.
tbh they don't even do that. If you extensively block, you can maybe avoid seeing it, but threats, slurs, and harmful recipes are routinely left up on twitter.
Freddie, do you think Twitter should enforce ANY moderation policies (e.g. violent threats, explicit racial slurs) or do you think it's too fraught and pointless and the downsides too weighty to go down that road at all?
But aside from the threats he’s not talking about ideas, he’s talking about the mechanics of the site. Like, who cares if other sites have a lot of bots. I just don’t want bots on the sites I use.
What’s wrong with we should be able to have actual speech norms on the internet like a real meeting? You can say a lot of hateful things at a school board meeting but if you issue a threat you will get arrested.
Like my wife got a rape threat over I’d like a lady character in Assassin's creed. That seems like hey this should come with consequences. Not that 4chan shouldn’t be allowed to exist and be terrible but that every community should have rules.
I'd add that that keeping certain things out of sight, out of mind, is fine in of itself, within reason and within communities. The issue comes when people assume that Twitter is the real world, or at least an accurate reflection thereof. Or worse, that the real world is downstream from Twitter discussion -- an insane claim anyone would deny when stated explicitly, but too often implicit in arguments about it. Thus, people come to think of the effect of banning ideas from Twitter as "these ideas are removed from public discourse", when in practice it's "these ideas are not allowed in our clubhouse".
(Which is your point, if I'm reading this article correctly, but just re-stating explicitly. And less elegantly, I'm afraid.)
Moderation controls on Netflix don't prevent extreme porn from being made either. Yet you don't want hardcore porn popping up in your timeline when you're searching for snarky takes on the Twitter person of the day. There's a fine line of exposing bad shit and normalizing it.
It’s amusing that some people are freaking out about the potential downfall of Twitter when I haven’t participated in it at all, ever. My life has remained unaffected.
I don't think it's possible to not participate in it though. Twitter basically has a choke hold on the entire media. I recently started buying print magazines to try to reduce my screen time and the twitter-induced brain rot from writers and editors is easy to spot.
Until the pandemic I never used Twitter for anything other than keeping up with my hobbies, mainly sports. I enjoy the app. There's this tiny (and hilarious) corner of it that's obsessed with politics but mainly it's a place for people to discuss The Bachelor and KPop.
In my field (librarianship) we try to reach different audiences about things we do (a book fair!) so we use twitter to reach the twitter audience. The other conversations abt Twitter's importance are not what it is used for by public entities.
Most of these folks mistook their participation trophies for an accomplishment. The others realize it was a joke, but are terrified if they loosen their grip, reality will leap up and take a big bite.
What's totally shocking to me is that Freddie writes these very nuanced articles about how the reality isn't that simple and then somebody bursts in and yells "it's actually <my talking point of choice>!"
Like, the entire thing about participation trophies is that everyone who got them knew they were bad, that they were more souvenirs than rewards. Even the people who gave them - the boomers - understood that at the time! Then 20 years later they collectively decided to pretend that the generation of people they gave them to had been weakened to the point of helplessness because they got a chunk of shiny plastic that had a team name and a year on it when they were 9 years old. Do you know how dumb this looks to anyone who isn't in the tank?
I wasn't casting dispersion on an entire age group. I was conjecturing a high correlation between those to whom I specifically referred and the folks Freddie describes. I apologize if that wasn't clear.
What is the difference between content moderation on a space like twitter and say, locking a comment section? I don't remember the thread, but I do remember some of that happening here. This isn't to point you out as some kind of hypocrite - I don't care, this is your place - but only to pose a question about discourse in private spaces.
Exposure to new and challenging ideas is important, but is that what twitter really does? My exposure to challenging ideas has typically been the result of a search, I've rarely had something new and different hit me as if stepping on a divine rake.
Twitter can moderate as it chooses. But the explicit claim that's going around is that far right extremism and violence will rise if their policies loosen, and that's ridiculous. If I moderate away a comment here I am most certainly not doing it because I think doing so will resist fascism.
If someone advocated for political violence here - whether it be an anarchist, socialist, or fascist, would you moderate the content?
I am sympathetic to the notion that it may be better to have all ideas out in the open, because if the are truly dangerous and repugnant, sunlight would sanitize. Much like drug use - these things happen any way. I just question the notion that twitter needs to be a common place. If twitter wants to be anti-fascist, fine. Now that it's owned by Musk, if it wants to delete things that are critical of Tesla, that's also fine. What's dangerous about twitter isn't it's moderation policies, it's the centrality it plays in public discourse.
The problem is that the result of such an approach is probably going to be people living in bubbles, siloed off from any information that they find uncomfortable. While you can bubble yourself off in the virtual world in the real world you have to get along with people who live in the same country who have radically different views than your own.
Secondly, let us suppose that an internet company decides that they want to try a maximalist approach. Instead of only catering to half the population, liberals or conservatives, they decide that they will simply allow anything and everything on their service n an attempt to get as large of a customer base as possible. What's wrong with that? If you don't like it why can't you just find another platform?
The practical effect of suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story, the Covid origin story, etc. is to drive the development of alternative services and further fragment society.
Um, can you clarify? Is "love basing" like "debasing"? What exactly is it that you claim you did to Freddie? Or is "based Freddie" an alternate version of Freddie, like black Spiderman...?
"But if the Supreme Court hands down a firm decision saying the constitution prohibits affirmative discrimination on the basis of race, albatross gone."
California and Michigan have both proved that affirmative action bans don't end affirmative action. California in particular uses race in UC admissions.
I might be wrong but I think when that prop passed it had a big effect on the demographics at the flagships
Had a big impact on all the campuses, but they changed the rules to weight grades more so that they could still commit a form of affirmative action and bring in as many blacks and Hispanics as possible. Their admissions process involved reading essays and weighting black/Hispanic ones more than Asian. And then, when all that wasn't enough, they changed the rules to end the use of tests entirely.
What does PMC mean?
I had to search on DuckDuckGo too. It means Professional Managerial Class.
Thank you!
Exactly so. You can't run even a small discussion group without content moderation, let alone a huge site like Twitter.
I've been managing online discussion groups of one kind or another for over twenty years and it's complex and difficult work.
He makes some good points, but he gives away the game by claiming Twitter is doing a great job and concerns about egregious censorship on the platform are baseless.
That exact same article was written about cars and batteries and ML vision systems and rockets and satellites. Now maybe Elon will fail spectacularly at this, but we really shouldn't be judging too hard yet based off a few conversations and lots of twitter trolling.
An old reddit CEO had a thread of what a world of hurt Elon is in for, and how it's a shame that it distracts Elon from things like EVs and Mars.
For what it's worth, I Might Be Wrong made the impish but sincere suggestion that Trump returning to Twitter would actually be good, or at least more entertaining than harmful:
https://imightbewrong.substack.com/p/i-demand-that-twitter-be-a-forum
It's called "message discipline" and it's important for political movements.
Certain groups who lack message discipline claim it doesn't matter, but that's because they don't have it. "ARGH are you ignoring the good policy because someone else said something bad?"
I agree, but the problem is that Trump's tweets were quoted everywhere, not just on Twitter. Like every dumb thought that pops into that moron's head is not something I need reported by the New York Times, you know?
They deserve each other. Spiders in a pot.
Before "but the harm" became popular every time someone would complain to me about Trump's tweets I'd always ask "why do you follow him then?" Man people will twist themselves in knots to be able to feel outrage.
All the journalists moaning that Trump might come back will be touching themselves when he does. They live for Trump-related histrionics. Churn out dire takes, get likes, feel dopamine for 2 seconds then crash...they can't stop.
My guess is the number one reason Trump was elected was NAFTA. There is an entire other group of people who believe it's because of his Twitter account.
Plus giving the PRC most-favored-nation trade status.
Correct. I'm from the rust belt. His rhetoric was spot on to appeal to rust belters whose communities and prospects were destroyed by NAFTA.
The decline of the Atlantic has been painful to witness.
True that. Used to subscribe. Used to be able to listen to NPR too.
Ouch
This is so funny. LOL! Hyperbole rules.
This is one of the best pieces on the current moral panic about free speech online I've ever read. Every single paragraph is spot on.
My thoughts exactly, Freddie was on top of his game today.
I thought it was excellent. I made the mistake of reading reactions on twitter. I won't do that again. I think these people feed on self-righteous schadenfreude. They are ugly intellectuals.
Calling them intellectuals is too generous, I think. They only care about *appearing* intellectual, but in practice, their stances are deeply anti-intellectual.
I don't really have a bone to pick in the censorship battle but fuck man, twitter during the Trump era was really not fun and that sucked because twitter used to be a lot of fun in the pre-Trump era. I was happy when he was booted off just so I didn't have to see journalists talking non-stop about whatever dumbass thing he said.
I believe they prefer “clickgrundel”
The main reason I don't want him to run in 2024 is I don't think I can take another election cycle and/or 4 years of everyone in my online social circle obsessing over and losing their shit at the guy.
I feel ya, but please bear in mind how incredibly convenient it was for the reporters. They could cite and comment on a Trump tweet without even getting out of their pajamas, let alone trying to approach strangers at a crime scene or the site of a disaster and persuade them to talk to you candidly.
The law of merited impossibility: "It can't happen and when it does happen you'll deserve it!"
I was going to link to Rod's description, but one of the first two links for it was Rod talking about Freddie re-discovering it.
(I expect Rod and Freddie agree about little else.)
"You know how that movie goes: what they consider literal fascism just grew over time, so that things that were perfectly common conservative positions 10 years ago now fall under that umbrella, and whatever simplicity and limitation that rule contained is gone."
Did anyone see that horrific Jon Stewart panel? Andrew Sullivan was accused of white supremacy for fairly moderate positions you'd hear from John McWhorter.
What if it's true tho?
I never loved him but I did like his movie "Irresistable." It was surprisingly balanced given his current philosophical turn. He used to be an old-school liberal. My, how times have changed.
That panel really bummed me out. I'm surprised Sullivan took it so well after the fact. I was actually quite depressed about it for an hour or two after I read about it and watched clips, and then I went outside and felt better.
Not that I think Sullivan is right about everything. But these positions seemed very good fodder for a probing political and philosophical discussion, instead of just trying to jump up and down on Sullivan's corpse.
Sullivan takes criticism surprisingly well imo
I remember the time Briahna Joy Gray went on his podcast and just absolutely kicked his ass when he passed her Reagan/Clinton talking points about black fathers and black-on-black crime, and then a month later he went on her podcast to keep discussing similar topics!!
He sucks, but I like him.
The horrible thing about the Jon Stewart panel was just how un-self-aware it is. They spent the first few minutes of the episode pointing out how Black Lives Matter collapsed into people renaming stuff with no substantial change…then the panel just decided people need to Think About Their Role Upholding White Supremacy.
It was kind of stunning since during the recycling episode they pointed out the folly of turning systemic issues into matters of private morality. But for one of the greatest systemic evils of the age? Totally, everyone just has to sit around being emotionally aware and adopting some private guilt with no connection to material issues.
I actually think that people taking more of an inventory of how our white experiences are different from Black experiences is a good thing! That said, I find that it's useful as a way of improving empathy, which seems to be missing entirely from these conversations.
But I'm sure making people feel shame and guilt will work wonders anyday now. It's the same reason no Catholics masturbate.
I agree with that. Privilege, as a form of epistemic humility and a reminder of what factors might make us less aware of some factors of the world and how we could try to learn more, is a valuable concept.
But privilege isn’t epistemic humility. The people who sling that around as an accusation lack epistemic humility themselves. E.g. you have privilege because you’re a cis white male, ergo [whatever]. Oh really? What about the autism, the poverty, the childhood abuse, etc.? [That’s a hypothetical, I’m not talking about myself.]
in other words if you’re going to judge people and pretend to understand their experience, and you content yourself with the bluntest instrument available, maybe you shouldn’t be the one making those judgments.
That's not privilege, that's some pathological oppression olympics nonsense.
As a young asexual growing up in a fundamentalist church, I literally had no idea why 'just don't have sex' was hard or objectionable. I don't know how to describe this but 'ace privilege'. The systems of the world local to me happened to fit my circumstances and inclinations well enough it was not obvious to me how they harmed other people.
If someone's trying to claim that this or that person's life is easy or anything they say can be discounted or thinks privilege is the reciprocal of oppression or something, they're just engaging in fashionable nonsense.
I agree with this to some extent, Dan. But I think we sometimes forget how many different white or black experiences there can be depending on so much...income, education, geography, family of origin, etc. I hope we can move away from race essentialism and be curious about all kinds of people whose experiences and backgrounds differ from our own.
There's something so twisted about making Race the top ranking categorical signifier that determines affinity or division. It's lazy and error-prone, Moreover, the inability to recognize the inherent weaknesses of the Woke "critical race" unified theory explanation- even when continually confronted with evidence that undercuts that exclusive focus- undercuts whatever valid points the adherent to Wokist orthodoxy might manage to assert.
I'm an Army brat; as a rule, it's easier for me to identify with and bond with someone else who grew up in a career military family, with the same perspective of a rootless tumbling tumbleweed and a daily life influenced by in common by the background ethos and signature sign-specific traits found within the institution of the American military service, than with a child of civilians who grew up as a "local"- in the same place all through their school years, with the same group of friends from age five through high school graduation (or maybe with one change of household location, prior to their teenage years.)
For me, compared to the common experience of an upbringing in the military life, the matter of someone's particular ethnic ancestry is comparatively insignificant. In my experience, military kids tend to be more familiar and at ease with travel and novelty- including multicultural exposure and a background of multiethnic acquaintances and friendships- than Americans who spent their youth growing up in one place, living like...civilians. And we service brats often share the same problem box, related to rootlessness, and long stretches of time with a parent absent, and saying a lot of goodbyes, losing touch, ghosting and getting ghosted. And being the new kid in town, again, trying to do like the local kids do. And grappling with the impacts of values instilled by the military profession, in our parents and ourselves, and in our peers. Some of which are positive, but often also to some extent insular. And some of which can be troublesome to examine.
So it's weird to find myself lectured at with a barrage of cliched assumptions about the limits of my life experience based solely on inferences drawn from my ethnic ancestry, by people with political cadre mentalities whose uncritical acceptance of a whole passel of nonsensically hokey sweeping generalizations is plainly the consequence of their own personal limitations of cultural upbringing and exposure. Not only do they lack a clue as to how narrow-minded they sound, they aren't interested in getting a clue, either.
I agree, but the perspective of highly educated woke upper middle class minorities is incredibly unrepresentative.
Jon Stewart has discovered the immutable truth that moral scolds don't win in the marketplace of ideas.
Hi Klaus, this is a great column from Sullivan occasioned by his Stewart experience....I don't think it's pay walled.
https://andrewsullivan.substack.com/p/the-problem-with-jon-stewart?s=r
Say what you will about Sullivan, the man has a conscience.
...which is one reason I subscribe to his substack. Plus the windows game :)
Yeah, I read that and thought it was excellent. I’m surprised Sullivan went to so much trouble, given that his interlocutors don’t GAF. But yeah, I think this is part of a flailing rebrand on Jon Stewart’s part. Him calling Sullivan “motherfucker” – a walk-of-shame moment.
Thanks. I was going to post this.
That's the most depressing thing I've read in a while. This fucking brain worm is ravaging so many people I wouldn't have expected.
Seeing wokeness as an emerging religion is the only real explanation I have for its incredible sway. I just don't get it otherwise.
It depressed me as well.
It's not just "conservative positions" and it's a lot shorter than "10 years ago."
Having Barack Obama's 2008 opinions was enough to get Eich axed in 2014.
"Do you think people are going to go to Twitter to treat it like Stormfront, find themselves censored, and just give up?"
I've said it elsewhere in discussion threads on this topic, but I really think there's an entire generation of activists/commentators who lack object permanence, like they all missed a crucial developmental milestone in infancy. The level of thinking here really is that if they make the bad thing unseeable that it will, in some real way, cease to exist.
It's the logic of literal babies.
That's not quite it. It's idealism. They believe that "discourse" is power, so they can change the world by changing the "discourse."
I'm not sure that's incompatible with my view; it strikes me as another manifestation of the same pathology.
“One has to belong to the intelligentsia to believe things like that: no ordinary man could be such a fool.”
--George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/notes-on-nationalism/
You responded to a very thoughtful article with "my political opponents are literal babies, actually". Do you think you're coming off well here?
I agree with the literal baby
But are they political opponents? The whole point for me is a lot of these people are not my political opponents, but their own “logic” somehow makes me their enemy.
The critique is directed at the intellectual indiscipline and self-indulgence of some political observers, not at any particular set of political views that they might happen to hold.
From the article:
"The insistence that the universe is obligated to provide us with morally simplistic answers is the kind of thinking that brings us religious fundamentalism, driven by a child’s anger that the world won’t capitulate and be simple for us."
episodenull isn't the only one to notice the peculiar childish mindset of the woke set and comment on it.
And, frankly, it applies to the Right as well; e.g. if they legislate against gay people, homosexuality will go away. I just find it more notable – and infuriating – on the liberal-left side.
Because we thought they were above such fantastical thinking.
I like this. I've often mused that the underpinnings of woke ideology stem from a combination of badly conceived philosophy and childish mentalities. This wouldn't be so bad if there were some adults in the room to curb the more toxic tendencies.
Great post. I always loved how the ACLU fought for the Nazis to have free speech. I don't need Nazis speaking near me or near Holocaust survivors, but it is better for our society than silencing them
They fought to prevent the government from blocking their right to protest. The didn’t fight to force The NY Times to publish articles from Der Stormer.
I think the problem is that there’s no way to even keep them from inviting themselves in to your house. Post about something banal and you’re all of a sudden waking up to a storm of abuse.
Yeah, but are you aware of the politics of the ACLU these days? Not a chance they would be doing anything other than demonstrating violently in Skokie to keep the Nazis from marching. In another example of institutional takeover, the worksters have infiltrated and turned the ACLU upside down.
Yes, they moved far away from that. Still, it represents the best of what America could be. What we have now is far worse. The ACLU is just another tool of the Democratic establishment.
I don't know who Collins is, so I can't speak to the rest of his body of work, but from this thread alone it doesn't seem like he's talking about simply silencing voice of the right. The first tweet makes it seem like that's where he's going, but his stated concerns after that are:
- "death threats, racial slurs and fake recipes for play doh that produce napalm"
- more ads
- selling user data
- prevalence of botnets.
Those all sound like legitimate concerns to me, none of which involve censorship. (I suppose if one is a true free speech maximalist you would permit the threats and napalm, but I wouldn't.). These things are not necessarily unique to a far-right extremist site, of course. You could prevent those things from happening while also permitting far right participants.
You're ignoring the basic claim of this piece: twitter's moderation policies don't prevent those things from being routinely traded online. They just keep them out of sight, out of mind.
On some level, yes. Thanks to network effects, Twitter has monopoly power. FdB does not.
Twitter doesn't have a monopoly over the internet itself, but it does have monopoly power over its specific segment.
Otherwise, the bluecheck set or MAGAs or whatever could set up their own analogous service and they would be out nothing.
Again, the specific point here is that unlike many people, I don't think my content moderation policies are part of the fight against fascism.
4chan has moderation, every board has janitors that ban porn and the like. I think 4chan is actually a successful example of how little moderation is actually needed. The safe for work boards on 4chan are tame and stay almost entirely on topic without much work.
tbh they don't even do that. If you extensively block, you can maybe avoid seeing it, but threats, slurs, and harmful recipes are routinely left up on twitter.
Freddie, do you think Twitter should enforce ANY moderation policies (e.g. violent threats, explicit racial slurs) or do you think it's too fraught and pointless and the downsides too weighty to go down that road at all?
But aside from the threats he’s not talking about ideas, he’s talking about the mechanics of the site. Like, who cares if other sites have a lot of bots. I just don’t want bots on the sites I use.
Sure, but keeping bad things out of general public view has some value.
Dogs have to poop, but it's better to pick it up and put it in the trash than leave it lying around on the sidewalk for people to step in.
The root problems is dogs need to poop. Removing the need to poop solves the problem.
What’s wrong with we should be able to have actual speech norms on the internet like a real meeting? You can say a lot of hateful things at a school board meeting but if you issue a threat you will get arrested.
Like my wife got a rape threat over I’d like a lady character in Assassin's creed. That seems like hey this should come with consequences. Not that 4chan shouldn’t be allowed to exist and be terrible but that every community should have rules.
I'd add that that keeping certain things out of sight, out of mind, is fine in of itself, within reason and within communities. The issue comes when people assume that Twitter is the real world, or at least an accurate reflection thereof. Or worse, that the real world is downstream from Twitter discussion -- an insane claim anyone would deny when stated explicitly, but too often implicit in arguments about it. Thus, people come to think of the effect of banning ideas from Twitter as "these ideas are removed from public discourse", when in practice it's "these ideas are not allowed in our clubhouse".
(Which is your point, if I'm reading this article correctly, but just re-stating explicitly. And less elegantly, I'm afraid.)
Moderation controls on Netflix don't prevent extreme porn from being made either. Yet you don't want hardcore porn popping up in your timeline when you're searching for snarky takes on the Twitter person of the day. There's a fine line of exposing bad shit and normalizing it.
It’s amusing that some people are freaking out about the potential downfall of Twitter when I haven’t participated in it at all, ever. My life has remained unaffected.
I don't think it's possible to not participate in it though. Twitter basically has a choke hold on the entire media. I recently started buying print magazines to try to reduce my screen time and the twitter-induced brain rot from writers and editors is easy to spot.
What is an example of this, in terms of what you've seen in magazines?
Thanks. Great read. Love Jerry Coyne.
Until the pandemic I never used Twitter for anything other than keeping up with my hobbies, mainly sports. I enjoy the app. There's this tiny (and hilarious) corner of it that's obsessed with politics but mainly it's a place for people to discuss The Bachelor and KPop.
Yes. This rationale for Twitter, I get.
As far as discussing political topics, Twitter is the Kiddie Pool.
Swimming in urine and somebody occasionally takes a dump in the water?
let's just say that for political discussions, I avoid the place
;-0
I was banned from /r/CringeWorthy ... twitter is a suitable substitute
😹😹😹
Yes, there are people who post sports updates on Twitter faster than any other place.
In my field (librarianship) we try to reach different audiences about things we do (a book fair!) so we use twitter to reach the twitter audience. The other conversations abt Twitter's importance are not what it is used for by public entities.
Most of these folks mistook their participation trophies for an accomplishment. The others realize it was a joke, but are terrified if they loosen their grip, reality will leap up and take a big bite.
What's totally shocking to me is that Freddie writes these very nuanced articles about how the reality isn't that simple and then somebody bursts in and yells "it's actually <my talking point of choice>!"
Like, the entire thing about participation trophies is that everyone who got them knew they were bad, that they were more souvenirs than rewards. Even the people who gave them - the boomers - understood that at the time! Then 20 years later they collectively decided to pretend that the generation of people they gave them to had been weakened to the point of helplessness because they got a chunk of shiny plastic that had a team name and a year on it when they were 9 years old. Do you know how dumb this looks to anyone who isn't in the tank?
I wasn't casting dispersion on an entire age group. I was conjecturing a high correlation between those to whom I specifically referred and the folks Freddie describes. I apologize if that wasn't clear.
What is the difference between content moderation on a space like twitter and say, locking a comment section? I don't remember the thread, but I do remember some of that happening here. This isn't to point you out as some kind of hypocrite - I don't care, this is your place - but only to pose a question about discourse in private spaces.
Exposure to new and challenging ideas is important, but is that what twitter really does? My exposure to challenging ideas has typically been the result of a search, I've rarely had something new and different hit me as if stepping on a divine rake.
Twitter can moderate as it chooses. But the explicit claim that's going around is that far right extremism and violence will rise if their policies loosen, and that's ridiculous. If I moderate away a comment here I am most certainly not doing it because I think doing so will resist fascism.
If someone advocated for political violence here - whether it be an anarchist, socialist, or fascist, would you moderate the content?
I am sympathetic to the notion that it may be better to have all ideas out in the open, because if the are truly dangerous and repugnant, sunlight would sanitize. Much like drug use - these things happen any way. I just question the notion that twitter needs to be a common place. If twitter wants to be anti-fascist, fine. Now that it's owned by Musk, if it wants to delete things that are critical of Tesla, that's also fine. What's dangerous about twitter isn't it's moderation policies, it's the centrality it plays in public discourse.
A war that killed 4% of the world’s population! Say what? That’s about 320 million people. What war is that?
WWII killed roughly 80 million people when there were only 2 billion or so on earth
Yeah! But what is the 4% of population referring to? Freddie seemed to be referring to the present.