(1) NUKED THE FRIDGE. Yahoo! News says there may be a good reason why Indy survived the atomic blast, in “Fan Theory Explains That Much-Maligned Indiana Jones Scene”.
Much like ‘jumping the shark’ from ‘Happy Days’, the Indiana Jones movie series has a similar phrase to encompass the moment it all went a little bit too far.
And it’s ‘nuked the fridge’.
Many ardent fans of Harrison Ford’s swashbuckling archeologist very much drew the line at the moment in ‘Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull’ where Indy jumps into a conveniently situated fridge to protect himself from a nuclear blast.
Walking away unscathed, it did seem a trifle unfeasible….
(2) POWERLESS LEAD ACTRESS. The name of the show, Powerless, makes punning inevitable. “Vanessa Hudgens Is Far From ‘Powerless’ – ‘Grease’ Star Will Headline NBC’s New DC Comics Sitcom” reports ScienceFiction.com.
Vanessa Hudgens is on a roll after starring in FOX’s smash hit version of ‘Grease Live!’ She’s just landed the lead role in NBC’s upcoming DC Comics-inspired sitcom ‘Powerless’. Hudgens will play Emily Locke, an insurance claims adjuster, working for “the worst insurance company in the DC Universe” which covers victims caught in the crossfire of super hero/villain battles. This workplace comedy has been compared to ‘The Office’ but set within the DC Universe.
(3) DECLAN FINN’S FELINE FAN. At Camestros Felapton’s blog, a hilarious faux interview “Timothy the Talking Cat Reads Honor at Stake”.
[Camestros] Noted. So what book do you have today?
[Timothy] Well, today I have with me Honor at Stake by Declan Finn. A tale of love and vampires in modern New York.[Camestros] And why this book in particular?
[Timothy] Well I was reading twitter and there was this tweet with a graph that showed it was really doing well in the Sad Puppy 4 lists.
[Camestros] The graph from my blog?
[Timothy] Your blog? I don’t think so, this was some sort of SadPuppy4 twitter account.
[Camestros] They tweeted my graph. Do you not even read this blog?
[Timothy] Good grief, no. I mean your very name offends me.…[Camestros] So the sexy love interest vampire – she is conflicted about this? A bit of a Romeo & Vamp-Juliet thing going on?
[Timothy] No, no. She is a good vampire and a good Catholic girl. She goes to mass and everything.
[Camestros] So crucifix don’t work on vampires then?
[Timothy] No, you see the book has this all worked out. Vampires can be good or bad and the more good you are the nicer you look and the less things like holy water and sunlight affect you. The more bad you are the more hideous you become and the more holy water hurts,
[Camestros] OK so the bad vampires are like regular vampires.
[Timothy] Yup – a bit like the ones in Buffy.
[Camestros] Let me guess – the author explains this by comparing them to the vampires in Buffy?
[Timothy] Exactly! Quality writing – explains things up front so you know what is going on.
(4) MEMORIAL CUISINE. Frequent File 770 contributor James H. Burns has found yet another way to time travel… See “Recipe For the Dead” at Brooklyn Discovery.
Perhaps this is unusual. I have no way of knowing. But when I’m missing a loved one who has passed, or wishing to commemorate someone who is no longer with us… Sometimes, I’ll cook a meal that they loved. Not that I necessarily ever cooked for the departed. But sharing a repast that they favored, having those aromas in the air as the food is cooking, seems a very real way of honoring a memory.
(5) OSHIRO STORY FOLLOWUP. Here are some items of interest related to the Mark Oshiro story.
- K. Tempest Bradford on Robin Wayne Bailey
https://twitter.com/tinytempest/status/701465208200495104
- Tiffany Robbins on the drama of ConQuesT 46.
3) I am and remain a big fan of Ms. Rosen. I’ve only read one of her novels, but I fell in love with her personality from the two times I’ve been to ConQuesT. She is lively, articulate on her strong opinions, and she is a strong woman. No, I do not always agree with her. In fact, I often greatly disagree with her and her methods of dealing with situations. It in no way changes my respect for her. She doesn’t need me to agree with her for her to be comfortable in her skin. We can disagree, and it in no way takes away from her person. That’s the biggest reason I like the woman. So, in my opinion, she can pull her pants down whenever she wants. Her white legged exposure at ConQuesT 45 was in no way indecent, and no one was assaulted by anything more than her wit, charm, and strong opinions. And honestly, if that’s not what you’re looking for, then you probably shouldn’t go to a convention filled with writers. If the writers at a convention are going to be overtly nice and congenial, I’m not going to pay a hefty entry fee to go listen to their polite little opinions. I go to conventions because of the lively discussion of various opinions from very opinionate writers. If I leave feeling strongly about something, even if that feeling is offense, then in my opinion, the panelists have done their jobs and done them well.
4) I was not present at ConQuesT 46 and cannot speak to the events that happened there.
(6) THE LEVERAGE CONCEPT. Elizabeth Bear offers help in “We provide…Leverage”.
If I am a guest at a convention you are attending, or simply a fellow attendee, and you feel that you have been harassed, intimidated, or that your boundaries have been trampled or ignored, please feel free to ask me for support, help, intervention, or just an escort to a safer area or backup on the way to talk to convention or hotel security.
If you do not feel that you can stick up for yourself, I will help. I will be a buffer or a bulwark if necessary or requested.
Just walk up to me and ask for Leverage, and I promise that I will take you seriously and I’ll try to make things better.
- Sigrid Ellis makes the same offer for those at CONvergence and WisCon in “Convention Safety: We Provide Leverage”.
- L.A. Gilman will provide Leverage at Anachrocon.
(This is not an exhaustive list.)
(7) BOSKONE COMPLETE. Steve Davidson finishes his Boskone report at Amazing Stories.
Final thoughts? There were lots of smiles walking out the door on Sunday. The David Hartwell memorial was touching, much-needed and well-handled. From what I was able to see, everything went very smoothly (except for perhaps a few hiccups with pre-registration that I understand are already being addressed).
(8) SLOCOMBE OBIT. Cinematographer Douglas Slocombe has died at the age of 103 reports the BBC.
Slocombe shot 80 films, from classic Ealing comedies such as The Lavender Hill Mob and Kind Hearts and Coronets, to three Indiana Jones adventures.
In 1939 he filmed some of the earliest fighting of World War Two in Poland.
Indiana Jones director Steven Spielberg said Slocombe – who won Baftas for the Great Gatsby, The Servant, and Julia – “loved the action of filmmaking”.
(9) NOW YOU KNOW. Some believe Carrie Fisher revealed the working title of Star Wars: Episode VIII when she tweeted this photo of her dog. It’s on the sweatshirt back of the director’s chair.
Y?????????????????????????®???????????????? pic.twitter.com/Y3eyMSb48z
— Carrie Fisher (@carrieffisher) February 19, 2016
(10) TODAY IN HISTORY
- February 22, 1957 — When Scott Carey begins to shrink because of exposure to a combination of radiation and insecticide, medical science is powerless to help him in The Incredible Shrinking Man, seen for the first time on this day in 1957. Did you know: special effects technicians were able to create giant drops of water by filling up condoms and dropping them.
(11) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY GIRLS
- Born February 22, 1968 – Jeri Ryan
- Born February 22, 1975 – Drew Barrymore
(12) CORREIA ISN’T LEAVING TWITTER. Well, what else do you say when somebody announces “I’ll leave the account open to post blog links back to here and book ads, but other than that I’m not going to use it for any sort of conversation,” as Larry Correia did on Monster Hunter Nation today?
Recently they created a Trust and Safety Council, to protect people from being triggered with hurtful dissenting ideas. Of course the council is made up of people like Anita Sarkesian, so you know how it is going to swing.
They’ve been unverifying conservatives, and outright banning conservative journalists. Then there were rumors of “shadow banning” where people would post, but their followers wouldn’t see it in their timelines. So it’s like you’re talking to a room that you think has 9,000 people in it, but when the lights come on you’ve been wasting time talking to an empty room.
For the record, I don’t know if that’s what happened to me or not. Some of my posts have just disappeared from my timeline entirely. Other tweets seem to show up for some followers, but not others, and it wasn’t just replies. Beats me. Either something weird was going on and I’ve violated the unwritten rules of the Ministry of Public Truth, or their technical interface is just getting worse (never attribute to malice what could just be stupidity). Either way it is enough of a pain that it was getting to be not worth the hassle.
Then today they disappeared all of my friend Adam Baldwin’s tweets. Ironically, his only visible post (out of 8,000) was a link to an article about how Twitter is banning conservatives. That was the last straw.
(13) THAT DARNED JOURNALISM THING. Actually, Adam Baldwin deleted himself.
….Baldwin, who has nearly a quarter of a million followers, deleted his entire Twitter history Monday morning, leaving only one tweet asking for the CEO of Twitter to be fired and the abolishment of the platforms new Trust and Safety Council….
“This group-think, Orwellian, so-called Safety Council is really killing the wild west of ideas that Twitter was,” Baldwin laments:
“That’s what made Twitter fun. You could run across all sorts of differing viewpoints. That is what free speech is all about. As long as you’re not threatening people with violence, have at it.”
Baldwin cites the banning of prominent conservative tweeter Robert Stacy McCain as a major reason for leaving …
(14) REASON’S INTERPRETATION. Reason.com’s “Hit & Run” blog asks “Did Twitter’s Orwellian ‘Trust and Safety’ Council Get Robert Stacy McCain Banned?”
Twitter is a private company, of course, and if it wants to outlaw strong language, it can. In fact, it’s well within its rights to have one set of rules for Robert Stacy McCain, and another set of rules for everyone else. It’s allowed to ban McCain for no reason other than its bosses don’t like him. If Twitter wants to take a side in the online culture war, it can. It can confiscate Milo Yiannopoulos’s blue checkmark. This is not about the First Amendment.
But if that’s what Twitter is doing, it’s certainly not being honest about it—and its many, many customers who value the ethos of free speech would certainly object. In constructing its Trust and Safety Council, the social media platform explicitly claimed it was trying to strike a balance between allowing free speech and prohibiting harassment and abuse. But its selections for this committee were entirely one-sided—there’s not a single uncompromising anti-censorship figure or group on the list. It looks like Twitter gave control of its harassment policy to a bunch of ideologues, and now their enemies are being excluded from the platform.
(15) BRIANNA WU DEFENDS TWITTER. Brianna Wu commented on Facebook about Correia’s Twitter statement. (File 770 received permission to quote from it; the post is set to be visible to “friends” only.)
He and other conservative figures like Adam Baldwin are claiming that Twitter is breaking down on “free speech” and capitulating to the “SJWs,” which I guess means people like me. I have spent much of the last year asking Twitter and other tech companies to improve their harassment policies. There is one problem with Mr. Correria’s claim.
There is no evidence whatsoever for it.
None, zilch, zero. It’s a fantasy. A similar lie is going around that Twitter has put Anita Sarkeesian in charge of their Trust and Safety council, which is similarly baseless. I’ve spoken with a lot of tech companies in the last year and I have never heard anyone propose shadowbanning.
The only “proof” that Twitter is shadowbanning people comes from a disreputable conservative blog, that is so disreputable it cannot even be used as sourcing on Wikipedia. That blog used anonymous sourcing, and was written by someone with a personal axe to grind against Twitter.
The truth is, companies like Twitter are finally enforcing their own TOS if you threaten someone, dox someone, or set up an account specifically created to harass someone. That has led to some people being banned, and some accounts that perpetually break Twitter harassment rules to become deverified.
The backlash against Twitter is by people that prefer these system to remain as they are – a place where the women in your life will get rape threats, where anyone can have their private information posted, and where swarms of vicious mobs are destroying people’s reputation with slander.
The last I checked, almost 100 people have spread Mr. Correria’s baseless claim – and even more with Adam Baldwin. This is an important thing to fact check, and I hope you’ll share this to set the record straight.
(16) ELSEWHERE ON THE INTERNET. Bailey Lemon at Medium writes “Why This Radical Leftist is Disillusioned by Leftist Culture”.
…And yet I witness so many “activists” who claim to care about those at the bottom of society ignoring the realities of oppression, as if being offended by a person’s speech or worldview is equal to prison time or living on the streets. They talk about listening, being humble, questioning one’s preconceived notions about other people and hearing their lived experiences…and yet ignore the lived experiences of those who don’t speak or think properly in the view of university-educated social justice warriors, regardless of how much worse off they really are. That is not to say that we should accept bigotry in any form?—?far from it. But I would go as far as saying that the politically correct mafia on the left perpetuates a form of bigotry on its own because it alienates and “otherizes” those who do not share their ways of thinking and speaking about the world.
I’m tired of the cliques, the hierarchies, the policing of others, and the power imbalances that exist between people who claim to be friends and comrades. I am exhausted and saddened by the fact that any type of disagreement or difference of opinion in an activist circle will lead to a fight, which sometimes includes abandonment of certain people, deeming them “unsafe” as well as public shaming and slander.
(17) YES, THIS IS A SELECTED QUOTE: Dave Freer makes his feelings clear as the summer sun:
I couldn’t give a toss how I ‘come over’ to File 770 and its occupants, (there is no point in trying to please a miniscule market at the expense of my existing readers) but it’s a useful jumping off point:…
Is Freer simply unable to generate his own column ideas? He proves his indifference by spending most of today’s 2,500-word post teeing off about half-a-dozen imagined slights he thinks self-published writers suffered here.
(18) PROVERBIAL WISDOM. Mark Lawrence declines to reap the dividends of political blogging.
When you declare a political preference (especially at either end of the spectrum) you’re immediately plumbed into an extensive support network. It’s rather like a church. Complete strangers will shout “Amen, brother!”.
Yes, you may well alienate half the political spectrum but you’ll still have half left, and half of ‘everything’ looks pretty attractive when all you’ve got is all of nothing.
Plus, the business of blogging becomes easy. You don’t have to think up something new and original to write, you can just turn the handle on the outrage machine and content drops onto the page.
“SJWs ate my baby!”
“This group of two is insufficiently diverse, you BIGOT.”
If you don’t ‘get’ either of those headlines from opposing political extremes then I’m rather jealous of you.
Anyway, the fact is that joining a side in the culture war can seem like a no-brainer to an aspiring author who needs backup. I’m entirely sure that the motivations for many authors taking to political blogging are 100% genuine, born of deep convictions. I’m also sure that many jump on board, dial up their mild convictions to 11 and enjoy the ride, blog-traffic, retweets, prime spots on the ‘right on’ genre sites of their particular affiliation, oh my.
It’s a step I’ve never been able to take. I do have moderately strong political convictions, but they’re moderate ones, and moderation doesn’t sell, doesn’t generate traffic, doesn’t get retweeted.
(19) CASE IN POINT. io9 reports “The BBC Is Bringing Back The Twilight Zone As a Radio Drama”
Ten classic episodes of The Twilight Zone will be broadcast in the UK for the first time—but, much like the show’s trademark, there’s a twist. The episodes will be reinvented as radio plays taken from Rod Serling’s original TV scripts, thanks to BBC Radio 4 Extra.
According to the Independent, veteran actor Stacy Keach will step in to perform the late Serling’s iconic monologues; other cast members throughout the series will include Jane Seymour, Jim Caviezel, Michael York, Malcolm McDowell, and Don Johnson. Producer Carl Amari has owned the rights since 2002, which he obtained in part by promising to do the episodes justice in terms of production values and casting.
(20) TECH TUNES UP FOR TREK. The Daily News profiled cast members of the Star Trek musical parody being performed this weekend at CalTech.
It’s not unusual for the cast and crew to open up text books, work on papers and discuss theoretical physics in their downtime. It provides an opportunity to network too, with students acting beside people who work in the fields they’re studying, Wong said.
“To be able to stand on stage with all of these people and sing about ‘Star Trek’ that’s just crazy,” he said.
“Boldly Go!” started out with the cast meeting on weekends, before amping up to twice a week and nearly every day in the past month.
Marie Blatnik, who studies experimental nuclear physics and plays a fierce Klingon named Maltof, described the scheduling as hectic. She originally auditioned — in half a Starfleet uniform — for a different role, but the brothers recast a male Klingon when they saw her energy.
“It kind of feels like a cult where they lure you in with ‘it’s only 15 bucks’ then jump to ‘I want your life savings,” Blatnik joked about the time invested in the show.
(21) YOUR GAME OF THRONES NEIGHBORS. Seth Meyers has had two Late Show skits where Game of Thrones characters are featured in everyday situations:
- Melisandre at the Meyers’ baby shower:
- Jon Snow at a dinner party:
[Thanks to John King Tarpinian, Cat Eldridge, Frank Wu, Rob Thornton, and JJ for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Anna Nimmhaus (you know who you are!).]
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@petrea. And there’s a reasonable argument to be made that the whole of The Red is a single work.
Hmm.
Thinking time.
@Simon, that is comforting, but they appear to be a bit outnumbered. Regardless, I have to get to work as I have well-worn out my lunch break and my other breaks. Cheers all. Don’t pat yourselves too hard on driving me off.
To the extent of my knowledge, neither Mr. Baldwin nor Mr. Correia are defending or perpetrating these actions.
Then what are they outraged about? The people who have been banned from twitter (or had their verified check mark removed) were people who were actively engaged in such activities. The reason their outrage is treated dismissively is because they have extrapolated a conspiracy theory from “some assholes who are also conservative got banned from twitter” and have taken up the banned of saying “twitter is censoring conservatives”. There’s no substance to their complaints, and no substance to yours either.
One might also note that Baldwin does have a long history of harassing women on twitter. Before he flounced, he made a practice of periodically attacking the women who GamerGate targeted and then, after he made a fool of himself, deleting all of his tweets on that subject. Pretending that Baldwin isn’t a member of the harassment brigade is disingenuous at best.
that is comforting, but they appear to be a bit outnumbered.
So once again, you’re wrong, but you’re going to still whine about how the world isn’t fair to you. Impressive.
@Sean
Have you seen the list of whose on the The Trust and Safety Council
ETA: When trolls or those behaving like trolls leave we don’t do stuff like pat ourselves on the back. We get back to whatever we were doing before we let ourselves be derailed. You guys really do think to much like cartoon villians.
Sean: part of the issue here is that we really don’t have any substantive evidence to support the claim that Baldwin and Correia were somehow targeted by Twitter. We have claims that some of their tweets may have “disappeared” in some contexts in some places, and a whole lot of leaping to conclusions about the dark, Orwellian nature of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council.” What does “disappeared” mean, exactly? (That is, could Larry and Adam’s followers see the tweets, but not non-followers? How about people who weren’t logged in? And importantly, was it consistent and repeatable, making it less likely it was a bug in Twitter’s rather notoriously glitchy back end?)
And have we gotten any examples of specific tweets that were claimed to have been targeted? I mean, we can’t get any from Baldwin, apparently: by deleting his Twitter history, he ensured there wouldn’t be any evidence for or against his claims. It’s just “take my word for it, because SJWs.” I don’t know Correia’s Twitter history, but I know enough of Baldwin’s to know that he’s certainly encouraged the harassment of GamerGate’s targets, and arguably engaged in direct harassment himself.
Last but not least, we actually have some evidence of what Twitter does when they want to go after people for harassment: they tell them they’re doing that, they don’t just do it silently. Milo was told why his verification badge was taken away; Robert Stacey McCain was told why his account was locked. IIRC, McCain received at least one warning from Twitter before this happened, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Milo did as well. If Twitter really wanted to get rid of Baldwin and Correia, they wouldn’t be silently “hiding” tweets, they’d be explicitly telling them they crossed a line.
Now on to the latest John Ringo zombie novel, Strands Of Sorrow.
The series so far has been a fun set of bath reads, if perhaps a bit too much of a counterinsurgency small unit tactics text book at times…
@Sean
Outside of your head, it does not. Just as outside of your head, we all know that rape is wrong. What all of this discussion has been about, inspite of all of your conspiracy theories about the evil leftist take over, is that people think Twitter shouldn’t be a consequence free tool for making threats of violence. You make jokes about reading comprehension, but that’s all we’ve been talking about. The threats of violence. And when Twitter takes steps to get advised on how to deal with its problem as a prime channel of these threats of violence, you clutch your pearls and invent things, things that did not exist outside of your own head, about people wanting to ban disagreement.
The fact that you find so many ways to misunderstand that, to turn the dictate of myself and others for people consequence free threats of violence, is why you’re not being assumed to be arguing in good faith, because when we are talking about what happens in the real world, you are LARPing some vast SJW conspiracy trying to shut down all disagreement on Twitter. When we tell you what we are actually talking about, you pretend to misunderstand that we’re talking about sexual assault in general.
No, what we’ve all been talking about is that we don’t think Twitter should be the consequence free highway for threats of sexual violence. All we’d ever been talking about. And we’ve been talking about Correia and Baldwin’s state opposition to making Twitter less friendly to people making those threats.
Why don’t you head back to KotakuInAction and let all your Redditor bros pat you on the head?
Tasha, I’ll do better than that; I’m emailing Cally a link to your statement in this thread! <grin>
Suppose I go to the bank across the street from my office and hand the teller a note: “I have a gun. Please give me all the money in your drawer.”
Nobody—not the ACLU, not Edward Snowden, not Wikileaks—is going to defend my act of passing that note as an exercise of my right to freedom of speech.
Given a particular action by a government or a private party that discourages or some kind of speech, we can have an intelligent discussion about the social costs and benefits of that action, and about whether the benefits outweigh the costs. But arguments of the form “this inhibits free speech and therefore it is bad” are vacuous. All the more so when people throw around claims that “X is doing something that inhibits free speech and therefore X is in the wrong” without even providing accurate specifics about what X is doing.
The stuff on Twitter people have been objecting to – the death threats, rape threats, incitement to criminal actions, that sort of thing – are not protected free speech in US law, or the law of any other sane jurisdiction. They’ve only been allowed to happen on Twitter (and other online venues) because of, well, lax enforcement of existing laws. If Twitter’s cleaning up its act, so much the better.
To any Twitter troll who might be reading, I propose a simple experiment: next time you feel the urge to say “I’ma rape u 2 death with a tire iron slut”, instead of tweeting it, why not write it down and send it anonymously through the mail? Then, when the police track you down, tell them you were only exercising your First Amendment right to freedom of speech. Let us know how well this works out for you.
@Sean
You mentioned FIRE a couple of times so I thought I’d check them out. Mission statement:
Why would they be part of Twitters panel? It’s not within their interest. So in addition to the good points made by fellow filers you need to do more research to be taken seriously.
I’m curious about the profit motive in (depending on one’s point of view) Twitter applying its TOS to eliminate abuse or Twitter “censoring conservatives.”
It’s a for-profit company, so I assume that consideration of what will/won’t hurt its profits is a consideration in all or nearly all changes that Twitter makes to format or content.
The “social media platform” market is much more crowded now than it was 5 years ago, or even 2-3 years ago. Is Twitter attempting to emulate newer social media platforms that it sees taking away market share or becoming far more competitive? Or is Twitter trying to implement policies that are still unusual in social media and which it hopes will make it more competitive against social media platforms that do not have such measures?
If they’re going to lose some people by implementing new moderartion (or “censorship”) policies, presumably the think they’ll keep or gain enough OTHER people to override that loss?
I’m pretty sure the idea that Indy’s life had been prolonged by drinking from the Grail was implied all the way back in the Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, where the framing mechanism of each episode involved an octogenarian or nonagenarian Indiana Jones buttonholing some poor innocent to tell a chunk of his life story to.
There it is. THAT’s the analogy I’ve been after. Playing in a pretend world where you can dress up as the hero and hit Things That Need Hitting (as denoted by aesthetics and labels). Having fun in an alternate reality, consequence free. Now I’m envisioning a bunch of Reddit guys dressed as sea lions throwing +5 spell beanbags at the malign Warriors of Social Justice.
@Cassy B
Cool. Thanks for holding me responsible for my words. *grinning*
I’m going to jump in and comment before I read all the comments because by the time I catch up, everyone will be on tomorrow’s scroll.
1 Indiana Jones I never made it through to the refrigerator scene because I hated too much before getting that far. Leaving aside issues with the characters and story, I most remember the scene where “everything metal” starts floating in the air. Everything apparently includes coins, which are generally made from nonmagnetic metals but did not include the buckles on bag handles, belt buckles or buttons on a jacket all clearly visible tonthe camera. Apparently the magnet attracts every convenient metallic thing, but nothing inconvenient or difficult to demonstrate…
3. Cat review – love it Camestros
Various fallout on Oshiro – what happened to him is appalling. I can’t believe that someone didn’t switch chairs with him when she wouldn’t stop touching him. Could the other panelists see or was this predatory behavior? Were they egging her on?
It sounds to me as if he was the only one on that panel behaving like an adult. The more I think on it, the more I wonder if the rest of them were piling on (unconsciously) because he kept trying to derail their avoidance of an uncomfortable topic. I would really like to hear a report from some of the audience members about that panel. I would think that most of them wanted to hear a serious discussion or why choose that panel to attend.
I am uncomfortable with the responses (or lack of them) from the other panelists so far. I really feel sorry for Mark Oshiro.
These points have probably been made by others but there’s my two cents.
@Red Wombat – just finished The Raven and the Reindeer. Loved it and strongly recommend it to any Filers who haven’t read it yet.
@Jon Olfert
It does sound so much better than “we stand up for the rights of people who want to call women sluts and threaten to kill them whenever they disagree with us on the Internet” doesn’t it?
(3) “Let me guess – the author explains this by comparing them to the vampires in Buffy?”
Loved this “interview!” 🙂
(4) Memorial Cuisine–lovely idea! Especially since I enjoy cooking. Lately some of my cousins and I have been doing something in a similar vein by exchanging our notes, questions, and experiments on trying to recreate our grandmother’s stuffed cabbage rolls and our great-grandmother’s Xmas fruitcake (which she made on the basis of a recipe we still have that my maternal ancestors brought with them from Ireland 160+ years ago).
(5) Follow-up on Mark Oshiro’s Con From Hell experience:
No, it’s unprofessional and inappropriate.
I’m a writer. I’ve spent most of my life around writers. I am personally acquainted with hundreds of writers. I attend cons every year, including cons where the attendees are mostly or entirely writers. I’ve never been to one (nor, until Mark’s account, ever even heard of one) where writers disrobed during a discussion panel–and then complained bitterly about con staff insisting on clothing being worn.
So, in fact, people can indeed go to conventions filled with writers and assume the writers will stay fully clothed during their workshops and panels. It’s stripping down to underwear or bare skin during a panel that’s the anomaly, not staying clothed.
(12), (13), and (15): So you’re saying that Larry Correia made accusations that were unfounded and wholly inaccurate, riffed angrily on that for a while, and has not corrected himself or apologized despite evidence that his “facts” were erroneous? All I can say is: I am shocked–shocked!–to find that gambling is going on in here. Etc., etc.
(17) You’d have to look long and hard to find something that I am less interested in that what Dave Freed thinks about File 770–or, indeed, anything else.
(20) & (21) I’d love to see a Star Trek musical! And I loved those Seth Meyers parodies.
Since he seems to have dropped the Sad Puppy crap, I don’t care about Larry Correia. I don’t like his fiction or the political windbag stuff at his blog, but both are easy to avoid.
Baldwin’s a Gamergater, so he’s part of a movement devoted to it. If Correia wants to complain about his issues with twitter without addressing the major problems others are having with abuse and harassment, then he is is who is the one who is being disingenuous. Bear in mind – HE linked his issues to this commission, not anyone else, even if his reporting has been shown not to be trustworthy,
I like Sean. I think he’s got a massive blind spot, but he’s coming across as sincere in his concerns, as far as that goes. Freedom to express different opinions. You? When people disagree with you, you scream about… witch burnings? Free speech! But not to disagree with Phantom! That’s just… evil!
than what Freer, not “that what Freed”
(vowing yet again to remember to proof before hitting “send,” rather than after)
@Sean
When this shadow-banning thing first came up, I read through some of the comments over on Vox Day’s blog to see what the specifics were. A couple of the commenters claimed that it only seemed to be happening to people who used the N-word in their tweets and that if you didn’t want to get banned, all you had to do was avoid that one word. Other commenters disagreed violently, arguing that self-censorship was just wrong. (No one suggested there might be two or three words, not just one, although I’d expect there to be at least four.)
I went back over there just now to find it so I could give a direct link, but it seems to be gone now. (I suppose it’s possible I saw it on a different site that was linked from there.)
This claim is very credible if only because it’s almost the only technique that would scale. Twitter would have to hire an army of inspectors if it wanted to censor based on ideas. (A hybrid might work best; decide which users to refer for human evaluation based on how frequently bad language turned up in their tweets. The top 1,000 might account for 99% of your harassment problems.)
Anyway, I don’t have a problem with Twitter silencing genuinely abusive people. Any public service needs to do that. Silencing non-abusive people because of their point of view would be a bigger issue, but I don’t think that’s what they’re doing, largely because I think that would cost way too much.
alexvdl notes
Why? Should “rape is okay” and “diddling animals is fun” be given a platform? Sure, the government shouldn’t infringe upon people’s rights to say stupid stuff, but Twitter ain’t the government. They aren’t preventing people from speaking, they’re preventing people from doing it in their house.
I’ve got several websites where all comments must be approved by me. The newest one, supportpeterbeagle.com, is so because I expect substantial shit from Peter’s former manager to sling my way directly or indirectly.
alexvdl notes
Why? Should “rape is okay” and “diddling animals is fun” be given a platform? Sure, the government shouldn’t infringe upon people’s rights to say stupid stuff, but Twitter ain’t the government. They aren’t preventing people from speaking, they’re preventing people from doing it in their house.
I’ve got several websites where all comments must be approved by me. The newest one, supportpeterbeagle.com, is so because I expect substantial shit from Peter’s former manager to sling my way directly or indirectly.
@TheYoungPretender
Well clearly. After all, the point of fantasy is the ability to ignore reality at your leisure, isn’t it? To play in a world that’s exactly like you want it to be?
*starts humming The Unexamined Life*
It doesn’t help that I’ve been reading the Scroll title as
“Through Pantless Realms Of Space, Scroll On”.
I’ve got to get out more…
Also: finished reading the second of Seanan McGuire’s InCryptid books. Not bad at all. Does tend to suffer from the “These beings (cryptids) are rare and hard to find — oh, wait, they are everywhere!” but still a very entertaining read.
I innately think of “conservative”as “someone whose ideas about the economic structures that would benefit society are very different from my own.”
I always stumble at the use of “conservative” as “someone who wants to use words like “n*gger” in public forums without being criticized, let alone kicked out.”
I guess such people like to call themselves “conservatives” because it sounds so much more ideological and respectable than “racist idiot.”
Oh thank Ghod I thought it was just me…
It’s a good thing I didn’t think of that because I might have used it….
Really big brush? Baldwin played a significant role in the growth of GG. Which is, you know, a hate group that spends its time engaged in harassment, both online and off. There’s no conflation there. Baldwin is a scumbag. He’s also an outspoken conservative. GG is a hate group. It’s also conservative and reactionary in its politics.
The “conflation” you describe is mostly the fault of the outspoken conservatives you paint as victims here. Because it’s among conservative circles that GG isn’t regarded as a hate group. It’s conservatives like Togersen who explicitly claim that people opposed to the hate group are way worse than the hate group itself.
Here’s how to not be confused with someone who supports online harassment: when the subject of online harassment comes up, don’t support the perpetrators of truly vile behavior. When someone gets punished for online harassment, don’t circle the wagons around them and claim them as your own. It’s an easy bar to clear, but it’s one idiots keep tripping over. And then they expect not to be judged for failing to meet even that basic standard of decency.
@Laura
I suspect the word “conservative” has lost any coherent meaning except as a tribal marker.
[3] The review was so entertaining that it made me want to read the book just so I could write my own snark.
[12-15] Most really badly behaved Twitter-ers are kinda right wing, but have any of you encountered the “Bernie Bro” phenomenon? Presumably they are quite left wing, based on their Bernie Sanders support, but they engage in rudeness, harassing, insults, vague threats and other tactics that are very reminiscent of gamergate or MRA types (though not those groups at their most extreme). They tend to target women, especially black women, who support or defend Hillary in any way.
The common thread seems to be misogyny, not right wing politics per se.
@steve davidson on February 23, 2016 at 9:51 am said:
I suspect that what they get out of it is whatever bullies used to get out of picking on nerdy kids like me back in the day.
What that is, I don’t know, but some studies seem to suggest that people get a little squirt of “status boost” brain chemicals from running someone else down.
Camestros wrote:
Yes, exactly thank you.
And if twitter is finally taking action to put a stop to it, more power to them and I will use twitter more.
And if Anita Sarkeesian were on the council I don’t see what would be the slightest bit wrong with that; I checked out her Tropes VS Women series and the person I saw in those videos was plainly both smart and measured in her reactions to things she disagrees with.
Mike
“I find your lack of pixels… disturbing.”
@John Seavey
Nope, I’m guilty there as well.
@sean
Largely because of luck. This particular fellow does not have a particularly good web presence and tends to get into spittle-flecked argument when he is present. In short, few people know about him and even fewer have a good opinion of him. So the little negative impact he has can be reasonably outweighed by the positive impact of using him as an example.
The problem in larger scope is that misinformation is TREMENDOUSLY HARD to correct. Some recent studies on trying to correct misinformation about vaccine safety have been basically ineffective. So when misinformation campaigns are able to get a lot of attention, the ability for scientists to effectively combat that misinformation becomes very small, and so leave many scientists in a bind of either attempt to combat (likely ineffective) or try and continue do their own work (which could get ignored due to the misinformation or become a political football). The negative begins to greatly outweigh the positive.
Please do note that I don’t think that censoring different views would be the right solution. I merely wish to address the notion that unfettered free speech always leads to the best result. I’m also trying not to say what your particular views on the issue are. Your words prompted me to hop down this tangent and I’m not sure how much it related to your original intention.
@McJulie
I feel like any movement that relies on the Internet to leverage itself, like Sanders campaign, is going to have an unavoidable number of trolls attaching themselves to it. Wherever it is not policed, the web is the trolls playground, and politics can be nasty enough as it is. Add a semi-coherent critique of the current liberal order, and you are off to the races, with a license to troll that sounds so much better than ethics in journalism.
@Tasha
FWIW, FIRE has a certain reputation about the kind of free speech it defends. The freedom to say things like “crazy chick stuff, who knows, amirite brah?” and a laughing, joking disbelief that any of these secularists or immigrants have any rights to their opinions in the face of some good, down-home Christianity. Free Speech! As to why they’d give the Seans of the world comfort, well, who knows? But I can infer.
(3) DECLAN FINN’S FELINE FAN
I read it. Laughed a lot.
Much gratitude to the cat who read this for our sakes.
@TheYoungPretender
I didn’t know about that. I took 2 minutes to find their mission statement which made it clear that being involved on the Twitter panel would make no sense and wrapped up. Had their mission statement indicated they’d be at all appropriate I would have spent more time researching them and then provided other reasons why they aren’t the neutral party Sean’s portraying them as. What can I say I spend as much time researching something as it seems to require. Twitter =/= University/College research done.
This claim is very credible if only because it’s almost the only technique that would scale.
Except twitter has a search engine, and one can check to see if tweets using the epithet are being censored or accounts of those who make such tweets are being banned. It turns out that the word has routinely used by many twitter users with no apparent official consequence.
There is a larger point here: The reason no one takes Beale, or Correia, or Baldwin, or any of their lackeys seriously on this subject is that they spin off into conspiracy thinking like this so quickly. Someone says “ZOMG! Twitter is banning people for using the N-word!” and everyone else in their little circle jerk takes the claim as gospel without doing even a rudimentary investigation to determine if it is true. Correia complains that Baldwin has been banned from twitter, and his commentariat run with it without checking to see if it is true. Baldwin claims Sarkeesian is heading the Council, and “conservatives” are up in arms over it, even though it isn’t actually true. Someone claims that Yiannopolous was penalized without being told why and conservatives run around shrieking about censorship, even though twitter did explain why. And so on.
Correia, Baldwin, Yiannopolous, and all the rest of the perpetually outraged “conservative” corner of the internet aren’t taken seriously because they have made it a practice to play chicken little. This stompy-foot outrage by Corriea and Baldwin is no different.
So, welcome to my kill file.
Tell me is it oppression when I ignore you? Or give others the tool to ignore you? Gravatar ID 769dc03bf7703e7fefd3635f0f1fa7c2
Plonk!
You know in my previous comment I show how little time it takes to do just enough research not to look ignorant. It’s too bad more people don’t take 2 minutes before opening their mouths/typing on the net.
It sounds credible =/= it’s true. Was it 4th or 5th grade where I had to back up assertions I made? I don’t remember but by 6th grade it was common to have to go to the library to find a book which would help prove my points. Today we have the Internet and Google so while bedridden I can still do the research. It’s an amazing world we live in with all this data just waiting to be found by those in need.
Tasha Turner said: “You know in my previous comment I show how little time it takes to do just enough research not to look ignorant. It’s too bad more people don’t take 2 minutes before opening their mouths/typing on the net.”
Or as I once said to someone, ” I am under no responsibility to cater to your ignorant opinion just because you hold it, and if your actual defense is, “I have no idea what the numbers are regarding people triggered, badness/length of trigger event, etc. I don’t know,” while you are literally interacting with people through the medium of the largest repository of information in human history, then ignorance of the facts may not be your biggest problem here.”
@Tasha Turner
I am sorry if I sounded critical; I was not intending to criticize your previous statement which I in fact agreed with. I was just mentioning that I’d found reasons, from the directions of Sean’s concern trolling, as to why he was a fan of the group in question.
@Laura Resnick
For what it’s worth, Vox Day appears to describe himself as a “White Nationalist” and seems to be just as critical of conservatives as liberals. I wouldn’t suggest reading much of his site’s content, but I don’t think he represents mainstream conservative thought–to the extent that there is such a thing anymore.
@Aaron
That’s sufficient to demonstrate they’re not banning people outright over it, but it’s not enough to establish that they’re not using it as a basis to identify people to sanction.
When I worked on what’s now called Bing, my team at Microsoft built a filter for what we euphemistically called “low-value web pages.” This was a simple maximum-entropy classifier that only looked at which words occurred on the page (but not in what order) plus a couple of other factors (e.g. multiple exclamation points). It turned out that there were half a dozen words plus a few symbols that accounted for most of the strength of the classifier.
If Twitter wanted to design a classifier to identify users to scrutinize more closely, something similar would likely work pretty well. Add in other factors like “did they retweet anything from other suspect users” and “has anyone ever made a complaint against them” and you might get something that was pretty effective as referring real abusers to human operators while leaving regular users largely alone. This isn’t even very hard to do (the work of a week or two).
As you say, it’s also possible that Twitter hasn’t done anything yet. I’m just pointing out that it’s well within the realm of what they could do if they wanted to.
Vox isn’t the mainstream of conservative thought. He’s one of the guys gunning the engine on the tractor they’ve got attached to the Overton Window to make it the mainstream soon enough, though.
There’s always tomorrow….
That’s sufficient to demonstrate they’re not banning people outright over it, but it’s not enough to establish that they’re not using it as a basis to identify people to sanction.
But that’s very different from what Beale’s dead elk were saying. There’s also not much evidence that twitter is using it to sanction people, since even a cursory search shows that there are numerous accounts that routinely use the word (and often use it to insult people) with no consequence from twitter.
Clicky.