(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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I’m probably not the right person to consider this; perhaps if I were 16 and came from a sheltered background I would think trouser dropping was an awesomely transgressive piece of performance art, but I’m not.
I’m fairly sure that the destigmatising of nudity is irrelevant to the question of what constitutes courteous treatment of others at SF conventions. There are, after all, plenty of opportunities to do the former without derailing a panel discussing totally different topics at a convention. And I can certainly see why someone who has received rewards for trouser dropping in the form of ‘she’s so edgy’ would do it again, this time with the added bonus of physical assault, sexual harassment and racist comment, because that makes her edgier than the Grand Canyon, and obviously we will be impressed.
And we are indeed impressed, but not in a good way…
Would photos spoil the surprise?
Thats a call for RedWombat!
(19) io9 is a bit behind the times. Those adaptations already exist, and have for years. You can buy them right now. I scheduled one as the kickoff for Sasquan’s audio program track.
Hampus, you’re a prince and honorary marsupial! I’d love to see a photo! Email me at ursulav (at) gmail etc when you’re back home and I will send you all the moneys and gratitudes and flailings!
Re: (15) BRIANNA WU DEFENDS TWITTER
I was a senior manager at Microsoft and Amazon up until I retired in 2014, and I can confirm that it was an idea people talked about, mostly as a way to cope with different kinds of spam. For example, if you delete spam comments and ban the spammer, he’ll just create a new account and come right back. But if his posts are visible only to him, it may take him longer to figure it out.
A more subtle version is to “scale” the star ratings on an individual basis, meaning that instead of seeing what I actually gave a book, you’d see an estimate of what you would have given it, based on some complicated math computed across the entire catalog and all users. A spammer running a set of fake accounts would see her reviews were all five stars and might never realize that most people would see them as one-star.
These things are a lot of work to actually do, and they’re apt to generate huge amounts of customer support contacts, particularly when/if they misfire. I never heard of anyone actually implementing one of them.
But Brianna is definitely wrong that no one has proposed it. It’s a fairly obvious idea that’s been around for a while.
(19) CASE IN POINT
As Petréa Mitchell said upthread, the Twilight Zone radio dramas have been around for a while – some of them are included on the BluRay release of the Twilight Zone original series, which I’m slowly working my way through at the moment.
But Brianna is definitely wrong that no one has proposed it.
To be accurate, she said she has never heard of anyone proposing it. Given the fact that it seems extraordinarily difficult to implement, there is every reason to believe it never came up in her conversations with the companies she spoke with.
Margaret Attwood’s The Heart Goes Last is on sale as a Kindle daily deal for £1.49; as far as I can see this is eligible for the Hugos, so I’ve bought it to read it asap…
Ray on February 23, 2016 at 4:13 am said:
Is pro-entitlement conserva-libertarianism a thing in the States?
The ranchers protesting federal ownership of lands where they graze their cattle are a prime example of this. Lobbying by the large beef concerns has meant that they pay (and some refuse to pay) approximately one tenth of the cost of leasing grazing land not controlled by the federal government. So yes, such a mind set does exist.
Shadowbanning. Huh. Putting toxic spouters into an echo chamber, away from the mainstream, where they just hear their own gas coming back at them, and thinking they have wild approbation for every bit of bile they come up with. But how is that different from what they’ve built for themselves already, and why do they think they’re against it?
As well as The Heart Goes Last, the other book I bought today was Between Two Thorns by Emma Newman (Planetfall, Tea & Jeopardy) which is a short term freebie to celebrate it having found a new publisher.
ETA: Seems to be free on Amazon.com as well.
What I’m reading….
From the library: Wonders of the Invisible World by Patricia McKillip and Killing Pretty by Richard Kadrey.
Best Novel noms: I’ve got a slew of the better-known contenders, but right now I’m bouncing off most of them. Right now, Archivist Wasp and Uprooted are the only ones that are really harmonizing with me but I’ll keep on plugging away.
So… nobody here sees a problem with a company specializing in communication services that establishes a “Trust and Safety” council wherein there are no free speech advocates? This doesn’t concern any of you? Any important forum wherein a significant viewpoint is silenced is worse off for it.
As to 12-15 specifically, it’s nice that everyone seems to discount the experiences of Larry et. al. based on him not knowing Mr. Baldwin had deleted his account, but what about the rest of it? What about his own tweets going missing or not appearing on his follower’s streams? What about others reporting the same thing? Notice that Larry couched his discontinued/limited further use of twitter as being based on either 1) gross incompetence OR 2) being political screened. Either is a valid reason to leave.
(5) I’m sure there are corners of the interwebs enjoying a spurt of schadenfreude over this one as people from diverse perspectives have their diversities compete.
As for me, I’d like everyone to be comfortable. I’d like everyone to be self aware enough to know when they might be causing discomfort. And I’d like everyone to be tolerant of those around them that are either being comfortable or perhaps having a moment where they are not self aware. ‘Taint easy being human.
(15) Ummmm…not exactly a “disreputable conservative blog“. The WaPo does suggest that something other than purposeful black-holing of legitimate opinions may be going on. But Twitter is being opaque so it’s hard to know the difference between inadvertent results and purposeful ones.
(16) Bailey’s essay is wonderfully introspective and sadly (IMHO) rare when it comes to leftist opinion makers. Well…at least since 2002 or so. Previously I had many wonderful discussions with people from a variety of perspectives.
Regards,
Dann
@Sean: Twitter is a private company. They can do what they want with their service and the market will react however it reacts to those changes. If Larry, Ted et al. no longer want to use the service they’re free to leave it.
But how many times has Facebook changed their posting algorithms and how many times has everybody threatened to leave because of it and how many people actually left in the end?
Adam Baldwin has left Twitter… and nothing of value was lost.
Seriously, how hard can it be to understand that sealioning and dogpiling is not any sort of ‘debate’ or ‘discourse?’ “Differing views” are easy to find, but the crap I’ve seen people go through on twitter isn’t ‘expressing different views,’ it’s ‘being assholes.’
And how the crap do you approach someone ‘respectfully’ with some of this stuff? “Hello, I understand that you believe that you should be treated like a human being. I would like to discuss with you a dissenting point of view: To wit, I have the urge to beat you to death with a tire iron instead. For some people this isn’t about ‘dissenting views,’ this is the difference between being treated like a gorram person and being considered fair game to treat as sub-human.
Sorry about that, I seem to have gotten bile and spittle on my screen….
I’m trying to think of something–anything–that would make me give a fuck about Correia and Baldwin’s anguish over not being able to be assholes on Twitter…and it’s just not coming to mind.
@Sean
Amoungst the 40 or so groups represented on the council, there are several that are involved in free speech on the internet along with wider issues. However, most are groups that deal specifically with abuse of one form or another. The head is not Anita Sarkesian, but Del Harvey, who has been in this role since Twitter’s first year.
The reason for the council in the first place can be attributed to the metric ton of brigading, harassment and threats that have turned Twitter into a toxic environment for many people. It has been actively hurting Twitter’s business model and their existence as a company. So, no, I don’t find it disturbing when a company has to implement policy to stop their business from being run into the ground by a collection of users who see it as an ideal way to find and attack ideological targets.
Playing the Sarkesian conspiracy card just proved that Correia’s in the same echo chamber as the dickheads who made such a step necessary.
We had someone on another thread here urging us to go make a vague unfounded accusation on their behalf at another person, so they could have that other person’s denial on the record, whatever that’s supposed to mean. And that’s just the tip of the fringe of a sliver of the horrific nonsense that goes on. Neither Correia nor Baldwin appear to give a shit about that, though. What would a freedom of speech advocate argue for, exactly, I wonder? Would they strive to balance that freedom with the necessity to protect people from harassment, or to provide people with the tools to protect themselves? Or would they simply sabotage such efforts?
So… the consensus is that distasteful speech (read: stuff you don’t like and/or disagree with) is open season for banning? Gotcha.
Keep in mind this street goes both ways.
No.
I think the consensus is that not conforming to terms of service which one has to consent to in order to use the service is a cause for banning. From that point of view, the obvious model for those who find the terms too strict (or potentially ambiguous, etc.) would be to engage with Twitter at the policy level rather than at the level of executing the policy.
So… nobody here sees a problem with a company specializing in communication services that establishes a “Trust and Safety” council wherein there are no free speech advocates? This doesn’t concern any of you?
Exactly who do you think would qualify as a “free speech advocate”? In any event, no, I’m not concerned what a private organization chooses to do to govern their private space. If you want the freedom to scream at people, you can do it the old fashioned way and get a bullhorn and stand on a street corner.
As to 12-15 specifically, it’s nice that everyone seems to discount the experiences of Larry et. al. based on him not knowing Mr. Baldwin had deleted his account, but what about the rest of it?
The rest of it is conspiracy theory bullshit that only a gullible crackpot on the political fringe (such as Correia or Baldwin) would take seriously.
@Sean
You may say the consensus is that if it makes you feel better/righteously oppressed. But it is not that.
So… the consensus is that distasteful speech (read: stuff you don’t like and/or disagree with) is open season for banning?
So, you’re comfortable just making shit up out of whole cloth?
Impressive that you got that “consensus” out of a wild reading of just a couple people’s comments, tho.
My opinion is that my opinion doesn’t matter in the slightest. Twitter’s gonna do what it’s gonna do. I have zero input on it, they won’t care if I leave, they have not yet done enough (or failed to do enough) to make me actually do so, and I have so many other fish that I could fry.
A small fundraiser for Peter Beagle is currently in progress.
@Sean
That’s just some lazy trolling, son. But please, don’t let us keep you from your victory lap at MHN.
“Any important forum wherein a significant viewpoint is silenced is worse off for it”
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’ll tell you right now, that you say some dumb shit like that in my house, I’ll kick you out real quick.
There are a huge number of things I don’t care about (as well as a great many I do). Unlike Dave Freer, I am not making any of them the subject of a blog post, because I don’t care enough. I will click away from a web page, put a book or magazine down, or tell a friend something like “I’m not really into football, what else have you been up to lately?”
I can get into occasional meta-discussions of what it’s like not following the team/hobby/television program that most of one’s friends are into, but the middle of a discussion of last Sunday’s game, or last night’s episode, isn’t the place to find them. And if I don’t lead off with “I am so tired of hearing about the Seahawks,” it may turn out that my brother-in-law the devoted football fan has something interesting to say about his experience of not being into a different popular obsession.
If you really can’t distinguish between distasteful speech, doxxing, stalking and violating the twitter terms of service, which any twitter user agreed to when they signed up, then there’s really nothing to discuss with you.
Others have mentioned it, so I am simply reinforcing this: TWITTER IS A PRIVATE COMPANY AND OWES NO ONE FREE SPEECH ON THEIR PLATFORM.
In the USA, the First Amendment protects citizens against GOVERNMENT suppression of their rights. It has no control over the Holy Free Market Corporation so beloved by the right wing. NO CONTROL. None. A corporation can do anything it pleases to suppress your speech within its sphere of ownership. Ask anyone who’s been fired for posting a criticism of their employer on Facebook.
I’m sorry Aaron, I should have been more specific. I was responding to Johnathan M. and Mr. Seavey, specifically these quotes:
and
As to the first, well, dogpiling = bad, right? Much as Aaron, TheYoungPretender, Rob_Matic, etc. have all immediately attacked or dismissed my statements because they were contrary to the general consensus? Or are we talking about a different type of dogpiling here, one that doesn’t involve silencing opposing voices?
As to the second, well, I will paraphrase the quote as saying, “People whose opinions I don’t like claim they are being silenced, and I could really care less how they feel about that because I don’t like them or what they believe.” Perhaps Mr. Seavey could clarify if that’s not what he meant to say.
Especially considering who Correia is carrying water for here — John Stacy McCain is the douchecanoe who, during the 2008 presidential elections, suggested that then-seventeen-year-old Bristol Palin should be dragged up on stage at the Republican National Convention and publicly slut-shamed for being pregnant out of wedlock. Nice friends you have there, Larry.
Johan P and Standback: Thank you for correcting my misunderstanding (which, truth be told, was lazy reading on my part.) And I apologize to Tiffany Robbins for misrepresenting her statements.
@NowhereMan: I don’t buy the argument that taking off one’s pants leads to a convention being unable to find a venue. I don’t think the slope is really quite that slippery.
I’m sorry, where did I say anything about free speech or the 1st Amendment? I said limiting voices makes everyone worse off, i.e., not having free speech advocates on Twitter’s council. There are quite a few of them, even ones who advocate for free speech for both the left and right. Take FIRE for example.
@Nate Harada
This is also the man with ties to the League of the South, a white supremacist association. And he’s deeply in the James May territory of ‘third wave feminism is an evil conspiracy and date rape doesn’t exist’ crazy.
@Sean
Twitter has burps all the time. My tweets show up double or not at all because technology. Same on FB. My first thought isn’t conspiracy. It’s either temporary glitch or their screwing with algorithms again. A follower claims not to see stuff? Could be the medium they are using to access tweets, some filter they’ve applied, a temporary glitch. The least likely thing is Twitter is spending time on LC unless he’s been making rape and death threats or subtly encouraging others to do so in which case see below.
Free speech doesn’t give you the right to make death and rape threats but for quite a while FB and Twitter have allowed members to make them.
I spent a fair amount of time yesterday accidentally on a few conservative sites. My husband linked to something funny on popehat and I decided to read articles and comments which sent me all over the net. It was an interesting day to do that and watch so many conservatives talk about the great SJW takeover. I rechecked congress, the most recent list of the richest in USA, checked the news to see if the major media or social media corporations had changed hands. Nope the political, social, media power and money in this country is still ~80-90% in the hands of conservative SWM.
Turns out I didn’t sleep through the great SJW takeover in the USA. One social media platform is finally taking responsible actions for threats made on it by users to other users. Would I like them to be more transparent? Maybe. But doing so might be a violation of someone’s rights.
I can see the outrage now if x was banned due to making y number of rape threats and z number of death threats against other Twitter users. Conservatives would then demand proof, everyone would scream violation of privacy, some would claim person didn’t mean it, it was a joke, others would claim it was faked. Yeah, no, I don’t see transparency working well with all the conspiracy theories going on.
@Sean.
You are confusing the Federal government with a private company.
Further, you are confusing personal responses from a handful of individuals on a single website with some kind of global position on subject, the focus of which is not clear.
I guess the “consensus” is that Sean likes to troll File 770.
Which leads me to the supposition that Sean isn’t interested in discourse and discussion, only in obtaining the fleeting egoboo some small minds get from doing such things.
But rather than go with snap judgments made on the basis of very limited information, I’ll make the assumption, for now, that you are capable of engaging in discourse and will ask some questions:
Why do you think some people apparently like to be dicks on the internet? What do they get out of it? Is there a score card central for internet trolls? Does someone pay for such activity in pursuit of some marketing or political goal? Does getting a response to a trollish comment provide some boost of testosterone or some other hormone? Is it an attention getting thing, even negative attention is better than none at all? What’s the preferred response? “You’re an ass?” “You’re a troll?” “That was a dick move?”
Who the heck likes and agrees with harassment and abuse? Obviously enough of it goes on to suggest that there are plenty who do, but who would admit to it? That’s why comments like this completely elides the harassment and the abuse. Pretends it doesn’t happen or doesn’t matter. Nope, no such thing! Insignificant! Price of doing business!
From reading a number of articles on the matter, some more mainstream than others, the complaints and exodus is at least partially because some of the bans have come down without any kind of explanation to the person being banned. See Mr. Gobry at TheWeek.com
I know. I’ve tangled with him more than once on assorted blog threads when I was more active in political blogging. My heart pumps purple piss that he has one less avenue to spread his corrosive toxicity, I assure you.
Where did you say anything about abuse and harassment? Nowhere! Full marks for shouting FIRE in a crowded comment thread, though.
I live in a country where Twitter regularly participates in the direct censorship of speech critical of the government, and where the service is temporarily switched off whenever a politically contentious event occurs. And yet the line in the sand after which a firmly principled flounce must be taken is a paranoid conspiracy theory involving Anita Sarkeesian and her dangerously feminist ideas.
Thank you ‘free speech advocates’ for your tireless efforts in the service of democracy.
@Tasha; another thing Twitter is doing: making the majority of their customers happy over the objection of a minority of their customers.
It’s not infrequent that a business decides it just doesn’t need customers who actively work against the business and decides to take action.
Example: I had several hundred teams in a paintball league, and one team of bad actors who got kicked out of the league. They were making life miserable for the other teams by cheating at a very blatant level.
I made one team (and whatever friends they had) VERY unhappy, while making ALL of the other customers VERY happy. AND I boosted the league’s credibility in the process. AND I got a large number of other leagues and related institutions thinking that it might be a good thing for them to do too. AND I got every single competitor out there thinking about their own actions while competing.
Taking a stand against assholes can be problematic, but there are a lot of intangibles that go along with doing so.
Mr. Davidson, thank you for the ad hominem attacks. I will attempt to see past them, but they don’t particularly help your point in discussing people being “dicks on the internet,” IMHO. As to your point about confusing the federal government with a private corporation, you apparently read “1st Amendment” somewhere I did not write it. All I stated was that discourse is richer and more valuable the more viewpoints presented. Reading comprehension.
As to how an internet troll benefits from trolling, I really haven’t the faintest idea. Some people are sadists or just enjoy annoying others.
However, don’t confuse trolls with opposing ideas and viewpoints, please. Just because a person believes differently than you or values certain ideas or principles differently, it’s quite easy to dismiss and not hear them and say things like, “You’re an ass?” “You’re a troll?” “That was a dick move?”
“Nice store you have here. Shame if anything happened to it.”
“I don’t appreciate being threatened by my customers. Get out of my store, or I call the cops.”
“Hey, what do you have against free enterprise?”
*tips hat to Nigel. That was funny.
@Sean
The speech people are worried about here, the death threats, the rape threats, the threats to burn down someones house, are much closer to “fire” than a political disagreement. These are people who welcome disagreement – it’s that “I’ll kill you with a tire iron, slut” is not exactly the definition of disagreement that people talking about open arguments and civil societies are thinking of.
I could claim that I was trolling JJ 🙂 but no, just my woeful spelling. All the best blogs have typos in their headlines.