"We all know it, and we all know nothing will ever be done about it"
I think most social media is taking things like this seriously, no? At least banning users who do it. Policing the internet for speech is just an incredibly difficult and fraught job.
There's literally no mechanism, other than some futuristic AI, that could prevent me or…
"We all know it, and we all know nothing will ever be done about it"
I think most social media is taking things like this seriously, no? At least banning users who do it. Policing the internet for speech is just an incredibly difficult and fraught job.
There's literally no mechanism, other than some futuristic AI, that could prevent me or you or anybody from saying something truly awful on social media right now. And it would be easy enough to find somebody vulnerable like a child or somebody who was suicidal, to target.
The only real preventative measure is human decency. I know we have differing degrees of faith in this quality, but regardless, without that, everything falls apart. Not just social media, not just the internet, the entirety of human civilisation rests on most of us displaying some amount of this quality. So giving up on it simply isn't an option.
And in the case of gay politics, for example, though I don't doubt for a second the belligerence you describe, there was that blissful period before the current toxicity of the trans debate where I don't think anybody thought of toxicity when they heard the letters LGBT.
I have never advocated giving up though I have repeatedly expressed despair. Some of us have never abandoned decency.
Twitter and Facebook have if anything promoted the savagery, with only perfunctory discouragement of dirty words and some ham-handed banning under the selection of non-English speakers. "Oh, drop dead" is a death threat? In German "break an arm and a leg" means "good luck," and Thelma Ritter's "kill the people" would you banned while Trump's four years of stochastic assassination was tolerated.
Medium's enforcement serves only to support the "trans" activists, making the platform worse.
Any actual enforcement would disproportionately ban the MAGA crowd and derail the quest for civility into political grievance.
At least Twitter blocks COVID misinformation. Small mercies.
I mean, it's very obviously not a death threat, but it's equally obviously not productive. I don't think you can compare it to the theatrical "break a leg," in anything even approaching good faith.
I've been arguing with trans people on Medium pretty regularly for around a year now. I'm sure some of them would like nothing more than to see me banned. Yet I'm still there. I think you underestimate the importance of the way you phrase things.
Maybe it's my advanced age but I remember "drop dead' as, at worst, an expression of mild derision, and often almost comical. A few years ago I was *banned* from Twitter for it.
If you have been arguing "trans" people on Medium and have not been banned yet it is only because none of them has seen fit to report you for "transphobia." I have solid evidence that only one such report is required and the offending response will not be read before throwing the switch.
I have a bad habit of staying on forums I no longer enjoy out of vain pride and not wanting to be driven away. I was on a WaPo community that existed within one of its blogs; all the people I had enjoyed reading were long gone and those remaining had cliqued around a woman I didn't like* and who despised me enough to invent lies about me. Another time I remained on a board where there were only two people I liked out of ten remaining.
Bad habit. Life is too short.
I like this place but if I started feeling combative I would just vanish. I do learn, though sometimes it takes me a while. Like, most of my life.
* this woman was "patriotic" and when the news came out about Edward Snowden's revelations it was a topic of active discussion. She posted about thirty times "I'm so mad I can't even talk about it!" This made me mad. She can't talk about it but she can talk about it by repeating the same sentence, exclamation point and all, over two dozen times. After that I didn't like her anymore.
"We all know it, and we all know nothing will ever be done about it"
I think most social media is taking things like this seriously, no? At least banning users who do it. Policing the internet for speech is just an incredibly difficult and fraught job.
There's literally no mechanism, other than some futuristic AI, that could prevent me or you or anybody from saying something truly awful on social media right now. And it would be easy enough to find somebody vulnerable like a child or somebody who was suicidal, to target.
The only real preventative measure is human decency. I know we have differing degrees of faith in this quality, but regardless, without that, everything falls apart. Not just social media, not just the internet, the entirety of human civilisation rests on most of us displaying some amount of this quality. So giving up on it simply isn't an option.
And in the case of gay politics, for example, though I don't doubt for a second the belligerence you describe, there was that blissful period before the current toxicity of the trans debate where I don't think anybody thought of toxicity when they heard the letters LGBT.
I have never advocated giving up though I have repeatedly expressed despair. Some of us have never abandoned decency.
Twitter and Facebook have if anything promoted the savagery, with only perfunctory discouragement of dirty words and some ham-handed banning under the selection of non-English speakers. "Oh, drop dead" is a death threat? In German "break an arm and a leg" means "good luck," and Thelma Ritter's "kill the people" would you banned while Trump's four years of stochastic assassination was tolerated.
Medium's enforcement serves only to support the "trans" activists, making the platform worse.
Any actual enforcement would disproportionately ban the MAGA crowd and derail the quest for civility into political grievance.
At least Twitter blocks COVID misinformation. Small mercies.
"'Oh, drop dead' is a death threat?"
I mean, it's very obviously not a death threat, but it's equally obviously not productive. I don't think you can compare it to the theatrical "break a leg," in anything even approaching good faith.
I've been arguing with trans people on Medium pretty regularly for around a year now. I'm sure some of them would like nothing more than to see me banned. Yet I'm still there. I think you underestimate the importance of the way you phrase things.
Maybe it's my advanced age but I remember "drop dead' as, at worst, an expression of mild derision, and often almost comical. A few years ago I was *banned* from Twitter for it.
If you have been arguing "trans" people on Medium and have not been banned yet it is only because none of them has seen fit to report you for "transphobia." I have solid evidence that only one such report is required and the offending response will not be read before throwing the switch.
I have a bad habit of staying on forums I no longer enjoy out of vain pride and not wanting to be driven away. I was on a WaPo community that existed within one of its blogs; all the people I had enjoyed reading were long gone and those remaining had cliqued around a woman I didn't like* and who despised me enough to invent lies about me. Another time I remained on a board where there were only two people I liked out of ten remaining.
Bad habit. Life is too short.
I like this place but if I started feeling combative I would just vanish. I do learn, though sometimes it takes me a while. Like, most of my life.
* this woman was "patriotic" and when the news came out about Edward Snowden's revelations it was a topic of active discussion. She posted about thirty times "I'm so mad I can't even talk about it!" This made me mad. She can't talk about it but she can talk about it by repeating the same sentence, exclamation point and all, over two dozen times. After that I didn't like her anymore.