Duck landing by Tony Riley
I don't have a TV, and haven't had one for ten years, so I didn't know what "Duck Dynasty" is. I had once seen a poster for the show on a bus shelter, and thought it was a one-time movie. Apparently, somebody decided to give it a far longer shelf-life so it's a sit-com or a series *shudder*. So I'll leave that one to others to dissect - Cathy Young has a particularly good piece about all his on RealClearPolitics.
Justine Sacco's saga, however, I watched unfold on Twitter, which is my main news source. That is, it isn't the things people say on Twitter that is my source, but merely the links it provides in a steady stream to all the major news stories in the world from a variety of perspectives.
MEDIA INDUCED PSYCHOSIS SYNDROME
Both these stories are, of course, text-book cases of what cube 3 (Larry Rosenthal) calls "MIPS" (Media Induced Psychosis Syndrome). You can read about it here on his blog. You can even order book bags and mugs with that great logo (and I've been meaning to get the book bag.
Yes, we get it that this wretched woman Justine tweeted something completely assanine, stupid and yes, racist. And because she worked for a gigantic public relations firm, she was fired instantly and the company fell all over itself to apologize. Then she apologized. Loads of people got to beat their breasts in wild self-aggrandized self-justification with life-ruination as the goal. But when "the world" (which means that tiny percentage of people on the planet who a) have cell phones b) have Twitter c) get involved in "progressive causes") becomes involved in a story like this, it's mass hysteria and never ends well.
NO ONE SHOULD BE FIRED OVER A TWEET
Generally, I don't believe people should be fired from their jobs over Twitter. The engineering of the firing of the Business Insider CTO by Wired State apparatchiks Anil Dash and Jillian York was utterly reprehensible and shrinks freedom of expression ever smaller. If an employee tweets something incapatible with the company line, you should make sure he isn't on the company account, that his own account carries a disclaimer -- and then just not follow him if you don't like what he says. Make your own policy clear to your followers, and call it a day. When enough people start doing this as a matter of course, we'll get past this very bad period when a few very bad, very oppressive people are trying to control the speech of everyone for no good reason.
To be sure, I thought that the firing of @natsecwonk was appropriate because he was a government official anonymously tweeting, and tweeting government information that was not on the record, and that's simply incompatible with good government or oath of office. I don't think government officials should get to make anonymous accounts and then fire off nasty tweets about their colleagues and various tid-bits out of context to vent their spleen. If you want to do that, don't work for the government. Fortunately, @natsecwonk has found a second life as a consultant somewhere else and survived his ordeal.
But I don't think people in the private sector should be fired, however, because speech offenses should not be grounds for losing your very livelihood. There are a variety of penalties, from suspension, to compelling an apology, to doing community service, to making amends, to be shifted to another position, short of taking food off someone's table.
I REJECT TWITTER GAGS
Hey, I get to say this because I know what it's like to get a Twitter gag at work, and not for anything I've said on Twitter, but fear of what I *might* say on Twitter, merely because of what I said in criticism in the comments of the Registan.com blog, in response to some really vicious tweeters who then worked mightily to try to get me fired because they didn't like my legitimate and much-needed criticism of their reprehensible views slyly favouring Central Asian dictators: Joshua Foust, Nathan Hamm, Sarah Kendzior and Katy Pearce.
Each one of these people is responsible for real harm to me and my family by literally removing food from my table by urging that I be fired -- and then hastening events whereby I quit anyway, because the conditions of work became unbearable. Interestingly, three out of these four themselves lost their jobs within a year, and probably their vicious tweeting had at least some role in their fates. I've recovered (although please do hit my tip jar), but I will never, ever work for anybody who says I can't tweet what I want on Twitter or will fire me over something I say on Twitter. If you don't like what I say on Twitter, don't follow me. Don't make it hard for me to feed my children. Thank you.
FIRST AMENDMENT SPIRIT
So again: I'm for people being called out and condemned if they say something either contrary to company policy or in poor taste or abusive and discriminatory. But bad speech should never be something that causes people serious injury like loss of employment or fining or jailing. That's contrary to the First Amendment in spirit, even if non-state actors can make policies falling short of the liberalism of the First Amendment because it only applies to government (although no one has ever tested the oppressiveness of government web sites that suppress speech exactly like any Silicon Valley social media provider in exactly the same ways with exactly the same language).
WHAT THIS REALLY IS ABOUT: POLITICAL WARFARE
The issue with Justine isn't just about the First Amendment and her theoretical right to say whatever crazy racist damn thing her airheaded whim moves her to say while drunk on Twitter. We get that her employer isn't bound by the First Amendment and for its own reputational integrity feels they have to fire her.
But no, it's about what kind of society we get when the consequences of misguided tweets are like Soviet Russia -- the GULAG -- and when we let virulently hateful politically-correct movements take over all politics and stamp out all dissent.
"The Internet" went wild, of course, in the way only "the Internet" can, with memes and fake accounts and "get her" posse antics. The smug sense of self-satisfaction was palpable everywhere.
And nowhere was it as bad as with Sam Biddle, the ValleyWag guy who is sometimes viciously funny, and sometimes funnily vicious and sometimes just uninteresting (I forget to read him for weeks at a time.) Drinking deeply of that Silicon Valley Better Worldism bullshit himself even as he always skews others, Biddle turned in this idiotic tweet:
No one cares that I was first but I will know I united black and white twitters. Welcome to post-racial twitter, you're welcome, god bless
— Sam Biddle (@samfbiddle) December 21, 2013
Sam caught this woman because she was with the big PR agency (otherwise he might not have bothered) and there is nothing more that Silicon Valley types HATE with the passion of a thousand suns than PR firms, especially the East Coast type. Amanda Chapel had a long run taking down Edelman, until her enemies savagely outed her and slapped a libel suit on her. I can remember the Crayonistas calling every other company flak "fucktards" on the the Alphaville Herald. It's new media hates old media on this one and the skewer is sharp and twisted endlessly.
Um, post-racial Twitter? Really, big guy? You spear-head a movement of politically-perfect persons who have scrubbed racism entirely from their souls? You're sure?
But here's what this stuff is REALLY about, and why I happily push back hard against it every time I get a chance.
IT'S NOT ABOUT RACISM, BUT EXPLOITATION OF THE RACISM SMEAR
It's not really about stopping racism, or making a nicer social media environment, or a better post-racial world where everybody can hold hands and sing Kumbahah.
It's about using the racism card in a hard left or "progressive" or socialist movement to eradicate any opposition to the left by tarring it with the racism brush.
It's exterminism.
It's not about countering bad politics with good; it's about eliminating a rival that is sometimes correct in calling out the hypocrisy of the left.
Example: what did everybody miss on Twitter because they were obsessed with the drama of one ditzy white girl who was going to get a whallop when she landed in now black-ruled South Africa? (She herself was originally from South Africa in the minority, obviously).
They missed, oh, things like Ambassador Samantha Power, the US envoy to the UN, flying to the Central African Republic, which is the scene of a terrible bloodbath now with hundreds massacred, as Christians and Muslims clash around corrupt government leaders and abusive rebels struggling for power. Now, Teja Cole might whine that this is white saviour industrial complex but I don't care. I think it's fine for white people to care about Africa and try to help. Yes, we can all have a debate about how aid goes wrong in Africa. But hey, I don't notice African governments clicking REFUND on any of the aid -- hardly sufficient -- the rich world does dispense to Africa because the donors aren't politically correct enough or neo-colonialists.
Here's where I really get angry with this stuff though: when I see it is about completely demonizing the right. No conservative group, the Republic Party, anybody on the right, is legitimate unless they toe absolutely up to the line of what the hard left believes is the proper set of beliefs on race and sex and many other topics. And they get to decide. And it's not about demonizing the right, ultimately, it's about demonizing pluralism, period.
There's no universal standard they concede, like the idea that "racism" really worthy of getting "the whole world" involved would actually be advocating barring people from equality, or actually inciting mass crimes against humanity, not tweeting something idiotic to your few followers (I don't know how many she had before the scandal, but it wasn't the thousands she got after).
What kind of racism would that be? Well, aside from the speech racism that already gets enormous amounts of attention (of the ineffectual kind) on Twitter, how about the kind of racism that the World Conference Against Racism didn't care to focus on, like the hatred of the Dalit or "untouchables" in India, that caused so many people to take the side of an Indian diplomat in New York City who got the standard treatment of all detainees over her exploitation of her domestic worker, and not the worker, who is Dalit.
Bigoted or hateful talk is easily fixed - you push back and you let the person know how wrong they are, how out of touch they are, and how unacceptable they are in decent company. Taking food off their table in spite and vindictiveness hardly accomplishes these goals; indeed it sets us up for a worse situation where we have no pluralism or true equality and tolerance of differences in society.
WHAT IT'S LIKE TO BE BULLIED AS A 'RACIST'
I know what it's like to be endlessly bullied and harassed for my critical blog with the false use of the "racism" card. I've had my Wikipedia constantly vandalized; I've been smeared with the false accusation of racism; I've been deluged with thousands of spam or hate messages and I endlessly get attacked by a small group of sectarians plus a few high profile Silicon Valley "thought leaders" because of this blog entry.
Um, no, I didn't say that "Romney lost the election because black people deliberately sabotaged his digital work and put bugs in his code" (!). Derp. That's just loony and insane. Romney didn't lose merely because his apps crapped out -- there were many other reasons for his loss, notably the bugging of his lunch-time quip about "the 47%" (not to be confused with "the 99%") which he could never overcome -- and a concerted campaign to discredit him as "Richie Rich" although he was no George Soros. One ad even accused him of causing the death of a woman of cancer because her husband lost a job in a factory he bought out as it was failing, which then later laid off people -- something happening in the steel industry all over the world.
What I did say was that the people who did Romney's digital work did not have their hearts in the job; they included Obama's 2008 digital manager (!) and Al Gore's 2000 campaign digital manager (!) in a shop with people clearly voting for Obama, not Romney. And that's the case. They didn't have the enthusiasm that keeps you working late into the night, and they can't be expected to. And the result -- due to the kind of "geek sabotage" that doesn't involve literally building bug bombs but mainly involves cynical negligence -- two of his apps failed, and his GOTV software failed spectacularly. People paid to do a gig like any other gig as if this didn't require utmost dedication didn't produce. I notice some of them aren't with the firms involved anymore, and I bet we won't see Republicans hire gently-used Democrats for digital work ever again, just like Obama didn't hire Republicans for his computer nerd work. It's not about race or ethnicity; it's about what you believe, and who you will do for.
Yet because I reported the obvious, and made a legitimate point which had nothing whatsoever to do with advocating racism -- and it involved calling out lefty geeks as not very loyal to their clients -- I was bombarded savagely. And Paul Carr was the latest to join this insanity just on the strength of reading outageously fake Wikipedia vandal quotations and one tweet pointing out that yes, Mandela did embrace communism -- which is true -- and that in fact likely delayed the end of apartheid, a point you can read on the pages of the very liberal Foreign Policy web site if you don't want to hear it from me.
THE EXTERMINISM OF THE LEFT
But see that's just it. We cannot criticize the left anymore. Not from the slightly-less-left or left-of-center or liberal middle or right-of-center that might share similar views with the Nation on a variety of topics like abortion or NSA. Not at all. Because criticism -- any criticism of the left is "racism"or -- a topic for another day, "the war on women".
And here's where I found this exterminism getting really awful: in Sweden: The Brown Scare in Sweden: Anti-Fa Hack Disgus to Out Internet Commenters.
The Anti-fa crowd (I've come to find them always and everywhere intolerant, hateful, and liars in a variety of countries and settings; maybe someone can convince me otherwise) decided to savage people whose views they didn't like and out them by hacking Disqus.
Disqus, unfortunately, is too leftist itself and filled with the Silicon Valley technocommunism ideology (I've had a number of arguments with them even though I do use my account their regularly) to step up to the plate on this vigorously. They've said nothing (as far as I can tell).
But boy is this wrong, and everyone should push back hard on it. And you can see from the handiwork of these creeps in Sweden that it isn't about stopping racism really, or making a better world; it's about taking power aggressively by eliminating critics and political rivals through the smear of racism.
ANONYMITY, PSEUDONYMITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY
I personally don't advocate anonymity on social media. I use my real name, and my avatar name is linked to my real name. I just like it better that way because I think people should be accountable for their words and they do by and large behave better when not anonymous and can build up a reputation, for better or worse.
I don't buy the arguments of AWFUL people like Jillian York of Electronic Frontier Foundation who insists on anonymity mainly as an organizing tool for revolutionary movements of the left she personally supports with her politics, mainly in the Middle East, none of which are very critical of Islamists and embrace the Palestinian cause while rarely condemning violence.
York like others falsely concern-troll with invocation of dissidents in trouble, or victims of domestic violence as requiring anonymity as a deadly necessity. Well, yes and no.
You know, Nelson Mandela used his own name; so did Andrei Sakharov; and for that matter, so dod Nadezhda Tolokonnikova of Pussy Riot and Farea al-Muslimi, the Yemeni anti-drones activist. Yeah, I totally get it that activists in Iran, China and many other places risk their lives if they give their real names. But that's no reason to enable a zillion assholes from Anonymous to harass people online with impunity. And why should you get to turn out 100,000 on a public square while hiding behind a Guy Fawkes mask or a nick on Facebook or Twitter? Say, the Ukrainians didn't run their revolution that way.
It's possible to have pseudonymity, which is the use of a pseudonym and presentation of real-life ID on social media to create a better environment.
No, this shouldn't be mandatory everywhere but I do think it's more than fine that Facebook makes it a requirement (yes, often violated) and Twitter doesn't. It's good to have a pluralism of environments so you don't have to live only with abusive anonymous assholes online everywhere. And no, I don't have illusions that unmasking these people makes them better. Often it doesn't. But I do see the comment section of Techcrunch got a lot better when they put in Facebook for commenting, and worse when they changed it.
Here are Phil Baumann's very wise words on the subject:
What the Justine ruckus demonstrates is not that there are racist people. We know that.
What it reveals, in fact, is that the reaction is precisely the kind of behavior that led to racism in the first place: the innate reactivity of shallow-thinking people to prove they are better than someone else.
The way the tweet-mongering crowd attacked an incompetent PR girl with lame sarcasm skills exemplifies the horrifying superficiality of thought that ramifies digital networks. Rather than taking on racism, we will have more of it - the racists now have even more fuel for their assaults because they see the vapidity of their enemies.
You will see more assassination of avatars while the cunning manipulators who daily strip the soul out of civilization continue to work their plans without chirping a single hashtag
Why am I writing so much about this now?
Because I think we will see LOTS LOTS more of this as the 2016 campaign gets going -- it's already going with vilification of the Clintons as in Ken Silverstein's hit job on CAP (more to come on that later).
I'll never forget when I tweeted a few tweets to Steve Gillmor at the dawn of Twitter and he went into a rage fit and demanded the company created search/block so that he would never have to see anyone who disagreed with him ever in his feed when he did vanity searches on himself. I continued to debate him strenuously and he actually invited me on his podcast show but then shut off the microphone as soon as I expressed the opinion that some of Obama's ideology was socialist. Shut off the microphone.
My original crime? I pointed out that his claims that Obama's pastor's outrageous remarks weren't anything to be complaining about just wasn't true, it was going to have huge ramifications. Obama himself wound up apologizing, so I tweeted to Gillmor that even Obama was criticizing this "America's chickens are coming home to roost" and "God Damn America" stuff of the pastor.
But then Dave Winer, the famous geek of Scripting News (and Firesign Theater) said -- I'll never forget -- "Everyone in the Northeast is racist."
Right. Everybody. Even the non-white folks, too.
And that's when I realized that the leftists, the technocommies, the "progressives" were going to endlessly race-bait and race-hustle to get their way in that election, and it would never end. Indeed, I began to suspect that some of them had deliberately decided to back a black candidate precisely so they could use this brilliant weapon endlessly keeping everybody silent for fear of being non-PC.
Obviously, "everyone in the Northeast" wasn't so racist that they couldn't vote for the first black president (including me). But Dave knows better.
So Justine did a dumb-ass thing and is paying for it dearly. She didn't actually do any harm because a million smug white dudes starting with Sam Biddle swooped in to save black people from suffering hate virtually on social media from someone that...they didn't have to follow and would never have heard of if Sam Biddle hadn't invented the scandal. Nobody complained that he and his enthusiastic meme-wranglers were part of the white savior industrial complex then. And there was a deluge of response with most pictorial comments consisting of some very tough and very angry black ladies from various TV sit-coms and movies (and nobody complained about their stereotyping then).
It's like the "Streisand effect," where if you try to stop the paparazzi from photographing you due to your desire for privacy, as Barbara Streisand once did, they just follow you worse.
The Biddle Effect is when something that wouldn't have been a scandal on its own (not enough people would ever see it) is artificially pumped up and used to incite action by cynical meme-handlers to enhance their own reputation and power. Biddling is when you heckle somebody to death using this method.
"Post-racial" Twitter and the Anti-Fa won, and they will proceed to stamp out all others' thought crimes who cannot admit the error of their ways. Unless you start now calling their bluff.
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