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The users of Bluesky, a platform that promotes itself as X/Twitter but without hate speech, have been having a meltdown for the last few days over the presence of Jesse Singal on the site. He is literally the most blocked user on the whole site. The current state of affairs is that they no longer post violent fantasies of killing him, after the moderation team indicated that they don't see a violation of terms and services in his account activity, they graduated into violent fantasies of killing him coupled with his home address attached. There's also a change.org petition for banning him, and I believe there are videos of prominent activists filming themselves signing it.
Jesse, for those of you who don't know, is a cohost of the Blocked And Reported podcast dedicated to internet drama, probably most relevant to users here as the place where Tracing Woodgrains had a brief stint. Jesse is not unlike JK Rowling in the eyes of the activists, in that he's 99% onboard with the left agenda, but has some doubts about some details of transgenderism. Even less doubts than her, in that his opinions is that some children are definitely trans, but some others will come to regret medical interventions, so caution should be exercised. And that's enough to label him as a heretical transphobe for the Bluesky users.
What was the trifecta for an effortful enough comment, event, context, personal opinion? Well, for the personal opinion, I always thought that the idea of heretics as more reviled than heathens was somewhat self-indulgent, but I'm starting to believe that idea.
I think a key difference with the trans issue and normal culture war issues, is that people have undergone difficult medical procedures in the expectation that the "civilized" parts of society will respect their choice of gender. That expectation would have been reasonable if Harris had won and the government continued to pressure employers and schools to punish anyone who didn't go along. Now, I have to imagine many fear being betrayed, not just by Trump voters, but by the realization that ambitious Democrats might abandon the progressive trans position to help win future elections.
Uh, are these people themselves trans?
Some are, certainly. More than zero of the people furiously angry at Singal are trans.
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Jesse also published articles by former moderator @ymeskhout.
Speaking of that guy, I saw he deleted his Twitter recently. Although he's still posting substack articles defending Letitia James's political prosecutions.
I find that hard to believe.
Link?
this query of google: site:substack.com ymeskhout letitia
only found him arguing with some other substacker, but no article.
https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/intellectual-insecurities
And the follow-up: https://www.ymeskhout.com/p/npc-dialogue-trees
It's really weird autism. I the guy not aware of the whole misinformation censorship complex where Dems had USG fund 'independent' NGOs to pressure platforms to censor?
He's a lawyer making lawyer arguments, that's just how they work:
If something's not good for your case, never bring it up. If the prosecution mentions it, try to get it struck by the judge. If you can't get it struck, smear doubt all over it. If the evidence is impeccable, try to claim it doesn't matter anyway and should just be ignored.
If important evidence gets ignored to your benefit, that's just how the game is played, and the other side should have just gotten gud, scrub.
Do all that and you can turn the entire censorship issue into "why are you so hopped up about a discovery dispute?!"
Lawyers just can't stop using their courtroom/debatebro skills. They're too effective to put down.
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You may have to fill me in.
Interestingly it doesn't seem to have been covered much or maybe I'm using wrong keywords in search.
Stanford Internet Observatory was one of these NGOs.
https://stanfordreview.org/stanfords-censorship-deceit-at-the-stanford-internet-observatory/
Mike Benz covered it in depth and maybe even broke the story. He's got a lot of info on it on his account.
https://x.com/MikeBenzCyber/status/1737489386244030932
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Those are the ones, thanks. The links were on my desktop, and actually going to substack crashes this old phone.
I've gotta ask if I can get a password reset to login on some other device.
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I mean, twitter also had ridiculous drama blowups of this sort. I'm not sure why it's newsworthy that resistlibs and SJWs do this; we already knew they did.
There is currently a bit of a question of whether bluesky will be able to pull the center away from twitter/x so this fight does kind of matter. We're going to learn whether people find the right wing stuff let run wild on X more obnoxious than the left wing stuff let run wild on bluesky. How this shakes out is actually probably of substantial importance.
I wonder, actually, if Twitter/Bluesky is an inversion of the old battle between neutral and conservative? Twitter is currently an officially-neutral-but-soft-right-leaning mainstream site, and the left defected from it to go and make their own space, which predictably went badly, and now is evolving much stricter and harsher purity norms than even pre-Elon Twitter had. They attract only the refugees from a right-slanted system, and so they get not only progressives, but the worst and most extreme progressives.
There's almost a schadenfreude in it - "Ha! Now you know how it feels!"
Unless, of course, Twitter craters even more. Other possible dynamics are right-echo-chamber-Twitter and left-echo-chamber-Bluesky, both of similar reach and power, which I would take to be the worst of all worlds; or Twitter collapses entirely and Bluesky takes its place as the default short-messaging platform.
If Twitter went from soft-left-leaning to soft-right-leaning this may have been a valid comparison, but it went from ruthless oppression of the right to "it's not fair that Elon retweets far-right disinformation". If you think this is in any way comparable to the landscape from "neutral vs conservative" you'd be shell-shocked if you found yourself in a world that's an actual inversion of it.
I think that, regardless of objective statistics or anything, it is felt to be right-leaning by the kind of people who migrate to Bluesky.
Is it possible that they're just so used to unchallenged left-wing dominance that any presence of non-censored, non-battered-and-fearful conservative voices at all seems 'right-leaning' to them? Entirely plausible, to me.
But even if it's just illusionary or a product of absurd expectations of cultural dominance, that would still get you the Neutral vs Conservative effect, where the most extreme witches flee, create their own space, and that space ends up terrible.
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Does Twitter even really lean right? Every left-leaning tweet I see gets an order of magnitude more likes than any right-leaning counterpart. People have claimed these are botted likes but that can't be the case for all of them.
Yes, it could.
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Anecdotally, I feel that there's subjective plausibility to the idea that heretics are more hated than heathens, or that traitors are more hated than enemies. If I ask myself how I feel about Mormons or Jehovah's Witnesses, and then how I feel about Muslims or Hindus, I realise that on a visceral, intuitive level, I dislike the former much more than I dislike the latter. Mormons and Muslims may both be wrong, and in fact the Muslims may be objectively more incorrect than the Mormons - but the Mormons try to pass themselves off as Christians, and the Muslims don't. The Mormons form a kind of threat to Christian identity or Christian unity in a way that the Muslims don't.
This may just be the barberpole model of fashion again. I'm a Christian, nobody is ever going to confuse me with a Muslim, but people might confuse me with a Mormon, and so I need to more militantly ostracise Mormons in order to make the distinction clear.
Or it might just be that I experience Mormons (or Jehovah's Witnesses or Baptists or whoever) as in a sense making a 'direct' attack on who I am, whereas outsiders are not doing that.
If we jump from explicit religion to pseudo-religion (I don't really consider liberalism or LGBT or progressivism to be religions, but many here do), it would not surprise me if the same dynamic is at work. A Bluesky progressive doesn't need to worry about actual conservatives because everybody on Bluesky already has very strong anti-conservative antibodies. Jesse Singal, however, like J. K. Rowling, is already a liberal and present in liberal spaces - and unless you make sure to ostracise him clearly to send a message, less aware liberals might listen to him.
Of course, this argument can only do so much, because if you look at the handful of conservatives on Bluesky, they don't do much better. Here's David French on Bluesky defending the Tennessee trans case. Look at the comments - nobody is sparing him, or going, "Oh, well, he's a conservative, he's outside the tribe, whatever." He is being predictably and brutally attacked. (Particularly amusing considering how more right-wing people on Twitter brigade him now, but I guess you can't win.)
I think this is the essence of it, Jesse Singal offers a plausible alternative vision for Democrats' future. Especially given the UK recently banning puberty blockers for minors, AOC removing pronouns from her twitter bio, Trump's tremendously successful 'they/them' ad and the general handwringing about the direction and electoral viability of the Democratic party, I think there is a real sense that hardline ideological transgenderism is very much "on the table" for debate and may no longer have the aura of untouchability it once did.
Unlike Matt Walsh, Jesse Singal speaks to moderate Democrats in their language with their etiquette and with solid Blue Tribe Elite bonafides. He went to Princeton, he's jewish, he lives in Brooklyn, he's written for The Atlantic, he cites scientific studies, he uses the preferred pronouns of transgender individuals and is unfailingly polite. He is threatening because he (or rather his position) could theoretically win over the Democratic party. Even if Republicans win an election and pass some hypothetical anti-trans law, in the minds of trannies at least they would still have one of the two major teams fighting for them, and it would only be so long before the Democrats eventually win one. However if the Democrats abandon them then all hope is truly lost, no major player will be on their side and childhood transgenderism risks being consigned to the dustbin of memoryholed progressive ideas like eugenics or lobotomies.
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sounds like https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything-except-the-outgroup/
Well, yes, and I take the whole "heretics are more hated than infidels" observation to be the same distinction.
I wouldn't say so.
Infidels in this case are the far group but when the infidels actually are right beside you they don't become more palitable than the heretic, in fact it's the opposite. When a group of infidels become available as an outgroup rather than a fargroup it frequently forces the nearby outgroups to band together against the new outgroup. This happens on the national levels in the case of regular wars as well.
That's not quite what I'm talking about in the specific example of myself - I meet a lot more Muslims in person than I do Mormons. It's the identity claim that gets under my skin.
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Without hate speech, or with the right kind of hate speech?
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