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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29716 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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From the brief reading I did last night, it appears they were banned by a possibly automated process after insisting on linking to real-time location doxing, including offsite, after an incident in which Musk's child was threatened by a possibly crazy person.

Per normal standards as I have come to understand them:

  1. Twitter is a private company.

  2. Free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.

  3. The people involved were directly encouraging stochastic terrorism, which is not protected speech.

Twitter is a private company.

Free speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences.

The people involved were directly encouraging stochastic terrorism, which is not protected speech.

I so want to rub this into the faces of people who bombarded us with that inane messaging for years now. And apart from satisfying my bloodlust, I think it would serve a useful purpose too: it would devalue moronic arguments like these, get the marginal person to think, and taxes the people who have been poisoning the well of public debate over the years.

Thing is, I can't. The people in my personal life aren't online enough to have noticed - and when they do, it will be sanewashed and 3 steps removed from the original incident to a degree that it won't be recognizable anymore; I have been banned from reddit for wrongthink and facebook fights carry too much of a potential professional cost.

Anecdotal evidence, I know. But the hallway monitors of the world have very effectively managed to never be confronted with their own hypocrisy.

I was fine with Twitter pre-Musk banning whomever they liked and I am fine with Twitter post-Musk banning whomever they like. Twitter is not the public square in my opinion and it can control what people can say and who can say it as much as it likes. It can take sides and it can be as transparent or not as it wants. If Musk wants to ban everyone to the left of the secret love child of Thatcher and Reagan that is entirely his prerogative.

Having said that I have derived some little dark amusement at Elon's public free speech absolutist attitude colliding with the reality of a social network, like Wil E. Coyote running into a painted on tunnel. Censorship is a tool and like every tool whether it is good or bad depends on context. I am glad he is learning that censorship is at times a positive thing, because this is an attitude I hold myself. I think a man as smart as Musk should have already learned this lesson a long time ago, but I will take what I can get when people get closer towards my own belief set. He may choose to censor different things than I would in his position but it means in some ways our values are now more closely aligned than before.

It may be "fair" on some most basic level of fairness to invoke "your rules applied fairly". But it is not honest, not when you spent all your time speaking out against those rules, while pretending the issue was with the rules and not that it wasn't you applying them.

I don’t see how this is applicable to me at all, you have it exactly backwards. I don’t think Musk banned these people for badthink, I think he did it for reasonable security reasons. I'm simply noting why every person whining about this is a disingenuous hypocrite, and, per their own standards, an enabler of stochastic terrorism.

I can agree with that. Musk can and is justified in doing that, but you bet I'll hold any previous and future free speech absolutism of his against him, as well as of his supporters against them.

I mean, maybe. But that cuts both ways when the people falling on their sword to expose Elon's "hypocrisy" spent the last 5 years screeching about the intersection of speech and safety, and the "hypocrisy" they are exposing involves doxing a family's whereabouts after there was already an attack.

It's hypocrisy the whole way down.

He did not seem crazy at all. He’s a left wing protestor/terrorist/insurrectionist or whatever word we’re using now.

Ah, that detail was missing from what I had seen. So, firmly in the established bounds of stochastic terrorism, then.

Am I reading you wrong, or do you mean there's a video out there?

There is, Musk actually posted it

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603235998263123969

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