Post 38 -- A brief response to the SPJ AirPlay

I came across SPJ AirPlay's post about violence and silence. Rather than piece it apart, which has been done by many, I left the following reply, which, I think, definitively ends the responsibility of #GamerGate individuals to explain where Ms. Quinn fits into the whole story:

I am confused on why an individual can unironically ask about unrelated matters and think it merits a response. It is clear what #GamerGate is about, and has been since the start: ethics in (gaming) journalism. Why must we account for events unrelated to that point? We are never asked about Middle-eastern terrorism, as it is not connected with the aims or ambitions of #GamerGate.

While Ms. Quinn was somewhat involved in the beginning, it requires only a cursory analysis of her relationship with Mr. Grayson to understand where the ethical violations took place, of which Mr. Grayson bears the responsibility for. Even as the eyes of the #GamerGate community turned to Kotaku’s Editor in Chief Stephen Totilo, reporters and bloggers from outside of the whole event were inexplicably focused on Ms. Quinn.

As such, the #GamerGate community was not and is not responsible for the interested journalists macabre fascination with Ms. Quinn. In other words, the discussion about Ms. Quinn, it’s continual talk about her whenever a newcomer wishes to talk about #GamerGate, and the many ignorant or spurious claims made by her and her ilk was born from and is perpetuated by curious outsiders. It is not a sin which #GamerGate must account for!

Post 37 -- The Reddit Revolt

Yesterday, Reddit admins posted an announced in regards to policy changes around how harassment and harassing subreddits would be handled. The most salient event was the banning of the subreddit /r/fatpeoplehate, a space where pictures of the obese were openly mocked by the community.

Reddit claims individuals within the subreddit were actively harassing moderators and administrators of the image hosting site Imgur, to which Reddit ostensibly acts as a portal for. The harassment began after moderators began removing images posted under the fatpeoplehate tag. True to the internet, people's personal information was found and some form of abuse began. Or at least that is what is alleged. I am attempting to find some evidence of this beyond the vacuous hearsay of the web, but so far have been unable to find anything.

I do want to respond to a few points made by the administrators in the announcement thread. First, there is the comment which helped me find them:

"Our goal is to enable as many people as possible to have authentic conversations and share ideas and content on an open platform."

Look, I've never posted in r/fatpeoplehate and never visited it, but can we drop the charade and everyone just come out and admit that all this is about making reddit's user base more palatable for advertisers? 

Coca-cola doesn't want to be associated with r/jailbait or whatever, I get that. Reddit needs to monetize because it's not profitable, I get that too. 

But let's stop pretending this is about ivory-tower ideals of community and free speech. Reddit has never been about free speech. Shadow-bans aren't the tool of choice for those who support free speech. And the isolated-island format with moderators having dictatorial control over their potentially-walled gardens hampers an honest exchange of ideas in favour of increased groupthink and radicalized discourse. Free speech and "authentic conversations" (whatever the fuck that means) isn't out there waiting in the wings for r/fatpeoplehate to be banned. Advertisers are. They don't want their ads accidentally popping up on r/ihatejews or something and then a media shitstorm erupting, so the admins need to sanitize. 

If this was about cleaning up reddit's act, then r/coontown and r/rapingwomen would be gone, too. But neither of those subs made it to the front page in recent weeks and r/fatpeoplehate did. It's so obviously about what makes them look bad to the media, and Yishan acted in the same way during his tenure. 

Ellen Pao is a lawyer and an MBA: you don't bring someone like that on board to create an ideal utopia. You call in the MBA's when you need to turn something that was idealistic into a profit stream. "Authentic conversations" is the most business-school phrase I've heard in quite some time. How about the admins treat us like adults instead of like idiots? 

edit: Guys please don't downvote the responses from the admins, they're relevant to the conversation and should be visible. At least make it easier for others to find them.
other edit: kn0thing on free speech
also edit: krispykrackers on SRS
such edit: sporkicide on SRS
other other edit: ekjp on bans
also also edit: 5days on bans

Now to the fun parts of this. I will take them in reverse order. 5days on bans

Systematic and/or continued actions to torment or demean someone in a way that would make a reasonable person (1) conclude that reddit is not a safe platform to express their ideas or participate in the conversation, or (2) fear for their safety or the safety of those around them. We used the behavior in the subreddits to determine the banning.

5days is stating the rules used by Reddit to ensure the platform is welcoming and allows for open discussion. The two-faced vomit that has come forth is a different sort of either double speak or idiocy; 5days is arbitrarily admitting to using this rule to set to remove subreddits which might be unwelcoming or which might lead to a safety risk for individuals. /r/fatpeoplehate was not a great place to go if you were obese and particularly sensitive about it. What about /r/coontown, though? A subreddit entirely dedicated to the maligning of blacks as "the Chimpire". At least there is some humour in the group, as the current sidebar has Ellen Pao's posted comment, which I will get to in a moment.

Does 5days believe that /r/coontown is a safe space for blacks to go and voice their opinions? Of course not! That racist corner of Reddit brings individuals together who hate blacks. Those individuals have a safe platform to express their views, which were not dissimilar to that of fatpeoplehate, where we can easily swap out "black" with "fat".

This rule can also be arbitrarily applied to any space which might be difficult for a dissenting voice to come in. Of course, the reasonable response would be a suggestion that, if you're black, don't bother wasting your time in /r/coontown, and instead spend time in other parts of the site. Does every subreddit have to be a safe space for everyone? Atheism would be gone because it's not a safe place for Christians or Muslims; /r/Christianity would be gone because it's not a safe space for atheists. It's the snake which eats its own tail.

ekjp on bans

We're banning behavior, not ideas. While we don't agree with the content of the subreddit, we don't have reports of it harassing individuals.

What a glorious quote from our dear leader. Does it have to be actively harassing individuals or can be passively harassing an entire race or culture?  This is the wonderful quote which exists in /r/coontown's sidebar currently. The idea of being racist is just fine by Reddit's admins, just so long as you don't act on it in some nebulous way. If the problem was the behaviour, why not just layout the clear evidence--names can be redacted if you must--which transparently shows the negative behaviour which took place and resulted in an entire community being shut down. It's not a stretch to assume that, if the evidence did exist, it would have been posted by now in an announcement of its own to clear up the confusion.

Obfuscation aside, the double-standard of not being allowed to hold the idea that obesity is unhealthy and worthy of mockery (just as all things in life are) and being allowed to post the racist tripe is damning of the Reddit admins. The sword of power is wielded as such to strike without notice, inspiring compliance by fear.

Because I am not familiar with /r/shitredditsays, its history of abuse, or how their standing now is still in-bounds after the recent goalpost shifting, I am going to skip those two comments. Read them from the announcement post, though.

kn0thing on free speech

Look, I've never posted in r/fatpeoplehate and never visited it, but can we drop the charade and everyone just come out and admit that all this is about making reddit's user base more palatable for advertisers?

No. Steve and I did not create reddit to be a platform for communities to target + harass individuals. It's really that simple.

No, but it appears that by the administrators' complicity with allowing spaces like /r/coontown to exist, they have created a platform which allows for the positive conversation around why it's great to be a racist. Does that make Reddit, as a whole, a racist site? Surely not; that's not the point to be made here. Rather, it's taking the oleaginous words of a founder to task over the stupidity of banning one subreddit over another based on non-producible evidence of harassment.

Reddit will kill itself with these sorts of actions. They are not transparent, leaving a myriad of communities in a state of nervous energy. Who will go next, because of some tangential piece of hearsay which might damn a single user who may be connected to one post on one subreddit? That is the fear used to control. It works on children and the credulous. It does not work on me. It will not work on most adults.

This has been an unedited rant. @nrokchi

Post 36 -- Random standouts from a debate

The 2007 debate between Christopher Hitchens and Alistair McGrath had, as most well structured debates do, a few smart questions. I cannot and will never be able to do better than the great late Hitch, but there was a question which sparked my thoughts while also not being full satisfied with Hitchens's response.

McGrath makes a point where the human sacrifice of Jesus as a means of absolving all of their sins, past, present, and future, is an invitation for us to accept. That is is not imposed upon us.

This here is the height of sophistry. It almost falls into the realm of Poe's Law. It is so extreme in its dogma that it would be impossible to tell if it is the unvarnished truth of a true believer or a complete satire. Not imposed upon us? That's rich. These are words which can only be spoken by a man who will lie about knowing what god thinks and then humble himself by saying, "We're all only interpreters."

The Christian reasons is as follows: Jesus died for your sins. These are sins which you were born with. You have no say in the matter of whether or not you have sin. It has already been decided that you have and there's no protesting it. Lucky for you, God has given you the free will to choose: support his sacrificed son and be washed clean of your sins or reject the heavenly and divine offer and suffer an eternity of torment. Again, you cannot argue with the sins you were born with. You have them and now you must choose: the light or hell?

It is a sickening game to play with the weak minded adults in our communities. The low standing of any human who plays this game with children, though, is something almost incomprehensible. Of course, we can now comprehend this, as we have seen priests who preach this fear while also sexually abusing children. That's right, as these men know of their sin and have accepted Jesus, purifying them of all their wrong actions.

Freedom of choice is something that can only exist when there is no act of coercion taking place. Philosophers have recognized this for centuries. To have an expression of free will, we must have no burdens on our choices beyond our own assessments of the outcomes. There is no free will when you threaten violence! "It puts the lotion in the basket or it gets the hose again." It's not a free choice to put the lotion into the basket as the consequence for not doing so is influencing the decision. The same applies to the question of free will to accept or reject Jesus as a savior. The threat of eternal, everlasting anguish is a coercive measure to ensure people will comply. But not only comply, but follow with the intent on getting others around them to do it too. Why? It's fine if you avoid the punishment, but do you want to see your spouse? Your parents? Your children? Absolutely not.

After all, you cannot argue about your original sin. You cannot avoid it. You can only deal with it by accepting a human sacrifice or suffering forever. It may not be imposed on us, but it surely does have the odds stacked in one direction. Mind you, most of this was not an issue until Jesus came along. Before Jesus, when you sinned, God was quick to punish you in the only life you had. It took Jesus to bring about the afterlife and the threat of a "second death". It wasn't until Jesus that we had everlasting Hell to send those who disagreed with the many contradictory statements made. Even with Jesus, where you can be forgiven of all your sins and errors and mistakes, there was still one thing you could never be forgiven for: unbelief. If you rejected the whole lot you were again sentenced to an afterlife of mutilation and pain. What kind of just being would impose that on its creation?

Sorry, was that "impose"? I mean, force its creation to choose. No, I will not have it for myself. I reject the very premise that comes from. I am not born into sin because of the acts of some long past man or woman. I do not even inherit the sins of my parents. No one does and we would do better to remember that when filthy faith comes knocking.

This is a weak game which is rigged from the start; failure to adhere to the rules is not a no-contest, but an automatic loss. Call it out for what it is: another tactic used to trick and trap the credulous into a system of belief that will never fully satisfy them. That is, not unless everyone else also believes it.

This has been a unedited rant. @nrokchi

Post 35 -- Social Justice Has Achieved Its Own Negation

With Hillary Clinton running for the Democratic nomination for the 2016 Presidential Election, I went ahead and picked up Christopher Hitchens's No One Left To Lie To: The Triangulations of William Jefferson Clinton. The original purpose of this was to discover any actions of Mrs. Clinton which may be pertinent to her running for President--and bringing Mr. Clinton back into the White House in the process. The term triangulation refers to the promise of one action and following up with a second action which purposely fails to achieve the original promise.

Then I come across Arthur Miller's piece in the New York Times from October 15, 1998. In his Op-Ed, Miller compares the Salem witch trails of mythological witch hunting of Satan-tempted towns folk with the impeachment process of Mr. Clinton. Miller writes, and perhaps my second favourite part of this article:

"It was a volcanic explosion of repressed steam that gave people license to speak openly in court of what formerly would have been shamefully caged in their hearts -- for example, the woman who testified that her neighbor flew in through her window one balmy night and lay upon her and had his way. Suddenly this was godly testimony, and the work of heaven was to kill the neighbor."

On its own it illustrates the insanity of the process of doling out God's justice on credulous people--as if individual mortals had the power to adjudicate the lives in totality of the people who were believed to have contact with a never seen, only spoken of, dual-phallused demon. Miller, however, uses this quip to undercut--a spectacular stroke which took more turf than ball--the "fiercely exact" Starr report. What's missed, and perhaps this speaks to his age, was the difference between the doomsday mythology and circumstantial accusations and that of non-circumstantial DNA evidence.

As not to be out-done by over soaking the already soggy cloth of the Salem witch hunts metaphor, Miller brings up a quote by Toni Morrison. He writes as follows:

"Then there is the color element. Mr. Clinton, according to Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist, is our first black President, the first to come from the broken home, the alcoholic mother, the under-the-bridge shadows of our ranking systems. He is also the most relaxed and unaffected with black people, whose company and culture he clearly enjoys."

I hunted down the original quote. Ms. Morrison published the piece in The New Yorker October 5, 1998. She wrote:

"Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas."

I am unsure how you can mince this up to claim Ms. Morrison was not attempting to claim Mr. Clinton as black. Even when writing with a passive voice, "murmurs" from the next table style, it was laid out clear. This is our first black President. Let us quickly compare what was said by Ms. Morrison to that of Mr. Miller. Rather than a "single-parent home" (Morrison), we have an "alcoholic mother" and "broken home" (Miller); "McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving" (Morrison) becomes the malicious shadowy "under-the-bridge" motif. What Ms. Morrison describes as tropes, leaving it open for whatever post-modernist lens you wish to apply, Mr. Miller instead makes stereotypical character claims. This leaves Hitchens to conclude, "political correctness has achieved its own negation."

The era of political correctness has since grown to becomes the mutli-headed hydra of "social justice", the Orwellian term which speaks of grand improvements but has utterly failed after being co-opted by narcissists. Do we have the Arthur Miller moment in social justice to claim it has negated itself? Of course we have.

Social justice is an amorphous idea which aims to bring greater equality. This does not necessarily mean the tide which raises all boats. While some might believe that to be the case, we must recognize that, for example, the pursuit of economic equality will come at a cost to some. Economist and American Enterprise Institute President Arthur Brooks believes social justice is ultimately about income redistribution. This has some validity, but is tangential to this conversation. The social justice ideology, however, is vastly different in practice than in theory. After all, who can be against something as noble as social justice? We all want justice for ourselves and our communities. In practice we see a different result.

Bahar Mustafa, Diversity Office at Goldsmiths University in the United Kingdom, describes herself as an "ethnic minority woman". Following this statement, she defiantly proclaims she cannot be sexist or racist against white men as women of colour cannot benefit from being racist or sexist against white men. Here we have a social justice push to bring up the voices and lived experiences of all people--unless you are a white man, then you do not need that platform. No, no; it's not because you do not have valid lived experiences with the immense social pressure to succeed (which drives men to vastly higher rates of suicide), but because you are white and are male. Any understanding of racism or sexism would make Ms. Mustafa's statement vapid and longing for oxygen; to judge a person's place in society or experiences solely on the basis of their gender or race is by definition sexist and racist.

The United Kingdom is not done representing the downward spiral of logic: This is what a feminist looks like t-shirt debacle is one of the top contenders in a rich field of competition for both irony and hypocrisy. The simple of aim of throwing a piece of cloth of your body was to show that anyone could be a feminist, akin to throwing a cross around your neck to show you're a Christian (of unknown denomination). This self-righteous rag of the faith was sold--or, perhaps, 'tithed'--to interested parties for £45 ($71.98 USD; now on sale internationally for about  $20 USD). The textile company Compagnie Mauricienne de Textile in collaboration with Elle magazine put on the stunt.

Surely a shirt with a strong political message in regards to the fight for equality would be produced in equitable conditions? Sorely mistaken, dear reader. The small island nation and former French colony of Mauritius is the home of the production facility owned by Compagnie Mauricienne de Textile. The women working in the facility earned the equivalent of 62p (or $0.99) an hour. The idea of bringing up the oppressed with economic equality does not extend to the natural beauty of Mauritius, it seems.

The abyss is not done staring back: "race relations". The Young Turks, a YouTube avant garde news channel, brought the discussion to a new place when 'reporting' on a New York private school. Fieldston Lower School, beginning at grade three, separates children into "racial affinity groups" during classes so the children can discuss their experiences with their race--eight year old children will talk frankly about their experiences? It would seem to me that focusing on the race as being the defining factor of one's lived experiences only magnifies the impact of race, a great loss to the richness of individuality. This in of it self would be an auto-negation of social justice, as the universal principles of equality transcend race. Nonetheless, the ravenous darkness creeps forward.

Both guests support the idea of segregating children. Becca Frucht and Ana Kasparian give a glowing example of Wilkinson's Law, whereby forcing dogmatic belief in these young children in regards to race is the best approach to beating out other dogmatic views from taking hold; "I think it's definitely important to reach children when their ideology is still malleable." The demagoguery of the far left is self consuming: advocate for progressive equality, but do so by targeting children with messages of societal constructed differences between races and genders and loudly claim a managerial role because the parents are racists. In case the horse was not high enough, the recommendation is made to include parents into this (re-) education program.

The drive for equality peaked prior to the ubiquity of the internet. Communication has brought in more voices and more spaces for those voices, but has resulted in a lower quality product. Rights are universal and are not contingent upon one's race, gender, wealth, or nationality. Forcing the conversation to be about race or gender elevates the role those play in how others view larger, complex issues. In the process, the emphasis on a dermatological subdivision or whether or not you have a Y chromosome justifies the elimination of the non-preferred group. Ms. Mustafa, The Young Turks, and over priced t-shirts are only a few examples of the current trend: social justice has achieved its own negation.