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| 3.95
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| unknown
| Mar 07, 2024
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liked it
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1) In warfare human beings discover a capability for violence they never knew they had; so long as it’s sanctioned by the state they can bomb and kill
1) In warfare human beings discover a capability for violence they never knew they had; so long as it’s sanctioned by the state they can bomb and kill with ease. Now social media has revealed something else we weren’t aware of - a propensity in many people for wild untethered beliefs and uncouth speech that has come as a shock. We have all found out that for many people (your son, your dear little grandmamma, the hairdresser, the bassist in your third favourite band) there is absolutely no notion of the objective reality we ourselves always assumed; they actually never did believe in any of these concepts of democracy and liberal government and rule of law that the rest of us have been taking for granted, they think it’s all a puppeteered sham and we are the sheeple being herded about. And it’s never not been a sham. 2) But wait - if the conspiracies unearthed by the theorists are so vast, complex and powerful how are they ever to be defeated? What would success look like to a conspiracy believer? 3) One conspiracy pusher explains the difference between him and Marianna : ”You believe all people are good. I believe almost everyone is bad.” [image] 4) Marianna asks herself why she doesn’t believe in conspiracies: At the heart of it is a simple answer: trust. I have faith in a system and institutions that have no on the whole let me down, plus a doctor for a dad and a mum who was once a nurse. OMG, this sounds truly naïve, and I can hear even non-truther readers failing to stifle guffaws. And yet, I agree with her. I believe in double blind clinical trials, I believe in peer-reviewed scientific papers, I believe that the government is real and that I and my fellow citizens can throw the rascals out when we vote, and get some new rascals in. 5) But! If you oppose conspiracy theories you are quite often in the sorry unpleasant position of having to defend the findings of the FBI and CIA etc about such matters as 9/11 and JFK. It’s invidious. [image] 6) The conspiracy believers will take the official version of a particular event and give it unrelenting scrutiny and dismantle it and mock it. The arguments against the official version, however, are given zero scrutiny, they are instantly accepted. 7) You might think that the conspiracy believers get involved in their campaigns in order to feel better, to gain what they call “agency” these days. But you’d be wrong (I was). The true believers become even more powerless, because ultimately thy can’t resolve the fabricated plot they think they’ve uncovered. They also find themselves exploited by new powerful people – the leaders of this conspiracy world. That was an interesting insight, on page 46. Unfortunately on page 47 we read : Conspiracy theories and falsehoods help believers feel powerful in a world where lots of people feel powerless. So, er, which is it? 8) Isaac Newton was an alchemist and Conan Doyle believed in spiritualism, and also fairies. Some scientists are full of irrational thought. 9) The Russian state conspires to promote conspiracy theories about the West, NATO, Ukraine, etc. A real conspiracy encourages fake conspiracies. 10) The last part of this book is very repetetetive. Marianna sets up a number of fake accounts with the Big Five (Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter/X, Tiktok) using various profiles and checks what stuff their algorithms send to her. No surprise, as, for example, a profile for a fake 14 year old boy, after he clicka and likes some videos, is quickly sent by Tiktok lots of videos glorifying gang life and knife carrying. Or a profile of a concerned 40 year old woman is sent antivax stuff. This is the stuff the companies say they don’t allow. When Marianna shows them proof that their vetting procedures are not working, they refuse an interview and fob her off with a bland statement. “Snapchat strictly prohibits bullying, harassment and any illegal activity…[we] provide confidential in-app reporting tools”. Marianna is contemptuous in a polite sort of way : These are the sorts of responses I often receive from social media sites. They are practically interchangeable, and often describe policies that my reporting contradicts or reveals to be inadequately enforced. 11) Conspiracy theories rely on the belief that many many people are almost superhuman, capable of plans that would be incredibly difficult or even impossible to pull off. When backed into a corner, conspiracy theorists afford magical powers to the cabal of powerful, corrupt people they believe are pulling all the strings. 12 ) Between 1 January 2023 and the end of June that year the BBC received 14,488 warnings about abusive social media posts relating to their personnel. Of this number, 11,771 relate to me. Because Marianna has been exposing online conspiracy trollers for a few years. They know who she is and they hate her. FURTHER READING I have already read : Troll Hunting: Inside the World of Online Hate and its Human Fallout by Ginger Gorman This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture by Whitney Phillips The Other Pandemic: How QAnon Contaminated the World by James Ball These are all well worth it, but of course the conspiracy theories of yesteryear begin to look quaint. [image] ...more |
Notes are private!
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Mar 09, 2024
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Mar 11, 2024
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Mar 05, 2024
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Kindle Edition
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| 1526642506
| 9781526642509
| B0BSKYWS4M
| 3.91
| 212
| Jul 20, 2023
| Jul 20, 2023
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really liked it
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From out of the dank unregarded thickets of the internet it came, from the giggling hyperactive mischievous brains of highly techliterate 15 year old
From out of the dank unregarded thickets of the internet it came, from the giggling hyperactive mischievous brains of highly techliterate 15 year old boys who were making stuff up on 4chan which was a place of great unseemliness, not that I would know; they knew they weren’t being serious – well, not serious-serious - they weren’t serious about anything. I mean – there was no vast conspiratorial cabal in charge of everything, but it was such fun to pretend there was, and hey you know, maybe, I’m not saying it is, but maybe it’s true, who knows, not me for sure, but saying all this stuff seems to annoy the very people we love to annoy, it’s the elaborate internet version of ringing an old fart’s doorbell and running down the road. But the thing is, when this laughing gas escaped from its 4chan/8chan messageboards of icky sickness (many rape jokes, apparently), what do you know, people on facebook started taking some of it literally. And then Fox News! Now it really got funny! We couldn’t believe it! Let’s make some other wild shit up! And they found that they could not make up shit that was too wild for people to believe. Because people believe anything! Anything! Not quite core to the conspiracy, but widely believed, was that the cabal was heavily involved in large-scale child abuse, quite probably for satanic or other ritual purposes Leading to the stroke of genius that goes by the name of Pizzagate. You like that one? What about this: Marjorie Taylor Greene [Representative for the 14th district of Georgia] in 2018 wrote that Californian wildfires had been deliberately started by a “Jewish space laser” Yeah, throw that one onto the pile along with 5G and anti-vaxxing. It’s all true you know. They never went to the moon! You know why? There isn’t a moon! [image] IF I ONLY HAD A BRAIN So this QAnon thing – it is the very definition of Anarchy. It’s a movement with no leaders, no fixed beliefs, no holy scriptures, it booms along and bits fall off it very frequently – like when a prediction that Trump will be reinstated doesn’t happen – yeah, didn’t happen, so what, we’re now waiting for the reappearance of John F Kennedy Jr – I know, the MSM say he died in 1999 but he didn’t and he’s back and he’s one of us – and anyway we’re all now busy doing research into the connection between Anthony Fauci and the Wuhan laboratory that deliberately started the plandemic – wait, maybe that was Hunter Biden… or Hillary Clinton – hold on, aren’t they the same person? My head hurts, I can’t keep all this straight. I need to lie down. But no time to weaken, you have to be online 25 hours a day or you’re gonna miss the next livestreamed massacre courtesy one of your little QAnon pixies (3 QAnon-related mass shootings in 2019 including the Christchurch mosque attack). Because although the whole thing started as a lot of crazy humour, when the racists and nazis joined the party it wasn’t that funny anymore. James Ball is a great guide through all this madness. Without overburdening us outsiders (who’ve never before heard of MyPillow or LARPing or Frazzledrip and only barely heard of gamergate and The Great Reset with too much detail -but there will still be too many obscure names and acronyms for some, it just cannot be avoided-) he pulls together and makes sense – in a way, in a way – of the means and methods of this amorphous nightmarish alternate-reality choose-your-own-plot do-your-own-research world we now inhabit. [image] He says stuff like The idea that there’s an elite running the show is something almost all of us believe to some extent – not least because it’s at least partly true He says that the MSM response to this farrago of poisonous fantasy is debunking and fact checking and is a total non-starter because there is no debunking or fact-checking these people, they are immune, you can’t prove a negative and with QAnon types there is no proof you could give them that they would believe. As an example, take the #SavetheChildren campaign, a QAnon offshoot. The statistic bandied about by QAnon and QAnon-adjacent influencers is that “365,348 children went missing in 2020” as QAnon congresswoman Lauren Boebert once tweeted, citing the stat to the FBI. “You haven’t heard a word from the media about it.” JB says – this number is accurate! Yes! But it actually refers to the number of missing person reports about children for the total year, not the number who are actually missing. Considerably more than 99% of missing children in the US are found alive and even in the most high-risk category – abduction by strangers or by a family member with an outstanding felony warrant – 97% of children are recovered alive. I think Lauren Boebert would probably wave away those stats as fake news. Even though they are from the same source that she uses. JB says So embedded are QAnon’s ideas in the conspiratorial corners of the internet that there are now hundreds of thousands or people who subscribe, at least in part, to QAnon without ever having heard of Q or QAnon itself. He says In the US, a poll taken by YouGov as early as May 2020 found that 44% of Republican voters believed Bill Gates was plotting to use Covid-19 as a pretext to plant tracking microchips in billions of people around the world. He explains how the wild ‘n’ crazy turbulence of Trump AND Covid rebooted the whole mania, and he pulls in, of course, the QAnon low-point culmination on 6 January 2021. Actually to discuss this whole giant QAnon conspiracy thing you have to rant on about so many loony things you get to start sounding as mad as the people who believe it! [image] THREE THINGS (OF SO MANY) I STILL DON’T UNDERSTAND I didn’t get where the obsession with Hillary Clinton came from. I don’t understand that if the deep state stole the election why they won’t steal the next one too, so what might be the point of Trump running in 2024? He will lose, the deep state will see to it. I still didn’t understand quite how the conspiracy believing MSM hating red pill eaters think our lives and our countries work. Because if there is a giant elite running everything, then democracy is a sham, justice is a sham, all those fine words mean nothing. Doesn’t matter which party wins an election, the elite will be pulling all the strings. They will continue to inject us all with vaccines to turn us into zombies or radiate us with 5G to turn us into… zombies… or zap us with a space laser to turn us into… zombies. How come they haven’t done all this already? I don’t understand. Oh boy, actually I don’t understand any of this. Recommended for masochists who enjoy feeling their brain melting. ...more |
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Jul 19, 2023
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Kindle Edition
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| 0525655115
| 9780525655114
| 0525655115
| 3.80
| 11,672
| Apr 25, 2023
| Apr 25, 2023
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liked it
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This book is half excellent and half terrible. First, it’s a great subject, horrible people who make great art is something that bothers all of us her
This book is half excellent and half terrible. First, it’s a great subject, horrible people who make great art is something that bothers all of us here I think. Claire Dederer asks all the right questions and rounds up all the usual suspects, Roman Polanski, Woody Allen, Hemingway, Picasso, JK Rowling…. Huh? What’s that you say? The author of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Incorrect Opinions? This is not an exhaustive trawl through the long list of awful men, so no R Kelly, Harvey Weinstein, Chuck Berry, Bill Cosby, etc etc. And for the most part the details of the alleged bad behavior are not described, it’s assumed you already know. CD says clearly that this is a book about the audience not the artist, about what we are supposed to do now that we found out about ---------- (fill in your favourite painter/singer/director/actor/author). I cannot refrain from pointing out the wretched irony of JK Rowling being considered monstrous these days. Most of the male monsters were raping and abusing girls and women, of course, and she (misguidedly or not) is all about trying to protect the rights of girls and women. We live in strange times. LITTLE LO The chapter on Nabokov is called “The Anti-Monster” because Vlad himself was in no way shape or form a monster but he wrote an appallingly accurate book about Humbert Humbert, the pedophile, leading CD to worry Only a monster could know a monster so well. Surely Lolita must be some kind of mirror of its author?... Just how did Nabokov come to understand Humbert so perfectly? Yeah, Vlad. Answers please. According to your biographer, you didn’t do anything nasty with little girls. We accept that. But you sure seem to have thought a lot about it. There’s a strange side issue here : this book is about 50% memoir, and not so coincidentally, that’s the 50% I disliked. I wanted to get back to the nitty gritty, and CD was waffling about left liberal life in the Pacific North West. One autobiographical detail jumped right out and whacked me about the gizzard, however : I was thirteen. I knew Lolita was officially an important book, but it was about a girl my age… I thought I might give Lolita a whirl… 13? This was some kind of madly advanced reader… I was still reading William books and starting on Ray Bradbury at that age. I would have made zero sense of Vlad’s fantabulous serpentine bejewelled sentences. I wouldn’t have made it to page two, but CD finished the whole thing. I am in awe. This is a most interesting chapter, a nice addition to lolitological Studies, but every time you are thinking this book has now found its groove CD comes out with some highly dubious apercu that calls forth a groan or a puzzled frown : Lolita is the scorched-earth offensive of pedophile novels (and sometimes, it seems, of novels in general) FEMALE MONSTERS CD meditates on whether women writers need to become more monstrous. The ruthless selfishness of the men is easy to see and involves tireless sexual appetites and endless expectations of a flock of female servants scurrying around. The selfishness of women is different – the only examples CD gives us is of women who abandon their children. Muriel Spark, Joni Mitchell, Doris Lessing, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath (who only abandoned her children when she abandoned herself) – oh, and there’s Valerie Solanas, who gets a chapter. (“Once you start quoting Solanas, it’s hard to stop, largely because she is often so right”). I was very happy to see her included. Yes, she was a monster! As were my other two favourite radical feminists, Andrea Dworkin and Aileen Wuornos (Aileen the more practical of the three). Of these beleaguered women artists, CD writes the best sentence in the book: What is feminism if not a daily struggle against forces that are so large, so consuming, that those forces are invisible to – forgotten, taken for granted by – the very people wielding them? Yes indeed. THE WRAP UP An interesting, frustrating, often aggravating first attempt to answer the question can we still watch Manhattan or Chinatown, can we still listen to Kind of Blue or River Deep Mountain High, can we still enjoy Les Demoiselles D'Avignon or Where do we Come From? What are We? The answer in the end is : You are not responsible for solving this unreconciled contradiction. Well, now you know. ...more |
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May 24, 2023
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May 26, 2023
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Apr 28, 2023
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| 0525574824
| 9780525574828
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| 3.79
| 4,689
| Jul 17, 2018
| Jul 17, 2018
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really liked it
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Update - I stumbled over a quote that gave me a chill. Here it is : Sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, I would meet wi Update - I stumbled over a quote that gave me a chill. Here it is : Sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, I would meet with the most outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious that they were parroting some piece of nonsense they had heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but on such occasions one was met with such a stare of incredulity, such a shock of silence, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty, that one realised how useless it was even to try to make contact with a mind which had become warped and for whom the facts had become what Hitler and Goebbels said they were. - William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1960) It fits today's situation all too well. ****** it often happens, that if a Lie be believ’d only for an Hour, it has done its Work, and there is no farther occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it. Jonathan Swift, 1710 The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. W B Yeats, 1919 ** Trump will not be back! I myself am a very accurate political predictor – I said Trump could never ever win the election in 2016 and in the same year I said that the UK would never ever vote for Brexit in the referendum – so whatever I think will happen you can guarantee the opposite will. Therefore because I think Trump will definitely run again in 2024 that means he won’t! This little book is very helpful in trying to wrap your poor throbbing head around all our manic and social political chaos, in which the two opposing sides deny each others’ grasp on reality whilst many alt-right jokesters cackle that there is no such thing as reality anyway. J G Ballard told us this was gonna happen way back in the 1960s. He wouldn’t be the slightest bit surprised. GOOGLE MAPS AS A METAPHOR I found out that if you look at Google maps in India or China you will see something different than if you look at them in Pakistan or Taiwan. The way Google gets round the tricky issue of territorial disputes is to show each country the border it wants to see. So in Pakistan Google maps shows all of Kashmir to be inside Pakistan, and in India Kashmir is all Indian. Simple! Avoids so much hassle! Give people the reality they want. BUT….I MISS REALITY Trump constantly accused the press & tv which he called the main-stream media (implication: controlled by the deep state to keep the sheeple pacified) of broadcasting fake news. At the same time he referred to a terrorist attack in Sweden that didn’t happen and his counsellor referred to another fictitious event called the Bowling Green Massacre, and none of that mattered. You could fact-check these people all day long (and people did) and to the voters it didn’t matter. It was just mood music. Whilst Democrats jumped around exposing his untruths he knew that most voters didn’t care if something was factually correct or not. If it sounded right to them, then it happened. Or it didn’t. Whatever. Likewise in Britain when Boris used to go round making up nonexistent ridiculous rules imposed by the EU on hapless British citizens he understood the same thing, it didn’t matter if it was true or not. Occasionally you get a backwards somersault happening : in the recent Alex Jones trial he had said the Sandy Hook shooting was fake news and had never happened and he had to admit in court that it did. Of course he said that he never said it didn’t happen, he was just posing some alternative facts, asking some questions, presenting some independent research or some such bullshit. Maybe he didn’t say any such thing but it really doesn’t matter if he did or not, he might have. That’s good enough for me. I can do it too. HOW DEEP IS THE DEEP STATE ANYWAY? We now have the strange spectacle of many American citizens despising and distrusting their own government (and clinging fiercely to the second amendment in order, I suppose, to be able to defend their homes when the deep state sends in the army to kill all patriots like them. But don’t these patriots actually venerate the armed forces, those defenders of the state? Yes they do! There doesn’t seem to be any…logic…here….) Trump himself was at war with the FBI if I recall correctly. Has Trump ever said how he grappled with the deep state when he became president? Oh wait – the deep state fixed the election and got rid of him. Of course. That’s the story. Better remember that, Donald. They did it once and they’ll do it again! EVIDENCE We’re always told to check facts and don’t believe anyone until you have and so forth but that’s a counsel of perfection. If you ever read any stuff about the JFK assassination you will know what rabbit holes look like. The arcane intricacies of the Single Bullet Theory, to take just one example : you have experts over here with their 40 minute youtube videos, and experts over there with their entire books. If you’re not prepared to devote months to figuring out if that one bullet could have done all that damage then maybe you’re not allowed an opinion. After that we can begin consideration of the Zapruder film, frame by frame. There goes another six months. This explains partly why people are happy to believe stuff if it feels right. No one has the time for the details, except the true cranks. DEMOCRACY Steve Bannon : Anger and fear is what gets people to the polls. HANNAH ARENDT Michiko Kakutani unearthed a great quote from Hannah Arendt from 1951 : Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness. So : this is a short book which asks many difficult questions. Recommended. ...more |
Notes are private!
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1
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Aug 04, 2022
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Aug 20, 2022
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Apr 02, 2022
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Hardcover
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| 023118512X
| 9780231185127
| 023118512X
| 3.66
| 267
| unknown
| Sep 19, 2017
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liked it
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This author calls the alt-right some bad names. They are all white nationalist, racist and antisemitic. And they hate women too. But alt-righters say W This author calls the alt-right some bad names. They are all white nationalist, racist and antisemitic. And they hate women too. But alt-righters say We just don’t care what you call us anymore WHO ARE THEY? WHAT DO THEY WANT? WHY DON’T THEY LEAVE ME ALONE? Your average alt-righter, I would probably say someone who is thirty years old, who is a tech professional, who is an atheist, and who lives on one of the coasts (Richard Spencer) They write a lot of nasty trolling stuff but they write as if nothing is really serious. This is Andy Warhol cut and paste so-what politics. A penchant for aggressive rhetoric and outright racial and anti-Semitic slurs, often delivered in the arch, ironic tones common to modern internet discourse (Rosie Gray) This is really different from what we remember the radical right to have been only a couple of decades ago. In the past, the stereotypical young white nationalist was an angry bitter skinhead with limited skills and prospects That’s right. We remember those skinhead guys! They were scary but they had no brains at all so they weren’t much of a threat. We see them in movies like American History X and The Believer (both recommended). THE ALT RIGHT IS NOT VIOLENT? OH, I DID NOT QUITE REALISE THAT This book is entirely concerned with the USA. That’s okay but I did not quite realise that. George Hawley says : I am not implying that the alt-right is a terrorist movement. At the time of this writing, I am aware of no acts of physical violence directly connected to the alt-right – online harassment is another story I was very surprised at this. I immediately thought of Dylann Roof, the lunatic who shot 9 people in a black church in June 2015. He was a white supremacist, wasn’t he? But George says Dylan Roof’s manifesto suggests he was more influenced by older white-nationalist writers Well, if you say so. If that is a distinction you wish to make. RIGHT WING VIOLENCE In June 2016 Jo Cox, British Labour MP, was shot and stabbed to death in the street by a guy associated with various online far right groups. Previously to that, of course, you had the Anders Breivik attack in Norway in 2011. He killed 77 people in support of his anti-immigration white-nationalist cause. (He described the attack itself as “the book launch”, referring to his online manifesto.) He was the poster boy for white supremacism. And only a month ago we had the horrible mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand. So, there are increasing real-world manifestations of the type of white-nationalism & racism that is peddled in arch, ironic tones by the American alt right, those boys sitting in their mothers’ basements. I did not think that this book should have so clearly exonerated the alt right of violence. But this book is nothing if not carefully argued. THE ALT RIGHT IS EITHER VERY HONEST, FINALLY, OR DISGUSTINGLY WRONGHEADED ABOUT THE USA George himself says, most bracingly, Despite the egalitarian rhetoric of the Declaration of independence, the United States operated as a de facto white supremacist nation for most of its history He adds that the alt right and Bernie Sanders would agree that “the United States was viewed by its founders as a country for people of European ancestry” Of course, Bernie would then say “and that was bad” and the alt-right would say “and that was good, and we should get back there again”. Over the past two decades, Americans have constructed systems of intellectual silencing that stifle the range of debate among responsible and public-spirited people, They’ve resigned hugely important topics to the domain of cranks and haters. A growing percentage of white America no longer views racism as a moral failing THE ALT RIGHT LOVES TRUMP BUT THEY DON’T LOVE THE TYPICAL TRUMP VOTER. MEANWHILE TRUMP DOES NOT LOVE THEM BACK Greg Johnson : Like an icebreaker, Trump has plowed through the frozen crust of artificial political consensus, smashing it to bits and releasing the turbulent populist currents beneath But the alt-right are a whole different bunch to the Trumpanistas : Evangelical Christians are more likely to be mocked than defended, and bald eagles and American flags are few and far between I'M SO BORED WITH THE USA BUT WHAT CAN I DO? So, it’s a new and different beast, and according to George, these guys (no surprise it’s always guys) actually want to dismantle the USA and erect in its place either one or several white race enclaves in North America, removing all non-whites from their territories. Pretty apocalyptic. I really don’t think you could do that without a little bit of violence here and there. George Hawley’s little book is probably for politics geeks only, and I would instead recommend for those interested in the more disturbing or alarming areas of internet culture two other books : This is Why we Can’t Have Nice Things by Whitney Phillips and Troll Hunting by Ginger Gorman [image] ...more |
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Apr 14, 2019
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Apr 16, 2019
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Mar 22, 2019
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Hardcover
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| 1743794355
| 9781743794357
| 1743794355
| 3.88
| 787
| Apr 16, 2019
| Apr 16, 2019
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really liked it
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As I was reading this book it did dawn on me that I MYSELF AM A TROLL right here on Goodreads. The great majority of trolling is done for the lols, you As I was reading this book it did dawn on me that I MYSELF AM A TROLL right here on Goodreads. The great majority of trolling is done for the lols, you know. Joking around, yanking people’s chains, getting a rise out of the unwary, lotsa lolz. So when I adopt the persona of an irritable 12 year old to review Gulliver’s Travels and complain that the author totally ripped off Honey I Shrunk the Kids, or I want my money back because there were no songs in Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens, or I criticize Steinbeck for not writing enough about mice in Of Mice and Men to warrant the joint billing, that’s really trolling, and many people have eagerly berated me for not realizing that Gulliver’s Travels was written a long time before Honey I Shrunk the Kids, and that Of Mice and Men is a quote from a poem. Oh, I did not know that, I say, and anyway, who cares, lol. WHEN THE LOLS STOP DEAD The ugly end of internet trolling is very straightforward – anyone sending death and rape threats to women should be given a prison sentence, that’s as much of a no brainer as the scummy trolls are themselves no brainers. But there is a much greyer, more convolutedly complex form of trolling, and a lot of this book is clogged with Ginger Gorman’s flailing attempts to find a foothold in this soggy, sinking moral morass. Let’s take #sandylootcrew. This was a “successful” co-ordinated campaign of what’s classed as media fuckery, a type of trolling designed to expose the built-in prejudices of our beloved mainstream media, and by extension, our own prejudices. During Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, one of the trolls interviewed by Ginger, Meepsheep, explains that trolls pretended to be a horde of black looters by making “all these accounts on Twitter pretending to be a bunch of black dudes in New Jersey and…posting that we’re going around looting and robbing and whatever during the hurricane. We used the tag #sandylootcrew and just through that, it attracted a lot of media attention. We were saying totally ridiculous things”. Many media outlets seemed to genuinely believe that an army of black people were looting everything from shirts to…cats! . … the tweets were explicitly and obviously fake. The posts contained racial stereotypes exaggerated to the extent that the messages became implausible Meepsheep said : That is kind of where some of the value of trolling comes from, that it can point out some of these flaws. GG is not convinced. She says What if, in exploiting the community’s entrenched prejudices for caricature, you unwittingly create actual racism? THE ALF GARNETT PROBLEM This is not a new question. Way, way back in 1965 a British comedy writer created the character Alf Garnett in the tv sitcom Till Death Us Do Part (this became All in the Family with Archie Bunker, in the USA). He was a white working class Conservative bigot who was very frequently explicitly racist, and this was done by the leftie Speight in order to satirize his attitudes. But not surprisingly, a part of the show’s huge audience turned out to be cheering on enthusiastically all of Alf’s tirades against blacks and wogs and Pakis. Oh dear! The satire defense is always very dubious. For instance, you get all manner of gross misogyny being served up and presented as satire and black humour, supposed itself to be excoriating misogynistic attitudes, not confirming them. (See Brett Easton Ellis’ nervous explanations of American Psycho, and Nick Palumbo’s outrageous claims about his movie Murder Set-Pieces.) THINGS CAN CHANGE People used to chuck the contents of chamber pots out onto the street, they used to spit on the street and on buses (I just about remember signs on buses NO SPITTING), they used to smoke cigarettes all the time, everywhere, they also used to let their dogs poo all over the place, on pavements, in parks, anywhere. None of this happens anymore. THEY DO SOMETIMES THROW TROLLS IN JAIL 9 July 2013 An internet troll whose grossly offensive Facebook postings included threats to kill 200 US children has been jailed for more than two years after a judge heard how he spread terror in local schools. Reece Elliott, 24, left abusive comments on tribute pages set up for two teenagers who died in car accidents, and when challenged, he sent more nasty messages directly to pupils living in Warren County, Tennessee, in February. 24 May 2015 New figures have revealed that 1,209 people were convicted of internet "trolling" last year – equivalent to three guilty verdicts per day. Of those convicted, 155 were jailed for sending messages or other material which was "grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character". The offence falls under Section 127 of the Communications Act 2003, which was rarely used before the invention of social media networks in recent years. 10 Feb 2017 An internet troll who sent antisemitic messages to a Labour MP and other victims has been jailed for more than two years. John Nimmo sent messages to Luciana Berger, the Liverpool Wavertree MP, which included a picture of a knife and a threat that she would “get it like Jo Cox”. He referred to Berger as “Jewish scum” and signed off his messages with the words “your friend the Nazi”. 1 Aug 2018 A disabled woman who was hounded by a “warped” internet troll for more than a year said she can “finally breathe again” now he has been jailed. Nicky Wright never met online abuse campaigner Nicola Brookes but stalked her on an almost daily basis online between June 2016 and September last year – mocking the fact she had Crohn’s disease, making sexually offensive remarks and even publishing her address. The 39-year-old came face-to-face with his victim for the first time when he was jailed for six months at Brighton Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday. Ms Brookes was bombarded by the obsessive “total stranger” who used 28 Twitter, 25 Facebook accounts or pages as well as blogs, online radio and video channels to carry out his “cowardly” campaign of hatred, the court heard. He photoshopped pictures of her, doctored comments she made, created videos about her, made sexually suggestive comments and posted hate mail. 15 Nov 2018 A "callous" internet troll who posted offensive material about a woman who was crushed to death outside a nightclub has been jailed. Paul Hind, 38, called Durham University student Olivia Burt, 20, a "sex worker" and "prostitute" on Facebook. Hind admitted he carried out his crimes when he was “bored" and confessed after an earlier court hearing "I targeted dead people because perhaps I knew that deceased people could not fight back, which is a really cowardly thing to do. "I knew they couldn't say anything because they were dead, unfortunately." THIS BUZZFEED ARTICLE IS EXCELLENT https://www.buzzfeed.com/patricksmith... Here we have the stories of two jailed British trolls, one female, who both sent rape and death threats to Caroline Criado-Perez, who was campaigning for a woman to be featured on the £10 note, and Labour MP Stella Creasy, who supported the campaign. The article interviews both of them about motive and life after jail. I thought this statement by John Nimmo was remarkable : "It was trending," he says. "I saw it was trending, so I looked into what it was about and, stupid me, I decided to join in. And I was getting, like, retweets, I was getting favourites and all that – and even the person I was sending tweets to, the person I was tweeting at, was retweeting it and answering back." Nimmo had – at best – only a vague idea who his victims were. Only after sending his abusive tweets did he see a TV news item about the £10 note campaign. CAROLINE CRIADO-PEREZ "Not feeding the trolls doesn’t magically scrub out the image in your head of being told you’ll be gang-raped till you die." She wrote an article about the whole thing which includes a handy list of the rape & death threats she got, should you be interested https://www.newstatesman.com/internet... WHERE DOES THE HATE COME FROM? It’s a large question, but undoubtedly most of the hate comes from young or youngish white men who have come to feel that they live in a suffocating liberal-left culture & that white men have been made the scapegoat for the whole world’s problems and who now perceive themselves to be the real victims & react by spewing forth unlimited hatred upon the easiest, most obvious targets, women and minorities and leftists. The cliché of the kid in the basement who’s never had a girlfriend is not that far off, according to Ginger. (Cf the modern incel self-identification.) Except that the guys she interviews (at length) aren’t like that. THE WRAP-UP I already read a similar book This is Why we Can’t Have Nice Things (great title) by Whitney Phillips. She is the sociologist, and Ginger Gorman is the emotionally committed journalist. Both books are essential reading about this whole cyberhate thing. Neither has any silver bullet solution, cause there ain’t one. ...more |
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really liked it
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“None of us is as cruel as all of us” – anonymous troll “I wormed my way to the heart of the crowd I was shocked to find what was allowed” – Howard DeVo “None of us is as cruel as all of us” – anonymous troll “I wormed my way to the heart of the crowd I was shocked to find what was allowed” – Howard DeVoto * The worst pun in the whole of the BBC is in the name of a radio programme called Thinking Allowed which is enough to make you avoid it. The second reason not to listen is the unctuous know-it-all presenter Professor Laurie Taylor, and the third reason is that it’s all about sociology (What do you get if you cross a sociologist with a Mafia don? An offer you can’t understand). Here are four recent topics, and I haven’t made them up, these are quotes from the website Vicki Harman, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Royal Holloway, University of London, considers the way in which middle class mothers view their children's packed lunches as a reflection of their parenting skills Sarah Neal, Reader in Sociology at the University of Surrey, discusses multicultural conviviality in coffee shops the social history of women only train carriages: did they promote safety or inequality? Fur, family and inheritance. Siobhan Magee, Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, discusses her research into the convention of passing down fur clothes from grandmother to granddaughter in the Polish middle class I am sure Whitney Phillips has already received an invitation from Laurie to appear on Thinking Allowed because this book is pure sociology and is all about online trolling and its “relationship” with “mainstream culture”. I’M A TROLL, FOL DE ROL Definitions are difficult in this area, especially as internet trolling has changed shape greatly since 2000. For instance, this book does not regard cyberbullying or hacking as trolling, but both play a part in trolling. Whitney Phillips’ main subject for many of these pages is 4Chan’s /b/ board, which was and maybe still is referred to as the asshole of the internet. This is where the trolls turbocharged their devilry. This is where memes were born, such as Pedobear, which was based on a Japanese character called Safety Bear. [image] WHO ARE THE TROLLS AND WHAT DO THEY WANT? They are like 95% plus all young white privileged males. They want Lulz. WHAT IS LULZ? It’s kind of an internet “gotcha” which produced much mirth for the troll. Example of a real big Lulz : Enter Oprah Winfrey. The trolls popularised the phrase “over 9000” to refer to any stupid use of statistics. It was taken from DragonBallz but who cares about that. In September 2008 someone decided to troll the Oprah Winfrey Show by posing as a paedophile on the show’s message board. Online sexual exploitation was her latest hot topic, and lo, she took the bait laid by the troll. “Let me read you something posted on our message boards” she gravely began, “from somebody who claims to be a member of a known paedophile network. His group has over 9000 penises and they’re all… raping… children…” Cue sound of trolls ROTFLTAO. This was a major win for the /b/ board. New words : trollercaust : whereby a website mass-deletes accounts it has figured out are fake troll accounts. Doxxing : revealing someone’s real name, address and financial details online ALL YOU NEED IS LULZ The trolls like to bray to all who will listen that they don’t have a point of view, they’re just mocking anything and everything, they have no agenda at all. What they say is : Better lulz than baww Whitney says this is not really so. They perceive mainstream media as disaster whores, turning human misery into ad revenue, so they exploit the fake outrage or fake sentimentality of mainstream media. But she accepts (you can’t not) that the unremittingly ugly tide of homophobic, racist and misogynistic trolling cannot in any way be seen as some kind of moral crusade. FACEBOOK MEMORIAL PAGE TROLLING [image] The specialists are called RIPtrolls. They got lots of publicity for posting grotesquely offensive messages mocking the dead person and the grievers, but again, Whitney is able to show that there was some method to their madness. The target of the offensiveness was not, she says, the friends and family at all, but the grief tourists who visited the memorial pages. As far as these trolls were concerned, grief tourists were shrill, disingenuous, and, unlike grieving friends and families, wholly deserving targets. The much ridiculed statement “I didn’t know you but I’m very sorry you’re dead” was therefore seen as a declaration of trollability. The trolls see the media’s fetishizing of dead white kids. The younger, whiter and more female the more the media will like the story. They love the fake handwringing – firstly over the fate of the victim (perhaps murder, perhaps suicide) and then over their own trolling. The journos and the trolls have a great time with each other – how sincere each side is remains obscure. Do the journos care about the people in their morbid stories? No. Do the trolls care? Again no. The family and friends of the victim are caught in this crossfire. Mostly this book avoids scholarly language, which is a great blessing. Now and again we get a sentence like Mainstream media outlets benefited from trolls’ fetishized engagement with the media’s fetishized engagement. FROM 4CHAN TO WALL STREET Whitney traces the split in the /b/ board users which happened in 2010 and was between those who saw trolling as amoral nihilistic Jokester attacks on straight society and those who saw that there could be something positive to do with the collection of skills they had evolved (this group were called “causefags”). The first ”serious” attack from /b/ was on the church of Scientology and the second was Operation Payback, in support of Wikileaks. After that came Occupy Wall Street. One original troll got quite upset about this new political activism Anonymous [the collective name for all posters on /b/] isn’t supposed to represent anything. We did stuff for lulz, for lulz only. Not because we care what happens in the world… We used to represent nothing and we were feared because of that, no one knew when we would act and what we would do. Even we didn’t… We do not have ideals, we do not fight for anything, we do not care about anything. [image] The trolls had been trolled by seriousness. But the original gang did not go away – the celeb nude photo hack of iCloud originated from /b/ and that was pure lulz. So – an excellent book about a weird and disturbing subject which I had only seen from the perspective of the whitebread media before now. This is not one of those scenes where to know all is to forgive all, I think most of these trolls should have been strangled at birth. But I understand a lot more about their corrosive puerility now than I did a few days ago. ...more |
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| 3.93
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| Mar 31, 2015
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really liked it
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Update (I can't resist): [image] Let shame follow this dentist even unto the last drilling and the last filling. & when he crosses the great divide, let Update (I can't resist): [image] Let shame follow this dentist even unto the last drilling and the last filling. & when he crosses the great divide, let all the animals he shot be waiting for him *** THE REVIEW OF THE BOOK Here is a 100% fast fun astonishing intriguing hectic sprint through the strange subject of shame. Our tour guide, Jon Ronson, is an amiable journo who’s cherry-picked a few recent spasms of shaming for our delectation and schadenfreude. Like a freak show, we can gawp and shudder in delicious horror. It felt like we were soldiers in a war on other people’s flaws The idea is this. In the olden days public shame was part of the judicial process: [image] but that was abolished in 1839. And now… it’s BACK. Public shaming has been revived and is in full swing on Twitter, Facebook and other social media. People are making mistakes and they are getting EXTRA-JUDICIAL PUNISHMENT doled out by ourselves, armed with only our keyboards and mices and tablets and iphones. We – us – are now the angry crowd of pitchfork peasants. We shove the miscreants in the stocks and pillories and pelt them with three month old cabbages and decaying turnips. ONE TWEET AND YOUR LIFE ENDS : JUSTINE SACCO Here is the example – the Awful Example – of Justine Sacco. Here is what public shame and utter humiliation does. She was a New York PR employee of some hot shit American conglomerate called IAC which I never heard of. On 20 December 2013 she was off on holiday to South Africa. She used Twitter and had around 30 followers. She was at Heathrow airport waiting for the plane to Cape Town and tweeted Cucumber sandwiches – bad teeth. Back in London! That was the level – unfunny mild insults about British people. Hmph! But then : Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white! Jon Ronson says “she chuckled to herself, pressed SEND and wandered around the airport for half an hour, sporadically checking Twitter. ‘I got nothing,’ she told me. ‘No replies.’” Then she went off on her 11 hour flight and couldn’t access Twitter. While she was in the plane her tweet exploded. Here’s how much it exploded: in October 2013 she was googled 30 times. In November 2013 she was googled 30 times. Between 20 and 31 December 2013 she was googled 1,220,000 times. No words for that horribly disgusting, racist as fuck tweet from Justine Sacco. I am beyond horrified. Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox news. From IAC, her employers : This is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in question is currently unreachable. Fascinated by the Justine Sacco train wreck. It’s global and apparently she’s still on the plane. All I want for Christmas is to see Justine Sacco’s face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox In fact her deeply tasteless comment was an attempt to spoof white ignorance. “Living in America puts us in a bit of a bubble when it comes to what is going on in the Third World. I was making fun of that bubble.” The world did not get the joke. (“I can’t fully grasp the misconception that’s happened round the world”.) She had to cut short her holiday. “People were threatening to go on strike at the hotels I was booked into if I showed up”. IAC fired her. (In this book people are getting fired for perceived-to-be offensive tweets right and left.) Jon Ronson puts his finger on the reason for the vast avalanche of insult which poured down on Justine Sacco in the last weeks of December 2013: Dragging down Justine Sacco felt like dragging down every rich white person who’s ever gotten away with making a racist joke because they could. SILENCE AND RESPECT So JR looks at various horror stories of this type, of lives destroyed by thoughtlessness. Here’s another example. Two women were guiding a party of disabled adults around Washington for the charity they worked at. They liked to make spoof photos, like smoking in front of No Smoking signs, juvenile stuff like that. They went to Arlington Cemetery and just took leave of their senses. One posed in front of the sign which says “Silence and Respect” – she pretended she was yelling and was giving the finger as well. What humour – it’s the opposite of silence and respect, see? I get it! So did all of Facebook when they insanely put the photo up, and the woman in the photo was fired [image] and spent a year afraid to leave the house. SHAMELESS: THE SICK NAZI ORGY JR examines examples of people who have been horribly shamed but were NOT destroyed. A good example in Britain is Max Mosley. He has had a fair amount of shame to bear in his life – son of Oswald Mosley, who was head of the British Union of Fascists and a supporter of Hitler. Max became head of Formula One racing and he liked to attend S&M parties. One of which was filmed and splattered over a tabloid newspaper here in the UK. There he was whipping girls and being whipped by girls: F1 BOSS HAS SICK NAZI ORGY WITH 5 HOOKERS … At one point the wrinkled 67-year-old yells “she needs more of ze punishment!” while brandishing a LEATHER STRAP over a brunette’s naked bottom. Then the lashes rain down as Mosley counts them out in German. Within a year Max had successfully sued the paper for breach of privacy and appeared on a few general political discussion shows in the UK. It turned out that the public couldn’t care less about S&M orgies. He was unshamed. This inspires Jon to visit Kink Studios to see if he can answer the question : is the porn industry populated by people immune to shame? Unfortunately he gets frankly rubbishy answers and does not pursue this line. But it does make me wonder – what do the models in even the anodyne disrobings on the most vanilla of porn sites think about their intimate parts captured forever by the internet’s powers of recall? Assuming they don’t stay in the porn biz for life, does this ever have any repercussions in the private or public sphere? WE ARE THE NEW CROWD OF PEASANTS WITH PITCHFORKS This book is nothing more than lightweight journalism but JR has a knack – just when you wonder what this or that person in the story had to say, what was their angle, what happened to her afterwards – he’s anticipated you and he’s emailed or skyped or twittered the person and he’s got the reply. Jon interviews James Gilligan (author of Violence: A National Epidemic – read and reviewed!) who says that if shaming people worked prison would work and no one would reoffend, but it doesn’t work. In the end, says Jon, this has been a book about people who didn’t do very much wrong and got vengeance and anger rained down on them. Vengeance and anger and shaming appears to be our default position, here on the internet. I would have liked JR to discuss more why men get shamed in a forensic manner, such as for plagiarism, and women get shamed in a personal manner which very rapidly descends into misogynistic rape & death threats (always the ol’ rape ‘n’ death threats) – he mentions this in a couple of lines then veers off. But that’s what this book is – filled with interesting ideas and questions, and leaping from one internet zone to another with the alacrity of an Olympic gold medallist gibbon – from Twitter to 4chan to instagram and back again. He didn’t ask us on Goodreads if we had any good stories, though. If he had, we would have collectively put our hands behind our head and gazed at the ceiling and said Well, now, there was once this retired librarian called Ginnie Jones… https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ...more |
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| Jan 01, 2013
| 2013
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The cover of this book just has the title and author’s name repeated five times. But my daughter Georgia spotted at once that one F and one OFF are in
The cover of this book just has the title and author’s name repeated five times. But my daughter Georgia spotted at once that one F and one OFF are in red – look, it says F OFF! This is a book in favour of free speech and against PC but the author is a lefty. It traces a great dollop of recent cultural and political history to explain how we in the West have created such a poison cloud of morbid oversensitivity, irascibility, aggravation, public hurt, censorship, self-censorship, bellicose shock-jock posturings, tea party caperings, leftist-fascist intertwinings and a wholesale miasma of distrust and good-intentioned own-foot-shooting that sensible debate is almost a thing of the past. The paradox is as plain as day and makes the case all by itself : to insist on respect and sensitivity is not to build a kinder society but one in which frustrations multiply and fester. To follow all this you have to have a sense of humour - the story is so absurd. Human stupidity is displayed under bright unsparing light, it’s a supermarket of wrongness we have here, all the way from frothing nut jobs like Pastor Terry Jones, the guy who set fire to the Koran, [image] to urbane types like Prof Alan Gribben who published an edition of Huckleberry Finn substituting the word “slave” for the n word. [image] The way RK tells it, and I pretty much agree, the 1960s counterculture was defeated by 1970, by itself through drug burnout and by the batons and gassings of the state (see the fantastic Nixonland for a blow-by-blow account; [image] and see the rise and fall of the Black Panthers for a lurid example). What came after the 60s was the indulgences of the Me Decade, as Tom Wolfe called it. The left had to accept that the revolution wasn’t going to happen. When the USSR melted in 1990, that was just switching off the life support system which had kept the brain-dead alternative to capitalism suspended in its parody of life for decades. So if the left couldn’t replace capitalism, the only thing to do was to try to make it better, and hence, the PC movement, which itself was fed by many streams, from feminism, anticolonialism, structuralism, ism ism ism (as John Lennon said). This led, of course, to the right wing backlash against PC. The backlash included stunts like the British tabloid press inventing stories wholesale – one famous one is that a nursery in Hackney (left wing London borough) banned “Baa Baa Black Sheep” because it was racist. It wasn’t true but I think most of the country still remembers it as a terrible example of loony-leftism. RK refers to a recent American backlash book with such a preposterous title I thought it was his own heavy-handed spoof invention : The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought – but then I found it: [image] You can see the same thing happening with the old global warming debate. The right hates this argument with a passion, whatever 97% of climate scientists say, because they see global warming as a Trojan horse – if you accept it, you’ll have to wave bye-bye to your Chevrolet Equinox or perhaps more pertinently your vague hope of one day being able to afford a Chevrolet Equinox; and solar panels on your head will be compulsory. And your kids will be given muesli at school, which will have come from a 5 mile radius of the school to save those evil food miles. The right’s idea of freedom is the freedom of poor people to think that they might one day have a guitar shaped swimming pool along with the freedom of the rich to ensure that that will probably never happen. But I digress. This book is born of three convictions : that the principle of free speech is meaningless unless it includes the freedom to offend; that the claim to find something hurtful or offensive should be the beginning of the debate, not the end of it; and that the modern fetish for sensitivity is corrosive of genuine civility. So he’s not saying he wants everyone just to play nicely with each other; he wants people to be more robust. It’s not “don’t be so offensive”, it’s “don’t be so offended”. Well, I’m not convinced that authors wagging their fingers at us all will help matters. In fact, now I come to think of it, what gives Richard King the right to lecture us on what we can or cannot say? Hey, Richard King, here’s some free speech for you : take your three stars and F OFF! [image] ...more |
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Jun 2014
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Jun 08, 2014
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