The retardery of the left's responses to Zuck's about face boggles my mind. I can't help but wonder if a single one of them doesn't self identify as an "activist" of one sort or another.
To pick just one example from your article that is particularly pertinent to myself: "Homosexuality" is in no way an outdated term. That somehow "queer" IMMEDIATELY overtook any other word in the sexual orientation lexicon was always highly suspicious. I've been "out" for twenty-two years and never met a single gay person who was offended at the term "homosexual".
There's just no way a full scale vocabulary replacement like that happened organically. And the thing is before the forced adoption of the term I wouldn't have been offended at being called queer either. It was only when "queer" became the ONLY allowable term that it became an offensive and suspicious term to me. Especially when long-standing gay/homosexual/fag icons like Oscar Wilde and Tom of Finland started being referred to as queer. A true WTF development.
Ariella Scarcella said that she has never met a "queer" conservative and that it is wholly a political identifier. Any conservative would just say "gay" or lesbian." I think it partially became popular because they made being "straight cis" so demonized so straight white women who are boring and probably also fat and ugly claim they are queer despite only being in relationships with men or whatever and there is no requirement to verify that but then they claim they are LGBTQ not just "an ally"
I almost went a little bit deeper into it in the article but so much of it is just a way to signify you are on the "good" team and will do whatever idiotic new thing is required of you. The funniest one is that, this has kind of passed I think, but you would see people say "folx" and not a single one was ever able to explain why you should spell it that way, because of course "folks" is a completely inclusive term as it is and basically means any number of any kind of people, they would just give you a vague explanation about how they think it was to do with spelling being white supremacy while acknowledging that they never actually bothered to consider why they are spelling "folks" with an X
I remember being in a “fancy” restaurant in Moscow Idaho with the extended family and our waitress/waiter kept referring to our child as they/them. I couldn’t help but point out that there was but one child. No one thought it was funny, so I just ordered another glass.
As a retired physician, it was a real eye opener learning how all my medical knowledge and experience was suddenly right-wing extremist conspiracy theory that couldn't be shared with friends. The reason why 1984 is mentioned so often now is we've had to live through it. The worst thing that ever happened to the US was the downfall of the USSR, because in losing that type of enemy we (somehow) lost knowledge of what we stood for and what we opposed. In the end without that foil, we (hopefully only temporarily) evolved into the very same thing.
My father was a disease researcher by trade [admittedly for plants but regardless] and my whole step family with no education managed to take over his household regarding this issue
yeah I already hated doctors but what was so maddening is even their nightmare scenario for deaths was not something that would have significantly harmed society. I live in a ton of 1000 people. If the 10 most death prone people died from March-June in one year [so 1% of the population] it's kind of a sad season but you would still barely noticed anything unusual had happened.
I went really crazy at the time because of the cognitive dissonance and how dumb society is. Fortunately my wife is a crazy conspiracy theorist and had always expected the government to ruin our lives in that or some other fashion, so she was much more equipped to deal with all of it than me.
yep, the lies and suppression of truth about the IFR was one of the tells that it was a massive psyop. It was ridiculous at so many levels to try to shut down civilization for a 0.3% case fatality rate.
and the thing is they tried to tell us 2% was the maximum fatalities and then tried to shift to saying if .1% of people died it would be the worst mass casualty event of all time. It was so goddamn stupid.
There's also some aspect of all of this that impacted liberals in a way I still don't understand, like relating to proving a point about public healthcare, or the ability of the government to stop pandemics, or something else. I'm rarely at a loss in the long term and I still don't understand why overall it is so incredibly hard for the great majority of people left of center to see through this scam, even if they think things got carried away
when you replace God with socialism and big government, pandemics are a wonderful opportunity to prove your faith. There are few areas better than "public health" to attack individualism and force everyone to all act together in specified ways. War of course is similarly well situated for "the health of the State" and I expect to see that soon as well.
My take: Elon and Vivek stepped in goat poop over H1B visas, and RoboZuck saw a business oppprtunity to claw back some support. Why anyone would trust either him or Elon and his new toxic positivity crusade, I have no idea.
Maybe it's the left's mentality of if they can't run the entire show their way, then they'll just leave (fine by the rest of us). But conservatives and libertarians usually need a bigger push to leave a space and will usually try to work around the system first before abandoning it entirely, hence why "cupcake(s)" now means "Covid shot(s)" on Facebook, masks are muzzles (because "face diaper" got added to auto-flag for being too effective), etc.
I had someone try to tell me on their page I needed to say "jab" instead of "vaccine" otherwise the algorithm would punish them.
Uh, lady, the algorithm most definitely knows "jab"
anyway yeah I never trust anyone, which I hope was clear in this lol. I do think though as I said this is fucking up his business and is also an enormous pain in the ass, so we can see reasons why Zuckerberg would want this to end which don't at all require him being some sort of newfound acolyte of free speech.
There's the other end of the stick where they have to censor propaganda. Politicians and their cronies ran a campaign against me for years, after I exposed corrupted. That amplified when I testified to Parliament. It got so bad I was labelled as a child abuser, and associated with a child that had gone missing. It was tough times in our town, so they regularly accused me of destroying jobs. Facebook did nothing to help me. The irony is that I collected the info on my cyberstalkers who then got orders against me as their cyberstalker. I was forced to take down posts but I was so disgusted at the lack of accountability of social media pages that i quit them all. Ironically, some of it is still up on FB yet I do not have access to it, and FB doesn't respond to my emails. Fuck Zuckerberg for not using moderators for what they should be for. I do not accept his makeover, but acknowledge you wrote a good article.
ah, that is terrible. And yeah it's not really a matter of accepting it or not accepting it, it's more what this says about the sentiments of society etc, but I did make clear within that that the other problem with them doing all of this bullshit is that then it is harder for them to do the things they actually should be doing.
(this is part of an analysis on Fb by a Romanian poster, Dan Pavel):
„Any attempt to divert someone's beliefs is either an attempt at education or an attempt at manipulation. Education is not done online and, in no case, by punishing the uneducated by blocking their access to social media or through hate campaigns. Then only manipulation remains, and here we have no ambiguities. In fact, the fact-checkers have won. The world around us has been significantly more dangerous, unstable, and poorer for a decade or so. Income and power have been concentrated at the top of society, which has captured all institutions or bypassed them so successfully that they have become irrelevant. Where possible, the oligarchy has effectively turned institutions against the masses. Zuckerberg's late revelations are unimpressive. The big platforms were taking orders from Biden and now they will take orders from Trump. The big influencers have consolidated and monopolized accordingly, and the small informants are no longer needed because their missions have been accomplished. I believe that we are living in the most dangerous times: late post-capitalism, the death of the last hopes for democracy, and the definitive enthronement of technofeudal dystopia. There are times when the little informants and the useful idiots are no longer needed because tyranny has been successfully implemented. It means that the masses no longer pose any threat to the oligarchy, they no longer have any power, and the spirit of the times has been captured. The oligarchy of the 21st century has become a new parallel society, above the states, supranational, with a parallel economy. It no longer wants to contribute to the old society and is trying to slowly break away with each president who becomes a client, with each monopoly that surpasses any legislative universe to which it would risk being held accountable. I am not happy about the disappearance of fact-checkers. I think it represents a victory, but not for whom we believe. In any war there is a loser and a winner, even in an ideological one, and I do not feel like I am on the winning side. And... as in any war for total control, at the end of it the little informants and professional traitors suffer the fate of any political commissar.”
"these are people who don’t have the mental fortitude for atheism but who nevertheless lack religion. Thus, in the absence of papal bulls, they need there to be universal truths, and they need everyone else to believe them, no different from a feeble minded religious zealot. This is why their devotion to this fact-checking industry is so extreme."
This is genius, and I say this as both an atheist, and a somewhat hardcore Marxist (in the sense of someone who is generally an admirer of Marx's analysis of capitalism, and also of religion).
I was in a conversation with an acquaintance who reminded firmly me she is an “actual scientist” (albeit a climate scientist) who assured me that my Ivy League affiliated sources who were actual virologists, public health experts, and biologists etc. were wrong. I’m a dropout and can check sources better than her grad students who are being taught “media literacy” which means “trust the experts.” (That’s why having read ‘1984’ was so vital a touchstone for understanding creeping totalitarianism.) There is no need for all that hard TLDR or to think for yourselves. The frequency of this type of interaction everywhere is what has been termed institutionalized schizophrenia: hearing outside voices that insist they’re right and order your actions, with all the evidence available to your senses becoming mistrusted.
I lost a friend who insisted screaming that a Trump election would cause actual harm to her people, lesbians, but could name no actual harm that had befallen her or anyone in her “community” during his first four years. Funnily enough to me anyway, people in our age group are indistinguishable as to sexual proclivities in any case. I caught part of Xanadu on teevee from the 80’s and there was acceptance, even celebration, for all manner of gender expression, decades ago. Victim contests need to end. Safe spaces are over. We’re all firefighters now, and need to get down to business.
I realized that in the Star Wars analogy Tom from Myspace is definitely Obi Wan Kenobi 😂
The retardery of the left's responses to Zuck's about face boggles my mind. I can't help but wonder if a single one of them doesn't self identify as an "activist" of one sort or another.
To pick just one example from your article that is particularly pertinent to myself: "Homosexuality" is in no way an outdated term. That somehow "queer" IMMEDIATELY overtook any other word in the sexual orientation lexicon was always highly suspicious. I've been "out" for twenty-two years and never met a single gay person who was offended at the term "homosexual".
There's just no way a full scale vocabulary replacement like that happened organically. And the thing is before the forced adoption of the term I wouldn't have been offended at being called queer either. It was only when "queer" became the ONLY allowable term that it became an offensive and suspicious term to me. Especially when long-standing gay/homosexual/fag icons like Oscar Wilde and Tom of Finland started being referred to as queer. A true WTF development.
Ariella Scarcella said that she has never met a "queer" conservative and that it is wholly a political identifier. Any conservative would just say "gay" or lesbian." I think it partially became popular because they made being "straight cis" so demonized so straight white women who are boring and probably also fat and ugly claim they are queer despite only being in relationships with men or whatever and there is no requirement to verify that but then they claim they are LGBTQ not just "an ally"
I almost went a little bit deeper into it in the article but so much of it is just a way to signify you are on the "good" team and will do whatever idiotic new thing is required of you. The funniest one is that, this has kind of passed I think, but you would see people say "folx" and not a single one was ever able to explain why you should spell it that way, because of course "folks" is a completely inclusive term as it is and basically means any number of any kind of people, they would just give you a vague explanation about how they think it was to do with spelling being white supremacy while acknowledging that they never actually bothered to consider why they are spelling "folks" with an X
absolutely ridiculous people.
I remember being in a “fancy” restaurant in Moscow Idaho with the extended family and our waitress/waiter kept referring to our child as they/them. I couldn’t help but point out that there was but one child. No one thought it was funny, so I just ordered another glass.
Lol what restaurant was it? And that is egregious, it still amazes me they sold anyone on they/them being a thing
As a retired physician, it was a real eye opener learning how all my medical knowledge and experience was suddenly right-wing extremist conspiracy theory that couldn't be shared with friends. The reason why 1984 is mentioned so often now is we've had to live through it. The worst thing that ever happened to the US was the downfall of the USSR, because in losing that type of enemy we (somehow) lost knowledge of what we stood for and what we opposed. In the end without that foil, we (hopefully only temporarily) evolved into the very same thing.
My father was a disease researcher by trade [admittedly for plants but regardless] and my whole step family with no education managed to take over his household regarding this issue
there wasn't one part of that whole thing that wasn't corrupted and wrong. I really lost any faith in humanity and in my former profession.
yeah I already hated doctors but what was so maddening is even their nightmare scenario for deaths was not something that would have significantly harmed society. I live in a ton of 1000 people. If the 10 most death prone people died from March-June in one year [so 1% of the population] it's kind of a sad season but you would still barely noticed anything unusual had happened.
I went really crazy at the time because of the cognitive dissonance and how dumb society is. Fortunately my wife is a crazy conspiracy theorist and had always expected the government to ruin our lives in that or some other fashion, so she was much more equipped to deal with all of it than me.
yep, the lies and suppression of truth about the IFR was one of the tells that it was a massive psyop. It was ridiculous at so many levels to try to shut down civilization for a 0.3% case fatality rate.
and the thing is they tried to tell us 2% was the maximum fatalities and then tried to shift to saying if .1% of people died it would be the worst mass casualty event of all time. It was so goddamn stupid.
There's also some aspect of all of this that impacted liberals in a way I still don't understand, like relating to proving a point about public healthcare, or the ability of the government to stop pandemics, or something else. I'm rarely at a loss in the long term and I still don't understand why overall it is so incredibly hard for the great majority of people left of center to see through this scam, even if they think things got carried away
when you replace God with socialism and big government, pandemics are a wonderful opportunity to prove your faith. There are few areas better than "public health" to attack individualism and force everyone to all act together in specified ways. War of course is similarly well situated for "the health of the State" and I expect to see that soon as well.
My take: Elon and Vivek stepped in goat poop over H1B visas, and RoboZuck saw a business oppprtunity to claw back some support. Why anyone would trust either him or Elon and his new toxic positivity crusade, I have no idea.
Maybe it's the left's mentality of if they can't run the entire show their way, then they'll just leave (fine by the rest of us). But conservatives and libertarians usually need a bigger push to leave a space and will usually try to work around the system first before abandoning it entirely, hence why "cupcake(s)" now means "Covid shot(s)" on Facebook, masks are muzzles (because "face diaper" got added to auto-flag for being too effective), etc.
I had someone try to tell me on their page I needed to say "jab" instead of "vaccine" otherwise the algorithm would punish them.
Uh, lady, the algorithm most definitely knows "jab"
anyway yeah I never trust anyone, which I hope was clear in this lol. I do think though as I said this is fucking up his business and is also an enormous pain in the ass, so we can see reasons why Zuckerberg would want this to end which don't at all require him being some sort of newfound acolyte of free speech.
There's the other end of the stick where they have to censor propaganda. Politicians and their cronies ran a campaign against me for years, after I exposed corrupted. That amplified when I testified to Parliament. It got so bad I was labelled as a child abuser, and associated with a child that had gone missing. It was tough times in our town, so they regularly accused me of destroying jobs. Facebook did nothing to help me. The irony is that I collected the info on my cyberstalkers who then got orders against me as their cyberstalker. I was forced to take down posts but I was so disgusted at the lack of accountability of social media pages that i quit them all. Ironically, some of it is still up on FB yet I do not have access to it, and FB doesn't respond to my emails. Fuck Zuckerberg for not using moderators for what they should be for. I do not accept his makeover, but acknowledge you wrote a good article.
ah, that is terrible. And yeah it's not really a matter of accepting it or not accepting it, it's more what this says about the sentiments of society etc, but I did make clear within that that the other problem with them doing all of this bullshit is that then it is harder for them to do the things they actually should be doing.
Let's be careful...
(this is part of an analysis on Fb by a Romanian poster, Dan Pavel):
„Any attempt to divert someone's beliefs is either an attempt at education or an attempt at manipulation. Education is not done online and, in no case, by punishing the uneducated by blocking their access to social media or through hate campaigns. Then only manipulation remains, and here we have no ambiguities. In fact, the fact-checkers have won. The world around us has been significantly more dangerous, unstable, and poorer for a decade or so. Income and power have been concentrated at the top of society, which has captured all institutions or bypassed them so successfully that they have become irrelevant. Where possible, the oligarchy has effectively turned institutions against the masses. Zuckerberg's late revelations are unimpressive. The big platforms were taking orders from Biden and now they will take orders from Trump. The big influencers have consolidated and monopolized accordingly, and the small informants are no longer needed because their missions have been accomplished. I believe that we are living in the most dangerous times: late post-capitalism, the death of the last hopes for democracy, and the definitive enthronement of technofeudal dystopia. There are times when the little informants and the useful idiots are no longer needed because tyranny has been successfully implemented. It means that the masses no longer pose any threat to the oligarchy, they no longer have any power, and the spirit of the times has been captured. The oligarchy of the 21st century has become a new parallel society, above the states, supranational, with a parallel economy. It no longer wants to contribute to the old society and is trying to slowly break away with each president who becomes a client, with each monopoly that surpasses any legislative universe to which it would risk being held accountable. I am not happy about the disappearance of fact-checkers. I think it represents a victory, but not for whom we believe. In any war there is a loser and a winner, even in an ideological one, and I do not feel like I am on the winning side. And... as in any war for total control, at the end of it the little informants and professional traitors suffer the fate of any political commissar.”
"these are people who don’t have the mental fortitude for atheism but who nevertheless lack religion. Thus, in the absence of papal bulls, they need there to be universal truths, and they need everyone else to believe them, no different from a feeble minded religious zealot. This is why their devotion to this fact-checking industry is so extreme."
This is genius, and I say this as both an atheist, and a somewhat hardcore Marxist (in the sense of someone who is generally an admirer of Marx's analysis of capitalism, and also of religion).
I was in a conversation with an acquaintance who reminded firmly me she is an “actual scientist” (albeit a climate scientist) who assured me that my Ivy League affiliated sources who were actual virologists, public health experts, and biologists etc. were wrong. I’m a dropout and can check sources better than her grad students who are being taught “media literacy” which means “trust the experts.” (That’s why having read ‘1984’ was so vital a touchstone for understanding creeping totalitarianism.) There is no need for all that hard TLDR or to think for yourselves. The frequency of this type of interaction everywhere is what has been termed institutionalized schizophrenia: hearing outside voices that insist they’re right and order your actions, with all the evidence available to your senses becoming mistrusted.
I lost a friend who insisted screaming that a Trump election would cause actual harm to her people, lesbians, but could name no actual harm that had befallen her or anyone in her “community” during his first four years. Funnily enough to me anyway, people in our age group are indistinguishable as to sexual proclivities in any case. I caught part of Xanadu on teevee from the 80’s and there was acceptance, even celebration, for all manner of gender expression, decades ago. Victim contests need to end. Safe spaces are over. We’re all firefighters now, and need to get down to business.