The Chocolate Chip Country

Two things can simultaneously be true about Twitter.

1) It's a private company and no law compels or prevents it filtering or censoring its information however it likes. Likewise, banning whoever it wants or denying them a voice on their platform.

2) Throttling engagement and censoring its users while denying any such actions is really crappy behavior. Not just because of the gaslighting, which is bad enough, but because a culture of free speech depends on much more then just what is legal.

Free speech works to the benefit of minorities. The majority does not need to concern itself with making itself heard- it can't be muted. It's the underdogs that need free speech. And keeping a culture alive that gives space to those minorities means putting up with some people who are awful into the bargain. But free speech is valuable in itself.

Two additional points- when people interact almost entirely in a censored space, especially if they are told it is not censored, they will develop an inaccurate idea of what people think and believe. Acting on that idea may lead them to grief.

When you censor and gaslight a large group of people and somebody comes along and tells them that the world is against them and it's too late for half-measures because all the levers of power are being turned against them, that argument is given force by the censoring and gaslighting. Not that conspiracy theories and populist mania won't exist without it, but they are made powerful because they are built upon a truth that people can see for themselves.

Twitter became a furnace fueling the culture wars, turning up the heat by its actions. Will any of that change under new management? That remains to be seen.

I suspect that just about anybody who might read this is already familiar with the people forced to bake cakes and take pictures for gay marriages, and the bills in Kansas and Arkansas designed to prevent that kind of coercion in those states.

I find it sad that our country has come to this. Several of the colonies that later became the United States were started by religious folk who wanted to practice their religion without dealing with the (rather strict) rules governing it in Great Britain at the time.

The political part aside, though, there is a theological issue to consider. Would it be sinful to perform your calling in service to an event like a gay wedding ceremony? Is it participation? Endorsement? This is a different question from whether secular law requires it or not.

Today, it occurred to me that there may be a Biblical answer to that question.

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http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/06/08/a-brief-history-of-the-corporation-1600-to-2100/print/

The article is an interesting read, because of some of the ideas it posits. The main one I'm looking at is near the end: Peak Attention. Similar to Peak Oil, the theory goes that there's only so much Attention out there, and it gets harder and harder to capture pockets of such Attention (with advertising, for example).

What we're talking about is the limits of time. We've reached a point where, if a TV show is to be successful, it must wrangle eyeballs away from other TV shows, internet entertainments, work schedules, play time with families, etc, etc. If it doesn't, well, Comcast is forcing Syfy to cancel Eureka because it doesn't generate enough ad revenue to support the cost of the special effects.

This explains a lot about things like why Borders went out of business. Borders no longer offered enough incentive to capture enough Attention to stay in business. Barnes & Noble is staying in the game by offering toys, games, movies, music, a decent web store online, and an ereader. In the absence of an easily captured pool, B&N solved the problem by casting the nets wider, into multiple pools.

It's a fascinating way to think about the current market.

http://www.kdvr.com/news/kdvr-arvada-police-arrest-11yearold-over-inappropriate-stick-figure-drawing-20110221,0,7099823.story

The link says it - 11 year old boy taken away in handcuffs for drawing stick figures in class.

Episodes like this are cruel to the kids and their parents, and create distrust of police and teachers.

The idiot persuaded to press charges and the idiot who called and persuaded them should both be fired.

Machines are less awe-inspiring, but more disconnecting.

Interesting essay -

That’s why rich entrepreneurs continue to work so hard. They already have enough money to meet every need they could ever have. But they still crave earned success like the rest of us, and so they are driven to create more and more value.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/04/15/online-shoppers-unknowingly-sold-souls/

That's what you get for always clicking through the agreements. >.>

Not that I'm much better at paying attention to these things

I caught most of his statement during my morning break today. I thought it was very mature. He used no weasel words and owned up to his mistakes. He was very clear that he knew he'd done the wrong thing, and made no excuses for it. He apologized to those he wronged and those he disappointed, and said that from here forward, what was important was his actions with his family, not just words.

And I also approve of him chewing out the media for speculating about things without facts and for hounding his family.

At this point, I hope we can all get back to watching him play golf, and he can work things out with his family in private.

When I was a teenager, my dad was the Conference Scouting Coordinator and head of the local NAUMS chapter and all sorts of things Scouting related. This was still a pretty new thing, so he was building groups and coalitions and having lots of meetings with folks. I came along on a lot of these, as I've always loved Scouting as well, and I found a role in the melee.

One thing was that, while the Boy Scouts were officially the Boy Scouts of America (BSA), the Girl Scouts were not the Girl Scouts of America (GSA). They were the Girl Scouts of the United States of America (GSUSA). Being a teenager, I found the distinction dumb, and I remarked on it to my dad.

He shrugged the question of how dumb it might be off. The important thing, he told me, is that this is all new to them, too. So, to show that we respect them and want to include them, it's important that we use the right name. We had a lot of Boy Scouts to whom BSA lingo was like breathing, but we needed to be able to show the Girl Scouts that we took them seriously and that they were important to us, too. So we had to learn and use the GSUSA lingo. To do otherwise would be rude, and would shut them out.

And we had to learn to speak Campfire Boys and Girls. And 4-H. Using the right names in the right places meant that they were welcome and important.

Now, I've twice in the past few months said something when somebody used the term 'antichoice', because those people are the sorts of people that I didn't think would want to be outright rude to others. I got nowhere in both conversations.

So, maybe this will explain. In this big social battle that goes on, using the preferred words and lingo used by the other side is like waving a flag of parley. It shows that you are interested in putting aside the fighting for a bit to discuss why we're here and what we expect to get out of this. We might not get anywhere in the discussion, but we can have it.

Using insider terms is like closing your visor and picking up your shield. Using an inflammatory term that is also used by trolls in internet fora is like picking up a sword. Both of these actions signal that you're not really interested in discussion, at least not with me.

And in that case, I'm don't want to fight in Livejournal or Twitter or Facebook or other such places. If fighting is what you want, I'll meet you at the voting booth and we can see which side prevails there.

And please don't make the mistake of thinking that because you don't mean it too horribly, it isn't rude. Imagine telling a room full of gay men that you only use 'fag' to refer to the really flamboyant gay men, and you don't mean the rest of them. You probably won't get a very good reaction from most of the room.

If you don't care about my opinions, that's fine, but be aware of the signals you send by the words you choose.

When I was a little girl, TVs used to have spots showing starving kids in Africa with pleas for money to help them.

These days, I see spots showing starving and abused animals with pleas for money to help them.