Elon Musk is a Doozle
About transgender, public discourse, and internet censorship and disfunctionality.
It is about time I put something out on my Blogs. I just had an irritating thing happen which gives me incentive. It touches on several topics not really worth a whole blog.
I do not use eX Twitter so much anymore. My decline in interest precedes Musk taking ownership. I have finally found something which is an adequate alternative to Twitter; substack notes.
Notes gives me something I have wanted for a long time on the net; a way of announcing my new writing to people who might be interested in it. I also hear from other writers who might interest me, when they drop new stuff. I often get referred to interesting new sources of news.
Twitter, er, X, is no longer as good for that as it once was. I get a feeling of just being fed what the Twit, er, ech, algorithm thinks I want to read. Yet internet is still the best newspaper in the world.
I remember before all these “platforms” when internet was mostly about all these people running e-mail lists. The net has mostly returned to that, with some help from improved blog platforms. If we were to achieve a government run, interoperable internet, most of the current platforms would wither away.
I just received a copy of a new book, The Internet Con by Cory Doctorow, which seems to make the same argument as I, but of course taking it further. The internet must become interoperable. It should be possible for creators and consumers, writers, and readers, to find each other without being interfered with by middle men who have carved up the cyberspace between them.
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But lo, I was scrolling down my Twitter feed and came upon something from someone I follow because she is good on the state of the covid war in the United Queendom of formerly Great Britain.
Oops, did it again. I give up, I will keep calling it Twitter. Frux Elon X. I hope Grimes wins her suit and makes you hand over Twitter. She would do a better job running it.
But as to Deepti and her subject of transgenderism. I have written frequently about how it saddens me that people who are good on one subject get outside their area of competence and advocate for utter nonsense. It is usually on one of these true believer topics being driven by the globalist thought control machine.
This invariably means that no discussion is allowed. The heretic is cut off and ordered to silence. Then he or she is removed.
If that is impossible, then the ideologue removes her or his self. Under no circumstances can the merit of the underlying idea be discussed. Invariably, the idea has no basis and can sustain no examination whatsoever.
The major tropes being driven in this way, by plain bullying, include ‘climate change’, Russia and its actions in Ukraine, and now transgenderism. All these are being pushed by the Davos, World Economic forum, global finance control machine, as part of that agenda. That is, the complete breakdown of economy and society so that a new form of feudalism can be established.
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Just before reading Deepti criticizing someone opposed to transgenderism, I had seen a video on the subject which defined it perfectly for me. To make it even more offensive to ‘woke’ people, it was on RT. That is, the Russian ‘state propaganda’ media which I can still get in Canada, and which is still very good on most things.
This was a segment of the “Direct Impact” show of Rick Sanchez, a renegade American telejournalist. He has gone over to the side of evil Russianness and dares to send serious news to North American audiences. This time he was helping an author pitch a book; Oli London and “Gender Madness.”
This might be the next book I get sent to me. Oli London has a very sad personal story to tell. He also has a very important public issue.
He had a lot of trouble with his parents, in school, and in adult life for looking and acting effeminate. He was persuaded that undergoing the transgender process would make him happy and accepted. It did not work for him and he has had a great struggle getting changed back.
He says that transgender is a racket. Rather than give people who are having trouble dealing with their sexuality some psychological counselling, it is much more lucrative to put them through the whole transgendering process. It is costly and complicated to change them back, too.
Since Oli began advocating against transgenderism, he has been amazed at how nasty the response has been from these ‘woke’ people. Few of them are themselves transgendered. He has become convinced that this really is a plot by malevolent interests to destroy family within Western society.
He notes that ‘gender dysphoria’ only seems to be a problem in western culture. Homosexuals exist everywhere but only in the west do you have people who seem to want to change genders. Even the other letters in the LGBTQ gallery resent that the ’T’ gets all the attention and their issues seem neglected.
Oli wonders why doctors are talking about genders as being ‘assigned at birth’. Doctors are supposed to be scientific. Genders are assigned by chance at conception and set for good at that time. There is XX and XY, and nothing else.
Oli is especially concerned about the growing trend to genetically ‘reassign’ children. This is not a delusion of honkie types wanting to attack the educational and other governmental systems. This is really going on. People who have not even reached puberty are getting chemically ‘reassigned’.
A long time ago now, when I was a kid, I had a peculiar kind of trouble with gender identity. Some people decided I was a homosexual. It seemed I acted effeminately in certain ways.
I eventually understood that these people really just did not like me, partly because I was a lot smarter than them. My birth had also been inconvenient for some people. I was confused for a long time but eventually decided that this homosexual thing really did not work for me and I wanted to be a plain, ordinary heterosexual.
I do not resent homosexuals or trannies. I get along with them fine. What I do not like are homo haters. I especially dislike anyone trying to tell me who I am.
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So this was the frame of mind I was in when I tumbled onto Deepti’s conversation with someone on Twitter about transgenderism. I could not read the other side of the discussion. I tapped out two paragraphs to her, stating that it was not trans people who are threatening, but the aggressive way in which gender reassignment is being promoted.
As soon as I hit send, very strange things happened. The message seemed to vanish. It happened too fast for Deepti to have read it and activated anything. I do not think she saw it.
This had to be an algorithm responding to some trigger word or phrase. But I was careful to use very neutral language.It is baffling what triggered this automated response.
Soon after I got a message from the Musk machine. I was able to screen shot it before it disappeared. I found this ‘help centre’ but did not find it helpful. I could only recover the back half of the message I sent.
I found Deepti’s original message on her feed. I sent her a message asking her if she could respond to me and enlighten the problem with Twitter thought policing in any way. That is probably futile but I think she should be aware.
Trying to discover what the ‘mistake’ was, or how to ‘appeal the decision’, was a dead end. There would not have been any ‘decision’ to appeal. I can detect no impediment to my use of Twitter because of this.
I checked out the feed of the person D had been interacting with, but could not find the conversation I butted into. The person is an adherent of neoliberal notions, but she is one of the less obnoxious ones. I am left with a feeling I was collateral damage in this exchange over transgenderism.
The issue I have with all this ‘pronouns’ and gendering nonsense is this; I do not accept being told what to think by ideological people. We are living in a time when this is a big problem. Language is being messed up.
George Orwell in “1984” illustrated this problem. I once attended a lecture from someone who had lived through the final days of Stalinist Communist rule in eastern Europe. She finds the present misuse of language in western cultures to be similar to the official language in that time and place. Totalitarian tendencies always try to control the use of language in order to control how people think, especially when such regimes are losing control.
The attempt to eliminate human genders is found in various subcultures at various place/times in history. There were the Gnostic sect within early Christianity, the Catharians in medieval times, the Bogomils in Byzantium, and the Manicheans in ancient Persia. In all cases, a cult within the greater society was trying to assert control, or protect itself, by breaking down existing social structures.
It is becoming clear that the ‘woke’ phenomenon is a manifestation of these tendencies in modern western countries. An elite group has been accustomed to being in control of society but has become disconnected from reality. They find the greater society, increasingly agitated by economic concerns, to be very threatening.
These tendencies are especially concerning in the technological age. We have modern communications technology and all its potential for abuse. But modern medical science can go after victim’s physical integrity with chemical and surgical alterations.
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It is this determination to control how people think which is the threat, not the people with any of the LGBTQ traits. It is the rise of narcissistic behaviour which is the threat. That is, people not just trying to tell me who I am, but how I have to perceive others.
This is what makes this ‘pronouns’ thing so offensive. How life is supposed to work is this; I form my own idea of who I am, based on my own experiences and reflections. I do not accept other people deciding where to slot me within a lot of arbitrary categories they have, and demanding that I believe it.
Concurrently, I do not go around trying to tell other people who I am. I expect they will make up their own minds about how to respond to me. If they cannot respect me as I am then I expect them to move on.
Reciprocally, I do not accept other people trying to tell me who they are and how I must respond to them. I will make up my own mind about them. That includes what gender they belong to.
Of course I am not hard headed about this. If someone really wants to do the tranny thing, I am happy to oblige. There are not really so many of them and they are usually not aggressive about it. It is weird that it is mostly non LGBTQ people who are shoving this on everybody.
What is also weird about this gender/pronouns thing is that in most human interactions gender is really not that important. Only a total dipstick would get annoyed or offended when someone gets their gender wrong in a situation where it is not immediately apparent. The ‘pronouns’ thing is at best a solution for a non existent problem, yet it is forced on everyone with insane aggression.
Why?
Thus, we can see that social media platforms, with responsibility for moderating interactions, have a difficult job in this era of social disintegration. We have several social factions trying to be the sole public voice and to throttle all the other voices. Really, all these fanatic factions need to be silenced, but that is not possible yet.
I will not here get into how public discourse should occur, and how social media should facilitate it. I made a start at that in this piece here. Someday I will go into that topic in more depth.
I will also soon blog more about how the net should be organized. I have made a start at that here. The basic problem is that it can only work as a public utility.
The national government in each country must control the pipes and the access onto them. All platforms must be licensed by the state, which must insure interoperability with all other platforms. This will require development of an actual democracy, with capitalism abolished and private business subordinated to the public good.
What also becomes possible with an actual democracy is factual news media and moderated public discourse. No kind of discourse and discussion is possible unless the participants are limited or there is a competent moderator. In an open discussion, it is the moderator’s work which makes the discussion useful.
Moderation is a different thing from censorship and makes censorship unnecessary. The problem with almost all social media is it depends on advertising and data collection to make a profit. The owners want the largest number of participants at the least cost, so they do not want moderation.
However, increasingly repressive government requires them to do censorship. They end up doing it by algorithm and “artificial Intelligence”. This gradually makes intelligent discussion on any slightly controversial topic impossible.
Moderation has to be done by reasonably sapient humans and so costs money. The influence agents and ideological warriors will inevitably scream that moderators are censoring them. They will take themselves out of the discourse, thus reducing the platform’s profit potential.
Thus, moderation can only be done on social media when the media is funded by fees, and either owned or closely regulated by a really democratic government. When that is achieved, the internet will be much more useful. Public discourse will be much deeper and more constructive.
Until that idyllic situation develops, we will have people like Muskmelon controlling our public discussions. The problem is not merely one of encouraging fractious and immoderate discourse so as to increase profit. It is not in using the platform to sell us to advertisers and data mongers.
The problem with these people is not merely in acting as an arm of the security state and the ‘mainstream media’ machine. It is not just in managing the platforms so poorly. The worst thing is biasing the platform toward their own ideas and opinions.
A really democratic way of shaping the public voice will not happen until we have real democracy. A social media where we are not constantly worried about tripping over some vague rule, and having our ‘privilege’ restricted, will happen only then. Really useful discussion, aimed at truth finding, will only be possible then.
Until then we put up with what we have. Oh, Mister Dorsey, when will I finally receive an invite into your realm of the Blue Sky.
I wonder what’s new on Notes.