Words as Violence and Coerced Speech
How Twitter defines words as actions to stifle speech.
Twitter’s “Rules and Policies” define speech as conduct. This means that Twitter defines words as actions.
The reason that leftists define words as actions is that it allows them to say that rhetoric is violence. And what do you do when someone inflicts violence on you?
Correct. You inflict violence on THEM in self-defense. This is how groups such as Antifa justify physical attacks on peaceful demonstrators with different political viewpoints. A micro-aggression is deserving of a bike lock to the skull.
All totalitarian ideologies view dissent as violence.
"We demand that there be a legal campaign against those who propagate deliberate political lies and disseminate them through the press… Newspapers transgressing against the common welfare shall be suppressed. We demand legal action against those tendencies in art and literature that have a disruptive influence upon the life of our folk, and that any organizations that offend against the foregoing demands shall be dissolved.”
From the National Socialist Program, also known as the 25 Points of the Nazi Party.
The Chronicle of Higher Education published a piece on words as violence. This article very astutely points out that leftist activist culture is identical to the “honor culture” of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
“In the honor culture of the antebellum American South, it was dangerous to be a newspaper editor. If a gentleman thought the paper had published anything unflattering about himself or a family member, he might challenge the editor to a duel (if he perceived him to be a social equal) or else simply beat him with a cane or whip.”
On May 22, 1856, Democratic Congressman Preston Brooks of South Carolina beat abolitionist Republican Senator Charles Sumner nearly to death on the floor of the US Senate in response to Sumner criticizing Brooks’s cousin over the latter’s pro-slavery views.
Today—162 years later—leftists have not changed. If anything, they’re worse.
It’s actually not possible for Twitter users to adhere to the Rules and Policies.
We’ll take “deadname” first.
To deadname a transgender person is to call them by their birth name.
“I was a stillbirth, but then I told everyone to call me Jimmy, and now I’m alive.”
Madness. This proves that transgender people can’t serve in the armed forces, for example. If you use the wrong name, air-raid sirens will go off, and the military police will march you to the brig as medics rush the deadnamed victim to the intensive-care unit.
To "misgender” someone is to use a gender or pronoun that they reject.
Facebook lists 71 gender options.
And here are some gender pronouns.
The first two rows look like pirate-speak. When I worked in Stavanger, Norway, the crews of the supply ships were from Newfoundland. They spoke like pirates.
“Aer and ey some right rotted diggin' thar doubloons, me hearty!”
They called me “the body on the pier,” meaning “the guy on the pier.” Can you imagine if you were forced to speak like a Newfie, on penalty of being banned from Twitter or fired from your job? You’d say, “That’s demented!”
Welcome to the demented reality of 2018.
As an aside, those Newfie pirates were the toughest people I’ve ever met. They didn’t cry when you asked, “What the hell does that mean?” AND they didn’t demand that I start saying “sleeveen” and “fousty” when I spoke to them. This was 1979, a year from a long-dead era.
Today in 2018 we are being coerced into using speech. It’s one thing to prohibit speech; that’s old hat for totalitarians. The current dictators demand that we USE WORDS that are foreign to our worldview.
Gender Nonconforming.
Intersex person.
T* woman
Zie.
Cos.
Xyr.
Quite a step forward on the road to total oppression.
And yet THIS is not hateful to Twitter and the other tech totalitarians.
I don’t miss social media. When I was a child, my greatest fear was that most people are insane. The midterm elections showed me that the American voter is utterly irrational, so I backed away from daily contact. We as a culture need decades of psychotherapy before we become functional. My time is too short to waste on angry children in the bodies of adults. I’m much closer to the end than the beginning.
There’s one thing about Americans that gives me hope: We are the only people who turn on a dime and reject things that don’t work. It’s still possible that we will do that again.
But until we do, I can’t muster the interest to again dive into that swimming pool full of vomit. I use the metaphor carefully.
Over half a century ago, my family took a trip into the Andes. We hired a giant black taxi and went up the winding roads. My four siblings and I got very carsick and altitude sick, and we all threw up, one after another. Then my mother threw up. Then my father threw up. Then the Venezuelan taxi driver threw up.
We arrived at the luxury hotel, and the uniformed doorman stepped toward us.
I’ll never forget his scream when he opened our rolling vault of vomit.
"¡Madre de Dios!”
Mother of God!
They hosed us down before allowing us inside. But we tipped the taxi driver a year’s worth of wages.
I may come back to social media when you people have been hosed down. In the meantime, you're just too crazy for me.