Tuesday, January 22, 2019

Uskirting law and the banality of censorship

Roosh has a post up about the demise of free speech on the Internet, where the key quote is: "If you haven’t been affected yet, either you have a strong filter, and could have survived during the Soviet Union without being sent to the gulags, or have not yet been heard. When the attack against you does come, you will be struck by how banal your thought crime actually was." I have so far escaped any serious censorship, which this isn't either, but now I can't tweet for a week simply for calling a hateful feminist a "hateful bitch":


 And here is the entire context from which my tweet is now removed:


She can call me a "sicko" but I can't call her a "bitch." Which I am not saying she should be censored for either, of course. Both of these are banal insults and policing this sort of speech is just ridiculous. But platforms like Twitter are now evidently governed by such a kindergarten level of rules, so we have to deal with that.

The silver lining here is that my ideology is not censored. My original tweet opposing the upskirting law is still standing, as are my 7000 other mostly ideological tweets and the entirety of my blog. If I had left out the word "bitch," and stopped at the salient point that it is hateful to criminalize men for filming women's genitalia in public when they can simply cover them up if they don't like it, I doubt I would be censored either.

The moral is, don't get carried away and engage in name-calling, even when badly insulted yourself. Express your ideology and leave it at that. This reaffirms my commitment to excluding the trolls from my blog. They shall not get the chance to provoke me into saying something they can use against me, no matter how ridiculous the rules get. Calling a hateful feminist another synonym adds nothing to the meaning anyway, so we are better off not wasting our time.

The day they start censoring ideology, we are in real trouble. But that is not happening yet from my point of view. Feminist ideology is winning, but we can still express dissent as long as we go about it in a rhetorically cool-headed manner. Which is the best rhetorical strategy anyhow. Remember, my most impactful tweet was just a lexicographical suggestion, and it pissed more feminists off than saying "bitch" or any other officially bad word ever can.

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