My daughter is lying on the floor with Apollo, and I said “what’s up?” and she said “this is our new business. I call it Collapsey Taxi.”
“The way it works is, you call us to come and get you, and we SAY we’ll pick you up, but actually we just send you our location every five minutes until you realize we’re not coming.”
Ok, y’all, gather round, because it’s Easter Sunday and @CodingEtudes and I stayed up way too late figuring out how the fuck Scott Adams ended up involved in the Matt Gaetz scandal.
Y’all, the answer appears to be “because everyone involved is dumb af.”
Let’s get into it.
First, a little background. In a lot of ways, this is a story about Bob Levinson. Levinson was a government agent who disappeared in 2007 in Iran. It’s widely understood that he was kidnapped by the Iranian government and died in their custody. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappear…
His family announced his death just about a year ago, in March 2020. The Iranian government still denies any involvement with or knowledge of his arrest, detainment, or death. C’est la guerre.
However, recently there have been rumors that Levinson is in fact still alive.
So, there’s a rhetorical trick I’ve noticed amongst the MAGA/Trumpist/whatever crowd that I want to call some attention to, because it is fuckin’ insidious.
In this exercise, the speaker re-defines moral positions as political positions, and then claims these differences must be set aside in the name of unity or fairness or neutrality or whatever.
I’ve been fighting with trolls on the internet since almost before there was an internet to fight trolls on. In that time, the trolls have changed a lot, but our tactics really haven’t, and it has cost us.
@tznkai@JimHenleyMusic@jsmooth995 Just ignoring the trolls worked great when they were individual people who were just looking to cause a ruckus, like a two-year-old kicking down someone else’s blocks. Eventually they would give up and wander off, no harm done.
@tznkai@JimHenleyMusic@jsmooth995 These days though, the trolls have goals, and they have allies. Now when we ignore them, we don’t win. We just cede ground. We move away into our own spaces and our own curated conversations and we leave the Default Internet to people with bad intentions.
It's not pro-harassment to say that a lot of harassing speech is protected by the First Amendment. It's just true. Saying that something is speech doesn't mean it's harmless, doesn't mean it's trivial, doesn't mean it's OK. It just means that it's speech.
If I say that most of what constitutes stochastic terrorism is 1A-protected speech, I'm not saying that I don't think it's a big deal or even that it shouldn't be stopped. But if you just pass laws against it, they're going to get shredded the first time they restrain someone.
Even if you think that speech *shouldn't* be protected, it *is.* If you want to effectively curb it with legal action, you can't just pretend like this massive Constitutional hurdle doesn't exist! Because it does!