#Like it or not‚ advocating for censorship in ANY WAY will always lead to a slippery slope‚ | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

cosmicjoke · 9 months ago

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Okay, this is a bit of a call-out post, which I don't like to engage in, but some of the stuff that's been brought to my attention, that's apparently been being said about me and, by extension, people who share my views, isn't really something I can let stand.

So apparently there's some blogs going around vague posting about Levi fans who dare (oh the horror) to call Levi a good man and a hero, saying stuff like doing so is how one treads down the path toward Nazism, because it's a "denial" of Levi's faults, and if we don't condemn his violence as outright bad or wrong, then we're liable to start making excuses for and justifying all forms of violence.

Do I even need to lay out why this argument is absurd and absolutely childish at its core? I don't think so, but I will anyway.

One of the overarching and main themes of AoT is that we shouldn't flatly condemn people for their actions without first understanding the context of those actions. That nothing is ever so simple as being flatly right or wrong, good or bad. That there can be and are complicating factors that might lead to any, given person's actions or behavior.

Levi himself is a prime example of this, and we see the error of flatly condemning and writing him off as "bad" in the form of Jean's and Mikasa's judgmental and dismissive attitude toward him after seeing him engage in acts of violence, only to themselves be forced into similar acts moments later.

The stupidity inherent to uniformly condemning all violence as bad or wrong lies in its total failure to consider any mitigating circumstances that might have lead to the violence in the first place, and, ironically, it's THAT sort of basic and simplistic thinking that leads toward the kind of fanatical, ideological foundations of Nazism and other, similar movements. Nuanced thought, consideration, empathy and critical thinking are never the things that lead down that road. Moralistic and generalized view points are what do that. To call Levi a "morally grey" character is to fundamentally misunderstand that morality itself is a "grey" concept. There's no such thing a black and white morality. Almost nothing is always right and always wrong, including violence. Very few things, if anything, can be definitely categorized as right and wrong in and of itself. The argument that some things need to be wholly condemned or eradicated is, for example, the same sort of logic that people who advocate for censorship apply. All pornography is bad or wrong? Better to just flatly condemn and ban all of it, then. Oh my, you're going to let two men marry each other? What if someone wants to marry an animal next? Better just make gay marriage illegal then, I guess. Many Jews are bankers, and banking is a corrupt business that preys on people's vulnerabilities, thus, all Jews are really just money launders and loan sharks and need to be stopped. Killing and violence is always wrong, and so people who kill or commit acts of violence are always criminals and bad people with malicious intent or who reveal in other people's pain. See how that works? All generalizations like that lead to is mass persecution, either of a concept or of a person/group of people, without taking into consideration the actual complexity or nuanced reasoning for why something or someone might be a certain way or do a certain thing. That's what's dangerous.

To deny Levi is a good man or a hero because he commits acts of violence is to totaly deny and strip him of all the many aspects and characteristics of his personality that makes him who he actually is. Levi's violence doesn't define him. It isn't who he is. Rather, it's a product of the world he lives in and the circumstances of his upbringing and life. It doesn't signify the person he is at his core. It doesn't negate the immense compassion, kindness, empathy and sensitivity with which he regards and treats other people. It doesn't render his heroism worthless or questionable. It doesn't undermine his intentions or motivations. It doesn't rob his many sacrifices of their selflessness. That's why I say Levi is a good man. Not because he's on the "good guy side" or because he holds a certain set of ideological beliefs, but because of those inherent qualities which define him as a good man. Compassion, kindness, empathy, emotional intelligence, and a genuine desire to help others for others sake. He's a good person because he actually, truly cares about other people. Is that assessment of him supposed to somehow lead down the road to fanaticism? How absurd.

That's not to say Levi doesn't have flaws. Of course he does. He's a human being, and all human's are flawed. Nobody ever said Levi was a "perfect" hero, just that he is a hero. Understanding Levi's violence and where it comes from and why he engages in it doesn't mean we're excusing it or calling it "good". It's simply an attempt to understand and acknowledge one of the main themes of AoT, which is that a person committing a "bad act" doesn't in and of itself make them a "bad person", and that certain actions and behaviors that are deemed "bad" by society can and often do have reasonable and justifiable explanations at their root. Does Levi resort to violence too often and too easily? Sure. I've said that and acknowledged it on multiple occasions. I've dedicated entire, long-winded analysis posts to exploring the duality of Levi's compassionate and empathetic nature with the fact that he's one of the most violent characters in AoT. His knee-jerk reaction and response to most situations is to apply physical force of one kind or another. Levi is also an extremely emotional character, and is given at times to bouts of emotionally excessive response. When he kicks Eren and Jean after his conversation with Erwin. When he manhandles Historia for her initial, flat refusal to take the throne. When he kicks Eren's teeth in during the RtS arc, or on the airship in Liberio. When he tortures Zeke in the cart on the way to the capital. These are all instances of Levi giving in to his emotion and responding violently. And no, it's not good, but it also doesn't make Levi bad. It doesn't make his intentions malicious or cruel in nature. In all of these instances of violence on Levi's part, it's driven by an intense emotional response, generally in regard to some traumatic event. Levi learning Erwin might not be the good man he thought he was. Levi having to torture a man for specific information, only to have the point of it threatened by Historia's self-pity. Eren interfering with Levi's direct command during a situation in which time was severely limited in making a decision. Eren slaughtering countless innocent people. Zeke forcing Levi to kill more than two dozen of his own soldiers. All of the examples one could point to of Levi being "unnecessarily" violent, meaning in a way that didn't further some larger goal or cause, were all moments of emotional reaction linked either to trauma or urgency or both. Most of these responses from Levi, in fact, came about because he was upset about someone else getting hurt, or at the possibility of people getting hurt. They're rooted, at their core, in Levi's compassion for others. They're emotional responses triggered by Levi's empathy and care. He gets angry because he's scared or grief stricken over someone else' suffering. And that's my and other fans' only point. Levi's violence might be considered bad by some, but the underlying reasons for it almost always prove Levi's goodness. He responds so strongly because he cares. So to refuse to acknowledge the circumstances and context surrounding those acts of violence and to refuse to acknowledge the influence of his upbringing in his inclination to respond with violence is grossly unjust and unfair to who Levi is as a person. To pretend that his very nature can't be contradictory to his actions and behavior is to deny, not just Levi's complexity as a person, but the complexity of people overall. Because Levi's nature is, much of the time, contradictory to his actions, especially when one only looks at his actions in a vacuum instead of in context. He's a violent man who also holds more kindness and compassion in his heart for people than any other character in the story. That's a contradiction. But it's true, nonetheless. You can be a good person who does bad things, or things deemed wrong by others and society.

Levi doesn't enjoy violence, and anyone who says he does or tries to claim he does is flatly wrong. To say, just because Levi is good at violence, that must mean he's somehow born to it, or that it's in his nature to want to commit it, is equally unjust and unfair in the way it dismisses the circumstances of his life and upbringing. A person can be forced into doing something that goes against their core temperament and personality due to forces outside of their control, and acknowledging that about Levi and his violence isn't the same as claiming him to be a "perfect hero". He's not perfect, but he is a hero. He's a hero because he's inherently selfless and kind and empathetic toward other people and their suffering, because he's willing to do all he can to help other people, despite an upbringing which forced violence and a familiarity with violence into his life, despite a childhood and young adulthood filled with deprivation and poverty. He wasn't born with a violent temperament, he was raised in an environment that necessitated a reliance on violence in order to survive, and so we see that manifest in Levi as an adult. A reliance on violence to survive. Again, to not acknowledge that and the impact it had on Levi's behavior and actions is unjust and unfair to him as a person. A stupid oversimplification of not just Levi as a character, but of people in general, and of the concept of justifiable violence too. Pacifism is an ideal, but one which doesn't and can't always coexist with reality. To judge someone and condemn then for engaging in violence, no matter the circumstances surrounding that violence, when nature itself is predicated on violence, is absurd.

Context matters. Circumstances matter. Intent matters. Levi's violence was never ideological in its reasoning. He never committed acts of violence in service to some abstract school of thought or philosophy. He never killed anyone because he thought they represented or symbolized some great evil or threat to the world and needed to be eradicated as a result. Levi's acts of violence have always been practical in nature. Defense of himself and others against people directly threatening their well being. And further, Levi has never, not once, tried to impose his way of thinking or doing on a single, other person. He's always, always, allowed everyone to decide for themselves. To come to their own conclusions of what they believe is right and wrong, good or bad. He's always allowed everyone their own agency. He's never manipulated or badgered or bullied anyone into agreeing with him or tried to brainwash anyone into a certain set of ideological beliefs. He's only ever wanted and tried to ensure people the freedom to make those decisions for themselves, and he's only ever tried to protect people, more often than not at great cost to himself.

He's the very definition of a hero, and to accuse people who call him that of exhibiting the kind of ideological thinking that leads to Nazism is not only absurd, but a massive insult, both to Levi's character and to the intelligence of his fans. As if they're incapable of understanding the nature of violence because they differentiate between acts of violence by applying critical thought to outside factors and mitigating circumstances. I guess our justice system is similarly incapable of understanding the nature of violence too, then, because it also dares to weigh outside factors and mitigating circumstances when judging a person's "crimes" or "guilt". It isn't the people who apply nuanced thought and consideration to Levi's actions who are susceptible to fanaticism, it's the people making those sorts of accusations who are, in exposing their total inability to divorce themselves from their black and white view of reality.

#Levi Ackerman #meta #commentary #analysis #attack on titan #shingkei no kyojin

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dbunicorn · 1 year ago

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https://www.landconflictwatch.org/conflicts/sikh-farmers-sell-land-move-out-of-gujarat-after-attacks-by-locals

I'm curious. I've been mistaken for muslim and harassed repeatedly since 9/11. Where is it you would like me to 'go home' to? Canada? I know I'm not welcome in India. The states? Be specific? What a brilliant display of 1984 style propaganda. When an abuser plays possum. Particularly men.

Where would you like my white husband and half white children to go? Be specific.

Why all the Twitter bans? Denying visas? Is stalking considered violence? Is child endangerment? I'm curious to have a debate about billionaires, taxes, water rights, indigenous rights, bank notes, women's rights, femicide, censorship , math and revisionist history. Land grabs. Sovereignty. Technology transfer.

Tell your young people about the reality of their day to day climate future.

This in NO WAY advocates violence. It advocates the truth. Not revisionist history. By the numbers TRUTH.

My father always told me 'all paths lead to God'. Even as an atheist my beliefs were grounded in morality and reason.

Corruption isn't a path. Neither is evil.

An excellent researcher/reporter will NEVER weaponize numbers. It destroys trust. You cannot get it back.

For the official record. This smells of the 1984 genocide, operation blue star, and 9/11 without any legality whatsoever.

The labelling of actual data as misinformation is a joke.

PS I took a moment to tune into wion, India today etc...for the purposes of research of course.

That's some really fair balanced angry journalism you've established. 👍👍

Relax....

#sikhs #propoganda #uncomfortable #punjabi #climate policy

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mojoflower · 4 years ago

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Thoughts on Censorship, Antis and AO3

I was reading a post about antis and incest/underage/problematic other on AO3 and started thinking about censorship.

I do not think that, in general, people who advocate for censorship either

a) consider what they're doing is "censoring" or

b) have anything other than the best intentions.

Let's step backwards, and examine 'gays' in literature. The people up in arms about that only wanted to protect their children from exposure to and influence by this terrible thing. Innocent children who didn't know better would be presented with 'gay' as if it were an acceptable concept. There is a thin line between fiction and reality, they said, and their children wouldn't recognize it. Such literature would plant crooked seeds in their malleable little minds that would flourish into crooked trees.

For a deeply conservative, Christian matron in the midwest, this was a truly evil and terrifying prospect, the unwitting corruption of her unsupervised child. Or even worse, the school system pushing these dirty concepts. Because everyone knows that if you read it, it becomes palatable, real and acceptable.

This kind of 'we must protect the children' attitude has been applied to so many things. In my lifetime, I've watched people try to ban 'satanic music', video games, porn, profanity, nasty art, and literature that might be gay/non-christian/contain adultery/drug use/incest/violence/rape/underage/mixed-race relationships/any form of revolution/confirmation of the Holocaust/references to magic (hullo Harry Potter), etc.

The denizens of Tumblr, at this point, would laugh at most of those crusades. Of COURSE we all know that reading about a happy gay couple will not make the reader gay. Of COURSE we all know that reading about murder or torture will not make the reader a sociopath.

I think the most important thing to consider, when establishing laws, is: can this ever be turned against YOU?

If you support the censoring of one thing, then chances are very, VERY high that at some point, someone else will want to apply it to something you think they shouldn't. Censorship in China is a great example of that. They are also vigorously against anything problematic, it's just that their definition is broader than yours.

Does NOT censoring lead to problematic issues? YES. Sometimes it does. Racism and stereotypes are currently at the cultural forefront. There are a lot of things in our culture that are damaging in a very subtle kind of way. Racism. Sexism. Violence. And, according to the antis, incest and underage on AO3.

(I actually think there's a big difference between a private individual writing fiction and a public megalith doing so for profit, but that's a different meta. As is whether reading or writing an underage story on AO3 means you advocate raping children.)

So as a culture, we must make a choice. Do we put the ability to censor in a few hands to dish out punishment and reward (like China) and just assume that they will always know best and never hurt anyone with their choices? Or do we NOT do that and then tolerate some of the yucky stuff that is allowed because of that choice?

I am a big fan of tags and warnings. I think that it is very reasonable to put them on things like underage. But even that is a slippery slope that can be turned against you. The people currently wanting AO3 to add 'racism' to its archival warnings are butting up against this same thing, because where, precisely, is that line? Who gets to decide? Who is the ultimate authority on what is and is not allowable?

I am comfortable, myself, with living in a society that allows people to express themselves freely, even knowing that some people will say/write/depict things that I find utterly repugnant. In my country (USA) the legal line stands at the intersection of free expression and actively hurting another individual: for example calling your followers to arms to hunt down a certain person/group, or announcing that using guns to exterminate the opposition is a good idea. Or using actual children to depict or enact underage.

tl;dr When you argue that thoughts hurt people, you aren't wrong, but examine the world where one group gets to decide what thoughts people are allowed to have. That can, and historically will, absolutely be used against you one day, depending on which group is in power at the moment.

Think about that.

#censorship #antis #censorship and ao3 #purity police #purity culture #mojo muses

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empiregalaxy · 5 years ago

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Leaving Tumblr

Dear Tumblr,

The cliche goes 'this is a hard post to write.' Well, it's not. This is very easy to write. I'm leaving Tumblr, and you should too. Here's why.

I joined this social media site in 2012, as I was drawn to discussing films. Soon, I got into 'fandoms', mainly Buffy The Vampire Slayer and A Song Of Ice And Fire. For the first few years, there was no problem. Well, except one. Let's call her 'MN.' MN and I met on Yahoo Answers, and we shared private e-mails. I felt safe around her, and I confided in her some of my secrets. She helped me when a Tumblr user were sending sexually crass messages to me. During a time when my social life was falling apart, she helped me. Then one day, she stopped talking to me. She didn't block or unfollow me, but she pretended that I didn't exist. No replies to my friendly comments (she'd reply to everyone else).

At the time, I thought I did something wrong. But now I realise she was a coward who didn't have the guts to tell me that she no longer wanted to be my friend. That's the thing about Tumblr. It's full of cowards, who lack the intellectual or moral ability to confront their 'friends.' And when you mention that, they convince you that the problem lies with you.

So I moved away from the film fandom.

During the next few years, I get more involved in the ASOIAF fandom, particularly the Arya Stark section. And yeah, I was an SJW (vomit!). I would write posts about Arya, how sucky the Sansa fandom was. But overtime, I saw a shift. What started as simple, light-hearted bashing of Sansa fans turned sinister. They 'controlled' the fandom and the mods at ASOIAF university. Looking back it, I want to tell them that Arya and Sansa are both fictional characters. They aren't real. But the Sansa fans you were bashing and calling names, spreading lies about? They are. I often say that 'Tumblr treats real people like fictional characters, and fictional characters like real people.' It's true. All of these characters that you care about... they aren't real. And people don't have to treat them like they are.

So I 'defect' from the Arya fandom. And oh boy did they turn on me. Some are more slower than others, and they tell me that the reason why they didn't block me immediately was because 'they didn't want to hurt my feelings.' That's utter bullshit. They did it because they were scared of the fallout. They were cowards. But once they did block me, they'd post lies about me. That I was a stalker. That I was a bad person. I was open slather once they decided that I was no longer one of them. That's the thing about Tumblr: it's tribal. People think there actions are morally justified, if the person receiving them is 'bad.' Everything about me was insulted, even my gifsets.

A user who was particularly vicious was Marie. She and I were mutuals for well over 18 months. But she'd call me a bad person, a creep, mentally ill, an evil Reylo or whatever. Worse, was that these Arya stans were discussing me on Twitter. When I exposed them, I only had my closest mutuals at the time supporting me. (I had over 2,000 followers. Only 3 bothered to ask if I was okay). Users I never heard of suddenly had 'hot takes' about me.

Lies were spread about me, non stop. I realised that not only was this behaviour permitted on Tumblr, but it was actively rewarded.

And it was all over a FUCKING FICTIONAL CHARACTER.

This happened in 2016, which involved Brexit and the presidental election of Donald Trump. Look, I believe in free speech. I don't care if you are for or against them. Personally, I despise the European Union and if I were American, yeah, I could have voted Republican. But that's irrelevant. Tumblr users were so unhappy with those results, that anyone who did like Trump and Farage were labelled all the awful names in the book. Racist. Sexist. Nazi. Not only did this teach me that Tumblr users have no idea what those words mean, but that they are willing to use them liberally in order to gain power. Looking back at it, I'm glad Trump won. I'm glad Brexit happened. Not only because of politics, but it meant that you guys LOST. You better get used to that feeling, because if you continue to treat people the way you treated me, that feeling will soon be the only thing you know.

A common misconception in the media is that Tumblr users act like 'SJWs' because they are young and ignorant. I mean, sure. But Tumblr users act like SJWs because they are fundamentally, cultish in nature and adhere to a hideous morality. I study Modern History, and a big part of that is empathy. What motivates someone to join the SS? Or run a gulag? Or torture someone? I manage to answer those questions, with relative ease. But I still have no idea why Tumblr users are so nasty and stupid. Like, none of you know shit about anything.

The breaking point, when I realised 'we are all fucked' was when neo-Nazi Richard Spencer got punched. Look, I disagree with EVERYTHING Antifa and the Alt-right do. Celebrating any form of political violence leads to a nasty path. One day you are celebrating some one getting punched, and the next, you are cheering people getting slaughtered. People should never be CELEBRATED for violence. There is no moral justification for it. And you guys are too stupid to figure out that once all the 'Nazis' are gone, you are next to be sent to the gulag. You see yourself as distributing justice, but never receiving punishment. And oh, that is going to hurt you long term.

I would subtely mention why Spencer getting punched was wrong. But people on Tumblr were saying 'if anyone doesn't support Antifa, they should get punched too.' That's utter tyranny, and its something a Nazi would do. Since 2017, the countless violence by AntiFa is astounding. And Tumblr cheers it on like its a fucking joke. Like the real world is a theatre, and we are all patrons in the globe. Well, I've got news for you. The world doesn't exist for your pleasure. People don't have to act in certain ways to make you happy. The universe is not a 'safe space.' And you have the arrogant audacity to think you can bully it into changing.

Worse, was that I was fearful to speak out against it. That's utter evil. I understood the meaning of the term 'self-censorship' and since then, have become a free speech advocate.

Of course, no letter about leaving Tumblr would be complete without mentioning Lindsay. Oh Lindsay. We were friends for 2 years, and then I said a historical fact (that the Nazis persecuted people beyond Jewish people) and she flipped out. She blocked me, sent me anon hate, and told all the Reylos to block me. And you know what? Alot did. I was put on hit and block lists.

Now, anyone who has studied World War II history knows that I am right. But because Tumblr is contrived of people who can't put Austria on a map, I was attacked and slandered. Lindsay would try to bully my friends into blocking me. They obviously refused. But Lindsay probably does the same shit to other people. Good thing she's a boring basic bitch with no personality, who has the charisma of a rock, because people with her mindset can really hurt people. She'll probably call me a 'Holocaust revisionist' for making fun of her.

I honestly don't care what she thinks of me. I don't care what Marie thinks of me. They will probably interpret me leaving Tumblr as a victory of sorts. And yeah, I'm gone from Tumblr. But I'm not gone from this world. I will continue to live, to write, to create, to argue. I know I matter. I know I'm a good person capable of a positive impact. I am not what you think I am, and I never will be.

You will always have the knowledge that I am out there, being me, being different and weird, and changing the world. Whilst you, are stuck on a computer screen, bullying people who think differently than you.

That's a bloody victory for me, and a sore loss for you. Although I am leaving, I will not delete this blog. I want people to comb through it, and study it. And learn. See my flaws, and know that it possible to leave Tumblr, and still have a good fucking life.

Goodbye Tumblr. Madeleine.

PS: I will say that the Sansa fandom and (some) parts of the Reylo fandom has been kind to me. It's sad to leave, because I will miss them. If you are one of them and you'd like to maintain contact, send me an e-mail at [email protected] and I'll give you my Facebook, Twitter or personal e-mail.

#i am done caring about this shitty place

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amin58fidele · 5 years ago

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* The war that no one expected

* Towards the post-Corona world *

Dr.. Theeb Hashem

March 24, 2020

The humble shoulder-strapped Stinger missile, produced by the United States with hundreds of thousands, which has set the world on fire for decades, from Angola to the Falkland Islands to Afghanistan and others ... It costs nearly $ 400,000, which equals the price of the artificial respirator that New York State screams asking for insurance to protect its citizens from expensive Death by suffocation.

This is not to mention the massive arsenals of stacked missiles of destruction and their imaginary prices, as the price of the Tomahawk alone exceeds 1.5 million dollars.

Italy, with the fifth largest air fleet in NATO, is struggling alone in the face of that hidden army that is killing its people, and it does not have artificial respirators to help the victims who fall daily.

Great Britain, with the arsenal of the 215 nuclear warheads, initially capricious and did not recognize the might and power of Corona, so it acted with its usual arrogance, and met with a miserable theory from its neighbor, the Netherlands, its name "herd immunity" in the face of the deadly virus, to discover late the enormity of its choice.

France, with its 300 nuclear warheads, followed Britain's path, then soon awoke to a severe shortage of its medical equipment needed to cope with the epidemic.

The countries of the European Union (Spain, the Netherlands, etc.) collapse one by one, and in the confrontation they find no ally who advocates them or noon to ease their tragedy.

Germany, the leader of the European Union, calls on its people to prepare themselves for the deadly disease, and, like Britain, heralds the loss of roses and loved ones.

As for Trump, the leader of the "First World", he is preoccupied with the pain of his allies, and even the suffering of his people by filling his strategic tanks with cheap Saudi oil. For him, the epidemic appears to be nothing but a troublesome Chinese product that may be included in the context of the trade war with Beijing, which, in his view, is adaptable with a new package of sanctions.

It is the Third World War that no one expected, neither the ancient intelligence services, nor the research centers that are filled with attractive scholars and thinkers. As for its effects, it has already started drawing the face of the new world.

It is time for the terrifying world order produced by the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs and the bodies of tens of thousands of people damaged by the nuclear explosion to retire.

The first victims are the European Union, the Western world image, then the United Nations and human rights declarations.

The European Union is no longer a role model, it has looked more wasted than the last country in the last marginal spot from what was once called the Third World.

The state of welfare collapsed in the hospitals of his dead, and with it the legacy of the Enlightenment, the philosophies of Rousseau, John Locke, Montesquieu, Budan and others ...

Do Europeans question themselves today about the need for tanks, planes, nuclear warheads, and weapons factories and their ability to protect, while they do not find hospital beds?

Was it not more effective for weapons factories to make a strategic stock of respirators in anticipation of the outbreak of war with disease, as was storing missiles?

Has the Europeans become aware, for example, of the suffering of a Yemeni whose country destroyed the weapons of Western factories and left a single siege to face the cholera epidemic without Nasser or Mu'in?

Does the European feel what his creation counterpart, the Palestinian, Venezuelan, or besieged Iranian, feels, despite the infringement of international laws?

What would a British, French, or Dutch citizen say, if he thought his leaders had linked his life to an economic formula that says, if Corona claimed the lives of a few thousand weak people? Much more useful in the balance of profit and loss than braking the economy and losing a few billion dollars.

It is a terrifying practical test in which theories advance are the misshapen mixture of merchandise Machiavelli, Malthus and Darwin, poured into the minds of leaders who have been stripped of their humanity, pocketed by arrogance and arrogance, and they have become more dangerous to humanity and their peoples than the epidemic.

These are the products of the pseudo-empty democracy after its human dimension, which the West has always bragged about, and they convinced the world that civilization is shortened by ballot boxes that coexist with nuclear missile factories, germ factories, and all kinds of deadly weapons that inflame the land of other peoples by looting, killing, and destruction without censorship or censorship.

That test confirms again, more clearly, that man, even the West, is not a value in the norm and civilization of the West, but rather a losing number whose burden should be removed from the state treasury when it is weak.

And that the world is nothing but a arena of conflict, the end in which it justifies the means even if it is fatal, and that the struggle for resources is a historical imperative required by the braking of population reproduction that threatens the resources in the universe, with wars, famines and epidemics.

And that survival, in this grinding conflict, is only for the strongest, just as determined by social Darwinism, and its principle of natural selection.

Does Corona vow the wrath of my God, which today calls on humanity to adjust its behavior after the earth was filled with the tyranny and corruption of the proud pharaohs of the age?

Or is it a war decision on humankind made by the hidden government of the world after it is time to conduct a haircut to prepare people to make way for the rest to enjoy a good life and abundant resources?

Whatever the case may be, all humanity today is in a single boat, and there is no mountain that protects from the flood, except the ship of reason that requires those with kinship to be beaten by these mighty idiots who lead the world to hell with their stupidity.

No one has any right today, from the countries of the fallen world, and he was called the first world, theorizing in human rights, and there is no sense for a body of nations, law, or an international community, unless there is a clear and frank effort to close the global factories of destruction, which produce deadly weapons. , And their tanks are filled with nuclear and biological bombs and missiles that cross human rights and human life.

It is then possible for man to devote himself to his mission in the reconstruction of the universe with morals, principles of love, compassion and lofty values.

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innuendostudios · 7 years ago

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The newest installment of The Alt-Right Playbook: Mainstreaming. If you like this series, or my other work, and want to see more of the same, consider backing me on Patreon.

Transcript below the cut.

Say, for the sake of argument, there’s this acclaimed science fiction writer and essayist who’s writing his memoir in the late 80’s. I’m gonna drop the pretense right now and say his name is Samuel R. Delany, he’s been namedropped on this channel before and he probably will be again because he’s my favorite writer. Delany’s writing about his experience as a young gay man in the late 50’s/early 60’s - that is, nearly a decade before Stonewall - and he opts to share a couple of anecdotes, which I will relate to you now.

One is about a time when he decided to come out to his therapy group. While being gay in mid-century New York brought Delany a lot of joy, he found himself describing his life to the group as though being gay were something he was trying to fix. By reflex, he presented himself as lonely and ashamed, though, in reality, he was neither. And, while he did eventually describe himself more accurately, he can’t help but muse, in the book, on the limits of language at the time.

Back then, the word “gay” was explicitly associated with high camp and effeminacy, where Delany is more of a bear, a term that was not yet in common usage. The default term was “homosexual,” which was then a medical classification for what was deemed a mental disorder. “Queer” and the f-word were still slurs that had yet to be reappropriated. So, while all the words to describe himself were, technically, available, they all carried the connotations of the most popular narrative about gay men: that they were isolated, aberrant, and pitiable.

Another story is about Delany being present for a police raid at a truck stop where queer men would meet for casual hookups. By the nature of being hidden in the bushes or secreted between parked semi trailers, any man in attendance could see the men nearest to him, but none could get a view of the whole. But, during the raid, from his vantage point, Delany saw, for the first time, the size of the entire crowd, and was shocked to see nearly a hundred men empty out of the parking lot to evade the cops. In the morning, the police blotter mentioned only the handful of men who’d been arrested, and not the 80 or 90 who got away.

Both of these stories are about how the dominant narrative of the isolated gay man becomes self-reinforcing: A constant threat of police violence meant gay men stayed hidden from the cops and, consequently, from each other. And the terminology of the era being mostly dictated by straight people made it very hard to talk about queerness without reinforcing their narrative.

Delany argues that, among the most revolutionary things the 60’s did to culture, was the radicalization of language - redefining old terms and popularizing new ones - and giving marginalized groups a budding sense of their numbers. In short, two of the most powerful tools for making any marginalized group less marginalized are Language and Visibility.

Folks, we’re talking today about Mainstreaming, the process by which a group or idea from the fringes of society moves towards the center. How strangers become neighbors and how thoughts become common sense. There is a concept known as the Overton Window, which I am not going to describe because plenty of people have done so already - link in the down there part - but, in short: as a fringe group becomes more visible, and their language becomes commonplace, their presence in society starts to seem normal. They become demystified. Some people who thought they were strange and threatening will start to warm up to them, though this does not happen across the board. Many who hated them when they were fringe will see their becoming mainstream as a kind of existential occupation of territory, as in “If this is normal now, what does that make me?”

But much of what is considered standard in society today has gone through this process.

Now, straight folks like myself often think that greater queer visibility and the proliferation of queer language is for our benefit; if our queer friends feel safe coming out to us and we know which words we should and shouldn’t use, it makes it easier for straights and queer folks to be pals! And it is true that no one gets mainstreamed without advocates in the existing mainstream, but let’s not beat around the bush: Language and Visibility are tools of consolidating power. Visibility means having a sense of your numbers. Common language means forming alliances. You get a bunch of formerly isolated gay men connecting with each other and accurately describing their experiences, you’ve got yourself a movement, with or without straight friends.

This is why it’s to the benefit of straight society to tell queer men they are isolated, because isolated queer men are in no position to make demands.

(Just so it doesn’t get left out of yet another conversation, Delany is writing about gay men because the book is a memoir and that’s his experience, but neither he nor I are ignoring that the Gay Rights movement was kicked off by trans women.)

Okay!

While the example I’m using is a positive one that any progressive worth their salt should be in favor of, mainstreaming is a morally neutral phenomenon. Culture is plastic. Any fringe group or idea can become normalized, regardless of its inherent worth. And, for a certain subset of extremely online people with fringe beliefs, who understand the ways mainstreaming has evolved in the attention economy, it can be a weapon.

We need to ask how a group of predominantly disgruntled twenty- and thirtysomething white men congregating on anonymous imageboards becomes a political movement, whose members get profiled in the New York Times, whose writing patterns are recognized by most of the internet, and whose figureheads get staffed in the White House. Where did the Alt-Right come from?

Mainstreaming is not a wholly organic process, because usually the people who get mainstreamed are actively working to become so. But people usually have only so much control over how and how fast this happens: A group expands its language and visibility; if this leads to larger numbers and greater mainstream acceptance, the process repeats, this time with a bigger group and a bigger audience; so long as there is growth, each cycle is more impactful, as the bigger a group is the faster it gets even bigger and the more common language becomes the faster it proliferates.

By all rights, if your beliefs are wildly unpopular, this process shouldn’t work. Your language and visibility don’t expand because too many people don’t want to talk like you or about you. So what do you do then? Well, normally, you either give up or bide your time, but, if you have a lot of media literacy and no real moral compass, you get it done dirty.

If the media doesn’t want to cover you, make yourself newsworthy. Threaten to publicly out immigrants in front of a crowd. Start a hoax about white student unions. Lead a white power rally and leave the hoods at home. Do the kinds of things that journalists cannot, in good conscience, ignore. Once you’ve made yourself news, they’ll feel they can’t publish a condemnation without getting your side of the story, so, bam, you’ve got an interview. The more erratic and dangerous you seem, the more they’ll want to write a profile so people can figure you out; the article about how surprisingly normal you seem in person basically writes itself. If you want to spread a conspiracy theory, send it to a small, local news site that doesn’t have the resources to fact check you; once they publish something salacious, all the bigger news channels will have to talk about it, if only to debunk it. Put provocative stuff in front of politicians; anything they retweet has to be news. In a pinch, you can always piggyback off a famous activist by making takedown videos, or, if you’re really ambitious, harass someone at a conference.

Everyone’s desperate for clicks. If you can generate them, you’ll get your message out.

If nobody’s adopting your language, adopt it for them. Make sure you and all your friends each have half a dozen fake Twitter accounts spamming the same terminology at everyone who discusses race, gender, orientation, or ability. Put every Jewish name in parentheses until everyone on the internet knows what that means whether they want to or not. Hell, don’t even do it yourself: Russia’s not the only one who can make bots. Make thousands of bots. And make sure your real account, your fake accounts, and your bots all talk the same so no one can tell the difference anymore. Make hashtags and get them trending all by yourself, and, while you’re at it, spam all the hashtags for movements you hate with porn and gore so they can’t be used. And if your words and memes still aren’t popular? Just steal words and memes that are already popular. Just decide “this? this means white power now,” “this is antifeminist now.” Saturate the web with your new usage, always insisting that you’re doing it “ironically,” while eroding confidence in anyone who uses these words in the original sense. And never stop insisting that most everyone would talk the same as you if there weren’t so much damn censorship.

Delany’s experience was having few words to describe himself that could conjure images of a gay man in a loving community. What the Alt-Right does is shout “you just call everyone you don’t like Nazis” while their people are giving interviews wearing Nazi paraphernalia; they even imply that calling dudes marching to the tune of “Jews will not replace us” Nazis is somehow antisemitic. Meanwhile they ask to be called identitarians and race realists. They want to stigmatize words that conjure images of white fascism - which, again, they very explicitly support - and replace them with words that conjure images of clean-cut philosophy majors.

And where Delany saw a group of 80 or 90 gay men reported in the papers as a group of 4 or 5, the Alt-Right wants to get reported as being much larger than it actually is. They want to draw attention to themselves by any means necessary, up to and including violence, but to ensure that, any time the cameras train on a violent act, there is a man in a suit ready to distance himself from it; to paint the picture that, but for a few bad actors, this is a peaceful movement of young, presentable intellectuals.

This isn’t simply a battle between different ideologies, this is a battle over the definition of normal. The Alt-Right knows how plastic culture can be. Their anger comes from the normalization of things they hate, and their movement exists because they believe anything that becomes mainstream can be made fringe again. Which is why, if you wanna cater to them, you promise to reassert old norms.

Much as we’d like to believe people are driven by morality, most people are driven by the desire to be normal. And when the news is filled with images of swastikas, iron crosses, and tiki torches, the guy in the suit with the fashy haircut looks pretty normal by comparison. And that’s why he wears the suit.

Thankfully, the plasticity of culture cuts both ways. Just as surely as we can lose all the ground we’ve gained over the last half-century, everything the Alt-Right does to make itself palatable can be undone. (In fact, it’s maybe beginning to happen.) It’s going to be a long road that will probably require changes to how media platforms generate traffic and a lot of new politicians. But I want you to keep a phrase close to your heart: this is not normal.

That phrase has become something of a mantra since the election in 2016. It can be misused: white supremacy, sexism, and every other kind of bigotry are part of the fabric of American life and always have been, so, even if this is more extreme than the ushe, it’s not by nearly as much as most privileged people like to think. So I want you to treat it less like an observation and more as a statement of intent. Whatever shit the Alt-Right pulls, I want you to say: this is not normal; this is not normal; this is not normal.

We will not let this be normal.

#video essay #the alt-right playbook #alt-right

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opaeka · 7 years ago

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Personal Branding in Music

As a media professional you learn that your personal values, strengths, and weaknesses take the driver's seat, media ethics are your GPS, innovations are the hills and your personal branding is your destination. Though my journey is only beginning, this essay will discuss these factors in detail and how they affect my future career in Music.

It begins, I’m sitting in my metaphorical car ready to begin my professional journey. Though I know how to use a map I reach for the convenience of my phone and punch in my destination. A pop up appears the GPS lets me know of cameras littering my route. As a media professional, the cameras are your audience and for these cameras, you have a responsibility to protect the more vulnerable. This is achieved by a group of rules. These rules are called media ethics and they outline the moral principles that media professionals have to abide by. These include but are not confined to issues such as stereotyping, obscenity, racism and sharing graphics, ideas and words that are triggering or disturbing (Chandler & Munday, 2011).

In the music industry, these rules are notoriously blurred with artists openly utilising themes like suicide, murder, and racism. It is in this industry though where the normal rules of ethics can cross the line between censorship and education. An example of this is Billie Holiday’s 1939 song Strange Fruit which was widely banned from U.S. radio play because it discussed the racially motivated hanging of two African-Americans (Newman, 2016). This outraged the mainstream public who questioned the morals around discussing something so graphic. But this was something historically founded, during the period of 1882-1968 over 3,466 African-Americans were lynched (“History of Lynchings", 2016). The banning subsequently glazed over the issue and removed the chance for conversations about racism to emerge.

In 2018, music artists are constantly dangling between what is morally questionable. It can even be suggested that some artists are utilising the line as a marketing tool. Notably, artists like Kanye West with his monster video that depicted death, Tyler the Creator who utilised dark themes in his lyrics and imagery and Madonna’s utilisation of religious theming. Though this is the only snippet of modern artists it is not uncommon for musicians at some point in their careers are known to stray away from morally sound imagery and music.

As a participant in the industry and also a person who struggles anxiety and depression media ethics play a big role in how I conduct myself. My personal branding and values press against the importance of being honest and transparent. But when expressing myself in my art I have to be mindful that I'm taking into account how moral and sensitive my expressions are. On the other hand, although it is important that media ethics and moral responsibility are applied to practicing music industry professionals. It is critical to always exist between the line of compassionate expression and not withholding art that could consequently move society forward.

The road of a media professional twists and turns and it is never blessed with a straight line. Cameras are on you and your moves are watched and criticised. While you are driving along you reach a hill. It is quite large and the sun is non-existent above it. Over the hill, a loud commotion can be heard of a small group of people. These are people who have looked past the fear of the unknown. They have jumped at the chance to improve, change or completely remove a product for the betterment of the industry.

When pursuing a new idea, method or product you are almost always in the dark. This pursuit of the new is the definition of innovation. Innovation can be categorised into four different types these are, architectural, radical, incremental and disruptive. Architectural is the reconfiguration of an existing product and applying them to a new market (Lopez, 2015). An example is the Toshiba laptops which were molded from the original IBM, Compaq and Dell computers but prioritised portability over performance (Lopez, 2015). Radical innovation is the introduction of a product that gives birth to an industry or consumes an existing one. Notably, an example of this type of innovation is the invention of the airplane prompting the commercial air travel industry to prosper. Incremental innovations are small changes to existing products that add value to customers. These are upgrades to websites, apps, and programs. Lastly, disruptive innovations are products introduced into their subsequent markets but begin not fully up to standard with competitors. Netflix is one such product beginning it’s life as an internet DVD rental service eventually putting all their competitors out of business (Lopez, 2015).

In the last ten years, nothing has been more monumental to the music industry than streaming services (Divekar, 2016). An example of disruptive innovation streaming services in 2017 made music distribution companies 1bn dollars (Wolfson, 2018). Additionally, streaming services have single-handedly created revenues for artists who would not otherwise. This is because instead of a lump sum received from CD sales, streaming services provide a way for artists to get paid as long as the music is on their platforms (Wolfson, 2018). Along with being a disruptive innovation, streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, and Soundcloud are examples of process innovation changing the way music and music services are created and delivered. This is illustrated by artists who make music to cater to particular streaming service playlists. Releasing acoustic covers, reggae, and rap versions of their songs (Wolfson, 2018).

Similarly, another disruptive innovation is Facebook which leads the way for the creation of many other platforms like Instagram, Youtube & Twitter. It is undoubtedly a powerful force in the greater media climate with 2.61 users worldwide (Statista, 2017). Access to this large audience coupled with the fact that it is widespread makes it such a powerful tool for music industry professionals. Mostly for the fact that it created platforms where artists could directly interact with audiences. Also reaching groups of audiences that would not otherwise have discovered their products. Social media has also opened doors in a similar way to streaming services creating a platform that is smaller, independent artist friendly.

Though both of these innovations have a lot of good intentions behind them. Their ease of use and availability has, unfortunately, it has resulted in an oversaturation of the music market. It is harder now to get noticed than it was in the age of CDs. This is why more than ever effective personal branding is so important.

Having driven through roads guided by an ethical GPS and leaping over a hill and joining innovative industry participants. A 25-year-old exits his car and the person that emerges is an individual with his own particular style, and approach to life. He emerges with a personal brand. Personal branding is a term first coined by Tom Peters in a 1997 essay and it is a combination of how you present yourself through the various means of communication and how you are remembered after you have provided a service ("Personal Branding", 2017). It is created through an examination of personal values, strengths, weaknesses in the context of an individual's passions and likes (Barker, 2016).

In music, a personal brand is almost always referred to as a package. These packages consist of an image, sound and a persona. Packages aren’t anything new the industry. But since the creation of the internet and the disruptive innovation of streaming services like Spotify & Soundcloud. Notably, an example of an excellent use of personal branding is the artist Lizzie Grant and her change to Lana Del Rey. After the branding change her whole “package” as a musician became more concise. Being a mixture of familiar and new audiences were drawn to it (Wells, 2016). Additionally, the authentic nature of her new branding contributed to its success.

No one in any industry can be successful without creating rapport with co-workers, peers, and audiences. Networking is a large part in the creation of personal branding. Even with sites like Linkedin the way a person interacts in physical form with others can make or break careers. Something common that happens in modern times is the inconsistencies between a person's online presence and their physical ("Authenticity Matters", 2017). For instance being a racially diverse advocate online but spouting racist jokes in person. Like having a consistent theme across all online platforms, a person’s physical presence needs the same treatment.

Personal branding in 2018 is the way to sell yourself. But the modern citizen does not like being sold to instead effective selling has become less of a transaction and more of a conversation (Saltzman, 2015). It is all about bringing your audience along for the ride. Audiences love to see growth, and changes in people. In modern times the more human a brand appears the more likely it is to be successful. With this in mind, we need to discuss how important the role of Social Media has become for personal branding.

On the internet, your personal brand becomes what you want to portray to potential employers, peers, and possible fans. Social Media lets our personal branding imaginations run wild. An everyday person can tweak their personal branding on social media in such a way that he could appear more, wealthy and artistic (Furedi, 2015). But with this, it is still very vital to remember the importance of authenticity. Afterall personal branding should be and is an extension of oneself (Montoya & Vandehey, 2002).

After finally arriving at a destination and unraveling each concept. It is clear to see how they affect my career in the music industry. Media ethics affect what I say, and how I do it. Additionally, it gives me the responsibility not to know the difference between censorship for the sake of censorship and artistic expression. As an illustration, I will not censor depressive imagery in my music rather I will find a way to discuss more compassionately. Innovation pushes me to be a moldable forward thinking individual, open to change and progress. Yes, Spotify did scare the industry for a time but it’s clear to see that innovations are important to the process of a not only the industry participant but also the industry as a whole. Additionally, personal branding affects my place in the world, how I want to be seen by others in the industry. It is always very important to have a personal brand that doesn’t sway from authenticity.

On the whole life as a media, professional has its twists and turns. It is important to take media ethics, innovations, and personal branding seriously. A modern citizen cannot properly participate in the greater world without a concise brand that is ethical and constantly innovates. The media contributes greatly to the ever-changing world and it is up to its participants to mirror that.

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thirdswordblog · 4 years ago

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SPECTACLE AT THE CAPITOL: WHO STANDS TO GAIN?

"There is a Latin tag cui prodest? meaning ‘who stands to gain?’ When it is not immediately apparent which political or social groups, forces or alignments advocate certain proposals, measures, etc., one should always ask: ‘Who stands to gain?’

It is not important who directly advocates a particular policy, since under the present noble system of capitalism any money-bag can always ‘hire’, buy or enlist any number of lawyers, writers and even parliamentary deputies, professors, parsons and the like to defend any views. We live in an age of commerce, when the bourgeoisie have no scruples about trading in honour or conscience. There are also simpletons who out of stupidity or by force of habit defend views prevalent in certain bourgeois circles."

(V.I. Lenin - Who Stands to Gain, 1913)

The theatrical spectacle on January 6th, in which a group of Trump supporters entered (and were apparently allowed to enter) the Capitol building, is now condemned almost unanimously by imperialist and reactionary states and media all over the world as a “coup attempt” by “terrorists” and “extremists”. In the larger perspective, this incident is one more glaring example before the world of the deep, desperate crisis of bourgeois so-called “Western Democracy”. To understand the more short-term, domestic political significance of this circus however, we need to follow Lenin’s example and ask “who stands to gain?” In fact, no one has more to gain from this incident than the U.S. imperialist monopolist bourgeoisie and the new Biden administration that it has appointed to represent it.

The objective situation is this: the U.S. ruling class is facing a developing revolutionary situation. The working class and the people are mobilizing in the streets - with more and more militancy - against repression and racism and for their daily demands. The crisis of bourgeois democracy is becoming more and more acute as the fraudulent parliamentary system loses its legitimacy in the eyes of the masses. Facing this sharpening class struggle, the ruling class is taking measures, intensifying its counterrevolutionary repression; more militarization of the police, more surveillance, censorship etc.; but it cannot rely solely on repressive measures. At minimum, it needs to make sure that it has at least the passive support of a significant part of the bourgeois and petty bourgeois “middle classes��, mainly the intellectuals; the journalists, the political leaders, the academics, i.e. those who are tasked with the education (indoctrination) of the masses and act as a “buffer” between the ruling class and the proletariat. While the ruling exploiters continue to abandon the principles of their own dying bourgeois democracy and move towards more and more open dictatorship, they still need to maintain the illusion of democratic “freedom”.

As representatives of the U.S. ruling class, the Republican and the Democratic Parties both have the job of carrying out these reactionary tasks: to repress and contain all revolutionary tendencies and to manipulate and mobilize different groups of masses to support this process and give legitimacy to the system. Like the fascist projects of the past, they both use real and often justified demands of the people, mainly the petty bourgeoisie, to foment “protest movements” that in reality serve to defend the interests of the monopolist bourgeoisie. While Trump’s method is to rely mainly on the rural and small-town petty bourgeoisie and their mistrust of the federal state and big monopolies, Biden and the Democrats rely mainly on the urban intellectual petty bourgeoisie, including the revisionist “left” and its connections within the protest movements and the Black and Latino communities. The Trump faction uses old-fashioned chauvinism and open racism; the Biden faction uses bourgeois so-called “anti-racism” and bourgeois feminism to divert the just struggles against the racist and patriarchal system. In both cases the purpose is to draw attention away from the class struggle and to prevent that the people’s struggles become a united revolutionary struggle led by the proletariat.

We can already see the results of the so-called “coup attempt”: all kinds of reactionaries, liberals and revisionist “leftists” now come together to defend “our democracy” against the “right-wing mob”. To question the legitimacy of the elections is now to be associated with white supremacist “crazies” and “rednecks”. “Insurrection” is to be equated with fascism. Liberals and revisionists take on the task of creating public opinion in support of more counterrevolutionary measures to protect government institutions from “violent mobs”, to “reject violence” and disarm the masses. Just like in Europe, fascist and racist groups are used not only as shock troops against the working people, but also as an excuse to take measures against “extremists” in general (aiming mainly at the communists). It is no coincidence that the bourgeois media now refer to the Trump supporters as “totalitarian”, a term invented by the reaction for this exact purpose.

So, “who stands to gain?” It seems clear that Trump and his people are on their way out; they didn’t gain the trust of the dominant factions of the ruling class to carry out its reactionary tasks. Instead, their last desperate spectacle serves as a perfect political tool to legitimize the new administration and establish its image as a liberal, almost “leftist” government so it can carry out the continuing process of reactionarization, intensified exploitation of the working class, repression of the people’s struggles and the imperialist wars of plunder and genocide abroad. For the communists and revolutionaries, the task is to lead and develop the people’s struggles, to reject and unmask the whole fraudulent electoral circus and the new Biden government, to unite all the classes of the people under proletarian leadership. The objective conditions are at hand; what is needed is a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist militarized Communist Party, reconstituted for its main task of preparing, initiating and developing the people’s war.

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canchewread · 4 years ago

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Author’s note: so as I mentioned in a recent post, I’m now transferring my original journal content from Facebook, to this blog; Can’t You Read. What’s the difference between a journal and an essay? Journals are shorter, more informal and represent my personal rebellion against hunting down citations for the disingenuous. Today’s journal content is completely new and has never appeared anywhere before now.

Journal September 3rd: The Home Front

I must admit that I am somewhat touched by the overwhelmingly positive response my recent writing about Trump's fascist intentions and agenda has received. After three and a half years of being told I was either hysterical or actively supporting the neoliberal interventionist agenda, I must admit I wasn't expecting even my more truculent readers to come around at this late a date; I guess trying to send the army into the streets to smash public protests, calling anti-fascism “terrorism” and admitting you're rigging the election represents a bridge too far for the average American after all.

While this welcome support for my writing has unquestionably worked to cure my resentment and bitterness, it has also cast me in the unfamiliar role of “anti-fascism advisor” as more and more people are asking me online “what can I personally do to stop fascism in America?”

I'll concede now that my life's experience has lead me to be far more comfortable with the role of doomsayer than activist and there are of course numerous legal limits to what types of anti-fascist action I can advise folks about on the internet. I am not a protest organizer and I think if you turn on your television, you'll see that there are plenty of already existing protest actions you can join if you want to put your body on the line against the fascist creep – of which racialized police violence by white supremacist murderpigs is a key component.

Additionally, I have little interest in advocating for an electoral process that will not function as an antidote to fascism and might not work even for removing Trump because this election is clearly rigged six ways from Sunday; there are plenty of people telling you how to vote and I'm just going to assume you've made your decision on that front already, independent of anything I could or would ever say you. There is an argument to be made that a “legally” re-elected Trump is a more dangerous fascist than one who must attempt a coup to retain power, but that argument would be better saved for another journal in my opinion.

What I would like to do today instead then is to talk about how everyday people who are as of yet unable (or unwilling) to man a barricade, can fight the spread of fascism in our society even in their everyday lives. While this work is by no means as glamorous, courageous or heroic as staring the reactionary serpent in the eye and challenging neonazis in the streets, it is by no means a less vital part of a society's immune-system to the fascist creep. After all, it does little good to "bash the fash” if the reactionary ideas, impulses and politics of a nation continue to breed more fascists; it is not an accident that the epicenter of the modern, increasingly global fascist movement is a white supremacist country built on slavery and genocide, namely the United States of America.

In order to effectively resist the “everyday” fascist creep, it is necessary to understand the importance of the ideological work undertaken by reactionary media and intellectuals to simultaneously normalize fascist ideology, argument and political policy, while obfuscating the fascist nature of those activities.

The simple truth is that fascism is a death cult with a fairly consistent track record of getting a lot of people, including its adherents, “perished.” You can't sell a society on fascism by outright admitting you're a fascist anymore, Hitler and the Holocaust kind of ruined that option for would be fascist dictators and violent reactionaries. Even after four years under Trump, you still can't openly admit you're a fascist in America and as such the reactionary right (which is to say the entire American right) is devoting millions upon millions of man hours trying to convince you that fascist ideas, eliminationism and violent right wing vigilante movements are “just American politics.”

As I have written in the past however, this position is not only ridiculous on its face but an active attempt to encourage violence against numerous marginalized groups in our society. White supremacy, ethno-nationalism and emliminationism are not political positions, they are statements of genocidal intent and should be openly treated as such in “polite” society; if only because fascism cannot yet survive the light of day in America even if the nation itself is awash in crypto-fascist ideology and perhaps always has been.

And yet with the exception of dedicated anti-fascists, we as Americans generally make little if any effort to push back against this normalization of fascist ideology in our everyday lives. In our communities, at our workplaces and indeed in our own homes we as a people have largely “gone along to get along” and remained silent as fascist talking points, disseminated by fascist right wing “media” or conspiracy websites, escape the mouths of our reactionary, fascist-curious friends, co-workers and family members. When we do engage these fascist ideas dressed up like “conservative politics” we overwhelmingly engage the reactionary right on its own terms and seek to merely debunk the factual inaccuracies presented in these arguments.

Why? Well of course because there is a social cost to calling your friends, co-workers and family out on spreading fascist ideology. This cost is only magnified if the call out in question is directed against someone in a position of authority in our lives, a boss, or a parental figure perhaps. Yet is it not reasonable to ask if in the face of rising American fascism that cost might not be too much bear? Can one not argue that there is virtue in refusing to work silently for a fascist, that there is a worthwhile reward in calling out fascist ideology before it poisons our communities and social groupings? How might a teenage antifascist or Black Lives Matter protester view our continued refusal to pay that cost from streets choked with tear gas and rubber bullets?

Moreover because we are not yet outnumbered by those who would openly embrace fascism, paying that cost and calling fascist ideology disguised as right wing politics out for what it is, allows us to levy an immense social cost in return on those who would preach fascism and fascist ideas. Ultimately that is the only way a society already steeped in nationalism, racism and genocidal white supremacy can hope to resist the fascist virus – by increasing the cost of embracing fascism on all fronts until nobody in their right mind is willing to pay it. The would-be fascist must be forced to pay that cost at every turn so long as he seeks to normalize eliminationism, ethno-nationalism and violence against his political enemies. That cost must be collected in the streets with his teeth, in the workplace with his livelihood and in the social sphere of his everyday life; otherwise the most marginalized among us will continue to bear that cost instead, as fascism eventually overwhelms American society.

And that my dear reader is what you can do, right now in your everyday life and beginning the moment you finish reading this journal – start making the fascists, crypto-fascists and reactionaries in your life pay a social cost for preaching hatred, violence and repression by publicly calling out their fascist ideas for what they are, regardless of the social cost to yourself.

Hey, I didn't say it would be easy; just that I knew how you could fight fascism without taking it to the pavement until you're ready for that level of engagement. As always, your mileage may vary and one way or another – the future is left.

- nina illingworth

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

Chat with fellow readers online at Anarcho Nina Writes on Discord!

“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”

#Fascism #American Fascism #Journals #Journal 3 The Home Front #Resisting Fascism #crypto-fascism

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gallery19chicago · 5 years ago

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How to Sell Queer Art Through Instagram, Art Fairs, and More.

Alex Mitow August 21, 2019

How to Sell Queer Art Through Instagram, Art Fairs, and More.“Given that queer artists have found success through pretty much the entire arc of art history, I'm not quite sure that the narrative of them being "underrepresented" would be something that we could cover.”

That was the response of a journalist from a major national publication, when our Superfine! Art Fair communications team reached out to discuss our upcoming Magick all-LGBTQ+ artist fair in New York City next year. The writer didn’t seem to think a queer art fair was needed in the contemporary art market. Surely if Leonardo da Vinci and Keith Haring are such household names, there must not be an equality gap on the commercial end of queer art.

Is the art market already saturated with queer artists? Are gay, lesbian, and trans artists - along with all queer artists - really getting the fair shake they deserve, when it comes down to brass tacks and actual art sales in the contemporary art market? We think not, and we’d like to illustrate some of the challenges queer and gay artists are facing, how they’re overcoming them, and give you an in-depth guide on how to sell queer art.

To help us get to the bottom of this, we first talked to Alex Guerra, the owner of The Gaythering Hotel in Miami Beach and the founder/curator of Art Gaysel - the tongue-in-cheek gay step-cousin of Art Basel Miami Beach. For four years going on five, Alex has painstakingly curated the best queer and gay artists from around the world, providing an amazing opportunity to show and sell their art during one of the most important art weeks of the year. He also brought the Art Gaysel experience to New York in 2017 at the first annual Superfine! Art Fair in Chelsea.

The crowds admiring and taking home queer art at Art Gaysel Miami Beach 2017.

Alex Guerra in his Art Gaysel booth at Superfine! Art Fair in Chelsea, 2017.

We asked Alex what he thought about the in-person art sales experience at a queer art fair and how that influences buyer behavior:

“It's very rare that you get to meet the artists at any fair. There’s always a middle man so you are surrounded by personified creativity where you engage one on one with the work and with a marketing driven response of a few sentences written by the gallerists. At Art Gaysel we strive to have as many artists present as possible. While the old saying "the work should speak for itself" is great and all, nothing beats probing the artists directly. This format creates an emotional connection between artist and buyer. The mutual engagement can seal the deal on the sale more than any social media engagement. Don't get me wrong, I feel that social media like Instagram is crucial to emerging artists and such an amazing avenue to reach new followers which lead to potential collectors. After all, 90% of our artists are discovered on Instagram.”

The conclusion? One way to sell queer art is to get your work where the queer art collectors are, and fairs like Alex’s Art Gaysel do just that.

Check out Art Gaysel on The Advocate and Huffpost, then visit the fair every December in Miami Beach!

But what about Instagram?

We’ve all heard about success selling art on Instagram, and chances are you might have bought a piece of queer art yourself right off the ‘gram. The most visual of social media platforms, queer art on Instagram seems like a natural fit. Can queer and gay artists make a living selling direct to their audience? We talked to artist Adam Chuck, a mainstay of Art Gaysel and special project artist at Superfine! NYC 2019, about his take on Instagram as a sales tool for queer artists:

“Instagram has been my main way of expanding my audience and market. I’ve found most of my opportunities to show my work through the platform as well as to sell it. It has been a fantastic way to engage with those who enjoy my work as well as meet contemporaries.”

However, he’s recently faced some difficulties on the platform:

“It’s been hard as of recently to work through Instagram due to their algorithm, which has gotten tighter and stricter over time. I’ve never been one to care much about the numbers, but it’s been clear that engagement is less and from my colleagues it’s clear across the board that (especially) queer artists are being censored and it is making it harder to get our work out there.“

Censorship is a very real issue and a major challenge for queer artists showing and selling their work through Instagram. Some of the other challenges artists like Adam are facing are how to raise prices when selling art on Instagram, and how to sell queer art to an audience when the algorithm that decides what posts will be shown doesn’t necessarily work in your favor, or under your control. The ‘gram is great for wide exposure, but defining and refining your audience is of the utmost importance.

Above: Adam Chuck poses with a new collector in front of his “Call Me By Your Preferred Pronoun” installation at Superfine! Art Fair in NYC, May 2019.

Regarding physical exhibitions and queer art fairs, Adam Chuck goes on:

“It definitely helps to be shown to increase your popularity and worth, but everyone should value their time and hard work in making (their art) regardless of the platform. Definitely when you are seen more and more “desired” it (physical exhibition) is worthy to raise the value of your work.”

The conclusion? Use Instagram as a tool to build a collector audience, create a visual story for your work, and as a major component of an overall art sales strategy that includes physical exhibitions and fairs as well. What it’s not is a be-all-end-all to a full queer art sales strategy.

Read about Adam Chuck’s “Call Me By Your Preferred Pronoun” installation at Superfine! 2019 on Newsweek!

So what do I do?

With all of this in mind, if you’re a queer artist reading this you probably still want to know exactly how to sell queer art, quit your day job, and make a living by creating and selling your art full-time. We’re right there with you, and we’ve prepared a step-by-step guide on how to sell queer art below. Have a read, ask us a question, and let us know what you think in the comments!

Step 1: Define Your Audience

Okay, okay...we’re talking about queer art so this should be easy, right? Wrong. Defining an audience is more than just finding a group of people that enjoys your work and shows up at your exhibitions. You want to make a living selling queer art so you need to find a group of people that not only support your art emotionally, but support it with their dollars. Questions to ask at this stage include: who does my art most resonate with? How much are members of that audience willing to spend on queer art? You can help identify this group by releasing what marketers define as a minimum viable product (MVP). See below for more on that!

Step 2: Create Your MVP (not a sports metaphor!)

We may not want to think of art as a product, but in order to understand the buyer relationship we have to think like a marketer and that means bringing in marketing terms. An MVP -- or minimum viable product -- is the smallest, least complex iteration of something that other people (your audience!) would pay for -- and will pay a price that allows you to scale (sell more!) and thrive. Let’s say for instance that you’re an artist who makes large scale oil paintings that take you dozens of hours each. Of course you want to get thousands of dollars for each in order to compensate you for your time in creating them, but if you haven’t yet sold in a quantity that supports you financially, you need to find your MVP first and then build up to selling your other work at the prices you want.

An MVP in this case could be sketches that embody all of the characteristics of your larger, more complex works, but in a smaller package that allows you to produce them with less labor hours. It could also be a queer art print. Once you’ve got this figured out, move on to Step 3 and...

Step 3: Set Your Starting Price

One of the things we constantly hear from both queer artists and non-queer artists in our client interviews is that while Instagram and their current methods of selling (often peer-to-peer or at small craft-type shows) are bringing an audience of interested buyers, the prices garnered are just too low to make selling their art their main revenue source — or even a major one. We’re here to help! Earlier we talked about creating an MVP. An MVP’s pricing should be just at the point where a significant number of people are willing to pay it without creating price friction. I would say that if you can get five people to pay the price you want for your MVP, you’ve got a winner and can start growing your audience. A $40 print is probably too low, but if you’re talking about original art and prints, you should probably be garnering somewhere in the $100-$750 range for your MVP.

Step 4: Create a Sales Strategy

Now that you’ve defined your audience and created a minimum viable product, it’s time to start selling your queer art to your audience. Some of the ways to do that have already been covered on this post -- joining queer art fairs like Art Gaysel and Superfine! Art Fair’s Magick edition in NYC and leveraging your Instagram presence. There are many ways to take control of this step but it has to come from you and your own planning, even if you work with others to help enact your strategy. We always recommend curating a booth that includes both your MVP (the prints, smaller works, sketches) and your larger “master works”. This way, buyers buying at the lower end of the spectrum can latch on to your work, and their understanding of your pricing is anchored by the higher priced, more complex pieces that you’re also showing.

Both Instagram and queer art fairs, in tandem, represent a great way to release your MVP and build a buying audience.

Step 5: Capture Your Audience Data

At this point, you should have achieved a buying audience. Even if that’s just 4-5 queer art collectors, you know who they are and you can grow from here. Make sure to save all relevant data on a spreadsheet. Taking notes and collecting emails in person works (we recommend an iPad or smartphone rather than paper so there are less errors!) but you want to spend some time after the sales process logging all of the info in one, central location. Specially you want any demographic data (even observational data works!) that helps you identify exactly who your audience is, their email addresses, and prices paid along with any discounts you offered them. All of this data helps you better understand the market price for your work and how to sell queer art to this audience over and over again as it grows.

Step 6: Grow Your Audience

At art fairs and online, artists often feel bad that they haven’t achieved a particular goal - made back their booth fee, garnered a significant number of collectors, and so on. However, if you’ve achieved any collectors at all, you’re doing great! It’s time to grow your audience. Now that you’ve got data, you can focus on steering your work towards what we call a lookalike audience. That is, buyers who share similar traits and characteristics to those who’ve already purchased your art. As time goes on, you may even find that the content of your work is more and more geared towards this audience. There are several proactive ways to quickly grow your audience as well. One is simply asking those who’ve already demonstrated commitment to your work by buying it to share one friend’s email address who might be interested in coming to your next show, viewing your digital catalog, or simply connecting. In this way, your audience becomes your ambassadors and you build a structure to expanding it.

Bonus Step: RAISE YOUR PRICES!

Any queer artist reading a blog post on how to sell queer art of course wants to know about this part. Even as Superfine! Is an affordable art fair, we fully believe artists should responsibly raise their prices as time goes on and their work continues to find more homes with a growing audience. All of this applies to queer artists as well.

Probably the most important factor to getting your prices up is spreading out your sales methods. This is where Instagram and online sales come up against a limitation. The higher the price of something, the more that potential buyers want to experience it in person. For this reason, fairs and pop-up exhibitions give you the chance to meet your buyers face to face and let them experience your work, and most importantly meet you. 70%+ of our Superfine! visitors and collectors say that meeting the artist is their favorite part and helps them move to a conversion more quickly.

Also, we’ve defined your MVP: it’s important to remember that people who are investing in your queer art at a significant level ($100-$750 — your MVP’s price point — is a pretty significant spend for most people) ultimately represent the highest chance of converting into a buyer at a higher price range in the future. You have to raise your prices gradually as demand for your work increases, and this audience is the first one you should always target. Never should your prices double or triple for the same size work in a short time. A better increase, once a collection has nearly sold out, is around the 10-15% range. Then, when you’ve nearly sold out that collection, another 10-15% price raise for the next one until you’ve reached the point where your existing audience starts to push back. At that point you can either stay at that range and be happy with it, or you can begin to experiment with other styles and media that typically garner higher prices (e.g. oil paintings versus charcoal sketches) to see if your audience is willing to bear a price increase for that.

So is there a market for queer art?

Let’s turn back to Alex Guerra from Art Gaysel again for that one:

“As long as gay/queer men have disposable income, queer art will literally have a home.”

So there you have it, queer artists, there’s a market out there for your art and you’ve now got some of the tools at the ready to go out and slay!

Think you know how to sell queer art and ready to gain some more tips and tricks on navigating the art market?

Get on our “How to Be a Better Business Artist” Monday Mailer for a weekly dose of art sales perspective geared directly to artists with limited time who are looking for serious sales success.

Source: https://superfine.world/blog-content/howtosellqueerart?utm_source=Superfine%21+The+Fairest+Fair&utm_campaign=6f582c6487-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2019_08_04_11_45_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_4b8ea74e8d-6f582c6487-117748527&mc_cid=6f582c6487&mc_eid=f6cb2bf16a

#superfineartfair #buyingart #queerart

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socialcoldstreams · 6 years ago

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Los Angeles Times says"Forget free speech"

True:

Facebook is not required to provide the online equivalent of an endless Open Mic Night to Alex Jones, Louis Farrakhan or anyone else.

Source: Forget free speech. Facebook should ban Alex Jones or anyone else who violates its rules – Los Angeles Times

The idea is that a private business should have sole control of their content.

Newspapers have long championed free speech, even advocating that journalists have more rights to free speech protections than the general public.

Thus it is odd for newspapers to advocate for suppression of speech.

The challenge is always – who gets to decide what speech to suppress?

Do only powerful entities like corporate newspapers and social media corporations get to decide?

I was taught in high school and college that the proper response to speech we do not like is more speech – not shutting off those we oppose. Guess I am old fashioned but I believe that is still the proper response.

Do censorship and net neutrality go together?

Social media companies are private businesses and therefore, may control the content on their platform.

Social media companies promote net neutrality – arguing their content must be compulsorily carried by third party private business that deliver Internet data services.

Social media companies want it both ways – to be a private company that is free to censor while simultaneously forcing other businesses to carry their own speech. Under net neutrality, Comcast or AT&T must carry all of Facebook’s traffic without restriction.

That would be net neutrality for us, but not for you!

Is social media like a telephone company and not liable for content?

Social media companies say they are like a telephone company and not liable for user speech on their platform. This gives them a “safe harbor” against being liable for content posted by users. However, once they begin to edit that content, they act like a publisher, potentially liable for their content. Except that Federal law lets social media delete any content they choose.

Social media companies want it both ways: they want to be not liable for user content but simultaneously want to edit/censor content like a traditional publisher.

Offensive speech should be countered with more speech, not censorship

I am generally not familiar with those who were banned by Facebook other than what I have seen in news stories. I have seen a little of the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones output and I don’t like it. I am not supportive of the thoughts expressed by those with these bizarre views – but I support the view that their offensive speech should be countered with more speech, not censorship.

(Update: These individuals have extreme views that few support and are certainly poor examples to use in defending free speech. After I wrote this post, I did, however, find other examples of dissent on less inflammatory topics that were silenced by those in power.)

I am not defending their speech – but am questioning the appropriateness of corporations silencing them. Corporate publishers and broadcasters already censor speech frequently as the examples, below, illustrate. There is a slippery slope and we are quite a ways down that slope as made clear by these real world examples.

Zuckerberg accused by Facebook co-founder of censoring speech

“The most problematic aspect of Facebook’s power is Mark’s unilateral control over speech,” Hughes wrote. “There is no precedent for his ability to monitor, organize and even censor the conversations of two billion people.

Propaganda Impacts of Censorship by Corporations

In Spokane, Washington, the local newspaper publisher is a family dynasty dating to the 19th century. They publish the paper, own a TV station and used to own an AM radio station, and are the largest land owner in downtown Spokane, plus they own another 100,000 or so acres in the county and an adjoining county and prime real estate in Spokane Valley. They also own the mountain top antenna site used by other TV and radio stations (which may enable them to influence other broadcasters). The publisher has used their media properties to control the public dialogue (look up the River Park Square parking garage fiasco – more here.)

When the Northtown Mall was opened, the local paper refused to run ads for stores there because it would conflict with the paper’s ownership of downtown real estate and would impact retailers in downtown (supposedly the downtown lease agreements included a percent of revenue to the landlord/publisher). When public measures went up for a vote – measures that involved spending taxpayer’s money to enhance the downtown area or areas located near the publisher’s properties, you can guess how the paper spun the news. The full story of corruption is lengthy.

They could this because at one time, a single family controlled over 80% of the ad dollars in the Spokane market!

Regarding the RPS fiasco – “Spokesman-Review editorial writers continued to treat all dissenters as crackpots.” The editor called the Mayor a “civic terrorist” for his opposition to the garage.

Not surprisingly, in the lead up to and aftermath of the RPS fiasco: “According to an independent analysis commissioned by the Spokesman in 2007, it had allowed River Park Square developer Betsy Cowles to influence the editing of its stories, some of which hyped up the deal and downplayed its dangers.” [Betsy Cowles is part of the Cowles family that owns the media empire and real estate businesses.]

In other words: propaganda messaging, in part, by “lying by omission”: Everything the publisher says is true, but by omitting critical information, the overall conclusion is not true.

This is also known as “What You See Is All There Is”. Given factual – but censored – arguments, the reader or viewer is steered to the desired conclusion, unaware that other facts may present a different view. I have an example of WYSIATI in action here.

This example illustrates how a private business with large market share strongly influenced public policy through its power of censorship. None of this involved hate speech are advocating violence.

Shadow Banning

A shadow ban is one the person who is censored is led to believe their content is public. For example, you post a Twitter tweet and you can see it yourself (when logged in). But no one else can see it. Facebook does this, as do moderated newspaper comments

A factual comment I wrote, quoting directly from a U.S. government agency web site in regards to a public policy, was shadow banned by our local newspaper. I could see the comment when I was logged in, but when logged out, my comment was not there. Logged back in, and there it was. My comment had been shadow banned by The Oregonian newspaper.

My comment was not controversial, cited actual data, provided a citation to the U.S. government agency source, and an explanation of the methodology used. I asked The Oregonian for an explanation and they did not provide any.

I could only guess that The Oregonian was censoring facts that were inconsistent with their reporting. Not cool.

Yes, they are a private business and have a right to censor anything they want – but can I trust the Oregonian to deliver accurate news when I know they censor factual, reliably sourced information that contradicts their report? Answer: No, I cannot.

Compare the Oregonian’s actions to those described for Spokane, above. In both examples, corporate publishers controlled the public dialogue on public policy through enforcement of WYSIATI.

The Facebook group page originally associated with this blog, was shadow banned by Facebook for six months before I discovered this had occurred. I believe it was due to a technical error on FB’s part, not because the content here questions the role that social media propaganda plays in our society. But – FB had the mechanisms in place to erroneously and secretly shadow ban users.

TripAdvisor

TripAdvisor is a user content web site that purports to offer travel information and user written reviews of travel destinations and service. For years, TripAdvisor deleted negative reviews – and did not disclose this to users of the web site. This included deletion of information about serious crime activities – resulting in travel to destinations that were not safe.

Having been de facto censored for unknown reasons by our local newspaper, for innocuous speech based on factual data, that cited references and clearly explained the methodology – I find corporate censorship of speech troubling.

Particularly when they promote free speech for themselves but not for others.

What happens when most public discourse takes place on corporate platforms and corporations choose what will be published and what will be silenced? (Answer: See Spokane!)

More posts on shadow banning here.

Los Angeles Times says”Forget free speech” was originally published on SocialPanic

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chvvva · 8 years ago

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With each passing day, I become more and more aware of fandom dynamics and of what belonging to an organized subculture means. It’s no secret that fandom is a pretty old thing, but, and here’s the point of this introduction, though social network may have quickened and facilitated the process of people with the same interests from all over the world amazingly coming together, it also consistently fueled a fascinating phenomenon. Yes, I’m talking about those little mean anons and those walls of repetitive ass complaints preventing you from seeing content in the tags. In short, “hate”. Which represents the anti-movement and, it’s safe to safe to say at this point, a sub-subculture in and of itself. A few inputs before the actual rant:

From a neutral perspective, the Internet basically works like this: Immediate access to/diffusion of informations = Viral and limitless circulation.

And that’s great and positive,

but if your parents told you not to believe everything you read on the web to be true, now it’s time to remember that advice.

Because when free info distribution and limitless circulation make sweet love, it leads to increasing misinformation.

You’re misinformed when: you read someone else’s opinion and are firmly convinced that it is true without resources and/or factual proofs and qualified people confirming it.

Rings a few bells?

But fine, let’s say that those who condemn social issues, those who advocate, who do their best to promote healthy and open mindsets, those who want some kind of progress, aren’t spending 90% of the time they could be dedicating to those important causes… on the Internet > The place where sometimes - sometimes, but it happens - questionably subversive arguments are worded better than motivational speeches. This can be proven by looking at any post containing words like; “fetishization”; everything ending with “-phobia”; “harmful”; no, I’m not making these up, they’re the literal parody of terms with a heavy emotional impact. It doesn’t matter if they lack meaning. They can affect people on different degrees, but rest assured that the chance of someone not reacting to them [on a subconscious level] is pretty slim. All in all, these words serve their purpose very well. Now let’s put misinformation aside, let’s put data indigestion aside, as well as fragile contestations, lack of investigation, and idealistic visions of societies where we all think the same way.

So, fast forward.

I want to talk about fandoms. Who am I kidding, this was originally 100% about the Killing Stalking fandom. Except between discussing dark content in media, and fandom culture, and looking up precedents, such as Strikethrough (when I say antis remind me of radical religious groups I’m not shitting you but I wish I was), the point became wider. And clearer.

Everything you’ll read from this point on boils down to: Art is bad. Art exists to be bad.

I won’t claim these are my words, people - far more intelligent than me - have been having the same intuition since ancient times.

Homer’s Iliad is about war, mourning and death. It glorifies them on cosmic levels. I have read the Iliad two times. Wow, I guess I think dying is fun.

Euripides’ most famous play, Medea, is about a mother murdering her sons, then escaping. She’s the heroine of the play. In ancient Greece, plays were performed during festivals in public theatres. And I’ll tell you more: citizens who couldn’t afford the ticket participated anyway, because the government paid it for them. That’s because everyone, and I mean literally everyone, was encouraged to witness “wrong, controversial, absolutely vile” things as long as they happened on the stage.

On a lighter note, it’s possible for art to be simply amoral, since it’s how it’s always been, and always will be, as long as we’ll be entitled to free speech. Authors make choices. Either they put their beliefs and opinions into their work or they don’t.

Literature swims in the murkier waters of the human condition.

I’m going to go a little bit into this. When we talk about the horror genre, we should consider its origins. I’m sure you’re familiar with the piece of literature that lied the foundations of this genre, or at least with its renowned title. “Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus” was published in London on New Year’s Day, 1818, and “there was no author named on the title page, and readers and reviewers, almost to a person, assumed the book had been written by a man. They were mistaken.” (New York Times) We modern readers and reviewers, however, know that the Gothic novel that has enjoyed the most enduring popular success was written by a woman. And she was not the first one. Richard Davenport-Hines takes us back to the 18th century, years before Frankenstein was even a draft: “A significant amount of horror fiction of this era was written by women and marketed at a female audience, a typical scenario being a resourceful female protagonist menaced in a gloomy castle.” (Gothic: 1500 Years of Excess, Horror, Evil and Ruin. 1998.) Knowing that women have given a remarkable imprint to the horror genre made me think quite a lot. Is it possible to assume that gothic/horror/psychological are, in fact, some of the few narratives women had (and continue to have) such a deep impact on? And why is that? Answering these questions would be as difficult as determining the brain mechanism that leads us to actively seek the thrill of a good horror movie. And if you claim that a the horror genre is good only when it explicitly condemns bad and vile things, you need to read more books. If you haven’t even thumbed through Frankenstein, you’re probably unaware of its controversiality. I must admit, much as death is depicted with violent and terrifying tones, it’s nothing compared to other works of fiction I’ve met. But what really sticks to you after an afternoon spent between those pages, is human cruelty, as well as the utterly disarming human inclination to error. It sticks to you because it is real. When you pass judgement against fiction for influencing reality, I think it’s a far fetched, if not plainly wrong assumption, because that is not the nature of this relationship, which is simple. Fiction draws elements from the real world. Just what is necessary. Conversely, reality isn’t bended by fiction; and Darwin knew there was no way of Shelley’s tale happening just as well as she did. The extreme and profound emotions her book explores, however, belong to a human’s inner dimension. As debatable as they may be, or precisely because they are debatable, they belong to the pages of a book.

I find kind of hilarious how only a century later a horror story, written by a woman, ends up in young people’s hands and it is immediately considered inexcusable and “nasty” because of “amoral content.”

If you followed me until now, it won’t be hard to understand the next point. Pleasure can be amoral. Either people put their beliefs and opinions into what they love or they don’t. Often, these factors play a big part on what catches our attention; but that’s not mandatory, as I certainly don’t think murdering your son is a nice family activity. Medea is still one of my favorite plays. In school, no one told me this would make me a “murder apologist”.

Whenever it became progressive and almost natural to overlap an author’s, or even a reader’s conscience to a character’s, for whatever reason, I’m sure art will never be really free from this prejudice. My guess is that people simply aren’t able to separate the concept of something real from the concept of a parallel reality [fiction] in which ethical and physical laws aren’t applied in the same way. (And some people might feel so out of place and insecure about their own morals that as soon as moral integrity is questioned for its inflexible nature, the world crumbles down.)

There’s someone out there who will read this and be condescending (I get a tiny bit pretentious, especially since my safe zone is involved) but I don’t really care as long as there’s polite debate.

The article that encouraged me to write down my opinion, while being a superficial source, is an interesting one:

“Literature swims in the murkier waters of the human condition. Conflict and matters of life and death, of freedom and oppression—it is the business of books to explore these themes, and the business of teenagers, too.

New brain mapping research suggests that adolescence is a time when teens are capable of engaging deeply with material, on both an intellectual level as well as an emotional one. Some research suggests that during adolescence, the parts of the brain that processes emotion are even more online with teens than with adults, (something that will come as absolutely no surprise to any parent of a teenager). So, developmentally, teens are hungry for more provocative grist while emotionally they’re thirsty for the catharsis these books offer. Of course teens are drawn to darker, meatier fare.” (Gayle Forman, novelist - interviewed by Time)

What I’m saying is that art is vile. But the real world is also vile. Where’s the catch? Which part of this comes as a surprise?

Here goes the true shocking reveal, though: discouraging the creation of bad art isn’t a way to make reality significantly less bad. Let me put this more straightforwardly.

Censorship means taking away one of the most important human rights, while me writing a story in which a character thinks abuse isn’t a bad thing doesn’t violate any.

At this point, someone could argue that surely I’m not being sensible to abuse survivors, but the reason why I get away with it and Unfriendly Anon doesn’t is that I don’t do anything to directly and purposefully affect another person. So I’m good. Hate to break it down to you, but I’m not in charge of every single person on this site any more than you’re in charge of me and of my feelings. Or of minors and their feelings. Or of survivors and their feelings.

I’ve probably left something out, but hopefully the main points came across clearly. It’s fine if you don’t agree with them. Maybe make sure to understand what you’re talking about before you do broadcast your thoughts.

#killing stalking discourse #fandom discourse #horror genre #long post yikes #ranthea be proud

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brajeshupadhyay · 5 years ago

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You may not have noticed, what with America’s COVID-19 deaths passing the 100,000 mark and cities in an uproar coast-to-coast over police tactics against black residents, but President Trump last week staged a completely fictional attack on Twitter and other online services. The fiction was embodied in an executive order Trump signed on May 28, purportedly aimed at “preventing online censorship.” The order targets Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which dramatically changed the environment for online services hosting user-provided content. Section 230, which has been consistently misunderstood by its critics across the political spectrum, allows online services to host potentially objectionable, even defamatory user-posted content without becoming liable to legal action themselves, while also giving them the discretion to moderate that content as they wish. We have to let go of some Platonic ideal of content moderation…. You’re always going to cheese off somebody. Eric Goldman, Santa Clara University “The section’s most fundamental concept is that we want internet companies to manage user content, and not be liable for whatever they miss,” says Eric Goldman, an expert in the law at Santa Clara University Law School. “The fear was that if they were liable for whatever they missed, they wouldn’t even try.” The tech community has long treated Section 230 as “the most important law on the Internet.” As my colleague Sam Dean reports, the title of a book on the section by Jeff Kosseff, a cyberlaw expert at the U.S. Naval Academy, labels its text “the twenty-six words that created the internet.” But the law also has come under concerted attack by plaintiffs who keep looking for loopholes and judges who open them, all aimed at scrubbing distasteful material from the Web. Trump’s executive order is a typical attack on Section 230, launched by someone acting out a personal grievance. It’s so sloppily drafted that it would accomplish nothing resembling the prevention of “online censorship,” would be almost certainly unconstitutional if it did, and was basically a reflexive reaction to one offense: Twitter’s unprecedented designation of Trump tweets as the embodiment of lies requiring corrections. Twitter tagged the May 27 tweets, which asserted that mail-in ballots would lead to a “rigged election,” with a note directing users to fact-checked information refuting the assertion. Trump issued his executive order the very next day. Twitter went even further a day later, when it placed a blocking message over a Trump tweet implying that participants in protests over the killing of George Floyd, a black man who apparently died in the custody of Minneapolis police, should be shot if they were looting. The message required users to click separately to view the tweet. The executive order bears all the hallmarks of a Trump tantrum, including the lack of a mechanism to turn it into action. It begins with a Frank Costanza-like litany of personal grievances. “Online platforms are engaging in selective censorship that is harming our national discourse,” the order reads, specifically calling out Twitter: “Twitter now selectively decides to place a warning label on certain tweets in a manner that clearly reflects political bias… Twitter seems never to have placed such a label on another politician’s tweet.” (Trump means any politician other than himself.) We added a label to two @realDonaldTrump Tweets about California’s vote-by-mail plans as part of our efforts to enforce our civic integrity policy. We believe those Tweets could confuse voters about what they need to do to receive a ballot and participate in the election process. — Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) May 28, 2020 The order calls on the Federal Communications Commission to “clarify” the scope of 230’s immunity from liability, even though that latitude is quite clear in the language of the law. The text makes it clear that the immunity is very broad indeed. It allows online services to restrict access to content that they consider to be “obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing or otherwise objectionable.” The catchall language of “otherwise objectionable,” Goldman says, “makes you wonder exactly what wouldn’t have been included in Congress’s expectations, since they gave such a broad-based mandate to services.” The 230 exemption has been relied on by countless services that allow users to post statements or other content on their sites — newspapers hosting reader comments, merchants posting consumer reviews, expert and amateur forums of every description. Nevertheless, efforts to place limits of the 230 exemption are legion. In one closely followed California case, a San Francisco personal injury lawyer persuaded a state judge to order the consumer review site Yelp to remove an ex-client’s criticism of her performance after the lawyer won a defamation lawsuit against the client. Yelp refused, noting that it hadn’t been named as a defendant in the defamation lawsuit and arguing that it was immune from liability for the client’s posts under Section 230. The California Supreme Court found in Yelp’s favor, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to take up the issue, ending the case against Yelp. (The defamation judgment against the client remained in effect.) Congress tried to carve out an exception to Section 230 protection aimed at online sites that purportedly facilitated sex trafficking. The so-called Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, or FOSTA, which passed overwhelmingly and was signed into law by Trump in 2018, made online services liable for ads ostensibly promoting prostitution, consensual or otherwise. But FOSTA has failed to achieve its goals. Law enforcement officials have said it has made it harder for them to root out sex trafficking, because it drove perpetrators further underground, and interfered with posts aimed at warning consensual sex workers away from dangerous situations or clients. This Tweet violates our policies regarding the glorification of violence based on the historical context of the last line, its connection to violence, and the risk it could inspire similar actions today. https://t.co/sl4wupRfNH — Twitter Comms (@TwitterComms) May 29, 2020 In Congress, attacks on Section 230 or services that rely on its terms are bipartisan. For years, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has been asserting that under Section 230, online services that remove conservative-leaning contents lose their status as “neutral public forums” and therefore their immunity. Those services “should be considered to be a ‘publisher or speaker’ of user content if they pick and choose what gets published or spoken,” Cruz wrote in 2018. (His target then was Facebook, which he complained had been “censoring or suppressing conservative speech for years.”) Cruz’s take was wrong and in any event unenforceable, since any content moderation whatsoever entails picking and choosing what to allow online. Cruz is a graduate of Harvard Law School, so it’s reasonable to assume that he knows he’s wrong, and just as reasonable to conclude that he’s merely preaching to an ideologically conservative choir . But an attack on 230 has also come from Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), who in 2018 proposed a sheaf of regulations on social media aimed at stemming the tide of disinformation, including faked photos and videos, posted online. Warner advocated making online services liable for defamation and other civil torts if they posted “deep fake” or other manipulated audio or visual content. But he acknowledged in his position paper that distinguishing between “true disinformation and legitimate satire.” He also recognized that “reforms to Section 230 are bound to elicit vigorous opposition, including from digital liberties groups and online technology providers.” The best approach to Section 230 is to leave it alone, but manage our expectations of what it can achieve. For the most part, legitimate online services find it in their best interest to combat material widely judged to be socially unacceptable —hate speech, racism and sexism, and trolling. But the debate on the margins is always going to be contentious. “We’re never going to be happy with internet companies’ content moderation efforts,” says Goldman. “You can’t ask whether one company’s doing it right and another’s doing it wrong. They’re all ‘doing it wrong,’ because none of them are doing it the way I personally want them to do it. Your standards may differ from mine, at which point there’s no pleasing everybody.” Online services will always be vulnerable to attacks like Cruz’s or, indeed, Trump’s. The goal of his executive order was to pump up the image of online services into behemoths that have taken over the public debate space for their own purposes, assuming “unchecked power to censor, restrict, edit, shape, hide, alter virtually any form of communication between private citizens and large public audiences,” as he put it in remarks during the executive order signing ceremony. In his mind, that made them legitimate targets for regulation. Trump’s audience, of course, wasn’t ordinary citizens who feel their access to information or right to post their content online was being trampled, but his political base, which imagines that its megaphone is being taken away. The biggest joke during the signing ceremony was Trump’s assertion that “if [Twitter] were able to be legally shut down, I would do it. I think I’d be hurting it very badly if we didn’t use it anymore.” As the prominent internet rights lawyer Mike Godwin observed in response, “Seriously? Who on earth believes that Donald J. Trump could make himself live another week in the White House — much less serve another term — without his daily dose of Twitter psychodrama?” In truth, Trump was just trying to work the referees — hoping that his rhetoric alone will discourage Twitter from further interfering with his tweets. That seems to be working with Facebook, which thus far has announced a hands-off policy on political posting, no matter how noxious or mendacious. Even Facebook executives, as it happens, have been discontented by the hands-off policy adopted by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Arguments that private companies such as Twitter or Facebook are infringing on constitutional free speech rights are misguided, since constitutional protections for free speech apply to official government infringements, not those of private actors. In the private sphere, the diversity of approaches to content moderation may be society’s safety valve. “We have to let go of some Platonic ideal of content moderation, that if internet companies just invested enough time and money, they’d come up with something that would make everyone happy,” Goldman told me. “That outcome does not exist. You’re always going to cheese off somebody.” window.fbAsyncInit = function() { FB.init({ appId : '119932621434123', xfbml : true, version : 'v2.9' }); }; (function(d, s, id){ var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) {return;} js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "https://ift.tt/1sGOfhN"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs); }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk')); The post Hiltzik: Trump’s fake attack on Twitter appeared first on Sansaar Times.

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compare-wp10 · 5 years ago

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Censorship Has Mutated During Coronavirus Pandemic

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Censorship, Pandemic Style Censorship is unfortunately alive and well during this pandemic madness, taking on a variety of mutated forms as it participates in the various rights-trampling parades going on in America. We have seen the petty tyrant governors and mayors use this time to overreach and cavalierly brush aside constitutional rights in the name of safety. The First Amendment has been particularly roughed up, with the free exercise of religion, free speech, and the right to peaceably assemble all taking major hits. Matt Taibbi — not exactly a rightwing stalwart — warned last month of what he called the “Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis.” He was responding to a rather insane and disturbing article in The Atlantic that was basically making the case for adopting a more ChiCom approach to dealing with internet speech. That’s right, a venerable American publication was advocating for more censorship. The ChiComs themselves aren’t letting the crisis go to waste. Pro-commie establishment members of Hong Kong’s parliament are pushing legislation to censor and punish any language mocking the mainland’s national anthem. As I wrote last weekend, social media platforms are using the pandemic as an excuse to censor any voices that run counter to the preferred narrative. There is to be no real free speech or debate about how we should proceed through each new phase of dealing with the pandemic. Each of the major platforms has opted to be tools of the various states and prop up whichever arbitrary shutdown rules are in place. The media bias we’ve seen during all of this is a perverse sort of self-censorship that the MSM hacks are doing to themselves. They’ve been running with whatever the official word from China is, and surely they know that the censoring is kind of baked into the cake with that deal. It’s always amazing to see American “journalists” be drawn to the types of ideologues who would be the first to shut them down. This may not be directly related to the coronapocalypse, but it happened on Monday. The United Nations took some time to offer the great unwashed a list of words that we should no longer say. I’m not really sure which part of the UN’s charter lays out why it should be in the censor game, but then I still haven’t figured out what in the hell they have to do with climate change. The shutting down of church services is a form of censorship as well, and I can’t help but believe that the Democratic governors have enjoyed keeping the church folk away from worship just a little too much. Thankfully, saner legal heads seem to be prevailing on that front in the last couple of weeks. The policing of speech had become worrisome long before this pandemic hit us. The danger now is obviously having some of these more tyrannical types make some new permanent censorship rules. Speech that’s censored today may very well remain censored when we emerge from this rough patch. I’ve been fighting censorship since I first started doing stand-up and it’s a battle I’m willing to wage until they find a way to shut me up. PC Police Step Up Efforts to Completely Ruin Stand-Up Comedy This Ought to Work Out Well Many low-wage workers earn more on unemployment than in their former jobs https://t.co/jMwBs9efgG pic.twitter.com/7iKO5Hq9KX — CBS News (@CBSNews) May 19, 2020 PJM Linktank My Tuesday column: My Last ‘Obama Is the Worst’ Column This Month (I Think) HILARIOUS: Trump Campaign Mocks Biden. Journalists Don’t Get the Joke Texas Reopens. What’s Really Happening With Its COVID-19 Numbers? Sheriff Revolts Against Lockdown: ‘We Are Not Stormtroopers. We Are Peacekeepers’ And not just for fun. Wow! Guess Who’s Taking Hydroxychloroquine? Donald Trump! God wins. Again. Hallelujah! Church Lawsuit Forces Oregon Governor to Re-Open EVERYTHING Ben Sasse Picks the Correct Fight With His Democrat Challenger Shock! Pensacola Shooter Turns Out to Be Al-Qaeda Operative Who Plotted His Attack for Years SANITY: New Jersey Gym Owner Defies Lockdown Order and Cops Refuse to Stop Him The Real Coronavirus Timeline Liberals Don’t Want You To See China Threatened Dan Crenshaw. Now He’s Demanding Sanctions. Attorney General Barr Just Made Major News on ‘Obamagate.’ You’ll Want to Sit Down for This Trump Didn’t Botch the Coronavirus Response, Andrew Cuomo Did VodkaPundit: China Orders New Wuhan Virus Lockdown Because They Beat COVID-19, Honest Quarantine them in a jail. Why Did New York Infect America With Coronavirus? New Report Blames Cuomo, de Blasio FBI ‘Mistakenly’ Reveals Identity of Saudi Diplomat Suspected of Aiding 9/11 Jihadis Anti-Lockdown Champion Elon Musk Just Picked a Side and It’s Glorious Obama Fired an Inspector General to Cover Up a Sex Scandal and No One Said Boo About It Liberals’ Direct Cash Payments Promise to Do to Main Street What They’ve Done to the Black Community: Crush It ‘Joe Has Absolutely No Idea What’s Happening’ It Is Very Strange That General Flynn Was Unmasked Almost 50 Times VIP VodkaPundit, Part Deux: Giving Government the Finger: Americans Ending the Shutdown on Our Own Terms VIP Gold The Tragic End to Deshone Kizer’s NFL Career…And It Began Where QBs Usually Go to Die The Emotional Toll Social Distancing Has Taken on People Should Not Be Underestimated From the Mothership and Beyond I like this story. The internal watchdogs Trump has fired or replaced Excellent. Oklahoma Governor Signs Bill Banning Red Flag Laws School District’s Fight For Armed Teachers Heads To OH Supreme Court NZ Gun Crime Rates Soar Following Gun Bans GOP Governors Rip McConnell Challenger for Partisan Attack Ad I’ll binge-watch this. Graham Moves to Subpoena Brennan, Clapper and Other Major ‘Obamagate’ Players Pelosi’s Strange Reason for Not Wanting Trump to Take Hydroxychloroquine Katie Hill Threw a Tantrum Because Republican Mike Garcia Won Her Vacant Seat Rep. Jim Banks: ‘Shameful’ Dems Are Focused on Going After Trump Instead of Holding China Accountable Leader McConnell Taps Rubio to Lead Senate Intelligence Committee Amid Burr Investigation The Misleading Attack From CNN’s ‘Reliable Sources’ on Fox News’ Coverage on Flynn and COVID-19 Petty Tyrant Update. Ohio Governor Reveals How State Will Respond to Businesses Not Complying with Restrictions WATCH: Crowd Cheers New Jersey Police After They Refuse to Cite Violators of Lockdown Order Trump to the WHO: I’ll Permanently Pull U.S. Funds From the Organization Unless… James Woods: Trump ‘Loves America More Than Any President in My Lifetime,’ Obama Admin Was ‘Scum and Villainy’ Twitch Thots are Horrible but They’re a Symptom, Not a Disease When Even CNN Gets There’s a Problem in the Flynn Case, But the Judge Doesn’t, You Know It’s a Problem LA County Public Health Director Isn’t an M.D.; Why Do These Official Websites Say She Is? Petty Tyrant Update II. Bill de Blasio Threatens Fences Around NYC Beaches and Warns Swimmers They’ll be ‘Taken Right Out of the Water’ Kira Davis: I Don’t Want To See One More Damn Coronavirus Commercial #MouthBarf: Who’s Ready For Michelle Obama’s “Prom-Athon” With MTV? Um…Feminist Susan Faludi: “Believe All Women” Is A Right-Wing Straw Man That Liberals Don’t Actually Embrace Navarro: Let’s Face It, The CDC “Really Let The Country Down” In The COVID-19 Crisis Eric Trump: Dems Have A Very Deliberate Strategy To Use Social Distancing Rules To Prevent Trump From Holding Rallies Gov. Gavin Newsom, ready to lay off first responders, kicks off coronavirus assistance for illegal aliens He’s not owned! He’s not owned! Ezra Klein corncobs himself trying to pretend he didn’t get trolled by Trump campaign’s ‘Truth Over Facts’ site Losing. Their. MINDS! Chris Cillizza calls Trump ‘an unlikable jerk that gets stuff done’ and the Left breaks out pitchforks and torches Oh. 2 professors warn using wedding pictures as Zoom background is a “microaggression” Poland marks centenary of St. John Paul’s birth Bee Me Back To Normal: Conservatives Go To Work While Liberals Stay Home https://t.co/GKabQNFVrM — The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) May 18, 2020 The Kruiser Kabana pic.twitter.com/cq0yyGR9yy — Archillect (@archillect) May 19, 2020 Let’s treat Taco Tuesday with the reverence it deserves, people. ___ Kruiser Twitter Kruiser Facebook PJ Media Senior Columnist and Associate Editor Stephen Kruiser is the author of “Don’t Let the Hippies Shower” and “Straight Outta Feelings: Political Zen in the Age of Outrage,” both of which address serious subjects in a humorous way. Monday through Friday he edits PJ Media’s “Morning Briefing.” His columns appear every Tuesday and Friday.

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neptunecreek · 5 years ago

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The European Union’s controversial new copyright rules are on a collision course with EU data privacy rules. The GDPR guards data protection, privacy, and other fundamental rights in the handling of personal data. Such rights are likely to be affected by an automated decision-making system that’s guaranteed to be used, and abused, under Article 17 to find and filter out unauthorized copyrighted material. Here we take a deep dive examining how the EU got here and why Member States should act now to embrace enforcement policies for the Copyright Directive that steer clear of automated filters that violate the GDPR by censoring and discriminating against users.

Platforms Become the New Copyright Police

Article 17 of the EU’s Copyright Directive (formerly Article 13) makes online services liable for user-uploaded content that infringes someone’s copyright. To escape liability, online service operators have to show that they made best efforts to obtain rightsholders’ authorization and ensure infringing content is not available on their platforms. Further, they must show they acted expeditiously to remove content and prevent its re-upload after being notified by rightsholders.

Prior to passage of the Copyright Directive, user rights advocates alerted lawmakers that operators would have to employ upload filters to keep infringing content off their platforms. They warned that then Article 13 will turn online services into copyright police with special license to scan and filter billions of users’ social media posts and videos, audio clips, and photos for potential infringements.

While not everyone agreed about the features of the controversial overhaul of outdated copyright rules, there was little doubt that any automated system for catching and blocking copyright infringement would impact users, who would sometimes find their legitimate posts erroneously removed or blocked. Instead of unreservedly safeguarding user freedoms, the compromise worked out focuses on procedural safeguards to counter over-blocking. Although complaint and redress mechanisms are supposed to offer a quick fix, chances are that censored Europeans will have to join a long queue of fellow victims of algorithmic decision-making and await the chance to plead their case.

Can’t See the Wood For the Trees: the GDPR

There’s something awfully familiar about the idea of an automated black-box judgment system that weighs user-generated content and has a significant effect on the position of individuals. At recent EU copyright dialogue debates on technical and legal limits of copyright filters, EU data protection rules—which restrict the use of automated decision-making processes involving personal data—were not put on the agenda by the EU officials. Nor were academic experts on the GDPR who have raised this issue in the past (read this analysis by Sophie Stalla-Bourdillon or have a look at this year’s CPDP panel on copyright filters).

Under Article 22 of the GDPR, users have a right “not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing, including profiling, which produces legal effects concerning him or her or similarly significantly affects him or her.” Save for exceptions, which will be discussed below, this provision protects users from detrimental decisions made by algorithms, such as being turned down for an online loan by a service that uses software, not humans, to accept or reject applicants. In the language of the regulation, the word “solely” means a decision-making process that is totally automated and excludes any real human influence on the outcome.

The Copyright-Filter Test

Personal Data

The GDPR generally applies if a provider is processing personal data, which is defined as any information relating to an identified or identifiable natural person (“data subject,” Article 4(1) GDPR). Virtually every post that Article 17 filters analyze will have come from a user who had to create an account with an online service before making their post. The required account registration data make it inevitable that Copyright Directive filters must respect the GDPR. Even anonymous posts will have metadata, such as IP addresses (C-582/14, Breyer v Germany), which can be used to identify the poster. Anonymization is technically fraught, but even purportedly anonymization will not satisfy the GDPR if the content is connected with a user profile, such as a social media profile on Facebook or YouTube.

Defenders of copyright filters might counter that these filters do not evaluate metadata. Instead, they’ll say that filters merely compare uploaded content with information provided by rightsholders. However, the Copyright Directive’s algorithmic decision-making is about much more than content-matching. It is the decision whether a specific user is entitled to post a specific work. Whether the user’s upload matches the information provided by rightsholders is just a step along the way. Filters might not always use personal data to determine whether to remove content, but the decision is always about what a specific individual can do. In other words: how can monitoring and removing peoples’ uploads, which express views they seek to share, not involve a decision about based on that individual?

Moreover, the concept of “personal data” is very broad. The EU Court of Justice (Case C-434/16 Nowak v Data Protection Commissioner) held that “personal data” covers any information “provided that it ‘relates’ to the data subject,” whether through the content (a selfie uploaded on Facebook), through the purpose (a video is processed to evaluate a person’s preferences), or through the effect (a person is treated differently due to the monitoring of their uploads). A copyright filter works by removing any content that matches materials from anyone claiming to be a rightsholder. The purpose of filtering is to decide whether a work will or won’t be made public. The consequence of using filtering as a preventive measure is that users’ works will be blocked in error, while other (luckier) users’ works will not be blocked, meaning the filter creates a significant effect or even discriminates against some users.

Even more importantly, the Guidelines on automated decision-making developed by the WP29, an official European data protection advisory body (now EDPB) provide a user-focused interpretation of the requirements for automated individual decision-making. Article 22 applies to decisions based on any type of data. That means that Article 22 of the GDPR applies to algorithms that evaluate user-generated content that is uploaded to a platform.

Adverse Effects

Do copyright filters result in “legal” or “significant” effects as envisioned in the GDPR? The GDPR doesn’t define these terms, but the guidelines endorsed by the European Data Protection Board enumerate some “legal effects,” including denial of benefits and the cancellation of a contract.

The guidelines explain that even where a filter’s judgment does not have legal impact, it still falls within the scope of Article 22 of the GDPR if the decision-making process has the potential to significantly affect the behaviour of the individual concerned, has a prolonged impact on the user, or leads to discrimination against the user. For example, having your work erroneously blocked could lead to adverse financial circumstances or denial of economic opportunities. The more intrusive a decision is and the more reasonable expectations are frustrated, the higher the likelihood for adverse effects.

Consider a takedown or block of an artistic video by a creator whose audience is waiting to see it (they may have backed the creator’s crowdfunding campaign). This could result in harming the creator's freedom to conduct business, leading to financial loss. Now imagine a critical essay about political developments. Blocking this work is censorship that impairs the author’s right of free expression. There are many more examples that show that adverse effects will often be unavoidable.

Legitimate Grounds for Automated Individual Decision-Making

There are three grounds under which automated decision-making may be allowed under the GDPR’s Article 22(2). Users may be subjected to automated decision-making if one of three exceptions apply:

it’s necessary for entering into or performance of a contract,

authorized by the EU or member state law, or

based on the user’s explicit consent.

Necessity

Copyright filters cannot justly be considered “necessary” under this rule. “Necessity” is narrowly construed in the data protection framework, and can’t merely be something that is required under terms of service. Rather, a “necessity” defence for automated decision-making must be in line with the objectives of data protection law, and can’t be used if there are more fair or less intrusive measures available. The mere participation in an online service does not give rise to this “necessity,” and thus provides no serious justification for automated decision-making.

Authorization

Perhaps proponents of upload filters will argue that they will be authorized by the EU member state’s law that implement the Copyright Directive. Whether this is what the directive requires has been ambiguous from the very beginning.

Copyright Directive rapporteur MEP Axel Voss insisted that the Copyright Directive would not require upload filters and dismissed claims to the contrary as mere scare-mongering by digital rights groups. Indeed, after months of negotiation between EU institutions, the final language version of the directive conspicuously avoided any explicit reference to filter technologies. Instead, Article 17 requires “preventive measures” to ensure the non-availability of copyright-protected content and makes clear that its application should not lead to any identification of individual users, nor to the processing of personal data, except where provided under the GDPR.

Even if the Copyright Directive does “authorize” the use of filters, Article 22(2)(b) of the GDPR says that regulatory authorization alone is not sufficient to justify automated decision-making. The authorizing law—the law that each EU Member State will make to implement the Copyright Directive—must include “suitable” measures to safeguard users’ rights, freedoms, and legitimate interests. It is unclear whether Article 17 provides enough leeway for member states to meet these standards.

Consent

Without “necessity” or “authorization,” the only remaining path for justifying copyright filters under the GDPR is explicit consent by users. For data processing based on automated decision-making, a high level of individual control is required. The GDPR demands that consent be freely given, specific, informed, and unambiguous. As take-it-or-leave-it situations are against the rationale of true consent, it must be assessed whether the decision-making is necessary for the offered service. And consent must be explicit, which means that the user must give an obvious express statement of consent. It seems likely that few users will be interested in consenting to onerous filtering processes.

Article 22 says that even if automated decision-making is justified by user consent or by contractual necessity, platforms must safeguard user rights and freedoms. Users always have the right to obtain “human intervention” from platforms, to express their opinion about the content removal, and to challenge the decision. The GDPR therefore requires platforms to be fully transparent about why and how users' work was taken down or blocked.

Conclusion: Copyright-Filters Must Respect Users' Privacy Rights

The significant negative effects on users subjected to automated decision-making, and the legal uncertainties about the situations in which copyright-filters are permitted, should best be addressed by a policy of legislative self-restraint. Whatever decision national lawmakers take, they should ensure safeguards for users’ privacy, freedom of speech and other fundamental rights before any uploads are judged, blocked or removed.

If Member States adopt this line of reasoning and fulfill their legal obligations in the spirit of EU privacy rules, it could choke off any future for EU-mandated, fully-automated upload filters. This will set the groundwork for discussions about general monitoring and filtering obligations in the upcoming Digital Service Act.

(Many thanks to Rossana Ducato for the exchange of legal arguments, which inspired this article).

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