Someday, I May Be Important Enough To Demand Fair Reply
...but until that day, Damion Schubert is tanking the Mark Kern aggro, and doing so very adeptly.
First off, let me say, without irony: welcome to the discourse, Mark. You have your own megaphone. No one is shutting you down, no one is shouting you down. I linked to your reply to Damion in the first line of this post. Your position in this foofrah is on the record and public knowledge. This is how it is supposed to work. You say things, other people say things in response, readers enjoy the interplay of ideas, *it's all good*.
Welcome to blogging, circa 2002.
Let me start by saying, I don’t have a problem with people blocking other people on Twitter, or using a service like a block-bot to do so. If, for some reason, you came to this conclusion I’d like to apologize.
Well, thank you, Mark. In an ideal world, this would have been your entire post. And I'm glad that you recognize that most people do not particularly want to see what weird anime porn 8chan saw that week on their Twitter feed and act accordingly. The best way to solve every problem is to give people the tools and power to solve it themselves. That is the libertarian philosophy, the anarchist perogative. We rule our own roosts, we have our own castles. This is the ideal. I'm glad you recognized this fact. And in a perfect world, this blog post would have stopped... here.
It's not over.
Another brief factual point, which Mark is correct on:
Also, Damion’s article refers largely to Randi Harper’s gg autoblocker. In my public tweets with Randi, I’ve made it quite clear that I’m not talking about her list, but rather the Atheism + list, called “theblockbot,” which is operated out of the UK and predates the gg Autoblocker. So this part of the article is factually in error and fails to address my concerns with the theblockbot.com.
And regular readers of this blog will note that this is in fact what we discussed. The issues with the UK Atheist blockbot (which are minor, but still problematic) have nothing to do with Randi Harper's ggautoblocker, who, in case you missed it at any point, I 100% support and recommend. Randi is doing the Lord's work, and being harassed for her pains, because, well, Internet. Do I need to continue? No.
But, of course, Mark does, because MarkKernMarkKern.
My simple question to the readers of @ZenOfDesign is this: Why is it necessary for these blockbots to label its lists as lists of horrible people who are bigots, harassers, or otherwise “bad people?”
Gosh Mark
https://twitter.com/CHOBITCOIN/status/572619685755142144
I can't
https://twitter.com/Quinnae_Moon/status/578658591034499072
imagine
https://twitter.com/srhbutts/status/578416902445240320
why
https://twitter.com/TheQuinnspiracy/status/577554454653759488
with such polite discourse being brutally suppressed by bots acting in self defense. (And trust me - it took some doing to find things that weren't in and of themselves an assault. I died for your sins.)
And that's really the point here. We're not talking about an alternative political viewpoint that is being suppressed. We're talking about a pack of obscene idiots who use the open nature of the Internet as a weapon to attack people they don't like. And those self-same pack of obscene idiots then complain, with no visible irony whatsoever, because they are being censored because a good many site hosts do not particularly want to host blathering obscenity.
At the end of the day, that is why people install blockbots. Not because they want to live in an echo chamber of people they agree with (or "hugboxes", in the entirely too illustrative vernacular of Gamergate where hugs are apparently awful things to avoid at all costs), but because they would like to read Twitter with 80% less sewage. That is, for everyone I've talked to about this, literally, LITERALLY the only consideration. No one has any problem with the sea-lioning "actually, it's about X in X" justifications. It's what comes after. It's the flood. It's the sewage. It's about self-defense.
And the fact that Mark Kern denies that flood of sewage exists is obvious, and incredibly illustrative, and demolishes any credibility he may have as a "neutral commentator" that he pretends to hold.
(But he's still fun to make fun of. Though I'll try to only do so in moderation.)
(PPS, and I didn't notice this but someone else did, so I will just point that out because it made me laugh for about four minutes)
https://twitter.com/InnerPartisan/status/578722730817806336