I had my second Twitter violation last Friday. The first one was in January, for a tweet in response to Curt Mills, a friend who writes for The American Conservative. He’s a big believer in generational warfare, which I’m not a fan of, so one time I sarcastically responded to him in kind. When Twitter puts you in jail, you open up the app and get a pop-up that leads to a screen that looks like this.
>The MSM has its problems, but a half hour reading the NYT on a particular issue – as long as it’s not related to race, sex, or gayness, where they’re completely deluded and make people dumber – will give you a lot more information than a half hour keeping up with what people are saying about the topic on Twitter, and without the distractions.
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
My feeling is that Twitter realizes it leaves itself open to accusations of hypocrisy and being anti-white and anti-right whenever someone on the right is kicked off for “crimes” against a protected groups. So if you point out a hate fact--like certain groups have lower average IQ than other groups, or that trans women are not actually women--they know it makes them look bad because they’re lying for ideological reasons.
But when they get a chance to kick someone on the right off *for saying something bad about white people or America more generally* they’re handed a golden opportunity to rid their platform of someone they dislike for reasons that even milquetoast Republicans would be okay with.
I have never tweeted anything and have no regrets about that. Twitter has never been and is not now a legitimate medium of communications. I recommend everyone get off it, and rebuild their audience here at Substack or elsewhere.
Richard: I think one of the worst things about Twitter usage, and you touch on this in your comment about how vapid your group chat’s Twitter commentary tends to be, is how it makes you seem/feel smarter and more knowledgeable than you really are. Whenever I use Twitter a lot, I feel like I’m basking in referentiality. I’ll go from a thread about dietary habits in classical antiquity to another thread about the follies of Biden’s student loan giveaway to a dunk on some liberal and I get such a thrill, such a rush from being able to incorporate so much disparate information in such a condensed manner. Of course, that’s only possible because the underlying content is like intellectual BABY FOOD: smooth, yummy and easy to digest! There is nothing impressive at all about consuming a bunch of shallow pablum! It’s HARD to read a multi volume history about the Greeks. It’s HARD to really dig into the nature of universities and how they get away with charging their students so much. Twitter gives college educated people a steady diet of information that is just substantive enough to make them *seem* like an informed person at the office.
Good for you. Your Twitter comments, while amusing, are hardly the best of your oeuvre. I, too, am finding the wasted time vs. gem in the dung ratio getting a bit high.
>I don’t feel particularly oppressed by leftists. They give me a lot more free speech than I would give them if the tables were turned. If I owned Twitter, I wouldn’t let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post. Why should I? They’re wrong about everything and bad for society. Twitter is a company that is overwhelmingly liberal, and I’m actually impressed they let me get away with the things I’ve been saying for this long.
>I would bend my libertarian principles to be in favor of using government to take away Twitter’s power to censor, but not based on some broadly applicable principle, because principle points in the other direction. In fact, I’d hate to see a social media website completely devoted to free speech. Already, my replies were polluted with ad hoc attacks, insults, and anti-vaxx nonsense. I couldn’t imagine how unpleasant Twitter would be right now if they didn’t already purge the most defective personalities. As I’ve pointed out before, the problem with modern liberalism isn’t its intolerance, which is mild by historical standards, but the fact that it is wrong.
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.
Epistemic arrogance is rarely rewarded with a better understanding of reality. The problem with intolerance is that it makes correcting mistakes harder than if you were to tolerate dissenting views.
I can't imagine that you made it this far in life without encountering the above line of thinking, so I'm curious to know why you've dispensed with Mill and sided with (((Popper))) instead.
It's funny how Twitter's rules seem to mimic those of the American justice system in that if you accept the plea bargain (i.e., remove the tweet and lower your head) you will be let go with a minor sentence (1st admonition, sit on the bench for 24h), but if you dare challenge their accussation you can expect a much heavier sentence if the Algorithm-Judge (there's no way that tweets are beng reviewed by actual people) should find you guilty. Ironic, because this very same system ends up sentencing thousands of innocents to unjust penalties, just because the accused (often minorities, whom probably the Twitter overlords would complain for being unfairly treated by "The System") don't want to risk a much disproportionally heavier sentence should they be (unjustly) found guilty.
If there is an algorithm, why not run it at the time of post and warn the auttor then. The author can then consider their tone and correct for misinterpretion.
I’m doing one better; I get my news from books. If it’s not important in 10 years, it wasn’t important in the first place, unless it affects me directly, in which case I’ll probably hear about it from someone I know. Luckily I don’t have the burden of needing to demonstrate how in the know I am.
Use of Twitter violates a core principle of Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Don’t engage the enemy on their battleground. As long as good people wallow in ego and/or addiction to social media there will be no victory in this war. And yes, this is war.
It’s important to remember that no matter what information can be found there it is still being sifted. What is found is also a shield for what isn’t there. It’s not advantageous for leftist Twitter to allow certain things to gain traction. I’m banned there. I never posted anything that wasn’t informative and sourced on purpose. I tested them with my posts. What legitimate sourced bit of info will trigger them?
Megvii. Openly reported prior to the rise of the Democratic Third Positionists. Joe Biden’s son and brother doing business with a company under sanctions by the US. Circumventing these sanctions by registering BHR in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone so investment can be made in mass surveillance which is being tested on the Uyghur population. Twitter doesn’t like that easily sourced information posted on their platform.
The second time was information I gained from a quote from a WTO official. This official used a strange word I had never heard. The media outlet that caught it does have an interest in exposing globalist corruption. Russia Today. One of the best available media sources. Why else would the West be so threatened by it?
The word was “Polycrisis”. It has a source. The source is connected to a mountain of money. A Google Trends search of the word shows it is not in wide circulation. Yet very rich people use it in their discourse. The site of origin has a definition of the Polycrisis. Read the last paragraph. It sounds like a lot of people are going to have a bad time. But not them. Hmmmmmm
Philippe Lemoine has recently posted about some of the things he got wrong (and right) about the Russia-Ukraine war. Any plans to do something similar?
Good for you Richard. If more people I know with something interesting to say would make the same decision, my life (and the world) would both be better off.
>The MSM has its problems, but a half hour reading the NYT on a particular issue – as long as it’s not related to race, sex, or gayness, where they’re completely deluded and make people dumber – will give you a lot more information than a half hour keeping up with what people are saying about the topic on Twitter, and without the distractions.
Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
Every time someone quits Twitter an angel gets its wings
My feeling is that Twitter realizes it leaves itself open to accusations of hypocrisy and being anti-white and anti-right whenever someone on the right is kicked off for “crimes” against a protected groups. So if you point out a hate fact--like certain groups have lower average IQ than other groups, or that trans women are not actually women--they know it makes them look bad because they’re lying for ideological reasons.
But when they get a chance to kick someone on the right off *for saying something bad about white people or America more generally* they’re handed a golden opportunity to rid their platform of someone they dislike for reasons that even milquetoast Republicans would be okay with.
I have never tweeted anything and have no regrets about that. Twitter has never been and is not now a legitimate medium of communications. I recommend everyone get off it, and rebuild their audience here at Substack or elsewhere.
Richard: I think one of the worst things about Twitter usage, and you touch on this in your comment about how vapid your group chat’s Twitter commentary tends to be, is how it makes you seem/feel smarter and more knowledgeable than you really are. Whenever I use Twitter a lot, I feel like I’m basking in referentiality. I’ll go from a thread about dietary habits in classical antiquity to another thread about the follies of Biden’s student loan giveaway to a dunk on some liberal and I get such a thrill, such a rush from being able to incorporate so much disparate information in such a condensed manner. Of course, that’s only possible because the underlying content is like intellectual BABY FOOD: smooth, yummy and easy to digest! There is nothing impressive at all about consuming a bunch of shallow pablum! It’s HARD to read a multi volume history about the Greeks. It’s HARD to really dig into the nature of universities and how they get away with charging their students so much. Twitter gives college educated people a steady diet of information that is just substantive enough to make them *seem* like an informed person at the office.
"If I owned Twitter, I wouldn’t let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post. "
Really? That seems really intolerant.
Richard, will you please open a betting market for:
"How long does it take RH to get back on Twitter"
Let's see what the audience thinks.
“as long as it’s not related to race, sex, or gayness, where they’re completely deluded and make people dumber”
Umm. Or war. Or Covid. Or politics. Or the economy. Or basically anything else that matters.
Dear Mr. Hanania,
Good for you. Your Twitter comments, while amusing, are hardly the best of your oeuvre. I, too, am finding the wasted time vs. gem in the dung ratio getting a bit high.
>I don’t feel particularly oppressed by leftists. They give me a lot more free speech than I would give them if the tables were turned. If I owned Twitter, I wouldn’t let feminists, trans activists, or socialists post. Why should I? They’re wrong about everything and bad for society. Twitter is a company that is overwhelmingly liberal, and I’m actually impressed they let me get away with the things I’ve been saying for this long.
>I would bend my libertarian principles to be in favor of using government to take away Twitter’s power to censor, but not based on some broadly applicable principle, because principle points in the other direction. In fact, I’d hate to see a social media website completely devoted to free speech. Already, my replies were polluted with ad hoc attacks, insults, and anti-vaxx nonsense. I couldn’t imagine how unpleasant Twitter would be right now if they didn’t already purge the most defective personalities. As I’ve pointed out before, the problem with modern liberalism isn’t its intolerance, which is mild by historical standards, but the fact that it is wrong.
I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken.
Epistemic arrogance is rarely rewarded with a better understanding of reality. The problem with intolerance is that it makes correcting mistakes harder than if you were to tolerate dissenting views.
I can't imagine that you made it this far in life without encountering the above line of thinking, so I'm curious to know why you've dispensed with Mill and sided with (((Popper))) instead.
It's funny how Twitter's rules seem to mimic those of the American justice system in that if you accept the plea bargain (i.e., remove the tweet and lower your head) you will be let go with a minor sentence (1st admonition, sit on the bench for 24h), but if you dare challenge their accussation you can expect a much heavier sentence if the Algorithm-Judge (there's no way that tweets are beng reviewed by actual people) should find you guilty. Ironic, because this very same system ends up sentencing thousands of innocents to unjust penalties, just because the accused (often minorities, whom probably the Twitter overlords would complain for being unfairly treated by "The System") don't want to risk a much disproportionally heavier sentence should they be (unjustly) found guilty.
If there is an algorithm, why not run it at the time of post and warn the auttor then. The author can then consider their tone and correct for misinterpretion.
I’m doing one better; I get my news from books. If it’s not important in 10 years, it wasn’t important in the first place, unless it affects me directly, in which case I’ll probably hear about it from someone I know. Luckily I don’t have the burden of needing to demonstrate how in the know I am.
Use of Twitter violates a core principle of Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Don’t engage the enemy on their battleground. As long as good people wallow in ego and/or addiction to social media there will be no victory in this war. And yes, this is war.
It’s important to remember that no matter what information can be found there it is still being sifted. What is found is also a shield for what isn’t there. It’s not advantageous for leftist Twitter to allow certain things to gain traction. I’m banned there. I never posted anything that wasn’t informative and sourced on purpose. I tested them with my posts. What legitimate sourced bit of info will trigger them?
Megvii. Openly reported prior to the rise of the Democratic Third Positionists. Joe Biden’s son and brother doing business with a company under sanctions by the US. Circumventing these sanctions by registering BHR in the Shanghai Free Trade Zone so investment can be made in mass surveillance which is being tested on the Uyghur population. Twitter doesn’t like that easily sourced information posted on their platform.
The second time was information I gained from a quote from a WTO official. This official used a strange word I had never heard. The media outlet that caught it does have an interest in exposing globalist corruption. Russia Today. One of the best available media sources. Why else would the West be so threatened by it?
The word was “Polycrisis”. It has a source. The source is connected to a mountain of money. A Google Trends search of the word shows it is not in wide circulation. Yet very rich people use it in their discourse. The site of origin has a definition of the Polycrisis. Read the last paragraph. It sounds like a lot of people are going to have a bad time. But not them. Hmmmmmm
Philippe Lemoine has recently posted about some of the things he got wrong (and right) about the Russia-Ukraine war. Any plans to do something similar?
Good for you Richard. If more people I know with something interesting to say would make the same decision, my life (and the world) would both be better off.