Ian Macdonald @ianmacd@qoto.org
- Keybase
- ianmacd
Sceptic; atheist; secularist; autodidact; cunning linguist; polemicist; nationalist; conspiracy realist; programmer; globetrotter; Silicon Valley survivor.
Joined Mar 2021
Verifying that I control the following Nostr public key: "npub10g6t6tww9mf0xjzvlsy6647e8s74lvcfvdwj2kwl9x7tarvrd7pqy7ajnl"
@elonmusk should change the #Twitter logo to a phoenix, since the bird is miraculously rising from the ashes today.
Why aren't all the liberals celebrating? After all, the USA's richest African American just struck a major blow for freedom.
No?
I'll be the judge of what's disinformation, thank you very much. I don't need the world's information curated for me by a condescending busybody with a moral superiority complex.
Goodbye, #DuckDuckGo. It was fun while it lasted.
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RT @yegg
Like so many others I am sickened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create. #StandWithUkraine️
At DuckDuckGo, we've been rolling out search updates tha…
https://twitter.com/yegg/status/1501716484761997318
Kan iemand mij uitleggen waaruit blijkt dat Thierry Baudet #Baudetlandverrader is? Dat moet ik gemist hebben vandaag.
Of gaat het hier alleen maar om de zoveelste afgezaagde hashtag waarmee de roeptoetsers elkaar weer geil maken?
Ik ben al een tijdje bezig, Thierry. Dit land heeft de ijsberg geraakt. Het komt niet meer goed.
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RT @thierrybaudet
Het wordt ook tijd om na te denken over een vluchtplan. Zijn er nog geen landen die ons, ongevaccineerden - dwz: kritische, onafhankelijke geesten, zelfstandige figuren, prima burgers kortom - asiel hebben aangeboden? Landen die NIET meedoen aan de totalitaire machtsgreep? https://twitter.com/rblommestijn/status/1466…
https://twitter.com/thierrybaudet/status/1466031229124460546
WIE verwondt #Baudet nou eigenlijk? Ik hoor alleen derden met een politieke agenda klagen, nooit bv. een jood.
En #Rutte? Brengt hij de waardigheid van de Kamer geen schade toe wanneer hij deze steeds belazert? Maar met hem kun je meeregeren, dus dan kijk je natuurlijk wel weg.
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RT @SigridKaag
Op Baudet reageren of niet? Dat is steeds het dilemma. Voor de nare oogst van dit weekend wil ik niet wegkijken.
Hij verwondt mensen met zij…
https://twitter.com/SigridKaag/status/1459952691820572682
@trinsec
De grond ligt vol met mensen die hun toestand pas serieus namen toen het al te laat was. Dus loop maar lekker in de pas, brave. Op hoop van zegen maar.
@trinsec
"Tweedeling is wat je ervan maakt", zeg je. Nou, maak er dan maar het beste van, zou ik maar zeggen.
Mensen die aan de bevoordeelde kant van een tweedeling zitten geloven dikwijls dat ze onverstoord verder kunnen leven, dat ze niet onderhevig zijn aan de onrust in de samenleving. Maar vroeg of laat komt Boontje meestal wel om zijn loontje. Dat wijst de geschiedenis telkens weer uit.
Zet dus je elektronische enkelband maar lekker om en geniet van je avondje uit. Je betaalt er tenslotte een hoge prijs voor.
@trinsec
Natuurlijk. Het zal vast wel allemaal meevallen, deze tweedeling in de samenleving.
Want wat is er nou zo erg aan drang? Gewoon aan toegeven, het is veel makkelijker zo.
En wat is er mis met bespioneerd worden door de overheid als je toch niets te verbergen hebt? Gewoon in meegaan, hoor.
Blijf maar lekker wegkijken.
China's social credit system is coming to the Netherlands, introduced by a government that has resigned in disgrace once already, but remains in office regardless.
I am proud to belong to the new Dutch underclass that rejects coercion and surveillance. #coronapas #NewNormal
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RT @thierrybaudet
I am Thierry, I live in the Netherlands. From the 25th of September, my family and I will be banned from restaurants, ceremonies, cultural …
https://twitter.com/thierrybaudet/status/1437305540368113667
@matthewbischoff Let's try to remember that no-one is forced to purchase the products of companies they wholeheartedly disapprove of.
Vote with your wallet and your feet.
@miamiautumn Historically, respecting gender identity has been straightforward and easy. People's given names reveal in most cultures the gender of their bearer. I won't go into the exceptions in Anglo-Saxon culture, as we all know what they are.
The advent and rise of anonymous or pseudonymous on-line discussion have muddied the waters a lot, as one can no longer reliably infer a person's gender from a nickname or the absense of any monicker.
This already troublesome situation has been exacerbated by the rise in recent years of gender dysphoria and the notion that there are, in fact, an infinite number of plausible genders.
The idea that one should have to resort to looking up a stranger's preferred pronouns in some authoritative global directory before referring to them in the third person, seems woefully impractical to the point of being doomed, and certainly not something I would be prepared to do.
It perhaps deserves reiteration here that any direct conversation between two people doesn't involve either referring to the other in the third person, so the issue of alleged pronoun dispect doesn't occur nearly as much in practice as the present attention to the subject in the media would suggest.
Regarding the use of 'they', 'their' and 'them' in the singular, perhaps the degree to which this seems unnatural depends on where one is from.
I grew up in the south-west of England, and whilst these words were sometimes used to refer to indefinite singular subjects whose name and gender were not known (e.g. "a person and their belongings"), they were *never* used to refer to an individual whose name at least was known.
That's why the use of American social media that peddle contrived abominations such as 'William has updated their status' is anathema to me. I used to read such text and literally wonder 'What? Whose status has William updated and why?' before the penny dropped.
I am now accustomed to seeing such verbal contortion, but I find it no less jarring than I ever did.
To me, language is central to my sense of self. It's at the very core of my existence and feels more closely woven with my identity than even my body or how I appear to others.
It's for this reason that the current sociopolitical trend towards compelling members of society to engage in increasingly outlandish excesses of so-called inclusive speech meet with so much resistance. It is experienced by many as a personal attack, and for every inch one concedes, a further mile is taken.
That said, I obviously can't disagree with the entirely reasonable stance that individuals enaged in any kind of discussion should show each other courtesy and respect. And as obvious as that sentiment might seem, the practice has gone into dramatic decline in recent years, ironically due in no small part to the outbursts of many who demand that the rest of us be more tolerant.
Ian Macdonald
boosted
🇳🇱
A chart showing the signature count as a graph comparing the #rms open support letter vs the anti-stallman letter... yay the letter in support of stallman is not just winning, but it seems to be growing in support where the other letter has lost steam and stopped growing.
The link below includes the script used to generate the chart
RMS
ML2, I pretty much agree word for word with your comments about #RMS. That will come as no surprise, given what I have already written here and elsewhere.
I do, however, want to address one thing you said, namely the phrase "as out-of-touch and inappropriate as his Epstein comments were, they do not rise to that level for me".
What's inappropriate to one person is acceptable to another, of course, but both in the tumult that rose over #Stallman two years ago and in the afterbirth pains of that discussion experienced over the last week, I can't help but suspect that many who claim to find Stallman's comments inappropriate actually find the summarised misrepresentations of those comments by others inappropriate. Those summaries are almost invariably caricatures of what Stallman actually said.
In other words, reports of Stallman's support for Epstein have been grossly exaggerated, and perhaps to even call them an exaggeration is hyperbolic in itself, because the term implies that some small kernel of truth was magnified out of all proportion. In reality, what Stallman said and how his words have been reported bear almost no resemblance to each other.
In the case of Stallman's comments on Epstein, the mainstream tech media reporting — both two years ago and over the last week — has been nothing short of sloppy and ignorant at best (using only secondary sources with no research into their accuracy), or wilfully misrepresentative at worst (people with a personal axe to grind against Stallman, and those seeking to further whichever agenda they deem worthy of slaughtering the truth for).
On 25th April 2019, Stallman wrote:
"Labor Secretary Acosta's plea deal for Jeffrey Epstein was not only extremely lenient, it was so lenient that it was illegal.
I wonder whether this makes it possible to resentence him to a longer prison term.
I disagree with some of what the article says about Epstein. Epstein is not, apparently, a pedophile, since the people he raped seem to have all been postpuberal.
By contrast, calling him a "sex offender" tends to minimize his crimes, since it groups him with people who committed a spectrum of acts of varying levels of gravity. Some of them were not crimes. Some of these people didn't actually do anything to anyone.
I think the right term for a person such as Epstein is "serial rapist"."
It's pretty clear from the above remarks that Stallman is not in support of any of the acts for which Epstein was prosecuted. Stallman argues only the specific legal applicability of the term "paedophile".
--
Note that the above remarks from Stallman were made 5 months before his comments to the MIT CSAIL mailing-list which led to the massive storm of protest against him.
In the wake of that storm, Stallman wrote again on 14th September 2019:
"I want to respond to the misleading media coverage of messages I posted about Marvin Minsky's association with Jeffrey Epstein. The coverage totally mischaracterised my statements.
Headlines say that I defended Epstein. Nothing could be further from the truth. I've called him a "serial rapist", and said he deserved to be imprisoned. But many people now believe I defended him — and other inaccurate claims — and feel a real hurt because of what they believe I said.
I'm sorry for that hurt. I wish I could have prevented the misunderstanding."
--
If there were any lingering doubts about where Stallman stood on Epstein after his earlier writings, the above clarification seems impossible for anyone acting in good faith to misinterpret. And perhaps that's precisely the reason that all of the melodramatic coverage of this affair over the last week has steadfastly chosen to ignore it.
Call me cynical, but I find it hard to give reporters the benefit of the doubt and chalk this up to a mere failure to conduct proper research. We live in such politically charged times that I much more strongly suspect malice and the furthering of a specific sociopolitical agenda to be at the heart of the media's widespread misreporting of this story.
Ultimately, it's hard for me to understand how anyone could find Stallman's actual stance on Epstein to be inappropriate, much less worthy of the tsunami of condemnation he once again now faces; which, I hasten to reiterate, is a response that I could never find appropriate anyway, since I maintain that Stallman's views on anything unrelated to free software, palatable or not, are utterly irrelevant to his professional work.
In veel gevallen wel, ja. #vrijheid #ikbeneenwappie
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RT @MikeinNederland
Precies. #Vrijheid #ikbeneenwappie
https://twitter.com/MikeinNederland/status/1375809106930499590
xkcd 1357 presents a cogent, yet naively simplistic and ultimately one-sided view of free speech. Indeed, things go awry in the very first frame, in which it is claimed that free speech amounts to no more than one's ability to speak without fear of arrest by the government. However, many people, myself included, would contend that the right to free speech is a philosophical concept that far transcends this narrow American legal definition.
The waters suddenly become much murkier when one examines the fact that large corporations with (socio-)political agendas have, in recent years, become more powerful and influential than even national governments and heads of state. This is an alarming and undesirable development, since said corporations are not subject to any third-party oversight or regulation, and there is no independent process of appeal against their summary judgements or the imposition of punitive measures.
This grave situation has steadily worsened over the last decade as the reach of these companies has expanded and gone largely unchecked by governments who either cannot see the danger rising before them, or find themselves without any existing legal recourse to combat it. The unfettered growth of this influence has emboldened these corporations to reach increasingly harsh and arbitrary judgements against selected users, whilst making proportionately diminishing efforts to justify their actions.
In many cases, governments have been not merely ineffective at curtailing this rise in influence, but instrumental in it, by misguidedly conferring on these corporations an editorial responsibility for the utterings of their users that no mere carrier or publisher should either want or be forced to bear. Historically, we have not demanded of the postal service that it take responsibility for the missives it conveys, nor of telecommunications carriers that they intervene if controversial and challenging ideas are sent over their cables and airwaves. Corporations like #Facebook and #Twitter are essentially no different, and should enjoy and be bounded by the same status, because to confer more is to endow them with a power that they can abuse, have abused, and will continue to abuse.
The rise of these corporations' influence has seen the town square, where we are free to gather and engage in public debate, controversial or otherwise, slowly undergo a paradigm shift from the physical world to the virtual realm; the crucial and essential difference being that access to the virtual town square is not without encumberment. It is not a public forum, and access to it is granted, tolerated and revoked at the pleasure of said corporations.
This grim development has been further catalysed by the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, which, in many parts of the world, has resulted in the actual revocation of the right to public assembly in a physical space. In much of the world, including the so-called free world, the actual town square no longer exists as a hub for the free and unhampered exchange of ideas. The ability to express one's thoughts is now largely confined to the virtual realm, and the freedom to wield one's voice in that expression is now, in no small part, at the whim of corporations run by megalomaniacal billionaire ideologues.
When the arena in which public debate takes place shifts to new ground, discourse in that new territory needs to be afforded the same privileges and protections it enjoys elsewhere. This is not currently the case, and our right to free speech is under extreme duress as a result.
Never a day passes now without new cases documented of "hateful" people having the right to voice their "problematic" thoughts and opinions suppressed. And with "hateful" and "problematic" being such subjective concepts, this is an extremely slippery slope on which society now finds itself.
You may have cause to celebrate the downfall of your particular chosen foe today, but when the tables turn tomorrow and it is now you or those you advocate in the sights of these corporations' guns, who will you turn to then?
- Keybase
- ianmacd
Sceptic; atheist; secularist; autodidact; cunning linguist; polemicist; nationalist; conspiracy realist; programmer; globetrotter; Silicon Valley survivor.
Joined Mar 2021
