With the French edition of Lucire KSA now out, weâve been hard at work on the second issue. The first was typeset by our colleagues in Cairo (with the copy subbed by me), but this time it falls on us, and I had to do a lot of research on French composition.
There are pages all over the web on this, but nothing that seems to gather it all into one location. I guess Iâm adding to the din, but at least itâs somewhere where I can find it.
The issue we had today was spacing punctuation. I always knew the French space out question marks, exclamation marks, colons, and semicolons; as well as their guillemets. But by how much? And what happens to guillemets when you have a speaker who you are quoting for more than one paragraph?
The following, which will appear in the next issue of Lucire KSA in French, and also online, is demonstrative:
In online forums, it appears the spaces after opening guillemets and before closing guillemets, question marks, exclamation marks and semicolons are eighth ones. The one before the colon, however, is a full space, but a non-breaking one.
I should note that the 1938 edition of Hartâs Rules, which was my first one, suggests a full space around the guillemets.
When quoting a large passage of text, rather than put guillemets at the start of each line (which would be hard to set), the French do something similar to us. However, if a quotation continues on to a new paragraph, it doesnât start with the usual opening guillemets (ÂŤ), but with the closing ones (Âť). That 1938 Hartâs disagrees, and doesnât make this point, other than one should begin the new paragraph with guillemets, which I deduce are opening ones.
If the full stop is part of the quotation then it appears within the guillemets; the full stop is suppressed if a comma follows in the sentence, e.g. (Hartâs example):
ÂŤ Câest par le sang et par le fer que les Ătats grandissent Âť, a dit Bismarck.
Sadly for us, newer Hartâs Rules (e.g. 2010) donât go into any depth for non-English settings. Hartâs in 1938 also says there apparently is no space before the points de suspension (ellipses), which I notice French writers observe.
Looking at competitorsâ magazines gives no clarity. I happened to have two Vogue Paris issues in the office, from 1990 and 1995. The former adopts the same quotation marks as English, while the latter appears to have been typeset by different people who disagree on the house style.
This is my fourth language so Iâm happy to read corrections from more experienced professional compositors.
We all know what will happen. This is one of two fakes who have sent me a Facebook friend request this week. The first was given the all-clear despite having spam links; and no doubt this will be judged to be perfectly acceptable by Facebook. (In the meantime, a post from Lucire that featured the latest PETA âwould rather go nakedâ campaign was instantly removed.)
What isnât acceptable, is, of course, criticizing them. Bob Hoffman writes (original emphases):
According to Vice, recently the Cybersecurity for Democracy project âhas revealed major flaws in Facebook political ad transparency tools and highlighted how Facebookâs algorithms were amplifying (COVID vaccine) misinformation.â This should come as no surprise to anyone who has been conscious for the past few years âŚ
This week Facebook, in an act of abject unscrupulousness, suspended the accounts of several of the researchers from NYU who are leading the Cybersecurity for Democracy project and need to access Facebook to do their work. One of the researchers called Facebookâs action ââdisgracefulâ at a time when the disinformation around COVID-19 and vaccines is literally costing lives.â
This is how weak and pathetic Facebook is. Instead of doing better (which they claim they try to do), theyâd rather shut down criticism. A bit like a dictatorship.
Theyâre not alone, of course. In the news recently were the snowflakes of Ebay, who also canât take a bit of criticism.
Ina and David Steiner publish a news website about ecommerce and were critical of Ebay in its latest incarnation. The CEO wasnât happy, nor was Ebayâs head of global security, James Baugh, who began a campaign to terrorize the Steiners.
The Steiners found their fence tagged, then Ebayâs staff began sending ordering items to be sent to them, including a fĹtal pig, a mask of a bloody pig face (witnessed by a police officer), a book on surviving the death of a spouse, a package of live spiders and fly larvĂŚ, and a sympathy wreath, among others. Then Ebayâs employees went to Boston, near where the Steiners lived, and planned to plant a tracking device on their car. The Steiners spotted the rental vehicles stalking them. Understandably, they couldnât sleep properly, and even slept separately fearing they would be physically attacked.
It was thanks to the Steinersâ own efforts that they managed to get the number plate of one of the vehicles tailing them, which was then referred to police, who finally managed to figure out what was going on.
One person has been sentenced in all this mess to 18 months in prison, and there have been other arrests, though as this is the US, the CEO gets off scot free with a US$57 million golden handshake.
This isnât that out of the ordinary, and entirely predictable for anyone who has followed this blog. Or the news, for that matter.
A few years ago, I blogged about how Elon Musk and Tesla tried to get one of its whistleblowing employees killed by telling the police that he was planning a mass shooting. According to Bloomberg Businessweek:
Many chief executive officers would try to ignore somebody like Tripp. Instead, as accounts from police, former employees, and documents produced by Teslaâs own internal investigation reveal, Musk set out to destroy him.
The employee, Martin Tripp, allegedly was hacked and followed before the attempt to have him swatted.
Former Gigafactory security manager, Sean Gouthro, said Tripp never sabotaged Tesla or hacked anything, and Musk knew this, but still wanted to damage Trippâs reputation. You can read more directly at the source.
My negative encounters with Big Tech, which I put down more to shoddy programming or incompetence than malice, are pretty tame.
Put together, the pattern of IP theft, censorship, inciting genocide and misinformation, and targeting individuals, is very obvious. Itâs part of their culture these days, since the US keeps letting these companies do what they wish with impunity, and to heck with what anyone would reasonably think the laws actually say. And itâs not just the US: when has our Blairite government or its predecessor moved against Big Tech in any meaningful way, on taxation, or on apportioning some responsibility for their part in COVID-19 misinformation?
Meanwhile, I was amused to see this under Arthur Turnure’s entry in Wikipedia:
So Turnure starts Vogue but decides to work under an 18-year-old in another city.
The reference linked doesn’t back this up at all.
I know Wikipedia is full of crap that we can all go and correct, but as we’ve seen, shit sticks and on the internet, bullshit sticks, including one item that I’ve blogged about before that remained for over a decade.
What gets me is why someone who doesn’t know a subject would deem themselves sufficiently knowledgeable to write about it. Because I just wouldn’t dare.
As detailed before, you don’t see as many inaccuracies in the Japanese or German versions of Wikipedia, and you have to conclude, especially now with politicians doing the same thing, that the Anglosphere is increasingly an anti-intellectual place to be. ‘The fundamental problem with the English-speaking world is that ignorance is not considered a vice,’ said the brother of my friend, Prof Catherine Churchman. My earlier post from 2018 stands now more than ever.
Here are June 2021âs imagesâaides-mĂŠmoires, photos of interest, and miscellaneous items. I append to this gallery through the month.
Sources The Guardian letter, from Twitter. Ford Cortina Mk II pick-up made by Hyundai, referred by ę°ëě° on Twitter.
Ikea water, reposted from Twitter.
Alexa launch, reposted from Twitter.
Protest Sportswear’s women’s range for springâsummer 2021. Read more at Lucire.
Collusion between Google and Facebook, from Bob Hoffman’s The Ad Contrarian newsletter.
Ford Falcon ESP limited editionâa familiar image to those of us who read Australian car magazines in the early 1980s. More on the Ford Falcon (XD) at Autocade.
This was the famous advertisement for the 1965 Ford Mustang, for its dĂŠbut in April 1964 at the World’s Fair in New York. It was mentioned in Lee Iacocca’s autobiography, but I had not seen it till 2020.
Dido Harding work history, shared by James O’Brien on Twitter, possibly from The Eye.
Iâve bought Don Blackâs The Sanest Guy in the Room, which is a great readâyou know that itâs piqued your interest if you can do 110 pages in a single sitting. Thereâs more to go, and itâs entertaining learning a bit about the backgrounds to his songs, âBorn Freeâ arguably his best known. (I do know there are insurance commercials with the song, so I hope he, and the families of John Barry and Matt Monro are getting decent royalties from themâthough itâs pretty bad I have no idea which company itâs for. I assume itâs a successor firm to AA Mutual.)
Don has been very humble in this book and in one part, excerpts his favourite lyrics that others have written. In my mind, however, Don is the top man in his business, and it seems right that I highlight a few of my favourites out of his extensive repertoire and honour him. These come to mind, in no particular order. Many show a good use of rhyme, and all evoke imagery. The repetition of a root word is also clever. And theyâre âsingableâ. As someone who works with the English language professionally they appeal to me for their ingenuity and, in some cases, brevity. Surprisingly, by the time I chose 10, I realized I had not included any of his James Bond lyrics.
Any errors are mine as I recall the songs in my head.
But how do you thank someone
Who has taken you from crayons to perfume?
(âTo Sir with Loveâ, from To Sir with Love)
Youâve been dancing round my mind
Like a bright carousel.
(âIf There Ever Is a Next Timeâ, from Hoffman)
While your eyes played games with mine
(âOn Days Like Theseâ, from The Italian Job)
This way Mary, come Mary,
While the sun is high,
Make this summer the summer that refused to die
(âThis Way Maryâ, from Mary, Queen of Scots)
Walkabout,
And as you wander on
Reflect and ponder on
The dreams today forgot to bring.
(âWalkaboutâ, from Walkabout)
The me I never knew
Began to stir some time this morning.
The me I never knew
Arrived without a word of warning.
You smiled and you uncovered
What I had not discovered.
(âThe Me I Never Knewâ, from Aliceâs Adventures in Wonderland)
Most people stay and battle on with their boredom
But whatâs the sense in dreaming dreams if you hoard âem?
(âI Belong to the Starsâ, from Billy)
Love has no season,
There are no rules.
Those who stop dreaming are fools.
(âOur Time Is Nowâ, from the Shirley Bassey album The Performance)
Main attraction, couldnât buy a seat
The celebrity celebrities would die to meet
(âIf I Never Sing Another Songâ, as originally performed by Matt Monro)
Thereâs so much more for me to find,
Iâm glad Iâve left behind behind.
(âIâve Never Been This Far Beforeâ, from Aliceâs Adventures in Wonderland)
When I was a kid and wanted to hit back at someone for being mean to me, my parents would often say that successful people, true leaders, would be 大ćš, which is roughly akin to saying that one should rise above it. I would say that goes with nations as well: you can tell when a country is in a good state by the way its citizenry behaves, and online behaviour is probably a proxy for that.
As many of you know, my literacy in my mother tongue is just above the level it was at when I left Hong Kong, that is to say, itâs marginally better than a kindergartenerâs. And where I come from, that means age 3, which is already in the big leagues considering I started at 2½, having passed the entrance exam, and had homework from then on. What I can write is in colloquial Cantonese, devoid of any formal structure that someone with a proper education in the old country would know. If youâre Cantonese, youâll be able to read what I write, but if your only idea of Chinese is Mandarin, youâll have little clue. (Bang goes the official argument in Beijing that Cantonese is a âdialectâ. It canât be a dialect if a speaker of one finds the other unintelligible.)
With Meizu having essentially shut its international forum, I decided to head to the Chinese one to post about my experience with its Music app, and was met by a majority of friendly, helpful people, and some who even went the extra mile of replying to my English-language query in English.
But there were enough dickheads answering to make you think that mainland China isnât a clear global leader, regardless of all the social engineering and online credit scores.
When I used Facebook, I had ventured on to a few groups where people simply posted in their own language, and those of us who wished to reply but didnât understand it would either use the siteâs built-in translator, or, before that was available, Google Translate. I still am admin on a group where people do post in their own language without much issue. Thereâs no insistence on âSpeak English, I canât understand you,â or whatever whine I hear from some intolerant people, such as the ones sampled below.
That makes you despair for some folks and one conclusion I can draw is that members of a country who demand such a monoculture must not see their country as a leader. Nor do they have much pride in it. For great nations, in my book, embrace, or believe they embrace (even if they fall short in practice) all tongues and creeds, all races and abilities. They revel in their richness.
Of the negative souls on the forum, there was the crap youâd expect. âWrite in Chinese,â âWhy is a Cantonese person writing in English?â âThink about where you are,â and âI donât understand youâ (to a comment I wrote in Cantoneseâagain supporting the argument that it isnât a dialect, but its own distinct tongue).
Granted, these are a small minority, but itâs strange that this is a forum where people tend to help one another. And it tells me that whether youâre American or Chinese, thereâs nothing in the behaviour of ordinary folks that tells me that any one place is more likely to be a centre for 21st-century leadership than another.
Iâve had far worse responses to Tweets, by a much greater proportion of people (the UK still stands out as the worst when I responded to a Tweet about George Floyd), but itâs the context. Twitter is, as Stephen Fry once put it, analogous to a bathing pool into which too many people have urinated, but a help forum?
Itâs the globally unaware, those who engage in casual xenophobia, who are intolerant of other languages, who are the little people of our times, having missed out on an education or life experience that showed them otherwise. They reside in the old country as much as in so many other places. The leading nation of the 21st century does not look like itâs one of the obvious choices. Future historians, watch this space.
Weâve had a âHighlightsâ section in our T&Cs for a while, but today I thought Iâd take another look at them. Without reading them again, I drafted these:
⢠We donât know anything about you unless you tell us.
⢠When you do tell us stuff (like signing up with your email address) we store that offline, not on the cloud.
⢠When you comment on our sites, we donât see your IP address.
⢠The businesses we work with might get data on you without us knowing because weâve used their programs. But weâve tried to work with companies in countries with stricter data laws, e.g. our feedback forms are with Aida in Germany.
⢠We have ads on our sites, and they might pick up info about you. We recommend you opt out of ad networks setting cookies on your system through Aboutads.info and related services.
The law degree kicks in and I wasnât quite able to replace the existing ones, but hopefully the final highlights suffice (links removed here, but they are on the page):
⢠We donât know anything about you unless you tell us.
⢠When you tell us stuff (like signing up with your email address) we ultimately store that offline, not on the cloud.
⢠When you comment on our sites, we donât see your IP address.
⢠We donât have a Google Analytics account so we donât collect stuff on our sites for that.
⢠However, the businesses we work with might get data on you without us knowing because weâve used their programs or plug-ins. Weâve tried to work with companies in countries with stricter data laws, e.g. our feedback forms are with Aida in Germany.
⢠We have ads on some of our sites, and they might pick up info about you (e.g. through cookies). They donât share this info with us. We recommend you opt out of ad networks setting cookies on your system (for example, click here, here or here). We also recommend you opt out of Google Analytics tracking you.
⢠More details are below.
While there are more bollocks below these on the page, covering our arses in various situations, including historical ones, fundamentally the above is what we follow.
We used to have a record of IP addresses and we never did a thing with them, and when our servers were rejigged in 2013, we stopped collecting them. Iâm sure some plug-ins on the sites know what they are, and theyâre bound to be in the logs, but no one here has the time to look at them. I donât think anyoneâs peered that those logs (save for debugging) for over two decades.
Anyone whoâs read this blog knows why I donât have a Google Analytics account, and long may it remain that way. I seem to recall finding a way to make sure I could never access that part of the Google Dashboard when I was granted access to Medingeâs analytics. Weâve none of our own.
I do know what pages are popular on the sites but thatâs from aggregated data. And frankly, thatâs all I need to know.
Itâs really how I expect to be treated by others and itâs not that hard to do this online. Who needs complicated T&Cs which even the company canât follow? Strip away the jargon, and both you and we win.
Two fantastic items in my Tweetstream today, the first from journalist Jehan Casinader, a New Zealander of Sri Lankan heritage, in Stuff.
Some highlights:
As an ethnic person, you can only enter (and stay in) a predominantly white space â like the media, politics or corporate leadership â if you play by the rules. And really, thereâs only one rule: blend in. Youâre expected to assimilate into the dominant way of thinking, acting and being âŚ
I sound like you. I make myself relatable to you. I communicate in a way that makes sense to you. I donât threaten you. I donât make you uncomfortable. And I keep my most controversial opinions to myself.
And:
Kiwis love stories about ethnic people who achieve highly: winning university scholarships, trying to cure diseases, inventing new technology or entering the political arena. These people are lauded for generating economic and social value for the country âŚ
We do not hear stories about ethnic people who work in thankless, low-skilled jobs â the refugees and migrants who stock our supermarket shelves, drive our taxis, pick our fruit, milk our cows, fill our petrol tanks, staff our hospitals and care for our elderly in rest homes.
Jehan says that now he is in a position of influence, heâs prepared to bring his Sri Lankan identity to the places he gets to visit, and hopes that everyone in Aotearoa is given respect ânot because of their ability to assimilateâ.
He was born here to new immigrants who had fled Sri Lanka, and I think there is a slight difference to those of us who came as children. Chief among this, at least for me, was my resistance to assimilation. Sure I enjoyed some of the same things other kids my age did: the Kentucky Fried Chicken rugby book, episodes of CHiPs, and playing tag, but because of various circumstances, as well as parents who calmly explained to me the importance of retaining spoken Cantonese at home, I constantly wore my Chineseness. I hadnât chosen to leave my birthplaceâthis was the decision of my parentsâso I hung on to whatever I could that connected me back to it.
I could contrast this to other Chinese New Zealanders I went to school with, many of whom had lost their native language because their parents had encouraged assimilation to get ahead. I canât fault themâmany of them are my dearest friendsâbut I was exposed to what Jehan wrote about from a young age.
It saddened me a lot because here were people who looked like me who I couldnât speak to in my mother tongue, and the only other student of Chinese extraction in my primary class who did speak her native language spoke Mandarinâwhich to many of my generation, certainly to those who did so little schooling before we left, find unintelligible.
At St Markâs, I had no issue. This was a school that celebrated differences, and scholastic achievement. (I am happy to say that sports and cultural activity are very much on the cards these days, too.) But after that, at one college, I observed what Jehan said: the Chinese New Zealanders who didnât rock the boat were safe buddies to have; those who were tall poppies were the target of the weak-minded, the future failures of our society. You just have to rise above it, and, if anything, it made me double-down on my characterâso much so that when I was awarded a half-scholarship to Scots, I found myself in familiar surroundings again, where differences were championed.
But you do indeed have to play the game. Want your company recognized? Then get yourself into the media. Issue releases just like the firms that were sending them to you as a member of the media. Donât bring your Chineseness into that, because you wonât get coverage. Jack Yan & Associates, and Lucire for that matter, always had a very occidental outlook, with my work taking me mostly to the US and Europe, with India only coming in at the end of the 2000sâbut then we were bound by the lingua franca of the old colonial power.
Despite my insistence on my own reo at home, and chatting every day to my Dad, I played the game that Jehan did when it came to work. I didnât as much when I ran for mayor, admittedlyâI didnât want voters to get a single-sided politician, but one who was his authentic selfâbut that also might explain why Stuffâs predecessor, which was at that stage owned by a foreign company, gave me next to no coverage the first time out. They werenât prepared to back someone who didnât fit their reader profile. The second time out, it still remained shockingly biased. Ironically the same publishing group would give me reasonably good coverage in Australia when I wasnât doing politics. Thatâs the price to pay for authenticity sometimes.
Jehan finishes his piece on a positive note and I feel he is right to. We still have issues as a nation, no doubt, but I think we embrace our differences more than we used to. There have been many instances where I have seen all New Zealanders rise up to condemn racism, regardless of their political bents. (What is interesting was I do recall one National MP still in denial, residing in fantasy-land, when I recalled a racist incidentâand this was after March 15, 2019!) People from all walks of life donated to my fund-raising when a friendâs car had a swastika painted on it. We have a Race Relationsâ Commissioner who bridges so many cultures effectivelyâa New Zealander of Taishanese extraction who speaks te reo MÄori and Englishâwho is visible, and has earned his mana among so many here. The fact that Jehanâs piece was even published, whereas in 2013 it would have been anathema to the local arm of Fairfax, is further reason to give me hope.
The second item? Have a watch of this. It’s largely in accord with my earlier post.
I summarized this article to my friends as: âHow can we trust Big Tech? Google didnât like hearing the truth from an intelligent woman, so they forced her out.â And my friend Cathy pointed out itâs a woman of colour.
And if you take the basic position that Google lies, just as I take the basic position that Facebook lies, then youâd rightly take Googleâs Jeff Deanâs explanation with a grain of salt. The MIT Technology Review noted that it doesnât hold water based on practice.
The ousted woman, Dr Timnit Gebru, was the co-lead of Googleâs ethical AI teamâyou can already spot the oxymoron as there is no place at Google, a company exercising monopoly powers and paying little tax, for ethics.
Dean claimed Gebru resigned voluntarily, which is being disputed by both current and former Google employees. The Review notes:
Online, many other leaders in the field of AI ethics are arguing that the company pushed her out because of the inconvenient truths that she was uncovering about a core line of its researchâand perhaps its bottom line. More than 1,400 Google staff and 1,900 other supporters have also signed a letter of protest.
Dr Emily Bender of the University of Washington said in Ars Technica, âFrom the outside, it looks like someone at Google decided this was harmful to their interests.
âAcademic freedom is very importantâthere are risks when [research] is taking place in places that [donât] have that academic freedom.â It wouldnât be the first time Google attempted to silence a critic, then claimed it did nothing of the sort.
And if it doesn’t like being warned about the dangers of AI, then what sort of horror awaits us from Google in that space? It’s not hard to foresee AI bots operating online being harmful or generating misinformation, with nothing to hold them back. Again from the Review:
In 2017, Facebook mistranslated a Palestinian manâs post, which said âgood morningâ in Arabic, as âattack themâ in Hebrew, leading to his arrest.
We are letting these companies get away with being accessories to crimes and, in Facebook’s case, to genocide (over which it withheld evidence).
I do a lot of rating on here. Which posts are you referring to? By the way w*nk is M, because we know what wank means. Rating on nT is done by people, not algorithms. We’re not perfect but we do our best.
This user, calling themselves Bottomsandmore, is rather âsplainy, telling me things everyone knows as though they were somehow authoritative (everyone on the site knows NewTumbl rating is done by peopleâI’ve even done some), and being plain wrong about the word wank (note that in the original post that was taken down at NewTumbl, it had the asterisk).
We all know what bugger and tosser mean but neither of them, as used in the colloquial fashion, is considered offensive, so they need to do better than that.
âSplainers bore me no end, and the internet is full of them. As the old Chinese saying goes, it’s like holding a feather thinking it to be an arrow. They lack substance and social media have taught me that pointing it out is futile because they lack the intelligence to understand what you are saying. Before you know it, you’ve strayed so far from the original point because the person keeps taking you further and further away from it as their defence mechanism, or unwillingness to be freed from their delusions. I don’t know if this is a conscious technique but it’s played out every day.
If NewTumbl is Mary Whitehouse on steroids, where moderators are ‘puritanically patrolling posts’ (my words tonight), then it’s not exactly difficult to set up an image gallery here. I also wrote:
This seemed like a fun site but if a professional has to make his case in a post like this against the decision(s) of amateurs (which is the case with Wikipedia: look at the talk pages!), then that just gets tiresome: itâs not a great use of my time. If you donât know the culture of the majority of countries in which the English language is used and somehow think 1950s white-bread America is the yardstick, then youâre already not on my level. Itâs not terribly hard to put together an image-bank site where I share those âirrelevantâ thoughts, as I call them here. I donât have Deanâs [site founder Dean Abramson’s] skill in making it a site for all, but my aims are completely selfish, so I donât have to.
And I may start experimenting with that soon, thanks to A WP Life’s New Image Gallery. Most of what I post to NewTumbl is imagery, and early next week I might see how this new plug-in goes. If it’s a success, then I may end my time on NewTumbl in under two years. As noble as its moderation system is, there is no appeal. The result is, like Wikipedia, actual expertise does not get its say. And that’s a real pity for the good people who actually run the site.
Iâm surprised that a clip from a front page of a British tabloid newspaper was ruled M by a moderator here after I made it O. It was critical of British cabinet minister Matt Hancock and made fun of his surname, with two words that rhymed with its two syllables.
The words on the headline included the work wank, which was even starred there (w*nk) for the really sensitive. I realize this is an American website but I didnât even think that was a word they used. For most of us in the Anglosphere, itâs nowhere near offensive. Itâs not uncommon to call someone a wanker and the word is never bleeped on televisionâitâs that throwaway. I learned of the word wank when I was 11, and wanker I heard before that. Kids would probably know of it even younger now. A younger reader would not link it to anything sexual and if they did, theyâre a dirty little kid. (Same with bugger, which infamously even appeared on television commercials for Toyota here, and I know in Australia, too.)
The second word that appeared was cock, a colloquialism for penis, but also it has other meanings. Letâs not get into those: itâs clear the context suggested penisâin the same way an American might call someone a dick, I suppose. Again, hardly offensive, never bleeped, and, I donât know about the US, but here itâs the word that children might learn to refer to male genitalia.
But, hereâs the real kicker: the image was from the front page of a national newspaper. Not the top shelf wrapped in a brown paper bag or plastic at a convenience store.
Looking at the classifications, M is for adults-only stuff, with âstrong suggestive or violent language.â O was already suggested by NewTumbl staff as suitable for politics, including COVID-19 posts (this qualified), and the language by any standard was mild (feel free to come and give your reasoning if you were the mod and you want to defend your decision).
So Iâve had a post removed for a word that an 11-year-old uses (remember, O is for âolder teensâ) and another word that children use, and both appeared on the front page of a national newspaper.
I have used these words on a website run from a country that thinks itâs OK to show people getting blown away in violent movies and cop shows (oh, sorry, âpolice proceduralsâ), where guns are commonplace, but words are really, really dangerous. Thought you guys had a First Amendment to your Constitution.
The conclusion I am forced to draw is that the post was removed because, like Facebook, there is a right-wing bias shown by a moderator who does not like a conservative government criticized here. Good luck, because Iâll continue to criticize a bunch of dickheads that even my right-leaning, pro-market, lifelong-Tory friends in Britain dislike. If this post is classified M then I will have to conclude that the reason is also political, because thereâs not a single word here that any right-thinking user of English would deem âstrong suggestive or violentâ.
I came here because I objected to the censorship at Tumblr, where, for instance, they hide posts referring to NewTumbl in searches. Thatâs pretty tame but enough for me to insist on free speech over silly, petty corporate decisions, the sort of games that other silly, petty corporations like Google play. I can live with NewTumblâs male nipple rule and other attempts to be non-sexist, but I also believe that if youâre moderating, you should be apolitical.
