Above: Flowers at the Islamic Centre in Kilbirnie, Wellington on Monday.
On 9-11, I wrote an editorial in Lucire immediately. It was clear to me what I needed to write, and the editorial got quite a few readers at the time.
Today is March 20, five days after a terrorist attack on our country, and itâs only now Iâve had some idea of how to put my thoughts into a longer-form fashion, rather than a lot of Tweets, some of which have had a lot of support.
I guess itâs different when the attack happens to your own people in your own country.
One of the earliest points I made, when the death toll hit 49, was that this was âour 9-11â, at least when you consider the per capita loss of life. When it hit 50, it actually exceeded the number of lives lost per capita in 9-11. This helps put the matter into some context.
While the terrorist is a foreign national, who was most likely radicalized by foreign ideas, it has generated a great deal of soul-searching among New Zealanders. Even the right-wing talking heads have suddenly changed their tune, although, if a friend and colleagueâs experience as a waiter in New York City in September 2001 is anything to go by, they will return to their regularly scheduled programming in two weeksâ time. Certain media bosses, especially among foreign-owned companies, would have it no other way, since they are not here to benefit New Zealanders, only their foreign shareholders and their own pockets. Stoking division is their business and I do not believe leopards change their spots.
Therefore, the majority of right-thinking New Zealanders are not complicit, but a minority of us harbour bigoted thoughts, and enough of that minority infect the commentsâ sections of mainstream media websites and social networks to make it seem as though they are more numerous in number. The outpouring of support for our Muslim community highlights that the good far outnumber the rotten eggs in our society. And I think more of us are now prepared to call out racism and bigotry knowing that, in fact, public opinion is behind us.
So many Kiwis, myself included, say that hatred toward Muslims is not in our national character. But it is sufficiently in our national character when Muslim groups have pleaded with government agencies to step up, to be met with endless bureaucratic roadblocks; and many political parties have stains on their records in appealing to Islamophobia, something which indeed was foreign to this nation for all of my childhood.
I grew up with a Muslim boy and we remain friends to this day, but I never thought of him by his creed. If I was forced to âlabelâ him I would have called him a Pakistani New Zealander. I am willing to bet many Kiwis were in the same boat: we probably knew Muslims but never thought once about their religion.
It takes certain people to make changes in mainstream thinking. I thought I might be labelled a âChinese New Zealanderâ till Winston Peters, now our deputy PM, droned on about âAsiansâ out of some fear about the weakness of New Zealand culture; and we might have only become aware of Islam to any degree after 9-11. But these are, in fact, foreign ideas, adopted here by those who lack imagination or a willingness to do some hard work. They have been imported here through the sharing of culture. While I support the exchange of ideas, in some misguided utopian belief that dialogue is good for us all, I certainly did not anticipate, during the first heady days of the web, that we would have so much of the bad come with the good. I believed in some level of natural selection, that educated people would refrain and filter, and present their countryâs or community’s best face. But as each medium boganfied (yes, I am making up words), the infection came. Newspapers changed thanks to Rupert Murdoch cheapening them, eventually morphing into publications that sensationalized division, especially against Muslims after 9-11. Television went downhill as well largely thanks to the same bloke and his lieutenant, Roger Ailes. The web was fine till each medium became infected with negativity, but Google, Facebook and Twitter were all too happy for it to continue because it increased engagement on their properties. Each fuelled it more with algorithms that showed only supporting views, deepening each userâs belief in the rightness of their ideas, to the exclusion of everyone elseâs.
Most Americans I know believe in civility. Iâve spoken often enough in their country to know this. They donât believe their freedom of speech is absolute, and personally draw the line at hate speech, but their big websites act as though this is absolute, and allow the negative to fester. It seems it is for profit: we see Twitter remove Will Connollyâs (âEgg Boyâ) account but not racist Australian politician Sen. Fraser Anning. It is tempting to believe that Twitter is following the dollars here without regard to their stated policy. We have, after all, seen all Big Tech players lie constantly, and, for the most part, they get away with it. We let them, because we keep using them. Mark Zuckerberg doesnât need to say anything about Christchurch, because weâll keep using his websites (Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp) and heâll keep finding ways of monetizing us, dehumanizing us. He wonât show up to the UK when summoned, and Facebook will continue to lie about removing videos and offensive content when we know many reports go unheeded. Umair Haque wrote in the wake of the Christchurch terrorist attacks: âFacebook and Twitter and YouTube etcetera really just bring the American ideal to life that there should be extreme, absolute freedom of speech, with zero consequences whatsoever, even for expressing hate and violence of the most vile and repellent kinds.â
As people become dehumanized through words and campaigns, it makes it easier for people to commit violence against them. They no longer see them as deserving of respect or protection. In the foulest version, they no longer see them as having a right to life.
Now, I donât believe that this absolute approach can be branded American. And I do believe Big Tech has very different values to Americans. Their newsmedia have, too. When regular people are censored, when big money talks more loudly than their laws, then there is something very wrong with their companiesâand this is the common enemy of both Republicans and Democrats, not each other. And this wrongness is being exported here, too. Iâve said it for years: we are a sovereign nation, and we have no need to copy their failed idea of a health system or even their vernacular (on this note: retailers, please cease using Black Friday to describe your end-of-year sales, especially this year). We do not need to import the political playbooks, whether you are a political party, a blogger, or a local newspaper. There are Kiwis who actually talked about their âFirst Amendment rightsâ because they may have watched too much US television and are unaware we have our own Bill of Rights Act. Even the raid on Kim Dotcomâs home seemed to be down to some warped idea of apeing their cop shows, about impressing the FBI more than following our own laws on surveillance and our own beliefs on decency.
I honestly donât see the attraction of turning us into some vassal state or a mutant clone of other nations, yet foreign-owned media continue to peddle this nonsense by undermining the Kiwi character and everyday Kiwi unity.
Did the terrorist see any of this? I have no idea. I equally have no idea if the people he came into contact with here cemented his hate. However, I think he would have come across sufficient international influences here to validate his imagined fears of non-whites and women. By all means, we should call out bad behaviour, but when we do, we shouldnât restrict it to individual cases we see in our daily lives. There are entire institutions that are doing this, strings pulled from faraway lands, and to them we must also say: enough is enough. The way you do business isnât in line with who we are. We need to be aware of who the non-Kiwi players are, often masquerading under locally grown brand names (such as âNewstalk ZBââa quick peek of shareholders suggest the majority are as Kiwi as Ned Kelly), and, if need be, vote with our time and money to support those who really understand us. Be alert to whoâs really trying to influence us.
Of my friends, about eight or nine voted for President Trump. Two voted for Brexit. These are my friends, who I vouch for, who I like. Other than a difference of opinion on these topics, we remain friends. I still think incredibly highly of them.
Since I know them well, I know a little bit about why they voted their way.
Of the Americans, some wanted an end to the neoliberal order and hoped Trump would deliver. Others saw Clinton as corrupt and that Trump would actually be better. Of the Brits, their reasons were more complex, but among them were the thought of an unwieldly EU bureaucracy, and the belief that a customsâ union would be sufficient to keep trade going with the Continent.
None of these people are racists or xenophobesâthe opposite, in fact. None of them are hillbillies or gun-loving, NRA-donating hicks, or whatever narrative the mainstream media would like to spin. Most of them would be regarded by any measure in society as decent, intelligent and compassionate.
I have found little reason to dislike someone, or not vote for someone, over one relatively minor disagreement. If their hearts are in the right place, it is not for me to condemn them for their choices. Indeed, when it comes to these issues, I find that while our actions differ (hypothetically, in my case, since I cannot vote in countries other than my own), our core views are actually quite similar.
In the US, strip away the hatred that vocal fringe elements stoke, and youâll find that most people have common enemies in big business, tax evaders, and censorship. In 2018 we have seen Big Tech silence people on both the left and the right for voicing opinions outside the mainstream. My two Brexit-voting friends share some concerns with Remainers.
Therefore, in August, when one of these American friends wrote a Tweet in support of her president, it was horrible to watch Tweeters, total strangers, pile on her.
Iâm not saying I like Trump (quite the contrary, actually), but I will give him props when he does things that I happened to agree with. If Iâve Tweeted for years that I disagreed with US military involvement in Syria, for instance, which at least one US veteran friend says lacks an objective, then Iâm not going to attack the man when he pulls his countryâs troops out. However, it was interesting to see some viewpoints suddenly change on the day. Those who opposed the war suddenly supported it.
I canât say that I praise him very often, but I like to think Iâm consistent. I was also complimentary about his withdrawal of the US from TPPA, something I have marched against.
And this friend is consistent, too.
In fact, her Tweet wasnât even one of actual support. Someone called Trump a âloonâ and she simply said, âYou don’t have to like my president,â and added a few other points in response.
The piling began.
It seems almost fashionable to adopt one prevailing view peddled by the mainstream (media or otherwise) but there was no attempt to dissect these opposing views. My friend was measured and calm. What came afterwards did not reciprocate her courtesy.
Since I was included in the Tweet, I saw plenty of attacks on her that day. I was included in one, by a black South African Tweeting something racist to me.
When the mob goes this unruly, and itâs “liked” or deemed OK by so many, then something is very wrong. These people did not know my friend. They didnât know why she supported Trump. They were just happy to group her in to what they had been told about Trump supporters being ill-educated hicks, and attacked accordingly.
Call me naïve, but social media were meant to be platforms where we could exchange views and get a better understanding of someone else, and make the world a little better than how we found it. The reverse is now true, with Google, Facebook et al âbubblingâ data so people only see what they want to see, to reinforce their prejudices, and having been convinced of their “rightness”, those espousing a contrary view must be inhuman.
I donât like dominant viewpoints unless it’s something like ‘Intolerance is bad’ or a scientific fact that is entirely provable, though you could probably take issue with where I draw the line. Generally, I like a bit of debate. No position is perfect and we need to respect those with whom we disagree. That day, Twitter was a medium where there was no such respect, that it was OK to pile on someone who fell outside the standard narrative. To me, thatâs as unhealthy was a socialist being piled upon by conservatives if the latter groupâs view happened to prevail. It doesnât take much imagination to extend this scenario to being a Chinese republican in the early 20th century in the face of the Ching Dynasty. Iâm always mindful of how things like this look if the shoe were on the other foot, hence I was equally upset when Facebook and Twitter shut down political websitesâ presences on both the left and the right wings. We should advance by expanding our knowledge and experiences.
It encouraged me to head more to Mastodon in 2018, where you can still have conversations with human beings with some degree of civility.
And, frankly, if you disagree with someone over something relatively trivial, then there is such a feature as scrolling.
Twitter became less savoury in 2018, and it has well and truly jumped the shark.
Scott Milne and I had a little fun over ‘American English’ recently on Twitter (and hopefully US friends will see this in the humour in which it was intended). He wrote:
It's the 23rd of November. Black Friday's are the 13th. Unless I am missing some imported America bullshit, I call bullshit.
I responded that Americans like big numbers. It’s a big country, and everything must sound more impressive, even yuge. Therefore:
Rest of world: Audi 100
USA: Audi 5000
Rest of world: 2019 Range Rover Evoque
USA: 2020 Range Rover Evoque
âBlack Fridayâ
Western world: Friday 13th
USA: Friday 23rd (it was this year, anyway)
1,000,000,000
Originally in English: ‘one thousand million’
USA: ‘one billion’
1,000,000,000,000
Originally in English: ‘one billion’
USA: ‘one trillion’
I realize Americans mean something different when they say ‘Black Friday’ (and it doesn’t mean we need to adopt a change in definition, though judging by the last two we probably will), and I realize how their model years work (and they have nothing to do with calendar years).
Since (mostly) leaving Facebook, and cutting down on Twitter, Iâve come to realize the extent of how outdated traditional computing definitions have become. To help those who need to get up to speed, Iâve compiled a few technobabble words and translated them into normal English.
app: in many cases, an extremely limited web browser for your cellphone that only works with one site, as opposed to a proper web browser that works with many sites.
bots: fake, computer-driven profiles masquerading as real humans on, predominantly, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.
clean install: something entirely unnecessary, but suggested by tech support people who want to cover up buggy operating systems (q.v. Windows 10).
cloud: hackable online repository of naughty photos of celebrities.
comments’ section: when you see this while surfing, it’s a reminder to leave the web page you are on and make up your own mind.
Facebook: a website where bots live, where post-sharing is intentionally broken to ensure you need to pay for attention. Once paid, your posts are shared with bots, so even fewer humans actually see them.
Facebook friend: (a) a friend; (b) a total stranger; (c) a bot.
Google: (a) a virtual hole into which you dump all your private information, to be sold on to corporations, but feel good doing it because you gave it up to a private company to use against you rather than have the state take it to use against you; (b) a cult that supports (a), whose members will think you have a degenerative brain disease if you dare question the perfection of their god.
malware scanner: malware (especially when offered by Facebook, q.v.).
messenger app: an inefficient messaging program where typing takes 10 times as long as on a desktop or laptop computer. Designed to dissuade you from actually calling the person.
phone: portable computing device, not used to make calls.
remote desktop: when your operating system fails, and the odds of you seeing your familiar screen are remote.
social media: media where people are antisocial.
Twitter: (a) social media with no discernible rules on who gets kicked off and why; (b) where the US president gets angry.
white balance: when racists attack people of colour but pretend they are noble and against racism.
Weibo: a website monitored by the Chinese Communist Party, where users have more freedom than on Facebook and Twitter.
Windows 10: a buggy operating system that requires 10 goes at any updates or patches, hence the name.
Some visiting Australian friends have said that they are finding New Zealand politics as interesting as their own, although I donât think this was meant as a compliment.
Those of us in New Zealand had a few days of House of Cards-lite intrigue, in that it was stirred up by a conservative whip, in an attempt to take down his party leader. Except it was so much more condensed than the machinations of Francis Urquhart, and, if you were Chinese, Indian or Filipino, in the words of Taika Waititi, it was âracist AFâ.
Two of my Tweets garnered hundreds of likes each, which generally doesnât happen to me, but I am taking that as reinforcing something I truly believe: that most New Zealanders arenât racist, and that we despise injustices and treating someone differently because of their ethnicity.
Botany MP Jami-Lee Ross and opposition leader Simon Bridgesâ phone call, where the former stated that two Chinese MPs were worth more than two Indian ones, drew plenty of thoughts from both communities, where we felt we were treated as numbers, or a political funding source, with none of us actually getting into a National Cabinet (or the Shadow Cabinet) since Pansy Wong was ousted last decadeâmaking you feel that had other Cabinet ministers been held to the same standard, they would have been gone as well. Here was my first Tweet on the subject:
In a bid to win National Party clients, Iâm changing my business slogan to âWorth more than my mate Krishna.â
Thereâs the inevitable look back through the history of Chinese New Zealanders, who have largely been humiliated since the gold-mining days by earlier generations, and the Poll Tax, for which an apology came decades after during the previous Labour government.
And the scandal also inspired Tze Ming Mok to write an excellent op-ed for The New Zealand Herald, which I highly recommend here. Itâs one of the most intelligent ones on the subject.
Sheâs absolutely right: those of us with few connections to the Peopleâs Republic of China donât like being grouped in among them, or treated as though weâre part of the Chinese Communist Party apparatus.
Her research showed that roughly half of Chinese New Zealanders were born on the mainland, and that the group itself is incredibly diverse. My fatherâs family fled in 1949 and I was raised in a fairly staunch anti-communist household, images of Sun Yat Sen and the ROC flag emblazoned on my paternal grandfatherâs drinking glasses. My mother, despite being born in Hong Kong, grew up behind the Bamboo Curtain and survived the famine, and didnât have an awful lot of positive things to say about her experiences there, eventually making her way out to her birthplace during her tertiary studies.
Tze Ming writes:
This chilling effect is harming Chinese people in New Zealand. Many people cannot differentiate Chinese people from the actions of the CCP (I mean hey, many people canât tell a Chinese from a Korean), but this is made worse when hardly any authorities on the topic will address the issue openly. Concerns can only erupt as xenophobia against the Chinese and âAsianâ population âŠ
CCP-linked politicians parroting Xi Jinping and promoting Beijingâs Belt & Road priorities don’t speak for at least half of us.
âAt leastâ is right. My father was born in the mainland where ćć ± was a catch-cry in his young adult life. Iâm willing to bet thereâs an entire, older Chinese-born generation that thinks the same.
She continues:
It’s endlessly irritating and insulting that both Labour and National have lazily assigned Chinese communities as the fiefdoms of politicians openly backed by the Chinese government.
Thatâs true, too. In 2014 I was approached by the National Party asking how best to target the Chinese community. My response was to treat us the same as any other New Zealanders. Iâm not sure whether the advice was taken on board, as within months I was invited to a Chinese restaurant for a $100-a-head dinner to be in the presence of the Rt Hon John Key, a fund-raiser that was aimed at ethnic Chinese people resident here. It certainly didnât feel that I was being treated like my white or brown neighbours.
The other point Tze Ming touches on, and one which I have written about myself, is the use of the term Asian in New Zealand.
Let me sum it up from my time here, beginning in 1976, and how I saw the terms being used by others:
1970s: âChineseâ meant those people running the groceries and takeaways. Hard working. Good at maths. Not good at politics or being noticed, and Petone borough mayor George Gee was just an anomaly.
1990s: âAsianâ became a point of negativity, fuelled by Winston âTwo Wongs donât make a whiteâ Peters. He basically meant Chinese. Itâs not a term we claimed at the time, and while some have since tried to reclaim it for themselves to represent the oriental communities (and some, like super-lawyer Mai Chen, have claimed it and rightly extended it to all of Asia), itâs used when non-Chinese people whine about us. Itâs why âMy best friend is Asianâ is racist in more than one way.
2010s: âChineseâ means not just the United Front and the Confucius Institute (which has little to do with Confucius, incidentally), but that all Chinese New Zealanders are part of a diaspora with ties to the PRC. And weâre moneyed, apparently, so much that weâve been accused of buying up properties based on a list of âChinese-sounding namesâ by Labour in a xenophobic mood. Iâve been asked plenty of times this decade whether I have contacts in Beijing or Shanghai. If youâre born in Hong Kong before July 1, 1997, you were British (well, in a post-Windrush apartheid sense anyway), and unlikely to have any connections behind the Bamboo Curtain, but youâve already been singled out by race.
Now, I donât want to put a dampener on any Chinese New Zealander who does have ties back to the mainland and the CCP. We share a history and a heritage, and since I wasnât the one who had any experience of the hardships my parents and grandparents suffered, I donât have any deep-seated hatred festering away. My father visited the old country in 2003 and put all that behind him, too. A republic is better than the imperial families that had been in charge before, and if I’ve any historical power to dislike, I’d be better off focusing on them. So in some respects, there is âunityâ insofar as Iâll stick up for someone of my own race if theyâre the subject of a racist attack. Iâll write about Chinese people and businesses without the derision that others do (e.g. here’s an article on the MG GS SUV that doesn’t go down the Yellow Peril route). But weâre not automatons doing Beijingâs bidding.
Iâll lazily take Tze Mingâs conclusion in the Herald:
We deserve better than to be trapped between knee-jerk racists and Xi Jinping Thought. Abandoning us to this fate is racism too.
I havenât even begun to address the blatant sexual harassment that has since emerged as a result of the scandal, but others are far better placed to speak on that.
Iâm not familiar with The Anti-Media, but New Zealand-based lawyer Darius Shahtahmasebi, who contributed to the site, notes that it was caught up in the Facebook and Twitter purge last week. The Anti-Media, he notes, had 2·17 million Facebook followers. âSupposedly, Facebook wants you to believe that 2.17 million people voluntarily signed up to our page just to receive all the spam content that we put out there (sounds realistic),â he wrote in RT.
After Facebook removed the page, Twitter followed suit and suspended their account.
Not only that, Shahtahmasebi notes that Anti-Media team members had their Twitter accounts purged as well. Its editor in chief received this message: âCareyWedler has been suspended for violating the Twitter Rules. Specifically, for:â. That was it. Sheâs none the wiser on what violation had been committed.
But here are the real kickers: their social manager had access to 30 accounts, and Twitter was able to coordinate the suspension of 29 of them, while their chief creative officer had his removed, including accounts he had never used. The Anti-Media Radio account suffered a similar fate, Twitter claiming it was due to âmultiple or repeat violations of the Twitter rulesââand it had no Tweets.
Shahtahmasebi has his theories on what was behind all of this. It does give my theories over the years a lot of weight: namely that Facebook targets individuals and its ârulesâ are applied with no reference to actual stated policies. Essentially, the company lies. Twitter has been digging itself more deeply into a hole of late, and itâs very evident now, even if you didnât want to admit it earlier, that it operates on the same lines. Google I have covered before, some might think ad nauseam.
One of his conclusions: âThere is nothing much that can be done unless enough people take a principled stand against such a severe level of censorship.â In some cases, including one Tweeter I followed, it has been to vote with oneâs feet, and leave these spaces to continue their descent without us.
I think the signs of a departure from Twitter are all there. Certainly on a cellphone there’s little point to it any more. As of last week, this began happening.
If you donât seesee me on Twitter as often, itâs becausebecause itâsitâs no longer compatible withwith the Swype keyboardkeyboard on my phonephone. I canâtcanât be botheredbothered correcting faults createdcrcreated by technologytechnology and not me. Other sites are fine.
That last sentence refers only to the fact that Twitter is the only website on the planet where the keyboard is incompatible. (Thanks to Andrew McPherson for troubleshooting this with me.) Other sites are buggy, too: earlier today I couldn’t delete something from Instagram (being owned by Facebook means all the usual Facebook databasing problems are creeping in), and one video required four upload attempts before it would be visible to others:
I couldn’t reply on the Facebook website to a direct message (clicking in the usual typing field does nothing, and typing does nothing) except in image form, so I sent my friend this:
Earlier this year, many friends began experiencing trouble with their Facebook comments: the cursor would jump back to the beginning of text fields, pushing the first few characters they typed to the end. Others are complaining of bugs more and more oftenâreminds me of where I was four or five years ago. And we all now know about Facebook bots, four years after I warned of an ‘epidemic’.
It’s as I always expected: those of us who use these sites more heavily encounter the bugs sooner. Vox was the same: I left a year before Six Apart closed it down, and the bugs I encountered could never be fixed. I’m actually going through a similar battle with Amazon presently, blog post to come.
Now, since Mastodon and others work perfectly fine, and there’s no end of trouble to Big Tech, it’s inevitable that we jump ship, isn’t it?
As Twitter (and other social media) descend, whatâs been interesting is seeing how many of us Kiwis arenât being terribly original. No, I donât exactly mean Dr Don Brash thinking that he can import US-style division into New Zealand wholesale without understanding the underlying forces that helped Donald Trump secure their presidency (in which case such attempts here will fail), but I do mean how later Tweeters hunt for keywords and arguments to defend institutionalized racism, sexism, and other unsavoury -isms, then use imported techniques because they saw on television that they worked overseas.
I recall one not long ago who was evidently looking out for white male privilege, with some pretty standard Tweets prepared and an odd refusal to address fundamental questionsâthat sort of thing. Thereâs little point getting into a debate with nobodies who troll, and itâs all too obvious how they emerge on your radar.
Once upon a time social media didnât have these types, but then once upon a time, email didnât have spammers. Itâs the natural development of technology that humans tend to mess up pretty decent inventions. But, like spam, we find ways of dealing with it.
Race was one that came up over the weekend. Now, if youâre against racism, it would stand to reason that busting false stereotypes would be something that youâd savour. Ditto if youâre battling sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.
Iâve mentioned some of these before, e.g. âAsian driversâ somehow being terrors on our roads, something that statistics donât bear out. (Or, for that matter, the total lack of truth about âwomen driversâ, who are statistically safer than men.) Among tourists, weâve established Australians and Germans are the two most dangerous groups. Food has been one thatâs been on our minds lately, since my other half managed to find herself ill from eating at two occidental restaurants, and given the amount of research sheâs done into the area, Iâll defer to her on the subject. Again itâs an area where I hear myths about Chinese food repeated ad nauseam.
The thing is that busting stereotypes gives racists less to go on, less of a feeling of superiority, so theyâll begin countering. Women know full well when sexists attack, and racists follow the same pattern.
A very funny chap sent two swear word-filled Tweets whichâand this is the only interesting thing about themâwere extracted fully right out of the racistsâ playbook. I was only surprised that this was still going on in 2018, hence this blog post, since I thought these signs were so clear by now that no one would be daft enough to try them on.
Their overriding message: dissing a western stereotype makes you a racist.
Akin to the âIâm not the Nazi, youâre the Naziâ Tweets and comments seen overseas, there was a suggestion that my lot was just as racist. Now, I donât deny that any majority race in any country can be racist. Itâs how I met one gentleman in Hong Kong who pointed out racism in a schoolbook that had a Filipina caricatureâI reached out offering to help. Or calling out the treatment of Malays and Indians by certain business people among my own lot in Malaysia. When youâve been the minority for most of your life, you can spot it, and you find it particularly tasteless when itâs perpetrated by your own race. (Thanks to #MeToo, it appears some men are getting better at calling out âlocker-room talkâ, too.)
But this is a diversion meant to cloud the issues. The intent is to criticize the person (by their race) in order to devalue the argument they make, and not deal with the argument itself. They miss the irony of this and it actually validates your original point. If you canât answer something civilly, then you havenât answered it at all.
In Tweet no. 2 (I wish I had taken a screen shot, as it has been deletedâI didnât expect the cowardice) was a variation on âMy best friend is Asian.â This one was about his partner and stepchildren being Asian, and his own son, who is half-Asian, and how he considers himself Asian. Um, no, youâre not, not from the exhibited conduct, but itâs a feeble attempt to scramble to give his own position a status above yours. Again itâs not about addressing the argument (a classic move in social media), but about debasing the opposition. Another one to look out for.
Now, if you really were to address this, wouldnât your best friend being Asian, or having a child with Asian heritage, mean you have a stake in busting myths that could harm that person? Thatâs not something they really care about, even if it harms those supposedly closest to them. (And those of us in New Zealand have a negative history with the term âAsianâ, so I doubt youâd actually use it in referencing your âbest friendâ. Youâd actually know their heritage, whether it was Iraqi, Asiatic Russian, Japanese, Kazakh, or whatever.)
Then there are the emotive overreactions, the falsely placed righteous moral indignation that this group is particularly good at. Itâs to make you think (unconvincingly) that your statements have potentially offended not just the racist, but, shock, horror, all right-thinking people.
Think about how a normal person would have reacted, and you have to conclude that no one jumps to uncontrollable shaking anger, the keyboarding equivalent of firing a gun as a result of road rage.
Thereâll be aspects of one or more of these in social media, and those who are combatting prejudice would do well to spot the signs.
To me, these are signs of unstable characters, akin to an adult having a tantrum. Or they specifically fish for things to make them angry. Now, I donât know how they dealt with their powerlessness ten years ago, but now they surf among us, hoping in vain to drag you to their level.
So given they are still around, the local body elections next year are going to be interesting, because you donât need the Dirty Politics crowd to coordinate it now: itâs a lot easier to provoke this dying group with fake news and let them run riot. On the other hand, itâs also a lot easier to spot them and see the conceit behind them.
Weâre a small enough country for most of us to know this by now anyway. Or so I hope.
I like apples. So youâre anti pears then. No, I just prefer apples. So you hate pears. I never said that. Fucking pear hater. I donât hate pears! Yes you do. You make me sick. Scum.
Then, within days, it played out pretty much exactly like this when Frank Oz Tweeted that he did not conceive of Bert and Ernie as gay. Or how Wil Wheaton can never seem to escape false accusations that he is anti-trans or anti-LGBQ, to the point where he left Mastodon. In his words (the link is mine):
I see this in the online space all the time now: mobs of people, acting in bad faith, can make people they donât know and will likely never meet miserable, or even try to ruin their lives and careers (look at what they did to James Gunn). And those mobsâ bad behaviors are continually rewarded, because itâs honestly easier to just give them what they want. We are ceding the social space to bad people, because they have the most time, the least morals and ethics, and are skilled at relentlessly attacking and harassing their targets. It only takes few seconds for one person to type âfuck offâ and hit send. That person probably doesnât care and doesnât think about how their one grain of sand quickly becomes a dune, with another person buried beneath it.
Oh goodness, what fun twitter was in the early days, a secret bathing-pool in a magical glade in an enchanted forest ⊠But now the pool is stagnant âŠ
To leave that metaphor, let us grieve at what twitter has become. A stalking ground for the sanctimoniously self-righteous who love to second-guess, to leap to conclusions and be offended â worse, to be offended on behalf of others they do not even know ⊠It makes sensible people want to take an absolutely opposite point of view.
Not that long ago I was blocked by a claimed anti-Zionist Tweeter who exhibited these very traits, and I had to wonder whether he was a troll who was on Twitter precisely to stir hatred of Palestinians. With bots and fake accounts all over social media (I now report dozens of bots daily on Instagram, which usually responds with about five messages a day saying they had done something, leaving thousands going back years untouched), you have to wonder.
Years ago, too, a Facebook post I made about someone in Auckland adopting an American retail phrase (I forget what it was, as I don’t use it, but it was ‘Black’ with a weekday appended to it) had the daughter of two friends who own a well known fashion label immediately jump to ‘Why are you so against New Zealand retailers?’ I was “unfriended” (shock, horror) over this, but because I’m not Wil Wheaton, this didn’t get to the Retailers’ Association mobilizing all its members to have me kicked off Facebook. It’s a leap to say that a concern about the creeping use of US English means I hate retailers, and all but the most up-tight would have understood the context.
This indignant and often false offence that people take either shows that they have no desire to engage and learn something, and that they are in reality pretty nasty, or that they have one personality in real life and another on social media, the latter being the one where the dark side gets released. Reminds me of a churchgoer I know: nice for a period on Sundays to his fellow parishioners but hating humanity the rest of the decade.
Some decent people I know on Twitter say they are staying, because to depart would let the bastards win, and I admire that in them. For now, Mastodon is a friendly place for me to be, even if I’m now somewhat wary after the way Wheaton was treated, but the way social media, in general, are is hardly pleasing. Those of us who were on the web early had an ideal in mind, of a more united, knowledgeable planet. We saw email become crappier because of spammers, YouTube become crappier because of commenters (and Google ownership), and Wikipedia become crappier because it has been gamed at its highest levels, so it seems it’s inevitable, given the record of the human race, that social media would also descend with the same pattern. Like in General Election voting, too many are self-interested, and will act against their own interests, limiting any chance they might have for growth in a fairer society. To borrow Stephen’s analogy, we can only enjoy the swimming pool if we don’t all pee in it.
