🐘Peter Annaert

Less is more
@[email protected]

[Seth Abramson @SethAbramson]

Apparently Elon Musk permanently suspended the user below for the tweet below, and did so on the grounds that comedy is not legal on Twitter when the butt of the joke is Musk himself.

So I propose a minor act of harmless Twitter disobedience: RETWEET the hell out of this image.

[🐘Peter Annaert @pannaert]

Nieuws dat u mag negeren (en waarom) https://t.co/th80Jm3Ykj

[Matt Johansen @mattjay]

🚨BREAKING: Genetics firm 23andMe confirms user data theft in a credential stuffing attack.

The hackers released 1 million lines of data targeting Ashkenazi Jews.

[Koenfucius 🔍 @koenfucius]

Google’s switcheroo…
It alters your search queries on the fly to get at your wallet: https://t.co/xk4XfuONqd 🤨

[SwiftOnSecurity @SwiftOnSecurity]

UX designers who eliminated the filesystem from user consciousness in name of simplicity ruined the world and are morally culpable for shriveling minds of children who are unable to tackle the challenges of today thanks to a choice rooted in misunderstood advocacy for the user.

[🐘Peter Annaert @pannaert]

@engineers_feed there's one missing: Over engineering

[Koenfucius 🔍 @koenfucius]

Economics made recorded songs grow in length, as vinyl technology advanced, enabling longer tracks. Economics is now shrinking then again: https://t.co/n4KbiRhQL4 via @econlife

[🐘Peter Annaert @pannaert]

@gunsnrosesgirl3 None: there is no driver in them

[Richard Dawkins @RichardDawkins]

How can we have a proper debate when we no longer speak the same language?

I was about to start work on this commission, when in came an email from Twitter. They’d received a complaint that the following tweet violated their standards.

“Sex is not the same as gender.” But it’s not your gender that gives you the physique to tower over woman athletes & break their swimming records. It’s your sex. It’s not your undressed gender that upsets women in changing rooms. It’s your sex. You can’t eat your cake & have it.

Twitter sensibly over-ruled the complaint and cleared me of the proscribed sins that they helpfully listed for me:

Violent speech, violent and hateful entities, child sexual exploitation, abuse/harassment, hateful conduct, perpetrators of violent attacks, suicide, sensitive media, illegal, private information, non-consensual nudity, account compromise, plus various legal technicalities.

I’m sure the complainant was sincere. And that’s my point. A certain type of activist has a level of paranoid hypersensitivity that almost literally warps their hearing. You can say ,“I disagree with you for the following reasons.” But all they actually hear is “Hate hate hate!” So instead of putting a counter-argument (which I would be interested to hear), they resort to censorship. All too often it goes further, and they boil over in virulent abuse: “Transphobe! TERF!”

At least the above tweet was partisan. But so hair-trigger is the hypersensitivity, a mere invitation to discuss something is enough to set it off.

In 2015, Rachel Dolezal, a white chapter president of NAACP, was vilified for identifying as Black. Some men choose to identify as women, and some women choose to identify as men. You will be vilified if you deny that they literally are what they identify as. Discuss.

That 2021 tweet caused the American Humanist Association to withdraw my title as 1996 Humanist of the Year. A 25-year retrospective swipe, which cost them the loss of several major donors. Once again, I have no doubt they were sincere.

On July 26, I interviewed Helen Joyce about her book Trans. The interview is being very well received on @YouTube. As it should be, for Joyce is extremely well-informed in her subject and she spoke cogently, soberly, reasonably.

But one of YouTube’s in-house judges heard only hate. And tried to censor the interview.

Short of an outright ban, YouTube has a variety of punishments at its disposal. In this case we got a minor slap on the wrist, a restriction on our video’s licence to advertise. But the real point is, yet again, the ludicrous hypersensitivity of the complainant. Those warped ears heard not reasonable argument deserving a reply, but “hateful and derogatory content”, and “hate or harassment towards individuals or groups”.

Obviously I can’t disprove that here. The interview runs to more than 10,000 words. But judge for yourself, it’s still up on YouTube. I earnestly challenge readers to search diligently for literally anything that a reasonable speaker of the English language could fairly call hateful. Enter it, labelled “Challenge”, in the comments section under the video, and I promise to respond.

I just said “a reasonable speaker of the English language”, and maybe here lies the key: language. If we want a fruitful argument, we’d better speak the same language. In today’s overheated sparring over sex and gender, both sides may appear to be speaking English, but is it the same English? Does “hate” mean to you what “hate” means to everyone else?

Or there’s “violence”. The Oxford Dictionary defines it as “the deliberate exercise of physical force against a person, property, etc”, and that is certainly the meaning I understand. Advocates of free speech often invoke, as a sensible exception, “incitement to violence”, where physical force is normally implied. But that sensible exception would mean something very different if you redefine “violence” to include the non-physical. If someone calls you “she” when you prefer “they”, I might see it as a mild discourtesy. But if you see it as a “violent” threat to your very existence, then our interpretations of “incitement to violence” — and hence of freedom of speech — are going to diverge sharply.

As a textbook example of incitement to real violence, you could hardly do better than “Sarah Jane” Baker’s speech at London Pride this year, where she told the cheering crowd: “If you see a TERF, punch them in the fucking face”. Or Sky News (January 23) has a picture of two SNP politicians grinning in front of a large, colourful sign depicting a guillotine and the slogan “DECAPITATE TERFS”. They claimed they didn’t know the sign was there, and I sympathise. You shouldn’t be blamed for the company you keep. No doubt I shall be labelled “right-wing” for writing this article — and that’s the most unkindest cut of all.

The Guardian (February 14, 2020) reported that police officers turned up at Harry Miller’s workplace to warn him about his allegedly “transphobic” tweets, such as the obviously satirical, “I was assigned Mammal at Birth, but my orientation is Fish. Don’t mis-species me.” One of them told Miller that he had not committed a crime, but his tweeting “was being recorded as a hate incident”.

Well, if Miller’s light-hearted satire is a hate incident, why not go after Monty Python, Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Rowan Atkinson, Private Eye’s royal romances of Sylvie Krin, the early novels of Evelyn Waugh, Lady Addle Remembers, Tom Lehrer, even the benign PG Wodehouse? Satire is satire. That’s what satirists do, they get good-natured laughs and perform a valuable service to society.

“Assigned Mammal at Birth” satirises the trans-speak evasion of the biological fact that our sex is determined at conception by an X or a Y sperm. What I didn’t know, and learned from Joyce in our interview, is that small children are being taught, using a series of colourful little books and videos, that their “assigned” sex is just a doctor’s best guess, looking at them when they were born.

A provisional guess, pending the child’s own decision (which is what really counts).

Joyce’s comment is: “And what are you meant to make of this if you’re eight? First off, that you’re very boring if you simply go along with what you were assigned at birth”. Her book quotes the boast of a mother of eight children, “without a single boring cis child in the whole bunch!” I recently received a moving letter from a highly intelligent American 12-year-old, worried that at her school it was not cool to retain your assigned gender. Yesterday I chanced to meet an American teacher whose school rules compel her to go along with a child’s declared gender and not tell the parents.

Miller’s case came up before Mr Justice Knowles, who thankfully didn’t mince words when it came to freedom of speech: “In this country we have never had a Cheka, a Gestapo or a Stasi. We have never lived in an Orwellian society”. 1984’s Appendix lays out the principles of Newspeak, the nascent language of Orwell’s dark dystopia. Newspeak was designed to make unorthodox thoughts impossible. There would be no words to express them.

O’Brien, Big Brother’s enforcer, holds up four fingers, and tortures Winston Smith until he really believes that 2+2= 5 if the Party wills it. Is that realistic? Could political power ever make you really believe a logical contradiction? The Times (January 18) reported that “a transgender woman has denied raping two women with her penis”. If “with her penis” is not quite 2+2= 5, it’s getting close. 2+2= 4.5? Joyce’s book quotes Orwell in an epigraph: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” Are we approaching that point?

But shouldn’t we just indulge the harmless whims of an oppressed minority? Maybe, were it not for a strain of aggressive bossiness which insists, not so very harmlessly and not sounding very oppressed, that the rest of us must humour those whims and join in. This compulsion even has the force of law in some states. And alas, we often zip our lips in abject self-censorship because we aren’t as brave as JK Rowling, and don’t fancy becoming a target of Twittermob vitriol. No, we don’t fear Big Brother or the Stasi. We fear each other.

Originally Posted on Evening Standard

[Rob Henderson @robkhenderson]

Arthur Schopenhauer on avoiding the Current Thing:

[🐘Peter Annaert @pannaert]

@uglybelgianhous when you have your house blurred out in the real world

[Best of Dying Twiter @bestofdyingtwit]

the irony of this graph not having an x-axis

[Gurwinder @G_S_Bhogal]

Me: “I refuse to define my political views by the left-right spectrum as I consider it a relic of the 18th century that cannot articulate the nuances of the modern age and so forces people into outdated categories.”

People: “So. You’re a centrist.”

[Marina Medvin 🇺🇸 @MarinaMedvin]

This is a really good community note. Wow what a difference context makes.

[🐘Peter Annaert @pannaert]

@Bennytouzine instellingen voor decimalen checken

[morgan @CasualEffects]

I'm amazed that the debugging experience circa 2000 in C++ with Visual Studio or CodeWarrior (or even xgdb) was more sophisticated than now with Python, JavaScript, and various GPU languages. We're really back to working with "printf" a lot instead of visual debugging.

[🐘Peter Annaert @pannaert]

Ik waande mij even in Qatar, Dubai of Singapore : zero criminaliteit, zero burgerrechten. Recht op privacy is cruciaal om een democratie te kunnen blijven.

[Hilde Crevits @crevits]

Als je moet kiezen tussen recht op privacy of het vermijden van criminele feiten, dan is de keuze snel gemaakt. Welzijn, justitie, politie en lokale besturen kunnen binnenkort informatie delen in het belang van slachtoffers.@vlaparl
 @Zu_Demir @BartSomers

[Jules Suzdaltsev @jules_su]

this is the the best idea I have ever had in my life