Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos is less a journalist than a professional attention-seeker, building up his notoriety (and his Twitter followers) though an endless series of calculated outrages designed to delight his fanbase of garbage people while offending pretty much everyone else in the world. But even he seems to have gotten bored with this increasingly stale schtick.
His latest attempt at outrage — a Breitbart post titled “Why Women Should Leave The Internet” — is so predictable and pro-forma I wonder if he simply farmed the whole thing out to his alleged army of interns. Or cut and pasted it from some 4chan thread. It’s Internet Outrage by the numbers.
Milo and/or his minions start out with an old chestnut, sniping at women for allegedly “invading” the allegedly male spaces on the Internet.
Time for some honesty. Women are — and you won’t hear this anywhere else — screwing up the internet for men by invading every space we have online and ruining it with attention-seeking and a needy, demanding, touchy-feely form of modern feminism that quickly comes into conflict with men’s natural tendency to be boisterous, confrontational and delightfully autistic.
“You won’t hear this anywhere else?” Actually, you’ll hear it everywhere else.
Here’s my suggestion to fix the gender wars online: Women should just log off.
Aw, but Milo, then who would your fans have left to harass?
Given that men built the internet, along with the rest of modern civilisation, I think it’s only fair that they get to keep it.
We Hunted the Mammoth to Feed … Ourselves?
And given what a miserable time women are having on the web, surely they would welcome an abrupt exit. They could go back to bridge tournaments, or wellness workshops, or swapping apple crumble recipes, or whatever it is women do in their spare time.
I guess we have to give him a point for not mentioning cats in his hackneyed list of Dumb Lady Things That Dumb Ladies Like Because They’re Dumb.
I, Donald Trump and the rest of the alpha males will continue to dominate the internet without feminist whining. It will be fun! Like a big fraternity, with jokes and memes and no more worrying about whether an off-colour but harmless remark will suddenly torpedo your career.
And this would be different from the currently existing internet how?
Milo and other right-wingers love to go on about how “political correctness” is killing free speech, even as they make careers out of spouting “politically incorrect” blather designed to appeal to the Internet’s worst people. Meanwhile, harassers of women worry so little about having their careers “torpedoed” by saying something offensive online that they often post literal death threats under their own names.
Milo goes on to suggest that women should get their own separate-and-unequal internet, adding that “[w]e could probably throw in all of the low-T male feminists too, since they haven’t got any balls anyway.”
Evidently in Miloland this counts as some kind of EPIC BURN.
Apparently afraid he hasn’t offended enough people, Milo tosses in this random swipe at trans folks:
Transgender people won’t be able to use the internet at all because they won’t know which ethernet cable to plug in, but they’re generally too busy hacking away at their forearms to remember to check Gmail.
Oh, Milo, this is just plain embarrassing.
DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT.
H/T — Thanks to @JoeKlemmer for the tip.
I was wondering will any women and girls like the female MRAs stay off the internet now that a man said so? Or Nah?
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants:
I shall mourn when that day comes. The Male Internet sounds awful and I don’t want to be forced to use it, but I understand why I would.
Wait a minute. Yiannopoulos says that male feminists should use the female internet too? Yay!
(Do you know who else that includes, though, Yiannopoulos? It includes Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the man who stole HTML from the gods, as well as Larry Page and Sergei Brin, the dual monarchs of the web. Fair is fair though: if we get them, it’s only fair to leave you Andrew “weev” Auernheimer. I’m sure he’ll apply his genius to making your special boys-only internet even better.)
@Catalpa:
That would be hilarious. Utterly so.
@EJ
The dudeizens of the Manternet would never accept Turing’s work, either.
Too bad for their sexbot fantasies, since he invented AI and all.
@abars01
Well at this point you can’t invoke Poe’s Law or Godwin’s Law anymore, those internet laws became moot when Poe noticed that hyperbole is the norm and satire became fact. Godwin just could not imagine the amount of literal nazis and decided to hang up the belt.
When religious zealots have been losing members left and right by death and moderates, and the newer generations are generally sick of the old systems, they have a very little, but loyally immature base to work off of. Like a little peat of bigotry grow orchids of antisemitism, there’s a limited supply before you run out of it.
The guise of sophistication is now gone, only to reveal the same angry parrot they all turn out to be. I mainly attribute it to the rise of Trump where immature bullying appeals to the simple minded, a half African American Man in office for 8 years to stoke bitter hate, gay marriage ruling and deaths of vile Supreme Justices and increasing lack of tolerance for those intolerant of Trans rights that even corporations are against them, make them feel lonesome.
You even have the parts where more and more social media, are slowly dragging their knuckles about to combat racism and sexism on their platforms while the man-children cry “freeze peach” by clamoring for government interference on private properties. Any claim for revolution by those like Sovereign Citizens is now considered a joke and never to happen for at least a few years, as the Oregon Standoff couldn’t have been done better sans one zealous tarpman.
Those left to idolize the reign of Saint Reagan are also slowly dying out, leaving way for more progressives who don’t compromise their morals to big corporations. Which is a funny thing because though alot of these people keep talking about government oversight and corruption, they seem to be okay with that so long as it’s the right tyrant for their position. Principles, naw I’m right and you’re wrong and I don’t have to remember what I just said. Fortunately there is growing sentiment among the newer generations that don’t wish to deal with the intolerant and wish to remove the corruption of money in politics, so there at least I can find peace.
In short basically society socially is moving on and big corporations also find it profitable to be more progressive and caring to employees and customers, leaving hardline conservatives less ground to fight on.
There’s still alot to be done, again corruption of money in politics, banks are bigger than ever, student loan bubble, public doesn’t get what they want compared to elites, tax evasion by the entire elite class, Military Industrial Complex, lack of any strong laws to keep Wallstreet in check, laws don’t cover how to effectively deal with mass internet harassment and stalking, police brutality in more corrupt parts of certain towns, NRA stopping gun control because they get more money every time there’s a shooting because scared people = more people buying guns to feel safe, social media platforms not addressing hate groups, the bigotry and sexism in the Atheist community, global warming dooming us all, etc.
But at least we’re making more progress than ever.
@Alan
I am mostly annoyed about the law-change discussion, to be honest.
1. it is another occasion for people who want to talk about how women are not to be trusted in general (because how can you know if “no” really means “no”?)
2. the idea that the rape laws need a change came up because of the events of cologne on new years eve. Because apparently it is only rape when brown people do it.
3. really small progress…
But i didn’t really follow the process (as it annoys me), and I’m not an expert, so this may be just my impression.
Also: Hi everyone!
Hedy Lamarr pops up quite a bit in discussions about women in technology, but she wasn’t actually the inventor of frequency-hopping spread spectrum communications, but she was an important contributor. There’s German work on it going back to 1908, 6 years before she was even born.
Its also sad that the only computer-related women who ever get mentioned are Lovelace, Lamarr and Hopper. The list of ‘famous women in computer science’ is depressingly short, but it does contain other names! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_computing#Worldwide_timeline
Can I suggest a few fresh names for future discussions? How about Barbara Liskov, whose eponymous substitution principle is an important part of the desgn of many of the major software libraries in the world, including the ones on which most consumer software is built on (eg. the web browser you are reading this on).
There’s Margaret Hamilton who was strong in favour of robust osftware architectures, and whose work went a long way to stopping Apollo 11 from turning into a fresh crater on the moon.
Adele Goldberg was one of the authors of Smalltalk, a programming language that heavily influenced the design of javascript which makes most of the fancy bits of the interwebs work today. She also co-authored “Personal Dynamic Media” in 1977, 30 years ahead of the release of the iphone which finally made the ideas laid out in that paper a reality.
I’ll finish with Sophie Wilson who designed the Acorn Microcomputer, the first machine sold by Acorn Computers Ltd, nowadays known as ARM. She also designed the ARM instruction set, a low-level programming language that is used on also every mobile phone in the world (smart or otherwise) and billions of other electronic devices (yes, billions. There have been 50 billion ARM processors sold, all of them using the instruction set she designed). Too busy building the foundations of modern technology to be hacking her forearms, I suspect.
I wonder…
If it is duller than iron, heavier than iron, colder than iron, and more useless than iron, so, if all in all, it is more than iron, can it be irony or ironic ?
But not ironing, for sure, for it is reserved to people who do not lose their time ranting at the air on the web.
But is he sure he want to expel Madam Hardy and the ones like her from the web ? He would lose steady allies…
I just have one response to Milo.
NO!
http://static.spin.com/files/130925-adam-sandler-theyre-all-gonna-laugh-at-you.jpg
NOOOOO!
That’s right Milo, keep verbally rimming your white supremacist audience and maybe they’ll forget you’re a degenerate homosexual with a non-aryan surname. Maybe they’ll even let you into their awesome frat house if you keep shrieking abuse at women and trans folk. Don’t forget to totally blame teenage boys for the sexual abuse they suffered at the hands of priests – that way you can show you think gay men are predators too! They’ll have to love and accept you then! Why don’t they love you, Milo?!
Long-time lurker here, hi @ all!
It’s done, Germany has today finally tightened it’s rape law – which won’t come into force before autumn because political reasons.
@Alan
If you’re unconcious, that’s rape, even by the previous law here in Germany.
@Axecalibur
No, I wouldn’t call any political party „the good guys“ in this.
The whole process started almost a year ago and the public pressure from various organizations played a big role in it. No big party stepped forward and said that this has to be done, several times it was delayed because no one deemed it necessary (and because of fear of false rape accusations, unsurprisingly).
The incidents in Cologne and other german cities as well as the case of Gina-Lisa Lohfink brought the problem further to public awareness and led to a proposal that is a lot stricter than first drafts.
Most important change is that it is no longer necessary to prove that a victim literally fought of her/his assaulter, but that the „recognisable will“ of the victim was overcome. To „perform sexual actions“ on an unconcious or otherwise defenseless person leads to stricter punishment.
Groping is also made criminal. Before that proposal, you could only report it – under very specific circumstances – as an insult.
The proposal also takes into account that a victim might be surprised and not be able to defend her/himself due to shock.
Problem is, the victim still has to prove that it wasn’t consenting, which could – and will – be problematic. But hey, we made marital rape punishable already in 1997, so that whole proposal is pretty progressive for german standards.
@EJ – of course you would be on our internet! (see: witty banter).
We’ll also have George Takei, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Stephen Colbert. But no Scott Adams, Richard Dawkins, Bodybuilding.com, or Taboola.
@Ooglyboggles – Demographics and time are on our side, but first we (and by “we” I mean mainly they) as a society have to relearn the art of civil political discourse. You can’t find common ground with people who have a conspiracy mindset nurtured by Breitbart, Fox, and Info Wars, and who think that whoever shouts the loudest wins the debate. You can’t reason with people who have their own set of facts. There’s no consensus anymore.
Democracy depends on acknowledging opposing viewpoints as legitimate. Unfortunately, one side views compromise as weakness. Both sides view compromise as appeasing the terrorists. In our self-created bubbles, whenever opposing views are encountered, either they’re caricatures held up for ridicule, or they get immediately shouted down by the pack. Instead of engaging in debate, people handwave away rebuttals as coming from a biased source. Very rarely do you hear “yes, you have a valid point, but…” The media sells conflict too, with cable news, Gish gallops, and ranting pundits passing off opinion as fact. Outrage drives up ratings. Confusion sows fear, which drives anger, which goads people to the ballot box and the gun store.
We joke about separate internets, but that would only worsen the problem.
I do find it interesting that all of our “moderate”, just-sayin’ trolls turn out to be alt-right sympathizers. Our collective idea of what’s moderate has moved so far to the right over the past three decades.
I lost it at the Transgender bit. If Milo really thinks he’s offending people with this nonsense he’s losing his touch. Seriously who uses Ethernet cables anymore?
Anyone who have a lot of work to do into tech use ethernet cable TBH.
But for the average customer of the internet, I can see why Wifi can be enough.
Also, unlike USB, ethernet can’t be connected the wrong way without a hammer.
Also, Milo is revulsive.
@Ohlmann
Yeah, especially if you have to connect to a VPN, ethernet is pretty critical for techies. Plus, your WiFi router gets its Internet connection through ethernet. But it’s really confusing that Milo thinks trans people are somehow less technically inclined than cis people, and that they wouldn’t be able to connect the same style plug that’s been used for phones for decades. (I did once have to show a male Software Engineer how the ethernet plug on his laptop worked, though.)
If we’re diverging from computers and gaming to geekdom as a whole, both fandom conventions and the sci-fi genre were invented by women.
And, of course, their beloved (yet painfully misunderstood, like, have any of those dipshits even seen the damn things) Matrix movies were made by two trans women, so no more use of the “Red Pill” name.
Isn’t that more that about 50% of the stuff is invented by woman, and we only see that in recent day because record keeping of inventors are significantly better ?
I can’t imagine what happens in someone’s life to turn someone into such an utter arsehole as Milo, but I’m very curious to find out.
On a side note, I got called both a cuck and beta for the first time by some libertarian shithead on Hillary Clinton’s Facebook page today. Both insults are simply too pathetic for me to feel offended by, so I’m more amused than anything else.
“It’s just satire”=”it’s just irony”=”it’s just a joke”=”it’s just trolling”
Humor is never just humor. Especially when the humor has to do with reducing the negative emotion related to one’s out-group. In those situations humor is a weapon.
@Ghost Robot
A “beta cuck”? Does that mean you watch someone watching their wife have sex with someone else?
Wow, Draco Malfoy really did use a lot of words to say ‘girls got cooties’!
@Huggbees:
Uh, I do, at least somewhat. It’s more steady and reliable than my Wifi.
Not directly related, but there’s still a rather large proportion of the world that has significant restrictions and limitations arbitrarily placed on their internet, and some people who live in areas with providers who don’t can’t actually even afford said internet in the first place.
I use ethernet when I can, for the same reason.
Milo, stop trying to make ‘cuck’ happen.
I am disinclined to acquiesce your request.
.
.
.
Means no.
Wench here; card-carrying member of the Wench’s Guild, in fact. Not an insult, brozos. (Thanks, Bina!)
littleknown said:
I was surprised to see a neuroatypical woman character in a Stephen King book (Mr. Mercedes) who became one of the heroes. Apparently, that set of characters is in at least one other book, too.
@Nequam – PStew is still all kinds of awesome! Really nice singing voice, as well.
@Zaunhockerin
Hallo, wie geht es Ihnen? Haben Sie ein Begrüssungsgeschenk bekommen? (Secondary school German, couldn’t resist. And I probably got it wrong, anyway ?)
Anywho, thanks for the info. Good news is good news. And don’t be a stranger!