By David Futrelle
Jordan Peterson, the sulky alt-lite celebrity professor who likes to sue people who disagree with him, has announced the imminent arrival of his new Free Speech Social Media platform Thinkspot, which promises to be the freest free speech venue in human history except that you have to pay for it and if you say something that offends the Peterson fans and oft-banned alt-right weirdos who will likely populate the service, they can downvote your comments until they disappear.
Also, Peterson is saying that there might be a 50-word minimum to comments — designed to make sure that comments are “thoughtful” — so that Nazis who want to post the 14 words will be allowed to but they’ll always have to post them four times in a row.
Here’s how the right wing site Newsbusters described it, drawing the details from a recent discussion between Peterson and stoner podcaster Joe Rogan.
Peterson discussed Thinkspot with podcaster Joe Rogan on June 9, emphasizing a radically pro-free speech Terms of Service. He described that freedom as the “central” aspect saying, “once you’re on our platform we won’t take you down unless we’re ordered to by a US court of law.”
That will be a profound contrast to platforms that ban users for “misgendering” people who identify as trans, or for tweeting “learn to code” at fired journalists.
Well, with the 50 word comment minimum, they’ll actually have to write:
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to code.
Learn to.
Clearly this will encourage only the most thoughtful of discussions.
As for the downvoting thing, Newsbusters explains that
All comments on the website will have a voting feature “and if your ratio of upvotes to downvotes falls below 50/50 then your comments will be hidden, people will still be able to see them, if they click, but you’ll disappear.”
Obviously this whole thing is going to be a smashing success, as right-wing “free speechers” love it when algorithms hide their comments from view, and they don’t consider this censorship at all or yell about it endlessly or anything.
Peterson has apparently got a bunch of true a-list free speech warriors lined up to beta test the “anti-censorship platform,” including, well, himself; failed-comedian-turned-alt-right-booster Dave Rubin; celebrity “skeptic” and alleged rapist Michael Shermer; and YouTube blabber/rape joker Carl Benjamin, a.k.a. “Sargon of Akkad,” a.k.a. “Carl of Swindon,” recently in the news for his disastrous campaign for the European Parliament, which went so badly that it kind of took down the entire UKIP party with it.
So basically, the consummate control-freak Peterson is asking the prickliest assholes in the world of social media to pay him money to use a platform that allows their political enemies to downvote their comments until they vanish. I really can’t imagine anything going wrong here.
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@Alan:
Now I want to see your file, just to check if there’s a footnote after “annoying vegan.” I imagine it reads “Is capable of severely beating you up; do not let annoyance show.”
@Jackson Ayres
One of the most surreal things for me was going from being a CSR where every second of your day needed to be spent being productive and a 5 minute conversation would get a manager snapping at you, even if it was about a customer issue you were working on, to being a software developer where I’ve seen people goof off a good half of their day, was a 2 hour meeting where an entire team argued about whether the opening curly brace should go on a new line or not. That was 12 developer hours spent to ultimately not change our style guide at all.
@Cat Mara
We use kebab-case for some things in Angular; mostly for things that will go into the HTML template.
\o/ to Alan !
@kupo : funny how things change when one’s expertise is in short supply.
For the record, I think most peoples litteraly cannot be productive more than 4 to 6 hours per day. At least for intellectual tasks (the one I am familiar with). But good luck making people understand that.
@Alan, nice one!
Yeah, it’s funny. I’m a CSR and currently a contractor, but just got offered the same job, but as a real employee. It’s only a 25 cent an hour raise, but more benefits, job security, and most importantly, the opportunity to apply for other positions after I put in a little more time. And even though my current job isn’t terrible, mostly due to my supervisors and manager being cool and laid back and don’t mind if we use our down time to chat, do things online or read a book, I still really want to move on to a different role. Every little thing is monitored. And there’s a whole separate department that schedules all shifts, including break times. I hate having so little control over my work day.
It’s hilarious how people insist that if you’re in a low pay/low power job, you must not be hard working. It’s the opposite. People in low power positions are expected to be at a constantly high productivity level in a way that people in cushier jobs never are.
1000x this
@Sheila Crosby:
Ah yes, “bikeshedding”. I suspect we’ve all experienced that.
I’m severely pissed off with my job at present, and looking to leave as soon as I can find another job (which won’t be easy). In the meantime, I’ve become more bloody-minded about compliance with management bullshit. After one day recently where I had six meetings, I began simply ignoring meeting requests where I expected the meeting to be non-productive. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out, but, so far, I’m getting away with it.
@Ohlmann:
I used to be able to hyperfocus, and in that state I could be productive for much longer than that. But I burned out, or maybe just aged out, and it’s rare for me to find that flow.
It doesn’t help that the modern open-plan office environment could almost have been scientifically designed to kill intellectual productivity.
You can, but it damages your health.
I was going to recommend The soul of a new machine which yeah, got Kidder a Pulitzer, and also The dream machine. It’s a biography of J.C.R. Licklider, and a history of all kinds of great DARPA projects. (Like the internet.)
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/722412.The_Dream_Machine
Two notes on women in IT.
When friends worked at Bell Labs in the 1960s, she was a very senior consultant, he was a junior programmer. He points out that all his bosses there were women.
When I first started as a software engineer in the early 1980s, half the staff in any financial services software group were women and half were men.
I’m really enjoying the IT insights that people are sharing in this thread. It’s informative and, well, sadly all the bad parts are true.
@Big Titty Demon
If I may ask that out of curiosity, what are your preferred languages in the field that abhors python?
Hester,
Yes, college professors teach the value of writing concise sentences, but certain folk believe this to be too short sighted. It’s an approach only for simpletons.
Their rambling run-on verbiage, on the other hand, is sheer brilliance. The people who complain about its unintelligibility are simply pea-brains who can’t comprehend literary genius.
I knew someone who wrote like that. Pity his overwhelming “talent” wasn’t appreciated by the morons in the publishing houses who had the privilege of receiving his prose.
Cough.
Bit late on the ball, but was otherwise occupied this weekend:
@Big Titty Demon:
I actually like Python. It’s a great ‘glue’ language for tying other libraries together, and great for writing quick scripts and libraries. In some ways it’s more user-readable than many of the other languages in the same sort of category. That said, there are definitely things at which other languages are better. (The whole ‘spaces are significant?!’ argument is stupid; that was done deliberately because in many languages it is quite possible to accidentally delete a closing brace and then the indentation will not match the actual compiled code structure. In Python, the apparent code structure from the indentation MUST match the actual code structure. That actually removes one entire class of errors when people read the code.)
Perl is great for some things, and very concise. It’s also close to being a write-only language because there are often five completely different-looking ways of doing the same thing.
(And my first programming language was APL. If you really want to talk about write-only languages, that’s high on the list.)
@Cat Mara, Jackson Ayres:
With regards to ‘all the hard problems were solved long ago’, the same can be said of Fortran. I know in several scientific fields there are places where Fortran is still very actively used, because the big standard analysis libraries were written in Fortran decades ago, and everybody in the field knows how to work with those libraries and knows what they do and where the limits are.
With regards to camelCase, I first ran into that when I worked as an intern at Microsoft for eight months. Anybody who’s gone through Windows programming documentation knows the ‘Hungarian notation’ used there, embedding the data type in the name. So you have things like ‘pchBuffer’ and ‘szBuffer’, where ‘pch’ means ‘pointer to character’ and ‘sz’ means ‘size’. It would be a more useful system if it were actually used more consistently.
With regards to imposter syndrome being the cause… that’s probably a part of it, tied up with the local version of toxic masculinity, of everything being a dominance display. When your identity is tied up in being smart (and a lot of these folks were likely the smartest people in their local schools before getting out of their small pond) and humility isn’t allowed to be an option… well, you get this.
While these “free speech warriors” were complaining about not being able to shout hate speech on twitter, the Supreme Court made it legal for cops to violate the first amendment.
Strangely, there has been no outcry.
Z~Here is what Dr. P. is making clear in reality for humankind’s dual nature, high to low IQ’s… etc.
Spin structures, contrast location and momentum for energy field’s inanimate parts following:
A) Jordan Peterson Explains Psychoanalytic Theory
B) https://www.spiritreleasetherapy.com.au/#!
C) Dybbuk – Wikipedia
https://www.edge.org/conversation/george_dyson-ai-that-evolves-in-the-wild