By David Futrelle
Last week, we celebrated Stefan Molyneux’s YouTube ban. Now the wannabe philosopher racist has managed to get himself banned from Twitter as well, reportedly not for anything he said but rather for “platform manipulation,” specifically fake sockpuppet accounts.
I don’t have much to say beyond “good riddance,” but others have been posting their responses to his banning on Twitter. So today I’m going to go all Twitchy and show you some of my favorites.
Let’s start with the eggs — referring back to Stefan’s weird and creepy obsession with young women’s eggs, particularly those belonging to Taylor Swift.
There were some who took a moment to remind us of some of Stefan’s Greatest Hits.
But it’s this tweet that may be Stefan’s real masterpiece:
I have so many questions. Why is the shoe so small? Why don’t the shoe and the egg cast shadows? And most importantly, WHY ISN’T HE WEARING A SHIRT.
For more of Stefan’s Greatest Hits, on Twitter and elsewhere, see the links here.
Good night, sweet prince. Go work your grift on Telegram.
H/T — @RationalGenius, from whom I borrowed the “cult leader banned” meme,
Send tips to dfutrelle at gmail dot com.
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@Naglfar: The UK does have an extradition treaty with the *US*, though. So does nearly all of Europe. He’d have to skate on all Federal charges at the very minimum to be safe in Scotland; I don’t know how it works on State charges.
I think Trump is most likely to flee to Russia, where he will find out what happens to people who are no longer useful to Putin.
@Snowberry, Threp
I’m not sure if federal charges will be pressed, seeing as I get the feeling Biden will not want to press charges for some naïve reason about “forgiveness” or the like. As for the state-level charges, I don’t know how extradition works for those. The state most likely to try to nail him with charges is New York, seeing as it’s a blue state where he has lots of property he probably didn’t pay taxes on.
… big, beautiful wall that the world’s best mountaineers couldn’t climb.
O/T: More TERF hypocrisy ensues, as JK Rowling and some other high profile bigots (and a few non bigots who claim they didn’t know what it was) have signed an open letter in Harper’s Magazine condemning “cancel culture” and complaining that they got pushback for bigoted view. Shortly after, Jennifer F. Boylan, the only trans* signatory, realized what it was and apologized, and JK attempted to send harassment her way and “cancel” her despite the letter ostensibly being anti-harassment and anti-“canceling”.
On the subject of “cancel culture”, can anyone explain to me what the fuck that even means? People seem to use the term for actions ranging from “publicly stating disagreement” to “sending death threats”.
Is it more than a buzz word? If so, what does it mean?
It means calling bigots on their bullshit and proposing that they should be socially marginalized because they’re scum.
@Lukas Xavier
It used to be called holding people accountable for their actions, but now is what (mostly) right wingers allege is happening when they get called out on their bigotry or find real world consequences.
The thing about it is, nobody seems to stay “canceled.” Pretty much everyone who gets “canceled” gets to keep producing media and often uses it as an opportunity to boost their profile by going on podcasts and television or publishing books about how they’ve been “silenced.”
My experience with “cancel culture” is extremely limited, but it seems that ideally it would consist of convincing third parties to deplatform them, and convincing their fans to abandon them en masse. Though generally, unless they’re not well known to begin with, or really egregious to “respectable people” to the point where it doesn’t actually take that much convincing, this isn’t nearly as effective as cancelers would hope. In addition, this nearly always comes with a side of harassment, both to them and people connected to them and occasional third parties with only tenuous or indirect connection. And even *if* it works, if they have a lot of resources, they can usually bounce back.
Canceling is all but useless at dealing with highly-problematic but “respectable”, well-off, cis-hetero white men, but on the other end of the scale, if you want to take out moderately-problematic but “unrespectable”, lower class, LBTQ+, woman of color, and you don’t care about the considerable splash damage, it’s a great tool. Or so it seems, again, in my fairly limited experience. While it does serve the function of giving the normally voiceless a sense of empowerment, so does (for example) scapegoating Jews. At present I’m highly skeptical that it does more good than harm.
@Snowberry
In my experience, the main people I’ve seen complain about being canceled were white cishet men who didn’t take any permanent damage from it. I’m sure it is worse for smaller actors, but I see far fewer of them complaining about it. I don’t approve of harassment targeted at people, but I do find it very hypocritical when conservatives complain about the left “canceling” people when conservatives do far worse to many people for minor reasons. For every leftist who stopped watching ContraPoints because she’s a transmedicalist, there are a hundred conservatives who burned Dixie Chicks CDs when the band opposed the war in Iraq.
(I should add that I meant “my direct experience is extremely limited”. I do have some significant secondhand experience, but that’s not the same thing.)
Naglfar
That Harper’s letter is such a shitburger. Posted on PZ”s blog:
href=”https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2020/07/08/weaponized-ambiguity/” rel=”nofollow ugc”
I am embarrassed for many of the signatories who signed it.
If your life’s blood is the meaning & precision of the written & spoken word, WHY, oh, WHY, would you ever sign such such a vague, half-assed, mealy mouthed document?
Airy, feel good statements like this are nothing but a right-wing PR tactic to get naive libs to sign onto their agenda to repress dissent against the status quo. And these “smart” schmucks bought it!
(The Discovery Institute did the same thing in 2001 with their “”A Scientific Dissent from Darwinism”” statement. One hundred “scientists” signed a statement, many without knowing its source, vaguely calling for “open-minded inquiry into competing biological theories”. Well, of course, scientists should be open minded!
Then they were Shocked! Shocked! I tell you, that their signatures were used to claim that hundreds of scientists not only knew that evolution was a lie, but that Creationism was true. Because that’s how the lyin’ Right rolls.)
@Naglfar
Not much of an improvement, because Natalie “Contrapoints” Wynn isn’t even a transmedicalist; she just refused to denounce Buck Angel, someone who she has (fairly limited) ties to, for being transmedicalist. Making excuses for him in response was kind of dumb, but even so, they’re still off-base here.
I love a good pair of red pumps, and I love omelettes, especially filled with spinach and herbs. Yum. Molyneux does *not* rock that leather jacket, either. He needs a sensible collared t-shirt, poly blend slacks and some golf shoes at his age, or whatever’s appropriate for misogynistic, racist cranks.
@Snowberry
She did more than refuse to condemn Buck. She made a 2 hour video bashing non-binary people for the whole thing, defended Buck’s history of domestic abuse, and declared that her trans* critics are actually Nazis in disguise. A good breakdown of her video can be found here:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=bCOq9BcRh54
And that’s before even getting into the other evidence of her being a transmedicalist and enbyphobic, like her videos on The Aesthetic and Transtrenders. Or her internalized transphobia in the video on Shame. Or her anti-autistic bigotry in her video on Cringe. In short, she is a rather problematic person.
Off-topic, but this came across my timeline and made me giggle, so I thought I’d share.
https://mobile.twitter.com/am_Dino_rawr/status/1281240361726291969
(It’s a Ven diagram with one circle labeled “incel” and the other circle labeled “excel”, with the middle bit labeled “incorrectly assuming something is a date”. Couldn’t figure out how to embed the image.)
@Catalpa
Here’s the image embed:
@everyone
Sorry if my last comment had too harsh a tone, I was writing it in a hurry because I had a video call to get on, reading it back now it sounds a bit terse. This was not my intent, apologies. Although I do think ContraPoints is a problematic content creator, I did not mean to be overly brusque in my comment.
@Naglfar
Much obliged!
Eeurg, I’m going to have to do research on a few issues which I admittedly have some knowledge gaps, watch a bunch of Contrapoints criticism videos, re-watch the most essential Contrapoints videos, maybe watch a few defenders as well, and take notes to make sure there’s no out-of-context-and-chronological-order Obama Time Machine Plot going on. And possibly be disappointed to find the real issue is “talking to the ignorant/uninitiated at a level they can comprehend rather than using ‘proper’ terminology and framing which they can’t yet make sense of” like I’ve gotten crap for doing in the past, or mistaking problematic characters who are supposed to show *why* the views they espouse are problematic for the actor’s actual views. Or maybe it’s legit and most of her fans never heard about anything except the Buck Angel thing (and based on her channel’s comments, it appears a lot of them never even heard *that* much until she made a video about it).
I’m not doing that right now. I need to spend the next few days helping someone move. For a future ‘project’, maybe.
@Snowberry
I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make you feel that you have to do a ton of research or anything like that. What I meant to do previously was point out the issues with Natalie from my perspective, with some sourced video essays that I thought summed up the issues for anyone interested. I didn’t mean to suggest you have to watch them or do a deep dive into her history. I admit I had a bit of a knee jerk reaction because I’ve already had several arguments on here about Natalie and Buck and wanted to pre empt another. I apologize.
@Catalpa, @Naglfr, I am inordinately amused.
Possibly that’s because I’m a SRSBZNS software developer reduced to coding up spreadsheets in my pointy-haired days.
Also it’s stupidly hot and I drank a small glass of wine.
@Naglfar:
No big. I do deep dives occasionally. Thing is, it appears that Natalie is really popular and hasn’t noticeably lost any popularity, I don’t see any serious problems with her channel (there are some things which would seem badly framed from a deep-end SJW perspective, but this channel is aimed at people on the shallow end and those not quite at the water, and they wouldn’t always get things otherwise), but I do note that there are a few “Natalie is terrible” people here and elsewhere who seem to be in a bubble which I have no awareness of. It might be interesting or useful to know what’s going on and why; I do make some effort to learn about what things are like outside the few bubbles I personally occupy.
I mean, I’m on *this* site so I can get a taste of various bubbles in the misgynosphere. I have done a few closer looks personally (mostly not the same ones David looks at) because seeing it curated isn’t the same as seeing it raw… but honestly, even what I see on WHTM is a bit corrosive to my mental health. I also occasionally lurk in several communities which I’m not meaningfully a part of, and even check out conservative news sources (intellectually I don’t regret that; emotionally I do) because being limited only to the tiny slice of reality which contains my comfort zone just isn’t my thing.
That doesn’t mean that I will, which is why I said “maybe later” – only that based on what I currently know, I suspect a shallow dive won’t actually do anything other than muddy the waters, and won’t let me pinpoint the bubble(s) involved which I can’t yet see.
[Edit] The “eeurg” was an expression of “kind of want to, kind of can’t” not disgust. Sorry.
@Snowberry
If you do in the future want to look into different perspectives on Natalie, the videos I linked above from Essence of Thought are a decent place to start from, and they also have works cited lists that contain further resources. Again, no obligation, you decide what works for you.
Speaking of which, is there a way to get around this in Excel? I’ve tried randomly turning off settings for automatic language correction etc.
@Snowberry
Chrisiousity has a pretty fair video about the whole cancel culture thing as applies to contrapoints. (I like chrisiousity, as much as I like any video – she doesn’t take 20 minutes to get to the damned point). It’s the top vid on her channel when you search contrapoints.
— skippable happiness —
A completely OT thing that has had me buzzing all night – was messing with the guitar after being reminded of the song La Seine et Moi, and the missus started singing along in the kitchen.
She almost never sings, despite having a wonderful voice and almost constant music in the house. Her Grandmother beat that out of her half a century or so back.
So – buzzed as hell. Still on twitter break, but I had to be happy about it somewhere! 🙂
If you don’t know the song, it’s by Vanessa Paradis and is from the movie A Monster in Paris. Warning – it’s an earworm, and the movie is wonderful.