An Open Letter To Twitter

So I'm having a party at my house and everyone's invited, right? There are so many people there from all over the place and it's kicking. You get the usual party antics - people pair off and go upstairs to find a quiet room; others square off and shout and bawl for a bit until one of them storms off. But in general, everything's cool. Everything works.

But then I start to get disturbing reports. I hear from multiple people that one of my guests is showing child pornography to anyone that wanders near enough. I already know that some of the guests at this party are kids themselves. Multiple people seek me out (You can always find me in the kitchen etc.) and ask me - beg me - to remove this person. And it's my party. My responsibility, ultimately.

So what do I do?

Well - if I'm Dick fucking Costolo (CEO of Twitter) I put my fingers in my ears, shut my eyes and go 'LA LA LA LA LA I CAN'T FUCKING HEAR YOU LA LA LA LAAAAA.....' or something to that effect, anyway. And then I turn around and have another glass of 'Fuck You All' Punch.

Well, Dick - I'm here to tell you that your party sucks. The atmosphere might be great on times, the guests might be varied and interesting, but your house rules suck balls. 

To allow accounts that openly distribute child porn on Twitter and THEN drag your heels for DAYS while countless people plead with you to take action? Son, you need a fucking slap. Hard. It was lucky that so many of your 'guests' took it upon themselves to report what they found to external authorities, because it looks like you were too fucking busy being the big CEO  to take any notice yourself. Oh, and before you throw some bollocks in about your security measures being 'updated' and 'improved' - this was taken from a report in January 2012:

The Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre (Ceop) has urged Twitter to address its fears that some paedophiles use the site to discuss abuse and link to pornographic images.

Twitter said safety was a high priority and it acted immediately on complaints of inappropriate behaviour.                           BBC News Online, 11 January 2012

Which is clearly a massive pile of bullshit, Dick. 

Sort it fucking out before your party crashes early.

JH

Twatmobs And Tattle Tales

Hello. Remember me? I used to blog here.

The black dog, he been sniffing around, see. He don' make me wanna do much, no sir. 

I find I've been really quite subdued; almost oppressed in my ability to produce anything other than an incomprehensible whining noise when asked a question that isn't 'cup of tea, Jase?'

Even this - this is forced. Forced because I'm really rather ashamed of myself and my inability to achieve - but also because I know it's part of a gyroscopic process. The process of creating fuels the desire to create. It's true. 

Even my time on Twitter's suffered because of it. If I'm not in the mood to communicate with anyone, then I'm just not. Real life or online, it's all the same to me. And that galls me too, because there are a lot of lovely weird odd sexy interesting people on 'The Twitter' that I generally (and genuinely) like interacting with. 

Of course, it's not all snakes and no ladders. I've had my 40th birthday present early, from my wonderful daughter and her lovely mother (If you want to stay great friends with a partner who you clearly can't live with, I thoroughly recommend splitting up - just saying). After years of feeling like I've had a limb removed, I have a bass guitar again. You know that bit in Thor when he gets his hammer back and shit starts getting real? Yeah, that's right. Still fucking got it.

Enough preamble. It's the 2012 Olympics. The biggest and most expensive misdirection operation the UK has ever embarked upon. The country's most vulnerable and needy are being pissed all over from the great heights of Westminster. The old and infirm are being brutalised, and our free speech is now non-existent. Which leads me to the reason I'm writing this blog.

Today, a 17 year old kid was arrested because he said something a bit out of order on The Twitter. It was aimed at one of our Olympic 'stars', thereby generating a wave of hatred from thousands of people, and some subjective attention from our fine news media. The phrase 'Twatmob' has been used in the past to describe the massed outrage against an individual on forums such as Twitter, and it strikes me as a perfect descriptive word for it. A Twatmob. A mob, comprised of twats. Yeah. Perfect.

I read his timeline. Went from cocky posturing to confusion, to fear, attempted apology, fear again, anger, outrage, fear and back to anger as he tried to process what his smart-assed comment had caused. 

Had it happened at poolside, there might have been an altercation; perhaps even a scuffle. Claire Balding might have been accidentally punched in the face. It would have made the news, certainly, but the Twatmob would not have been invoked. 

There are lots of wonderful things about The Twitter. But to think it might inadvertently be the final nail in the coffin of truly free speech isn't doing much for my desire to engage with it on any serious level anymore. Of course, I jettisoned Facebook ages ago. And it's the change in the collective psyche that Facebook is largely responsible for that has created this situation. 

The technology changes, and it creates new shapes for our consciousness to fill. But It's a more fascistic, hysterical, overreactive version of the hive mind. It's the kind of collective that will report dissent, that will obey the party rule without question because the alternative is to allow chaos to rule. Just black or white. No 50 shades of fucking grey here, kids.

You're one of us, or you're not. If you're not, prepare to be outcast.

JH

Moral Philosophical Quagmire #1

Four girls under the age of six. 
Now again, in bold. Four girls under the age of six. 
Look at that fucking sentence. Keep looking at it until those words dissolve and become meaningless; make them irrelevant to you, like I've had to do to stop myself from exploding with rage. And then, once they've become transparent - lost all their weight, their power, their potential to engage you on any level whatsoever, then keep reading.

Because those four girls that now mean nothing to you were part of the body count that one US Staff Sergeant just racked up in a personal skeet shoot in Kandahar. Took his gun, left the base in the middle of the night, chose some doors, kicked them in. Ended the lives of eleven children, three women and two men. Tried to burn some of the bodies for good measure.

Tell me, reader...

...are you a parent? Are you a father or a mother to a bright, precious, beautiful child? A mischievous, loving, infuriating, amazing, frustrating, incredible son or daughter that makes every day on this planet full of lies and death and corruption and oppression and pain just that bit more bearable? Do you, as I do, lie awake, terrified of what you'd do - how you'd cope - if they were suddenly taken away from you?

Do you look at the news footage of the man in Syria, or the woman in Palestine, or the family in Egypt, all cradling the lifeless bodies of their own children? Do you see it in their eyes? Lying in wait behind the grief and the despair? Do you recognise it? Do you see it in yourself?

THE DEFINITION OF TERRORISM (Dictionary.com)

noun

1. The use of violence or threats to intimidate or coerce, especially for political purposes.

2. The state of fear or submission produced by terrorism or terrorisation


So tell me, Obama. Tell me, Cameron. Tell me how what YOU do, what YOU sanction and YOU condone differs from the above definition?

Tell me. I'm all fucking ears.

Hey, reader. Chances are you live in either one of the two countries I just mentioned. If you don't, congratulations - perhaps you actually DO live in a democracy or a 'free' country (increasingly unlikely, I'll admit). Be warned. If you are American or British, and you agree with what I've written here, your government considers YOU a terrorist. You are a threat because you dare to disagree. This is not democracy at work. This is fascism. 


And this will not go away, this will not end, without the forced removal of our current tyrants. They will not go quietly, they will try and tell you that everything they do is for your safety, security and long-term benefit. They will show you monsters that live overseas and tell you how those monsters are planning to slaughter you and dismantle everything you hold dear. They are frantically trying to hold onto an economic model that cannot survive because it's based entirely on a lie (fiat currency). They know it will eventually fail, but they will pretend it can be regenerated by hard work and sacrifice on our part. They steal our money and call it taxation. They keep us ignorant and call it 'state education'. They slaughter innocents in their thousands in other countries and call it 'the war on terror'. Why? Because they still think they fucking can.


The US soldier that slaughtered sixteen Afghanistan innocents the other night has no doubt been asked the question 'why?' many times since he handed himself in. As yet, the media has given no reason.

I can't help but try to fathom his logic, to understand why he'd do that himself. As a father to two children back home, why he'd take a gun and end the lives of those little children that already had their lives ruined and their childhood taken away by a war that shouldn't be happening.

They say he's done four tours of Iraq. He's as indoctrinated as it gets into the US Military mindset. But ask yourself. Did he suspect or know what effect his actions would have on the war, on the perception of the U.S. in the eyes of the world and in particular in the eyes of the Afghan people, before he went out that night?


I suspect the answer is yes. A part of me believes that the atrocity he committed may have put a bullet between the eyes of the War machine itself. To do something so completely without justification or compassion, acting as a representative of an invading nation, is to hold that entire nation to account in front of the world - to force them to justify the unjustifiable. And it can't be done. The Afghan people want this man's blood, and rightly so. The anti-US sentiment is off the scale, and rightly so. They, along with their lapdog the UK, are invaders, usurpers and bullies.

One can only wonder what was in that soldier's mind. But he MUST have known his actions would have terrible repercussions for the 'campaign' he was part of. And if that were true, might it not also follow that he purposely committed an atrocity that couldn't be ignored in order to deliberately generate an adverse reaction to it?


That's a really fucking uncomfortable thought.


JH