Jonathon Kay is entirely correct here.
I quit Twitter in January and it was a good thing. I go on for sports and sports alone because there is nothing quite as fun as sharing a sporting event with other people.
The rest is garbage.
Jonathon Kay is entirely correct here.
I quit Twitter in January and it was a good thing. I go on for sports and sports alone because there is nothing quite as fun as sharing a sporting event with other people.
The rest is garbage.
Never been on Twitter … never will. Although I could definitely use the forced brevity. I wholeheartedly agree with the “high school cafeteria” analogy. While engaging in a mass FOOD FIGHT !!! might be fun … once … it gets really old if it’s day-in and day-out.
Having said that … I, 100% … APPROVE of President Trump’s off the cuff TWEETS !!! By-passing the “dark” MSM media filter is simply brilliant. But one DOES need to be careful about feeding the leftist beast with inarticulate statements … which get pounced-on like a slow Wildebeast …
Sports are good – I also use it for traffic reports – local news radio tweets accidents in town, plus OPP does major highways
twitter: noun. to post a brief message online.
root word twit.
twit: slang, an idjit.
Never been on Twit or Fake book
Gott in himmel!!!!
Did you see how much he wrote on this ? Is he paid by the word?
Me either. Never opened a Facebook page. Never will. You want to be my “friend” … fine … drop by the house or send me an email. And I PROMISE I will never send you a “BLAST” (or whatever it is)… detailing my breakfast foods.
Naw, it’s just JK whining again. Twitter isn’t the problem. The “problem” is that he and his friends are now getting a taste of their own medicine.
https://www.fivefeetoffury.com/2017/06/23/journalists-your-moral-and-intellectual-superiors-jonathan-thanks-now-you-can-shut-up-kay-edition/
A wise old friend of mine, a veteran of the internet and bulletin boards before it, said to me 15 years ago that “online heat is virtual heat”. At the time he was right.
However, as Kay points out, the Stupid Twitter people are perfectly willing to go after the jobs, families and reputations of people they disagree with. And within Jon’s little world this can have actual consequences.
The online SJWs are having a moment and I suspect that moment will last a bit longer in the rarified world of magazine editors and “street activists”. If you live in that world you are stuck having to play by its ever-changing “rules”. (Rule #1 – never get a tranny mad at you.)
The good news is that in the real world, among us normals, these Twitter storms simply do not signify. If someone came to me and said “Don’t hire X because he said something disrespectful about Y on Twitter” I would laugh in his face and make a mental note to no longer take him seriously.
At the end of the day there will be a pile of bodies – mainly insufficiently politically correct leftists – with a dumb blue bird circling over it. No one will care.
Exactly. Like many of his ilk, his sensibilities are too delicate for criticism…especially the belittling kind.
That and he’s just discovered that his “friends” are cannibals. He’s no longer sure of how and to whom he’s virtue signalling.
They are bullied because the allow themselves to be bullied.
Fake apologies and all the rest of that PC gutless nonsense is what encourages this.
If you write something and someone takes it the wrong way all you need to do is explain what you meant and that’s the end of it.
If they continue to be offended or triggered that is your problem, not theirs.
Er, last sentence should read ‘that is their problem, not yours.’
His article is not really about Twitter or social media. It’s about Orwellian totalitarianism. Check the link to see what happened to the cbc editor who commented on culture appropriation. It’s chilling, shades of Cambodian re-education camps.
BS
Justine , Wynne , Liberal , Hillary luvin Kay was getting blasted daily
his bullshit was not being swallowed
his Trump hating Fake News made up garbage exposed daily
Kay is a compulsive liar
Kay had a snowflake meltdown
Agreed — Orwellian totalitarianism is where we are headed. This is mostly being pushed by the left. It is outrageous. Kay`s article is thought provoking and captures the impact that social media has as we march towards totalitarianism. Social media invites `group think`. This has a very negative impact on ideas, creativity and expressing alternative views. Kay provides some examples — there are many, many more.
Exactly. His article should have been titled How I Discovered Too Late That I’d Devoted My Life to Making Friends With Evil People and Working For the Wrong Side.
instead, it gestures in the general direction of Twitter as some malign force.
His “friends” and fellow elites didn’t need Twitter to turn on each other. They never have.
Read Witness by Whittaker Chambers or Radical Son by David Horowitz, or anything about the Soviet show trials.
Kay has point. The fact that he used to be part of it is just delicious irony.
I’ve read the first two volumes of The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn relates how the Soviets experimented with show trials on a local basis far away from Moscow but the locals ended up running the regional officials out of town on a rail because they could see through the farce.
The conditions had to be right, everyone had to drink the same cool aid, share the same perceived objectives, live in the same box for the whole thing to work. Kay for a brief moment saw he was inside the box and he didn’t like it. You’re right, he thinks twitter is the box. But the box is his friends; it’s him; it’s the echo chamber they’ve created and held up with their sophistry through the press and twitter.
Thanks for the references. I’ll check them out.
I think you are being unfair to Kay. His point is well taken, and many perfectly reasonable people have been professionally destroyed or nearly destroyed by Twitter. Tom Flanigan is one example. I have always found Kay to be thoughtful. In this case he takes issue with the potential damage done to individuals and social discourse via Twitter. I especially admire Kay not going along with the dictates of political correctness. Some of the critical comments about Kay being part of the nasty group think attacks are not warranted.
“Group Think” exists exclusive of Twitter. The key to group think is the group. Ideas are subject to attack regardless of where they are expressed. That’s why free speech is so hard. This “nasty group” and what it thinks would still exist without Twitter. Kay made the choice to run with that pack. He seems to regret it in this instance but it sure looks like crocodile tears to me.
Kay did not choose to “run with that pack”. I don’t know where you are getting that. He works as a journalist, but it is rather silly to conclude all journalists are nasty,or that Kay is in any way friendly with the ones who are. He is attacking the group think on twitter — and yes it exists elsewhere, but there is no validity to claiming Kay is part of it.
I’m getting that right from his own piece. He relates a story of sitting down with a friend “of letters” who had a pretty rough week on Twitter. He does not sit outside and report on what he sees, he’s in the heart of it and doesn’t like the fact that he’s been on the receiving end lately. Of course what he’s saying is true, but that’s been obvious to anyone outside of the echo chamber. Dog bites man isn’t news.
“Don’t look for anything to get better…it’s only going to get worse. ‘
Duh?
The ship of state,Canada is going aground, I do not see a mud/sand bottom.
The Hull is already leaking like a sieve,I suspect the bottom is going to be torn right out on the next impact.
Too late to change course, to even throw the engines into reverse is gonna take too much bloodshed.
Far better to pack the essentials and slip off the boat .
So is that defeatism?
Or realism?
I have been bailing for 40 years.. meanwhile the officers have partied drunkenly on.
How many fools and bandits are you willing to kill?
To prevent the already happening?
I prefer to let them do themselves in, believing I am sufficiently prepared and bloody minded enough to survive and prosper as this Kleptocracy eats its own.
Theft by government is an unstoppable force, being fully accepted and encouraged by 60% of those who vote, short of financial collapse, you have any idea of how to PEACEFULLY reform fools and bandits?
And when the bankruptcy comes,I am sure the same creatures who caused it will be loudly blaming everything except themselves and demanding all who have prepared.. be robbed to save their asses..
Oh wait thats already happening.
Kay is out to lunch. He says, “since the solution requires collective action that cuts against the self-interest of the dogmatists who now dominate Twitter, there is no obvious path to a systematic solution.” On the contrary, those obvious paths are on bright display in the nationalist movements in Europe and the Trump-voting deplorables in the States. These growing movements are the only ones assaulting PC tyranny which is itself in large part the creation of the multiculturalist ideology that is presently infecting the West. The idiot cult of diversity does nothing but crank social tensions and undermine cohesion which consequently can only be maintained by strict control of what people are allowed to say and do. Notice how most of the incidents of censorship and repression that Kay refers to have ethnic and racial underpinnings: BLM, cultural appropriation, aboriginal issues; to which we can add the Islamophobiaphobia, affirmative action, uncontrolled mass immigration. These are all areas where puritanical goodspeak is imposed, not just by the Twitterrati but also by so-called hate-speech laws. Kay declares that the days of racially, ethnically and culturally homogeneous nation states is over for people of white European descent: “that world is gone, in large part thanks to the “identity politics” activists that cranky white cultural critics are always complaining about.” That is precisely the world in which freedom of expression and association were able to develop and grow in the first place. Destroy that world and then good luck holding on to those freedoms. If Kay is right, then the new puritanism infecting the West is here to stay, at least until the antagonisms boil over and the place explodes. You can’t have it both ways. European, American and Australian nationalists are the only ones who have understood this.