Tuesday, August 08, 2017

...TILL FINALLY THEY CAME FOR THE BIGOTS, AND THERE WAS NO ONE LEFT TO SPEAK UP FOR ME.

That Google guy who thinks ladies don't perform as well in tech as men because they lack "men’s higher drive for status" and other butch traits has, predictably, attracted the adulation of straightmale-rights dorksBen Domenech begins his entry with a bad-faith clusterbomb:
Fear of crackdown on free speech is a bipartisan thing these days. In the run-up to the 2016 election, conservatives were terrified that Hillary Clinton would ratchet up the crackdown on right of center groups seen under the Obama administration’s IRS, and particularly the exposure of even modest members of the donor class to public outcry along the lines of Brendan Eich’s experience at Mozilla.
(ed. note: The IRS and the Brendan Eich controversies were always both bullshit, and only mentioned during the 2016 campaign when wingnuts needed a break from Benghazi, I Have Here In My Hand a List of  33,000 Emails, and Trump Is a Businessman He Will Fix Everything.)

Domenech goes on to say that Donald Trump's not as hard on free speech as liberals think (notwithstanding that his Attorney General recently threatened a bunch of reporters), and even defends Trump's temperament, reminding us that Obama once had an interview with "a YouTube star who sits in bathtubs full of milk and cereal" -- an old wingnut trick to make the gomers think Obama was interviewed while this person was in the bathtub. (Comparing even that favorably with the history of our Pussygrabber in Chief is of course out of the question.)

Anyway Domenech moves on to one of the clumsier sure-corporations-can-do-what-they-what-but-homina-homina-homina bits I've seen:
Now, Google is not a public platform, and of course there is all sorts of awful content that is on a daily basis flagged and removed with objections that are justified. But you can see the direction this type of story is headed. First Google will be forced to hire people to do a better job of policing its sites, tasked with removing “extremist” content – and then there will be definitional drifts in how such content is considered extreme. What is religious speech in some parts of the world will be hate speech in some other parts of the world, and then the ability to use the platforms that have come to dominate the space will be determined by the priorities of the corporations involved.
My devotion to capitalism has bitten me in the ass again! We have been around this mulberry bush before, so I'll make it short: Show me, please, a conservative who has similarly spoken up for the rights of other at-will employees fired for speech who were not peddling modish rightwing bigotry, and maybe I'll take this more seriously.

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