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That's because there's a terminology gap.
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I hear "nobody wants to take away all your guns" a lot - which seems demonstrably false - but what guns do gun-control advocates want to take away, or restrict? Most of the time I don't know and I suspect that the advocates don't know either. If we had the "reasonable gun control" I keep hearing about, what guns would be limited? I'm arguably not a complete idiot, but I can't figure it out. But don't pretend you're actually going to change anything. But is it working for you here? Reasonable gun control advocates, how far will you get with the message "a vote for reasonable gun control is a 'fuck you' to the hicks"? Gun control opponents, for how long do you think you'll thrive with "allowing gun control is like allowing gay marriage"? We use culture-bundling to get out the vote, or to associate one policy position with another one. Your intended message may be "the government doesn't get to determine my rights based on its assessment of what I 'need," nor do fellow citizens who may arbitrarily determine I don't 'need' a wide variety of things based on their concerns." But what you are conveying is that "the people who want gun control are God-hating, kale-chewing, coastal-elite socialists who want to imprison your pastor for not marrying gays."Ī lot of this is deliberate. The intended message may be "fuck the people who don't seriously debate gun control because they accept vast campaign donations and they are afraid of NRA-led primary attacks and who refuse to even consider whether there's something we can do about madmen spraying crowds of innocents with bullets." But your message is "fuck you and your flyover-country Daddy teaching you to shoot in the woods behind the house when you were twelve and fuck the church you went to afterwards." In this bundle, guns mean Republican, guns mean conservative, guns mean not liking President Obama, guns mean religious, guns mean socially traditional, guns mean rural, guns mean football and Nascar and using fewer than five words to order coffee. It's a classic example of guns-as-culture. But it didn't persuade anyone - other than, perhaps, a few more people to vote Republican. I'm sure this felt good to the people who made it and distributed it, and to the like-minded people who saw it. I saw this on my Facebook feed last week: We use guns as shorthand for a bundle of ideas. Most of our talk about guns is cultural signalling. Gun Talk Is Cultural Talk, And Culture Mattersįirst, we'd have to stop framing the debate in terms that suggest "I hate you and everyone like you. Imagine we wanted to identify our irreducible philosophical and practical differences, seek any areas of agreement, persuade anyone on the fence, and change some minds. Say we wanted to have a productive conversation. Do you think it's going to build a majority on any issue? Take a look at the discussion of guns on your Facebook feed right now. We yell, we signal to the like-minded, we circle our wagons, we take shots at opponents. Much of our modern American dialogue about gun rights and gun control is like that. It neither seeks nor finds common ground. It pleases me, it entertains like-minded people, and it reaffirms that which people already believe.īut it doesn't persuade. How could I? We just brought on Marc Randazza and the man swears like a drunken Newark stevedore with his dick caught in a French press.Īt least most of the time, I grasp that my self-indulgence doesn't accomplish much. My purpose is not to condemn such behavior. Boasting, bloviating, berating, shouting, snarking, and swearing are all pleasures, indulged with little if any guilt. Twitter is still where the abusive can rail on and on before they get canned, while anyone with an earnest interest in using the site in good faith must adhere to vague, unhelpful policies in how they deal with all that trash.I confess from the start of this: I enjoy unproductive talk. Now, if Twitter reviews this, and thinks that's the right result - well, that would be something else again. Want a platform with no dumb policies? Create one or pay for one.įor the moment, I doubt this reflects an evaluation by anyone at Twitter that "it's okay for a deranged bigot to threaten people on Twitter but not okay to publish his threats." Rather, this is part of the inevitable result of automating responses to abuse complaints. When you use a "free" service like Twitter and Facebook, you're buying into the policies and attitudes they pursue, for better or worse.
#Popehat twitter free#
It's got the right to free speech and free association. It has every right to suspend me or kick me off, however foolish its reason. But it was White's response that fell afoul of Twitter's mysterious rules on posting personally identifying information-even when such information is disclosed and widely publicized.