I used to think like this, but then I realize that a good portion of the students who are used to this kind of institutionalized infantilizing internalize that it is proper and necessary.
Then they go on to agitate for similar structures “in the real world”. Something to be especially mindful of is the fact that these students are going to “elite” schools and are therefore likely to end up in management or decision making positions.
See the ultimate example in Yoel Roth (PhD in woke nonsense) acting as the stick-up-the-ass hall monitor for our entire civilization.
Other than that, your knowledge of current events is spot on.
https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2022/12/22/how-twitter-hid...
1. These accounts weren't promoted, they were just protected from being "deranked".
2. Twitter and Meta suspended most of these accounts, and made public that they had done so. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/19/us/politics/pentagon-soci...
So the entirely of this "scandal" is that Twitter agreed to shield these accounts from being attacked themselves (mass labeled as spam) - which as it turns out wasn't needed because according to their own records, these accounts received 1-2 impressions per post. In other words, no one even saw them.
Then Twitter banned them and pubicaly fingered them.
Should Twitter have done this? No. Is it proof of an engine of Twitter/US Gov cooperation to promote certain things and silence others? No.
Sometimes individual government employees report posts, the same way you can; this doesn’t have the force of law and you can ignore them.
1) Twitter censorship often took place at the discretion of employees, including Yoel Roth
2) The FBI was in consistent contact with Roth and co, directing them on which topics and individuals to censor
3) the CIA also had representatives who met with Twitter to help arrange censorship.
Best to catch up on the latest breaking news before wading into these discussions. Im sure you’d agree that mis, dis, and malinformation are extremely dangerous to our democracy!
2. There was no direction. FBI pointed out content that filed Twitter's rules (NOT its rules), and Twitter sometimes took action and sometimes didn't, at their own discretion.
3. Communications yes, "arrange censorship" no. See above.
I get that the "Twitter Files" is a perfectly engineered PR campaign to convince conservatives of the one thing they believed all along "they are censoring us!". Well, you are half right. "They" meaning Twitter did take repeated actions against right wing accounts for breaking its rules against harassment, election/public health misinfo, and general awfulness. That's true. But the US government never demanded or received any action.
If you need a reminder about what free speech actually protects (hint: it's not the consequences of being an awful person online). https://xkcd.com/1357/
The part where he mentioned posts being deleted without saying what they were for instance - you can look all those up on archive.org. They’re penises. The part today about the CIA is just nonsense.
Similarly, the laptop story was suppressed by Trump’s FBI because it sounds worse when you post vague insinuations about it then if you saw the real thing, an obvious fake[1]. You can look up the original “reporting” on the archive too - it comes from Guo Wengui, a Chinese billionaire friend of Giuliani, and it’s full of lurid writing about, again, the size of his penis[2] and claims it’s full of child porn.
[1] https://twitter.com/revhowardarson/status/159983985145688883...
[2] https://twitter.com/beijingpalmer/status/1325259822829334535
Including the ;) is unnecessary and makes this post come across in a really condescending way.
Well, they only do because people, probably including yourself recruit them preferentially. They don't magically end up in these positions.
Disagree? Make sure you exclude graduates from the top 20 universities in the US in your next recruiting event.
The parents of millennials (boomers) have been lamenting their creation for years already.
America created and raised these children and now seems to have some remorse about it, and history continues to repeat itself.
Maybe the dominant culture is leaving some folks behind.
It's a cultural shift that seems crafted:
Self-fulfillment -> follow your heart -> feelings first -> feelings only.
We have a whole generation of people who excuse bad behavior and failure with "I was having a hard time, I have to have my support peacock on the plane." None of these people heard "No" enough as a child.
There's value in teaching children to ignore name-calling. "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words can never hurt me." This is what we used to teach. People can be mean, don't let it affect you. Show grit, find it in yourself to continue anyway, and you'll succeed.
Now? Achieve power by exploring your victim-hood and collapse in shaking outrage because someone disagreed with you.
We need to start fixing this, and clearing these piles of frivolous administrators from the staff at universities would be a great start.
I think it's fair to say LGBTQ, women and brown folks are being hurt in tangible ways by dominant language (words can in fact hurt when they influence generations of behavior), and like most progress there seem to be some who are experiencing downsides now that things are changing.
Who decides who has sour grapes?
Were these bureaucrats just waiting in the wings for an excuse to pounce with regressive policy?
Blaming the staff without examining the broader cultural shift seems as bad as an emotional support peacock.
Words cannot harm you. Actions harm. Please stop perpetuating that nonsense.
Name-calling or epithet-hurling has not hurt anyone in a tangible way (tangible means "touchable" something physical). Bias, and discrimination based on bias or prejudice does cause economic and sometimes physical harm. It is proper behavior we need to teach, not hypersensitivity to phrasing.
I worry we throw the marginalized baby out with the bath water in discussions like this.
It causes far more harm on average than any minimal help it does in some cases. There’s substantial active harm in the amount of gaslighting and ill conceived redefinition of words going on. It’s exactly the sort of whitewashing of thought that’d lead to the world found in The Giver.
> throw out the marginalized baby
I think that’s just an updated version of the “white mans burden” — the white man has a burden to take care of the poor colored people.
The real way to change such things is over time by hard work and engagement. Dismantling actually oppressive systems in financial systems and laws. Giving opportunities not outcomes. Reducing things like inflation which disproportionately affects poorer people. And a hundred other things, all of which were working over the last decades with improvements in almost every metric for marginalized groups. Still lots of real work left.
Were these bureaucrats just waiting in the wings for an excuse to pounce
with regressive policy?
Of course, they don't do this for themselves. No, of course not. They do it to improve the moral worth of the people. Their zealotry is driven by the purest of intentions.
Who decides who has sour grapes?
"The beatings will continue until morale improves."
This rings true to me, and I find it very insightful. Thank you for writing it.
This is it. This sentence is 100% correct.
OI. The parents of the millenials are the X-gens mate.
Sometimes known as the lost generation, or latch-key-kids etc.
The boomers are _our_ parents! And don't you forget it.
Now, get off my lawn :)
Usually, yes, but not always! I'm 29 (born in 1993), which I think is pretty clearly in the range of millennial (definitions vary, and I've seen cutoffs anywhere between 1994 and 1997, but I don't think anyone would put me in Gen Z by any reasonable stretch of the imagination). My parents were born in late 1958 and early 1959, which is probably not within the most common definition of boomer, but I've met other people my age with parents born a few years before mine. I don't think anyone would consider someone born in, say, 1955, to be Gen X, and having a kid at 39 in 1994 would have been somewhat unusual but not really that crazy (especially if the other parent happened to be a few years younger).
If that still doesn't convince you, I don't think I have anything else I could say, but maybe reading this comic might provide a compelling argument: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EOdaSW2XUAE1Pxm?format=png&name=...
I get where you're coming from but I think maybe relax a bit there...
The dirty secret is that they haven't really had those supposed educational advantages for a long time, if ever.
I attended undergrad at a large university that was (and still is) around the 75-100 range in US News rankings. I then attended graduate school at a top-10 US News school. My expectation coming in was that compared to my peers in undergrad, the undergrad students I was teaching as grad student would on average be smarter and work harder, and would have better resources available to them. All three were false. They were on average more ambitious and more demanding (in terms of e.g. asking for points back on assignments), but not smarter.
There are very real advantages to attending an elite school, but they are primarily social rather than educational. Having letters of recommendation from top scholars helps you get into grad school. Making friends with other people attending an elite school can provide all sorts of opportunities down the road. Just having the name on your resume will open doors for you. The undergrad education itself, though, probably isn't better.
Not only are the students of less quality, the pace has to match the bottom, so they don't fail out all the special entries.
All those schools have going for them these days is a reputation that’s no longer deserved, social connections, wealth and a sense of entitlement that scores them freebies from time to time.
Based on my own experience at an elite school (as a graduate student, teaching undergrads), this is definitely false.
> Why are people so willing to accept that from childhood leagues to professional, in basketball, football, soccer, etc. society scours and finds all the best players, and nobody is out to prove that it's not true, but that somehow we as a society are incapable doing it in intellectual fields?
Because athletic performance can be objectively and reasonably easily measured along many (not all) dimensions. Intellectual performance is (1) much harder to measure objectively and (2) much less socially acceptable to use such measurements. Good grades can indicate high intellectual performance, or they can indicate grade inflation. A high SAT score can indicate high intellectual ability, or it can indicate that your parents paid $4000 for SAT prep courses and 1-on-1 tutoring. Basing college acceptance on a battery of psychological tests might be somewhat better than current methods at selecting elite students, but (1) those tests would immediately become the subjects of a new test-prep industry and (2) it's not socially acceptable to do that.
My gut feeling is being responsible for your own well being (rent, food, job) is important for contextualizing other aspects of your life, like studying vs play.