At first I thought it was straight spam. Then I looked again and saw that it might not be. Then I read it carefully and laughed for a full minute.
Then I realized that if I found it entertaining, that means I've spent way too much time on comment threads in intra-left debates speckled with porn spam for my life to be well-spent. I'm going for a walk.
Paula's put her finger on...probably a lot of things, but among those things is an insightful point about free speech: even free speech's most-vigorous advocates and users happily sweep entire categories of speech, like spam, off the table as if they couldn't possibly count as speech. When I encountered 4chan way back when, I was struck that even anonymous posters who enthusiastically threw around slurs, continually instructed each other to install malware and kill themselves, and butted against the edge of child-porn laws, had spam deleted with a quickness.
I've never conversed with an actual free-speech fundamentalist; everyone ends up denying some speech as Obviously Beyond The Pale. The meaningful free-speech debate is less about who supports it and who doesn't (I couldn't name anyone who actually supports free speech in toto), and more about which kinds of speech ought to count as Obviously Beyond The Pale.
An interesting pick by The Atlantic. Looking forward to seeing her face off against Conor Friedersdorf.
I clicked on the link and entered my credit card number. I'm sure she'll write me back, she's just busy.
Jeff I respect your dedication, this post must have taken FOREVER
thank you, I laughed.
At first I thought it was straight spam. Then I looked again and saw that it might not be. Then I read it carefully and laughed for a full minute.
Then I realized that if I found it entertaining, that means I've spent way too much time on comment threads in intra-left debates speckled with porn spam for my life to be well-spent. I'm going for a walk.
I felt dirty reading this. Excuse me while I install a malware detector on my phone.
Paula's put her finger on...probably a lot of things, but among those things is an insightful point about free speech: even free speech's most-vigorous advocates and users happily sweep entire categories of speech, like spam, off the table as if they couldn't possibly count as speech. When I encountered 4chan way back when, I was struck that even anonymous posters who enthusiastically threw around slurs, continually instructed each other to install malware and kill themselves, and butted against the edge of child-porn laws, had spam deleted with a quickness.
I've never conversed with an actual free-speech fundamentalist; everyone ends up denying some speech as Obviously Beyond The Pale. The meaningful free-speech debate is less about who supports it and who doesn't (I couldn't name anyone who actually supports free speech in toto), and more about which kinds of speech ought to count as Obviously Beyond The Pale.
An interesting pick by The Atlantic. Looking forward to seeing her face off against Conor Friedersdorf.
Gold, Jerry, gold!!
Clearly Jeff read FdB’s latest call to action: https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/it-could-be-so-much-better-than-this
zOMG
This was fucking brilliant. Totally forgot about the week of Paula Fox spamming everyone.