23 Comments

What these "journalists" are displaying is the classic behavior traits of malignant narcissism. They often engage in malicious rumor mongering and outright libel that does immense amounts of damage to innocent people, and then claim victimhood when called out on their s***. That is classic malignant narcissist behavior. And they are incapable of self-reflection nor an iota of compassion for others. In other words, they're a bunch of Lord Ha-Ha's doing the bidding of their fascist masters.

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The only people being silenced these days are those being deplatformed by Google/Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon and GoDaddy. In the last five years, many, many individuals and outfits have been deplatformed by these firms. How many of them were mass media journalists?

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Is the PEN Report an April Fool's Joke? They can't be serious.

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The simple solution to this - offered as an admitted old codger - is to stay the f**k off Twitter and Facebook. And internet comments sections.

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Abandon social media. That’s the only solution. They are poisonous, manipulative, and shallow. They were fun for awhile, but now are beyond redemption.

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What never ceases to amaze me are the double standards and special pleading, which Tracey highlights here.

How someone can go from calling the lightest criticism "abuse" and "harassment," to then cruelly engaging in shaming, name calling and throwing emotional barbs, and not noticing the contradiction, and expecting no one else to notice, blows my mind.

Of course we don't treat such "abuse" seriously Ms. Journalist, because neither do you.

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One of the hottest takes found in the Report is the recommended creation of an “SOS button” that would allow journalists to “instantly activate ... in-platform protections,”

Every electronic device has an off button. Use it to protect yourself from words and thoughts. There is no button which will deactivate the rest of the world.

" as well as “an emergency hotline (phone or chat) providing personalized, trauma-informed support in real-time.”

Tech opportunity - develop a bot to reaffirm elite journalists who are traumatized by reality. No human would volunteer for that.

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Great writing, I keep searching Monty Python to see where they get their material from. How many crying rooms does she have? I wrote on this topic here https://riclexel.substack.com/p/beyond-1984

The manipulation of words is so insidious, and comes when student reading comprehension and match ability scores are at the all-time lowest. Half of the population literally cannot comprehend what is going on in the life around them. Scary how funny they are

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Thank you ! Same "journalists" have been completely silent for years on the persecution and torture of the publisher of the century and leading free speech advocate who deserves Nobel Peace Prize, Julian Assange.....

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And - a little bit more on the Honorable Kamala Harris:

http://reason.com/archives/2018/08/21/backpage-founders-larkin-and-lacey-speak

Kamala Harris' office accused him of pimping, including some counts involving minors. The Texas state attorney general said he was "making money off...modern-day slavery."

Lacey and Larkin were also arrested and charged with "conspiracy to commit pimping." They spent four days jailed in Sacramento, California. Harris, who at the time was running for the U.S. Senate, called them "despicable" and labeled Backpage "the world's top online brothel."

News of the arrest was covered extensively in major media outlets, with Harris quoted prominently. Her complaint was that bad actors and teenagers sometimes used the site—and her evidence that Backpage "knew" this to be true was that it reported suspected underage ads to NCMEC and cooperated with police. Harris was using Backpage's history of working with law enforcement against it.

"Make no mistake," said Lacey and Larkin in statement that month. "Harris has won all that she was looking to win when she had us arrested. Like Sheriff Arpaio, she issued her sanctimonious public statement, controlled her media cycle and got her 'perp walk' on the evening news." While such targeting was not new to them, this was the first time a state had decided it was "okay to consider the First Amendment implications after, not before, hauling people off to jail."

In early December, a Sacramento Superior Court judge dismissed the case. On December 23, with just a few days left in office, Harris tried again, filing new conspiracy-to-commit-pimping charges against Lacey, Larkin, and Ferrer, along with allegations of money laundering. Ferrer also faced 12 counts of pimping. Again, all pimping and conspiracy charges were dismissed, though the judge allowed a money-laundering case to proceed.

"We've never, ever broken the law," Larkin says. "Never have, never wanted to. This isn't really—I know this is probably heresy—this isn't about sex work to me. This is about speech."

"This is the biggest speech battle in America right now," Lacey adds. "The First Amendment isn't about protecting the rights of the McLaughlin Group to speak their mind on television. This is specifically what the fuck it's about. Unpopular speech. Dangerous speech. Speech that threatens the norm. Not only do we have that right, our readers have that right. The [Backpage] posters have that right.

"We spent 40 years doing journalism, groundbreaking journalism, and they want to take all that away," he says—because "they don't like who exercised their constitutional rights to use our advertising platform. And that has no goddamn bearing. The law doesn't say, 'You get to pick and choose who exercises their constitutional rights by whether or not you like their lifestyle.' It's just incredible."

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Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words, now there is real trauma.

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Oy, just oy.

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One wonders how Hunter Thompson or Norman Mailer would deal with online criticism of their work. I don’t think that they would reach for the “SOS” button. My guess is that they would reach for something else and deal with it themselves without complaining.

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Michael - thanks for articles without handcuffs or biased restraints. As the Woke culture try’s to replace the 10 Commandments with Twitter law, we go from “Holier than Thou” to “Wokiest of all”. If you live long enough one thing an observant individual can see, is the shifting of power, first based on abuses of the powerful, then the shift to something else to dilute it. That “something else” (Woke, Twitter, FB, media, politicians...) takes on almost the exact same abuses, but applies them to the former power group. Christianity was the basis of our legal system for a couple hundred years; is “Woke Culture” that new replacement or a phase? Will corporate CEO’s, Hollywood or CNN set our morals, laws and punishment? We can only hope the pendulum has reached an apex, and we return to some balanced level. If we lose free speech to the “Woke” we’ve lost our freedom to oppose those we disagree with.

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In conflating your humane, articulate, and non-abusive posts with those vitriol filled, irrational screeds we are all so familiar with - you accusers are making the lives of those who have suffered real trauma harder, drowning out their voices, shutting them out (as they would like to do to you). so challenge them; which paragraph exactly sent them into shock? A jury on that paragraph will surely find in your favour.

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"Evidently for these downtrodden journalists, the world is their therapist, and all conscientious citizens (in both the private and public sectors) are now obliged to assume an active role in aiding their navigation through a never-ending saga of psychological turmoil."

Michael Tracey now added to my Substack subscription list.

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