Tea at Trianon: Twitter’s New Trans Speech Rules

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Twitter’s New Trans Speech Rules

From The Federalist:

Running a social media company sounds like a terrible job. Sure, you get to be really important and make a ton of money selling users’ private information to political consulting firms and presumably underwear manufacturers, but you also have to figure out how to avoid censorship in an industry where the business model is “hand a megaphone to a bunch of froth-mouthed rage-addicts and let them spend all day screaming every demon-thought that’s ever popped in their heads.”

Such rage addicts seem more attracted to Twitter than to any other social media platform, so you might think the company would have more experience, and thus more expertise, at the delicate balancing act of defending free speech while policing vile and ugly language. However, with a recent tweak to their terms of service, Twitter has made it quite clear that it’s not in the business of creating a platform for people to exchange ideas without being cruel. Rather, it’s in the business of silencing conservative voices and exiling anyone who deviates from the new political-religious orthodoxy. (Read more.)