Brian of London: Thank heavens I’m not on Facebook any more…….

Thank heavens I’m not on Facebook any more

I’m so glad I was removed from Facebook and have a home here on Steem! Have you seen their new terms of service?

“By continuing to use Facebook, you hereby agree to serve as a loyal foot soldier in any wars, domestic or overseas, that must be fought to defend Mark Zuckerberg and his company from hostile forces,”

“Once this agreement has been ratified, Facebook reserves the right to summon users for medical inspection, at which point eligible users will be trained and ultimately deployed to take down any government that threatens our social network’s sovereignty, including the United States of America. In addition, once signed, all users will be required to renounce their country of birth and automatically become a citizen of Facebook.”

This is, of course, satire from The Onion…. but only just. Read the whole post here.

On a more serious note, The Verge has been publishing extracts from a 2 hour Q&A with Zuckerberg. Overnight in their email they highlighted something new about Hate Speech, they haven’t directly posted this to their site yet so I’m quoting it here because it really is fascinating. My emphasis and comments added.

All Hands on Deck: Hate speech

Here’s a question from the July Q&As that I found notable for two reasons. One, it gets at internal tensions around Facebook’s hate speech policies. Two, Zuckerberg’s answer — which is basically that too much content is hosted on Facebook for the company to apply any level of nuance to individual comments — speaks to how the challenge of content moderation has overwhelmed the company despite a massive investment in contracted moderators.

Question: According to your policies “men are trash” is considered tier-one hate speech. So what that means is that our classifiers are able to automatically delete most of the posts or comments that have this phrase in it. [Why?]

Mark Zuckerberg: The hate speech policies are the most fraught. So I’ll walk you through the reasoning of how we got to this policy. And so there are a few things that are going on that I think you want to think about. So one is, gender is a protected category. So substitute in your mind while you’re thinking through this, what if this were “Muslims are trash,” right? You would not want that on the service.

Interesting that his go to example of a group to be attacked is Muslims. There are over a billion Muslims, around 57 countries are run according to Islamic rules and at least one of those has nuclear weapons, but they’re the oppressed (by words) group he thinks of.

More here

Written by KGS

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

There’s No Common Cultural Legacy For The Alt-Right

Still, is there something to it? Is there a common heritage that will cover El Greco and Hume and Dostoyevsky? Is there one that can include the Jacobites and the Jacobins? There is, but it is not racial, and white supremacists reject it because it rejects them. The unifying heritage of Europe is religious and philosophical. It is Jerusalem and Athens, in one famous formulation. Christian religion and Greek philosophy, filtered through Roman law and culture, are the foundation of European culture. The tensions, agreements, developments and settlements between these have shaped the Western world, and these roots of Western civilization are not congenial to white supremacy.

Christianity is universal in its message and Jewish in its origins. For centuries after its founding, Christianity’s center was the Mediterranean world, including Asia Minor and North Africa. Christianity has never been defined by race, and locally-grown racist heresies are only sustainable among those ignorant of Christianity’s teachings, origins and history.

Greek philosophy is likewise ill-suited to serve as a basis for white identity. It is either too universal (addressing the human condition in general) or too local—none of us live as citizens of an ancient Greek polis. Later philosophical developments in Europe, such as the philosophies of the Enlightenment, likewise tend to be too universal for white supremacists seeking a tribal identity. As for the scientific revolution that developed within Western culture (albeit with much borrowed from outside Europe), math doesn’t care what color someone is.

"More here"

War is being waged against Western culture from within which is in essence a war against Christianity and its moral origins in the Hebrew Bible. By attacking these Biblical foundations in the name of reason and human rights, the culture warriors of secularism are sawing off the branch on which they sit. The only way to defend Western civilisation is to reaffirm and restore its Biblical foundations. My argument is a development of ideas I first explored in my 2012 book The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth and Power.

We are living in an era which extols reason, science and human rights. These are said to be essential for progress, a civilised society and the betterment of humanity. Religion is said to be their antithesis, the source instead of superstitious mumbo-jumbo, oppression and backward-thinking.

Some of this hostility is being driven by the perceived threat from Islamic terrorism and the Islamisation of Western culture. However, this animus against religion has far deeper roots and can be traced back to what is considered the birthplace of Western reason, the 18th-century Enlightenment.

Actually, it goes back specifically to the French Enlightenment. In England and Scotland, the Enlightenment developed reason and political liberty within the framework of Biblical belief. In France, by contrast, anti-clericalism morphed into fundamental hostility to Christianity and to religion itself.

“Ecrasez l’infame,” said Voltaire (crush infamy) — the infamy to which he referred being not just the Church but Christianity, which he wanted to replace with the religion of reason, virtue and liberty, “drawn from the bosom of nature”.

Perfecting society

But this Enlightenment did not remove religion so much as pervert it. It took millenarian fantasies, the idea that the perfection of the world was at hand, and it secularised them. Instead of God producing heaven on earth, it would be mankind which would bring that about. Reason would create the perfect society and “progress” was the process by which utopia would be attained.

More here"

“I think that we should correct the vocabulary that we use, and call a spade a spade. It is all about Jihad, the Islamic effort to spread Islam globally”:

Terrorist attack – should be called Military Jihad.

Incitement – Media Jihad.

Al-Jazeera – Media Jihad Channel.

Imposing Sharia law – Judicial Jihad or Legislative Jihad.

Boycotting Israel (BDS) – Economic Jihad.

Emigration to EU and US – Emigration Jihad / Hijra Jihad.

Building mosques, Islamic education institutions – Cultural Jihad.

Halal food – Dietary Jihad.

Hijab or Niqab – Clothing Jihad.

Activity of MSA – Academic Jihad.

Activity of CAIR – Political Jihad / Public Jihad.

Collecting money for Islamic “charities” – Financial Jihad.

Political correctness – Submission to Jihad.

J Street, Peace Now, JVP and their likes – Jewish Useful Idiots who Serve Jihad.

Iran deal – Western Support for Nuclear Jihad.