Sunday, September 15, 2019

The Bigotry of 'Hate Speech' and Facebook Fascism

Being a mouthy genderfuck internet personality, I've grown accustomed to hearing some pretty caustic shit online and I've generally come to except it. After the sixth or seventh time being threatened with gang rape by yet another alt-right troglodyte, the shock runs a little thin. I've actually become rather skilled at the digital-jujitsu that's become a necessity for existing as an openly trans person online. I've even made a few hideous friends on the far-right in the process. Generally speaking, most trolls are either childish pranksters or sadistic psychopaths. If you keep a razor sharp tongue and a sense of humor, either one can be handled with relative ease. This isn't to say that they aren't despicable human garbage or that words don't hurt, but there are things far worse than hate speech online and I personally have never felt more dehumanized or offended as a queer person than I have by the way Facebook treated me this past week, all in the name of policing hate speech and patronizing marginalized creatures like myself.

It began as a pretty typical week for a mildly agoraphobic gonzo visionary. Writing, volunteering, therapy, more writing, hyperventilating, more therapy. All through out this literary basket-case existence, I try to keep the handful of my very dearest motherfuckers who follow me online informed and entertained with a withering barrage of foul mouthed snark and incendiary rants. After coming home from an extra soul digging, come-to-Jesus, round of group therapy, still basking in the teary-eyed afterglow of cathartic trans sisterhood, I went to log offline for the night, only to discover that Facebook had banned me for 24 hours. Now usually this kind of authoritarian negative reinforcement would be reason for celebration. I work very hard to upset the normies in the straight world and if you haven't been suspended from Facebook in this line of work, you're probably not doing it right. Right? But it wasn't simply being banned that disgusted me. What really drove the proverbial screws into my thumbs was their excuse. You guessed it, 'hate speech'. And what heinous thing did I dare post to be deserving of such virtue signalling corporate censorship? I can't remember the exact words because they dutifully expunged them from my permanent record, but it was something to the effect of-

"Afghanistan is where empires go to die. Maybe we should send the Taliban a gift basket, "Knock it off with the fag-bashing but keep up the good work. Hugs and kisses, Some Tranny Anarchist""

Pretty typical anti-imperialist gallows humor from yours truly and hardly unusual, but lets pretend for a second that Facebook really gives two fucks and a shit about 'hate speech' and unpack their cracked Orwellian line of reasoning. There are only two bits of that admittedly iconoclastic blurb that could possibly be construed as hate speech. The first is my saddling the poor Taliban with the label "fag-bashing." If this is hate speech, it's clearly not directed at any hypothetical 'fag', but rather the bastards who bash them. Which essentially means that Facebook is protecting the butt-hurt feelings of those fine dope-peddling pederasts in the Taliban, the poor babies. And if this was it, then I probably would have spent those 24 hours laughing my faggot ass off at the hysteria of such knee-jerk political correctness, rather than stewing like a genderqueer gumbo.

The one that set me off, that made me want to break my pumps off in Zuckerberg's pasty ass, is the insane contention that the way I choose to self-identify as "Some Tranny Anarchist" constitutes as hate speech. Who the fuck do those motherfuckers think they are, telling me which word I can or cant repossess to empower MYself and MY community? I own my space as a crazy, heathen, tranny, bull-dyke, and some limp-wristed, milquetoast, bean-counting, cubicle jockey or the cryptic computer algorithm he rode in on is gonna tell me how to step in those heels? Fuck you and fuck your mother.
If you don't wear this fucking skin, you don't get to tell me how to fucking rock it, you little bitch.

Lets get fucking real here folks. We all know who runs Silicon Valley and it ain't cunts like me. It's a whitey-white, cis-hetero, Proud Boy's club that has little space for anyone who sits down to pee. The fact that these bougie billionaires in training are the first line of fire in the war on hate speech is proof positive that the concept in and of itself is inherently bigoted. When you give the same white supremacist patriarchs who invented this bigoted power structure the right to determine what hate is, you give them control of the narrative. You afford them the ability to censor the very people they facetiously claim to protect anytime the conversation gets uncomfortable.

When a queer person identifies as a fag or a black person identifies as a nigga, they aren't just repossessing those words, they're assuring that they remain a part of the conversation. This runs contrary to censorship's culture of mild mannered silence which numbs the sting of injustice without addressing the authoritarian hierarchy that serves as its source and, Surprise! Surprise!, those rules are being installed by, you guessed it, that very same authoritarian hierarchy. Political correctness has nothing to do with equality. It's about making it easier for bigots like the ones in Silicon Valley to hide behind the Teflon shield of decorum and good manners. These cunts want the niggas, spicks, faggots and trannies like me to be seen but not heard,  domesticated exotic pets in their multicultural cyber-zoo. Well, I'll say it again, fuck them and their shallow 'feelings.'

All of this, however, assumes that this countries twisted concept of political correctness is the source of my temporary suspension, and it may be, but considering the sheer volume of possible 'hate speech' to be policed on social media juggernauts like Facebook, it seems more than likely that my latest expression of vocabulary gender rebellion is likely motivated by more political aims. I may be a small fish online but my small pond of followers includes some big scary sharks; militiamen, national anarchists, tankies, third world journalists, euroskeptics and curiously, as of last week, every Russophobes favorite boogeyman, Aleksandr Dugin, who reposted one of my many calls for revolutionary left-right bottom unity on his own Facebook page just before my frequent use of 'hate speech' suddenly officially crossed the line.

All of this would sound like something straight out of an Oliver Stone flick even to me in any other decade. But in our age of post-Trump McCarthyite hysteria, where DARPA and State Department think tanks like the Atlantic Council are quite openly working in tandem with Big Tech to damn the Fifth Estate that threatens its zeitgeist dominance to the digital apartheid of 'fake news', nothing seems paranoid anymore. Seemingly bit players on the antiwar fringe like Daniel McAdams and Peter Van Buren have been banned for life from Twitter for the kind of off color banter that occurs fifty tweets per second from the kind of trolls I've grown muscular grappling with without repercussion. Could I be next? Could you? The message to me seems to be pretty clear, if your world view falls outside of the globalist status quo, watch your fucking mouth because your next post could be your last. I feel safer already. How about you?

As far as I'm concerned, all censorship is bullshit and the corporate manufactured territory of social media is as good as any other commons. We the people who occupy these spaces have squatters rights and policing our profiles for politics of profit makes the Mike Zuckerberg's of this world no better than any other garden variety slumlord who flagrantly violates the rights of his tenants. I for one am a mutualist and a syndicalist, so I don't fucking swing that way. Property, even of the intellectual variety, should defined by occupation not management and any business that profits off the labor of others without the balance of democracy is little more than a modern slave driver. In an increasingly digital universe it's high time that we brought this master class to its fucking knees and take back what's rightfully ours. We need to put the socialism into social fucking media.

Being the technologically retarded Luddite that I am, I couldn't begin to tell you how to achieve this goal. I'm a big idea bitch, dearest motherfuckers. I'll leave it up to you to handle the nuts and bolts. But one thing I can tell you with total confidence is that I will never stop using social media to afflict the comfortable or comfort the afflicted, and you better fucking believe that that includes proudly and loudly identifying as a crazy, heathen, tranny, bull-dyke. If Facebook wants to shut me up, they're gonna need something with a higher caliber than a fucking keyboard to do it. Bring it on, you cissy honky twats. I've tangoed with worse and won.



Peace, Rage & Empathy- Nicky/CH



Soundtrack; songs that influence this post

*  Violence by Grimes & i_o
*  Let's Lynch the Landlord by Dead Kennedy's
*  All My Friends by LCD Soundsystem
*  It's Coming It's Real by Swans
*  Express Yourself by NWA
*  Gene Kelly by Mika
*  Retard Girl by Hole
*  In a Big City by Titus Andronicus
*  Stigmata by Ministry
*  Queen by Perfume Genius
*  Closer by Nine Inch Nails
*  Kids by Pup
*  The Future by Leonard Cohen
*  I Live My Broken Dreams by Daniel Johnston



This post is dedicated in loving memory to Daniel Johnston, another freak who never retreated from his pride in being broken. Daniel's own perseverance over mental illness and the restraints society failed to put on him because of it inspired me during one of the darkest periods my life to pull the proverbial revolver from my mouth and put my pain down on paper. Without his influence, a highly doubt that this blog would even exist. Godspeed, my crazy brother. You will not be forgotten.


1 comment:

  1. "is likely motivated by more political aims."

    Bingo! Daniel McAdams used the word "retarded" to describe Sean Hannity, and he gets banned from Twitter for life. This, in spite of the fact that any search for that word on Twitter yields at least thousands of hits, these other people who used it not getting so much as a warning.

    Being an anti-imperialist is dangerous, not only for the anti-imperialist, but also for the imperialist, and the imperialists will do everything in their power to silence those who would oppose them. I cannot, of course, absolutely prove that is what is going on here, but the situation smells like a skunk smoking an ounce of the good stuff.

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