The Perils of Twitter

The Perils of Twitter
By Happy Hiram 

Okay so I am sitting here with my phone service stalling as it always seems to be when I am not on the highway somewhere, thinking about the state that the idiocy of Twitter has gotten me into.

First, why bother then? My friends and I have a normal interchange and then I go on twitter and they say things that they would never dream of passing off in any other form of communication. So I feel compelled to respond... And then I get stuck on the stupid format.

My friend, my reasonable friend, retweets things that say "Islam is a violent religion" and site ISIS as an exemplar. I wish I could find the sequence of posts but twitter is like the Atlantic Ocean and each post is like that one hypodermic swimming around. You respond to being poked and the poke and response end up on opposite ends of the coast.

Anyway I respond by saying "ISIS and Islam do not equate." Except somehow I can't fit equate in 140 characters (after all the names of the retweeters) so it goes in as = WHICH IS NOT THE SAME THING. It's okay, they'll tell ya, its Twitter shorthand. No, it is not okay to sacrifice sense to mere speech. That is why I am responding in the first place. Because what was SAID was ridiculous IF MEANT, but of course when you separate MEANING from communication you don't have any IDEA what was meant. 

So my friend replies "I take ISIS at their word. WTF does that have to do with the question? How do you functionally say "what you are saying is a non-sequitur and has no merit to the subject at hand which is that the conflation of a hate group with a WHOLE SERIES of cultures makes the respondent a hate group instead of just having an opinion." Even if you could BASTARDIZE that into 140 wrds you have to take out for the names you are RESPONDING TO.

So then my friend retweets "a white person is 250% more likely to get assaulted by a black person than a black person by a white."

If I have eight friends and one of them is a red-head, if I swing a cat and throw it I have a slim chance of hitting a red-head. If HE SWINGS a cat at US, he has a 100% chance of hitting a non-redhead. That alone makes him 12 times more likely to hit me. Black on black crime is higher than black on white crime, so see, poverty and ghettoization WORKS! Add the super high rate of drugs in the ghetto and you have a formula for 250%.

On average, most black Americans have less wealth than white Americans. So I post that I should have been robbing poor people instead of people with money because I was messing the statistics up completely.

No response. Is that good or bad? How do I know if anybody even read what I wrote? On blogger I get stats. On twitter I get piecemeal promos like "7 people were interested in your tweet" Six months from now that seven number will be meaningless. I won't even know what week it was.

So in response to the ISIS "take them at their word" canard I reply "ISIS is not Islam" to which I get "They say they are... I'll take them at their word."

To which I reply, "The Black Panthers say they represent the black community, so does that make all blacks black panthers?"

Now, I know my friend, he is a good guy, not out to entrap me or make me look foolish or anything. He responds: "if you said all black panthers were black, I'd agree with you..."

Does he mean:

A) you wrote your argument wrong ways round (ignorance?)

B) I am willfully pretending to not understand you (arrogance? Not really his style) 

C), well, I can't really think of a C. The point is that now I don't know if I am being fucked with or my smart friend can't read.

So I respond "saying 'all A's are B' is not the same as saying 'all B's are A' but by the time I mangle that into a tweet it has lost all sense of meaning.

"I don't know what you are saying." He replies. Wow, you think?

I reply (of course you can't cut and paste out of the twitter app so this is long form) "'If Nation of Islam members are black and ISIS represents Islam, then all black people are terrorists' is the kind of logic you are proposing." You can just imagine how distorted THAT gets in 140 (minus the sendees) wrds.

So is communication by twitter possible? I think not. I mean who is ever gonna read this article? It has WAY MORE THAN 140 CHARACTERS!

The response will quote where I am misquoting (due to lack of access) the original tweets, or their sequence. Well I can't ACCESS the original tweets nor copy them if I could. So if you think I am somehow wrong, it is twitters fault again. Don't blame me. 

The Nature of Humor?

The Question:
Is it impossible to be FUNNY and KIND?

Funny AND kind?

My Answer:

Humor, even from the classic comedians is based on aggression and psychic disturbance. Some commenters confuse "clean" comedy with "kind" comedy but all humor is based in inequity and anger. The trouble is that inequity and anger are real, so that someone who is going to deny other people's suffering, deny inequity and deny the right to call those things out is not being gentle to me, they are selling me out. I personally think the whole range of human emotion is appropriate and that can never be fair or painless to those around us. So I have the choice between being kind or true. I don't want people who are being nice to me. I want people to be real. So I guess I am pro-comedy and anti-golden rule. If a person can't be true to their own experiences what good are they to me?

One Appeal and One Answer

My Appeal to YA! for my removed question:

Which is worse, saying the truth, or giving every idiot with a grudge the right to bury questions, remove them and write slurs and insults anonymously (so that you can't block them.) You are encouraging bad behavior because it causes Stockholm Syndrome and ties users more closely to YA! 

So you can no longer hide behind the bad behavior of a few. YA! has now industrialized it.

The Removed Question:

"Is YA! actually trying to facilitate troll behavior with their new policies?"

Another person's Question:

"How would one behave after being tortured?

Happy Hiram answered just now:

Well let see:

You try and go about the room being yourself, but every utterance or move you think is going to be slammed down or intentially distorted and misinterpreted. You spend an inordinate amount of time studing those who have captured you to the extent that you understand their motives better than they do. You find yourself imitating their

strategies (in order to regain some semblance of self-power) and

agreeing with thier motives to the point where you become in effect,

your own enemy (see Stockholm Syndrome in wikipedia for the details.)

Eventually you live in the abuse and violence of your attackers which

is exactly the point of allowing them to do this to you. You become

addicted to the place of abuse.

At least that is how I experience Yahoo Answers.

What was the question again?

Everything I ask or answer in Yahoo Poetry gets violated

My Appeal to Yahoo Answers:

1) it is not against Yahoo guidelines to ask help locating a poem.
2) almost* every question or answer I have done in yahoo poetry in the last three months has been reported because your "trusted members" want to blackball me.
3)*They have left two of my questions up and the REPORT ANYONE WHO ANSWERS THEM (to give me a bad reputation) and THEN they will report ALL of my questions and answers.

If Yahoo is unable to deal with this (or even offer a COMPLAINTS department to take it up with) then why are you in the Internet business?


The question on Yahoo Answers was reported and deleted by one or more trusted members of the Answers community:

"My friend wrote a poem?"

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My three questions for yahoo:
A) why don't you monitor your own damned site?
B) why doesn't it say "having problems? Call here: _____ 
C) how does the money work when you lose all the users?