CYBER WARRIOR

MASTODON.IE

Since Musk's takeover of Twitter I had been looking for somewhere to migrate to on the assumption either that Twitter would implode or that it would become a place I didn't want to be.

I was directed to mastodon.ie where buckets of people were heading, including a raft of Irish speakers. It looked like a friendly and laid back place so I signed up and made what I consider a not insignificant donation to the running costs. The influx to this site/instance was massive and risked overwhelming the proprietor and his server, so I sort of came to the rescue, a wee bit.

So there I was, commenting, collecting followers and following others myself. All was going well in the best of possible worlds, to paraphrase Professor Pangloss, when I see a note that two Irish speakers of my acquaintance have been suspended for linking to an article by Cathal Mac Coille, a well known and respected Irish journalist.

What, I wondered, was in this article? Must be bad. So I went and read it. Nothing to see there. Cathal had gone to a meeting of Women's Space and was reporting on it along with some of his own views on how trans people should be respected but that there were still issues to be dealt with in relation to "women's spaces". A perfectly reasonable and civilised article drawing attention for the need to balance different "rights".

I should add that the article was in the Irish language and appeared in the Irish language paper Tuairisc. It was headed by what I assume was a (militant?) feminist symbol, which I suspect was not Cathal's doing.

I found the article perfectly reasonable and failed to see why linking to it should cause offence, but if this was the way this site/instance was going to be moderated, better find out sooner rather than later. So I posted, linking to the article (second post cited below first).

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And this was the immediate, and I mean immediate, response.

I was disappointed, but have no intention of appealing. Better to know earlier rather than later that the site/instance is run by a trigger-happy or anti-free-speech moderator, who may, or may not, understand the Irish language. I don't want to go to the trouble of establishing a presence there only to find myself thrown off on a whim by this idiot.

Fancy, the irony of deciding to transition from Twitter to Mastodon.ie to escape from the abritrariness of Twitter under Musk only to find intolerant moderation on Mastodon.

It is not clear to me if the moderator either read the article or understood it, or if there is a ban on any discussion of matters trans because of the inability of stupid moderators to distinguish between discussion and opposition, a point made in the article itself.

I thought I was coming into a welcoming and rational circle. I sympathised with owner's/moderator's difficulty in dealing with the massive influx of new members, so much so, as I said above, that I made a financial donation virtually immediately on joining. Now, at this remove, that only adds to the hurt of finding that what I joined was not what I thought it was.

I have had little or no significant response to my tweets/action bar one idiot accusing me of being in some way responsible for the recent mass shooting in Colorado, and another bemoaning the fact that I had let the side down.

So much for my first personal contact with "cancel culture".

Link to the article
Google Translation here.

TWITTER

This one might be a little more understandable, but only just.

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And then, precisely six minutes after I deleted the offending post:

So Twitter gave me a twelve hour suspension for harassment and advocating violence.

The offending tweet concerned Vladimir Putin and I penned it in a fit of suppressed rage after reading of yet more of this war criminal directly targetting civilians and civilian infrastructure in Ukraine.

The tweet went something like:

And I suppose he'll have died before they get a chance to hang him by his toenails.

I wonder if I'd have suffered the same fate if I'd commented on Hitler in the same terms during the Holocaust?

Anyway, I suffered in silence and after twelve hours on the dot I was fully back online.

Another restriction from Twitter. Sailing closer and closer to the edge.


ISRAEL IN IRELAND

Then there was the Israeli embassy in Ireland. A really mad nest of Hasbara which in the past has heaped abuse on the Irish state for its support of the Palestinians.

Well, they recently blocked me in Twitter, no doubt because I described what they are doing in Gaza as a Pogrom. This seems to be one of their sacred words of victimhood which they don't like seeing applied to their own actions.

Mind you, I have also in the past criticised the embassy and in particular this mad lady Deputy Ambassador (wife of the then Ambassador if I recall).

She made a speech in Hebrew in Israel describing the Irish people who she divided into three non-comprehensive categories.

I'm not in any of them. Are you?

And all of this is how I became an accidental cyber warrior.

Good Lord, There's More (29/1/24)
Google/Blogger have just informed me, if I understand them correctly, that UK readers will no longer be able to access my blog "Introducing Jersey". This is a blog I set up to familiarise people with the corruption of the Jersey (CI) régime. It is not clear to me, if objection was taken to certain posts on the blog, why the whole blog, rather than the offending posts, was rendered inaccessible to UK readers. Stuart Syvret, in a similar situation way back was first asked to delete certain posts which he refused to do and they then suspended his blog in its entirety for everybody everywhere. This followed a request from the Jersey administration at the time backed up by a pseudo-legal piece of paper which made blogger shit in their pants.

I'm not yet sure if the ban applies to the Channel Islands, which are not, of course, part of the UK. But we'll see.

Screen grab from a friend in UK

MORE TWITTER

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More restrictions from Twitter. They didn't like the post/reply referred to above. As far as I'm concerned it was pretty mild compared to the emotions raging inside me when I read the original tweet which revealed that Israel had tortured UNRWA employees to get them to "confess" that members of that organisation had taken part in the HAMAS atrocity on 7 October.

This, of course, was lapped up by mainstream media and a group of donors who, in any event, are supporting the genocide on one way or another.

I stand by what I wrote and would even add that Israel's behaviour since 7 October, and even since 1948, does call into question not just the right of Israel to "defend" itself but for it to exist in the first place.