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Legion

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iu



Back when Parler was first taking off, I warned that its app-based dependency meant that two companies, Apple and Google, can eliminate it anytime they like.

It was only a matter of time.

The transition from desktops and laptops to Android and IOS devices mean that users are operating in a walled garden run by two very lefty companies. Those companies can do with the garden what they please. Those users who choose to jailbreak their devices have more options, but most don't. Conservatives can try to distribute the knowledge more widely and encourage that kind of self-empowerment. But the bottom line is most smartphone, Kindle, Chromebook, etc users want a simple device that just works and runs all the apps in the app store. Doing anything more complicated would be inconvenient.

People also tend to get their smartphones from one of the handful of remaining providers, e.g. the big three, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. You may think you're not using one of those companies, but even then you're probably using one of their branded providers or a small company that's using their services.

That means 5 companies essentially control the mobile ecosystem and can shut down an app like Parler anytime they please. They can also, if they please, shut down access to any site accessed through their browsers. They can also ban any browser from their app store or device that doesn't shut down access to these sites.

There are potential workarounds, but they all involve escalating levels of difficulty.

And since the trend has moved away from any kind of independent user agency and toward crippled 'smart' devices, that's the battle going forward.

Don't get the idea that desktops and laptops are safe.

Microsoft is 'evolving' toward a walled garden of apps. Redmond being incompetent, it's messed up multiple opportunities to do so, notably Windows 8, which was a complete disaster. The PC is really only free because Microsoft is incompetent. But Microsoft wants to take a percent from every app installed. And at some point it's going to shove that into Windows 10 in another update while deliberately breaking Windows 7 under the guise of some sort of urgent emergency threat.

The internet service providers are also narrowing down to a smaller group that's only going to get smaller which would make it possible for a handful of telecoms to likewise block access to particular sites. There are a lot more workarounds for that scenario, but every workaround limits the potential audience and ghettoizes conservatives.

The conservative movement in the past few years embraced Section 230 abolition. As I warned in the past, threatening to abolish Section 230 is a good form of leverage, but would accomplish very little once it's done, except reward some rivals like Disney. Antitrust breakups, which the DOJ and Republican states were pushing for, would have done far more. But considering the events of the past few months, that's a lot less likely to happen. Instead, look for Google and the rest of the boys to "negotiate" a settlement that will see them moving millions into DEMOCRAT and lefty groups in exchange for promising not to misbehave. Win-win, as they say.

I've laid out the scale of the digital iron curtain only in part. I haven't even gotten to the problem of services like cloudfront and similar services, and how they can be used to curtail competition. I previously discussed why it's so hard to launch a rival search engine (there are only two actual search engines, Google and Microsoft's Bing. DuckDuckGo is cute, but just allows you to search Bing without Microsoft seeing your searches.)

Nor have I even touched on the role played by advertising and payment solutions. Control those and no conservative site is going to be profitable. Meanwhile lefty sites can be awash in cash. It's not just the internet obviously.

Antitrust action is a partial answer. It's the biggest one to date. The only other answers are to work around the restrictions, to be rats in the walls, a challenging prospect that will limit the potential audience, or to re-imagine the internet, an even more challenging concept. There are some ideas there, but they'll have to wait for another time.

This is a big problem. It might even be the biggest problem.

The problem isn't just that Facebook, Twitter, or Google are biased against conservatives. The problem is that the internet is controlled by an increasingly small interconnected network of companies who can act in concert to suppress anyone or anything they don't like. You can't just walk in and 'compete' with a trust. In the last decade, the DEMOCRATS, the media, and Big Tech assembled a rationale, e.g. disinformation, Russian interference, for heavily censoring the internet.

Conservatives were slow to grasp the scale of the threat, to react to it, and to build a plan to fight it. That plan still isn't fully there. And there's only so much time.




https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/01/parler-and-problem-escaping-internet-censorship-daniel-greenfield/
 
Legion said:
iu



Back when Parler was first taking off, I warned that its app-based dependency meant that two companies, Apple and Google, can eliminate it anytime they like.

It was only a matter of time.

The transition from desktops and laptops to Android and IOS devices mean that users are operating in a walled garden run by two very lefty companies. Those companies can do with the garden what they please. Those users who choose to jailbreak their devices have more options, but most don't. Conservatives can try to distribute the knowledge more widely and encourage that kind of self-empowerment. But the bottom line is most smartphone, Kindle, Chromebook, etc users want a simple device that just works and runs all the apps in the app store. Doing anything more complicated would be inconvenient.

People also tend to get their smartphones from one of the handful of remaining providers, e.g. the big three, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. You may think you're not using one of those companies, but even then you're probably using one of their branded providers or a small company that's using their services.

That means 5 companies essentially control the mobile ecosystem and can shut down an app like Parler anytime they please. They can also, if they please, shut down access to any site accessed through their browsers. They can also ban any browser from their app store or device that doesn't shut down access to these sites.

There are potential workarounds, but they all involve escalating levels of difficulty.

And since the trend has moved away from any kind of independent user agency and toward crippled 'smart' devices, that's the battle going forward.

Don't get the idea that desktops and laptops are safe.

Microsoft is 'evolving' toward a walled garden of apps. Redmond being incompetent, it's messed up multiple opportunities to do so, notably Windows 8, which was a complete disaster. The PC is really only free because Microsoft is incompetent. But Microsoft wants to take a percent from every app installed. And at some point it's going to shove that into Windows 10 in another update while deliberately breaking Windows 7 under the guise of some sort of urgent emergency threat.

The internet service providers are also narrowing down to a smaller group that's only going to get smaller which would make it possible for a handful of telecoms to likewise block access to particular sites. There are a lot more workarounds for that scenario, but every workaround limits the potential audience and ghettoizes conservatives.

The conservative movement in the past few years embraced Section 230 abolition. As I warned in the past, threatening to abolish Section 230 is a good form of leverage, but would accomplish very little once it's done, except reward some rivals like Disney. Antitrust breakups, which the DOJ and Republican states were pushing for, would have done far more. But considering the events of the past few months, that's a lot less likely to happen. Instead, look for Google and the rest of the boys to "negotiate" a settlement that will see them moving millions into Democrats and lefty groups in exchange for promising not to misbehave. Win-win, as they say.

I've laid out the scale of the digital iron curtain only in part. I haven't even gotten to the problem of services like cloudfront and similar services, and how they can be used to curtail competition. I previously discussed why it's so hard to launch a rival search engine (there are only two actual search engines, Google and Microsoft's Bing. DuckDuckGo is cute, but just allows you to search Bing without Microsoft seeing your searches.)

Nor have I even touched on the role played by advertising and payment solutions. Control those and no conservative site is going to be profitable. Meanwhile lefty sites can be awash in cash. It's not just the internet obviously.

Antitrust action is a partial answer. It's the biggest one to date. The only other answers are to work around the restrictions, to be rats in the walls, a challenging prospect that will limit the potential audience, or to reimagine the internet, an even more challenging concept. There are some ideas there, but they'll have to wait for another time.

This is a big problem. It might even be the biggest problem.

The problem isn't just that Facebook, Twitter, or Google are biased against conservatives. The problem is that the internet is controlled by an increasingly small interconnected network of companies who can act in concert to suppress anyone or anything they don't like. You can't just walk in and 'compete' with a trust. In the last decade, the Democrats, the media, and Big Tech assembled a rationale, e.g. disinformation, Russian interference, for heavily censoring the internet.

Conservatives were slow to grasp the scale of the threat, to react to it, and to build a plan to fight it. That plan still isn't fully there. And there's only so much time.




https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/01/parler-and-problem-escaping-internet-censorship-daniel-greenfield/
Click to expand...

The filthy cunt leftists hate free speech
 
ow..I need to read that -some above my tech ability..
I long for the days when we were just another banana republic before we became a totalitarian state
 
Legion, I'm an extremely introverted person and I have more Facebook friends than this place has active posters. This place is irrelevant. Unless someone were to report it its existence probably wouldn't even be noticed.
 
A few months ago, Google began aggressively censoring my articles. My Front Page Magazine articles went from appearing on the first page to the seventh page. As did my old personal site. Even specific searches for particular articles often no longer turn up results on the illegal monopoly search engine.

This isn't entirely unusual and has happened to a number of other people writing about Islamic terrorism.

I wasn't particularly surprised because I had spent quite a few years warning conservatives that Big Tech was coming for them only to be greeted with incomprehension. (Fast forward to today and everyone is engaged on it, but generally in the wrong ways, going down the Section 230 rabbit hole.)

Conservatives now champion DuckDuckGo, which is a cute privacy oriented way to get results from Microsoft Bing. Since Bing is already privacy oriented, I'm not sure why that's much of a help. But I was recently introduced to Gigablast which, on casual inspection, actually seems to function like an actual search engine. It may not be pretty, but it fills me with some 90s nostalgia. It's a lot smaller, but it bills itself as the "the only non-Big Tech search engine in the U.S. that still crawls the web."

That's an important distinction, as we'll see.

And when I use Gigablast, I actually seem to get the kind of results I would have gotten from Google in 2012, instead of the usual grab bag of redundant corporate media spam, assorted spam from Google's garbage index which sucks in every single spam page from the third world, but keeps out conservative content, and Google's attempts to reword my query to match what its algorithms say most smartphone users are searching for.

But Gigablast's situation also breaks down the problem of just telling conservatives to build their own search engine or other service.

Google and Microsoft are the only search engines that spend hundreds of millions of dollars annually to maintain a real-time map of the English-language internet.

“It costs more money than we can afford,” said Gabriel Weinberg, chief executive of DuckDuckGo. In a written statement for the House antitrust subcommittee last year, the company said that “an aspiring search engine start-up today (and in the foreseeable future) cannot avoid the need” to turn to Microsoft or Google for its search results.

And that's not a search engine. It's just remixing leftovers from Google and Microsoft into Thursday's meatloaf.

But it's not just about the money. Sites will block or interfere with search engines crawling the web that aren't Google or Microsoft. And here's where we get to the fundamental problem of Big Tech monopolies.

You can't just make your own Google today.

When FindX started to develop an alternative to Google in 2015, the Danish company set out to create its own index and offered a build-your-own algorithm to provide individualized results.

FindX quickly ran into problems. Large website operators, such as Yelp and LinkedIn, did not allow the fledgling search engine to crawl their sites.

That's a point that Gigablast makes on its blog when it comes to Cloudflare, which is widely used.

It has come to my attention recently while spidering the web that Cloudflare, a Content Distribution Network (CDN), is now offering as they put it: "DDos Security" by using several tactics that prevent free web search engines from spidering public web sites.

...and Google...

The big tech companies are buying up all the best content on the internet and prohibiting smaller search engine companies from indexing it. For example, Google owns youtube.com and is increasingly prohibiting potentially-competitive search engine crawlers from indexing its content.

...and the United States Senate

Then I followed up, twice, actually, asking if Google was throttled the same way, or if I could be on the same whitelist that Google is on, and was met with deafening silence. I need to be able to spider somewhat fast to get any sort of coverage on these big websites. To surmise, if you want to start a search engine to compete against Google, the U.S. government will make sure you do not get far.

And as Matt Wells of Gigablast notes,

"Google prevents their search results from being combined with search results from other search engines to create a meta search engine. So, in other words Google is saying something like "we are free to use your stuff how we see fit, but you can't use our stuff how you see fit."

So when you're searching something like DuckDuckGo, it's drawing on Bing's index.

Google gets treated differently by webmasters (an old un-pc term) because it dominates over 80% of search traffic. When Google gulags you, you're gone. But you can't just duplicate another Google. Not unless your search engine provides enough traffic and even then, a whole bunch of major sites will likely block you, either on principle or because they're already in bed with Google.

This is another example of why the dot com monopolies can't just be fixed by building alternatives. Not when the infrastructure is already rigged in favor of dot coms like Google. The only answer is to break up the big monopolies, particularly Google.




https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2020/12/why-conservatives-cant-just-build-their-own-google-daniel-greenfield/
 
I have been saying for awhile that JPP is almost certainly Dead, that the Revolution will not allow such a free mind spot to exist. Judging by the actions of the Tech Overlords today death day will be sooner rather than later.
 
Legion said:
iu



Back when Parler was first taking off, I warned that its app-based dependency meant that two companies, Apple and Google, can eliminate it anytime they like.

It was only a matter of time.

The transition from desktops and laptops to Android and IOS devices mean that users are operating in a walled garden run by two very lefty companies. Those companies can do with the garden what they please. Those users who choose to jailbreak their devices have more options, but most don't. Conservatives can try to distribute the knowledge more widely and encourage that kind of self-empowerment. But the bottom line is most smartphone, Kindle, Chromebook, etc users want a simple device that just works and runs all the apps in the app store. Doing anything more complicated would be inconvenient.

People also tend to get their smartphones from one of the handful of remaining providers, e.g. the big three, AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile. You may think you're not using one of those companies, but even then you're probably using one of their branded providers or a small company that's using their services.

That means 5 companies essentially control the mobile ecosystem and can shut down an app like Parler anytime they please. They can also, if they please, shut down access to any site accessed through their browsers. They can also ban any browser from their app store or device that doesn't shut down access to these sites.

There are potential workarounds, but they all involve escalating levels of difficulty.

And since the trend has moved away from any kind of independent user agency and toward crippled 'smart' devices, that's the battle going forward.

Don't get the idea that desktops and laptops are safe.

Microsoft is 'evolving' toward a walled garden of apps. Redmond being incompetent, it's messed up multiple opportunities to do so, notably Windows 8, which was a complete disaster. The PC is really only free because Microsoft is incompetent. But Microsoft wants to take a percent from every app installed. And at some point it's going to shove that into Windows 10 in another update while deliberately breaking Windows 7 under the guise of some sort of urgent emergency threat.

The internet service providers are also narrowing down to a smaller group that's only going to get smaller which would make it possible for a handful of telecoms to likewise block access to particular sites. There are a lot more workarounds for that scenario, but every workaround limits the potential audience and ghettoizes conservatives.

The conservative movement in the past few years embraced Section 230 abolition. As I warned in the past, threatening to abolish Section 230 is a good form of leverage, but would accomplish very little once it's done, except reward some rivals like Disney. Antitrust breakups, which the DOJ and Republican states were pushing for, would have done far more. But considering the events of the past few months, that's a lot less likely to happen. Instead, look for Google and the rest of the boys to "negotiate" a settlement that will see them moving millions into DEMOCRAT and lefty groups in exchange for promising not to misbehave. Win-win, as they say.

I've laid out the scale of the digital iron curtain only in part. I haven't even gotten to the problem of services like cloudfront and similar services, and how they can be used to curtail competition. I previously discussed why it's so hard to launch a rival search engine (there are only two actual search engines, Google and Microsoft's Bing. DuckDuckGo is cute, but just allows you to search Bing without Microsoft seeing your searches.)

Nor have I even touched on the role played by advertising and payment solutions. Control those and no conservative site is going to be profitable. Meanwhile lefty sites can be awash in cash. It's not just the internet obviously.

Antitrust action is a partial answer. It's the biggest one to date. The only other answers are to work around the restrictions, to be rats in the walls, a challenging prospect that will limit the potential audience, or to re-imagine the internet, an even more challenging concept. There are some ideas there, but they'll have to wait for another time.

This is a big problem. It might even be the biggest problem.

The problem isn't just that Facebook, Twitter, or Google are biased against conservatives. The problem is that the internet is controlled by an increasingly small interconnected network of companies who can act in concert to suppress anyone or anything they don't like. You can't just walk in and 'compete' with a trust. In the last decade, the DEMOCRATS, the media, and Big Tech assembled a rationale, e.g. disinformation, Russian interference, for heavily censoring the internet.

Conservatives were slow to grasp the scale of the threat, to react to it, and to build a plan to fight it. That plan still isn't fully there. And there's only so much time.




https://www.frontpagemag.com/point/2021/01/parler-and-problem-escaping-internet-censorship-daniel-greenfield/
Click to expand...

Fantastic points, and both Google and Apple are talking about banning Parler for WrongThink.
 
Now there is a call from an elected official and a competing network for cable and internet companies to ban conservative news outlets.

DEMOCRATS and CNN are lobbying for right-leaning news outlets such as Fox News to be pulled from the air.

CNN’s chief media correspondent Brian Stelter recently called for action in his newsletter, claiming that “dishonest companies that profit off of disinformation and conspiracy theories” such as Fox News need to be de-platformed. “We regularly discuss what the Big Tech companies have done to poison the public conversation by providing large platforms to bad-faith actors who lie, mislead, and promote conspiracy theories,” Stelter wrote. “But what about TV companies that provide platforms to networks such as Newsmax, One America News — and, yes, Fox News?”

In addition to declaring that these conservative outlets spread “lies,” Stelter also amplified the concerns of a Democrat politician, who claimed that “Fox and Newsmax, both delivered to my home by your company, are complicit.” Stelter said New Jersey state Assemblyman Paul Moriarty texted an executive at Comcast on Thursday questioning the decision of TV providers to host conservative media.

“What are you going to do???” Moriarty texted. “You feed this garbage, lies and all.”

“Moriarty was referring to the fact that Comcast’s cable brand, Xfinity, provides a platform to right-wing cable networks", CNN echoed Stelter’s call-to-action by re-publishing his newsletter with the same headline on the business portion of its website.

“Analysis: TV providers should not escape scrutiny for distributing disinformation,” the headline states.

The Washington Post also ran multiple columns on Friday that shifted the blame for Wednesday’s riot onto conservative media.

“This would never have happened if Fox ‘News,’ OAN, Newsmax, Mark Levin, the Daily Wire and all the rest had not been spreading poisonous lies to allege that the election was stolen,” one article read.

“The pro-Trump media world peddled the lies that fueled the Capitol mob. Fox News led the way,” read the headline to another WaPo column.

These points, echoed on Twitter by columnists, pundits, and other elites intertwined with the corporate media, are eerily similar to the celebration of Facebook and Twitter’s censorship.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/08/power-drunk-democrats-join-cnn-in-lobbying-to-ban-fox-news-from-the-airwaves/
 
Legion said:
Now there is a call from an elected official and a competing network for cable and internet companies to ban conservative news outlets.

DEMOCRATS and CNN are lobbying for right-leaning news outlets such as Fox News to be pulled from the air.

CNN’s chief media correspondent Brian Stelter recently called for action in his newsletter, claiming that “dishonest companies that profit off of disinformation and conspiracy theories” such as Fox News need to be de-platformed. “We regularly discuss what the Big Tech companies have done to poison the public conversation by providing large platforms to bad-faith actors who lie, mislead, and promote conspiracy theories,” Stelter wrote. “But what about TV companies that provide platforms to networks such as Newsmax, One America News — and, yes, Fox News?”

In addition to declaring that these conservative outlets spread “lies,” Stelter also amplified the concerns of a Democrat politician, who claimed that “Fox and Newsmax, both delivered to my home by your company, are complicit.” Stelter said New Jersey state Assemblyman Paul Moriarty texted an executive at Comcast on Thursday questioning the decision of TV providers to host conservative media.

“What are you going to do???” Moriarty texted. “You feed this garbage, lies and all.”

“Moriarty was referring to the fact that Comcast’s cable brand, Xfinity, provides a platform to right-wing cable networks", CNN echoed Stelter’s call-to-action by re-publishing his newsletter with the same headline on the business portion of its website.

“Analysis: TV providers should not escape scrutiny for distributing disinformation,” the headline states.

The Washington Post also ran multiple columns on Friday that shifted the blame for Wednesday’s riot onto conservative media.

“This would never have happened if Fox ‘News,’ OAN, Newsmax, Mark Levin, the Daily Wire and all the rest had not been spreading poisonous lies to allege that the election was stolen,” one article read.

“The pro-Trump media world peddled the lies that fueled the Capitol mob. Fox News led the way,” read the headline to another WaPo column.

These points, echoed on Twitter by columnists, pundits, and other elites intertwined with the corporate media, are eerily similar to the celebration of Facebook and Twitter’s censorship.

https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/08/power-drunk-democrats-join-cnn-in-lobbying-to-ban-fox-news-from-the-airwaves/
Click to expand...

Democrats: More dangerous than Nazis in the 30s/40s.
 
Legion said:
Conservatives were slow to grasp the scale of the threat, to react to it, and to build a plan to fight it. That plan still isn't fully there. And there's only so much time.
Click to expand...
Intelligent, sane Americans know they can put up a website and download any app they want up there. The fucking morons are shitting their pants without Apple or Google to hold their hands. Sad.

https://parler.com/
 
War=Peace said:
Democrats: More dangerous than Nazis in the 30s/40s.
Click to expand...

I've been warning you since last March.

The pandemic was the opportunity they needed to ignore state election safeguards and scare people into thinking that mail voting was safe.
 
GOP Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri landed a book deal with Simon & Schuster on the topic of Big Tech monopolies censoring speech. The book deal has now been canceled by the publisher.


https://townhall.com/tipsheet/bronsonstocking/2021/01/08/cancel-culture-scalps-hawleys-book-deal-n2582827
 
Study Finds Majority Of College Students Think Government Should Punish ‘Hate Speech’

An overwhelming majority of students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison think the government should be able to punish “hate speech,” according to a new study released Thursday.

An online survey of 530 undergraduates, conducted by the Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership in partnership with the University of Wisconsin Survey Center, asked students, “How much do you agree or disagree with the following statement: The government should be able to punish hate speech?” More than half, 63 percent, responded that they agree, 29 percent disagreed, and 6 percent were unsure.

What constitutes “hate speech” is very subjective and a hot-button issue on college campuses. Left-wing activists are constantly trying to expand what the ambiguous term includes. Statements that veer from the leftist orthodoxy on issues such as abortion, gender, race, and immigration are often deemed “hate speech.”

In fact, 40 percent of students agree the government should be able to restrict the speech of “climate change deniers,” and 50 percent of students believe the government should be able to restrict the speech of “racially insensitive people.” An unsettling 53 percent believe that employers’ religious beliefs should give way when it comes to providing goods or services, such as contraceptives or abortion coverage, that violate their religious beliefs.

The report says that “these results show that many students find it difficult to distinguish between, on the one hand, the moral concerns of speech or activities that are contested or even detestable and, on the other, the long run value derived from free speech and religious liberty.”

The survey also found that female students are much less supportive of free speech than males. Of the male participants, 47 percent said they “slightly,” “somewhat,” or “strongly” agree that the government should be able to restrict hate speech, while 75 percent of female students believe so.

Self-identified liberals were another group more likely to support speech restrictions compared to self-identified conservatives. More than half of liberals (62 percent) agree that “hate speech” should be restricted, but only 18.1 percent of conservatives supported speech restrictions.

UW-Madison spokeswoman Meredith McGlone told The College Fix that the school believes strongly in the rights to free speech and expression provided in the First Amendment. “University campuses are fertile ground for the free exchange of ideas, and UW-Madison has a legacy of promoting free and open expression,” McGlone said in an email.

The Thompson Center disagrees, arguing the survey results “are at odds with UW-Madison’s stated dedication to academic freedom and freedom of expression” and insisting that the school “must do more to instill in its students a deeper respect for and understanding of the First Amendment, its protections, and the importance of an unfettered marketplace of ideas.”

The report says the survey is consistent with other recent polls of students’ attitudes toward free speech and expression. “The results are further troubling when taken in conjunction with other findings that the views between younger and older generations are ‘as wide as they have been in decades’ and that younger people are more supportive of limiting speech than older generations.”




https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/08/study-finds-majority-of-college-students-think-government-should-punish-hate-speech/
 
University Of Michigan IT Department wants people to stop saying ‘picnic,’ & ‘girl'

article-5fe48c9f2a67d.jpg




The University of Michigan’s technology department is doing the important work of protecting students from the horrors of words like “picnic,” “girl,” “man,” “preferred pronouns,” and “honey,” even though the real horror would be finding these offensive. The list, created by the “Words Matter Task Force,” details words and phrases deemed anathema to an “inclusive” work and academic environment, offering awkward or non-specific replacements.

The strangest inclusion on the list would have to be “picnic,” which finds itself on the chopping block due to a false story about its origin. Rumors spread across social media contending that the word “picnic” developed in the context of lynching black people in the 19th and 20th centuries, but these claims have been debunked.

The word actually derives from the French “pique-nique,” which was coined in the 17th century to describe people coming together to eat as a group, with participants responsible for bringing different food. The university thus wishes to censor language based on an internet hoax.

Likewise, the common expression “long time no see” is derided for potentially being derogatory towards people from Asian descent. Or Native Americans. No one is quite sure. Due to the ubiquity of the phrase, it is virtually impossible to trace its origins, but it likely arose as a direct translation from Mandarin Chinese, Cantonese, or a Native American dialect. Yet the leap from “may have started from direct translations from an undetermined language” to “harmful and exclusionary” is vast.

All words that include any reference to the sexes are now deemed incompatible with a comfortable working environment. Apparently, the student body, faculty, and staff are so delicate that they need to be protected from being referred to as a “girl” or “boy,” to avoid acknowledging that sex is binary. Further, addressing groups with “Hey, guys,” must be replaced with the far more practiced, un-casual “folks” or “everyone.”

Surprisingly, a phrase once beloved with the progressive crowd has suddenly become outdated and regressive: “preferred pronouns.” Now, prefacing pronoun with any description implies that people’s pronouns are a choice and not an immutable facet of their being, just as Justice Amy Coney Barrett was demonized for using the term “sexual preference” when the phrase was commonplace among the left just days before.

To save women from feeling patronized, the task force suggests limiting the use of affectionate monikers “sweetheart,” “sweetie,” or “honey.” While these phrases can be used to talk down to someone, they just as often are merely a way to demonstrate support and care. Any term can be condescending with the right tone, even, as is suggested, “the person’s name.”

At least the IT department is proposing to hold themselves to their own absurd standards by censoring typical tech jargon, such as “blacklist,” “dummy variable,” and “grandfathered,” a shift Twitter made this summer in an effort to be more “inclusive” and to avoid being labeled racist, ableist, or sexist.

At the top of the list, the task force assures readers that the list will continue to grow. One could hope that, going forward, pushes towards inclusive language will only focus on words and phrases that are legitimately offensive, but, more than likely, many more innocuous expressions will continue to be censored in the name of woke-ness.




https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/28/university-of-michigan-it-department-wants-people-to-stop-saying-picnic-preferred-pronouns-and-girl/
 
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