Maybe It's You

First, I want to encourage everyone to read the original article by Dr. Joseph Mercola. If it exaggerates the censorship situation today, it won't tomorrow. 

https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/google-gmail-tracking-censoring-cola/

Corporations can reach a point where, like Standard Oil or Bell Telephone, they need to be broken up for their own good. When Google flashes messages like "Got interruptions?" to tell viewers for whom Chrome isn't working that they're making it not work intentionally because our local servers withheld some data-ganking privileges from Google, it's time for the splitter. 

But some readers have undoubtedly visited Mercola's web site. 

Nobody's questioned that Mercola is a doctor or that some of the "alternative" advice he gives isn't true, but there is some reluctance to trust the Mercola site in the way people trust WebMD or MayoClinic. Not even because Mercola has gone out on a limb in recommending new, experimental practices, although he's done that. What hurts his credibility and causes people to block him from their e-mail is that his site is a hot mess.

Visiting mercola.com today, for fresh details of the messiness, actually opened a nice quiet message that the site was "undergoing detox." Jolly high time.

When I've visited that site in the past, the usual result has been that my browser crashed. Most computers I've used wouldn't open mercola.com. Period. The ones that did showed a riot of distracting visual clutter that basically tells people, "Never mind the content you were looking for, whatever it was. It wasn't worth reading anyway. All we're about is shoving spyware onto your computer."

If I'd gone to mercola.com to look up something basic, like "nutrients," the exact content of the whirling, flashing, screaming ad widgets would have varied but the effect would have been something like this:

"Nutrients WHERE ARE YOU? are substances WHERE?? found in food that supply nutrition LOOK AT THIS! to the body NO THIS! Vitamins are one OVER HERE!!! class of nutrients. BUY SOMETHING NOW! Vitamin A NO, BUY THIS!! was discovered first. It is YOU'VE READ ENOUGH, NOW BUY SOMETHING! found in carrots, gree CRASH!!!!"

Most people in cyberspace do not have the kind of neurological wiring that really likes a three-ring circus. Consider this blog, Dr. Mercola. Consider how respectful of the reader's device's memory and the reader's attention it is. There is one sidebar, not two, containing a few small unobtrusive widgets that are easy to ignore. Content flows down the page without interruption. Each of the few pictures is chosen to illustrate something in the text and appears in between the paragraphs that refer to it. Text does not wrap around pictures. All pictures sit still on the screen. Although we are adding links to sites where those who are able may choose to listen to music, nothing on the screen at this web site blinks, flashes, moves, or makes a noise. 

That's the goal to strive for, Dr. Mercola, if you want credibility. Make each page look like an article i a medical journal, only written in everyday language. Use clear black letters on a white background. Let ads and widgets run along one side (or the top or the bottom) of the screen, not two. Large detailed pictures go on a separate page. Ads never look good for anything by a M.D. but if you need the money, put the ads in a row at the bottom. 200x300 pixels is a good size for pictures. Do not allow animation, text wrapping, or sound anywhere on a serious web site. When you think a page looks proper, take out one more picture.

Avoid the pitfall of thinking that if literate people can watch videos, while illiterate people can't read words, posting videos is more "inclusive" than posting words. It's not. Most people can't listen to videos if we want to, and don't want to spend the extra time it takes to listen to words we could have printed out and read. Never try to communicate serious ideas through a video. Even people who enjoy listening to sound on their computers don't want to sit through lectures. 

I was surprised by my own reaction when someone posted a good informative video on a site that's mostly "for entertainment" with lots of jokes, banter, pretty pictures, and music videos. I had forced myself to sit through the video as a lecture; I'd agreed that it could work for illiterate audiences, and recommended it. So some friendly soul posted it on a "fun" site...yuck. It was like being at a party, circulating, listening to music, sipping a drink, and coming to somebody who'd set up a chalkboard and was giving a lecture. 

There are sites exclusively for videos, like Youtube, Rumble, and Discord. Sites where people look for advice from doctors should not look like them.

I have had to take some trouble to stop Outlook misfiling welcome correspondence as spam, and I'm sure people who use Gmail are having the same problem, but if your e-mail is obnoxious or leads to an obnoxious web site, your intended audience will file your e-mail as spam all by themselves. 

What about the conservative sites that are being classified as "defamatory and dangerous"? Is that because the people who post on these sites are more concerned about the damage done by coronavirus vaccine than about the damage done by coronavirus itself? Maybe so. I wouldn't put it past those who whine for censorship. I think censorship itself is more dangerous than anything anyone is likely to say.

I think we need some restrictions on the use of censorship on the Internet, e.g.: "If your company has publicly traded stocks, then it is no longer a private company and is subject to a lawsuit for censoring anything that it can't prove to be doing material harm to a person." If a web site is a private blog, the owner should have the right to ban, and claim to be banning as "libellous" if the readers think that sort of thing is funny, comments like "Golf is a great game." If it's making enough money off "information" to be on the stock market, maybe not. Maybe sites like Google, Paypal, Yahoo, Amazon, and Twitter should be subject to fines if they can't prove that they represent all points of view impartially, that if tweets that support one party, for example, outnumber tweets that support another party it's because Internet users actually favor one party over the other. If your friends were on Twitter when you were and your tweet did not show up on their home pages, maybe Twitter should be fined. Certainly, when I go to Twitter and realize that an e-friend's tweets weren't showing up on my page, I feel that Twitter should be fined.

However, even if censorship for political content, or religious content or other content that reflects individuals' beliefs, were treated as a crime--which I think might be a good thing--some people who complain about censorship now might still be subject to censorship just because of the way they present their opinions.

"Impeach Biden" would be legal, so calls for people to do that are legal and should not be censored. "Who's Joe Biden?" would be a taunt to which the President's and his admirers' only retort would be "If you don't know that, what do you know?" Calls to rape/murder President Biden, or any other person, are not legal and should be censored by all sites and publishers. 

"JoeBama" is an epithet that accuses President Biden of taking advice from ex-President Obama. To what extent that's true would be hard to prove. "Hunter Biden's father" is another thing people might call President Biden that would communicate a low opinion of him without being libellous. "Resident imbecile" makes a statement of fact, in obsolete terms, that is not true; it could legitimately be said to deserve censorship as libellous. The President may have endorsed some ideas that are imprudent and dangerous, and in my opinion he has, but he obviously has learned more about how to survive in this world than an average seven-year-old child. I don't think anyone seriously thinks that any President of the United States ever has been an imbecile, and I think the tradition of calling them that is venerable enough that calling a President "the resident imbecile" is probably safe, but the President could legitimately ask that it be censored.

A third category of legitimate censorship is involved when people post personal information that could be used to identify, and thereby harass, a person on the Internet. The harassment doesn't have to be personal: consider the way people who've called web sites have received junk calls, sometimes twenty or thirty a day, for the next six months. Web sites should not be allowed to store or display anything that might be an individual's phone number. They should not be allowed to collect individuals' names, addresses, dates of birth, proof of citizenship, or any sort of tax, bank, or employment information, either. They should not be allowed to store pictures of people who are not physically on their property. Individuals must be regarded as innocent until proven guilty, rather than constantly subjected to surveillance and harassment, because the United States is a nation of free adults. 

How much harm does "prejudicial" content do to people? Well...consider a fond memory of my young adult life. I'm 5'4". My flatmate was 5'5". The guys we'd invited to dinner that night were 5'6" and 5'8". So all of us could be described by most of our generation as short. We were celebrating my flatmate's divorce from a young man who was 4'10". The divorce had been his idea, because she'd been diagnosed with an incurable disease and he'd wanted to bolt before she actually became disabled. So we took turns putting LP records on the stereo and the record we wore out that evening was one by Randy Newman. The people downstairs, if they were home, would have had to endure the sound of four short people dancing and singing along with, "Short people have no reason to live." 

In a different context any of us might have found that song offensive.

Anybody Out There might choose to hate me because person is a hater. I might go online, Google my own name, and find web sites set up with names like IHatePriscillaKing.com and PKingHasTheWorstBlogOnEarth.org. Or the hate might be more generic. Somebody might be posting "Why All Irish-Americans Are Imbeciles" or "There Are Too Many Knitters In This World" or "Writers Eat Rat Droppings." People can and do post things, like this week's troll, that rely on a stereotyped assumption that women are incompetent. That kind of thing is annoying but, hey, at least it tells you where people stand and warns you not to waste any friendly gestures on them. 

I think that's applicable to all nonviolent expressions of hate, actually. There is still an organization called the Anti-Defamation League whose purpose is to wail theatrically that saying things like "I can't stand Jewish people" actually harms Jewish people. I've never had a reason to say "I can't stand Jewish people" myself, but as a Bright Young Thing I used to have reasons to say "I can't stand Stephanie," Stephanie being another Bright Young Thing who happened to be Jewish. So, if somebody else can't stand Jewish people, maybe what person means is that the Jewish people person has known happened to be Stephanie and, hypothetically, her brother and sister who were even worse. I have no real problem with that. Really harmful expressions of ethnic hate, that deserve censorship, are the same as the really harmful expressions of personal ill will. In fact more harm is done by the expressions of personal ill will. If classmates go around saying "I hate freshmen," even though freshmen have historically been an oppressed class subject to ridicule and hazing and sadistic club initiations, still, other freshmen are likely to sympathize and they can bond with one another. When classmates make their hate individual and personal, even stupid little statements of ill will like "Tracy is soooo stupid, it's embarrassing that Tracy goes to our school," is when poor idiot kids like Tracy commit suicide. More intelligent people just acknowledge that haters hate because they are haters, and get on with their lives.

But what happens when information is used to create prejudice against an individual by dispersing that information through cyberspace, along with some sort of message that you want to persecute the person? Depending on who you are, that can do real material harm. You, the person "doxing" your enemy (or your customer, or even your children in a misguided belief that you're making them "popular"), don't even know how much harm you may be doing. "But people have a right to know that X owes me money, so that they won't lend him any money until he pays his debt." Maybe X owes you money, and then again maybe he doesn't; maybe what you've reported was a mistake you made, as a result of which X might be denied a loan that would cause his business to fail, his wife to leave him, his wife's brother to beat him up because his wife didn't want to admit she was leaving him just because of money, and who knows what else. 

The Chinese government infamously experimented with a "social credit" system. Whatever benefits they might have expected or even got, this kind of thing is abhorrent to the American soul. The only possible response to government gossip on that scale, people say, is for everyone to zero out their "social credit" score and collapse the system. 

I frequent some web sites because they have big comment sections. At one such web site, even though some people's original screen names identified them as liberals and Democrats, reactions to the censorious comments of certain leaders of that party have created a backlash. People take the nastiest thing a Democrat has said about them or their group and use it as a screen surname. They are now identified as John Doe Deplorable, Jane Doe Ultra Conservative, Richard Roe Terrorist. 

Pasting labels on people in this way does little material harm to them. It does more harm to the person calling names in what the person imagines to be aid of a cause. A troll blunders into a web site and wants to express disagreement with something posted by a writer the audience admire. People aim their barbs at the troll. Oh good, trolls like attention. Eventually the troll gets blocked from the site. 

The troll may have had a valid point. I don't believe the troll who's been calling me names on Disqus, in defense of glyphosate, has any valid points. I do believe the writer-chick who got so upset about the way I recommended her book, last week, had a valid point. There were meant to be three versions of that book review: a terse one on Goodreads, a rambly personal one aimed at The Nephews here, and a "literary" one in a literary magazine. I think the rambly one that upset Tanya Mills was preachy, and could have been shortened. If Mills had controlled her emotions enough to call out specific phrases that she felt made the characters in her poems sound bad, I would probably have cut those phrases out; for one thing I didn't read the characters as prostitutes and didn't say they were. But she didn't. She could have called the review preachy, pompous, or longwinded, but instead she chose to attack me. She was looking for a fight. You don't win concessions by looking for a fight.

Or the troll may have hoped to recruit support from people who already agree with him. Funny thing about that mouthy little guy on Disqus. The farmers at the chemical industry rag had been ignoring me, and the young parents at the Children's Health Defense site rarely bother to vote other people's comments up or down. The troll recruited a good dozen farmers to read both sites, voting my comments up and his down. Hallelujah! I have not lived in vain! 

You can win support by debating someone's claims honestly, based on facts, if there happen to be facts that support you, as in the case of glyphosate there are not. But you can score points by saying, "What about the X study linked at...?" or "As Y said..."--showing a better level of research than the other person's. You can't score points by bellowing "You're an idiot and the person you're quoting is a liar AND SO IS YOUR MOTHER." 

I'm not in any way upholding "niceness" over truth in saying that "conservatives" can benefit by not sounding like trolls. Actually I think this administration got away with several very harmful mistakes because people were more interested in bickering about the popular vote than in debating actual policy issues. I am saying that when we keep the debate about the facts or the ethics of a question, without ill will for persons, there's some slim chance that people on the other side of the debate will at least be willing to compromise. When we lead with hostility toward persons, we can probably manage to lose a debate about whether puppies are lovable. 

As the experience of bland, polite, moderate Vice-President Pence, or the low-content fashion-model tweets posted for Melania Trump, or the initial hesitation and skepticism I brought to Glyphosate Awareness, have shown, debating courteously is no guarantee that the other side won't act like the haters they are. They will. But politics, dear conservatives, is about persuading the audience, especially the swing voters. They're the ones whose judgment of you as bullies picking on other people's grandparents, or heroic souls speaking your truth and being attacked for it, can keep the popular vote from being close enough for anybody to cheat. 

There were years when the voters actually needed to be "polarized" in order to have an incentive to vote; W Bush and Al Gore looked and sounded like a matched pair of bookends. Those years are over. We ought to be a solidly post-socialist world by now, but we're allowing a few bitter clingers to keep people polarized about an issue from a hundred years ago. The swing voters know something is wrong; in the next political post I'll consider an interesting psychological study of why it seems to take more effort to toe the D party line than to endorse R ideas. Conservatives need only sound rational, which presupposes sounding polite, to win this year's election. It's not hard to beat a party associated with inflation, hard times, and the threat of nuclear war. It's a righteous act to beat such a party, to force them to spend time thinking about the good they want to accomplish and why they're failing to accomplish it. But it's possible, if Rs make themselves obnoxious.