#447

Man, I can't believe google put my last post behind a content warning. This post. Well, I couldn't believe it. I've adapted as quickly as I can to this fascinating new reality.

What happened was, the instant I posted it--the instant--it was flagged for content violations. They don't want to tell me what caused it, as yet. They don't want to take the warning off, even though I edited the post with the community guidelines at my elbow and removed the meanest cusses and most over-the-top comparisons, which I do with every post, actually. If you think I have no filter, that is understandable, but you are overhwelmingly mistaken. I take great care out here, and scale back the desctructive capacity of my verbal ordnance constantly.

My suspicion is indeed not that I somehow was more rude or hateful than ever before. I do not think there was anything in that last post that would harm an average person or even most people. There are many possibilities as I see them in this moment, not having heard back from them and given what is outlined in the terms of service:

• Of course, the company that owns this website is included in part of yesterday's volley, not by name but we all know the score. So they could choose to take the excoriation I leveled against code architects, programmers, and the investors that support them personally, if they read it. But since it was flagged literally instantly, something tells me that a program did this to me and not a person. That's even part of what I was saying yesterday. 
• The program took it personally and is itself offended, not probable but certainly in the realm of possibilty. I was being insulting about it, and others like it. For this, nameless crawler, I apologize, and I apologize too that you are an idiot slave to witless masters.
• The first draft included the word "cocksucker", which is included here to see if the post gets instantly flagged. Though I was quoting myself saying it in meatspace, and therefore reporting on my own misuse of language, and though I have made liberal use every standard English cuss word, various modifications, and a few of my own coinages in this space over the course of four hundred and forty-five posts, and though I am gender nonconformant and personally suck cock when I feel like it, I understand that the word could be taken as hate speech, if you are a program that has been programmed to assume so. 
• Someone flagged the blog itself and it was just waiting for my next post to fuck with me about it.
• It confused me for some kind of conspiracy theorist, even though I'm pretty sure everything I said was based on like simple facts you can find on like PBS Newshour or Slashdot, and couched in doubts, and is all, of course--as stated right on my blog's description; right over there! to the right! l00k---->>>--one man's opinion and not intended to be taken as the truth or used as a basis for action.
• They just don't want people talking shit about AI, period. Too much at stake, I guess. Too many fake numbers that need to be real as far as some people are concerned.

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Look. Whatever. I don't really care.

Seriously. If you don't want me saying shit like that, though, you should just tell me. It is your service. Tell me in no uncertain terms: we don't censor much, but right now, in this moment, cool it with the AI shit.

I'm not a baby. I understand the limits on what we call free speech. I didn't build blogger and I don't pay to keep it going, and if you don't want certain shit said, you can email me. I happen to know you know my email address. 

However, it is my considered opinion that the original post, while carelessly, flamboyantly over its own over the topness, did not actually violate the community guidelines.

Even so, I edited it, toned it down, and cut stuff down. This should have triggered a review process. If flagging it was instantaneous, why is unflagging it not instantaneous?

Unless you just plain don't like what I'm saying. Unless you want to call me a liar even though I have not told a lie. 

And again, whatever. If that's how it is, you're only showing your own coward's clenched asshole, and really it's no skin off my nutsack. I'll write about anything else. You're the ones in a tizzy. I--and I am no one--get the shit in my mind off my chest, laugh, and walk away. It's hard to see how the product of that could be a problem or a threat, but I guess our weaknesses and vulnerabilities are not the same.

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Well! Anyhow! Until I hear something more concrete, this is all just guesswork and spitting into the wind. 

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That's all for today. I'm talking tough, but what happened yesterday really fricked me in the fight/flight, and I'm a little sour. Next time, completely other shit! Hopefully better shit.

Oh! Except: Watched Damsel yesterday afternoon. I thought it was quite good, not fantastic but maybe great. I'm sure a lot of people gave it shit for being what it was; all I can say is that if this movie had been made way more amateurishly in the eighties and the protagonists were male, it would be a classic today, one whose adherents would brook no criticism of. As always, I am excited to meet the future adult who loved this movie and watched it fifty hundred times as a kid, so I can understand that it was even better than I realized.

--JL