Because that is where I get to hear from all my friends and family scattered around the globe, and none of them are likely to resume yearly postal newsletters, or follow me onto some new experimental social media platform any time soon. Despite Facebook’s best efforts, I still manage to get a few occasional glimpses into the lives of the ones I care about. Which is nice.

I won’t be deleting my Facebook account, because it just isn’t worth the hassle. Thanks for coming to my TED talk and have a great day.

As for why I will no longer use Facebook…

Not because of the frenetic mining of my personal data: everything they could grab has long been grabbed, and will live in their datacenter long after the end of humankind.
Nor because they betrayed my trust by selling access to my private conversations to whatever government or company gave them a few bucks for it: they never had any of my trust for them to betray in the first place.
Nor even because their mix of greed and incompetence singlehandedly took the world that much closer to the global dystopia we were all warned about before the internet even existed.

I no longer post on Facebook, I no longer “like and comment on what my friends have to say”, I no longer “engage” with Facebook contents… because I am so fucking tired of playing guinea pig to 20-year-old brogrammers looking to optimise their metrics by turning my reptilian brain against me.

Because for every tiny bit of actual news from a friend, I have to sift through a million attempts at goading me into clicks and likes and emoji angry faces. Because ‘liking’ that thoughtful progressive feminist queer-friendly left-leaning post, will have no other discernable effect on the real world, other than trading me a short-lived bout of smug self-satisfaction in exchange for yet another datapoint heaped upon my ad profile.

Because even when my feed is not entirely made up of shitty clickbaits trying to weaponise my emotions, the remaining leftover content overwhelmingly features those people most desperate to convince the rest of the world that they are doing great-so-great-look-at-my-fabulous-holiday-selfie-great. And because resisting the constant urge to feed the great data moloch with the dregs of my own online persona, is downright exhausting.

Hi Dave, why don’t you let all your friends know what a cool person you are by posting these pictures of your weekend in the Hamptons! Just click here and I will post it all on your behalf!

In conclusion

I shall still try to keep up with your Facebook wedding announcements, birthday reminders and holiday pictures, and I might even occasionally hit that ‘like’ button, when my frontal lobe fails to catch the electrical impulse in time, but I will continue to do my utmost best to keep my interactions with Facebook at a minimum.

I might even resurrect this blog, and party like it’s 2009 again.

The year is 2017, and voicing your concerns at the idea that vigilantes can just punch people they disagree with, makes you slightly worse than Adolf Hitler.

This whole discussion started on Twitter. Now summing-up and continuing in a medium where every nuanced argument does not have to fit in a neat 140 characters1This other post gave a good summary of my own thoughts on the matter. Unfortunately, with a needless anti-intellectual, leftwing-strawmaning tangent in point 4..

“Why do you love Nazis so much?”

If you remotely know me and utter that statement, you are being a glib arsehole. If you don’t know me at all, you are still favouring ad hominem while completely missing the point. Either way, I am afraid there is just no point discussing further.

“You aren’t a Nazi. You are way worse: you are an appeaser !”

Remember when Bush Jr used that term to attack people who opposed the war in Iraq? Congratulations, you have just used a Dick Cheney talking point to justify the use of gratuitous violence.

“Appeasing” does not mean what you think it means. Appeasement was the cowardly policy of letting Hitler murder his people and invade neighbouring countries, in the hope that he would enjoy his victories and stop there. The farthest victories enjoyed by our 21st century nazi so far, has been the ability to broadcast his spiteful bile to a bunch of basement-dwelling internet trolls and talking to the occasional moron journalist (more on that in a minute). Your problem is with free speech and its limits, not “appeasement”.

“Calling for genocide is not free speech.”

We are finally in somewhat-sane debating territory. And you are right: even the US’ extremely permissive free speech laws prohibit incitement. That’s great news: someone ought to drag this muppet to court and make an example out of him.

Except: chances are, he never outright called for genocide, because like most semi-successful scumbags, he is smart enough to know how far he legally can go.

Most of his statements, however, would easily land him in a European court, where people are understandably more touchy about the whole nazi-speech thing. I happen to lean with Chomsky and against this attempt at legislating hate away, but I would not necessarily think that people on either side of that debate are freedom-haters or nazi-lovers…

The crucial word in all the above is “legal”. That bit of nazi-punching occurred in a country that enjoys a reasonably sturdy (if imperfect) legal framework that offers some decent amounts of protection from physical oppression by civilians2Yes: with many systemic oppression issues. But the sources of that oppression are overwhelmingly agents of authority, not sociopathic weirdos wearing a frog lapel pin.. If you object to speech: you have legal recourses. If these recourses are lacking, you still have many options to fight back without resorting to punching. But the fact you don’t have legal recourses in a lawful state would be a good indication that you are not being directly threatened physically, and that’s where most people consider punching a no-no.

“As a non-oppressed person, you are not entitled to have a position on this”

First, this is a comically bad application for this argument. As a very-white, cis, hetero, able-bodied, financially-secure guy, there are very few discourses I could legitimately cry oppression about, and yet as it happens this is the one instance where I am fairly sure I have a lot more personal skin in that game than the sheltered black-bloc teenager with anger issues who socked our nazi3Before you howl at my reductive characterisation of typical black-block protesters, you better make sure you know what you are talking about. Because I was a stupid teenager once, and I have a pretty good first-hand idea..

Moreover, that is an incredibly silly thing to respond to someone voicing concern about the legitimisation of violence in a civilian context: it might be relevant if I was defending his right to free speech, but I am not. I am defending his right to not be punched, as long as he does not present a clear and present danger to anyone.

“If punching people is off-limits, I guess you’d rather we engage nazis and be nice to them”

Actually no. There is a huge array of options between “engaging” (or even “tolerating”), and punching. My preferred option by far, would be to completely shun and ignore that sort of abhorrent but fringe views, and instead focus on the much more concrete danger of a toxic authoritarian moron (and his cronies) heading one of the most powerful country on Earth. But I realise this is a lot more difficult than reposting cool memes of a hateful leech getting repeatedly elbowed in the face, to a cool beat.

“That nazi is now a walking joke who has gone into hiding and lives in fear: Punching Works!”

Ignoring the whole “end-justifies-means” angle for a second, even this tiny achievement is verifiably false: never has there been more mentions of him in my social media feeds, the guy is now giving interviews left and right and featured in every single news outlet. Congratulations on giving a piece-of-shit nazi the kind of media exposure he could only ever dream of a week ago. Hope that meme was worth it.

Most importantly: assuming it even achieved any measurably positive result, what is the end game here? Do we go around punching every nazi sympathisers until not one dares speak up in public4Good thing they don’t have any worldwide network that would let them anonymously share their despicable ideas and organise from the comfort of their home, safe from punching, huh?? Obviously, we next have to do the same to every racist arsehole out there5Unless you think it is acceptable to only wish black people dead, as opposed to both blacks and Jews. But you don’t, do you?. Or perhaps we start with all the homophobic scumbags freely spouting their hate on TV?

Guess you have a lot of punching to do. Off you go then. Good luck and remember: thumb always on the outside.

“Whatever… It won’t achieve much but at least it felt good watching a nazi getting punched.”

… is probably where that debate should start, if everyone was honest with themselves.

And yes: it did feel good watching that spiteful piece-of-shit getting sucker-punched mid-sentence. It still feels good after repeat viewing, and some of these nazi-punching memes are outright hilarious.

But there’s a major difference between having a positive visceral reaction to an act of violence, and intellectually condoning and defending it. That difference is the essence of modern democratic societies: the idea that might does not make right6And for the love of Hobbes, spare me your arguments about State violence, and resistance to it. This particular internet-forum nazi was most definitely not an agent of the State nor exercising violence in its name..

Once this is acknowledged, feel free to accept the use of extra-legal civilian violence in times of peace as an agent of social change, but do not be surprised when you find yourself in the company of the very people you claim to be fighting.

“OK. Maybe not a great idea. But really not worth fretting about.”

Because when a populist authoritarian xenophobe just became President of the USA and is pushing to keep his own privately-ran militia, what could go wrong with the legitimisation of unsanctioned violence committed by private citizens?

How much do you want to bet, that this video will soon resurface, reframed as an example of the lawlessness of the land and the need for more authoritarian control? When your grandma from Kansas sees the video of a nicely-dressed gentleman with a friendly demeanour, speaking in a reassuringly calm tone, getting suddenly knocked out by a masked assaillant, do you think she will think “that nazi scum had it coming”? And if you just said “screw stupid grandma and her Fox News-bred ignorance”, congratulations: you are a perfect example of how a populist moron with marginal support managed to win that election.

The main reason punching nazis is bad7Assuming you live in 2017 DC, and not in some alternate dimension where the Reich controls the Eastern seaboard…, is that, on top of achieving no measurable positive long-term result, it will likely bolster the moral and PR position of said nazis and other, less cartoonishly evil but no less despicable, people.

“Had there been more nazi-punching in the 1930s, maybe things would have turned better”

… is what you might say, if you have never opened a history book describing the ascension to power of the German Nazi party in the 1930s.

One of the main reasons Hitler was able to transform a thin electoral victory within a weak-but-functioning democracy, into complete totalitarian control, in a matter of years, was precisely the perception that public order was no longer assured and that social norms had broken down. A perception mostly orchestrated by nazi propaganda, but conveniently supported by a decade of street violence by post-spartakist KPD and other radical leftwing movements. It did not matter how morally justified or isolated these acts of civilian violence may have been: they were propped up as examples of the failings of democracy and, by the time the Reichstag burnt down, enough Germans were fine with a dictatorship.

To be very clear: the vast majority of that nazi punching was entirely justified, and you would have hopefully found me cheering on the punching if not outright participating. But never use it as an argument that pre-emptively punching nazis in the street is how you prevent nazis from gaining power, because that’s demonstrably false.

“Shut up already… Alt-right stooge…”

At the end of the day, I do not think this incident is either the next Reichstag Fire, nor as innocuous and laugh-inducing as some would want it to be. I am fairly confident that the vast majority of people who disagree with me on this somewhat-academic issue are not bloodthirsty beasts. I may also be completely blind to the very real and impending risk of that nazi’s ruthlessly organised online paramilitary organisation taking over the country tomorrow and putting his unfathomably horrid ideas into practice. Maybe that black-bloc guy was actually a time-traveller who prevented the next Hitler. In any case, I think it is a debate where it is perfectly possible to hold either opinion and still be a very decent person one might enjoy a cup of coffee with8By comparison, I doubt I could even enjoy a post-apocalyptic survival meal with a Trump supporter..

Interestingly enough, that is not the position of many people on the opposite side of this debate. Apparently, merely questioning whether punching people is OK, automatically moves me from the cozy near-radical leftwing views I always foolishly thought I held, to the outer fringes of Pepe-loving foaming Rightwing Twitter trolls. At least based on some of the lovely measured reactions I got on Twitter on occasions where the topic came up9I would bet a tenner that this guy, for example, is busy patting himself on the back for telling off one of them Trump-loving nazis….

And that, (not so) ironically, is a good example of why allowing the free punching of nazis without due process, is a dangerous idea.

IMG_8265

  1. Start your title with a number.
  2. Include random grandiloquent synonym for “great”.
  3. Attach irrelevant but eye-catching stock photo loosely-credited picture nicked from Google Image.
  4. Throw a dice, pick a list item and single it out in your title, to fool people into thinking the list was put together by someone who gave a fuck.
  5. Include a few useless factoids and thoroughly obvious common-sense observations as filler.
  6. Sunny weather often follows bouts of rain. Except when it doesn’t.
  7. The Jews control the media and are conspiring with the reptilian political elites to enslave the human race.
  8. Include at least one moronic / blatantly false / controversial item, to goad naive people into engaging with your list on social media, thus giving it more exposure.
  9. Stop and contemplate the vacuousness of your existence.
  10. Come to the frightening realisation that you are an insignificant leech on the backside of Humanity, whose contribution to the Joy, Happiness or Anything Good to the world is a net negative.
  11. Jump off a bridge.

Airlines tend to be like banks: name any one of them in large-enough company and there is bound to be at least a few people with personal horror stories and imprecations never to use their service. Hard to tell apart the inevitable statistical occurence from true patterns of bad customer service.

Last week, however, I finally understood why all my US friends heaped so much scorn on United Airlines. And why I’ll be joining in on the chorus of “never again”, next time their name comes up in discussions:

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There’s nothing new in whining about tech monopolies: the companies that enjoy them and the doom that awaits us for foolishly trusting them.

At this point, we have all been at either end of a speech on the dangers of letting Microsoft/Google/Facebook’s dominion over our life go unchecked and unbalanced. A speech that usually ends with one party’s eyes glazing over and excusing themselves to the restroom.

The problem with standard denunciations of these potential abuses is that they tend to rest on abstract, distant and mostly theoretical arguments. It’s not that we don’t care about fair competitive practices and healthy markets, it’s just that we care a lot more about convenience and not messing with things that run kinda-ok. If the Galactic Empire could ensure that the Alderaan-Tattooin express shuttle runs on time, most of us would be fine with their hegemonic market practices, and tell that troublemaker Luke Skywalker to go seek therapy for his Freudian issues instead of blowing things up.

But the reality is that, if you use any of the services provided by these monopolistic behemoths (and even if you don’t), there is a statistical certainty that it will bite you in the arse at some point. And when it does, that monopolistic behemoth status means you will be absolutely without recourse.

Ever felt somewhat powerless, troubleshooting your internet connection with some underpaid cable company support rep? Now picture the same thing if you were an ant and the support rep a 100 foot-high concrete wall, and you may have an accurate allegory of dealing with Google or Facebook as an end-user.

Allow me to illustrate with two absolutely-true real-life examples of the hopeless situations one deals with, when a glitch occurs in the Matrix:

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Ukip in Britain, Front National in France, and a similar array of smiling europhobic racists and neo-fascists in Denmark, Austria and Hungary

In most cases (except perhaps the UK, who really just doesn’t get that whole EU thing): because people just can’t be arsed enough to cast a serious vote, or cast a vote at all, at EU elections, and would rather “send a message” to their respective local governments by voting for the looniest candidate with a populist slant they like. Even if that means fucking up one of the only political entity that can truly make a positive mark on their lives in the coming decades.

Way to go, people.

These days, presumably to make up for the shutting down of US panda-cams, the World has taken a keen interest in the reproduction problems of the Japanese people.

The last wave started with a cheap click-baiting article in the Guardian, who really, by now, should know better than publish poorly-researched articles about made-up Japanese “trends”. On par with its gratuitously sensationalising title, the article gleefully mixed miscellaneous unconnected research data with completely random anecdotal stuff. Using the thin pretense of studying Japan’s problematic demographics, to go on a fact-finding mission with a Japanese dominatrix turned sex coach: because prurient article on the wacky sexual habits of the Japanese sell so much better than boring age pyramid charts and the like.

In response to this new milestone in paid-by-the-click pseudo-journalism, a few marginally better-written articles popped up, somehow attempting to reframe the discussion into something approaching fact-based reporting. While a whole lot more just piled on, presumably in hope of getting some of that sweet sweet internet buzz. Finally, some journalists pointed out the glaringly racist undercurrent running through the whole thing (not that orientalism is a new thing), charitably overlooking gross journalistic incompetence as the key ingredient to that potent mix of offensive stupidity.

In the lesser spheres of non-retributed publishing, every Japan-related blog or forum has contributed its fair share of anecdotal comments ranging from the Reddit-topping hilariously inept armchair pop-psy take on it1Extra irony points for having started in the psychology subforum of Reddit, where people are hard at work dispelling any notion that it might be an actual science. to the ubiquitous (and no less silly) counter-argument: “These articles must be wrong, because I know lots of Japanese who are having lots of sex. (wink wink nudge nudge)“.

Some Japanese blogger came very close to summarising my exact thoughts on the subject, in a few neat statistical plots2I know: not exactly gonna sway the masses against the appeal of “Queen Ai, professional Japanese dominatrix” and Guardian in-house resident statistics expert.. But it still missed some fundamental issues I have with this joke of a news trend, so I thought I’d give it my own try:

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