August 2017 – Amanda Unvarnished

“Many Sides” My Ass!

| Saturday, 12 August, 2017

Logs on after Shabbat. Oh look! Nazis! Looks at my social medias. Oh look! People in my timeline/newsfeed defending the nazis, because free speech! Time to visit the bank of fucks and purge more accounts, because as a Jew I will not tolerate this shit, and as a white person I will not stand by silently while this shit is defended, no matter what the reason, and I will not stand by while other white people look the other way and shrug their shoulders, wring their hands, and/or say there’s nothing that can be done about this. Now is not the time to be neutral, and it is not the time for nuance. If you are silent, you are complicit. If you’ve ever opened your mouth to condemn Black Lives Matter, or condemn Muslims when one of them rams a vehicle into a crowd, don’t you dare keep it shut now. This is not, (as our president says), about violence on the part of “many sides”. It’s about white supremacists coming out in force, and committing an act of domestic terrorism. You’re only as awesome as the things you tolerate, and if there are assholes in your community, it’s your fault. If you can’t muster up the courage to do anything more than role your eyes and wring your hands, or offer up thoughts and prayers, then whether it’s friends or family, we need to re-evaluate our relationship, because I am fucking done.

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Amanda CAARSON

| Sunday, 13 August, 2017

OK, so let me explain how nazis_dangit would work. Right now, there’s a filter in WordPress called capital_p_dangit that gets fired when you misspell WordPress with a lower-case “p”, but only when you’re using the visual editor, I think. I wouldn’t know because I almost never misspell WordPress, and I never use the visual editor. You can disable this filter with one line of code, but most people probably don’t, because most people really aren’t that invested in something that trivial. So nazis_dangit would work like this: If you’re using the visual editor, and you type the word “Alt-Right” without quotes, WordPress replaces it with Nazis. If you type it in quotes, (as pretty much anyone who doesn’t actually call themselves alt-right would do), the word survives. You could disable this, just like you can disable capital_p_dangit, or if you really wanted the word to show up, you could just type it in quotes. But if someone wants to seriously use the term to name themselves, they won’t want it showing up in quotes, because people tend to look at a word in quotes as something to be taken not seriously. It would diminish the power of the term in readers’ eyes, thus diluting their message. I’m only half-serious about all this, because I’m pretty sure someone like Mika, (who I think is great), is going to come up with a really good reason not to do this. But we’ve already been accused of social justice coding thanks to both the emoji support and the accessibility stuff. I say we give the social justice haters something to really whine about. I think we’ve gotten to the point where a project like WordPress can’t say it’s completely not responsible for what people do with the software. And WordPress isn’t the only one in this position. We tend to take a position in tech that if we create something, people can do whatever they want with it, and we bear no responsibility. But we don’t accept that argument from gun manufacturers, so why should we accept it from tech?

OK, I should probably go to bed now. But I’m still really, really pissed about all this, and to be honest, this is kind of a tipping point. I’m really fed up with the astounding amount of “not-my-problem” when it comes to Trump, what he says, and the people and views and actions he indirectly supports. We are way past the point where anyone can claim with any credibility that there’s no evidence that Trump himself is a bigot. He just flew his colors with that crap about “many sides”. Not that most of us are surprised, but for those who were still rationalizing the bigotry away, that gig is up, and it’s time to take off the rose-colored glasses.