it's feeling like @jack and the winged monkeys are really upping their censorship game again.

respond (respectfully and with data) to a blue check pushing covid fear, and you get your replies put in twitter jail behind the "show more replies" prompt.

seeing this over and over.

i just had millions of impressions from the last week "disappear" from my history.

half the accounts i follow do not show up in my feed or alerts. i have to go to their pages to find their tweets.

hearing from lots of people they are having same problem following me.

getting loads of DM's from people who followed me saying they had mysteriously "unfollowed me" despite never having done so.

seeing engagement drop like a stone all of a sudden.

this is as exquisitely lame of twitter as it is utterly predictable.

just more thumb on the scale.

leaving aside all the censorship issues and partisan assclownery of "ideas so correct they must be protected from scrutiny and opposing viewpoints" i think we actually start to land on another issue:

evolution.

@jack does not seem to understand it & it's why his gang will lose

species evolve due to pressure. antelopes are fast because cheetahs are fast and vice versa.

but what happens when you remove all predation and evolutionary pressure?

you get dippy little animals like the kiwi bird that's unviable in any competitive ecosystem.

coddled = weak.

ideas and schools of thought work the same way

i went to an uber-liberal university. a real hotbed of PC doctrine

it's why i got a great education. spend 4 years at brown arguing libertarianism and you're going to have every single thing you say challenged

and learn

a lot.

toe the line on doctrine and dogma, and you can just cruise along on the soft clouds of groupthink and echo-chamber reinforcement.

you'll learn chapter and verse, but not how to think about them or even to think at all.

unchallenged ideas are weak ideas.

one look at the preposterous nonsense and word salad emerging from the grievance studies departments at US universities makes this painfully obvious to anyone not already drunk on the kool aid.

these ideas would never, ever survive actual debate and discourse.

what makes twitter great (when it's allowed to work) is what a full blown arena this place is

ideas that can survive out on that serengeti are tough & fast & clever

you think you have it nailed & some acct w/ 4 followers who happens to know 20X what you do guts you like a trout

it's glorious. and it's educational.

it's a place where cats and us congress-people can rub elbows and learn stuff.

it's a place where nobel laureates help you with things and where the hive mind can answer your complex questions in minutes.

it's a place where ideas go to get refined and strong or to die trying.

if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.

when it's allowed to work.

but when you coddle certain views and shelter them from analysis, criticism, and debate, that all breaks.

weak ideas persist.

and this is why this policy of censorship and sheltering will be its own undoing.

it raises weak ideas and ideologies. their glaring holes and false presumptions are allowed to persist and the people who accept them and fail to see the issue are much the stupider for it.

this is how intellectual movements rot from the inside out.

any fool can see that if you ban auto imports and only have one national car company, you're going to get crappy cars.

guess what? ideas work the same way.

this censorship does not protect them, it keeps them weak.

the need for it is an outright admission that the ideas are weak and cannot stand on their merits.

but instead of allowing them to engage with other ideas and grow, censorship of opposition freezes them in place.

they become the kids that will never grow up.

it's a trap.

once your philosophy and dogmatic belief is rooted in weak ideas that must be sheltered to survive, your whole movement is built on a foundation of weak sauce.

and the real world, which is still out there, will eat it like a lion eats a staked goat.

food for thought.