Time Out

So I am currently suspended from twitter due to the below tweet.

Which, you know, I'm not even mad about it.

It has enough keywords in there that I'm not terribly surprised it ended up getting moderated.

I *did* attempt an appeal, saying that, clearly the idea of a vaccine transforming someone into a complex piece of communication equipment is *clear enough* to be satire rather than vaccine fear mongering.

My appeal was pretty quickly rejected. Which did surprise me, but maybe shouldn't have, since you have to consider that a lot of people try to hide terrible ideas behind the context of "I'm just joking".

So, in this case, while I still think I was at least 3 paces off the line, moderating content is nearly a complete "grey area" moral mess, and tough work, so I'm cool with the above being a false positive casualty of the difficult and necessary work that Twitter is doing.

Although I also found the process of being suspended for a naughty tweet interesting as well.

When I login into my twitter account I can't do anything at the moment. Can't view anything, can't post, it just immediately brings me to a single page, displaying my flagged tweet, and a big red delete button.

Which I found interesting. First, it means I actually have *more* access to twitter when not logged in, which I find amusing.

Secondly, that they have even bothered presenting me with this metaphorical "choice". The tweet is already effectively deleted in every manner that matters. So why even make me click a thing to "delete it"?

I don't know if it is just a UI decision, to make actions against posts very clear?

Or if they were advised by a psychologist, to make the user "own up" to their actions and make it seem like the decision is actually theirs.

I also find my reaction to it interesting. I mean what I said above. I think it is *good* they flagged my tweet. I think it is *defensible* for them to even reject my appeal, since if they didn't, some *worse person* might point to the words used in my tweet and be like "my tweet is just like that one!"

Twitter's actions here are fine. That said, I also don't think it is in violation.

So, at the moment, I can't bring myself to click that delete button. Which, I guess means I'll never get to use twitter again?

My actual posting on twitter, for me, was always low stakes. I genuinely didn't care how many likes a post got, the only thing I really rated it on was whether I liked it, and I found it interesting scroll through some old ones, to kind of remind myself where I was at.

But I've been meaning to start blogging again anyway.

And honestly, being off twitter is probably for the best. The drama bubble involve with being "engaged" with it is fun, and it actually is super enjoyable to be able to interact directly with some really smart people, some of whom are authors of books I really adore... But it is also a novelty seeking Skinner box dressed up as a marketplace of ideas.

We'll see if it sticks or not. Maybe I'll be mashing that big red button within the week to restore my IV drip of curated confirmation bias.

The Batman Problem

So I've been trying my best to understand more about structural racism, and taking a second look at elements around me that may contribute to it.

I think one of the more obvious sources that has pervaded our culture has been the portryal of the police as uncomplicated protagonists. The percent of network TV shows that are some version of "police procedural" often times seems to be 80 percent or higher.

If a police officer is portrayed poorly, odds are it is because he likes donuts or in the worst case, is a "crooked cop" who takes money from the mob.

Never do these shows mention or even hint at existence of "The Blue wall of silence", if they do it is regulated to a feature of an evil individual, such as a Sherriff in a small town in the south. Never would an entire metropoletain department be implicated, because to do so would acknowledge that the police force culture does NOT have a culture that "good guys" would have.

So I was already happy to goto war against TV pop cultural representations of police. But then I came across the following tweet, which stopped me dead:

One of the big problems with "dark and gritty" Batman movies is that the people writing them can't craft a mystery that's so complex only Batman can solve it, so Batman's "superpower" ends up being "the ability to violate people's Constitutional rights."

— Sean Kelly (@StorySlug) August 24, 2020

Oh no, not Batman!

I really enjoy the "Dark Knight" iteration of "The Caped Crusader", the Nolan films being some of my favorite... But I have to concede the point to Sean Kelly here. Modern Batman is very much extrajudicial. He "gets results" when the police can't.

Say what you want about police procedural cultural crimes, who themselves, often allow their character to angrily strike out at a prisoner in frustration... But it is a rarity, whereas the major premise of Batman is that approach is "super" effective at stoppin crime.

Or put better by Mr Kelly:

Physically, cops nowadays have pretty much all the same capabilities as Batman does. The only thing that makes him different from them is that he's gets to be *WORSE* than them.

— Sean Kelly (@StorySlug) August 24, 2020

Batman is a juggernaut in our culture, there are likely very few people unaffected by him as a symbol of retribution against criminals. But does it really matter?