Blacklists

Blacklisting, aka pre-emptive blocking by mass list on Twitter, for the most part is politically infantile – but that also makes it dangerous. There's a strong whiff of McCarthyism and Cultural Revolution style zealotry that emanates from a lot of the people who deploy Twitter blacklists. 

These mass blacklists are the social media equivalent of deep sea trawling for a particular species of fish. You may catch what you want but inevitably you also catch and waste loads you don’t.

I've recently discovered that I'm on several blacklists – mostly I suspect because I've tweeted, and written on this blog about gender issues in ways that are deemed to deviate from the one true path, or I have followed or been followed by the wrong people, or liked or RTed the wrong tweets.

Well, so be it. I've been on the Left for too long and suffered more actual consequences as a result of that than most of the armchair arbiters of what is true and just, so I'm not unduly bothered.

This is not a whinge – well, not much –  more an expression of my concerns about the effects of the politics behind it all at a point in human history when senseless divisions are arguably more dangerous to the entire planet than at any point ever - including when the USA and USSR were at risk of lobbing ICBMs at each other.

I don't reactively block people who've blacklisted me but I did get irked last night when someone, when it was pointed out to him that he'd blocked me, checked out my timeline and declared sententiously - and behind my back – that  “it's very clear she's on that block list for a reason and I shan't be manually unblocking her.”

The "I shan’t" was so very Christopher Robinish, that shall be his name for the purposes of this post.

My immediate response to Christopher Robin’s patronizing and supercilious dismissal of me was adrenaline fuelled and for about five minutes I wanted to rip him up for bog paper but my rational brain kicked in before I put fingers to keyboard - as it almost always does.

One of the other people in the thread is also on the same blacklist - presumably for the same reasons - ie being someone who has been declared to be a gender identity deviationist.

Her guilt has been determined by some anonymous person/s who added her account to the mass blacklist, TerfBlocker. However, Christopher Robin doesn't block her - presumably because they share other platforms, which would make it all a bit awkward.

Another person I know is also on the same blacklist and as a result has been blocked by Christopher Robin.

Now, all three us who are on the blacklist that Christopher Robin uses as a sort of force field to protect himself from circuit blowing rage surges, are left wing women who are unfailingly polite and rational – not to mention articulate, erudite, and thoroughly decent human beings.

One is a very dear friend on whose behalf I have decided to be deeply offended. Like me, she has reservations about aspects of the current transgender orthodoxy but unlike me she is too worried about the toxic nature of the on-line debate to engage in it publicly. Yet she is also on the blacklist and so is blocked by Christopher Robin.

I can imagine the enlightened ones would say, ‘ah but she's a closet TERF so she deserves to be on the blacklist because she thinks bad thoughts.'

The likes of Christopher Robin don't matter much because in the great scheme of things, they're inconsequential lightweights – but overall it's the Left's loss. 

It's a classic own goal. Self-censorship. Political infantilism.