Friday Ephemera

Best comment on that “search”, “I mean, how hard could it be…”

Attention hipsters:
Yeah, yeah, we all know, hipster = immature and clueless.
Snowflakes.
Yeah, yeah, we all know, hipster—Oh, wait, actual snowflakes, not metaphorical snowflakes
Cool!!

I am very sad the fish are asleep so I cannot interact with them. And I have to wait four more hours for them to wake up!!
Totally unfair.

Play with a giant eyeball. You know you want to.
It’s the way it follows you round the room.

Best comment on that “search”, “I mean, how hard could it be…”
I had no idea that penis donation was such a competitive business.

Apropos of nothing in particular, this seems like a good time to note that The Guardian features an article about the “subversive” political ramifications of women singing about masturbation.
http://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2014/feb/27/female-masturbation-pop-miley-cyrus-music-video

@Patrick Brown, ‘Pinball Wizard’ is good, but their ‘Theme From Shaft’ had me crying with laughter!

OT
Actually apologies because this is wildly off topic – but for the first time ever I signed up to The Guardian this evening and left a comment there at 06:42 pm this evening and how was it received?

This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn’t abide by our community standards. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs.

Within 90 minutes of the original posting.
In spite of all the many times I’ve seen others discuss the hair-trigger sensitivity of the Grauniad’s moderators on this site, I am nevertheless absolutely astonished that this has happened.
I can absolutely assure you there was not one, single thing in the message that I wrote that could even remotely have been construed as having breached any one of the 10 so-called ‘Community standards and participation guidelines’.
I’m speechless.
Heh, literally.

Also, bean beards.
Yeah, yeah, we all know, hipst—Oh, that one is a Japanese thing . . .
Oh yeah, that fits . . . .
So in Wales, one observes lots of men singing. Scots watch other Scots throwing telephone poles.
And Japan has lots of people going out and doing things that other people are doing, preferably in public and in great masses. While I was trying to find one occurrence, I ran across this other one.

On moderation, I recall some years ago, someone who posted a comment on the guardian online about the Climbie case (the comment being about the political correctness of the authorities in attributing the abusive behaviour of her killers to cultural factors), not only had his comment removed, but the moderator accused him of being racist and banned him!
There followed a bit of online meltdown from other posters who pointed out that similar points had been made in the guardian itself when reporting on the Laming Inquiry. Indeed, some years later, Trevor Phillips made the same point in his excellent ‘benign neglect’ speech.
However, on CIF there continues to be a rather partial approach to moderating. Polly Toynbee is free to write abusive stuff about tories and deride what she calls ‘toffs’, but woe betide someone posting likewise about ‘chavs’. She can blithely accuse others of ‘a final solution’ to the poor, but questioning Citizen Toynbee’s motives earns a quick erasal. CIF is not about debate – it’s about engineering a mindset and choreographing the response. Anything they post on gender and race is almost beyond parody and is not permitted to be challenged. Thus a distorted view from extremists like Penny & Bindel – who I’ve never heard anyone in real life from any background endorse – becomes a graunian impression of normality.
That sites like this exist for a bit of cathartic challenge is massively refreshing – that the uncensored views are virtually always unanimous, as well as reasoned and humorous, restores a bit of faith in humanity.

And they call it ‘comment is free’.
Joan, of course comment is free.
Commendation takes money.

But as Jeff Goldstein would say, it’s who they are, it’s what they do.
Jeff got it from Mark Levin. I doubt it’s entirely original, though.

David and esteemed others, thanks for your interesting comments on CiF
No other national paper I know of has that kind of censorious zeal … it’s who they are, it’s what they do. WrongThought™ must be purged.
Heh.
This made me laugh, which is just as well because overall I was really taken aback at my own reaction to being censored – I was actually seething and I’m not sure that can be entirely put down to having had a stressful week at work.
It is really aggravating to be find yourself censored in that way on what is essentially a message forum – I can understand and even support deleting puerile comments from Trolls (though even in that case I might think twice about hitting the delete button) – but some of the stuff CiF axes?
I’m likely coming late to this particular party, but did you all already know that without even having to sign in, CiF allows any reader to click the ‘report’ button which allows them to choose from this list of offences:
Personal abuse
Off topic
Legal issue
Trolling
Hate speech
Offensive/Threatening
Copyright
Spam
Other
Even more surprising is that the ‘reporter’ is given the option to remain completely anonymous as supplying an email address is optional (though presumably they must be able to track down the user in other ways, otherwise what would be there to prevent a real troll hitting the report button + Offensive/Threatening on literally every single comment that appears in CiF?)
I’m guessing that if I was the unpaid intern moderating this that the quickest thing to do would be to delete any comment that’s been reported on the principle that it must be offensive for someone to have been offended.
Neither the Telegraph, the Independent or the Daily Mail allow for an option in which someone who is not even signed in can report a comment in order to have it deleted.
CiF = Censorship is Free, even if Comment isn’t.