Harassment & Free Speech

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

The essayist who wrote this in 2012:

We are all by now accustomed to the periodic whinging of public figures after another round of drive-by shootings on Twitter. But the problem isn’t restricted to those who put themselves on a public platform. Just take a look at how people are talking to each other as well. Frankly, it’s terrifying, and it occurs to me that one of the great challenges of the next decade will be how we, as a society, manage those people unable to manage themselves.

… was banned “permanently” from posting on Twitter this week. A spokesman for Twitter told an interviewer for Buzzfeed, “People should be able to express diverse opinions and beliefs on Twitter, but no one deserves to be subjected to targeted abuse online, and our rules prohibit inciting or engaging in the targeted abuse or harassment of others.”

The author of the essay quoted above, titled, “The Internet Is Turning Us All Into Sociopaths,” is one Milo Yiannopoulos, who seems to have decided that his article was more useful to him as a point-by-point, how-to-become-a-sociopath expository essay instead of a complaint against sociopathy. In the subsequent four years, he became famous as an Internet sociopath, celebrated as an “alt-Right wing” hero of some sort, a keyboard bully who never had the balls to say what he wrote to anyone’s face and yet wore a bulletproof vest for show as if he had even one time spoken truth to power.
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Today in History: July 23

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

U.S. Patent Number 5581X was awarded to William Austin Burt on this date in 1829 for his “typographer” (seen above). It was the first device that can be called a typewriter, although that term (with a hyphen) was not in use until the 1860s.

Burt’s invention was large: 12 inches tall by 12 inches wide by 18 inches long, and it did not utilize a keyboard. It worked via a wheel on the front, which one used to dial up the desired letter and line it up where one wanted it, and then one pushed an attached lever to make contact with the paper. (It must have been like composing a text on an old cell phone via a number pad, one letter at a time, except with a giant wooden box.)
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Today in History: July 22

Posted on by Mark Aldrich

On this date in 1934, federal agents shot and killed a man while he was watching a movie in a theater.

Now, that man was John Dillinger, and he had in fact robbed about a dozen banks and he had escaped prison, but nothing he had done impelled federal attention (he was accused of killing a police officer)—except that he was attracting national attention, “bad guy getting away with it” attention, and was receiving more positive media coverage than J. Edgar Hoover’s Division of Investigation (the precursor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation) and his “G-Men.”

After viewing Manhattan Melodrama in Chicago’s Biograph Theater, Dillinger stepped outside, detected the presence of law officers out to get him, and ran into an alley, where three G-Men pursued him and each one of them fired his weapon.
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