Shut Up, They Explained

A persistent feature of the culture wars is the epistemological closure of progressives. The mental image this conjures is that of a child putting their hands over their ears, then repeatedly saying, "La la la la I can't hear you..." The progressive core belief is that they are on the side of science and good intentions, and that their adversaries are evil and ignorant.

The unwillingness to engage opposing opinions is endorsed by our President, as reported by this New York Times article. In it, the President sees an "overarching problem" in the media when "two opposing sides are given equal weight regardless of the facts," calling this a "false balance."

Legacy media has been all too happy to oblige. Last year, the Los Angeles Times announced that they would no longer print letters from 'climate-change deniers'. Legacy outlet Popular Science decided that they would permanently disable comments on their web site, explaining that "comments can be bad for science."

In the front of the culture wars known as #Gamergate, the blue team is keenly interested in filtering out unwanted viewpoints. Newly-minted feminist icon Anita Sarkeesian doesn't allow comments on her Youtube series, "Feminist Frequency." For sensitive Twitter users, Randi Harper has developed a tool, gamergate autoblocker, that allows them to preemptively block other users. By using this autoblocker, you have to assume that anyone who follows both Milo Yiannopoulos and Mike Cernovich is a misogynist and that the risk they will issue harassing tweets is too great to assume.

Randi Harper then turned to a gentleman named Jacob Hoffman-Andrews to implement another tool, called Block Together. With Block Together, "every time Harper blocks an account, every user subscribed to Gamergate autoblocker also blocks that account, automatically." This is done, supposedly, to make the job of blocking hundreds or thousands of Twitter users easier for the user who is "tired of hearing about Gamergate."

I wonder if Randi Harper heard about I Can Be A Computer Engineer Barbie? Computer Engineer Barbie had to get "Steven and Brian's help to turn it into a real game."

What if a Twitter user follows a #Gamergate 'ringleader,' and also follows NARAL? Would that be enough to mitigate the block? I don't know everything about Twitter, but it strikes me that if a user is "tired of hearing about Gamergate," they could just block everything with that hashtag.