02.23.20
FSF’s Interim Co-President Alexandre Oliva on Being Cancelled
Original blog post by the FSF's interim co-president
“In the next hours, people would dig up tweets and display them out of context to paint me as an unrepentant racist and homophobe” — Quinn Norton, in What Happens After You’re Cancelled
It was reading this that I realized I’d been cancelled myself. In my case, I was painted misogynist and transphobic, and for a post in which I supported women but denounced a crowd of men twisting the feminist cause, that I share, to attack rms, as if he wasn’t a feminist himself; and in which I express curiosity as to what pronoun to use to refer to zero women to paint me as someone who disregards gender identities and their pronouns. Doh!
And then, there were the jokes I collected from emails and newsgroups at the uni, before we had Internet, before I even learned much of the English I know now, used to support the misogyny nonsense, as if my having some day saved a collection of blonde jokes proved something that the collection of jokes about the death of driver Ayrton Senna or of the airplane crash that killed the whole band Mamonas Assassinas didn’t. I suppose I was fortunate to not be a twitter used so I couldn’t even try to participate in those silly conversations.
And my friend wasn’t even a nazi, nor a paedophile, just someone who said there was no evidence of the use of force implied by an accusation against a third party, who was later found not to have committed the crime attributed to him.
But of course he and I haven’t been cancelled for this single act of speaking for the innocent, the abused, the helpless and defenseless. we’ve devoted our lives to speaking and fighting for them, and that’s what can’t be tolerated!
Thanks, Quinn Norton,
So blong…
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