An Example of Woke-Speak

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I still cut-and-paste links to my articles on Twitter – for the same reason I’ll use a public urinal in a pinch. Some of you may have noticed – seen – the little pop-up that pops up when you go to Twitter. It reads:

You’re in Control 

. . . and then proceeds to try to get you to click on either of two buttons:

Turn on personalized ads

Or:

Keep less relevant ads

So how “in control” you are?

You get to pick which ads they assault you with!

Once upon a time, ads had copy that read: For more information, call (this was before the Internet). Nothing wrong with that. If you’re interested in finding out details about whatever they’re selling, here’s how to do that.

Today, it is “learn more” – as if getting peddled to buy whatever-they’re-selling had anything to do with learning something. You’re being sales-pitched. Why not say so? I know why. Because it sounds better – in an insipid and treacly way – to imply that by reading a sales pitch you are being edified.

How about “partners”? It sounds very cozy – when it’s all about getting into your wallet. Then there is “associate” – as if you worked in a law firm as opposed  to bagging groceries for minimum wage.

I get emails daily from practitioners of this low art, describing themselves as “bloggers” interested in “posting content” on EPautos. What they are, of course, are ad peddlers trying to get me to publish their greasy ads disguised as articles, thinking you’re too stupid to notice the difference and might actually click on the link to whatever they’re trying to sell you but aren’t honest enough to tell you they’re trying to sell you.

I often wonder whether this approach actually works. I assume it must since if it didn’t surely they wouldn’t do it.

As a writer, I have great respect for – affection for – words. Which is also why I get mad when words are violated in this manner.

No, Mr. Twitter, we are not “in control” when given the choice to turn on personalized ads or keep less relevant ads.  Being “in control” means having the choice to turn on no ads – and to turn you off. Bye-bye, now.

Maybe I’ll return when you cease pissing down my pants leg and telling me it’s raining.

 

 

25 COMMENTS

  1. It’s hard enough to get an accurate repeat of a story you told to someone personally. I never trusted any internet social program and refused to use one. I told my cousin he was playing with fire and he told me, “I just use it to keep up with my old classmates and friends”. Funny that, he can’t stand his old schoolmates.

    I do copy and paste when somebody reminds me of something I once enjoyed as Jason Bermas does here with Reno 911. In the middle of the night when I was awake, I began thinking about good old movies that could never be made today. Everybody takes themselves too seriously. I take little except bad health and nearly getting eaten recently by an enraged sow. She stopped my morning walk so instead of doing something for my health, I returned to the house, opened a beer (or 5)and sat on the couch with vibrations going through my body as did CJ when he got right against me after I cleaned his butt where she got right on the boy’s ass.

    But back to my thoughts of good movies, I decided I’d try to find “Stripes” today and have a few laughs. It may not be as funny but probably is close to it. “Son, do you mean to tell me your unit has been training without a drill sargeant?” “That’s a fact, Jack”. Kills me every time.

    • Hi Eight,
      “Stripes” was a great comedy, as were most of Bill Murray’s early movies; “Caddyshack” is also a great one.

      • Bill has another good movie that’s more along the lines of where I am today called Saint Vincent. He’s still funny. He’s listening to music at the end and doing his version of singing along which was hilarious as he laid in his outdoor lounge chair over a freshly mowed to the dirt yard he’d paid his neighbor’s child and best friend while he squirted water on the dirt and smoked cigarettes.

  2. Regarding Facebook…
    Zuckerberg created a product that has no intrinsic value at all. An advertising platform? You could do better elsewhere. Looking at your so called “friends” baby pictures and dog photos…they could email them to you if they were that proud or that important.
    Facebook is a bad place where weak people get positive feedback for their psychological emotional problems, crappy political views, re-enforces their anger, and if you are not careful will get you fired for *wrong thinking*.
    Is the world a better place because of Facebook….no, it is actually worse.

  3. Newspeak abounds. Linguists have long known that the language we use has an effect on our thought process. Change the language, change the thinking. Which public education is eagerly engaged in. If one is the authority defining what your own success is, one is always successful. Public schools get to define what education is. The older I get the more clear it becomes that people aren’t necessarily stupid, just uneducated. Possibly because I grew up in an age when there was still some aspect of actual education in public schools, and I didn’t stop my education after I got my certificate. In fact it’s still ongoing 50 years later. It is indeed remarkable how many think they know something, while the only evidence they have is what some psychopath or a shill thereof said.

    • So true about language John, George Carlin did a great bit on how “shell shock” became “combat fatigue” and then morphed to “post traumatic stress disorder”. Never allow a simple explanation when you can make it convoluted.

    • If your email is ‘free’, you’re giving the owners permission to violate any sense of privacy you might have. Google is simply an adjunct to the NSA and funded through the theft of the USD printing press.

      I’ve always paid for email and although of course anything can be hacked if you become large enough a target, why not make them work for it? There are excellent email providers for a small fee.

      • Months ago Yahoo informed me they’d be reading my mail and censoring it. I tried to start a Proton account with VPN but can’t figure out how to move my contact list from Yahoo to Proton.

        • Had to break this up to get past the spam filter due to multiple links…

          Proton mail is about as good as it gets for free email as far as being privacy-oriented. The only downside is the limited amount of space allocated to free accounts (500 MB). So if you get a lot of emails with large attachments you’d have to clean out old stuff pretty frequently.

          Another privacy-oriented service is Tutanota email, based in Germany, that provides 1GB space on free accounts. Still limiting, but double that of Proton mail:

          https://tutanota.com/

          Another possibility would be Vivaldi email (by the Vivaldi browser people) which at least is free of the spying done by Google and other tech giants, and provides a fairly generous 5GB space for freebies:

          https://webmail.vivaldi.net/

          (None of these services come close to gmail’s 20GB space allocation for free accounts, but you know how Google is paying for that “generosity”!)

          • Many thanks Jason. This was all great info. I’ll try it on Proton since I have an account there already and it has VPN protection.

            • Hej 8SM,

              Glad to see you back in the community. Regarding protection of privacy, there is a really good website that I read called restoreprivacy.com and the contributors consider pros and cons of various solutions. The most important of which is not all VPNs are very good at protecting privacy.

  4. “Mandatory volunteerism” is what I call it. Sure, you have a choice, but if you say no………

    It’s the “offer” you can’t refuse like the one in the Godfather. You really can’t say no, you really don’t have a choice, someone has already made it for you. The deciders have decided and you just need to go along.

    It’s like the highway project in my town a few years ago. The deciders decided on the design long before the public comment meetings. What got built was what they decided on, not what people were saying they wanted. The general public wanted something totally different from what the deciders decided on.

    Do they really think that not not so bad if they don’t say its mandatory?

    We should be a opt-in society, rather than the false fake opt-out.

  5. Never had a twitter account, never will. Facistbook i had for pleasure, now the only reason its still open is i need it for work. The few family/friends that want to stay in touch with me have my phone #. Worst part is i may have to get an instagram account for work because i will need to monitor the sales force if the company allows them to use the site.

  6. ‘You’re in Control’ — Twatter

    A San Francisco artist mocked the living sh*t out of Twatter with a spoof post about Blue Check Homes (TM).

    https://twitter.com/djbaskin/status/1355394022362148864

    And guess what? According to SFGate, 495 hapless n00bs took the bait at bluecheckhomes.com to apply, hoping their social media influencer credentials would ‘qualify’ them to pay $3,000 for a virtue-signaling blue check crest to be mounted on the front of their house.

    No doubt Blue Check Cars will launch soon. But you have to drive a zero-emission EV to qualify. CO2-spewing lepers and deplorables need not apply.

    Presumably spoofer DJ Baskin will get away with nothing more than (at worst) a temporary banning for wounding the dignity of billionaire tech lord @Jack Dorksey.

    Not so lucky with a similar spoof was Douglas Mackey a/k/a Ricky Vaughn, who convinced 4,900 low-information Hillary supporters that they could TEXT their 2016 presidential vote, using this gem of ethnic affinity marketing:

    tinyurl.com/19tr66mb

    Over four years later, the Biden regime has charged Mackey in Brooklyn federal court for embarrassing some painfully clueless folks.

    Conclusion: mocking and ridiculing our thin-skinned overlords seriously upsets them. So let’s amp it up. Time to go after the baby-faced Minister of Electric Vehicles, Pete Buttitwitch.

    Fight climate change – text ‘Buttitwitch’ to 59925!

    • I hope he actually delivers those blue check marks. No better way of showing the world someone is an overpaid gullible idiot.

  7. I hate it when good words or phrases are destroyed: the destruction of “hero” is seen a lot, but “thank you” has been curb stomped too. You’d normally hear “thank you” whenever you did something nice or when out of your way to do something, i.e. something you did not have to do but did so anyway. Now I attend a mandatory meeting at work and hear “thank you for attending” – yes, I attend or I get fired, don’t think me! Or “thank you for paying your taxes”. Reminds me of one of those movies when the villain and his goons have gathered the prisoners to hear the villain monologue, and he villain starts off with “thank you for showing up”.

  8. From rexresearch on their ‘stuff’ page, recent relevant information:

    Memo to Selfs:
    Pardon our cynic, USAmerica, as Fox friend & I ignore in your specific direction, as Now as never, this willfully ignorant dumbass Nation, saddled with idiotic stupidity, rides unbridled on a wild Ass in full career steeplechase through abandoned mine fields to — ask the asinine Ass as it spendthrifts its dowry and inheritance and credit on a fool’s errand. ( Paraphrased with alliterative apologiae to Diogenes, et al. ). Now once was prophecy; now it is orwellian news and history, the horrors of inhumanity all edited into this topo-illogical timehole event horizon, inutterably void of humor. Alas ! Pray upon your God for Grace, or Amen.

    In the parlance of our times, I suppose. Hilarious, really.

    Had to go to reddit to read all about wallstreetbets and gamestop’s meteoric rise to glory, great comments by the autist retards.

  9. I can’t do social media, well, other than texting that is. Something about the format of it just drives me nuts plus I just don’t give a shit about what people are doing ever damn minute of the day. As I get older I care even less. Now that I’ve seen the censorship I don’t understand why anyone would support those platforms by working for them for free.

    • PappaS, I’m very disappointed that you don’t do social media! I was so looking forward to sending you a picture of what I had for breakfast this morning. I was even going to add some cute description, like “this is what us beautiful people eat” or something like that. Really can’t understand why you don’t give a shit about that.

    • Indeed, I have noticed in my later years that I’m less and less willing to put up with the male bovine fecal matter produced by others. A thing that is progressing at a geometric rate. Perhaps the awareness of my impending mortality has given me a better perspective to distinguish the odor. A perspective that clearly defines the difference between things that matter, and there are damn few of them, and things that don’t. Which makes it harder for the fertilizer factory to sell me something I don’t need. Whether a physical item, or an idea.

  10. I have a twit login, but rarely use it. About the only time I go there is if I’m following a link to a post there. Gave up farcebook last year, and while I did create accounts at MeWe, Minds, etc., I never use them.

    There is a website for Freedom Cells, which is a fairly new concept to organize people and reclaim our freedom. I signed up and am looking to get some people in my area organized, but I’m thinking that a lot of people there are just using it as yet another social media platform. I’m not interested in social media, I want to actually meet in person and do the work to build community. Sigh.

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