I have not posted on Twitter in a while. Today I found out that I have been suspended. Again. My last post was in May, this being a message to someone I follow, to migrate to BlueSky. I guess that post could be viewed as a violation of the terms and conditions. I still lurk on Twitter, but make my posts on BlueSky. Twitter is too toxic, and while BlueSky is a lot quieter, it is a nicer place. I still manage to be blocked by people and have been added to lists allowing me to be blocked by many without seeing any posts by me. Some do not like this feature, but while it is annoying, it is better to allow those who prefer not to be engage in civil debate, the option to do so. Anyway, someone has offered to help me to get back onto Twitter, but I have declined that help, at least for now.
Last year, when I used Twitter more, I was told that Bluesky should be called paedosky. The post was made from an account that is now suspended (and I am not going to sign up for Twitter chat to share the conversation).
When it comes to banning Twitter (or X as my wife and much of the world calls it) over deepfakes, that is a decision I am against. Deepfakes have been around for a few years now and have been used to create sexualised images of women, and children but not to this extent. I use an AI image generator for my hobby of role playing and when I have used it, it will rightly delete images that it considers too rude. Just for the record, I have not tried to create such images, but occasionally it will self censor images it deems inappropriate. In addition to this, the main AI engines I have used will not allow images of real people to be altered or created. But I have not tried Grok for my hobby as I don’t use Twitter that much.
Sadly, I think that the only thing to do, to ensure that Twitter is punished for this, is for users to switch to Bluesky. Legislation has been suggested on this matter in the past, and acting now to single out Twitter when this matter has been ignored for years is morally and legally dubious. Actions against all software which do this is overdue.
I enjoy a good, and ideally, polite debate. Now that I use Bluesky more than Twitter, it can be harder to find one. But there are some topics where I disagree with others, notably my views on gender and JK Rowling.
What I do find interesting are the arguments that she is racist or that she is right wing. Yes, there have been issues with the name of Cho Chang for example, others have complained about the name of Kingsley Shacklebolt a character described as highly efficient and "gets through twice the work of the rest of them" in the series. JK Rowling defended the casting of Noma Dumezweni as Hermione Granger and her books included British people of colour in positive roles.
As for JK Rowling being right wing, people forget the money she gave to Labour before the defeat of 2010. In the UK the issue of gender identity is debated across the political divide. Yes, more of the right are critical, but the MP Rosie Duffield is more left wing than many of her peers, and she is someone who is considered transphobic for her views.
Thanks to Elon Musk, I have moved to Bluesky, mostly. I still visit Twitter, but tend to see what a few people have tweeted, including JK Rowling. As more and more people make the switch, it has left a huge number of people there who I consider toxic.
Bluesky has very few right wingers on it, most of the time, I do not encounter posts that I disagree with. But using it is a much calmer experience than Twitter. The downsides have been that I have had more issues accessing it, that there are some accounts on Twitter who have not moved over and that there are still lots more people on Twitter.
What has been interesting is to read the comments on two identical posts from Fesshole. The Bluesky one has polite responses to it, but on Twitter, the comments there are full of bile and hatred. If you are interested, click on the links to read them, and if you want, you can leave a comment on this post below.
First of all, Arsenal. I was nervous about this game, mostly because it was a derby game, and I went to watch it with some friends, one of whom said that we were certain to win. He has predicted a score of 3-1 and he was right about that. We showed resilience to come back from being a goal down, but most importantly, with Gabriel Jesus out injured for at least two months, Eddie Nketiah stepped up. I had hoped that the team would pull together and they did.
The kids are enjoying the days off that they had. I fed them leftovers for lunch and they enjoyed what I made, I had better not mention this too much to them as normally they do not like it when I feed them, though that is changing.
Last of all, I have been suspended from Twitter, again. In a recent debate I have stated that I am a misogynist, transphobic and also an against the rights of women because I do not think that anyone with a penis, who is guilty of sexual assault or rape, should be allowed in a female prison. This happened with Karen White, a man pretending to be a TransWoman who had raped two women outside prison and went onto sexually assault two more women when in prison. Hopefully my suspension will not last too long.
I cannot believe that I forgot to mention in the blog that my son and I watched this on the weekend! My wife and daughter were with us for the start, but both left for different reasons. It was an enjoyable film. Predictable with no real surprises, but it was great to see Mary Poppins back on screen again. This is not a film I would take time out to watch again, nor would I have wanted to pay to watch in the cinema, but I am still glad that I watched this feelgood film and also am glad that I watched it with my son. Though I have to admit, I forgot to ask him what he thought of it!
As for today, I thought that I had been banned from Twitter when I was not able to make a post. Later on, I found out that this appeared to be a system error. Makes no difference to PMQ's later today as I have a work meeting when it is on, so I will miss it. I doubt that it will be very interesting as Boris Johnson is to leave office and from the way it looks, we may be getting our first non-white Prime Minister!
Earlier on in the invasion of, sorry, the “special military operation” involving Ukraine, there appeared be be support of the Russian cause on social media from China. I ended up in debates with a few Chinese tweeters, most of whom ended up blocking me. It was interesting to see the perspective they had on different issues though.
In the argument that they used, they claimed that Kary Mullis said that the PCR test was not designed to detect infectious diseases. When I pointed out that they were wrong, they offered to show me a video of him saying this, but blocked me so that they were not able to do so.
They made many other claims, but as they have blocked me (they were abusive to me), I cannot counter them. So much for being willing to debate a topic...
And before I go, just a reminder about a few issues.
1 - COVID kills. I have treated people who survived as well as too many who died. A nursing home I am involved in looking after has yet to become full again after COVID killed many of the residents there last year.
2 Face masks save lives. Not just by reducing the risk of spreading it if you have no symptoms, but as seen by those working in healthcare, face masks prevented many from catching this.
3 - Funeral homes were overwhelmed over the wave of infections seen in the last surge of infections. I know as I had to visit a few. One had issues coping despite the increased capacity that they had built.
4 - People with no symptoms can spread COVID. We saw that with the super spreader event held by President Trump last year.
5 - Just because Boris is to drop restrictions, this does not mean that we can act like we did in 2019. The Indian Variant may cause havoc here and unless we act to flatten the curve, our hospitals may be under pressure again like they were this winter when our local hospital were limited to life and death operations only. Another surge like that will kill many and lengthen waiting lists again.
My blog as vanished from the Bing search engine. By strange coincidence, I am having a discussion about various matters with what appears to be employees of a Russian Troll factory. I may be doing them a disservice saying this, as they be nothing to do with Russia.
I worked at the Colchester Vaccination centre today. I was meant to work in the afternoon, but got called in early due to sickness of someone else. Considering that I got home after midnight the night before, I was not too pleased. But the service needs to be provided so that we can hope to make a dent in the plague.
It is scary working in the NHS on the frontline, and vaccinating patients meant that I saw loads of people, a number in a day that I have not seen since the flu clinic last year. I know that these vaccinations are not going to be effective in all, but I also know that this will save lives. Saying that, I told all those I saw to observe the hands face space rule. The only way to find out if the vaccination that someone has got is effective or not is to catch COVID and I strongly recommend that people do the best they can to avoid contracting this terrible plague.
And on this topic, I reported by first YouTube video. I am a firm advocate of free speech, but I found my limit with a person spreading fake news on the internet. I know that there are those who are sceptical about vaccinations, but people spreading, what is in essence either lies or delusions is unacceptable. Due to this, I have made my first report of a post, in this case, a You Tube video.
This video is littered with half truths. The first half truth relates to how COVID was geographically located at 03:10. COVID was geographically located within Spain and Italy, the worst affected areas having much higher rates than other areas of those two countries, this relating to a Champions League game involving Spain and Italy. At 05:40 she discusses how mismanagement of patients was the reason for deaths. This ignores how many people died of COVID in the community who were not admitted, an example being how a COVID-19 outbreak killed many in a nursing home which I am involved in caring for. She talks about how a quiet year with deaths would result in a spike later, but this ignores how influenza killed so many in the winter of 2017/18. At 09:20 she talks about how many die of other causes and just happen to have COVID, describing an example at 09:55 of a patient with heart failure who died after contracting COVID. She is right that this patient may have died soon anyway, but COVID places additional strains on the heart due to the hypoxia it causes. The odds are (I have to say this as I am basing this on my experience with other patients) that COVID was the big shove that pushed them off the cliff edge and resulted in their death. In the UK, such a death would be recorded as 1a- heart failure 1b - ischaemic heart disease 2 - COVID19. She later talks about financial incentives to doctors to record COVID cases. There is no such incentive in the UK and in the US, this is not an incentive, but rather compensation due to the increased costs that caring for someone with COVID brings. At 10:40, she features a doctor talking about the uncertainty with COVID diagnosis. This was a major issue at the beginning of the pandemic when testing was not available but COVID also presents with certain features not normally seen on a chest x-ray making a diagnosis of COVID more likely, an example being patchy bilateral pneumonia and on CT scan, also has a characteristic appearance. In the first lockdown, I treated a fit runner who came down with sudden onset fever and shortness of breath. They did their best to remain at home, but when they got to hospital, it was too late for the PCR tests to pick up COVID. The x-ray and CT findings however confirmed the features of COVID. So on testing they were negative, but based on other investigations and the presentation of this, they had it. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck and is seen amongst loads of other ducks, the odds are that it is a duck. It just happens that she is selling a book, which I suspect is spreading half truths.
This woman tells the real truth about COVID-19. I disagree with some of the things she is saying (notably about government support considering that there has been a recent change in government in the USA which means it must be given a chance to bring about change). The change about what happened is from 0:55 and at 1:15 she explains why so many celebrities have not died, but so many others have. An issue described so well last year on the BBC.
Locally, our GP surgery is working really hard to vaccinate people. Healthcare workers are working extra hours, in hospital to treat people with this and in the community to continue treating people with other issues as well as preventing illness by vaccinations. So when people like Jimmy Kimmel calls for people to be vaccinated 24/7, he forgets that we need trained people to vaccinate the population of the world and those trained people like me are busy doing our job.
I have been warned by Twitter for copyright infringement for a tweet that used a GIF found using the Twitter app itself! While I cannot link to the tweet itself, I can link to the thread it was on. #Eyeroll!
Am still suspended from Twitter. Which is still annoying but I expect it to continue for a long time.
Back to the holiday though. It rained a lot last night which woke us up at different times at night. And then the local cockerel decided to wake us up. Which it has been doing since we arrived.
So in the morning the kids were up when I ate the remnants of the takeaway from last night and then my daughter and I went for a walk. I had asked my son but he was not interested. We went to find the wild ponies that I had seen yesterday. But they were not to be found. We did walk down a path to find them but my daughter was concerned that the ponies would attack us and that birds would feast on our corpses. So we turned around. We did walk everywhere that she wanted to go, which put her in a bad mood.
We then went on a drive to Rye. It was lovely driving through the sun but once there, the heavens opened. Fortunately this was only for a short period of time and we walked through part of the town before stopping for lunch. Initially we had only wanted to stop for a snack, but the place was so nice we stayed for longer. We drove to Battle afterwards but it was too crowded to walk about in a safe manner. I have always wanted to visit here so we will have to return another time.
I did have a chat with my son about bonding. After my father died, and watching Life on BBC, I wanted to act to try and bridge the increasing gap between us. We have watched The Mandalorian together before, but he has decided to watch it without me. I go for walks with my daughter and we watch several television shows together. I hope that my son and I do not drift apart beyond the point of repair.
Tomorrow it is meant to rain a lot more so our day has been planned in advance. Hopefully I will have Twitter back but I doubt it.
I am still suspended from Twitter. The frustrating part of this is that I still get notifications. I have made my second appeal and they have stated that they will get round to looking at it, but that I can regain access to my account by deleting the offending tweet. I suspect that this will be a game of chicken and that after a long period of time, my appeal will be rejected. So I will have to make to with the frustration of getting an alert about a tweet and not being able to read it. Saying that, going without Twitter may be better for me as I was/am addicted to it.
My son has had an interesting time. Since my last post, he has strived to be banned form his phone for a long time. His issues with not putting away clothes for the house continued since my last post. Not only had he not put away clothes as required, but he had tried to hide them under mess in his room which was meant to be clean. A day after he was busted, a more in depth inspection of his room found yet more clothes that he had not put away! On the bright side, he appears to have learned to flush the toilet, though occasional issues are still present.
I am hopeful that the phone and television ban that he has been subjected to will focus his mind. Considering that his sister had a ban for a month a while ago, he knows that things can get worse.
I am still suspended from Twitter. I was told that my tweet had been reviewed and was felt to violate the terms and conditions of the site. I am an advocate of free speech but also I believe that people should obey the terms and conditions of any website they sign up to. Twitter is right to police what is posted and hate speech should be acted on, as it violates the terms and conditions of what people agree to when they sign up to the site.
My son is in he doghouse. He is meant to put away clothes once my daughter has washed and dried the clothes. Yesterday I woke him up when I was not able to find any socks. Today, I had no jeans or jumpers. In addition, he is not able to flush the toilet anymore.
Woke up this morning to find that I had been suspended from Twitter for violating the rules. In the thread, someone referred to Stormy Daniels as a whore. I pointed out that she was a Porn Star and was not a whore, as well as pointing out that Melania Trump used her sex appeal in the past as well. I did not post any of the pictures that have been shared about Melania Trump on-line as I feel that doing so would be Slut Shaming her.
I can accept the suspension, or appeal. I do not think that I have done anything wrong, so even though it means I may be suspended from Twitter for longer, I will be appealing.
I got blocked again on Twitter. This time it was for the crime of being subject to abuse. When I am subject to such abuse, I often try to ignore it and engage in a civil manner. But some do not appreciate that!
