Twitter Gulag or no Mike Hummell will be heard on DaTechGuy on DaRadio

If your offer’s good it will stand up under fire

Jean Lafette The Buc­ca­neer 1958

A Demo­c­ra­tic thief is as bad as a Repub­li­can thief

Grover Cleve­land

It’s very unusual that I linked from the Daily Kos and it’s 1000’s times odder to get a pos­i­tive shoutout from them but that took place ear­lier today:

I was fas­ci­nated by his unique view so I responded and have been shown noth­ing but respect from the man. I sent him a let­ter and he pub­lished it as a com­ment and as a guest post. I will be on his radio show, air­ing from Worces­ter, MA on Sat­ur­day at 11am East­ern time to dis­cuss the Host­ess strike.

The Author Mike Hum­mell is a mem­ber of the Bak­ers Union, the post he is talk­ing about is here which said in part:

I spoke to a dri­ver from a rival com­pany that has all the work he can get with Host­ess gone, and he said if it was him, he wouldn’t have taken the deal, not with big bonuses going to execs. He said with the cuts they would basi­cally be work­ing for nothing.

I dis­agreed with the premise under the 92% of some­thing is worth more than 100% of noth­ing but it occurred to me: Could these bak­ers have decided they were “Going Galt”?

After all is one per­ceives they are not get­ting the reward for had and increased labor it makes no dif­fer­ence if it is gov­ern­ment or man­age­ment that is tak­ing the sur­plus, the net effect is the same.

Of course in the­ory if it is man­age­ment one can find another employer but to the baker with a more spe­cial­ized pro­fes­sion they might not see it that way.

So in that sense the bak­ers are no dif­fer­ent that any other pro­fes­sional who has decided they just aren’t work­ing any­more for less.

I thought it was an inter­est­ing argu­ment so we exchanged e-​mails and I arranged for him to be on my show DaT­e­chGuy on DaRa­dio tomor­row in the 2^nd hour (WCRN AM 830 10 — noon) to talk about the strike from the Bak­ers Union’s point of view.

Today we tweeted back and forth to con­firm the show and the details and he began tweet­ing about his upcom­ing appearance:

To answer his ques­tion, yes 888 – 9-​fedora toll-​free from any­where to call in.

You might won­der why I have a screen shot of his tweets rather than the tweets them­selves. Well there is an expla­na­tion and it’s not pretty:

I have just been sus­pended from Twit­ter for the 7^th time in less than 60 days. I have the emails to prove it. There is an amaz­ing cor­re­la­tion between my post­ings on the Host­ess Bankery and the tim­ing of these sus­pen­sions. Ear­lier today I pub­lished about Host­ess again. Within an hour of tweet­ing the news my account was suspended.

I have never posted a com­ment I wouldn’t show my kids. If my account was up I could prove that too. This is not about me being some kind of troll. I do not use any fea­tures more than an aver­age twit­ter user. I will even­tu­ally receive an auto gen­er­ated response that says I should stop auto reply­ing to peo­ple. The irony is an espe­cially aggra­vat­ing part of this.

I’m not an expert on Mike’s tweets but other than some I dis­agree with (OK most) I’ve seen noth­ing that look like grounds for sus­pen­sion and if he tells he there are no ground for this I take him at his word:

I am not accus­ing twit­ter of doing any­thing vin­dic­tive to me. I am say­ing that they have a sus­pen­sion pol­icy that can be exploited to shut peo­ple up and it MUST be fixed. Some­one is ben­e­fit­ing from this and it ain’t me.

I’ve had sev­eral friends end up in the so-​called Twit­ter Gulag includ­ing peo­ple I know per­son­ally like Chris Loesch. On Twitchy they are talk­ing about tac­tics to fight the use of the Twit­ter Gulag:

The buzz con­tin­ues to build for the Twit­ter Gulag Defense Net­work, a grass­roots project launched last week­end by Twit­ter user Todd Kin­can­non. Using the hash­tag #TGDN, the project con­nects con­ser­v­a­tive activists and helps Twit­ter users com­bat the abu­sive flag-​spam tac­tics used by some left­ists to silence con­ser­v­a­tive voices.

#TGDN has been trend­ing off and on since Sat­ur­day, Jan. 5, and more than 4,000 happy war­riors have joined the net­work. This morn­ing, Kin­can­non reached out to #TGDN mem­bers with his sug­ges­tions for stay­ing out of the dreaded Twit­ter Gulag. His ideas include meth­ods to thwart flag-​spam trolls and tips to avoid trig­ger­ing Twitter’s auto­matic sus­pen­sion algorithms.

I’ve dealt with more than my share of folks on twit­ter who would rather throw an insult than make an argu­ment and I don’t hold them in high regard. If your point of view is valid it should be worth defend­ing and able to accept a chal­lenge. As for try­ing to silence peo­ple on twit­ter let me say under­handed tac­tics used to silence con­ser­v­a­tive speech I agree with are just as despi­ca­ble if they are used to silence lib­eral speech I dis­agree with.

If any­one on the right is respon­si­ble for this, let me say I’m ashamed of you, you should know bet­ter. If you are some­one on the left out­raged by this I would ask you to show that same out­rage the next time some­one tries to silence Ann Coul­ter or my friend Pam Geller.

Either way Mike Hum­mell is going to be on this Sicilian’s radio show tomor­row, he’s going to make his points con­cern­ing the Host­ess Strike, I and my co-​host will make mine, our callers will make theirs and I’ll trust my lis­ten­ers to make up their minds. Twit­ter Gulag or no Twit­ter Gulag I’ve agreed to have him on and that’s the way it’s going to be. Period!