This blawg was censored for a while this morning. And thereby hangs a tale of both human and artificial stupidity.
In the wee small hours of this morning, I received the following e-mail message for each of three blawg entries from the distant past (all grammatical/typographical/formatting errors in the original):
Subject: Your post titled "" has been put behind a warning for readers
Hello,
As you may know, our Community Guidelines (https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy) describe the boundaries for what we allow-- and don't allow-- on Blogger. Your post titled "" was flagged to us for review. This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content; the post is visible at http://scrivenerserror.blogspot.com/2003/07/continuing-from-wee-hours-of-this.html. Your blog readers must acknowledge the warning before being able to read the post/blog.
We apply warning messages to posts that contain sensitive content. If you are interested in having the status reviewed, please update the content to adhere to Blogger's Community Guidelines. Once the content is updated, you may republish it at https://www.blogger.com/go/appeal-post?blogId=5530154&postId=105957727153045899. This will trigger a review of the post.
For more information, please review the following resources:
Terms of Service: https://www.blogger.com/go/terms
Blogger Community Guidelines: https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy
Sincerely,
The Blogger Team
Along with, over the next couple of hours, messages related to two other posts from the distant past: Nothing to Do With Linda Lovelace and Sausages Frozen Solid. Note carefully that the most-recent of these items is from over fourteen years ago.
So why these three (and only these three) posts? The messages don't say. The posts do, however, have something in common:
- They all reference Watergate.
- More to the point, they all reference the cover identity of the main "inside" source that has been disclosed to date as used by Woodstein, W. Mark Felt a/k/a/ Deep Throat. (Let's see if this entry gets censored!)
- And it's two weeks to the day until an HBO miniseries on Watergate will begin its official release.
Notice, too, that the e-mail provides no link to appeal this determination, nor instructions on how to do so, nor a hint that buried at the bottom of the page after one fully logs in to the account, then backs up to the e-mail, then clicks the post link from the article, one will see a button to ask for reconsideration. So, about twelve hours after the beginning of the censorship, the pieces were restored (and I kept the correspondence, oh yes I did you arrogant maroons). So, my only real response must be to implicitly violate community guidelines and utilize a particularly wicked Anglo-Saxon phoneme fricative. Herewith the cleaned-up version:
F*ck you sideways with a splintery 2x4, Google. "Sensitive content" my amputed left great toenail; you f*cked up. You waited a decade and a f*cking half to misimpose "community guidelines" on a f*cking indirect political commentary and reference that's in the f*cking public record and the f*cking public consciousness; anybody who doesn't know that "Deep Throat" means "W. Mark Felt and Watergate," in addition to any salacious misinterpretation your f*pping automated screening system imposed, is not someone who would read this blawg in the first place. You did so without f*cking disclosing what you were actually f*cking objecting to. You did it on a Monday at zero-dark-thirty. You did it via an automated screening system that ardently refuses to use the same level of "artificial f*cking intelligence" to screen out pirated copyrighted material rampant on both this and other parts of your services. You did it without going after any of the other more-questionable-under-Moral-Majority-interpretations-of-the-Community-Guidelines pieces I've posted, including two embedded images of oil paintings depicting unclothed female secondary genitalia (gasp!), let alone any other discussion of "morally questionable" artistic materials or direct criticism of your own quasicriminal conduct and lack of ethics (offsite republication of material that remains on this blawg). You did it without bothering to f*cking test your filter on any real f*cking commentary; one wonders if "Harry Reems" or a reference to US v. Battista will result in censoring this post. Just f*ck off on your way to Correctional Custody, where some hard-ass NCOs will teach you the real meaning of "Community f*cking Guidelines" while you do pushups until I get tired.1
The irony that this bit of censorship was of political pieces that offhandedly referenced the fallout from a cover-up of political and ordinary-considerations crimes is obviously beyond the suboptimal intellectual capacity of anyone in Mountain View — real person, juridical person, or artificial intelligencestupidity system masquerading as a person. Apparently, Google wants to be El0n Mu5k and Birdpoop. <SARCASM> As there's no way to accuse this blawg of being "government funded" or "government sponsored" or "paid with government funds," you maroons had to find some other ridiculous rationale.
</SARCASM>
- No, you probably don't want to know what the first-thing-on-Monday-morning-before-any-caffeine reaction was. I can use that particular phoneme fricative grammatically correctly as at least six parts of speech without any conscious f*cking effort. I was trained in this by the very best: Senior NCOs. I can also chew someone out without raising my voice, using grammatically correct sentences and language otherwise appropriate for fine-dining establishments and even a white-upper-class religious institution; that requires coffee first.