The internet should be neat lawns, picket fences, and net curtains. https://twitter.com/timothy_stanley/status/1347902091549962244

The real world used to be as vulgar and rude as the Internet.

Watch this film made in 1964 about heckling of politicians in town halls, as politicians and candidates made their pitches to the public, who did not hold back. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p006df7k

Tim Stanley can have his myth of prim, prissy, proper and polite "conservative" values.

Fine, then, I am not a conservative: I don't think that enforcement of manners is the job of any government or its agencies, companies, or renegade enforcers and snitches.

Too many in society, who occupy too many positions that they manifestly do not deserve, believe that *any* form of challenge to their positions is itself rude, recast as "offensive".

That is what is going on.

That is the order that Trump upset.

Tim Stanley would politely clap while whatever it is that he stands for is censored out of the public sphere.

Being angry about it, and the lies that would be told about why it was being done, would be impolite, right?

Making a forceful argument against it would be insurrection, terrorism, sedition, incitement, violence *itself*...

You can see when someone being rude is doing so to challenge your position, or because they are bereft of a better argument.

You can engage, then, in either way. Or block or mute. What is so difficult? It can be the polite little Internet you wanted.

Another Telegrapher signals her preference for the fantasy narrative that has been constructed... https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/01/09/donald-trumps-despotic-mania-threat-democracy/

"A functioning body politic requires not just institutions and laws, but rationality and the expectation of civil behaviour"

"Civil behaviour"...

Just as Tim said.

Apparently "uncivil" behaviour is equivalent to violence/sedition/incitement/insurrection/etc.

"For democracy to win requires not just institutions and laws, but rationality and the expectation of civil behaviour."

Bollocks.

Institutions are very easily captured.

Laws are invented to protect them from challenge.

"The expectation of civil behaviour" is a moveable goal.

We see it already, and it has been unfolding since long before Trump.

The regulation of speech and thought, of expression on unregulated platforms and in the public sphere, and the state's loss of control have vexed policymakers for decades.

They are terrified of democracy.

From political correctness, through 'microaggression' and 'safe spaces', and much more besides, the point has been to expel wrongthinkers from public discourse -- to erect Tim's neat lawns, net curtains and picket fences.

And it will take Tim and Janet with it...

People have been removed from the public sphere for wearing shirts, telling the wrong kind of joke, not being aware of the historical connotations of a word, and for once, decades ago, having dabbled in the wrong kind of politics.

Don't tell me that there's a crisis of civility.

It is not possible to conform to the new expectation of civility. To be "polite" according to the bewildering constellation of infractions that have been invented recently, is to say absolutely nothing.

And even then, 'silence is violence'.

Tech companies have LOVED it.

So read @LibertarianBlue's book.

Read it today.

And then read it again.

Memorise it. https://www.amazon.co.uk/DELETED-Techs-Battle-Movement-Election/dp/154605930X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=11CDBBL9AOFJQ&dchild=1&keywords=allum+bokhari&qid=1610031028&sprefix=allum+b%2Caps%2C151&sr=8-1

The "expectation of civility" is the expectation to conform to the political and moral demands of people, who hate you and want you dead.