UPDATED WITH FRESH TWEETS/Saviour Balzan is campaigning heavily to have his critics silenced
China worked on him. They must have put some brainwashing fluid in that Peking duck they served him when he was handpicked to visit Beijing with a Malta government delegation and Ariadne Massa of Times of Malta.
Well, not really. He was always like that: totalitarian in outlook and absolutely unable to tolerate what he considers slights to his ego and honour. You can tell, in fact, that he was raised by progressively liberal Mintoffians in a family of Laburisti. People of that mindset don’t understand the essential underpinnings of democracy. They always want to control and silence anything and everything they don’t like.
Now Saviour is blocking all his critics on Twitter and making a meal of it, as a result of which he too is experiencing the Streisand Effect.
Those he is blocking are instead swarming in with replies to his ‘silence the web troll’ tweets (apparently, I am the web troll). So instead he’s blocking them from retweeting his tweets, and instead they’re copying his tweet links and tweeting that for others to retweet.
To quote his column in Balzan Bile Today this morning, “We cannot stop the tide, the immensity of the social media, but even the social media is waking up to the malicious commentary and blocking it.” By that, he means himself and his mates in the Labour Party.
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Joseph Muscat should make sex at work a serious crime, and not web trolling.
I am interested in finding out what Mr Balzan classifies as normal.
I find any attempt at labelling something “normal” rather tenuous since it is one of the main aspects of that “bad barrel” that brings about discrimination and racism.
“Normal” in the past has been endowed with many different characteristics and such a definition has been responsible for all forms of racism, sexism and all other forms of discrimination.
“It’s not normal for people of different races to marry” for example. Or better still, “It is not normal for people of the same gender to get married, therefore they shouldn’t be allowed”.
Such parameters lead to an unfair alignment which causes much pain and suffering for those who don’t fall within those parameters. The step from simple unspoken indifference towards the dignity of others who aren’t “normal” to violence is often described as imperceptable. It is a very small step indeed.
So Saviour Balzan seems to say that those who do not fall into his definition of “normal” are not allowed the right to freedom of speech.
It is no surprise there. I believe that the reason why the PN have struggled is because they are being discriminated against.
Allowing one set of people certain rights while denying them to others based on something like their skin colour, gender, or political beliefs in discriminatory and has no place in a democracy.
The same goes for the likes of Mr Balzan and the Labour Party. Answering questions posed by one set of people but not the other is denying the other a freedom that they have a right to.
Expecting one set of people to be silenced while saying nothing of another group of people’s opinion is also discriminatory.
But what I am saying is not new, it is well known. Unfortunately bad barrel makers and bad barrels are often difficult to see coming and lead us down a road that ends in terrible mistakes.
I think Saviour Balzan has taken one of those imperceptable steps which he should endeavour to correct, lest he finds himself taking one more.
The use of “normal” and “not normal” reminds me of the national socialists. Those who denied human rights to millions of people in Europe and beyond.
Saviour Bezghan, like many others in Labour and among the switchers, are running out of arguments as they find themselves having to defend the indefensible, and when an administration and its allies reach this point, they become dangerous.
From here onwards, it becomes about censorship, insults, lies, denial of rights, abuse, and who knows, maybe even violence.
Saviour Balzan is possibly the most obnoxious person I have ever met. He is also profoundly incompetent, even though he clearly thinks otherwise.
Twitter should block those who maliciously use its resources to promote the silencing of others. Hence users like Saviour Bezghan.
Saviour of “ex-Communist China” fame.
“Non ragionam di lor, ma guarda e passa”
Very apt in this instance, even though recommended by Virgil to Dante 700 years ago.
“Salvu Balzan in Twitter mud fight, calls for trolls to be locked up at Corradino”
This so-called journalist ‘fights’ for freedom of the press with his pathetic fund to sustain libel suits made against the press. And now he states THOSE WHO SPEAK THE TRUTH or retweet the truth should be jailed? Wow… speechless…
He’s caught the Jeffreytitis.
Shameful – instead of championing freedom of speech, opinions, blogs, whatever, he is campaigning for the opposite. There are plenty of countries he can emigrate to, China, Russia, North Korea, Uzbekistan. Take your pick, Salv.