Monday, April 9, 2018

The Legend of E. Manuel Goldstein

MLive has a comment board that periodically purges those commenters who are too provocative for their tastes. Apparently, total freedom of speech is not MLive's claim to fame when it comes to the comment boards. The latest example is the case of E. Manuel Goldstein, and the subsequent commenter screen name Content Disabled, who were unceremoniously dumped from MLive's archives of comments. Recently, MLive started using a bot-managed comment collating service called "viafoura" whose website touts its ability to "manage" commenters. E. Manuel Goldstein and Content Disabled would have none of that, and MLive apparently couldn't handle it anymore.

E. Manuel Goldstein's ironic name comes from the book Nineteen Eighty Four by George Orwell. The character is used  by the fascist State to inflame the Party Members during a daily "two minutes hate" session. Goldstein's face is shown to crowds gathered  for the daily exercise, and when his voice comes over the loudspeakers, the crowd goes into a murderous frenzy,  much like the neo-fascist comment posters on MLive's comment boards. E. Manuel Goldstein's comments were recently purged, but the  Fuzzbollah collective managed to save them to post them here for your reading pleasure.