Play with the cards you were dealt with

WEDNESDAY, 19 OCTOBER 2022

A man appears in a video interview on social media. He refers to himself as a woman, and appears in clothes, make-up and hairstyle that are traditionally more associated with a grown woman than a grown man. He speaks in a high voice and rejoices in the possibilities that he believes are now open to him to be a mother, among other things.

Here are the facts:

1. This person was not born in the seventeenth century. Some people think it would have been interesting to have lived through the wars in Europe during that century, or better or worse times in other parts of the world. Fact is that the person was born in the twentieth century. The person can have clothes made and dress up as someone from the seventeenth century, and even ride around in a horse-drawn carriage but will not be able to change anything about the fact that he was not born in that century. The same argument can be made about the fact that the person was not born in 1950. Maybe he has daydreams about what it would feel like to be a child of the fifties. He can dress in clothes that would have been appropriate in the fifties, sixties, or seventies, but nothing can change the fact that he was not born in 1950.

2. The person was not born as a black man or woman. Some people wish they were born with the DNA and pigmentation of a black person, but the fact is that the person in this video in question is indeed not black. Even if the person wanted to be black, it is not biologically possible. The person can smear shoe polish over his face, but he will never be more than a white person with black shoe polish covering his face.

3. The person was not born in Japan as the child of ethnically Japanese parents. Again, there are Caucasians and people of other races who wish they were born in Japan, as children of ethnically Japanese parents, but alas … they were not. Like the person in the video. He can move to Japan, learn to speak Japanese fluently, adopt Japanese cultural customs, and even get citizenship of the country. But he cannot change the fact that he was not born the child of ethnically Japanese parents.

4. The person was born with biological characteristics that make him a man, not a woman. Because his post-puberty body does not have the biological ability to produce eggs, and he is not capable of bearing children, he is not a woman. If his body had all the biological elements necessary to produce eggs and give birth to children, but because of illness or other medical reasons he cannot go through the process, or because of age or other reasons he can no longer do it, he would still be a woman. But because his body lacks the necessary biological elements, because he has never possessed the necessary elements, and because he will never possess the necessary elements, he cannot be defined as a woman. As with the century or the decade in which you were born, and your ethnic and cultural origin, the person may wish he had been born a woman. He can dress the way he thinks a woman should dress, wear make-up, and change his hairstyle – and make himself guilty of stereotyping how a woman should appear in public. He can also learn mannerisms that are closer to stereotypes of how a woman should talk, or toss her hair, or laugh, or make hand gestures. He can even get hormone treatment that will make his body grow breasts – like a woman. He can go even further and have his penis removed and what is left moulded into something that might look like female genitalia. But nothing will change the fact that he was born with the biological elements that make him a man.

Ultimately, there is no right way to be a boy or a girl, or a right way to be a man or a woman. Not all boys play sports or climb trees. Not all girls play with dolls or walk around in their mothers’ high heels. Likewise, some men like to wear makeup, and they are more comfortable in dresses. Some women prefer short hair and muscular biceps. Some men are sexually attracted to other men, and some women are sexually attracted to other women.

The ways you can express your personality are virtually endless. But if you were not born in the seventeenth century or in 1950, you can say you were, but that won’t change the reality. If you were born in Sudan to ethnic Sudanese parents, nothing you say can change the fact that you were not born in China to ethnic Chinese parents. And if you were born with a penis and one X chromosome and one Y chromosome, nothing can change the fact that you are not a woman as an adult.

Our options of where and how to live are much broader than our ancestors’. You can choose clothing and a hair style that suit your personality. You can choose how you want to talk, how you want to laugh, and what hand gestures you want to use. You can learn to speak several languages fluently and live in any of almost 200 countries in the style most people from that country are used to. You can have surgical procedures done to your body, make changes to how big your ears are or how round your eyes. You can lose weight and get super fit, or you can get as fat as you want. But everything happens within certain limits: When you were born; where you were born but especially where you grew up; who your biological parents are; and alas, the gender you were born with. Play with the proverbial cards dealt to you. Your options are almost endless.

THURSDAY, 20 OCTOBER 2022

Say there’s a guy at work who thinks he’s a pirate. “Peter” dresses up like a Caribbean Sea pirate from the early eighteenth century. He often swings his sword around when he thinks no one is looking, and every now and then he utters sounds like “Argh!” and “Gar!”

The guy is generally pleasant, and he does his job well enough that no one complains. Most people are polite and play along with his delusion.

One week you realise he’s not there. After asking around, you learn that he had one of his legs amputated and replaced with a wooden peg. Like a real pirate.

The piracy trend gets stronger and stronger not only in your country, but in other countries as well. People who identify as pirates even start political pressure groups.

After another year or three, everyone is informed at an urgent meeting that if anyone fails to confirm the self-identification of “Redbeard” (formerly known as “Peter”) as a real pirate, you can just pack your things and leave. Hateful people like you are not welcome in the company.

What to do now? Everyone has always known that “Peter” wished he had been born in the eighteenth century, with circumstances that would have forced him to spend his life as a pirate. But everyone also knows that “Peter” – like all his colleagues – does not live in the eighteenth century, and that “Peter” is not really a pirate. But now you could lose your job if you don’t support his delusion? You get an official warning if you don’t refer to him as “Redbeard”? And are reports true that the police have started to arrest people for saying nasty things on social media about Real Pirates?

My opinion is that “Peter”, as things stand now, can go to hell. Not because he wants to be a pirate. Not because he identifies as a Real Pirate. And not because he had one of his legs replaced with a wooden peg. “Peter” is a grown man. He can do what he wants with his leg. And he can appear in public as he likes. And he can yell “Argh!” and “Gar!” until his throat becomes hoarse. But if I can lose my job if I don’t greet him back with an “Argh!” and a “Gar!”, and if I am socially ostracised and labelled as hateful because I think he wasn’t really born in the eighteenth century, then there’s something wrong with the whole story.

* * *

Getting back to Dylan Mulvaney, the person in the video with the red dress and the red bow in his hair. Do I want someone to pull the bow out of his hair? Are you crazy? Do I want someone to yell at him to take the dress off because men don’t wear dresses? Again, are you out of your mind? Men can wear what they want. Women can wear what they want. Women can flex their muscles and ride motorcycles and swear and smoke and wear their hair short and sleep with other women. Men can wear dresses and make-up and tread delicately in high heels and laugh in high-pitched voices and sleep with other men. None of that is my business.

When does it become my business? When one is compelled in your speech to deny biological reality.

Why is this even a possibility? Because an obscure academic idea about gender identity almost overnight became the dominant ideology in some Western countries.

Would I also have a problem with people losing their jobs or being banned from social media or having to close their businesses because they don’t want to submit to the idea that Jesus Christ is their “Personal Lord and Saviour”? Yes, I would have a problem with that too. The same with people being forced to publicly submit to the idea that “Allah is the Only God, and Muhammad is his Prophet.”

There is reality, and there is belief. In a free, liberal world, we are free to believe as we wish and appear to ourselves and others as we see fit, as long as we do no harm to anyone. And we should be free to point out biological reality without fear of being chased down the street by an angry mob, or worse, by the police. Even if our refusal to support someone else’s perception of themselves hurts their feelings.

FRIDAY, 4 NOVEMBER 2022

In the debate about gender ideology, there seems to be broadly two camps.

Camp One says there is no right way to be a boy or a girl. Boys can wear their hair long, arrange flowers, play with dolls and design clothes, speak with a high-pitched voice, and have manners and habits that remind some people more of a woman or a girl, and still be boys. Girls can wear their hair short, climb trees, get into fistfights with boys, allow their legs to get fluffy when they’re older, and like motorcycles and cars, and still be girls.

Camp Two believes there is a right and a wrong way to be a boy and a girl. These right and wrong ways correspond to stereotypes from decades ago. Boys have short hair and muscles. They like sports and swearing and cycling through the mud. Girls are delicate and wear their hair long. They wear dresses and can’t wait to wear makeup like older women. They also prefer to spend their time in the house and play with their dolls. Boys who like things that girls usually like, or girls who have habits and preferences more associated with boys, are manifestations of a tragic phenomenon in nature: children born in the wrong bodies. When the child then realises something is wrong, or when their parents become aware that something had gone horribly wrong in the womb, they must, after short consultations with medical staff and perhaps a psychologist, be placed on puberty blockers and hormone treatment. If applicable, they also have to go for breast removal surgery sooner rather than later and begin the long and expensive and risky process of transforming their existing genitalia into genitalia of their real gender.

If you have young children or you’re planning to start with a family in the near future, or if you are serious about the right of women to have their own spaces, including help centres for abused women or even prisons free of male prisoners who identify as women, or the right of gay men and women to limit their relationships to people of their own biological sex without being called “transphobic”, it might be a good idea to sort out in which camp you feel more comfortable.

Read more about the debate:

2018-07-06 – Saying Goodbye to the Tomboy (“Danya”)

2018-10-19 – We must reject self-identification (Joanna Williams)

2018-10-31 – Silencing Women in the Name of Trans Activism (Julie Bindel)

2019-01-31 – Homophobia and the Modern Trans Movement (Sky Gilbert)

2019-02-01 – The Nature of Sex (Andrew Sullivan)

2019-12-06 – The trans ideology is a threat to womanhood (Meghan Murphy)

2021-02-09 – Inside Planned Parenthood’s Gender Factory (Abigail Shrier)

2022-06-15 – The Billionaire Family Pushing Synthetic Sex Identities (Jennifer Bilek)

2022-07-26 – I Would Have Been a ‘Trans Kid’ (Eva Kurilova)

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The split personality of the government in Taipei

MONDAY, 17 OCTOBER 2022

On 10 October 1911, a series of uprisings started that, over the course of the next few months, led to the fall of the Qing Dynasty and the birth of the Republic of China. After a decade of violence and political tug-of-war, the Chinese Nationalist Party led by Chiang Kai-shek ended up in control of the republican government.

The island of Formosa is about 200 kilometres from the Chinese coast. The island was ruled by Qing China between 1683 and 1895, when it was ceded to Japan. A few weeks after Japan’s surrender in 1945, officials from the Republic of China stepped of a boat in the north of Taiwan with a United Nations mandate to administer the island until a final peace treaty was signed with Japan.

In his authoritative report of the period, Formosa Betrayed, George H. Kerr narrates that the officials of the Chinese republic saw Taiwan (or the island of Formosa) as a warehouse full of luxuries that needed to be plundered as quickly as possible. Factories were dismantled and shipped to Shanghai. Furniture, ornaments, bicycles, money, jewellery, and anything else that looked like it might have value was looted and robbed either by government officials, or by soldiers brought in to terrorise the local population.

By early 1949, it was clear that the republican government, then based in Chengdu in southwestern China, was going to lose the civil war against Mao Zedong’s Communists. Between January and December 1949, most of the republican politicians and institutions, a lot of cultural treasures as well as financial resources under the control of the Republic of China were moved to the island of Formosa.

The six million inhabitants of Taiwan were not consulted about this takeover of their island by the Nationalists. For the next four decades, the population’s complaints about everything from the denial of human rights to the corrupt expropriation of property were brutally silenced.

By the early 1990s, enough of the Civil War era politicians had died out, and supporters of the idea that the government in Taipei would eventually retake power in Mainland China became fewer and fewer. In 1996, the first Taiwan-born person was chosen as president of … the “Republic of China”, because calling it what it really was – the Republic of Taiwan, was a controversy that would send the missiles flying across the Strait of Taiwan.

On 10 October 2022, several hundred thousand people in Taiwan actively celebrated the anniversary of the founding of the Republic of China (millions, of course, enjoyed the holiday without attaching any political value to it). The president of the “Republic of China”, Tsai Ing-wen, also solemnly celebrated the day with a speech. Although she referred to Taiwan as the “Republic of China”, most of the speech was about the island of Taiwan.

In a speech on 4 August 2022 in response to live-fire drills by the Chinese navy and army around Taiwan, she referred to the threat to “our nation’s sovereignty”. The question remains: What nation was she talking about? Taiwan? China? If she was talking about the island of Taiwan with surrounding smaller islands under Taipei’s administration, and the 24 million Taiwanese (and other long-term residents), then why at all celebrate the founding of the Republic of China – which for all practical purposes is a decayed relic of Chinese history? I understand that the government in Beijing threatens to go to war the moment Taipei officially declares independence, but is that reason enough to still solemnly party on October 10th every year?

It is clear that to be able to distinguish between the official independence of Taiwan and de facto independence requires a lesson in political doublespeak. But that the government in Taipei still uses the flag of the losers of the Chinese Civil War, the flag of the looters of Taiwan and the oppressors of freedom and human dignity, and still after seven decades actively celebrates the founding of a state that has long ceased to exist, is sometimes difficult to grasp.

Flag of the Republic of China, 1912-1928, before it was replaced by the government of Chiang Kai-Shek with the flag below
The flag of the Republic of China, 1928-1949, after which it served as the flag of the ROC on Taiwan

* * *

The dream of independence of millions of Taiwanese (not all, but a large proportion of the adult population) is understandable. Even in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Taiwan was only an afterthought for the Qing government in Beijing. Then for fifty years the island was part of Japan, and for the last seventy years, it has been ruled separately from Mainland China. Generations of Taiwanese have been born and have lived their entire adult lives with the daily reality that the island is governed separately from China.

On the other hand, I also understand the argument of Greater China supporters, who consider the majority of the population of Taiwan to be part of the same ethnic family as the majority of the population of Mainland China. Language and cultural roots are also shared. Thousands of families in Taiwan have relatives in China whom they visit regularly.

I also understand that the government of the People’s Republic of China has an argument for reunification. They see themselves as the inheritors of Chinese history, with the responsibility to the ancestors and descendants of the Chinese population to make whole what had been broken by the end of the Qing Era.

Whether the People’s Republic can make a legitimate argument about jurisdiction over Taiwan requires a deep dive into the murky waters of treaties signed after World War II between Japan and America, and between Japan and the Republic of China. It was, for example, not spelled out specifically who Taiwan belonged to after Japan had ceded control over the islands.

Arguments aside, what sometimes irritates is the split personality of the government in Taipei. I appreciate the thorny problem that if independence is officially declared, the government in Beijing will have little choice but to carry out its decades-long threats. The Taipei government nevertheless walks a fine line. Passports are issued these days with “Taiwan” in large Roman letters, and “Republic of China” only in Chinese characters. Statements are made about Taiwan’s independence, but under the name “Republic of China”. Says President Tsai Ying-wen in an interview with the BBC after she was elected in 2020: “We don’t have a need to declare ourselves an independent state. We are an independent country already and we call ourselves the Republic of China (Taiwan).”

Taiwan passport

If Taiwan were truly independent, would the president not refer to her country as the Republic of Taiwan? And how much does it matter that Taiwan is officially only recognised as independent by fourteen countries and doesn’t have a seat at the United Nations? Most countries do maintain diplomatic offices in Taipei, but none are official embassies, in deference to the People’s Republic of China that considers Taiwan a province of China.

The fact of the matter is, there are three actors in this play: The group advocating for Taiwanese independence, who make pretty strong arguments; the government in Beijing (and supporters of reunification in Taiwan), which also makes points that cannot be dismissed out of hand; and then there’s the government in Taipei which officially upholds the One China policy, but also makes no claim to being the legitimate government of Greater China, and – at least for the last two or three years – also claims that Taiwan is independent, but under the banner of the Republic of China. Can anyone be blamed for being confused?

* * *

What do I see as a more honest situation than the current shuffle closer to the abyss? I reckon: A cooler relationship with America – an unreliable “friend” at the best of times; a warmer relationship with Beijing – albeit with a government dominated by a political party that was not appointed by the Chinese people and cannot be removed by the Chinese people except with extreme violence; and increasingly less emphasis on the symbols of, and less reference to, the obsolete relic of history, the Republic of China.

Naive and unrealistic? I guess so.

———————-

A few useful links:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_the_Undetermined_Status_of_Taiwan: “In 1950 […] United States President Harry S. Truman said that […] ‘the determination of the future status of Formosa must await the restoration of security in the Pacific, a peace settlement with Japan, or consideration by the United Nations.’ This statement of Truman is generally regarded as the origin of the Theory of the Undetermined Status of Taiwan. In 1951, Japan concluded the Treaty of San Francisco with the Allied Powers. It renounced all right, title and claim to Taiwan and the Pescadores without explicitly stating the sovereignty status of the two territories.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_San_Francisco: “President Ma expressed that the Treaty of Taipei has voided the Treaty of Shimonoseki”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Taipei: “Article 4: It is recognized that all treaties, conventions and agreements concluded before December 9, 1941, between China and Japan have become null and void as a consequence of the war.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taiwan_independence_movement: “The governments of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC) oppose Taiwanese independence since they believe that Taiwan and mainland China comprise two portions of a single country’s territory. For the ROC, such a move would be considered a violation of its constitution.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_status_of_Taiwan: Specifically look at the “Arguments for the Republic of China and/or People’s Republic of China sovereignty claims” and “Arguments for Taiwanese self-sovereignty claims and its legal status”

———————-

The birth of the Republic of China is celebrated on October 10th, and 1911 is seen as the first year of the Republican Era. Yet the Republic of China was not actually founded on 10 October 1911. A quick timeline:

1894-1895: War between China and Japan

1899-1901: The Boxer Rebellion

14 November 1908: Emperor Guangxu dies; one day later his aunt, the powerful Empress Dowager and Regent Cixi, dies (the suspicion is strong that she had her nephew poisoned)

2 December 1908: Aisin-Gioro Puyi, the two-year-old son of the Manchu Prince Chun, is crowned as the Xuantong Emperor, the last of the Qing Empire

10 October 1911: The Wuchang Uprising leads to a series of uprisings across China

November 1911: fourteen of fifteen provinces in China reject the Qing government

1 January 1912: The Republic of China is established

12 February 1912: Empress Dowager Longyu signs the abdication decree on behalf of the now six-year-old Puyi. This ended more than 2,000 years of imperial rule in China.

Empress Dowager and Regent Cixi; the Xuantong Emperor, better known as Puyi; Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek

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What I needed in February 2004

TUESDAY, 4 OCTOBER 2022

I’m reviewing the February 2004 pieces, “Advice about staying or coming back”, “Slave to the word” and “About friends, and other personal reasons”. It’s unpleasant to read. I had an intense desire to go “home” (“home” in quotation marks, because why wasn’t Taiwan home?). It can be simplistically argued that I was afraid to take the step after five years in Taiwan where I had created a comfortable life and home for myself. However, I had a strong suspicion that it would have been the wrong move for me. I felt that a conventional life with a 40-hour-a-week job and salary and house in the suburbs was something that wouldn’t work for me, even if I could put all the parts together. I could say I wasn’t special, and if millions of my contemporaries could get the hang of it and find happiness in such a life, surely, I could too. Fact of the matter is that people differ. One man becomes a professional soldier, and his old childhood buddy becomes a high school Science teacher. Why don’t both become professional soldiers? Why not both teachers? People differ.

The man behind his computer early 2004

FRIDAY, 7 OCTOBER 2022

The pieces from early February 2004 are … strange to read now. The situation was that before the end of the first week of February I had to go for a medical examination as a requirement to extend my work permit. I was also desperate to leave Taiwan, and to go back to South Africa (it wasn’t necessary that the first action should lead to the second). I knew that if I did not do the medical test on time, my work permit couldn’t be renewed, and then my residence permit would expire. I would then have no choice but to leave Taiwan. The icing on the cake was that I had never been keen on doing the medical. So, all I had to do in order to get my way – to leave Taiwan, and probably go back to South Africa – was to not do something I didn’t want to do anyway.

On the other hand were the memories of the previous time I was in Northeast Asia, with a job and an income and a place to live, and me deciding that I simply had to make a move – as soon as possible.

If I made the wrong decision, I knew, I might be paying for it for years to come.

From “The last exile” of Monday, 22 December 2003 up to and including the few paragraphs titled “11 February 2004” is a piece of personal history of me basically arguing with myself.

WEDNESDAY, 12 OCTOBER 2022

00:57

The possible lifting of my exile in February 2004 was a complete fuck-up. On the one hand, I put pressure on myself: “If you want to feel like you belong somewhere, you must leave behind the life you built up in Taiwan and go back to South Africa. That way you can enjoy barbecue and pudding with your parents and your sisters as often as you want.” And from the other side an admonition: “You’ve already written so many pieces about going home. If you don’t act now, no one will believe you ever again if you say something.”

With a personality like mine, plus the right psychological pressure points, you don’t need many enemies.

12:36

I wrote in the piece, “And the answer is …”: “The product [that I tried to sell to myself] is one that I need. It’s the pill I need to swallow to continue with my life.”

The implication, if you read the piece, is that the product was to pack up my life in Taiwan and go back to South Africa – to be closer to my family and to feel I am in a place where I should be.

Looking back after almost two decades, I want to venture a better interpretation: What I really needed was a conviction that I belonged where I found myself at that moment of my life – be it Taiwan, South Africa, or anywhere else in the world. I needed to be convinced that wherever I was, was right for me – or in stronger terms, that I was in a place where I was supposed to be. In February 2004, I believed that that place was not Kaohsiung in the south of Taiwan, but rather in the province in South Africa where my parents and younger sister were living at the time.

What I needed was to develop a sense that Taiwan was indeed right for me. But more than that – that one can belong in a place far from where you were born and grew up, just as you can feel lost in the very place where you first took root.

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I write to survive

SATURDAY, 6 AUGUST 2022

Writing is prayer/To write is to pray.

(When I write, I believe someone will read it. When millions of people pray, they believe someone will hear it.)

MONDAY, 3 OCTOBER 2022

I am translating the last of the Personal Agenda pieces that I didn’t translate ten years ago. It brought me in close contact again with questions I wrestled with twenty years ago: What should I do with my life? What type of adult life do I want, or need, to develop for myself? And: Should I leave Taiwan on Thursday, 4 March 2004?

Being able to spend hours every day on writing projects was an important consideration in my decision-making process. It was an important factor in 2001 when I was developing ideas about what type of adult life I wanted to lead, and it was an important consideration when I had to decide in the last months of 2003 and the first two months of 2004 whether I was going to go back to South Africa with all my earthly possessions in tow.

As I’ve worked on publishing my writing over the last decade, I often wondered why I never wrote more. One sometimes hears of so-called prolific writers who’ve produced dozens of novels, several collections of short stories, articles, poems, and a few plays to boot. My average for the last ten to fifteen years has been about 20,000 words per year (not counting pieces that I consider unpublishable).

However, if I look at months like September 2003 and February 2004, I see that I wrote as much in those months as I would later write over the course of a whole year. How does that work?! And why couldn’t I keep it up?

Fact is, I only write when I have something to say. If I don’t want to say something specifically, there’s no inspiration.

I also wrote in the February 2004 piece, “Slave to the word”, “I believe I’ll slide into a bottomless depression if I write less.” I have also mentioned many times over the years that I am at my happiest when I’m working on some piece of writing. As the months of September 2003 and February 2004 made clear, writing is a mechanism that helps me to survive. That’s why I’ve never put much effort into marketing my writing, and why I’ve never put much effort into trying to monetize it.

Writing helps me make sense of things. And it has always been a good way to work out solutions to dilemmas in the absence of people with whom I could talk about certain matters, or with whom I could discuss things as much as I deemed necessary.

To summarise: I only write when I need to write. I write to survive.

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Considerations before you spend money on information

WEDNESDAY, 17 AUGUST 2022

Seeing as I’m on Twitter almost every day, and have a few of my own products to market, not to mention this site and the Afrikaans version which could always do with some extra readers, I thought it might be good to invest in a course on how to make money on Twitter. The hottest product on Gumroad is a guide called “The Art of Twitter”, available for $89.00 (or if you’re lucky and get it at a discount, $62.00). More than 5,000 copies of the guide have already been sold, so it’s certainly worth considering.

However, I hold back before I press the “Buy Now” button. Here are the reasons:

I have bought many information products. Almost always you are disappointed at the end. Why? Maybe the content is nothing but rehashed nonsense. In other cases, the information is decent enough, and you learn things you didn’t know. What’s the problem then? You complain that you hoped there would be “more information”.

What you really mean: You were hoping on the last page of the PDF would be an incantation that conjures up a fairy who will do all the work for you. Because this is the inevitable next step: Six months plus of mostly boring work before you see any results.

The other reason I’m holding on to my $89 (or $62) is because – so I reckon – you can get most of the content for free if you just search for it on Google (or Bing, Yahoo, Duckduckgo or Brave). Check out the table of contents: The basics of Twitter; Picking a niche; How to attract followers; Popular tips NOT to follow; Growth strategies; How to create tweets that get likes, retweets, and engagements; The easiest, fastest, and safest ways to make money with Twitter; How to avoid getting banned; How to build a strong network. Then there are the bonuses: How to create and monetize Twitter bots; Growing beyond Twitter (Reddit, Telegram, Instagram, Facebook); a free 3-month subscription to an automation tool; and an archive of 258 of the author’s best tweets. Besides the 3-month subscription (on your own you get seven days free anyway, and after that it’s $12.49 per month minimum), you can find similar information in sometimes long, detailed articles on the first page of Google’s search results – provided of course you use the right phrases and keywords. Similar research can also be done on YouTube, Pinterest, and of course on Twitter itself, where people regularly publish mini articles on the topic.

Wouldn’t it save time to just buy the product? I reckon: Not really. It doesn’t take long to search for information, and you can read five or six different articles instead of getting just one person’s view. And there’s always a possibility that one article will give you additional phrases with which you can search for more information.

Why, when you can get most of the information for free, do people still spend so much money on a set of PDFs?

The psychological factor. You feel if you spend more than a few dollars on something, you will surely jump in and make use of what you learn. Plus, an information product worth a quarter of the retail price will provide you with a plan you can start executing once you’ve read the last few pages (and, to your dismay, seen there’s no incantation for a fairy who’s going to do all the work).

So, what should you do if you want to continue your attempt to make money from Twitter?

Ask yourself when you want to start, because what you’re looking at is a new part-time job. Want to get started right away? Tomorrow morning? Next Monday?

Then you need a plan, preferably in steps: Who is your target market? What topic are you going to focus on? What will you include in your Twitter profile? What type of content will you post? How often will you be posting content? A list of big names in your chosen niche that you should follow, and whose content you should respond to. And so on.

Then, time to do some research.

If you don’t mess up too much, you might be able to buy yourself a new lawn chair in a few months with your accumulated Twitter dollars – or, who knows, perhaps a new car.

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