Begin at the Beginning

Posted on January 4, 2018 by erick

I have been working on a book for months. It’s the intro that keeps stopping me. In trying to explain who and what I am now, I have to try to explain WHY I think I became who I am.

 

This is a sample of the beginning. There will, of course, be a lot more than this. If I ever decide I like the way I tell my own story.

“I always knew you were a good kid.”

This was a refrain I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard once I’d grown up and moved away from my dad. Relatives told me. His friends told me. One of his ex-girlfriends told me. And when I heard it, the only thing I could think was, “you saw it. You saw what I was dealing with. Why would you think your pretty words mean anything to me NOW?”

Sure, this requires some background. So let’s have a bit of background.

My father served in 5 theaters of war, and was wounded several times in battle. He went into the ground with German shrapnel still in his back, because the dangers of removal had caused doctors to decide that it was better to leave it be. Dad landed in Africa in a company of 205 soldiers. When the final surrender was signed 3 years later, exactly 4 of those soldiers he landed with were still alive and in uniform (he estimated around 10 others had been gravely wounded and shipped home, or wound up being shipped back for other reasons.) By the time my father was 25 years old, he was in a situation that most of us have to live 45 or 50 years to see – as in, more of the people he knew were dead than alive. As you might have guessed, it left its mark. I never knew him to sleep over 2 or 3 hours at a time. He was given to tremendous mood swings. He could flip from being a reasonable human being to a monster on a dime, and you never knew when it was coming. He could not, and indeed would not, find anything I did to be satisfactory, ever. He seemed to delight in making sure that everyone he talked to knew how unsatisfactory I was, in fact. The embarrassment from that is really hard to explain to someone who has never lived it, and I really hope you’ve never lived it. If you haven’t, trust me when I tell you it’s bad. If you have lived it, I’m very sorry.

 

 

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The Future Isn’t This

Posted on December 16, 2017 by erick

Yes, the world breathed a sigh of relief when Alabama actually failed to elect a serial pedophile to the United States Senate. But the world was right to be concerned that Alabama might do exactly that. They had every reason to believe he’d prevail, after all. And the numbers bore out their fears.

 

In Alabama, the white vote usually determines the outcome. And in the case of this election, white voters just loved the serial pedophile. 74% of white men voted for Roy Moore, and nearly 2 in 3 white women did the same thing.

 

The very people Bernie Sanders has assured us that we need to be reaching out to, in other words. Bernie’s people were Roy Moore’s electorate. The only thing that stopped Moore from prowling the malls of the DC area for teen girls are Black men and women, who voted better than 90% for Doug Jones. Bernie has called those people “low information” voters.

 

I call them voters who caught onto his game early.

 

Bernie is wrong. Whether he knows this and is lying, or he’s just too disconnected from the world to realize it, is for others to sort out. The mythological “white working class” of Bernie Sanders did not, and does not, vote out of “economic anxiety.” They vote bigotry. They vote hate. They’ll cut their own throats if they think there’s a chance to nick the throat of whatever minority of woman they blame for the predicament they find themselves in. The GOP has known this for a long time, and carefully played on it. And now, with a well-oiled, Russian-influenced propaganda apparatus masquerading as “news”, they can keep them bamboozled from now until the end of time. They voted for a pedophile, and they’d do it again. They’d vote for anyone who says things like Roy Moore said. Moore, after all, said that Muslims shouldn’t be allowed to vote. He also said that the greatest era of the United States was the era of legal slavery. He’s intimated that women shouldn’t be allowed to run for office. All of this is music to the ears of Bernie’s “white working class”, as they’ve been conditioned via FOX “News” and online propaganda to believe that all of these things are true. They have chosen to embrace it. We will not change the way they think, or the way they vote.

 

Am I suggesting we abandon them? No, of course not. But we can’t embrace them either, because it won’t work. We must reach out to men and women of color to finally put the nightmare of the present day firmly behind us. Many of those men and women are facing difficulty in voting due to suppression measures. We must help them fight this. Many others are not participating. We must use Alabama as an example to show them what the possibilities are. We can form a broad coalition of people of conscience, and push aside the Nazi-flavored tyranny of the present day. This is the one thing that will help the nihilist “white working class” more than anything any politician to date has promised them.

 

We must write them off politically to help them economically. Sanders would have to know this, as I am quite sure he has people around him who are well aware of the facts regarding what really drives them. Since I am certain he knows the truth, I am just as certain he’s pandering to them for his own reasons, and not because he actually wants to see things get better. Is he another old white bigot, just like Trump? No. His life history says that he’s been at various times a sincere fighter for the rights of those who are being suppressed. But his present political tack has erased a lot of his history. It could be that the old gentleman is too full of himself now to be a force for good.

 

If this is the case (and it looks to me like it is), it’s time to stop giving him oxygen. Kirsten Gillibrand, Kamala Harris, Ted Lieu, Jackie Speier… they are the future. Bernie is an impediment. It’s time to acknowledge that he was once a good man and a force for good, but that day has passed. Let Bernie and Trump continue to pander to the shrinking numbers of the scared and ignorant racists. The rest of us need to marginalize both of them. We have a lot of work to do.

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The Point Is Being Missed. Seriously

Posted on November 16, 2017 by erick

The news seems to have something new about Roy Moore every day. We’ve heard that when he was in his 30s, he was very anxious to get a number of young girls (the youngest being 14) to touch his naughties. We’ve heard he was on a banned list at a local mall because he harassed teenage girls. We’ve heard that he pulled teenage girls out of class at the local high school to ask them on dates. and we KNOW that his much younger wife was a classmate of one of his accusers.

 

So why are we not talking about what ELSE we know? Actually, since no one else wants to, allow me.

 

Roy is a fundamentalist Baptist. Anyone who has ever seen my Peaceful Christian Trading Card collection isn’t the least bit surprised by what Roy’s been up to. Indeed, I’m not at all surprised myself. I would have expected that he’d be up to such things. In the circles Roy travels in, old guys dating/molesting/even marrying much younger women is accepted as the norm, and that hasn’t changed for centuries. We know it hasn’t changed because in a poll taken of Alabama voters last week, those who consider themselves “Evangelicals” expressed even MORE support for Moore after the allegations surfaced. Again, I’d have expected precisely this kind of reaction. I’m rather shocked at those who seem dumbfounded by it.

 

Fundamentalists like Moore see women as property, and they see anyone old enough to reproduce as a “woman” for their purposes. We’ve seen it over and over again. We saw it with Tony Alamo. We saw it with Warren Jeffs and the FLDS. We’ve seen several examples from within the “Quiverfull” fundamentalist movement. This is who they are, this is what they believe, and this is how they live. When Hannity talked on his show about the activity with a 14 year old girl being “consensual”, a pretty good sized portion of his audience undoubtedly saw it, and see it, exactly that way. These people adhere to customs set up in an era where a girl would be lucky to have more than a few children and not die from the experience. It was also an age when people could expect to die in their 30s. A woman who starts producing children at 14, in fact, is GREAT for movements like the FLDS of Warren Jeffs, and the “Quiverfull” movement people like the Duggars of TV fame belong to. With our advances in medical sciences, a young girl can follow the Old Testament instruction to “be fruitful and multiply” many more times now than at any other era in history. And that’s just what people like Roy Moore want. This is why they seek not just to ban abortions, but to ban ANY form of contraceptives. This is why they seek to remove all traces of sex education from the schools. Teenage girls who aren’t pregnant aren’t doing what the Old Testament God expected them to do. And after what Eve did by listening to that serpent, all of her female descendants have a responsibility to adhere to that instruction, and do it without complaint.

 

This isn’t just about Roy Moore. This is how people like him see women, and the kind of society they want us to have. If you are one of those who was shocked by his behavior, stop being shocked, and start being angry. And, most importantly, get off your ass EVERY election and do something about it.

 

Moore got caught. But he has a whole bunch of brothers in influential positions already, many of them undoubtedly just as guilty – and as Godly – as Roy is. Stop them now, or you may not get another chance to do it.

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The Failure of “Flea Economics”

Posted on October 27, 2017 by erick

If you’re old like me, you’ll remember when this was a thing. The “thing” being the Berlin Wall, which was built around the western part of the City of Berlin. Berlin sat entirely in the Communist GDR (East Germany), but due to the postwar security agreements, Berlin itself was split between a Soviet occupation zone and an Allied zone. The Allied zone became West Berlin, which became a funnel for eastern Germans wishing to escape the Communist GDR. As a result, the East German Government eventually built the Berlin Wall to stop the defections. And it worked; the flood out of eastern Germany slowed to a drip. The “brain drain” of educated East German citizens slowed to a near-stop. But people still tried. Well over a hundred died trying to get across that wall.

 

And now, nearly 30 years since that wall came down, a sizable plurality of eastern Germans wish the wall was back up. Even with the (by numbers) lower standard of overall living. Even with the state security apparatus they used to live in fear from. Why? Mainly because of what they didn’t have to fear in their old country. Eastern Germans had childcare. They had jobs. They had decent places to live, for the most part. They knew they were going to eat. As the reunified Germany is a social welfare state, some of these guarantees remain. But a place to live and a job are certainly not guaranteed any longer, and the unemployment figures in the old East Germany remain in double digits in many areas, this long after the fall of the wall. The East Germans of the early 1990s were victims of the worldwide economic model of today, something I think could accurately be described as a “flea economy.” Let’s expand on that a bit.

 

A flea lives by finding a host and attacking it for blood. If that host dies, or sickens to the point where the blood isn’t readily available, the flea will leave for a different host. This is precisely what multinational corporations do in this day and age. Once they’ve sucked all the resources they can out of any given country and/or sickened the host with their pollution, they hop out of that region and into another one. They did it here in the US. They’ve done it in Europe. They’ve done it throughout North and South America. And now, Asia is the latest host for the parasitic corporate model. There is growing evidence that their time on China’s back is coming to a close, as they seek to attach themselves to new hosts in southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent. The parasites have also returned to Africa, not as slavers or plantation master this time, but as economic exploiters of cheap labor and lax environmental laws. The story of the West is going to be repeated in the East, and in Africa, and they are going to keep doing it until there’s no blood left anywhere anymore. The favored business model of the large corporation is parasitic and must fail.

 

But the favored employment model of capitalism as we now know it also must fail, and is failing. The parasites are automating at the same time they’re draining resources. Fewer and fewer workers are needed all the time, and that’s not just in the West. It’s everywhere. The Chinese have dealt with that problem by constructing, constructing, and constructing, to the point where there are now cities of gleaming apartment complexes that sit largely empty. Our way is a bit different, of course; here in the US, we’ve been content with the return of Depression-era homelessness and child malnutrition, while the parasites at the top enjoy a bounty like none ever seen before. Here in the supposed cradle of freedom, many jobs that were once filled by teenagers after school have been taken by people with great work histories and educations, simply because decent jobs for those people do not exist anymore. And in this era, even those lousy jobs are starting to disappear, as things like automated ordering are being rolled out at fast food establishments. You don’t need someone at the drive-thru speaker when you can make the whole order on your phone and just go pick it up.

 

It has to be rethought. All of it. The idiotic push for more tax breaks for the rich is going to cause an evisceration of payrolls, because the parasites don’t create jobs. And if there are no revenues for public sector jobs, THOSE jobs are also lost. There is no “trickle down.” There is only a “catch basin” where any tax cuts will simply sit, doing nothing. The flea economy is a failed economy. We have to realize it. And then, we have to do something that makes sense. As hard as it will be for a lot of people to swallow, the only thing that is going to work in an automation age is for the public sector to be greatly expanded. And to do that,  we’re going to have to start taxing the rich again. And corporations will have to be taxed at a much higher rate than they’ve seen in at least 50 years. Those revenues can be used to educate children. To repair dangerous bridges in bad need of updates. To reopen rural hospitals that are closing at alarming rates. To clean up and to beautify the public spaces. To fully fund our underfunded police, fire, and emergency response apparatus.

 

We are heading straight for a “Mad Max” world if we don’t step away from the economic models we’re presently using. I assure you that Trump, who has never lived in your world, doesn’t give a rat’s ass. But is that the world you want to live in? The world you want your kids to inherit? If it isn’t, it’s time for you to get off your ass and get involved.

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Yes, He Will Walk Away

Posted on October 25, 2017 by erick

I’m seeing it all over the social media. People insisting that Trump is “too proud” or “too stubborn” to ever resign the Presidency. And to this, I just shake my head and say, “really?” Have these people actually studied the way this guy has lived his entire life? Trump’s entire adult life has been a series of walk-offs, right after he’d squeezed every dime he could get out of whatever failed venture he was involved in at the time. All he’s ever done, in fact, is walk away. From his wives. From his businesses. From his supposed “University.” Trump’s MO is to squeeze it and then run from it.

 

Yes, this is a bit different, because this time the scale of his potential legal trouble is much greater. Yes, he might do horrid things to try to deflect from what’s coming to hit him in the face. That’s certainly a worry. The checks on him have been tepid to nothing at all up to this point, and we’re all wary and worried. But the cracks are showing now. First it was McCain. Then Corker,who has been getting more strident by the day. And now Jeff Flake, who I’m sure can look forward to a tweetstorm beginning around 4 in the morning. While it is true that only a few GOP Senators are openly hostile to him now, it’s also true that it only takes a few of them. If McConnell wasn’t a worm, he’d be with them. But of course, he’ll never be anything but a worm, as Paul Ryan will always be a worm. Ultimately, it probably won’t matter what McConnell or Ryan do, because I think that the peeling off will continue. Trump is easily the most hated figure in the Oval Office since Nixon, and the most hated man worldwide since Hitler was still alive. To oppose him isn’t nearly as dangerous as it is to appease him, from a political perspective. His cult is only, at best, around 1 in 5 adults. That leaves 4 out of 5 somewhere on a scale that ranges from perturbed at his stupidity to absolute loathing of the man. There isn’t a lot of capital to lose by opposing him. John Kasich has seen this all along. Others are coming around. And more are going to come around with every new revelation. The Nunes silliness on Clinton isn’t going to stop it, nor will the Breitbart repetition of Russian disinformation.

 

The rest of this is speculation, but I think it will play out more or less in the following way. First, enough of Congress becomes hostile to make his impeachment/removal via the 25th Amendment a real possibility. At that time, I think we’ll see that he’s always had an escape clause of sorts, as he suddenly resigns and heads to Russia with most of his brood. The State of New York will probably indict him, but he will never be extradited. Will he live out the remainder of his life in peace and luxury in the Moscow suburbs, or will Putin double-cross him? I don’t know the answer to that. But I think that you and I are going to find out all of this sooner than we might think. Trump’s hysterical tweets and Breitbart’s headlines tell me that something very, very bad is coming down the pipeline. Congress, being servants of the rich, are going to try to ram that horrid tax bill through while they still can, so they’ll tolerate Trump until the heat gets really hot. But it is going to get really hot.

 

And when it gets hot, Trump walks away. Always.

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Shutting Down the Press. What Could Go Wrong?

Posted on October 23, 2017 by erick

It pains me that so many people parroting the stupid “fake news” refrain of the Orange Thrush don’t understand how that usually turns out.

 

Hitler is often the first tyrant we think of when we think of campaigns against an honest press. Yes, Hitler is an excellent example, and Trump’s mentality is basically Hitler’s minus a few dozen IQ points. But Trump and Hitler are far from the only ones to slur anyone who dared report the truth on them. And the reasons for muzzling the press are always the same – as in, the clown crying about the press wants to go about whatever his business is with impunity. Said clowns nearly always set up their own “news” agencies as well, to continue to befuddle and bamboozle those stupid enough to follow them to begin with (and to put their own narrative in the public discussion.) Once unencumbered by the press, you can do astounding things, like starve millions into submission in Ukraine, or set up a system of extermination camps to eliminate countless millions of those you see inferior (fun fact: a lot of people thought the Soviet reports on the death camps they found in German-occupied Europe were “fake news” due to the Soviet habit of making shit up. I kid you not.) And the ultimate fake news hater, Pol Pot, turned an entire nation into a vast death camp, while his propagandists wailed about the “lies” defectors were bringing out of the country.

 

The idiots now gleefully parroting the Nazi moron in Washington have no concept of actual history, as is usually the case with stupid people. If they bothered to check into history, they’d learn about things like the “Night of the Long Knives” in Germany, or the “Great Purge” in 1930s-era Russia. Press-hating tyrants destroy their most ardent supporters just as quickly as they’ll destroy their worst perceived enemies. When you back a monster, you can’t be shocked if one day the monster decides that maybe you’ll taste better than the others he’s eaten. Men without conscience never make mistakes, and are never sorry about who they destroy. The Trumps of the world have no friends, and no loyalties, to any but themselves. The fool screaming “fake news” today may be screaming in pain tomorrow from the torture, or the piercing of the bullet.

 

The US has an incredibly impotent mainstream media as-is, and their failures in the past have made it much easier to label anything they say now as “fake news”, even when it surely isn’t. And I honestly don’t feel sorry for outlets like the New York Times or CNN when they get attacked, because I remember how gleefully they peddled trash about Hillary Clinton, paving the way for the monster in Washington. But I don’t have to rely on them as sources (nobody should, really.) I sample from a variety of domestic and foreign sources, like Truthout in the US. I don’t always agree with them, but I do believe they’re trying to report the truth, and I respect their reporting, even when I disagree with the opinion. For foreign points of view, I find Deutsche Welle, the Guardian in the UK, and Xinhua to be fairly straightforward reporters of facts. Yes, I trust the Chinese state news agency more than I trust CNN.

 

Look them up. You’ll see why soon enough. Look at all the sources I mentioned. And if you have sources you see as honest, I’d be interested in hearing about it.

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What Price Honor?

Posted on October 19, 2017 by erick

We like to think that our Armed Forces officials, past and present, will always be honorable people. Today, we saw conclusive proof that this is far from always being the case.

 

I watched a man with an honorable service record debase himself in the service of a moron, and it makes me nauseous.

 

There is no way that John Kelly doesn’t realize how hurtful Trump’s phone call with the widow of La David Johnson had to be for her, and how much pain it will cause her family for a long time to come. His mealymouthed excuse that Trump never served in combat is appalling. Millions of us never served in combat, but we’d know better to basically tell the widow of a fallen soldier that he got what he signed on for. That Kelly would choose to criticize that this information became public, rather than the mean-spiritedness of the call that Myeshia Johnson got from this despicable man is beyond the pale, beneath the dignity of a General in the United States Armed Forces, and disgusting. Especially in light of the politicization of the death in Afghanistan of his own son. How do you continue to serve Trump after that? To make excuses for him?

 

I said awhile ago that no honorable person serves Donald Trump. People have insisted that Kelly is some how one of the good guys. I’d like to ask the people who believe this to explain the press conference Kelly just gave. These are the words and deeds of an honorable man?

 

And we have to balance what Kelly did today with what another man did a little earlier. George W. Bush, in sharp contrast to both Trump and Kelly, took a stand against the meanness. For all of the terrible things he was involved in as President, Bush did not sell out his soul. He believes in things. He actually stands for things. And George W. Bush would never, and did never, say anything so hurtful to the family of a fallen soldier. For all of his faults, George W. Bush is still a human being.

 

Donald J. Trump never was. And now he’s dragged what was an honorable man to his level.

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The Death of Patriotism

Posted on October 18, 2017 by erick

What should Patriotism logically be? I think it should mean a desire to see your neighbors do well, whoever they are. To see the children of your community fed, educated, and able to dream about reaching ever-higher. To want your air and water to be clean. To be able to live your life in peace, and to wish the same for the other people in your community, no matter what their skin color is, how they do or don’t worship, or who they love. To have, in all ways, the best possible community for the biggest number of people. And I think that we may have different ideas about how to get to that kind of a place, but it should be the place we all want to go.

 

But those aren’t the ideas that the people who style themselves “Patriots” have. Those people want to force you to live by their dictates. They will tell you where you must go to church, and they’ll make sure that “church” comes to you by codifying their dogmas into law. They will tell you that you must adhere to public rituals that they will define for you. They will separate you into different castes based on things like skin color, nationality, belief system. And if you are a woman, they will dictate to you how you will live your life, whether or not you have access to birth control, and of course you will not be allowed to ever terminate a pregnancy, even if the likely outcome of that pregnancy is your death, the death of your baby, or the death of both of you. And it may well be your death, since they also don’t want anyone to pay to have any access to healthcare. And for the children? In this day and age, as I sit here and type this, the “patriots” are openly suggesting that we scrap child labor laws, and return to an era where a lot of men died in their 30s due to the conditions they worked in as 12 year olds. Of course, we’ll all be dying younger anyway, from the chemicals that find their way into our water and the pollution-tainted food we eat. Nope, the only people who will be exempt from short, illness-plagued lives will be the ultra-rich. They, of course, will continue to enjoy access to the finest of everything.

 

Who in their right mind wants to live in such a place? Especially if you are a woman, or a person of color, or anything other than a fundamentalist Christian? Can you actually imagine being asked to fight and die to defend such a place? How could any thinking person be that kind of a “patriot?” I don’t think you can be. And I think the perversion of the word has largely led to the death of the entire concept. The Patriots that I recognized as a kid are belittled and shouted down in this day and age. Men like John McCain, who spent almost 5 years in a prison on behalf of his country. He is literally being asked to DIE on social media now by these so-called “patriots.” Oh, and those flag lovers don’t have any problem at all with a President who is very evidently compromised by a hostile foreign power, either. Hell, they ADMIRE that hostile foreign power, because it is the source of so much hate. If there’s one thing the so-called American “patriot” can’t get enough of in this era, that thing would be hate.

 

If you really love your neighbors, your family, the children of your community, and this land you live in, you can’t call yourself a Patriot anymore. You don’t want people 20 or 30 years from now referring to you with that title. Trust me when I tell you that it isn’t going to have a good connotation by then.

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When Will Someone Finally Ask?

Posted on October 16, 2017 by erick

Puerto Ricans are starving to death, and dying of diseases left eradicating in the western world long ago. The death toll from wildfires in California is climbing. US soldiers are getting shot to death in faraway places. And we never hear a word about it from the so-called President. It certainly isn’t what we heard regarding Florida and Texas, is it? Why, then, is Trump more interested in talking about flag worship (for nonwhites only) and TV show ratings than he is the disasters all around him? I have a theory about it, and it seems to me my theory might have some merit.

 

Let’s suppose for a moment that Trump didn’t actually win anything, either in the EC or in the popular vote. Let’s speculate that he was, in fact, installed in the Presidency by Vladimir Putin, tho who he may be beholden either for financial reasons, or some serious blackmail material, or maybe both. Suppose that Trump is actually not as incompetent as he seems (though he is surely a stupid man.) Is it not possible that there’s more than incompetence here? That perhaps Trump’s machinations have been dictated to him by someone who would like to see the USA collapse? It’s not as farfetched as you may think. We all know what the Puerto Ricans will do the next time a separatist vote comes up. And now, he’s letting California twist in the wind. California, of course, is a lot bigger than Puerto Rico, and is now being deliberately overlooked by Trump. What happens if THEY take a separatist vote a couple of years down the road? And these things don’t even touch his vicious bigotry in regard to overall social policy. This is the guy demanding that people of color behave to his dictates, while excusing actual Nazis as “very fine people.” Not to mention his moves towards turning women into the poorly-paid property of men.

 

Aggravating people already hostile to you is a recipe for separatism. And maybe that’s exactly what Trump is hoping to foment. With enough inhuman and soulless moves, Trump could easily alienate large sections of the country in a short amount of time. And if those sections start breaking off, Vladimir Putin will have achieved the revenge he’s sought since 1991. And as for Trump himself, I frankly can’t imagine that he hasn’t always been prepared for a likely need to exile himself somewhere down the road. There are plenty of dachas in Russia that no one ever moved into full-time after the Soviet government collapsed. Once Putin’s boy is finished with his dirty work, there’s probably room for him in Russia.

 

Think about it. If you were actually trying to stir up secessionist feelings, what steps would you take?

 

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“Media”, Sure. “Social”, Not So Much

Posted on October 15, 2017 by erick

I want to begin this by saying the obvious. I am well aware that what social media does is perfectly within their right to do. They are private corporations, and they have no obligation to treat anyone evenhandedly. They can allow whatever they want to allow, and banish whatever they don’t like. And if I don’t like it, that’s tough.

 

But, you know, I don’t like it. At all.

 

I suppose this was an inevitability, since the original ideas were bought out, co-opted, and corporatized. But what was once a vibrant place for the exchange of ideas has become monolithic, right-leaning, and in many ways, poisonous to the culture. FOX “News” now has powerful partners in the propaganda business, operating out of the Kremlin. And as a result, I suspect we’re looking at a country so wrecked that we’ve passed the point of no return.

 

I’m sure most of you heard about Rose McGowan’s Twitter lockout, and the weak explanation from Twitter that she’d inadvertently left a phone number showing on an email she’d screencapped and uploaded to her feed. Those of us who have used Twitter for years rolled our eyes collectively and said “bullshit.” Twitter hasn’t seemed to care about an endless number of abusive doxers who will use the names and phone numbers of those they seek to undermine as banner pictures. It almost seems, in fact, like Twitter arbitrarily enforces its supposed rules when you look at how many people have had their accounts suspended for saying bad words here and there (and I know of what I speak; I’ve lost 6 accounts, and I never doxed anyone, nor would I retweet a dox.) People of a certain political persuasion will be kicked off Twitter left and right, as we saw with Rose McGowan. However, bullies, cowards, and predators (like Ted Nugent, Jimmy Woods, and Donald J. Trump) can say the most disgusting things about others (and in the case of Trump, threaten to kill people) and their accounts never have any issues. Never ever.

 

Most of the people who read this know about a Peaceful Christian Trading Card page I had on Facebook until yesterday. It got yanked, supposedly for “hate speech”, though every card featured men and women who had either committed vile crimes, or were awaiting trial for said crimes. Every card was factual, and I pulled cards for mistakes as simple as a wrong year of birth, let alone wrong biographical information. As Facebook didn’t bother to show me what was supposed hate speech, I do not have any expectation that the page will ever be allowed again. The joke is on them; I have already built a new repository for the cards, and new cards will be produced, and they will be shared out. Just not on a Facebook server anymore (they’ll be shared from their repository.) And they still won’t be hate speech.

 

Social media has now suffered what the print and broadcast media already succumbed to. Conservatives can’t govern. They can’t win wars. They can’t keep it in their pants. They can’t tell the truth. They can’t stop stealing. But what they CAN do with great efficiency is to organize herds of screaming babies to shout down anyone who dares to contradict whatever lunacy they’re shopping on any given day. That’s why Rose McGowan goes down on Twitter, and Jimmy Woods continues to post some incredibly vile shit. That’s why I can’t have a Trading Card page anymore, but Russian disinformation is still available all over Facebook (and shared endlessly by the teabilly hordes.) Social media is proving itself to be every bit as spineless as our mainstream broadcast and print medias proved themselves to be. As a result, it’s turned into a bad place for honest people. Good people are being shut down, shut up, and frozen out. Honest conservatives often suffer the same fate that liberals do, because the screaming hordes can’t tolerate an honest conservative any more than they can abide a liberal. Social media is becoming a great place for misogynists, religious bigots, and racists to spew their hate unabashedly. I don’t think that this can be denied anymore.

 

So here, in 2017, I find myself going full circle. I started out as a blogger because I had no place to speak my mind. I gradually let that go in favor of social media. But social media has sent me back to where I came from. And unless and until those in charge of moderating social media actually start acting upon real offenses, rather than attacking whoever the screaming hordes demand they go after, I’m probably going to be in My(own)Space a lot more as time goes on.

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