George orwell would have thought this week’s plot is too far fetched

I can’t even keep up with the news anymore. Yesterday morning everybody was all stunned to learn that “sexual preference” had suddenly turned into homophobic hate speech because Amy Coney Barrett used it (even though we’ve got clips of democrats and gay rights orgs and publications using it up until now without issue) but within hours of that straw grasping bullshit getting tossed out by the dumbest senator in America, many of my liberal acquaintances were gas lighting everyone that the term had always been hateful AND THEY EVEN HURRIED AND EDITED THE DICTIONARY.

You’d think that the left changing the dictionary definition to make a commonly used term into oppressive hate speech (within 24 hours of the narrative deciding it must be!) would be the most Orwellian thing we’d see that day. But nope. Not even close!

Then some truly heinous shit drops about Crackhead McStripperbang (the artist formerly known as Hunter Biden). October Surprise! From what I’ve seen so far, it looks really really sketchy. And also hilarious, judging by all the crack pipe pics and goofy ass self-incriminating e-mails.

Didn’t anybody ever tell you Rule Number One of Doing Crimes, Joe Biden? NEVER COUNT ON A CRACKHEAD!

But anyways, Joe Biden potentially doing sleazy shit isn’t the point of this post. Because the really Orwellian thing was what came next, when the big soulless social media megacorps tried to squash the story in the most ham fisted way imaginable.

They didn’t just squash the story. They squashed the story and then bragged about it in public. They declared the story to be “harmful” (as in harmful to the election prospects of their chosen candidate). And they cited some bullshit reasons about why they couldn’t share this story, even though they were happy to ignore all those same rules repeatedly whenever it was a breaking story that hurt Trump.

Supposedly they can’t allow the sharing of a story that makes Biden look bad because the information was “leaked”… except they were gleefully sharing Trump’s leaked tax info last week, and before that Russia Collusion nonsense wasn’t so much a leak as a high pressure lawn sprinkler. That was totally okay.

Of course, prog apologists were quick to dismiss the New York Post as fake news, even though it’s the fourth biggest circulating newspaper in America, and these same sites have zero problem sharing painfully obvious fabricated bullshit from crap sites as long as it agrees with lefty orthodoxy. And even then the Post could be total trash, but that’s still Hunter Biden there smoking crack on camera and influence peddling while talking about getting a cut for Pop. (as in Joe Biden, not Corn Pop, gotta clarify because there’s a lot of guys called Pop in this saga).

That would be bad enough, but then it got extra stupid! So while these evil media empires are pretending that they are unbiased and merely trying to “curate the truth”, they banned the White House Press Secretary! They stopped sitting US senators from sharing news articles. Then they banned the president’s reelection campaign nineteen days before an election!

If social media had banned Obama’s press secretary, and then stopped Diane Feinstein and Chuck Schumer from sharing articles from the New York Times, and then shut down the Obama campaign page nineteen days before his election against Mitt Romney, everyone would have lost their fucking minds. And rightfully so! Because that kind of blatant manipulation of information is evil.

If I put that into a thriller my editor would tell me it was too far fetched. Nobody would buy into such mustache twirling villainy, even if I was writing cyberpunk dystopia.

But Correia, they are private companies and you are usually against meddling in the affairs of private companies, you big hypocrite! Yeah, usually I am, but this is also something new, the likes of which mankind has never seen before, with these entities being the primary exchange of information for BILLIONS of people, so it’s kind of hard to put this thing which didn’t exist before into historical context. Facebook has no real competitors, and it has something like 2.7 billion regular users. With the flick of a switch it can stop a third of the Earth’s population from seeing whatever it doesn’t want them to see. Humanity has never had that before.

That’s real fucking power right there.

Now, unlike most people on the internet, I am not compelled to pretend to be a lawyer who just got my law degree from the University of Internet. Communications law is not my area, and I’m not going to be a Dunning-Krugerand talking about section 230 or whatever.

However, what I do know is that this is some seriously dangerous bullshit, and if we keep going down this road it is going to lead to some very bad ends. Freedom of speech functionally ceases to exist when both sides speak, but only one side is heard. If social media is a forum, then it needs to be an actual forum. If it is functionally a propaganda arm of the DNC, then so be it, but it can’t keep pretending to be something its not, while mindfucking the populace.

They are subpoenaing the Twitter CEO to come testify before congress but I expect that to be another utterly useless clown show where dummies ask dumb questions about something they don’t understand to some clever asshole who is just going to lie.

Like most liberty minded people, I have a reflexive dislike for government regulation of the free market. If the government can screw something up, it will. However I doubt I’ll feel that strongly about the sanctity of the free market as I’m being starved to death in a re-education gulag, after conservatives were stupid enough to let a tiny group of control freak statists have absolute power over the whole country’s speech and information.

What we’ve got right now with a handful of organizations having a monopoly over news and knowledge is stupid, getting stupider, and going to end extremely badly.

I don’t give a shit if you are liberal or conservative, the idea of some entity like Google determining what mankind is allowed to know or not know should terrify the shit out of you. Free speech becomes a meaningless concept if only approved speech is ever seen. And if you are cheering this shit on because right now it is helping your team score points against the other team, you are fool. Because once they have that power it is only a matter of time until one of your beliefs ends up on the naughty list too.

(note, that’s not an issue for Kool Aid drinking progs, because they don’t actually have any beliefs beyond GET POWER. It took them less than 24 hours to change “sexual preference” to a bad thing in the dictionary)

The only good thing about this situation is that even though Facebook and Twitter are trying to monopolize the flow of information, they are still bad at it. This week’s attempt at shutting down the New York Post’s expose will probably go down as the biggest Streisand Effect in history. Their painfully obvious censorship will make far more people pay attention and lend credence to the report. Because after all, they wouldn’t try this hard to squish it, if there wasn’t some meat to it.

However, just because they are currently bad at being evil, doesn’t mean that what they are doing isn’t evil. They’re going to get better and better at controlling what you do and do not see. They will learn from their failures and be craftier next time.They are clearly trying to manipulate all of us, and though they sucked at shutting down this story, how many other times have they gotten away with it? How many times have these people hidden something important from you and you don’t even know it?

They decide what the narrative is. They decide what you learn and what you don’t. What do most of us do when we want to learn about a topic? We plug it into a search engine and read the results. Only they control the search engines. They write the wikis. They determine the truth, and then slide those fish hooks into your brain. Reality becomes whatever they say it is, and if you disagree and say that wasn’t how it was, they’ll just pretend that you’re crazy and it’s always been that way.

Information is power, and this tiny insular group holds power over the minds of the people so great that it would make emperors and god-kings weep with envy.

And if you find yourself thinking that I’m exaggerating the danger here, these fuckers just changed the DICTIONARY twenty four hours after it became convenient just to smear a judge. They are downright fucking brazen about it.

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257 thoughts on “George orwell would have thought this week’s plot is too far fetched”

    1. What ‘brilliant’ truth? The right in the USA has done a lot too, I’ll bet, and nobody on your side ever gave a shit when it did. Perhaps said overlords realized how much the alt-right loves to use words to create hate against women and LGBT people, and so they squelched the word from ever being viral enough for the alt-right to use. I’ve sort of agreed with a few things younwere angry about in the past, Larry, but not this one.

      1. Bigotry is only bigotry when done by people with power. The Left has taught us that for decades.

        Google and Facebook and Twitter are power. Therefore, what they do is bigotry.

        1. Excuse me, sir, but the right has been in power (and has had influence over culture) for far longer than the ‘left’ ever has in the United States, so please don’t be bullshitting me or anybody else by escaping from that fact. The hatred of sexual and racial minorities has now backfired, and is on the run because of pushback from said people due to the voice the Internet has given them, which now scares people (not necessarily you) because you can’t take it or what they have to say, extremist as it can get.

          Perhaps they shouldn’t have done this, but one thing is clear: the right pushed them to go to this extreme due to engaging in homophobia and bigotry. You reap what is sown.

          1. “….so please don’t be bullshitting me or anybody else by escaping from that fact.”

            Speaking of bullshitting, gonna need you to back this whopper up, Sport.

            In fact, gonna need to see you back the rest of that vomit up.

          2. I think you are mistaken. Most of the Right doesn’t “hate” sexual and racial minorities. We object to the coercion of their advocacy, their lack of scientific backing, and their non-optimalization for the survival of humankind.

        2. The solution here is actually simple. They have made themselves into a publisher by editing for political purpose. They are now completely liable for all the crap that got posted.

          Did Vile 770 post libelous content against Larry? Well now Larry can sue the pants off of them for allowing Vile 770 content to be published.

          They just took their “platform” fig leaf out and shot it.

          Hillarious.

      2. I am part of the lgtb community and ask what hate does the words sexual preference have. Btw even we have it, even if for some of us the preference changes or another way of putting it why not both. To be offended by those two words is insanity at best. And while yes there are some downright idiots on the right, democrats are making them look like brilliant people right now. As to the New York yeah it may be the fourth largest paper but they are still kin to the Enquirer. Even though they are questionable the fact this info came out a year ago about Biden and nothing was done speaks volumes that no one wants the left taken to task. See you would think they would welcome the investigation if he was innocent. As to Facebook, while yes they are a private company, they like Larry said are in uncharted waters and they are outright contradicting what they said they were going to do just a month ago.

        1. If he’s wanting a bit of historical context in terms of raw force being able to be applied, look no further than MicroSoft and their shenanigans in the 90s. Monopolies kill competition, and cause all sorts of problems in innovation. They’re still plenty big even after being broken in two.

        2. Perhaps the LGBT community shouldn’t have done this, but as I said above, the (North) American right wing have pushed them to do this (remember, extreme actions provoke/cause extreme responses.)

          In any case,I don’t think it’s as bad as Larry posits, and I believe that this might even be temporary; it’s nothing to demonize the LGBT community over.

          1. Number of people who demonized the LGBT community over this: 0

            No one provoked anybody here, but please go on. Just when I think you can’t outcringe yourself, you surpass my expectations.

      3. Yes, because ACB is so obviously a member of the alt-right, and “sexual preference” has been used so frequently as an obviously inflammatory term. And we have always been at war with EastAsia.

        1. She pushes her lord and master Trump’s positions on abortion and other things pertaining to women’s health and reproductive rights, therefore she gets slammed. Also, if you or others don’t like this, then maybe you should be stopping other neocons (if you are one) like yourself from being hateful towards abortion and being disdainful of what women and LGBT people want as far as their human rights are concerned. To paraphrase Malcolm X, ‘let white straight heterosexual people teach tolerance for others to other white straight heterosexual people.’

          1. Wow, calling a professional, accomplished woman subservient to Trump. Please do go on with your white knighting.

            You do know that she held her position on abortion long before Trump rented a loft in your little head, right? Or do you just normally think that women have no agency without your guiding hand?

            But, being “hateful toward abortion”? What a stupidly pre-teen way to word that. Why do you hate babies so much?

          2. I very much doubt he said that, since the Marxist obsession with gender didn’t exist while he was alive.

            And really: “straight heterosexual”? Was Malcolm an apparatchik for the Department of Redundancy Department?

      4. You accuse with no proof of anything happening. Fact is I trust very few politicians but don’t accuse without the truth we have on the Dems. I grew up blue collar Dem and watched from the early 60s how they’ve bastardized that party into the trash of today so I DO know of their corruption which is huge while the right isn’t near as bad but as I always say, “I’m tired of voting for the lesser of two evils.” Bottom line is that I know the left is crooked and power mongering for themselves ONLY and I haven’t had a thing to do with them since about the mid 60s because I have the proof that I observed myself.

        1. How did they ‘bastardize’ anything, sir? The party became too liberal for your tastes when LBJ passed the CRA and the VRA back in the early ’60’s (therefore seeing people like you exist the party, cross the floor to the Republican party, and get entranced by the Southern Strategy started by Richard Nixon>) Also, the ‘corruption’ in the Democratic part is nothing compared the the current corruption in the Republican party (both Bush and Trump’s administrations), and what it’s done to the USA.

          Face it, you just wanted to vote for Trump because he appealed to your sense of entitled white (male) butthurt about the sociopolitical changes going on in current society, and how he’s reverse them if he got elected because said changes ‘threatened’ your way of being.

          1. Forgive the unenlightened Eastern European here, but what exactly are these “sociopolitical changes going on in current society” that the apparently uniformly “white (male)” crowd is supposed to be butthurt about? For all the eight years of the Obama presidency, the main sociopolitical phenomenon was that anyone who dared question his policies was immediately and invariably declared racist by both the Democrat establishment and the mainstream media. No criticism allowed, no discussion needed.

            Consequently, I’d wager that, by far, people voted for Trump, or more likely, against the Wicked Witch of the West Wing, because they didn’t want a repeat of the above, only with “sexism” being the excuse du jour. And in turn, the only people feeling threatened were the numerous crybullies bursting into tears on post-election morning, only then starting to realize just how much everyone else had gotten tired of their bullshit.

            Finally, I’d say women and minorities in particular have gotten tired of being taken for granted and used as props for liberal policies and polemics (“You ain’t black”, anyone?). If anything, I’ll bet that’s what tipped the scale in Trump’s favor back in 2016, and it likely to do it again come November. So, it’s you who maybe should consider toning down the white knight routine with regard to people who never appointed you as their spokesman, let alone their defender.

          2. Weapons grade historical ignorance. The first civil rights legislation was proposed by Republicans and signed into law by a Republican, and nearly gutted by the then Senate Majority Leader LBJ (do you know who that was?)

            Republicans at the time were fighting Democrats in the south over school desegregation, something that LBJ utterly failed to address while he was president. It took the next Republican president (do you know who that was?) to correct it.

            But do go on with your bUt tHe SoUtHeRn StRaTeGeRy trope. It’s cute when lefties try to talk history.

          3. Gmmay70:

            Nixon’s only ‘Southern Strategy’ was not being a Democrat in a time when the South had grown weary of racist Democrats.

          4. Nixon’s only ‘Southern Strategy’ was not being a Democrat in a time when the South had grown weary of racist Democrats.

            I’m still waiting for Komrade Joe Biden to reject HIS OWN long history of white supremacy.

          5. Your own obvious whiteness disgusts me, lefty, but not nearly so much as your parroted SJW dogma.

      5. You’re an imbecile to disagree with what he just laid out. How do you not see through what they are doing? Information is power, no denying that. If you deny the left controls what information we are allowed to see (Google, Facebook, Twitter etc.)…. Well, I guess you are gullible or not paying attention.

        1. I’m not a neocon dunderhead like you, nor do I vote against my own best interests by voting for a sexist incompetent pile of poop like Trump.

          As to what you were blabbering about, like I said before, ‘Extreme actions lead to extreme responses’.

          1. What “extreme actions”?

            And I’d be careful with that last sentence, btw. That’s how people have justified Trump.

          2. Been my personal experience that the ones with a predilection for playing with excrement are the ones that hate President Trump the most.

      6. So, I missed it the first time through, but have to love the “I’ll bet” in “The right in the USA has done a lot too, I’ll bet, and nobody on your side ever gave a shit when it did.”

      7. “My side” does not express bigotry on people’s life styles. If a few jerks who say they are on the right say or do offensive things, I don’t own them and they have nothing to do with me. Remember lots of people on your side these days are saying and doing lots of offensive things. Would you like me to insult you because of their doings?

      8. Maybe the Right kinda sorta did something, perhaps.

        Speculative whataboutism?

        The hottest of hot takes right there.

        1. The right are the masters of whataboutism, especially considering many of the racist, sexist, and homophobic things that they do.

          1. Ah, the “I know you are, but what am I” counter.

            *Chef’s kiss*

            Did you learn anything inside the school, or just out on the playground?

          2. Name them.

            Name the racist, sexist and homophobic things that they do.

            Put up or shut Lefty.

      9. “The right in the USA has done a lot too, I’ll bet, and nobody on your side ever gave a shit when it did. ”

        I’ll take that bet. Now put up. What has the right done that is akin to censoring a major newspaper carrying a major news story about a presidential candidate right before an election?

        “Perhaps said overlords realized how much the alt-right loves to use words to create hate against women and LGBT people, and so they squelched the word from ever being viral enough for the alt-right to use.”

        The alt-right are collectivist authoritarians, that is, Leftists. They use the same tactics and lingo and have the same goals and stance, the only difference is that they are pro-White and pro-West rather than anti. So they have nothing to do with the Right, that is, the Constitutionalists, Conservatives, Libertarians.

        Is there even a single example of someone on the Alt-Right’s overlords squelching a word from going viral? Do you have a real example of anyone on the Right editing a dictionary to retroactively accuse someone of a wordcrime?

        1. The alt-right are the right’s shocktroops, not what you’ve been saying, John. Your whataboutism is showing, and your denial of history is telling.

          1. The ‘alt right’ are ALTERNATIVES to the right, thats what their name means. the other name for this is ‘the left’. Alt right are white supremacists and socialists. Both of those ideologies come from the democrat party. Oh, and they just endorsed joe biden a while ago so there is that.

            It was the DNC that created the KKK. The white supremacists have always been leftists.

            these are YOUR shocktroops, not ours, and it is you that is denying the history of the democrat parties support for slavery, jim crow and the kkk.

          2. “whataboutism” = the indigestion the left gets when asked to put something, anything at all, into the context of common behavior.

      10. “The right in the USA has done a lot too, I’ll bet, ”

        Oh, are we in BET ME mode? How adorable.

        Can you give me one instance where the right cracked down on a story like this? And no; you don’t get to hide behind “Just Google it.” Let us see you back up your words with facts.

      11. “The right in the USA has done a lot too, I’ll bet…’

        OK. For a paycheck.
        Show me something conservatives have done that comes REMOTELY CLOSE to this.

        I’ll wait.

      12. What planet are you living on where conservatives are “creating hate…” ? WE ARE “CREATING” HATE FOR MARXIST ASSHOLES, you moron!

  1. How does one cope with people who refuse to educate themselves and spread things that are patently false like “The Earth is flat”, “The US is a Democracy”, and “The Holocaust didn’t happen”?

    I know that censorship is a slippery slope, but some of this bullshoy will inevitably spread to those who refuse to do their own homework because of “reasons”. Those few have a HUGELY out-sized platform because the internet is both awesome and awful.

    Perhaps dealing with stupidity is the tradeoff for a lack of censorship?

    1. Why do we have to do anything other than offer them our contrary view? No one guaranteed us that free speech would lead to universal wisdom. Censorship gurantees that the censor’s views will be unopposed, and while you might hope the censor’s views would be more accurate than “The Earth is flat”, “The US is a Democracy”, and “The Holocaust didn’t happen”, history tells us that censors seldom restrict themselves to stifling nonsense.

    2. Lots of people have believed stupid things forever — look at the people who still buy Marx’s opium dreams — but short of libel and slander, when has it been a legal issue?

      Let’s prefer open channels to thinking there are people who will finely-tune them without succumbing to the temptation to twist things in their favor.

      1. Except that they have a specific immunity to libel and slander under circumstances that off-line companies do not have.

    3. We allow people in the US the right to be flat-Earthers and Holocaust deniers. They don’t allow that in lots of other countries. But people are allowed to spread those messages here in the US. And the reason why they’re allowed to spread those messages is because the benefits of Freedom of Speech outweigh the drawbacks of not having it.

      As for allowing those people to have an out-sized platform – *everyone* is supposed to have access to that platform. Yeah, there will be nut-jobs. But if everyone has an out-sized platform, then no one has an out-sized platform.

    4. Exactly. Dealing with stupidity is the downside of free speech. The upside is a free exchange of ideas where each side gets to present their points of view and reasonable people can make a choice.
      But when we allow large corporations to filter those ideas, we no longer are in world of free speech.

      1. Or put it another way.

        No one is allowed to criticize poisoning a little boy with chemicals to retard his sexual development, because despite having normal male physiology and normal XY chromosomes, this *child* likes playing dress up. So the adults in his life insist on transitioning him to a female identity.

        Compared to that, Flat Earthers are practically Aristotle.

        So bring back the blasphemy laws. Because if free speech doesn’t include the freedom to expose people who torture kids for status and profit, it’s not worth the candle, right?

        So… Maybe if you’re keen on Hate Speech bans, and high tech censorship, you might want to reconsider? Because once enough people are convinced that the 1st Amendment is a dead letter and a scam, it’s a free-for-all on who gets to silence who. And it’s not likely to be you, personally, who ends up on top.

      2. Another upside to free speech is that when people don’t need to hide their opinions, you have a better idea of who they are. This is good because if you hear someone expounding up the Flat Earth or some other nonsense, you know if they are the type of person you want to hire for a job or invite into your home to break bread.

      3. This.

        The answer to bad ideas isn’t putting people who have bad ideas in jail. The answer to bad ideas is better ideas.

    5. This is the exact same argument as is made in strict Islamic societies: Freedom rightly understood is the freedom to Do What’s Right, and people must be protected from that which would lead them astray; their very souls are at stake, not to mention the harmony and cohesion of the society. This was not pleasant for me to live under in Pakistan, and it’s scary to see the argument catching on here. Just saying.

      1. This is the “People are stupid” argument. Too stupid to be trusted with freedom. They have to be controlled for the good of society, and for their own good. Its Karen, basically.

        To which there is no reply, really. You get a guy who’s convinced that all humans are evil, venal and disgusting, only kept in line by fear of retribution, you’re not going to change his mind.

        Which is why the Framers added a 1st and 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution. You can’t discuss things with a Karen. You can only defeat them. They were hoping free speech would be enough, but afraid it wouldn’t and they’d have to do it the other way.

        The Karens have been chipping away at it for 200+ years, because the idea of people being free to make their own decisions makes their skin crawl.

        1. Here’s my thing.

          If you believe that people are evil, venal, and stupid, and only kept in line via fear of retribution, why would you give anyone power over other people?

          1. Simple – this kind of mentality is typical in self-absorbed misanthropes who believe themselves to be superior to “other people”… and always look for excuses as to their otherwise lack of personal achievements. Thing is, this level of cognitive dissonance tends to fall apart as soon as they leave their basement (and I wish I was speaking figuratively here). So in turn, they fantasize about dictatorial systems that would keep everyone else in line, but wouldn’t affect them in particular.

            Or in short, rules for thee, not for me. Censorship is only as bad insofar as it silences one’s own opinion, and tyranny is only evil if the tyrant disagrees with one’s own worldview.

            The funniest thing is, it doesn’t even work. Back in the old Soviet days, for example, and even moreso today, the anti-religious propaganda and pretentious scientism propagated by the party, only spurred people into abject superstitions, from soothsayers to charm-sellers. I suspect even the modern flat-earthers have sprung precisely due to the Orwellian policies that literally tell people to disbelieve their own eyes and reason, and only listen to whatever they’re told, not matter how much it changes every week.

            Bottom line is, you can try and shackle speech, but you can’t cage the mind behind it. Something’s got to give, and when it does, the results are invariably worse than if you leave people to their own opinions.

          2. It’s the same cognitive dissonance that states there is no objective moral truth while positing that their idea of a moral truth should grant them the power to shut you down.

            People who view the world through the oppressor/oppressed binary want to be the oppressors.

            Marxism in one sentence.

          3. “People who view the world through the oppressor/oppressed binary want to be the oppressors. “

            I suspect it’s more like they view themselves in a third category – that of anointed saviors – wherein they can feel morally superior to the “opressors”, and physically superior to the “oppressed”. It’s basically Munchhausen by proxy, only on a massive scale… though just as prone to panic particularly when the “oppressed” don’t feel like playing the role.

            That’s also why they frequently obsess over apocalyptic delusions or grand social issues, whether it’s climate change, or racial injustice and income inequality, or what-have-you – it allows them to ignore their otherwise pedestrian personal problems. After all, who’s gonna care they’re flipping burgers and serving coffee, when their “real” identity is that of grand global defenders, all but superheroes in their own minds… and a general nuisance to everyone else.

          4. “I suspect it’s more like they view themselves in a third category – that of anointed saviors – wherein they can feel morally superior to the “opressors”, and physically superior to the “oppressed”.”

            Possibly, but – for all their talk of understanding nuance – they exhibit binary thinking, particularly when it comes to human behavior. That’s why I maintain that they just want to occupy the oppressor role; some are just better than others at it.

            It explains all the petty little tyrannies exercised by “fellow” communists and socialists in those types of societies. What better way to exercise power over another than turning someone in, or threatening to do so. Reporting social media users to the relevant overlord? Same deal. They get to participate in the oppression.

            They never gave a damn (historically or currently) about people (real or mostly imagined) being oppressed.

            Loved your comment though. Always a good read.

          5. “…they just want to occupy the oppressor role; some are just better than others at it…”

            Well, yesterday’s liberators do tend to be tomorrow’s oppressors… and I should know, it’s the Balkan national sport. But yeah, I’ve definitely noticed this streak as well. Regarding fiction in particular, the woke crowd tends to flock around franchises where, within the fictional setting, people are strictly stratified into haves and have-nots, with no social mobility allowed. You see that in the mages of “Harry Potter”, the benders in “Avatar”, the Jedi in “Star Wars”, and of course, superheroes.

            In all these cases, the main characters belong to increasingly privileged groups, empowered by birth or otherwise uncontrolled contrivances, and having zero accountability to anyone beneath their level. It’s easy to see why the banshee brigade would project onto that. For all their talk of social justice and equality, it’s pretty blatant that they fantasize about systems that are inherently unequal, only with themselves at the top.

    6. The answer to bad information is more information

      For that matter, how does one cope with people who refuse to educate themselves and spread things that are patently false like “Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election”?

      The Clinton campaign and the Obama Admin colluded to spread Russian anti-Trump disinformation (Putin hates fracking, and hates fracking supporters). Anyone who says anything different is lying, or “flat Earth” level of misinformed.

      So, shall Twitter and Facebook every tweet / post talking abotu “Trump’s Russian collusion”, and delete them? Delete the accounts of anyone who pushes such a fraud more than once?

      Or is it different when your lies are involved?

    7. [Yul Brynner voice]Let him speak, that men may know him mad.[/Yul Brynner voice]

      “If you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar. You are only telling the world that you fear what he might say.” Tyrion Lannister

      The solution to things like that (ridiculous or even reprehensible speech) is not censorship but more speech. The question is, do you have any belief in the rightness of your own ideas and beliefs, in your ability to effectively convey those ideas to others? If you do, then it shouldn’t matter if a few nutjobs argue ridiculous or even vile things. You present your case and people looking can choose between the two.

      People censor because they’re afraid. They’re afraid that their own ideas are not so irrefutable as they’d like to tell themselves. They are afraid that the “other guy” really does have a more persuasive argument than they do.

      So, instead of censorship, I suggest you look to your own house first. Make sure your own ideas really do hold up to examination and sharpen your ability to convey that to others.

      And be not afraid.

      1. I agree with you, up to the point where the truth gets drowned out by the tsunami of useless, toxic bilge. Before you can listen to the whisper of someone in a room full of shouting great apes, you have to know they are whispering.

    8. The platforms got big not because the internet is “awesome”, but due to government assistance heavily altering the nature of web 2.0. Facebook is the poster child for that bullshit, although google isn’t far behind it.

      One that people neglect, but should be illustrative of the issue would be a site once known as “Digg”. The Power Users there heavily manipulated results to the point where the average user jumped ship to “Reddit”(Which does the same exact shit, and the whole reason that site was known was due to an astroturfing campaign anyways!). Not all of the reason this stuff’s so terrible is on the mods alone. The Power Users do it for free, and trash potential competing places because it threatens their illusory good boy/girl points.

    9. Sarah Hoyt said the best way to counter patently false declarations of that nature is not to censor them, but to laugh at them into sputtering incoherence.

  2. Yeah, we’re in some dangerous waters right now. On the one hand, the fact that they’re being this brazen could mean that they know how bad the Biden family story is and they know that Biden’s done if it gets out to the public. On the other hand, the fact that the social media oligarchs can do this at all is terrifying.

    1. “They know that Biden’s done if it gets out to the public.”

      You severely underestimate the power of a sycophant’s rose-colored glasses.
      “I Could Stand In the Middle Of Fifth Avenue And Shoot Somebody And I Wouldn’t Lose Any Voters “ – Trump, 2016

      1. Ah, the gas lighting… “They say I have the most loyal people — did you ever see that? Where I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” he said.

        Loyalty is swell, though it matters what you are loyal to, and why. If you think Biden’s voters (as opposed to his fellow political criminals) are *loyal* you are dreaming.

        It is simply that for some, no matter how bad Mr. Biden really is, or what is revealed about him, the mirage of Literally Orange Hitler is worse. Which means anyone not consumed by TDS is open to being swayed by the discovery that the genial old fool is actually a horrible crook. Which makes voting for the blowhard incumbent easier.

        1. I must agree. I am unenthusiastic about Trump. There have been far too many broken promises. But even if he had entered the White House and spent four years playing golf and taking naps atop the desk in the Oval Office.

          Joe Biden is a figurehead, and not even a credible one. He’s an old, tired, sick, weak, weak-willed almost-octogenarian who struggles to string together a coherent sentence even with the aid of a teleprompter, just as he struggles to walk at better than a tired-old-man-afraid-of-falling-and-breaking-a-hip waddling shuffle, and keeping him in the race at this point amounts to elder abuse. He is a nonentity. An entertainingly corrupt nonentity, from what we’re learning from Hunter Biden’s laptop computer, but a nonentity nonetheless.

          Kamala Harris is the one who’ll be sworn in if he wins–he’ll duck out and blame The Coof, or something–and she’ll be sworn in, in a victory for Diversity and Grrrl Powah. She might even select Hillary for her VP, if Carol Mosely-Braun, Maxine Waters, and Shirley Sherrod all have preexisting commitments. She terrifies me, because she is basically Hillary with a tan. She and her party have already promised to disarm Whitey while simultaneously abolishing local police and sheriffs’ departments. They have already promised to pack the Supreme Court and pack the Senate by adding new Senators to represent flyspeck overseas territories, who will be Democrats forever; that this will also forever destroy the legitimacy of both institutions in the eyes of the general public either has not occurred to them or is in their eyes an acceptable risk.

          She is of the AOC/Ilhan Omar wing of the party, who are, frankly, evil and insane, just like Hillary, only more so, and even further to the Left; where Hillary is an amoral power-monger with few detectable principles, Harris and The Squad are True Believers, and they are all-in for De RebboLOOshun. On her Twitter she has been since July actively raising funds for bail money for the Antifa/BLM terrorists who are burning down the cities and setting forest fires out west. The party’s ideologues are floating ever more insane and terrifying trial balloons, up to and including an article this week in The Atlantic suggesting that they can and should just abolish the Constitution by an act of Congress, just wad up the Constitution and throw it over their shoulders into the shredders with a giggle and a shrug, because it, like a Supreme Court not packed with Marxist ideologues, presents an obstacle to the things they want to do. It’s for your own good. Just trust them. You’ll like it.

          This is a recipe for civil war. I don’t know whether they have figured this out yet, or whether these announcements of their plans reflect that they’ve already looked at the risk-benefit equations and decided that the permanent unbreakable total power grab forever is worth the risk of turning the continent into Bosnia circa 1993 writ large. Did I mention that Harris terrifies me?

          Harris is, if anything, worse than Hillary Clinton, even more ambitious and power-hungry and even more amoral. You will recall that in 2016 Hillary promised to send the Navy to the eastern Mediterranean to impose a “no fly zone” over Syria, and said that, yes indeed, she was willing to order them to shoot down Russian planes. No one in her campaign staff had either the integrity or the wit to run out onstage, grab her by the ear, yank her away from the cameras and microphones, and say “you just declared war on Russia. You just promised to start a nuclear war. Do any synapses fire off inside your skull when I speak these words? Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” Kamala Harris frightens me more than Hillary did. President Hillary would have played stupid geopolitical games that could have exposed me to radioactive fallout. Kamala is all-in on the side of lawless people with masks and guns who want to put Molotov cocktails through my window, right here, right now.

          So I will hold my nose and vote for Trump again in two weeks, because the alternative is too horrifying to bear long contemplation.

      2. Oh good, glad to see someone else already called out your lie.

        So I can just point out the irony of Lefties and Left-curious folk howling about the spread of misinformation.

      3. It’s been proven this year where no matter how many buildings burn and lives end antifa and BLM are still supported widely by the left and even considered the good guys by the genocide apologists.

      4. And there he was wrong.

        On the other hand, it’s highly likely that Hillary could have driven over a grandmother and a half dozen Brownies in Times Square on national TV; and nobody would have reported it.

    2. There’s an alternative to this being particularly damaging material.

      Joe Biden may not be mentally competent, or may simply be not competent when it comes to managing his disinformation operation.

      This disinfo event seems to be a result of continuing to use Obama’s MO, but this time recruiting from Twitter. Thing is, the ideal way to use facebook and twitter disinfo is not the same as the ideal way to use CBS, CNN, MSNBC, etc for disinfo. Wannabe losers left over from Obama are not going to know how to direct Twitter and Facebook censors, and Twitter and Facebook censors recruited into the campaign are not going to know what is and is not a real problem for the campaign.

      If the Campaign was not confident in Joe Biden’s ability to soft pedal and bluster Hunter’s issues, if it had not prepared him to do so, it had fundamentally failed well before this point.

      Presuming that Biden’s campaign was ever viable, switching focus for the last two weeks to Twitter censorship is going to hurt the candidate most with the least mental agility.

    1. Oh not so sure about that. However, if they get there way we may be soon. It will make the movie idocracy as their playbook (it already does).

  3. People regularly call me crazy for not using cloud services to store all my photos and work in progress. Watching Google/Twitter/Farcebook stickhandle their way through this election cycle, I feel pretty good about keeping all my stuff on physical hardware I own.

    I also love screenshots these days. There’s nothing like a nice screenshot to take all the gas out of a bit of gaslighting.

    By the way, speaking of gaslighting. We all remember the horror of [gasp!] Conservatives daring to participate in Worldcon. Four years of screeching and international media involvement.

    Well, -this- year Communist China has a group trying to get WorldCon 2022. Communist China. The place where slavery and officially sanctioned murder of political dissidents is -common-, not imaginary as it us in the USA.

    Please note the utter lack of comment, screeching, international media coverage and etc. In fact, Cat Rambo the puppykicker extraordinaire says Chengdu is a beautiful city that she remembers with great fondness, and hopes that things will work out in such a way that people feel comfortable going there.

    I think they will not be stopping with the dictionary. Just sayin’.

    1. Chengdu is where 80 members of the Early Rain Covenant Church (a house church) were thrown into prison for being Christian back in 2018. Then they were tortured and drugged to make them testify that their pastor had colluded with foreigners and was a traitor. Pastor Wang Yi was sentenced to 9 years in the Chinese gulag, and his books have been banned. Members of the church were also condemned for “illegal trade,” by which is meant an independent publishing or zinemaking group at the church.

      Wow! What great fannish hospitality we can expect in Chengdu!

      1. Chengdu was also the site of a CCP conference on “ethnic solidarity,” by which they mean that all of China’s minorities have to become Mandarin-speaking government Chinese, or get eliminated.

        It was also the site where Chengdu University professors have been punished for sharing wrongthink on social media about topics like Hong Kong.

        It is also a town where over 500 food delivery guys were recruited to snoop on their customers, with a questionnaire and observation app that reports directly to state surveillance. They don’t get paid; Red Armbands are a volunteer corps of secret police in their spare time.

        What a great Worldcon venue!

    2. Oh, yeah, and all of Sichuan Province, including Chengdu, has been the site of huge amounts of destruction of outdoor Buddhist statues, Buddhist shrines, Taoist temples, normal Chinese temples, etc., over the last year or so. Even during the ‘Rona. Gotta fill those destruction quotas set by the State!

      How hospitable! How safe we will feel!

      1. Oh, and they have a homegrown Christian denomination called The Church of Almighty God, aka Eastern Lightning, which believes that Christ coming again in the east doesn’t mean the Mount of Olives, but China. And that totally freaks the CCP, so CAG is currently the most persecuted denomination in China.

        And guess where most of the persecution is happening? Chengdu!

    3. A WorldCon. In China. The very same China whose government unleashed the Wuhan Virus on the rest of the planet and is trolling the world and avoiding blame for causing it (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/03/china-trolling-world-and-avoiding-blame/608332/)? The same China responsible for persecuting Muslims and Christrians? The same China whose government is also persecuting Falun Gong practioners?

      The Hugo people are really, surely smart to be doing this. ????

    4. Well, -this- year Communist China has a group trying to get WorldCon 2022. Communist China. The place where slavery and officially sanctioned murder of political dissidents is -common-, not imaginary as it us in the USA.

      Relax, I don’t think they’re going to win their bid (and China isn’t really ‘Communist’ anymore, anyway.)

      1. You’re right. They’re a bit more fascist than communist now, which is a HUGE improvement, since international socialism and national socialism are so VERY different…

        1. You know… Given how much persecution of every group is going on in Chengdu, and given that the convention plans have the flavor of a “national patriotic activity,” authorized by the state… Holding it in Chengdu might constitute a sort of veiled threat to Chinese fans. And certainly fans will not be allowed to attend if they scare the government (outside) or don’t have enough credit (inside).

          1. “Enough social credits” is what I meant.

            All that said, Chinese fans are in a weird position but are probably safer than many, just as happened in USSR SF fandom. As long as futuristic lit can be construed as adhering to Communist theories of history and beneficial to science education, they have a space of freedom.

            Given the CCP’s war on most of traditional Chinese literature and languages (ie, getting rid of Cantonese), and even on normal Mandarin in favor of replacing it with government Mandarin (the normal term for grandma was outlawed), but also given state support of government SF, the Party may see SF as the literature side of government Mandarin.

            Also, without in any way contradicting the State, it is interesting that Chinese fannish Chengdu promotion talks about exactly the kind of traditional activities and tourist sites that keep getting destroyed in the province.

            Much respect for them, but do we really want to grant Berlin a bid for the 1936 Olympics? A lot of US and UK athletes got injured or had their equipment destroyed by Party members behind the scenes, even if the German athletes themselves were good sports.

      2. I hope they do win it. That would be the beautiful cherry on top after all the assholery of changing the voting to keep the horrible Fascists out.

        And really, WorldCon is the type of thing that -deserves- to be held in a Communist country. It looks good on them.

      3. Given that they call themselves communists – like their junior Maoist revolutionary counterparts burning down small businesses over here, I’m wont to take them at their word.

        They are smart enough to understand the economic failure of communism, but they just can’t quit the totalitarian aspect.

    5. Considering that the ChiComs undoubtedly have a dossier on me (if for no other reason than my career began during the Cold War), I would never be comfortable going to Red China under any circumstances that didn’t involve bringing down the CCP regime.

      Even at that, I wouldn’t expect to live through the visit, but I would be comfortable with that outcome, were it to be successful.

    6. There are actual signs on buildings in red China “No Blacks allowed”. But the Chinese bigots are not the hated Out group, and black bodies were never more than convenient human shields to the puppy kickers. So no worries, right?

  4. I wrote a whole piece on this a year or two ago, save it was related to the book industry. “Invisible Censorship and Books.” Because this sort of Orwellian thing is more and more frequently becoming a common practice. Change the definition. Shadowban the information we disagree with. But then hide the evidence of that happening. Make sure no one knows that rules were even violated, or what those secret rules are.

    With computers, a dark side of things is that such actions are frighteningly easy to carry out.

  5. Part of what pisses me off about all this is how their blatant and flagrant misuse of information resources (in this case, the dictionary) make other sources suspect by association.

    Dictionaries SHOULD change over time, because language changes over time. But what they SHOULD NOT do is prescribe changes based on political motives.

    1. If dictionaries “should” change to reflect current societal usage, then they also “should” be required to provide ALL previous definitions of the word/phrase complete with the first date of entry for that definition, directly adjacent to the current.

      1. And while not practical for a print edition, for straight text based information there’s no reason that any given word couldn’t have fifteen to five hundred entries covering previous usage, regional usage, etc., with current mass usage listed first for convenience.

  6. Yep, this is getting beyond any fiction we could write. The truly scary part is, as you said, “Information is power, and this tiny insular group holds power over the minds of the people so great that it would make emperors and god-kings weep with envy.”

    THAT is what worries me more than anything else. The left/millennials/etc. RELY on Farcebook and Twit for their entire existence. That IS their world.

    1. I read a recent poll that had Tik Tok in first place, followed by Instagram, with Twitter coming in far down the line after multiple other platforms and Facebook grabbing the dishonorable spot of Dead Last.
      So there might be *some* hope on that front.
      (FB owns IG but the censorship rules there seem completely different. )

      1. Yes, and I’m sure you can provide a long list of all those times the vast right wing media establishment (aka “The Penatverate”, who control everything in the world, including the newspapers) kept a story from being shared or mentioned because it exposed an obvious truth about their candidate, and changed the dictionary definition of a word within hours of deciding that it’s “bad”, because someone they opposed used it.
        So you’ll be posting those examples now, right?

      2. Yeah? Name one time that the Right shut down the whole news cycle over a damning scandal involving their candidate in an election.

        You don’t seem to get it, Mr. Lefty. This is a scandal that makes Monica’s blue dress look like a youthful indiscretion. Clinton boinking the intern is nothing in comparison.

        But here is Twitter, Facebook, Google etc. covering it up.

        In addition to which your candidate, Joe The Sniffer, is DEMENTED. As in, is suffering from obvious and advanced Senile Dementia. You people are trying to give the Big Red Button that destroys the world to a guy who can’t find the bathroom by himself.

  7. 1: Where’s the get the pictures of Hunter? If they didn’t have his HD, how did they get those previously never seen pictures?

    2: The Biden campaign hasn’t denied that the emails are real

    3: The Biden campaign hasn’t denied that a meeting took place.

    So, what exactly IS “sketchy” about the claims?

    1. So, what exactly IS “sketchy” about the claims?

      Nothing at all, IMHO, except that Larry and his fellow neocons don’t like anything that attacks their Beloved Leader, the Orange Cheeto, or, as I said above, prevents the alt-right from having something to hurt vulnerable people with, so he’s angry about this and then some.

      1. Oh, getting even better! So Larry is a “neocon” member of the “alt-right” now. You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.

        1. He keeps using many words and phrases that do not mean what he thinks they mean.

          …but it was all he had on the script downloaded from the Hive, so he’ll repeat them verbatim.

      2. This may be low quality bait by common standards, but I feel I should respond, if only to bring attention to it, because:

        a) it paints someone (to my observation) critical or indifferent toward Trump, neocons, the alt-right etc., as some sort of fervent supporter.

        and

        b) it paints someone who frequently advocates and used to professionally teach armed self-defense, as trying to “hurt vulnerable people”. Who’s “vulnerable” here – a former veep, or his crackhead son who’s too dumb to even hide his pipe?

        Now, the rest is already some piss-poor strawmanning, but out of all the imaginary flaws you could have thought up, you decided to go with ones diametrically opposite to the traits of the person at hand? Sure, I know the groupthink brigade tends to use the same playbook and script for every situation, but come on, at least don’t mix up the pages here…

        1. Gone? That boy has spent a lifetime building an imaginary mansion on the corner of Delusion Avenue and Batshit Crazy Boulevard. Hasn’t been in touch with reality since Billy Clinton got caught banging the help.
          ———————————
          “When someone does a foolish thing, you should say it is a foolish thing. They may still continue to do it, but at least the truth is where it needs to be.”

      3. So, what i see you saying is that it is proper to suppress the truth if, in your sole opinion, it “hurt[s] vulnerable people”.

        Would that be a correct restatement?

        Because, if so, FOAD

      4. Hmmm.. I’m going to channel the spirit of a giant monochrome Totoro-bear in a minute. But first… What does this L.T. guy have to gain? From what is he distracting us? He started with “Your Team Censors too” and then tied Mr. Correia to the alt right Demon Heretics and their word-crimes.

        Here goes:

        Nothing at all, [Is sketchy about their claims–O.H.] IMHO, except that

        Note the weasel “except”. He admits the claims are solid. But! Maybe not solid, to wit, not to be taken seriously because

        Larry and his fellow neocons

        Oooh! A two-fer! Larry is a Bad Person (poor neocons! Both the lefties hate you for being Trotskyist traitors to the Revolution, and the Right hates you for being, well… Trotskyists) so even if “nothing at all [is sketchy about his claims] you need to pretend it is because Larry Correia is part of a bad group of bad people. Bonus! It’s misinformation, since the Big C. is not a neocon anyway. This is bait to get you to start a pointless argument about political definition minutiae.

        don’t like anything that attacks their Beloved Leader, the Orange Cheeto,

        He ties Mr. Trump to communist dictators and to low-caste junk food. Which makes you, and by implication, Mr. Correia, Not Our Kind Dear, as well. This is supposed to be a good reason to pretend that the thing Lefty Whoosit agreed was solid, is actually sketchy.

        or, as I said above, prevents the alt-right from having something to hurt

        Snazzy! He uses “something ” instead of the actual words “sexual preference” because the notion that something so milquetoast could injure anyone is risable. And just in case you remember how completely trivial the censored words are, Lefty hits you with the alt right terrifying bogeyman who can magically turn it dangerous in ways we can’t imagine. Because they do not exist

        vulnerable people with,

        There he goes again. Vulnerable people conjures up images of a kid like MZB’s daughter, trapped by serial rapists, not “people who identify as gay”. Because the gay people would point and laugh at you as well!

        so he’s angry about this and then some.

        Gas lighting extraordinaire! One little “so” prefaces the anger to tell you that even though Lefty Thwawtsit admitted right off that this was based on a solid info, your normal reaction: anger, is bogus.

        Masterful work, Lefty T.

        And now we know why he does it. Look how long it takes to defang the snake. And we either take that time (better spent elsewhere..) Or censor him.

        Honk. Honk.

        1. It’s also worth noting that “Neo-cons” in general aren’t particularly enamored of “Beloved Leader, the Orange Cheeto,” nor is Trump fond of them. Many are “Never Trump”; the rest are probably in the category of “Reluctantly Trump” while having serious policy differences with the Trump Administration. And of course, as far as I can tell, Larry is not part of either of those groups.

          The only way that this makes any sense is under a weird transitive property where:

          Larry = bad
          Neo-cons = bad
          Trump supporters = bad

          Therefore:

          Larry = Neo-con = Trump supporter

      5. Dude, even ignoring the ‘up is down, your eyes are lying’ nature of your claims with regard to Larry’s motivations, your argument is nonsense on stilts with a loudspeaker.

        When Larry is calling the thing sketchy, he is saying that the claims made about Hunter Biden and Joe Biden are less credible. Partly, no doubt, because of the chain of fucking evidence not being 100% trustworthy and reliable.

        Remember, allegedly this laptop got dropped off broken at a repair place, helpfully labeled with a Biden sticker, chock full of incriminating evidence (covering events in 2015) in April of 2020, and never retrieved. If someone on Biden’s team dropped it off, they were careful enough to not give their name and contact information, and careless to be using an untrusted repairman, and careless enough not to recover it. Hunter is perhaps mentally incompetent enough to be that stupid, but April 2020 suggests a set up.

        You would have to believe that Archduke Ferdinand shot himself, or had a shaving accident, to overlook the many suspicious elements of this incident.

        Okay, a Trump supporter would have incentive to overlook those elements in support of arguing that Joe Biden is unfit for office.

        But Larry is a Republican, he already has all that character information about Joe and Hunter. Furthermore, I don’t recall him coming out in favor of Trump, so I’m assuming that he doesn’t have any need to convince himself that Joe Biden is not a great person. So, because I don’t think he needs to hide Trump’s deficits from himself, I sincerely doubt he has any need to trust a October surprise to convince himself to change his vote.

        For someone voting for neither Biden nor Trump, it is safe to assume that all October surprises are information that would not stand up to more weeks of analysis.

      6. So the post is about media censorship of a story that hurts Biden, and you respond with “something something Cheeto”.

        And you let that go unedited for 5 minutes.

      7. You were asked what was sketchy about the claims, namely, that recently discovered emails are evidence of bribery and corruption among the Bidens, and your response was to attack the motives of Larry Correia, as if he were arguing in bad faith.

        This is not only rude and stupid of you, it is an informal logically fallacy known as ad hominem.

        What have you to say to the undecided and candid reader who, seeing the story about the emails, and hearing your spirited defense, wishes to know on what grounds your defense rests, or what facts, evidence or reasoning supports you?

        Have you nothing? Nothing at all?

      8. I’ll have you know that my not so beloved President Orange Cheeto has been singularly providing more stimulus for the economy than the entire Democrat Party. Of course trying to explain to my two ignorant as hell socialist sons that Cheeto is the one helping me pay off the student loans they defaulted on (not to mention mine and Mom’s retirement funds) just pisses me the heck off. Home school your children. Whatever you do, do NOT let public schools get their claws in them.

  8. Although I don’t like the anti-trust route, being opposed to such laws, what bugs me about Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., is that a major part of their value is due to network effects. That is, people use them because other people use them. This is what makes it tough for competitors like Parler or MeWe to start up now and compete. But those network effects have been built up over the years under false pretenses: the idea that the companies were neutral platforms. For example, a YouTube press release in 2009 says “Three years ago… we’d just made headlines by joining with Google in our shared goal of organising the world’s information (in our case video) and making it easily and quickly accessible to anyone, anywhere.” Same thing goes for the rest of them. If they’d said from the get-go “To anyone, anywhere, unless that hurts Democrats”, a huge chunk of users would never have started using their service, and the value of those networks would be correspondingly-lower.

    Whether this legally counts as fraud or false advertising, I’m not qualified to say. I’m not a lawyer. But it sure seems to me that it goes beyond “We make the best burgers in the world!” fluff that everyone knows is hyperbole.

    1. Parler has another problem. And that problem is that someone who isn’t a member of Parler can’t see your posts. It’s a tiny little closed community, and it doesn’t allow drop-in visits.

      On another note, there’s a lot more going on than just the already existing market-share of certain social media networks. If you were to start a social media network and not toe the line, then they’d go after the company providing your hosting. And the company providing your on-line financial services. And your bank. And in each case, they’d be successful. The social media networks are big and loud and blatant. But the other businesses that I’ve listed have been just as quick to fall in line when pressure was applied.

      1. Good points. Regarding people trying to cut off supporting services, though, I expect that’s another thing where an established network has an advantage over small, late starters: it would be a lot easier (I would expect) to pressure a bank, credit processor, or whatnot to stop doing business with a small guy than to pressure them to drop a hugely-profitable account with, fx., Facebook.

    2. We don’t have to regulate them

      All we have to do is completely end Section 230. Or, even better, end it for all sites that have more than X people posting to it.

      Then we let Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc., all go bankrupt for lawsuits. Because part of the goal here has to be to punish everyone involved in turning “social media” into a left wing weapon.

      Then, after the tech billionaires have become no more than tech millionaires, start a new Section 230.

      This one requires a company to explicitly state that it will not make any “moderation” decisions based on politics, in order to get the protection.

      And establish a private right to sue any company that violates that promise, in any Federal Court in the US, with the fine being $1 million per infraction.

      They want to be publishers? That’s their inalienable right. But publishers don’t get protection from libel laws, copyright or trademark infringement, etc. So if they want that, they can keep their political opinions to themselves

      1. All we have to do is establish that online, as off line, you can be a publisher (and get sued for what you post) or a platform (and have no control). That is, get rid of Section 230.

        1. Except most are a little of both. Take this website. Larry posts info and opinions of his own, which makes him a publisher, but he lets other people post comments which makes him a platform. So should his protection if you post something illegal and he misses it go away?

  9. They’re brazen about it because the press has their backs. 95% of the news rooms, news papers, tech media, teachers, and government flunkies are progressive democrats.

    We’re past the point of no return.

    Future history books will either site these sorts of events for how CWII began, or they’ll say nothing, because freedom lost.

    1. In actuallity, if a civil war starts, it’ll be because the red states that voted in The Orange Cheeto fall economically behind more and more, and because as they do, they’ll declare war on the blue states to get everything said states have.

      As for control of media, the neocons and the alt-right have had more control over media for quite a while, and have been messing up society through the Fox ‘News’ channel and reichwing talk radio, so I wouldn’t be accusing progressives just yet.

      1. So, to be clear, “the neocons and the alt-right have had more control over media for quite a while”, and your full list of examples is “the Fox ‘News’ channel and reichwing talk radio”?
        I have no further questions, your honor.

        1. Well, Lefty’s masters see any source of information that opposes Teh Narrative to be a deadly threat, so they made sure to put it in his talking points to screech about.

          Though, as you noticed, it isn’t nearly as big as it is in Lefty’s script. Still, it was what they downloaded to him so he’ll repeat it verbatim with utter fervor. It’s what he does, it’s all he can do.

      2. Man, Throckmorton, I’ve read several of your posts here now, and you’re usually pretty left-talking-points-disconnected-from-reality dependable, but this post… wow, you’re out there, even for the regular people who go by talking points and don’t care about reality.

        1. Agreed. There are posts of his that sound almost sane… and then there’s this. I guess pre-election tensions don’t mix all too well with the usual TDS of the past few years.

      3. This Lefty Throckmorton is some Grade A, USDA choice Prime Parody. Has. To. Be. No one is this ignorant. It’s not possible.

        I disbelieve!

        1. I’m starting to lean this way too. I usually can’t take anyone seriously who uses “orange Cheeto”, but his meme-to-wordcount ratio is getting too low.

        2. I thought the same about Gersh Kuntzman. I thought Larry was making him up in some sick parody. Or SOMEONE had made him up as some sick parody. We’ve reached the point where the left has ruined parody, because some of ’em really ARE that dumb.

      4. The biggest blue state in America can’t keep the power on 24/7, can’t regulate its water properly, and is spending a ton of money on a high speed rail project that’s going nowhere.

        What exactly is to envy there?

        Look at the 20 most crime ridden cities in America, and then tell us how many have been run by a republican the last 50 years.
        Look at the states running the largest budget deficits, and the find out when the last time they had a Republican in charge was.

      5. Wow, you just don’t let up on the insanity, do you?
        You project, as most leftists do, so hard that if an HDMI cord could be plugged into you, you could be used to show movies on the moon.

      6. ROTFLMAO!
        Are you naturally this ignorant, or do you deliberately try to be as uninformed as possible?

    2. Gotta push back on this.

      The left is mentally broken precisely because they have a religious trust in simple curves fit to complex things. Forex, the theory that white people are always oppressors, and black people always victims.

      Part of fully opposing the left is the spiritual discipline of assuming that a phenomena may be more complicated than labels or theory will let you understand, and may be impossible for you to predict 100%.

      I’ve written about this elsewhere using a different handle.

      In particular, this situation may be a breakdown in censorship, not an increase. Obama may well have had a hundred distinct scandals, of which most are known to very few.

      Furthermore, we know that the left likes head games, getting into the minds of their opponents to defeat them before the fight. Whenever you find yourself taking a simple curve, and extrapolating it to ‘doom’, be wary of it being all a head game.

    3. “Future history books will either site these sorts of events for how CWII began, or they’ll say nothing, because freedom lost.”

      I am old enough to remember when everyone, everyone without exception, looking at the startling growth and success of the Soviet Union, at its unstoppable might and moral conviction, and said matters must either end in atomic war or the capitulation of the West.

      Living through the Fall of the Berlin Wall makes such predictions of doom seem not so inevitable.

      The enemy is powerful, entrenched, and has countless hordes of brainwashed serfs and minions, not to mention cadres of self-hypnotized addled volunteer acolytes, eager to do the bidding of the latest critical social justice theory fad.

      But they have been losing the fight these last three years, in one arena after another, with only the smallest imaginable fraction of the population willing to oppose them.

      Explain that for me, please. If the foe is so potent, why are they panicking? Why did they impeach Trump when they knew they lacked the votes to convict? Why go all-in on the Russia Hoax, when they knew they had no chance with that story? Why smother the New York Post in such a heavy-handed way, when something subtler would have gone unnoticed?

      1. Because they’re using the right hand to distract us while the left hand is doing something else entirely.

        It’s the only reason I can think of that the actions during the last three years have been so consistently stupid.

  10. The real take away here is that 2.7 billion people world wide are fuqqing imbeciles. I do not facebook, I will never facebook. Time for lots of people to get fuqqing lives !

  11. I’ve read pieces Instapundit has linked to here in the past, but this one really distinguishes itself as an outrageous example of obsolete, outmoded, and discredited thought. As a punishment I have bought three of your books, which I will check carefully for ungoodthink.

  12. The fact that it’s so blatantly obvious is actually quite encouraging. It shows that they have become weak. This radical left-wing gaslighting has been going on since before FDR, the most fascistic president we have ever had. But back then, it was just the water we all swam in. The fact that we can see it now means that they are losing, and losing bigly.

    I have to say, though, if you truly want to stop these Silicon Valley big tech companies from having so much power, don’t give it to them. Delete your Facebook and Twitter. I deleted mine in 2016, and life has been so much better without them.

      1. They’re pretty dang close on the Fascist Scale.
        FDR actually was able to get the UN up and running, something Wilson couldn’t do. He was also able to raise the general level of trust in Big Government solutions and Internationalism.
        Had WWII not broken out, FDR could have continued to use the Great Depression as an excuse to nationalize more and more industry.

        1. You make a good case. For what its worth, I’m not sure if I could say one was more fascist than the other. Like you said, “They’re pretty dang close…”

      2. Yes, but only because Wilson laid all the groundwork. The American people weren’t ready to accept concentration camps on American soil during Wilson’s presidency, but by FDR they were.

        1. Again, it’s pretty close, like one of those memetic FB image things that could be blue or pink depending on how you look at it. Both bastidges took all the personal power they could get a hold of, but FDR actually made himself basically President For Life- something Wilson wouldn’t attempt.

  13. Orwellian? Haven’t you heard about “Cuties”? With how the establishment wants to normalize sexualization of children, we’re in a *Huxleyian* nightmare.

    1. Not to mention that frankly, most people on the left would love to spend their time high on soma and having a different partner every night.

      1. I mean, I’m a liberal, and I’d like to spend my time high on pot (sadly, pot has a weird effect on me where it just makes me dizzy, not high); and I have no problem with people sleeping with multiple partners, even while — gasp ! — remaining unmarried. But that doesn’t mean that I somehow inevitably “normalize sexualization of children”. It’s kinda like saying that all Christians are wannabe crusaders who want to genocide the Middle East at the earliest opportunity. It’s a false generalization.

        1. Yeah. Pelosi’s daughter was amongst those condemning Cuties.

          And if there was a trend, it was more towards ‘people who think of themselves as cultured elites’ than a right/left divide.

          Plus, well… there’s also plenty of “libertarians” who really only care about the freedom to be libertines.

        2. Aren’t you one of those creeps that doesn’t want to defund and abolish public education, and put all education majors and teachers on the sex offenders registry? 🙂

          In all seriousness, the excuses provided for sex ed in elementary do not hold. For that age of student, the size difference, and the fact of strangers being employed by a bureaucracy, carry an implicit threat of physical violence. Maybe that is acceptable if instruction were purely reading, writing, and arithmatic, skills that are not deeply tied to worldview and understanding of human societies. The power disparity makes sex ed entirely inappropriate, a form of grooming.

          1. Regarding sex ed, it’s obviously inappropriate in elementary school (duh), but it’s a good idea in general. No matter how hard you try, you won’t stop teenagers from having sex (short of some truly totalitarian options), so you might as well increase their chances of doing so safely.

            In fact, on a more potentially inflammatory note, I find the Republican opposition to abortion rather inconsistent with their opposition to sex ed and contraception. If I set myself the goal of reducing abortion rates, I’d campaign for making contraception free and ubiquitous. Of course, I do understand that Christian values are rather prohibitive of sex in general, so I suppose it does make some internal sense…

          2. It is not inflammatory, you’ve just misunderstood Republicans as badly as Throcky does Larry’s motivation in thinking that the provenance of the hard disk drive is sketchy.

            People are, long term, happier and healthier when their sex acts have a long term discipline to them.

            There are a lot of persons whose wiring tries to go from a sex act to establishing pair bonding. When this sort of person has sex with many partners, they will find themselves distressed when the level of emotional investment does not match what their instinct is telling them should exist.

            The targeting of sexual interest is partly learned. There are at least two areas where we can conclude this from observation. 1. Long term pair bonded couples. Consider a couple that gets together when young, becomes more interested in each other, and in old age one party’s interest in the other partner (who has different physical qualities from when they were young) has clearly changed from when they were both young. Old people (50-80s) have sex, and young people (20s) mostly do not start out sexually interested in the 70s-80s cohort. 2. The other area is pornography. There are many little subtypes of pornography, which have fans who like one sub type, and are unexcited by others. From a materialist perspective, it is absurd to conclude that someone was predestined from birth to like one particular subtype of pornography. There are too many subtypes to match to some discrete physical state of the newborn brain. Pornographic subtype specific interests are clearly at least partly learned, learned during consumption of pornography.

            If sexual interest is even partly learned, particularly if as seems apparent early/first experiences are strong, then disordered sex ed will lead to disordered interests. If someone believes it when they are told that they will be having lots of sex, and with many persons, they will go forward with that expectation. Disordered sex ed is bad for people who a) aren’t wired for benefiting long term from having many sex partners b) don’t have the self knowledge to realize that the curriculum does not match their inner reality /and/ the stubbornness to ignore claims that are dubiously sourced.

            How many persons fit this criteria? If a majority, Republicans would be legitimately justified in thinking all public school sex ed is damaging. If an extreme majority, an anti sex ed policy would seem to be justified on the same grounds that the transgender pushed has been justified on.

          3. @Cooter Chang:
            I don’t know what you mean by “disordered sex ed”, especially since this implies that there’s “well-ordered” sex ed that you’d be in favor of. Obviously, I’m against inaccurate or traumatic sex ed, just as I’m against any other kind of inaccurate or traumatic education. I’m now envisioning some sort of sex ed equivalent of Creationism… yeah, that would be bad.

            That said though, my own teenage years are sadly very far behind me, but still, my own experience with sex ed was mostly pretty humdrum — just as my experience with driver’s ed, really. Besides the archetypal condom-on-banana action, we were taught about STDs, pregnancy rates, alternatives that reduce the risk of pregnancy (for straight people, that is), all the ways in which porn is different from reality, etc. From what I’ve heard, girls were taught about various forms of hormonal birth control and period relief. At every step, the message seemed to be, “look, we would prefer if you didn’t have any sex until you’re 30, but we know we can’t stop you, so please at least practice some basic safety procedures”.

            One part that I found really funny back then, and that I find fairly frightening now, came when the teachers asked for audience questions. I’ve heard questions like “is is true that you can’t get pregnant your first time”, and “if the woman is on top and gets pregnant, does this mean the baby will be a girl”. These weren’t 8-year-olds from Iraq or somewhere, but modern teenagers living in a fairly prosperous area in the USA, and yet they had no idea how human biology even works. That’s why I think sex ed is still pretty important today.

        3. That’s not what I was saying. My point was only that while Orwell’s dystopia gets brought up far more frequently, I think Huxley’s dystopia is closer to our current world.

          Part of what makes that so frightening to me is that many people would actually like to live in the world Huxley described, or at least would have difficulty articulating what’s wrong with it. And it’s true, as someone notes below, that that isn’t limited to the left. (Frankly, praise and worship music always makes me think of the Georgie Porgie scene; chanting the same six words over and over seems like self-hypnosis to me.)

        4. The issue is not that there are parties guilty of atrocious behaviors on both “sides” of the fence.

          The issue is that the Left’s atrocious behavior is echoed, mirrored, and/or apologized for by far too many of its cultural, political, media, and intellectual luminaries.

        5. “all Christians are wannabe crusaders who want to genocide the Middle East at the earliest opportunity”

          We do not want to genocide the Middle East. We Crusaders wish to restore the Holy Land to the dominion of the Holy Roman Emperor, and for the land to be returned to the Chosen People. This is the opposite of genocide. It is the prevention of an anti-Semitic genocide that is ongoing.

          Now, there may be those among us who feel that the Mohammedan heretics should be given the chance to convert, before being burned alive atop the blasphemous books of their false prophet. But that is still not genocide.

          Do not accuse us of things done only by socialists, radicals and political ideologues. Those are your people, sir, not ours.

          DEUS VULT!

  14. There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur, or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: There is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to… The Outer Limits.

    1. Busy playing ICP’s “Its all over” which seems fitting. at the moment.

      The problem is that if it goes this way its not going to stay shoot some Commies and start over. Its going to be “nits make lice” no matter what side of the war wins.

      Better than slavery to the Left be sure but an ignominious end to a once great nation.

      1. The left is going to be handed green cards and told if they want to be citizens again they get to go through the procedures immigrants get.

  15. The “horrible truth” that the media wants to hide is not that the Biden crime family is as bad as it really is, it is that they are nothing unusual, just an ordinary leftist power-seeking family, like so many others.
    Increased centralized government power has made these people who control government actions, and the companies and nations who support and control them, able to shift the burdens to the middle class, where most of the nations’ wealth was, and to concentrate the benefits among those who can buy government actors, and those actors themselves.
    Trump has drawn these forces out into the light. Their glove is off, and the iron fist is revealed. They have to try to win it all, and win it now, because they are exposed for the evil that they are.
    I think that they have lit the fuse on their revolution a generation too early.
    I think that the real riots will start after Trump is re-elected. The next six months may be sporty. Be as ready as you can.
    American, by grace of God, John in Indy

    1. The ‘horrible truth’ is that people like you let your racism (towards Barack Obama being POTUS, sexism (towards Hillary Clinton becoming/being POTUS) and homophobia get the best of you, and so in the confused state you created for yourselves, you turned to The Beloved Leader, the Orange Cheeto to ‘fix’ things, just like the people of Germany went for Hitler and the people of England went for Adam Suttler in V for Vendetta.

      Yeah, I’ll admit that the emoprogressives have royally fucked things up, as have the third waver feminists, but they had prodding and provoking from the neocons (and the alt-right) to do what you and Larry are railing against. As they say, it takes two to tango.

      1. Yes, yes, any opposition to what you think is obviously some kind of -ism.

        It’s utterly impossible for the people who have opposed a certain policy position to oppose it equally no matter who brings it – when a black person brings that policy, opposing it is racism, and when a woman brings that policy, opposing it sexism. What is it called when we oppose it when a white man brings that policy?

        You want an example of racism? See how the left treats Clarence Thomas. You want an example of sexism? See how the left treated Sarah Palin – the most egregious public sexism in decades.

        It takes two to tango, but destruction only takes one – and the left has been all in on the destruction of western civilization for quite a while now. Ridiculous lying to the point of gaslighting about basic facts, as you are doing, is par for the course now.

        1. Hell, just turn up the audio on the lily-white “BLM” protestors and how they talk to Black police officers.

      2. This is the second time I’ve seen you use “neocon” that makes no contextual sense with your meme-splaining.

        I would appreciate it if you could take a moment to breathe, focus, and then explain precisely what you think a “neo-con” is.

        Please, take your time.

      3. “The ‘horrible truth’ is that people like you let your racism (towards Barack Obama being POTUS, sexism (towards Hillary Clinton becoming/being POTUS) and homophobia get the best of you, and so in the confused state you created for yourselves, you turned to The Beloved Leader, the Orange Cheeto to ‘fix’ things, just like the people of Germany went for Hitler and the people of England went for Adam Suttler in V for Vendetta.”

        I am ashamed to admit that I was fooled. I thought this was an actual Lefty troll. He had me going.

        But, here, the parody is laved on too thickly, and even someone as slow on the uptake as me cannot fail to see it.

        Well played, sir. Well played.

      4. I’m sure that sounded devastating when the voices in your tiny overheated head outlined it for you to regurgitate. Alas, the people you hate are not what those voices claim they are.

        More’s the pity. HTH, HAND.

        (Haven’t finished the thread, has this twit tried the “I was just trolling” bleat to hide it’s idiocy yet?)

      5. Uh, no. BHO’s racial inheritance was relatively irrelevant to my deciding about 90 days into his first term that my vote for him was a mistake.
        My opposition to Hillary Clinton was based on personal knowledge that she’s a felon, and a monster that the U.S Treasury couldn’t cover the PUFF on her.
        I don’t fear homosexuals; but I don’t approve of their behavior, and find advocacy of their lifestyle to be detrimental to the family and society in general.
        Your equating of Trump with Hitler and Suttler betray a complete lack of understanding as to what fascism really is.

  16. Does anyone remember the huge body of economics research on what’s called “natural monopolies?”

    Well, Facebook, Twitter, Google, et al meet the definition of “natural monopolies” within their market sphere – that’s why they made a lot of money. The founders saw those opportunities and developed and positioned their companies to exploit the characteristics so that they could get power.

    Most of us would expect them to use that power to make money but now they are using the power to control information to maintain their monopolies. Think Democrats are going to rein them in somehow, now that they show their service to Democrats?

    What if the power company or the water company threatened to cutoff customers who criticized their leadership? Would we stand for that?

    Oh wait! That just happened in Los Angeles where the LA Department of Water and Power threatened just that to critics of the mayor.

    Time to regulate and regulate HARD! Our freedoms are at stake.

    1. I’d say Google is at the “actual monopoly” phase of their cycle based on the singular fact that they control 85-90% of internet ad revenues.

      And there’s way more to Google than ad revenues.

  17. It’s not the first time the dictionary has changed definitions to suit the left. I believe it was after the sandy hook shooting they changed the definition of Assault Rifle from being a firearm that was magazine fed, select fire, and fired an intermediate cartridge to that but also a semi automatic copy of such a rifle.

  18. “I don’t give a shit if you are liberal or conservative, the idea of some entity like Google determining what mankind is allowed to know or not know should terrify the shit out of you. ”

    To me that is the essence.

  19. Pardon me for mentioning a different author and publishing house. Just reread S.M. Stirling Draka novels and there has been some stealth editing out of the uncomfortable parts in current society. Our “hero’s” journey home in the begiining of the first book is missing most of the events that happened on the road. I feel cheated, imagine if they did the same to Shakespeare’s plays….

    1. The primary reason I own physical copies of books still.

      This sort of editing is not uncommon in the e-realm, and Amazon is getting more end more censorship-curious.

  20. The grammar is clear: sexual “identity” is what the individual chooses for themselves or how they self-identify. Sexual “preference” is who the individual prefers to engage in sexual activity with. There is absolutely nothing wrong with these terms.

    Other than what JK Rowling pointed out: the core distinction is a woman menstruates. I know, I know. Outrageous, that biology thing. Facts can be really troublesome.

    Nobody is willing to acknowledge real-world facts anymore. They all seem to think they can dump a load of horse-apples on them and pretend like they don’t exist. No society can survive being smothered in horse apples.

    1. How hard is it for people like you to deal with what the LGBT community wants? And, why is it that hard?

      1. Maybe because, unlike you, we don’t assume that “the LGBT community” is a monolithic bloc that is 100% represented by the loudest and most obnoxious among them, and because it’s obvious those “leaders” didn’t care about the term until ACB, who obviously had no intention of hurting anyone, used it in an obviously innocent manner.
        Also, never pay the Danegeld.

      2. How dishonest can you be? Wait, I don’t want to know – you’ve probably got a healthy distance farther you can go.

        For just one example of how ridiculously you are lying, Joe Biden used the term “sexual preference” publicly earlier this year. I assume you will now denounce him as an alt-right bigot, right?

        1. Sadly, it doesn’t work like this. See, unlike most sane people, guys like Lefty here don’t value actions – or words in this case – as right or wrong on their own. No, actions serve only the purpose of identifying sides – and people are subsequently judged by which side they belong to, rather than as individuals.

          Thus, everything Joe Biden says is good, because Joe Biden is good, because Joe Biden is already on the good side… meaning the progressive left. (Granted, the only thing progressive about him is his dementia, but that’s beside the point.) And everything ACB says is bad, because she’s on the bad side… namely, being an overall impartial seasoned judge that doesn’t seem likely to abide by liberal bullying and smear tactics.

          Same goes for everyone else here, I’d wager – we’re already evil by association, regardless of individual merit… never mind the “evils” we’re associated with are only in the mind of Lefty here.

      3. Motherfucker, go to my facebook page and I’ve got a shit ton of people in the “LGBT community” scratching their heads and saying “what is this bullshit?” Quit acting like you’re Speaker For (insert minority group X here).
        Why is that hard?
        Because you dishonest fucks don’t get to just twist reality to suit you and then expect the rest of us to conform. Fuck off.

        1. Lefty is just another White Knight, nobly stepping up for the poor little minorities he thinks are too weak and stupid to speak for themselves.

          Oh Lefty, White Savior of Minorities, do they worship at your feet, praising you for using your Superior Whiteness for good instead of evil? Do they sing your praises and celebrate your wondrous deeds? Are they impressed that you descended from your lofty Perch of White Privileged to speak on their lowly behalf?

      4. When the “LBGT Community” starts doing exactly what I want, then I will worry about doing exactly what they want.

        Because their “wants” aren’t the least bit more important than mine

      5. You know, I think I’m really lucky to have met all of my current gay-married friends before I’d encountered the “LGBT Community”. This way, I just happened to form the opinion that gay people are just regular people whose romantic inclinations are a bit unusual. The modern LGBT Community is… something else. If I thought all gay people were like them, I’d have stayed the hell away from them, and missed out on several lifelong friendships.

      6. Because when the “LGBT Community” demands to control my language, the LGBT community can fuck right off.

        And I speak as someone who would fall into that group myself, assclown.

      7. How hard is it for people like you to understand that wrapping yourself in the identity of the people/things you prefer to screw doesn’t grant you the ability to change the language – or science – to massage your feelings.

      8. “How hard is it for people like you to deal with what the LGBT community wants? And, why is it that hard?”

        By the same token, how hard is it for people like you deal with what decent people who love liberty want?

        Why is it so hard for you to leave us in peace, my dear little self-lobotomized totalitarian gollum?

      9. How hard is it for you to actually state what the LGBT community wants (or what you think they want); rather than posting an completely undefined strawman?

  21. Glad to see you writing more here Larry. Leave the bookface garden, write where they can’t control you.

    And of course, we will continuing to buy the books they can’t control either. But your pithy nonfiction observations have an audience for sure.

  22. The Internet was monopolized by the powerful Elite (Bilderberg types). This was intentional so that they could control the flow of information to the general public. They were never going to stop the full flow of information, as there is always a black market for it, but so long as “those people” were classified as “crazies”, that really didn’t matter.

    Right now, they’re overreaching and “those people” now include just about everyone on the political spectrum who ranges from the center to the extreme right.

    My advice in response to this is simple: use alternatives and tell your family you’re no longer using Facebook, Twitter, etc. None of the mainstream platforms will benefit you in the slightest at this point anyway because of all the social media noise. Join Gab, Parlor, MeWe, etc. Use Infogalactic instead of Wikipedia. Use other search engines like Bing in instead of Google. Open an email account with Proton Mail.

    There are many other alternatives, I’m sure, so it’s up to you. But don’t use the mainstream ones for any personal or business reasons anymore. If you keep them around, just use them to observe others, but don’t use them to interact with people.

    1. It is always easy for people with no skin in the game to tell those of us who make our living off of fan interaction about how we should just bail out on the platform with 2.7 billion active users, and move over to one of the tiny ones with no users.
      Unfortunately content creators built our fan bases on social media back when it was pretending to be social media. Then they pulled a bait and switch. Only the content creators are all stuck in this abusive relationship.

    2. It would actually be quite comforting if there were some kind of a global conspiracy that is ruthlessly controlling all communications for nefarious ends, because in this case a). at least the people in charge would be competent (more so than anyone we’ve seen so far), and b). we’d have a clear target to fight. But in reality, these global monopolies naturally arise out of a combination of an unregulated market and economies of scale; they’re less like the Illuminati and more like gravity. We can fight gravity, no problem, but it takes a totally different kind of effort.

      That said though, I do use ProtonMail, and I think it works quite well, so +1 for them.

      1. “But in reality, these global monopolies naturally arise out of a combination of an unregulated market and economies of scale.”

        This is the sort of comfortable (or ignorant) fiction that fans of regulation cling to. Giant megacorps LOVE regulation. It’s how many of them thrive, because they’re able to influence lawmakers, who in-turn influence regulators to regulate/legislate out (or limit) competition in myriad ways.

        The most insidious mechanic in play is that there are a whole host of laws/regulations that could be applied to many of these tech companies, should we have a curious media/federal bureaucracy/political class…but we don’t. There’s too much money to be made by the players involved.

        Our economy is not some unregulated free market (Capitalism Has Failed!!!!), but a highly regulated corporatist one.

        1. When I said “regulation”, I meant, “actual regulation”, not “giving free handouts to corporations”. Things like anti-trust laws, for example, or removing their status as a protected platform if they start to editorialize en masse.

          I agree that corporations have way too much influence over lawmakers, and I would love to remove all the myriad of ways they can use to legally bribe senators and congressmen, but that’s a separate issue.

          1. Oh, corporations are evil huh? The government is in bed with Wall Street? Then you should go check and see where Joe Biden’s campaign donations have come from recently. 😀

          2. Since I didn’t say “giving free handouts to corporations”, I wasn’t talking about giving free handouts to corporations.

            Read the words on the page.

            You’re clearly not aware of what regulations even are, let alone how they work. Regulations are costly to comply with. So much so that large corporations have a huge advantage compared to smaller businesses because they can absorb those costs. They’ve got the money to lobby the state and federal governments to craft regulations which favor them in this regard.

            This is basic stuff.

          3. @correia45:
            AFAIK a lot of Biden’s donations come indirectly from China — as if he needed even more reasons for me not to vote for him…

          4. @gmmay70:
            A regulation such as “you can’t be a monopoly” would only be costly to comply with if one is a monopoly. This is basic stuff.

          5. “A regulation such as “you can’t be a monopoly” would only be costly to comply with if one is a monopoly. This is basic stuff.”

            No, Anti-Trust Law is not a “regulation” (as if Anti-Trust law is the only thing in play on this topic, but whatever).

            If you’re going to be a dishonest douche, get the basics right first.

            Go give your parents some hell for not teaching you that.

  23. Establishment Republicans, Conservatives and Libertarians will not save America from the long night. The younger Dissident Right folks have been screaming about this tech danger for four years but the same people who abandoned the education system to the Left did nothing. If we aren’t willing to fight just as hard and dirty as the Left, we’ll lose. If we don’t vote for people who have a clue and are willing to fight, we’ll lose. Yeah, Trump may not act nice, but the people who voted for him wanted someone who would fight and win. Trump has done some good work but we have to find others to keep the fight going.

  24. They changed the dictionary definition of a word just to score some cheap points against a political nominee. I don’t care what your politics are: this should terrify the living crap out of you.

    1. Newspeak, a reinvention of the language meant to prevent the ability to commit thoughtcrime.

      SJWspeak, a reinvention of the language to confirm the existence of thoughtcrime.

  25. I don’t see how any of the tepid attacks on ACB make any larger point, except the Democrats on the judiciary committee don’t want to jinx what they see as a potential Senate majority making election. She will be confirmed, even if Mitch has to wheel in ICU beds with Republican senators on respirators. And well he should.

    Censorship is bad. Check. Hunter Biden hurts his dad. Check. Strange evidence appearing that if you actually look into it’s provenance looks like it could be manufactured, planted, and maybe from someone who wants to influence this election (like they did the last presidential election, not my opinion, what our law enforcement says happened.) Check. Larry is not a Trump supporter. Check. Larry is a good person, whom I would wholeheartedly trust with my life or child. Check. Can reasonable people disagree with all his conclusions. Yes.

  26. Speaking as the token liberal here, I’d argue that the problem is that we have too little governmental control over private companies — specifically, that we need to prevent them from forming monopolies. The problem is that we’ve got just one Twitter that essentially controls all our news; just one Google that essentially controls all our search (come on, no one uses Bing), etc. If we had a thousand mini-Twitters all competing for users, maybe they wouldn’t be so quick to ban half the population.

    Of course, it could be the case that economies of scale preclude this scenario. Maybe Facebook only works if everyone is on the same platform, so they can all talk to each other — so monopolies are inevitable. But in this case, yes, we should regulate those monopolies so they are at least as accountable as Congress (which is not very accountable, but still). Otherwise, you’ve got a major national infrastructure asset that is run by people who answer to no one, and that’s really dangerous.

    1. The main issue at hand is that social networks used to dodge a bunch of legal issues by styling themselves as “platforms” – meaning they’re not responsible for the posted content – whereas now they’re openly acting like *publishers* – promoting and censoring content at will. Too much abuse on that front, and subpoenas would be the least of their problems.

      Might be just my wishful thinking here, but it may be possible for numerous smaller social hubs to counteract the major monopolies, by setting up the ability to directly cross-reference and share (some) content with one another. Kinda like how phone numbers from different operators can still dial each other. Or how the immortal hydra that’s the Linux distro range managed to hold its own against MS Windows – the digital monopoly of yesteryear – and even topple it on the phone and tablet markets.

      In short, I’m putting on my best Brent Spiner here and saying: It’s… possible, Captain. Not without its pitfalls, and definitely requiring going outside the box, but possible.

    2. I keep hearing that Facebook only works if everyone’s on Facebook. Nonsense. Email works, and email is distributed. There’s absolutely no reason why social networking can’t work in a federated fashion.

      Similarly, there’s absolutely no reason why microblogging (Twitter) can’t work in a federated fashion.

      You might have to pay NotFacebook or NotTwitter a monthly fee, the way you have to pay your email provider, but I consider that to be a win. If you’re not paying for the product, the product is you.

      1. “If you’re not paying for the product, the product is you.”

        That is the truest statement I’ve read this week.

    3. As I pointed out to you upthread – the issue is not government control, but government (read politician) involvement. There are already regulations in place to prevent what’s happened with Facebook and Twitter.

      Twitter has most definitely given the Democrats, and Joe Biden in particular, possibly the most massive in-kind donation to his campaign in history, without incurring any cost. Same thing with Facebook. Amazon has prevented politically oriented commerce in only one direction. And that’s not even getting into the publisher/platform issue, or the murkier aspects of viewpoint discrimination.

      We simply lack enough politicians with the political resolve to drop the hammer.

      1. I mean, I agree with you regarding in-kind donations, and I agree that “we simply lack enough politicians with the political resolve to drop the hammer” — but what’s the solution ? It’s easy to say “let’s get some awesome new politicians”, but where are you going to get them from ?

        1. I wasn’t talking about getting new politicians, but that the issue wasn’t a lack of governmental control.

          You asserted that there was “too little governmental control over private companies”, which is quite obviously not the problem, considering the legal/regulatory framework in place already exists to rein them in. Given that, what on Earth makes you think more government is going to fix a problem that the government allowed to happen?

          Of course, it’s apparent you suffer from a conceptual misunderstanding when you seem unaware of the contradiction inherent in “more government control of private companies”.

          1. Take another look at what I wrote above. I said that I’d like more anti-trust enforcement, and/or to take away a monopoly’s status as a platform if it starts editorializing and gatekeeping. All of those would be additional government regulations over what we have currently (although it looks like we might be moving in that direction vs. Google). Your argument seems to be that the current regulations that we do have either don’t work, or do more harm than good — but your position and mine are entirely compatible.

          2. “Take another look at what I wrote above.”

            I did. And you still seem to operating under the misapprehension that your proposed solutions require some additional regulation. They do not.

            How can you possibly say, in the same paragraph, that we are moving in the direction of enforcement with Google, when such an action would supposedly require additional government regulations?

            My argument, as clearly stated, is that the regulations and laws already exist to rein in this poor corporate behavior. In other words, this isn’t about more government, but demanding the government we have enforce the laws and regulations it created.

  27. Hunter Biden is small potatoes compered to the rest of the Biden crime family. Look up the NY Post article that the anti-social media is desperately attempting to hide.

  28. Amusingly, if you google search “Crackhead McStripperbang” the top page is all Hunter Biden. Despite their best efforts, they can’t stop the signal. And worst of all, everyone can SEE them trying to stop the signal.

    Really, if I was one of those Black Lives Matter people, or some other flavor of Social Justice Warrior, I’d be voting for Trump, because the only reason those fools are getting any press or attention rather than having their cause buried next to Jimmy Hoffa, is because the disgusting tools in charge of the Media think they’re useful for smearing Trump. The microsecond a democrat is in the white house, they will be erased, like their name was Trotsky.

    1. Gotta disagree.

      BLM exists in the first place because of Obama using his bully pulpit to deliberately support its development. He probably has ties to the money behind it.

  29. I’m far more sanguine about the world ending consequences of Facebook and Twitter picking political sides. Newspapers have done so for years, and Fox news lives off that very model, it’s just more of the same on a grander scale. If nothing else, the computer programmers I know who have worked at these companies are absolutely crystal clear that they, Facebook especially, have ZERO compunctions about tossing their ethics out the door for short term gains, regardless of which political position they need to adopt. Today it’s the Dems, but tomorrow it will be the GOP, as sure as the sun rises.

    Hopefully Facebook’s foray into “curating” their content will result in some lawsuits that will clarify a lot of these issues, because once you start down that path, you’re suddenly liable for all the crazy crap you DON’T censor! Which is exactly why they avoided doing this kind of thing until recently. Makes you wonder if they’ve received some quiet assurances about what the next Congress will and won’t look into? But even with Democrats in the White House and Senate, I’ll bet the judiciary will be looking to crack down hard on this stuff before the next election.

    Larry, I am a bit surprised you’re so worked up about this. Fox news does this all the time, failing to cover all sorts of Trump craziness, and the world keeps turning. I definitely think the issue is larger with these social media platforms, but isn’t that just the Democrats doing a better job turning a media outlet into a mouthpiece than the Republicans this cycle? I get that they claim to be forums and platforms, and people have committed resources to them with that in mind, but newspapers claim to be unbiased sources of information all the time and only rarely manage to deliver on that assertion. Maybe a bit of misconduct on the part of social media platforms will force a healthy dose of skepticism into the voting public. You can’t tell me it’s all that hard to find more sources with just a little more keyboard sweat (I say this with my optimist’s hat on, knowing full well how disastrously lazy people are).

    I don’t have any skin in the game with respect to Facebook, so I understand how their changing standards and capricious enforcement can ignite the burning hate of bureaucracy in the breast of someone who uses the platform!

    The real issue is the legislation that keeps getting introduced by BOTH Republican and Democratic lawmakers to place backdoors into end-to-end encryption. It keeps coming back over and over again, so there must be some group or interest that wants it back, but its utterly disastrous for personal privacy and communications. From a technical standpoint, it is the equivalent of having a law requiring every piece of electronics in your house having a special direct line to the FBI–which will never be misused, no!

    1. Your comment requires an alternate reality to make sense.

      Of course, it doesn’t help that you’re relying on the “But Fox!” trope. Anyone who holds your opinion of Fox is clearly not familiar with Fox and the fact that nearly their entire news division skews Left and is virulently anti-Trump. This is the same network currently running cover for George “Art Historian” Soros. But sure, Fox didn’t report on Trump having two scoops of ice cream, so they’re TOTALLY in the tank.

      The idea that the tech companies are somehow going to swing GOP “as sure as the sun rises” doesn’t even pass the laugh test.

      “I definitely think the issue is larger with these social media platforms, but isn’t that just the Democrats doing a better job turning a media outlet into a mouthpiece than the Republicans this cycle?”

      Yeah, if you think in thirty year cycles.

      “I get that [social media] claim to be forums and platforms, and people have committed resources to them with that in mind, but newspapers claim to be unbiased sources of information all the time and only rarely manage to deliver on that assertion.”

      Were you trying to compare apples to oranges, or did it come naturally?

    2. The “but FOX doesn’t cover stories embarrassing to Trump” thing doesn’t work for two reasons:

      1. It is a statement of…dubious veracity.

      2. What Facebook and Twitter have done is far beyond “not covering the story.” They have attempted to suppress coverage of the story.

  30. I don’t trust the establishment media. I also don’t trust Giuliani: He has made oaths and broken them outright and thus his word means nothing. I believe the hard drive contents are authentic for one simple reason: If it’s fictional, where did they get the multiple photos of Hunter smoking crack?

    If the photos were faked, which is certainly possible (Hollywood can stick one person’s head onto another person’s body in moving pictures fairly casually now) why aren’t the media saying so? It would have to be some really high quality photoshopping to not raise concerns of the images being doctored. Surely catching Republicans in a lie is more beneficial than going full ” SHUT DOWN EVERYTHING”.

  31. If the term “sexual preference” is actually bothersome to Sen. Hirono, Sen. Booker, and some portion of the LGBTQ+ community, then they can start bashing Joe Biden for using it as well. Until that happens, I’m ignoring the nonsense as the politically-motivated mess it clearly is. Since the folks at Merriam-Webster can’t seem to differentiate, I’ll switch to OED.

  32. In other new, Sargon of Akkad, aka Carl Benjamin in England just got one of his podcasts deleted by the censors of YouTube on that grounds that the vid was harmful or harassment.

    The topic was “Why are SJWs attempting to normalized paedophilia?”

    The censors are, in other words, protecting the paedoes from Hate Speech. We can all sleep easier in our beds tonight, knowing Big Brother is watching us.

  33. You know the hard drive and its contents are real because Biden’s lawyers tried desperately to get it back. The there’s the fact that Biden’s camp isn’t disputing their authenticity either.

    1. I guess they didn’t think that the small print would ever be used against a client. Like the part that says “Pay up in 90 days or it’s considered abandoned.”

  34. People here may be interested in knowing Larry’s friend Tracy Hickman, alongside Margaret Weis, is suing Wizards of the Coast for breaking contract and canceled a contracted Dragonlance project to show how woke they are. Attorney and livestreamer Nick Rekieta says Weis and Hickman seem to have good council (both now and in contract drafting), a damning complaint, and perfect venue (Washington State law apparently takes a dim view on WotC’s method of breaching contract).

  35. Man. I didn’t know you had a blog. I was just trying to figure out when the next MHI book was coming out and stumbled across this treasure trove. If I didn’t already love you, I do now! I’ve been thinking this shit is straight outta 1984 lately, and it just gets worse and worse. So much respect to you sir.

  36. I agree with the substance of your pungently phrased post, Mr. Correia, but I’m personally optimistic for hidden personal reasons that the apparently terrifying power imbalance you point out can be repaired with a competing information infrastructure so compelling in its value proposition that existing network effects aren’t enough to save Facebook, Twitter, Google, et alia from effective obsolescence, possibly overnight as time seems to go in the warp-speed pace of the Internet.

    However as has been pointed out here and elsewhere, Facebook, Google, Twitter, et alia have indeed horrifically abused their competitive advantages by falsely claiming up front to be politically neutral while secretly suppressing in ways numerous, subtle, and deep the ideas of conservatives, libertarians, and objectivists. The principals of said companies essentially tricked folks at large into helping said companies build their overwhelming network effects. It’s a massive fraud upon the public commonweal. I wouldn’t mind seeing these profoundly dishonest grifter organizations shattered into pieces by the brute force of the government. They richly deserve it.

    And it’s still “Dunning-Kruger” and not Dunning-Krugerrand.” Although I must admit to liking the mental image of South African gold bullion coins, so emblematic of hard-core individuality, swanning around a sea of leftist arrogance and stupidity.

    1. Dunning-Kruger describes the effect. Dunning-Krugerand is the hilarious way to refer to the people who are spiking the graph. Trust me on this. I’m good at this shit. 🙂

      1. Okay! I still don’t get the inside joke or (presumably bad) pun, but I’m perfectly willing to take your word for it that it jolts neuron-challenged leftists into jumping up and down and making enraged monkey faces. 🙂

  37. I am appalled at how much power the radical left has over public discourse. The examples of them redefining the phrase ‘Sexual Preference” overnight to suit their needs passes anything in Orwell’s book.
    The attempt to censor the Biden Email stories was less shocking to me than changing the dictionary overnight. (CNN, MS-NPC, CBS has me expecting that sort of thing by now.)

    The whole affair is rather depressing so I find myself dosing up on Pure Awesome to counteract it by watching this (On an Alt-Tech platform for obvious reasons):

    https://www.bitchute.com/video/WBbytIJFXt78/

    Metal, Humor AND Patriotism all in one package.

    1. I have to admit that even for a jaded, deeply cynical fellow like myself, the cuteness with redefining the dictionary meaning of an ostensibly harmless phrase overnight struck me as having dived fast and deep into surrealistic Black Mirror territory. O_o

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