I wrote this a few days ago on FB, because I’m out. 🙂
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I’m paring down my FB presence. For the last week I’ve only been on for a brief time each day. I’ll be taking that down even further. I’ll be posting links when I blog for the people who stick around. There’s a few groups I use here that I can’t get the equivalent resource anywhere else yet (but I’m currently banned from posting in all groups anyway). And that’s about it. Basically, I’m done being a content creator for those censorious pieces of shit.

Guys like me write stuff which gets shared hundreds of times and gets thousands of people commenting/participating. FB uses that free content to keep people corralled here so they can mine your data. And then when us content creators get uppity, they fuck us over with impunity while their ideological allies get a pass. But then we come crawling back again and again, like abused trailer park wives, because we don’t want to abandon the kids (as in the communities we spent the last ten years building before the relationship turned abusive). I’ve stuck around because I didn’t want to hurt my business/sales. It is still the best place to reach the most people the fastest. We made it that way. All us content creators foolishly moved over there back when Facebook promised to be one thing. Now that they’ve pulled a bait and switch, the content creators feel trapped. In good conscience, this can’t continue.

I’m done helping those parasites. Facebook is trash. We all know it. We’ve all seen it. We’re just there because of inertia. Over the last decade, working with some stupendous moderators and great fans, we built a gigantic, thriving, fun, fan page here on Facebook. It’s one of the bigger author fan pages on the internet where the author can still actually talk to his fans. Being able to interact there was great. But Facebook took that from me on a whim.

They banned me from my own group because of what I MIGHT say.

However we prepared a fallback. There’s another Monster Hunter Nation fan page over on MeWe. LINK I’ll be posting there instead from here on. If the fans want to keep posting there, great, but I won’t be. I can’t even post this to my own FB fan page, which illustrates just how screwed up this situation is. We’ll see how long that lasts, until Big Tech finds some way to squish every place they can’t control. My primary place will still be here on my blog, monsterhunternation dot com. There is an email newsletter you can sign up for which is only book related stuff, no politics. I’m on MeWe under my same name. I was on Parler as @monsterhunter45, though I never really used it, and I have no idea if that place is going to survive. I’ll be looking into other alternatives as well.

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So for the last few days I’ve avoided Facebook entirely (while the fan page on MeWe gained a couple thousand new members), and I had three of the most productive writing days I’ve had in months. Then last night I checked my FB feed for a few minutes to see what I missed..

Very first notification, some random crazy stranger had tagged me in a post screaming at me about Sad Puppies (which was like 6 years ago) and how I was a crybaby loser, and something about QAnon(?). Beats me. I just instablocked and kept scrolling.

There were probably a bunch of other random assholes tagging me to scream at me (there always are) but I didn’t scroll through the notifications far enough to tell. (random nobodies always feel the need to “call me out” for some inexplicable reason, and I’m like dude, George Martin at the height of his fame “called me out” for 40,000 words of sanctimonious blog posts and it didn’t do shit. Who are you?)

So then I scrolled through my feed. There was lots and lots of links to Proper Media and gloating and virtue signaling about the end of our “national nightmare” by total strangers which I’m being shown for some baffling reason. Then there were posts by my actual friends, only anything they said which deviated from leftist orthodoxy usually had comments from angry self-righteous types trying to shame/browbeat/gaslight them into compliance.

And then the last post I read? Some local dude I friended years ago for reasons I can’t even remember posted a giant screed about how he was butt hurt and outraged because he walked into a blue collar automotive business, and some of the employees weren’t wearing masks. (GASP!) So he did his business in abject terror of looming death (he’s around my age) and immediately afterwards reported the business to their corporate headquarters and the state health department so those evil murderous (probably scraping by on just over minimum wage) employees could get fired and their (probably struggling) franchise owner could get fined into bankruptcy. Then all the comments were people telling this hero how stunning and brave he was.

At that point I closed the page, assured I was making the right call. Any loss of sales I get from no longer participating in that cesspool will more than be made up for by improvements to my mood. If leaving Facebook means that I’m going to be in a “right wing echo chamber” (as I’m continually warned by my co-dependent friends who have become accustomed to the endless abuse masquerading as “dialog”) so be it. That sounds splendid. 😀

I’m participating in this book giveaway with seven other authors. The winners get signed copies of all of our books. I’ll be giving out 5 copies of Gunrunner signed by me and John Brown.

http://davidjohnbutler.com/giveaways/seven-authors-five-books-january-2021-giveaway/

Even if you don’t win, you can still get signed copies from none other than Uncle Hugo’s! Like a phoenix that rises from the ashes, you just can’t keep a good bookstore down. Uncle Hugos is selling autographed copies of Destroyer of Worlds and Gunrunner (preorder now, available February) I signed a bunch of stickers for them to put into the front of the books. I’ve got a package of them here on my desk already signed by my coauthor John Brown to send off.

http://www.unclehugo.com/prod/ah-correia-larry.php

I wrote this on Facebook this morning.

Somebody shared my post about big tech censorship yesterday and in his comments some other guy was barking about how “you don’t get off that easy” and that I can’t just recognize problems but I also have to supply solutions. Then the poster who shared it tagged me to answer. (I get shared thousands of times so please don’t do that) but my response got me thinking, and it’s not just related to our current topic either. If you still think this is all about Trump, you are a fool.

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Nope. Don’t tag me. I get an endless time suck random moron parade on my own page as it is.

Anyways, it doesn’t matter because that line of thought is a dishonest derailment trap, where if someone notes a problem, the first step is always to speak about the topic. Except to the disingenuous that is insufficient, and talking about the existence of a problem is invalid unless you also provide a solution to said problem. It is just designed to shame/silence opposition, because nobody has all the solutions fully formed when they first note complex issues. It’s the very act of discussion which they are trying to shut down that usually postulates solutions.

Which is another example of why the left only wants the right to be able to discuss issues in spaces they can control or manipulate.

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That last sentence is key.

For all of history when people have a problem they have been able to talk about it and hash it out. Solutions to complex problems don’t spring fully formed into existence the instant you note the problem. You get ideas from others. Their perspectives help you better articulate the issue and recognize consequences you didn’t expect.

Lawyers know law, engineers know engineering, artists know art, so on. So when there is a big problem that spreads across multiple fields, of course you need to talk it over with people who know those areas, because they know things you don’t. Being smart in one area doesn’t automatically make you an expert in others. We all need help. Big problems require discussion and brainstorming. Even if it isn’t effective, it’s still useful for the clever people who can make solutions to be able to listen to what the regular populace thinks and feels so that they can get the scope and understand how the problem hurts the public.

In the old days these conversations happened at churches, taverns, colleges, that kind of thing. All the famous places where big solutions to big problems were hashed out have a historical marker on them today. For us, those things are now illegal or stifled and we get the internet.

So of course the people who don’t see the problems as problems—or sometimes they are the problem—are trying to stop the rest of us from discussing the problems or they are trying to control where and how the conversations happen. Since they benefit from the problem, they will squash or sabotage people talking about solutions. It is in their best interests to do so, and when you give a bully a stick, they will beat you with it.

The topic of the current problem isn’t the important thing. This is our public square now whether we like it or not. We have foolishly abdicated the public square and now we are paying the price. Of course they can’t just let people they don’t like converse. That’s dangerous to their positions.

So when information they don’t like appears, they hide it. If they can’t hide it, they “fact check” it, and often that’s just a headline screaming false followed by an article full of straw grasping excuses they know most people won’t read. The goal is to shut you up or discredit you.

In the old days, at your pub or church, your drinking buddies or co-religionists probably shared your concerns and faced the same problems. So at least you were working toward a common goal. But now, big tech doesn’t want that. They don’t like groups or forums that don’t share their orthodoxy. They want/need to keep you here, and they need strangers to constantly kick in the doors and blunder in to tell you that you are stupid or crazy, that way we waste time arguing with them. It used to be a village had one idiot. When we talk now we get to deal with a thousand villages worth of idiot.

Of the many things booted or banned this week, one that I found interesting was the email newsletter of a group of former Democrats who have left that party. As far as I am aware not a single member was involved in the event at the Capitol and every member of their leadership condemned it. Yet their private email correspondence was shut down.

Why? I’m sure some bullshit justification will be offered, but really it is because they don’t want you talking somewhere you can’t be browbeaten and shamed back into compliance. Go somewhere else? Make your own thing? So that they can shut that down too?

Most of us who stay here do it because this is where we built an audience/community before the bait and switch. We feel stuck, and thus, we are part of the problem. I personally, am part of the problem. I stay here making content they profit off of, because this is where I’ve got the audience. I’ve been trying to move my audience elsewhere… only to discover that the company that runs my blog server and the company that processes my mailing list are willing to engage in the exact same behavior.

The arguments that this foolishness is to stop the incitement of violence is asinine, when we have literally thousands of examples of worse on these pages that aren’t being removed from app stores. The employees of this page routinely suffer from PTSD from the sick shit they see. The TOS is unevenly applied, so that the left gets a pass on actively coordinating looting and arson while guys like me routinely catch bans for asinine and silly reasons. Twitter bans Republicans, but is okay with literal foreign terrorist organizations and communist propaganda about how the genocide they are currently committing is really a nice thing.

Rules selectively applied are not rules at all. They are a shield for their cronies and a club against their enemies.

But that is where we are.

What do we do now? I don’t know. Try to figure it out… as long as they’ll let us.

I posted this on Facebook yesterday:

I said I was going to try to avoid the internet, and anybody wake me if something asinine happens… 48 hours later three giant mega-corporations colluded to crush a little uppity company for not bowing to leftist orthodoxy.

If you conservatives don’t like it here, go start your own place!

Okay.

NOT LIKE THAT!

(Wow. I’m sensing a pattern here)

Now comes the part where leftists suddenly love free enterprise and companies being able to do whatever they want… Okay, can all the small businesses open? Nope. Only companies that benefit leftist orthodoxy get to do what they want, and if you disagree with this double standard, obviously you hate–the leftist has to look at the printed word and try to sound it out–cap e tall ism?

Listening to lefties explaining capitalist philosophy is a lot like listening to militant atheists explaining what your religious beliefs are.

In principle I’m usually in favor of letting businesses do whatever they want. You know what else I’m usually against in principle? Bombing Japan. Yet strangely, after Pearl Harbor, circumstances changed, and things which were previously disagreeable become necessary. Go figure.

So basically, if Home Depot and a cabal of every building supply store in the country wants to ban an entire class of citizens, that’s fine, just grow your own trees, cut them down, and shape them into lumber yourself. Oh… except once you’ve put in the labor and grown the trees, then the saw companies say no chainsaws for you either. I guess you should just build your own chainsaws from scratch.

It’s okay though. All those companies are allied with the political party that hates you and wants to see your kind utterly eradicated from society, because you are bad people who deserve it. And most of the “leadership” on our side says this is fine, and it’s more important to be polite and play by rules the other side forsook a long time ago. When they get around to throwing dissidents into gulags, I’m sure guys like Mitt Romney will still be chiding us for using impolite swear words during our executions.

And this whole thing is a stupid play on the left’s part anyway. (I will admit to some schadenfreude, seeing thousands of pissed off republicans using a quote from lefty hippy George Martin about how ripping a man’s tongue out shows you fear what he has to say).

A giant swath of America already knows Big Tech is biased and full of shit. We all know that they lie and manipulate us constantly. It’s easy to spot because they are so damned bad at it. Even the people who pretend that Big Tech isn’t biased bullshit know that it is, they just lie and pretend to like it because they are shortsighted and think the lies currently benefit their team. Then all of us put up with it because it has basically become the public square (oh, and the government’s closed all the places human beings would actually talk to each other).

So when Big Tech all teams up to crush some little company, it’s going to make more people interested in the little company. Which is ass backwards for Big Tech, because if they’d just left the little oddball alone, it would probably end up wallowing in obscurity like most social media start ups without a critical mass of users. A few weeks ago I saw people saying “lol I don’t want to go to some stupid right wing echo chamber” and now the SAME people are like “omg we have to download the app before Big Tech takes it down” and sharing pics about how to change your settings to keep Apple from deleting it off your phone. Because nothing makes a real American want to do something more than a bunch of scolds telling them they can’t.

Personally, I registered on there as a fallback and I think I’ve posted like twice. But oh, NOW I’m invested.

So it’s stupid business, but there is much worse coming. So much worse, that these idiots can’t even sorta comprehend because they are totally out of touch with most of the country, and their view of us is a laughable caricature.

When tens of millions of people are feeling fucked over and that the system is rigged against them, and the media who are assuring them that everything is in fine working order are the same untrustworthy media who’ve been caught lying to them about literally everything else daily for years, now feel like their voices are being squashed by the same cabal of mega companies that have been lying and manipulating all the information we are allowed to see for years… and an increasing number of these usually calm and responsible, but now angry and disenfranchised people (who are also the ones who make society work and keep the lights on) are starting to think that lefty style stupid political violence might be the only way to be heard… so go ahead and kick them while they are down.

I’m sure that will work out splendidly, with absolutely no long term negative consequences.

And now I’m going to get off the internet again until the next crisis. Honestly, debating with repetitive idiots is the time suck part. So I’m just gonna share my take and then walk away… until they ban me for bad think again, obviously.

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I posted that yesterday. I really am trying to avoid the internet because responding to the inevitable NPC parade is a time suck of stupidity. Randos just keep on appearing, trying to shame you into compliance with their boring, repetitive, inane narrative talking points (which you’ve probably already rebutted earlier). However, I’m also too opinionated to not say what I think, so I’m just going to drop my take, and then mostly ignore the comments. If there is some entertainment value and a sufficient audience I’ll engage idiots, but for anybody who is just egregiously stupid, I’m going to be a lot faster on the block button. Life is too short to listen to the same idiot gotchas over and over again.

Like I skimmed the comments to this post yesterday, and it was as expected. HUR DUR YOU SAID NO BAKE CAKE! Oh yeah… That’s totally the same thing. Because remember that time the entire baking industry colluded to deny bread to all gay people, and when the free market responded and somebody opened an LGBT bakery the powerful oven industry stepped in to shut them down… You fucking dopes.

Somebody else asked if I thought all these megacorps who are in a symbiotic relationship with the DNC destroying one little social media page was really going to push people further to the edge. That’s SO SILLY, CORREIA (insert vapid gas lighting here). Except it isn’t just this one thing in a vacuum. It’s a bunch of things. It’s business magazines threatening any company who dares to hire evil bad republicans who worked for Literally Hitler with bad press forever. It is one act of stupid civil disobedience being Kristallnacht, while thousands of acts of violence, looting, arson, and murder are fine. It is where congress works being a sainted temple but where you work being expendable. Shut up. You’ve got insurance.

When you run a business you will get audited by the government. If something your company does raises a red flag with the government, they will audit you. If there is an anomaly in your government mandated paperwork you must legally submit, it can trigger an audit. And sometimes, various agencies will just randomly audit you to make sure you are obeying all their regulations.

The IRS audits everyone’s financials to make sure they are paying all their taxes. That’s federal, but you will also be audited by your state tax commission. If your state has sales tax you will eventually undergo a sales tax audit.

If you have employees you will get random audits to make sure your EEOC paperwork is in order, and you can have ICE audits to make sure all your employees are citizens or have their immigration paperwork in order.

Your workplace will eventually be audited by OSHA to make sure it is compliant with health and safety regulations. If you process food products, you will be audited by the USDA inspectors. They even have people to check your dairy cows.

If you own a restaurant you’ve surely met your state Health Inspectors many times. Are you building a house? That’s getting inspected by a building inspector to make sure it is up to code.

If you are involved in military contracting you will be audited by the DCAA. Every single invoice, every part, and every single billable hour had better match what you reported to the government. (and trust me, this one is basically a colonoscopy).

If you are part of any small business programs you will be audited by the SBA. If you sell or manufacture firearms you will be audited by the BATFE. In preparing this post I did a quick search for government auditor positions, and there were jobs for agencies I’d never even heard of before.

In between all of these various government audits, companies employ internal auditors to continually check all their systems to make sure they are in compliance, and then they bring in outside 3rd party CPA firms to test them as well, all to get ready and fix any potential problems before the various government auditors show up. Because if the government catches you doing something wrong they can fine you, shut you down, or even throw you in jail.

Every government department has auditors to check on every single entity under their purview. Every single government program that does business with the private sector has auditors to check those businesses for compliance. Every single state and city that gets money from some government department gets audited by that government department, and then those local governments check all the people and businesses they work with too. Every step of the way the government audits the people, and if you don’t obey their rules, you will be corrected, punished, fined, or imprisoned.

It is a great big audit jamboree of everybody checking everybody else’s work, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing, because it is always safe to assume in any given endeavor human beings make mistakes and sometimes they are dishonest.

Except for elections. Elections are special.

Apparently elections are a sainted process, and people would never lie and cheat there, and the people over the controls would never obfuscate and cover their asses if their controls were insufficient. That only happens in literally every other industry on Earth… but not in elections. They are different.

Because the government gets to audit the people, but the people don’t get to audit the government. Nope. At best we get recounts, where we simply count the fraudulent data twice. And if you don’t like it, shut up.

If your company has glaring statistical anomalies that all benefit the same party, or there were tips saying you’d violated some regulation, government auditors would perform an audit on you. You could be innocent, and there could be a perfectly rational explanation for those flags. But that doesn’t matter, a full audit would still be performed, because the government would make sure you hadn’t wronged it.

But that’s a one way street. If the people feel they have been wrong in an election, no audits are performed. Sure, you might get a cursory spot check here or there, but the idea of having outside auditors come in and give them access to the data to check to make sure it is valid? (like is required in every other thing in the world) That’s crazy!

No. Checking an election consists of the system asking the system if the system is okay and the system declaring the system is fine. Then they call that an “audit” and you should just suck it up. In elections you can just make up whatever excuse you want to explain the flags, and that’s cool. If anyone questions this, they obviously hate democracy.

And even if you’re like me, and you’ve got a professional background of going through many different kinds of audits from various federal and state agencies, if you think the election result should be audited with the same level of scrutiny the government would apply to any of our businesses or personal financials, you are a terrible conspiracy theorist, and should be shamed into silence. Now enjoy these “fact checks” written by journalism majors who can’t balance their checkbooks.

I’m kind of bummed that I got that accounting degree, and then spent all those years being audited in various industries, when all I had to do is declare “I checked myself and everything is fine here” and that’s sufficient.

Now watch. As you share this a horde of gas lighting morons will arrive on your page to shame you into silence. We already know what they’ll say. They’ll cite court cases being tossed, even though most of those were on standing or legal procedures, not fraud. Most of the fraud stuff has never been presented in court, and even if it did, it was compiled by outsiders using data available to the public, not real auditors with access to source data, which is what is necessary in order to prove fraud. Or they’ll cite some of the weak sauce “audits” which have happened around the country, even though at best those are spot checks (sometimes in the wrong spot!) not audits, and they were conducted by the same people who probably fucked it up to begin with. Don’t worry. None of them will read this far. Just watch.

So in conclusion, the government loves auditing everything the people do because we are incompetent, untrustworthy, cheaters. But if the people want to audit election results, we are terrible bad conspiracy theorists who need to be shamed into silence. Them auditing us is good and necessary. Us auditing them is silly foolishness.

I’m glad we got that cleared up.