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Posts Tagged → fakebook

Are you in a cattle chute or a professional funnel? Yes, you are

Because LinkedIn had driven me away years ago with their need to control everything I said about myself, I left and did not return until today. Not that I wanted to return to LinkedIn, but because the two people I was trying to reach for professional purposes left me, and their prospective audience, no other way to reach them. Their only presence on the Internet is through LinkedIn.

Turns out that even when I re-registered on LinkedIn, I still cannot reach the two people who advertise there, because they have no contact information published. Like no phone number, no website, no email, not even a FakeBook page listed. So I am left with the option of inviting them to connect to my LinkedIn page, or, for a fee, messaging them through LinkedIn. No other way to reach these people, because they do not have their own websites, and they do not advertise anywhere else on the Internet.

Because I value my privacy and I desire to keep my business work to myself, I decline to use the messaging functions on most social media companies, like LinkedIn. Myriad reports about social media companies’ staffers reading, manipulating, editing, acting on, and deleting people’s “private” messages indicate that using these functions comes with a high risk. You certainly don’t want to engage in anything personal through these messages that you would be embarrassed about in public. Because if a company employee feels like anonymously divulging your “secret” and “private” communications to the public, they can and will. Plenty of evidence of it.

So LinkedIn has these two people’s careers and livelihoods and even their personal lives by the throat, because they are in a cattle chute or a funnel. LinkedIn controls literally everything digital about them. And I imagine that many, if not most other LinkedIn users, are in the same boat.

The only way to actually benefit from using LinkedIn is if everyone literally buys into their whole package deal and submits to LinkedIn’s total control over your communications and networking. However, as we have seen in recent months, LinkedIn monitors every word its users say to one another, even in private messages, and some words (most of which are a mystery until a user steps on them and sets them off like the hidden land mine they are) are such huge no-no’s that people have had their LinkedIn account summarily suspended, indefinitely and without clear reason or evidence why.

And if your LinkedIn account is summarily suspended, and you have no other means of advertising yourself, no other way for people to find you and reach you, then you are basically canceled and do not exist. You literally are in virtual suspended animation. And now that there is cooperation or collusion between LinkedIn and other social media platforms, if you get suspended on one, you get suspended on the others. You can say just one “wrong” word on one social media platform and end up virtually unknown and unreachable on the Internet overnight. Your entire market presence is gone.

Something similar is afoot with Microsoft, where your laptop is no longer yours and yours alone. Now, unless you aggressively ward off all of their nonstop funneling and controlling efforts, you must sign in to your own computer through Microsoft. Microsoft controls your access to your own personally owned machine. It is a digital filter, a limitation, a brake, a collar, a control on how and when and under what terms you access your own laptop computer. And just because you said “No” to Microsoft’s cattle chute fifty times before does not mean that Microsoft won’t keep trying to funnel you into their control. The company will keep on trying to shunt you into their own login system so that they become the gatekeeper of your own personal computer that you paid for with your money. I myself do not need or want a gatekeeper over access to my work machine. That spooks me, because I need full control of my work and my digital life.

The gatekeeper function and corralling effect is a bad deal and I don’t accept it. I want full manual control over my computer and over my life. I do not understand how or why Americans allowed themselves to be corralled this way, their entire persona and professional presence centralized and controlled by someone else. Why they have allowed themselves to be put into a cattle chute or into a professional digital funnel, where the only way forward is the one given to you by some digital overlord in Silicon Valley, California. Usually that overlord is a twenty-something inexperienced kid with a computer chip in their hand and a hair trigger bad attitude chip on their shoulder.

What could possibly go wrong?

Oh, by the way, Steve Steen and Becky Geer, if either of you are interested in doing the OGM abstracting LinkedIn says you want to do, contact me. Right here.

 

ANTIFA’s Supreme Court Black Bloc

ANTIFA has a Supreme Court.

No, no, I am not talking about Facebook’s silly ‘court of appeals’ for users who have had their Fakebook pages locked or shut down for daring to share information damaging to liberal causes like Lyin’ Joe Biden’s sleepy campaign for president. Nor are we talking here about Twitter’s murky blackmail process for re-instating Twitter accounts that have been locked or shut down for posting information damaging to liberal causes, like Hunter Biden’s catastrophically illegal corruption. We are actually talking about the US Supreme Court.

Yes, folks, the violent domestic terrorist group ANTIFA pretty much owns the US Supreme Court, as evidenced by several decisions emitted by the Court over the past week. Yes, emitted, as in something that might emit from one’s bodily orifices, such is the worthlessness and a-legal constitution of these decisions.

The recent US Supreme Court decisions we are talking about here approved clear and obvious voting fraud in Pennsylvania and North Carolina, where true to form, the Democrat Party is busy changing the rules of the game in the middle of the game because it is looking more and more like the Democrat Party might not win the game according to the rules set down when the game (the election) began. Now, ballots filed long after Election Day and even with the wrong signature and with even other otherwise disqualifying flaws must be counted, according to a majority of the US Supreme Court.

And who is this majority on the US Supreme Court that is allowing America to be held hostage to purposefully delayed voting results so that illegal ballot harvesters can run around inventing enough fake ballots to finally declare Joe Biden the winner? Well, it is no surprise that leftists Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer are in this majority. These three Marxist political activists vote together as an unbreakable bloc, and in their somber, black judicial robes they are the Court’s Black Bloc. They never, ever cross over to join the conservatives/ originalists/ textualists on the Court on any decision. Nope, the US Supreme Court’s Democrat Party appointees are reliable, consistent political activists, running interference for the Democrat Party; they are not jurists. But with fellow Black Bloc Justice Ginsburg now thankfully consigned to the dustbin of history, it would take one or two other Justices to join the Marxist Black Bloc to carry a decision over the goal line.

So who has joined the US Supreme Court’s Black Bloc? Unsurprisingly, it is Justice Roberts, whose long commitment to undermining America from inside at every possible turn is evidenced by his many crucial policy decisions, like approving ObamaCare, and not hearing Second Amendment civil rights cases where politically activist lower courts have de facto overturned the Supreme Court’s own Heller decision. Now, Roberts is openly siding with the Democrat Party’s widespread voter fraud, allowing last-second changes in battleground states that could easily change the outcome of the entire election. Roberts does this knowing full well that none of these changes pass the sniff test let alone any legal test or any nationwide consistency test, which is what the Court usually applies.

Last night, Justice Kavanaugh joined the Court’s Black Bloc, not on political policy grounds or on blatant political ‘we-must-save-Joe-Biden’ grounds, like the others, but on the principle that he had to demonstrate extreme fealty to localism and state law, and not allow the federal Court to ‘interfere’ with state laws. Despite the fact that North Carolina is not having a state election, but is participating in a national election for the presidency, a federal issue. A subject the US Supreme Court is uniquely, solely designed to address.

Kavanaugh must be trying to prove his federal aloofness and purity by pretending to live on Mars. He must still be reeling from the brutal and politically motivated mauling at his confirmation hearings.

Putting this situation in the local Central Pennsylvania vernacular for addressing unbelievably foolish outcomes, I shit you not. There is simply no good reason for allowing voting to continue past Election Day. Nor is there any good reason for allowing obviously fake ballots to be counted as actual votes. Every honest American voter should oppose seeing their sacred vote be diluted.

The long and short of these Black Bloc decisions is they benefit ANTIFA, who will be allowed to violently run amok in your neighborhood while America is artificially paralyzed after Election Day, the usual voting results being artificially delayed while we all wait for known fake ballots to be counted as real votes.

And so ANTIFA has their own Black Bloc on the US Supreme Court – Kagan, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Roberts, and as long as this group is the dominant force on the Court, ANTIFA owns America’s streets and the US Supreme Court.

Time to regulate the social media utilities

Social media companies like FakeBook, Twitter, Google, InstaGram, etc. have become the modern day information equivalents of the first power and public service utilities.

Instead of water molecules, gas, sewer, or electrons (electricity) entering and exiting your home to keep your life running, today’s digital social media companies transmit photons and ones and zeros to your laptop and handheld device. The net result for the end user is that all these things are all one and the same utility service, and they serve the same function.

Just like the power company, say PPL, and the gas company, and the water company cannot discriminate against users of their services, so the same applies to the digital information companies above.

For example, you do not come home at night, flick the light switch on your wall, and remain in darkness because you got a call earlier in the day from PPL saying “Sorry, Jane, we have turned off your electricity, because we have determined that your political views are contrary to our arbitrary and vague terms of service and our company’s values.”

PPL and other utilities must provide their services and products equally to all who pay for them.

It is time to hold digital utility service providers to the same exact standard. No discrimination against users.

Presently, Google so obviously fakes its search results to favor political candidates and campaigns the owners of Google favor. Google’s politicization of search results on every subject and person is egregious.

Like Google, FakeBook also obviously discriminates against conservatives, engaging in shadowbanning and hiding messages its liberal owners do not want the public to see. Worse, Fakebook has made a lucrative business charging its users for advertising, but the person who pays for that service never knows just how far their investment went, because FakeBook deliberately withholds information about its actual efforts.  It is a blind item, exactly the opposite of what it should be: Open and transparent.

Twitter’s legendary war against non-liberals is the most public form of censorship. As illiberal as this censorship is, liberals still cheer.

These companies and the many other liberal book-burners in the digital media business have declared war on ideas and people they simply disagree with. It is time to end this assault on the First Amendment rights of American citizens who have entrusted these companies to abide by universal free speech standards.

It is time to regulate these companies like the public utilities they have become, to prevent them from illegally discriminating against people who merely disagree with their owners.

Treat us all the same legally.

Speaking of campaign contributions

Is anyone tallying the in-kind political campaign contributions donated by the US media, Google, FakeBook, Twitter, and the rest of Silicon Valley to one particular political party?

The hoopla surrounding the pairing of FakeBook user data with Cambridge Analytica sounds like someone committed a crime. But that is only because conservatives did it, and they actually paid money for it. As opposed to Google and FakeBook, which practically lived full-time at the Obama White House.

For free. As in they donated their private user data to one political party for free. Without disclosure, without attribution.

Google and FakeBook in particular have been working hand-in-glove with just one political party, and especially with the past Obama administration, giving away user data for free, and artificially suppressing users opposed to the Obama revolution.

Recall how typing into the Google search engine variations of “Hillary Clinton crime criminal” would generate ridiculous results, like “Hillary Clinton’s position on crime control” complete with a smiling glamor shot of Hillary Clinton. Nowhere in Google’s search results would be anything about how Hillary Clinton was an actual criminal, or a suspected criminal who had been and was being criminally investigated.

That is worth money.

And how about that September 2016 Barron’s Weekly, with the grinning glamor photo of Hillary Clinton under the headline “Time for President Hillary?”

This kind of free promotional advertising is worth huge bucks.

And the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times were all proud to openly promote Clinton and attack Republicans. Not just in their editorial pages, but in their “news.” Their “news” reporting became wall-to-wall political advertising and attacks.

The US media has been an obvious mouthpiece for this one political party and its candidates, cheering them on and covering up for them. Big bucks, folks, huge contributions.

What’s that you say, what about Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity?

Folks, if the US media just did their jobs as reporters – facts instead of activism – there would be no demand for Limbaugh or Fox News or Breitbart. Only because the media is a wholly owned subsidiary of one political party is there a demand for other views to be aired. And that is going to happen somewhere.

God forbid there are literally a handful of news outlets not controlled by the establishment media and their political party!

So what is the value of all this collusion between Google, and FakeBook, and Twitter? All the user data they gleefully provided to the Obama White House and the 2012 Obama campaign? You know, the private user data that the Obama campaign gloated about in public.

Someone needs to get to the bottom of this. I’d just ballpark the in-kind contribution value at about a billion dollars. At least. And none of it was officially disclosed on campaign disclosure documents.

All illegal behavior and political contributions, folks. A lot of fines, and maybe jail time for people. But because the chosen side did it, it’s fine, apparently. Well, not to me, it isn’t, despite the mainstream media’s unwillingness to report it.

Get a special investigator and prosecutor on this right away. Hold these law-breakers accountable. Because we all really care about upholding the law, right?

I am crying over spilt milk

Whether FakeBook causes, accelerates, or encourages the split-up of long standing friendships and friendly acquaintance-type relationships is a subject of endless discussion.

People who for many years, even decades, shared affection for and cheerful enjoyment of one another’s company and personality are now not talking, communicating, or sharing. Instead, one party has abruptly broken off entirely, leaving the other party bemused, hurt, and or frustrated. The drama can be plain silly, because we are talking about adults here who post histrionic things like “If you voted for ________, then just un-friend me, now, please, I beg of you.”

Or it can be more subtle, with people hitting the “ignore” button on a relationship, pretty much tossing the friendship away without the pain of actually breaking off.

This one-sided dynamic plays out most visibly on FakeBook because “likes,” comments, and the number of “friends” are actual numeric measures of a relationship’s quality. And when you start seeing a numeric down-trend in one area, you often see the actual end coming quicker and quicker.

And what is the primary cause of these fractured friendships?

Why political differences, naturally.

Do you recall the poll done about eight or ten months ago (Pew, Gallup? I don’t recall which firm did it, but it was a real polling firm and the results are believable), which showed 39% of self-identified liberals can and will live with a conservative, versus nearly double that for conservatives willing to live with liberals?

That poll showed what many of us have observed personally for some time, and increasingly over the past year: Political correctness has destroyed liberals’ ability to live up to the qualities they claim ownership of, like being tolerant, open-minded, and accepting of differences.

PC has become so intense that now simply belonging to the wrong political party, driving the wrong vehicle, or EVEN HAVING THE WRONG SKIN COLOR is grounds for heaps of burning hatred and criticism. Nothing about this behavior is open-minded. It is not tolerant. And watching people walk around with a burden of hate for all kinds of classes of people makes them look and feel a lot like the other side, the KKK or neo-Nazi side, who are ALSO intolerant and violently hateful.

While the few decades-long friends I and others I know have lost through FakeBook were not violent people, their visceral hatred still burned bright.

Where someone’s burning hate becomes physical violence is a subject for philosophy books, because gut instinct tells you that one naturally follows the other. Seemingly uncharacteristic behavior for the loving and gentle relationship we had enjoyed lo these many years, even decades, suddenly there was the hatred, the intolerance, the violent words, and then the break.

Not one conservative I know of has broken off with the liberals in their lives (because they are liberals), via FakeBook or any other way, but the number of liberals who have broken off with people who are not liberals is legion and legendary.

These liberals’ behavior is the very definition of intolerance.

Do you ever wonder why there is no ‘world peace’?

I do wonder now, and I always have wondered since I was a kid, when the Vietnam War was going strong.

Well, part of the answer to why there is no world peace is that those people who most assiduously claim ownership of being peaceful are those who in personal practice are the least peaceful.

During the Vietnam War, being pro-peace meant being against American war-making in Asia; but those same anti-war people were not against Asians making war against other Asians, or against America. So they were not really, truly pro peace. They were simply anti-America, despite living in and enjoying America.

One test of being peaceful is your ability and willingness to accept differences between one’s self and other people without getting angry, hateful, judgmental, accusatory, or violent. When that inability to accept others turns to intolerance, why then…there is an absence of peace. And you are not a peaceful person. And it is self-evident to those around you.

And no, demanding that people adopt your way of thinking is not being tolerant. Humans have been doing things a few certain ways for thousands of years, and if you want to deviate from that, then asking for tolerance is fair. Demanding acceptance, acquiescence etc at the cost of breaking off (a form of coercion and violence) is unreasonable.

I am crying over all this spilt milk, because to not cry is to lie to myself, and to make pretend that certain unhealthy dynamics are not happening.

I am sad at the lost friendships, whether mine or those of friends of mine, for sure. I am also sad about an America that has everything, certainly more than any other country, and yet is being torn apart by violence and hate in the name of “peace” and “tolerance.”

The relationships between fellow Americans are being torn apart, over what?

This is spilt milk, and I prefer to cry over this now and have a positive, healing, peaceful conversation with someone about this, rather than later cry over something else being spilt as a result of no attempts at healing having been made and the logical outcome of hate and intolerance come to fruition.

Is censorship American?

Wasn’t calling someone a “censor” one of the worst things you could do, way back when?

After all, the First Amendment to the US Constitution prohibits infringements of free speech, guaranteeing to all citizens the right to speak our minds.

Enter the mainstream media, captured by one political party since the 1960s and now an unabashed arm of that single political party.

For so long has the mainstream media been an integral part of just one political party and its agenda, an orthodox culture has developed around it.

Deviation from the script, the narrative, the talking points of that orthodoxy and media results in huge amounts of flame, vituperation, scalding attacks. Even worse, two generations of Americans have not been taught critical thinking skills. Oh, that narrative is drilled into their heads by the media, Hollywood, their high school teachers and college lecturers. But the ability to discern correct from incorrect, false from true, accurate from inaccurate is a skill that has been purposefully cast aside.

Now that the media has been thwarted and bypassed by alternative modes of communication, the ultimate result being the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, a new effort is under way to reestablish control over the information flow. Information must flow with the orthodoxy, the narrative, the agenda. So when new voices, critical thinking voices, bubble up from the huddled masses and serfs below, the media strikes back.

“Fake news,” is what the media calls irony, sarcasm, and also honest, factual reporting that does not fit with the media’s established agenda. Now FakeBook is working hard with a cadre of “fact checkers” funded by billionaire anti-American activist George Soros and staffed by hardened politicos, to censor news and information that does not fit the agenda.

Even the ACLU has embraced this move to shape public opinion. Once upon a time, the ACLU was against censorship, but now that power and control might be lost to the exercise of free speech, even that once vaunted group has thrown in with the censors. We cannot have those puny serfs making up their own informed minds!

Is it American to be a censor, to censor what people can read, or to block or shape what information Americans can obtain? I don’t think so. I believe it is fundamentally un-American. The great irony of all this is that the LA Times, the Washington Post, New York Times, NBC, CBS, BBC, NPR et al all routinely publish news and information that can only be called fake. This information is grossly inaccurate and at best a misrepresentation of some fact the media do not like.

Who would have thought that in 2017, the protected establishment media would be seeking ways to silence alternative sources of information, so that they can maintain their hegemony over the flow of information, ideas, and public opinion?

Among some Americans today, being a censor is the proudest thing they can be, and that is sad. How do we get our nation back?