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Posts Tagged → cancel

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.

 

President Trump, a black guy, a Hispanic guy, and a Jewish guy go into a bar

Two weeks ago, if someone had posted a “news” headline that involved President Trump, a black guy, a Hispanic guy, and a Jewish guy having dinner, it would have sounded like one of the old time ethnic jokes that were once so refreshingly popular among Americans of different ethnic backgrounds.

One of the old strengths of America back when it was America were both its diverse workers and their enjoyment at laughing at themselves and their own peculiar ethnic foibles. They did not take themselves so seriously that someone could not make fun of them, so long as they could give it right back in equal measure. This form of humor was a great cultural leveler and communal uniter of universal American identity among people from all over the world.

Well, this headline really did happen, and the real joke is what a ridiculous outcome it has spawned. It is the Russia collusion hoax, Alexander Vindman Ukraine call hoax, serial liar Adam Schiff hoax all rolled into one brief dinner.

Yes, it is true that President Trump recently had dinner at his Mar-A-Lago FBI resort and spa with entertainer Kanye West and some guy named Fuentes, who tagged along unannounced with West.  I still have not bothered to research this Fuentes (Nick Fuentes?) guy, but people in the mainstream media claim he is a “white supremacist,” while he replies that he is an American Christian, or a Christian American.

While I do not know Fuentes, I do know the mainstream media, and I know that they lie constantly, and so I am going to discount what they say about Fuentes. He is probably just a right wing guy who loves a constitutional America, and right there the mainstream media begin to boo and hiss. We will address Fuentes later, but for now, he is a tag-along uninvited dinner guest whom President Trump is too gracious to eject at his doorway, simply because he does not know the guy.

Let us get a couple life rules re-established here:

a) Americans of all backgrounds should be having dinner with each other and talking about whatever regularly, even if they disagree on some things or most things or all things. Talking, arguing, even…debating…are at the core of being an American. There are no sacred cows here. But somehow Americans have become allergic to debate. They would rather just push the little buttons on their smart phones and fire barrages of digital nuclear missiles at other people, which is weak bullshit. Talk it out, people, in person.

b) Americans should remember what it was like to have old friends drop by and bring along an uninvited cousin or buddy at dinner time. This is an American tradition as old as dirt, and yet, I don’t think Americans actually have dinner any more, certainly not together as a family around a table, and not at 6pm dinner time, and certainly not with unannounced guests and strangers. Nope, Americans are now too shielded from the outside world, and too busy looking inward and handward to have dinner or discourses in person any longer. Fakebook and Twitter and whatever else other vacuous social media nonsense has taken up all the space in our lives, including our family dinner time. For shame for shame for shame.

So, President Trump lives by the old American culture rules of having dinner with someone who asks to come over, and who then brings his awkward buddy along. Good for President Trump, a confident gentleman and a thinker. Just his willingness to have dinner with Kanye West reinvigorates my respect for my president, Donald J. Trump. Especially because West was in the process of being socially canceled, and President Trump could have easily just rejected him like the social plague he carried.

But again, President Trump is way too much of an awesome all-American guy to just reject people he has known for a long time, and especially someone who had supported him politically. Trump is no typical fair weather friend politician, and he let Kanye West in the door to have dinner, along with Kanye’s unknown pal.

So why is Kanye West suddenly now such a no-no canceled non-person, after being THE person who embodied modern American culture for so many years? Uh oh, yup, you know he did it: Kanye said BOO BOO WORDS! Yes, it is true, West was dumb enough…or vexed enough… to post publicly on social media his mixed admiration combined with envy and frustrated disbelief at the material success of so many American Jews…and a lot of frustration at the negative effect so many liberal American Jews seem to be having on everything around them, politics and culture.

Like serial rapist and big Democrat Party donor Harvey “Hollywood” Weinstein, Pedophile In Chief and big Democrat Party donor Jeffrey Epstein (who did not kill himself in jail), and crypto currency Ponzi scheme master and destroyer of Americans’ retirement accounts Huge Democrat Party Donor aka SBF Sam Bankman-Fried (yes his name really is Bankman, go ahead antisemites and rejoice along with the easily humored)…I am sure I have missed a few about whom Kanye is fretting.

Folks, we have to be able to have discussions about politics and culture again. Even about uncomfortable subjects, like why such a small minority of people fields so many wonderfully positive overachievers and so many recent evil supervillians like, oh yeah, Larry Fink at BlackRock. These discussions must happen in the open, around dinner tables, on back patios, at Mar-A-Lago, at hunting camp, among friends and political enemies, between cousins who disagree on politics and between neighbors who see life differently.

Because the alternative to transparent sunshine is that nasty things grow and fester in the dark. And yes, these nasty things are growing and festering. I am seeing it more and more. You cannot ignore it away, and you cannot wish it away, and you cannot cancel it away. The more you try these infantile efforts, the more it grows in the dark. Only sunshine will disinfect it.

The only people who want to socially cancel Kanye West and to illegitimately stigmatize President Trump for having dinner with West (and Fuentes) are people who want to control everything that you and I say and write and think and do, and how we live and what we drive and what is in our bank account and what we eat and what we read. These are not good people; they are bad people. Controlling people are always bad people.

It is a telling hypocrisy that these same people hating West and Trump never tried to cancel or stigmatize their evil messiah, Barak Hussein Obama, for being personally chummy with raving racists and Jew-haters Al Sharpton, Jeremiah Wright, and Louis Farrakhan. That is because they like what Obama says, and does. Trump is a savior of America and the West, while Obama is the evil angel destroyer of America and the free West.

As a result of this Kanye West-Fuentes BS, I now still and ever more strongly stand with my president, President Donald J. Trump. Not because I am blindly loyal to Trump, but simply because he is the only person who stands between a living Western Civilization and the whole thing going over the edge of oblivion, an edge on which we now precariously teeter.

The Kanye West thing is just another ridiculous distraction to what is really at stake.

And do you know who the Jewish guy was at their dinner? All of Trump’s Jewish family members, that’s who. They of his blood and who are always present in President Trump’s heart and mind, and whom he would never forget or sell out. They were at that table, too. Trump brought them to dinner, as well.

We are in a war for our civilization, people. Pick a side and stand firmly on it. I have carefully picked mine. It is the side of personal freedom and liberty, free markets, sunshine, family, open doors, friendship, and America.

And President Trump.

Evil angel Obama chumming it up with racist and Jew hater Louis Farrakhan in 2005. Why aren’t people stigmatizing or canceling Obama?