March 23rd, 2023
Blazing Saddles was a movie that still defies categorization. In 1974, movies in America were highly regulated, and there were all kinds of seemingly artificial limits placed on what you could and could not see, or say, for people of all kinds of age groups. OK, normal people recognize that foul language, violence, and nudity are not appropriate for young people, but the censors then went far beyond these basic limits.
Somehow, Blazing Saddles made all kinds of end-runs around the film censors, without showing any naked bodies or using four-letter words, while still carrying a very adult social theme. One word in particular that is used throughout the movie is “The N Word“, and it is used to great effect in stabbing racism against blacks straight in the eye. And that’s the beauty of good art. Left to function properly without censorship or outside meddling, good art maximally tells its story and makes its best point.
Blazing Saddles may be funny, but it also addressed racism straight on in a way that has never been done since. And it moved the discussion about race relations farther ahead than all of the serious blather about feewings ever could. You couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today, though, because of the censorship, and so you’d never benefit from its valuable message.
This subject of censorship and free speech has been brought to the fore by (among other direct assaults on free speech) recent revelations that PC Woke book publishers are going through existing books by Roald Dahl and other authors and actually, unbelievably, incredibly, re-writing them to fit today’s snowflake boo-boo word fearing man-child.
It seems that today’s censors and book burners are the same people who are publishing books, and they have taken it upon themselves to be like the scientifically illiterate church censors of old re-writing Galileo’s scientific theories. They are destroying important art in the name of protecting people. These same people today would never have allowed Blazing Saddles to be released, because of the “hurtful” boo boo words nonsense.
This is civilization-destroying stuff, because when the people who publish the books are also burning the original books and then re-writing the books, you really end up with, in effect, no books worthy of being called books. Real books of original creative content carry real messages and real information, real insights, not artificially dumbed-down, white washed, or filtered content that misses the entire purpose and point of the author’s original work.
Yesterday a man named Norman Steinberg died, at the age of 83. He was the humor-filled screenwriter for Blazing Saddles, among other funny and powerful message movies. I wonder if he died of old age or of a broken heart, because he surely must have been America’s last humorist. Today’s censors say that no one is allowed to say or depict certain things (except for pedophilia, or cross-dressing, or biologically impossible and socially implausible gay/trans/etc beings which all seems all the rage among the Left), because somewhere in the universe a person’s feewings will be hurt.
Today’s censors don’t mind hurting the feelings of religiously observant Christians, Muslims and Jews, the people who keep modern society functioning, but God help you if you hurt the feelings of some pathetic 20-year-old weenie college kid somewhere. Burn that book!
You couldn’t build America today with all of the outrageous and useless regulations (which I had a direct hand in when I worked at USEPA in Washington, DC) weighing down our nation, and you couldn’t film or write Blazing Saddles today, because of all of the censorious book-burning crap coming out of Hollywood and from the supposed caretakers and curators of American culture.
Rest in peace, Mr. Steinberg. Wherever you are now, I hope you have been able to travel across artificial boundaries and achieve your highest and best abilities and purpose. Lord knows, you couldn’t do any of that here on earth today.
Today’s cultural censors would never approve this silly poster because of the gun (“guns are bad”), the rope (supposed violence), the horse (supposed animal abuse) etc
February 8th, 2023
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.