Here the free spirit of mankind, at length,
William Cullen Bryant, The Ages, XXXIII.
Throws its last fetters off; and who shall place
A limit to the giant’s unchained strength,
Or curb his swiftness in the forward race?
“Do not close your Facebook or Twitter accounts,” wrote Michael Rectenwald a few days ago.
But I already closed my Twitter!
“Do not give up the geography you have and the connections you’ve made within those spaces. Instead, subvert from within.”
Still, I never liked Twitter. It seems a poisonous atmosphere of too much snark, virtue signaling, mobbing, and worse.
“As of now, there are no alternatives. Parler will be shut down by Amazon within hours. It will also be shut out of Apple and Android vis-a-vis Apple Store and Google Play.”
I hopped on Parler, when it got attacked. With the outages, etc., it is impossible to use.
“Gab is a digital silo or ghetto that contains and isolates deviationism.”
And former leftist professor Rectenwald — author of the books Springtime for Snowflakes, The Google Archipelago, and Beyond Woke, as well as a novel, Thought Criminal — means “deviationism” in an entirely good way.
“MeWe has already succumbed to the oligarchical censors,” he informs.
“Instead, keep the beach heads that we have and spread out. Don’t give up the connections. We must retain the network of thought deviationism . . . . Read this article and you’ll understand why it’s not as simple as you think,” linking to a Daniel Greenfield essay on Frontpage, “Parler and the Problem of Escaping Internet Censorship” (January 8, 2021).
The problem is oligopoly, argues Greenfield, since five big corporations “control the mobile ecosystem and can shut down an app like Parler anytime they please. . . . an increasingly small interconnected network of companies . . . can act in concert to suppress anyone or anything they don’t like.”
And what role does the federal government play? It applies pressure by threats at the top end (Nancy Pelosi, et al.) and who-knows-what at the Deep End (the CIA and other intel agencies, which have working arrangements with all major tech companies, including Apple).
All the more reason for you to (ahem) SUBSCRIBE for email service on ThisIsCommonSense.org, if you haven’t already. Email is harder to control.
And we have a lot of work to do, to fight back.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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[K]eep the beach heads that we have and spread out. Don’t give up the connections. We must retain the network of thought deviationism. . . .
Michael Rectenwald, author of Beyond Woke and the novel Thought Criminal, on Facebook, January 10, 4:26 AM. See also “Our Info War.”
The tongue is the only tool that gets sharper with use.
Yes, you can make this stuff up.
But long before you could add your implausible idea to your farfetched script about the weird dystopian future or recent tyrannical past, some big-tech social-media company will have galumphingly implemented that notion.
Former Congressman Ron Paul said the following on Facebook, reprinting a column on his site:
“Last week’s massive social media purges — starting with President Trump’s permanent ban from Twitter and other outlets — were shocking and chilling, particularly to those of us who value free expression and the free exchange of ideas.
“The justifications given for the silencing of wide swaths of public opinion made no sense, and the process was anything but transparent. Nowhere in President Trump’s two ‘offending’ Tweets, for example, was a call for violence expressed explicitly or implicitly. It was a classic example of sentence first, verdict later.”
Then Facebook blocked Dr. Paul.
“With no explanation other than ‘repeatedly going against our community standards,’ Facebook has blocked me from managing my page,” he reported on Twitter, itself no sturdy redoubt. “Never have we received notice of violating community standards in the past and nowhere is the offending post identified.”
Can humongous corporations really jerk people around so dishonestly? Is it legal?
Paul further argued that “this assault on social media” is not merely “a liberal or Democrat attack on conservatives and Republicans.”
“As progressives like Glenn Greenwald have pointed out,” explains the doctor, “this is a wider assault on any opinion that veers from the acceptable parameters of the mainstream elite, which is made up of both Democrats and Republicans.”
The narrowing of opinion down to what elites find acceptable is one definition of fascism: a no-opposition-allowed corporatist state.
I’m not making this up.
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Those animals which are incapable of making binding agreements with one another not to inflict nor suffer harm are without either justice or injustice; and likewise for those peoples who either could not or would not form binding agreements not to inflict nor suffer harm.
On January 12, 1904, Henry Ford set a land-speed record of 91.37 mph on the frozen surface of Lake St. Clair in Michigan, driving a four-wheel vehicle, dubbed the “999,” with a wooden chassis but no body or hood. Ford’s record was broken within a month, but the publicity from Ford’s achievement was valuable to the auto pioneer, who had incorporated the Ford Motor Company the previous year.
Twitter, Facebook, Google, and Amazon are on a de-platforming binge.
The official rationale? Anyone “associated” with rioting must be expelled from virtual society.
Yet these social media outfits have hardly ousted endorsers of violence against innocents with anything like consistency. Iranian Boss-man Ali Khamenei still has a Twitter account. Socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Cortez, who has opined that some people “have no choice but to riot,” is still merrily blathering on Twitter.
The latest victim of Big Tech’s assault on speech is not an individual but a competing platform, Parler, whose support for free speech is its main selling point.
Apple has kicked Parler off its app store, and Parler got booted from the Google Play store, too.
Now Amazon, which provided storage for Parler, is kicking Parler off its servers with essentially zero notice because Amazon employees “were lobbying the company to disconnect Parler from AWS for hate speech,” which is like arguing that USPS or the Constitution must be shut down because it enables hate mail.
Apparently, once enemies of speech employed by a big-tech service provider scream “Deplatform so-and-so,” any erstwhile reservations of top management — Jeff Bezos, in this case — pop like a soap bubble under a hot iron.
Parler was one possible landing place for the President of the United States, booted from Twitter for allegedly inciting the capitol riot.* It now seems that Trump may find refuge at Gab.com, where his tweets expunged from Twitter have been republished.
But note: Gab has long been out in the wilderness, denied service on Google’s and Apple’s systems.
Folks who demand inclusion sure do practice exclusion well.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* Rush Limbaugh deactivated his Twitter account in protest of Twitter’s action. And I deactivated mine as well — something I meant to do when Twitter blocked the New York Post’s truthful reporting on Hunter Biden during the election.
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On January 9, 1788, Connecticut became the fifth state to be admitted to the United States under the new Constitution. Connecticut was one of the first nine states of the original union, under the Articles of Confederation, to accept the Constitution, and thus officially ratify it. All 13 original states had ratified that new compact, officially, by May 29, 1790. The first state to be added to the original 13 was Vermont, in 1791.
Most of us who have had decent parents would shrink from wishing that our father and mother had been somebody else whom we never knew; yet it is held no impiety, rather, a graceful mark of instruction, for a man to wail that he was not the son of another age and another nation, of which also he knows nothing except through the easy process of an imperfect imagination and a flattering fancy.
George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879).