Posted on 04/27/2021 9:43:23 AM PDT by MtnClimber
once upon a time, on an internet not so very far away, there was a cat who met a bluebird. the cat had opinions and ideas. the bluebird had a forum and a promise to “stand for freedom, empower dialogue, and speak the truth to power.” the cat believed the bluebird and set about joining this community. he made many friends and had many adventures. by and by, the cat grew to some small prominence and was friend to pundits and politicians, researchers and soul searchers, nobel laureates and nattering noobs. but twitter was not an honest bird, and one day, without excuse or apologia, the abusive avian banished the cat from all the realm. many others who failed to suit the narrative of the bullying bluebird were treated likewise. and so began the madness of king jack…
a good fairy tale has a moral, and the moral of this sad and all too common parable is this: it is easy to become that which you purport to hate. those who conquer kingdoms by “speaking the truth to power” are, once enthroned, often those least likely to allow truth to be spoken to (or even nearby to) them. after all, who better to understand the dangers posed to rulers by such truths than those who just used them to supplant the last sovereign? put a shiny hat upon a man’s head and watch as he becomes the very king he once condemned: from @jack to @jackboots in one business cycle. it’s just human nature. you cannot fix it. you cannot get smarter or more noble guys next time. there is nothing new under the sun.
how we respond to this new king and his transformation into the keeper of the very system he once knew to be the problem is going to matter greatly. many conservatives and even self-described libertarians are now calling for government intervention to ensure 1st-amendment-style access to this modern version of the public square and to eliminate censorship of viewpoints within it. this has greatly intensified after what happened to parler, a competing service to twitter that was gang-tackled off the internet through a savage collusion of apple, google, amazon, and others. they barred parler from app stores, kicked them off the AWS servers with one day of notice, and demanded that service providers, from email services to lawyers, drop them or get blacklisted. it was a concerted attack to prevent political and personal expression and keep “the conversation” within the confines of spaces the reigning technocracy can moderate and shape. the recent “cancelling of australia” by facebook over a spat about payments to media sites is likely to blow this issue into the stratosphere.
this newly omnipotent and assertive technocracy, it is argued, proves that the playing field is not level, fair, nor even reasonable. it’s a rigged game, and the notion of “go build your own” or “this is not a monopoly” is a fantasy. even governments must kiss the ring (though given newfound congressional interest in censoring conservative media, it appears they too would like to climb into this ring). While I can certainly see how people have arrived at this viewpoint, it is one with which I must respectfully disagree. to my mind, it has proven the precise opposite: it has shown just how badly we need to build our own. it just shows that we tried to build it incorrectly. there is an old adage in nautical construction: “if a wave tears a piece off your boat, that piece should not have been there.” so, what did the ocean just teach us about designing our future community?
Just wait for all the leftist wailing when the blue bird gets cancelled by the cat site.
“Just wait for all the leftist wailing when the blue bird gets cancelled by the cat site.”
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My beloved husband always wants/wanted (?) Tweety to get EATEN.
lol
I still have twitter and facebook accounts. I’ve just unfriended everyone and no longer use either.I have facebook because it’s a great photo sharing site now. When I share my photos here it is from there. I’m using their storage for free. :)
Was this written by ee Cummings?
I have no “friends” and no one “likes” me. Zero (0).
Same here. I did keep one friend: my wife. I also made my account public so anyone I unfriended can still go there and see my “to whom it may concern” final post about it not being personal.
Maybe this writer is triggered by the use of CAPS at the beginning of a sentence.
Whoever it is, they love to ramble in the minutiae.
Sort of like Proust.
“Whoever it is, they love to ramble in the minutiae.”
I noticed that as well.
Facebook is data mining your photos.
I don’t care.
My first thought too.
It looks like e. e. cummings wrote this.
I think this is because cats don't have opposable thumbs. I looked it up and verified it is true. That makes it very difficult to hit the shift key and type at the same time. Thus all lower case.
Fair enough. But what’s e. e. cummings’s excuse?
That would have been archy - mehitabel was only telling her stories.
I think I know why. If you type in only lower case you can only count to nine (if you have shoes on). When you type in caps you can only count to eight. That is why I am not wearing shoes right now....8, 9, 10. And that is why I don't use caps if I am typing my Social Security number with shoes on.
The cat, @boriquagato, actually did get banned from twitter.
Just remember the alternative to twitter isn’t Parler or Gab, it’s actually meeting and talking to your neighbors...
Bummer. Freedom for the cat!
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