“Why are there so many amendments? Get it right the first time people!” – Veep
I heard a Zoomer kid say: “The Bill of Rights is so old, I think they made it on a typewriter.”
A few years ago I gave up on Twitter®. Flat gave it up. It had ceased to be fun. When I first started out, I had a (plainly marked) parody account of a famous person (it may or may not have been Chelsea Clinton), and enjoyed that quite a bit. I then switched to being just plain old John Wilder. Twitter© had been fun – it was a good way to meet like-minded folks, and a really interesting way to irritate famous people.
John Cusack blocked me. That was a fun day. To be fair, I would have blocked me, too, since I was right up in his extremely Leftist face.
Gradually, then suddenly, my Tweet® impressions started to drop. I had Scott Adams liking my posts, and had Ron Howard Retweet© me when I told him that Hollywood actors felt guilty by having buckets of money. It was a reasonable conversation. I would get tens of thousands of impressions (people viewing my Tweets®) on an average month after I figured Twitter® out.
Back then, Wilder, Wealthy and Wise wasn’t getting near the traffic it gets now, so in some months virtually all of the people coming by were tricked into coming here from Twitter™. After traffic here started picking up organically, something happened at Twitter© – my Tweets™ weren’t getting any views. I went from 100,000 a month (going from memory) to, maybe, 10,000 a month.
I was shadowbanned.
I always wondered how Vader© ate with the mask on. Then I realized: Force™ feeding.
By manipulating “the algorithm”, (or by picking me directly, but probably just a general tune of the algorithm because Leftists hate people on the Right) Twitter™ programmers made it so I virtually disappeared from view. I went from knowing I irritated John Cleese to wandering down the hallway of a closed sanitarium by myself along with the 2,000 or so followers I had.
So, I gave up. I didn’t shut my account down, I just stopped going there. I think that was a part of the plan – Twitter® was about ideas, but only if yours matched The Narrative.
But then I noticed something interesting – my views here started going down here, leveling off in 2021 with a slight dip in 2022. Now many sources of traffic were more-or-less constant, but the biggest drop was from search engines. I’m on pace to have a drop of search engine traffic of 63% this year from the search engine traffic I got in 2020. It will hurt overall readership, but the bigger thing is that it won’t grow the site if new people can’t find it.
By 2023, I’ve written millions more words, had big links from major websites, but the only conclusion that I have is that “the algorithm” hit me and is suppressing me showing up in search recommendations. I guess the loneliest place on Earth is Twitter® after a shadowban is being on page 2 of the Google® search results.
I heard if you don’t pay your exorcist, you get repossessed.
I am not alone. The Unz Review™ (to be fair, MUCH MUCH bigger than me) has experienced a similar problem with search according to Ron Unz. And while comments here are a lunchroom food fight, his comment section looks like the Siege of Paris in 1870 – it’s fancy, but they’re still eating zoo animals.
The first idea that I came up with is that the comment section is too spicy for the search engines. I doubt this since the most of the 25,000+ comments have been PG-13 or less. The other alternative is that the entire viewpoint of the Right has been tuned out. I suspect it’s this. If your page is dedicated to comments to the Right of center, it’s lonelier than an idea in Whoopi Goldberg’s head.
Search engines are important, since they drive new traffic to a site. I recalled early on when I could count the website hits here at one an hour, and then someone would hit the site and the traffic would go up from someone who just stumbled upon the place enjoying reading what I wrote. I hope I gave them an afternoon with some chuckles.
I then read with an utter lack of surprise that our government had been colluding with Tech companies to suppress viewpoints they found unacceptable. Things about The Vaxx®. Things about the validity of the 2020 selection. Comments critical of Dear Leader and three-letter agencies. Propaganda against the American people was made legal again in 2012, and now the Federal Government was colluding with private industry to shut down uncomfortable viewpoints. Why? Because they can can can.
I published a book on propaganda. You’ll never find a better book on the subject.
Missouri (along with a host of others) sued. The Judge in the case was fairly blistering in his 155 page injunction. You can read it here (LINK). Although I am not a lawyer, amazingly, I can still read, and the parts I’ve gone through are very enjoyable. I haven’t read it all, but I do say the man is not afraid, since in his THIRD LINE he writes “If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”
Now this is what I call Stunning and Brave.
What did the government do after being slapped so fiercely? Appeal. The Deep State and the Left want to weaponize the Government-Tech-Investment Bank Complex.
Against you and your ideas. What ideas? All of them. Here he lists just a few, but they are doozies:
It’s not being paranoid if they really are out to get you.
It should make you mad that this brazen manipulation against ideas that are generally recognized as the basis of Western Civilization and the United States are being actively suppressed by a shadowy combination of elected and unelected creatures skulking in the darkness with secret meetings determining what you should read and hear and think.
It should make you happy that it has been uncovered and the cockroaches, rather than scurrying for the cover of the cracks they hide in when the kitchen light is turned on are showing themselves to hate you as much as you thought they did. They’re not denying it – they’re brazenly trying to keep this advantage of a deadly combination of Leftist ideology and the power of Big Tech.
But back to Twitter©.
After reading that Elon had found that he was still shadowbanned as late as May or June, I thought I’d give Twitter© a try again.
Wow. Last two days on Twitter™, I had over 70,000 impressions (Tweet® views), hundreds of likes and retweets, and even several hundred poor unsuspecting folks clicking on links to show up here to read a post or two. This was after four hours of Tweeting®.
Four hours.
I should have called her @aoc, since she doesn’t like capitalism.
And also I put the meme right above this in AOC’s Tweet™ and I’m sure she (or the dogwasher who does her Tweets®) saw it. I also “Reported” a dude for calling me a “cis virgin”. Elon said “Cis” was a slur, so we’ll see. Old me would have said, “I’m sure your mom would agree, but her mouth is full right now.” But I’ve grown up.
Regardless, it was a pretty good day.
When they don’t hold us down, look at how we fly.
This is why we’ll win. When held up to the Light, the Truth doesn’t scurry away or cover itself in lies and deceit. It shines.
The Empire Strikes Back…
https://www.newsweek.com/conservative-twitter-users-rage-after-30-million-add-threads-app-day-one-1811436
https://www.outkick.com/mark-zuckerbergs-threads-app-is-already-censoring-accounts/
https://i.imgur.com/YDMzw9n.jpg
And Threads doesn’t allow you to pick what you see – it picks.
I can only stand being on Twitter once or twice a week for maybe half an hour. It is just a cesspool of stupidity. I can handle people being nasty to one another but the idiocy drives me away.
Some booze helps.
Not a Twitter person, nor have I been one for 25 years or so – but congratulations on the uptick!
I did see that there is a new Book of Face sponsored Twitter-lite site. I am confused how this is different than the actual Book of Face, although apparently with the censoring, it is not really all that different.
I wish some genius (hint hint, looking at you) would do a side by side comparison between what the Constitution actually says and where we find ourselves.
As I posted elsewhere and don’t feel like retyping:
“Any man with any measure of heroism in his blood who actually reads the texts and speeches of our Founders cannot help but to feel the call to pick up his musket and fight Britain. Moreover, the tyrannies endured by our ancestors seem almost trivial in comparison to the daily villainies perpetrated on their descendants by those who purport to rule them; shouldn’t the urgency of action be all the greater? And yet…
Perhaps I should clarify: Any man or woman who can actually read the texts and speeches cannot but help to feel the call to action. But today almost no one can actually read them. The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of Patrick Henry’s “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” speech is 11th grade; of the Declaration of Independence, 12th grade; of the U.S. Constitution, 18th grade.
According to the National Assessment of Adult Literacy, 57% of Americans have a reading grade below 9th level, and 13% have a reading grade below 5th level. Only 13% can understand the Declaration or Patrick Henry’s speech, and virtually none can understand the Constitution. And that includes all Americans. Among Generation Z, it’s far worse. They are the least literate generation in American history.
Dumbed down citizens, where did we hear about that first? Lenin or Marx?
Like Orville’s 1984 doublespeak and warping of language.
Biden is our Emmanuel Goldstein
(Like the meat puppet can even choose his own ice-cream?)
Trump is the leftists Emmanuel Goldstein
(and over half of us argue with the other half that HE’s CLEARLY a TOOL or something)
In the course of daily life in Oceania, Goldstein is always the subject of the Two Minutes Hate, a daily programme of propaganda that begins at 11:00 hours; the telescreen shows an over-sized image of Emmanuel Goldstein for the assembled citizens of Oceania to subject to loud insults and contempt. To prolong and deepen the anger of the spectators, the telescreen then shows images of Goldstein walking among the parading soldiers of the current enemy of Oceania — either Eurasia or Eastasia. The Two Minutes Hate programme shows Goldstein as both an ideological enemy of the Ingsoc régime of The Party and a traitor aiding the national enemy of Oceania.[4]
The Party’s scapegoating of Goldstein justified the voiding of civil rights, the implementation of universal surveillance, and poverty. Save for The Party’s cultivation of a vague, but fervent, patriotism for Oceania, the Proles were excluded from the politics of Oceania, and only members of the Inner Party concerned themselves with the existence or the non-existence of Emmanuel Goldstein and The Brotherhood; thus, when the protagonist Winston Smith asks the villain O’Brien, a member of the Inner Party, if The Brotherhood exists, O’Brien replies:
That, Winston, you will never know. If we choose to set you free when we have finished with you, and if you live to be ninety years old, still you will never learn whether the answer to that question is Yes or No. As long as you live it will be an unsolved riddle in your mind.[5]
The real Powers that Be are laughing at us all as like the bottle of red and black ants that don’t attack each other UNTIL THEY Shake the jar for their amusement.
Maybe a few nuclear sunrises would be an improvement. In but a few days the “We Prepped” folks will learn if they were able to shoot themselves out of death by dehydration.
Get right with your Creator, the powers that BE are trying to start a Nuclear war.
That’s an interesting idea, though I think it would quickly go to book length.
I got a Tweeter account in its early days, haven’t used it in 20+ years. Never had a Fakebook but Sweetie Pie does. I just don’t have the time to F with things like that.
As far as the DeepState/Blob appeal, I anticipate Circuit will overturn, then the SC will confirm the District decision. Hopefully.
Twitter is a weird one – it is exposed everywhere because it is seen by billions that don’t use it. Don’t have an account? You still see the big Tweets.
Bravo. Keep the pressure up.
I avoid all social media. Have two longstanding pages, one blogger and the other wordpress. Blogger site gets small, steady number of visitors, consistent with my arcane and challenging content. It ain’t for Karen.
The wordpress site, similar content and format, gets about zilcho. Least the stats show that. Probably been shadowbanned about a decade, I’d estimate. I take it for granted and just lay it on the Boss to ensure my arrows find their mark. He’s good at that.
‘And they that be wise shall shine as the brightness of the firmament; and they that turn many to righteousness as the stars for ever and ever’ (Daniel 12:3)
‘The LORD is a man of war. The LORD is his name’ (Exodus 15:3)
He is good at that. Well said.
I’ve been on and off Twatter more often than [insert Your Mom jokes here], but I can’t stand Elonner any more now than I could Jacker before. It’s not them, it’s me. I have been miserably unhappy paying good money (for me) running a website blog for years. I confess that the dearth of readers far exceeded my ability to sustain enthusiasm for a regular writing schedule. I have subscribed to a number of blogs, and to other social media platforms, only to fall away for reasons various and sundry. [Not so here.] As a voice crying in the wilderness, I (a) truly admire your talent, and (b) have come to realize that it may not be the best idea for me. Or maybe I burned out serving as editor for my dear late lamented friend L. Neil Smith’s “The Libertarian Enterprise” several decades ago. There’s no one wildernessier than that, I assure you.
Keep up the great work!
Thank you! The world is a sadder place without L. Neil. Thank you for the kind words, but as someone with even more talent said, “it’s on loan from God” . . .
10..9..8…2….
Annnnnd, your gone.
Piss’em off while you can.
I will. It’s fun.
Of course you’re being shadow-banned.
I watched views on my blog, in real time, go backwards, in job lots of 500 views at a time.
6000…5484….4821…4311…
Then sit at zero for several hours straight.
(Whereas if I so much as burp, at 3AM on a holiday weekend, there will be 500 hits in half an hour.)
Which is quite simply impossible.
My overall numbers have been roughly half ever since.
They can’t compete, so they sit on the scales.
Bloggers here is a tip for hits going down. Show meme’s of heroic nazi soldiers with flame throwers, Orthodox Jews as the assassins of Western civilization, and Israel as the enemy of mankind. things will pick right up.
This will work even better if you pretend to be Christian, and feature an “ok” Jewish blogger that you don’t call a khazar.
Agreed. I’ve seen similar shenanigans, and expect that the real battle should be in the search engine space, which is more influential than even Twitter.
I find most of the sites I visit from either links in other articles/entries on sites that I visit regularly or from blogroll lists on those sites. Certainly not through Google searches and their ilk. Or Twitter.
And I did not have a Twitter account until last week, though I did often go to Twitter entries that were linked from other sites. When Twitter suddenly quit working (i.e., only took you to a home page) last week if you could not login, I decided to create a free account so that those links would start working again. I never comment through Twitter; information flows one way only. It’s like reading a newspaper and I don’t send in Letters to the Editor for the world to see. I have no desire to create a trail of my thoughts and comments for anyone else to follow there.
Yup, searches are key way to throttle, but you can’t stop the signal. Twitter is exactly that – a trail. And one that can be tied to a real person.
AOC loves her some Irish gingers. (honk!)
She is Criminals IN Action like Chuck?
You ain’t seen nothing yet regarding weaponization on the road to Fwance and gut the 2A summer isn’t even heated yet with plenty more Smith-Mundt Kabuki to come.
Compare search engines to see the difference between righty lefty pages and results.
Recently a massive outage right after an ISP truck pulled up in front of the hood and I’m sure there are prying eyes now and they can duck down here and get some duck sausage.
I’ve done several tests – search engines are very skewed Left, at least all that I can find.
Pleasing search engines is like pleasing voters by ringing doorbells on your block. It’s not going to happen because most voters^H^H^H^H^H^H search engine users demand magic unicorns that fart rainbow and poop skittles. Instead, focus on policies and strategies which still work after voters choose Communism(TM) and try to institute struggle sessions.
It should make you mad that this brazen manipulation against ideas that are generally recognized as the basis of Western Civilization and the United States are being actively suppressed by a shadowy combination of elected and unelected creatures skulking in the darkness with secret meetings determining what you should read and hear and think.
I’m a libertarian. Every government is a brazen manipulation against ideas that are generally recognized as the basis of Western Civilization and the United States being actively suppressed by a shadowy combination of elected and unelected creatures skulking in the darkness with secret meetings determining what you should read and hear and think.
Or maybe I burned out serving as editor for my dear late lamented friend L. Neil Smith’s “The Libertarian Enterprise” several decades ago.
I once called LNS a “pacifist” because his absolute prohibition against collateral damage meant the would-be-Americans couldn’t fire guns on Lexington Green, because the bullets would end up endangering bystanders inside populated buildings at the edges. He didn’t have an answer for how his libertarianism could win that actual war. I concluded ZAP was a goal not a moral rule, and collateral damage was unavoidable in war, with the enemy culpable for making it necessary, of course.
I don’t think it’ll win here, so I think we avoid the Struggle Sessions. Fingers crossed.
I rejoined Twitter to read your tweets but I keep forgetting to look at Twitter.
https://imgflip.com/i/7rzfkz
Ha! It’s mostly me dunking on the Left and Powerful. Leftists don’t like that, which makes me laugh at their responses. They called me a “virgin”. Ha!
What that judge did won’t amount to a hill of beans. The communists prosecuting the coup and the revolution don’t give a thought to judges. They’ll just push harder, and worse.
They will push, until they push too far.