You’re Not Alone

“Théoden King stands alone.” – Lord of the Rings

GOOGLE

Google® is so biased they only ranked our Solar System one star.

Originally this was going to be an economic post (as is usual for Wednesday) about Crisis Capitalism and how this particular Crisis, like many others in the past will be used to concentrate wealth even more, perhaps with bikini graphs.  Maybe the bikinis get smaller as the economy shrinks?  At least that would bring some good out of the current crisis.  Plus I’ll always be known as “the guy who made economics interesting at last.”

That post will have to wait until next Wednesday.

What hit me today was an onslaught of news.  Not one story, but nearly every story I read was about deplatforming or attempting to silence alternative viewpoints to the conventional narrative as seen on TV.  In rapid-fire, I saw stories about deplatforming of news and opinion outlets, deplatforming of individuals and doxing (making private personal information public of non-public figures) of pre-teens(!) for thoughtcrime.

Heck, there was even a Serbian soccer player (playing soccer for an American pro soccer team) that was fired (after he was made to apologize) for comments his wife made on social media.  And his wife made those comments in Serbian.  I guess that he should have done his manly best and kept her home without access to electronic media devices?  Is the message that athletes should take away from this is that they should keep their women on a shorter leash?

Is this the Left telling men that they need to be more patriarchal and tell their women to be seen and not heard?

SERBIA

But his wife wanted to go anyway.

But the seemingly disjointed activities all had one purpose:  to make you feel alone.

The biggest story is that Zero Hedge® was cut off from Google® advertising revenue.  Since ZH™ is a for-profit company, this will hurt them.  Why was it cut off?  The story I saw indicated that it was because people commenting on the site were being less than politically correct.  And, yes, Google® has the legal right to do this, unless they did it because Zero Hedge© is transgender.

No, I don’t have examples, but these are commenters, not ZH© staff.  I jumped in to see the comment section on a typical post that I thought might be incendiary.  Would all the comments be safe to repeat at work?  No.  Have I seen worse comments on Twitter®?  Yeah, a lot worse.  I’ve seen worse commentary on Yahoo® news stories.

Zero Hedge™ has already been banned “permanently” once by Twitter©, and then reactivated.  The reason given was that Zero Hedge® had “doxed” a Chinese researcher . . . by publishing information that was already on the Wuhan Institute for Creating COVID Virology’s website.  As of now?  They’re unbanned.  Twitter© called it “an error.”

But it’s clear that they have made someone angry.

How much will it Google’s deplatforming cost Zero Hedge©?

I have no idea.

SECOND

Google® did give a four star rating to Chernobyl.  They would have given it five, but the locals ran out of fingers.

I do know that The Federalist™, another website was threatened with Google® demonetization due to comments on articles like this one (LINK).  The Federalist© just shut off comments entirely.

And that just might be the point.

Comments here are (generally) fairly unmoderated.  I think that outside of auto-moderated comments, I’ve nuked only one or two comments out of thousands during the life of this blog.  I am blessed with some of the smartest, most well read, and politest commenters on the planet.  You’re also probably the most physically attractive commenters on any website in existence, and I bet you all have impeccable armpit hygiene to boot.  But the comment section gives people a chance to talk to each other, bounce ideas off each other, and get to know each other.  It also is a little light on a dark Internet letting you know that you’re not alone.

Even the people who don’t comment benefit from the comments section.  For each person who comments, at least 100 other readers don’t comment.  But they read what you say.  And it’s important to them, and lets them know that they’re not alone, either.

Then there’s Laura Towler.

Laura is a British YouTuber® who is on the Right.  On June 6, she sent the following Tweet® and got the reply that follows it:

laura

“Chuffed” is slang that means “happy as a poodle with a pudding pop.”

This all went international.  The idea that a company would be so “brave” as to come out in favor of a group that is only supported to the tune of tens of millions of dollars by the largest tech companies and most of the largest news companies is really risky.

To boot, Yorkshire Tea© then picked on a (nearly) unknown individual citizen.  Brave, indeed – I’m sure that Laura is quite the power to be reckoned with given her 50,000 or so YouTube™ subscribers.  And Yorkshire Tea® is so small, being the biggest selling tea in Great Britain (which made 5.5 billion tea bags last year).

It’s like Coca-Cola® decided to pick on some kid going to prom.

But it led me to ask this question:  Did any of the companies that sponsor BLM even bother to go to the BLM website?

Outside of the cringing references to “comrades” and “collectivism” on the BLM website, they note that BLM wishes to:

  • “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family” and “collectively” care for one another.
  • They also want to [free themselves] “from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking.”

This is not the language of a civil rights program, it’s the language of a communist front masquerading as a civil rights program.  And it’s not even Halloween yet, and I think that all of the cosplay conventions are on Coronahold.

JUICE

What’s the best way to kill communists?  Communism.

We’ve seen that at C.H.A.Z. and virtually every other protest activity that BLM is tied tightly to Antifa.  Imagine that C.H.A.Z. wasn’t six blocks being held by armed Leftists, and instead was being held by a militia from the Right.  I’d imagine we’d see National Guard Apache helicopters and the Seattle mayor calling for a neutron bomb strike to make the Hug Box of Seattle safe again.

I’m sure someone will bring up the Wildlife Refuge seizure by members of the Right in 2016.  But 26 of the occupiers of the Wildlife Refuge were charged with felonies.  Care to take bets on if the C.H.A.Z. occupiers will face any criminal charges?  Any of them?

Ms. Towler was able to handle the media storm that followed, and not apologize.  Heck, her Twitter® feed now cheekily shows “Disavowed by Yorkshire Tea©” as the lead line.  That takes style.

But Laura knew she wasn’t alone, and has weathered international condemnation.

It doesn’t stop there.

CENSOR

Russians call their website censoring the Inter-nyet.

The classic (and very boring) movie Gone With The Wind, the television shows of COPS®, Live PD™, and an episode of (the very funny) Fawlty Towers that first aired on October 24, 1975 have since been either hidden or cancelled.  Just like statues, these works of art define who we are as a people.  And removing them makes us not more, but less.

Every person who has a statue made out of him has something in common with those works of art – they have faults, especially when viewed through the lens of the 2020s.  And removing them or hiding them or tearing them down with mob violence is meant to make you feel alone.

If you’re against police corruption and militarization?  You’re not alone.

If you’re against excessive use of force by police?  You’re not alone.

If you’re against rioting and mob violence?  You’re not alone.

If you mock companies that virtue signal popular causes while avoiding tough issues like the near slave labor they use to produce goods that they offshored from American production?   You’re not alone.

If you’re against globalism and collectivism?  You’re not alone.

I’m not saying that the position of the Right is always the right position.  There are times the Right has been wrong.  But the positions of the Right aren’t based in hate – they’re based in a love of freedom, or family, or tradition, or nation, or a healthy desire to be religious.

If those things are important to you?

You’re not alone.

DRIVER

And if you suffer from paranoia, you’re not alone.  There’s someone behind you.

If you want this nonsense to stop so you can see economic graphs featuring bikinis?

You’re not alone.

Author: John

Nobel-Prize Winning, MacArthur Genius Grant Near Recipient writing to you regularly about Fitness, Wealth, and Wisdom - How to be happy and how to be healthy. Oh, and rich.

34 thoughts on “You’re Not Alone”

  1. The time has now come where the only light left is that which we shine upon each other. This is very sad, but events are now converging into crises that are interconnected. The prudent course is to make those preparations we have all hoped would not turn out necessary.
    They now are.
    As a Canadian, I am aware that America is the last place on earth that still has it’s rights to fight for. The UK surrendered to the darkness long ago, and Australia seems to be just finishing up the process of removing individual rights. Here in Canada, we never had them to fight over. We have ‘freedoms’ and ‘privileges’, both of which can be abrogated at any time should the Crown wish it so.
    America is all that remains. If she falls into darkness and doubt, we are lost. The fight will become, in that moment, an order of magnitude more difficult.
    Thank you for your continued efforts to offer reason and logic in the teeth of the madness.

    2. True. I was really shocked when, lo these 30 years agone, I discovered that Canadian customs can and will seize books prohibited by the gummint and destroy them. Book burning by a civilized nation in the 20th Century-?

      God bless you and save you from said government.

    3. Also as a Canadian, I approve this comment because it is true. It doesn’t mean all freedom-loving Americans are wise and good. Many are foolish and ignorant. But they are freedom loving, and at this point in the West’s social, cultural and economic devolution, that’s all that matters.

  3. 2020 is so weird. Humans want to belong. To something. And the internet allows that bonding to occur. To people whose real faces and names you do not know. While you sit all alone in a room. Where if you’re lucky and have a job you’re telecommuting to work and seeing your co-workers on screens. Because if you go out to be among real people you could catch a killer virus and die in just a few days or weeks. After being physically alone in a hospital room with a ventilator down your throat, and mentally alone in a medically-induced coma. But people are ignoring that possibility to be together physically anyway. First as a Memorial Day party. Then as protests. Then as riots and occupations. Not fun places to be. So the richest among us accelerates efforts to get a human colony on Mars (see https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/07/elon-musk-email-to-spacex-employees-starship-is-the-top-priority.html ). So people can be all together in a can of air for months, on their way to an empty, desolate planet where they can be all alone. And leave behind a planet seemingly gone mad.

    This isn’t the 2020 milestone interplanetary future I expected. Even “Star Trek” is woke now. Sigh.

    John, with your blog you’re just like The Rolling Stones fifty years ago in 1970, creating a rallying point and anthem when we need it most. We are all crying out “Gimme Shelter” these days, each in our own way, and you hand it out to your readers three times a week. Thanks for that.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RbmS3tQJ7Os (you gotta endure a commercial first, but it’s worth it).

    Even amid all the racial turmoil of the 1960s there were black voices that worked right alongside whites to get a hopeful message across. For Gimme Shelter, that voice was Merry Clayton.

    http://www.openculture.com/2013/06/mick_jagger_tells_the_story_behind_gimme_shelter.html

    I would submit that in 2020 such a voice is Samantha Jones. She’s only got 4300 or so followers on Twitter. IMHO the world would be a better place if she had many more.

    https://twitter.com/Samantha_J9

    None of us are alone.

    2. Ricky, you’re welcome – and we won’t stop. You can’t stop the signal. I’m just a little conduit keeping it going.

  4. We are discovering the very high cost of “free” services like Google and Facebook which now have near monopoly control over online interaction and are uniformly leftist politically. It is like we turned over our entire media to the Japanese in World War II.

    1. The Left control of media isn’t new. McCarthy was right about every single thing. And who still makes movies about how evil he was?

    2. And it was so easy, right? Free e-mail. Free connection . . . free friends. Free tracking device that knows all of your opinions and is hackable by the NSA . . . oops.

  5. Thank you very much for this post.

    I appreciate the comments here as well. They are polite, intelligent, and reasoned.

    We will have to stick together during the upcoming troubles.

    1. We will. The first part is finding and not looking for the smallest faults. But do kick out those that like metric.

  6. To go off on another relevant tangent, just this morning I saw a local version of your Yorkshire Tea story. A Birmingham (Alabama) night club is doing the Internet Walk Of Shame kowtowing because woke white folks have called their dress code racist. Please don’t break our windows or firebomb us, they say between the lines, because we surrender and will do whatever you want…

    https://www.al.com/life/2020/06/birmingham-bar-cancels-racist-dress-code-after-social-media-outcry.html

    This isn’t enlightenment. This is extortion by another name, when as a business you see the writing on the wall. And I’m not talking about graffiti.

    https://www.thenewcivilrightsmovement.com/2020/06/video-purportedly-shows-white-woman-setting-wendys-on-fire-at-scene-of-rayshard-brooks-killing/

      1. In my opinion, we have two rebellions in progress.

        The first is the communist insurrection.

        The second is smaller. At times, law enforcement is refusing to engage, particularly in the Democrat-held cities and counties. Sometimes this is because rebellious leadership has asked them not to. Other times the police just don’t feel like doing their job until things get totally out of hand.

        The moral of this story is don’t live in a Democrat-held county or city right now (“blinding glimpse of the obvious”), and don’t take the bait.

        1. The second ‘rebellion’ you mention is the civil war. The Left is waging a revolution against America. In doing so, they are pushing the country toward civil war. The police rebellion, as I see it, is the opening shot in that civil war. But these are just opening salvos, premature, actually. They will simmer through the summer awaiting the election the Left assumes it will win through voter fraud and social media hijacking. With its hands on the remaining reins power, the Left assumes it can then launch its Reign of Terror against everything to the right of themselves. The civil war will follow. Cheers.

  7. What Google did wasn’t legal, but we won’t know for sure until a judge or Rick Wilson tells us: See ‘tortious interference’, although I’m not a lawyer, a judge, or Rick Wilson. The Federalist’s comment section disappeared faster than a shot of vodka on Nancy Pelosi’s desk, which should tell its readers exactly how much The Federalist values them.

    1. YES!!!! I was thinking just that.

      We’ll see. Emanations and Penumbras also meant that DACA, unConstitutional on it’s face? Upheld.

  8. Moved my email off Google onto private servers a couple of years ago, along with my website analytics. Even I thought I was being a little paranoid at the time.

  9. I am now (thanks to the Kung Flu and my state governor’s over-reaction to it) in the unenviable position of looking for freelance design and illustration work. I’ll probably have to go through and scrub my blog of all my outrageously unpopular opinions such as “respect for the law”, “due process”, “free speech”, “Guns? Hell yes!” and such in order to even be considered for work.

    But since The Internet Is Forever® removing them is probably a waste of time on my part.

  10. Lots and lots of us have figured for years we were not alone. That’s why we have been quietly been preparing for a large group activity that will involve firearms, bandages and probably lots of use of a shovel.

    1. It’s a lot closer after the last four months, sadly. You can nearly see the writing on the wall.

  11. I’ve got to say when I heard about deplatforming due to comments on Zero Hedge and the Federalist, I was stunned. Holding them responsible for someone else’s speech seems beyond Orwell. Supposedly the complaints came from a “monitoring group” in the UK.

    Besides, on most commercial sites, your IQ goes down 10 points for every minute spent reading comments and I avoid them on virtually all of those sites.

    Someone is selling a hat that says, “Make Orwell Fiction Again”. I might have to buy one of those.

    1. I did do some research on the “monitoring group” and they looked made up as can be. It’s a political hit job. Tried to find funding, but nothing popped up.

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