Twitter Rewards & Punishes Incivility

Do you use Twitter? Have you ever wanted to have a post go viral? Being unkind is probably the way to go. The most ‘viral’ thing I’ve ever done on Twitter was to make a non-supportive comment on Bernie Sanders’ tweet. I got so much flak from that I had to change my settings! And I wasn’t even rude or nasty or anything. It’s just that Sanders’ fans don’t appreciate anything other than Sanders-worship.

Tired old ex-celebrities have found their tweets unignored when they venture forth with unhinged comments about how Pres. Trump’s children ought to be murdered. As long as they are progressive ex-celebrities they will probably not have their Twitter account suspended. (If they did, they’d just make a new Twitter account and continue as before.)

Personally, I don’t see why anyone should call Bernie Sanders or Barack Obama or Donald Trump a POS when you can just say ‘bless his heart!’ and mean more or less the same thing. We live in a world full of unhinged people. Civility is a safety measure.

But if you are regularly uncivil in your Twitter life, and if you are some flavor of conservative or Republican, and you are NOT Donald Trump, the Twitter gods are likely to punish you. You may lose your account or be ‘shadowbanned’ or, as I have recently heard, you may find yourself following someone/something you would never follow voluntarily. I have seen this happen to people I know who are kind, decent people— people I would turn to for help if reconstituted Nazis were hunting me. 

Since neither the progressive nor the conservative movements are monolithic entities where everyone thinks the same, I’m sure there are progressives who have been persecuted by Twitter for not saying the right— or Left— things. In fact, I’m sure there are those in the Twitter beast that are madder at the deviant progressives than they would ever be at we mere conservative ‘haters.’ 

So what is a tweeter to do? If we are too polite, our tweets will be ignored and disappear into silence. We will lose our chance to be of influence. But if we are ‘spicy,’ even if in a mostly civil way, we’ll be guilty of hate speech, deplatformed and silenced. Sometimes our words will be grossly misinterpreted in order to make us guilty. 

I have no answers, other than to be flexible. Don’t put all your internet ‘eggs’ into one Twitter or Facebook basket. Have a blog, have a Gab or MeWe account, try something different. Spread your effort out in more than one place. It’s highly unlikely you will be suspended from Twitter, Facebook, Gab and MeWe at the same time, and also have your blog taken down. And if you blog— consider compiling some of your more ‘evergreen’ blog posts into an ebook on Smashwords, or even a printed book. Banning a book is harder than taking down a Twitter account or a blog.

Amazon-dot-com really is out to get us

I’ve been a customer of Amazon-dot-com for some years now, and I tend not to think of them as promoters of book censorship. After all, early on I got my copy of ‘The Turner Diaries,’ a once-talked-about badly written white supremacist, antisemitic book about a future race war, from Amazon.

But in more recent times I’ve heard stories of censorship at Amazon.  There were stories they were going to start banning or shadow-banning books with ‘keto’ in the title, because the keto world is full of cholesterol-deniers  who believe scientific research rather than ‘fats are bad’ bleating.

I also have heard a report that the works by the founder of ‘conversion therapy’ had been pulled from Amazon because the LGBT leadership feel these books conflicted with their dogmas.

The Aquila Report: Amazon Bans Books on "Conversion Therapy"

But now, Amazon has pulled some e-books by Christian authors I happen to know personally, Declan Finn and Jon Del Arroz. I have read their previous books and named kittens after both men. OK, one kitten is named Declanna and the other is Jon-with-Rice, but still.

Both books were in the pre-ordering stage and both authors have lost the pre-orders they had for the ebook edition. In both cases, the more expensive paper-based versions of the books were still available. 

Evidently Amazon is claiming that the authors took the books down for revision (a lie) or that the publisher did something (also a lie.) I wonder if their plan is mainly to persuade certain non-progressive authors that Amazon is not their friend and they should boycott and make it harder for themselves to get their books out with alternatives to Amazon. 

The thing about Amazon is that they are out to make money. They probably believe they will make more money by giving in to complaints by the Progressive special-snowflake types, than standing strong against all censorship. But the more they cater to the special-snowflake, safe-space, pro-censorship crowd, the further they will have to go. Someday they may need to start taking down books and movies that earn them good money to prevent an expensive boycott from the Left.

What can YOU do? Buying Declan Finn and Jon Del Arroz’s books are a good start. It is also good, when you hear of a case of this type, to transmit it throughout your social media— tweet, Facebook, MeWe, Gab, whatever you’ve got. Blog about it. Because this kind of progressive sh-t only works when they can keep us in the dark.

PajamasMedia: Amazon Bans Christian Novels Glorified and Deus Vult

John C. Wright: Declan Finn Encounters Rough Waters on Amazon....

Bounding Into Comics: Amazon Removes Two Christian Fiction Books

Rawle Nyanzi: Why #BrandZero Matters

Jim McCoy: Stop With The Discrimination

Congresscritters shalt not commit adultery

Among the many things that Congresscritters, male and female, ought not to do, adultery is high on the list. Even if you call it ‘open marriage’ or ‘polyfidelity’ or violate the terms and conditions of the English language by using the non-word ‘thruple.’ 

Why? Congressing is a job in which you are expected to swear an oath of office. Swearing a solemn oath is a big hairy deal! Throughout much of history folks worried if they swore a solemn oath and failed to keep it, they could expect some hellfire in their long-term future. They didn’t feel entitled to shrug their oathbreaking off with the insincere words ‘well, I tried.’ 

And marriage? It’s not a government benefits program for sex partners no matter how much some people want it to be. It is a covenant— another solemn oath you are expected to keep. The institution of marriage is also a major building block of any society. Marriage traditionally creates a home with a man and a woman at the center of it. Scientific studies have shown that these marriage-based homes provide a beneficial environment for the raising of children. Just look at children who have been raised in orphanages and the foster care system, and you will see there is no substitute. 

Now, when you are selecting a candidate to vote into Congress, you want someone who is going to take his oath of office seriously. And one hint is to see how well he has kept the other solemn oaths in his life. A person who is on record as having committed adultery, just like a person who has been convicted of perjury, is usually not a good choice.

Former congresswoman Katie Hill has been mislead by our sick society into thinking that the word ‘polyfidelity’ somehow makes adultery OK and gets her permission not to keep her marriage oath. She also thinks accusations of ‘abuse’ make her misdeeds all right. She is wrong, and that makes her resignation the right thing to do, but I’m afraid she will never know it and will think of herself as an innocent victim. 

Now, there have been even presidents of our country who are believed to have committed adultery while in office— the business with JFK and Marilyn Monroe being one example. Does that mean we should have rejected JFK from being our president (had we known?) No, we are allowed to forgive presidential (and congressional) sins. But it is far better when our nation’s leaders have the morals and the dignity to avoid adultery and other major violations of moral law. 

Marriage is the heart of our society— it’s where are most competent members of society are raised. Adultery, in the German language, is called ‘Ehebruch’ or marriage-breaking. Perhaps that’s where we get our concept of the ‘broken home—‘ a home which is destroyed by an annulment or divorce, which is in turn often triggered by adultery or suspicions of adultery. When a marriage is broken by adultery, a light goes out in our society. When enough lights go out, we have violence in the street and filled prisons because of all of the young people who come from ‘broken homes’ and don’t have the moral foundation or mental health to become contributing members of our society. 

Some people look down their noses at the ‘prudes’ who don’t want known adulterers elected or appointed into positions of power. ‘We should pick the best guys regardless of their private life,’ they say. But are they the best guys if they are adulterers? Or perjurers, thieves, bank robbers or serial killers? Would you vote a Jeffrey Dahmer into congress if he had good skills, or would you hold out for someone who had the moral values to at least not kill people?

Katie Hill says 'this isn't over' despite resigning over sex scandal

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They're Out to Get the Children!

They are out to get the children. No, not the zombies. The progressives. It’s a simple matter of math. As long as the progressives have not yet managed to replace our ‘two-party system’ with a one-party tyranny, they have to manage to get 51% in some election to even have their guy in Congress. 

But progressives have one major obstacle in gaining future votes: they have much more fully embraced ‘birth control mentality’ and abortion culture than the conservatives. As a result, conservatives have larger families. Progressives may not have children at all. Global warming, you know? Children are a form of pollution, like carbon. Progressives may pride themselves on being more environmentally friendly, but by giving up children they are giving up the chance at having a captive audience in their home to recruit to the cause. 

And so they turn to the public schools, and, through laws and lawsuits, they exercise some controls over private Catholic, Lutheran and other Christian schools as well. Overwhelmingly, people who want to become public school teachers are required to join a liberal teachers union that uses union dues from members to support progressive political candidates. In the states where teachers do have a legal alternative to joining the union, they are certainly not told about that fact routinely and it is not made easy. In some cases, they have to pay union dues anyway. 

Teachers’ unions provide access to the teachers for indoctrination purposes, if they haven’t already been indoctrinated enough by their schools and colleges. The result? In stories throughout the nation, for decades now, we hear that children who express support for Republicans are viciously bullied— by the teachers as well as other students. While children who express progressive views, even contradictory stupid ones, are praised.

Biased rules of ‘diversity’ support help promote the progressive atmosphere. Kids who come out as LGBT-whatever are rewarded by having ‘Gay-Straight Alliance Clubs.’ Christian kids don’t get to form ‘hateful’ Man-Woman Marriage Support Clubs, they are lucky if they are not forbidden to wear crucifixes or crosses to school. Because they are haters, see?

Many years ago, I was a teacher in a Lutheran school. Because the parents had to pay tuition, every single parent thought he was in charge. One parent would want zero homework for the younger kids, another wanted more homework for these same kids. Some parents wanted Lutheran religious instruction, others wanted generic Protestants. We as teachers had to try to make everyone happy.

Progressive public school teachers don’t think like that. I’ve heard of a case where the teacher inspected a child’s lunch from home, deemed it nutritionally inferior, and forced the child to pay for an (institutionalized processed food) school lunch. Because teachers have more rights than parents in that area, in progressive teachers minds. Parents are the problem. 

More recently there are cases where teachers have ‘diagnosed’ a child as ‘transgender’ and demanded that the parents take the child to a pro-gender-transition ‘therapist’ or be prosecuted for child abuse. 

In California there was several years ago a requirement that all schools teach ‘LGBT history,’ which I suppose means that to California kids Abraham Lincoln and Emily Dickenson are Gay now. Whether Abraham and Emily like it or not. Children need LGBT history whether it’s true or not!

Once children get fully indoctrinated by progressive schools, we know what party they are going to be casting their first ballots for. Some of these young voters will, in time and with exposure to the real world, become mentally free to consider both sides of some issues. But in the meantime they will be voting the way progressive teachers have programmed them to.

I think that we conservatives should not just lie down and take it. A few families homeschooling is not enough. Why are there not funds in every single American city and town, so that every family who wants to send a child to a conservative Christian school can get a scholarship to do so? We can’t wait for school voucher programs to magically appear and magically be fair even to ‘hateful’ conservative schools. As long as Big Government holds the purse strings to schools and school vouchers, education of children will be a political football. And I hate football. We need to opt out— not just for our own kids if we are lucky enough to be in two-parent families, but for other kids as well. Government schooling is becoming an increasing threat to the democratic process. Let’s seek alternatives.

Why College Education Can't Be 'Free'

College students who are too dim to make it in college are demanding that college educations should be ‘free.’ What they really mean is that THEY don’t want to pay for it. They just want the benefits if they actually manage to get themselves educated, or get a degree in spite of their cluelessness.

Colleges and universities have a staff— professors and others— and buildings in which to hold classes. Both these things cost money that someone will have to pay for. Yes, we COULD enslave all college professors and make them teach for free, but we’d still have to feed them, because their deaths by starvation would inhibit their teaching ability. Feeding our nation’s college professor slaves would cost us money. We’d also need to house them in some manner nice enough they won’t all run away from the educational plantation and leave the college students untaught. 

Because of the costs, what ‘free education’ usually means is that those few students who pass the entrance exams with flying colors will get the educations. The students who today can enter classrooms based on student loans (which have to be paid back) would have no shot at higher education. This would actually be good for the dim bulbs who could never have graduated anyway, since they would have no loans to pay back.  But the others— the ones who are not epic test-takers but who could have managed to learn and graduate anyway— would have no opportunities.

Another approach to ‘free education’ is what happens in our public high schools, especially in poor neighborhoods. The standards are lowered, classes dumbed down, and before long you see high school diplomas handed out even to kids who can’t even read the words on the diploma. That’s a major reason that college is so important for people who want a job— high school diplomas now mean nothing. College diplomas are going the same way. 

I’ve heard someone express admiration for some foreign country in which ‘anyone’ can get government funding to live on while they go to university. But they never ask how many applicants can get into the colleges, how many places there are available compared to the number of high school leavers who don’t have jobs yet and might look at government funded studying as an alternative to getting a job. I doubt any country with ‘free education’ can afford to give it out to all comers. Someone has to get jobs to pay the bills.

As college degrees become worth less and less, it’s interesting that some are pointing out the shortage of young persons willing to train to become plumbers, carpenters, electricians, and other skilled non-college jobs. I guess the work is just too hard, compared with going to a college for years, majoring in binge drinking, and hope Bernie Sanders will magically pay off everyone’s student loans without collapsing the economy too badly.