Facebook page closed

I have voluntarily closed my FB page.  I do not want to participate in the censorship circus.  pl

Comments

[Serge]

I did so in 2012 and never looked back. I used to recycle Twitter accounts every few months but now you need a phone number to do that. The near future of the internet is the absence of the perception of anonymity, every child will be assigned an internet identifier that will be linked to his social credit score. This is the ultimate goal of the tech companies: to merge the real life with the internet as much as possible, and then own/profit from that outcome. They have a common goal with the government in this quest, control.

[siberiancat]

Moved from FB to MeWe
Moved from Twitter to Gab

MeWe works great! Gab is very slow.

[EEngineer]

I dumped FB years ago myself. In the process of moving to Protonmail from gmail. Disentangling from Amazon is next.

[blue peacock]

Bravo!

I've never had a Facebook account. I follow many people on Twitter. Mostly financial market participants but also political commentators across the spectrum. All the "conservatives" on my feed have been disappeared. I stopped using Google for search many years ago as I noticed that their results were getting worse and shifted to DuckDuckGo.

I used WhatsApp for international calling and text messaging - but am part of the wave that have shifted to Signal in the past few weeks.

https://www.netflix.com/title/81254224

“It’s the gradual, slight, imperceptible change in your own behaviour and perception – that is the product.” That is also how these corporations make their money, by “changing what you do, what you think, who you are.”

They make profits, big profits, from the predictions business – predicting what you will think and how you will behave so that you are more easily persuaded to buy what their advertisers want to sell you. To have great predictions, these corporations have had to amass vast quantities of data on each of us – what is sometimes called “surveillance capitalism.”

https://consortiumnews.com/2021/01/14/netflixs-the-social-dilemma-tells-only-half-the-story/

Harvard professor Soshana Zuboff rang the bell some years back.

https://youtu.be/QL4bz3QXWEo

[elaine]

First they'll teach us not to use gender pronouns & perhaps reward
us with a treat as we learn to think & speak like them. It's just
an obedience school they want to run for the greater good of course.
An old phrase comes to mind, "The beatings will end when compliance
begins" Boycotts are now at best symbolic as "They" run the currency.

[Fourth and Long]

Tor was developed by the US Navy to enable spies to communicate over the web without being traced. But to actually work effectively lots of other more and less normal people had to be encouraged to use it. The details are fascinating. Two links below.

Spy-funded privacy tools (like Signal and Tor) are not going to protect you from the government -- see this from 2016

https://yasha.substack.com/p/spy-funded-privacy-tools-like-signal

And this today:

Signal is a government op:

https://yasha.substack.com/p/signal-is-a-government-op

[Ed Lindgren]

I had a Facebook account for about six weeks (a decade ago). My preferred search engine is DuckDuckGo. I pay five bucks a month for the services of an Australia-based email provider ( fastmail.com ). And Amazon is my vendor of last resort.

What is the path forward for those who desire a forum to present an alternative point of view?

Ron Paul touches on this in his most recent column:

“There are no easy solutions. But we must think back to the dissidents in the era of Soviet tyranny. They had no Internet. They had no social media. They had no ability to communicate with thousands and millions of like-minded, freedom lovers. Yet they used incredible creativity in the face of incredible adversity to continue pushing their ideas.”

At the rate this is all going, we might have to start thinking “outside the box.”

Dr. Paul’s column can be accessed here:

http://www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-articles/2021/january/11/the-war-on-terror-comes-home/

[Deap]

Religious communities used to be our like-minded shared communities. We would gather once weekly, share social events and good causes, while providing Sunday school values education for our children.

Only until a few decades ago, this was our very effective social networking system. With multiple denominational choices appealing to differing philosophical approaches.

Were these really hard core litmus test ideological institutions, or in fact a wonderful social network of shared values and a place to explore new values and put them into direct action?

Might be time to explore one's local religious institutional again to see if one can still find a comfortable social networking fit, and take a longer and less harsh literal view at what comes out of the pulpit.

Though raised in the liberal Christian tradition as a child, I spent many a Sunday at Washington Hebrew Congregation in Wash CD for their Sunday Scholars series which proved to be a mind-opening intellectual challenge when facing the moral dilemmas of adult life.

Religion with a small "r" and random"church shopping" will always provide at least one take-away moment to ponder for the rest of the week. And some free cookies and coffee.

[Artemesia]

related topic: Does anyone share my belief that the "requirement" for heavily armed guards and barricades around state capitols, based on FBI threat assessment that ProudBoys and other white supremacist/deplorables/smellies plan armed attacks in protest of Biden's inauguration is the prequel to imposition of martial law and/or a false flag?

I've never used FB and don't understand how or why to use Twitter.
I don't have TV and haven't watched MSM or cable news for about a decade.
I do, however, -- or did -- watch C Span, including Washington Journal almost religiously.

This morning's Wash. Journ. was outrageous. Moderator Jesse Holland, who teaches journalism, if I'm not mistaken, opened with, "The insurrectionist riots have the nation on edge . . ." Luge downhill from there.
C Span has revealed itself as Propaganda Central. Moderators proclaim themselves to be "objective" and even invisible: the callers are the focus. But especially since the beginning of the pandemic, and blatantly since the election & ensuing controversy, Moderators produce heavily loaded questions that function more as conditioners- normalizers; they validate callers who conform to the party line; and they argue with or cut off callers who disagree with the party line, even when such callers present articulate and soundly sourced information.

Brian Lamb retired in 2012 but remained a presence until about 2 years ago, and to the best of my knowledge has not appeared on the network, in person, since 2018. I believe the C Span project has morphed into something he did not anticipate and might not endorse.

[Alves]

People either push for the enforcement of antitrust laws in the app stores of Android and iOS or sooner or later you will be back to pre-internet times as far as interaction goes if you are a "wrong thinker".

[BillWade]

Artemesia, This seems far-fetched but perhaps these troop deployments are coming at President Trump's direction but the opposition is "owning" them with the help of the MSM. We all know good and damn well that Trump supporters aren't going to storm the capital nor the state capitals but Antifa/BLM might.

Love him or hate him, Alex Jones has an intriguing article up today that compares the Q movement to an operation the Bolsheviks ran (pretending to be dissident military that gave hope to the regular folks that they were going to be able to eventually defeat the Bolshies).

[Deap]

It was in the 80's, skies were blue, many people were enjoying picnics and playing sports in our local rose garden park, grass was green, dogs were frolicking, mountains in the background, historic structures in the fore, and we asked ourselves, does this looks like people are hiding behind their curtains worrying about an..... Insurrection?

Today' scene was also a face of America, but since this was California they already know what is to come since they are living it. Are they worried in DC? Most likely since this is all home-grown stuff and they know they caused the backlash.

[JohninMK]

BillWade you touch on an interesting topic.

Who made the decision and why is it thought necessary to turn central DC into the equivalent of the Green Zone in Baghdad? With an estimated 30,000 troops, 50 odd medium armour Strikers, engineers, drones plus goodness knows what else.

I understand that it is a 30 day deployment, why for so long after the inauguration?

As military Intel is usually good they surely can't be expecting strike columns of Deplorables in their 'technicals' a la ISIS?

This quite naturally leads to the theory that if they are not to keep someone out, maybe they are there for the opposite. We will know in a few days.

[Bobo]

Interesting short video from young man on his way to work. Some vulgarities.

https://www.instagram.com/tv/CKG6Wq0DXqL/?igshid=1114dk12t071l

[jerseycityjoan]

I am very sorry that you have left Facebook. I cannot say you were wrong to do so. I hope you were but I just don't know.

Free speech is essential to America. I don't want to lose it and I don't want to see it restricted in the future more than it has been in the past.

What we should do with people who lie and incite others is a question we shouldn't have to answer but somehow we will have to decide something. There are fanatics who don't play fair and enjoy causing trouble who get amplified on the internet in a way that harms others.

How do we maintain our freedoms in an unreasonable world?

[Deap]

I think we stop using the "net' for communication, if we want to retain our freedoms. The "net" is ungovernable, and freedom of speech is a protection conferred only on the governed.

Otherwise it is the law of the jungle on the net, and I see no way around it other than strong censorship for small sel-selected cells of users. There must be an analogy somewhere to describe the devolution of "net" communications we are now seeing. Trying to sweep back the sea is one.

Head of Parler now has to go into hiding after death threats to him and his family and security breaches. This is now a fact of life; not a preventable aberration.

As if all we needed was the original net motto posted on the wall at Google/Amazon??? -- don't be evil. Yes, sweeping back the see. Modern Satan walks amongst us. I applaud all those far brighter than me who have learned how to malevolently abuse the "net". But I also know when I have entered a danger zone and when it is time to get out. Not retreat; just common sense.

There are a lot of nut cases out there. They indeed are the real "secret spreaders". You never know when you will become their victim. Did "covid fear" simply act as a stalking horse for the dislocation of lives lived for too long on the unstable net?

"Something" is out there and it beyond our control. And the best we can do is quarantine ourselves from the evils lurking on the net, and mask our existence. Covid and the disease of the cancel culture may be cut from the same cloth.