About six months ago, I deleted my Twitter account. Once I realized I had been shadow banned merely for expressing an conservative controversial opinion about abortion, I just removed my account without any fanfare. What would be the point of "tweeting" a complaint if nobody but me could read it? The beauty of a shadow ban is the victim may not realize the ban is in effect for a while and may waste time and energy writing comments that no one but them can see. It's a lot like accidentally pressing the mute button in the middle of a phone conversation and failing to realize the other person can no longer hear a word you're saying. To be perfectly honest, I'd never liked the constraint of limiting my thoughts to 140 characters or less, so I decided to just delete my Twitter account and move on with my life. The only thing about the whole situation that still bothers me is the idea of some anonymous coward monitoring and then censoring my speech, and being powerless to stop it. But what other choice do I have? There aren't any grounds for a lawsuit. Yet according to Twitter's CEO, the corporate culture at his company is so toxic that conservative employees don't feel safe to express their personal opinions at work. Dorsey claims he doesn't think that's right or fair, but he's done absolutely nothing to stop it.All he would have to do is threaten to suspend or fire any employee for discriminating against users of their service or their fellow employees for political reasons, and it would stop. With his public denial of a strong liberal bias as the dominant … [Read more...]
OBE questions for Dr. Susan Blackmore
Dear Dr. Blackmore, With great interest, I read the personal OBE account from November 1970 on your website. I must admit I was a bit surprised, given what I previously knew about your work and your book, The Meme Machine. I had no idea that you received your PhD in parapsychology. Given the nature of the questions I'm about to ask, I have some concern about the sentence in your biography stating that you no longer research paranormal phenomena. However I must ask these questions of someone, and your particular area of expertise would seem to make you the ideal person to submit my query. Your 2016 lecture at the SANDS conference in Italy would have been the perfect forum to ask my questions but unfortunately, I wasn't invited. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBDPji5p6zE I'm not going to try to convince you that your alleged OBE wasn't a drug-induced hallucination, because I've never had one myself and that seems to be the best explanation for the "experience" you described. Because I know you're very busy and have an assistant screening your emails, I'll get right to the point. My first question is this: given that you presented reasonable evidence that your OBE wasn't real, why did you call it an OBE? Why didn't you just call it a drug-induced hallucination, as it seems to have been? Have you assumed that because your "OBE" probably wasn't real, that every other alleged OBE must also be a hallucination? More importantly, what do you do with evidence that if true, would invalidate your assumption? My remaining questions are all related the specific … [Read more...]
The Rootstock saga
Attention science fiction and fantasy fans! Here's a link to a new blog you should follow, about the upcoming Rootstock series of novels. Questions: are you bored with the same old tropes of a male-dominated genre? Tired of starting an epic story the author can't be bothered to finish? Give a woman's take on epic fantasy a chance to change your mind about what the genre can deliver. The genius behind these four terrific novels had this to say: Rootstock tells a powerful story of who we are and why we are here. Interwoven voices tell the tale in shifting, short chapters of tight POV crafted to hold a reader's attention in an age shortening attention spans. Plentiful dialog, edgy themes, and a diversity and depth in characters lift Rootstock above the norm.Rootstock chronicles a future beyond our forgotten past. The Watchers, ancient civilizations grown weary of war but stagnated in their state of perpetual ease, have been seeding Earth for eons, competing for evolutionary preeminence in never-ending cycles. Set amidst the rich backdrop of clans, kingdoms, and empires in a roughly eighteenth-century society, Rootstock follows a compelling ensemble of POV characters in their struggle for survival. Drawn from diverse cultures and ideologies, their paths entwine in love, duty, and the quest for freedom.Swordplay occurs far more often than gunfights, and remnants of technological wizardry such as teleportation are still accessible for a select few. Special “mindgifts” begin to awaken as bloodlines inspired by the Scots, Native Americans, Berbers, and even Middle-Earth … [Read more...]
An open letter to Jim Acosta
Dear Jim, My name is John, and I'm here to help. First, let's get something straight. I don't hate you. I don't even harbor a strong dislike for you, and I certainly wouldn't want anyone to cause you physical harm. My personal feelings toward you might best be described as disdain or contempt, because I have absolutely no respect for the job you do, or for your employer. It's nothing personal. Recently I watched a video in which you stormed out of a press briefing in a temper tantrum. White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders had just refused to declare the media is not the enemy of the American people--even though you and your colleagues have been doing a remarkable job of creating that impression for Trump voters. The problem is that President Trump didn't actually say what you accused him of saying--he didn't say the media was the enemy of the American people. He specifically referred to FAKE NEWS media. ABC News reported that on February 17, 2017, the president tweeted these exact words: "The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!" My only complaint was that President Trump neglected to mention MS-NBC and The Washington Post in the same tweet, because if the shoe fits... Horribly biased coverage by the mainstream media that favored the Democratic Party has been problematic for decades. For example, Bill Clinton inappropriately had adulterous sex in the Oval Office with a woman young enough to be his daughter. He sexually harassed several others, and … [Read more...]
Mob rule
Socialism is defined as "a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole." Mob rule is "control of a political situation by those outside the conventional or lawful realm, typically involving violence and intimidation." Basically, the most significant difference between those related forms of tyranny is whether the force applied to separate an individual citizen from the fruits of his or her labor is applied by government forces or private citizens. What then, is Democratic socialism? According to the Democratic Socialists of America, Democratic socialists believe that both the economy and society should be run democratically—to meet public needs, not to make profits for a few. To achieve a more just society, many structures of our government and economy must be radically transformed through greater economic and social democracy so that ordinary Americans can participate in the many decisions that affect our lives. In other words, Democratic socialists want to use the power of government to redistribute private wealth in order to buy votes, using the familiar and more palatable euphemisms such as "progressivism" and "the rich paying their fair share" to justify what is tantamount to legalized theft. Bernie Sanders might be the most famous American politician who describes himself as a Democratic socialist but runs as an Independent, while Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is a rising star in the Democratic Party and another … [Read more...]
