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...]
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...]
A blind rock maker?
In his 1802 book titled Natural Theology, or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity Collected from the Appearance of Nature, Anglican Priest and philosopher William Paley made the classic teleological "argument from design" in his famous Watchmaker analogy, which says: In crossing a heath, suppose I pitched my foot against a stone, and asked how that stone came to be there; I might possibly answer that, for anything I knew to the contrary, it has lain there forever. Nor would it perhaps be very easy to show the absurdity of this answer. But suppose I have found a watch upon the ground, and it should be inquired how the watch happened to be in that place; I should hardly think of the answer, which I had before given, that for anything I knew, the watch might have always been there.... The watch must have had a maker: that there must have existed, at some time, and that some place or other, and artificer or artificers, who formed it for the purpose which we find it actually to answer; who comprehended its construction and designed its use.... Every indication of contrivance, every manifestation of design, which existed in the watch, exists in the works of nature; with the difference, on the side of nature, of being greater or more, and that in a degree which exceeds all computation. Granted, rebuttals have been attempted in response to Paley’s argument for Intelligent Design, but the question is: can these counterarguments actually challenge a modernized version of Paley's Watchmaker with any real success? It seems to me that all of these counterarguments … [Read more...]
