Thought For the Day
- Donald R. McClarey
Donald R. McClarey
Cradle Catholic. Active in the pro-life movement since 1973. Father of three, one in Heaven, and happily married for 43 years. Small town lawyer and amateur historian. Former president of the board of directors of the local crisis pregnancy center for a decade.
The solution is for conservatives to abandon Facebook, Twitter, Google. I have. Don’t say it won’t make any difference if only one person does it.
Use Parler, meWe and alternative browsers to Chrome (Brave, Firefox), alternative search engines to Google (DuckDuckGo, Bing,..)
I was surprised by the number of competing search engines. I found the Swiss Cow particularly interesting, its marketing statement was family friendly and free from the influence of US and EU .
https://swisscows.com/?culture=en
Populism seems to be growing and not confined just to Conservatives in our nation. I think our big tech oligarchs are sawing off the limb they are sitting on and as competition grows they will lose influence.
Perhaps what is needed is a Conservative and Progressive populist movement to take down the Establishment of both parties. Alternative media would allow for a more free flow off ideas and finding issues of common interest. Some examples of common interest may be to defund the FBI and CIA, which progressives were distrustful of before conservatives.
Populism seems to be growing and not confined just to Conservatives in our nation.
You can say that again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XF5M2Jn3p0
Parler and MeWe are nothing like Facebook and some are moving there, in my opinion, sadly, and abandoning those of us who “know” Facebook, but are not Leftists. My own daughter did it and it breaks my heart. I, so looked forward to her posts and those who interacted with her. MeWe cannot and will not hold a candle to Facebook. In my opinion, Conservatives who left or are leaving, especially Catholics, are doing more harm than good. But, like the Catholic hierarchy in my long annulment battle, which I won, both times, but lost the war because I lost everything in my life than once mattered to me, those who left, will never have the integrity to face the fruits of their abandonment. To me, these conservatives are little different than the Catholic hierarchy and our spouses who have abandoned us, in our marriages. I am not going to argue. I have done that enough. It is not a perfect analogy, but the consequences are hurtful. Don, if you want me to remove this post, simply say it and I will. Thanks.
@Karl – Can understand the feels, but to continue your metaphor of a marriage, part of the problem is that for many conservatives, being on facebook (and other platforms) is the equivalent of staying in an abusive marriage.
Though I quite understand the exhaustion of the social media churn. Maybe it’s time to go back to emails and pen pals.
Nate, if my personal circumstances were different, I believe that my reaction, above, might be as well. What I have gone through for numerous decades has, radically, changed my life for the “less than positive”.
Karl
I am not a fan of social media, it just seems to me to be a mile wide but an inch deep. That is my own ignorance and personality flaw.
Twitter vs Parler or Facebook vs MeWe do not seem to be mutually exclusive. It does seem that the censorship of Twitter and Facebook censorship can be used as a stumbling block to the goal of expanding a populist base. Each is a tool and different tools are suited for different jobs.
Another reason to think ill of Michelle Obama.
Recall that she quit practicing law in 1991 and allowed her license to lapse in 1993. From 1991 to 2008 she had a series of handsomely compensated public sector and non-profit sector positions in Chicago doing no one knows what. Her salary was doubled after her husband was elected to the U.S. Senate, to $300,000 a year. When she left it in 2008, her oh-so-important position was eliminated in a hiring freeze.
The retired Foreign Service officer Lewis Amselem offered some years ago that he and his colleagues who had been posted to Latin America understood the Whitewater scandal immediately. “The function of the 1st Lady is to launder the bribes”. This aspect of the Obamas life and career has hardly received any attention.
Steve Sailer has been one of the few to remark on the anomaly of their turning to Tony Rezko to finance their real estate purchases: It’s a reasonable inference that they’d mismanaged their finances so that they did not qualify for an ordinary bank loan to purchase the oversized house Mooch wanted. (Recall that Madelyn Dunham had given them a condominium free and clear as a wedding present, a start few people receive).
The one appealing feature of the Obamas is that they have remained married and not generated any scandals involving adultery, liquor, or street drugs (I assume the media who buried Hunter Biden’s laptop also buries any shabby behavior by the Obama girls).
“do not seem to be mutually exclusive.” As long as you realize that Facebook will then continue to monitor / track your internet usage everytime you log back on unless you actively delete your caches.
Duckduckgo is not just a search engine, but a nice smart(?)phone browser. I generally use Brave on my laptop, but have trouble w it I want to watch “entertainment.” I have a MeWe account, but can’t get even conservative friends to switch.
I think we have to sacrifice something to make a statement. Granted MeWe isn’t as glitzy and functional as Facebook. I’m still giving that up (and my articles and photos and contacts with kids) to be a rebel. There’s no way the tech oligarchs will change their censorship unless their pocketbook starts to empty.
I have very few interactions on either Facebook or Twitter. I only read what is on there, and that very sparingly. From just about the beginning of Facebook its ever shape shifting privacy policies and tracking gave me the creeps. Another factor that soured me on Facebook usage was that employers used it as form of social scoring and credit system in the hiring process.
*
I’ve gone to using DuckDuckGo and Bing as search engines, and trying to use alternative web browsers to get away from Google. The Microsoft Edge web browser is now based on the same open source Chromium code base that is the foundation for the Google Chrome web browser.
Right: “. . . a mile wide and an inch deep.”
I keep a list of logical fallacies, i.e., the tools of lies and propaganda.
Aside from pics of your grandchildren, 99% of everything posted on social media is dishonest, dumb, or illogical; the rest is farce. Unbelievable as this may seem, the media is worse.
This just in, Google and Apple have removed from their app stores a tool which helps you download Parler and Apple is trying to extort from the owners of Parler the imposition of content moderation.
See what’s up at Althouse. Althouse read Trump’s hour long speech and put the most incriminating passages up on her site. Read them. This notion that he ‘incited’ anyone is another rubbish meme. It was enough to persuade four officials including two cabinet secretaries to resign. IOW, they didn’t read any of the speech or they’re pretending he said something he did not. (Has anyone figured out why Wm. Barr resigned?).
I am amused that Mitch McConnell has issued a memorandum delineating the parliamentary procedure for addressing an impeachment resolution by the House. Because Congress is in recess until 19 January, the Senate will be able to begin hearing the managers on the afternoon of the 20th.
The all-out effort to permanently brand Trump as responsible for everything bad that has happened in the past year seems to me to be a manifestation of terror on the part of both the left and the Republican elites that he might come back to haunt them, starting right after the inauguration of President Puppet. He must have hurt them even more than we know. It will be interesting to see what they do next. I still believe a full-court press toward prosecuting him for some fabricated crime is on their agenda. This absurd talk of impeachment is just the warm-up.
They don’t seem to comprehend that calling further attention to Trump after he leaves office and demonizing him and his supporters is likely to have the opposite effect from what they seek. Unless they really do want to start a shooting war. I pray they are not that stupid.
Trump and we [tens of millions of productive, thinking Americans] who support him are not going away.
Truth: Donald John Trump’s four wonderful years were a huge blessing – peace and prosperity – for all Americans, which was 24/7/365 queered by academia, the administrative/security state, media, globalists, social media/tech titans, and assorted other evil people.