The Right-o-sphere is rife with personal stories of Facebook, Google/Youtube and Twitter either de-monetizing, restricting, throttling, censoring or banning conservative and libertarian voices.

Facebook seems happy to do it – while allowing Islamists the run of the place, to the point where PM Theresa May called for Internet censorship after the recent Islamist mass murders in Manchester.

Earlier this year, Mark Zuckerberg said:

[Terrorist attacks are] carried out with a goal to spread fear and distrust, and turn members of a community against each other. I believe the only sustainable way to fight back against those who seek to divide us is to create a world where understanding and empathy can spread faster than hate, and where every single person in every country feels connected and cared for and loved. That’s the world we can and must build together.

This is so misguided that, coming from a nominally-intelligent man, one must almost wonder if some evil force possesses him? Because it happens to be what the wolf would say to the hounds if it could; or what Satan might say when cornered.

Newsflash, Mr. Zuckerberg: terrorist attacks are carried out with a goal of killing infidels and establishing the supremacy of Islam. Period. You have to admit a problem’s true nature, before you can solve it.

I don’t want to “fight back against those who seek to divide us.” Because that makes zero sense. Anyone who ever does anything good or new, or who takes a stand (be it true or false) on anything, “seeks to divide us.” It happens. It makes much more sense to fight back against those who seek to subjugate and/or kill us.

The terrorist losers use your own platform, Mr. Zuckerberg, and it’s not clear if you make much effort to stop them. Much less, an effort greater than what you put into stopping U.S. conservatives, or other critics of Hillary or the Big Government that you love so much.

Recently, a Pakistani man was sentenced to death for alleged blasphemy – on his Facebook page. Facebook claims innocence; “we do not provide any government with direct access to people’s data. We will continue to protect our community from unnecessary or overreaching government intervention.”

But I don’t know if I can believe that. Because:

• Pakistan asked Facebook’s help to fight blasphemy.
• Reports exist that Facebook assisted them.
• Which are credible because of Facebook’s track record. When Angela Merkel pressed Zuckerberg to crack down on posts critical of Germany’s Muslim refugee crisis, he told her yes, they’re working on it.

Is Facebook an accessory to Pakistan’s judicial murder of Taimoor Raza? We need to know. I couldn’t find any recent statement about it.

And of course, that Facebook would ever give a hoot about anti-Jewish or anti-Christian blasphemy is unimaginable. (As it should be; the point here is Facebook’s extreme double standard.)

Right now it appears that Facebook puts WAY more into stopping conservatives and libertarians – people who stand for life and liberty – than it puts into stopping various kinds of Islamic murderer. That’s evil.

Hat tip Steven Crowder. By the way, his Painting Muhammad video is must-see.

Apparently, making fun of their nipples is an effective tactic, if you can get access to pictures of their nipples and their nipples are mock-worthy.

OK, this is kind of an unserious post, but there is a broader more serious discussion going on about fighting the left more aggressively. Since the George W. Bush administration, the right has been lectured that we should take the high ground, that we should be civil and not resort to the kind of violent, deranged rhetoric of left wing politicians, or the obnoxiousness of groups like Occupy Wall Street, Code Pink, Black Lives Matter, Antifa… and the list goes on.

But all these years of Civility haven’t gotten us anywhere. Meanwhile, the left has only gotten more obnoxious. Look at Evergreen State College and Berkeley as only the most recent examples. The failure to push back against the violent left has only emboldened them to push harder and harder, become more extreme tot he point where they think it is okay to sneak up behind a peaceful right-wing protester and bash him on the head with a bike lock.

Not to mention that the right’s limp-mule response to the left gave rise to the alt-right; which is willing to fight back against the left, blow for blow but unfortunately contains some racist and disreputable elements. Someone once said that if good people refuse to fight, then they ought not complain if not-so-good people pick up the fight instead. Or, something like that.

Dems have been complaining for months & months about Dir. Comey. Now that he has been fired they PRETEND to be aggrieved. Phony hypocrites!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 10, 2017

UPDATE: A commenter has made a reasonable challenge in another thread: (more…)

Your Left at work:

The idiot made a detailed death threat against President-Elect Trump, on social media.

He was then surprised that it got out to society. You know, surprised that people on social media would be social with it.

He tried to plead that it was a joke, that it was alcohol-fueled, and that it was only meant to be private (i.e., he’s sorry he got caught). But those excuses didn’t stop his getting some death threats in return.

Surely those threats were also jokes, alcohol-fueled, and only meant to be private. Even so, when it was done to him, he was shocked – and for some reason he felt a need to go into hiding.

His former company, to its good credit, has gotten rid of him. And he has apologized; God bless him, for that. Hat tip HotAir.

UPDATE: Your Left at work, again. The Left’s New Hot Meme has arrived. Lefties will be labelling all news/opinion sites that dare challenge them as “Fake News”.

We can foresee what comes after: The Left will eventually get its “Fake News”-labelled sites to be banned or boycotted by Facebook, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, CNN.com, and so on. In this way, the Left will once again control all discussions and get the peasants to conform. Google has started going there.

UPDATE – Climate of Hate: Daisy Luther on how Obama, Clinton, and Sanders Could Stop the Riots But They Just Watch.

Last month, there was a brief internet infatuation with James Robertson, a resident of the Democrat Stronghold of Detroit, Michigan. People were inspired by his 20 mile daily commute… on foot… to his factory job, and were so moved that they raised over $3oo,000 for him on GoFundMe, and a local Ford dealership presented him with a new car. And this was all done voluntary, without any bureaucratic coercion from the Federal Government, because people wanted to show support for someone who demonstrated good values and a good work ethic.

But after his story went viral, the parasites who make up the city that has been run (into the ground) by progressive left Democrats for fifty years decided that Robertson should… gee, how to say it… “Spread the wealth around.”

After that, everybody knew him. And everybody wanted something. The neighborhood started showing up on his porch with their palms out, though Robertson has yet to receive any of the money. His girlfriend — the one who owns the house and charges him 200 bucks for the bedroom — demanded a payout, he said. So did her ex-husband who lives with them. So did her adult son who lives with them. So did the other dude who lives with them.

Safe bet that none of those people would ever walk 20 miles a day to get to a job. The upshot is, Robertson had to move to a secret location, under police protection, because in Detroit, if people think you have some money, they will kill you to get to it.

I just wonder where they got the idea that just taking stuff from people who are better off than you was fair and just.

Social Justice, Inc,. presents the 2015 White Guilt calendar.

EJI is proud to announce the release of our 2015 calendar, A History of Racial Injustice. This full-color wall calendar expands on EJI’s previous calendars with new historical entries and short essays highlighting historical events and issues in our nation’s racial history.

The 2015 calendar is part of a series of reports and educational materials that explore (America’s) legacy of … slavery, racial terror, and legally supported abuse of racial minorities.

Then again, this calendar may not be for you guys, because some elements of the Racial Justice Movement have decided that Gays are the Oppresor.

We can no longer sit idly by as you, mainstream LGBT organizations, center your movements and advocacy work on some within our varied communities but not others. We are no longer OK with the mainstream LGBT organizations among you who signal your complicity in anti-Black violence through your loud silence and deliberate ignoring of the types of systemic, institutionalized forms of anti-Black racism that negatively impact Black queer and trans people (and all Black people), disallow Black well-being, and deaden us.

Imagine the dillema now faced by Chris Lemon, Michael Sam, and RuPaul.

This could be satire, but considering that the Feminist Left has already gifted us with “Micro-aggresions” and California’s affirmative consent law, is anything too ridiculous to doubt that Progressives won’t make it a thing.

HotAir pointed out yesterday that “Consistent liberals” are most likely to block others on social media for disagreeing with them politically.

Hence, my question. I’m honestly divided. In this complicated world, we’ve all known some lefties who are plain jerks, while some other lefties may be fairly nice people – apart from their never wanting to hear or know of any information that could make them question their prejudices.

I ran into the second kind of person just the other night, at my dad’s. “Cynthia” is a highly-educated neighbor in his retirement community, very nice in terms of watching out for my dad’s disabled girlfriend, and with a pleasant demeanor. So far, “not a jerk.”

But narrow-minded. As one example, she’ll dismiss (as in, will not hear) any information of Sarah Palin being anything other than a total dummy. Which is funny because the prominent Obama supporter and former “green jobs czar”, Van Jones, has now admitted in essence that the Left lied to people about Palin in the 2008 campaign:

“Sarah Palin .. people forget. She had the Democratic party shaking in our boots in 2008. She came out, she gave that speech at the convention. That was, hands down, one of the best convention speeches – not by a woman, by anybody in 2008. People were running for the hills…

Now it can be told! Now it can be told! We were scared!”

It must help the Democrats that their most officially ‘educated’ supporters are among their most dogmatically-gullible supporters. The Democrats can lie to such people and they won’t even care. For another example, we have President Obama’s recent admission that the Democrat candidates who are staying distant from him this year are engaged in a lie:

Well look, here’s the bottom line. We’ve got a tough map. A lot of the states are contested this time are states that I didn’t win. And so some of the candidates there – it is difficult for them to have me in the state…

The bottom line is though, these are all folks who vote with me. They have supported my agenda in Congress…These are folks who are strong allies and supporters of me, and you know, I tell them, I said, ‘you know what? You do what you need to do to win.’

Dogmatically-gullible people: They enable the Democrats to get away with it. Some of them are jerks, some of them are nice – but narrow-minded.

Apple, Facebook will pay for female employees to freeze their eggs:

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Apple Inc and Facebook Inc will help pay for female employees to freeze their eggs…

From January, Apple will pay both full- and part-time employees up to $20,000 for procedure and storage costs for female employees to freeze their eggs.

“We continue to expand our benefits for women, with a new extended maternity leave policy, along with cryopreservation and egg storage as part of our extensive support for infertility treatments,” Apple said in a statement.

I’m pretty sure that Apple already covered its employees’ *medical fertility problems*. (If that’s mistaken, please correct me in the comments.) Something else must be new here. What is it?

Could it be, a benefit for egg-freezing as a pure career move? Let’s see:

“We want to empower women at Apple to do the best work of their lives as they care for loved ones and raise their families.”

NBC News reported on Tuesday that Facebook recently began covering egg-freezing for non-medical reasons…

Egg freezing is a pricey but increasingly popular option for women. It enables women to delay child bearing…

A sign of the times. Now that Facebook/Apple woman can freeze her eggs at 30, work years of 80 hour weeks, and then at 50 when she’s pulling 300K a year (and naturally infertile), pay a surrogate to do that other part of her life for her – you know, having kids from her eggs.

Honestly, I see nothing wrong with it – if she’s doing it all with her own money. The issue I see here is, Apple and Facebook are choosing to engage in a form of discrimination against their employees who don’t make (or shall we say, don’t need to make) that particular, optional choice.

Remember, the money comes from somewhere: the overall “employee comp” budget. Rather than pay tens of thousands of dollars for a hugely *optional* procedure for a special category of employee, why would Facebook/Apple not raise all employees’ bonuses by (say) a thousand dollars? That would empower far more women (and men, and transgenders) and be much more fair.

The free market will (or should) ultimately decide if Apple and Facebook have done the right thing here. In the meantime, some people appear not to grasp that freezing your eggs – purely as a career move – is optional:

“Egg freezing gives women more control,” said Jennifer Tye, marketing lead for Glow, a mobile application aimed at helping women avoid pregnancy or conceive.

“When I turned 30, I had this notion that my biological clock was ticking, but I didn’t know what my options were,” said Tye.

Really? At 30, she didn’t know what her options were? I hope she was misquoted; if not, it’s mind-boggling stupidity.

Social media have allowed us to interact and connect in ways not possible just a decade ago.  They have made it easier for us to track down long-lost friends and to  learn about their present doings.  Even as I write this, I am chatting on Facebook with an Australian gay man who, like many of our readers, differs from the norm of our community; he reached out to me after discovering the blog.

Facebook has also allowed me to see a phenomenon I first witnessed when I came out in the 1990s, of the loneliness of many gay men, perhaps a loneliness paralleled among our straight peers, but one which, at times,seems unique to our particular situation.  And Facebook magnifies it.  Some men seek solace in identifying with a political group, fearing to differ in one iota from its ideology, lest their peers cut them off.  Others relate the most mundane items of their day, as if that will help link them to the outside world.

Here we have this means of instant (virtual) connection and yet all too many of us aren’t really connecting.

These observations have caused me to revisit some (somewhat) dormant ideas about loneliness — and that too human hunger for real connection, for friends who see us we are and in whose presence we feel part of the universe because to truly feel part of the universe, we must, all of us, feel some connection to our fellow man.  And not just the connection of their physical presence, but a meaningful bond where they delight in our idiosyncrasies — and they in ours.

Understanding that, I found it very hard to watch the 1964 Bette Davis movie Dead Ringer, a film where the screen siren plays twin sisters, with the less financially fortunate Edith Phillips murdering her more wealthy sister Margaret in order to assume her identity and live in luxury.  As soon as Edie commits the crime, then puts on her sister’s clothes and goes to her house, all I could think about was how miserable her new life would be, no longer able to spend time with the Karl Malden‘s Jim Hobbson, the cop who truly appreciates her–cut off not just from him, but from her friends in the bar she manages.

I just couldn’t believe that anyone, well into middle age, with real friends would want to give them all up for a chance at riches.  And yet some people do.

After all, what is wealth if you have no one with whom to share it? (more…)