Day after day I see liberals banning, shadow-banning, demonetizing authors they disagree with. No, not just Nazi saluting, racist slur shouting idiots, not like those repulsive views doesn’t have the right to be expressed, see unanimous US Supreme Court decision (most of these companies are in the US).
You can get banned for collecting data about Islamist terror attacks or posting pictures of a fat hedgehog. Or check out these white supremacists that Youtube bravely stopped:
Liberals are openly calling for banning the President of the USA from the internet and express displeasure at the tech companies for letting some “hate” sites exists.
The purpose of this isn’t to take down the actual posters. They are both capable of reappearing at other, at worst foreign hosts and also preach to the choir. Not like many independents or politically unaffiliated people follow Lauren Southern. So silencing them won’t change anything, anyone who read them will keep reading something like that and even if all “hate” content disappear (for example the extremely hateful position of Ann Coulter that the existing immigration laws should be enforced), the former readers will still be diehard anti-liberal voters.
No, the real target is the content creator like myself. Someone who mostly doesn’t post political things. Someone who doesn’t make money out of politics and can live without it. I post mostly about video games. Sometimes about economics. Rarely about politics. I could go on without posting about politics. Which is the very point of the current censorship campaign of the leftist: to make me censor myself in fear of being banned. After all, I can write about how to find medkids in Mylta and look how much hits I got for it:
Why risk my blog for an occasional political post? It’s safer to shut up and monetize those hits. Maybe setting up a twitch channel and telling fart jokes while collecting medkits!
People like me are the most dangerous to the liberals because my readers are from various parts of the political palette. Ann Coulter won’t reach a liberal or an independent, as they are already made to believe that she is a bloodthirsty Nazi and no decent people should ever listen to her, she must be silenced by setting dumpsters on fire. I do reach these people, because they come here for a-political video game ideas again and again and once BANG! there is a forbidden thought about welfare being bad or the Nazi idea of meritocracy. I have a chance to convince independents or even liberals that not being lazy and dumb isn’t equal to joining the Totenkopf-SS.
Blogger.com is owned by Google, which is the most aggressively liberal company I know of. They fired this engineer for the horrible crime of citing the scientific consensus about differences between the averages of males and females:
I guess I don’t even need to post about meritocracy and capitalism to get banned, it’s enough that someone writes them a complaint “im john and i play wow with the name arthasdklől and this gevlon guy bullied me for having small penis (he used the gaming slang DPS) im literally shaking stop him” and I’m banned. Probably this happened to this statistics prof who didn’t even do politics. Some liberal wrote an anonymous “I’m victim of microaggression” post and it’s enough.
Since I rigorously save everything and I backup my computer regularly and I keep backup DVDs away from my home, I never really bothered about losing my blog content. I just realized that what I can lose is the blog address. I mean if Goolag bans my blog, I have no way to tell you where my new content can be found. You won’t even know I’m banned, you can just assume that I ragequit.
So today I escaped the Goolag and continue my blog on this site. The template is rudimentary, the format is horrible, I have to figure out how to do things, but I’ll manage. I will no longer post content on greedygoblin.blogspot.com, but for the foreseeable future I will post a link every time a new post here is up. I keep the old content where it is, will bother migrating the old posts when Goolag chooses to ban me. Maybe they won’t, since I will no longer post content on their site, so there isn’t much point anymore. While I’ve found no instance of WordPress banning people for not supporting Hillary/Justin/Angela, it’s also possible that this site gets banned first, but then I can use the old google site to tell you where you can find me.
I’d like to stress that this isn’t a political solidarity for Ann, Lauren, James or the countless others the liberals try to silence. It’s simply a precaution to prevent it happening to me. Yet it somewhat depressing that I’ve grown up listening how the generation of my parents fought against communist oppression and how lucky I am that I’ll live my life in freedom and yet I need to do the exact same things they did against the exact same lefties marching under the exact same flags:
The blog will not become any more political than it was (yes, there will be a political post tomorrow, the blame is on Tobold). It will still mostly about video games and their strategies. Instead of preaching, I want to show how meritocracy and “pay to win” mentality works in the simulated World. I can’t stop a war with preaching. I can make someone’s life better if I convince him to stop carrying morons and slackers on his back.
Please be patient while I figure out how this works. Especially how to make the text field wider, I hate that 70% of my screen is unused and the post is a small column in the middle. Also, anyone knows how can I comment as “Gevlon” instead of “greedygoblinblog”?
Finally, something funny but true:
– If communism doesn’t work, why do so many people support it?
– Because they don’t work either!
Test comment by Gevlon
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Themes are going to be your go-to resource for blog layouts. Unfortunately, most of them have the dead space to the sides, primarily to make blogs look good on tablets/phones without extra formatting. Browsing through a few, it looks like the “Kelly” theme has a wider one-column text than the others. Most themes have a few customization options, but fine-tuning will require paying for WordPress Premium.
As for changing your username, look for the “WP Admin” option at the very bottom left of edit mode. Click that, and you’ll be in the “real” edit mode. Click on Users, then My Profile, and then type Gevlon down in “Display name publicly as.”
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It is telling that people forget history. Blog posts, websites, twitter accounts, etc, are just one more form of print. It is extremely narrow minded people who are afraid of other ideas that burn books. They are not only insecure in their own mind about what they think but frightened that others might entertain thoughts contrary to them.
Certainly these are private companies. They have a right to not host things or by extension be seen as participators or approvers of the actions of others. But companies like Google, can, arguably, be seen as providers of a public service. Their censorship is problematic then. Their knee jerk response to search data is problematic because it assume the motive of the person or that searching for knowledge is akin to supporting ‘evil’ knowledge.
It is not surprising that Google would do what it did. See how the great “do no evil” caved to China regarding its search engine. Apple will surely do the same. They mistake perception for reality… such a flawed way of thinking and living.
“I might not agree with what you say, but I will die for your right to say it.” What happened to America that this way of thinking has died? One thing: the mindset that believes their thinking is the only tolerable way of thinking has gained control and soaked into the younger generations. How ironic that this mindset is one in the same with the mindset of many the people they think they should silence: the Hitler’s and other oppressors of the world.
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@S Riojas: in my limited historic experience, anyone who aimed to “do no evil” ended up doing much more evil than those he tried to stop. The ONLY way of consequently doing good is following rational self-interest, which in Google’s case would be maximizing profit from selling ads next to accurate search results and any kind of videos people watch.
What happened with America is “elitism”, the belief that the common man is unable to to think for himself and we must do it for his own good. It’s a variation of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man%27s_Burden the belief that “the Empire existed not for the benefit — economic or strategic or otherwise — of Britain, itself, but in order that primitive peoples, incapable of self-government, could, with British guidance, eventually become civilized (and Christianized).”
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“Liberals are openly calling for banning the President of the USA from the internet”
No, they are not. The article you linked to talks about whether Twitter, a private company, should set and enforce rules about who they want to offer access to their service and on what terms. I kinda expected you as a libertarian to be all in favour of private companies having the freedom to shape their business and not be forced into having it forcefully shaped by others.
Also, as a Eastern European Citizen (and having talked about historical aspects of the region – you’re even mentioning communist oppression in this very post) I didn’t think you’d simply copy the comparison of Google to a Gulag. Damores comparison ranges from clueless to idiotic; he either has no clue what Gulags were or he’s really gone mad and thinks that working at Google (and getting compensated very well to do so) is the same as being forced to do hard physical Labour under terrible conditions.
(Also, his memo clearly suffers from selective reasoning and confirmation bias, and what he presents isn’t necessarily “scientific consensus”.
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@Azuriel: thanks, now I’m Gevlon
@Harper: there is a problem with that “private company does what it wants” and will be a post on Friday. But please note that I did not demand some lawmaker to change Google but I abandoned its services. I also not suggest the President to set laws against banning him from the de facto internet, but team up with friendly developers and create their own alternatives.
Gulags were the end of communist oppression. They started with censorship and street violence. All dictatorships ended up with some form of camps for dissenters.
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>> for the horrible crime of citing the scientific consensus about differences between the averages of males and females
It’s not that. He extrapolated this as a proof of existence of biological differences (“statistic differences” and “predefined biological differences” are, um, different things). More importantly, he stated that those biological differences are relevant for being competent in specific skills (this is called neurosexism). Then he suggested various practices intended to utilize those differences in work process (this is called sexism and discrimination).
Yes, he started all this as a response to Google’s own discrimination (affirmative action being just a form of it). And yes, he should not be fired. His manifesto was polite and intelligently worded. In a proper society this makes him a candidate for a civilized discussion, but not a criminal or a person unfitting to work as a programmer or whatever he was working at Google as.
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To enable anonymous comments: link.
Also, the best way to avoid censorship is to get your own DNS address. The cheapest ones only cost 1-2$ per year and already include a privacy option that hides your real name.
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@Hanura H’arasch:
I don’t see how a DNS record can help against censorship if the blog remains hosted on WordPress platform. Basically platform owners can still remove the whole content if they like.
Ordering DNS + own VPS then installing WordPress software manually surely will help, but has enough convenience downsides.
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Hanura: yesterday’s traffic (with PUBG peak) needed over 50GB upload. Such capacity is not cheap and that’s before a DDOS attack that any script kiddie can do.
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@Antze K.:
They sure can, but as Gevlon already pointed out that irrelevant. He can just make the DNS entry point to another service and upload his content from backups again.
Completely hosting the content yourself of course would be even better, but can’t be expected by someone who doesn’t have experience with that stuff already.
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@Gevlon: I meant buying a DNS entry, not a server, so you wouldn’t have to pay for traffic.
Though I will note that you can get 3000 GB a month of bandwidth on a halfway decent VPS for about 10$/month.
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You can get hosting with 3TB of data usage for $10 a month. Getting DDoS protection is another $3 a month.
http://www.ramnode.com/vps.php
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Congrats on moving away from the botnet. As Hannura said, if worried about getting banned from wordpress.com register a domain from 3rd party domain registrar and use it on this blog like so https://en.support.wordpress.com/domains/map-existing-domain/
This way you could always rehost your blog elsewhere while keeping the same address, and it should be harder to get banned from domain registrar for ridiculous reasons.
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Updated my bookmark (RSS feed really).
For now Google has made a deal with the European establishment to suppress the alt-right in Europe and in return does not get prosecuted too heavily for abusing their monopoly . Luckily several of the east European countries seem to have some sanity left.
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Gaa. How do I just register so I can leave named comments.
I do not want to use facebook, google, or twitter. I do not want to set up a WordPress blog.
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You are right about freedom of speech. No entity shall stop you from shouting whatever you like. Doing so against your country or religion/political mantra is something personal you have to deal with, and we don’t care. This doesn’t mean others are forbidden to comment. Reciprocity make talks going wild or smooth, depending on the interlocutors, but at the end, YOU hold the censor hammer. What about the comments you censored and the home made “rules” you applied ? How is this different ?
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@Guldur: answer on Friday
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/looks around new place
/shrugs indifferently and types comment
It wouldn’t hurt if there was a breakdown of the extent of damage the whole goolag thing seems to be doing. Atm i’m seeing a lot of ideology from the anti-goolag camp (which i sympathise with), but not a lot of numbers.
Also, it would be helpful to find some hints on any services around that are similar to google drive / docs and mail in terms of easy-to-use combined functionality (i know i can rig dropbox to work with MS Office docs and a self-hosted email account, but that would defeat the whole point).
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What did socialists use before candlelight?
Electricity.
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@ Gevlon: Certainly in more of the leadership of various government entities and corporations there is an elitism that views other people as inferior in any decision making process. However, that does not drive censorship. That form of elitism views ‘native’ or inferior views as something mythological and while not encouraged is not suppressed.
What we are seeing is a fear of opposing ideas that sees a need to suppress them. You do not censor an idea simply because you think your own way is better. You censor ideas because you are afraid people will agree with them. There is a distinction.
Everyone is biased, there are no exceptions. The differences are in where, to what degree, and if the person is even aware of their bias. But to the degree that one is confident in one’s own thinking one does not feel threatened by the ‘inferior’. The number of people who think they know better than you how you should live is not a small number. The number of those people who think they know better than you how you should live is more noticeable now because more and more of them are running things that impact you.
Totalitarians are fine when they are your mother-in-law, not when they are the major power wielders like Presidents, Judges, Legislators, and Corporate leaders. You can always move away and change your phone number to avoid the in-laws. Harder to do when they are in leadership of your nation.
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@Maxim: I have no idea because I’ve never used Google drive, docs and the blog mail was always a local host.
@S Riojas: the source of censorship is indeed “you are afraid people will agree with them”, however it’s a product of looking down on people. I believe:
– my ideas are right and I can convince reasonable people to believe me if they see my arguments equally as my opponent’s
– the people are reasonable and can be convinced by right ideas
I don’t think the liberals are Evil (with big E) and purposefully push ideas they know to be wrong and want to silence better ideas.
I think they believe that the common man is a deplorable who is incapable of making the right decision, therefore must be stopped from hearing my argument
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@gevlon
there are actually good tutorials around for migrating from blogger to wordpress:
it is possible to:
– import all your old posts on the new platform
– have redirects for pretty much any link people have to your old blog (people automatically end up here)
might be a bit more work but would make the move smoother and not cut the history.
e.g. http://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-switch-from-blogger-to-wordpress-without-losing-google-rankings/
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Maximum file size for import: 15MB.
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@Gevlon: can you send me exported XML file? I should be able to split it into smaller files that you can then import.
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@Hanura: no need. I started doing importing manually the pages and I’m fixing them a lot. I mean the content. I use the site change for a well-overdue cleaning. The important posts will be updated. The not important are … not important.
Also, Goolag has little reason to ban my old site now, so they probably won’t.
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@Gevlon:
“there is a problem with that “private company does what it wants” and will be a post on Friday. But please note that I did not demand some lawmaker to change Google but I abandoned its services. I also not suggest the President to set laws against banning him from the de facto internet, but team up with friendly developers and create their own alternatives.”
I did not suggest you demanded either. What I said was that your depiction of someone being banned by twitter is far from being “banned from the internet”, as you depicted it. That you suggest they create their own service shows that it’s not about banning him from the internet but rather that you were overly dramatic.
“Gulags were the end of communist oppression. They started with censorship and street violence. All dictatorships ended up with some form of camps for dissenters.”
“Some form of camps for dissenters” is hardly an apt description for voluntarily taking a (very well) paid job at a company that is known for offering a work environment with many amenities that one can leave at any time at own will. You’re basically confirming that his comparison that you happily recreated and copied wasn’t even remotely accurate; I’d say it was stupid, ignorant and tasteless considering that the real, historical Gulags destroyed and often times even took the lifes of those suffering there just because they were considered enemies of the state and had no way to escape.
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@Harper: about alternatives, please wait for tomorrow post. For now, imagine if the electric company would refuse to serve you. You can get a generator though.
The problem with Google isn’t that it is firing dissenting employees (while I’d love to see a company firing someone for supporting BLM), the problem that it censors practically everyone on the internet.
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I agree with what was said before, ideally you’d be telling us to visit greedygoblinblog.com or greedygoblin.blog or some such — as it stands you are repeating a “mistake” by telling us to update from yourStuffHostedAt.blogspot.com to yourStuffHostedAt.wordpress.com so if/when you’re not happy here, your audience will have to come find you at the next place. Buy a domain name, configure it at https://en.support.wordpress.com/domains/map-existing-domain/ and you will have better control if you want to move.
Good luck with the new blog!
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Echoing Sparky (even though I’m probably late) you really should just get your own domain as to avoid this problem in the future, as currently your just passing the buck.
Some suggestions:
GreedyGoblinBlog.com @ $10.69/year
(https://www.namecheap.com/domains/registration/results.aspx?domain=greedygoblin.com)
greedygoblin.online @ $0.88/year
or if you’re feeling like a hipster
greedygobl.in @ $9.99/year
When even random and ~apolitical~ company likes cloudflair feel comfortable randomly booting people, you know its time to host yourself. I would definitely shop around a bit, and hosting a simple wordpress site is not too much hassle.
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