Right over the target

Patrick Crozier, at Samizdata, bewails the action of Twitter in banning Instapundit:

…Reynolds is not a nutter. If they can ban him they can ban us all.

No no no no no [Brecht].

Twitter is not a public service funded by a benevolent World Socialist Government. It is a profit-making corporation. It makes and applies its own rules as it sees fit within its own virtual ‘premises’ and there’s sweet Felicity Arkwright that anyone can or should do about it.

Apart from voting with their mouse and taking their business elsewhere, of course. But he goes on:

Worse still, it is not as if Twitter is alone. It is remarkable how quickly internet stalwarts like Google, Facebook and Twitter have gone from being dynamic, “don’t be evil”, believers in freedom to being fully paid up members of the bansturbationary elite.

I have never trusted or used Google, whose cutesy rags-to-riches story is just a tad too Hollywoodesque to be believed, and I’ve never used the other two either. I don’t believe they were ever ‘on our side’.

Get a grip, man! If a huge, secretive corporation that wasn’t there last week and now knows everything about everyone claims repeatedly that it is “not evil”, what do we all think it is, children?

Mr. Crozier’s colleague Rob Fisher suggests the use of gab.ai as an alternative.

My points:

(1) It is entirely possible to establish online comms without having to ‘sign up’ to ‘social media’ at all. Here we are doing it.

(2) If Instapundit got hit by flak then there’s a good chance that it was right over the target at the time.

 

Sheep

It’s a question of whether I can write anything about Facebook today without feeling it necessary to mention that I think Mark Zuckerberg looks like a sheep.

 

 

No, I’ve decided that on this occasion I can’t.

I think Mark Zuckerberg looks like a sheep.

Right, that’s that over with. Now then. Breitbart cites the Guardian, which in turn cites Aftenposten. Most readers will, I imagine, by now be aware of this case, but it is possible that not everyone has read all the way though Espen Egil Hansen’s lengthy ‘open letter’ to the sheeplike one, protesting at said unworthy’s media corporation first having censored the famous ‘napalm girl’ photo from the Vietnam War, and then having censored everyone who objected to their censorship, including the Prime Minister of Norway.

My sympathy for those who have wilfully handed over their lives to the computers of a creepy foreign sheep squillionaire is rather limited. I never ‘signed up’ to this or any other such nonsense, and always respond to the programmed salestalk of his (and others’) mind-slaves in much the same way.

If asked by the blank-eyed owners of thinking-brain phones why I am not ‘on Facebook’ I reply that I do not need to be, because I have real friends. Usually they then become self-righteously offensive, demanding to know ‘what I’m trying to hide’, to which there is only one logical response: “Well, I’m not telling you.”

So my sympathy for what seems, in this instance, to be much of the Norwegian establishment is also limited. I will not join the chorus of people demanding ‘freedom of speech’ from this or any other private entrepreneur. Or sheep.

One hears this sort of prolix, lachrymose and ultimately futile whingeing all the time, usually with added NLP, e.g.

“Google needs to…”

Like hell it does.

Oligarchs don’t need very much, and they certainly don’t need to listen to an endless, dribbling litany of complaint from the pathologically entitled.

There is only one thing that sheep oligarchs understand and it is Border Collies profit.

If you don’t like the way Zuckerberg runs his company, don’t do business with it. I don’t like him, or his company, or any company like it, and I’ve never done business with any of ’em.

As to Facebook’s being ‘free’, nobody should by now need reminding that if you’re not paying, you’re the product.

I may not like the fellow, but I’d be the first to grant that he only looks like a sheep.