DATELINE LAS VEGAS
After a shocking early morning phone call from Stacy in which he revealed that he had sold the blog to Jeff Bezos of the Washington Post for an undisclosed amount of money “and other valuable considerations”, possibly including a minority stake in the Hagerstown Suns minor league baseball team, it is my unhappy duty to inform you that this will be the last post at The Other McCain. Family spokesman Kirby took the phone and said there would be more details in a later video post on YouTube, “but right now Stacy has to talk the Ewok off the ledge.”
Smitty had no comment, but sources speaking on background to the Navy Times revealed that the former Admiral of the Afghan Sea had been recalled to duty, promoted to Commodore, and would be sent on a three-year accompanied tour of the Little America Antarctic base where he would be in charge of efforts to root out alleged multi-racial white supremacists in Neu Schwabenland.
I don’t think anyone except the Silicon Valley oligarchs, who no doubt had this planned well in advance, and Vox Day, who had expected this for some time – expected the whole sale purging of conservative & populist accounts from social media that’s taken place this week. President Trump, Lin Wood, Sidney Powell, and General Flynn, to say nothing of such badthinkers as the #WalkAway group on Facebook, have all found their Twitter and Facebook accounts shut down. Not content with that, Apple and Google both dropped the Parler app from their app stores, and to make sure you proles get the message, Amazon Web Services is terminating Parler’s contract as of Sunday, which means they’ll be offline for at least a week while they try to find alternative hosting. I’d be willing to bet that even if they do succeed in finding/building infrastructure to replace what they had on AWS, they’re going to get the same treatment Gab got – people trying to support them with their credit and debit cards will be blocked, hosting services that agree to host them will be pressured to drop them, and every means short of actual physical violence will be used to drive them out of business. For that matter, after the Antifa/BLM riots of this past summer, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to see Cuban-style “divine mobs” used to destroy server farms belonging to companies hosting websites deemed guilty of “sedition”, “incitement”, or whatever excuse people like Maxine Waters want to use.
Daniel Greenfield lays out the obvious part of the problem rather clearly. Control of the Internet, which used to be a flexible network designed to automatically route information around blockages, has now fallen into the grasp of a handful of companies, all of them seemingly eager to institute a Red Chinese social credit system. Conservatives and populists have relied for too long on Section 230 to protect us from exactly the kind of hamfisted behavior that Jack Dorsey, Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos, and Tim Cook are engaging in right now. We have a very limited amount of time to find and use alternatives like blogs, e-mail lists, Telegram, Signal, and Gab; we must also build alternative financing structures so the wokerati running Mastercard and Visa can’t cut off the flow of funds. People used to accuse Vox Day of being paranoid when he said these things a few years ago. What’s keeping me awake nights is that Vox might not have been paranoid enough.
Enormous thanks to everyone that hit the tip jar to bail me out of this latest mess, which ought to be the very last one of these, God willing. Despite the credit union making it more difficult and painful than necessary to actually make the payment, I’ll be all caught up as of tomorrow morning, when I drop the remaining $535 in cash on them.
It’s very easy to become cynical and bitter about people in these decadent and depraved times, especially if you spend a lot of time on the Internet being exposed to all manner of idiocy, “edgy” displays, and vile behavior. Crowdfunding efforts like this (and similar efforts for those in need), though, restore my faith in people, specifically the commenters here, who have repeatedly proven themselves to be kind and generous folk. I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that without your help, I wouldn’t have made it through the very difficult month in 2018 after my stint in the hospital, or through the months following my eviction last fall.
Thanks again for your kindness and generosity. I will do my best to personally thank all of you who threw money at PayPal or the GoFundMe over the next couple of days.
Because this is the Internet, where nobody remembers anything that happened before last Tuesday, it is probably necessary first for me to explain that Little Green Footballs (LGF) is a blog run by Charles Johnson (CJ). Until about 2007, LGF was one of the leading conservative blogs, but then CJ lost his mind (or was possessed by demons) and declared war on Pamela Geller, accusing her of being a Nazi despite the ((( obvious ))). CJ’s meltdown proceeded slowly at first, but then in September 2009, he declared that I was also a Nazi. By the crazy logic of CJ’s demon-possessed mind, anybody who didn’t shun and denounce me was a Nazi sympathizer. Because I’m obviously not a Nazi, however, everybody with an iota of common sense at that point realized CJ was crazy, which inspired the Charles Johnson, Race Detective parody.
That’s the short version of the LGF meltdown saga. A longer version would include some discussion of how CJ got captured by his commenters. That is to say, most of what went on at LGF was not about anything that CJ did, but rather about the wide-open comment fields, and the commenters who got promoted to being contributors and given “admin” status. Several of CJ’s admins had personal agendas that were in direct opposition to the conservative politics that originally made LGF successful, and their influence seems to have inspired wave after wave of purges among the site’s commenters, reminiscent of Stalin in the 1930s. Which brings us to the Something Awful meltdown . . .
If you’ve been following this is one of the worst instances I’ve ever seen of a community just getting wrecked from the inside out by over-zealous attempts to adhere to catty identity politics. I really don’t have anything against Trans people if people reading this think I do, it does not reflect on that community as a whole just because the Trans community on SA has become insanely controlling and intrusive, but it does say something about the crab bucket mentality that afflicts leftist communities all over the place, the seeming obsession over offence and oppression that results in ever more ugly and extreme behavior being tolerated and encouraged and driving away more and more people to chase some Sisyphean ideal.
What can we say about this? Why have accusations of “transphobia” become such a dye-marker of online neo-Stalinist repression?
My theory: A lot of people who inhabit “transgender” personas online (whether or not they are actually transgender in real life) are porn addicts, and porn addiction always produces insanity. These self-professed “social justice” activists are actually exhibiting a psychological defense mechanism, rooted in a twisted shame/guilt complex about their perverse sexuality. They present themselves as Arbiters of Righteousness, and lash out at scapegoats — “Nazis! Transphobia! ORANGE MAN BAD!” — as a way of shielding their damaged ego from the superego, to drown out the voice of their guilty conscience.
In a way they’re like Ted Haggard, the closet-case homosexual who preached constantly against homosexuality. That was one variation of the shame/guilt complex expressed as pharisaical hypocrisy, and endless bleating about “social justice” is just a different variation.
You should probably hit my tip jar for using the word “pharisaical” in a sentence, but in addition to having a formidable vocabulary, what I offer readers is a vast memory of historical trivia that most people never learned, or have forgotten if they ever knew it at all. Back in the 1990s, when the founder of SomethingAwful-dot-com was just a teenager, I was an assistant editor at a newspaper in Rome, Georgia, when we got our first Internet connection — one computer connected to the web via AOL dial-up. And my editor Pierre-Rene Noth said to me, “Stacy, find out what kind of Civil War stuff they have on there.” You see, that area had a lot of Civil War history and this was just a few years after the Ken Burns PBS documentary series, so appealing to the Confederate heritage interest among our readers was a good way of pursuing Pierre’s single-minded idea of local! local! local! news. But I digress . . .
The way I got smeared as a “white supremacist” originated in that 1995 assignment to research Confederate heritage on the Internet, which put me in contact with the League of the South, a so-called “neo-Confederate” organization that was later hate-listed by SPLC. Now, when I first contacted the League in 1995, there was nothing racist in their message, and I remember sitting with the League’s president Michael Hill, a history professor, having brandy and cigars on a friend’s back porch. But after I moved to Washington, D.C., and lost contact with my friends, they came under attack by the SPLC and after an organization is publicly branded “racist,” this becomes a certain kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Respectable people don’t want to be associated with racism, which means that once a group gets hate-listed by the SPLC, the kooks take over. A good barometer of the kook takeover is when you find people muttering about how international bankers (nudge, nudge) are advancing their secret plan (wink, wink) to destroy our Aryan Gentile purity.
What does this have to do with the SomethingAwful-dot-com meltdown? Well, transgender activists are kind of like Jew-haters in their paranoid obsession, and once you let trannies assume the role of Arbiters of Righteousness, a complete kook takeover is probably inevitable.
I’m obviously not a visionary, but I predicted that the internet would be sh–ty back in 1999. Everybody was talking about how the internet was going to revolutionize everything and everything was going to be great, but nobody ever talked about how sh–ty the internet could also be.
A long time ago, if somebody said they really wanted to f–k a pillow with anime on it, if they went out in public and said that, they would be laughed at. There would be some element of shame. They would keep that inside and say, ‘Well, I want to f–k a pillow with anime on it but I can’t tell anybody.’ But then the internet came along and they could get on a webring or whatever it was back in the day. Go to rec/all/f–kanimepillow or whatever. Then other people would say ‘I want to f–k anime pillows, too.’ You had this community of people who were very intent on f–king anime pillows. The typical person does not want to f–k a pillow with anime on it. This, of course, was back when f–king anime pillows was fresh and new.
I found it to be very interesting that these subcommunities would sprout up and their numbers would grow and pretty soon it’s Pillowf–kers United, Inc. And I found that whole process back then — it was even happening in the usegroup days — I found that whole process incredibly interesting, how the groupthink would manifest itself and increase exponentially over time. It was something that all the media outlets were ignoring at the time.
You may not have spotted the telltale clues there, but Kyanka’s subconscious was trying to tell us, “Hey, I’ve got some very bad habits, and I’ve been pursuing these habits online since I was about 17.”
According to . . . uh, what somebody wrote on the Internet, when Kyanka’s first wife divorced him, she cleaned him out for $140,000, and his second wife, an immigrant, fled the state with their young daughter. While it may be that Kyanka has a habit of marrying crazy bitches, perhaps we should consider the possibility that Kyanka himself is a dangerously crazy person who needs to be investigated by the FBI.
This is where the totalitarian impulse arises: Sadistic freaks in the grip of sexual insanity (or demonic possession) crave power and seek to silence others — ban them! purge them! — who dispute their authority. Some of these weirdos become Gender Studies professors, because this SJW regime is nowhere more powerful than on university campuses, but the same impulse is also manifested in the otherwise inexplicable desire of some people to play Internet Thought Police. Keep in mind that the Internet is crammed full of the most disgusting filth you can imagine and yet, we are told, “free speech”! You’re a right-wing theocratic anti-sex Nazi if you criticize porn or the perverted consumers thereof. The same people who adamantly defend pornography, however, insist that the Internet must be kept safe from “hate,” a term of elastic definition, so that you are guilty of “hate” (transphobia) if you are against allowing grown men in dresses to use the same public restroom as your daughter.
Is this contradiction not obvious? Whenever I see the Thought Police running around shrieking about racism, sexism or homophobia — “Somebody said something rude on the Internet!” — I automatically suspect them of extreme depravity, because no emotionally healthy adult would waste two minutes of their time worrying about that crap. Last year, when the SPLC’s toxic work environment became a scandal, I was not surprised. You think Mark Potok and Morris Dees are normal human beings? No, they are very sick individuals, because who else would volunteer for that kind of job? The fact that Richard “Lowtax” Kyanka has now surrendered his site to trannie SJWs tells you something about his fundamental problem and, yeah, it’s Something Awful.
An American Instagram model has raised more than $100,000 for Australian bushfire victims by encouraging her followers to donate in exchange for naked selfies.
Kaylen Ward offered to send a nude photo of herself to any person who donated at least $10 to an organisation assisting with battling the devastating blazes.
She said in the past she has sent photos for money, and was hoping her regular customers would be interested in donating to a good cause.
Within minutes, her private messages on Instagram and Twitter were bombarded by hundreds of people sending in their receipts to prove they had donated.
The Texan model, who now lives in Los Angeles, has spent almost every minute since responding to the more than 20,000 messages she received with individualised naked photos.
Ms Ward said she was motivated to use her following to contribute to the cause after photos surfaced of the catastrophic conditions.
‘It’s devastating and any normal person would be concerned and want to help,’ she said.
(Apparently, abnormal people want to help, too.)
She asked her followers to donate directly to a list of charities she suggested, which included NSW Rural Fire Service, Victorian Country Fire Service, Red Cross and certain koala hospitals across the nation.
Ms Ward hoped her post would attract ‘a few thousand dollars’.
Within one day, she had about 20,000 messages in her inbox with receipts.
She’s now hired a team of four people to help her sort through the thousands and thousands of DMs she’s received. They’ve been working around the clock to verify donation confirmations as best they can and reply with the promised nude.
Ward said that by midday Sunday, they estimate more than $500,000 has been raised thanks to her campaign. . . .
But Instagram has thrown a bit of a wrench into her plans. Although she was running the campaign on Twitter, word of it spread to Instagram, where Ward had 50,000 followers. On Saturday, Ward said Instagram shut down her account, claiming she’d violated their guidelines.
In a screenshot posted by Ward, Instagram said she had posted “sexually suggestive content,” though the model denies she broke any rules. She’s tried to reach out to Instagram but hasn’t heard back.
What hypocrisy! There are thousands, maybe even millions, of hoes who use Instagram to advertise their, uh, services and if Instagram is going to ban every hoe who posts “sexually suggestive content,” practically every sorority girl in America would have her account shut down. Seriously, ask around — most young women (and many not-so-young women) have figured out they can hustle more money from guys on social media than they can in any actual job for which they’re qualified.
Most college guys can’t get the time of day from any decent-looking girl on campus nowadays because if a girl rates as high as 7 on the 10 scale, she’s got hundreds of horny men swarming into her DMs, offering money for nudes. “Hit me up on venmo” — five words that no horny fool can resist, apparently, and if Kaylen Ward can get 20,000 donations in a matter of days, doesn’t that give you some idea of the size of this market? Maybe your college-age daughter is not whoring herself out via Instagram, Snapchat or some other online venue, but she certainly knows she could if she’s even remotely attractive. The Internet means every good-looking girl is sitting on a gold mine, given the worldwide demand from fools desperate to see what she’s sitting on.
If you wonder why young men are so profoundly cynical about women, regarding them as a bunch of selfish sluts, this is the explanation. Of course, most parents are clueless about what’s happening, but let me point something out that you may not have noticed. Next time you go to the mall or some other retail venue, notice that none of the clerks or cashiers are attractive young women. There was a time when retail businesses placed a premium on hiring “eye candy” in customer-service positions, but you practically never see a pretty face working retail anymore, and why? “Hit me up on venmo.”
Work? An actual job? That’s for ugly people. All the pretty girls are peddling nudes on the Internet. Welcome to the 21st century.
Given the ongoing “cancelling” of conservatives and libertarians on social media, I’ve been using the title of this post as something of a catchphrase, and occasionally educating random yoots on how blogs worked before Jack and Zuck enticed us into their walled gardens. The rest of us ought to be giving some serious thought to those alternatives in case Google, Facebook, and Twitter decide to take the gloves off and just boot everyone who even looks like they might vote for Trump off their platforms before the 2020 elections.
Up to this point, the Silicon Valley oligarchs have been careful to single out the edge cases, the people they can count on Bill Kristol and other #NeverTrump “principled conservatives” to go “Ewwww! Alex Jones deserved to get deplatformed! Laura Loomer deserved to get deplatformed! Lauren Shepherd deserved to – oh, wait…” But come September of 2020, what if they decide to emulate their heroes and business partners in Beijing, and shut down anyone who isn’t sufficiently woke for them? How many of us would be thoroughly cut off if our Gmail accounts, Blogger and WordPress blogs, and our Facebook & Twitter accounts were suspended?
We should be giving serious consideration to taking that power away from them. We should have accounts on Gab and MeWe, and e-mail accounts with local ISPs or third-party vendors, even if we have to shell out a couple of bucks extra a month for it, or at least have an account with Microsoft, which doesn’t seem to be moving in lockstep with its Silicon Valley partners – yet. Here’s a useful article from Techdirt back in June listing plenty of options to avoid Google. We should have e-mail networks already set up, and updated blogrolls listing friends and allies. Maybe I’m being paranoid, but after the last few years of deplatforming, shadowbanning, monkeying with search results, and other forms of suppression, is it really paranoia? They really do seem out to get us, after all.
One way to drive yourself crazy is to become obsessed with a problem that is too large, or too distant, for you to influence the outcome — famine in Africa, global warming, “white supremacy,” etc. This is what Jordan Peterson’s “clean your room” advice to young people is about, correcting the “activist” mentality that plagues modern youth:
“Don’t be fixing up the economy, 18-year-olds. You don’t know anything about the economy. It’s a massive complex machine beyond anyone’s understanding and you mess with at your peril. So can you even clean up your own room? No. Well you think about that. You should think about that, because if you can’t even clean up your own room, who the hell are you to give advice to the world?”
Teaching young people to be like Mrs. Jellyby was always a bad idea, and it has been exacerbated by social media, where hashtags become a substitute for rational argument, and kids think they’re changing the world by re-tweeting a liberal celebrity’s message. Those of us who were adults before the Internet existed — I’m 59 — have difficulty understanding how the social-media environment has reshaped the minds of young people, who cannot remember a world before Twitter, Instagram, Tinder, Tumblr and Pornhub. Speaking of which . . .
Pornhub said [May 2] it is “extremely interested” in buying Tumblr, a blogging platform once notorious for the pornography it fostered before it banned adult content last year.
“We’ve long been dismayed that such measures were taken to eradicate erotic communities on the platform, leaving many individuals without an asylum through which they could comfortably peruse adult content,” Corey Price, vice president at Pornhub, said in a statement.
The statement follows Wall Street Journal reports that Verizon is looking to offload Tumblr after failing to meet revenue targets. Verizon wound up with Tumblr as part of its acquisition of Yahoo in 2017. Yahoo bought the then-fast-growing blogging platform for $1.1 billion in cash back in 2013.
As I have previously noted, Tumblr is “effectively worthless.” Once hailed as an innovative platform, the site was wrecked by a social-justice warrior (SJW) mentality that disdained advertising revenue, and its blogging-for-dumb-people system where users could create the appearance of engagement merely by “reblogging” other people’s content. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer’s billion-dollar purchase of Tumblr was one of the biggest blunders in Silicon Valley history, and the fact that Pornhub might end up owning Tumblr is deeply ironic, considering that Tumblr also hosts some of the most strident radical feminists online.
Tumblr has so many problems, it’s impossible to describe them all. In 2013, nearly half of Tumblr’s users were age 16-24, and that youth vibe was why the site was considered a hot commodity. But much of that audience has been lost to other sites — primarily Twitter and Instagram — and Tumblr’s problems intensified last November after they got hit with accusations of hosting child pornography. Because the site didn’t have enough staff to properly monitor content, Tumblr announced a ban that effectively prohibited all nudity on the site, using some kind of software that flagged as “inappropriate” content that was not even remotely pornographic. The Internet reacted harshly: “Tumblr banning porn is like KFC banning chicken.” The site started shedding users rapidly, and by March, had lost nearly a third of its traffic.
You might think the Tumblr implosion would make other social-media firms think about the downside risk, but Facebook and Twitter continue stumbling forward as if their monopolistic hegemony were secure. However, Professor Glenn Reynolds is sounding the alarm:
Right now, it almost seems as if the social media world was designed to spread viruses of the mind. And that’s probably because it was. While in the earlier days of the internet, ideas spread faster than before, today in the walled gardens of social media outlets like Facebook, Instagram, or especially Twitter, ideas spread much, much faster, and with less time for rumination or consideration, than ever before. And that’s by design, as social media companies use algorithms that promote posts based on ‘engagement’ — which typically means users’ emotional reactions — and ‘share’ buttons allow each user to pass them on to hundreds or thousands of friends, who can then do the same. This repeated sharing and resharing can produce a chain reaction reminiscent of a nuclear reactor with the control rods removed. . . .
Generally speaking, I don’t comment on the rare occasions when I use the banhammer on some fool in the comments. The departure of the unfunny, unlamented Guinspen, however, strikes me as a good time to remind people of the ground rules here.
Some years ago, when Stacy asked me to come aboard and help out when Smitty headed off to assume his duties as Admiral of the Afghan Seas, he asked me to take up the banhammer and maintain order in the comments, because this was not a task he enjoyed. I, however, having been a trained and seasoned jammer operator, Goon, and former /b/tard, enjoyed being unpleasant to people in the line of duty, especially if those people were being unpleasant to start with. For the most part, it’s been a fairly undemanding task. The vast majority of the commentariat here at The Other McCain are reasonably polite folk, and on the rare occasions when people lose their temper and start commenting with more anger than discretion, they usually respond well to requests to chill out.
Which brings us to the most recent dirtbag to get the boot. I don’t have a lot of rules, but chief among them is that y’all need to keep things polite and not get personal in your invective. If you forget this, I’ll ask you to knock it off, and if you keep it up, you’re gone. As I said previously, most of you do as I ask, and some of you have even apologized, which is nice. On the other hand, if you ignore the “Mod” tag on my posts, threaten to stop contributing to the Shoe Leather Fund, and try to insult me into the bargain*, you get whacked with the banhammer and your comments get deleted at my discretion. I’ll usually leave the offending comment up as an example for others.
So: be polite, think twice before you post in anger, and you’ll be fine. Give me a bunch of lip when I call you out, and you’re history. This concludes your block of instruction on comment courtesy; feel free to post as you will.
*If things have gotten to that point, insulting me is a waste of your time, because I don’t care about your opinion, angry idiot on the Internet.
