Yay My Blog Got Censored

I was so happy to hear that the Nazis at Blogger/Blogspot censored this blog and deleted a post.  Ha ha, the joke is on them, I was going to pull it anyway.  What a bunch of losers!  Would you trust your entire body of work for 15 years to these idiots?  I dont recommend it.

Cartoon Realism and the Issue of Internet Censorship

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I think that pretty much everyone, except maybe Republicans, understand that the  internet can not be allowed to self-regulate. The world contains malign actors that will attempt to steal money, steal elections, and destabilize the country in many different ways.  How that will all work out, whether with legislation or merely secret cabals of justice loving cyberwarriors or something else is unknown at this point. I have no reason to have any hope that a reasonable system will come into place.  In the meantime, there are some ad hoc systems that claim to enforce community guidelines but maybe have the real purpose of protecting otherwise swine-like gangster capitalist companies from litigation.

As you know, this blog has been whacked several times by these guardians of all that is "good about our great country".  Although they cant tell me what they object to either specifically or generally, I am supposed to accept their judgment and go away and die or something.

One problem that we may be having is that the software used to make this judgment doesnt seem to have a sense of humor or a sense of irony or sarcasm.  I am pretty sure that is because the companies that implement this software dont have a sense of humor either.  

If I say that a certain former president with dyed orange hair should have a piano dropped on his head, will I be referred to the FBI because I am making a threat against someone's life? How about a safe?  An anvil? Ripe tomatoes? Nothing?

For more on the importance of the anvil in fiction, see:

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/AnvilOnHead

Yay! Global Wahrman is a "Hate Site" !

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The swine-like arbiters of all that is good and right, Boingo, an ISP for chrissake, has determined that this blog is a "hate site" and that their customers must be protected from me.  A greater compliment I can not imagine.  

 

I tried telling them that I am in reality a "contempt site" but it went over their heads.

 

Yes, global wahrman must be a "hate site" as I hate injustice and hypocrisy and, horrors, I am willing to write about it.

 

Second Boingo Letter

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For some reason unknown, Blogger wont let me post the second letter to Boingo without turning my blog blue.  I am blue but I dont want my blog to be blue.

 

So what I have done is to make three jpegs from the letter and see if I can post that.  I thought it was a nice letter and I am being a nice guy.  You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, and besides, what else am I going to do?  Sue them?  Write my congressman?  

I am starting to like the idea that I am considered a hate site.  Maybe my blog is actually better than I thought. But I think this is just the result of a dumb program at Boingo filtering at random and it found some words it disapproved of.  Thats my guess.

 

 

As America Declines into Self-Parody (10/26/2022)

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As the American Empire or Republic or Whatever-It-Is continues to self-destruct before entering its full-fascist period, we are required to watch one ridiculous self own after another.  Its sad to see a formerly great nation, perhaps, or at least one with some self-respect collapse into farce but here we are. Please forgive this brief narration as frankly I find the whole situation tiresome and there are others out there perfectly capable of writing about the situation, and a few of them do.  I write this post more as a form of diary.  These are the events that pollute my life and humiliate my country before the world.  

 

First, at a time when the Supreme Court is making itself illegitimate, we have our old buddy Clarence Thomas give Sen Lindsey Graham a pass.  Lindsey doesnt have to face a grand jury to testify and no doubt perjure himself because Clarence gives him a pass until after the midterms, at least.  This is the same Clarence Thomas who should recuse himself from anything related to the attempts to overthrow the US Government, an activity that his wife is well known to have participated in.  Now tell me the Supreme Court has any legitimacy, I dare you.  Their illegitimacy is so flagrant as to be insulting.

 

This on top of the Trump loose-Cannon and her "special master" makes the whole justice system seem a joke.  [As some wit put it, if you want to use the term "special master" it should be at a BDSM party.]  If you want us, or some of us, to respect the judiciary and its decisions then you have to do something to mitigate the damage that Cannon and Thomas and Alito and Gorsuch and Barret and Kavanaugh do in plain sight.  Tell us your plan.  Oh, you dont have one.  I see, thats clear. 

 

As we blunder into the midterms where is the DOJ in the effort to make the midterms a legitimate exercise in democracy, the free exercise of the franchise?  Nowhere to be found.  Vigilantes in Arizona and Republicans in state after state are working to restrict the vote and intimidate voters.  Many of those to-be-elected are so insane as to believe that their leader, the traitor who stole classified documents and got caught at it, was elected in 2020.  Guess what, he wasnt.  

 

Where are we in getting rid of the Electoral College, that fatal compromise from 250 years ago?  Our leaders are nowhere to be found. Nowhere.  Nothing.  Here we have an unstable situation where a minority can seize the presidency against the will of the people again, and force someone, maybe even Trump, on a defeated former Democracy, if that is what we were, and there is no serious effort to fix it.

 

And while the DOJ fiddles, they manage to arrest some Chinese spies, which is nice, I guess, but how about putting Trump and his minions in jail.  Nope, nothing.  

 

Totally impotent.  A complete failure.

 

This country is pathetic.

 

[And so, Boingo, if this is what you call hate speech and therefore censor me because I express my opinion, then so be it.  I dont think it is hate speech.  I think it is the honest expression of an informed citizen about the most important events in my lifetime, the collapse of the American Republic.  Golly, I guess you dont approve. ]

Global Wahrman is being Blocked / Censored

A friend at the Phoenix airport tried to reach my blog  (I guess she was really bored) and got the following notice.  This is good news because it means I am finally saying something sufficiently interesting that the right wing nuts who run our country (or our internet) found the need to block me.  First amendment?  Not for people like me, I guess.

 

It might be because she was using a Boingo-managed hotspot, whoever they are.

 

 

Guess Which Picture Violates Facebook Community Standards

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Guess which of the pictures below violates Facebook Community Values and will get you blocked.

Have you guessed yet?  Examine each one carefully!  Which one is the most salacious, which one is the least?   Your average 12 year old boy would have no trouble answering this question.

The answer is image number 2 from Lifeforce (1985).   This is the image that got me blocked from Facebook for 24 hours.  The other two caused no problems with their totally automated, perfectly insane, AI guardian of public morality.

Pretty wacky, huh?

When you consider that Facebook also owns Tumblr, the very home of twisted pornography on the Internet, the mind achieves a unique state of Zen like incomprehension.

[My friend Jerry Weil informs me that there was a huge brouhaha about "nipples" on Facebook and so he knew immediately which picture was the offending one.  Well, me bad, I had missed this important social dialectic entirely but it reinforces my opinion: Facebook is not very sophisticated here, they are in fact, holding back my real feelings, near moron-like stupid.]


______________


Notes:

1. For those of you who are coming into this late, my objection is not to Facebook's removing images, my objection is to how they handle it, the lack of human communication, and the extreme punishment system which is probably malfunctioning.  You are welcome to read the forums if you want to see what other people think of this Facebook system.  Be prepared to read many swear words.

2. The other two pictures are (1) the famous Vampirella of comic book fame and (3) a still from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2.

Cowardice, Network Television and the Affair of the Three Missing Words

Those of you youngsters who are reading this may never have heard of network television, so I will endeavor to explain it to you. Once upon a time, the new technology of broadcast television was invented, so the government decided to award a franchise to their friends so they could make a lot of money. Three different networks were created, the red network, the blue network and the eye network (NBC, ABC and CBS respectively). Ok, this is not exactly what happened, but it is close enough for our discussion.

The first thing that would happen if you became a television executive, apparently, is that, symbolically at least, your backbone was removed. Network executives became known the world over for lacking a spine, in other words, they regressed to invertebrates. Hundreds and then thousands of cowardly decisions were made to keep television lily-white and inoffensive.

But there was one moment that symbolized for me the lack of backbone, one decision that was so cowardly that it seemed to encapsulate all the other cowardly moments and coalesce them into one brilliant and insane cowardly moment.

Once upon a time, when movies were first shown on broadcast television, this was considered to be an Event. But since just anyone could switch on the TV and watch, the networks felt that they had to protect the morality of Americans, that this was their responsibility. And so, the infamous warning “edited for television” came into existence, announcing to the world that the creative work about to be shown had been castrated for your safety. Artistic Integrity is not a term much used by television executives.

In the premiere that was the penultimate nadir of integrity that I refer to, in editing for television all that changed was to remove three words out of a full-length movie. Three little words, how bad could that be? I mean what could you lose with three words, for goodness sake?!

Well, in this case, it changed the meaning of the film, and its impact, significantly. The movie was Cabaret (1972) and the scene was as follows:

And the three words that were removed? It was Brian saying “So do I” ... in other words, confessing to a homosexual relationship with Lothar. This was considered so shocking that it was removed. But removing it changes everything.

I have a copy of this film online but I am brilliantly unable to find this scene no matter how I look. Of course, one way to look, to start at the beginning and go to the end, would not be possible.

I am still looking for the date of this Event and the network.  The Internet is great for research up to a point but at the end of the day it is not a reference library, exactly, but something more amorphous.  And so finding this information will take a little digging.   

Cabaret (1972) on IMDB

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0068327/