A message in two parts – part two.

Posted by Pointman on January 8, 2017 · 50 Comments 

There’s a reason this is a two parter. I wanted to have right of reply on my own blog to refutations or perhaps contra arguments to the personal assessment I’d made that the climate wars were over and we’d won before rolling on with part two. As it happens, there wasn’t much beyond an expected it’s not over until various fat ladies etc etc, so I’m rolling on.

In a way, I was hoping some telling argument might be made which might let me off the hook, but it wasn’t.

Every one of us skeptics in the climate wars were unpaid volunteers from the very start, and just as I make no judgement on any one of us whose assessment is we should continue prosecuting the war with vigour in the same way towards what they consider a firm conclusion, then as a matter of common courtesy I’d wish my individual choice to disengage at this point to be respected by the skeptic community, which by and large it has.

I’ll still be in the fray with an occasional article on the subject though to a much lesser extent, but I do wish them every success with their continued endeavours.

This was never a snap decision and looking around the skeptic community, I can see others in it and in different ways are moving off in new directions. For me, the thing is over, as I signalled it would be several years previously to some unwelcome ears. It’s pastures anew time before I become just another sad bastard flogging an obviously dead horse.

A final thing I’d like to say before moving on to the substance of this piece is that there was always a reason why global warming was such a long drawn out battle – it was the maskirovka being used to justify what was the social engineering of the west along more socialist lines, a philosophy which was deeply out of favour with most people. It was never about saving the planet or sharing the wealth with the developing world. All the pushers of it were always at heart population controllers, also known as Eugenicists or elitist bastards, who actually didn’t give a tinker’s cuss about the collateral damage to the “excess people” on the planet anyway.

A number of commenters and readers of part one correctly intuited in what new direction I was going, and therefore what direction this conversation which has always been a campaigning blog was going to go.

I’m talking about protecting our freedom of speech on the internet.

At this point I’m going to ratchet backwards about ten years or so. The whole of the mainstream media were doing the full on madness of crowds bebop-a-luhlah about global warming but there began to emerge this contra narrative on this new fangled thingy called the internet which they had no interest in and therefore no control over.

To summarise a few behind the scenes mainstream media conversations – “I’ve heard of the Internet but what is it, what’s it do?” While the internet may have been new, blogging was definitely well into terra incognito. Here there be dragons, and there were. That was the one loophole they’d no control over which we exploited. Anyone could start expressing their viewpoint without fear of the thought police’s heavy stamp of censorship.

We piled in hard, overcoming any decorum, innate lack of any talent whatsoever or any idea of what we were actually doing with the sheer enthusiasm of finally finding a forum where we could stand and speak forthrightly. All those apparently innocuous options to add a comment underneath a piece in the legacy media’s attempts to surf the fibre-optic wave of the internet became forums in themselves. They really didn’t know what they were letting themselves in for.

It was a glorious first flowering of being able for the first time ever to interact and respond to information in real-time that had been presented to you, no matter how clumsily or in how nerdy a fashion it had been done. It was two-way, unmoderated (ie uncensored), roughty toughty and certainly no damn place for the upcoming generation snowflake. There were no safe spaces for the thumb suckers.

One by one, all those forums in the legacy media where we could come together and express our viewpoint by commenting on an article, have been closed down by disallowing comments or just dropping their blogging activities completely. Even before comments were banned, various oppressive “moderation” regimes were gradually put in place which were so restrictive they killed any substantive discussion.

As the internet has matured, this creeping form of censorship has not only got progressively worse, but nearly all of the most popular social networking apps have become enforcers of a liberal bias in all things. As far as they are concerned, their services are only for the use of leftward leaning people, with anyone of a rightward leaning being censored to hell or their account suspended. A graphic illustration of this almost systemic bias was an experiment done by two journalists to test out how equitable Facebook’s so-called “moderation” actually was.

They set up two Facebook pages; one that was pro-Zionist and one which was anti-Zionist. They gradually posted more inflammatory but equivalent rhetoric at each site. When they stated making complaints to Facebook about both sites, the Zionist one was promptly closed down whereas the anti-Zionist one was allowed to continue, even after its content became progressively even more extreme.

The video streaming on Facebook of the torture and abuse of an 18 year-old mentally handicapped child can be ignored because he’s white and the four abusers are black, and Facebook will over the objections of its users refuse to close down the feed. Perhaps what made them agonise for so long before deciding to cut it was the abusers shouting things like “fuck Trump” or “fuck whites”. Lord help us all. How many people irrespective of their colour think that’s wrong?

My account at Facebook has already been suspended and can stay so because I wouldn’t tell them who the Pointman persona actually was. I wouldn’t trust them with any significant information about me.

Google can go a whole presidential election year only mentioning Trump occasionally as an afterthought in the tending list, but blasting Clinton at us on a daily basis. He was nearly invisible on Google News at times, except when there was some sort of scandalous fake news to lard on the negative publicity. Try googling for hard information on Hilary Clinton and compare the number of hits you get on a similar query on Donald Trump, and then if you’ve got the time order them by the amount of adulation or hatred of the individual.

Twitter, unless you’re very careful about what you say, will yank your account and everything you’ve ever said, and it will be as if you never existed. As per the pattern, it’s a haven for assorted liberal extremists, foul-mouthed trolls and the usual anti-Semites, but woe betide little old you if you decide to express dissent if not disbelief in leftist sacred cows such as Obamacare.

YouTube can not only yank videos they don’t like, but the whole account of people they don’t like either. Like me. It seems that their business plan of making money by facilitating breaches of copyrighted material is fine, but allowing the free speech to air different political views is against their virtuous moderation policy.

I could go on, but the pattern and the trend are there to be seen. Those are the mechanism by which selective control by companies abusing what are obviously monopoly market positions are disappearing or suppressing the voices of dissent. It’s not all bad news though. WordPress, the blogging software I use, I know have been pressured to close down blogs unpopular with the establishment. To their credit, they’ve allowed me and other much more influential blogs to roll on, but they’re just a corporate takeover away from closing down this blog and several others for which they’ve taken a bullet or two over the years.

All that is bad enough, but the other bandwagon being pushed along by Obama and the legacy media is to actually close down so-called “fake” news sites. Make no mistake, what they’re talking about is closing down dissent by people or internet sites they can’t get control of. They’d close down Project Veritas and WikiLeaks in a heartbeat, but in the meantime have to be content with doing things like treeing Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian embassy.

So, not only are the facilities we use to find information being manipulated, but the whole concept of free speech is under attack from people like the President of the USA and pretty much all establishment figures downwards of him.

What were a decade ago the elemental tools of the ragged and penurious resisters to climate alarmism on the wide open frontier of the internet have now become tools of an establishment determined to exert the sort of control on the internet that they currently exercise over the printed media and television channels.

I intend this year to repurpose this blog to fighting this attack on free speech on the web. If we lose that battle, campaigns like the one we ran against climate alarmism will no longer be possible, and that’s their aim. The blogosphere aspect of the internet has an influence but won’t be a mass opinion former until internet access is both ubiquitous and universal, which will happen.

The legacy media is dying for several reasons but the main one is the ordinary person no longer trusts it. A vacuum is forming and if the blogosphere gets its act together, it could be part of filling it. In a world where globalisation is both welcomed and feared, the “we don’t trust the media” meme will travel far and fast, especially in the wake of the self-damage it did to itself in trying to get a generally despised candidate like Clinton into the White House against the people’s wishes.

At face value, they look to be in a good position to achieve the control of the web that they are seeking. Google, Facebook, Twitter and the other big corporates can be leaned on to comply, and I’ve no doubt will be absolutely delighted to help banish any nasty dissenters out of their safe spaces. At a more elemental level, and the one they’ll almost certainly use to control your particular surfing activities, they’ll lean on the your internet provider (ISP) to simply make sites they don’t approve of inaccessible to you.

One day you’ll click on that link to a favourite site or blog and receive a nice screen saying your access to it is blocked permanently because after you strip away the legalistic jargon and references to obscure pieces of legislation you’ve never heard of, it offends the thought police in whatever country you live.

My ISP knows every site I’ve visited, every email account I have and every keystroke is recorded by Microsoft Windows and sent back to them. Yes, actually, all of that’s true. I’ve always acted on the basis that they’ve got it all in terms of my internet activity. It’s a privacy nightmare not even Orwell could have anticipated.

However, I know how to circumvent all those restrictions, all that snooping on me and recording of my activities and can do so without either breaking the law or being a computer whizz kid. Teaching you how to do that will be the secondary objective of this blog. Ten years ago, a lot of climate skeptics learned how to do new things on the internet, and if you decide to come along for the ride, it’ll be the same fun of figuring out a few new skills. Personally, I’ve always enjoyed learning something new.

That’s quite an ambitious aim for an already modest blog way out on the periphery of anywhere, so if you want to bale, now would seem to be an opportune moment. However, if you stick with me, your reward will be that you’ll become a ghost surfing under everyone’s radar and evading all the restrictions the compulsive controllers will try to place on you.

I’ve never chased the hits, so from now on you’re going to presented at times with the very real question of whether I’ve gone full-on tin foil hat paranoid, or perhaps I might be on to something. As usual, you’ll be getting my fully opinionated view with extra wingnuts added but what you make of it is your choice.

I can promise you nothing beyond my stubborn honesty and my best very unfashionable attempt to articulate that, however unpalatable it may be. The only thing I can really promise you is that it won’t be comfortable, you’re going to have to venture outside your comfort zone once in a while, nobody is going to luvya as usual, it’s all going to get a bit undefined at times, but I think it’s going to be an exciting trip.

The big question is, are you up for it kiddo?

©Pointman

Related articles by Pointman:

A message in two parts – part one.

Betrayal by those you once trusted.

The loss of faith in the political class.

Click for a list of other articles.

 

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