Welcome back Parler, I think …

Posted by Pointman on February 17, 2021 · 3 Comments 

Hearing that Parler was back up, I gave it a try. If you’re not familiar with its short and spectacular history, it had barely been up a few weeks when big tech ganged up on it and closed it down by a combination of deplatforming and refusing to stock it in the company stores. There are a few links below going into the detail. It timed its entrance very badly in so many ways. It was at the time of the Big Steal and it debuted with a lot of fanfare.

With big tech censorship really coming down brutally hard, people were fleeing in hordes the big social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and others. At face value, it was an opportune moment since all those addicted to social media were flocking to Gab or Parler, so lots of new punters coming through the doors of the last two remaining bastions of free speech on the net. Unfortunately, it was totally unprepared for being deplatformed and cast into the wilderness from the woke stores, so it folded quickly.

Andrew Torba, the proprietor of its only competitor Gab, had worked in Silicon Valley, made his bundle there but got pushed out mainly I feel because of his strong religious convictions and belief in wholesome old-fashioned family values. He’d an advantage the people behind Parler didn’t. He knew only too well the almost pathological controlling tendencies of the likes of Zuckerberg, Dorsey and Bezos as well as their intolerance of any viewpoint that differed from their approved one. He also knew they were insatiably greedy and morally corrupt. In short – vermin.

Knowing that, he build Gab the expensive way with its own hardware, server stacks and zero reliance on the vermin’s ownership or indirect control of the internet support services such as hosting and payment systems, and independent of the company stores. Parler hadn’t done any of that, so it folded within days once it got squeezed. The result was that Gab got hit with a second wave of homeless refugees from Parler but after scaling up its capacity, it survived albeit after some growing pains.

That’s the abridged history. I tried it earlier on today and it was obviously having performance problems. The login screen took ages, to the point where it nearly froze my computer. Having got in, the same performance problems were apparent. There were some obvious “features” like not being able to scroll down my feed using the mouse or the keyboard, making it pretty unusable. Hopefully, some elbow grease and a lot of engineering overtime will iron out the bugs on this its second shakedown cruise. To be fair, Gab suffered similar problems when it got flooded out, but managed to overcome them in the end.

I’ll still use it but rather tentatively I fear. All these places have their own character. Parler had a frontman called Dan Bongino with the irritating personality of a pushy car salesman. Gab had Torba’s religious observations appearing in my feed a mite too often. A man’s religious convictions are his own but not to be pushed clumsily in my face every time I hit refresh. I’m an example of what Brendan Behan so wittily called a badly lapsed Catholic, meaning you weren’t happy being in and you’re still not easy about being out. It got irritating but it’s been toned down now. Perhaps someone had an ecumenical word in his ear.

My reservations stem from two events. Parler has a new CEO and I watched him on some fake news program promising that they’d be back soon and they were making some progress in negotiating their way back onto the shelves of the company store. A smooth talking swamper if ever I saw one and in case you didn’t know it, the only deal you can do with the big tech monopolies is to do business in the way they dictate. Toe the social media party line, methinks.

The second was finding out that the conservative blogger and speaker Milo Yiannopoulos had just been banned from it on its first day back. He’s a larger than life character I enjoyed following on Twitter until they banned him. I believe he’s also been banned as a speaker on most campuses or at least excluded from their safe zones.

He’s intelligent, quick, articulate and witty with a wicked but pointed sense of humour. He really takes the piss out of these holier than thou woke wretches that plague social media with their hair-trigger sensibilities and multiple personality afflictions. He revels in being a fey, outspoken homosexual with a black husband, but the hell of it for them is that he’s a conservative. To say he leaves most of the woke crowd seriously conflicted about whether or not to hate him is a serious understatement, especially as he’s a scream and they’ve all had the humour bypass snip.

Banning a firecracker like Milo doesn’t bode good for any supposed free speech platform.

©Pointman

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Your survival kit – Comms.

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Filed under Article · Tagged with Company store, Gab, Milo Yiannopoulos, Parler, Resist the Regime