Tag: alternative platforms

05JUN2023 – OCF Update – This’N’That

photog Current Events, OCF , , , , ,

Probably the most significant news is that yesterday the long-discussed Ukraine offensive began.  There were several troop and tank movements in the Donetsk

“Russia’s defence ministry released video of what it said showed several Ukrainian armoured vehicles in a field blowing up after being hit.

Russian forces killed 250 Ukrainian troops as well as destroying 16 tanks, three infantry fighting vehicles and 21 armoured combat vehicles, the ministry said.”

Currently the Ukrainians have not released any statements with their take on the fighting.  From what I read the Ukrainian forces involved included about sixty tanks, 3,000 men, artillery and other armored vehicles.

This is still just a small fraction of the forces available for this offensive but it seems clear this wasn’t a feint.  It’s act one.  It will be evolving over the next days and weeks and it will be gut-wrenching for all involved.

……………………………………….

The Z-Man had an interesting post today about the evolving perspective on the dissident right about what the struggle with the Left actually entails.  Instead of the resistance of the Right to slow down the Left’s never-ending push to produce a heaven on earth he posits that the dissidents are aiming to eliminate ideology as the engine of human social advancement.  What’s being rejected is basically the Enlightenment project that gave birth to liberal democracy in the West.  In its place would be a pragmatic program based on the limitations of human society.  No more heaven on earth.  Just earth.

Pretty thought provoking stuff.

…………………………………………..

I’ve been hearing a lot of buzz about a horror movie (if that’s the genre) called Nefarious.  Apparently it’s a death row prisoner being interviewed by a psychiatrist to see if he’s sane enough to be executed.  The twist is that the prisoner claims to be possessed by a demon who wants the execution to proceed so he can escape to a new body from which he can continue his mayhem.  It’s still in the theater so they want twenty bucks to stream it at home.  Well!  I must be getting old.  I remember when twenty bucks was actual money.  I remember as a kid I once found a twenty dollar bill and I thought I was rich.  So anyway I’m stalling until it comes down in price.  It looks pretty good in the trailer.  The producers aren’t mainstream Hollywood types.  They’re on the religious side of things.  So that makes it even more interesting to me.  Maybe I’ll spring for the twenty bucks.  I’ll probably still be able to eat that week.  And supporting alternatives to woke corporations like the Hollywood studios is almost a religious obligation.  So I guess I’ll fork over the quatloos.

Supporting the Revolution

photog Current Events , , ,

Every aspect of our lives is touched by the division that splits the people of the United States into two almost completely non-overlapping groups; the Left and the Right.  Sure, there are people who claim they are outside these two groups but they’re wrong.  And that’s because the Left will not let you be exempt.  You’re either inside their orthodoxy or you are a pariah whose destruction they will pursue doggedly.  And for those of us on the Right, we have to struggle to survive this pursuit.

But no one just wants to survive.  We want to enjoy all aspects of life.  We want family, friends and things we can do to make our lives enjoyable.  And we want to forget about the Left and their lunacy whenever we can.  Now I won’t delve into the problems of avoiding the governmental controls that the federal government imposes or the even more onerous controls that blue states force their citizens to endure.  Let’s save all that for another day.

Instead let’s talk about what we can do as individuals to create the options we want in our lives.  A trivial example is the recent outrage over Anheuser Busch and their fake spokeswoman.  Here is an opportunity to use your status as a consumer to punish a company that went out of its way to antagonize its patrons and you can make a statement to the rest of the beer companies that you value a company that at worst stays neutral in the culture wars.  Even better would be finding a company that openly supports traditional values.  But neutrality will do.

Now look at that example.  And translate it into as many other choices and decisions that you make in your life.  The bank you keep your money in, the stores where you buy your groceries, the places you shop for your hobby supplies, the browser you use on the internet, even the social media sites where you interact with the on-line world.  All of these are potential choices.  Of course, some of them will be non-starters.  Amazon, Walmart, Target and the rest of the retailers are hopelessly left-wing.  The best you can do is occasionally try to shop directly from manufacturers who you know to be non-leftist.  That’s not such an easy thing.

But in other cases, there are choices.  Recently, Elon Musk has significantly reduced the anti-right activities on Twitter.  He’s un-banned numerous people on the Right and openly refused to silence even outspoken right-wing voices.  As an experiment I’ve recently decided to pay him his eight bucks a month to get the controversial “blue check” and I’m not saying it’s been some kind of golden ticket to viral success but I do enjoy some of the content I find on Twitter and I feel like I’m supporting a platform that doesn’t hate me.  So, if you have a choice between using Twitter or Facebook well that should be easy.    And I feel a hell of a lot happier with what I pay Twitter compared to the cable bill that supports the likes of CNN, MSNBC and the rest of the lefties that inhabit the various cable networks.  One of these days I’ll cut the cable and just use the channels that don’t hate me.  That will be a big day.

For another example, I use the Brave and DuckDuckGo combination as my browser and search engine respectively.  They respect privacy and block a lot of the ads that usually follow you around the internet.  As for news I use the sites that at least provide both sides on current events.  Real Clear Politics balances their articles about 50/50 between Left and Right.  It’s not ideal but I can just pick and choose based on the sources.

In the future I’m expecting that there will be a major dedicated right-wing news site on the internet with some free and some paywalled content that I will be willing to pay for.  That’s because I expect that Tucker Carlson will be participating in some kind of a larger news/opinion project with some of his more ethical colleagues.  Maybe it will be on Twitter, maybe on substack, but I suspect soon there will be a service that will be worth a few bucks.

And I expect in the future more companies and platforms will start trying to brand themselves as friendly to the Right or to conservatives or traditionalists or some other words to that effect.  Now it’s going to take some vetting to eliminate the phonies and the grifters who just want to jump on a bandwagon.  Probably word of mouth from trusted sources will be most helpful.

But in general, I think it’s a good idea to go out of your way to find a product or service that is produced by people who don’t openly despise you and buy it.  Don’t get ripped off doing it.  The premium for patronizing someone on our side should be reasonable.  Is that 10 or 15%.  Sure.  But not 100%!  And the quality should be comparable, not noticeably inferior.  I remember I tried using a coffee brand because they advertised their sympathy for the military but the coffee wasn’t any good.  So, I had to drop that.

Anyway, you get the picture.  It’s time for us to start putting our money where our mouths are.  Look for worthwhile products on our side and support them.  And if they pan out, pass the info along on social media.

Fight the power baby!

What’s Next for Tucker Carlson?

photog Uncategorized , , , , , , , , ,

Well, now there’s no reason to watch Fox News anymore.  It should be interesting to see how Carlson decides to go forward from here.  I’m assuming he’s not hurting for money.  He should probably start a channel on Rumble and put up a paywall.  He’s one of the more interesting people in broadcasting.  People will pay to get his content.

The other possibility is he goes into politics.  That I see as more problematic.  Politics is a very dirty game.  If you don’t need to use it to make lots of dirty money it won’t be an interesting career.

I think Carlson could form some kind of relationship with the likes of Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Salena Zito, Sharyl Attkisson and a few other real journalists to produce a media outlet that would provide the kind of reporting and opinion that can’t be found anywhere else in the media.  They would have believability.  That’s something that is so sorely lacking everywhere else.

If done right and without all the overhead that comes with a Fox News or a CNN, Carlson and a few reporters could break away from the dying landscape of network and cable news shows that no one needs or wants anymore.  News and analysis.  With the internet and a few resources like Rumble and maybe Elon Musk’s Twitter who needs studios and boardrooms?

Come to think of it, Carlson interviewed Musk last week.  Maybe those two could strike up a deal where Tucker’s content was available exclusively on Twitter with some of it behind a paywall.  It could make both of them a lot of money.  And it could serve as a model for the future.  I’ve heard that Musk wants to add a “substack” option to Twitter.  Having someone like Tucker Carlson as his first big “channel” might be just the thing he needs to steer talent to his platform.

So anyway, Tucker’s “firing” could be a very opportune moment to start seeing a new journalism.  Without the bloat of the dinosaur media, a cadre of people who want to tell interesting stories that have some resemblance to objective reality could provide a service that people would be willing to pay for.  I, even I, would pay a little bit for that.

Now it’s also certain that all the usual suspects on the Left will be gunning for Tucker Carlson.  I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s a target for the Justice Department’s attack dogs.  Their hatred for him probably rivals how they feel about Donald Trump.  After all he’s another traitor to his class.  They’ve already once gone after his family at home.  He had to move away from Washington to protect them.  This is not a trivial threat.  Hopefully he’s made enough money to be able to afford professional security services.  But no one is safe from the abuse that the FBI can bring to bear.  We’ll have to see whether these problems crop up for him.

Well, these are interesting times.  Tucker Carlson has been the only truthful voice in mainstream news commentary.  I hope that he will be able to find a way to continue shining a light on the criminal activities of the Washington regime.  There isn’t any other voice out there that has both his reach and credibility.  Hopefully someone like Musk who has the reach and also the money to set up a platform for him will come along and take advantage of this interesting opportunity.

What Could Twitter Be?

photog Current Events , ,

All of the revelations about government directed shadow banning on Twitter of conservatives and other opponents of various government policies is very interesting and may help to convince some few remaining idiots who haven’t already seen what’s perfectly obvious to most people of normal intelligence.  But I don’t see that it will accomplish any practical result.

But what would be really useful is if Musk decides that providing a legitimate commercial platform for non-Leftists is a profitable business model.  Of course, this is a question that hasn’t been answered.  Now, Jeff Bezos was eventually able to make Amazon very profitable.  But he had the advantage that he was able for many years to provide his customers with a product line that avoided all state sales tax.  And Google was able to capitalize on government contracts to fund their capture of the worldwide advertising market.

But what’s left for Musk to capture?  Twitter is a political gossip column and little else.  If kept in its current form it’s really not good for much.  So, what was Musk thinking when he spent $44 billion for it?

For that kind of investment, he must be looking at something enormous.  My guess is that he’s looking at some kind of integrated on-line service platform.  The question is how he plans to steal a march on his competitors.  So, if you are eying the revenues that Apple, Google, Facebook, PayPal and Amazon have, how do you steal away some of them?

His first step was easy.  Fire the worthless two thirds of your employees that spend their time in yoga and meditation rooms and demand results from the remaining people.  Right there he’s practically made the company profitable.  But after that he needs to find the future of digital enterprise.

And it’s not going to be something idiotic like Zuckerberg’s ridiculous metaverse.  Thinking the world is going to be revolutionized by everybody walking around wearing VR headsets is close to moronic.  It’s going to be something that uses artificial intelligence for something more than advertising.  Currently Silicon Valley has just been shilling for the woke powers that be who are looking to eliminate the great unwashed (meaning us).

A way to utilize artificial intelligence in a profitable and useful way is to provide those who are currently being ostracized and silenced with a platform to organize and accomplish useful things.  And not just political organizing.  In fact, the cultural and commercial aspects are even more important and desperately needed.

In fact, what Musk could make the most money on is streaming entertainment.  There is such a drought of enjoyable content that he could get his whole $44 Billion back on that alone.  When was the last time there was anything actually funny put out on television or in the movies?  Other than Dave Chapelle everyone is so afraid of offending someone by saying something actually funny that they’re reduced to just insulting straight white men, the only allowable target for abuse.

And there are many other forbidden enterprises that Musk and his partners can get involved with.  Being one of the original creators of PayPal makes it certain that he could add financial functions to his platform.  It could include payment processing, crowd funding, and even normal banking services.  Grateful customers would be more than happy to throw their other on-line business his way.  He just has to make it simple to get started.

He could steal a page from Amazon and get into self-publishing.  He could build a better smart phone.  I’ve heard he’s even considering starting his own news network.  There are all kinds of opportunities.  He could even become a site host for all the folks who’ve been de-platformed.

And these are just the things that occur to a regular guy like me.  Surely super-genius Elon Musk can produce ideas that are a thousand times better and more lucrative.  So come on, Elon get cracking, we’re getting tired of waiting.

Elon and the Deplorables

photog Uncategorized , , , , ,

Elon Musk has jumped into the middle of the culture war with both feet you could say.  He’s spent fifty-five billion dollars buying a company that the Left thinks must belong to them and that has ticked off the powers that be.  He’s refused to disenfranchise the various deniers; COVID, climate, election, you name it.  He’s even pardoned Donald Trump.  And now he’s unbanned everyone who hasn’t broken the law getting kicked off.  He’s a heretic and must be punished!

Essentially, he’s embraced the deplorables.  Why?  I have a theory.

I think Elon Musk sees an opportunity.  The cultural divide in the United States is a powerful force.  And power, if harnessed correctly is one of the most valuable commodities there is.  The endless conflict between the Left and Right on Twitter is far from a useful activity.  Nevertheless, it is an energetic process.  It doesn’t produce much light but it does produce heat.  And heat is a kind of energy.  And it attracts attention and in some ways that was the main product that Twitter sold during the Trump presidency.  Even with the biased treatment of the two political sides there was an active interest in the antics on Twitter.

And yet Twitter never made any money.  And as the field of battle on Twitter became more and more tilted against the Right it lost more and more money.  I think Elon realized that Twitter was run by very stupid people that had no clue how to harness the tool they’d been given by the government.  After all, the big tech companies exist because the intelligence agencies subsidize their operation in order to use their data feeds as surveillance resources.

I think he realized that if someone smart were running things a profit could be extracted from the operation.  And I’m only guessing, but I suspect he would like to use the outsider status of the deplorables as a marketing mechanism.  Here is an enormous pool of people who have been demonized, mocked and whose purchase preferences have been the target of a campaign of eradication.  Think about it.  Hollywood, television and the major corporations have outlawed anything that doesn’t wholeheartedly embrace and display the woke message.  Old movies and shows have to be remade just to insert abnormal sexual lifestyles and minority characters.  In fact, Hollywood has an actual quota system for actors and production crew.  Straight white men need not apply.

Suppose Elon has decided that this large unappreciated market that is just sitting, waiting for someone to embrace it could make him a lot of money.  Wouldn’t he be the obvious person to take advantage?  And the beauty of it is he doesn’t even have to lose the other part of the market.  He doesn’t have to reject the woke.  All he needs to do is provide an option for each side.

Door Number One could be the present woke system.  It would have all the rainbow and BLM flags flying in the breeze.  There would be trans this, trans that and trans the other thing as far as the eye could see.  Basically, he just links to Disney and Amazon.  But to take advantage of the other half of the world it would require Door Number Two.

It could be a tiny button with a huge warning label that cautioned the general public that down this path are forbidden things.  Books and movies where the cowboys are the good guys and Thomas Jefferson isn’t a monster.  There would be historical dramas about Rome and Greece, Tudor England and the Age of Exploration, where all the actors were (gasp!) white.  It would have an explicit bias toward normalcy and it would be unabashedly proud of the western tradition.  Even Christopher Columbus would still have a place of honor.  Every boy meets girl plot line would feature a real boy and a real girl.  Oh, the horror.  Someone alert GLAAD.

So, Elon Musk is positioned to take advantage of almost half the population looking for someone to sponsor them and sell them things that somehow are now forbidden.  He could be the Jeff Bezos of the Right. His Lord of the Rings series wouldn’t have to have trans-hobbits and boss-girl Galadriel.  He could just follow the books.  His payment system could be PayPal or it could be his own.  And it could be a bank and a crowd funding platform too.  As he’s said he could have his own cell-phone company too.  None of this stuff is rocket science and he is a rocket scientist!  All these things could be packaged to people who currently feel left out by the woke business world.  All he has to do is take our money and get richer.

So, think about it Elon.  Currently you’re losing a billion dollars a year catering to woke snowflakes who spend all their time complaining about their feelings and are too cheap to pay eight dollars a month to be certified on your website that they spend all their time on.  Or you can sell things to people who like to pay cash, believe two plus two equals four, can tell the difference between a man and a woman and only ask for the minimum of respect.  It’s a pretty easy choice.

Twitter Cries Out!

photog Current Events , , ,

Supposedly Elon Musk is going to buy Twitter on Friday.  I don’t know if he is.  Things seem to go back and forth on the sale so often it’s hard to say for sure.  But I was interested in an article that quoted an open letter that some Twitter employees have released.  It addresses a rumor that Musk is going to lay off 75% of the employees of the company.

Now that caught my attention.  What a marvelous idea!  Reducing Twitter’s payroll to two thousand employees sounded like a brilliant way to focus the attention of those remaining employees on doing their jobs instead of practicing social justice.

But apparently not everyone views this situation the same.  The employees who wrote this open letter to Musk are not as thrilled as I am.  Here are some excerpts:

We, the undersigned Twitter workers, believe the public conversation is in jeopardy.

Elon Musk’s plan to lay off 75% of Twitter workers will hurt Twitter’s ability to serve the public conversation. A threat of this magnitude is reckless, undermines our users’ and customers’ trust in our platform, and is a transparent act of worker intimidation…….

We demand of current and future leadership:

Respect: We demand leadership to respect the platform and the workers who maintain it by committing to preserving the current headcount.

Safety: We demand that leadership does not discriminate against workers on the basis of their race, gender, disability, sexual orientation, or political beliefs. We also demand safety for workers on visas, who will be forced to leave the country they work in if they are laid off.

Protection: We demand Elon Musk explicitly commit to preserve our benefits, those both listed in the merger agreement and not (e.g. remote work). We demand leadership to establish and ensure fair severance policies for all workers before and after any change in ownership.

Dignity: We demand transparent, prompt and thoughtful communication around our working conditions. We demand to be treated with dignity, and to not be treated as mere pawns in a game played by billionaires.

You know, that’s a lot of demanding going on there.  I have to assume they are speaking from a position of great strength.  Otherwise, it might seem that they are painting bullseyes on their backs with respect to the new boss firing them.

Now the interesting thing is that they released this letter but refuse to release the identity of the signatories until some critical mass is reached.  My guess is that will be never.

So, what will Musk do?  Well, I can’t tell the richest man on Earth what to do.  But if I could I’d tell him to change it to 80%.  I’m on Twitter and as far as I can tell the algorithms are so rigged in favor of the wokesters that getting rid of almost everybody working there would be an enormous improvement.

I think the real challenge is to find the real bottom number for employment there.  After all isn’t the whole point of automation and artificial intelligence that you leverage machines to do the work.  Maybe the real number is one thousand or a hundred or even fifty.  I think that’s where Elon should invest his time.  He should figure out just how small a company is needed to run Twitter and that may tell him whether the whole thing even makes sense at all.  Maybe he needs to change the “business model” for Twitter altogether and build in something more useful than just a message board for random humans.

And I think that’s what he intends to do.  My guess is he thinks he can do better than Meta, YouTube and even Amazon.  Maybe we’re about to find out if he’s right.

A Multipolar World Might be the Answer to Cancel Culture

photog Current Events , , ,

If an American film maker or author said that effeminate men were a disgraceful role model to show children in books or movies he would be finished overnight.  His movies or books would be burned in a bonfire at every university and Silicon Valley campus.  He would be banned on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.  He’d never work in Hollywood or have another book published and he might even have his credit cards and bank accounts shut down.

And yet Chinese leaders said that very thing a few months ago.  And Russia’s leaders express the same disdain for America’s LGBTQ fetish.  Hollywood has catered to the Chinese market for the last ten years at least.  They self-censor their movies to prevent offending Chinese sensibilities on politics and social subjects.  But when Hollywood hears Chinese leaders saying such things, they keep quiet.  Cancel culture can’t go after Xi Jinping.  First off because they need his money, secondly because he’s not ruled by Google.  China has control, strict control on its on-line ecosystem.  In America Facebook can cancel the President of the United States.  In China the General Secretary can cancel Facebook, or Twitter or any other tech presence that displeases him.

And moving beyond social media China has its own financial systems that are beginning to emerge out of the shadow of Western banks and the Fed’s dollar infrastructure.  Russia has recently negotiated a trade agreement that will allow it to sell oil and gas using China’s yuan currency instead of the dollar.  And likewise, instead of Visa and Mastercard, China has its own credit card platform (UnionPay) that Russia will be shifting over to.  Perhaps in the not-too-distant future American conservatives might find themselves using that same credit platform after they’ve been bounced out of the American credit systems.  We might have to pay a premium to do it but knowing that your livelihood isn’t at the mercy of social justice warriors would be incredibly liberating.

The next thing to explore is the cultural products of these other cultures.  Maybe the Russians and Chinese have movies and books that are more in line with the tastes of the cancelled conservatives living in the West.  I’d hate to think I’ll have to learn Mandarin and Russian to enjoy a comedy or a drama but technology can come to the rescue on that.  Seamless computer-generated voice and lip dubbing could create English language versions of foreign films in the near future.  It’s been at least twenty years since I could say that the majority of the best picture nominees for the Academy Awards were watchable.  Lately I doubt that even the target audience for these movies are interested in watching these pathetic excuses for entertainment.  I think it’s entirely possible that some non-Western country will rediscover the formulae that Golden Age Hollywood used to entertain the whole world in the 1930’s and -40’s.  We’re all entertained by the story of boy meets girl, not trans-boy meets trans-girl.  We want a crime story where the cops are the good guys, not a story of heroic Antifa burning down Portland.

Sure, the idea that we will have to depend on non-Western countries to provide us with commercial and cultural choices that we can’t find here in the cradle of freedom and land of capital opportunity is a rebuke of our civilization but as a practical consideration it would be the solution we need.  At least until sanity returns to the West.  Now it may turn out that choices will start to appear in America.  I’ve seen that payment processors have appeared that will defy the cancel culture police and cater to the deplorables.  Maybe soon movies will be created in America for normal men and women.  But even these innovations may be driven to some extent by the knowledge that some non-Western nations are immune to the attacks of the cancel culture warriors.  So, death to the global empire and long live cultural diversity, and down with the cancel culture.  At least until I get the whip hand, then we’ll see!

18AUG2017 Update – Make a Start

photog Current Events, Trump , , , , , , ,

So, every month or two the world becomes even a lot weirder and I need to do an evaluation to allow for course correction. And it’s definitely one of those times again. The events of the last week have pushed us still deeper into the uncharted territory of American Guerilla War. The prospect of Antifa battling it out with Nationalists has become reality. And right on script establishment republicans have backed Antifa. The press has become almost apoplectic and President Trump is still managing to defy the powers that be. Wow.
The upshot. Social media and much of corporate America have joined lock-step with the narrative that right-wing = Nazism. Even relatively moderate bloggers are being deplatformed by social media and even their internet service providers. Moderates are panicking and swearing allegiance to anyone on the left who will accept their confessions. Many on the right are angry and confused. Some are blaming the Alt-Right for making all this happen.
What do I think? I think that those who foretold a growing separation between left and right in America and the beginning of a schism of the American public were right. I think it may be starting to happen. Now, I don’t think this will be some civil war (either cold or hot). I think there will be more clashes in the streets and more and more animosity and hate. And I think it will harden opinions on both sides and it will move things further along toward a separation of us and them. Alternative platforms and companies and agencies will begin to form that will allow people to disengage from the irritants that exist in the present condition. A way for people to avoid Twitter, Facebook, PayPal, Patreon and Google and the other myriad institutions that despise the right and everything it believes in. And then people on the right are going to start using boycotts to put pressure on Walmart and Target and the other big businesses to stop caving into the pressure from the left and just sell their crap to us without the social justice virtue signaling attached. And they are going to have to start looking for alternative places for their kids to go to school. That will be the toughest choice of all.
But I think all of these things are starting to become more real. The left becomes ever more hateful and irrational. It becomes ever more strident and its demands become more and more intolerable. I believe people on the right will have to build networks and relationships that allow mutual support and even economic relationships. Hire the people you trust and the people you like. Buy from people who don’t despise you. Shun the businesses and the individuals who openly hate everything you stand for and believe in.
It’s not a pretty picture. A year-ago I would have said it sounded silly and melodramatic. I don’t think so anymore. I think it’s the direction we’re going. I’ve begun the first little steps myself. I will no longer click on a news link from any of the left-wing media. Never. I avoid all arts and entertainment sites that control the message and only allow leftist dogma. That is one of the reasons I include photography and science fiction on this website. I wanted a place where people on the right who enjoyed these things weren’t second class citizens. I am looking for alternative companies for products that are produced by flagrantly leftist companies. I don’t use Twitter, Wikipedia or Facebook. I limit what I use Google for and avoid their browser. I support alternatives like Gab, Infogalactic and Brave. I’m waiting to see what alternative crowd-funding and other funding choices become available.
Of course, these are tiny steps. For many of the daily actions no good alternatives exist yet. But start somewhere. Patronize those who agree with you. Shun those who are your sworn enemies. Make a start.