{"id":13433,"date":"2021-02-06T14:14:19","date_gmt":"2021-02-06T19:14:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/?p=13433"},"modified":"2021-02-06T14:14:19","modified_gmt":"2021-02-06T19:14:19","slug":"back-in-the-ussa-not-quite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2021\/02\/06\/back-in-the-ussa-not-quite\/","title":{"rendered":"Back in the USSA, Not Quite"},"content":{"rendered":"

The downside of reading the Gulag Archipelago is that you become dismissive of the power of the FBI.\u00a0 I mean compared to the KGB and its precursor the NKVD our secret police are pretty lame.\u00a0 Of course, everything is relative.\u00a0 Compared to the unimaginable freedom that we used to enjoy here, the present police state is very repressive and upsetting.\u00a0 A generation ago we would have laughed at the idea of the government spying on all of the phone conversations of the American people.\u00a0 And the idea that political opponents would now be the targets for re-education camps would have been the subject of science fiction dystopias that sane people would have found too far-fetched to be interesting.<\/p>\n

But getting back to the USSR, the Soviets didn\u2019t do anything half way.\u00a0 They were so zealous and thorough that they would arrest random people just because their quotas hadn\u2019t yet been met.\u00a0 I was reading a story about a landlady who went to the police station to ask about what to do with a nursing infant whose mother was one of her tenants.\u00a0 The mother had been arrested by the NKVD and now the child needed milk.\u00a0 She wanted to know where she should bring the child.\u00a0 They brought the landlady to a waiting room and after a delay of a few hours they decided to arrest her just because she was already there and the quota needed filling.\u00a0 She disappeared into the gulag and was never seen again.\u00a0 Now there\u2019s an action that would bring tears of joy to Jim Comey\u2019s eyes.<\/p>\n

I guess my point is that as maddening as it is to see the freest country ever imagined devolving into a police state the reality is that we have a lot of latitude to communicate our ideas and information with each other.\u00a0 After all I can call Joe Biden, Dementia Joe and Kamala Harris, Willie Brown\u2019s Ho.\u00a0 And so far, I haven\u2019t been dragged away to Siberia (or even Minnesota) or been shut down by the thought police. \u00a0Sure, they\u2019ve shut us out of Twitter and Facebook but honestly those things were overrun with Leftists anyway and from what people on them have told me they weren\u2019t fun anymore anyway.\u00a0 Larry Correia is one of my favorite fantasy authors partly because he is not a Leftist.\u00a0 On his blog, Monster Hunter Nation, he wrote a recent post that chronicled his decision to abandon Facebook<\/a>.\u00a0 Apparently, they didn\u2019t shut down his very popular page but instead blocked him from writing to it.<\/p>\n

I have a Gab page, but honestly, I\u2019ve never really gotten any traffic from it.\u00a0 The short-short form of writing doesn\u2019t really seem to suit me.\u00a0 Maybe it\u2019s a skill I need to learn.\u00a0 But I like writing on my blog and if I can get some visibility from folks like Whatfinger<\/a>, Disturbed Deputy<\/a> and MaddMedic<\/a> then I\u2019m happy to communicate that way. \u00a0Lately I\u2019ve been getting some organic search traffic but it\u2019s still quite limited and is restricted to very specific posts that have little to do with the majority of my content.<\/p>\n

What I\u2019m getting at is that although I\u2019d love to suddenly go viral and have millions of readers, I\u2019m not sure that was ever a realistic thing.\u00a0 Are there really that many people interested in the things I am?\u00a0 Maybe I\u2019ll never know.\u00a0 But if the people who like my stuff tells some of their friends that\u2019s probably the best way for my site to grow and right now, I don\u2019t think the FBI or even Google is interested in my nefarious writings.\u00a0 If I do get hurled off my platform, I guess I\u2019ll change my tune but I think what I\u2019d do is what Gab did.\u00a0 I\u2019d make my site completely bullet proof.\u00a0 I believe I\u2019ve found a hosting plan that avoids all the vulnerable infrastructure and doesn\u2019t cost an arm and a leg.<\/p>\n

Circling back to the beginning.\u00a0 We have lost a lot of freedom but compared to real totalitarian hell like the Soviet Union or that madman in North Korea we have enough wiggle room to say what we want, to whom we want.\u00a0 And right now, that\u2019s good enough.<\/p>\n

So spread the good word, send all your conservative friends to Orion\u2019s Cold Fire and spit in the eye of Google and the FBI.\u00a0 Free America still exists here and I\u2019m not feeling pessimistic today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The downside of reading the Gulag Archipelago is that you become dismissive of the power of the FBI.\u00a0 I mean compared to the KGB and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,818],"tags":[2256,799,184,535,302,2894,157],"class_list":["post-13433","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","category-ocf","tag-aleksandr-solzhenitsyn","tag-build-your-own-platforms","tag-comey","tag-fbi","tag-google","tag-gulag-archipelago","tag-ocf"],"yoast_head":"\nBack in the USSA, Not Quite - Orion's Cold Fire<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2021\/02\/06\/back-in-the-ussa-not-quite\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Back in the USSA, Not Quite - 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