Tag: media

Holding their breath and turning blue

It should be obvious that women cannot and will never be as effective as men if they are going to come right out and openly declare that they will not do their jobs because they find doing so to be offensive:

Rebecca Davies, who writes the children’s books blog at Independent.co.uk, tells me that she is equally sick of receiving “books which have been commissioned solely for the purpose of ‘getting boys reading’ [and which have] all-male characters and thin, action-based plots.” What we are doing by pigeon-holing children is badly letting them down. And books, above all things, should be available to any child who is interested in them.

Happily, as the literary editor of The Independent on Sunday, there is something that I can do about this. So I promise now that the newspaper and this website will not be reviewing any book which is explicitly aimed at just girls, or just boys. Nor will The Independent’s books section. And nor will the children’s books blog at Independent.co.uk. Any Girls’ Book of Boring Princesses that crosses my desk will go straight into the recycling pile along with every Great Big Book of Snot for Boys. If you are a publisher with enough faith in your new book that you think it will appeal to all children, we’ll be very happy to hear from you. But the next Harry Potter or Katniss Everdeen will not come in glittery pink covers. So we’d thank you not to send us such books at all.

Duly noted. I wonder how long this policy will last before it quietly goes by the wayside? Probably right around the time that a massively successful book explicitly aimed at just girls, or just boys, is published. If I were managing The Independent, I would immediately fire both women for their open refusal to simply do their jobs and review the books that are submitted for review.

This is a particularly egregious case of the gatekeepers attempting to decide what is permissible to read and what is not. The ironic thing is that they probably think the Spanish Inquisition’s list of proscribed books is one of the great crimes of human history. Would you trust these people’s opinions on any book now?

The ridiculous thing is that there is nothing to prevent a boy from reading a pink sparkly book, or to prevent a girl from reading a book with a Frazetta-style painting of a young man holding a severed orc’s head on the cover.

Of course, they’re already walking back their idiotic public posturing: We’re not planning to judge books by their cover….

Sure you’re not. And if sex-specific books demean all children, don’t sex-specific changing rooms and bathrooms demean all adults?

Same as he ever was

You may recall that I previously demonstrated that John Scalzi’s claim to have 50,000 daily readers was a 12x exaggeration of his actual daily blog readership in 2013, which was 20,600 daily pageviews and 4,085 daily readers. As it turns out, this significant exaggeration of his site traffic and his influence was nothing new.  Consider this post from July 2009, in which he arrogantly claimed that he was more influential than the three major SF publications, Analog, Asimov’s, and Fantasy & Science Fiction, combined.

Brad Torgersen: “Unless the work you’re writing is not the sort that fits any of the
Big Three, why would you allow the format and method of submission to
stop you from sending to the three markets still considered to be the
Top Dogs in short F and SF fiction?”

John Scalzi: “Because it would cost me money to buy a printer, paper and ink, the
rate they pay is shite, and I can reach more people on my Web site in a
day than any two of them can in a month.”

 In July 2009, Whatever had 300,487 monthly pageviews, or 9,613 per day. That meant he had about 1,940 daily readers. In 2009, Analog’s monthly circulation was 25,418 and Asimov’s was 16,696. It will probably not escape the mathematically literate observer’s attention that 42,114 is more than 1,940. So, five years ago, he was exaggerating his site traffic by a factor of 21.7. His absurd 2013 claims are actually less exaggerated than his previous claims.

And, of course, he was aggressively policing his potential critics even then.

Just as a general note, as I’ve told Brad to move on from this thread, directing comments to him specifically will be frustrating for him, and will not get actual responses.

Those who have recently lost respect for John Scalzi were simply not paying sufficient attention to his antics before. He’s precisely the same narcissistic con man that he’s always been, the only difference is that now he is less able to successfully control the narrative and spin a self-serving web of deceit because an increasing number of people in the SF/F world are aware of the facts and are able to see through his incessantly fraudulent activity.

As Bernie Madoff learned, eventually people figure out the con. Mr. Scalzi may not yet have come to terms with the fact that the jig is up yet, but sooner or later, he will have to do so.

“WHEN YOU SEE FRAUD, SHOUT FRAUD.”
– Nassem Talib

Stacking the deck

The mainstream media picks up on a tactic that has been utilized by left-leaning academics for years:

Neither CBS nor ABC have included a skeptical scientists in their news shows within the past 1,300 days, but both networks included alarmists within the past 160 days — CBS as recently as 22 days ago. When the networks did include other viewpoints, the experts were dismissed as “out of the scientific mainstream” or backed by “oil and coal companies.”

The networks were able to promote the myth that there is a scientific consensus for man-made, catastrophic climate change by including climate alarmists much more often than skeptical scientists and by challenging the credentials of the skeptics that they did include.

There are thousands of skeptical scientists, so it’s not like the networks couldn’t find any. Marc Morano, who runs the website Climate Depot, has published a special report listing more than 1,000 dissenting scientists worldwide who dispute man-made global warming claims made by the likes of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and former Vice President Al Gore.

CBS was the worst, ignoring skeptical scientists for 1,391 days, ever since the May 15, 2010, “Evening News.” That night, CBS interviewed former NASA climatologist, Dr. Roy Spencer during an extensive profile of alarmist meteorologist, and non-Ph.D., Dan Satterfield.

It was just 22 days ago, on Feb. 12, 2014, that CBS included an alarmist physicist, Dr. Michio Kaku on “This Morning.” Kaku is a contributor to “This Morning” and that day he warned of the “heating up of the North Pole” which “could cause gigantic storms of historic proportions.”

ABC last included a skeptical scientist 1,383 days ago. During the May 23, 2010, segment of “World News,” ABC played a brief, 23-second clip of Princeton-educated Dr. Fred Singer expressing his skepticism over man-made climate change, along with clips of two alarmist scientists. Singer’s was the only opposing view in that report and his views were actually taken from a much earlier interview aired on ABC March 23, 2008.

This reminds me of the way most evolutionists and atheists are always willing to debate some random individual, but are very careful to avoid taking on their more intelligent and intellectually dangerous opponents. For example, PZ Myers has been running away from me for years, despite the fact that he openly issued a challenge and even though my readership has continued to grow steadily while his continues to shrink.

Of course, all this tactic accomplishes is to drive even more people to the alternative media, where the more intelligent and autodidactic readers are increasingly congregating.

To sign or not to sign

This new petition of Amazon is interesting and relates to some problems to which I’ve pointed before:

Protect Amazon.com Users and Indie Publishing Authors from Bullying and Harassment by Removing Anonymity and Requiring Identity Verification for Reviewing and Forum Participation

For the consideration of Mr. Jeff Bezos and Mr. Jon P. Fine:

The purpose of this petition is to bring to the attention of Mr. Bezos, Mr. Fine, and anyone else employed by Amazon or its subsidiaries, the lack of oversight and or control in the Amazon system regarding product reviewing—in particular book reviewing—and in the participation of the many forums on Amazon.

It is known the world over that Amazon changed the face of self publishing by implementing their Kindle Direct Publishing platform as well as their CreateSpace platform. Anyone can now quickly and easily publish a book using the tools freely provided by Amazon. Whether or not everyone who publishes through KPD and CreateSpace should is not at issue here. What is at issue is the fact that there is an incredible amount of bullying and harassment of some of these self publishing authors taking place on the Amazon platform/system.

I believe, as do countless others—many who will have signed this petition—that the reason this bullying and harassment is able to take place is because of the allowance of anonymity on Amazon. People have found ways to exploit this flaw in the system and are using it to bully, harass, and generally make life miserable for certain authors on Amazon. These people are able to create multiple accounts and then use those accounts to viciously attack and go after any author or person that they feel doesn’t belong on Amazon or who shouldn’t have published a book, made a comment on a forum post, etc. With the current system, if one anonymous account gets deactivated because it was reported for these things, it is easy for the bully or harasser to simply create another anonymous account and continue on with their shenanigans.

What I—we—would like to see happen is for Amazon to revise their policies regarding anonymity when it comes to writing product/book reviews and for participation in the forums. Reviewers and forum participants should not be anonymous. By removing their anonymity and forcing them to display their real, verified identities, I believe that much of the harassment and bullying will cease. It may continue elsewhere on the web, but not on Amazon, the largest online retail marketplace in the world, where it really counts. Buyers of products on Amazon must have their identities verified, so it should be an easy transition to implement a policy whereby reviewers and forum participants must also have their identities verified.

While I could do without the appeals to bullying and so forth, the problem of fake reviews is definitely a real one. And while I am completely opposed to the law mandating real identities, this is simply one private corporation’s policy. So, my inclination is towards signing the petition, but I’m curious to know what the other authors and readers here have to say about it.

I think I’d sign it without question if it was limited to reviews. As much as I dislike restricted forums, I dislike even more the idea that the self-published authors, who are much less accustomed to trolls and socio-sadists working out their psychological issues online than I am, are forced to put up with this sort of nonsense from the very start, especially since they can’t control the forum comments the way I can here. Here it’s no trouble to ban the likes of the usual suspects, or put the short-term kibosh on someone getting out of line, but that’s simply not possible on Amazon.

I think the author of the petition’s assumption that sunlight will deter the trolls is generally correct. I noticed that the number of fake reviews of my books on Amazon declined considerably after I tracked down the woman from Minnesota and posted her address on this blog. Even the Greatest Pensman in All Karatonitus significantly reduced his activities here after I called his place of volunteer work and made it evident that I was in possession of the email addresses of his friends and extended family members. There are few trolls so shameless that they are willing to have those around them know what they are doing and how they are behaving.

UPDATE: Upon reading the discussion and engaging in further reflection, I have decided not to sign the petition. There are more effective ways to deal with the problem and anonymity can be a vital and necessary state for people in certain circumstances.

Tilting the level playing field

The mainstream media’s attempts to ignore, belittle, and compete with the independent media has failed, so now they are desperately trying to appeal to anyone, from the government to Google, who will stack the odds in their favor:

Who, for example, could object to a paper that opens with something as reasonable as:

“At a time of extraordinary domestic and international policy challenges, Americans need high-quality news. Readers and viewers must decipher the policy options that the country faces and the manner in which various decisions affect them personally. It often is not readily apparent how to assess complicated policy choices and what the best steps are for moving forward.”

You know you are wading into difficult waters, however, when in the very next paragraph West and Stone quote warnings about the perils of the present political polarization from Brookings’ Thomas Mann and the American Enterprise Institute’s Norm Ornstein. AEI is indeed a conservative think tank, and a jewel of one at that, but any idea that coupling these two scholars from AEI and Brookings produces a balanced analysis should go out the window. Ornstein is AEI’s resident liberal and about as representative of the scholarship at AEI as I am of the Harlem Globetrotters. Mann and Ornstein are themselves very partisan players who would like nothing better than to go back to the old days when Tip O’Neill got the better of Bob Michel in the House of Representatives; they blame all of Congress’s dysfunctions on the Republicans, especially the Tea Party branch. So when West and Stone blame the role the news media are currently playing in the polarization that Mann and Ornstein decry there is more than just the sound of academic “tsk, tsking”—there’s also a slight whiff of “here’s hoping that we could set this darn clock back.”

In fact, attempts to do just that permeate the entire paper and its recommendations. West and Stone even chide the practice of pairing conservatives and liberals on TV to comment on issues, which they say results in “polarization of discourse and ‘false equivalence’ in reporting.” Getting both views means there is a lack of “nuanced analysis,” which “confuses viewers,” they write. As with all liberal grousing, there is also throughout the paper the suspicion that the average American is not capable of filtering the news by himself. Another passage reads, “the average reader’s ability to critically judge this new presentation of digital data is still developing and is lagging behind the ubiquity of interactives and infographics on the web.”

So journalists should lead the average American reader out of his torpor by linking to thoughtful commentary that give the context the reader needs, just like in the old days. And who might be good examples of such much-needed context-givers? West and Stone observe that “Platforms such as the Washington Post’s Wonkblog and Andrew Sullivan’s “The Dish” provide daily developments in policy news for those seeking to understand the intricacies of complex issues.” And, no it doesn’t end there. They also recommend Democracy Now!, which they describe as “a daily, independent program operated by journalists Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez. It runs stories that have ‘people and perspectives rarely heard in the U.S. corporate-sponsored media.’ Among the individuals it features include grassroots leaders, peace activists, academics, and independent analysts. The program regularly hosts substantive debates designed to improve public understanding of major issues.”

Both Sullivan and Klein are uniformly liberal in all issues and supportive of Barack Obama’s agenda. They are also, however, deep-thinking innovators who explain things thoroughly in their respective sites, even if from their perspectives. Not so for Goodman and Gonzalez, who can only be described as neo-Marxist apologists for Chavez, Castro and the Sandinistas.

We can only be thankful that West and Stone revealed their weakness for Goodman and Gonzalez for it alerts the discriminating reader to be on the lookout for danger to come, and it doesn’t take long to materialize. Buried beneath moderate-sounding verbiage there is nothing less than a call for neutering the citizen journalist through mass editing (crowd sourcing) and for making it harder for average web searchers to find ideas that do not conform to the accepted wisdom. “Citizens without journalistic training may be more likely to report inaccuracies or file misreports,” they write. “Because they are reporting of their own volition, it is possible that they might have a specific agenda or bias. They may repeat false ideas reported elsewhere and help bad ideas go viral.” Combining the mass editing of crowdsourcing (“the virtues of collective reasoning,” as the authors put it) with citizen journalism, however, would be a way to hold these untrained journalists accountable.

Perhaps even more troubling is their proposal for dealing with diversity of views on the web. West and Stone quote New York Times managing editor Jill Abramson as opining that there is “a human craving for trustworthy information about the world we live in- information that is tested, investigated, sorted, checked again, analyzed, and presented in a cogent form. …. They seek judgment from someone they can trust, who can ferret out information, dig behind it, and make sense of it.” I think we all know what the managing editor of the Times thinks when she talks about sorting and analyzing news. So here’s what West and Stone propose:

“Search engines employ many criteria in their algorithms, but many of them are based on the popularity of particular information sources. Yet these algorithms lack the embedded ethics of human gatekeepers and editors. Articles or sources that generate a lot of eyeballs are thought to be more helpful than others which do not. This biases information prioritizing towards popularity as opposed to thoughtfulness, reasonableness, or diversity of perspectives. “Digital firms should be encouraged to add criteria to their search engines that highlight information quality as opposed to mere popularity. They could do this by adding weight to sites that are known for high-quality coverage or providing diverse points of view. This would allow those information sources to be ranked higher in search results and therefore help news consumers find those materials.“

In other words, Google, Facebook et al should move up higher and promote the “high quality coverage” practiced by Abramson, Klein, Sullivan, Gonzalez and Goodman, and which would produce once again the type of politics that Ornstein and Mann find acceptable. Much lower down would be the muck-raking journalism of James O’Keefe and Breitbart, the opinions of Sean Hannity and Hugh Hewitt or pieces run by National Affairs or NRO. Sen. Cruz’s refusal to go along with higher spending, or Sen. Lee’s analysis of how our current welfare system keeps the poor poor would be about 20 clicks away, if anywhere at all.

This is precisely why I have continued pointing out the behavior of the SFWA with regards to me and other SF/F writers who refuse to join the hive mind. The Left always attempts to eliminate its opposition, by hook or by crook, because it doesn’t believe in open and honest competition, but manipulation and con artistry. This isn’t a current phenomenon; John C. Wright writes eloquently about how the founder of SFWA and the Clarion Writer’s Workshop, Damon Knight, waged a long-running campaign against one of the original Big Three of Science Fiction, A.E. van Vogt, which succeeded to the point that most people today wrongly believe the Big Three were Asimov, Heinlein, and either Arthur C. Clarke or Ray Bradbury.

(As we see time and time again, the rabbit of little ability but a highly developed talent for social manipulation and bureaucracy hated his superior in intellect and accomplishment. Knight famously claimed van Vogt was: “not a giant as often maintained. He’s only a pygmy who has learned to operate an overgrown typewriter.” I found this informative because after reading Knight’s fiction about ten years ago, I’d wondered how he could possibly have ever been named an SFWA Grandmaster. It turns out it was an Appreciation Grandmastership; he was the Scalzi of his day and began his now-forgotten SF career as the writer of a fanzine called Snide.)

So, we see the phenomenon writ small in the SFWA. We see it writ large in the European Union. But what we see is the same fractal political phenomenon that is always and everywhere dedicated to reducing the limits of the freedom of human thought.

The decline of the Grey Lady

This New York Observer article doesn’t tell us anything new. We all know the New York Times editorial page is terrible. But it does help explain why:

IT’S WELL KNOWN AMONG THE SMALL WORLD of people who pay attention to such things that the liberal-leaning reporters at The Wall Street Journal resent the conservative-leaning editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. What’s less well known—and about to break into the open, threatening the very fabric of the institution—is how deeply the liberal-leaning reporters at The New York Times resent the liberal-leaning editorial page of The New York Times.

The New York Observer has learned over the course of interviews with more than two-dozen current and former Times staffers that the situation has “reached the boiling point” in the words of one current Times reporter….

“I think the editorials are viewed by most reporters as largely
irrelevant, and there’s not a lot of respect for the editorial page. The
editorials are dull, and that’s a cardinal sin. They aren’t getting any
less dull. As for the columnists, Friedman is the worst. He hasn’t had
an original thought in 20 years; he’s an embarrassment. He’s perceived
as an idiot who has been wrong about every major issue for 20 years,
from favoring the invasion of Iraq to the notion that green energy is
the most important topic in the world even as the financial markets were
imploding. Then there’s Maureen Dowd, who has been writing the same
column since George H. W. Bush was president.”

Yet another former Times writer concurred. “Andy [Rosenthal] is a wrecking
ball, a lot like his father but without the gravitas. What strikes me
about the editorial and op-ed pages is that they have become
relentlessly grim. With very few exceptions, there’s almost nothing
light-hearted or whimsical or sprightly about them, nothing to gladden
the soul.

Of course, it probably doesn’t help that the paper has largely converted itself into one massive editorial page. A recent study showed that only one in six front page articles could be considered proper news, the rest were all editorials cloaked in a newsy disguise.

The thing is, newspapers are absolutely allergic to permitting anyone who isn’t a doctrinaire left-liberal get any exposure, so they sentence themselves to grim and tedious left-wing dogma. It is little surprise that even liberals tend to find it less than scintillating.

The phony Dark Enlightenment

As I have previously noted, I don’t buy into this Dark Enlightenment nonsense. And these comparisons should suffice to demonstrate the absurdity that Nick Land, a British philsopher of whom I had literally never heard before, is any sort of leader, intellectual or otherwise, of a coherent movement.

Now, Alexa is very far from reliable, but the sheer scale of the differences indicates what a more accurate traffic metric would likely show. First look at the two individuals who have been mentioned by the leftists as leaders of this dangerous Dark Enlightenment.

Nick Land (xenosystems.net)
Global 658,815, USA 268,030

Moldbug
Global 882,792, USA 279,490

Pretty influential, are they not? Now let’s look at some of the others who are more or less well-regarded throughout the non-mainstream Right.

Steve Sailer
Global 161,960, USA 38,356  

Roissy/Heartiste
Global 29,405, USA 10,307

Vox Day
Global 31,286, USA 4,969  

Fred Reed
Global 313,779, USA 84,841

The so-called Dark Enlightenment is just another fantasy media “trend”, about as credible as the New York Times annual stories on junior high school sex rings.

The wrath of Kong

“Hey, it’s only the National Enquirer,” responded all of John Edwards’s supporters:

Under the headline Obama Divorce Bombshell!, the National Enquirer claims their 21-year marriage has dissolved in a string of ugly fights that were prompted by the Mandela memorial incident and — far more outrageously — Mrs Obama’s discovery that Secret Service bodyguards had been covering up infidelity on her husband’s part…. Mrs Obama, the Enquirer claims, intends to stand by her husband until his presidency is over, at which time he will move back to Hawaii, where he grew up, and she will stay in Washington with their children.

For the moment, they are allegedly sleeping in separate bedrooms after Mr Obama’s attempt to ‘mend fences’ backfired so badly on a recent Christmas getaway to Hawaii that he returned to Washington with their two daughters, leaving his wife behind.

The National Enquirer, it must be said, quoted only anonymous insiders in support of these sensational claims, and is hardly the most reliable source of hard news.

Actually, the only thing that would surprise me here is if it turned up that the infidelity involved a woman. Obama’s body language always struck me as indicative of being even less comfortable around women than Ricky Martin’s did back when he first hit the big time.

As always, the watchdogs of democracy as all over the story, just like they were with JFK’s now-notorious philandering: “Washington’s media has ignored the story. But everyone remembers how the Enquirer famously got it right when it claimed the supposedly squeaky clean Democrat presidential contender John Edwards had fathered a love child by a former campaign worker.”

Bomb-makers in Minneapolis

What used to be known as the Ghettos in the Sky are now the center of Mogadishu on the Mississippi. And the Somali population in Minneapolis has already contributed suicide bombers to Al-Shabab in Somalia as well as mall attackers to the same group in Kenya. So, the mysterious recent explosion in the heart of Somali Minneapolis should be a matter of more than a little concern to Minnesotans, as it indicates that the Somalis are likely to bring their jihad to the Mall of America or some other local target sooner or later.

A big explosion occurs next door to a mosque that has an unabashed
affection for the Muslim Brotherhood, in a Somali neighborhood where
terrorists are known to hang out — what could possibly be amiss with
that? Nothing, except possibly an Islamophobic hate crime, according to CAIR.

Zuhur Ahmed, a board member of the Minnesota chapter of
the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said the group was monitoring
the situation closely. “So far we don’t have any details,” she said. “But whenever there’s
an explosion, fire or anything of that sort by a mosque, there’s a
little bit of concern if the motive is a hate crime. We’re just
concerned and watching out for that.”

But then, CAIR always believes that the best defense is a good offense. If it were a gas explosion, the normal process would be for gas to
accumulate inside the building until a chance ignition detonated it.
Under those circumstances, the walls of the building would be blown
outwards, causing a sudden, catastrophic collapse of the structure and
filling the street and surrounding lots with bricks and rubble.

Nothing of the sort occurred. The earliest photos show an intense and
rapidly-spreading fire that looks like it originated on the second
floor, immediately above the grocery. This would be consistent with the
unexpected detonation of an explosive substance — say, ammonium nitrate,
just to pick a random example — which then distributed very flammable
material within an enclosed space, creating a flash-fire.

The explosion was subsequently blamed on a gas leak, which is interesting because the Star Tribune has been caught lying about its conversation with the gas company responsible.

I contacted CenterPoint and spoke with Rebecca Virden. I’m glad I did
because as you’ll see in a moment, there’s some very bad reporting
going on with this story.

“Our distribution system after we checked it — which runs
up to the meter, which is the distribution system’s responsibility, to
the meter — has no leak on it at all. We tested that system and it holds
its test. We even took it apart and tested it to make sure because it
had no leakage. It’s fully sound. As for our system, we had no leakage, no leak history, no leak calls
into our call centers prior to the incident before, during or after.”

Throw in the fact that Homeland Security was spotted on the scene and it points to the probability that the police and media are covering up the explosion of a Somali bomb-making factory in Minneapolis.

The fading First Amendment

Even the New York Times appears to be a little concerned about the incarceration of a blogger:

For over six years, Roger Shuler has hounded figures of the state legal and political establishment on his blog, Legal Schnauzer, a hothouse of furious but often fuzzily sourced allegations of deep corruption and wide-ranging conspiracy. Some of these allegations he has tested in court, having sued his neighbor, his neighbor’s lawyer, his former employer, the Police Department, the Sheriff’s Department, the Alabama State Bar and two county circuit judges, among others. Mostly, he has lost.

But even those who longed for his muzzling, and there are many, did not see it coming like this: with Mr. Shuler sitting in jail indefinitely, and now on the list of imprisoned journalists worldwide kept by the Committee to Protect Journalists. There, in the company of jailed reporters in China, Iran and Egypt, is Mr. Shuler, the only person on the list in the Western Hemisphere.

A former sports reporter and a former employee in a university’s
publications department, Mr. Shuler, 57, was arrested in late October on
a contempt charge in connection with a defamation lawsuit filed by the
son of a former governor. The circumstances surrounding that arrest,
including a judge’s order that many legal experts described as
unconstitutional and behavior by Mr. Shuler that some of the same
experts described as self-defeating posturing, have made for an
exceptionally messy test of constitutional law….

On Nov. 14, the judge held a hearing, and Mr. Shuler, who was
representing himself, took the stand, insisting that the court had no
jurisdiction over him and calling the court a joke. The judge decided
that the hearing had “served as a trial on the merits” and made his
final ruling: Mr. Shuler was forbidden to publish anything about Mr.
Riley or Ms. Duke involving an affair, an abortion or payoffs; was to
pay them nearly $34,000 for legal fees; and was to remove the offending
posts or remain in jail.

That didn’t take long. How long ago did the Left first start banging the drums about the need to ban “hate speech”. Ten years ago? And now we’re already seeing overtly political speech being banned in America. It’s only a judge’s action rather than a legislative act, but then, as we’ve learned from the examples of California and other states, it is the courts that now make the law, not the legislatures.

As per Barack Obama, the executive branch merely decides whether the government feels like implementing it or not.

The incarceration of Roger Shuler is merely one more example showing that there is not even the pretense of the rule of law in the USA anymore. The USA has devolved into a Maughamite state. Do what thou wilt is the whole of the law, with due regard for the federal agent around the corner.