So Facebook has disabled Doug Henwood's account UPDATED
Some of you may know Doug Henwood as the individual who had a show that could be found on Pacifica Radio and its affiliates. Well, the "discussion section" for general issues of global politics which accompanied that radio show was on Doug Henwood's Facebook profile, which has been disabled. No reason given, no appeal process, nothing.
Mark Zuckerberg can be found at https://twitter.com/finkd -- please direct your tweets to him, for now. Perhaps something bigger is in the works.
I really don't know what the regular readers of Henwood's profile are going to do. But this is a significant disappearance, which it is going to take some time to address. There are people who suspect that Henwood posted something about Israel/ Palestine which someone didn't like, but I don't know enough to say one way or another.
UPDATED: Doug Henwood has been reinstated. We still don't know why he was reinstated, either.
Comments
When will people realize
that faceplant is not in the business of enlightened views?
Everything about them is clickbait and censorship in the name of profit.
Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.
We can explain all we want.
The problem is that so much has already been organized on Facebook, and that the communities assembled therein cannot easily be transplanted to different places. Henwood had the maximum allowed 5,000 Facebook "friends" before his account was excised.
I was once a participant, many here may remember, at DailyKos.com . I was there for nearly ten years. When I choose, in March and in April of 2016, to desert my account there, I moved current postings here, and archived postings to an account on Wordpress. I can speak freely here now, unlike on DailyKos, but I am speaking here to a much, much smaller audience than the one I confronted there.
“The loyal Left cannot act decisively. Their devotion to the system is a built-in kill switch limiting dissent.” - Richard Moser
That is the only solution.
Speak through market solutions. Walk away is the only thing they understand but it’s doubtful they would change regardless. The howler monkey base won’t go anywhere.
"Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now..."
Facebook delendum est.
Thank you for stating so succinctly why I maintain that Facebook must be destroyed. Or at least nationalized, like all other natural monopolies.
Your worthwhile audience, those who are here to exchange real ideas with real people, are about equal in size. DailyKos is nearly all noise and no "signal" today.
Ceterem censeo: Facebook delendum est. (Further, I opine that Facebook must be destroyed.)
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
My feeling --
was that the worthwhile audience for my interviews with candidates might have been here had that audience known about this place. But they did not know about this place, alas.
“The loyal Left cannot act decisively. Their devotion to the system is a built-in kill switch limiting dissent.” - Richard Moser
Same goes for Twitter!
I've spoken before on here about the "Broad Street pump", and how social media and iPhones are the 21st-Century version of it; I'm kinda hoping for some kind of "enlightened terrorist attack" to bring the whole thing down, unplug people from the Matrix cold turkey.
From what I understand, solar flares are a "when, not if" type of threat to the modern cybersphere; I wonder if they can possibly be directed to zap some things and not others....
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
You can sort of speak your mind at DailyKos
. . . right up until you offend the wrong sliver of those easily offended and then you will find yourself dogpiled by screaming minions of cancel culture. (Say something mean about someone's favorite red state and they come spewing profanity and insults like a junior high locker room.) Most of the time, though, it functions okay. I read the front pagers for news but by and large avoid the rec list. I stopped posting over there a few weeks back because life felt too short to waste with pie fights. LOL
It was acceptable --
up until Markos told everyone that only "constructive criticism" of Hillary Clinton would be permitted on the site. (Yes it was somewhat authoritarian before then, but it was acceptable.) The order went out March 15th of 2016. Of course, what this really meant, with election fraud going on right in front of everyone's eyes, was that one was not allowed to say anything about the real Hillary Clinton on the site.
So I bailed, and had about 95% of what I did transferred to my WordPress blog and then deleted from DailyKos.
Henwood, on the other hand, has been banned from Facebook, a much bigger realm than DailyKos, and without being given any reason. It's not like he was even given any rule he was supposed to follow before being shut out. Maybe what will happen is that his audience will try to create some sort of forum for him at some other site.
“The loyal Left cannot act decisively. Their devotion to the system is a built-in kill switch limiting dissent.” - Richard Moser
I was a member and abandoner too
though never a strong writer. Until this year I was working too hard to find time to delete traces of myself there. But when petitions come through and I read the ToP name in the supporter list (and see the ToP font) I won't sign them.
I was banned too.
They never bothered to tell me why, although I asked. Thought Crime apparently.
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
Not clear why Henwood was axed at FB.
May have had something to do with an article he most recently linked from Haaretz reporting on an increasing number of Leftwing Israelis who are self-exiling themselves and pulling up stakes to move to the States because of the stifling rightwing cultural and political atmosphere that is choking Israel.
Then, again, there may be another explanation. Henwood, who is an astute financial reporter (he is the author of Wall Street, one of the best critical treatments of the Subject on the last 20 years) reported a couple years ago on an attempt by Zuckerberg to use FB's assets to launch a cryptocurrency, That story wasn't covered in the WaPo, for some reason. Wonder why? Without coming out and directly saying so, a big play in that emerging assets market would enable FB and its owners to hide corporate and personal wealth in the global netherworld of cryptocurrencies.
Why would Zuckerberg want to silence Henwood now?
That's the important question.
Also, it wasn't just Doug Henwood who was being silenced, but all of the people who commented on his profile, me included.
“The loyal Left cannot act decisively. Their devotion to the system is a built-in kill switch limiting dissent.” - Richard Moser
I would rather be inundated by half baked
CT, white supremisists and religious cults than to have the owners of the internet turn the cacophony of voices into a lush green lawn of cultivated vegetation like that found on The Truman Show.
Unfortunately, the shapers of our perception are clearly pulling weeds, pungent herbs and even tall trees here and there to bring the taming uniformity we now find of the mainstream media outlets into the larger social intercourse we have enjoyed on the internet.
No more coloring outside the lines, boys and girls. It’s time you start acting like adults. We know what’s best for you. Trust us.
“ …and when we destroy nature, we diminish our capacity to sense the divine,and understand who God is, and what our own potential is and duties are as human beings.- RFK jr. 8/26/2024
It's so perplexing
I keep running into dead-opposite definitions of what it is to "act like an adult" - everyone seems to think it's a good thing, but does it mean independence...or supplication? Do we ever get to have any freedom or power of our own in this life, or do we just get handed off to wicked step-parents?
In the Land of the Blind, the One-Eyed Man is declared mentally ill for describing colors.
Yes Virginia, there is a Global Banking Conspiracy!
If you hate capitalism then
why in the name of all that is holy would you ever visit Facebook?
I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.
For the same reason --
that I don't respect the argument that opponents of capitalism need to live like renunciates, shying away from the pleasures of consumer life, in order to prove their bona fides as anticapitalists. I post on Facebook because that is where the audience is, and the fact that it's owned by Mark Zuckerberg is something I have to put up with until my Facebook audience can be transplanted to somewhere less onerous.
I started posting "diaries" in 2006 at dailykos.com because that was where the audience was (and also, incidentally, because at that time I could post what I wanted to post there -- that changed in 2016), and if I had never done so, if I had never posted there, I would never have met OPOL and I would never have met OPOL's audience.
“The loyal Left cannot act decisively. Their devotion to the system is a built-in kill switch limiting dissent.” - Richard Moser
I started to get attacked in 2011
with the R2P destruction of Libya. This was followed by Iran, Syria, Russia - the site had became a pack of war mongers in the name of "human rights" and "democracy". It was all explained away - Obomba was playing "three dimensional chess" and we mere mortals were simply unable to understand Obomba's grand plan. We were to be patient and wait until all would be revealed. The fucking site had turned into a faith based religion.
The majority in DKos were COMPLETELY wrong about Libya, Syria, Russiagate and the 2016 election. With the ignominious loss of their goddess, Her Heinous, they quadrupled down on Russiagate and went completely berserk led by Mark Sumner's deranged piping.
Now that Russiagate has collapsed, there is nary a peep about it. All the lies and deceptions promulgated in DKos have been conveniently disappeared down the memory hole.
DailyKos was a site --
with its fair share of corporate Dems and other such unstable types in an era in which the dominant pack of lies was that Obama was this super good guy. There were also plenty of genuinely good people there. I published a fair number of Rec Listed diaries there and was a Trusted User. It was a fairly relaxed scene if you avoided offending the wannabe hall monitors. But that was before 2016. At some point in May of that year OPOL stopped posting there -- his last recorded post there was titled "Hillary Clinton: Too Much of a Clinton Democrat?" and it gently chides Markos for having once criticized Hillary Clinton, ending with "what happened to you, dude?".
It's like there were two different places, DKos before 2016, and after. The big mystery of history, in retrospect, is why the place before 2016 existed at all. Markos Moulitsas was always a ruling-class sycophant with CIA credentials who came from an ugly place to have CIA credentials, El Salvador. But DKos before 2016 actually existed! Hard to explain.
“The loyal Left cannot act decisively. Their devotion to the system is a built-in kill switch limiting dissent.” - Richard Moser
There was the build-up to
2016. IIRC, it was post-2010 electoral bloodbath that Lord Kos decreed advocating 3rd party is a bann-able offense. From there it was all downhill.
From "Crashing the Gates" to being a gatekeeper....
Oh there were signs throughout the Obama period --
suggesting that the Daily Kos audience had to be sent somewhere else. That was one of them. Not that there was a whole lot of "third party" action during the Obama period, an especially repressive period in American history as historical periods go, comparable to the first Bush administration. There was a lot of sneaking-in you could do, a lot of Daily Kos samizdat you could import into links within your documents. You could "float under the radar" of the wannabe hall monitors.
2016, though, was a sea-change. If a site can't tolerate its most popular rabble-rouser, which was OPOL, that definitely says something.
“The loyal Left cannot act decisively. Their devotion to the system is a built-in kill switch limiting dissent.” - Richard Moser
Au contraire
Sumner and others are still pushing Russia propaganda on the site. There is a diary up right now about Russian tactics and bots pushing some nonsense. The comments are full of anti Putin remarks.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
~Hannah Arendt
I don't see them talking about
the 53 declassified transcripts of witnesses that blows the entire Russiagate shitshow out of the water.
Of course there is the usual anti-Russia/Putin comments but that has been going on since 2008 to my knowledge. It all started with Bush seeing the soul of Putin.
Right now, to my knowledge, all that is left of Russiagateis the muddying of the water around Barr's investigation and Flynn.
Oh all of that is still happening
There and on Twitter. I’ve been following a DK Russiagater on Twitter and every time she accuses Trump of doing something because Putin told him to I ask her if she saw Horowitz telling congress what he did. She and others come back with things totally off topic. And if Trump is so dangerous then why did democrats give him more power to spy on us. No answer yet.
One guy responded with all the unconstitutional things Trump has been doing so I asked him why Pelosi didn’t impeach him for them. Plus they blame everything on Trump while giving Cuomo and others a pass for not doing everything in their power to stop the spread.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.
~Hannah Arendt
reinstated
Pressure.
I wouldn't be surprised if this very essay was a factor in it.
Nevertheless, ceterem censeo: Facebook delendum est.
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides