Our Agent 78 is a philatelist [= stamp collector, Ed.] as well as a Catholic. A couple of days ago, 78 listed a small collection of stamps from the Holy See [= Vatican, Ed.] on Facebook Marketplace. Here's what happened next.
Our agent appealed, and the appeal was denied. Apparently the Karens at FB -- owned by (((Mark Zuckerberg))) -- Think there's something about these little bits of art that violate their woke "community standards". What could the problem be? Look closely!
I don't see anything naughty there. Do you? But, as Vince Offer used to say: wait, there's more! the collection includes this postcard.
By George, Holmes, I think you've got it. The wokesters at Facebook aren't anti-Catholic. They're anti-Michaelangelo! Funny, though. You'd think their biases in favour of all that is encompasssed by the liberal queer agenda would welcome publication of depictions of the beauty of the male body. Apparently not.
Anyone who's had similar experiences with ridiculous censorship on Facebook Marketplace is encouraged to share them in the Comments section. Click on the headline and the window will open underneath the text.
We pause now for a word from our esteemed sponsor. (We call him that because he's really esteemed about the Canuck Freedom Convoy!)
He's just listed dozens of used copies of National Lampoon, the Adult Humor Magazine, from 1980 through 1985, in lots of three or four for only $5.00 or $6.00 plus S&H.
When you buy, be sure to tell `em Walt sent ya! We don't get a commission, but every now and then CJ feeds Walt's kitty, if you know what we mean.
Amusing (?) footnote: Our sponsor reports that Facebook Marketplace won't take these listings, which they say violate their blue-stocking "community standards". Don't know which community they live in, but apparently nothing is funny there!
Cazart! The state-owned Canadian Broadcorping Castration (CBC), the font of endless torrents of liberal (and Liberal) propaganda, admitted today that (1) they do pay attention to comments on the social media, (2) they know thousands of readers/listeners disagree with their constant and cloying "wokeness", and (3) their "journalists" ["stenographers", shurely. Ed.] are cracking under the strain.
In a remarkably self-serving "Editor's Note" published today, Editor Brodie Fenlon complains that some of his poor dears are suffering from stress and anxiety caused by "the vitriol and harassment many of them face on social media platforms and, increasingly, in the field."
He quotes one of his typists, André Picard, who calls "platforms like Twitter...a cesspool of hatred." Then he tells us that Catherine Tait, the president of CBC/Radio-Canada [who probably signs his paycheque. Ed.] "has also written about the increased abuse of journalists on social media, especially women and journalists of colour."
Could it be that some Canadians don't like being talked down to by Toronto-based hijab-wearing Muslims? Could be! But to Ms Tait, attacks on her diverse and inclusive propagandists are nothing less than a "threat...to free speech and democracy." That's pretty rich coming from the head of a media outlet which deliberately denigrates and "de-platforms" anyone to the right of Sleepy Joe Biden!
Am I being unfair to the Corp(se)? After all, by suppressing the criticism of folks like us, they're only trying to protect their sensitive, easily-triggered audience. So says Mr Fenlon, who says it's unaaceptable "for our audience members who try to engage with and discuss our journalism to encounter it on platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, where they are almost guaranteed to be confronted by hate, racism and abuse." Horrors!
So what is the CBC going to do to promote social justice, inclusivity, diversity, yada yada yada on the social media? Answer: "beginning on Wednesday and for the next month, we will close comments on all news links and video posts to the Facebook pages belonging to the journalism division of the CBC (News, Current Affairs and Local)."
But why? Try to keep a straight face as you read this.... "As the conversation has degraded on these platforms, we find ourselves limiting what we post there. We know certain stories will draw out obnoxious and hateful comments. The truth is we spend a considerable amount of attention and resources attempting to moderate our Facebook posts. It takes a mental toll on our staff, who must wade into the muck in an effort to keep the conversation healthy for others."
Can you believe it? Facebook sets the standard by silencing Donald Trump, to protect those who still use it from the Donald's hateful thoughts. [He incites riots, you know. LOL. Ed.] So the anti-Trumpers at the CBC (that would be about 99.9% of them) are going to shut down Facebook, to protect readers from pro-Trumpers!
But fear not. In the interests of promoting social discourse, freedom of speech, yada yada, comments on the CBC News website will remain open, subject to "moderation" of course, for any articles that don't involve immigration, refugees, black crime, or the scandals and ineptitude of the Liberal government, which (by the way) funds the CBC to the tune of hunreds of millions of beaverbucks every year.
As I write this, readers were still being allowed to comment on Mr Fenlon's drivel. Here's what two readers had to say:
"Bob Evans" - "This is how dictatorships work. Speech is suppressed and the excuse given is they are 'protecting' people from harmful speech.
"Chantal LeBouthi" - "In 1934, it was illegal to criticize the German government. Even telling a joke about The government was considered treachery. People in Germany could not say or write whatever they wanted. Controlling what news appeared in newspapers, on the radio, and in newsreels. Textbooks are a good example of how propaganda and censorship worked together in the Nazi regime back in the 1930s
I feeling we are going back to this and is extremely scary when is coming from so call democratic nations."
"Davide Richard" - "Perhaps if there was even a whiff of even handedness you may not anger taxpayers who pay for the cbc as much. Constantly presenting biased left wing favouring causes and opinionated news has a way of irritating us centrist thinkers."
"Jacques Untel" - "Maybe if the CBC was less 'woke', less intent on pushing the liberal agenda, you wouldn't be taking so much flak. The many Canadians who are fed up with your editorial stance, but can't comment directly on this website because of the heavy 'moderation', take their shot on Facebook."
Hm. Wish I'd said that! Here's my final comment.
UPDATED ADDED 16/6/21: Rebel News got their hands on some of CBC's internal e-mails showing how the "moderators" of the Comments section on their website. (Comments are not allowed if the subject of the story -- e.g. refugees and asylum-seekers -- is likely to attract anti-liberal feedback.) The "moderators" are now proven to have deleted "negative" comments on such subjects as Donald Trump, Wendy Mesley's use of the "N-word" and the January 6th Capitol "riots". Here's the video.
I don't believe anyone will dispute my assertion that the liberal elites of Not-so-great Britain (aka the Disunited Kingdom) are even more nutso about political correctness than are those of Canuckistan and the Excited States of America.
Nor will anyone argue that political correctness and freedom of speech are antithetical.All the same, it comes as a surprise that Internet censorship should now be extended to the other side (as opposed to our side) of the political spectrum. But here's a headline that proves it, posted by the far left British Socialist Workers Party.
Did you check out that logo? The SWP is a charter member of the loonie left, for sure. And yet, the UK edition of rt.com reports, they were temporarily booted from Facebook, only to be restored hours later with no explanation given for what the Lefties called "silencing of political activists."
Dozens of related pages remain banned.
The party said its main account, as well as its local pages, were deactivated on Friday, calling in an "attack", while demanding the profiles be "reinstated immediately." In a press release, the SWP said "Facebook has shut down the accounts of one of the biggest left wing organisations in Britain," adding that only racist conservative fascists deserve that kind of treatment. [Ed., please check the last clause. I'm not sure it's an accurate quote.]
While the SWP said Facebook provided no rationale for the move, it noted that its page often posts "in support of Palestine, Black Lives Matter and against Boris Johnson’s Covid policies," and was "silenced for speaking out on these issues."
How then, do they explain why they were shut down? Walt can reveal that it was a simple case of mistaken identity. Google "socialist workers party" and you'll eventually find an entry for the "National Socialist German Workers Party" (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei or NSDAP), aka the Nazi Party. And you know who they were, right?
It's pretty easy, then, to see what happened. Still, it's amusing that the far left should now be bleating about the kind of attack on free speech which those even an RCH* to the right of centre have been experiencing since the daze of the Obama presidensity. Look good on `em!
* RCH - a unit of measurement known only to engineers.
I confess to not having heard of the Babylon Bee until I read, earlier this week, that the notoriously left-leaning "fact-checker", Snopes, is trying to shut the website down. In "No Joke: Babylon Bee Sics Lawyers On Snopes Over 'Fact Checks'", HotAir reports that Snopes has attempted to exploit its position as a Facebook partner to "deplatform" the "Christian news satire" site.
Apparently, Snopes doesn't know the difference between satire and "fake news", and rated a Bee piece "false", prompting FB to threaten BB with limitations and demonetization. When the folks at Bee pointed out that their work is not intended to be taken seriously -- indeed, the legend "Fake news you can trust" appears at the top of every page -- and after some media attention shed light on the problem, Facebook apologized for their handling of the matter and admitted that satire is, errr, not the same as fake news.
That would be the end of it, if it weren't for Snopes' role as a sometime Facebook gatekeeper. That role gives Snopes a significant amount of power over a major distribution channel for independent publishers, not just the Bee. The threat of malicious deplatforming in that context is real, and Snopes' disparate treatment of the Bee as opposed to The Onion certainly makes it look personal and biased against conservative satire.
Intrigued, I visited the Babylon Bee website today, and have bookmarked it for perusal every day for the rest of my years. Here follows an example of the Bee's sense of humour.
What? You want me to repost the text as well? Just click on the headline and you can read it for yourself, straight from the Bee's, errr, proboscis. Enjoy.
Meet Wendy Bell, a hitherto successful Pittsburgh-area news anchor. In at 18-year career with WTAE-TV (a Hearst station), Ms Bell won 21 regional Emmys [Emmies? Ed.], and was highly regarded for her professionalism, and charming on-air personality. It all came to an end on Wednesday, when she was fired after "engaging in racial profiling of the worst kind" on her official Facebook page.
Walt can't show you the FB post that wrote finis to Ms Bell's career, since it has been removed, along with her profile on the WTAE-TV website. And you've probably guessed already which race it was that Ms Bell "profiled" in a negative way. (I won't say "libelled" or "slandered", because in any action for defamation, the truth is the best defence!) Hint: it wasn't Caucasians or Hispanics or Asians. No indeed. What Ms Bell said in a classic CDM (Career-Destroying Move) was that the killers in a brutal area murder were "young black men".
The problem was that Ms Bell posted her assumption -- for that's what it was -- before anyone was taken into custody following a horrific mass shooting in Wilkinsburg PA earlier in the month. "You needn't be a criminal profiler," she wrote, "to draw a mental sketch of the killers who broke so many hearts two weeks ago Wednesday. They are young black men, likely in their teens or early 20s. They have multiple siblings from multiple fathers, and their mothers work multiple jobs."
Would it come as a surprise to anyone if that description turned out to be accuratge? Of course not. The trouble was that it's politically incorrect! In Obama's America, you can't call a spade a spade.
A statement from Hearst Television said, "WTAE has ended its relationship with anchor Wendy Bell. Wendy's recent comments on a WTAE Facebook page were inconsistent with the company’s ethics and journalistic standards." Apparently those standards forbid any suggestion that black people might be responsible for black-on-black crime. Even that phrase makes a racist assumption, eh.
For her part, Ms Bell issued the customary abject apology, "I now understand that some of the words I chose were insensitive and could be viewed as racist. I regret offending anyone. I'm truly sorry."
That was the required act of contrition, but Ms Bell expressed her real feelings in an interview with AP, saying that she didn’t get a "fair shake" from the station, and that the story was not about her, but about "African-Americans being killed by other African-Americans. It makes me sick! What matters is what's going on in America, and it is the death of black people in this country.... I live next to three war-torn communities in the city of Pittsburgh, that I love dearly. My stories, they struck a nerve. They touched people, but it’s not enough. More needs to be done. The problem needs to be addressed."
It's hard though, Walt thinks, to address a problem if you can't even mention it.
This started out as a joke, see. Ed. found a picture of a Muslim woman (?) wearing a burqa, and said to me, "I guess all their Facebook profile pages look like this." Ha ha. So we put it up.
Then last night, while tidying up my library, I found this book, which I can't recall reading. I must have bought it [or stolen it. Ed.] and put it away for future reference. So I'm referring to it now. [Geddit? Ed.]
Sold, by Zana Muhsen (with ghostie Andrew Crofts) is "one woman's true account of modern slavery". (That's what it says on the cover.) It was published by Warner Books in 1991.
According to the summary on the back cover, the author -- 15 years old at the time -- and her still younger sister, Nadia, born in Birmingham, England, were asked by their folks if they'd like to go on a holiday to visit relatives in northern Yemen. To the innocent girls, it sounded like the trip of a lifetime.
Those who know a bit about Islam and the countries of the Arabian peninsula will not be surprised to learn that the girls' father had sold them into marriage! Once they arrived in the sandpit, they were held virtual prisoners in primitive stone houses, with shit-plastered walls and no running water. They were subjected to beatings, rape and "the terrifying ordeal of childbirth on bare mud floors with only old women in attendance".
This went on for eight years, and the book is the story of how they escaped what is, sadly, "normal life" for young women in countries bound by the feudal barbarism of Sharia law. Is it still like this for Muslim women, a quarter of a century later? Answers on the back of a postage stamp, please, to the usual address.
