I was one of the founding members early on in the steemit.com days for #informationwar. I wasn't the founder but I was an early active member. I was also a board member for some time. I have been gone until recently for about two years.
It was suggested we reply with a little bit about ourselves and our biases in response to attacks on #deepdives, and #informationwar. I began it as a reply which is a stream of consciousness ramble but it is none the less pure me. It is so lengthy I decided to turn it into a post. This is intended as my companion piece and reply to @truthforce post here. If you are lost and need some context I recommend reading that first.
I will respond with my biases:
I've voted for Democrats before. I've been a delegate for the GOP twice both times Ron Paul ran for President. I am currently registered Libertarian but consider myself independent and an individual.
I do not donate to the RNC or the DNC and never plan to. I consider them corrupt. I also won't donate directly to the Libertarian party.
I'll donate to individual candidates at this point.
In 2016 I voted Libertarian and Third Party whenever I had the choice. I did not vote for Trump. I despised Hillary though it took research for me to do so as I once liked the Clintons. I consider her one of the most corrupt politicians ever to be in our government. To me she was like a female Mafia Boss. I would have been happy in 2016 if ANYONE but her won. I didn't think Donald Trump would win. I was under the impression they put him in there to scare people into voting for Hillary. I was pretty surprised when he won.
Before 2016 in my first hand accounts as a delegate I saw the corruption in the party. There are a lot of good people, but those calling the shots choose when to follow their own bylaws and when not to. Both the RNC and DNC did nearly identical things in 2012 to stop the chances of grassroots movements having a chance. We had Ron Paul and the DNC had some people they apparently didn't like in their camp as well. They wanted to make sure that couldn't happen again. Which is when I immediately changed my registration.
When I couldn't vote for Libertarian or some other Third Party that I thought was okay I voted about 50/50 GOP/DEM in 2016.
Then we had 4 years of Trump. I certainly didn't agree with everything he did but unlike most people I don't treat Presidents as Gods that must perfectly agree with me. I view them as humans. I also know as humans they are going to be good at some things and not good at others and have to rely on advisors. If their advisors end up being good choices then things will likely go well.
The things Trump did that I most disliked were at the advice of others. The biggest one for me missile strikes into Syria based upon bogus chemical weapon claims he did at the behest of advisors and some Nepotism. The truth came out. They tried a year later a similar chemical attack move in Syria and he didn't fall for the sham this time. He did what I expect from people. Learn from mistakes.
Even though I didn't vote for him I could see the undeniable massive nonstop propaganda bombardment he was under and the attempts to stifle him no matter what. Even when what he happened to say was something good. He couldn't be allowed to be right about anything. Despite all of that he still accomplished a massive amount of good things. That did it for me. I am an actions person. I don't care about words if they are not tied to actions. His "Pussy" statements he made in a locker room to a friend were not unlike things that commonly are said in such places (by women as well). What he said was also not a lie. With his status if he wanted they would let him do exactly what he said. Note that is what he said. He said they would let him do it. He didn't say he did it.
Regardless. I didn't care.
For the record I also didn't care about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky at the time it occurred and I still don't. Several presidents had Mistresses living in the white house. JFK also was not the paragon of virtue in such matters.
I said way back then that it was between him and Hillary and all I cared about is if he could do the job we elected him to do.
In 2020 I didn't vote for a single Democrat. It is highly unlikely (though not impossible) that I ever will again. I would if the Democrat I voted for had a good record of ACTIONS that showed me what type of person they were. I am not a fish. I don't need to be caught by the choice of words they say on the stage. I also don't care how beautiful or handsome they are. I prefer honesty and brutal truth to telling me what they think I want to hear. I don't want a salesman. I want a leader.
None of my family voted for Trump in 2016.. In 2020 ALL of us did. I have a pretty big family.
Not because he is perfect. Far from it. Because he had shown me he could do the job. I found myself often wondering what he might have accomplished if he'd actually had cooperation and wasn't under nonstop unprecedented attack.
He had some blindspots for sure. He also had some crappy advisors. He needs to listen to Jared Kushner a lot less (perhaps not at all). John Bolton was a bad choice from the outset and many of us knew it immediately. He was a neocon warhawk and the record was there. He had to learn from that as well, but learn he did.
It is hard to drain the swamp when you are surrounded by the swamp and the advisors are recommending other people to you from positions within the swamp.
Yet Trump could also be a showman. He could be misleading me. I considered that. Then I looked at the actions and the results of what he did. That silenced such concerns.
As to FAR RIGHT. That is a go to label for the hijackers of all labels that I call the leftists. You see I don't call them Liberals. I don't call them Progressives. Sometimes they refer to themselves as such things. Yet they are not. They are neither Liberal or Progressive. They are the least tolerant people on the planet. They talk about tolerance, inclusiveness, and diversity while being on the attack and out to destroy and silence anyone that even remotely disagrees with them. They demand conformity of thought. Their diversity focuses on immutable characteristics like skin color rather than focusing on things that actually are valuable to have diversity in. Such as ideas, character, etc. They want conformity in those areas. They will be quick to tell you all the people they HATE and things they HATE right after bashing people for what they call hate speech. Usually they are the ones most actively talking about all the things they HATE.
I've given hate some thought when it comes to myself. I have found there is only one type of person I HATE and it has nothing to do with any immutable characteristic. I hate the willfully ignorant. Those that realize they are wrong and ADMIT it and yet it destroys their narrative, following, or they don't want to admit it beyond that so they'll keep spreading what they just admitted was wrong. To me that is spreading mental rot and the reason I hate them is by their admission of being wrong it means they are intentionally choosing to spread lies and misinformation.
I do not recognize anyone or any group as an unquestionable authority. I don't blindly accept the label "scientist" when it is applied to people that are not using the scientific method. I view scientist as something you are when you are using that method. When you are not then you are not. By this measure scientist is not a permanent status or label to me. This can apply to any expert. Simply because you are expert does not mean you are sticking to that exclusively. Humans have biases (so do I) and just because they are an expert at one point and may do what that expertise requires without bias that doesn't mean they ALWAYS do that. No one should be blindly trusted.
Instead I work off of internal probabilities. I must decide how probable I think the person is to be correct. I do what research I can. Then I must make my own choices. I am often wrong. SO ARE YOU. We all are. I just hope I learn from my mistakes.
I will not apologize for anything I say that I meant to say. I will resist people telling me or others what I was implying when I say something. I say what I think. I don't play word games and expect you to read between the lines and try to interpret what I was thinking. What I was thinking is what I said. Nothing more, nothing less.
I get irritated by mind readers that will act like I implied something and approach me talking about such things. The vast majority of the time those implications were not even an idea or possibility that entered my mind. They are projecting their own mind, and their own thoughts as if that was me. If they say I am implying something horrible... that implication happened in THEIR head, not mine.
Sometimes a mirror is useful when you plan to accuse people of implications.
I will talk about anything. I will be open to challenging anything. I dislike dogma. I dislike absolutes even though all of us use them from time to time.
I don't trust the government(s).
I do not trust the United Nations.
I've never elected anyone to be on it and neither have you. It is an unelected oligarchy making decisions for the world.
One of my daughters is a Lesbian. One of my sister in-laws (I am an only child) is a Lesbian. One of my closest high school and college friends came out to me FIRST out of everyone in the world as being Gay because he knew I'd accept it and not treat him differently. This was before pride, this was before any or this horde of movements. I am not a homophobe by any stretch of the imagination. Though I do dislike the LGBTQ movement.
I am advocate for equality. If we want equality then we don't need to be giving ANY groups special treatment. We simply need to treat everyone the same.
As humans.
I don't care about Gay marriage.
To me it is a human deciding to marry another human and enter that social contract. That is none of my business. If it is voluntary then I won't stop it.
I would fight people trying to make laws to give special treatment to certain groups. That is because if we want equality those things shouldn't exist.
Yet I will also fight people trying to make laws to restrict voluntary choices as long as they don't hurt others and their property.
I am also against White Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ Lives Matter, or any other movement that puts emphasis on immutable characteristics people were born with. Those things were not a choice. If we want equality we treat people the SAME regardless of such things. Not special. Not Lesser. Not Greater. We don't generalize and get caught in the endless oppressed vs oppressor trap that is a vicious cycle without end.
- I am for equality. You cannot achieve that with overcompensation.
- I am for equality. You cannot achieve that with vengeance.
I am anti-socialist. I don't think Compassion can be accomplished by proxy.
I am anti-Communist/Marxist/Maoist.
I am anti-Censorship. You are free to talk about all the things I dislike and I'll fight for your right to do so. Yet I'll also respond to your words and thoughts with my own words and thoughts if I feel like doing so. I will not respond physically unless I am forced to do so, or in the defense of someone else being physically attacked.
I am anti-aggression. I am not anti-self defense. Though I recognize that if I only respond to things that I see near me I will be blind to other attacks that are just as deadly or worse. I need to be ready to respond to those things as well.
My body my choice. Is a great slogan. It is sad that the Left is very picky about when they mean it. It seems to only apply to abortion for them.
My Mind, My Choice.
I am not anti-vax so much as I am anti-no accountability for the manufacturers. If they don't have accountability and their product can be mandated and forced directly or through coercion/bribery then why should they improve their product? To maximize the profits of their shareholders they sometimes even revert to inferior products that were not as safe. As they did with the MMR vaccine.
I am against forcing people to take unknown/unproven products under the umbrella of an authority (see my previous comments on experts/scientists/authority) issuing an Experimental Use Authorization. By the way the same authority has since reported that the things they used to justify that are not useful and they are against it. Did they rescind the EUA after ceasing to support the thing that they used to justify it? Of course not.
If you think you can force others. I will fight you.
If you are acting in self defense and not force... I may stand beside you.
I'll talk about anything and everything. That doesn't mean I believe it. I just like to explore things with my mind. I can hear the words "Conspiracy Theory" without it triggering a Pavlovian Response.
I try to avoid the word BELIEVE and say THINK instead as to me BELIEVE is often the path to Dogma. I do still use believe occasionally because I haven't completely broken myself of that habit. It is a work in progress.
You can challenge anything I have to say. I welcome it. If you resort to attacking my character, calling me names, or otherwise ridiculing I'll consider you the LOSER in that exchange. I may be angry momentarily. I may feel pity for you. Mostly I'll be annoyed by wasted time I spent talking to you. Our lives are finite. How we spend our time is perhaps the most important thing.
I learn the most from people that are civil that I disagree with.
If a person has made up their mind and will consider nothing besides what they began with then eventually I'll consider it a waste of time. I call that a person who is tunneling. They have tunnel vision and are deep down in the tunnel and don't even want to see if there is a way out. That would make all of that time tunneling seem like a waste. Though it would not have been because you learn from such things. Yet some people if they've been tunneling long enough simply can't bring themselves to stop digging...
That is also sometimes called dogma.
I don't even view myself as an authority. I argue with myself constantly. I have dialogs with myself where I am pushing an idea and trying to imagine the Devil's Advocate at the same time. A lot of the things I think are from that process.
What I said 1 year ago was a different person...
What I said 5 minutes ago was a different person...
I welcome my mind changing, and adapting. I don't view being wrong as a bad thing and haven't for some time now. The only time I see it as a bad thing is if you are repeatedly wrong about the same thing.
I don't deny Climate Change.
I deny the fake scientists pushing dogma that chose to use that label in the first place. I am against the MOVEMENT. Not the concept.
Global Warming was a specific type of climate change. It was something we can measure and see.
Global Cooling is also climate change.
So when this movement began it was all about "Global Warming"... they could be right/wrong about that. It was measurable and we could see how well their predictions pan out (Really badly by the way).
They then changed it to "Climate Change" which revealed the con. The climate always changes, has changed, and will continue to change. Cooling, and Warming are opposites yet they are both Climate Change. They picked a label that they can't be wrong about because it is not specific at all.
It is like they were talking about a specific color of crayon and saying we need to watch out for that color. Then they changed it to being about the entire box of crayons and all the colors. Now they are ALWAYS right, even if they are technically wrong.
Word games. Very Cultural Marxist...
Right now there is a mental virus going around the world that is hijacking words, history, culture, and everything and corrupting, destroying, and sometimes inverting them.
Most people that are called Liberals today are nothing of the sort. This is why I call them leftist.
Most people that are called Progressive today are nothing of the sort. They wouldn't be trying to bring segregation back if they were. That is regressive. The opposite. Cultural Marxists have inverted the meaning of that word when stacked next to their actions.
A word gets a good reputation. Such as Liberal. The Cultural Marxist hijacks the word and uses it as an umbrella for their actions which are not good things. Because people call them "liberal" and it has a good reputation they shrug off and don't pay as much attention to their actions.
When that word becomes no longer useful as they've tarnished its reputation so they can no longer hide behind it they simply hijack another label and use that.
They steal the reputation of other things to hide behind as long as they can get away with it.
What is @informationwar to me?
It is challenging all of this. Fighting the propaganda. Pushing back against the authoritarian programming.
It is the underdogs still trying to make sure people are free to think, and free to live.
It is not blindly going along with ANY political party, any politician, any religion, or any expert.
Question everything and use your own mental probability matrix to make your own choices.
Just know that the consequences of those choices are your own.
Not seeking scapegoats for your own mistakes.
That is #informationwar.
Anyone is welcome.
They don't have to agree with each other on everything and I assure you the community does not. It has many different people that believe very different things.
Yet we respect the right of people to have different ideas.
We may even consider they could be right. Our probability matrix may be just siding in a different direction.
!BEER
Respect and integrity are rampant in most of the #informationwar tagged post. I read a few of them, not all of them, and people do seem to be pretty responsible when responding to the post.
Hey is there a war against informationwar? Great post here, worth my full upvote. I'm also getting daily downvotes by the sunset profile, like you, regardless of topic posted. It's like a personal attack on several bloggers here on Hive.
Well put and I always enjoy reading your articles.
The part that is becoming more and more common and is super concerning is this hyper partisan collective group think that is coalescing on the left, it has taken over MSM/Hollywood/Academia/Workplaces/Corporations/Social Media/almost everything. I don't understand why everyone wants to continue down this path of woke-ism and insanity of everything is racist/sexist/homophobic/bigoted/etc. It's getting pretty tiresome and one of the main motivations why I wrote my rebuttal.
There is a growing amount of pushback to it. Even from some celebrities and from new people like Tom MacDonald who are doing a damn good job of making people think about it who otherwise probably wouldn't have.
I was going to write something else and did a half assed version of it after making the reply to yours. I kind of spent that energy on the reply to yours. That is fine... just not at all how I envisioned things going when I sat down at my computer.
I JUST WANT TO LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE EVERYONE FOLLOWS THE SAME LAWS AND RECEIVES THE SAME PUNISHMENT FOR THE SAME CRIMES AUTOMATICALLY.
NO LAWYERS.
I DON'T WANT TO LIVE IN A WORLD WHERE THE RICH AND OR "WELL CONNECTED" GET SPECIAL TREATMENT.
IT'S A PRETTY SIMPLE GODDAMNED CONCEPT.
I FRANKLY DON'T CARE IF YOU WANT TO CALL IT A "DEMOCRACY" OR A "REPUBLIC" OR A "COMMUNIST STATE" OR A "SOCIALIST UTOPIA" OR A "KLEPTOCRACY" OR A "MONARCHY" OR A "DICTATORSHIP" OR EVEN A "THEOCRACY".
NONE OF THAT MATTERS.
We could start with just following the Constitution of the U.S. as it was written and toss out 99.9% of all the other B.S. that has been added in addition to that and we'd pretty much achieve what you have described there.
As far as services, social welfare nets, etc.
Crowd source that stuff. If people were not having their income and work stolen by the government they would have more to contribute to services and causes that they VOLUNTARILY choose to support...
Will there still be asshats? Of course we can't completely eliminate that EVER... in attempting to do so we most likely would become an asshat ourselves.
Well put, I was just starting an article based on similar themes but from a different angle and completely different so enjoyed reading your perspective. I think we all go through a 'lefty' phase don't we? It's an age thing IMO but class definitely has an effect too. As in conservatives (at least the young ones) tend to be upper class at least that's how it works in UK.
Wow... Great lesson. At first when i saw this post i was like this is much to read but after reading i got a great lesson and the lesson never to fight Authoritarian program which you refers to Informationwar
#informationwar is far from authoritarian. They/We fight authoritarians.
Wow, I see myself writing a post half long someday. Thanks for sharing
I remember you. I saw your plight back then and how you gave up. If we did not have downvotes hitting users instead of offending posts (or comments), Hive would be a vibrant community of people from all walks. It would also be at least twice as big. I know more users that have quit due to the above than I know users.
We do not need guardians of the blockchain or reward pool. The guardians take more from the pool than they protect from being taken. They expect people to somehow learn the dos and don'ts without any mistakes along the way. Then put them on a permanent kill list.
I wish I were able to post stories about that abuse. I remember you doing so and it does not fly unpunished.
Hello, was just reading this post now. Hope you are doing well.
The reason people like @dwinblood come back to Hive is that we have our own group that helps upvote posts that he writes and similar posts. If you were interested in joining a curation trail I run one for the last 4 years called informationwar over on hive.vote.
We upvote politics/news/informationwar/deepdives and a bunch of other tags and communities. We have a post in our Bio over on @informationwar of what we are all about. If you want to delegate to @informationwar or join the informationwar curation trail we are constantly upvoting daily so that. If you followed it or delegated to us we would be using the HP very well, so that we spread the votes out between a lot of people.
Thanks for reading :)
I've been slow at posting lately. I moved to another state. Still getting used to my new life.
Good to see you back!
I actually never got targeted myself. I mainly got sick of seeing it happen to so many other people. I'd have people come after me but usually not anything particularly bad.
I don't like to see it done to other people and I saw it as toxic for a creation that I could see the beauty in.
You can only stare at the rot for so long before you tap out...
I stared at it for quite a few years.
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