you're not paranoid

They really are out to get you if you're not toeing the line.

Seen on Instapundit, which linked from here:

"It’s Official: Google Is a Democratic Party Front."

Someone leaked to Breitbart an hour-long video of an “all hands” Google meeting that was held just after the 2016 election. The video features Google’s co-founder, Sergei Brin, its CEO, Sundar Pichai, and numerous other high-ranking “Googlers” speaking in turn about the election’s tragic outcome. It is stunning.

All of the speakers express grief over Donald Trump’s election. All of the speakers assume that every Google employee is a Democrat and is stunned and horrified that Hillary Clinton–the worst and most corrupt presidential candidate in modern history–lost. There is much discussion about what Google can do to reverse the benighted world-wide tide exemplified by Brexit and Trump’s election. The insane doctrine of “white privilege” rears its head.

You really have to see it to believe it. Having suffered through the hour-long cri de cœur–OK, to be fair, there is a huge element of schadenfreude, too, and you will relish much of it–you probably will have several reactions: 1) These people may have certain valuable technical skills, but they aren’t very bright and are unusually lacking in self-awareness. 2) It is remarkable that they can achieve such an extraordinary monoculture in an organization with thousands of employees. It must require vigorous enforcement of right-think. 3) It is easy to see how these uniformly left-wing robots/people seamlessly transitioned into Resisting the duly elected Trump administration.

If you don't toe the leftist party line, your options for self-expression on media controlled by leftists are decreasing steadily. The result is about what you'd expect: the advent of alt-media options. Most of these options are in the fledgling stage; most of them have little clout compared to the giants with which they're competing, but ultimately, these options will grow and become home to the voices being silenced in current major venues. For every YouTube, there are alt-services like BitChute; for every Twitter, there's now a Gab; for every Google-owned Blogspot, there's now Minds.com.

I saw that Twitter just banned the use of the phrase "illegal alien" as a form of hate speech—another reason for me to be glad to be off Twitter. This is incredible to me, but upon reflection, not really all that surprising, given the Orwellian nature of trends on the left. (Oh, to be sure, the right has its own Orwellian tendencies when you give it too much power; this is a human problem more than a specifically lefty or righty problem, but the focus is currently on the left, for the moment, because it's the left that so thoroughly dominates the media, which means it thoroughly controls how people think. Once the right develops its own alt-Hollywood—which will likely be equally stupid, overprivileged, and misguided—things might start to change.)

The rise of alt-services comes with its own baggage, as I've mentioned before. Gab.ai is rife with people who freely sling around the epithets kike, faggot, and nigger. Jew-blaming for America's ills is rampant on that platform, along with pro-Hitler posting, Holocaust denial, and some of the stupidest, most wild-eyed conspiracy theories I've ever had the misfortune to encounter. That is, of course, the price you pay for free speech: the signal-to-noise ratio slides disappointingly toward noise. Still, there's enough bigoted vitriol out there for me to think the liberals aren't paranoid when they associate bigotry with the right: these aren't tiny pockets of prejudice by any means; it's a sickening torrent of bile. I've seen others on Gab respond to complaints of voiced bigotry by angrily snapping, "Just mute it!" Yes, that is one option, but it doesn't really address the more important problem of why such bigotry exists to begin with. Per the lefty stereotype, there do seem to be plenty of gun-loving, dumb-hillbilly racists out there who would like nothing more than to rid the country of anyone even remotely dusky-looking. I imagine that, if I were to take a tour of Minds.com and BitChute, I'd find much the same mental sludge clogging up the works. All of this nastiness undermines the lofty goals of such sites and services, which want to present themselves as proud, bright, pro-free-speech alternatives to the oppressive monopolies of Google, Amazon, Twitter, and Facebook.

So the mainstream entities are oppressive because they're being repressive, and the alt-alternatives are oppressive because they're chock-full of repugnant people. (I'm serious: there are times when I miss Twitter because sloshing through the swamp of Gab.ai is an actively unpleasant experience. Twitter has its own ready-made crew of assholes, to be sure, but their population density is somewhat less because Twitter is home to more middle-of-the-road people.) There's no real refuge for those of us who consider ourselves moderates; there's shit to both the left and the right of us. For me, Gab is a slightly better alternative because of its ideology, but in practice, Gab is awful because of the creatures that actually inhabit it.

Maybe this is the cosmos's way of saying it's time to just unplug.