Thursday, June 27, 2019

et tu, Vimeo?

Video-hosting service Vimeo, a YouTube competitor, has now also deplatformed James O'Keefe's Project Veritas video exposé about election-meddling at Google. Unbelievable. And shameless. Here's the screen grab I just saw on Gab:


I lived through a censorship nightmare here in Korea years ago. The ROK's Ministry of Communication and Information decided to block entire domains used by bloggers (including blogspot.com) after a video of the beheading, by Muslims, of Korean hostage Kim Sun-il got leaked. We all found ways around the blockage, of course, but those felt like dire times all the same. Seeing this happening now, in the US, is a soul-crushing experience. Of course, if you're not a wrongthinker, then there's no problem for you because you already toe the party line. But for people who simply want to say "you're still chromosomally male even after transgender surgery" or "the solar minimum is about to prove that human activity has had very little effect on global climate," or any number of other things that aren't at all racist, sexist, or otherwise bigoted, all this encroaching, suffocating censorship feels like the coming of a very dark age, and it wouldn't surprise me if extreme (i.e., violent and bloody) action were taken as a corrective. Such action wouldn't be a corrective, of course: it would only make tyrants into martyrs and solidify the cause of the oppressors. But it wouldn't surprise me if someone took the notion that "heads oughtta roll" seriously. I hope the execs of Google, Facebook, et al. are living behind very high walls, and that they have plenty of guards.




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