Stripping Away The Clutter

Good morning America.  Did you hear the exciting news concerning the new Facebook app?  Well if you haven’t, here’s the skinny.  Facebook is reportedly stripping down, and gunning for the look and feel of Flipboard, only with an emphasis on your Facebook feed as a source of data and news.  I’ve used Flipboard and IIRC you tell the app exactly the websites and such that you want it to feed you. I can’t recall if Flipboard also has one of the tabs where they offer up things their data mining software feels is appropriate to you (or the advertisers pay them enough to pimp).

The Facebook Newsfeed Process

With Facebook, picking and choosing websites and “news” in your feed is the equivalent of pinning The New York Times, The National Enquirer, The Onion, all the junk mail you received the last month via post directly to your living room wall and blindly throwing darts at them to select the news you will see and read any given day.  If Facebook goes down, or our computers are all killed by an errant solar flare, it’ll be the closest analog solution for those Facebook addicts to calm their withdrawal symptoms.

With Facebook, there’s no way to protect yourself against a constant influx of Fox News hyperbole or missives invoking you to “LIKE and SHARE if you want to tickle Baby Jeebus” because yourr friends list contains so many of your aging shut-in parents and grandparents, as well as the obligatory odd crazy uncle.  Bless them for sure, but if Facebook can’t figure out, given all they already know about me, that I don’t want to see a steady stream of evangelical Christian nonsense, then why should I get all excited that it’ll be coming at me with smoother graphics?  But that’s not the issue that needs to be addressed.  The clutter that needs to be removed isn’t the ever-present sidebars which allow space for even more obnoxious marketing ads, links to friends and groups, or the live streaming real-time ticker that continual documents and scrolls every action of every person on your friend list.   No indeed.  Facebook is broken in a way that I haven’t yet seen addressed.  I don’t care how well they dress up the pig they call Facebook.  Put a fancy dress and lipstick on it and it’ll still be a pig.   To be continued.

Enjoy.

Me and Larry Flynt

Welcome to the 21st Century on Facebook, where images that weren’t even considered pornographic in the Cold War Era are now being effectively suppressed by the American Taliban.  I’m opening this up for public discussion as I ponder, at the bare minimum, the degree of incompetence of a company that has such a complete track record of nearly every aspect of my life, and yet could so easily be misled into taking what I believe many of you will agree with is a customer service social faux paux of the highest possible order.  They didn’t just ban the picture, they banned me from any posting on Facebook over an illusory violation of a breach in their “terms of service”!

For fuck’s sake they’ve never so much as lobbed a first warning at me in response to any of the umm…more colorful language I use on Facebook with enthusiastic reckless abandon.  I’d at least have a bit more sympathy for Facebook, but no more respect, if that was the issue under consideration.

Keep in mind I ignored their first warning to remove the photo after reading that if I didn’t remove it immediately it would be put under a higher level of scrutiny, which I naturally assumed would involve some actual person at Facebook Central Command laughing his ass off while deleting the “complaint” that spawned the banning.  A complaint lodged by what I suspect was some militantly pissed off rightwing goober offended by my liberal politics or lack of proper respect to the memories of their imaginary Jeebus.  

Before you take the trouble of wasting your time trying to explain to me how it’s all automated, I’m going to respond that it hardly matters to me from my perspective.  If they are willing to pass off this decision to artificial logic, they need to do a much better job of programming, and I’m willing to make an example out of myself in the greater interest of maintaining free speech on the internet.  

Facebook may well be a private company, but they are operating in the public space on infrastructure built and maintained at great taxpayer expense and have a certain responsibility in regard to that position which is totally independent from their ham-handed customer service policies.  And let’s be clear, that’s what is ultimately at stake here unless we’re willing to push back against the religious trolls intent on defining pornography down to a level where a picture of a naked Barbie doll gets you banned from all social media for life.  Slippery slope and all.

In any event, I think it’s highly ironic that at a time where tech, mainstream and financial news headlines are filled with stories of youth fleeing Facebook in droves, they are willing to risk offending someone of my advanced age (and online spending habits) by willy nilly banning me over the aforementioned “pornography”.

What rights of mine have been violated, if any?  Have I not been recklessly slandered by someone that Facebook could easily identify to me (under court order e.g.) so that I may seek compensation for damages in a court of law against this defamation (I’ve essentially been accused of being a public pornographer).  If there’s an eager young lawyer out there looking for a pro bono case to make a name for himself (win, lose or draw), I’m easy to get ahold of.

It’s “only” a 24 hour ban right now, and a minor perturbation in terms of access to Facebook, but  in the overall picture of which social media service I intend to give the bulk of my data (and hence their income stream), you can bet that unless I get some type of feedback from Facebook in the form of an apology (at a minimum), I’m going to be moving off their service (like so many others have lately) and will share my marketing information with a data management service that has the competency to judge my character more judicially based on the weight of a hundred thousand web postings I’ve already shared with them against the baseless complaint of one lunatic pearl-clutching prude intent upon helping them ruin their market share.  In the meantime I encourage those of you who support or sympathize with me on this issue to help spread this blogpost as far and wide as possible.  All it takes for evil to take over is the lack of action by a few good men.

Enjoy.

Tater Twits

Although I never really left blogging, the distractions of the new social media have had a deleterious effect on the hardcore blogger that burns inside me.

My insistence on creating quality content (the caliber of which is all most people will ever know of me) across so many varied platforms seriously hinders my my prolificacy on WordPress. That is about to change.

The malevolent 140 character limit imposed by Twitter has left its traces. My mind is now a thesaurus of short synonyms for longer words (I abhor odd truncations and language graffiti vandals, doU?).

Distancing myself from the plethora of weak-thinking, misshapen ideas promulgated by privileged White Americans trying to enforce their views as universal, was a big benefit of leaving the US, but even that simple fact won’t fit into the confines of a 140 character tweet. On top of that, agents of the American Girlyban blockbot brigade are trying to turn Twitter into East Germany, circa 1980. Time to break free!

My brain, under constant assault by the logical fallacies coming from Atheismplus, is likely to become as malformed and molested as Rebecca Watson’s bleeding liver if I don’t disengage a bit. A guy would have to be blind to ignore the savaging effects of same on that poor dumb bastard @ELEVATORgate, or for that matter, Richard Carrier. The casualty count on both sides? Hard to say. I’ve run out of fingers and toes to keep track of them all.

Brother Zed’s traveling sideshow of gypsies, tramps, and thieves forces me to keep as tight a grip on the handrails of reality as Watson does to a double vodka martini during happy hour (4 a.m) at an Irish hotel bar. It’s pick pocketing plus. An attempt to steal your integrity while simultaneously stuffing your pockets with Atheismplus fortune cookie slogans. For the love of all that is not holy, please don’t force me to mansplain it to you! Believe me when I tell you that you’ve much better use for your time. Checking for free range buggers comes to mind.

I’m aware that some will take issue with the carnival metaphors, but they are apt. Selling painted rocks while simultaneously decrying the dangers of fake jewelry is as close to snake oil sales as modernity allows of “skeptics”. It is also an assault on American capitalism. I cannot imagine a more disgusting or surly idea being promulgated, let alone embraced, by anything resembling the skepticism my mama raised me in.

As to Watson? She doesn’t even need the big red goofy clown nose, such are the effects of her notorious imbibing (apparently even when shopping for hair dyes).

But I digress.

Having already having fully basted themselves in the delectable juices of self parody (and no @Mykeru, that is not trigger code for you to begin masturbating) there is little point in continued piling on. There are other fish to fry (Rossi Ecat cold fusion scammers, US war criminals, the prison industrial complex just off the top of my head). There are, even though I hate to be the one to have to point it out, greater threats to the skeptic movement that this motley band of a dozen skeptic apostates can muster.

You will still see me on Twitter, but mostly from auto posts connected to my vast array of other social media interactions (e.g. Yelp, FB, Instagram,YouTube, etc). As always, your comments are welcome here. I do screen for spam and asshattery, but as is apparent in the comments on my more controversial offerings, not for ignorant slanders. They NEED the exposure!

Note: If any of the bloglinks offered in my posts seem counterintuitive when clicked on, you probably missed the rollover (hover) text that accompanies most all of them.  I refer to it as hover joy.

Enjoy.