If you, like many people in this country, consider yourself to be a normal working class American with half a brain then you have probably realized that free speech in this country as a whole is slipping. As the old saying goes if you want to cook a frog, you don't drop him in a pot of boiling water. You put him in a pot of cold water and slowly turn up the heat, because if you do it right,he wont jump out, you can slow-cook him without him even noticing. The same thing went for the Jews in WWII (yes this tired old example because amazingly we still have much to learned from it) the Jews weren't exterminated overnight along with anyone else who didn't agree with the Germans. It started with people, ordinary people who were angry because they lost the war. They were all sitting in a bar and all of a sudden a man named Adolf Hitler walks in and convinces them over the course of the next few years that the Jews are to blame for all their problems. Then slowly but surely Hitler rises to power and the holocaust is ushered in. They didn't see it coming because it happened so slowly, just like us.
what we know.
Its 2015 and if it weren't enough that our current administration subpoenas nearly every journalist that even REMOTELY disagrees with the governments "status quo". Agent saboteurs sent to initiate violence during a peaceful protest on wall-street just to give the police a reason to break it up. What does this mean? Every protest the government disagrees with can be shut down under the guise of "riot prevention". Not 30 years ago men like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange would of been hailed as heroes like Deep-Throat was for Watergate and Daniel Ellsberg (acquitted) for the pentagon papers. Now they are considered criminals, for what? For telling the truth? Exposing corruption? Exposing the wrongs our government Takes part in everyday? Well those liberal hipsters got one thing right as corny as it sounds the truth is vastly stranger than fiction
What Reddit was...
Reddit, a website that takes democracy and uses it as the building blocks of its structure is being censored. In its very nature Reddit has (what you could describe as) an alternative function. When its not being spammed with the latest celebrity gossip, cat picture, and trolls. It functions as a loudspeaker and gives its users a voice, but with the amount of users it has,you could go as far as to say that the front page of the Internet allows the voice of the people to be heard. Reddit uses a system like other websites called "up-votes", If enough people agree on the topic or are just generally interested they can "up-vote" a topic whether it be funny or political to the top of the page where it can be seen by everyone. Just like in democracy, majority rules, as it should be. In addition to up-voted topics, the website also has a comments section that uses up-votes as well. This is where ordinary people like you and me get to ask the hard questions and speak the truth. The most popular questions/statements, like the topics, rise to the top of the page and usually end up in a further commented discussion.
Why is this important?
When controversial topics such as the Ferguson riots,occupy wall street and the SOPA bill came under Discussion, we discovered many truths about them that for some reason were not being talked about in the mainstream media. This is the place where many people such as myself discovered that SOPA (the Stop Online Piracy Act) was nothing but a bill that would lawfully bring about widespread censorship over the Internet.The bill essentially gives the government the right to censor or block any website that it did not agree with. Believe me when I say that this short paragraph does not do this website justice for all the good it did.
Censorship and why I stopped visiting Reddit.
A few months ago I stumbled across a post on Reddit that talked about bots,and that they weren't just removing posts that were trolls or threatening in nature. But removing posts that had gotten many upvotes because they had contained words such as NSA, government spying, Edward Snowden, sopa....etc. Im not even going to get into the fact that Glen Greenwald posted a story on Reddit
regarding the disinformation spread by British intelligence and how it
was taken down within seconds and could not be reposed no matter how
many times users tried. Since then there have been numerous stories regarding the censorship of Reddit on websites ranging from Cnn to the Washington post, all leading up to what most people are calling the Reddit Exodus. They are leaving, and most have gone to a Switzerland based website called Voat where free-speech is not censored.
Where we are and what this means for the future.
Lets just take a moment to let sink in the fact that we as Americans are being censored so much in our own country that we have to go to an outside website in Switzerland to have free speech. I am starting this blog not just out of anger, but perhaps to document the final days of free speech in the country. Its amazing to me to see just how far the mighty America has fallen in the area of freedom.So when the lights go up and the curtain finally falls on free-speech in this country at least we can watch it together over a bottle of vodka,like the drunken fools we are for thinking this could all last, I guess that's about all we can hope for really.
never stop spreading the truth.
Lets just take a moment to let sink in the fact that we as Americans are being censored so much in our own country that we have to go to an outside website in Switzerland to have free speech. I am starting this blog not just out of anger, but perhaps to document the final days of free speech in the country. Its amazing to me to see just how far the mighty America has fallen in the area of freedom.So when the lights go up and the curtain finally falls on free-speech in this country at least we can watch it together over a bottle of vodka,like the drunken fools we are for thinking this could all last, I guess that's about all we can hope for really.
never stop spreading the truth.
