I went to the retinologist’s office this afternoon for my bimonthly eye injection to control my condition (wet macular degeneration) and prevent further flare-ups. As a result, I’m kind of running on three cylinders this evening.
I’ll take this opportunity to do something I should have done weeks ago, which is to give a final wrap-up on our winter fundraiser.
The first item of business is that we had just one thank-you note bounce. It was sent to a donor in Alberta. So if you’re out there buried under the snowdrifts on the freezing plains, and never got an acknowledgement of your generosity, that’s the reason.
Here’s the final tally of locations for donors (right up through yesterday):
Stateside: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia, West Virginia, Washington, and Wyoming
Far Abroad: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Kuwait, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden, Thailand, and the UK
Canada: Alberta, British Columbia, New Brunswick, Newfoundland, Ontario, Quebec, and Saskatchewan
Australia: Australian Capital Territory, New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria
May I take this opportunity to leave a note of thanks to Baron, Dymphna, and the contributors to the site? The fact that it depends on contributions serves as an insulation to the suppression of news and opinion we see on the “free” media, including Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.
There is a focus on events and politics in Europe, pertaining to what is fast coming to the North American continent, which I haven’t seen elsewhere. The views and information available on Gates of Vienna are simply not available elsewhere. I hope the population in general comes to realize that to get real information, they’ll have to subscribe to it. It’s amazing what we give up in privacy to Google for the benefits of map directions, calendar tracking, office functions, directed searches, good email handling, and lots of social networking capability. In other words, the attraction is there. I myself use lots of Google because I don’t care if they track me.
I hope the right doesn’t give in to the swan song of giving government agencies direct authority of the content of internet sites. The presenting reason might be to guarantee free access, but in a few years, the power will be used to harass sites that are actually independent. I do think the law section 230, giving social communications sites immunity from libel for the opinions of their (unfiltered) contributors, ought to be amended. If they filter for viewpoints, they should be liable for libel.
By the way, this would mean that there would be a lot more offensive comments. One huge problem is, as Mathew Bracken has pointed out, the truly unfiltered communication sites tend to get flooded with mindless sloganeering, making any real give-and-take difficult or impossible.
That’s one reason I didn’t like FaceBook. Mean, often viciously ugly comments follow on the blandest of assertions. Otherwise, it has become a place for kitten and puppy photos and a descent into time-wasting mindlessness.
One useful aspect is that members of large families can keep up with one another. Otherwise, it’s not a helpful use of one’s time:
https://hbr.org/2017/04/a-new-more-rigorous-study-confirms-the-more-you-use-facebook-the-worse-you-feel
as Mathew Bracken has pointed out, the truly unfiltered communication sites tend to get flooded with mindless sloganeering, making any real give-and-take difficult or impossible.
I almost never bother with the comment sections on stories I read at big sites. When it says 2,845 comments I figure the insults will be flowing like cheap booze, often from the get-go. First discovered this phenomenon when the B used to post on Breitbart. We quit after noticing the hatred directed toward Europe. The first comment would inevitably be a version of “Europe’s done. Stick a fork in it”. As if that were a clever response to anything.
I’ve wondered what would happen if those sites started charging subscription rates of some sort just for the right to comment. But then readership would no doubt drop.
Thanks for that, Dymphna. As a Brit (so culturally European, if not always politically!) I resent the likes of Robert Spencer writing us off. They may be right, but the history is still to be written.