rightwingnuts Archives - neal umphred dot com

want to find “Q”? find the missing basement …

May 25, 2020February 22, 2020 by Neal

WHERE THE HECK IS “Q”?!!? Since the demise of 8chan in August 2019 due to its being linked to acts of violence (including the gunman who killed at least 49 people at mosques in New Zealand), the supderduper anonymous “Q” has been silent. While the loss of the notorious social media platform—effectively a virtual home for Q and his/her/their followers—has forced those followers to other sites, little has been heard from Q his/her/their self (selves?) READ MORE

an experiment that actually curbed hate speech on the internet

April 18, 2020April 30, 2018 by Neal

I HATE BULLIES and I see internet trolls as bullies. So I hate internet trolls. But aside from Facebook, where I can keep them curbed by excluding them from my comment thread, I have little interaction on social media platforms on the internet. Consequently, I have little interaction with bullies and trolls on the internet.

Oh, I see them when I’m out and about reading articles and essays on other sites—whether news sites or opinion sites. READ MORE

trolls are leaving forests and bridges for the internet

February 2, 2020January 18, 2017 by Neal

TROLLS ARE EVERYWHERE! It wasn’t always this way. Once upon a time, trolls dwelled in Scandinavian folk tales, creatures hostile to all things human. But now trolls are everywhere! They’re leaving forests and bridges and the rocks and trees of the Old World to dwell in the cybercities that encircle the globe. And now we call these new city-dwellers ‘internet trolls.’ READ MORE

sadism! psychopathy! machiavellianism! and trolling?

February 26, 2019September 29, 2016 by Neal

THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPHS were taken from an article titled “The One Psychological Characteristic That Online Trolls Tend to Share.” It’s an interesting look at what trolling has become, and most of the findings fit my observations of and experiences with persistent (compulsive?) trolls on social and news-oriented websites.

It also continues nicely with my series of rants against any and all bullies (see below). READ MORE

what about them there leftwingnut trolls?

July 26, 2019April 13, 2016 by Neal

AH YES, LEFTWINGNUT TROLLS. I suppose they’re there, but they have to wait until I address old-fashioned, moderate Republicans. If they have a presence or a voice on Facebook and other social media on the Internet, it’s hard to find. Or it’s there but drowned out by the ubiquitous and rabid rightwingnuts and their bellicose blatherings and intellectually-challenged ‘opinions.’

If so, then the former are being found guilty by association with the latter and by not gainsaying them. READ MORE

rightwingnuts do it for free on facebook (hate free zone 2)

July 26, 2019January 30, 2016 by Neal

RIGHTWINGNUTS DO IT FOR FREE is a follow-up of sorts to an earlier article where I discussed turning my Facebook page into a “rightwingnut hate free zone.” I did that so there will be NO MORE racist homophobic misogynistic Islamaphobic etcetera comments! Which doesn’t mean those folk aren’t otherwise ubiquitous on Facebook and across the Internet.

Off the Internet—you know, in ‘real’ life—I often tell younger folks how far America has progressed in my lifetime, as we no longer have ‘blacks only’ services or the blasphemy of lynchings. READ MORE

on being misinformed and yet always being “right”

May 2, 2020January 20, 2016 by Neal

THIS ONE’S EASY-PEASY: I don’t actually have to pick a topic, do hours of research, ratiocinate my way through the data, and then spend hours writing and rewriting all, and then more hours poring over photos for illustrations! I don’t really even have to much writing with this one. ¹

All I really have to do here on this piece about being willingly misinformed is to type out a few opening paragraphs and then copy and paste some photos from someone else’s website! READ MORE

mentally ill panhandler plots downfall of da big apple (embedded in ice, part 2)

May 2, 2020January 3, 2016 by Neal

I WAS UP ALL NIGHT WRITING. Up all night because I hardly sleep in my doddering old age. Again. And without the benefit of caffeine, as I cut my intake by half two weeks ago. The article I was working on concerned the rush to publish the alleged ‘facts’ about the alleged ISIS terrorist Emanuel Lutchman by major and minor ‘media.’ READ MORE

FAVORITE QUOTES

“Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. We should, therefore, claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant." – Karl Popper

"So long as opinion is strongly rooted in the feelings, it gains rather than loses instability by having a preponderating weight of argument against it. For if it were accepted as a result of argument, the refutation of the argument might shake the solidity of the conviction; but when it rests solely on feeling, worse it fares in argumentative contest, the more persuaded adherents are that their feeling must have some deeper ground, which the arguments do not reach; and while the feeling remains, it is always throwing up fresh intrenchments of argument to repair any breach made in the old." – John Stuart Mill

“A state of scepticism and suspense may amuse a few inquisitive minds. But the practice of superstition is so congenial to the multitude that, if they are forcibly awakened, they still regret the loss of their pleasing vision.” – Edward Gibbon

"Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither. We know not what comes next, or what follows after. Thus, the most ordinary movement in the world, such as sitting down at a table and pulling the inkstand towards one, may agitate a thousand odd, disconnected fragments, now bright, now dim, hanging and bobbing and dipping and flaunting, like the underlinen of a family of fourteen on a line in a gale of wind." – Virginia Woolf

“When you speak truth to power, power fights back." – Alexandria Octavia-Cortez

"Time is a created thing. To say, ‘I don’t have time,’ is like saying, ‘I don’t want to.’” ~ Lao Tzu

"Clearly, any real body must have extension in four directions: it must have length, breadth, thickness, and duration." – H.G. Wells

"People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion." –Albert Einstein

"Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it." – M. Scott Peck

"The future has a way of arriving unannounced." – George F. Will

"Right now, I'm having amnesia and deja vu at the same time. I think I've forgotten this before." – Steven Wright

“How did it get so late so soon?” ― Dr. Seuss

"The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use them.” – Philip K. Dick

"While all acronyms are initialisms, most initialisms are not acronyms." – Q (lol)

"It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble—it's what you know that just ain't so." – Mark Twain

"I don't trust anybody I'm not close enough to kill." – Kelly Burkhardt

"I have lived with many Zen masters, all of them cats." – Eckhart Tolle