One of the by-products of this diary site is that I wind up having to sort through my old stuff to pull together materials that explain or illustrate this and that. Which is both a good thing and a bad thing. It serves to remind me of how much there is to draw upon (and make some needed link corrections along the way), but it’s also an automatic distraction that uses time I feel guilty for not spending on what strikes me as more urgent in the moment.
Urgent is a relative term though, isn’t it? Couple things I’m putting up today for the simple reason that I had forgotten about them altogether and wouldn’t have found them without the rooting around in old business exercise. This first one is kind of embarrassing.
Not kind of. Very embarrassing. After hearing all the recent Dem promises to start rounding up MAGA malefactors after they’re back in power, I was moved to reference an Instapunk Returns post I put up in 2020, after the election and before the Jan 6 debacle. Even the old midget Robert Reich was suddenly scratching around again on a subject he’d been vocal about before. I’d written a response in 2020 that seemed timely again, a phenomenon I experience a lot: “I Volunteer to Stand Before the Reich Commission.”
The post contained a kink of hyperlinks connecting to the reasons for my defiance and the proof of my indestructibility in the face of attempted intimidation. After I’d made my new reference to it, I checked the links, found broken ones, fixed than, and an added an update to explain what I’d changed, reinforcing my commitment to volunteer again if need be,
One of the links that still worked was to a Blogger site I had no memory of. It had my stuff alright. And then I saw that the site profile was to my wife. Which was when memory started sputtering back to life. There was a period of time after Jan 6 when I started feeding the heavy, and heavier, hand of Facebook suppression. I got suspended, had group participation and messaging shut down, and in none of the disciplinary actions was there room for any real appeal, only a checkbox followed by automatic denial and imposition of sentence. When, I suppose, I got the idea my wife could be a conduit if the banning behaviors spread from Facebook to Google as they already had done with YouTube (two strikes out of three allowed, a pitch count that remains in stasis today).
Here’s what I found when I followed the one link I had to reach my wife’s profile page.
Pat’s Blogs
https://www.blogger.com/profile/06635471918646899739
https://letsaskrobert.blogspot.com/
https://lairdpod.blogspot.com/
https://rflaird111.blogspot.com/
https://lairdfanclub.blogspot.com/
I haven’t asked her about them. There’s nothing to be done with them really. Three of them are nothing more than placeholders, like the graphic above. But there they are, a relic of the ducking and hiding a lot of us were attempting during the Biden censorship regime all the accomplices keep denying ever occurred.
It is a good reminder that my wife is not the only one here with some memory issues. Just this morning — when I was looking for some of this uxorial collaboration in the “updated” Apple Notes app that is suddenly 25 percent less usable than it always was, requiring searches even to locate today’s Note entries — I found another old repressive reaction I’d forgotten about.
This one involved Glenn Reynolds, an early sponsor of mine as an up-and-coming blogger in the early 2000s until he killed me off as a source for anybody and inspired an avalanche of death threats against my person in 2009. Maybe that’s why I forgot about a joke years before he didn’t find amusing in his august realm, a spoof of Instapundit called AutoPundit. He seemed to regard it as a copyright threat of some kind.
This just a screenshot. Links are below.
It was actually just an experiment with comedic possibilities. Or so I thought anyway. There was plenty of real work involved in Reynolds’s updating of his site every day. I knew that, but I was also impressed by how little writing he did. Just a one-liner, Drudge style (or, these days, Citizen Free Press style), and it looked to me that fairly modest AI-type programming could automate Glenn Reynolds and his interchangeable teasers himself. Ergo:
And when he objected to AutoPundit without linking it, I responded as follows:
It’s possible I apologized afterwards, but I have no recollection of that. At any rate he resumed linking my posts from the original Instapunk.com until I decided to accept President Obama’s invitation to have an honest conversation about race in America. I used the N-Word to demonstrate that you couldn’t have an honest discussion without acknowledging that the word existed and that black people were happy to use it constantly, even though if a white person did he could wind up dead. I obviously proved my point. I never submitted the post to Reynolds; he just happened to discover it in reading an Easter post written and submitted at IP by a business partner of mine. He denounced the Instapunk website and me personally and that was it for my prospects of becoming a popular blogger.
I am not apologetic for having written what I did. But I have never deleted it, and it is reprinted in one of my books, including a lot of the bike aI received in return. It’s part of the price I’m still willing to pay for being honest about what I think and believe.
I don’t edit or rewrite the past. On balance I have been right far more than I have been wrong about all kinds of things factual, cultural, and political. Just yesterday, Breitbart was excited about director Chris Nolan’s decision to cast a Nigerian beauty as Helen of Troy and Eliot Page as Achilles. My Reel about it has already scored 723 views, and I didn’t even take the opportunity to link the 20-year-old post in which I’d prophesied this fad…
That’s enough bothering of you for one day. I’m glad I decided to build this record. Some of what’s in it may not see the light of day elsewhere until long after I’m gone, which sometimes feels like the day after tomorrow. Like today. C’est la guerre.
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