Permanent Suspension

Well i finally have something in common with Donald Trump: i've been permanently suspended from Twitter, silenced, left to languish in Twitmo forever...well, i had a good ride.

It started with SB8. Once i found out about this evil anti-choice bill and it's provision to create an Informant website where private citizens were to snitch on anyone they suspected had helped a woman to access abortion services, i went berserk. I cannot imagine anything more vicious, inhuman, or more damaging to society than empowering vigilante posses to ruin other people's lives they had no business with in the first place. And for a BOUNTY of 10,000$! Barbaric. Cruel. Not to mention, entirely unconstitutional and a land mine to the rule of law.

I had called the organization, Texas Right to Life, who put up the website, to confront them, and ended up talking with a woman in the Houston office for about three hours. I was outraged. I confronted her on how unChristian and totally against the teaching and example of Christ such a law would be. She was one of those adult women whose voice is childlike. She really sounded like a teenager. When i found out she's forty, i should have known that something was terribly wrong with her. In her zeal to "minister" to me she pretended that the offensive website did not belong to her organization, although it clearly did. (Later when i confronted her about lying to me, she denied what she'd done.) But it made me doubt myself just enough to extend benefit of the doubt to her. Now i believe she's a sociopath.

What does this have to do with Twitter? Well i'd run afoul of the rules before, but there were usually long stretches of good behaviour in between. Twitter was always my "wild wild west" of political rant. I usually try to avoid arguing with people on Facebook, though i still do it on occasion. I would get in trouble when i felt how much was at stake, and ever since the 2016 fiasco of an election, EVERYTHING has been at stake.

Anyway when i found out about the permanent suspension i thought maybe it was the picture i found online of a woman, ostensibly Arabic, buried up to her neck in the ground, who had been or was being stoned. It looked kind of fake but it could also have been real. It was not a very graphic or gory image, only shocking for what it represented. I had used this picture in a message to the same anti- choice org which had created the Informant website, then posted it a couple of times on Twitter. But no, it wasn't that. Then i thought maybe it was the Hillary meme showing a mock book of hers and on the cover she's shooting the finger and the title reads "F*ck Ya'll" because she had warned us this would happen (the SCOTUS refused to stay this extreme bill from becoming law, and as of this writing, it is the actual law in Texas and abortion access has been denied, and vigilante posses are free to terrorize women.) I thought that, because when i checked my Twitter feed, the image had been greyed out. Which was strange, because people shoot the finger all the time on Twitter. I had even seen an image someone posted of an aborted fetus, that last night of tweeting. Compared to what i've seen others post, my tweets didn't seem that bad.

Look people this is war. American democracy is on it's last legs, along with human life on Earth itself, possibly. People feel frustrated and helpless to see freedom and due process and secular civil society slip away and they want to do something, to speak out, share information, and take a stand with like minded citizens, and sometimes you trip the wire, use language that the AI systems detect. But it wasn't what you think. In the end, it was me telling a troll "go drink sheep dip" because antivaxxers have been drinking Ivermectin, which is livestock dewormer, to treat Covid, rather than just getting the damned vaccine. I told you- the entire world has gone stark, raving mad. That's all it took. Me telling a troll to go drink sheep dip was a "targeted attack", rather than sarcasm. I doubt AI can detect sarcasm. In any case, this isn't the end of my activism, although i have gotten in jail on facebook also, but for different reasons. I post a lot of art and articles, sometimes featuring nudity which is not gratuitous (South American Indigenous tribe which doesn't wear much clothing, featured in an archeology article, or a photograph or artwork showing too much of the human body.)

No- I will keep speaking out, and voting, and fighting with any tool at my disposal to keep democracy alive a little longer, for whatever my puny efforts are worth.

But i will be more careful how i use words. And i will never be deceived again into thinking that anyone working for a so-called Christian or other religion based anti-choice/anti-women organization, could have any motivation that isn't pathological. SB8 is simply something that Jesus would never do. He did not use force, but love. The ends simply do not justify the means. Especially those evil, horrible, despicable means...

Here are a few screenshots i took of a thread in which i was arguing against a profoundly reactionary man who was eloquently making an argument for the personhood of the unborn, from the moment sperm meets egg. With him i used more elevated language. He blocked me of course, then i was banned from Twitter permanently. Oh well it will do me good. (Some of them didn't post because he blocked me so i cut and pasted them and made new tweets, but they had originally all been directed at him).