I just did a post about Jerry Falwell which you can reach here if you make it past the Scary Content Warning that Google slapped on it the minute it went up, and which was replicated on two of the 8000 social media sites on which we lil' folk must hawk our wares if we want to see any traffic at all.
As an experiment, I'm making the title of this post -- "Jerry Skids" -- a slight variation of the title of the flagged post to see it that's what triggered the warning from the Google Decepticons.
I also tagged the previous post with a lot of naughty labels, so I'll test that next.
Anyhoo, here's the note Google sent me:
Hello,
As you may know, our Community Guidelines (https://blogger.com/go/contentpolicy) describe the boundaries for what we allow-- and don't allow-- on Blogger. Your post titled "Jerry's Kids" was flagged to us for review. This post was put behind a warning for readers because it contains sensitive content; the post is visible at http://driftglass.blogspot.com/2023/07/jerrys-kids.html. Your blog readers must acknowledge the warning before being able to read the post/blog.
We apply warning messages to posts that contain sensitive content. If you are interested in having the status reviewed, please update the content to adhere to Blogger's Community Guidelines. Once the content is updated, you may republish it at https://www.blogger.com/go/appeal-post?blogId=11363027&postId=6958696997669486806. This will trigger a review of the post.
For more information, please review the following resources:
Phase One complete: No flag is I change the title.
Phase Two begins: What happens when I add bawdy labels to this post like "Christian Sex Toys,Patriotic Christians for Against Socialism,Sex Dolls for Christ,The 10 Hour Orgasm Diet,Get your handjob certificate in under 16 weeks"? Let's find out!
Phase Two complete: Labels added. Still not flagged. Hmm. Alright, I'm going to let it cook for a bit, then remove the bawdy labels and change the title to the same title as the flagged post. Scientific method people! Happening right here!
Phase Three begins: Removed bawdy labels, and changed name to match original, flagged post. I'm going to let this simmer and see what happens. If nothing happens...
Phase Three complete: No change. So...
Phase Four begins: Add the bawdy labels back in to see if those + the original title is sufficient to get this post flagged. If nothing happens, add the Falwell video to the top of this post to see if that plus everything else triggers a flagging.
Phase Four complete: No change. So, adding the Falwell video to the top of this post. and then, once again, the waiting game begins!
Phase Five begins: Falwell video added back. Other than a few pics and word, this now replicates the conditions of the original post that was flagged.
Plan Nine from Outer Space: Create an entirely new post, also with the same name as the original and with, I dunno, pictures of puppies or something. This is currently underway.
Plan Nine results: I have, step-by-step, altered a cat pic post to be an exact replica (except for this sentence) of the original post that Google flagged as violating community standards.
So lets find out what this does in 3...2...1...
Well, nothing happened. So, as the old programmer that I am, there remains one more test to conduct. Rather than starting with an innocuous post with a cat pic and gradually building it into a replica of the original, flagged post one "Update" at a time, what happens if I do it all in one shot, as I did with the original?
Well, we're about to find out.
Final results: Again, nothing happened. Theory #1 was that, starting with an innocuous post and building it up to community-standards-violating post was a way to beat the Google flagging system. Great theory, until I created an exact copy of the original post in one shot and nothing happened. So my guess is that either some troll told Google that I was up to naughtiness and, out of an abundance of legal department generated caution, they flagged it, or there is a glitch in the A.I. which causes it to be over-cautious so that *anything* with "Kids" in the header gets flagged. And maybe that has since been tweaked, but the flagging can't be undone except by a Google flunky who has better things to do.
Anyway, it's been a journey! I'm deleting all the test posts but this one so as not to confuse my future self as to what the hell I was doing back in summer of of 2023. Also, as fate would have it, my next post will riff on the original, flagged post for entirely different reasons that this now-completed experiment.
Although I was married to an attorney for a number of years, I myself am not a lawyer, I am completely unlettered in the field. And yet even I, a complete naif, know that the First Rule of Writ Club is to never, ever put a witness on the stand -- or on teevee -- and ask them a question to which you do not already know the answer.
Itinerant hack-for-rent Howie Kurtz apparently never hearda such.
The primary viewership for Fox News are old, cranky, poorly-informed white people who want those nice young men and ladies on the teevee machine to be perky and well-groomed and tell them just what they want to hear. To slightly misquote General Sternwood from "The Big Sleep", Fox News viewers exist largely on faux-controversy heat like a new born spider, and as such must be induced to keep right on believing that what they are getting from Fox News is the rill dill (to slightly misquote Sarah Palin) -- the Pure Quill, unfiltered by all of those Libruls who secretly control the media.
They must continue to believe in the immersive fiction of the superiority of their information, rather than the ugly reality that they are cage-fed morons mindlessly sucking down raw Conservative propaganda laced with news-flavored gobbets of bullshit. And as such, nothing that reminds them that Fox News is a ruthlessly for-profit enterprise can be allowed to get in front of the camera. It all falls apart otherwise, which is why any business which is built on illusion knows that the illusion must be maintained at all times.
It's the reason why the actions and movements of Disney theme-park actors are so carefully choreographed.
And its the reason you do not put someone in front of a Fox News camera who knows damn well how the business of making of the teevee sausage works and is delighted at the chance to slap the smug off of Mitah Kurtz's face and tell his audience the real rill dill.
The endorsement of Erick Erickson, the founder of the conservative blog RedState and a CNN contributor is for sale as part of an advertising package, according to an email circulated by an account executive for The Human Events Group -Eagle Publishing, which recently purchased the site.
"Erick Erickson's reputation along with his rising profile, combine to make RedState the most influential conservative blog on Capitol Hill and across America," writes the account executive, Chris McIntyre, in a form email forwarded to POLITICO by two surprised conservatives. "Why not put Erick's influence to work for your organization?" ...
Why not indeed?
The Fuck-Saw Junior -- Asshole tested... ...Asshole approved!
Of course, if pressed at, perhaps, a Davos media mogul bukkake roundtable on, oh, let's say, the Future of Post-industrial Media Ecosystems and Integrated Wisdom Vector Visioneering they'll make a little moue and explain how they rilly, rilly regret it, but times are tough and sacrifices have to be made and it's whole new world now and where the fuck is that intern with my latte and a big sack of free content I can used to pad out my cash cow bold, new direction in journalism?
WaPo Staffers Pissed at Publisher’s Paycheck By Alec Jacobs on March 25, 2011 4:54 PM
WaPo‘s 2010 SEC filings were released this week. In a year when the newspaper saw tough cuts in staff, publisher Katharine Weymouth (granddaughter of famed Post publisher Katharine Graham) earned $537,000 and a bonus of $483,750, plus an additional $1,053,441 based on a pre-established long-term pay plan. She’s also getting a 16.5% raise in her 2011 salary. Not too shabby. Except that now, staffers at WaPo are…displeased. ...
And from "Broadcast News"...24 long years ago.
Because everything old and filthy is new and even filthier again.
In case you ever idled away an afternoon screwing around with your old political chemistry set/fantasy football league lineups and wondering what would happen if you took a bunch of Republican primary losers (Charlie Christ)...added in a goonbag of out-of-work and out-of-favor former Republican speechwriters and campaign button-men (David Frum/John Avlon/Mark McKinnon)...the last of the politically arteriosclerotic insider DLC goofs who aren't already drawing paychecks under the Obama Administration's "Former Clinton White House Full Employment Project" (Nancy Jacobson aka. Mrs. Mark Penn)...Republican minor teevee celebrities (Joey Joe Joe Junior Scarborough)...
...and David Fucking Brooks?
And then sprinkled the resulting crime against nature with an assload of money (because there are always, always endless assloads of money available for any horrible idea that reinforces Villager sensibilities)?
What you get crawling out of the Petri dish are things like the autotuned, content-free, sugar-coma-inducing horror that is
I mean, ever since the Republican Base ducked out on paying the tab for a generation of being loudly and catastrophically wrong about everything by putting on funny hats, screaming about liberty and calling themselves "The Tea Party", their sleazy Centrist enablers have been seething with jealously. Quite suddenly the monster they built didn't need them anymore and the skeevy hustlers who had helped create the Racist/Corporatist/Dominionist Confederacy on the bones of the New Deal and the grave of the American Dream found themselves cast out and looking for their next meal ticket.
Preferably a meal ticket under a banner that -- like "Tea Party -- wouldn't keep bringing up their horribly inconvenient past as the sleazy, enabling hustlers.
Hey, kids! I have an idea! Lets peel those the icky, damning labels off of everything and -- presto! -- there is magically no longer any difference between rat poison and apple sauce!
Can I haz my million dollars now?
Well, how about another, better idea? One for which there is never a million-dollar payday for Beltway insiders because it does not offer to chop-shop your miserably failed past out of existence, and let you roll right back out the door cleansed and shriven thanks to a cheap "Tea Party" or "No Labels" spray job.
How about, to fix our big, national problems, we start by calling our problems by their real names
so that we can deal with them as they really are?
Of course, the problem is, if you take your political nutrients by re-breathing Rush Limbaugh's racist beer farts, you can't join.
If your worldview is informed by mainlining Glenn Beck conspiracy theories with ever-larger gauge needles, you can't join.
If you believe that the Earth is 9,000 years old, that global climate change is a George Soros put-up job, that science is bad...and insist that your head-up-ass fantasies be legislated into reality, you can't join.
If you are Newt Gingrich or his space-age polymer wife, you can't join.
If you are Sarah Palin, you really, reallycan't join.
If you want the government to keep its hand off of your Medicare, you can't join.
If you're a Birther or a Death Panel monger, don't even fucking bother.
If you lied us into a war (and then botched that war), you can't join.
If you listen to Fox News and Hate Radio to "get both sides", you can't join.
If your bookshelf is shot through with crap that has been pooped out of the Regnery Press Mendacity Factory, you can't join.
If you think President Obama and anyone else slightly to the Left Sean Hannity is a radical, committed Marxist, you can't join.
If you still think ACORN was a threat, Andrew Breitbart is a journalist and James O'Keefe is a hero, you can't join.
So...tallying up the results here...looks like the entire Conservative Movement is wingnuto non grata at the "No Liars" movement.
How sad.
Worse yet, if your are a purveyor of the Biggest Lie of All, you are also obviously out of the club.
...
And for twenty years – while the mass purveyors of carefully calibrated hate and rage and xenophobia on the Right gathered more and more power and got more and more vulgar and vicious in their rhetoric – what did the Left try to do?
We tried to find common ground. To meet our opponents half-way.
To compromise…with people who sneered at the very idea of working together and said quite openly that compromise was “political date rape”.
While the Emperor of Weaponized Bile, Newt Gingrich, took over the House with a campaign explicitly based on calling Democrats “traitors” at every opportunity, and Limbaugh was being honored as the “Majority Maker” by those House Republicans, we on the Left were still trying to do and be all the nicey-nicey things that Alan Simpson is now all weepy and wistful for.
And it didn’t work. And while we played by Marquis of Queensbury, the orcs laughed in our faces, overran the joint, and bequeathed to us as its apotheosis the worst, most despicable, most incompetent, most Constitution-loathing Administration in American history.
Al Franken and Air America did not arise in a vacuum. The came into being as a desperate, eleventh-hour attempt to fight back against a twenty year multimedia blitz of unremitting, unrebutted Conservative lies and bigotry.
They arose because no one in the Mainstream Media had the guts to take on the GOP Propaganda Machine head-on. Instead, the MSM collaborated, because collaborating in the Big Lie was a much better, safer career move.
Progressive Radio arose because politicians like Alan Simpson were, for twenty years, perfectly content with looking the other way and harvesting the electoral fruits of the poison tree that their Conservative/Christopath/Racist Hate Radio, Hate TeeVee, Hate Satellite, Hate Cable and Hate Publishing so lavishly watered and fertilized.
Because the GOP was never concerned with the destruction of political comity…as long as it was working to their advantage.
As long as all of the screeching Orwellian hellfire was coming from the Right, they never said a fucking word.
But now, finally, after twenty years of unilateral disarmament, now that the Left has at last decided to fight back hard, suddenly old Republican loons like Simpson get all gooey for the glory days of cellulose collars, nickel candy bars, whale-bone corsets, heroic cavalry charges and a politics of gentle, ruffled fisticuffs followed by brandy, cigars and top-shelf hookers.
Suddenly it is “zealots on both sides” that have torn his beloved Temple down.
Well fuck you, Alan Simpson. Fuck you sideways for your bogus hand-wringing and crocodile tears.
And fuck you, George Mitchell, for sitting there with your thumb up your ass and allowing your good, Republican friend to spread this Big Lie unchallenged right under your nose.
So -- moar sad! -- looks like our Centrists friends are out too.
Leaving one group which, whatever their faults and frailties,
by and large doesn't fucking lie to you all day, every day on order to scare you so stupid that you will not only gladly drink poison...
...but you'll demand a second helping if the first dose doesn't kill you.
UPDATE: Tengrain attempts an ancient and all-but-forgotten journalistic rite known as "Following The Money" here.
