Category Archives: Non-fiction

Essays, Non-fiction

In favor of the Universal Basic Income

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INTRODUCTION
     Social programs are all the rage with the leftist. They say these things are for people, because life is what happens and you cannot account for most things that come up, like injury for instance. While their argument there is sound, they don’t factor human nature into it and these programs actually hurt those with the greatest needs for them, whilst allowing for parasitic waste of flesh and oxygen to suck from the system and to breed their maleficent genetics into the world destroying the American Ecosystem.

WHAT IS AN ECOSYSTEM?
     An ecosystem is a system filled with many different species, all of which should, ideally, live in a harmonious environment among one another, where everything adds, rather than detracts from the system. The ocean is one such ecosystem, where species cohabitate among one another, with a hierarchical structure of predator, prey, producers, consumers and decomposers. These complex systems are dependent on producers to create the vertebrae that keeps the system afloat. Humans also follow these patterns as well and we can break down how each establishes itself into our country. Producers are the job creators, movers and shakers of this world. A producer need not be a businessman, since the arts are also producers, but primarily, businessmen and woman will be the glue that holds the economy together. Consumers are exactly what one would expect, they consume. In biology, consumers are organisms that create no food of their own, much like the general populace, they’re entire being is dependent on being able to get food from the producers.

     Now, we should, in capitalistic society, be based on mutualism, in which relationships are formed with benefit. The role between job provider and employee for example, is one such form of mutualism. Commensalism is where one organism benefits and the other isn’t harmed, exhibited by the roles of parents with their children. The other is parasitic, where the parasite benefits at the expense of the host, but doesn’t kill it, since a non-living organism wouldn’t be beneficial to the parasite, exhibited by government dependents and government themselves, ironically, forming an exclusive form of mutualism, the benefits both, but no one else within the ecosystem.

HUMAN NATURE
     Human beings are considered a complex system, albeit, we’re not really that complex to understand. Humans fall into all different sets of people, but one look to our brethren in the wild and we’re not really that different from the animals we claim to have dominion over. Like an ecosystem, we’re filled with producers and consumers ourselves that fall into other subcategories as well, such as altruist acting, cheats, reciprocators and other types of beings you can read about in The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.

     What we’re going to look at here just those that would come about in regards to social programs as they currently are. Cheats from a selfish gene point of view are animals that benefit in a commensalism nature. To borrow directly, but not verbatim, from the book, some apes groom each other to remove parasitic animals that would otherwise harm the host, even if it doesn’t kill it. Cheats will benefit from this by getting themselves groomed, but not returning the favor, thus the commensalism aspect of the relationship, where one organism benefits, but the other isn’t harm, maybe just it just hurt feelings. When someone doesn’t pay their taxes, they’re referred to as a cheat, because this is the exact type of relationship I am discussing. One of the arguments against welfare is steeped in exactly this type of reasoning and it isn’t erroneous. Welfare leaves rooms for cheats to benefit. The social programs we currently have, almost never actually benefit those who need them most and while welfare fraud is at a very low frequency, that hasn’t stopped some people from being cheats, even if it is rarity in regards to welfare benefits, let’s take a closer look at human nature and that is the perception department.

     The golden ratio deals with humans forms of attractiveness, the higher you are in this ratio, the more symmetrical you are and the more beautiful you are perceived as. You are also viewed as having good genetics and there is a lot of privilege that comes with such beauty. To borrow from Michio Kaku, if you go to the doctors and they ask you what’s wrong, you’re registering good genetics. Humans gauge people on these looks every day and it is partially how we interact with one another for everything from sex to work and beyond. More attractive people are often deemed smarter than their less attractive counterparts, which can negatively impact intelligence quotient scores and perhaps erroneously inflate them as well.

     Currently we don’t have a database that deals with the number of highly attractive people there are in the world, just studies showcasing beautiful privilege, regardless of skin color, this will hold concurrent across races. In other words, subjectivity in regards to race would have little bearing in such. I bring this up because I want to discuss one welfare program, called disability, which is where this will be a huge hurdle for people to clear, when they’re high up on the golden ratio. Just because you’re born attractive, does not mean you cannot have something bad happen to you and this factor comes into play when they go to approve you for disability, seeing attractive people as abled bodies. Often times these people that need it the most will be turned away, while inferior genetics easily get on and for very easy things, such as depression or gender dysmorphia, because them being less attractive makes their plight seem more believable, even when others, with innumerable amount of evidence proving their disability, cannot. Whilst anecdotal, I’ve had friends who were rejected for this very reason, while living in a town where lazy people are ushered into the program and then working the second they get their lavish back pay. A video in regards to this has cropped up on Youtube some years ago and can be found very easy.

FIXING THE SYSTEM
     While we can never know the true extent of fraud that goes on in regards to these programs, we can prove that faulty human nature will err by way of sheer incompetence making the decisions, time and time again. So how can we fix the system and make the world a better place, while seeing both sides of the coin? We need to look at the Universal Basic Income. I know it is a very un-libertarian idea, but it makes sense from all angles, including fiscally conservative. First, studies have shown that when a populace is giving a UBI, more people become entrepreneurs, which creates more producers, making the backbone of our ecosystem stronger. Why is this? Well, some people are trepid and unable to take risk without a safety net. While I cannot have sympathy for these types, I can understand they’re different from me in that regard. The other factor in this, is it is fair to those born with good genetics, who may land on times of hardships and not just subsides genetics that wouldn’t otherwise breed in a Darwinian society. If we look to the number of government programs we spend on each year, the amount is quite costly, without factoring in the lack of yearly revenue from companies missing out on employable people. A UBI would almost certainly be cheaper in the long run and give a bigger boost to the economy than anything that has come before it. Furthermore, a UBI can be given to everyone, including the affluent, without discrimination. It levels the playing field between all types of Americans, reduces the stigma for those who truly need the help and even alleviates the strain on neurotic types that need stability to produce, like with Lazlo’s hierarchy of needs. The benefits, both macro and micro are too many to count and ultimately lead to a more productive society.

RECAPITULATION OR TL;DR
     The economy is an ecosystem, as with any ecosystem, is has it rules and all different types of organism, each with their own set of rules. The rules that govern humans do not work for social programs of most types, as they might be in direct violation of an individual’s personality or a person genetics might impede them form gaining such. The only way to fix this is to look at the Universal Basic Income as a way to impede human nature from harming innocents and causing a rift between leftist and conservatives alike.

Essays, Non-fiction

Generational Gaps in Thought

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INTRODUCTION
     What can be said about generations that hasn’t already been made up, through random samples, by people who lack a degree in any science, never mind sociology? That is what we’re going to attempt to explore in this essay by doing some real analysis and sorting the chaff from the wheat from someone who has actually attended college and knows how sociology works.

WHAT IS A GENERATION
     A generation is defined as a period of twenty years of child births that result in some level of alleged similarity between human beings belonging to this arbitrary system that makes little more sense than the bullshit astrogeology or religion that morons tend to buy into. The idea behind a generation, besides time of birth, is apparently the way of the world at the time someone is born. You know, much like how mars in retrograde impacts gullible people and lunatics use the full moon to blame for their actions or even how some idiots think your magical body energy feels like another generation entirely, unlike Rainman, these people are not idiot savants, they’re just dull. These are the two major things that we’re going to look at and put into perspective in regards to those born into these generations and also what is and isn’t nature vs nurture.


FUCK YEAH, SCIENCE BITCH
     It is important to remember that no one cared about generations prior to the baby boomers and that was important to keep track of in regards to social security, whilst Gen X was only slightly monitored by the government, but with little to care about. Mostly this bullshit comes from marketers looking to make sales and helplessly inept people who don’t understand individual people’s psychology, so they hop on the internet and read the first douchenozzle that created a post, confirming their bias and accepted it as fact. If you don’t match their mold, they suffer sever cognitive dissonance and cannot reason why you are the exception, so it is important to note that most idiots giving a fuck about this shit are predominately sensing types in the MBTI, except they don’t accept the MBTI as a fact, since it is theory and a lot of Sensing types despise theory. Instead, they like to go on personal experience, which one does not inviolate. Sadly for them, we’re what you call intellects and that means personal anecdotal evidence doesn’t count as fact. Now, if there was a way to quantify these things as truths, we could start to consider them as potentially having merit. One should not consider anecdotal the same as observational. Observational is that which is discernible by anyone within the world, it isn’t limited to just one person’s experience. The thing with these sensors is that, their precious experience they’re drawing upon, besides being the hallmark of a giant cuckholded racist prick, is that it lacks falsifiability. Science looks for falsifiability in regards to that which it considers in regards to hypothi. An example of falsifiability is all apples are green. Even if all observable apples are indeed green, it cannot be 100% true that there isn’t red apples.

GENERATIONS II-ELECTRIC BOOGALOU
     We’re going to be discussing three primary generations, whilst temporarily leaving Gen Z out of this, as we will get to them by the end of the article. Right now, we’re dealing with Baby Boomer, Generation X and Millennials, the three generations with the most “adults” within the workforce.

     What years are these generations born into? Good fucking question, because no one has any real data that makes sense in order for it to be a valid truth hood. Let us look at the book, generations, that claimed to have started it all and then extrapolate to that, with the common and more accepted answers that are mindlessly floating all over the internet.

     Generations defined Boomers as 1943-1960, Gen X as 1961-1981 and Millennials as 1982-2004. This may seem different from the years you’re used to, since, much like religion, any asshole with an internet connection and an opinion can hop on, write an article at a 4th grade level, back it up with no real data and have it become easily accepted by the masses who eat this claptrap up. In other words, every idiot thinks they’re an expert, much to the chagrin of those of us who have actually put effort into studying. More common versions of the age ranges put Boomers up to 1964, Gen X from 1966-1982 and Millennials from 1983 until about 1996 or so. These age ranges are easier to work with then the book generations, which is a fantastic work of fiction, with its only equal being L.Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics.

     Here is a venn diagram of generations with overlaps between them and the same tropes they used over and over again, in regards to the generations:

Venn Diagram

     As you can see, a lot of these are easily due to personality types as opposed to rearing. How does independent thinking come about through rearing alone? How about herd mentality? What type of parent would force their child to be a sheep? While some attribute the school system for attempting to force herd think on the child, clearly from one look on the internet, there are plenty of millennials thinking independently. This is falsifiability in action and because we cannot be sure of any one individual’s upbringing, the only conclusion we can draw from the “evidence” is that either the person was born this way or learned the behavior. If they’re born this way, it is most likely from personality type. For instance, the Gen X personality type is made of four different intuitive on the Myers-Brigg’s with the remainder of Millennials being akin to sensing types. Raring would have very little to do with these traits as they would, without a doubt, have been innate in the individual from birth. Albeit, the MBTI is really more of a system, then a collection of traits, but I do think, the system impacts some traits, but can be altered of course. Sensors do not tend to be comfortable with theory, but some can understand it well. This isn’t really a paradox, since a sensors system, combined with say, a higher intelligence, may confer such ability on the personality. No one really bothered to factor in the personality types in regards to generational discrepancy and I think that plays a major problem in regards to how and why people seem to have overlap and confliction in regards to discussion on the individuals that are sampled.

THE GIST OF IT
     Now that we have that out of the way, we need to get into the crux of my article, which is, the MBTI is ultimately responsible for the generational discrepancies and the generations should be turned into personality types and dispense with the rearing bullshit, since very little is discernible from the untrained person, in regards to a person’s background.

     Hitherto, we’ve had only someone’s personal testimony to relay on from a second hand source. In other words, no one has bother to check the veracity of the claims in regards to the sampling of people that took part in nonexistent studies. These have never been the backbone of science, nor have they ever contributed to anything outside of the odd whack job article, riddled with typos, written at a 4th grade level and slapped onto the internet with little thought put into the implications of such. Now we have a deeper understanding of how science should work in regards to these types of hypothi, but not a single one on the internet hold ups to snuff. Much like fake news is now abhorrent, we should also look at pseudo-science the same way and extirpate that from our lives as well. If you choose to indulge yourself in such piffle, that is up to you, but do not expect everyone to be peachy keen on your ignorance, nor should it be accepted enmass. Just because you’re unable to think critically, doesn’t mean everyone is like yourself. Solipsism plays a small factor in such atrocities against the thinking mindset and colleges really need to do back to teaching critical thinking, but I digress.

     Furthermore, we should demand more from studies if they’re going to claim to be such and ask for and demand more of these people evidence. I was able to, in less than 10 pages, showcase everything wrong with generational bullshit, but these people cannot even add real data to supplement their experience? The generational gaps being reworked to become personality types as opposed to years of birth, as it would make a lot more sense and even help within the workforce. Not everyone needs to be told what to do and some people work better in groups, these are traits that we can observe, but cannot really have much to do with upbringing and while we cannot always appreciate the nuance in the differences between us, we need to learn to accept them as parts of a system and genetic as opposed to things that can be changed. A tiger cannot change his stripes, nor can the thinker repress their thoughts.

     Now, I turn my sights to Gen Z, whom are just really getting into adulthood, I don’t know shit from shinola about how they were raised and minus the few dullards on the internet eating tide pods, they are all different individuals and should be seen as such. They are a group of people, made up of different backgrounds, different personality types. Some match the core experience, some are outliers who don’t fit the mold. Some of them are young right now and some are mentally old. Regardless of the pattern, let us learn from our past mistakes and correct course while we can, because our future depends on these kids being heard and given an opportunity to shine and the only way to do that is give them a hand up, because they seem to have quite a hand on what is going on and an ability to bring that message to the world, let us give them the chance no one was willing to give the other generations and hear them out whilst wishing them luck, so they won’t be stuck betwixt a rock and a hard place in their adulthood!

Non-fiction, Opinion

What Giving Up TV and Video Games for 7 years, taught me.

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     The year is 2011, I’m twenty-five years old and I am absolutely sick and tired of media and consuming it. Every other movie is a remake, every other video game is a sequel or update and television is filled with even worse television than some of the stuff I imbibed as a child growing up in the 1990’s. What is a person to do when you’re bored with the same claptrap day in, day out, year after year? You give it all up and see what happens.

     First, lets put it all out there so that we know what led into this, since it wasn’t just waking up one day and quitting. The last video game I chose to play was Modern Warfare 2, I bought a used copy of Skyrim in 2013 and beta tested The Elder Scrolls online. Before Modern Warfare 2, I had bought was MLB 2k6 in 2007, when I was 21. I finished Elder Scrolls 4 in 2011, five years after it was released, one winter, whilst having a few beers. I rented Ghostbusters: The Video Game and loved it! Gears of War was also the last series I found intriguing.

     These are all major gaps in my video game history, as an adult. So already, as I was getting older, I was moving away from video games as they were just a waste of time, constantly the same thing they yielded nothing in return. Basically, video games were a slightly healthier version of cigarettes.

     Next came television, which started at about 20. I never watched much past 18 and when I did, it was Monday Night Raw or Smackdown as well as the news. I watched the first season of Lost in 2004 and said screw this, it wasn’t good enough to keep me watching. Part of that was the poorly done, lack of tying up loose ends at the end of the season. I tried the first season of The Walking Dead and said the same thing, for similar reasons. I did find myself enjoying How I Met your Mother, but little else that I hadn’t already liked as a child or teenager.

     Movies, the last one I saw prior to Star Wars The Force Awakens was the remake of A Nightmare on Elm St , before that, The Dark Knight, Toy Story 1 and 2 3D and Friday the 13th remake, Clerks 2, Superman Returns preceded by Revenge of the Sith.

     As you can see, my desire to consume media was waning and the older I got, the more it thinned out into a watery clearness, like a glass of wine. So it wasn’t like I just got sick and tired one day, it was a long journey and the build up to freedom.

     First thing, I went back to writing a lot more like when I was a child and teenager. I quadrupled my book buys and had a lot more to discover new enjoyment. I exercised, gain weight, lost weight, gained again and lost again, and will lose weight one more time. I rode my bike again, something I hadn’t been able to do since I was a child, since we lived in areas were doing so was tough. I ended up giving my bike to a homeless man, who needed it to get to and from work and he thanked me with a hug. I brushed up my skills on middle school Spanish and learned German as well. I’m currently planning to learn three more at the very least, plus sign language. I finished multiple novels and Pre-Crime, as well as starting Bestinyourgirl.com, along with exercising my right to dissent against local politicians and making their lives an outright living hell, for their ineptitude.

     I accidentally started smoking in 2011 around the same time and actually drinking, but those are going to be easy to extirpate from my life. Well, maybe not booze entirely, but cigarettes, absolutely. Life has been really, really good in what I have been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time, within the last seven years.

     I have since decided to give some entertainment a try, after a long time away, but I don’t miss it and I am very selective on what I am willing to waste my time on. I rarely watch Netflix, but will visit the movies, I play some games from my youth, but could see myself adopting Virtual Reality games when they get more honed and I don’t think I will bother much with traditional television ever again.

     I think the journey was one of the more interesting undertakings I have ever done and would do so again in a heartbeat. You can learn so much more about yourself and I always favored a more active style in what I do as opposed to passively sitting there watching one more crap movie, one more crap show, play one more crap video game just to not even have the energy to review it, because it sucked your soul out, like a dementor at Hogwarts.

     I’m not saying what I did was right for everyone, but if you’re so inclined to give it a go, I would highly recommend it, as I think you’ll find so much more pleasure away from the mindless monotony of zombified entertainment.

Essays, Non-fiction

Why I Hate Modern Prose

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     The only thing tougher than being a writer sometimes, is being a reader. I’ve had the chance to read some blogs, articles, poems and the like and find those to be pretty well done and in some cases, writing far better than my own. Don’t get me wrong, I still adore books and reading, but the last 10 years have made me really sadden and depressed when it comes to the novel, primarily.

     In no period of human history, short of the 1800s until about the invention of the television set, has the novel been the primary form of a person’s love and adoration, baring the few of us who really enjoy it, to the point our rooms look like Belle’s Library in Beauty and the Beast. The irony here is the amount of people who want to write one at some point in their lives far outnumbers the amount of readers.

     It doesn’t take much to find books in today’s day and age, but the amount isn’t the problem, it’s the prose that is and with that, I am depressed, because with so many more options, there could be so much better writing.
I don’t pretend to be the William Shakespeare of my generation, only with a modicum of luck and ingenuity, I may be able to make such beautiful works myself. That said, I still think most of what is floating around out there is rubbish. It makes it hard as a reviewer sometimes to find things that I would love to write about, when every other book is a 50 Shades of Gray.

     I look at The New York Times bestsellers list and I still see a lot of the same authors adorning it as when I was a child. I’m a 32 year old man, in 6 months I shall be 33. While 33 years on this planet may not be the longest amount of time to have lived, it is long enough to know that it is a problem when I can only come across the same authors, some who have been writing longer than I have been on this planet, on The New York Times bestsellers and wonder why these are the only authors I can come across. When it isn’t the same author’s, sometimes it’s their children. Is there no one new?

     Not a single person on that list doesn’t deserve their success, they merited it, but I can’t help but think of how much that success is partly owned to gauging the work by the amount of money it makes as opposed to the prose. Don’t even get me started on the awards, I don’t believe for a second an award has any meaning anymore. Game of Thrones has a Nebula award, I shit you not. How does something like this happen? Do reviewers not even know how to do their jobs anymore? There once was a time when the critic meant something, they were people who understood their niche in reviewing. They understood beautiful prose and exquisite story telling. Now everyone is a critic, but not a good one. Critics remind me of the age old adage about everyone having a novel in them and in most cases, that is where it should stay, except replace novel with criticism. Being a critic is no longer for the sake of intellectualizing about books anymore, but serves only to exist for one more asshole to attach Stephen King, George R.R.Martin, Ann Rice, J.K. Rowling, Vince Flynn, James Patterson, Dean Kootz, Joe Hill or some other more successful writer than they are for SEO and chase that $0.01 blimp from drawing someone into their blog. It works too! I don’t blame people for doing this, it is human nature, looking to capitalize and make money, but we’re people are struggling over pennies, when most of you couldn’t even be bothered to bend down on the street to pick one up. Irony is when not even 10 years ago, the government seriously considered phasing out the penny, but when the same object is digital, it is gold!

     Writing is hardly the only spectrum to be hit with this, one look at the trends on Youtube and we can see a generic no name rapper attacking a well-established star to get themselves over with the crowd.

     The new age where anyone can now go out and do whatever they wanted hasn’t helped much to alleviate this at all. Now there is so many more options, but who am I going to read? You have to do so much more footwork now a day, because an award is as meaningless as doing household chores, critics have no fucking clue what they’re talking about, they just want to be blow hards for the sake of being blow hards, your average fan with no special knowledge of writing doesn’t know shit from shinola, but they know what they like and with any typical fan they will gush about you from here to Alaska without missing a beat, because of how you made them feel.

     I know having guardians that can decide to can and cannot publish isn’t a great thing for most people, because they too, are all about marketability when it comes to books and each year, we lose out on amazing potential authors who deserved to have their book published, but when the opposite end of the spectrum offers the same set up, are creators and consumers really winning? Is there no happy medium where we can concentrate on beautiful prose and still have the occasional 50 Shades of Gray, instead of attempts to rank in Google searches, monetization, attack artist you once enjoyed, boycott things, frivolously on Twitter, because they threaten you, not because you actually believe in the bullshit you espouse? Just to get that pittance of money? I don’t think so, and to quote Bill Hick’s, “All my heroes are dead!” I’m glad too, because I couldn’t imagine how I might feel if they were alive and doing this shit!

     I’m not free of absolution here, I am just as complicit as anyone, because of my desire to write and communicate my thoughts so they can be understood from a wide audience and you do not have to have a Ph.D to understand my writing. I sold out, a long time ago and I don’t know if I am better or worse off for it.

     After reading Dracula the other night and coming away from it, feeling as I did when I was a kid, just discovering books for the first time, I had this epiphany. It wasn’t even just the book that inspired this piece, it is partially brewing for a while, because of critic’s ineptitude and then there is the fact Twitter has also allowed me to see deeper than any other social media. Looking at random accounts, some with blue check marks, and not for real world success. There are people who have fans, just for being fans. What the fuck is wrong with this world? 20k followers just for enjoying things. Meanwhile, I watch people who have actually worked in Hollywood, with fewer followers than your random blogger and have to wonder to myself, what the fuck! Who would want to write and especially well, when your fans will end up with a better following just for loving you?

     I don’t profess to have all the answers in regards to this, but I do know, I don’t like this new world, one that is championing mediocrity and promoting idiocrasy. Up until now, I wasn’t like a lot of people with nostalgia for the past, because I don’t miss it. I do miss discovering good lit though and that, if anything, is what truly has be nostalgic. I defer to Kylo Ren when he said “Let the past die, it’s the only way to become what you were truly meant to be.” Couldn’t that be at a higher plane than we are now, though?

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Slight edits to text 14 OCT 2018 9:29 AM

Essays, Non-fiction

Elitest Snobbery 101 or No, you don’t own that!

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     Progressive, what a scary word! The right tossed it around as another word for the Socialist, leftist embraced its use as a euphemism for communism, but it in no way does this word mean socialism or communism. So what exactly does progressive mean? It means to advance, to progress and to move forward.

     Why then, is it becoming a bad word like Liberal was made out to be in the 1960s? What is so collectivist about that word? Surely a business man who expands his business and creates more jobs for Americans is being progressive, is he not?

     If being a progressive is a bad thing, then those of you who are in opposition to progress must be regressive, right? You wish to go backwards in our country and bring back years of horrible oppression towards people of difference, archaic laws that squelched human rights and dignity or downright hurt others, then? What’s that you say? You are not for regressing. Oh, so that would make you a progressive, would it not? You want to move forward then, right?

     The difference is only in how we agree to do it. Everyone is a progressive. We all want to move forward and better ourselves. Isn’t that what life is about? If we didn’t progress, wouldn’t we all still be living with our parents? That would be one huge collective house hold, the likes America hasn’t seen since the 1800s.

     So we must advance the dialogue in this country, not use fear to sway public opinion. Those who would seek to influence public opinion with propaganda must be called out and chastised for it, not heralded. Words cannot be high jacked by just one party alone, nor can they be used to slander individuals for their thoughts. Words are not meant to be owned by just one individual, they’re here for all of use to communicate with one another. Humans are meant to use them to form whole sentences, which create paragraphs, which exhibit meaning, in order to use them to elucidate on ideas, refute abhorrent trains of thought or otherwise engage in a civil discourse that propels the narrative forward. The next time you hear someone use progressive like it’s a bad thing, remind them that our country was founded by progressives and built up by progressives. That city you live in? It was built by progressives. That car you drive? It was built by progressives. God himself, if you believe in him or her, was a progressive.

     It’s time to take words back and use it in its proper context, along with other words being blindly molested by nefarious actors, looking to get a quick blip of emotion out of otherwise, rational humans, if not for desire to be team players. Being progressive is not dirty, socialistic or communist. It’s the American way. American exceptionalism is built on American progressivism. After all, we all want what is best for America, don’t we?

     So are you progressive or regressive?

Essays, Journalism, Non-fiction

Twitter Dee and Twitter Dumb

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Twitter has a real problem and no, I don’t mean the fact it is the only social media company that cannot make money.  I started an account for @Bestinyourgirl back in 2014 with the desire to build it up for promotional purposes.  By January 2016, I had just broken 400 in the early days of the account seen below:

10422176_10156521715470177_8855192212611536022_n

By the end of that same year, I had hit 600 on Twitter and it only seemed to be going up and up. My statistics were great, showing I knew what I was doing on Twitter, is was great for me, because I had no clue what I was actually doing, but still excelling.

14681818_10157526789330177_6953811081355953899_n
mid-late 2016, when I first broke 600 followers on Twitter.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I noticed though, that by the end of 2017, my followers really started taking a hit and everything I had worked to build on Twitter was going to hell, including the statistics that showcased I had merited an account, worthy of being in the middle tier of “successful” accounts. I was and am not a Twitter legend, but given that I had no clue what I was doing in 2014, I was very proud of what I accomplished in so little time.

Now, up until a couple days ago, my account stayed at about 380-ish, when my account started to balloon again, along with my tweets and statistics doing better again. It could be just interesting timing with the Tweets, but I suspect it isn’t. The weird thing is, all my new followers, baring a few, were ghost accounts. So I looked into this and found nothing. Here is the account as of Oct 10th 2018

newtiwtter

Back at 400, and growing, which is interesting. So, now I decided to go investigate how many accounts are real and here are the results:

twitteraudit

A majority of my 400 followers are real, except wait, that says 572, about the same amount I had by mid 2016, of 600, if you add in the fake ones, it is over 600. Also, Twitter says I only have 400. So the question becomes, why is Twitter removing and then allowing back these accounts, so that my count keeps going up and improving my Twitter stats again? Clearly Twitter should know the difference between fake accounts and real accounts, right? I’m not the only one being hit by this and this doesn’t seem to be discriminating between left or right leaning politics, it just hurting everyone who has taken the care to build their brand online, using these services and the sheer incompetence exhibited by Twitter, not just as entrepreneurs, but as service providers is staggering.

I for one do not think this is a result of Twitter attempting to get rid of fake accounts, something that doesn’t do much at all to boost most Twitter accounts. I think that was a way to save face and skit responsibility to avoid a lawsuit from brands being crippled by the system in favor of of lifting up verified or more followed accounts to attempt to make some money.

Has anyone else had this problem? How has it impacted you? Comment below!

 

Edit: Minor corrections to the text @ 9:52 pm October 10th 2018. Also, account is now at 401 and slowly growing still.