The Political Hat

     Apparently a recent post here has been declared so unconscionable by Reddit that your humble author’s Reddit account was suspended for three days. The content of said post being a link to this blog containing… a video of William F. Buckley’s “Firing Line” with guest Allen Ginsburg talking about the “Avant Garde“… from about half a century ago.

     Upon what basis is this done? The video, btw, is on the copyright holder’s own channel that doesn’t disallow embedding.

     Does Reddit apply such strict copyright standards to other posts to other webpages that link to yet another’s video service which might or might not contain copyright questionable material?

     Does this have to do with the title of “Firing Line” which applies to a show that debuted over half-a-century ago and has nothing to do with “guns” or even a “threat” of violence.

     If you believe that William F. Buckley’s “Firing Line” featuring formative figures of the Left is beyond the pale, then perhaps people ought to know your political ideology that determines what the vast majority of Americans, if not most in the world, is presented as absolute truth beyond reproach.

     Your humble author is not ignorant of the current and past particulars that have indicated the threat of a select few digital oligarchs ruling over the news, entertainment, and information from which most people derive their knowledge and information. But also, one must be cognizant that any rule that can be used against a gatekeeper can be used by a gatekeeper against you, if power were to shift.

     One of the refrains often heard to those who haven’t been purged, yet, from some popular proprietary platform is either an outright, or paraphrased, quote from Martin Niemöller’s “First they came” poem that posited that those who did not object to some more extreme sounding position were guilty of accepting the extreme position of some declared opposition, and so later purged. Divide and Conquer, so as to speak.

     Yet the reality was that those who believed in such fundamental principles and liberties won some times in a rear-guard action, but did not dig deeper into the fundamentals from whence the principles and liberties camefrom and assumed that temporary victories (and all the #winning that came with it) was but transitory.

     What then?

     Is some transitory governmental control worth the precedent of control by a far more established, in a Fabian fashion, opposition?

     Is there such faith that all opposition to what we hold so dear and important is incorporated in some fantastical conspiracy that can be dismissed, leading to a thousand year plus utopia?

     Of course not.

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