Unadulterated Conversation with Boomer Kimberly 'Hitch' Hitchens of Booknook.biz
"My attitude is simple; I'm a Libertarian and free speech is that hill I'll die on."
Unadulterated Conversation with Hitch
Readers are seldom interested in what is going on behind e-books to get them published. It was my pleasure to become acquainted with a remarkable woman before she passed in June, an e-book designer. formerly a New York model, soldier, website designer, and hotel designer.
World's Most Popular Blogger Blogs Again!
ME I paraphrase the most popular i.e. highest trafficked blogger on the Web when blogs became the thing over 20 years ago. Runner up was a woman who posted SCREAMS in various forms. Pay was a nickel a hit. I cracked up. It gave blogs a bad name for a while.
HITCH Uh, yeah. I seem to remember it being nearly...when? Gosh, there were already 8 billion--billions!--blogs, in the early eighties on Google's blogger. Amazing, really.
ME Lol. What amazed me is how blogging stars arose, got tons and tons of traffic with chit chat, I couldn't figure out why really, that was a sort of Facebook twitter precursor I guess. The stars were nobodies really, not Trump--I hear he has his own thing, dunno how it's doing. The funniest of all was that lady who just screamed in different ways and got hundreds of reactions. I noticed at the time a book came out in Hawaii in pidgin authored by a Filipino girl about how her father kept raping her etc. Sold out.
HITCH Uh, let's see, Trump's thing is actually the most downloaded app on Apple's whatsit platform, you know, their app store for iPhones and iPads and Macs. I think people got tired of the one-sidedness, and the high-handedness, of Twitter. Well, Elon Musk sure did. ;-)
ME Indeed. I don't make my decisions and actions dependent upon what someone says on Twitter or anywhere else. It's best to have opinions aired. Censorship on Facebook is childish. Social media is fine for marketing but not a great place to socialize in my opinion.
HITCH My attitude is simple; I'm a Libertarian and free speech is that hill I'll die on. Yes, both Twitter and FB are private companies--but they are private companies now 100% protected from the consequences of their actions by the government, and CDA 230. [see Note below]. That's unacceptable. If they want to censor and ban people, and do that selectively--ducky, but then let them stand up in court when they get sued for the selective application of their rules and TOS etc. and explain it. Let a jury of everybody's peers decide. Love or hate Trump, the sheer unmitigated HUBRIS of a company like Twitter, banning the President of the United States? The Leader of the Free World? Can you imagine what the airwaves would be like, if they banned Uncle Joe Biden? OMG, you could hear the wails and lamentations of the women from here to Mars. It's absurdly one-sided and I have no reason on earth to believe that they were remotely even-handed about it. I mean, as people have often said, the Ayatollah, who openly calls for the destruction of Israel, hey, he is still on Twitter, but Trump isn't? That's just nuts. They control too much of the modern-day information flow--Musk is right.
ME Hey, as a part-time libertarian I agree with you 100%! I actually got condemned to limbo by Facebook for saying, "speaking hyperbolically, I believe the ambassador from Russia should have been hung by the General Assembly for lying." Someone explained to me privately that the company is expanding in Russia
HITCH Yes, well...it's like MLB deciding to cancel the All-Star Game in Georgia, over their "pernicious" voting laws, allegedly all Jim Crow and all that, when Biden's own state has stricter voting requirements--and now, they're going to play in the Middle East, where they are about as woke as my cat, still putting gay folks to death. YEAH, that makes perfect sense (not).
ME Remember, opposition or contradiction is what rolls wheel. Biden is a machine about run down. Trump is off the rails already. What to do? Write a book? Buy gold?
HITCH I'm at the point of just...giving up. It's too exhausting. The Dems are all party first, country second, taxpayer last. The last two might be out of order. The Republicans are disorganized, which hardly is surprising. After all, they don't rule top-down, from the party, with the RNC handing out monies "if" you obey or not and given how they feel about individual freedoms, et al, it's not surprising. The Libertarians...sigh. They should be the perfect party, but you also get total nuts in there. I mean, REALLY nuts. Look around--Musk has gone Libertarian, b/c the Dems have left him, Bill Maher doesn't know it yet, but he's at best Libertarian, possibly conservative. Jonathan Turley and ALAN FREAKING DERSHOWITZ are now on NewsMax, which is considered a conservative channel. Meanwhile we have nuts that are now dismissing "Boomers" out of hand, saying that all the lead paint and gas fumes (lead) when we were growing up made us all demented and incapable of learning. And let's not forget, some deranged Supreme Court Clerk who thought that s/he knew best, that leaking that draft decision was the "right" thing to do, so now we have marchers trying to INTIMIDATE Supremes into changing their minds--and law enforcement does nothing about it, even though there's a federal law against that very thing. Why? Because Biden and his AG think that this marching and intimidation works for them, come November. So, now we have selective law enforcement, around marching, protesting, intimidation, the border.... I can't take it.
ME I know. Insane!
xYx
Image Above: Kimberly “Hitch” Hitchens
Note: CDA 230 CDA 230 refers to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a US law that provides immunity to online platforms from liability for content posted by their users. This means websites and social media companies are generally not held responsible for content created by their users.