Paypal removes ban on Jihad Watch
[NOTE: This post refers back to events that were decribed in a previous post.]
Paypal, in its infinite mercy (that’s sarcasm, by the way, in case it’s not clear), has decided to reinstate the account of Jihad Watch, previously banned by Paypal as a hate site.
Robert (not Richard!!!) Spencer of Jihad Watch writes:
The Left, seeing a golden opportunity when a Nazi psychopath plowed his car into a crowd of Leftists in Charlottesville, tried to use the moment as its Reichstag Fire, and crush all dissent from the hard-Left line. And there is no doubt that initiative will continue. But in banning Jihad Watch, PayPal overreached, and encountered a crowd of free citizens.
Correct.
Paypal is a company, and it’s free to ban anyone it wants. And people are free to react to that banning. In banning Jihad Watch, which is not a hate site but which is devoted to monitoring Islamic terrorism, Paypal must have encountered enough of a backlash to make it worth their while to reinstate the site.
I have long used Paypal on my blog, too, because it has been the best way to accept donations. I did some research last night on alternatives, and didn’t come up with a good one. For now, I will probably retain Paypal, but if anyone has an alternative to suggest that makes sense, I would certainly consider it for the future. One of the problems is that this sort of thing has become almost universal (Google being a prominent example as well).
[NOTE: I am beginning to think that Robert Spencer should start using a middle name to better distinguish himself from Richard Spencer. Just a middle initial wouldn’t work, because they both have the middle initial B.]
I am beginning to think that Robert Spencer should start using a middle name to better distinguish himself from Richard Spencer.
neo: Agreed. I made that mistake myself in a discussion with Somebody.
I’m glad PayPal relented. I buy stuff occasionally on eBay and was considering setting up a PayPal account but not now.
You should consider accepting bitcoin.
Paypal is notoriously bad for shutting down / suspending accounts first and asking questions later. Actually, not asking, nor explaining much or well as to why after the fact.
This has put some small businesses at financial risk, as any cash they may have in their account is unretrievable for an extended time.
Tip: regularly clear the Paypal account of funds, if your business relies on that money.
@Neo – Article on alternatives that might be reasonable for your needs:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/online-payments-paypal-alternatives/
The reality is that until something like Bitcoin becomes more mainstream (and it has its own cons), any service is open to using the ban hammer.
Robert Spencer is close to a saint in my book for his steadfast, articulate defense of Western Civilization against jihadist Islam.
The pay is poor and the danger great.
Alternatives to PayPal?
Google Wallet is very popular.
Cornflour:
I looked up the alternatives, and I forget the details but Google Wallet had some significant drawbacks for blogs. Google is also in the PC political censorship business, every bit as much as Paypal if not more.
I was kidding about Google. Frying pan, fire, and all that.
Cornflour:
Oh dear, hope I’m not losing my sense of humor.
neo-neocon Says:
August 22nd, 2017 at 7:06 pm
Cornflour:
Oh dear, hope I’m not losing my sense of humor.
* * *
If you think it’s funny now, your sense of humor is fine.
Not catching sarcastic remarks in the first place is not hard to do, even when you know the context and the commenters, especially if tired or busy thinking of something else.
One of the advantages of this rather small board is that diligent daily readers can get a sense of personality to help with that judgment, but even then it’s easy to mis-read a bald text.
You may have to insist on sarc tags, just because so much of reality is quoting from The Onion.
No sarc tags please. We depend on innate intelligence.
Good laughs. I missed it too, but then thought “who’s cornflour?” based on old posts.
I’ve lately been wondering if Richard Spencer owes his popularity to people mistaking him for Robert.
“Spencer a neo-Nazi? No way, I’ve been reading his Jihad Watch stuff for years!”
“Spencer a neo-Nazi? No way, I’ve been reading his Jihad Watch stuff for years!”
Yackums: Yep. I did it.
Here’s a similar story which bears repeating.
Salil Mehta is an adjunct professor at Columbia, and runs a popular statistics-based blog. On Friday, he discovered that his Blogspot blog – which had 150k subscribers and had been read 27 million times – had been taken down by Google.
To make matters worse, his Gmail email had also been disabled. “I was completely shut down in all my Google accounts (all of my gmail accounts, blog, all of my university pages that were on google sites, etc.) for no reason and no warning,” he said.
Mehta says Google gave him no reason for suspending his account, but he seemed to hint that his blog was taken down because of some controversial posts he’d written. “Freedom is not free unless corporations who exert a large influence in our lives believe in our well-being,” he said. Some of his blogposts, which which were widely read and cited by outlets like NYT and Bloomberg, appeared to support Trump’s decisions using statistics. When Donald Trump had introduced his Muslim immigration ban, he’d used probability theory to prove how people from those nations were “a thousand times more likely to commit terrorist attacks against the US.”
https://officechai.com/news/statistics-professor-gets-blocked-google-blog-taken-gmail-account-frozen/#sthash.uRWqUvmI.dpbs
Mehta has since had his Google privileges restored.
However, Google in its infinite, divine remoteness from ordinary folk, even a professor at Columbia, chose not to explain anything.
Mehta’s response was abject:
I also don’t carry any grievance towards any part of Google, and have no intention of further comments.
I love Big Brother.
Following on from Mehta, for those who might suppose there’s not that much risk in opposing The Narrative while working in academia…
I don’t know if anyone remembers Engram (though I’ll bet neo does), who had a blog supporting the Iraq War from 2006-2008.
On the blog masthead:
I am a professor at a major research university, a registered Democrat, a liberal by some measures, but a radical conservative relative to the large majority of my colleagues.
In his profile he said:
I’m married with kids. Pre-9/11, I was a politically incurious liberal, but my curiosity increased substantially — and my views changed considerably — after 9/11.
Engram wrote painstakingly clear posts, like neo’s only with lots of graphs. I suspect Engram was an economist or statistician.
A week after Obama was elected Engram stopped posting and deleted all his beautiful web pages.
Fortunately I downloaded almost all of them before Engram faded back into the shadows again.
“I am beginning to think that Robert Spencer should start using a middle name to better distinguish himself from Richard Spencer.”
No. Even if his name was Richard Spencre, nobody should have to change their name just because snowflakes are triggered by it. Doing so just encourages the SJWs to declare themselves triggered by even more ridiculous things, and every inch you give just lends more power to the inevitable tantrum they throw when they can no longer be appeased.
The ALt Right is used to rofle stomping SJWs, but what are they going to do about Islamic Jihad and the capital of evil DC? Is Trum going to rofl stomp them so easily now.
Tatterdemalian Says:
August 23rd, 2017 at 6:19 am
nobody should have to change their name just because snowflakes are triggered by it.
* * *
Unless you’re an Asian sportscaster on ESPN.
huxley Says:
August 23rd, 2017 at 3:32 am
Following on from Mehta, for those who might suppose there’s not that much risk in opposing The Narrative while working in academia…
I don’t know if anyone remembers Engram (though I’ll bet neo does), who had a blog supporting the Iraq War from 2006-2008.
* * *
A very smart man; I loved his blog, which probably shaped a lot of my political views once I started paying attention (was a very well-educated but LIV for many years due to focusing on other priorities).
He illuminated other topics than just the war.
I was not foresighted enough to copy his work, alas, because at the time I thought Blogs were Forever (who would care enough to shut them down?).
There were a few reports claiming to “out” him; maybe they were right and that’s why he went undercover.
(Maybe he was just a troll from the VRWC and saw he had “lost”??)
Anyway, he set a very high standard for evidence and argumentation.
More from the Mehta link:
“Mehta then tweeted to Google’s top leaders, including CEO Sundar Pichai and Eric Schmidt, hoping to get their attention. Several prominent personalities tweeted about his situation, including editors at prominent publications, and Nicholas Nassim Taleb, author of the bestselling The Black Swan.
…
But Mehta’s situation only underscores how risky putting all your eggs in the Google basket can be – he’s lost a popular blog, his email account, and all his contact information because Google chose to block his account for unspecified reasons. And worse, when contacted, Google has given him no further information, but only directed him to read Google’s Terms of Service.
When a service is free, it’s probably free for a reason.”
* * *
Mehta got his accounts back because he had a public platform from which to call attention to Google’s Goolag.
And the Tech Monopolists have served notice that their TOS rules are just the floor: they will arbitrarily ban you for anything they want.
The Internet Archive (archive.org) has saved Engram’s blog 193 times between 6-11-2007 and 11-9-2016.
The URL for the archived pages is
https://web.archive.org/web/*/engram-backtalk.blogspot.com
The current URL for Engram’s blog is
http://engram-backtalk.blogspot.com
The blog isn’t very active. Over the years, it’s undergone substantial changes, and it’s now mostly a platform for attacking Trump. Older blog entries aren’t available via the blog itself.
I’m not sure, but I think that the blog is written by John Wixted, a professor of Psycholgy at UCSD (University of California, San Diego).
I was never a reader of Engram’s blog, but the comments by huxley and AesopFan piqued my curiosity, so I looked a few things up. Am passing on what I learned, in case anyone else wants to know.
P.S. Here’s Wikipedia’s definition of engrams:
Engrams are theorized to be means by which memories are stored[1] as biophysical or biochemical[2] changes in the brain (and other neural tissue) in response to external stimuli.