Out of the Spider Hole…Fifteen Years Hence

Libertarian-Socialism.org

On the 15th anniversary of Saddam Hussein being pulled from his hideout by American troops, I was taken back to aught three. The media referred to it constantly as his “spider hole” all throughout the end of the year back in 2003. It made me think about how 2003 pushed me back into the political debate. I had been fairly apolitical after the birth of my children, but the invasion of Iraq jarred me from this stupor. I was forced to reconsider my cynical politics and start speaking out. I put up a web site and started blogging. I also linked to the forged documents that had been used to convince Americans they needed to invade Iraq. To my surprise, when I tried to advertise the site, Google flagged me as a hate site. I write about a bit here. I Operated a Hate SIte I had no recourse. Thinking about this now in the context of the 2016 election, I have become a bit annoyed. Google, Facebook and Twitter are acting like their monitoring for hate sites is in its infancy or they were not really thinking about it until 2017. I know for sure that fifteen years ago that there was a policy and a process to flag hate sites. I also know it was not transparent and that now these companies are even more powerful. They have become public utilities in my opinion. Finally as we close out the holidays with historically low unemployment and fairly high stock market valuations despite the volatility, please think about the homeless. They are economic refugees and they are all over the nation. It does not matter what the statistics coming out of DC look like. It does not matter what the numbers are, when there are homeless everywhere, it is not a successful economy. This is not the America that I believe in. Where we ignore people in need and allow them to whither in the streets.