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For years, people would ask me how I do my research. Online and in radio interviews I always gave basic, vague answers because I was trying to protect my small market share. I didn't want to create my own competition because I was being selfish. It was a mistake. [Today's thread]

 Market share is not the right term, really. I never received a dime for my years of conspiracy debunking and putting out truth to combat the world of lies people encounter online. Perhaps it is better to call it my niche.
I did it for free, in my spare time, while working two jobs and writing novels when the urge struck me. I did it because I was extraordinarily concerned with people being manipulating by the BS the find online.
So people often asked how I figured it out. How did you dig that up? Why wasn't that in the article I read? I've never seen that before! WHY haven't I seen that before?
I would give answers like..

You didn't look in the right places.
Or,
You need to double-check your sources.

Those sorts of answers.

"It's just a thing I do. I probably couldn't even show you how to do it."
I did write a humorous little book titled, Just Stop. In it, I tried to help people understand how conspiracy theorists design their scam, how to spot it, and how to avoid being a victim of it, but I didn't really show them how to "do their own research" to do it themselves.
Me and others doing that - protecting our "thing"- was a bad idea, I think. We should have been teaching people how to navigate the labyrinthine chaos of the worldwide web. We should have shown them how to check their confirmation bias at the keyboard and find actual answers.
I even went so far as occasionally portraying myself as knowing far less about technology than I did.

"I'm a gray-haired old man on the innerwebs. I'm just an old gumshoe."

It wasn't true.
Even some friends would be shocked when they recommend I try a new system or program and I'd tell them I did that and also added this other thing &.... "Wow, I thought this would be harder for you!"

"Bitch, I was running PCs from command prompt before your parents met!"
But...I didnt tell people that. Now, I'm no tech genius and tech advances faster than I can keep up but I can hold my own for what I need to do.

I type over 90 wpm, which scares people sometimes when they see a balding grumpy guy tapping away on the keys.
Still, I was always downplaying everything and shrugging and being coy.

How many people could I have saved from the conspiracy theory rabbit hole if I had taught people how to do it? Instead, I let them rely on going to my website for MY stuff.
I wrote a novel titled, Patriot Deception. In it, I described various vague things about online activity and various programs. When IT people told me I did a good job of describing things clearly, I would literally deflect and say I had to do a lot of research about it.
No, I didn't! It was stuff I was doing every damn day. LoL I sort of really got into my online persona of a relatively technology challenged old investigator, struggling to uncover the great mystery.

In most cases, the job took me about 15 minutes.
I still never taught anyone how to do it.

I saw basically no other examples of researchers teaching people HOW to properly research the "news" the absorbed constantly.

So I didn't either.

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Totalitarianism is best understood as the politicization of everything. Every facet of life is infused with political meaning... and subjected to political control. There is little room for privacy or individualism. Every word and deed is seen as a political action.

Totalitarianism does *not* require authoritarian government, although it usually leads to such. You can be totalitarian without having any real government power at all, enforcing your political will through mob actions and corporate power. Examples from recent history abound.

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🧵 @DianeLangberg wrote about NDAs in Christian environments, noting “An NDA is an agreement to hide something. In the cases I have encountered it has always been an agreement to exercise power over and hide sin.... [it is] unlike our Lord.”
1/

NDAs are traditionally “non-disclosure” - don’t talk about specific X. Often in church/ministry cases - they’re overly broad - don’t talk abt *anything* re: your employment

but also may include

“non-disparagement” - don’t say anything negative about us EVEN IF IT IS TRUE
2/

Numerous articles have described the use of NDAs in Christian environments and the conflict with principles described in the very faith supposedly being promoted. I’m linking them here then I’ll offer my 20-year lawyer and victim of silencing (gag order) take on the practice.
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“Silence of the sheep” (2018) from @emlybelz described how the conference of catholic bishops has now banned NDAs in abuse cases but how some churches and Christian orgs still use them without

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To the person who thinks that they might be autistic. - a thread. /1

I imagine you have gone your entire life wondering why you are different, why you can't seem to understand things the way that others can and why everything just seems so hard. I'm proud of you for getting this far. /2

Part of you might be thinking:
"But if I was autistic, surely it would've been noticed when I was a kid? So maybe I'm making this up."
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Christianity has been a weapon used by systems of oppression to call that which is harmful and abusive; good and God’s will. It has been a weapon to normalize hegemonic power, and keep people from questioning it or challenging it because “it comes from God.”

1/

Gender “norms,” harmful ideas about sexuality, social hierarchy, the construct of race, notions of nuclear family, toxic ideologies of work, bodies, finances, government, relationships, parenting, or criminal justice; are all rooted in Christianity and...

2/

backed up by verses of the Christian Bible taken out of context, to assert that this isn’t just normal, but what God desires. And who dares challenge God?

Christianity has allowed for people w/power to use the idea of god, and *his* “word,” to pass their ideas as God ideas.
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This is one of the reasons why people react so violently when we say the Bible is not the word of God, they can’t accept that everything they’ve been given as normal, good, ideal, God’s will... may just not be so.

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Their nervous systems tells them it is better to maintain the certainty of what is in their hands; even though it causes harm; than to give into the uncertainty of imagining a different world where equity is possible.

And then their ego gets involved, and admitting they’ve

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the strange reality of strict calvinism is that it makes a mockery of God's claims to hate, abhort, or even be theoretically opposed to evil

the calvinist solution to the problem of evil, which I have *literally heard from the lips of a faithful well-catechized Presbyterian* is, "well, all that happens is God's will, and to do His will is to manifest goodness, and goodness gives God joy, so God must rejoice in evil"

The hypothetical I gave was, "Suppose that there was a city of Christians, and a bomber flew over the city, and the guy at the controls tripped and accidentally armed and dropped a bomb, and wiped out the city: is that God's will? What does God think of that?"

His answer in addition to the above cited the Flood, Soddom, and Nineveh.

Because we all know that God's response to the Flood was, "I REALLY liked that, it was AWESOME, it satisfied my will and purposes to obliterate my creation!"

Once you have drunk the "but muh sovrintee" Kool-Aid you cannot escape the argument that literally everything that happens is not just God's will in some philosophical sense, but His will in the sense of "things that bring him pleasure."
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