Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

I still feel as free as I did 30 years back.  I'm not sure what I've lost.

Perhaps it hasn't affected you specifically in your day-to-day life, but I'd recommend taking a look at the powers the federal government has assumed in your lifetime contrary to Amendment 10 (I think?) which loosely translated says the feds can't just assume powers not specifically granted to it by the Constitution.  Granted, these powers were reserved a government--the states--but there are a number of reasons I won't get into here why this is different--and better--than the federal government taking on expanded roles (and yeah, the states taking on more than they should is also a problem).  This has been rampantly trampled on in my lifetime.  The judicial branch creates law from the bench.  Neaux.  Every presidential administration in my adult life has "ruled" more akin to a king than a US President, creating fiat law by executive orders.  Again, neaux.  (Yes, I know EO's are a thing.  The scope of them that we've gotten to is not supposed to be a thing.)  This is the tip of the iceberg.  The more power the government has, by definition the less freedom you have.  And the government is much, much more powerful and pervasive than when you were a young man.  Think about something as mundane as the AFA.....the Federal government mandated that every citizen was compelled to purchase insurance on pain of financial penalty.  That was unthinkable even when I was in college.  That limited freedom, it was noticeable, and it was distressingly run-of-the-mill.  Ask Badger about owning a business.  You think he'd tell you his freedom as a business owner is more or less than it was 30 years ago?  

Free speech is not so technically different, but in practice it is, particularly as pertains to religion and politics.  Yet in several instances, it has in fact been legally curtailed.  

Censorship, information flow-control, and gaslighting has reached levels I wouldn't have dreamed of 20 years ago.  This has as much to do with tech companies as governmental issues, but the effects are the same, and I'm so aware of them to the point it stuns me when someone else isn't.  Maybe you don't see this as a freedom issue.  I think it absolutely is.  

My taxes are not better/lower.  Don't know how you've managed it.  For me and my wife, things are not better than they were in our early 20's.  Even if they were, government spending is way up, and though government spending may not be something you think of as "freedom," it is related.  The more recklessly the government spends money it doesn't have, the more our future selves are indebted to the future government.  That's moving in the other direction from "freedom."  

The Patriot Act was/is a cluster (thanks, W.) even if you don't feel it in your everyday life.  Few citizens have directly felt the adverse effects--that I know of--but the fact that three-letter agencies have so much more leeway when they do decide to mess with somebody concerns me.  The mere potential is what should be concerning, and why I feel less "free" than before Bush's administration pushed it through.  

I can't presume to tell you how you feel, but I submit that if you don't feel any less free than you did 30 years ago, you aren't trying to step in many of the places many other citizens are trying to.  Try having my political and religions opinions and see how it flies when applying to or working for a Fortune 500 company.  The response and consequences are patently NOT like they were 30 years ago.  

We’ve evolved to a point where are free-speech discourse conflates the legal elements of free speech and sort of moral norms/norms of politeness. And most of that covers for a reality that a distressing majority of folks who get worked up believe strongly that speech they agree with is under attack (either in the legal or norms sense) but speech they dislike should be attacked in both senses.

This is something I've also noticed along the way.  There are definitely different "spheres" largely controlled by one side or the other where certain opinions are likely to be ridiculed, or even perhaps outright banned.  I would suggest that it's worth noting when either side has control of the majority of those spheres.  

It's tempting for a guy like me to say hey, a rule or law that stops people from saying racist stuff would be a good thing, right?  Then I think about my affinity for free speech and I wonder what my disconnect is.  Then I think about it some more and I realize, you know what, I actually want the racists to be able to say whatever dumb things they want to say.  They out themselves so much quicker that way and I can waste less time with a-holes because they're not pretending to be something they're not.  Somebody wants to have a club where only white supremacists are allowed in?  Go ahead.  That's free info for me that I don't want anything to do with a member of that club.  Saves a lot of time and effort for me.  There is such a thing as the social free market, a societal evolution, if you will, and I'd rather let every dumb opinion compete in the marketplace of ideas with trust and hope that the best ones will win.  1) Ideas that get banned don't go away, they just hide and fester and down the road lead to worse people subscribing to them when a shining light would've exposed that stupidity long ago.  2)  Who decides what gets banned and what we get to keep?  My moral compass is pretty good...maybe it should be me.  But then, regardless of whether I'm right or not, that just makes me your tyrant.  No thanks.  

Tell that to these guys.

A. Sigh
B. That sentiment is right, even if that article was mostly fear-stirring bunk
C. Someone at the ACLU firing from the hip is ... sadly not surprising. That org has done a lot of good work and still does some, but it's also fair to say they've strayed from their mission in some unsettling ways (unrelated to this post)

A. Sigh
B. That sentiment is right, even if that article was mostly fear-stirring bunk
C. Someone at the ACLU firing from the hip is ... sadly not surprising. That org has done a lot of good work and still does some, but it's also fair to say they've strayed from their mission in some unsettling ways (unrelated to this post)

seems to me you are criticizing the messenger instead of the message

seems to me you are criticizing the messenger instead of the message

To which messenger are you referring?

That is an opinion piece from an outlet that churns politicized red meat. It seeks to confirm biases and division instead of deliver truth or information.

(That is not to say the government does not put undue and flat wrong pressure on social media sites, but by most indications, this ain’t it)

Yes, the outlet that Twitter suspended (under FBI pressure) for a true laptop story in October 2020. A story that has been proven true.

That outlet.

If an outlet like that, with dozens of lawyers and millions of readers, can be silenced, what do you think could happen to YOU?

This is actually really scary stuff.

Ask @Drew4UTk what he had to go through to keep Big Tech out of our business here (OK, it was the board down South of this one - A51). Seriously. They were (and still are) coming after our little site. What do we have? 200 members?

what happened here was astounding, to me anyway. 

the top level domain issuer actually owns the domain name as is the case with any domain... they are the registar - i am the register... when a domain is rented the DNS is pointed to the server that holds the files... that requires a domain server lookup every single time someone types in the name in there address bar.  there are close to 70 worldwide accepted stations that keep these records- as fail safe but also to speed the process... there are more who look it up once and then hold it in cache to be used if it's requested again to save effort/time.  

that cache can be dictated at the registar level- in a TTL (time to live)... most TTL's are in terms of minutes, and 128000 is a good number for sites that don't plan on going anywhere (changing servers)... one of the important steps to consider when moving a domain from one server to another is to set the TTL PRIOR to the move so all the servers in between know to come back and confirm based on a shortened TTL... when i first opened this place and then the company i used for over a decade went tits up i had to do this- and there was downtime when that happened- not for everyone but for some- and because those 'some' registered the new DNS from a server that already updated. 

at any rate, someone changed this sites DNS TTL at the very top level without my permission... without my knowledge... this after a run of registrations here and traffic from three letter agencies.  they were tracked to three letter agencies or they were outright pingback to three letter agencies.  the DNS was sent to an IP that was non-sensical, and the TTL was set in minutes to a astronomical number- like, hundreds of years away.  

i pulled something off i didn't know was possible... i reset the registar to another dedicated IP i had in reserve, and set that IP with a TTL to just minutes... then, I reset the original IP to another domain altogether and ran a series of pushes for the DNS lookup... cache buster, if you would... after a bit i swapped it back to it's original config and it took... it worked. 

the only site either on the server or at the registar that was impacted was this one.  A51 is now behind a membership wall... after several weeks the traffic ceased from those sources, and after the membership rolls were weeded.   there is zero doubt this site was targeted- by gov't or not i can't say for certain, but it's more than strange all the traffic from the alphabet groups happened all at the same time.