2 responses to “Four Thoughts for the Fourth”

1. Joe

   July 5, 2018

   And speaking of the Declaration of Independence in our modern times, this is interesting news piece:
   The Liberty County Vindicator, a community newspaper between Houston and Beaumont, had been posting the whole Declaration in small daily chunks for nine days on its Facebook page in the run-up to July 4. But the 10th excerpt was not posted Monday as scheduled, and the paper said it received an automated notice saying the post “goes against our standards on hate speech.”
   Part of the standard notice, Vindicator managing editor Casey Stinnett wrote, included a warning that the newspaper could lose its Facebook account, on which it depends for much of its reach, if there were more violations.
   The offending passage?
   It was part of the document’s “Bill of Particulars” against Britain’s King George III: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
   Mr. Stinnett dryly replied in an article about the rejection, “Perhaps had Thomas Jefferson written it as ‘Native Americans at a challenging stage of cultural development’ that would have been better. Unfortunately, Jefferson, like most British colonists of his day, did not hold an entirely friendly view of Native Americans.”
   ———–
   Facebook’s automated thought police were corrected presumably by its human thought police.

2. Sick of it All

   July 30, 2018

   Here is a thought for the Fourth https://www.smdailyjournal.com/news/local/county-funds-immigrant-aid/article_30b1d17c-93a2-11e8-aff4-03678233c6df Three quarters of a million dollars of American taxpayer money.