Abuses Of Internet Quotes

Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden—but it’s there. As we’ll see, the effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain.

What they get wrong is precisely this false belief that online prejudice is easily compartmentalized or categorized into, say, racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, or ableism when really it flows freely between these various bigotries.

Studies conducted around the world have shown a close correlation between materialist values, depression, and substance abuse.

As porn has gone mainstream, ushered two decades ago into middle-class living rooms and dens with VCRs and now available on the Internet, it has devolved into an open fusion of physical abuse and sex, of extreme violence, horrible acts of degradation against women with an increasingly twisted eroticism. Porn has always primarily involved the eroticization of unlimited male power, but today it also involves the expression of male power through the physical abuse, even torture, of women. Porn reflects the endemic cruelty of our society. This is a society that does not blink when the industrial slaughter unleashed by the United States and its allies kills hundreds of civilians in Gaza or hundreds of thousands of innocents in Iraq and Afghanistan. Porn reflects back the cruelty of a culture that tosses its mentally ill on the street, warehouses more than 2 million people in prisons, denies health care to tens of millions of the poor, champions gun ownership over gun control, and trumpets an obnoxious and super patriotic nationalism and rapacious corporate capitalism. The violence, cruelty, and degradation of porn are expressions of a society that has lost the capacity for empathy.

The Internet “is a TV that watches you,” he said, a technology “governments are abusing … to extend their powers beyond what is necessary and appropriate.

Home is to be a safe place, a refuge for all who enter, a protection from the harm and storms of the world. Yet often or even daily we open our doors -- usually via television or the internet -- to ideas and images that can damage our faith, abuse our hearts and minds, sear our psyches, and tear apart our peace. Home should be a place where, behind its doors, one should expect to find protection and safety from all the harms of life, including voices that do not speak truth or wisdom. Only the foolish would invite just anyone to enter the door of their home.

Truth arises by an invisible hand from our many errors, and both error and truth must be protected. The heretic, however, is now exposed to public intimidation and abuse on a scale inconceivable before the invention of the internet. Of course, we have moved on a bit from the Middle Ages. It is not the man who is assassinated now, but only his character. But the effect is the same. Free discussion is being everywhere shut down, so that we will never know who is right - the heretics, or those who try to silence them.

Cheryl was aided in her search by the Internet. Each time she remembered a name that seemed to be important in her life, she tried to look up that person on the World Wide Web. The names and pictures Cheryl found were at once familiar and yet not part of her conscious memory: Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, Dr. Louis 'Jolly' West, Dr. Ewen Cameron, Dr. Martin Orne and others had information by and about them on the Web. Soon, she began looking up sites related to childhood incest and found that some of the survivor sites mentioned the same names, though in the context of experiments performed on small children. Again, some names were familiar. Then Cheryl began remembering what turned out to be triggers from old programmes. 'The song, "The Green, Green Grass of home" kept running through my mind. I remembered that my father sang it as well. It all made no sense until I remembered that the last line of the song tells of being buried six feet under that green, green grass. Suddenly, it came to me that this was a suicide programme of the government. 'I went crazy. I felt that my body would explode unless I released some of the pressure I felt within, so I grabbed a [pair ofl scissors and cut myself with the blade so I bled. In my distracted state, I was certain that the bleeding would let the pressure out. I didn't know Lynn had felt the same way years earlier. I just knew I had to do it Cheryl says. She had some barbiturates and other medicine in the house. 'One particularly despondent night, I took several pills. It wasn't exactly a suicide try, though the pills could have killed me. Instead, I kept thinking that I would give myself a fifty-fifty chance of waking up the next morning. Maybe the pills would kill me. Maybe the dose would not be lethal. It was all up to God. I began taking pills each night. Each-morning I kept awakening.

In 1953, Allen Dulles, then director of the USA Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), named Dr Sidney Gottlieb to direct the CIA's MKULTRA programme, which included experiments conducted by psychiatrists to create amnesia, new dissociated identities, new memories, and responses to hypnotic access codes. In 1972, then-CIA director Richard Helms and Gottlieb ordered the destruction of all MKULTRA records. A clerical error spared seven boxes, containing 1738 documents, over 17,000 pages. This archive was declassified through a Freedom of Information Act Request in 1977, though the names of most people, universities, and hospitals are redacted. The CIA assigned each document a number preceded by "MORI", for "Managament of Officially Released Information", the CIA's automated electronic system at the time of document release. These documents, to be referenced throughout this chapter, are accessible on the Internet (see: abuse-of-power (dot) org/modules/content/index.php?id=31). The United States Senate held a hearing exposing the abuses of MKULTRA, entitled "Project MKULTRA, the CIA's program of research into behavioral modification" (1977).

If ever I create a website, I'll call it Two-Face Book, and I'll invite everyone to it, it will be a game board, of a whitewash chalkboard. A social network, with reserved intentions, where we can fall into our cliques and circle of friends. We can dis who we want and accept who appeals to our discretion. Where the users will keep abusing, and abusers keep using, where the computer bullies will keep swinging and the J-birds that fly by will die; where the lonely will keep seeking and the needy still go desperate, where the envious will keep hating, and the lustful will keep flashing. Where those that think ignoring, will keep one down and the wannabes will foolishly think themselves greater by the number of "likes" that pours caffeine into their coffee. We can jump on the bandwagon of likes, or reserve not to show we care. Where the scorners, scammers and stalkers lay wait to take hold of the innocent and fragile, and my pockets will get fatter as more and more will join up, where being fake is accepted. As a mirror that stares at a different face. It will be my two-face epilogue, in a 3-world dimension, of a twofold war. I will build an empire of contagious hooks, and still we will live, happily-ever disastrous.

Misinformation and disinformation about ritual abuse and mind control trauma and psychotherapy to treat such trauma appear in both paper and electronic media, but are particularly abundant on the Internet on websites of individuals and organizations, bookseller reviews, blogs, newsletters, online encyclopedias, social networking sites, and e-group listservs.

Comment sections on the internet are like gang graffiti, abusive words sprayed like gibberish and it's ugly to look at.

GamerGate wasn’t really about video games at all so much as it was a flash point for radicalized online hatred that had a long list of targets before, and after, my name was added to it. The movement helped solidify the growing connections between online white supremacist movements, misogynist nerds, conspiracy theorists, and dispassionate hoaxers who derive a sense of power from disseminating disinformation. This patchwork of Thanksgiving-ruining racist uncles might look and sound like a bad joke, but they became a real force behind giving Donald Trump the keys to the White House.

The first school shooting that attracted the attention of a horrified nation occurred on March 24, 1998, in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Two boys opened fire on a schoolyard full of girls, killing four and one female teacher. In the wake of what came to be called the Jonesboro massacre, violence experts in media and academia sought to explain what others called “inexplicable.” For example, in a front-page Boston Globe story three days after the tragedy, David Kennedy from Harvard University was quoted as saying that these were “peculiar, horrible acts that can’t easily be explained.” Perhaps not. But there is a framework of explanation that goes much further than most of those routinely offered. It does not involve some incomprehensible, mysterious force. It is so straightforward that some might (incorrectly) dismiss it as unworthy of mention. Even after a string of school shootings by (mostly white) boys over the past decade, few Americans seem willing to face the fact that interpersonal violence—whether the victims are female or male—is a deeply gendered phenomenon. Obviously both sexes are victimized. But one sex is the perpetrator in the overwhelming majority of cases. So while the mainstream media provided us with tortured explanations for the Jonesboro tragedy that ranged from supernatural “evil” to the presence of guns in the southern tradition, arguably the most important story was overlooked. The Jonesboro massacre was in fact a gender crime. The shooters were boys, the victims girls. With the exception of a handful of op-ed pieces and a smattering of quotes from feminist academics in mainstream publications, most of the coverage of Jonesboro omitted in-depth discussion of one of the crucial facts of the tragedy. The older of the two boys reportedly acknowledged that the killings were an act of revenge he had dreamed up after having been rejected by a girl. This is the prototypical reason why adult men murder their wives. If a woman is going to be murdered by her male partner, the time she is most vulnerable is after she leaves him. Why wasn’t all of this widely discussed on television and in print in the days and weeks after the horrific shooting? The gender crime aspect of the Jonesboro tragedy was discussed in feminist publications and on the Internet, but was largely absent from mainstream media conversation. If it had been part of the discussion, average Americans might have been forced to acknowledge what people in the battered women’s movement have known for years—that our high rates of domestic and sexual violence are caused not by something in the water (or the gene pool), but by some of the contradictory and dysfunctional ways our culture defines “manhood.” For decades, battered women’s advocates and people who work with men who batter have warned us about the alarming number of boys who continue to use controlling and abusive behaviors in their relations with girls and women. Jonesboro was not so much a radical deviation from the norm—although the shooters were very young—as it was melodramatic evidence of the depth of the problem. It was not something about being kids in today’s society that caused a couple of young teenagers to put on camouflage outfits, go into the woods with loaded .22 rifles, pull a fire alarm, and then open fire on a crowd of helpless girls (and a few boys) who came running out into the playground. This was an act of premeditated mass murder. Kids didn’t do it. Boys did.

Most of the activists and survivors I know... knew the loudest, most hyperbolic garbage will rise to the top if left unchecked. We knew enough people in charge either don't understand, don't care, or are part of the problem.

Eh, it's going to end like it always ends. The internet will have its lb of flesh, this kid will get fired from his internship and then get a speaking spot at CPAC, and we'll all forget about it until he's on The Real World: Scottsdale and comes out of the closet. Meanwhile we'll all move on to the next rapping granny or institutionally abused transgendered kindergartner and concentrate our efforts there and hopefully within the next ten years Skynet will kill us all and we won't have to do this again.

Seeing people who personally profited off the abuse against me being selected for Trump's cabinet scares the hell out of me. I don't know how to express to anyone the extremely weird issue of having your personal trauma wrapped up in international trauma.

A disturbed fan used that information and showed up at my front door, made his way INTO MY HOUSE, and afterward, proceeded to obsess over me online in an erratic and abusive way to the extent that I was terrified he would show up again and do something violent.

One of the greatest accusations against us by the cult was that we were “broad brushing” all the IFB churches, but with an estimated eight to ten thousand survivors speaking out on the Internet, telling the same stories from their experiences within IFB churches from all over the country, we finally put that accusation to rest. Dozens of public and private Facebook groups and blogs are now highlighting their abuses. That was precisely what the mob bosses feared: We could prove the entire cult was rife with sexual abuse cover-ups and we had a mountain of evidence to back up our assertions. To my knowledge there is no religious cult anywhere with more people speaking out through social media about their physical, emotional, sexual, and spiritual abuse than the former members of the IFB.

Although there are more than six million documents on the Internet addressing the issue of ritual abuse, few take as fair and comprehensive approach as this; many of the writings deny the existence of ritual abuse despite masses of evidence to the contrary. As a consequence, some victims are persistently re-abused psychologically by having to deal with the fact that organised abusers, their defenders and even police refute their realities and dismiss their reports as fantasy or mental illness. - Ritual Abuse & Torture in Australia (introduction)

Stacy hated people who abused digital systems. It affronted her that they had fatally undermined the fundamental beauty and purity of the internet. They'd corrupted the most revolutionary invention of the twentieth century and turned it into an engine for triviality, for vitriol, for scamming...

The behaviour you’re describing—reading your emails, going through your Internet browser history—you describe all this as though it is commonplace, as though it is normal. It isn’t, Megan. It isn’t normal to invade someone’s privacy to that degree. It’s what is often seen as a form of emotional abuse.

There was a rush of expectation with the vast transformation of our society by social media and by the internet itself. To be sure, we have greater access to each other now, we can find each other more easily, but we can also annoy each other more incessantly, intrude more abruptly, and use and abuse each other more profoundly by bombarding folks with unwanted commercial, religious, political, sentimentalized, and trivial chaff. (Wherever the human imprint advances, the Shadow follows apace.) For all the connectivity the modern electronic world offers, and I do appreciate that gift, I also perceive that we are more atomized, more disconnected from each other than ever before.

Everything I have, everything good in my life, I owe to the internet’s ability to empower people like me, people who wouldn’t have a voice without it. All the garbage that is thrown at us is enabled by this broken machine, yet I firmly believe that the internet is also the best tool we have to address the problem. To the uninitiated, it might seem easy to blame the very things that make the internet great for the rampant abuse, but that reaction would be alarmist and simply incorrect. One might see the relative anonymity of the online world as something that allows people to do heinous things to one another without accountability, but anonymity is also what can give isolated teenagers like I was the ability to talk about their queerness without fear of being outed.

Calling the Internet a public forum is done to invoke a conceptualization of the Internet in which all expression is seen as valid and worthwhile. However, in reality it frames abusive comments as suitable online behavior while vilifying any attempt to make online spaces safer for everyone interacting in them. After all, if the only way for women to avoid abuse is not to talk, whose free speech has actually been affected?

Warning: “Good Intentions” contains violence, explicit sex, nudity, inappropriate use of church property, portrayals of beings divine and demonic bearing little or no resemblance to established religion or mythology, trespassing, bad language, sacrilege, blasphemy, attempted murder, arguable murder, divinely mandated murder, justifiable murder, filthy murder, sexual promiscuity, kidnapping, attempted rape, arson, dead animals, desecrated graves, gang activity, theft, assault and battery, panties, misuse of the 911 system, fantasy depictions of sorcery and witchcraft, multiple references to various matters of fandom, questionable interrogation tactics, cell phone abuse, reckless driving, consistent abuse of vampires (because they deserve it), even more explicit sex, illegal use of firearms within city limits, polyamory, abuse of authority, hit and run driving, destruction of private property, underage drinking, disturbances of the peace, disorderly conduct, internet harassment, bearers of false witness, mayhem, dismemberment, falsification of records, tax evasion, an uncomfortably sexy mother, bad study habits, and a very silly white guy inappropriately calling another white guy “nigga” (for which he will surely suffer). All characters depicted herein are over the age of 18, with the exception of one little girl who merely needs to get her cat out of a tree. Don’t worry, nothing bad happens to her. She makes it through the story just fine.

Not all addictions are rooted in abuse or trauma, but I do believe they can all be traced to painful experience. A hurt is at the centre of all addictive behaviours. It is present in the gambler, the Internet addict, the compulsive shopper and the workaholic. The wound may not be as deep and the ache not as excruciating, and it may even be entirely hidden — but it’s there. The effects of early stress or adverse experiences directly shape both the psychology and the neurobiology of addiction in the brain.

I do love Oregon." My gaze wanders over the quiet, natural beauty surrounding us, which isn't limited to just this garden. "Being near the river, and the ocean, and the rocky mountains, and all this nature ... the weather." He chuckles. "I've never met anyone who actually loves rain. It's kind of weird. But cool, too," he adds quickly, as if afraid to offend me. "I just don't get it." I shrug. "It's not so much that I love rain. I just have a healthy respect for what if does. People hate it, but the world needs rain. It washes away dirt, dilutes the toxins in the air, feeds drought. It keeps everything around us alive." "Well, I have a healthy respect for what the sun does," he counters with a smile." "I'd rather have the sun after a good, hard rainfall." He just shakes his head at me but he's smiling. "The good with the bad?" "Isn't that life?" He frowns. "Why do I sense a metaphor behind that?" "Maybe there is a metaphor behind that." One I can't very well explain to him without describing the kinds of things I see every day in my life. The underbelly of society - where twisted morals reign and predators lurk, preying on the lost, the broken, the weak, the innocent. Where a thirteen-year-old sells her body rather than live under the same roof as her abusive parents, where punks gang-rape a drunk girl and then post pictures of it all over the internet so the world can relive it with her. Where a junkie mom's drug addiction is readily fed while her children sit back and watch. Where a father is murdered bacause he made the mistake of wanting a van for his family. In that world, it seems like it's raining all the time. A cold, hard rain that seeps into clothes, chills bones, and makes people feel utterly wretched. Many times, I see people on the worst day of their lives, when they feel like they're drowing. I don't enjoy seeing people suffer. I just know that if they make good choices, and accept the right help, they'll come out of it all the stronger for it. What I do enjoy comes after. Three months later, when I see that thirteen-year-old former prostitute pushing a mower across the front lawn of her foster home, a quiet smile on her face. Eight months later, when I see the girl who was raped walking home from school with a guy who wants nothing from her but to make her laugh. Two years later, when I see the junkie mom clean and sober and loading a shopping cart for the kids that the State finally gave back to her. Those people have seen the sun again after the harshest rain, and they appreciate it so much more.

David Lester, a psychology professor at Richard Stockton College in New Jersey, has likely thought about suicide longer, harder, and from more angles than any other human. In more than twenty-five-hundred academic publications, he has explored the relationship between suicide and, among other things, alcohol, anger, antidepressants, astrological signs, biochemistry, blood type, body type, depression, drug abuse, gun control, happiness, holidays, Internet use, IQ, mental illness, migraines, the moon, music, national-anthem lyrics, personality type, sexuality, smoking, spirituality, TV watching, and wide-open spaces. Has all this study led Lester to some grand unified theory of suicide? Hardly. So far he has one compelling notion. It’s what might be called the “no one left to blame” theory of suicide. While one might expect that suicide is highest among people whose lives are the hardest, research by Lester and others suggests the opposite: suicide is more common among people with a higher quality of life. “If you’re unhappy and you have something to blame your unhappiness on—if it’s the government, or the economy, or something—then that kind of immunizes you against committing suicide,” he says. “It’s when you have no external cause to blame for your unhappiness that suicide becomes more likely. I’ve used this idea to explain why African-Americans have lower suicide rates, why blind people whose sight is restored often become suicidal, and why adolescent suicide rates often rise as their quality of life gets better.

If you’ve ever signed up for a website and given a fake zip code or a fake birthday, you have violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Any child under thirteen who visits newyorktimes.com violates their Terms of Service and is a criminal—not just in theory, but according to the working doctrine of the Department of Justice.1 The examples I’ve laid out are extreme, sure, but the laws involved are so broadly written as to ensure that, essentially, every Internet-using American is a tort-feasing felon on a lifelong spree of depraved web browsing.

As a general observation, I think our high school and college-age students are wonderful, that they’re striving collectively, I think, to be as fine a generation of young people as we have ever had in this Church. But even as I say that, I am quick to acknowledge--and I don’t want to minimize that compliment, but I am quick to acknowledge what you already know--that exceptions to that rule are too many and often far too serious. When our youth sin now, they can do so in such flagrantly offensive ways with ever more serious consequences in their lives. That is the world we are in and it is, by scriptural definition, a world that is getting progressively more wicked. So over time we will continue to see a steady deterioration of what is acceptable in movies, on television, in pop music (which, in the case of rap lyrics, isn’t even music at all), and, perhaps in our most dangerous contemporary foe, abuse of the Internet. I have learned what you have learned--that the door to permissiveness, the door to promiscuity and lewdness, swings only one way. It only opens farther and farther; it never swings back. Individuals can choose to close it, but it is quite certain, historically speaking, that public appetite and public policy will never close it.

I've seen cases on the Internet, of a dog being locked in a car for several hours and comments from people so enraged, that they threaten physical violence toward the perpetrator; some even crying out for the owners to be faced with the death penalty! These self same people will likely not think twice about the animals on their plates. In fact, they usually react more strongly toward such events (dogs locked in cars) than do most vegans. The often unconsidered, deep seated reasoning behind their indignation, is to draw away attention from their own wrong doings toward animals, and focus it elsewhere. If they shout loud enough, perhaps people won't notice that they themselves, are behind far worse animal treatment!

Obviously, in those situations, we lose the sale. But we’re not trying to maximize each and every transaction. Instead, we’re trying to build a lifelong relationship with each customer, one phone call at a time. A lot of people may think it’s strange that an Internet company is so focused on the telephone, when only about 5 percent of our sales happen through the telephone. In fact, most of our phone calls don’t even result in sales. But what we’ve found is that on average, every customer contacts us at least once sometime during his or her lifetime, and we just need to make sure that we use that opportunity to create a lasting memory. The majority of phone calls don’t result in an immediate order. Sometimes a customer may be calling because it’s her first time returning an item, and she just wants a little help stepping through the process. Other times, a customer may call because there’s a wedding coming up this weekend and he wants a little fashion advice. And sometimes, we get customers who call simply because they’re a little lonely and want someone to talk to. I’m reminded of a time when I was in Santa Monica, California, a few years ago at a Skechers sales conference. After a long night of bar-hopping, a small group of us headed up to someone’s hotel room to order some food. My friend from Skechers tried to order a pepperoni pizza from the room-service menu, but was disappointed to learn that the hotel we were staying at did not deliver hot food after 11:00 PM. We had missed the deadline by several hours. In our inebriated state, a few of us cajoled her into calling Zappos to try to order a pizza. She took us up on our dare, turned on the speakerphone, and explained to the (very) patient Zappos rep that she was staying in a Santa Monica hotel and really craving a pepperoni pizza, that room service was no longer delivering hot food, and that she wanted to know if there was anything Zappos could do to help. The Zappos rep was initially a bit confused by the request, but she quickly recovered and put us on hold. She returned two minutes later, listing the five closest places in the Santa Monica area that were still open and delivering pizzas at that time. Now, truth be told, I was a little hesitant to include this story because I don’t actually want everyone who reads this book to start calling Zappos and ordering pizza. But I just think it’s a fun story to illustrate the power of not having scripts in your call center and empowering your employees to do what’s right for your brand, no matter how unusual or bizarre the situation. As for my friend from Skechers? After that phone call, she’s now a customer for life. Top 10 Ways to Instill Customer Service into Your Company   1. Make customer service a priority for the whole company, not just a department. A customer service attitude needs to come from the top.   2. Make WOW a verb that is part of your company’s everyday vocabulary.   3. Empower and trust your customer service reps. Trust that they want to provide great service… because they actually do. Escalations to a supervisor should be rare.   4. Realize that it’s okay to fire customers who are insatiable or abuse your employees.   5. Don’t measure call times, don’t force employees to upsell, and don’t use scripts.   6. Don’t hide your 1-800 number. It’s a message not just to your customers, but to your employees as well.   7. View each call as an investment in building a customer service brand, not as an expense you’re seeking to minimize.   8. Have the entire company celebrate great service. Tell stories of WOW experiences to everyone in the company.   9. Find and hire people who are already passionate about customer service. 10. Give great service to everyone: customers, employees, and vendors.

a person gave away your body to some passerby, you’d be furious. Yet you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along, so they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled—have you no shame in that?” —EPICTETUS, ENCHIRIDION, 28 Instinctively, we protect our physical selves. We don’t let people touch us, push us around, control where we go. But when it comes to the mind, we’re less disciplined. We hand it over willingly to social media, to television, to what other people are doing, thinking, or saying. We sit down to work and the next thing you know, we’re browsing the Internet. We sit down with our families, but within minutes we have our phones out. We sit down peacefully in a park, but instead of looking inward, we’re judging people as they pass by.

I doubt it's a strictly factual account, but these attitudes are deeply imbedded. Which means that our only hope of changing them, of ending the wrecks, lies not in stopping or even changing the Internet -- even with the best blocking functions, report-abuse functions, real-name transparency protocols, and twenty-four-hour moderation in the world, hate (to quite Jurassic Park) finds a way -- but in changing ourselves, and our definitions of womanhood. We have to stop believing that when a woman does something we don't like, we are qualified and entitled to punish her, violate her, or ruin her life. We have to change our ideas of what a "good" woman, or a "likable" woman, or simply a "woman who can leave her house without fearing for her life because she is a woman," can be.

Maybe you'll express an opinion on a political issue and it will get noticed by that wrong person. Maybe you'll wake up to find that a company you once bought shoes from online was careless with security, and now your personal information is in the hands of anyone who bothers to look. Maybe someone who has a grudge against you is relentless enough to post and promote bogus information about you online—stuff that can never be erases. Maybe you're a member of a demographic that is constantly targeted—you're a woman, you're black, you're trans, or any combination of these or other marginalised groups—and someone who wants to get people like you off "their" internet decides to take it upon them to make your life hell. Online abuses target countless people every year for any number of arbitrary reasons.

The benefits go beyond research and influence. We lack comprehensive historical records of internet culture and patterns of abuse. Those of us on the front lines tend to have institutional memory, but archiving this information would be extremely beneficial for tracking patterns and mechanisms in different settings. The kind of coordinated mob abuse that I went through was the same kind of abuse the women who exposed #EndFathersDay experienced was the same kind of abuse the infosec community instigated against Kathy Sierra in 2007 and so on. Some of the actors are even the same. This data could be invaluable to sociologists, technologists, and historians alike. However, due to the extremely personal nature of this information, the details of how it’s obtained, who obtains it, and what is done with it must be well thought out.

Just as the printing press led to the appearance of a new set of possibilities for democracy, beginning five hundred years ago—and just as the emergence of electronic broadcasting reshaped those possibilities, beginning in the first quarter of the twentieth century—the Internet is presenting us with new possibilities to reestablish a healthy functioning self-government, even before it rivals television for an audience. In fact, the Internet is perhaps the greatest source of hope for reestablishing an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. The ideas that individuals contribute are dealt with, in the main, according to the rules of a meritocracy of ideas. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. An important distinction to make is that the Internet is not just another platform for disseminating the truth. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It’s a platform, in other words, for reason. But just as it is important to avoid romanticizing the printing press and the information ecosystem it created, it is also necessary to keep a clear-eyed view of the Internet’s problems and abuses. It is hard to imagine any human evil that is not somehow abundantly displayed somewhere on the Internet. Parents of young children are often horrified to learn what obscene, grotesque, and savage material is all too easily available to children whose Web-surfing habits are not supervised or electronically limited. Teen suicides, bullying, depravity, and criminal behavior of all descriptions are described and—some would argue—promoted on the Internet. As with any tool put at the disposal of humankind, it can be, and is, used for evil as well as good purposes. And as always, it is up to us—particularly those of us who live in a democracy—to make intelligent choices about how and for what we use this incredibly powerful tool.

March 8th DON’T UNINTENTIONALLY HAND OVER YOUR FREEDOM “If a person gave away your body to some passerby, you’d be furious. Yet you hand over your mind to anyone who comes along, so they may abuse you, leaving it disturbed and troubled—have you no shame in that?” —EPICTETUS, ENCHIRIDION, 28 Instinctively, we protect our physical selves. We don’t let people touch us, push us around, control where we go. But when it comes to the mind, we’re less disciplined. We hand it over willingly to social media, to television, to what other people are doing, thinking, or saying. We sit down to work and the next thing you know, we’re browsing the Internet. We sit down with our families, but within minutes we have our phones out. We sit down peacefully in a park, but instead of looking inward, we’re judging people as they pass by. We don’t even know that we’re doing this. We don’t realize how much waste is in it, how inefficient and distracted it makes us. And what’s worse—no one is making this happen. It’s totally self-inflicted. To the Stoics, this is an abomination. They know that the world can control our bodies—we can be thrown in jail or be tossed about by the weather. But the mind? That’s ours. We must protect it. Maintain control over your mind and perceptions, they’d say. It’s your most prized possession.

But as people become anxious to be accepted by the group, their personal values and behaviors are exchanged for more negative ones. We can too easily become more intense, abusive, fundamentalist, fanatical—behaviors strange to our former selves, born out of our intense need to belong. This may be one explanation for why the Internet, which gave us the possibility of self-organizing, is devolving into a medium of hate and persecution, where trolls6 claiming a certain identity go to great efforts to harass, threaten, and destroy those different from themselves. The Internet, as a fundamental means for self-organizing, can’t help but breed this type of negative, separatist behavior. Tweets and texts spawn instant reactions; back and forth exchanges of only a few words quickly degenerate into comments that push us apart. Listening, reflecting, exchanging ideas with respect—gone. But this is far less problematic than the way the Internet has intensified the language of threat and hate. People no longer hide behind anonymity as they spew hatred, abominations, and lurid death threats at people they don’t even know and those that they do. Trolls, who use social media to issue obscene threats and also organize others to deluge a person with hateful tweets and emails, are so great a problem for people who come into public view that some go off Twitter, change their physical appearance, or move in order to protect their children.7 Reporters admit that they refuse to publish about certain issues because they fear the blowback from trolls.

To understand why it is no longer an option for geneticists to lock arms with anthropologists and imply that any differences among human populations are so modest that they can be ignored, go no further than the “genome bloggers.” Since the genome revolution began, the Internet has been alive with discussion of the papers written about human variation, and some genome bloggers have even become skilled analysts of publicly available data. Compared to most academics, the politics of genome bloggers tend to the right—Razib Khan17 and Dienekes Pontikos18 post on findings of average differences across populations in traits including physical appearance and athletic ability. The Eurogenes blog spills over with sometimes as many as one thousand comments in response to postings on the charged topic of which ancient peoples spread Indo-European languages,19 a highly sensitive issue since as discussed in part II, narratives about the expansion of Indo-European speakers have been used as a basis for building national myths,20 and sometimes have been abused as happened in Nazi Germany.21 The genome bloggers’ political beliefs are fueled partly by the view that when it comes to discussion about biological differences across populations, the academics are not honoring the spirit of scientific truth-seeking. The genome bloggers take pleasure in pointing out contradictions between the politically correct messages academics often give about the indis​tingu​ishab​ility of traits across populations and their papers showing that this is not the way the science is heading.

We live in a time I did not think I would see in my lifetime, a time when freedom—and in particular freedom of expression, without which the world of books could not exist—is everywhere under attack from reactionary, authoritarian, populist, demagogic, narcissistic, careless voices; when places of education and libraries are subject to hostility and censorship; and when extremist religion and bigoted ideologies have begun to intrude in areas of life in which they do not belong. And there are also progressive voices being raised in favor of a new kind of bien-pensant censorship, one which appears virtuous, and which many people have begun to see as a virtue. So freedom is under pressure from the left as well as the right, the young as well as the old. This is something new, and made more complicated by our new tool of communication, the Internet, on which well-designed pages of malevolent lies sit side by side with the truth, and it is difficult for many people to tell which is which; and our social media, where the idea of freedom is every day abused to permit, very often, a kind of online mob rule, which the billionaire owners of these platforms seem increasingly willing to encourage—and to profit by. What do we do about free speech when it is so widely abused? We should still do, with renewed vigor, what we have always needed to do: to answer bad speech with better speech, to counter false narratives with better narratives, to answer hate with love, and to believe that the truth can still succeed even in an age of lies. We must defend it fiercely and define it as broadly as possible, so, yes, we should of course defend speech that offends us; otherwise we are not defending free expression at all. Let a thousand and one voices speak in a thousand and one different ways. To quote Cavafy, “the barbarians are coming today,” and what I do know is that the answer to philistinism is art, the answer to barbarianism is civilization, and in any war it may be that artists of all sorts—filmmakers, actors, singers, and, yes, those who practice the ancient art of the book—can still, together, turn the barbarians away from the gates.

The Internet as a Source of Drugs of Abuse,” the web page for such a site may be physically located in Uzbekistan, the business address in Mexico City, money generated from purchases deposited in a bank in the Cayman Islands, the drugs themselves shipped from India, while the owner of the site is living in Florida.

This is a guidebook for a fairer kind of Internet. While we intend to foster something new in the online economy, we do so by turning to something old: the long tradition of cooperative enterprise. The problems of labor abuse and surveillance that have arisen with the “sharing economy,” also, are not entirely new; they have much in common with struggles on nineteenth-century factory floors. By considering the emerging platforms in light of well-hewn cooperative principles and practices, we find an optimistic vision for the future of work and life.

We should be judging the effectiveness and value of any of our solutions by how well they'd work for people with the least institutional power. Aside from idealism, it's pragmatic—if marginalized users are the people being targeted the most and being targeted the worst, then designing solutions that focus on the majority and treat the marginalized users as edge cases is not logically sound, because they aren't. Conversely, there's no reason to assume that the solutions that work for the people who need it most wouldn't also work for people who aren't as much at risk.

We should be judging the effectiveness and value of any of our solutions by how well they'd work for people with the least institutional power.

While online abuse can happen to anyone, it is by no means an equal-opportunity occurrence. We're dragged the same sort of cultural baggage that we live with offline into online spaces like a gross piece of toilet paper stuck to our shoes.

So do you go to the police or not? Well, if you don't, people will claim that the abuse wasn't real because theres no police report about it. If you do enter the system, you have to accept that all of what I've detailed in this chapter is what you're facing; be willing to sign up for the years-long process in the event that case actually goes to trial; know you have little chance of seeing justice because legislation and law enforcement have not yet caught up with the pace of online crime; and, even if you re successful, accept that a court order may not do much to stop an obsessive abuser.

In some situations, the attempts to "do something about this" can directly stress the person being targeted or make their situation worse. One example from my own experience is that people frequently screenshot and send me something horrible someone has said about me to give me a "heads-up" when I have purposefully reorganized my life to keep that stuff as far away from me as possible.

...when someone comes to me who possesses any traits that stray from what might appear in an American i950s-era sitcom, their identities are part of their abuse. They are targeted by certain people who want them to suffer for existing.

Much of the existing dialogue around the issue of online abuse frames it as violence against women, and that's a major problem. Most of the space being taken up focuses on gender and ignores race, sexuality, and every other type of identity and the intersections thereof. Yet most of the people whom I consider to be the top experts on online abuse and how to defeat it are not white.

I don't care if he posts about what he had for lunch sometimes; I want to know why that somehow gives him a free pass to post death threats on your service.

How do you tell someone that the people who could have stopped it saw what was happening to them and, even though you fought tooth and nail, were determined not to care?

toxic. There are other potentially toxic elements, too, such as music, television, books, magazines, and the Internet. Each of these elements is nothing more than a vehicle carrying the toxic material just like a person can. Not all people are bad influences. Likewise, not all music is degrading. Not all television programs are amoral. And not all books, magazines, and Internet sites are trashy. Just as you would with people, you have to look for those things where your time is well-spent. Seek out that which uplifts and enlightens you. If it doesn’t, then, avoid it or get rid of it. If you keep putting garbage in, you’re going to keep getting garbage out. It’s that simple.

Newspapers ran accounts of Western soldiers torturing or mistreating prisoners in Iraq or Afghanistan. They could well have put troops’ lives in danger as the Internet and satellite television sent images of abuse round the world. If anyone raised the matter with us, we replied that freedom of the press and the need to expose torture trumped all other considerations. It would have been a conclusive argument, had we not refused to publish articles and cartoons that might have put our lives in danger.

Banning anonymous expression would therefore have little impact on groups already steeped in violence and abuse, and would risk stifling much more than online aggression—a high price to pay, especially when one considers the overwhelming political and social benefits of a free and open Internet.

The Internet has spawned an abusive malevolent platform that cyber stalkers and trolls can use to harm people in the real world and ruin their victims lives forever with their permanent posts. Cyberspace can also be used to hunt those that prey on innocent people, so that those who live by the malicious words may also feel the repugnant feeling of being stalked and hunted even in their own false sense of anonymity.

You know, I’ve been hanging around your place, riding with you, throwing the stick for your dogs, and I never asked you about the husbands. Like, how many? And why you think it didn’t work out?” “What makes you think I feel like telling you?” she asked. “Aw, you’ll tell me,” he said. “You’re just that kinda gal. And I told you about my wife.” “Okay,” she said, still slapping sandwiches together. “The synopsis. The first one was fifteen years older than me, my agent. He’s still my agent—he married the talent, not the person I was. He was very ambitious for me, for us both. He still thinks I divorced him because of his age, but I divorced him because all he cared about was my career. I don’t think he could tell you my favorite color…” “Yellow,” Walt said. Her head snapped around and she stared at him. “Yellow,” she said. “That was easy,” he said. “It’s all around and you wear it a lot. Red’s important, too.” “Right,” she said, shocked. She shook herself. “Okay, number two hit, number three cheated, number four had a child he failed to mention, number five—” “All right, wait,” Walt said. “Is this going to go on for a real long time?” She grinned at him. “Didn’t you look it up on the Internet?” “I did not,” he said, almost insulted. “We’re stopping at five. He had a substance-abuse problem. I didn’t know about it beforehand, obviously. I tried to help, but I was in the way—he needed to be on his own. That’s when I decided that, really, I should quit doing that. Marrying. But please understand, it’s not all my fault—Hollywood doesn’t exactly have a reputation for long, sturdy relationships. I did the best I could.” “I have no doubt,” he said. “Do you say that because you have no doubt? Or are you being a sarcastic ass to a poor woman who had to go through five miserable husbands?” He chuckled. Then he slipped an arm around her waist and kissed her cheek.

Moreover, these changes occurred when most American households actually found their real incomes stagnant or declining. Median household income for the last four decades is shown in the chart above. But this graph, disturbing as it is, conceals a far worse reality. The top 10 percent did much better than everyone else; if you remove them, the numbers change dramatically. Economic analysis has found that “only the top 10 percent of the income distribution had real compensation growth equal to or above . . . productivity growth.”14 In fact, most gains went to the top 1 percent, while people in the bottom 90 percent either had declining household incomes or were able to increase their family incomes only by working longer hours. The productivity of workers continued to grow, particularly with the Internet revolution that began in the mid-1990s. But the benefits of productivity growth went almost entirely into the incomes of the top 1 percent and into corporate profits, both of which have grown to record highs as a fraction of GNP. In 2010 and 2011 corporate profits accounted for over 14 percent of total GNP, a historical record. In contrast, the share of US GNP paid as wages and salaries is at a historical low and has not kept pace with inflation since 2006.15 As I was working on this manuscript in late 2011, the US Census Bureau published the income statistics for 2010, when the US recovery officially began. The national poverty rate rose to 15.1 percent, its highest level in nearly twenty years; median household income declined by 2.3 percent. This decline, however, was very unequally distributed. The top tenth experienced a 1 percent decline; the bottom tenth, already desperately poor, saw its income decline 12 percent. America’s median household income peaked in 1999; by 2010 it had declined 7 percent. Average hourly income, which corrects for the number of hours worked, has barely changed in the last thirty years. Ranked by income equality, the US is now ninety-fifth in the world, just behind Nigeria, Iran, Cameroon, and the Ivory Coast. The UK has mimicked the US; even countries with low levels of inequality—including Denmark and Sweden—have seen an increasing gap since the crisis. This is not a distinguished record. And it’s not a statistical fluke. There is now a true, increasingly permanent underclass living in near-subsistence conditions in many wealthy states. There are now tens of millions of people in the US alone whose condition is little better than many people in much poorer nations. If you add up lifetime urban ghetto residents, illegal immigrants, migrant farm-workers, those whose criminal convictions sharply limit their ability to find work, those actually in prison, those with chronic drug-abuse problems, crippled veterans of America’s recently botched wars, children in foster care, the homeless, the long-term unemployed, and other severely disadvantaged groups, you get to tens of millions of people trapped in very harsh, very unfair conditions, in what is supposedly the wealthiest, fairest society on earth. At any given time, there are over two million people in US prisons; over ten million Americans have felony records and have served prison time for non-traffic offences. Many millions more now must work very long hours, and very hard, at minimum-wage jobs in agriculture, retailing, cleaning, and other low-wage service industries. Several million have been unemployed for years, exhausting their savings and morale. Twenty or thirty years ago, many of these people would have had—and some did have—high-wage jobs in manufacturing or construction. No more. But in addition to growing inequalities in income and wealth, America exhibits

Inside the U.S. Antitrust Probe of Google By Brody Mullins, Rolfe Winkler and Brent Kendall | 1277 words WASHINGTON—Officials at the Federal Trade Commission concluded in 2012 that Google Inc. used anticompetitive tactics and abused its monopoly power in ways that harmed Internet users and rivals, a far harsher analysis of Google’s business than was previously known. The staff report from the agency’s bureau of competition recommended the commission bring a lawsuit challenging three Google practices. The move would have triggered one of the highest-profile antitrust cases since the Justice Department sued Microsoft Corp. in the 1990s.

Non-professionals can also misrepresent the personal characteristics, religious beliefs, and appearance, of these therapists, can name-call and otherwise mock them, and can attribute false agendas to them, such as assigning religious motives to secular therapists working with ritual abuse or mind control survivors. For example, there is little to prevent someone from claiming on his or her own website that a psychotherapist is a fundamentalist Christian zealot at war with Satan, when that therapist might be an atheist, Jew, Buddhist, etc., who places no stock in the existence of Satan. But such a claim, when spoken as if it is fact, accomplishes its intended purpose of maligning that therapist." - Common Forms of Misinformation and Tactics of Disinformation about Psychotherapy for Trauma Originating in Ritual Abuse and Mind Control (2012)

The comment section of the internet is like gang graffiti, it makes no sense and is ugly to look at.

Well, I know you don’t want to talk about it anymore, but I signed you up for that computer match thingy.” Why is it that so many people over the age of sixty refer to everything on the Internet as some sort of “computer thing”? Helen was trying to contain her laughter. “Laura, do you mean Match.com?” My father was groaning audibly now. “Yes, that’s it. Charles helped me put up her profile.” “Oh my god, Mother. Are you kidding me?” Helen jumped out of her seat and started running toward the computer in my dad’s home office, which was right off the dining room. “Get out of there, Helen,” my dad yelled, but she ignored him. I chased after her, but she stuck her arm out, blocking me from the monitor. “No, I have to see it!” she shouted. “Stop it, girls,” my mother chided. “Move, bitch.” We were very mature for our age. “This is the best day of my life. Your mommy made a Match profile for you!” “Actually, Chuck made it,” my mother yelled from across the hall. Oh shit. Helen typed my name in quickly. My prom picture from nine years ago popped up on the screen. My brother had cropped Steve Dilbeck out of the photo the best he could, but you could still see Steve’s arms wrapped around my purple chiffon–clad waist. “You’re joking. You’re fucking joking.” “Language, Charlotte!” my dad yelled. “Mom,” I cried, “he used my prom photo! What is wrong with him?” I still had braces at eighteen. I had to wear them for seven years because my orthodontist said I had the worst teeth he had ever seen. You know how sharks have rows of teeth? Yeah, that was me. I blame my mother and the extended breastfeeding for that one, too. My brother, Chuck the Fuck, used to tease me, saying it was leftovers of the dead Siamese twin I had absorbed in utero. My brother’s an ass, so it’s pretty awesome that he set up this handy dating profile for me. In case you hadn’t noticed, our names are Charlotte and Charles. Just more parental torture. Would it be dramatic to call that child abuse? Underneath my prom photo, I read the profile details while Helen laughed so hard she couldn’t breath. My name is Charlotte and I am an average twenty-seven year-old. If you looked up the word mediocre in the dictionary you would see a picture of me—more recent than this nine-year-old photo, of course, because at least back then I hadn’t inked my face like an imbecile. Did I forget to mention that I have a tiny star tattooed under my left eye? Yes, I’d been drunk at the time. It was a momentary lapse of judgment. It would actually be cute if it was a little bigger, but it’s so small that most people think it’s a piece of food or a freckle. I cover it up with makeup. I like junk food and watching reality TV. My best friend and I like to drink Champagne because it makes us feel sophisticated, then we like to have a farting contest afterward. I’ve had twelve boyfriends in the last five years so I’m looking for a lifer. It’s not a coincidence that I used the same term as the one for prisoners ineligible for parole. “Chuck the Fuck,” Helen squeaked through giggles. I turned and glared at her. “He still doesn’t know that you watched him jerk off like a pedophile when he was fourteen.” “He’s only three years younger than us.” “Four. And I will tell him. I’ll unleash Chuck the Fuck on you if you don’t quit.” My breasts are small and my butt is big and I have a moderately hairy upper lip. I also don’t floss, clean my retainer, or use mouthwash with any regularity. “God, my brother is so obsessed with oral hygiene!” “That’s what stood out to you? He said you have a mustache.” Helen grinned. “Girls, get out of there and come clear the table,” my dad yelled. “What do you think the password is?” “Try ‘Fatbutt,’ ” I said. “Yep, that worked. Okay, I’ll change your profile while you clear the table.

Who are these hordes of fat people chasing you around, insisting that eating pot pies all day is awesome and good for your health? Because, um, I don't believe you. That sounds like a strawman. And I know some of your best friends are fat or whatever, but you sound like a bigot. Also, your super fucking obvious and regressive point has been made. Everyone in the world already thinks fat people are lazy and gross[...] We get it! You are not breaking any new ground here! Being fat is its own punishment. I don't give a shit if you think I lie on the couch all day under the Dorito funnel. I'd just rather not be abused on the internet from inside my own workplace.

White women who were raped were expected to die as a result of their abuse. Their degradation was expected to be totalizing, making postrape life unimaginable. But black female slaves survived their rapes and continued the work they were forced to do—a circumstance used as evidence that they were not properly feminine.11 According

I'd had my own laptop for a couple of years by then, and I could access the internet. Before, I wouldn't have dared to look up my questions online. I only used the computer to write stories for myself, to post articles about home schooling and teaching piano on a freelance writers’ website, and to write a blog under a pseudonym about my life in Hawai’i. But one night I opened up Google and started searching. Slowly words surfaced, coalescing into a description of my reality: control, authoritarianism, manipulation, coercion, abuse.

When so much of online abuse is driven by a failure to empathize with someone on the other side of the screen, turning those who are abusive online into some unknowable, unstoppable force of nature is a damaging mind-set. If we don’t try to understand them on a human, personal level, then we are moving forward in the dark. By dubbing them “those people,” we are also explicitly setting ourselves apart as if we aren’t one of them and thus can’t be part of the problem. Therein lies the most common trap we fall into when trying to make the internet a safer place: framing it as a war of good people versus bad people instead of looking at acceptable and unacceptable ways to treat each other. “Good people” get off the hook for doing bad things, while “bad people” aren’t considered worth understanding or empathizing with and aren’t encouraged to progress, evolve, and do better.

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As I'm sure you can imagine, it's profoundly dehumanizing to listen to a virulent the angry stranger shout about how horrible you are to people who are primed to hate you.

Internet Inquisitors harness this fandom to make money. Multiple websites have been set up since the beginning of GamerGate to pander to this audience, gaining ad revenue and a following. YouTube, Kickstarter, GoFundMe, Indiegogo, Patreon, and other money-making platforms are leveraged by the more opportunistic among them.

Nowadays people are choosing to be more aggressive, viler .More toxic. More evil, more racist, more sexist more abusive, more provocative because it gives them engagement and expressions. The more engagement or expressions the more they get paid in some social media platforms. People are now choosing to lose their morals, values, principles and teachings because of that payment. But what good is the money or how do you even enjoy it . When you know you got the money by hurting, bullying and abusing others. Money comes and goes but your character will be forever questionable because of your actions. Good or bad whatever you put out there. Will eventually come back to you. Choose wisely.

That doesn’t mean it’s cool to cheat on your partner because they won’t agree to threesomes or to get yourself off looking at internet porn at the expense of sex with your spouse because you claim they don’t satisfy your superficial sexual “needs.” Nor does it mean it’s suddenly cool to have an affair with Heidi from work or Brad from the gym because the attention they provide strokes your lovey-dovey, feel-good emotional needs. But it DOES mean that we should all be super-intentional about discovering our partner’s needs (not what WE think they are, but what THEY know they are) and commit to helping them achieve their personal five levels of the human-needs pyramid and become their best-possible selves. Either that or communicate honestly and clearly that we are unwilling to so that they can then pursue a life without us deliberately holding them down. Not supporting our partner’s pursuit of living their best life does not justify them betraying or abusing us. But does it justify them choosing a life in which we are no longer the obstacle in their way because we are unwilling or unable to move?

in my view, no other variable has changed in the last twenty years that could possibly account for a tremendous rise in youthful ED and low libido. For example, unhealthy lifestyles, such as poor diet leading to obesity, substance abuse and smoking (factors historically correlated with organic ED) have not changed proportionately, or have decreased, in the last 20 years. Obesity rates in U.S. men aged 20–40 increased only 4% between 1999 and 2008[45]; rates of illicit drug use among US citizens aged 12 or older have been relatively stable over the last 15 years;[46] and smoking rates for US adults declined from 25% in 1993 to 19% in 2011.[47

My fears ran deep as though I were in a terrifying nightmare. I thought we’d left all the danger behind us in Urumqi, but was Gobi still at risk? If someone was making a play to claim Gobi on the Internet, wouldn’t it make sense for them to try and get Gobi in the flesh? If they had the dog, they could control the story. Was that why I was being followed by the men in suits and the gray sedan? I’d always thought they were from the government, but was it possible that they were actually reporting to someone else entirely? These thoughts stayed with me like a mosquito bite. I couldn’t stop returning to them long after my call with Jay ended. The more attention I paid them, the more inflamed and painful these dark fears became. I spent the entire flight home going over the same thoughts. Images of Gobi getting stolen from Kiki’s kennels flashed through my mind. Conspiracy theories about what might happen cast deep shadows over me. And a desperate desire to make sure that Gobi was okay left me feeling hollow inside. Added to that, I was thinking about work. I had been away from my job for almost two weeks, and I worried that I was pushing the limits of the company’s generosity. Everyone had been supportive throughout, and there was never any pressure to return from Urumqi, but I knew my colleagues were working extra hard to cover my workload in my absence. I didn’t want to abuse their kindness or take advantage of it. But I knew that, yet again, I had a choice to make. I could stick with the plan and leave Gobi in Kiki’s care for the next twenty-nine days while we waited for the all-clear on her

When the present pandemic began to take hold, a passage from the writings of Martin Luther went the rounds on the internet, with Luther’s usual combination of down-to-earth wisdom and practical piety. Luther faced several plagues in Wittenberg and elsewhere in the 1520s and 1530s, and in his letters to church and civic leaders he insisted that preachers and pastors should remain at their posts: as good shepherds, they should be prepared to lay down their lives for their sheep. Likewise civic and family leaders should only flee from a plague if they had made proper provision for the safety of those left behind. He offers advice which sounds as relevant today as it was five hundred years ago. Plagues, he says, may perhaps be messengers from God; but the right approach should be practical as well as faithful. This, he says, is how one should think to oneself: With God’s permission the enemy has sent poison and deadly dung among us, and so I will pray to God that he may be gracious and preserve us. Then I will fumigate to purify the air, give and take medicine, and avoid places and persons where I am not needed in order that I may not abuse myself and that through me others may not be infected and inflamed with the result that I become the cause of their death through my negligence. If God wishes to take me, he will be able to find me. At least I have done what he gave me to do and am responsible neither for my own death nor for the death of others. But if my neighbour needs me, I shall avoid neither person nor place but feel free to visit and help him. Luther: Letters of Spiritual Counsel, ed. T. G. Tappert (London: SCM Press, 1955), 242, from a letter of 1527.

The Lost Child As the name states, the Lost Child is one who chooses to turn within and ignore than harsh reality playing out in their family.  They may lose themselves in fantasies, books, movies, games, and the internet. This person is often the youngest member of the family who has sought to find safety by staying out of the way and being alone.  It is important that they learn to engage with the world and face reality rather than attempting to hide and run away from it.

The toxic products of his processed food, along with the pace of life he demands, keep us in a sick and depressed state. We become so vulnerable that we can be addicted to anything that gives us a kick: food, alcohol, sugar, drugs, games, TV, internet, abusive relationships, work, and so on. The result of all this is the same: we lose control of our minds and our lives. Our vision is too blurry to see that every single addiction and associated disease we have leads to more undesirable circumstances for us and more business opportunities for the Mad Man.

I will say three things about my experience: first, it felt good to be doing something for other people. I spend so much time thinking about my troubles that I often feel very bad about life. But when I was handing out sandwiches, it made my problems go away for a time. It made me feel useful to the world in a simple way. Second, the Church may not be all bad. I met one old woman who had been doing this every week for the last forty-eight years. Even if God does not exist, this woman has been doing good in His name so maybe it does not really matter. I only wish the Church were more like her and less like the priests who abuse their powers. Third, the slums were not as bad as everyone makes them seem. There was not as much garbage as I expected, it did not smell as bad as I thought it would, and the people did not seem to be as miserable as I have been led to believe they are. Yes, it is VERY crowded and unsanitary and hot. But people still go to work, they still watch TV and look at the Internet through their phones, they still bathe and wash their laundry, they still have children that laugh and play and cry, they still love their families. Life persists.

We need to start thinking about the separation of money and state, and understand that it is just as important as separation of church and state. Money in the control of single governments… maybe here in New Zealand it works well. Great, you have one of the few benevolent governments in the world. The rest are not like that; the rest abuse the power over money to punish their political opponents. They use the bank controls not to stop criminals but to stop their political opposition and competition.

Humans hadn't even fully acknowledged the equal rights of each other, let alone those of animals or the planet. Animal slavery was as common as housecats and feedlots. Subjugation of ecosystems for natural resources ran as rampant as the rape and abuse of women. The same mentality that sought to possess and extract from the land also sought absolute dominance over the Internet and computers. And now this current corporate-political regime strove to shove humanity back into the dark ages just when our survival depended on recognizing the equal rights of all creation.

That was when The New York Times announced the appointment of a 30-year-old writer on tech issues to join the paper’s editorial board. Like all such appointments, Jeong’s promotion to such a position at a young age attracted a considerable amount of attention. And attention in the age of the internet obviously includes online rakings of everything the person has said. In Jeong’s case the raking turned up tweets with a particular focus – which was a sustained and pretty crude abuse of white people. Jeong’s tweets included ‘Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like grovelling goblins?’; ‘I dare you to go on Wikipedia and play “Things white people can definitely take credit for”, it’s really hard’; ‘White men are bullshit’; ‘CancelWhitePeople’ and in one stream of tweets ‘Have you ever tried to figure out all the things that white people are allowed to do that aren’t cultural appropriation? There’s literally nothing. Like skiing, maybe, and also golf . . . It must be so boring to be white.’43 It is fair to say that her Twitter feed showed an obsession with this theme. She even committed the basic error of comparing those people she didn’t like with animals. ‘Dumbass fucking white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.’44 Another tweet said, ‘Oh man it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.’45 Jeong

You do not need to be desperate...you just have to read and be in fellowship with the Holy Spirit of a Sovereign God. When life is not making sense for you, just get hold of this healing blog book and read through and it will uplift your spirit....and comfort your soul with divine healing. Blog 9: Blogging of a Healing Blogger In The Name of Jesus Christ This blog 9 healing blogging book comprises of cleansing and healing blogs that were posted on internet Social Media by Stellah Mupanduki for the benefit of the healing of the people of this world. These living and active healing blogs remove desperation and hopelessness from people. This blog book has unpredicted, random unparalleled expressions of healing and visual depiction of the prevailing love, mercy and protecting power and the healing presence of God in and on anything on this earth; be it a society, a system, an entity, a people, a soul, a country, a continent and the whole creation of God. If you feel lost, when your spirit is low, when you need the comfort and presence of God, just open this blog book and read randomly and the Lord will speak to your heart and soul and ease your troubles and concerns of your life. These are healing blogs that bring salvation to people and to this world. Many were healed through them as they were posted on Facebook. For years, these blogs were there to help people in times of hopelessness. The author moved according to the command of the Holy Spirit in fulfilling her vows that she made to God when she was facing times of trouble, when she said everything about her work belongs to God Almighty and he does what he wants with it. So the Holy Spirit did what he wanted by allowing these healing blogs to be given freely at that time through social media. Good and wonderful testimony from those healed came out of these healing blogs. Now they are powerful books and they are living and active because of the presence of the Holy Spirit who heals, liberates and anoints the reader at any point of life as he/she reads in truth and in spirit. You do not need to be desperate...you just have to read and be in fellowship with the Holy Spirit of a Sovereign God. When life is not making sense for you, just get hold of this healing blog book and read through and it will uplift your spirit....and comfort your soul with divine healing. (less)

Two primary points of abuse are the use of the meta fields in websites and extraneous links. Meta fields were originally designed to provide a way for site operators to add some keywords to their sites that did not need to be displayed to users, but might be useful to search engines. A site might use meta fields to give some synonyms for their content or to elaborate ideas that might be taken for granted by readers. For example, a website mentioning Brooklyn many times, but not New York City, might decide to add New York as a meta tag. However, some site operators put words in meta fields that have nothing to do with their content (the most common such word being sex since a great many Internet searches are from people looking for pornography).

An undergraduate researching the "witch hunt" cases asked for evidence that there had been more than one hundred cases, noting that the major lists of such cases added up to about fifty. There was no reply that provided documentation to support the claim.[34] The members of the list were generally strong proponents of the witch-hunt narrative. They knew the answer to the question “Is there a child sex abuse witch hunt?” These “witch hunters,” as those on this list soon came to describe themselves, were increasingly activists who used the internet to exchange information and ideas. Jonathan Harris may have done more than anyone else to disseminate the witch-hunt narrative in the mid 1990s and beyond.[35]

The answer may be much simpler. It starts with an honest self-appraisal. It acknowledges the eviction of an entire people—literally and systematically—from their own land. It recognizes that predatory economics is a raging parasite that will destroy its host. It sees that Puerto Rico is a harbinger of cultural and political consequences that are imminent, global, and unavoidable. Too many people have been converted into debtors, renters, consumers, gullible voters, abused taxpayers, ill-paid laborers, and passive audiences, all for the benefit of a privileged few. The notion of floating an American way of life at the expense of the entire planet is no longer sustainable—particularly when that life consists of little more than Black Fridays, widescreen TVs, Internet chat rooms, comic book films, and corporate and political fraud. A positive future for Puerto Rico and other comparable republics will require less greed and more humility.

Jessica uncapped a marker and wrote ILLS at the top of the whiteboard. “Right,” Averman said. “I thought we’d begin with an overview of the problems at hand. This is a brainstorm. There’re no bad suggestions. We’ll prioritize and organize in the second session.” Four men spoke at once and then deferred to Roark. “We’re to list, what? Global pandemics?” “Everything. Like heart disease, for example.” Averman replied. Jessica wrote HEART DISEASE in the top left corner. A voice from the third row. “World hunger?” Jessica wrote WORLD HUNGER. Guy figured he’d come this far. “Jingoism!” JINGOISM. Benatti yelled, “Famine!” “Isn’t that the same as world hunger?” Roark asked. A chorus of assenting murmurs. Wright called up from the second row. “World hunger is a distribution problem. Famine is agricultural.” “Gentlemen.” Averman put his hands up in a conciliatory gesture. “Again, there are no bad suggestions. We’ll sort everything in the second session.” FAMINE. “SIDS!” Mary Ellen yelled. “Malaria!” someone shouted. Momentum gathered: “Alzheimer’s! Influenza! Cerebral palsy! Women’s education! Recidivism! Rising oceans! The migrant crisis! Diabetes! Earthquakes! Wage disparity! Racism! Blindness! Domestic abuse! Nuclear armament! Nuclear stockpiling! Opportunity for the less affluent! Drug patents! Ennui! Urban zoning! High-speed internet access! The Great Barrier Reef! Food deserts! Healthcare reform! Religious extremism! Crohn’s disease! Meningococcemia! Carbon emissions! AIDS! Female genital mutilation! Apathy! Child labor! Deafness! Corporate monopolies! Tax reform! Flesh-eating viruses! Infrastructure! University endowments! River-borne diseases! Mudslides! Marfan syndrome! Wildfires! Sexism! Opioids! Locked-in syndrome! Gambling addiction! Lyme’s! Lack of potable water! Tuberculosis! COPD! Syphilis! Deaths of despair! Mass transportation! High blood pressure! Bee extinction! Monogamy! Pneumonia! Mass incarceration! Mass migration! Pornography! Fibromyalgia! Diarrhea! Cirrhosis! Bacterial infections! Poor hygiene! Illiteracy! E. coli! Car accidents! School shootings! Xenophobia! Holy wars! Preterm birth complications! Sugar! Terrorism! Diabetes! Unemployment! Depression! Norovirus! Fracking! Oxygen depletion in the oceans! Nuclear waste! Mortality! . . .