December Small Ball Update & Content Organization Notes

Editor’s note: given my surprise suspension from Twitter on Christmas Day, the ongoing concerns I have about Facebook censorship and the fact that December is a compressed month anyway because of the holidays, this edition of the Small Ball Update (featuring all my offsite blogging links) is going to be a little bit different.

 

Some Brief Notes on Content Organization & Crossposting

As some of you may have already noticed, I’ve been tinkering around with various aspects of this website in an effort to make my content more manageable for me, and easier to find for my readers; for example, I’m currently just over halfway through a project to standardize my article tags because they are, to put it politely, a hot freaking mess. Although explaining the minutiae of how this going to work when it’s all done would be terminally boring for both of us, the ultimate goal here is to make it possible for readers to navigate through all of my work, across all of my websites, entirely with the Features Page or the top menu bar here on ninaillingworth.com. The good news is that none of this should interfere with your usage of the site, but the bad news is that I’m definitely not going to be finished by the 2nd of January like I’d originally planned, and given how I actually did spend my Christmas (dealing with the fallout from a Twitter suspension that I still don’t entirely understand,) I’m now facing a tremendous amount of pressure to get everything done and start producing content before folks forget about me. For those curious, I still haven’t heard back from Twitter about my appeal so at this point I think you should probably just assume that I’m not returning to the bird site; you can instead find me on Facebook, Mastodon or my pinko Discord server.

Unfortunately, give the loss of my primary form of exposure (posting links to my articles on Twitter,) this now forces me into a couple of decisions I didn’t really want to take. First of all, this is probably the last Small Ball Update I’m going to write, because in the new year I’m just going to farm links to every new post, including the film sessions, blogs and annoying personal updates, here to ninaillingworth.com and also on my Patreon blog. To put it politely, I hate everything about this; not only does it make more busy work for me, and annoying duplicate notifications from multiple websites for my subscribers, but it also encourages folks not to sign up for my blogs at Can’t You Read, Media Madness or my Facebook Journal and instead just rely on the links. Factually however, I can no longer tell new readers to “just hit up the pinned thread in my Twitter account it has literally everything inside” and thus I have no choice but to use the website with my name on it, and the website where they’d never dare hide posts from paying customers to funnel traffic to my work. Please forgive the intrusive notifications of new articles in advance; my hands are literally tied at this point.

Which brings me to my second unfortunate decision; during the back half of December, I wrote a personal journal-style essay explaining why I intended to start signing my articles with the pen name of “Kongming.” While I still think the essay itself is worth reading because I believe it has some, shall we say, unique observations about gender-based interactions online, the simple truth is that no amount of being annoyed at patronizing eighteen year old “bros” engaging in what seems like the ritual negging of my work, is worth trying to accomplish a rebrand right now without access to Twitter and a large core of followers. The plus side is that since Twitter itself is the primary vehicle by which I’m forced to interact with forum Chuds who think they’re leftists, the problem should come up quite a bit less; but in the meantime I’m just going to keep signing my work “Nina Illingworth” for the foreseeable future – sorry for the false alarm, but again I didn’t realize I was about to catch the banhammer when I wrote that article.

Okay, let’s hit the links.

Media Madness Links

Ok, so as I’ve already mentioned in various places, this recent Twitter suspension and Facebook’s ongoing censorship of anarchist pages has got me a little spooked, so I’ve already starting moving content that would typically be on my Facebook Journal, over to other sites. Naturally, I’m still going to post links on Facebook and continue to interact with readers through the comments section underneath my posts there, but I’m trying very very hard not to ultimately give Mark Zuckerberg control over any of my unique writing; since clearly, he doesn’t like folks like me as much as he likes fascists and reactionaries. Naturally then, this also includes our weekly “film session” posts:

 

Film Sessions: Jim Crow, Neoliberalism, And The Current Fascist Backlash Against Civil Rights Movements – first up is this tight, 39 minute offering from Cody Johnson over at Some More News. It’s an older video from just before the 2020 US election, but as I mentioned in the write up, a friend of mine sent it to me to remind me that despite the absurd pushback coming from the contrarian left, I’m not crazy and I didn’t spend four years writing about Americanized fascism for nothing. In this video Johnson examines why cultural values we commonly think of as American, have primed and will continue to prime most of the Pig Empire for fascism. Which is a good thing to know, because as readers of my work on other sites already know, I’m pretty sure fascism isn’t going away just because Trump lost the election and his “chicken coup” floundered in the clutch; after all, the billionaire mutants who’re paying for this nonsense certainly haven’t gone anywhere.

 

Film Sessions: The Myth of a Free Press: Media Bias Explained – at some point I knew I was going to have to branch out and find new left(ish) Youtube creators to keep this series going, which ultimately led me to Tom Nicholas and his “What the Theory?” videos. Touching heavily on the work of Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, Nicholas breaks down how the five filters of media bias work in real time during this extremely granular, fifty-five minute video with exceptionally high production values. Naturally, as someone who writes about media bias, the propaganda model and the effect privately controlled media has on the discourse in a capitalist society, I couldn’t resist checking it out and I was pleasantly surprised that the video still had a lot to offer even for someone who has already read Manufacturing Consent – although Tom, like Chomsky, could have at least given Michael Parenti a shoutout.

 

Film Sessions: An Economic Hit Man Confesses and Calls to Action – my decision to choose this eighteen minute video arose almost entirely from my desire to write a little bit about John Perkins, the author of “New Confessions of an Economic Hitman.” Although I’m not a huge fan of the Ted Talk format (even if this is a TEDx talk) and Perkins spends an awful lot of time blabbering about the difference between “good capitalism” and “bad capitalism” as if such a thing were even possible, the video does quite clearly demonstrate that the paper thin wall between globalization, international finance, assassinations and very real violence conducted by military forces is at best, a poorly maintained illusion.

 

Film Sessions: Oligarchs Will Let the World Burn – finally, after a long and objectively trying month of writing my butt off about difficult subjects under frustrating circumstances (see that whole Twitter suspension thing that might choke out my “career” as it were,) I decided it was time to sit back, pour myself a Rummy Egg Nog and let someone else rage about rich people for roughly sixteen minutes. That someone is anarchist Youtube Creator Thought Slime and you can find his Youtube channel here. Touching on nuclear annihilation, climate catastrophe and even the election of Donald Trump, this video explains why Thought Slime became an anarchist – because rich people are absolutely trying to kill you my friends.

 

Facebook Journal Links

Right then, so as noted above, Facebook’s twitchy behavior towards radical leftists had already convinced me to start transporting unique content over to other websites even before some rat-fink bastard got my Twitter account suspended. As such I only have two Journals to share this month, and both of them have already been re-posted; one on ninaillingworth.com and one on my (always free to read) Patreon Journal; which of course includes the essay I mentioned above, and my (now) abandoned re-branding attempt. I’m pretty much including both of them here for completeness at this point, so forgive me in advance if you’ve already seen one, the other, or both.

 

Personal Journal: A 3rd Century Kinda Girl

A Brief Post-Twitter Update & Thank You Note

 

And with that I guess I should add my goodbyes to a year that can’t end fast enough for my liking, and the monthly Small Ball update. I’ll see you folks again in early January after I’ve cleaned up my disaster area office a little bit – in the meantime, please don’t forget to subscribe for free email notifications whenever I post a new article here on ninaillingworth.com; you can find the subscription bar on the right hand side of this page. Thanks and have a good one.

 

• nina illingworth

 

Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!

You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog

Updates available on Instagram, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at “No Fugazi” on Soundcloud.

Inquiries and requests to speak to the manager @ASNinaWrites

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“It’s ok Willie; swing heil, swing heil…”