This is to answer an email I received recently about what sorts of posts are allowed on the group. The message goes like this: “ Is it ok to share videos from other creators for critique and discussion? What is the criteria for things we should or shouldn't share. Do you want us to keep it topical or is it ok to talk about other things? I just don't want to cause any trouble or make any mistakes.”
My attitude is it’s better to ask forgiveness than permission. I picked this platform so that folks could enjoy complete free speech - meaning anything that’s legal to talk about. I was so sick and tired of the major platforms and their disgusting censorship actions. I’m a 50-year-old red-blooded American man. It is absolutely, indisputably unacceptable for a bunch of pansy computer nerds out there deciding what I’m allowed to talk about or not talk about. I bet a lot of you feel that way, too.
So go ahead and talk about and share anything you want here in our group. As long as it’s legal to discuss and you’re not spamming the place up, I’ll be ok with it. I don’t have to agree with it, but I support your inherent right to talk about whatever you want to talk about.
The school textbooks tell you the settlers crossed the Atlantic for religious freedom.
Some of them did, partly. What the textbooks leave out is the thing that sits in the actual letters, in the sailors' accounts, in the merchant pamphlets circulating in English ports from the 1580s onwards: a major reason people came to America was the wild game. Meat you could take. Meat nobody owned. Meat that walked into camp.
For a population legally separated from the animal for five hundred years, this was the whole pitch.
Consider what they were leaving.
A family in a Devon cottage in 1618 eats pottage. Oats, barley, an onion, whatever greens grew near the back door. No meat in it this week. No meat in it last week. There will be meat in it on Christmas Day, God willing, if the chicken is still alive by then. The deer in the forest at the end of the lane have been the king's property under the Forest Laws since 1066. Taking one is a hanging offence. The father has never taken one. His father never took one. The institutional...
