SLABBER REPLIES

Jeff,

To answer your question:

I checked my blogs on Saturday morning, February 20, but they had disappeared. All of them had suddenly and arbitrarily been deleted.  Not only that, my entire account -- my ENTIRE account for those blogs -- had been shut down and eliminated.  In other words, suddenly and without warning, I had absolutely no access to my blogs, to my Gmail account, or to my paid Picase account.  Everything was totally wiped out.  (One note:  the Gmail account for my blogs was private and entirely separate from the email account I'm using for this message).  The damage is the following:

• The Slab (successor to "The Daily Slab/TDS," which Google shut down in August 2009) -- Gone.
• guycandi -- Gone.
• Special Content -- Gone.
• The J.O. - Josh Ohl -- Gone.

Of course, no specific reason was given by Google/Blogger for these stormtrooper tactics. The Nazis of Mountain View continue to hide, silently, behind the vague generalization of "Terms of Service," and that terminology will undoubtedly be a convenient excuse for the bigotry, intolerance and regressive persecution that the brownshirts at Google choose to pursue.

I have received a handful of very gracious emails from followers of "The Slab," and I am grateful to those individuals for their kind comments.

I do not know what the future holds for any work I may continue to do online. Certainly, I will have no further association with Google (in ANY fashion) or its gaspipe-swinging goons at Blogger. As a side note, I had stayed with Blogger (even after their lethal sabotage of "The Daily Slab" in August 2009) for one reason alone:  the superior functionality of Picasa for managing and posting images -- and let's face it, images are what it is all about in this conversation. Alas, I am not aware of any decent competitor to Picasa, but I certainly wish there were. If anyone wants to recommend a better (or comparable) photo-uploading program for blogs, I am all ears.

My experience with Google now stands as a vivid, highly detailed case study of the blatant abuse of power by a thoroughly monopolistic American company.  Google cooly asserts that "You can make money without doing evil," but that statement is a lie designed to grease the speeding wheels of the company's unending greed. The smirking boys who rule the Googleplex are, indeed, street thugs and bigoted engineers who have absolutely no respect for anything but advertising revenues. The assassination of multiple gay-oriented blogs is living proof of that. In short, Google now makes the blockheads at Microsoft look like saints.

And yet Google continues to get away with it, scot-free. Their monopoly thrives in today's Amerika. Eric Schmidt publicly licks the President's rear-end. More to the point -- Google's targeted wipeout of gay-oriented blogs is as real and present as any modern-day Nazi "pogrom" can possibly be. Achtung! It's Kristallnacht every night in Mountain View!

Anyone who continues to believe the simplistic Google mantra, "Don't be evil," needs to have their head examined. In my humble opinion, to which I am entitled, Google executives and managers are dishonorable (as we continue to see in China), and they are worse than disrespectful (as we continue to see in minority communities). And yet they go unchallenged. 

I'm sure there are all kinds of ways of disagreeing with what I'm saying. Fine.  Knock yourselves out. But the fact is, what I'm saying is true. And while we are told that the truth will set you free, I firmly believe that the truth will get you mugged and brutalized online.

Thank you,

The Slabber