Mark Gisleson's Techdirt Profile

Mark Gisleson

About Mark Gisleson

Mark Gisleson's Comments comment rss

  • Dec 13, 2023 @ 10:42am

    When you can't clean your own house

    Worst case of TDS ever. And no, I'm not a Trumpie but you're forcing me to use their language. Your political coverage is deranged and craven. You are clearly being handed your talking points by others. Now, when honesty would do the most good, you're still stanning for the liars because . . . of Trump? So weak and sad. I can't do this anymore. I'm deleting my account and ignoring you forever. You've had seven years to wise up but you're still carrying water for the sociopathic neoliberal frauds who bought the Democrat party and turned it into an even shittier version of the Republican party. Blather on about Missouri but what you're really doing is trying to get people to stop thinking about Gaza where YOUR SIDE (the Biden/Hillary/Obama side) is murdering children as deliberate policy. I have never been more disappointed in a website. I hope that at the very least they were paying you to ruin your excellent tech rep with this third-rate political bullshit.

  • Jul 19, 2023 @ 10:50am

    Whatevs

    At least I can use my own name to say these things and I accept that doing so costs me an audience. Every Anonymous Coward just reinforces the fact that there are serious consequences for publicly speaking your mind in this country. But clearly sharing every few months on this site is burdensome to those still clinging to Russiagate, natural origin, or simply an inability to weather an election loss without melting down for seven years and counting so I'll pass on further comments. Sorry to have bothered you, your side won and that makes them permanent winners forever and ever amen.

  • Jul 19, 2023 @ 09:43am

    "leak stuff"

    Another ostrich-American with their head in the sand. The "stuff" JULIAN ASSANGE published was actual emails from US govt officials. Which Americans are, of course, forbidden to read lest we get a clue what our government is doing in our name. Quick show of hands: How many TechDirt readers wanted a war with Iraq? Afghanistan? Russia? US govt operates in secrecy because their policies do not have our approval. How is that a good thing? BTW, I tweet under my own name. Before a massive "you can't blog about Israeli Apartheid!" DDOS attack in 2005, my blog used to get up to 5k readers a day. 1000 of them followed me to Twitter where they simply stopped seeing what I wrote almost immediately (following my one-year "not a suspension" I get 20-30 views on avg). You can applaud my views being suppressed (and on this site ridiculed) but old skool USA USA was supposed to come with "freedom of speech." Now it's all about "OMG WE CAN'T LET PEOPLE SAY THAT!" Anything else you don't want us to talk about?

  • Jul 19, 2023 @ 06:27am

    ??

    Current AIs can't tell stories at all. They just slop text around on a page until the space has been filled. It is easier to rewrite AI text than it is to edit it. Corporations don't respect writers because of all the job slots to fill, their nephew/niece fit that slot best. Shuffling along with a substandard writing staff, managers lose respect for writing/editing (not that they had much to start with). The problem isn't AI or substandard human writers. The problem is a corporate management suite that struggles to read or comprehend but that most of all does not understand that writing is about telling truths. Sharing untruths is much much harder, way above an AI's pay grade. Pay the talent, fire the managers who fail to properly select and manage talent. Not one TechDirt story ever could have been produced by AI. I'm pretty much done with this site (Russiagate¡¡¡)but I'd make a donation to help pay to hire AI to write a TechDirt story. Give it a phony byline and publish it. Then see how many of your readers notice. I'm guessing 100% of them but maybe less as it's possible that senior management also reads TechDirt.

  • Apr 20, 2023 @ 08:28am

    I already have this

    Shortly after I moved to a rural area in 2017, the local rural telephone company [absolutely stand alone NOT part of a bigger company] upgraded from standard cable broadband to fiber. Initially I got 200mbps up and down speeds, lately it's been more like 400mbps (I think they're testing new equipment but like ALL ISPs they really don't tell us what they're doing). My understanding is that Trump did something that made this possible. I don't know why, I just know that I have broadband that is 10x faster than anything I ever got while living in St Paul or getting phone service in Wisconsin from the infamously horrible Frontier. Not promoting Trump and I have no idea if he deserves any credit, but something changed around 2018-19 that resulted in my extremely rural community getting the best broadband I've ever had so whatever was done by whoever, could we please have more of that?

  • Apr 10, 2023 @ 10:45am

    "woke censorship"

    And the Techdirt cmty rushes to flag and hide yet another comment because you can never censor enough comments about censorship!

  • Apr 07, 2023 @ 10:14am

    This appears to be

    the stage of grieving in which the bereaved still has not accepted their loss and instead goes on long and extremely detailed explanations of why Elvis can't possibly be dead. Been there, done this. Time to step back and reappraise. Change IS going to come because Americans are not good Germans and too much is being done without consent or legal authority. Enabling Deep State black shirts as the price for defeating Trump's brown shirts is not a winning strategy for anyone but the shirts running this country.

  • Mar 17, 2023 @ 09:55am

    Back on Twitter

    After only one year and six days of being blocked from accessing my account (for linking to The Saker (not that Twitter will admit to any reason for locking my acct)), within minutes of Matt Taibbi beginning to testify to Congress, my account was unlocked and I did not need a ph# to regain access. Do I have a right to know WHICH govt agency asked Twitter to lock my account? Do I have a right to know why my unlocked account is even more shadowbanned than it was before? Of course not. I'm perfectly free to build my own platform where people can link to foreign news sources. Because FREEDOM! (And I'll take all the mocking responses offline, I won't be responding to you so be really super brave in letting me know what I should think.)

  • Apr 29, 2022 @ 12:44pm

    Disinfo Ministry

    Sadly, this seems to only be readily available thru Tucker Carlson, but the video he shares speaks for itself. At the 6:05 mark you can see a video the new Head of the Disinformation Ministry posted about her job: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4inJSblCUY&t=148s It's very brief and extremely memorable.

  • Apr 18, 2022 @ 02:12pm

    an example

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNizGwjZbo0 This is the kind of above board content you should be able to link to, even in times of war. A HERO of the Ukrainian RESISTANCE (i.e., a mercenary) and now a POW has been interviewed and has some interesting things to say if you have the courage to listen.

  • Apr 18, 2022 @ 10:35am

    It's more complicated

    I'm currently suspended from Twitter for unstated reasons but they imply my account was hijacked even though every tweet published is mine. My tweets, however, were focused on pro-Russian and/or objective news sources (The Saker, Oriental Review, Scott Ritter, etc). This is the news that's being censored. If you seek to share truth about Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Twitter silences your account. I was easy to silence, I refuse to give Twitter my ph# and they won't let me log back in without one (they let me back in without one when an Elon Musk social media spammer hijacked my account, but Ukraine is apparently a much more serious matter). If you go to Twitter, feel free to search for me and then tell me which of the news stories I have links to are inaccurate. So far all of them seem to be holding up quite well even as our State Dept embarrasses itself with jingoistic talk of sanctions.

  • Mar 17, 2022 @ 12:58pm

    Sidebar

    This is NOT a pro-Trump comment, just an observation of fact. I retired to a small rural community in 2017. In 2018 or 2019 we got fiber optic cable installed by our local telcom with a grant from the Trump administration. We now get 200mbps uploading and downloading speed with absolutely no cap on usage. I never got this kind of service living in St Paul or when I lived for a while in Wisconsin. The U.S. doesn't get quality broadband from sea to shining sea because the people that make money from garbage service have more clout in our govt than we the people do. Srsly, my internet hasn't been this awesome since I did work for an indie ISP and they let me have a wildcard email address back in the '90s. EVERYONE SHOULD HAVE THIS KIND OF BROADBAND.

  • Mar 08, 2022 @ 10:23am

    Other (sorry but pro-Russian) sites are all saying the same thing: no beards in the Russian army unless you're Chechen (Muslim). Same eyebrows, bags under eyes, and beard could be dyed (or simply better groomed plus different lighting, my beard becomes less gray when combed out). There is a pro-Russian site dedicated to debunking Western propaganda. I've doublechecked a few of them and was able to find earlier uses of the same picture. https://waronfakes.com/

  • Mar 08, 2022 @ 09:29am

    Russian POW

    Moon of Alabama has pix that strongly suggest the Russian POW is in fact Ukrainian special forces: https://www.moonofalabama.org/2022/03/disarming-ukraine-day-13-lies-do-not-win-wars.html

  • Feb 02, 2022 @ 12:31pm

    What if you don't have a phone?

    Just completed my 14th month of life without a phone (it's wonderful, thanks for asking).

    So far I've had to give up online banking even though I'd never accessed my account from my phone (save when ELAN would text me the code to prove I was really me trying to access my account from the only computer that had ever accessed my account).

    When I shop, I lie and use my old phone number because you cannot shop online without a phone number. You also can't fill out any online forms.

    And now I could be ticketed for speeding and never know it until the summons arrives because I didn't pay the ticket I didn't know about?

    Increasingly it appears to be all but illegal to live in this country without a phone.

  • Jan 22, 2022 @ 05:37am

    Early cable user

    I cannot think of any cable packages they offered in the early '80s that weren't higher than Netflix's rates and that's not adjusted for inflation.

    Dive into cable and streaming and find me a package that lets me see every MN Timberwolves NBA game for less than $8/game. [Please respond w/something besides a Reddit link to pirated games]

    Netflix is one of the better bargains out there, even with the rate hike. Honestly have no clue what people are comparing them to because only broadcast television is cheaper to watch.

  • Dec 02, 2021 @ 05:22pm

    Re: Re: Re: Currently locked out of Twitter

    Figured it out after deleting the Musk tweets. While I was locked out the 'hacker' drove about 40k views in traffic. I'm guessing most of that was from other hacked accounts and the real bottom line was that Musk is buying traffic for his social media accounts and this is where some of it is coming from.

  • Dec 02, 2021 @ 01:15pm

    Re: Currently locked out of Twitter

    And....Twitter finally got me back in and I found I had just followed Elon Musk and tweeted my appreciation for his account. And then the 'hacker' closed my account. Which makes no sense to me whatsoever. But rather than delete my original comment I'm leaving it up because as a long time Twitter user, stuff happens on Twitter that's really hard to explain.

  • Dec 02, 2021 @ 01:03pm

    Currently locked out of Twitter

    Last night while watching my NBA team lose, I received four emails from Twitter urging me to change my password as someone from Vietnam had logged into my account.

    By the time I saw the emails, I was locked out of Twitter and my account was closed. So far I have been unable to open a new account because the registration process does not allow me to not have a phone (I quit phones forever last year, never going back until our corrupt Congress gets rid of phone spam).

    Twitter Help says they've given me access but only for my email address. They didn't notice the account had been closed and their system no longer recognized my username.

    Not crying on anyone's shoulder here, but I do wonder if this wouldn't be the perfect way of "cleansing" Twitter without exposing the new CEO to heat over political account closures. I have been very abrasive here about Russiagate and more so at Twitter where I also have a long history of RTing news about a certain country's Apartheid policies.

    I hate to think this way, but for the life of me I cannot see how anyone would gain from hacking into my account and closing it unless they intended to silence me. [Which did happen in 2005 when I was routinely blogging about that certain country's Apartheid policies and the server farm hosting my blog got hit with a DDOS attack and I had to find a new host.]

  • Nov 22, 2021 @ 10:21am

    There is a third way to look at this

    It's not binary: Trump can be wrong and the NYT/WP should return their Pulitzers.

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