#justsaying

If some site irritates me I simply delete it from my universe.

The site formerly known as twitter -- gone

Facebook -- gone

Google search -- gone

Amazon -- gone

Etc., etc.

The culling of television in our home is more intense than that. My wife and I have a DVD player and at any given time subscribe to two or three no-advertising streaming services. We don't have cable or satellite television and the last time we watched broadcast television was in January 2012. The TV we have now isn't even set up to receive broadcast channels and it's not connected to the internet. It's merely a monitor for the DVD player and whatever device we choose to plug into it.

We all have a choice. We don't have to bathe in the raw sewage streams of the internet or television.

Don't watch much television, eschew Facebook, Hitler Twitter, Tik Tok, etc.

Social Media is horseshit and it has made many people more stupid than is actually necessary.

By comparison, at least TV stations have professional editorial oversight compared to the anyone-can-post-anything platforms like Facebook.

The number of different ways is dizzying and depends on what firewall or computer you’re using.

If each of us who knows how offers one way to block a site we could help a lot of others here.

Search algorithms are your friend for this. But I’ll start:

iPhone has a block website feature if you navigate to
settings -> screen time -> content and privacy -> web content. Now enter the site you want to restrict.


Sadly it can’t be done as a context-based thing but the domain name is always shown in the safari browser. That’s all you need to block an entire site.

Most browsers have this option.

Crappy internet sites will use these cookies to lead people down the garden path to even crappier sites.

The internet wasn't such a dangerous place when web sites were static, not generated on demand to capture and hold the attention of each visitor.

It may rankle all of us who like to believe in authenticity, factual sourcing, etc, but it's the way things are done now in many circles and the second-best option is adopt and subvert that mode of expression to suit our needs.

I also hate it when people say "scan" when they actually mean "skim," fwiw, but that battle is long lost.

In the past it was very difficult to verify the authenticity of whatever bs the corporate media was shoving at us.

With social media we have the power to authenticate. One of the best things about sites like DU is knowing you can read a news headline, then come here and find "Oh that's bullshit, here's what's actually happening" link, link, link.

It can actually encourage critical thinking

My carefully crafted memes and fakes, labeled as such unless I am tired and forget, go NOWHERE outside DU.


I'll keep an eye open for the mistakes of others!!

The lack of critical thinking in the post-truth era is more dangerous to democracy than Trump or any other politician.

it rly disheartens me that we r being flooded by fake feelgood stories. this athlete gives their ENTIRE bonus to some good cause, when anyone in their rt mind knows they dont even get a check for the entire amount. or some scientific breakthrough that is grossly exaggerated.
i dont understand y more celebs dont sue over this nonsense. wouldnt ppl then expect them to give away their money?

it’s frightening, rly.

From Purdue Owl (Purdue University): "The primary function of quotation marks is to set off and represent exact language (either spoken or written) that has come from somebody else."

And an apology to my teacher, Sister Mary Daniel, who taught me to know and do better.

These quarantined posts would come with a warning that the quotes haven't been verified and they may be incorrect or out-of-date. (They might even be a parody.)

Once they are verified the quarantine comes off and the post enters the normal flow of DU's everyday threads. But by quarantining those suspicious or unattributed posts it would take the pressure off of DU's sterling reputation. Problem is that it takes time and labor to verify these quotes, and we're all giving what we can to DU - a few are giving much more than others already.

Ideally each DU poster should verify his or her own quotes before posting but ...

to fall for it every week.