I got a surprise message in my email this morning, although, come to think of it, it's not much of a surprise. Salon.com is shutting down its sister site, Open Salon as of, well.............they've already done it. No warning. No time to go in and pull out your dozens of blog posts. Just so long, farewell and sayonara!
The blogs will be up for another 14 days, but you won't be able to edit them or add new posts. This probably saves "Open" Salon from some really nasty comments. Much better to lop off the head of the beast than to give it time to speak. I will make an attempt to pull as much of the original material I posted there as I can. The process will be time consuming since I can't get at the html code anymore.
Uncle Tom's Traveling Salvation Show (the name of my Open Salon blog) will migrate to my already crowded Blogger.com stable and maintain at least an archival presence on the net. I'm really not surprised they've pulled the plug. I mostly wrote stuff for Open Salon to irritate my liberal fellow bloggers there. We've had some pretty lively discussions there and I actually convinced some of my liberal buds to change their opinions a bit. That may have been part of the problem. Apparently, conservative proselytizing is not permitted where there are people with unformed opinions.
Open Salon is a notable liberal site. Their stable of writers are by and large progressive socialist in their politics. They keep a few cartoon conservatives around for their select readers to snipe at, but the site is not noted for it's open-mindedness. The point of creating "Open" Salon, seems to have been to encourage amateur liberal pundits to chime in and create a kind of "Hallelujah Chorus" for the main website.
The problem is that nasty old conservatives found the site and set up their own blogs on it and began commenting on the blogs of their liberal brothers. Actually a moderate who is refreshingly open-minded invited me to come over to provide a balancing voice to the increasingly strident liberal screed that past for "dialogue" on the site. Other conservatives joined the site and began creating some surprisingly resilient networks that spider-webbed out through the liberal blogosphere of the Open Salon site and provided a dissident anti-chorus to the liberal cheer-leading.
Apparently Salon.com has had enough of all this "open" discussion and has lowered the hammer. Open Salon will be no more in just two weeks. They say you still have access to your blogs, but since you cannot sign in to your account, the only way you can see your blog is to do a Google search on the exact title and sneak in the back way. I managed to get to my blogs by entering the URL of my blog page ( http://open.salon.com/blog/twayneking/ ). I suspect the brainiacs at Open Salon didn't think mere conservatives would be able to figure that one out or else they'd have just shut it all down without warning. If they did that though, their liberal followers, who had lovingly crafted blog after blog built around DNC talking points memos, would have set up a howl and believe me nobody knows how to whine, howl, pitch and moan better than a liberal. Ah, the perils of allowing free speech to get just a tiny toe-hold in your propaganda machine.
Think of Open Salon's execution as a preview to the institution of the New America these guys hope to change us into - a progressive national socialist America. Here in the violent beheading of Open Salon, you get a little peek, if you will, at what will happen to the freedoms we enjoy now, when the inevitable collectivist state, that Salon's writers hope to create, comes crashing down upon us.
I suspect the FCC, having seized power over the Internet, will soon join the less sophisticated Salon.com in shutting down troublesome sites in short order. But for now, we will keep on writing and speaking truth to power; just not the truth that power had hoped we would speak.
Just one man's opinion.
Tom King
© 2015
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