Parler is dead, for now. The very loosely moderated Twitter clone — designed to appeal to the sort of people who get kicked off of Twitter — went dark last night after Amazon pulled the plug on its web services.
With its site unreachable, and with Apple and Google both removing the Parler app from their respective app stores, it’s not clear if Parler will be able to rise from the grave, as some other terrible sites have managed to do when faced with similar issues. (I’m looking at you, Daily Stormer.)
Since most of you probably never looked at Parler during its relatively brief lifetime, I thought I’d take a few moments to let you know just what you missed. Here are an assortment of classic Parler posts, as collected by the indefatigable @ParlerTakes on Twitter.
Parler, popular with QAnon cultists and conspiracy theorists generally, was a wonderful source for intriguing facts — or should I say alternative facts:
And then of course there are the violent threats and genocidal fantasies:
Some of this vitriol is aimed at an unexpected enemy of the Parler patriots: the police.
Suffice it to say that Amazon was not terribly popular on Parler after it announced its plans to shut off web services to the site.
There were more than a few edgy opinions:
Parler is where everybody’s favorite self-aggrandizing semi-fascist opinion-haver Milo Yiannopoulos went after being kicked off of Twitter:
Parler was also home to right-wing bloviator Bill Mitchell and his peculiar opinions:
And it’s where L. Lin Wood, the unhinged, QAnon-infected, pro-Trump lawyer, posts his … stuff.
I’m just going to pray that Parler remains down.
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In other news, Gab apparently gained 600K users today. And over on Twitter there seems to be an abundance of trolls returning from Parler today.
Ok, so I just went through all those. I believe I just lost about 35 IQ points, maybe 36.
Isn’t (or hopefully, wasn’t) Parler that place where you start out shadowbanned until the very right-leaning mods deem you worthy of entering the echo chamber?
“Free Speech,” everybody!
Didn’t Obama move to Martha’s Vineyard, like, two years ago?
It always amazes me that these guys thinks the left don’t have guns or military training. My husband is a democrat. I’ve known how to properly clean, handle and fire a firearm since I was 7. It amazes me that these people think they are the only ones who own firearms and know how to use them and that someone from the left would not shoot them with a firearm to protect themselves of their family. That is the only time I would ever use mine of a person. I don’t even like guns, there is a reason I’m on the left, But you know who still has one by in the bedroom? me! If only for the other reason to make my husband feel more secure when I’m living alone. But these really seem to believe their own slander propaganda about the left being sensitive and week so they can’t possibly fight back if someone threatens them with death. It’s really amazing to me.
OT for a moment. Wanted to tell you guys the good news. My husbands on a list for getting covid vaccinations at the moment. He might be able to come home this year and he might be qualifying for early separation. This is his last year of active duty.
I’ve gotten some all clear from my doctors and I’m going to graduate in may hopefully. So by the end of this year or slightly in the next, I could be back with my husband in our little apartment, working through life and pregnant with our first kid if we’re lucky.
@Lainy
Congratulations to you! I hope you continue to get good news for the rest of the year! ?
@Lainy: I hope it all works out for you, minus having to shoot anyone.
Wingnuts are all “we can get Parler back up real quick!” and I’m wondering a) with what money? Are their original founders going to put millions more in and b) do they have any idea what kind of a project this is? Bubba in his mom’s basement can’t code this up in a week.
I suppose it could be done better, since they didn’t bother with any sort of security. Between the hack a couple months ago and the complete download of their entire database this week (including fun things like driver’s licenses and GPS coordinates). All that money sure didn’t go into infrastructure — but that’s RW grift for you.
@GSS
I hope I never shoot anybody in my life time. It’s a skill I really don’t want to use. But I’ve been hurt to many times by to many men to let my guard like that down. I’d rather the world would be different and everyone just behave and didn’t hurt each other. These guys want a violent world though.
@Patty
Yeah I hope so too. Being a mom is one of things I really want to be in life. We’ve been talking about kids since we first started date. I’m lucky enough to have found a partner that wants children just as bad as I do and I think we’ll be secure enough to have one when he gets home. I’m really scared though because I’m expecting this year to come punch us all in the gut with the power of a wrecking ball.
@Lainy
They also seem to forget that great things, even the greatest things, in history have been accomplished without guns or weapons. Even the supposed highest ideal of the right never lifted a finger against those who came to murder Him: was Jesus weak? I think Trump cultists would say yes, because they have found a new god.
Edit: huh all the other comments loaded in after I posted mine. Congrats on the positive bill of health and I’m glad your family life is shaping up the way you want. 🙂
@Lainy
I think it’s because they refuse to actually listen to anyone from the left, so their only source of “knowledge” is stereotypes and memes that they made up, so they become increasingly convinced that the left actually resembles the stereotypes and get further and further disconnected from the reality.
Congratulations on your husband getting vaccinated and coming home, best of luck.
@GSS ex-noob
Parler appears to be funded from some Russian sources, so although it’s possible they could sink more money, it probably wouldn’t be worth the cost of finding a new host.
@Big Titty Demon
If Jesus appeared today the far right would probably try to have him deported because he wasn’t white, try to kill him because he was a Jew, or try to kill him for being “antifa,” or some combination of those.
@Lainy:
Just the fact you even mention cleaning it suggests you’re probably more knowledgeable and skilled than a lot of the fanatics waving theirs about.
Coding up a replacement parler would not be hugely difficult. Coding it well to cope with a decent traffic level and with a good UI and to have security would be a lot more work.
But even, then that’s far from being the biggest problem they will have. If they can’t get vendors, then they will have to buy their own hardware, purchase their own datacenter (yes, that means real estate – and there won’t be anyone wanting to be their landlord), run their own fiber and then get peering arrangements – and they’ll have to hire a real network engineer, because they’ll be running their own ISP, not just hosting.
They’d still have one vendor – a Tier 1 carrier that they have to purchase transit from – but that would be both easy to replace, and they are often regulated as common carriers, required to sell to anyone who will pay and comply with basic technical requirements (and, after a long battle in the 1990s to get regulators to permit this, a rule to not carry spammers).
“Richard’s” comment above about attacking Amazon delivery drivers worries me, because that’s the kind of thing RWers could pretty easily put into action – there are a lot of deliveries being made at any given moment, all across North America, and even if Amazon cared about employee safety I doubt they could put a security detail on each truck.
@Naglfar : in the context of the time, Jesus was the equivalent of a white from a rural area (he was of the main local ethnic group, but not from the aristocracy) ; from a middle class background (carpenters weren’t particulary poor at the time). Probably very much antifa tho. The bible depict him as rather radical in his teaching, which is a sharp contrast with how mainstream christianity is.
Of course, he is allegedly omniscient and omnipotent, so he could be whoever he need for his wisdom lesson, and make sure republicans martyrize him only as much as he need for the lesson of the day. And he would not have good answers to “why exactly didn’t you change the ICE guards into so many salt statues when they started locking up childrens ?”
Semi OT.
Today I learned (via Beau of the 5th column on YouTube) that lots of government buildings in Washington DC ping your phone as you walk in. So all those rioters/insurrectionists/terrorists busy taking selfies were also telling the secret service who they were.
This is probably one of the reasons why so many of them found themselves on no fly lists.
I’m hoping this is part of the reason so many were allowed to walk away from the capitol. Law enforecement already knew who they were, and it was safer to arrest them in ones and twos rather than all at once.
@Ohlmann
Fair, what I meant was that Jesus would not be considered white by most modern standards, despite much media depicting him as white.
@Ohlmann
Jesus’ teachings were well within Pharisaic and Rabbinic traditions. No clue whether he’d have been anti fascist. As a Jew, I feel no need to assume that he’d disagree with any or all branches of Christianity. I suppose he might.
@Naglfar:
This is part of a larger, pervasive pattern of epistemological failure on their part that leaves them with an ontology that belongs in The Twilight Zone.
@Ohlmann:
So, the rough equivalent of a certain middle-class Jew from Vermont, save for the fact that the latter went on to become a mayor and then a senator whereas the former got treated rather more like MLK Jr.
@Morsley : you’re right nothing in christianism was particulary novel. However, it *is* pretty radical, and especially so given that the Catholic Church have enforced conservatism and a ton of shit explicitely or implicitely condemned by the new testament for a lot of its history.
At the very least, half of the new testament is Jesus showing his middle fingers to conservatives. Like talking to prostitutes, removing the temple merchants, and generally insisting on being a good man over adhering to social convention. An antifa by far right definition since he was so opposed to conservatives and fascists, but indeed not an anarchist, and probably decently moderate by antifa standard.
@Surplus : more or less. With the caveat that MLK wasn’t planning to get himself killed to teach a lesson (and also do some mystical sacrifice thing). And also could not say three day after that “that was fun, but bye bye I go back to my cool mansion”.
Also, now you make me fear again for his life.
@Ohlmann
Yes, I’m aware that by our standards he wouldn’t be antifa, but to conservatives “antifa” means anyone who isn’t an open Nazi at this point.
The one about injecting chemtrails is, I’m about 90% confident here, a troll.
The one about a “tribe”? I’m 100% confident that’s an anti-Semitic Nazi dog whistle.
I’m pretty sure that, yes, we would hear about a pandemic of a highly transmissible virus that is not fatal but causes miscarriage in pregnant people. I am also sure that people like Bill Mitchell would as much or even more opposed to any public health measures intended to slow the spread of the virus. They would probably be calling for all pregnant people to have to quit their jobs and stay in the kitchen barefoot while everyone else goes about their regular days.
@Tabby
Yes, that’s definitely an antisemitic dogwhistle.
@naglfar
Thank you. Hopefully it’s all going to work out well. I miss him so much
@moon
I know. It’s really sad and concerning. I see way to many people who are obsessed with guns but couldn’t tell you the first thing about how to maintain it