Peter's Place

On the evening before five very important primary elections were to be held on Tuesday, April 26, 2016, supporters of Bernie Sanders noticed something quite strange taking place on Facebook: groups advocating support for Bernie Sanders, which have been a primary vehicle for disseminating information and mobilizing support for actions, were disappearing. According to Lauren E Stafford, a social media consultant and administrative assistant, many of the affected Bernie Sanders Facebook groups have more than 50,000 members. "At least ten such very well-known and popular groups were removed during Monday evening's attack, leaving hundreds of thousands of Bernie Sanders supporters in the dark," she claimed. Evidence implicating a coordinated effort by Hillary Clinton's campaign and/or her supporters was quickly uncovered as some Clinton supporters, such as Casey Champagne, bragged about being part of that effort in the "BROS 4 HILLARY #GiveEmHill" Facebook gr...

Huffington Post's Healthy Living editor Lindsay Holmes recently published an article advocating unfriending seven types of people from one's social media circles. The premise of the article is that getting rid of the seven types of people she describes will create a healthier life. I disagree. First and foremost, unfriending someone is, in most cases a hostile act. Hostile acts such as unfriending someone require negative energy. This is the exact opposite effect Ms. Holmes purports to achieve in her suggestion of unfriending the types of people she suggests. There are less hostile and non-hostile ways of disengaging with individuals one may consider to be irritating. As I set forth below, I believe that the vast majority of "types of friends" Ms. Holmes suggests unfriending are those one may very well wish to keep in their circles, as such friendships -- whether "in real life" or "through social media" have real value in our lives. 1. T...

I wrote this on 30 March 2010 but just haven’t had a chance to post it until now. But then, something happened today (a few conversations with a few different TweePALs) that made my memory job back a few months and remember what I had written, and realize that now would be a great time to finally get this up on my blog: I had to go into the City today and forgot to bring a book along with me to read on the train ride. While the ride isn’t that long (50-minutes tops, from my sister's home) it’s long enough to get through a few chapters of a good book. I did, however, have my trusty laptop computer with me so I’ve brought it out as the train is departing and am just going to write down some of my thoughts until a few minutes before my stop, when I’ll have to start the process of hibernating the computer (it takes a few minutes to go into hibernation mode because writing 3,221,225,472 bytes (3GB) of data to a hard disk drive – no matter the speed and/or interface – still takes a...

Today, 10 September 2009, is World Suicide Prevention Day . I am a suicide survivor. My first attempt was made when I was a teenager, because I couldn't come to terms with being gay and being Catholic. I just responded to someone on Facebook who inquired about this. Here's what I wrote: I was raised in a very conservative, very religious Catholic Democratic household, by my very religious, very conservative Democratic Grandparents . I didn't know that there were gay people growing up. Then I started going on-line, and I met my first gay person, my Unca Uni . He got me to realize that all the fantasies/what not I'd been having were b/c I was gay. I couldn't reconcile being Catholic with being gay. One night, whilst on the phone w/ a fellow young Republican from Yonkers, I came out to him. I was also taking sleeping pills. But having led an extremely sheltered life, I didn't know that you're supposed to take the whole bottle all at once, not one at a time (wh...

OK, I've been trying to do this for the past few weeks but things just haven't been in my favour. I'm hoping that today, they are. Actually, I started this tag a number of weeks ago in my #followfriday and #samesexsunday recommendation posts but I just never had the chance to explain it until now. As most of you know, I use Twitter, that wonderful micro-blogging service that where you send status updates in 140 characters (or less) in response to a very basic question: What are you doing? One of the greatest things about Twitter, and what I find most valuable about it, is the ability to connect with people around the world who you may otherwise never come into contact with. I hold daily conversations with folks from the Netherlands, Australia, Europe, Asia, and the Americas (North and South) that I've met -- solely through Twitter. I've formed great friendships, and met some truly wonderful folk. The way to interact with people on Twitter is by following them, or ...

Today is #samesexsunday on Twitter . In a nutshell, this is the day when Twitter users recommend other lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) users to follow. It was started by The Bilerico Project : "Same Sex Sunday is an idea hatched by me and Bil to build a stronger sense of LGBT community on Twitter. The concept is pretty simple. Its #followfriday gone gay, gay, gay." My list has grown a bit, so instead of tweeting it, I'm going to tweet this post, and then link to the people I recommend on here. I can also add comments about users here, as well, as that pesky 140-character limit won't get in the way. All of the following Twitter users are LGBT people I recommend because they're personable, knowledgeable, helpful, insightful, and good folk. Send them an @ (a directed message on Twitter) and you'll most likely get a response. Additionally, I've also tagged certain people with other twitter hashtags, to denote whether they're, say, a #wome...