I don’t want my personal page to be about business or politics or anything like that anymore. However from earlier blog posts I wrote that I have always been a very strong advocate of free speech going back to when I worked for the Winnebago County Library System in college. I’ve written about that almost too many times lately.

I did however want to write about Twitter and not from any particular view other than to say, I now find it interesting for the first time. I’ve been on Twitter since 2009, but the moment I felt there was bias, early on in my use, I stopped using it and only kept it to preserve my name on Twitter. I stop reading things like Twitter when I can’t rely on the content. I’d tweet now and then, just to keep my account alive and now I’m back on, cheering on Elon Musk, as long as the platform remains a place for debate, opinion and discourse on all sides. If I see the left getting kicked off for different standards than the right, that too will bother me as I think there is room for lots of opinions.

Some ask, where do you draw the line? I tend to lean on the side where you don’t do anything other than keep it civil, even if it’s hot tempered at times. I don’t mind name calling, but I do mind when I see someone getting bullied. I know, complete free speech, terrifying as that sounds, matters. The problem is the slippery slope.

Wouldn’t it be better for bad people to reveal themselves as such? Would Hitler ever gained fame if he didn’t suppress the other side? Imagine how that would have changed the whole world had he been shouted down! I’m never going to like everything I read on Twitter and I will fight back on some topics that matter to me.

I don’t worry about what the left says about Trump. Before that it was Bush and so on. It’s thick on both sides. Biden gets his unfair lumps sometimes too.

To add some context about truth finding, I also wrote in the past that, I’ve been following US mortality stats for probably twenty years. Why? I find it interesting. Call me weird.

I read them in detail because it puts some context into news and it helps me when someone pitches me about a product or service that saves lives. I find the data to be fascinating. For instance, when the oxycodone epidemic was happening, you could see life expectancy drop as a real number for the first time. It was actual evidence that people were dying from pain meds and what was in the press was probably true.

The whole concept of decreasing one cause of death increase other causes of death while lifespan increases fascinates me because of how it can be spun. If you eliminated heart disease, cancer deaths would increase and someone could claim cancer deaths are on the rise and that we have to do something.

The opposite is also true because we all die of something, which by itself people ignore in the calculation. All we’re doing is shifting the cause of death. The mortality pie gets bigger when we all live longer, but the slices are just that, one trade for another. If they eliminated every cause of death other than an infected hangnail, that would be the leading cause of death. The dumb press would report that death by infected hangnail is on the rise. True on its face, but only because every other cause of death was eliminated.

When I saw the mortality numbers dramatically shift during COVID, without shifts in other categories, I knew that we were not getting the truth in the data. I studied it carefully and knew the numbers were rigged. Why? I didn’t have a lock on the truth and we still won’t know the real story for a couple of years. All I know is that what we’ve been told by our government doesn’t fit our historical mortality stats like it should if they were on the up and up, so I’m a COVID skeptic. Come back to this post in a few years.

My point isn’t to debate COVID, my point is that the government doesn’t have a lock on the truth and the only way to get it out there is through debate of all sides, which is why I’m back on Twitter. Let people smarter than me raise the issue of the faulty data. We all want to know the facts, no matter what without censorship. At least I do. It’s not a political thing, it’s just the numbers. I’m curious about how it all goes down.

What we all want out of a free society is to be well informed and to have the right data. I spend hours writing answers on Quora and it doesn’t bother me when someone else has a different opinion.

So why do I delete trolls? Well, I don’t want them to not post their opinion, but there is a difference between that and harassment. That’s where I draw the line on free speech on Twitter. Disagree, but keep it from becoming a fistfight. I’m having fun watching both sides on Twitter, and I recommend it if you love a good debate.