Someone on Facebook in a public group, in a public posting, put up a picture with a caption that triggered a horror experience from my childhood It was a picture of a wild coyote with an "exit hole" blown completely thorough it by a bullet. The hole was the size of a baseball. This post was in a group dedicated to a particular brand name of firearm that rhymes with "clock".

When I was a kid not more than 8 years old, while hiking at my grandparent's house on a holiday, I came across a beautiful German Shepherd in the woods, lying dead only a hundred yards from my grandparents house. I can't forget the image of the hole in the side of the dog, filled with blood and flies. It was a pool the size of a drinking glass.

That was almost the same image that this guy posted in his gun group of a wild coyote, bragging how proud he was of his kill, how the gun which the group was named after created this "exit hole", and then he said,

"I doubt the coyote was so happy"

That's a dark and empty soul, in my opinion. And since that post was public, which means he who uploaded the picture and wrote the caption wanted all members of the internet-viewing public to know of his achievement and his pride, I was in his audience.

so I responded in kind, using words that rhyme with "other trucker". I should re-post the words verbatim, because Facebook wants me to know that my words crossed their lines of appropriate social decorum.

and of course, he reported me to Facebook, who has censored my posting capacity for three days, and told me that since this is my third occasion, that my account risk permanent deletion if there are more. Lesson: you can kill animals, post pictures of your achievement, and brag about the size of the hole you made, and how the dead animal is probably "not happy" while lying dead for your photo, full of lead and your macho ego. But if you use the 1st Amendment (the one right before the 2nd, which guarantees the right to the gun that made the hole in the dead animal) to say that the animal killer is a sick motherfucker ....well, NOW you've gone too far.

My question to you - and Facebook - is this -

Why are we having this measuring contest to rank who offended and horrified who more? Did me calling this guy who delights in the death of animals a profane word cause him more pain than his gory picture of the dead animal that awoke a 40 year old flashback of childhood horror in my life?

So that's what Facebook is all about now. A "community" with "standards"

two words that are as vague and amorphous to a society as diverse as the Internet as "pain" and "joy" - - who gets to measure one against the other and declare winnners and losers?

Facebook, that's who.

he who reports first, wins. After that, nobody answers the door in the judicial chambers to explain their decision, and no appeals are granted.

Funny, don't you think? People arguing about free speech that uses a platform that has arbitrary and capricious censorship, that -

in it's most tragic applications

can amplify horror, and silence objective critics.