<div class="header-image"></div> # About The Candid Apples moniker began in 2015 as I was looking to begin anew with some of my social media accounts, which had become fixated on the New Atheism movement. While I am certainly still an atheist, and still enjoy the debate now and again, I'd grown weary of the same arguments over and over. I was also growing more concerned with the attacks on free speech and individualism at different Colleges and Universities across North America, and eventually all of the western world. For all my life until that point, I saw myself as a socially liberal, Left-Wing progressive. What this meant to me was freedom, pure and simple. I saw the Right as preaching freedom, but in name only. I grew up through the Satanic Panic, religious pearl-clutching, sexual repression, and censorship of all sorts of art and literature by the Religious Right. It was also the Right who was behind ridiculous airport security, wiretapping its own citizens, and imprisoning whistleblowers. It was the Right standing in the way of same-sex marriage in America, and demonising homosexuality. They said "They hate us for our freedom," while restricting the freedom of an entire country. I saw the Right as nothing but oppressive hypocrites. After Trump won the 2016 American election, I saw my progressive allies all across the West crumble into authoritarian conformity. They wanted to restrict the ability to communicate online to those who shared their own narrow ideology. They didn't want to debate opinion; they wanted to enforce it, and did, with the help of the tech industry. The Right, on the other hand, became free speech champions. They embraced same-sex marriage, spoke up for small start-up businesses and the working class, and sought to restrict the overreach of massive, multinational corporations, particularly in the tech-sector. In short, in all the ways that mattered to me, the Left and Right flipped political stances. Now I find myself without a political identity at all. There is still too much I disagree with on the Right to consider myself a Conservative, and the Left has disintegrated. I am a centrist in a world polluted with tribal identities, accused of "fence sitting" for not towing any party line. This blog aims to discuss current events from this perspective, with the odd foray into more non-political topics like running, music, and tech. ## Contact The best way to contact me directly is on X: [https://x.com/Candid_Apples](https://x.com/Candid_Apples) If you like, I have a Mastodon account, though I'm not very active over there: [https://linuxrocks.online/@candidapples](https://linuxrocks.online/@candidapples) I also have a Bluesky account but I use it even less: [https://bsky.app/profile/candidapples.bsky.social](https://bsky.app/profile/candidapples.bsky.social) If you want to email me, you can, just be sure to include "blog" in the subject: [[email protected]](mailto:[email protected]) ## The Code This blog is powered by Obsidian Publish. There is no Javascript; all styling elements are done with CSS. For anyone interested, contact me using any of the above methods, and I can send you my publish.css file.