Tag: free speech

Little Marco Grew Up

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In the above linked video CBS journalist Margaret Brennan confronts Secretary of State Marco Rubio about JD Vance’s statement that Europe has a problem with free speech.  She condemns Vance for defending free speech in Germany where she declares free speech was responsible for the Nazi genocide against the Jews.

I found this video interesting because I wouldn’t have guessed that Rubio would be as agile as he showed himself to be.  He fired back that he disagreed with her premise and forcefully stated that there was no free speech in Nazi Germany but there was a totalitarian state there.  And it blamed part of its population for economic and social problems and had no moral qualms with murdering these innocent men, women and children on an industrial scale.

I’ve never held the opinion that Marco Rubio was all that sharp.  But he did a very competent job making Brennan seem ridiculous.  Maybe he’s wised up over the years, maybe he’s more confident nowadays to speak sensibly out in the open because Trump has his back or maybe Brennan is just such a lightweight and her logic was so ridiculous that any half intelligent person can make her look like an idiot.

But whatever the cause it was stunning to see just how stupid her case sounded.  But Brennan can’t take all the blame.  After all free speech is not the law of the land in Germany, England or France.  In fact, in Germany there are laws that ban the distribution of materials from groups like the Nazis or other “unconstitutional organizations.”  These laws are being used to try to suppress the AFD (Alternative for Germany) party because they want to restrict immigration.  So, JD Vance advocating for free speech is actually radicalism in a place like Germany.  But Margaret Brennan managed to make it sound completely ridiculous by trying to blame the Holocaust on free speech.

What you see here is the difference between the American conception on free speech and the European fear of speaking uncomfortable truths.  To them some things are too dangerous to say or even think.  And that is the viewpoint that the Democrats tried hard during the Biden administration to import.  That is the reason for the emphasis on misinformation.  Apparently, people can’t be trusted to make up their minds about what is true and what isn’t.  We are too stupid to figure out what’s true so the government and the media have to tell us.

And that is why organizations like CBS fought like hell to make sure Donald Trump didn’t become president.  Because if he did people would be allowed to say what they really thought about things like transgender identity or how bad crime is and whether millions of illegal aliens were a good thing or not.

So here was CBS trying to condemn JD Vance for outraging Europeans with the opinion that denying their people free speech would come back to bite them.  And it was a useful demonstration of where main stream media’s true beliefs sit.  They are solidly behind the globalist position that regular people should just shut up and take at face value whatever the “experts” in the government (except Trump) or the media or the NGOs tell them.  And if you voice a dissenting opinion then your guilty of spreading disinformation and in a perfect world you’d be silenced and sent to the reeducation camp.  Very interesting indeed.

Kudos to JD Vance and (surprisingly) Marco Rubio.  I guess Little Marco grew up.

Painting Myself into a Corner

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Last month I whined about an insanely expensive critical repair project going on at the Compound.  Well, my contractor performed flawlessly and after a month or so of staged demolition and construction we ended up with the end of the house restored to its former functionality only with the ground floor consisting of a poured slab instead of a pier supported wooden floor.  The only hitch was that the slab needed to cure another two weeks before staining it.  And since this contractor has moved onto his next big project, getting him back to stain the floor isn’t possible.  No problem, I promised Camera Girl that I would take care of the painting myself after the requisite two-week delay.

Well, last night she reminded me of my lightly given promise and that by her reckoning Friday was the end of the two weeks.  Like a trapped creature I looked around for a sliver of daylight that I could run through.  But as I’ve said, the middle of October will be a tragically busy time for me when I won’t be able to do anything significant like painting rooms and moving furniture.  Checkmate.

So early today (11am) we went to the big box store and I bought the stain and all the accoutrements.  And after lunch (the condemned man had a hearty meal) I performed the ritual first coat.  Tomorrow, I’ll purchase a paint brush (I thought I had one lying around), do the detail work in the tight spots and put on the final coat.  Then, Sunday I’ll be toting barges and lifting bales for several hours restoring the contents of the room to their original positions and thereby fulfilling my promise to Camera Girl.  Such is the life of a modern husband.  When his wife has the effrontery of quoting his own words back at him, wife beating is no longer a convenient option.  In fact, it’s positively frowned on in some circles.  O tempora, O mores.  I really need to bring Camera Girl to a showing of Shakespeare’s, “The Taming of the Shrew.”  Kate saw the light.  Camera Girl should follow her good example.

But when all was said and done, I rather enjoyed the event.  Well, all except taping the moldings.  That really should be done by someone young and spry.  But rolling on the stain was fun.  Painting a floor is easier than painting walls and a lot easier than ceilings.  No drop cloths, no crick in the neck.  So, I acquiesced semi-gracefully and pretended that I was completely on board with finishing the room this weekend.  Mental agility (or self-deception) is an important survival trait.

I was thinking today about the kind of world that the information age is creating.  Specifically, with the monopoly of advertising being in the hands of Amazon and Google, there is an incredible need (opportunity) for alternate information flow paths.  Google has been declared a monopoly by the federal government but no action seems in the offing.  Since that is the case, it seems more important than ever that some private resource step in and provide an alternative.  Elon Musk has hinted that X is that alternative.  But will it be?  Does he have the vision to provide an unfettered electronic agora where both commerce and information can flow unimpeded by ideology?  So far, I haven’t seen that realized.  Maybe he’s waiting to see if Trump wins the election.  After all the federal government is the biggest customer for his batteries and his rocket ships.  If the Democrats are ensconced in power maybe he’ll just give up his free speech and populist efforts and concentrate on making money.

So much seems to depend on an election that probably won’t be honest.  Maybe I’m the one who is looking at everything all wrong.  Possibly the important lesson to be learned is not how to have free speech but rather how to have hidden speech.  Now that’s a thought.

Well, Maybe

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I get an e-mail whenever Curtis Yarvin writes a post in his Substack; Gray Mirror.  Now Yarvin is a lunatic but an engaging and clever lunatic.  His answer to all of the ills of our society is always the same; install a king.  So, I’m always a little daunted when I consider reading his posts, not least of all because they are usually between five and ten thousand words long.  Yikes!  Luckily this one was on the low end of that range.

It was a gentle chiding of Richard Hanania for becoming a moderate.  I guess Hanania was being attacked in the media for being an alt-right partisan in his younger days.  Well, who wasn’t?  Anyway, after a few thousand words to ridicule the concept of classical liberalism Yarvin gets down to his bottom line.  Any and all progress against the woke left is hopeless because the oligarchy protects it and the only way to get rid of the oligarchy is with a king.

Well, maybe.

So, because our representative democracy has been hijacked by an oligarchy, according to him we should welcome a dictator.  And you wonder, how did that work out for the Romans?  Julius Caesar and Augustus were pretty good.  But after that, what a nightmare.  How do you keep the king from being a madman or an incompetent?  Yarvin has this idea that it would be like some kind of CEO for the country and there would be a board of directors who could hire and fire the king.

Well, maybe

But I’m guessing that stuffing that board would be like stuffing the Supreme Court.  And truth be told the board would be the oligarchs and they would just choose one of their oligarchi-est oligarchs to run their show.  And how in hell do you get something like this started?  No, there is no way out that way.

What seems to be the case is that we are heading for a crisis.  The old system and the way that it works is reaching a breaking point.  Those in charge seem to have a plan to permanently make the voting system just a rubber stamp for their regime.  And at the same time, they want to change the class system in this country from a middle-class dominant model to a feudal system with the peasants working for the oligarchs.  And to be totally honest it sure looks like they’re way ahead getting their plan done.  A big chunk of the millennials and zoomers have serf written all over them.

Well, maybe.

But the best laid plans of oligarchs and serfs oft time go to hell in the real world.  I still think it’s too soon to just throw in the towel.  The demolition of the American economy is preceding at such a breakneck pace that it is somewhat possible that a popular revolt might miraculously sweep the Democrats completely out of power long enough to allow actual representatives of the people to make drastic reforms and restore our interests.

Well, maybe.

After reading about the FBI gunning down that old guy in Provo, Utah I’m not feeling so chipper today.  I know the radical nature of the killing should help to delegitimize the institutions like the FBI.  And it probably does.  The man as described was obviously no threat to anyone.

“Neighbors who spoke with the Deseret News described Robertson as a markedly different person than what he portrayed online. One person called him a “teddy bear” known for his woodworking who would sit in the same seat at church every Sunday; another said he was barely mobile, weighed nearly 300 pounds and was unable to walk without a cane. He would drive to church, despite it only being about 200 yards from his home, because he had so much trouble moving around.

Neighbors also described a harrowing scene, with dozens of agents converging on the Provo house, rifles drawn and hiding behind bulletproof shields as flash bangs exploded.

“I just can’t believe that this man warranted that kind of response,” said Travis Clark, who lived up the street from Robertson.”

It makes me sick to think that the FBI has become a secret police agency, no different from the Stasi and the KGB.  In fact, worse than those organizations.  At least the KGB wouldn’t have allowed BLM and Antifa to burn down their own cities.  But maybe it will be this kind of gestapo tactics that convinces a solid majority of the American people that our “leaders” are really our overlords now and need to be replaced with something better.

Maybe, maybe not.

Tough day to be optimistic.

Texas Joins Florida in Tackling Social Media Bias and De-Platforming of the Right

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Governor Abbott of Texas has joined Governor DeSantis of Florida in calling for state legislation to rein in anti-right bias in the social media platforms.  Let’s hope they coordinate their efforts to enact the same legislation and then share it with the rest of the red states.  I’d love to see these states sue the pants off Google, Facebook and Twitter among others.  While they’re at it they might as well look at what Amazon is doing with banning books.  They’ve got a whole lot of money that could really help a lot of state rainy day funds.  You could build a lot of roads and bridges with what Bezos spends on the Washington Post every year.

So here’s hoping this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship between the red state governors and their legislatures.  May a thousand law suits bloom and bleed the social media companies dry.

 

 

 

 

03MAY2020 – American Greatness – Post of the Day – Bound and Gagged by the Bugmen

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Someone pseudo-named L0m3z has a post about SJW double talk or as he references it bug speak.  He makes his point but what really makes this worth reading is his quote from the “Zaphorian Cossack’s Letter to Sultan Mehmed IV.”  That scurrilous obscene screed to the Ottoman sultan is downright hilarious.  And Lom3z is using it as an example of non-bug speak such as he highlights in President Trump’s straightforward way of speaking and writing.  You owe it to yourself to read the details of the Cossacks’ history with the sultan.  It makes you proud to be a free man to know that such courage and creative obscenity has been passed down to us through history.  Take a look at the famous painting celebrating the momentous writing of the letter.  It does my heart good.

I’ll conclude with the conclusion of the Letter, “Now we’ll conclude, for we don’t know the date and don’t own a calendar; the moon’s in the sky, the year with the Lord, the day’s the same over here as it is over there; for this kiss our arse!”

 

 

 

Tucker Carlson Hits Another Home Run

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This is so on the nose I hope the President listens to it and congratulates Carlson for saying it.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2019/01/13/tucker_carlson_free_speech_of_all_americans_is_at_risk.html

Once the new AG is sworn in I hope he does exactly what Tucker is talking about.  Go after companies and the non-profits who goad them into firing people over speech and put a stop to it.  Finally someone in the mainstream media talking straight about this stuff.  It’s about time.

What Can We Learn from the Death of Gab?

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Vox and the Z-Man have posts up on the shutting down of Gab.

http://thezman.com/wordpress/?p=15418

https://voxday.blogspot.com/2018/10/they-cant-say-i-didnt-warn-them_28.html

There are a few ways of talking about this.  First off, we can discuss what is lost by a Gab shutdown.  Personally, I’ve never really completely understood Twitter or Gab.  It just seemed like everyone linking to everyone else but not actually reading the content.  What the actual value of that is escapes me.  I tried reading my linked content many times and found it a muddled mess.  Maybe that’s what happens when a million people are mixed in a blender together.  But I will confess I probably just didn’t know what I was doing.  So, all in all from a personal point of view it won’t actually affect me.  Now, maybe it has actually been useful for other folks for communication and publicity.  If anyone has found it valuable, say so in the comments.  But from my point of view it wasn’t very useful.

The next way we can look at it is what can we learn from how it was shut down.  Andrew Torba was vehement that he wanted freedom of speech to be the defining characteristic of Gab.  That sounds like a laudable ideal.  In practice, however, the content became pretty foul.  There were some pretty crazy people on the site.  Now, it’s unclear how much was just trolling by those looking to destroy Gab and which was legitimate nutbaggery.  But regardless, the result was unpleasant and chaotic.  Not being a Twitter user maybe I’m just unaware that this is par for the course in a social media arena.  If that is so then it sort of reinforces my impression that Twitter and all these social media environments are toxic places that are mostly about battling your enemies for sport.  I run a very different type of website.  It’s a microscopic place compared to Gab (never mind Twitter).  But we have to deal with the same questions of how to regulate the written interactions between real people.  I have the advantage that I can monitor the discussions on my own.  The scope is possible in a small venue.  For a place like Twitter or Gab it becomes expensive and difficult to maintain a consistent policy because of the need for multiple individuals with their individual points of view.  With respect to freedom of speech on my site, I tell people they can speak their minds but keep it reasonable.  Obviously, that isn’t a highly precise statement.  What I’m trying to say is stay within legal and cultural norms.  Different people have different perspectives on those and the only standard that I have to decide on what conforms and what doesn’t is my own judgement.  But that isn’t too different from any other venue where people interact and debate.  I’m guessing that a truly free speech site will always be a sort of giant demolition derby.  If your site is perceived as being on the right-wing it is clear that you will be punished whenever the opportunity presents itself so allowing the crazier individuals to let it all hang out will eventually lead to the situation that occurred at Gab.  So, the lesson to learn is a fully free speech site is not going to happen in the present environment.

And finally, we can look at what should be changed to avoid this waste of resources.  The first thing that comes to mind is an analysis could be done to find out exactly what are the useful functions that a Twitter, Facebook or YouTube serves and how, if at all, they could be replicated in a competing right-wing entity.  I am hardly qualified to do such an analysis but I’ll at least attempt to discuss some of the more obvious answers.  The two most important functions these sites accomplish is communication and commerce.  The sites allow people to find their audience.  To the extent that they are right-wing sites I guess that will help pre-select for the audience intended.  The second function is allowing content creators to monetize their product.  This will be tied into advertising revenue.  From what I’ve heard advertising revenues, even on established giants like YouTube and Instagram, are shrinking drastically.  What I think this all means is that a viable right-wing social media site will be a site where content providers will pay a fee to obtain visibility and the site will provide amenities like video storage space, band-width and some amount of moderation of the trolls.  Eventually, popular content producers will be able to sell advertising on their videos and other content products.  To me this seem to be the future of right-wing social media.  And it seems like a reasonable model.  Eventually the site will develop other ways to monetize its value.  Subscriptions like Netflix and Amazon eventually will be the end state.

So that’s my take on what can be learned from the Gab debacle.  Experience is the cruelest teacher but the most effective.