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2022-


2022-04-30 d
IT'S TIME FOR THE BEST SELLING BOOK


2022-04-30 c
IT'S TIME FOR THE MINISTRY OF TRUTH

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2022-04-30 b
IT'S TIME FOR THE TRUTH

Naomi Wolf Eloquently Deconstructs the Terms Dis, Mis, and Malinformation

The first principle in battling against the Alinsky crew is to not to accept their terminology.  Controlling language is a specific tactic of the professional political left.  We used to call it labeling, but modern leftists moved beyond labels into the creation of new definitions.  Modern leftists now use two different strategies depending on their target: (1) create new words, the traditional labeling; and (2) redefine existing words.

In this interview Naomi Wolf is one of the few people I have seen who correctly starts her discussion by dispatching the linguistics and framing her own baseline argument.  All politicians and candidates for office should watch how Wolf responds to the first question from Tucker Carlson, and then makes the better argument.

Wolf doesn’t waste time debating “misinformation”, “disinformation”, or “malinformation”, instead she accurately just says those things do not exist. Information stands undefined. From that position there are truth and lies.  Her approach is exactly correct.  Do not accept the insanity of the Alinsky language effort.  A refreshing and really good interview, WATCH.

On January 13, 2022, the fraudulent and managed autocrat, the installed occupant of the White House, gave instructions to his fellow travelers in Big Tech, and I quote:

“I make a special appeal to social media companies and media outlets: Please deal with the misinformation and disinformation that’s on your shows.  It has to stop.”   ~ Joe Biden

It was crystal clear what Joe Biden was telling his allies in social media to do.  There is information the Government wants us to hear, and everything else is disinformation or misinformation the U.S. Govt disapproves of.

Immediately CTH encountered criticism for our position on information. However, Wolf understands exactly what we have discussed:

…”There is no such thing as “disinformation” or “misinformation”.  There is only information you accept and information you do not accept.  You were not born with a requirement to believe everything you are told; rather, you were born with a brain that allows you to process the information you receive and make independent decisions.”…  (link)

Ultimately, the government is not trying to control words, they are trying to control thoughts.

(read more)

2022-04-30 a
IT'S TIME FOR THE GUILLOTINES

As if a switch had been flicked, now the cruel moral judgments, the two-tier society, the mandates, the coercions, the nasty looks, the desperate masked children with their laboring breath, the loneliness, the desolate centrally-planned economies — had evaporated and were no more.

A memo from a political consultancy had gone out to the DNC, warning about how these policies spelled defeat in the midterms, and Pouf! — a whole retinue of “mandates” messaged as if they had been matters of life and death, a raft of Board of Health demands, a plethora of social strictures, and baroque instructions on how and when to discriminate against one’s fellow Americans — vanished, like the smoke from an unwelcome cigarette on a breezy veranda. An MSNBC commentator said, in a logical non sequitur, that now that vaccines were available for kids, in-person office life would resume.

Overnight, a new concern, a new moral signifier, was presented, wholly formed: and it involved a conflict area half a world away. Now, war is always bad and invasions are always cruel; but I could not help noticing that there are wars, refugees, invasions and conflict areas around the world, and that only this one — this one one — demanded the attentions of my irksomely cultish and uncritical former tribe. I could not help noticing that the dozens of devastated conflict areas and war zones being totally ignored by the ex-Brooklynites — from Ethiopia, where there have been 50,000 deaths since September, to Sri Lanka, with its catastrophic food shortages, to Mexico’s drug war, which has led to 300,000 deaths, to Afghanistan, where women are being rounded up and people are being shot in the street — do not involve white people who look like the ex-Brooklynites; and for various other reasons, are not attracting a lot of television cameras.

You’d think the ex-Brooklynites, with their expensive educations, would bear those complexities in mind.

But no; the ex-Brooklynites are so easily led, when it comes to anyone invoking their particular moral high ground.

When they are directed to pay attention to one conflict out of dozens, and ignore the rest, no matter how dire the rest may be, they do so. Just like, when they were instructed to present their bodies uncritically to an untried mRNA injection and to offer up the bodies of their minor children, they did so. When they were asked to shun and to discriminate against their blameless neighbors, they did so.

So the great apparatus of messaging about COVID was switched off, almost overnight, as the politics clearly soured and as Republicans consolidated an increasingly popular, multiracially inclusive, transpartisan-ly appealing freedom message; and the comms apparatus simply replaced the COVID drama with a new, equally gripping European-conflict drama.

These dramas are real, of course, but there are also highly messaged; a fact about politics that adults such as these are, would do well to understand at last.

But — when politics required it — Look over there!

So now — as I was driving through the sunny valley that looked and felt like it was becoming America again, with freedom coursing through the towns and rural areas like blood slowly returning to a limb that had been asleep — I started to realize what my sense of sorrow really was.

People who had joined school boards that had masked ten-year-olds — their lives were back to normal! People who had told family members that they were unwelcome at Thanksgiving dinner — their lives were back to normal!

Huzzah.

On MSNBC that morning, Dr Anthony Fauci, that entangled mass of compromised spiritual matter, who had presided over the intentional wastelands of the pandemic; who had for two years delivered in his nasal Brooklyn cadences its lie-based soundbites with their dearth of scientific studies, that wrecked livelihoods, destroyed kids’ educations, and that drove whole communities into destitution — had declared, as if he were God Himself, that the pandemic was over.

Well — okay then!

I realized as we drove that my grief was not actually grief. As any pop psychologist will tell you, just beneath depression is rage.

I realized — I was furious.

Brian and I had been fighting, side by side, relentlessly, for over two years, in a bitter, exhausting war to return America to — simply to normal; to its historic status as a great, free society, in which people could enjoy their Constitutional liberties.

We were part of a loose community —a movement, say — of people braver and more dedicated than we; we were part of what you might call a liberty movement. But these heroes and heroines alongside whom we fought, were all pitiably few in number. There were maybe hundreds; maybe a few thousand. Many more perhaps were in sympathy with us, but our energies were still spread very thin. As I have written before, these heroes and heroines risked medical licenses, risked livelihoods. They were smeared and mocked by their peers. They were stripped of credentials. They staked their savings and lost them as they had their incomes taken away.

But they burned, as the rebels in 1775 had burned, to defend our way of life and our institutions. They would not let the dream of America die.

They were the miserably few real doctors and real reporters, real activists and real lawyers. They were the truck drivers; they were teachers and cops and firefighters.

They were patriots.

They did not have easy lives.

You know who had easier lives over the past two years? The damn quislings.

The people who stayed at the cocktail parties and who mocked the unvaccinated. The doctors who were silent about vaccine harms when teens presented with heart damage, because they might lose their licenses if they breathed a word of what they knew. The ex-Brooklynites who were supposed to be journalists but who smeared and attacked the medical freedom movement instead of reporting on Pfizer’s internal documents showing massive undisclosed medical catastrophes, in what is turning out to be one of the great corporate coverups of our generation.

I realized the source of my rage: the labor and nightmares and isolation and persecution and money worries and — well — awful battles waged by us few hundreds, few thousands, had helped these quislings and collaborators have back what — what we had wanted them to have back; indeed, what we had wanted us all to have back; our America.

The fight was not over — it would not be over til open-ended emergency law was made impossible by new legislation, and until every last criminal was charged and tried; but hey, the folks who had gone along with it all, they were getting their America back, in many ways.

I thought of the Biblical phrase —that the rain falls on the just and the unjust alike.

But I wanted — justice.

I wanted, I blurted out to Brian, some kind of closure. Some kind of Nuremberg Trials, of course. Some kind of Truth and Reconciliation Commission — the South African kind, not the CCP kind. I wanted people to face what they had been, what they had done.

“It’s like the partisans after the end of the war — or the revolutionaries after the fall of the Bastille; I want to shave people’s heads and march them through the town square,” I said to Brian, uncharitably.

I am not proud of that — but there is a reason societies display their collaborators and quislings and traitors. There is a reason treason is a capital offense. There is a reason fraud and coercion, battery and child abuse, unlawful detainment and theft and child endangerment, all of which crimes were committed against us “in the pandemic”, are criminal offenses.

For there to be healing, there has to be justice.

To have a free society we have to have a history, and in this major historical moment, we had a massive betrayal of the social contract — a betrayal committed by millions. The social contract cannot be re-knit without public accountability, trials, confrontations, and even condemnation.

Let the school board members who masked the children be sued in civil court. Let them do community service in bright orange vests and pick up garbage along the sides of the roads.

Let the members of the Boards of Health who shut down their neighbors’ businesses for no reason, face civil charges. Let their names be published in the newspapers.

Let the ones who shunned the unvaccinated and disinvited them from their galas and dinner parties, experience for themselves what that feels like and face the fact that they were hateful and engaged in hate.

Let the deans who took millions of dollars from nonprofits to adopt policies to mandate vaccines for healthy young college students — vaccines that disrupted the cycles and damaged the hearts of perfectly healthy young women and men in their charge — face trials for racketeering and reckless endangerment and coercion. Let the Pharma executives and the heads of the FDA be tried for fraud and battery. Let the trials begin.

For people to be part of a healthy society they need to face themselves; and these quislings and collaborators should confront what they did. If they committed crimes, they should be tried and convicted.

Will I let it go? Will I forget? Will I forgive? On another morning, maybe, I pray that I will.

But not yet. Not this morning.

Amos [KJV 5:24] promised: “Let judgment run down as waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.” Jesus said, Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth; I did not come to bring peace but a sword [NKJV: Matthew 10:34-39].

Maybe they meant that there are times to make amends, but there are other times to overturn the tables of the corrupt.

I am angry that beautiful America is mostly back, mostly free again, overnight, just because a shameless creature who should never have had the power to suspend our liberties in the first place - said so; just because the whiny-voiced evildoers of the last two years, now that evidence of their fraud and coercion emerges irrevocably to light, want to tiptoe away from the scenes of their massive crimes.

I say: Not so fast.

Freedom is not free, as many veterans have said, and I never really understood what that meant except superficially.

But you don’t get freedom back so easily if you yourself committed massive crimes.

Freedom is not free. You don’t get to take away the freedom of others and enjoy it, without penalty, for yourselves.

The people you harmed, the parents of the children you harmed - they are coming. Not violently; not vengefully; but with the righteous sword of justice; with the law in hand.

Don’t rest too easy, leaders who did wrong, in this bright American sunlight. You don’t get America back as if nothing happened.

The Statue of Liberty holds up a torch. Crimes must be illuminated.

You cannot yet know that it’s really over — just because you said so.

You can’t know yet that you will never be unmasked; never revealed to all, in the bright sun of the town square.

Dr Naomi Wolf

2022-04-29 c
ALZHEIMER IN CHIEF III

2022-04-29 b
ALZHEIMER IN CHIEF II


2022-04-29 a
ALZHEIMER IN CHIEF I
“ill begotten gains”

Biden Malfunctions

It is getting worse….

(WATCH VIDEO)

This is not okay.  Nothing about this is okay. (read more)

See also: https://www.zerohedge.com/political/president-biden-ok

2022-04-28 c
PLATFORM AS PATHOLOGY II

POSOBIEC: Elon Musk didn’t just purchase a platform he purchased evidence https://t.co/OVLH8QckFn

— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) April 27, 2022


2022-04-28 b
PLATFORM AS PATHOLOGY I

Laura Gómez, former head of localization for Twitter, says @elonmusk owning Twitter is one of the greatest threats to American elections. In 2020, Twitter was one of the platforms that censored reporting that was damaging to candidate Biden. #ElonMusk #ElonMuskBuyTwitter pic.twitter.com/SB650uJ39g

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) April 25, 2022


2022-04-28 a
PEDAGOGY AS PATHOLOGY

The parental revolt against woke indoctrination

Mums and dads are rising up against the politicisation of education.

There is something very wrong in our schools. Each new day brings reports of some ideological madness being foisted on children. In the past week alone we’ve heard about Welsh plans to teach kids as young as three about sexual attraction and gender identity. We’ve heard that the education department in the Northern Territory in Australia is wondering out loud if schools should drop apparently oppressive phrases like ‘boys and girls’ in order not to offend kids who may be ‘questioning their gender identity’. We’ve heard about a school in South Carolina that planned to separate kids by race so that they could be counselled by an external speaker on ‘how to cope with being a student in a predominantly white school’. Oh good, racial segregation is back.

Across the Anglosphere, schools have become hotbeds of woke indoctrination. It’s no longer just ‘the three Rs’ kids are exposed to – that is, reading, writing and ’rithmetic – but the entire alphabet soup of identity politics, gender ideology and neo-racial thinking. There’s the school in Denver that wants to teach kindergarteners and first graders – five- and six-year-olds – about race and sex. It held a ‘Black Lives Matter at School Week of Action’, in which, among other things, the children were taught about ‘trans-antagonistic violence’. Do they even know what ‘antagonistic’ means? There’s Nonsuch High School in Surrey in England, whose sixth-formers, apparently with teacher approval, offered advice to gender-confused girls as young as 11 on how to bind their breasts, for that ‘flatter, more masculine appearance’. What next, foot-binding in PE? It’s little wonder that at one top secondary school in the UK, one in 15 pupils now identifies as trans or non-binary.

First graders in New Jersey have been given 30-minute lessons titled ‘Pink, Blue and Purple’, in which they’re taught about ‘gender, gender identity and gender role stereotypes’. Teaching about ‘white privilege’, as if it were an uncontested fact, is reportedly ‘rife’ in British schools. One UK school handed out ‘A kid-friendly guide to social-justice terms’. Another reportedly told its white pupils that they are ‘privileged by virtue of being white’. And ignore the protestations of the US liberal elite who insist that critical race theory is not being taught in American schools. They protest far too much. Sure, the intricate academic theory of CRT isn’t being taught, but its basic precepts are. As one report says, it is now pretty common for American schools to teach about ‘systemic racism, white privilege, white fragility and the predatory white imagination’. White people bad, black people victims – such simple-minded, hyper-politicised education is a recipe for social strife among those who have not even reached adulthood yet.

A new form of indoctrination is clearly sweeping through school systems. It has become most visible – and most unsettling – in those TikTok vids of mostly American teachers boasting about how they educate their charges about non-binaryism, about why it’s iffy to make the Pledge of Allegiance, about the problem of doctors ‘guessing’ the gender of newborn kids from their mere genitals when what we should be doing is waiting until people are old enough to pick a gender for themselves from the 72 – is it more now? – in the gender catalogue. The exposure of these TikTok videos of teachers revelling in their power to push highly eccentric ideological beliefs on to the next generation has caused a storm in the establishment media, which would no doubt prefer that the woking of education remained their own little secret.

The targeting of kids with highly inappropriate, supposedly woke beliefs has reached its nadir in some extracurricular ‘education’ that has been exposed in recent weeks. In the US, there’s Sexy Summer Camp, for teens, which reportedly teaches about sex liberation, gender exploration, BDSM, being a sex worker (!) and ‘self-managed abortions’. Sign your 16-year-old up! In the UK there’s been a huge storm over the Family Sex Show, a supposedly educational theatrical thing that was due to take place at the Norfolk and Norwich Festival in May. Its aim was to teach kids as young as five about ‘bodies, sex and relationships’ and it said it would feature full-frontal nudity. Its website encouraged kids to Google masturbating animals, so that they might see how natural masturbation is. Searching for ‘wanking animals’? What could go wrong?

Adults getting naked in front of children and talking about dogs bashing one out is clearly at the extreme end of the bending of education to ‘sex-positive’ and other gender ideologies. And yet it also feels like a grimly logical conclusion. If it’s okay to teach young children that gender is fluid, and that sexual attraction is cool, and that pubescent girls who think they might actually be boys should painfully wrap their breasts in metres of restrictive cloth, then why not have some naked bloke on stage telling an audience of littl’uns about bodies and feelings? It’s all gone too far, hasn’t it? Many people now have a very strong sense that children are being exposed to things they probably shouldn’t be exposed to, from age-inappropriate information about sex to flat-out confusing commentary on genderfluidity to dangerously divisive ideas about white privilege, black victimhood and general racial tension. Which is why – at last – there’s a brewing parental revolt against all this woke indoctrination.

From Florida to Wales, South Carolina to Northern Australia, parents are clubbing together to say: ‘Enough.’ The recent news about the Welsh government’s plans to teach kids as young as five about sex and gender has got many parents up in arms. Parents have complained that they cannot ‘request information’ about what is being taught or ‘ask that their child sit [the classes] out’. So parents are launching legal action, suing the Welsh government over its plans for mandatory sex’n’gender classes. In the US, a group called Parents Defending Education, a grassroots, non-profit outfit, aims to reclaim education from ‘activists promoting harmful agendas’. It campaigns for a ‘non-political education for our kids’, an entirely reasonable demand. And of course the Virginia election late last year, won by Republican Glenn Youngkin, was fuelled to a large extent by parental fury with woke social engineering in schools. Youngkin attracted the votes of many mums and dads with his declaration that ‘political indoctrination has no place in our classrooms’.

Perhaps the politician who has most expertly given voice to parental disgruntlement with woke indoctrination is Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor of Florida. His House Bill 1557 – melodramatically christened the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill by his opponents – stipulates that in Florida’s schools there should be no ‘classroom instruction’ on issues of ‘sexual orientation or gender identity’ for kids under the age of 10. DeSantis’s latest move is to sign into law a ‘Stop Woke Act’ (officially House Bill 7), which limits how race-related issues are taught in public universities and colleges. At its launch he was surrounded by supporters holding placards saying ‘Freedom From Indoctrination’ and ‘Stop Woke’. Whatever you think of DeSantis, there is no question that he has sussed, quite rightly, that education, and its transformation into a tool of moral and social re-engineering by the woke elites, will shortly become one of the issues of American public life. Who would be surprised to see DeSantis running for the presidency in 2024 on a ticket of saving schools, and America more broadly, from the new indoctrinators?

The revolt against the woking of education is not without its problems. Legally banning the teaching of CRT in schools and colleges, for example, comes off like an authoritarian solution. And while we can all agree that teaching five-year-olds that they can choose their gender or encouraging them to Google masturbating animals is wrong, surely we should acknowledge that at a certain age – 11 onwards – sex education can play an important role in a young person’s learning. So let’s not crush everything that might seem ‘woke’. And yet the parental anger over the politicisation of education is real and apt and it could become a very dynamic force in the political life of the Anglosphere. Parents know what is going on here – the elites are overriding the sovereignty of the family and are coaxing kids into eccentric and damaging ways of thinking that most ordinary people, including their folks, disapprove of. That is anti-democratic, authoritarian and against the spirit of education, which should be about learning and understanding, not cynical social engineering. More power to the parents’ revolution. (read more)

2022-04-27 b
WASHINGTON POST CRYBULLY SCREWED UP II

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2022-04-27 a
WASHINGTON POST CRYBULLY SCREWED UP I

Why they loathe Libs of TikTok

This social-media account has exposed just how insidious and dangerous woke indoctrination can be.

For more than a year, the Washington Post pretty much ignored the explosive story about the son of the president of the United States dumbly leaving his laptop, packed with dodgy images and information, in a repair shop in Delaware. But fret not, the Post has finally found a scandal it can sink its Watergate-sharpened teeth into – the existence of a woke-mocking online phenomenon called Libs of TikTok.

Yes, who cares about Hunter Biden’s laptop – and other proper stories – when there’s an anti-PC Twitter account to rant and rage against. If you haven’t heard of Libs of TikTok, you need to rectify that. It is a brilliant social-media account that finds the batshit-craziest videos on TikTok and puts them on Twitter and Instagram for us grown-ups to gnash our teeth over. You have no idea how far down the path of lunacy wokeness has gone until you peruse this account.

It’s like a virtual Bedlam. We have recently been treated to the sight of a hyper-woke pastor explaining that God is queer, non-binary and autistic. And a green-haired young woman saying she refuses to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance because she’s a socialist witch. And a preschool teacher in Florida – also with green hair! – boasting that she has informed her infant pupils that she’s a non-binary witch. There are a lot of witches on TikTok – and in schools, it seems.

Libs of TikTok also features ‘throuples’ who raise their kids gender-neutrally, men who identify as women complaining about period pain (those phantom vaginas, eh?), and a trans-species activist who identifies as a werewolf. Then there are the pronouns. So many pronouns. My favourite is the earnest if slightly bleak TikToker whose pronouns are ‘death / death’s / deathself’. So you would say, ‘That’s death’s jacket’ and ‘Death went to the Prom all by deathself’. Cheery bunch, these turbo-woke loons.

The most alarming thing is the narcissism. Obsessive self-regard seems to be all the rage in youthful online cults. In the videos highlighted by Libs of TikTok, people talk endlessly about themselves and their neurodivergency, their sexual inclinations, their gender orientation. And they bark, constantly, at the faceless audience lapping up their vids, warning them to never use the wrong pronouns, or to question ‘my identification as a deminonbinary agender person’, or to step outside of one’s own cultural lane. I just felt sad watching a young woman (blue hair, blue eyebrows) wondering if her use of black music in her TikTok videos is an example of ‘digital blackface’.

The biggest talking point has been the schoolteachers featured on Libs of TikTok. There seem to be a fair few teachers in the US who see it as their job to infuse the next generation with woke nonsense and gender ideology. One teacher says she had her pupils pledge allegiance to the Pride flag rather than the Stars and Stripes. Another coos over the fact that her young charges correct anyone who refers to her as a woman and say: ‘No, she’s enby!’ (That’s non-binary.) Another – turquoise hair – describes himself as a ‘queer teacher’ and says he’s worried about the way that heterosexuality is ‘pushed on our kids’.

You don’t have to be Mary Whitehouse to find this stuff alarming. You don’t have to be a grey-haired, leather-elbowed old don to worry that 23-year-old pink-haired schoolteachers are telling kids that gender is fluid and witches are real (and cool). Libs of TikTok has done a very good job in highlighting the consequences of today’s nuttier pseudo-left ideologies. And as a result, it has become incredibly popular. Republican politicians and the mainstream media like and share and discuss its content.

So now, naturally, there’s a backlash. And the Washington Post is leading the charge, whipping up Twitter folk to damn Libs of TikTok as ‘problematic’, the 21st-century word for heretical. The Post published a long piece on Libs of TikTok, giving personal info about the woman who founded it and accusing it of ‘spreading anti-LGBTQ+ sentiment’. It depicts Libs of TikTok as a crazy right-wing hate machine.

Of course, the Post is well within its rights to write about, and condemn, Libs of TikTok. (Though I am happy to inform that paper, for free, of at least a hundred stories that are more pressing than the fact that a social-media account is ripping the piss out of TikTok crackpots.) And Libs of TikTok is not perfect, of course. I don’t like the way it occasionally veers towards trying to get crazy woke teachers sacked (schools should decide for themselves who they employ) and the very fact that it uses the word ‘Lib’. TikTok’s eccentric, speech-policing, overly pierced promoters of regressive garbage are not, by any definition, ‘liberal’.

But what interests me is the question of why Libs of TikTok has so rattled sections of the media establishment and Twitterati. To me, it seems pretty clear – it’s because this account has shone a light, and a harsh one at that, on the highly narcissistic and deeply destructive ideologies that young people are being exposed to every single day.

TikTok is a young person’s game. It has around a billion users and 43 per cent of them are aged between 18 and 24. Thirty-two per cent are 25 to 34. I’m sure my experience is typical of my age group – I have never so much as glanced at TikTok (except for the vids I see on Libs of TikTok) and yet my nieces and nephews are obsessed with it. It matters – no? – that young people are encountering lunatic info about gender, sex, race and manners every time they switch on the internet.

This is what is infuriating many so-called liberals about Libs of TikTok. This account drags into the daylight the kind of thing that us mere adults, us old-ish squares, are not meant to see. That is, the belief systems that are being foisted on to the next generation; the hang-ups that have been inflicted on the young; the fears and confusions that identity politics has inculcated in under-18s. This is all supposed to happen out of sight, in classroom chats that parents are told not to get too het up about, in popular culture that oldies don’t watch, and in online zones like TikTok where youngish adults are free to indoctrinate youthful users in the ways and beliefs of genderfluidity, pronoun-use, racial correctness and all the rest of it.

The greatest sin committed by Libs of TikTok is that it has thrown open the doors of these new political cults and allowed rational outsiders to peer inside, to see how far things have gone. There are some who would prefer to keep the woke indoctrination of the young, so giddily facilitated by Silicon Valley, shrouded from external concern and criticism. It is they who are in the wrong, not Libs of TikTok. (read more)

2022-04-26 f
DEEP STATE TOOL BUYS TWITTER VI

Is Misk a rat?

2022-04-26 e
DEEP STATE TOOL BUYS TWITTER V


2022-04-26 d
DEEP STATE TOOL BUYS TWITTER IV


2022-04-26 c
DEEP STATE TOOL BUYS TWITTER III


2022-04-26 b
DEEP STATE TOOL BUYS TWITTER II

— Robert Reich (@RBReich) April 24, 2022


2022-04-26 a
DEEP STATE TOOL BUYS TWITTER I

Why I'm (cautiously) optimistic about Elon buying Twitter

The company's fractious management was simply never going to fix the platform's problems.

So I guess I’m doing two posts about social media in a row! It looks like Elon Musk has successfully purchased Twitter, and will turn it into a private company. As someone who has written extensively on the problems with Twitter, I probably need to offer my thoughts about this.

In a nutshell, Twitter is important because it has the strongest network effect in all of social media — maybe in all of tech, period. There are plenty of social networks for keeping in touch with your friends, but there is really only one for having public discussions about public affairs. Twitter acts as the live news feed for the nation, as the assignment desk for the mainstream media and the blogosphere alike, and as the universal forum for the airing of public grievances great and small. If Reddit is the internet’s basement, Twitter is its commanding heights.

Because of this seemingly unbreakable stranglehold over public discourse, Twitter has managed to be utterly secure in its corporate position despite having famously fractious management, never really making much money, and not having that many users compared to other social networks. The company’s board was free to feud and fight, and its management was left to carve out fiefdoms instead of working together as a team, because nothing they really did could sabotage the invincible network effect.

But at the same time, that network effect made Twitter something of a dystopian technology in many ways. Media figures like me, and like every New York Times reporter, have to use it for our jobs — we just don’t have an alternative. Politicians, businesspeople, academics, artists and activists are heavily incentivized to use it as well. But this means that we’re inevitably over-exposed to the often extreme views of the relatively small slice of the public that uses Twitter all the time — the people I call the Shouting Class. It also means that we’re over-exposed to the relentless negativity and rage that characterizes interaction on the platform.

Over the past few years, a number of people have begun to warn that this was contributing to unrest, both in the U.S. and in the world at large. Martin Gurri’s excellent book The Revolt of the Public argued that social media (but really mostly Twitter) took power out of the hands of the populace at large and put it into the hands of a number of small “publics” — sets of dedicated activists with the time and inclination to shout about issues they cared about. In the Atlantic, Jonathan Haidt wrote a long and persuasive article arguing that social media platforms (but really mostly Twitter) were fragmenting society and destroying trust in institutions. Twitter’s fractious management was simply unable to deal effectively with the corrosive effect that the platform was having on the world.

This is why, in our podcast a few weeks ago, Brad DeLong and I explicitly called on Elon Musk to buy Twitter! (The relevant discussion starts at 39:57, and the part about Musk is at 44:30).

The problems with Twitter are so deep and so difficult that only total control by a single individual has a realistic chance of solving them. Transforming a sprawling octopus like this can only be done via dictatorial authority (which is why founder-led companies tend to outperform).

Now that doesn’t mean Musk will solve Twitter’s problems. I am no Muskologist (though I’d love to get him on this blog for an interview). With my limited knowledge, I can’t really predict what he’s going to do with the platform — maybe he himself doesn’t even know yet. The only thing I can confidently predict is that whatever he decides to do, he will probably be able to do it, whereas the status quo would have meant that Twitter’s ineffectual management would have probably continued on to infinity. So at least now we have a chance for positive change.

And as to the specifics of that change, I’m cautiously optimistic.

For one thing, I think Musk is well-positioned to deal with foreign information ops, especially those perpetrated by Russia and China. Russian bots and agents are big on Twitter, and China has been working to build a similar network. This presents the disturbing possibility that the existence of Twitter spells doom for liberal governments — if totalitarians can exercise tight control over their own Twitter-like networks while using info ops to heavily influence the discussion on Twitter itself, it could give them a crucial advantage in the new era of international competition.

I suspect that Musk is thinking about this scary future and how to avert it. When Russia invaded two months ago, Musk instantly shipped thousands of Starlink internet kits to Ukraine. This was crucial in helping the Ukrainians keep their internet running in the face of Russian cyberattacks and bombardments. This demonstrates that Elon values the defense of liberal societies against totalitarian aggression. It stands to reason that he’d also care about this in the case of Twitter info ops as well. Elon famously cares about free speech, but when totalitarian governments use their power to selectively disrupt speech in free societies, that seems pretty detrimental to free speech, and it needs stronger pushback.

It also seems possible that Musk will figure out a way to address the problems with Twitter’s quote-tweet function. As Haidt notes — and as any Twitter user well knows — the quote-tweet makes it extremely easy to summon mobs. It is thus one of the main tools of Cancel Culture, which Elon is not a fan of.

Chris Wetherell, the engineer who invented the quote-tweet button, later recognized what a disaster it had been. But the company has been reluctant to change the way the function works, probably because it’s worried this would reduce engagement. If anyone can figure out how to change the quote-tweet function so as to preserve engagement and discussion while not biasing the platform toward the formation of cancel-mobs, it’s probably Elon.

This also applies to an even more damaging variant of “cancellation” — the ability of powerful Twitter users to sic mobs on people in real life. The most famous example of this is when Twitter activist Shaun King posted the photo of a man whom he falsely accused of the murder of a young girl. The true culprits were later arrested, but the man King falsely accused suffered extensive real-life harassment. Yet the company refused to crack down. Musk has a chance to address this as well.

And even beyond addressing these specific behaviors, Musk may try to tweak the algorithm to push Twitter toward being a more positive, less bitter, less toxic place — in his own words, “more fun, less shun.”

I offered a few suggestions for how to do that in an earlier post.

But I’m sure Elon will have even better ideas — especially after studying the problem in detail.

All of these would be welcome changes — at least in my point of view. Twitter is one of the mezzanine institutions of our society — both its rules and its algorithm have the power to make speech unfree, even though it’s not an arm of the government. Built-in algorithmic toxicity, mobs, false accusations, and foreign info ops are all things that make speech feel less free, and in my view that’s what’s important.

In any case, this is why I’m optimistic about the changes Musk might bring to Twitter. Not everyone, of course, is so optimistic — the list of fears that people have about what Musk might do is far too long for me to address in a blog post. But there are a few specific fears that I think are probably overblown.

The single biggest fear seems to be that Musk will admit Trump back onto the platform. But Trump has stated that he has no intention to return. The most likely reason is that the former President’s overwhelming ego would make him wary of being subordinate to another man, especially one with whom he hasn’t always gotten along.

Then there’s Jeff Bezos’ odd allegation that Musk would do the bidding of China’s government:

This doesn’t make a lot of sense even in the narrow sense of business incentives, since China’s government is supporting a host of Tesla competitors. Some Western business executives over the years have fallen all over themselves to do favors for China’s government in exchange for promises of market access, only to see themselves muscled out by state-sponsored competitors after giving China’s leaders what they want; Elon seems way too smart to fall for that old trick. But on top of that, as I mentioned above, Musk seems committed to the defense of liberal countries against authoritarian ones. Nothing kills free speech faster than when the tanks roll in.

Anyway, there are plenty of other fears that various people have about Musk controlling Twitter. There’s no way I can address them all here, even if I had room. The truth is that we just can’t really know exactly what Musk will do with the platform, and we’ll just have to wait and find out. But as someone who called for Musk to make exactly the move he just made, I’m cautiously optimistic that it’ll end up improving the situation. (read more)

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Richard Feynman, “Learn from science that you must doubt the experts. As a matter of fact, I can also define science another way: Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

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Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Here in America, we are descended in blood and in spirit from revolutionists and rebels – men and women who dare to dissent from accepted doctrine. As their heirs, may we never confuse honest dissent with disloyal subversion.”

H. L. Mencken, “All government, in its essence, is a conspiracy against the superior man: its one permanent object is to oppress him and cripple him. If it be aristocratic in organization, then it seeks to protect the man who is superior only in law against the man who is superior in fact; if it be democratic, then it seeks to protect the man who is inferior in every way against both. One of its primary functions is to regiment men by force, to make them as much alike as possible and as dependent upon one another as possible, to search out and combat originality among them. All it can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man to any government is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.”


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