We Fabricate Our Opponents

From Steve Stewart Williams:

I wonder whether a motivator is that in these highly dysfunctional times, we crave being to be the morally pure protagonists of our story. It's cheap and easy to polarize the narrative and to blame others for every dysfunctional thing we notice.

Continue ReadingWe Fabricate Our Opponents

Copyright Law Being Misused to (Continue to Hide) Manifesto of Nashville Mass Murder

If the mass murderer had been an avowed white supremacist, his/her writings would have been public immediately after the murders. In the case of the March 2023 Nashville mass murders, however, the shooter was a transgender man, so the rule are completely different. The authorities are doing everything possible to prevent those writings from being public because the would (presumably) conflict with a powerful narrative relating to transgender ideology. FIRE explains:

A Nashville judge held that the journal entries of school shooter Audrey Hale, who went by Aiden, can’t be released under state open records law because to do so would violate copyright law. If you’re confused, that’s probably because you understand copyright law, open records law, or both. In the United States, copyright is an economic right. While those are important, they should not generally outweigh compelling public interests — like knowing how we missed the motives that led to the murder of three children and three adults. I recently wrote about the backstory of this case on FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoff’s Eternally Radical Idea Substack newsletter, but let’s walk through how we got here.

Continue ReadingCopyright Law Being Misused to (Continue to Hide) Manifesto of Nashville Mass Murder

The Lack of Book Reading

I once had a dream about writing a book, but I was realistic about the slim odds that it would be read by more than a handful of people.

From a 2021 article by Elle Griffin.

Almost a third of Americans don’t read books at all. And, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the ones that do spend only 16 minutes per day reading. Compare that to the average Netflix watcher who spends close to three hours per day consuming video content. At that pace, a watcher might get through 681 movies in a year while a reader gets through only 16 books—and that’s presuming those 15 minutes are spent reading books.

In reality, books compete for our reading time alongside newspapers, magazines, and other online publications. Even this year, when leisure time increased as a result of the pandemic, novels saw only a subtle increase in sales over last year—by 2.8 percent. News consumption, however, saw an increase of 215 percent with most of that time taking place on Facebook (23 minutes per day), Google (14 minutes per day), and MSN (five minutes per day).

Continue ReadingThe Lack of Book Reading

Solution for Inconvenient Information Regarding Attempt to Assassinate Donald Trump

The spin machine has kicked into overdrive. If only they worked this hard to protect the leading candidate for President.

It's not difficult to see through the deception, the pomposity, the arrogance and the manipulation. Our job as citizens is to shut the fuck up and mind our own business. Federal Law enforcement's job is to conceal screamingly relevant information when it is inconvenient to the elitist leadership, in order to protect us. Nothing to see here. We're going to hide this from you for no good reason. Trust us. Maybe we'll let you see it in 60 years, as we did with the Kennedy assassination (the 1963 coup). And yes, it's what we did to "protect" you when a transgender person murdered a group of people in Tennessee (and see Glenn Greenwald's discussion and see here and here).

Go back to your lives and don't fuss about the motives the would-be assassin might have for trying murder the front-runner for U.S. President.

Continue ReadingSolution for Inconvenient Information Regarding Attempt to Assassinate Donald Trump