“No One is Safe”: The Many Stages of the COVID Messaging Campaign.

Matt Orfalea offers a new collection of the many stages of the Covid-19 messaging campaign, including a collective roar against “asking questions” or “doing your own research.”

Matt Taibbi follows up with this article: "Looking Back on the Sadism of the Covid-19 Shaming Campaign: As Matt Orfalea's new video shows, Apologies are due for the media campaign against "the unvaccinated," which unveiled open cruelty as public policy strategy." An excerpt:

I got the shot and never advised people not to get vaccinated. I couldn’t imagine an area where I was less qualified to give advice. But this is the point: the same people Orf shows picking up torches and railing with bloodcurdling certainty against “the unvaccinated” are nearly all people who knew as little as me, and whose beliefs about the vaccine were at best secondhand.

You’re disgusted at those who “do their own research”? What do you think journalism is? None of us do lab experiments. The job is always an imperfect effort to figure out which sources are most trustworthy, and because even the most credentialed often screw up, we always need to leave room for consensus proving wrong.

In this case one didn’t need a microbiology degree to recognize something about Covid-19 messaging was off. From flip-flops about masks (an “evolving situation,” Dr. Anthony Fauci said) to unwillingness to be frank in discussing natural immunity or risks to children, even casual news-readers saw confusion in the ranks of senior officials. Later, a series of reversals on key questions — first about whether the vaccine prevented contraction, then about whether it prevented transmission — left even people who wanted to follow official advice unsure of what to do.

I hope Matt’s video survives as a warning. There is still a lot of investigation to be done, in particular about the origins of the pandemic — certain segments of the national audience may still be in for a shock or two there — but as Matt shows, we already see a cautionary tale about faulty information being used to gin up real hatred.

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About “Book Banning” and Young Children.

Deciding what is age-appropriate is not "book banning." This is not a difficult distinction except for those who seek headlines based on half-truths.

I've seen images of many of the pages of many of the books that have purportedly been "banned" from grade school students. As a parent, I would have been aghast had my young children had access to most of these books without my specific knowledge or consent. BTW, I know "Elizabeth Bennett" personally and I have no doubt that what she has written is true.

The following is an excerpt from the Court's Aug 5, 2022 Order in the case of C.K.-W v Wentzville R-IV School District Order Denying Preliminary Injunction, US District Court, Eastern District of Missouri Case No. 4:22-cv-00191. We are facing some real problems with conservatives going crazy banning valuable and age-appropriate books in school libraries. Before you fall prey to the claim that ALL of "book banning" cases are the same, however, consider the court's description of the books being "banned" in this case:

'Fun Home,' for example, has entire illustrated pages showing characters engaging in oral sex along with accompanying ribald language. Doc. [2] at 214; see also id. at 80–81 (showing various detailed illustrations of two undressed individuals in bed together with the narrator explaining that she “spent very little of the remaining semester outside her bed”). 'All Boys Aren’t Blue' vividly describes multiple sexual encounters of the author. See Doc. [3]. “He reached his hand down and pulled out my dick. He quickly went to giving me head. . . . [W]e dry humped and grinded. . . . I put some lube on and got him up on his knees, and I began to slide into him from behind. . . . I eased in, slowly, until I heard him moan. . . . I finally came and let out a loud moan—to the point where he asked me to quiet down for the neighbors. I pulled out of him and kissed him while he masturbated. Then, he also came.” Id. at 266–268. All Boys Aren’t Blue details another encounter. “[H]e told me to lie down on the bed. He asked me to ‘turn over’ while he slipped a condom on himself. . . . [T]his was my ass, and I was struggling to imagine someone inside me. And he was . . . large. But I was gonna try.” Id. at 270–71 (second ellipsis in original).

In keeping with the pattern, 'Heavy: An American Memoir' likewise has detailed accounts of sexual encounters. The book does not attempt to hide its contents. As the back cover explains, the book discusses the author’s “complex relationship with his family, weight, sex, gambling and writing.” Doc. [4]. The author writes that “Renata pulled up her shirt, unhooked her bra, and filled my mouth with her left breast. . . . Choking on Renata’s breasts made me feel lighter than I’d ever felt. After a few minutes, Renata grabbed my penis and kept saying, ‘Keep it straight, Kie. Can you keep it straight?’” Id. at 22–23. And elsewhere, “I got close enough to the door to see Delaney was standing in the middle of the room with his soggy maroon swim trunks around his calves. Dougie was on his knees in front of Delaney with his hands behind his back. His tongue was out, licking the tip of Delaney’s penis.” Id. at 40.

Could a librarian or, ultimately, a school board official conclude that these books were age suitable for some older students and that the books merited inclusion based on their content overall? Sure. But can this Court conclude that the librarian’s determination that these books were not age appropriate was a pretense, absent some actual evidence, and that the real decisive reason for the removal was to deny access to students of certain ideas? Not at all. But Plaintiffs make the sweeping and, frankly, disconcerting request to have this Court require that the District “restore access” to these three books and “any books that were removed from school libraries during this school year and for which access has not been restored.” Doc. [19] at 17 (emphasis added). Meaning Plaintiffs would have this Court force the District to provide access to these, or any other books, that the District’s librarians concluded were appropriate for removal no matter the reason. Even if one of these books, or another that was even more sexually explicit, had been available to a library that served third graders, either inadvertently or because the librarian was unaware of the content, Plaintiffs would have this Court order the District to return the book for the third graders to read.

Continue ReadingAbout “Book Banning” and Young Children.

FIRE CEO Greg Lukianoff Discusses the Importance of Free Speech

Greg Lukianoff, CEO of FIRE, addressing the audience at FIRE's recent gala expanding its free speech mission beyond schools and colleges. I created the following transcript based on this video:

Athens. 375 BCE. The agora. A man goes before the agora, and he talks about a better world in which the smartest of us would would lead us the people who can understand the real and permanent truth that exists beyond our common understanding. It would be a new and better world led by the Guardian class. And a man stands up and says, "Plato, this sounds awful. Like really awful. "By philosopher kings, you mean like you right? And you really think us dummies sit and watched shadows all day?"

Fast forward ahead to the French Revolution. Robespierre is defending the terror by citing the general will. This same figure pops up again, and says, by "general will," you mean like yours, right?

Fast forward again, to default to the Bolshevik revolution. People say to Lenin, "You know, I don't know if you're seeing this. But your system makes good people into suckers and sociopaths and gives them superpowers, right?"

And then fast forward again to the Nazis. And someone stands up and says, "So you guys think you're really into evolution, and you don't understand biodiversity?"

And sometimes these people managed to survive because instead of saying any of this stuff, they stand up and instead say, "I don't want to get guillotine. Anybody else want to move to the United States?"

And a lot of us are descended from these very types of people. I am for one. And why do I bring this weirdo up? Because he is us. He is people like the people in this room. People who do not like the arrogance of power. People who do not like the idea that someone who thinks they're smarter than us is going to tell us what to say or what to think. It's the personality that brings us all together.

So one thing that all the weirdos that I work out at FIRE have in common is we hate bullies. What is our job? Our job is to fight the Guardians, now and forever. And the problem is, of course, that a lot of times, this is a population that self-elects in every generation, the ones who are going to save us from ourselves. Weirdly enough, they oftentimes claim to speak for the people, which doesn't really work. The funny thing is they usually talk about, "Oh, I speak to the people. I mean, maybe there's people over there. They're the real people. You might have false consciousness or something.

And whenever you hear this, and it's very important to say today, when someone says that they claim to speak for the people, you should say to them, "Why don't you let the people speak for themselves?" That is the wisdom of the First Amendment. So what do we get as we celebrate free speech, as we celebrate the First Amendment? We should remember what we fight for, because the fight is getting harder. But we need to remember why we fight for it. So what does free speech give us? Free speech does not give us certainty. And that's a good thing. Certainty is a dangerous illusion. But it does give us richness. It does give us complexity. It does give us nuance. It does give us awe if we're lucky. And it gives us the only chance we'll ever have to know the world as it really is. And what does free speech give us that's better than civility? Candor, and authenticity. Authenticity. You cannot be yourself if you're not allowed to speak. Censorship is a tactic used over and over again that societies use to lie to themselves that they're just fine. And that's why I've joked for years that censorship is like taking Xanax for syphilis. It makes you feel a little better about your horrible disease. But your horrible disease keeps getting worse.

What else can free speech give you that the Guardians can't? Individuality? You can't have individuality without freedom of speech. There's a cynicism that often goes with this. Just remember that when people talk about being unique individuals--and we have all of this kind of putting people in the groups--remember, your individual uniqueness is a scientific and mathematical fact. Not some goofy poetic vision. It's literally true and never let someone take that away from you.

On the Other Side, none of us are all that smart individually, except for maybe Steve Pinker, who's here tonight. But if we stay curious, intellectually humble and keep talking to each other, we can know a billion billion times more than any lone human being. It'll be messy. It'll be strange. It'll sometimes be troubling. But I'd rather live in the real world with the unruly and ever-evolving lot of you than to live in the dreary conformity of any utopia. I want nothing to do with utopia. It's a place where humans can't go and stay fully human. The chaotic paradise, the loud, creative cacophony of a free people, is where I want to be.

Continue ReadingFIRE CEO Greg Lukianoff Discusses the Importance of Free Speech

Taxonomy of the Censorship Industrial Complex

Matt Taibbi's most recent report fleshing out the taxonomies of the "Censorship Industrial Complex." This is what we know so far about the 50 groups (Funded by well-monied foundations, many of them with government support) dedicated to protecting you from your own thoughts. They see us as infantile and naive, defenseless and incapable of sorting through conflicting information. The existence of these sorts of organizations indicate some combination of grifting/rent-seeking or a substantial abandonment of the American Project, IMO.

Taibbi comments:

The “Censorship-Industrial Complex” is just the Military-Industrial Complex reborn for the “hybrid warfare” age.

Much like the war industry, pleased to call itself the “defense” sector, the “anti-disinformation” complex markets itself as merely defensive, designed to fend off the hostile attacks of foreign cyber-adversaries who unlike us have “military limitations.” The CIC, however, is neither wholly about defense, nor even mostly focused on foreign “disinformation.” It’s become instead a relentless, unified messaging system aimed primarily at domestic populations, who are told that political discord at home aids the enemy’s undeclared hybrid assault on democracy.

They suggest we must rethink old conceptions about rights, and give ourselves over to new surveillance techniques like “toxicity monitoring,” replace the musty old free press with editors claiming a “nose for news” with an updated model that uses automated assignment tools like “newsworthy claim extraction,” and submit to frank thought-policing mechanisms like the “redirect method,” which sends ads at online browsers of dangerous content, pushing them toward “constructive alternative messages.”

Binding all this is a commitment to a new homogeneous politics, which the complex of public and private agencies listed below seeks to capture in something like a Unified Field Theory of neoliberal narrative, which can be perpetually tweaked and amplified online via algorithm and machine learning. This is what some of the organizations on this list mean when they talk about coming up with a “shared vocabulary” of information disorder, or “credibility,” or “media literacy.”

Anti-disinformation groups talk endlessly about building “resilience” to disinformation (which in practice means making sure the public hears approved narratives so often that anything else seems frightening or repellent), and audiences are trained to question not only the need for checks and balances, but competition. Competition is increasingly frowned upon not just in the “marketplace of ideas” (an idea itself more and more often described as outdated), but in the traditional capitalist sense.

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And then almost predictably, we now know that Facebook it protecting us from Matt Taibbi's analysis. of the Censorship Industrial Complex:

As one of our contributors points out, Meta is indeed very big on irony. It seems the social media giant has deemed an announcement about the Racket report on censorhip to be “hate speech.”

I try to keep perspective about incidents like this, given that smaller independent outlets deal with much more serious threats to their livelihood when they have content blocked or receive strikes on sites like YouTube. But in this case, a lot of people apart from myself have put in a lot of work on a report that wasn’t intended to be sensationalistic or needlessly provocative. It’s a scrupulously researched project that is intended to provide other journalists and researchers a starting point for investigations into this space.

I’ve put in a query to Facebook, but if this is how the algorithm responds to this kind of content, it says a lot about their algorithm.

Continue ReadingTaxonomy of the Censorship Industrial Complex

The Annual Love-In with the White House and “Journalists”

Have you recently visited any of the left-leaning corporate media outlets to try to find one thing, anything, that they write that is critical of Joe Biden and Democrats? What are the odds that even your favorite politician can do no wrong for 2 1/2 years? But it happens over and over. With only a few notable exceptions (e.g., Tucker Carlson), it also happens on the right.

Well, it's time for those journalists to celebrate with the country's centers of power and you will never hear Glenn Greendald heap such scorn upon other human beings. It's because they are proudly abandoning their mission to be adversaries of the White House, not buddies seeking to get even more friendly. The net result is what you don't see: News accounts that **** badly on the White House. Here's an transcript from Glenn's Rumble show, System Update:

s repulsive as it is to watch corporate journalists make this pilgrimage to the White House that they make every year under the guise of the White House Correspondents Dinner, where they pretend to celebrate their commitment to press freedom and the important role they play in safeguarding our democracy, it actually is important to look at because it is one night where they let the mask drop and reveal who and what they really are. It's become kind of like the Oscars, in the sense that – in many senses, actually, but one important one is that it is not just one night, but many days leading up to it, where they have all kinds of parties that are the buzziest of the ones that they get to attend. But they also spend a lot of time before the event trying to justify to the American people why it is that these people who claim to be our watchdogs, the people who are safeguarding our basic rights, who are holding our government accountable, are instead dressing up like it's the Oscars, in gowns and tuxedos, and appearing with celebrities and the politicians they supposedly hold accountable at the gaudiest and sleaziest event you can possibly imagine held at the White House hosted by Joe Biden, the person whom they're supposed to be adversarially covering.

And so, in the days leading up to the event, they spend a lot of time trying to justify what it is that they're doing and within those justifications reside a great deal of insight into how they actually think. As I said, it's a mask-dropping event. They know what it makes them look like, but they do it anyway because they're so desperate for the self-importance that it provides. It's really why they do their job – to be around power or to be accepted by power, to feel as though they're part of the Royal Court – and so, it's way too valuable to their sense of purpose and self-identity to relinquish it, even though they know that it's one of the most revealing lights that ever get shined on them.

You can view the entire episode here, at Rumble.com

Continue ReadingThe Annual Love-In with the White House and “Journalists”