Silicon Valley Continues to Invoke its Vague Guidelines to Clamp Down on Free Speech

Yes, I know. The First Amendment doesn't apply to private companies and social media are private companies. But consider also that 95% (or something like that) of our communications to each other are funneled through social media. When Youtube shuts down a journalist's coverage of a news-worthy event based on an absurd interpretation of its unilaterally imposed guidelines, it's something we should document and fix (I don't pretend to have an easy fix). Matt Taibbi tells the story here. It's part of a growing trend. This issue burst onto the national stage when Twitter shut down the New York Post's account over the Hunter Biden censorship story. Krystal Ball's tweet at The Rising sums up this latest incident:

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San Francisco Schools Will No Longer be Named After Racists Like Abraham Lincoln and George Washington

This is "progress" for San Francisco Board of Education." Per the article, it will cost $10,000 to rename each school. Excerpt from the NYT:

Following the unrest in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, which led to the killing of a protester by a white supremacist, the board moved in 2018 to establish a commission to evaluate renaming schools to “condemn any symbols of white supremacy and racism,” said Gabriela López, the board president.

The commission had decided that schools named after figures who fit the following criteria would be renamed: “engaged in the subjugation and enslavement of human beings; or who oppressed women, inhibiting societal progress; or whose actions led to genocide; or who otherwise significantly diminished the opportunities of those amongst us to the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

My question: How many of members of the SF BD of Educ thought this was a ridiculous idea, yet sat on their hands in silence, afraid to speak out?

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John McWhorter Discusses the “Use” versus “Reference” Distinction Regarding the “N” Word.

John McWhorter now has a Substack column and I have signed up to support his work. He recently expressed dismay that a particular group of people pretend that they don't understand this distinction: it is one thing to use a rude word as an epithet to hurt someone and an entirely different thing to refer to that word (in this case, the "N" word) by saying it or writing it in order to discuss that word. Woke mobs are doing everything in their power (including attempted cancellation) to characterize non-harmful uses of the "N" as "harmful to people in exactly the same way it hurts people to hurl the "N" word as an epithet.

McWhorter's position (with which I agree) is that this is all theater and power plays. No one is hurt when we discuss the "N" word and all of us know that. In fact, we should be able to freely discuss the use of that word by using the word. This Woke trip wire should be dismantled. What truly hurts us all is to pretend that use and reference are the same. Here's an excerpt from McWhorter's essay, "The N-word as slur vs. the N-word as a sequence of sounds: What makes the New York Times so comfortable making black people look dim?"

The idea that it is inherent to black American culture to fly to pieces at hearing the N-word used in reference is implausible at best, and slanderous at worst. But the second and more important is that insisting on this taboo makes it look like black people are numb to the difference between usage and reference, vague on the notion of meta, given to overgeneralization rather than to making distinctions.

To wit, the get McNeil fired for using the N-word to refer to it makes black people look dumb. And not just to the Twitter trollers who will be nasty enough to actually write it down. Non-black people are thinking it nationwide and keeping it to themselves. Frankly, the illogic in this approach to the N-word is so obvious to anyone who does make distinctions that the only question is why people would not look on and guiltily wonder whether the idea that black people are less intellectually gifted is true.

I would like to be the fly on the wall in the private living spaces of all of those people who claim that they are hurt even when someone uses the "N" word merely to refer to it or discuss it (e.g., to discuss the extent to which it is harmful). I smell the strong stench of hypocrisy wafting from the Woke mob.  How long before it is a terrible thing to even write "the 'N' word" or "N*****" when merely attempting to discuss the word?

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The Most Important Thing we are Losing

On January 5, Sam Harris kicked off his newest season of his podcast, Making Sense, with an episode he titles "A Few Thoughts for a New Year. He covers a lot of ground in 30 minutes. I wish I could say that I disagree with him on any of the major points he is making. His main concern is that we seem to be losing grasp of our ability to work together to solve the problems we face as a country.

As always, Sam articulates his concerns precisely and he avoids taking political sides. His focus for the coming year is seeking real life solutions for the many pressing issues he touches in this podcast. I highly recommend listening in. If you can't afford it, he offers subscriptions without cost. Simply listen to the end of this episode for details.

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Glenn Greenwald Warns of the Domestic War on Terrorism

Here are the opening paragraphs of Glenn Greenwald's latest article, "The New Domestic War on Terror is Coming":

The last two weeks have ushered in a wave of new domestic police powers and rhetoric in the name of fighting “terrorism” that are carbon copies of many of the worst excesses of the first War on Terror that began nearly twenty years ago. This trend shows no sign of receding as we move farther from the January 6 Capitol riot. The opposite is true: it is intensifying.

We have witnessed an orgy of censorship from Silicon Valley monopolies with calls for far more aggressive speech policing, a visibly militarized Washington, D.C. featuring a non-ironically named “Green Zone,” vows from the incoming president and his key allies for a new anti-domestic terrorism bill, and frequent accusations of “sedition,” treason,” and “terrorism” against members of Congress and citizens. This is all driven by a radical expansion of the meaning of “incitement to violence.” It is accompanied by viral-on-social-media pleas that one work with the FBI to turn in one’s fellow citizens (See Something, Say Something!) and demands for a new system of domestic surveillance.

Underlying all of this are immediate insinuations that anyone questioning any of this must, by virtue of these doubts, harbor sympathy for the Terrorists and their neo-Nazi, white supremacist ideology. Liberals have spent so many years now in a tight alliance with neocons and the CIA that they are making the 2002 version of John Ashcroft look like the President of the (old-school) ACLU . . .

An entire book could — and probably should — be written on why all of this is so concerning. For the moment, two points are vital to emphasize.

First, much of the alarmism and fear-mongering is being driven by a deliberate distortion of what it means for speech to “incite violence.” . . .

To illustrate this point, I have often cited the crucial and brilliantly reasoned Supreme Court free speech ruling in Claiborne v. NAACP. In the 1960s and 1970s, the State of Mississippi tried to hold local NAACP leaders liable on the ground that their fiery speeches urging a boycott of white-owned stores “incited” their followers to burn down stores and violently attack patrons who did not honor the protest. The state’s argument was that the NAACP leaders knew that they were metaphorically pouring gasoline on a fire with their inflammatory rhetoric to rile up and angry crowds.

But the Supreme Court rejected that argument, explaining that free speech will die if people are held responsible not for their own violent acts but for those committed by others who heard them speak and were motivated to commit crimes in the name of that cause (emphasis added)

. . .

And that is directly relevant to the second point. Continuing to process Washington debates of this sort primarily through the prism of “Democrat v. Republican” or even “left v. right” is a sure ticket to the destruction of core rights. There are times when powers of repression and censorship are aimed more at the left and times when they are aimed more at the right, but it is neither inherently a left-wing nor a right-wing tactic. It is a ruling class tactic, and it will be deployed against anyone perceived to be a dissident to ruling class interests and orthodoxies no matter where on the ideological spectrum they reside.

The last several months of politician-and-journalist-demanded Silicon Valley censorship has targeted the right, but prior to that and simultaneously it has often targeted those perceived as on the left. The government has frequently declared right-wing domestic groups “terrorists,” while in the 1960s and 1970s it was left-wing groups devoted to anti-war activism which bore that designation. In 2011, British police designated the London version of Occupy Wall Street a “terrorist” group. In the 1980s, the African National Congress was so designated. “Terrorism” is an amorphous term that was created, and will always be used, to outlaw formidable dissent no matter its source or ideology.

If you identify as a conservative and continue to believe that your prime enemies are ordinary leftists, or you identify as a leftist and believe your prime enemies are Republican citizens, you will fall perfectly into the trap set for you. Namely, you will ignore your real enemies, the ones who actually wield power at your expense: ruling class elites, who really do not care about “right v. left” and most definitely do not care about “Republican v. Democrat” — as evidenced by the fact that they fund both parties — but instead care only about one thing: stability, or preservation of the prevailing neoliberal order.

Unlike so many ordinary citizens addicted to trivial partisan warfare, these ruling class elites know who their real enemies are: anyone who steps outside the limits and rules of the game they have crafted and who seeks to disrupt the system that preserves their prerogatives and status. The one who put this best was probably Barack Obama when he was president, when he observed — correctly — that the perceived warfare between establishment Democratic and Republican elites was mostly theater, and on the question of what they actually believe, they’re both “fighting inside the 40 yard line” together

Greenwald then links to this video of Barack Obama.

This point can't be over-emphasized, but I fear that this point is invisible to the tens of millions of Americans who are convinced that U.S. politics can best be understood as a tribal pursuit between the "Left" and the "Right."  They are deeply trapped in an illusory matrix that has the viscosity of fundamentalist religion. Greenwald's articles are mostly only for subscribers, but this one is open to the public.

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