“Online Safety Expert” Cross-Examined by Representative Nancy Mace

Glenn Greenwald:

This is a brilliant exchange by @NancyMace yesterday in Congress. There is a tiny group of hateful left-liberal fanatics whom have been arbitrarily dubbed "Online Safety Experts" and constantly warn hateful rhetoric incites violence. Yet they're the most hateful people around.

Four minutes worth watching.

Glenn's entire thread is worth a read, including his discussion of the important book by Jonathan Haidt and Gregg Lukianoff, The Coddling of the American Mind. This video is Exhibit A, introducing us to one of the many adult-sized children who think they are clever to tear down America's institutions while offering nothing in their place. In short, they are purveyors of Chesterson's Fence. They have turned out this way because they have been coddled throughout their lives, never forced to learn how to have adult conversations . . . until now.

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About the Nord Stream Pipeline

Matt Taibbi comments on the Nord Stream Pipelines:

The massive dual Nord Stream 1 and 2 natural gas pipelines between Russia and Germany were struck by highly suspicious twin underwater explosions, causing a giant environmental disaster and deepening an already devastating European energy crisis. Reactions from Russian, European, and especially American political protagonists ranged from merely unbelievable to abjectly comic. U.S. National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan tsk-tsked that some unknown not-American actor must have committed a “deliberate act.” Not since Shaggy came out with the one-hit-wonder It Wasn’t Me in 1999, or O.J. launched his hunt for the real killers, has American popular culture seen a less convincing cover story. U.S. officials were long ago on record promising to cut off the pipeline if Russia invaded Ukraine, with Joe Biden saying in February, “We will bring an end to it.” When asked how, Biden coyly said, “I promise you, we will be able to do it.” The operation, no joke, came in the same week NATO tweeted that ongoing exercises presented “opportunities to test new unmanned systems at sea” (see TWEET HISTORY MAY REMEMBER). A rapid-fire tweet by former Polish Foreign Minister saying, “Thank you, USA” was mysteriously taken down later in the week, inspiring trolls to tease that his hardcore interventionist wife Anne Applebaum made him do it. Meanwhile, mainstream pundits in the U.S. and the U.K. in impressive deadpan argued that Russia had sabotaged its own pipeline, its best and perhaps only source of leverage internationally. The U.K. Spectator for instance suggested Russia did it to “up the ante on the West.” Throughout, three boiling patches of methane, one a kilometer across, poured toxic gases into the atmosphere in an “unprecedented” climate disaster. Fortunately this worries almost no one, since we’re now currently preoccupied with an even bigger fear, of nuclear war.
From Aaron Mate:

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About Tyrannies

This is a passage from Will Storr's new book, The Status Game: On Human Life and How to Play It  (2022):

Tyrannies are virtue-dominance games. Much of their daily play and conversation will focus on matters of obedience, belief and enemies. Is the game you’re playing coercing people, both inside and outside it, into conforming to its rules and symbols? Does it attempt to silence its ideological foes? Does it tell a simplistic story that explains the hierarchy, deifying their group whilst demonising a common enemy? Are those around you obsessed with their sacred beliefs? Do they talk about them continually and with greedy pleasure, drawing significant status from belief and active belief? Does it seek to damage and destroy lives, often with glee? Is this aggression made to feel virtuous? That’s probably a tyranny. This might sound melodramatic, but we all contain the capacity for this dreadful mode of play: those cousins are built into our coding. If we’re serious about ‘never again’ we must accept that tyranny isn’t a ‘left’ thing or a ‘right’ thing, it’s a human thing. It doesn’t arrive goose-stepping down streets in terrifying ranks. It seduces us with stories.

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Freddie DeBoer’s Smallish List of “Good White Men”

Over the past couple of years, I have learned a lot about writing by reading Freddie DeBoer. He's got some incredible chops! His most recent article is a masterclass, especially his psychoanalysis of the ACLU's Chris Strange. Here's an excerpt from his article, "The Good White Man Roster: a database of progressive white men who are thirsty for credit."

These are the guys who have carefully crafted personas as ALLIES, as the good ones, as the right kind of white guy. These are the dudes whose every engagement on social media functions to let you know how very sorry they are, but always seem to come out on top in doing so. These are the guys who always stand behind women, ready to catch them when they fall, which they will inevitably do because of fucking patriarchy, man, and if people would just read their bell hooks maybe we’d be getting somewhere!, please like share and subscribe. These are the guys who think all complaints about identity politics, political correctness, and cancel culture are just the dying gasp of reactionary old men, which is why they lie awake at night praying to god that they never get canceled. These are the guys who put their pronouns in their bios in hopes that doing so might get them a little pussy. These are the guys who will harangue you about how white dudes do this and white dudes do that, speaking to you from their blameless white dude mouths in their righteous white dude faces. These are the guys who look at the discourse about white supremacy and patriarchy and see market opportunity.

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Citing Accurate Statistics Can be Harmful to Your Career: The Cases of Zac Kriegman and Roland Fryer

Zac Kriegman lost his job at Thomson Reuters for the sin of doing his job well.  Citing accurate statistics collided with the prevailing Black Lives Matter narrative regarding the extent of police violence against unarmed blacks.  Unfortunate for his career, Kriegman also concluded that the Ferguson Effect stemming from the BLM protests and riots has resulted in the deaths of thousands of black men.

[Please assume that wherever I use the terms "black" or "white" that I am using these terms in scare quotes.  I am asking readers to make this assumption because I am convinced that concept of "race" is illusory and pernicious and should be eliminated from all discourse. I am quite aware that people come in various shapes and shades of skin color, but none of this is evidence supporting a belief in "race."  I have been convinced that this is the proper course based on writings of Sheena Mason, Thomas Chatterton Williams, Zuby (and see here), Kmele Foster, Coleman Hughes, Angel Eduardo and Inaya Folarin Iman.  In an earlier post, I characterized the belief in "race" to be as absurd as the belief in astrology.]

What follows is an excerpt from Kriegman's article at Common Sense, "I Criticized BLM. Then I Was Fired: The data about police shootings just didn't add up, but no one at Thomson Reuters wanted to hear it.":

I had been following the academic research on BLM for years (for example, here, here, here and here), and I had come to the conclusion that the claim upon which the whole movement rested—that police more readily shoot black people—was false.

The data was unequivocal. It showed that, if anything, police were slightly less likely to use lethal force against black suspects than white ones.

Statistics from the most complete database of police shootings (compiled by The Washington Post) indicate that, over the last five years, police have fatally shot 39 percent more unarmed whites than blacks. Because there are roughly six times as many white Americans as black Americans, that figure should be closer to 600 percent, BLM activists (and their allies in legacy media) insist. The fact that it’s not—that there’s more than a 500-percentage point gap between reality and expectation—is, they say, evidence of the bias of police departments across the United States.

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