Twitter’s COVID Censorship

David Zweig's new article at The Free Press: "How Twitter Rigged the Covid Debate: The platform suppressed true information from doctors and public-health experts that was at odds with U.S. government policy." An excerpt:

The United States government pressured Twitter to elevate certain content and suppress other content about Covid-19 and the pandemic. Internal emails that I viewed at Twitter showed that both the Trump and Biden administrations directly pressed Twitter executives to moderate the platform’s content according to their wishes.

At the onset of the pandemic, the Trump administration was especially concerned about panic buying, and sought “help from the tech companies to combat misinformation,” according to emails sent by Twitter employees in the wake of meetings with the White House. One area of so-called misinformation: “runs on grocery stores.” The trouble is that it wasn't misinformation: There actually were runs on goods.

And it wasn’t just Twitter. The meetings with the Trump White House were also attended by Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others.

When the Biden administration took over, its agenda for the American people can be summed up as: Be very afraid of Covid and do exactly what we say to stay safe.

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Diagnosing Woke Ideologists

Josh Slouch lost a job he loved. In his current essay, he indicates that a Woke Mob came after him. He writes:

What was my sin? Had I hung a noose from the rearview mirror of my Prius? Did I assault a trans person? Did I don blackface and drop the n-bomb? No. It was more sinister than that. They discovered that I, a gay man, host a conservative podcast.

If you're wondering how a progressive gay liberal became a libertarian conservative, the story of that political transformation will be told on my Substack soon.

I'll be on the lookout for that forthcoming article. In the meantime, Josh has contemplated the types of people who joined the Woke Mob that cost him his job. Here's how he diagnoses them:
I believe part of the answer to this complicated question lies in the normalization of a type of psychology that drives domestic abuse known as Cluster B personality disorders. These include narcissistic personality disorder, borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, and anti-social personality disorder. The symptoms of these disorders are diverse and overlapping, and people with them engage in conflict, deception, abuse and mistreatment of others (almost always while claiming they themselves are victims).

These are more than “difficult people.” They are impossible, and often dangerous, people. A quick glossary of the Cluster B disorders. There is a lot of overlap in symptoms among them:

Narcissistic Personality Disorder—self-centered, vain, may be a braggart or may be the type that acts like a very special put-upon victim. The world revolves around them, and others are objects to be used, not people to love or respect.

Borderline Personality Disorder—extreme emotional instability, laughing one minute, crying or screaming the next. Borderlines fear abandonment but engineer conflicts with everyone around them until they fulfill their own fear of being rejected. Think “I hate you/don't leave me.”

Histrionic Personality Disorder—Big emotions about everything all the time. Life events are over-dramatized. Minor disagreements become relationship-shattering cataclysms. Histrionics are often sexually seductive and go beyond flirtation in acting out for attention.

Anti-social Personality Disorder—also known as “sociopathy” or “psychopathy.” An absence of conscience or empathy. Antisocials lead a parasitic life draining money and time from others. Many are criminals. Others stay within the law but torment their families and colleagues to get what they want.

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Stanford University Attempts to Dismantle Harmful Language

Stanford University has launched an initiative to protect us from harmful language. This language is so incredibly harmful that after the link to the website started getting passed around, Stanford shut down public access. Now only Stanford students will get to know the language that purportedly harms all of us.

Heather Heying had been poking around at the Stanford website that was designed to protect her (and me and you and everyone else) from certain terrible words and phrases, but before she could finish reviewing the website, Stanford closed off public access. Here's some of the information that Heather can report at her website, Natural Selections:

Finally, I grabbed a single screenshot of one of the recommendations on the site before access was restricted4. Here it is:

[More . . . ]

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Taking Liberties with the National Anthem

I'm not a fan of singing the national anthem before a baseball game. Patriotism and the anthem have nothing to do with playing a sport. Absolutely nothing. The anthem wasn't even played at Major League Baseball games until 1918. There's nothing magic about the anthem. The lyrics are not compelling today and it's not even a beautiful melody. It is a great excuse for powerful people to push ordinary people around by challenging their patriotism if they resist. That's why, even since the anthem started being played in 1918, no one was able to uproot it and yank it out of baseball games to speed up the games (which desperately need speeding up). In fact, given that there were 2,430 Major League Baseball games played in 2022, assuming that it takes 2 minutes to sing the anthem and given that 65 million American fans attended attended MLB baseball games in 2022, this means that more than 5 Billion person/hours were spent listening to the National Anthem at MLB games in 2022 (5,265,000,000). The song is not a fan favorite. It doesn't stand on its own. I doubt that of those fans ever bought a recording of the national anthem, none of them sing it in the shower, and none of them seek to listen to it as a work of art.

Enter musician Jose Feliciano, who sang the national anthem for Game 5 of the World Series between the Cardinals and the Tigers. Here is Jose's unique version, which is much in keeping with his musical style. I enjoyed it.

But this version was too much for some of the fans, who booed after Jose finished singing. The Tigers even blamed him for the losing that game. Here's what Feliciano had to say about his version of the anthem:

Baseball is permeated with ritual, one of which is the singing of the national anthem, which must be played, or else. And even if one is a gifted musician, it must be song close enough to the standard version, or else. Why? Just because.

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