Rumble’s Antitrust Suit Against Google

Matt Stoller offers an update on this case. Is it really about Google prioritizing certain viewpoints?

Many Republicans believe that progressives are running Google or other big firms, and these executives are making censorship choices about how to elect more Democrats or foist health choices on the public. They do this, so goes the theory, even if it means making less money. While it's certainly the case that plenty of conservatives get knocked off big tech platforms, so do many others with all sorts of viewpoints (like pro-choice advocates marketing abortion pills on Instagram). More importantly, Google executives are heavily motivated by money, and they would vastly prefer not to have to deal with difficult censorship decisions that amount to which politically powerful customers to piss off.

What is really happening is that these firms are trying to monopolize a market, and then exploit their resulting power to generate cash. Only, in speech or cultural markets, fostering a monopoly means not only that you are able to extract profits. It also means, willingly or no, you become a powerful influence over speech. Large publishing houses choose who gets published and who doesn’t, and that confers significant power. The more dominant the publishing house, the more power. Search engines or social networks are vastly more concentrated, but a similar dynamic exists. Once you control society’s single search engine or social network, editorial choices, whichever direction they lead, help determine what is heard in the public square. So what these executives are doing isn’t trying to censor, but trying to ensure that they have market power in targeted advertising, search advertising or book sales. They simply end up as speech police, because that’s what it means when you build a monopoly that can determine who gets to be heard and who doesn’t.

Continue ReadingRumble’s Antitrust Suit Against Google

University of Oregon Division of Equity and Inclusion Hard at Work Protecting Us from Dangerous Tweet Comments

The University of Oregon's Division of Equity and Inclusion is hard at work protecting us from wrong-think. This time, the professor who needs to quit expressing improper thoughts is Bruce Gilley.  The following excerpt is from a press release issued by the Institute for Free Speech:

Portland, OR – A local university professor filed a federal lawsuit on August 11 against an officer in the University of Oregon’s Division of Equity and Inclusion for blocking him from the division’s official Twitter account.

“Apparently, the state’s flagship university has a concept of inclusion that does not include tolerance for differing viewpoints. When a government employee uses a Twitter account for official business, they are legally obligated to respect the First Amendment rights of those who respond,” said Del Kolde, Senior Attorney at the Institute for Free Speech.

Oregon resident and Portland State University Professor Bruce Gilley filed the lawsuit after being blocked by the division’s official Twitter account, @UOEquity, for seemingly no reason other than his viewpoint. Gilley had quote-tweeted a message from @UOEquity promoting a “Racism Interrupter” and chimed in with his own: “all men are created equal.” That, apparently, was enough to earn a block from the account’s manager.

“Nothing could better illustrate the problems with diversity ideology than a state university that bans a member of the public for quoting our Declaration of Independence. This lawsuit is necessary to defend our freedom of speech and the rule of law,” said Professor Gilley.

Gilley is no stranger to controversy. He often says what he believes, which is getting to be a scarce commodity in some departments of far too many American universities. Gilley has also fending off slipshod and illiberal attacks upon his balanced discussion of the pros and cons of colonialism (his original article was titled "The Case for Colonialism.”)

Here is Gilley's thesis:

Research that is careful in conceptualizing and measuring controls, that establishes a feasible counterfactual, that includes multiple dimensions of costs and benefits weighted in some justified way, and that adheres to basic epistemic virtues often finds that at least some if not many or most episodes of Western colonialism were a net benefit, as the literature review by Juan and Pierskalla shows. Such works have found evidence for significant social, economic, and political gains under colonialism: expanded education, improved public health, the abolition of slavery, widened employment opportunities, improved administration, the creation of basic infrastructure, female rights, enfranchisement of untouchable or historically excluded communities, fair taxation, access to capital, the generation of historical and cultural knowledge, and national identity formation, to mention just a few dimensions.

I recommend reading Gilley's entire article, but here is his summary of the types of responses he received from highly educated modern day academics:

I find that my critics mostly misread my article, used citations they had not read or understood, failed to adhere to basic social scientific principles, and imposed their own interpretations on data without noting the possibility of alternatives. I note that a failure to adhere to academic standards, the main charge levelled against my paper, is rife among those who have levelled such charges. The use of their critiques to impose professional penalties and punishments on me as a scholar bespeaks the fundamental problems of ideological monoculture and illiberal censorship in academia today. I conclude that the problems of most research on the colonial past since roughly 1960 are so deep-rooted that nothing short of a complete rewriting of colonial history under appropriate scientific conditions will suffice in most cases.

Meanwhile, in a nearby state, a shitstorm ensued after Professor Stuart Regis refused to follow the University of Washington's directive to add a proper land acknowledgement on his computer science class syllabus:

When Professor Stuart Reges challenged the University of Washington’s position on land acknowledgements, administrators punished him, undermining his academic freedom. Today, backed by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Reges sued the university to vindicate his First Amendment right to express his opinion — even if it differs from the party line.

Colleges increasingly promote land acknowledgment statements that recognize indigenous ties to the land on which a college sits. On a list of syllabus “best practices,” UW’s computer science department encourages professors to include such a statement and suggests using language developed by the university’s diversity office “to acknowledge that our campus sits on occupied land.” The fact that the statement could be adapted seemed clear — until Reges wrote one that administrators did not like . . .

On Dec. 8, 2021, Reges criticized land acknowledgment statements in an email to faculty, and on Jan. 3, he included a modified version of UW’s example statement in his syllabus: “I acknowledge that by the labor theory of property the Coast Salish people can claim historical ownership of almost none of the land currently occupied by the University of Washington.” Reges’s statement was a nod to John Locke’s philosophical theory that property rights are established by labor.

Continue ReadingUniversity of Oregon Division of Equity and Inclusion Hard at Work Protecting Us from Dangerous Tweet Comments

Dangerous Intersection – Website to Undergo Repairs

I've been pulled away from writing for a variety of compelling reasons lately, but that's a temporary lull. I have a lot of ideas I will be sharing in the coming weeks and months.

One of the recent distractions is my troubled website. I'm getting a lot of error codes and dysfunctions. My plan is to rebuild this website over the next few days. It's going to get a lot uglier before it becomes functional again. When it is fully restored, DI will include all of the current content (more than 6,000 articles over the past 15 years) and I plan to add to it, at least several articles per week, all of it free of charge and ad free.

Thank you for your patience.

Erich

Continue ReadingDangerous Intersection – Website to Undergo Repairs

Jonathan Haidt Discusses “De-Tot”: Decentralized Totalitarianism

Wokeness is a form of "De-Tot," Decentralized Totalitarianism. Jonathan Haidt discussed this phenomenon with Melissa Chen and Angel Eduardo at FAIR:

So, you know, I, perhaps like many in the audience, have lost money. I was going to say investing in cryptocurrencies, but I'll just say gambling and speculating. And one of the things that's kind of fun about, it's just learning about the blockchain and decentralized finance and realizing that the technology makes it possible to have all kinds of things without anybody in charge.

Many have observed this began in 2015. So I co-founded Heterodox Academy with some other social scientists. Some of our members from Eastern Europe were saying, this is just like what we had in the communist countries: the fear of speaking up the witch trials, the purity spirals.

People ever since then have been using his metaphors like what's happening on campus, what's happening in the world is somehow like the totalitarian countries. But yet, there was no dictator. There was no totalitarian person or authority or office. I think what we have is you might call "De-Tot"  It's decentralized totalitarianism. The difference between totalitarian and a dictator is that a dictator tells you what he wants, and he'll kill you if you don't do it. But totalitarianism means it gets into the totality of your life. "We're going to control how you raise your kids what to think the food you eat, the science, everything, control everything."  That's very hard to do. It's only been tried a few times, certainly the Russians, the Chinese. Only a few countries have been tried to control everything of your life. And in a way this thing that we call wokeness has elements that are totalitarian, but there's no person. There's no authority. So what you have when everybody can record everybody, when everybody can shame everybody, you get human behavior reacting as if you were in a totalitarian country, but yet there's no totalitarian

Continue ReadingJonathan Haidt Discusses “De-Tot”: Decentralized Totalitarianism

Why Tavistock Was Shut Down

This is a brand new insider's account about the closing of the British gender-affirming "treatment" center, Tavistock. Seventeen years after there initial complaints, the authorities finally act. How many hundreds of lawsuits are about to be filed for the damage done to vulnerable children at this "treatment" center in furtherance of gender ideology?

By the way, it's been almost a week since it was announced that Tavistock would be shut down because children are being harmed. Despite the significance of this shut-down and the fact that gender ideology is largely to blame, you won't find one word about the sudden closing of Tavistock in the New York Times, NPR, Washington Post or MSNBC.

Here's horrifying insider account of what has been happening at Tavistock for more than a decade. The article, written by a nurse named Sue Evans, was published at the Substack of Bari Weiss, Common Sense.

How Tavistock Came Tumbling Down. I was a nurse working on a team that recklessly prescribed puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones to kids. I blew the whistle in 2005. Now the government is finally listening.

Continue ReadingWhy Tavistock Was Shut Down