Have you noticed more attacks on free speech than usual?

Noticed more press censorship than normal? More out-and-proud attacks on free speech (plus push-back)?

Yesterday in The Week in Woke, Ace included a video clip of Kamala speaking to the NAACP: "I will direct the DOJ to censor 'misinformation and hate' online". And she asserted that it was necessary to fight this fight as a "community".

A "community" backed up by the strength of the Department of Justice to keep hate and misinformation off social media!

From the comments:

The ARC of History! at September 06, 2024 06:48 PM

Matt Taibbi has been doing a study of the various disinformation "laboratories" at places like Stanford and the University of Washington, and has noted a curious thing about their "research".

The government never provides "misinformation".

All information provided by the government is correct and truthful.

Only opponents of the government provide misinformation.

I think the post below is about the same study by Matt Taibbi:

John Hinderaker on Liberal Know-Nothingism:

A novel aspect of our present political moment is that the more credentials a person has, the more likely he or she is to be a Democrat. This wasn’t true 50 years ago; on the contrary. But creeping credentialism has become a key feature of our culture. I think we are in the midst of a coup being carried out by people who are dumb, but have credentials, usually half-baked.

These thoughts are prompted by Matt Taibbi’s current Racket News post. I am not sure whether that link will work if you are not a Racket News subscriber. If not, you might consider signing up. Meanwhile, I will try to do justice to the post with a few excerpts.

Briefly, Taibbi has obtained documents in response to a FOIA request. His post focuses on an alleged “misinformation” expert named Michael Caulfield, of the University of Washington. Early in the covid fiasco, Caulfield wrote an email in which he ridiculed people who were trying to understand the actual lethality of the virus:

Caulfield dismissed efforts to analyze data to figure out what was happening, on the ground that most people lack credentials. (Not that he himself had any relevant expertise, by the way.) Instead, the average person–pretty much everyone–should just figure out “who [sic] to trust.” And that would be the government.

Check out the details at the link.

Of course, as to the covid epidemic, the oft-censored independent voices generally turned out to be right, and the government was wrong.

Finally, I note that Caulfield described thinking for oneself as “a lousy epistemology.” As a one-time student of epistemology, I say with confidence that no philosopher has ever advanced such a theory. The idea that one should always believe the government and follow its dictates has a name, not in epistemology but in politics. It starts with an F. That is where today’s Democratic Party lives.

Why are academia and government teaming up to teach people not to think?

Jay Bhattacharya

We need to make viruses more dangerous to protect you from viruses.

We need to suppress dissident scientists to preserve science.

We need to suppress free speech to preserve democracy.

Does the "rules-based international order" sound like a conspiracy theory?

A 16 minute excerpt from an interview with Eric Weinstein showed up in my Twitter feed this week. He is a man of the left, but interesting for a few reasons, among which are:

1. He knows J.D. Vance
   
2. He is Bret Weinstein's brother and a free speech advocate
   
3. He named the Intellectual Dark Web. Remember them?

In this excerpt, Weinstein helps explain the behavior of members of The Borg and manages to make one wonder how conspiratorial the "international rules-based order" is, without panicking. Sorry if my comments are disjointed, but the interview is kinda disjointed.

Trump is seen as a threat to "the rules-based international order" which is supposed to keep the world free of war and keep markets open. I don't think a lot of people think that this "international order" has been in terrific shape.

Eric Weinstein is unsettled about this year's election, and his thoughts here should not be considered to be definitive. There are some alternative ideas in the comment thread, too. He doesn't think that Trump will be allowed to become president, or to function as president.

He views Kamala Harris as the tail end of the group trying to hold the order together just a little longer. He thinks the State Department and other agencies have a responsibility to explain to voters that if they choose populist presidents, those populist presidents may risk international agreements. As if the Deep State would ever be this frank with voters!

Check out the last segment starting at 13 minutes, on the media.

There are people who disagree and have other points of view in the comment thread.

The longer video from which the excerpt above was taken - more than 3 hours - may be a window into a world with which J.D. Vance was familiar before he became the candidate for Vice President. Eric was the only Democrat at a 3 day meeting years ago with J.D. in Ohio. The segment concerning J.D. Vance starts at 3 hours 19 minutes. He describes his personal experiences with J.D. as being not exactly like the person he sees campaigning. But he is confident that J.D. cares about hillbillies. He describes slavery in the 20th century, lots of it white.
Democrats abandoned the working poor, Republicans started listening to them.

Also in the last segment, how the Democrats will likely neutralize Trump.

Although the video at YouTube includes major topics for segments you can skip to at the bottom of the screen, the entire interview has a kind of stream-of-consciousness character and may be sort of hard for a lot of people to follow. Much of this three-hour interview goes over my head, especially the parts about math and physics, with references to previous conversations between the two men. But the final part, starting at 2 hours 48 minutes, is worthwhile listening, with interesting ideas and memorable illustrations about things like the importance of holding on to heritage and the sacred. He is very concerned about the frightening way heterosexual relationships and white men have been denigrated and ignored in the culture.

He sees AOC as a communist and Kamala Harris as a sort of amalgam of things like Marxist and crony finance (3 hr 9 min). His segment on "what can be unburdened by what has been" is kind of scary. It starts at 3 hours 3 minutes.

He recognizes that we don't have a president at this time.

In case you have been wondering what Eric's brother Bret has been doing lately, he has been campaigning to defeat the enemies of free speech - namely the Democratic Party and their cohorts.

The Party of Joy

Censorship

Zero is a special number.

Music

Eric Weinstein described why Something Like That by Tim McGraw is a great, slightly cringey song supporting committed heterosexual relationships in society (at 2 hours and 52 minutes in the longer video).

Hope you have something nice planned for this weekend.

This is the Thread before the Gardening Thread.

Last week's thread, August 31, California as a ridiculous oligarchy

A couple of topics from the post:

Comments are closed so you won't ban yourself by trying to comment on a week-old thread. But don't try it anyway.