They believe that shutting down debate will tamp down dissent. It's like removing fire alarms from a house and thinking it will never burn down.
The 2020 election was stolen by the Tech overlords. But they don't understand that they have created millions of people who hate them with a passion. They and their families will have to have armed guards for the rest of their lives. And guards can turn on you.
One of Mrs Thatcher's great insights was: First you win the argument; then you win the election.
To win the argument, you have to make it. In the Westminster system, you make the argument for three or four years, then you have a six-week election campaign. That's when the system's functioning, which it certainly wasn't under, say, Andrew Scheer's Tory leadership in Ottawa.
But, even when it's not functioning, somebody's making an argument. Thus the fatal miscalculation of David Cameron when he decided that the Brexit referendum would be the best way to put the EU issue to bed once and for all. By then every electorally viable political party - from the Tories to Sinn Féin - was "pro-Europe". Nigel Farage had been making the argument for twenty years, but, because he had no real political party to advance it, it didn't get him anywhere at UK general elections. So, the minute Cameron called a referendum on Nigel's issue in splendid isolation, it gave Farage a shot at the second half of Maggie's great formulation: He'd won the argument; and Cameron delivered up a mechanism that allowed him to win the vote.
In the American system, it is, as the Brits say, arse over tit: As Monty Python once asked, where's the room for an argument? There are no parliamentary debates, so you never see a Dem senator going at it with a GOP senator. Even more strikingly, there are a bazillion political talk shows, none of which ever features a Dem senator going at it with a GOP senator - the way that even the most despised BBC, CBC, ABC yakfests routinely feature opposing legislators debating health care or the Irish backstop or Covid response.
After the last half-decade, my instinct is not to believe a single word the FBI says about anything, and to support any candidate who vows to dissolve the bureau and start from scratch. Setting aside the Strzok-Page-Comey-McCabe stuff, this is a national police agency that devotes more resources to investigating a Nascar garage-door pull-rope than to a Hunter Biden laptop bursting with oligarch money-laundering and alleged kiddie porn: I would be surprised if such bizarre priorities could get them elected as village constable in the average New Hampshire township. Yet we are now assured, at a time when Big Social are more powerful than any government on the planet and are openly suppressing one of the two presidential campaigns, that the big problem is mullahs posing as "Proud Boys".
Yeah, sure, whatever.
Facebook fascists suppress the most critical piece of journalism in the 2020 election cycle.
Hunter Biden got a million-dollar board position with a company in an industry of which he had zero knowledge in a country with which he had no familiarity, solely for that company’s purpose of buying a sitting American vice president who had been made the point man on foreign policy with that country. This really can’t be disputed anymore thanks to the New York Post‘s reporting, and to call it disqualifying to Biden, even in the absence of anything else already in the hopper where he’s concerned, might even be charitable.
This is the kind of bombshell that should ruin not just Biden but his party’s down-ballot contenders. It casts an impression that the entire Democrat Party is a criminal conspiracy, so open was Biden’s corruption and so shameless was the Democrats’ attempt to cover up the Ukraine mess by impeaching Trump for having mentioned it in a phone call with that country’s new premier last year.
But will it have that effect? Probably not.
Why not? Because the American corporate legacy media, every bit as corrupt as the Biden family, is actively suppressing the story.
Read the whole thing.
Censor this, you corrupt commies. pic.twitter.com/9C0PUk1gz3
— Elizabeth Harrington (@LizRNC) October 14, 2020
We have a lot of dumb people in this country. But the difference between the stupidities cherished by the Idiocracy set ingesting fish cleaner, and the ones pushed in places like the Atlantic, is that the jackasses among the “expert” class compound their wrongness by being so sure of themselves that they force others to go along. In other words, to combat “ignorance,” the scolders create a new and more virulent species of it: exclusive ignorance, forced ignorance, ignorance with staying power.
Censorship, he writes, is hardly the answer, and crushing “less well-known sources” only hurts journalism.
“The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant,” he concluded.
To grasp the affinities between administrative governance and algorithmic governance, one must first get over that intellectually debilitating article of libertarian faith, namely that “the government” poses the only real threat to liberty. For what does Silicon Valley represent, if not a locus of quasi-governmental power untouched by either the democratic process or by those hard-won procedural liberties that are meant to secure us against abuses by the (actual, elected) government? If the governmental quality of rule by algorithms remains obscure to us, that is because we actively welcome it into our own lives under the rubric of convenience, the myth of free services, and ersatz forms of human connection—the new opiates of the masses.When you are able to influence what people think and how they think, what is allowed and what is out-of-bounds you have the mechanism of tyranny, no matter if the influencers are government employees or private citizens. And these citizens are totally unaccountable via the ballot.
To characterize this as the operation of “the free market” (as its spokespersons do) requires a display of intellectual agility that might be admirable if otherwise employed. The reality is that what has emerged is a new form of monopoly power made possible by the “network effect” of those platforms through which everyone must pass to conduct the business of life. These firms sit at informational bottlenecks, collecting data and then renting it out, whether for the purpose of targeted ads or for modeling the electoral success of a political platform. Mark Zuckerberg has said frankly that “In a lot of ways Facebook is more like a government than a traditional company. . . . We have this large community of people, and more than other technology companies we’re really setting policies.”
That is more or less where we are, as a society.
The left has had control of education, of means of communication, of intellectual ideiation and narrative for a century. Full control, I mean. Before that they had partial control and toe holds. Also before that they were not as full on communist. All the things we “know” and were taught aren’t necessarily so.
And make no mistake, while the current crop of fog machine leftists are almost transparently inept, this wasn’t always so. Much of your ideas of everything from industrialization to the position of women in society to… well, anything is informed by very smart, very gifted men and women who believed in lying for their cause, and that sufficient lies would bring about utopia.
You realize this when you realize how lies shade differently in other countries, how you get people in Europe who earnestly believe the only alternative to socialism is monarchy, or that people were starving to death in Sweden just before socialists took over.
The lies corrupt everything, including the West’s view of itself. And it’s a fog....
You might even think socialism is nothing to be scared of. After all the soviet union was communist not socialist. (Except that they never called themselves communist. And communist East Germany called itself Democrat. Let those who have ears hear.)
Your history, your literature, your news are covered in fog. It might be pleasant to imagine they’re something other than they are. Certainly if you believe in the power of the government to bring about utopia. But it doesn’t make it less dangerous. Because you can’t see the precipice clearly.
In one Nigerian community, illiterate fathers have learned from their sons that Facebook is a good way to let buyers know their daughters are for sale.
OBANLIKU, Nigeria—Monica, 16, is one of two sisters sold as wives to men who found their photographs on their father's Facebook page and contacted him. She and her 14-year-old younger sister never wanted to get married until they completed their secondary education in Ogbakoko, a small village in Obanliku Local Government Area in Nigeria’s south-central Cross River state. But the teenage sisters fell victims to a culture which subjects little girls, some as young as 10, to de facto slavery through a tradition called “money marriage.”
The sisters belong to the Becheve community, a large tribe of 17 villages in Obanliku where there is a long tradition in which young girls—often referred to as “money women” or “money wives”—are sold in exchange for food or livestock or cash, or to settle debts.
U.S. Approved Thousands of Requests to Bring in Child Brides
Like hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of girls from the Becheve clan who are victims of money marriages, Monica and her sister were sold without their consent. Their father wanted to clear the debt he owed to a distant relative. The two sisters got married a month apart to men whom they did not know at all and who were old enough to be their grandfathers.
Reports of Facebook being used as a tool to facilitate child marriage aren’t unique to Nigeria. Last November, the social media platform came under fire after posts discussing the sale of a 16-year-old girl in South Sudan. The victim was married in the process after her father, in exchange for his daughter, received 530 cows, three Land Cruiser V8 cars and $10,000. The teenager reportedly was bid on by five men, including senior officials in the South Sudanese government.
