I don’t remember it being a trait of the Left to work at the World Bank, the National Democratic Institute, and HSBC, intern at the Council of Foreign Relations, be a WEF young leader, or a fellow at the Atlantic Council, a NATO affiliated think-tank. Maher is what I call a Cosmopolitan Authoritarian – a cultural libertine that institutional power has anointed into the charmed circle.
Somehow – call me naive – I just didn’t expect the New York Times to be all-in on the immediate establishment of the surveillance state and universal censorship by the “awesome” Deep State. But think of this. If the NYT can be fully captured by this ideology, and probably captured by the money that goes with it, so can any other institution. You have probably noticed a similar editorial line being pushed by Wired, Mother Jones, Rolling Stone, Salon, Slate, and other venues, including the entire suite of publications owned by Conde Nast including Vogue and GQ magazine.
Now We Are Supposed to Cheer Government Surveillance? Read More
The mindset has over the past several decades coalesced into a religion of sorts. It has its tenets that are now taken on faith and condemns anyone who questions them or commits acts of “heresy.” And, something of which you must be aware is that the “true believers” see any challengers as heretics and are willing to ruthlessly suppress or cancel with bad recommendations, direct attacks on employment, sanctioning through exercises of administrative power, etc. I do think that there is some growing pushback but we will need to see its development.
What to do about it? I would suggest a simple answer. Forget the model, which might be completely misconstrued in any case. Just say what is true, with sincerity, without malice, without convoluted hopes of manipulating others. It’s a time for truth, which earns trust. Only that will blow the window wide open and finally demolish it forever.
Is the Overton Window Real, Imagined, or Constructed? Read More
Finally, if you agree with me that my cast of Covid characters much more closely represents what we actually mean by that term, what does this tell us about how the Deep State is now encroaching on the lives of the civilian public in the homeland, rather than sticking to its pre-2020 playbook of sucking up resources by destroying and then rebuilding foreign countries?
The slogan became popular about ten years ago: the revolution will be decentralized with the creation of robust parallel institutions. There is no other path. The intellectual parlor game is over. This is a real-life struggle for freedom itself. It’s resist and rebuild or doom.
Your name is important. To renounce it or change it is momentous. To be given a new secret name by an intimate partner is sublime. Imagine a new name, known only to you, carved on a white stone, handed only to you. How precious that would be. For now, each of has the name we have. If we don’t use it, who will?
If the justices want to distinguish between persuasion and coercion in the injunction, they need to appreciate that social media companies operate in a very different relationship with government than traditional print media. These asymmetrical power dynamics create a relationship ripe for unconstitutional government coercion.
That is what the once vaunted now openly vile Poynter Institute – a pivot point of the international censorship-industrial complex – wishes to “strengthen…around the globe.” Pointedly, not “free speech,” but “fact-based expression.”
The New York Times has published a strange article by Justin Wolfers, an economist at the University of Michigan. The headline is that his economist brain makes him say with regard to inflation: “Don’t worry, be happy.” The article gives the reader as much reason to trust economists as you do epidemiologists, which is to say not at all.
On March 21, a settlement was reached, leading to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) agreeing to remove social media posts and webpages discouraging the use of ivermectin for treating Covid-19.
Thorsteinn Siglaugsson was wickedly accurate in sketching the typology of fact-checking techniques. Create a straw-man argument that can be easily knocked down. Assert that a claim is not supported by evidence, is questioned by other experts, lacks context, is misleading, or is only partly true, etc. Engage in ad hominem attacks against the person rather than with their evidence and argument.
