Andrea Mitchell (B.A., English Lit., Penn., 1967) had a bad day on Twitter yesterday after failing to recognize Macbeth as the original source of a quote. Speaking of Macbeth, here are a few more lines from the play that seem to fit the news of the day—
The Three Witches/Impeachment Managers: Fair is foul, and foul is fair …
Second Witch/Eric: I’ll give thee a wind.
The Three Witches/Impeachment Managers: A deed without a name.
Our revels now are ended …
A lot of the stuff in academic publications, the main stream media, main stream social media, and the like sure looks that way to me. But I’m a straight white male, so my opinion is now outside the Overton Window.
‘You are a slow learner, Winston,’ said O’Brien gently.
‘How can I help it?’ he blubbered. ‘How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.’
‘Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are 81,281,502. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.’
Void where prohibited.
You only silence critics when you have something to hide.
—Huma Yusuf
Parler is suing Amazon Web Services alleging violation of the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, breach of contract, and tortuous interference with business. IANAL, but it seems to me that this is exactly the approach that is most likely to be successful against Big Tech. If I read the complaint correctly, Parler is alleging that AWS effectively conspired with Twitter to silence Parler because it would be mutually beneficial for Amazon and Twitter.
Here’s the complaint.
Parler is asking for an injunction requiring AWS to restore their service pending the outcome of the case and for treble damages under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
Stay tuned.
I only lost two followers on Twitter overnight.
A little mouse of thought appears in the room, and even the mightiest potentates are thrown into panic. They make frantic efforts to bar our thoughts and words; they are afraid of the workings of the human mind.
—Winston Churchill
IMHO, that’s the money quote from Nineteen Eighty-Four. O’Brien says it to Winston Smith during his torture in Room 101.
‘You are a slow learner, Winston,’ said O’Brien gently.
‘How can I help it?’ he blubbered. ‘How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.’
‘Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.’
Given the reporting of the events in DC from all the various sources, each pushing its own narrative, I’m not sure if what I’m seeing in front of my eyes is real. There are so few trustworthy sources.
I suppose I’m not even a slow learner.
One of the presuppositions behind truthful communication in Western Civilization is that the language used will have sufficient commonality among the talkers and listeners that both sides of the conversation will have similar understanding of what is being said. That doesn’t seem to a valid basis for approaching what many on the Left are now saying and writing. They are using old words with new and often contradictory meanings as well as using new, ill-defined terms.
Consider the word sedition. It is defined in law as an act or conspiracy to overthrow the government, to prevent it from acting lawfully, or to unlawfully seize government property. Some on the left are now trying to spin using the courts to prevent the government from acting unlawfully as sedition, using the word exactly opposed to is definition in law. It’s hard to follow an argument that is based in the premise that A and not-A are the same thing, particularly for those of us we still think 2+2=4 or can remember when we weren’t at war with EastAsia.
And then there’s all these new pronouns and categories of oppressed people. I keep losing track. I can’t remember if the Gostak is the oppressed or the oppressor or whether its a good to be the distimor or the distimee. Or whether Doshes have come up at all during 2020.
For now, I’m sticking with Standard American English as my primary language rather than the media’s Newsspeak. I’ve lived in America for 73 years now. If new immigrants don’t have to learn a new language, why should I?
UPDATE—The Gostak and the Doshes
Gentle Reader, I don’t know if your doshes are galloons. YMMV.
The fat lady ain’t singin’ yet, but I can hear her warming up backstage. The odds now highly favor a successful theft of the election by the Democrats. Their candidate will probably be taking the oath of office on 20 January.
However, Democrats have overreached. His Fraudulency Joe Xiden’s “victory” has been, and will continue to be, extremely costly. First, the blatant theft of the election was so throughly bungled that almost a third of all Democrat voter’s believe the count was crooked. There’s simply no way enough of the public will believe in the integrity of future elections without stringent reforms in counting procedures. The coming fight in blue states over electoral reform has the potential to consume much of their political bandwidth.
BTW, the Left’s increasing use of street violence over the past four years was unwise for many reasons, not the least of which is the way it has tried the patience of many in the Center and on the Right. Bluntly, if public order breaks down, there are more veterans in the political Center and on the Right, and history favors the assumption that they wouldn’t allow corrupt thuggery to destroy public order if push comes to shove. However, even the mayor of Portland is trying to put an end to the street thugs, so problem may fade.
In 2020, the Left has also overreached into the day-to-day lives of the American people through unscientific, control-freak regulations allegedly aimed at controlling the Wuhan virus pandemic. Today is the 307th day of the 15-to-45 days that I was told I would not be working on-site in order to deal with the pandemic. I’ve been working remotely, sometimes overtime, and haven’t missed a paycheck. But too many people have been crushed financially for no good reason. Too many have had non-pandemic medical issues complicated by incompetently designed and managed lockdowns. Too many were killed in nursing homes by wrongheaded regulations. Too many people have been kept out of their houses of worship. But now, people are fighting back, and there are too many instance of non-compliance and too many court cases before honest judges for the blue states to maintain their control much longer, especially since law enforcement agencies are now beginning to side with the people rather than the politicians.
Meanwhile, the Republicans have increased their levels of control in state legislatures. They will have the upper hand in redistricting for the House of Representatives, and that will weaken the Democrats’ position going into the 2022 elections.
All is not lost.
That’s not to say that the next couple of years will be easy.
First, The Empire Deep State Strikes Back would be a fitting title for next two years. Much of the Deep State is intact, and it would be foolish to believe that it won’t try to regain as much power and influence as it can. But most of its power can from how deeply it could hide its activity. The last five years have removed much of its cover. People will be watch, and they know many of place to be looking. The smarter members of the Deep State will burrow deeper or move on to other sinecures, but most of them will actively participate in the Xiden/Harris attempt to revitalize the Left’s control of the bureaucracy. I expect there will be lots of clumsy attempts at restoring “order.”
Second, there will be plenty of work required to keep exposing what happens to public view—and to keep people laughing at the Xiden/Harris failures. The Main Stream Media and Main Stream Social Media are now essentially fully integrated with the Left. I believe that it’s time to revitalize the Blogosphere as it existed a decade ago. That will restore a platform for opposition voices, and those opposition voices should be merciless in holding a Xiden/Harris administration to account. And we should do it with humor. Remember Alinsky’s Rule 5: Humor is man’s most potent weapon. The people we’re dealing with take themselves too seriously. They are too self important. They can’t stand to be laughed at, but most the American people still have a sense of humor.
2021 may out-wierd 2020.
Fasten your seat belts and stay tuned.
Don’t believe everything you see on the Internet.
—Abraham Lincoln
Note the red tag line Twitter has added to this tweet—
In one sense, the tag line is true. Democrats are continuing to make statistically improbable claims about the election without offering any evidence that Joe Xiden actually got as many votes as they allege. OTOH, Trump’s legal team keeps bringing forward sworn testimony, expert analysis, and, now, video evidence of illegal acts during the vote counting. The Democrats are making extraordinary claims without producing extraordinary evidence, while the Trump campaign is making straightforward claims supported by such mundane evidence as eyewitnesses testimony backed up by videos.
And Twitter has chosen an editorial side in the controversy.
The Gentle Reader should not be surprised that Twitter would choose a side—or that the company would take the side unsupported by the evidence. For years, it has demonstrated an allegiance to the Left’s politically correct worldview that is incredibly resistant to Reality. Consider how long it took to unlock the NY Post’s account after the Hunter Xiden laptop lockdown.
I’m still on Twitter because I use it to promote posts here at Hogewash!, but I wish it were less of a leftwing echo chamber. Gab, Paler, and MeWe show promise, but they need to find ways to attract more diverse user bases.
I’ve just hit the DELETE button on my Facebook account. I wasn’t really using it, and attempts by other users to link to posts here at Hogewash! are being blocked because Facebook has determined that this site is offensive. While I’ve referred to being censored by Facebook as a badge of honor, I’ve decided it makes no sense to be where I’m not welcome. I’ve pulled the plug.
I’m still on social media. You can find my wjjhoge accounts on Gab (I’m a minor shareholder), Parler, MeWe, and Twitter.
When I first started using Twitter eight years ago, it was still a more-or-less open platform where I was able to interact with folks of all sorts of political persuasions, but by 2015, it had evolved into a space much less friendly to conservatives. I was one of the first conservatives permanently banned, allegedly because I was engaged in “targeted abuse” of a leftwing political operative. I was also one of the few to have one of my accounts restored when it turned out the allegations against me were false. Twitter appeared to have learned from that episode and became more careful in the way they describe their reasons for lockouts and bans. By being nebulous about their “Rules” they’ve managed to avoid making provably false statements about punished users, protecting the company from defamation claims.
That changed this year. Twitter is now willing to punish users who publish truthful material and to publicly state a false reason for the punishment. The case of the @nypost account lockdown is but one example. Yes, Twitter has now admitted that the Post‘s story was factual and based on documents that weren’t hacked, but as I write this, the @nypost account is still locked.
Based on what I can see, it looks as if Twitter is afraid of the likely changes in the regulatory and legal environments that could come during a second Trump administration, not just for the leftwing causes the company and many of its employees support, but also for the company’s own power in the marketplace. It’s not that Twitter has nothing to lose. It’s more like they feel they have everything to lose and are willing to sacrifice (the stock price tanked after @jack’s testimony this week) to save a failing business model—and their sense of importance and control. They’re all in.
Meanwhile in the Real World (and the part of the Internet that intersects with it), Twitter’s attempts at suppressing truthful reporting on the Hunter Biden story have backfired.
Barbara Streisand and Brett Kimberlin were unavailable for comment.
UPDATE—Twitter has unlocked the @nypost account without requiring the newspaper to take down it tweets to truthful news stories. Also, institutional investors took an aggregate loss somewhere north of 2 billion dollars over this week’s drop in Twitter’s stock price. The Gentle Reader may remember that I have suggested that the market may provide corrective action for the misbehavior of various social media companies faster than any government.
You only silence critics when you have something to hide.
—Huma Yusuf
From Twitter on our iPhones to Facebook on our laptops, a silicon curtain has descended across the face of the Internet. Behind it lie all the media outlets and individuals engaged in fair reporting. The NY Post and all its readers are but one example of those who suffer from what I must call Progressive censorship, and all of us are subject to one form or another of Progress influence over what we may hear and say, increasingly under the control of Silicon Valley.
For decades, the Left conducted what has been called its march through the institutions to place itself in control. They wish to stay in control, but in 2016 the Deplorables cheated by using the Electoral College to install Donald Trump as President. Trump, in turn, has worked to disrupt the Left’s control. The situation is intolerable. Therefore, the Left has pulled out all the stops and is using every means necessary to defeat Trump in 2020. At times, their naked use of their power to conceal one form of corruption has revealed another, but the Left doesn’t seem to care. Winning really has become the only thing for them.
Victor Davis Hanson has a post over at National Review about the Left’s efforts to retain control.
The progressive project is now hubristic, drunk with power and the belief that it can control an America that does not like it and that in turn it holds in contempt.
But with hubris comes nemesis, as we saw on all fronts last week. Joe Biden, the DNC, the media, Silicon Valley, the identity-politics industry, and the FBI were all shown to be not so much partisan and corrupt as, far more important, inept and ridiculous.
The corrupt can tolerate charges that they are dishonest, because such an accusation implies (they assume) a tacit compliment that they are also cunning and adroit in obtaining such power in the first place to use for such unethical purposes.
One of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals is to hold the opponents to their own rules. Another is that ridicule is the most potent weapon. That’s why the Hunter’s Laptop and the Toobin Zoom stories are so important. As VDH notes,
But when they become so brazen that they are exposed as silly and absurd, they begin to fear. The Left doesn’t mind being portrayed as Machiavellian or even perhaps a little Rasputin-like. But they can’t tolerate being revealed as the buffoons they so often are.
If we want to win this November, we Deplorables would be well advised to follow an order given by a 19th-century Democrat, and “Keep up the skeer!” We need to keep confronting the Left with the incompetence of their corruption so that all voters understand the real nature of the choice before them.
Twitter’s ham-fisted attempt at censoring the New York Post has blown up in their face. @Jack tweeted this—
I’ve been sued for defamation because of posts here at Hogewash!, and I’ve won all of those suits because the plaintiff was never able to show that anything I wrote was false. The truth or a reasonable opinion based on evidence can’t be the basis for a defamation claim. The plaintiff also tried to claim that I was responsible for the content of remarks made by commenters here at Hogewash!, but Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides immunity for website publishers from third-party content. Neither this site nor Twitter is responsible for what a third party posts.
However, if Twitter adds “context” to a tweet or comments on it, Twitter will be responsible for what it posts—and could be held responsible for the its statements providing such context or commentary. By making its own comments, by speaking for itself, Twitter should become a speaker unprotected by Section 230 with respect to its own speech. Saying that an article contains hacked information when there is evidence that the information was obtained legally might be the sort of false statement that would trigger a defamation suit.
Twitter needs to keep its users satisfied. It makes money by selling ads, and driving users away with unfair censorship policies isn’t good for business. OTOH, keeping its users happy may make it difficult to operate as a progressive echo chamber, so we may have reached a market-based solution to Twitter’s unfair treatment of a large group of its users, many of whom have been leaving for Gab and Parler. Section 230 may need some legislative tweaking based on lessons learned since it was enacted in 1996, but the market may apply more pressure more quickly to drive Twitter toward better behavior.
Of course, Twitter may think that it is a monopoly that is too big to fail. That’s what America Online AOL thought.
Things are about to get interesting.
Stay tuned.
To whom do you award the right to decide which speech is harmful or who is the harmful speaker? … To whom would you delegate the task of deciding for you what you could read?
–Christopher Hitchens
Here’s a Tweet from the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee.
Here’s what you get when you click on the link.
I told you they’re all in on their censorship. Twitter is now deprecating links to official dot gov websites.
The Left has given up on any pretense of fair play for the coming election. They are lying brazenly, and they’re pulled out all the stops on their Internet censorship. The censorship of this morning’s Hunter Biden story from the NY Post by Facebook and Twitter show the Left really has reached the point where they feel they must use any means necessary to defeat Donald Trump.
In order to confirm the censorship was happening, I attempted to post a link to the Biden story on Twitter. I was blocked.
Then, I posted this tweet.
Twitter has suspended the New York Post‘s account and suspended or locked the accounts of several people who tried to link to the Biden article, including White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany. Twitter responded to users’ questions about the blocking and suspensions with tweets from @TwitterSafey containing various excuses, but while I was typing this post, this tweet from@Jack popped up in my timeline—
Twitter may be feeling some heat, but I’m pessimistic about their ultimate response. Based on my personal experience from having been unjustly banned for truthful reporting, I expect that Twitter will do its damnedest to continue its censorship. (I was banned for allegedly harassing Brett Kimberlin. I got the @wjjhoge account back when the false criminal complaint against me dropped for lack of evidence. I suspect that their lawyers figured out that I had an open-and-shut defamation case against them.)
The Left has pushed all their chips out on the table. If Trump wins the election, I expect the Left, including Facebook and Twitter, will go down swinging. Things have gotten ugly; I’m afraid they’re about to get uglier.
“Anonymous sources …” “A source close to …” “Experts say …”
I’m getting tired of fictional rumor mill “news” from the Main Stream Media. At least, the supermarket tabloids used to claim a source for their stories with headlines along the lines of Elvis Says Space Aliens Framed OJ.
Who, what, when, where, why, how and the truth, please.
I’m seeing tweets and posts on social media suggesting that the White House is issuing false information about the President’s health. The President’s physician is a Commander in the United States Navy, and the President is being treated at Walter Reed Medical Center, a military facility.
Given that it is a court martial offense under Article 107 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice for a member of the Armed Forces to make a false official statement with the intent to deceive, I believe I’ll trust the statements made by CMDR Conley regarding President’s medical condition.
But to get to the point of this post, I have the following question for the those saying that we’re being given false information about the President’s medical condition, considering that such false statements would be criminal acts by some of the people making them: You may be accusing someone of committing a crime; do you have evidence for what you are saying or are you saying it with a reckless disregard for the truth?
The Democrats and the press (but I repeat myself) are in full handwringing mood over how Cocaine Mitch’s following of the established precedents of the Senate is somehow “violating norms.”
It turns out that Norm was available for comment; he just wants another beer.
