BuzzFeed has a post up titled Facebook’s Preferential Treatment Of US Conservatives Puts Its Fact-Checking Program In Danger.
BTW, Hogewash! is one of the websites that Facebook censors. I’m informed that users have not been allowed to link to my posts.
Les fausses opinions ressemblent à la fausse monnaie qui est frappée d’abord par de grands coupables et dépensée ensuite par d’honnêtes gens qui perpétuent le crime sans savoir ce qu’ils font. False opinions are like false money, struck first of all by guilty men and thereafter circulated by honest people who perpetuate the crime without knowing what they are doing.
—Joseph de Maistre
Bill Schmalfeldt has managed to excel in one area far beyond any of the other members of Team Kimberlin. He’s used up even more, perhaps twice as many, Twitter handles than Brett Kimberlin has filed and lost lawsuits. Who could have seen this coming?
Well, he said modestly, I kinda hinted at what was coming in the TKPOTD for seven years ago today.
* * * * *
Blood on the Microphone
Radio Slappy
Derp Brain Radio
Radio WMS (old time radio)
Radio WMS (talk)
Etc.
And now, Radio Shiloh. I’ve lost track of the fits and starts of Cabin Boy Bill Schmalfeldt’s Internet radio career over the past few months. I went over to his new website to check things out (so you don’t have to), and I took a listen to his new Station ID.
It mentions poop.
* * * * * *
I was going to tag this with the French phrase plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, but on second thought the old GI expression abbreviated SSDD seems a better fit.
Let blockheads read what blockheads wrote.
—Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
I see that the usual suspects are in a tizzy over the armed St. Louis couple who confronted BLM protestors outside their house. It appears that the pair are both lawyers, so I’m going to assume that they are aware of the elements of the crime of assault and that they would not have pointed their weapons at anyone who was not threatening them with severe injury or death.
However, their gun handling is clearly inept. They appear to have poor awareness of the direction their weapons are pointing, and the women never seems to be holding her Walther PPK properly. They both need more training in safe gun handling.
I haven’t had to shoot anyone since I left Viet Nam in 1972, but I have been in several dangerous confrontations since then. In all of them, when the other people realized I was armed, they decided to withdraw. The sight of a holstered sidearm or a firearm slung over my shoulder or held at low ready was enough to influence their behavior.
The arms I keep for defensive purposes are not kept for offense. They are not kept to inflict my brand of justice on anyone else. They’re kept as a credible deterrent, tools that I am trained to use and willing to use.
One of the reasons Mrs. Hoge and I settled where we did was that the community was peaceful. I doubt that we’ll see much turbulence here, but if the rioters come to our small town, they’d be well advised to stay off my lawn.
Here’s another Blognet episode. This one’s from five years ago today, the time when Twitter’s so-called Safety operation was beginning to crack down on conservative users but could still be counted on to suspend dangerous harassers.
* * * * *
MUSIC: Theme. Intro and fade under.
NARRATOR: Ladies and gentlemen, the story you are about to hear is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.
MUSIC: Up, then under …
NARRATOR: You’re a Detective Sergeant. You’re assigned to Internet Detail. A group of bloggers and their commenters are being cyberstalked and harassed on Twitter. Your job … stop it.
MUSIC: Up then under …
ANNOUNCER: Blognet … the documented drama of an actual case. For the next few minutes, in cooperation with the Twitter Town Sheriff’s Department, you will travel step by step on the side of the good guys through an actual case transcribed from official files. From beginning to end, from crime to punishment, Blognet is the story of the good guys in action.
MUSIC: Up and out. Continue reading
Ron Coleman has a white paper posted over at Likelihood of Confusion which suggests using a state-based consumer protection process to reign in censorship abuse by social media companies.
Political or ideologically-based corporate censorship of social media content and users is a discernable social, economic and political problem. As private conduct, it is not a violation of the First Amendment’s speech clause. The problem appears intractable because of a combination of broad statutory protections for online service providers, one-sided terms of service and a lack of federal regulatory acknowledgment fo the problem. This paper suggests, however, that a state-base consumer protection initiative requiring “good faith” application of social media platforms’ terms of service to user bans could overcome these obstacles and would be consistent with a wide range of consumer-oriented remedial regimes that have survived constitutional and other attacks.
That’s the paper’s abstract. Read the whole thing.
I’ve been on the receiving in of Twitter’s bad faith. My business and personal accounts were permanently suspended as the result of a false claim of harassment. When the legal case against me collapsed for lack of evidence and it became obvious that the complaint had been based on false testimony, Twitter told me I could have one of my accounts back. One. Not both. I elected to have my business account reinstated.
None of the accounts related to my false accuser were sanctioned in any way.
The sort of regulation Ron Coleman proposes is overdue.
UPDATE—I received an email this morning from a friend who tells me that Facebook won’t allow her to share content from Hogewash! because it violates their “community standards.” I’ll take that as a badge of honor.
Mika haz sad …
… I remember when the Left fancied themselves to be the Reality-Based Community, people who adhered to facts.
These days, facts keep interfering with The Narrative.
Chuck Todd has been caught editing remarks by Attorney General William Barr to misrepresent what Mr. Barr really said.
Yawn.
There’s nothing novel about the Left’s crude attempts to edit Reality to their liking.
Neither Nikolai Yazhov nor Winston Smith were available for comment.
The initial reporting in the Main Stream Media is as I would expect.
I’ve watched the White House briefings most evenings this week, and when I read the accounts published by many of the media outlets and repeated by the blue check crowd on Twitter, I’m reminded of how facts get twisted when they’re transmitted through non-reliable channels.
BTW, Truth is often an even more effective disinfectant than Lysol.
Parkinson’s Law states that “”work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”. Gresham’s Law states that “”bad money drives out good”.” The news coverage of the Wuhan virus pandemic I’ve been seeing over the past couple of appears to be the result of some sort of intersection of those two laws. Something on the order of “bad journalism expands so as to drive out good journalism.”
Of course, in any situation as serious as the current pandemic there will be a mix of good news and bad news, successes and failures. I get the distinct impression that the too much of the Main Stream Media is more invested in reporting bad news about Donald Trump than truthful news about what’s happening.
In the near term, the American public needs to be given a clear picture of the what’s happening nationally and locally so that we can act responsibly.
In the long term, we need to know what worked and what didn’t so that we properly evaluate people and policies—and take appropriate action on election day.
Over at Instapundit, Glenn Reynolds has remarked, “One of the problems with our ruling class is that it’s not just frequently wrong, it’s that it’s always self-assuredly arrogant in its wrongness.” Arrogance is fairly common trait of people who wind up in leadership positions for which they lack training, experience, and/or talent, and too many of the current crop of the best and the brightest weren’t trained in the disciplines of leadership. They are credentialed but uneducated.
Murphy was an optimist.
So far, the MSM and Big Tech haven’t been able to exercise sufficient control over the Internet to install an effective memory hole function. For now, they’ve been limited to trying to change the debate by trying to change the usage and meaning of words. There’s an odd kind of precision in their sloppy language that tries to strip words of their nuanced meanings.
It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take “good”, for instance. If you have a word like “good”, what need is there for a word like “bad”? “Ungood” will do just as well–better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of “good”, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like “excellent” and “splendid” and all the rest of them? “Plusgood” covers the meaning, or “doubleplusgood” if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words—in reality, only one word. Don’t you see the beauty of that, Winston?
…
Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it. Every concept that can ever be needed, will be expressed by exactly one word, with its meaning rigidly defined and all its subsidiary meanings rubbed out and forgotten.
One of the problems with the Internet is that it can gum up the works when Our Betters want to erase their previous statement which are no longer politically correct. The Main Stream Media’s previous use of the now-raaaaaacist terms Wuhan virus or Chinese virus are too well backed up to allow them to credibly challenge Donald Trump’s using them. Their words won’t disappear, and too many people remember what they meant when they were spoken.
We need to remember that in the Real World 2 + 2 = 4.
Monday. Check.
Tuesday. Check.
Wednesday. Check.
Yep. Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.
Those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it.
—Werner Herzog
There’s a scene in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in which the use of a spaceship’s infinite improbability drive causes two guided missiles to be changed into less threatening objects several miles above the surface of the planet Magrathea. One becomes a whale which asks all sorts of questions about its new situation as it plummets to its death. The other is a bowl of petunias which simply says, “Oh, no, not again.” That’s pretty much my reaction these days when I hear someone claiming to be a victim because he was truthfully quoted. I’ve had to endure multiple LOLsuits alleging defamation because this blog wrote truthfully about certain people.
The latest bit of such whining comes from Don Lemon, Wajahat Ali, and Rick Wilson. They are upset because of a Republican ad which uses a video clip from CNN which shows them expressing their distaste for Trump supporters. Wajahat Ali would have us believe that he is being bullied by being truthfully quoted.
Yeah. Right.
My podcasting partner Stacy McCain has a post up appropriately mocking Lemon, Ali, and Wilson. Go read it.
Eugene Volokh has a post over at The Volokh Conspiracy that looks at the possibility that the journalists who leaked the Bolton book story might have committed a felony by publishing the government’s “predecisional information.” About a month ago, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit decided a case (U.S. v. Blaszczak) finding that a federal agency “has a ‘property right in keeping confidential and making exclusive use’ of its nonpublic predecisional information.” By a 2-to-1 vote the court held that a federal employee’s leak of such information—and its receipt by someone cooperating with the employee—could be felony wire fraud and conversion of government property.
Nor would journalists have an obvious First Amendment defense that others don’t possess. … [T]he First Amendment generally doesn’t give institutional media more protection than other speakers.
Even if a court could distinguish use of government property for public speech purposes (whether by the media or other speakers) from such use for private purposes, the statutes on which the panel relies draw no such distinction. And the panel’s reasoning as to property draws no such distinction, either: If the predecisional information is federal government property, and using that information for one purpose (selling stocks) is conversion of that property, then using that information for another purpose (selling newspapers) would be as well. Certainly journalists (or independent bloggers or other commentators) have no assurance that they would escape criminal liability under the panel’s theory.
Conversion is a form of theft. While the First Amendment protects our right to speak freely about public issues, it doesn’t protect theft. For example, I generally can’t publish someone else’s copyrighted material as my own.
IANAL, but it seems to me that while the government can’t generally engage in prior restraint of speech, it might reasonably be able to punish someone who steals government property.
Hmmmmmm.
From the Internet’s Newspaper of Record—
I’m so old I remember when outlets like The Babylon Bee were still satire, and satire was a form of joking.
Kyle Smith has a piece over at Nation Review that looks at the difference between The Media’s relative interest in David Hogg vis à vis Jack Wilson.
What kind of culture are we living in when Hogg-ism is somehow more celebrated than Wilson-ism? Hogg is one of many Americans who think gun-control regulations should be tightened. He may be right, he may be wrong, but there is nothing particularly exceptional about him. Wilson is a singular figure, a man of action who did something amazing on the spot that can hardly be praised enough. Who knows how many more people might have suffered and died that day in Texas if Wilson hadn’t been so skillful and brave? Led by our media, we’ve become a society that reacts intensely over terrible things but works hard to forget about the great things.
Yeah, but so many of those great things don’t fit The Narrative.
The Narrative states that we lesser folks don’t need firearms to protect ourselves or, if we do, we should follow Joe Biden’s advice and get a shotgun instead of an AR-15.
The West Freeway Church of Christ murderer used a shotgun.
He was stopped by a good guy carrying a concealed handgun.
Of course, the facts don’t fit the Narrative, so I suspect that the Media will quickly (in the words of David Burge) cover the story. With a pillow. Until it stops breathing.
On Christmas, Teen Vogue tweeted … oh, read it for yourself—
As a species, we humans are evolved to have intercourse in a particular way. Trying to assemble the parts incorrectly may be fun for someone, but a continual desire for infertile sexual encounters is an evolutionary disadvantage that removes one’s genes from the pool.
Of course, that may not be such a bad thing in the case of some science deniers.
… it’s time to admit you’ve been pushing fake news.
Matt Tabbi has a review of the recently released DoJ IG report over at Rolling Stone.
Then, following a series of leaks, the news media essentially reported on the FBI’s wrong reporting of Steele’s wrong reporting.
The impact was greater than just securing a warrant to monitor Page. More significant were the years of headlines that grew out of this process, beginning with the leaking of the meeting with Trump about Steele’s blackmail allegations, the insertion of Steele’s conclusions in the Intelligence Assessment about Russian interference, and the leak of news about the approval of the Page FISA warrant.
As a result, a “well-developed conspiracy” theory based on a report that Comey described as “salacious and unverified material that a responsible journalist wouldn’t report without corroborating,” became the driving news story in a superpower nation for two years. Even the New York Times, which published a lot of these stories, is in the wake of the Horowitz report noting Steele’s role in “unleashing a flood of speculation in the news media about the new president’s relationship with Russia.”
No matter what people think the political meaning of the Horowitz report might be, reporters who read it will know: Anybody who touched this nonsense in print should be embarrassed.
They should be embarrassed because their behavior was unprofessional and immoral, but I suspect for most of our betters among the “journalists” the source of any embarrassment is frustration caused by being caught.
It’s being reported that the Baby Yoda character on the new Disney series The Mandalorian is generating twice as much social media buzz as any of the 2020 Democrat presidential candidates.
It seems The Force is more powerful than The Farce.
Don’t start an argument with somebody who has a microphone when you don’t.
—Harlan Ellison
