patrick.net

https://alexberenson.substack.com/p/my-pensacola-lecture-why-the-first

Last year, for example, students at Stanford Law School – law students, who should understand the value of the First Amendment better than anyone else on campus – shouted down a federal judge whose views they didn’t like. When a Stanford diversity dean – yes, that’s an actual position – appeared on the scene, she didn’t back the judge. Instead, she instead lectured him, asking, “Do you have something so incredibly important to say?” and, infamously, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

This was far from an isolated incident.

Adults, particularly left-leaning young adults, truly believe they have the right not to hear words or concepts that might bother them. They refer to “microaggressions” and “unsafe environments.” ...

The solution for those of us who believe in free speech is to let advocates and opponents, of the Covid vaccines or anything else, talk to each other, or past each other, or at each other – while the world listens, or doesn’t. ...

Why have journalists and academics – the very people who should care most about free expression - lost their appetite for free speech? And how did I get caught in its crosshairs?

The simple two-word answer is Donald Trump.

Trump’s election in 2016 set our elite institutions into a spiral of anger – not merely at Trump, but at the Americans who had the temerity to resist Hillary Clinton’s coronation and elect him instead.

But Trump is not the only answer.

After all, 2016 wasn’t just the year of Trump. It was the year of Brexit. It was the year when elites on both sides of the Atlantic fundamentally lost their ability to set the so-called Overton window, the acceptable parameters of political discussion. No one serious in Washington or New York or Los Angeles or San Francisco – Republican or Democrat - wanted Donald Trump elected in 2016. And no one serious in London, Tory or Labor, wanted Britain to pull out of the European Union.

And the elites, correctly, saw large social media sites, Facebook and Twitter in particular, as the largest single engine of their loss of control.

https://barsoom.substack.com/p/political-conflict-in-the-age-of

Curation of the public discourse makes a self-referential parody of democracy: the legitimacy of the Regime nominally rests upon the will of the People, but the will of the People is whatever the Regime wills the people to will. In a sense, this has been the case in industrial technocracies more or less since their inception. Whoever controls the organs of opinion formation – the news and entertainment media, the schools, the universities – controls the mass mind, and therefore controls politics. The openly totalitarian regimes of the Democratic People’s Republics did this blatantly, with direct state management of the press and the academy; the more subtle liberal democracies did this behind the scenes, with nominally independent, private media and universities manipulated via back-channel communications, government grants, intelligence agency inserts (e.g. Project Mockingbird) and so on. The Great Shuttening is partly a reaction to the loss of influence of these legacy institutions, and a panicked attempt to assert control over the unruly many-to-many communications networks that have been displacing them.

https://barsoom.substack.com/p/political-conflict-in-the-age-of

Now let’s say things get dire and desperate for our beloved Regime. Effeminate foxes they may be, preferring subterfuge to naked force, but events force their hand. Order 66 goes out. Quadrotor swarms are despatched across the world, a Night of the Loud Drones – although it doesn’t take a whole night, it’s all over in minutes. A few hundred thousand small and precisely targeted explosions, and the most troublesome dissidents are excised from the body politic.

Sure, there will be shock and horror among the people. But the software update will follow up immediately after: these were all terrorists, fifth columnists, agents of Russia, China, and Iran, racists and sexists and homophobes, climate-change deniers and antivaxxers, removing them was necessary as a public health measure. And a few days later, another software update: Drone Passover never happened. See, all those people are still posting on social media. Their accounts are still active! Everyone saying they’re all dead (and that we murdered them) is a conspiracy theorist.

Remarkable what you can do with Large Language Models.

Or maybe they’ll simply claim that the people they murdered were innocent casualties of Russian Orthodox terrorists, and that much stricter controls are now necessary For the Safety of Our Democracy. The NPCs would buy that too. But they’ll buy anything.

https://slaynews.com/news/canadian-government-moves-criminalize-christianity/

The proposed amendment aims to remove the provision that allows individuals to defend themselves by claiming they genuinely believe in and were merely expressing religious teaching already found in the Scriptures.

This means that citing religious beliefs as justification for words or actions that the state effectively regards as “heresy” will no longer be accepted as a valid defense under the law.

The bill states:

“The enactment amends the Criminal Code to eliminate as a defense against wilful promotion of hatred or antisemitism the fact that a person, in good faith, expressed or attempted to establish by an argument an opinion or a religious subject or an opinion based on a belief in a religious text.” ...

“If ratified, Canada’s anti-Christian legal apparatus created over the last decade will overtly persecute Christians with the force of criminal law.

“Everything is already in place,” he warned. “Buckle up.”

Dr. Boot went on to explain that evangelism, preaching, counseling, statements in the workplace, on social media, and in books that condemn homosexuality or transgenderism on biblical grounds could be “subject to criminal prosecution and with heavy fines or jail time.”

The legislation will also include statements deemed “anti-Semitic.”

https://judiciary.house.gov/sites/evo-subsites/republicans-judiciary.house.gov/files/evo-media-document/NSF-Staff-Report_Appendix.pdf

THE WEAPONIZATION OF THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION:
HOW NSF IS FUNDING THE DEVELOPMENT OF AUTOMATED TOOLS TO
CENSOR ONLINE SPEECH “AT SCALE” AND TRYING TO COVER UP ITS
ACTIONS

Interim Staff Report of the Committee on the Judiciary and the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government

U.S. House of Representatives
February 5, 2024

https://notthebee.com/article/in-england-they-now-throw-you-in-jail-for-years-if-you-post-offensive-stickers-in-public-places

England sentences man to two years in jail for "offensive stickers"

The stickers in question ranged from:
"It's OK to be White"
"White Lives Matter"
"Love your Nation"
"Stop Anti-White Rape Gangs"
"Stop mass immigration"
"Reject white guilt"
"They seek conquest, not asylum"

To the racism that's sadly growing on the Right (because the Left won't allow public discourse and the free exchange of ideas):

"Why are Jews censoring free speech?"
"Small hats, big problems"

... Maybe you say, "Yeah, but he was antisemitic," which still doesn't erase free speech, but okay - let's play that game.

Why aren't there mass arrests of the Arab "asylum seekers" in England who routinely call for violence against the Jews?

In the U.S., where freedom of speech is broadly and proactively upheld, profane stickers are protected under the First Amendment. In England — and in much of the rest of Europe — you can be prosecuted and imprisoned for displaying an offensive sign.

And the seriousness with which law enforcement takes that responsibility is pretty much laughable:

Det Ch Sup James Dunkerley, head of Counter Terrorism Policing North East, said: 'Those that seek to bring hatred to our communities through actions such as stickering will be identified and brought to justice.'

Free speech was born in England ... now it has died there.

Start stickering cop cars.

https://www.aussie17.com/p/shocking-response-from-tga-regarding

What about creating terror by persecuting the innocent and letting the guilty prey on the innocent, but not persecuting the guilty, don't you understand? It's Stalin kindergarten.

Patrick says

https://www.aussie17.com/p/shocking-response-from-tga-regarding

I think we've just gone and are still going through a conformance test of some sort. I don't know which side "wins" in this, or if there's a some sort of selection process going on.

I think if the government set out to kill people, they can't do it with biological weapons and realistically, the only people they would be able to kill easily would be the compliant ones. Maybe they don't care about compliant or non compliant people either way.

https://slaynews.com/news/wef-demands-governments-make-concerted-effort-silence-critics/

Google now suspending my commenting ability on YouTube for writing "F Dimentia Joe"

UkraineIsTotallyFucked says

I do not know why Jason Jones thinks AOC is not playing with a full deck. It does not matter that what AOC said about X changing algorithms to alter the results of the midterms is absurd. That is just a way to force sale of X. Any honest lawyer would say that convicting someone of fraud because they overvalued the worth of properties when applying for a bank loan is also absurd, but look what happened to Trump.

https://notthebee.com/article/new-hate-crime-law-in-canada-would-allow-judges-to-hand-down-life-sentences-for-speech-crimes

There is also no institution which can be trusted to print money without falling into corruption, so the Fed should not exist.

https://babylonbee.com/cleanArticle/progressives-fear-that-without-tiktok-they-wont-be-able-to-convince-kids-to-join-their-weird-sex-cult

A story from 27 February illustrates how bad things have gotten. It involves a 16 year-old girl at the Richard-Wossidlo Gymnasium in Ribnitz-Damgarten (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern). She posted an AfD-friendly video featuring blue Smurfs to TikTok, in which she said that Germany was not just a place, but also her home. School officials got wind of the blasphemy and the principal, Jan-Dirk Zimmermann, called the police; subsequently, no less than three officers were dispatched to neutralise this unusual threat to the German democratic order. After first establishing that the girl’s social media posts were totally legal and broke no laws, they took her from her chemistry class and escorted her to a staff room, where they told her to refrain from making such posts in the future, “for her own protection.”

Nice legs you got there, would be a pity if someone broke them...

Patrick says

There is also no institution which can be trusted to print money without falling into corruption, so the Fed should not exist.

Friedman rule, money supply = GDP Growth + 1% with a narrow quarter/half point range they can use for extra help in recessions or overheated.

Constitutional amendments for this and for a 15% absolute minimum reserve for commercial banks.

Make Savings Great Again.

AmericanKulak says

Friedman rule, money supply = GDP Growth + 1% with a narrow quarter/half point range they can use for extra help in recessions or overheated.

It's called Monetarism. And is bullshit too.

Friedman's greatest flaw.

https://jameshowardkunstler.substack.com/p/consequences-minus-truth

Momentous events await. This Monday, the Supreme Court will entertain oral arguments on the case Missouri, et al. v. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., et al. The integrity of the First Amendment hinges on the decision. Do we have freedom of speech as set forth in the Constitution? Or is it conditional on how government officials feel about some set of circumstances? At issue specifically is the government’s conduct in coercing social media companies to censor opinion in order to suppress so-called “vaccine hesitancy” and to manipulate public debate in the 2020 election. Government lawyers have argued that they were merely “communicating” with Twitter, Facebook, Google, and others about “public health disinformation and election conspiracies.”

You can reasonably suppose that this was our government’s effort to disable the truth, especially as it conflicted with its own policy and activities — from supporting BLM riots to enabling election fraud to mandating dubious vaccines. Former employees of the FBI and the CIA were directly implanted in social media companies to oversee the carrying-out of censorship orders from their old headquarters. The former general counsel (top lawyer) for the FBI, James Baker, slid unnoticed into the general counsel seat at Twitter until Elon Musk bought the company late in 2022 and flushed him out. The so-called Twitter Files uncovered by indy reporters Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and others, produced reams of emails from FBI officials nagging Twitter execs to de-platform people and bury their dissent. You can be sure these were threats, not mere suggestions.

One of the plaintiffs joined to Missouri v. Biden is Dr. Martin Kulldorff, a biostatistician and professor at the Harvard Medical School, who opposed Covid-19 lockdowns and vaccine mandates. He was one of the authors of the open letter called The Great Barrington Declaration (October, 2020) that articulated informed medical dissent for a bamboozled public. He was fired from his job at Harvard just this past week for continuing his refusal to take the vaccine. Harvard remains among a handful of institutions that still require it, despite massive evidence that it is ineffective and hazardous. Like West Point, maybe Harvard should ditch its motto, Veritas, Latin for “truth.”

A society hostile to truth can’t possibly remain civilized, because it will also be hostile to reality. That appears to be the disposition of the people running things in the USA these days. The problem, of course, is that this is not a reality-optional world, despite the wishes of many Americans (and other peoples of Western Civ) who wish it would be.

https://www.eugyppius.com/p/smurf-scandal-update-and-open-thread

I offer a brief Sunday evening post with updates on The Great Smurf Scandal from last week, wherein a 17 year-old school girl was scolded by three police officers for posting content to TikTok that appeared to support Alternative für Deutschland.

1) The offending video has since emerged. I recommend viewing it with your audio muted. It consists of nothing but three looped slides. The first announces that “The Smurfs and Germany have something in common.” The second is a picture of the Smurfs with the words “The Smurfs are blue …” The third says “Germany is too!” and shows a map of AfD poll results, colour-coded in varying shades of blue.

2) State security services are investigating the Stralsund police for intimidation and violating the girl’s freedom of expression! Oh no, that’s wrong, I read too quickly. What they’re actually investigating, is the “right-wing hate campaign” against the school and the local police. Important people have received “threatening phone calls and abusive emails” because of sensationalising reporting in the “populist right-wing media,” and that just can’t stand. Thank heavens we have such an overblown overfunded state media system to report on these urgent threats to our democratic society.

3) The girl, who is named Loretta, has now given an interview to Junge Freiheit. She says that the police first assured her that her TikTok post had broken no laws, before proceeding to lecture her on “incitement” and “opposition to the constitution.” They also objected that she had expressed “too much national pride” on online, and they made her promise to stop posting content for her own good.

So, that’s it. Despite writing about Germany for over three years and reading about the sorry state of my country’s politics every day, I still routinely underestimate how extreme things have gotten. I very much doubt Loretta’s is a unique case.

https://twitter.com/SHomburg/status/1768335691765723371

https://cognitivecarbon.substack.com/p/openai-and-the-folly-of-safety-controls

It strikes me that what will actually result from these “safety frameworks” that restrains what answers "the unwashed" may obtain from future AI systems is a form of knowledge suppression that the U.S. Government itself could not dream of achieving on its own due to Constitutional limits.

It is a form of "censorship of wrong think" that these mega Tech firms pioneering AI will do on their own, just like they did with “social media”.

10 years of work summarized in 10 words:

https://rwmalonemd.substack.com/p/why-the-department-of-justice-wants

Apple is a main distributor of podcasts in the country and world, just behind Spotify (which is foreign controlled). There are 120 million podcast listeners in the US, far more than pay attention to regime media in total.

If the ambition is to control the public mind, something must be done to get those under control. It’s not enough just to nationalize Facebook and Google. If the purpose is to end free speech as we know it, they have to go after podcasting too, using every tool that is available.

Antitrust is one tool they have. The other is the implicit threat to take away Section 230 that grants legal liability to social networks that immunize them against what would otherwise be a torrent of litigation. These are the two main guns that government can hold to the head of these private communications companies. Apple is the target in order to make the company more compliant.

All of which gets us to the issue of the First Amendment. There are many ways to violate laws on free speech. It’s not just about sending a direct note with a built-in threat. You can use third parties. You can invoke implicit threats. You can depend on the awareness that, after all, you are the government so it is hardly a level playing field. You can embed employees and pay their salaries (as was the case with Twitter). Or, in the case of Psaki above, you can deploy the mob tactic of reminding companies that bad things may or may not happen if they persist in non-compliance.

Patrick says

Antitrust is one tool they have. The other is the implicit threat to take away Section 230 that grants legal liability to social networks that immunize them against what would otherwise be a torrent of litigation.

Another tool that was blatantly put on display is the phony Trump fraud case. Anyone can be targeted by a politically corrupt judge who ignores evidence and declares a crime, then imposes a bank busting fine. Imagine that power granted through the IRS - the tax code is so complex that no one but a simple wage earner is immune to a judge interpreting fraud in a tax return, even one that is decades old. Now add the judge imposing confiscatory fines and the Dems have a perfect intimidation tool. Many think that what that corrupt judge and prosecutor did to Trump will encourage other businessmen to leave New York, but there is too much money to be made in that city. The real result, and the Dems know it, will be for businesses to be sure and never cross the Dems, and in fact, become big donors and supporters of Dem lest those business owners/leaders get the Trump treatment.