Muh Private Company

Over the past two weeks we have witnessed big tech flexing their muscles against President Trump and against a social media site.

After a month of labelling Trump's election-fraud-related tweets as falsehoods and making those tweets either more difficult or impossible to share, Twitter has completely banned him from their platform. Facebook, YouTube, and other social media platforms then piled on top. Further, Shopify has taken down two of his online stores, and Stripe will no longer process payments.

Twitter did this over the incorrect claim that Trump incited violence at the Capitol last week. Meanwhile, Twitter says that China’s tweets stating that Uyghur forced labor camps don't exist are acceptable, despite the fact that such camps do indeed exist. Twitter is OK with censorship on US soil but is opposed to Uganda’s internet shutdown, since Uganda is violating basic human rights by doing so.

Twitter didn't stop with Trump – General Michael Flynn was blocked, as was Sidney Powell, and supporters of QAnon, along with many, many conservatives, myself included.

In a Project Veritas video recorded by a Twitter whistleblower, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey stated:

"We are focused on one account [@realDonaldTrump] right now but this is going to be much bigger than just one account and it’s going to go on for much longer than just this day, this week, and the next few weeks, and go on beyond the inauguration."

In brief, they're just getting started.

Big tech effectively muzzled the most powerful man on Earth, and that fact should terrify everybody regardless of political persuasion. If they can do it to Trump without consequences, then they can do it to anybody else.

The reaction by some people supposedly on the Right has been along the lines of "Twitter is a private company, they can do what they want. Just let the free market work. You can always build your own platform." This, by the way, is the same rationale given by people who support private businesses enforcing the social-distancing and mask edicts that certain state governors enacted in response to the China Flu.

Some on the Right did exactly that - they built their own platforms, one of which is called Parler.

Within the past few days:

• Apple and Google removed the Parler app from their respective app stores
• Twilio and Okta, which are authentication services, ended their relationship with Parler
• The database that Parler contracted, ScyllaDB, also terminated their services
• The cloud hosting platform on which Parler was built, Amazon Web Services, suspended their hosting service
• Finally, their lawyers stopped representing them.

So much for building your own platform.

If this isn't enough to dissuade the limousine libertarians from their position, let's apply their line of bullshit rhetoric to the Jim Crow laws. These were state and local laws that enforced segregation and were passed by Democrats to roll back the advancements made by blacks following the Civil War.

• Under Jim Crow, blacks and whites had to travel in separate rail cars, cars that while being separate were certainly not equal. According to the limousine libertarians, blacks should build their own railway system and quit their complaining.
• Blacks had to sit in the back of busses in Alabama until Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. Instead of protesting, she should have started her own busing company.
• After Jim Crow laws were overturned by Brown v. Board of Education, some companies continued enforcing segregation. For example, black people couldn't eat at the same Woolworth lunch counters as whites. Maybe blacks should build their own lunch counters and let the free market work.

"This is horrible!" the limousine libertarians would say between sips of their caramel lattes while wondering if they need glasses for their myopia.

Yes, it is indeed horrible, but if they are consistent, they must condone this.

"But they're private businesses, they can do what they want!" the limousine libertarians bleat.

No, they can't do what they want. Being a business owner doesn't absolve him of the obligation to do what is right.

Further, in what sense are they "private" businesses? They lost that status when they became proxy law or edict enforcers - like with the enforcement of Jim Crow laws, or with tax laws, or with the companies that currently enforce China Flu restrictions. They lost it when corporations harvested and sold customer data without consent. Big tech companies certainly lost their status as private businesses when they interfered with and invalidated our elections.

The problem with limousine libertarians (they may be chauffeured in limousines, but they're usually the chauffeurs) is that they are silent in the face of oligarchy. Their "build you own" mantra is just a stale bromide used to cover their cowardliness while allowing them to feign enlightenment.

Bootlickers, Ahoy

Republicans knew this would happen, that big tech would flex their muscles. Trump vetoed the NDAA in part because it retained the Section 230 blanket protections for big tech. U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who was himself briefly banned from Twitter in 2019, voted to override Trump's veto. Given the Republicans' refusal to investigate election fraud, this turncoat behavior is to be expected from them.

Politicians weren't the only quislings...

The extent to which a few patriot commentators are willing to accept all this is nauseating. A few days ago the host of one online video show stated that this is not a free speech issue since you, gentle social media user, agreed to their terms of service agreements.

You'd think such commentators never heard about individual rights: such rights, be they God-given or follow from our nature as rational animals, are not gifts from the state. Individual rights, including the freedom of speech, are inalienable, which means they cannot be transferred or signed away. So much for terms of service agreements.

This same commentator was excoriating Trump supporters for doing nothing but flying their American flags, having fun at Trump rallies, engaging in online arguments with Leftists - in other words, for enjoying the relative freedom that we had under Trump.

What should we do instead? One would hope that this commentator would implore us to be wolves instead of sheep. He didn't, he was too busy either wallowing in guilt or insisting that we wallow in guilt. No one told him that masochism has no place outside the bedroom.

The Politics of the Future

Conservative Twitter users are cutting their losses and heading to greener pastures. This loss of users won't just impact Twitter's customer count, but also the quality of the platform: Twitter thrives on conflict, and without conservatives Twitter will just be an echo chamber where liberals boast about their intersectionist brownie points.

Meanwhile, Trump seems to be experiencing an increase in popularity - we are seeing the Streisand Effect in action!

No reporter has investigated how the actual process by which the deplatforming of Trump and the attack on Parler were orchestrated - which is not surprising. Did we witness a series of independent actions, or were they coordinated? Are the CEOs acting on their own wokeness, or are they responding to a woke mob in order to appease them?

In Twitter's case, Jack Dorsey took the initiative, at least based on the Project Veritas video. Similar videos from inside Google show the same thing. This may or may not hold for other tech giants and doesn't address whether there is collusion among them.

Again, in this conservative cleansing, are the companies taking the initiative, or are they reacting?

In one sense, it doesn't matter - the companies are the ones doing the deplatforming and the election-rigging, and they richly deserve retribution for their actions.

It does matter in another sense, because we must know who is in the driver's seat, the CEOs or the social justice warriors. If the CEOs are in charge, then they will influence the woke mob to do their bidding. If the SWJs are in charge, then the CEOs will be constantly blown about, constantly adjusting their company's terms of service to address the latest outrage du jour.

CEOs can make the claim that they actually built their companies, even though they have wet noodles for spines. The SJWs' only hold on the world are other people's tolerance for their shrillness and arrogance. These pink-haired, skinny-jean wearing, dildo waving hipsters only claim to importance is that they are woke. They are actually less intelligent after getting their gender studies degrees than before they entered college. They truly expect the federal government to pay off their useless degrees that rendered them not only unemployed but unemployable, and they see nothing wrong with shitting in their own mess kit.

In essence, tech CEOs and woke hipsters are equally unqualified to mettle in the affairs of others, and their sense of entitlement over the affairs of others must be resisted at all costs.

If the CEOs are acting on their own initiative, then they are on the treadmill of politics, not technology and not business. Perhaps they will realize that this wasn't the reason they got into the IT business in the first place, but that's doubtful.

If they are reacting to the petulant demands of the woke mob, then the CEOs are blind cowards who evade the fact that mobs are never satisfied by appeasement or capitulation. In reference to countries that were neutral at the start of World War 2, Winston Churchill said:

"Each one hopes that if he feeds the crocodile enough, the crocodile will eat him last. All of them hope that the storm will pass before their turn comes to be devoured. But I fear greatly that the storm will not pass. It will rage and it will roar ever more loudly, ever more widely."

This applies to corporations as well.

The answer to who is in the driver's seat ultimately answers another question: is America now an oligarchy or a mobocracy, the pure democracy that the Left wants? It is too early to tell, but something we know now is that businesses will be the enforcers of either alternative, and that their terms of service are more important than our Bill of Rights.

(From Stonetoss Comics)

#WalkAway from Identity Politics

There were three outstanding themes experienced by attendees of last month's #WalkAway March. There was the sense of freedom that comes from escaping the Democrat’s plantation. There was the excitement of meeting new people and making new friends. But there was also an element of sadness over the family and friends lost due to the issues that riven our country.

One man I met there was a U.S. Army veteran of the Vietnam War. He became estranged from his two sisters, the only family he has, partially over Trump and the whole Kavanaugh media circus.

There’s also a friend (who wasn’t at the march) that became alienated from a person she knew for 30 years. They met while in high school, and he was her first gay friend. She walked away, he didn’t. Something similar happened with her mother’s cousin, who knew her since birth, who “changed her diapers” as she put it. Because of various family events, they had to remain in contact, but their interactions became infrequent, their conversations became terse. A mutual friend told me about how much grief she was experiencing over this. The description reminded me of the AIDS crisis writ small.

These same stories are repeated all across America.

Why is this happening?

This is partially due to the changing definition of friendship. We all have online friends, most of whom we’ll never meet. What is the basis of these friendships? It’s not two good people who share similar virtues and who wish each other well, but rather two people clicking the “like” button – not the same thing!

Other types of friendships, like those based on utility or pleasure – are by definition transitory. That’s all that online friends are – friendships based on utility or pleasure. Yet we equate them with real friendships, in their importance and in their permanence.

All types of friendships require time and effort and real-world interaction to cultivate and maintain. Given the number of social media “friends” that people have, it is simply not possible to maintain them all! Once the “friendship” has outlived its usefulness, or is lost in quantity, we either allow it to fade or we terminate it in the most brutal way possible - online interactions allow people to be rude to each other without any real-world consequences.

This somewhat explains the plight of the Vietnam veteran mentioned earlier: he lives in Buffalo, New York, while one sister lives in Florida, and the other is in Arizona. They maintained contact only via social media. There was no real-world interaction, so the friendships withered.

This does not explain the other person mentioned above. In her case, and I think most cases, the dissolution of friendships was solely over ideological differences. The ideology in play is identity politics.

Here’s how it works:

• People belong to identity groups, either by birth or choice or assignment. These identities are artificial, and two members of the same group frequently have nothing in common except for that identity – yet there is an expectation of solidarity.
• Membership in an identity group is not the same as a gym membership. Membership defines and determines their whole existence, and to doubt this is blasphemy.
• Current and historical events are seen by members of any class through the lens of their identity. Doubting the identity or the veracity of its history is an offense to the very core of their being, and to do so makes you ableist, misogynistic, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic, racist.
• Each group has its own cultural norms. These norms must be respected by other groups, because it is taken on faith that all cultures are equal. They are skeptical of some religions, yet they accept items like this on faith. They are true believers.
• People are encouraged to interact only with other members of their identity. They exist in a bubble yet claim that they are living rich and full lives. They do not go outside their comfort zone, yet they consider themselves brave.
• People are to be loyal to their identity class. They are expected to favor their own, yet they wonder why the world is suddenly so racist.
• People are expected (in most cases) to be proud of their identity.
• To shore up this pride, each identity has its own history. Events that do not fit with a particular group’s history can be safely ignored, or revised, or destroyed. This results in an ever-shifting narrative.
• There is one group that acts as an oppressor, and that group is the white male (either heterosexual or homosexual). Their culture is not to be respected, and pride in that identity is considered to be the very height of racism.
• The degree that an individual is oppressed depends on the number of intersections that this person belongs to. For example, a black disabled lesbian crossdresser is more oppressed than your average lesbian. It’s sort of like a food pyramid of victimhood.
• Those who aren’t oppressors are victims. But not only are they victims, they are helpless, since self-defense is considered wrong.
• Being helpless victims, they are subject to fear, uncertainty, and doubt inflicted by anyone who wishes to manipulate them.
• Since they live in a bubble, they are in no position to verify that they should really be afraid of any particular current event, or whether they are just being manipulated.

Identity politics provides a convenient excuse to prune one’s real-world friends list. And when people indeed end a friendship over identity politics, instead of being angry or upset, they have the warm glow of smugness that comes with virtue signaling. From their standpoint, the friendship was based on a mistaken identity – you fooled them, until they became “woke”.

Identity politics is designed to divide and conquer. It is working.

What can be done? We must begin with a dose of reality.

First, realize that “Hallmark moments” almost never happen in the real world, and it is not possible to hold one’s breath until they do happen. If you doubt this, ask any draft resister or gay man who has been estranged from his family.

Next, look at the pretense under which the friendship was ended: one side believes that the other is a heretic who engages in wrongthink. Ask yourself: why hold on to people who aren’t adult enough to understand that individuals can have different opinions or principles?

Believing in identity politics requires that one suspends their sense of reality. Anybody with an ounce of integrity would reject the theory rather than reject the facts. Ask yourself: do you really want to be friends with a person who trusts their identity group’s agitprop over their own lying eyes? Can you trust someone who outsources their sense of judgement?

Look at the extent the other side is willing to go to purge wrongthink: they are willing to fire you from your employment, to deny you ways of earning money via online activities, to destroy your career. Ask yourself: in good conscience, would you be able to do this?

Finally, ask yourself: is the person who terminated your friendship over identity politics experiencing the same sense of loss?

The situation appears even more intractable when you realize that social justice is a kind of cult, and people who advocate identity politics are not just fervent believers, but the fundamentalists of this cult.

Again, what can be done?

It is tempting to retreat, hole up, and wait for this to pass. It won’t pass. In fact, retreating makes things worse, since everybody will then ask themselves: why not take whole what others propose to divide?

We cannot forget what is at stake: our country, our home. They demand that we relinquish our sovereignty as individuals and as a country. All these are too important to abandon for the social justice warriors’ obvious and vulgar games.

We also cannot forget that we hold the upper hand. The funding of their universities, their affirmative action programs, and their welfare state, depends on us. We can live without them, but not vise versa. Further, we have the element of stability that their narrative du jour precludes - and they know it.

The solution lies in more engagement, not less. It requires that we break down the bubbles which identity politics requires people to inhabit. Even then it will not be easy, since it is far harder to make a believer into a skeptic than to make a skeptic into a believer.

No Hiding Place

It starts in the crib.

Young children spend an inordinate amount of time exploring the physical world - they learn how balls bounce, how liquids splash, why they shouldn’t touch a hot stove, etc. They’re not limited to physics, though: they learn about poison ivy, they learn why one should never pull a cat’s tail, they learn to distinguish between friendly and unfriendly dogs. Their investigations include people, too - they trust their parents, and they learn that the vast majority of people in the world are kind. More than that, they begin learning how to distinguish between people who wish them well and those who desire to harm them.

The world is a wonderful place, according to this perspective, and we are confident in our ability to survive and to be happy in it.

That is, until the world stops being benevolent.

In the first week of January, in Chicago, a white special-needs teenager was kidnapped and held captive by four black teenagers for 24 to 48 hours. One of his captors was an acquaintance. The victim was bound and gagged, partially scalped, forced to drink from a toilet, and verbally abused by his captors, who said things like "fuck white people" and "fuck Donald Trump". Parts of this attack were livestreamed on Facebook.

Thanks to Facebook Live, we have photos of the victim as he is being assaulted, and there's one in particular showing him cowering in a corner, looking directly at the camera.

Oh God, that photo.

Anybody who has been so assaulted saw that photo in their mind whenever they closed their eyes. They were unable to sleep the night they read the news. They were extremely angry, and irritable to those around them for days afterward. They went to work the next day, in part to avoid thinking about the incident, but mostly out of fear of just what they would do if left to their own devices.

There's a popular phrase to describe what the four thugs did: they "objectified" their victim. That's a euphemism, for objects cannot experience fear, or betrayal, or helplessness, or any of the other emotions the victim experienced. Just look at that photo.

It's also easy to assume that the thugs got a sexual thrill, as if the event were an elaborate BDSM scene gone awry. No, they were thrilled over the fact that they could torture with impunity, that there was nothing stopping them - not the victim, not the police, not bystanders, and certainly not their own consciences.

The attackers didn't stop because the victim capitulated to their demands. There were no demands, at least of the type this victim could understand. Rather, the thugs stopped because they got bored.

Surely the police would show some courage about this event, wouldn't they? They didn't. Speaking of the four assailants, Chicago Police Commander Kevin Duffin stammered: "You know, although they are adults, they’re 18... Kids make stupid decisions — I shouldn’t call them kids, they’re legally adults, but they’re young adults and they make stupid decisions. That certainly will be part of whether or not a hate crime is — seek a hate crime and determine whether or not this is sincere or just ranting and raving."

You know, the very fact that the four perpetrators did adult stuff makes them adults. And it is irrelevant whether they were sincere or just ranting and raving: those four adults acted as the feral animals that they are, and "ranting and raving" cannot be used as an excuse for what those feral animals did. You'd almost expect Duffin to say it wasn't a hate crime, since Trump-supporters aren't a "protected class".

Later, the four thugs were indeed charged with a hate crime. Was it because the attackers were black and the victim white? Or was it because the victim has special needs? That ambiguity is the police commander's safe space, or as he put it: "It’s half a dozen of one, six of the other", which is another euphemism, meaning that he's more than happy with that ambiguity.

One would hope that the good Commander got a fair price for his spine, for he has clearly sold it.

Commander Duffin's handwringing was matched by the quality of media coverage - Duffin may not have explicitly provided the main stream media their soundbites, but his doubts certainly gave them license.

CNN's Don Lemon essentially echoed the Police Commander's words: "I don’t think it's evil. I don't think it's evil. I think these are young people and I think they have bad home training. I have no idea who is raising these young people, because no one I know on earth who is 17-years-old or 70-years-old would ever think of treating another person like that. It is inhumane. And you wonder, at 18-years-old, where is your parent, where is your guardian?"

On the same Don Lemon program, another member of the press described the attack as an example of "man's inhumanity to man" - that's yet another euphemism, meant to absolve the perpetrators while allowing the speaker to signal his "concern".

At least Don Lemon mentioned the race of the victim and the attackers - he had to, since TV is a visual medium. In the "This Week in Hate" column, the New York Times described the events in a race-neutral fashion: "Four people have been charged with a hate crime, among other charges, in the beating in Chicago of a teenager with mental disabilities, which was broadcast on Facebook Live on January 3. The video shows one of the suspects shouting about Donald Trump and 'white people.'"

Most reprehensible of all is the CBS Radio's report which acknowledged the race factor but reversed the races of the victim and the attackers:

"The viral video of a beating and knife attack in Chicago suggests the assault had racial overtones. CBS’s Dean Reynolds tells us the victim is described as a mentally-challenged teenager.

"In the video he is choked and repeatedly called the n-word. His clothes are slashed and he is terrorized with a knife. His alleged captors repeatedly reference Donald Trump. Police are holding four people in connection with the attack."

The hate crime debate, the media's distortion of the events, the police commander's cowardice, all of these, are distractions from the actual events. It is the substitution of politics for ethics - and look at the type of politics involved. All these actions are the actions of cowards, substituting fairness in place of justice, thereby achieving neither. With their dissembling, the media and the Chicago Police are excusing monsters and the evil that they do.

Justice can be achieved only if one has the pertinent facts, and excusing evil requires that those facts be obscured; justice is thus precluded.

Any bystander with a shred of decency would interfere. They certainly wouldn't stand and do nothing but watch, or take videos with their cellphones like those thugs did. They wouldn't stop to wonder whether the attackers were adults or "just kids". They wouldn't try to decide whether they were witnessing a hate crime. They wouldn't attempt to psychoanalyze the attackers. At the very least, they would use their cellphones to call the police - and hope that Commander Duffin would not answer.

At best, bystanders would put away their cellphones and set upon the assailants. Their need for justice exceeds society's "desire" for cultural sensitivity and abrogation of personal responsibility. They would stop the thugs not with necessary force, but with overwhelming force - proportionality be damned. Why? Because that will be the only opportunity for justice to be served.

That opportunity is now past. All we can do is watch, observe the helplessness, observe the betrayal of a lifetime's worth of experience, and witness the abrupt end to the victim's childhood.