The near-hysteria on the progressive left at the prospect of Elon Musk buying Twitter can only be described as "delicious!". Glenn Greenwald reports:
During the failed liberal campaign to force Spotify to remove Joe Rogan's podcast — remember that? — I wrote that the real lesson from that tawdry episode was that the central religious belief of American liberals now is censorship. Silencing, deplatforming and otherwise preventing their adversaries from being heard is their paramount goal, their primary weapon.
. . .
As I noted yesterday in reporting on the unprecedented censorship regime imposed in the West in the name of the war in Ukraine, a series of ostensible crises — Russiagate, the 1/6 riot, the COVID pandemic and now this war — have, in rapid succession, convinced not just liberals but increasingly large numbers of Westerners in many ideological camps not only to tolerate but to crave state/corporate censorship. They have somehow inverted history so that they now believe that it is not censorship that is the favored tool of fascists, tyrants and authoritarians — even though every fascist and despot in history used censorship as a key means for maintaining power — but instead believe that it is free speech, free discourse, and free thought that are the instruments of repression.
Few events have revealed this twisted framework as vividly as the news that Elon Musk offered on Wednesday to buy Twitter and take it private. The fact that Musk has repeatedly denounced Twitter's increasingly heavy-handed and clearly ideological censorship regime does not mean he is earnest in his intention to restore free speech to the platform, but the mere possibility that he does intend to do so has sent censorship-dependent liberals into spasms of panic and hysteria. Before the morning was over, some were even comparing Musk's offer to ... the rise of Nazism in the 1930s.
I will undoubtedly have more to write about these potentially exciting and encouraging developments as they proceed. Few things are more potentially positive than the restoration of free discourse on major internet platforms.
There's more at the link.
As if to provide a counterpoint to Mr. Greenwald, Katy Tur of MSNBC moaned:
"There are real and devastating consequences for using that platform to lie, and we've seen it happen ... You know in talking about this, you know, it's kinda funny, oh, Elon Musk wants to buy it, but there are massive, life and globe-altering consequences for just letting people run wild on the thing.”
Ye Gods and little fishes. She's having a meltdown because someone is threatening to make speech on one platform a whole lot more free than it is at present. She's supposed to be a bloody journalist, for heaven's sake? If she isn't on the side of free speech, she's no journalist at all - she's a paid hack for the establishment!
That's why I'm on Gab rather than Twitter or Facebook. I unreservedly and unequivocally support free speech. There are things that make me uncomfortable, and at times I've approached some people to ask them to tone it down. If they do, fine: but if they don't, I don't blame them in the least. Free speech is their right as well as mine. If the topic is sufficiently important to me, I simply leave the platform concerned, or stop (at least publicly) associating with them. I'm not censoring them, and I won't, because if I try to censor others, they can do the same to me. It's a two-way street, and we have to live that way.
Meanwhile, let the progressive meltdown continue. It's good entertainment, if nothing else.
Peter
3 comments:
couldn't find contact info, but thought you'd be interested in this
https://www.judicialwatch.org/cartels-fly-drones-into-us/
Mexican drug cartels have conducted more than 9,000 drone flights into U.S. airspace in the last year to surveil American law enforcement and security operations in the southern border region, a senior Homeland Security official told Judicial Watch this week. The drones are observing federal, state, county, and city agencies near the Mexican border, including the U.S. Border Patrol, Texas Department of Public Safety, Texas National Guard, county sheriffs and local police. The Border Patrol, which operates under Customs and Border Protection (CBP), has captured about a dozen of the drones, and accessed the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles’ (UAVs) guidance and memory systems to gain intelligence information, according to a high-level official at the agency.
My question is: Which freaks them out more - the inability to create a fake outrage and then use that for headlines to gin up real outrage from it, or the possibility that non-allied people might see their private DM' to each other, and what lies and hijinks they arranged therein?
They only want free speech for the right sort of billionaires, and their paid minions.
Like all good communists, free speech is too important to be given to The People.
The unintended irony of her comments, and the total granite-headed obliviousness to how her entire profession has become nothing other than serial fabulists, is completely lost on her.
Somewhere, there's a wall and a blindfold she's needing, really urgently. I'm hoping she and thousands of her colleagues get what they so richly deserve: someone to open their minds. With .223 and .308.
Musk has reached Epic Worldwide Grandmaster trolling status. And it's hilarious.
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