If you are unfamiliar with the form of satire in the 2nd video below, watch the Steely Dan video before you watch it.
The New York Timeslied its ass off about the Patreon banning of Carl Benjamin and others, even going so far as to say, quoting Patreon CEO Jack Conte, that—
“You can use a press debacle like this to drum up your community and rile people up and get them to support a cause,” Mr. Conte said. “We welcome competition.”
In short, Jack Conte claimed that those opposing censorship on his platform got upset in order to drum up business. He said that Patreon welcomes competition.
Well, what really happened is that as soon as Patreon (Conte) banned Carl Benjamin, youtube "creators" started moving to a start-up crowdfunding site called SubscribeStar, which almost immediately found itself unable to function when payment processors PayPal and Stripe, which take their marching orders from MasterCard and Visa, removed their support for this start-up. And thus SubscribeStar was effectively crippled.
Do you see how these lies pile up? This was reported in the venerable New York Times, which to use an old joke apparently can not lie straight in bed. Apparently the Silicon Valley/Banking cartel behind this censorship doesn't actually "welcome competition."
So much for "all the news that's fit to print," the New York Times motto. So how does Silicon Valley get away with this censorship shit? Well,
they and their financial partners (e.g., Master Card) form a monopoly and are therefore able to enforce arbitrary rules about who can and can not use their services, and thus they effectively control free speech on the internet;
elite publications like the New York Times —pick your favorite lamestream media source because they're all the same— legitimize this monopoly, so nobody outside a few youtube creators gives a fuck
Problem solved! That's not so hard for your Big Brain to understand, right?
On Jack Conte's first bullshit point, that people are getting pissed off to drum up financial support for their youtube channels, watch this first video.
And now watch this hilarious satire to get the real point
There is corporate fascist attack on Free Speech going on. Maybe you failed to notice.
Dave Rubin and Jordan Petersen discuss this terrifying situation in the second video below, but some youtube guy named ShortFatOtaku has actually sussed out the whole thing out (first video).
As we go forward into yet another insane election cycle in the United States, it certainly seems possible that free speech could disappear altogether unless people protest a lot. I mean really make a stink.
It's up to you. I've given up on Homo sapiens altogether but while we've got a civilization, sort of, it seems worth it to me to protect the important freedoms we've got left, even if it will make no difference in the end.
You may think I've become some sort of nutter conspiracy theorist, but nothing could be further from the truth. Humans (here, financial corporations) actively pursuing an agenda which benefits them is not a conspiracy. It is simply self-interested instinctual behavior (e.g. Mastercard, video above).
Unfortunately, the intellectual dark web people defending free speech do not seem to fully grasp what they are up against (video below).
I found out yesterday that Carl Benjamin (aka youtuber Sargon of Akkad and here and here) got "de-platformed" at Patreon, which means that he just got booted off for no good reason. Patreon is a crowdfunding site which supports internet "creators" of content. Benjamin's content is political. He is a "classical liberal" in the John Stuart Mill sense. Benjamin's youtube channels have not been removed—yet—but he has effectively been de-monetized, which is the more subtle strategy for suppressing free speech.
But that's not the story authoritarian alt-liberals want you to believe (political philosopher John Gray's term). No, these so-called liberals want to tell you Benjamin is an alt-right fascist, or a gateway to white supremacy or some such nonsense, which is a beautiful example of the primitive defense mechanism called projection.
Projection is the misattribution of a person’s undesired thoughts, feelings or impulses onto another person who does not have those thoughts, feelings or impulses. Projection is used especially when the thoughts are considered unacceptable for the person to express, or they feel completely ill at ease with having them. For example, a spouse may be angry at their significant other for not listening, when in fact it is the angry spouse who does not listen.
Projection is often the result of a lack of insight and acknowledgement of one’s own motivations and feelings.
The rule of thumb is simple—always focus on what people do, not what they say. This rule of thumb is right there in the flatland model of human nature if you properly understand that model. Straightforwardly—
those suppressing freedom of speech on the internet are the dangerous ones, not those exercising their right of free expression.
Asserting the principle that free speech is indispensable in a free society is what the important free speech movement at Berkeley in the 1960's was all about.
So, what is my warning to humanity? Again, straightforwardly, if you want to preserve free speech, if you want to preserve due process and the presumption of innocence, if you want to be protected from arbitrary arrest for imaginary "hate" crimes, if you want to keep your precious Western Civilization, such as it is, and you don't want to see the large-scale political "mistakes" of the 20th century repeated in the 21st, then you should be very alarmed about the suppression of free expression on the internet. Your rights are not guaranteed. There is nothing natural about them. Indeed, it is human nature to try to take them away from you.
History tells us that dangerous repressive things like internet censorship always start out small and then snowball. Experience tells us there is a slippery slope. At the start everyone has rights, then some people have rights and some people don't, and then, lo and behold, there comes a day when nobody has rights except self-appointed gatekeepers who then tell you what you can or can not say or do.
I could not have published DOTE if there were not freedom of speech rights in the United States. Surely some repressive do-gooder busybody would have tried to shut me down for saying, among many other things, that humans like them suck.
I stopped reading, listening to or watching mainstream media about a year ago. I went cold turkey. I get all my news on youtube now. Using only "alt-media" has been a revelation. While I understood that the corporate-owned media was corrupt, biased and therefore heavily edited, I did not realize the full extent of it. For example, only one mainstream outlet even mentioned that Carl Benjamin was de-platformed at Patreon. That was vice.com, who said only this—
The accounts of British conspiracy theorist YouTuber Carl Benjamin, better known as Sargon of Akkad, and U.S. far-right political commentator James Allsup, were removed Thursday.
The ban will be a particular blow for Benjamin, who was earning more than $12,000 a month from the crowdfunding site [Patreon]. Benjamin did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
I have watched lots of Benjamin's videos. I have never heard anything even close to a "conspiracy theory" in those videos. In fact, this conspiracy theory bullshit is yet another projection (definition above). The only conspiracy happening here is to suppress the free speech rights of people like Benjamin who hold non-politically-correct views. The mainstream media routinely misrepresents or totally distorts the views of people like Benjamin and all others who refuse to go along with an increasingly intolerant "social justice" agenda. That can not be an coincidence.
At this point, labels like "nazi" or "nationalist" and so on have completely lost their meanings because anybody to the right of Pol Pot is routinely called a nazi or alt-right or far-right or some similar delusional ad hominem bullshit on Twitter. I hope you realize just how dangerous this corruption of true meaning is.
And when Apple CEO Tim Cook tells you his company won't tolerate "conspiracy theorists" (like actual conspiracy theorist and wacko Alex Jones) on Apple's platforms, you had better watch your back because today's classical liberal can easily be cast as tomorrow's conspiracy theorist.
I'm still working on a short essay which will attempt to explain all the embarrassing political nonsense happening in the United States and much of the western world. It's coming along very nicely.
But with the midterms tomorrow, could the great truth this former Trump voter received at a Swarthmore poetry slam tip the balance for ordinary voters?
Despite my best defensive instincts screaming duck and cover, keep your head down, try to stay invisible, I plan to publish a short essay to try to explain how human nature drives the political & polarization crisis in the West. I will of course be using my model of human nature as described in the 4th flatland essay. In so doing I will fill in many of the gaps in that model. In particular, I will finally fulfill this promise—
An updated discussion of (instinctual) Sociality will be published as an addendum to this essay.
I started this project in a recent post Sociality Rules (Tribalism). And I thought, what the hell, I'll just finish up what I started. Some tragically motivated part of me still wants somebody—anybody—to understand Homo sapiens the way I do.
First, let's get in the mood.
Below I've included a link and a couple videos for you to watch. These sources unknowingly introduce some key things you need to understand in order to figure out what is motivating the political crisis in the West and in America in particular.
Politics and polarization have obviously gotten very bad and are getting worse by the day, not only in the United States but also in the rest of what has historically been called "western civilization." Tribal behaviors are primitive in the sense that they are entirely instinctually driven, so those engaging in these behaviors are never aware that they are doing so. These unconscious behaviors can be overridden over time, but only with great effort and only rarely. The rules below are for non-tribal observers who want to understand what they're looking at.
This is a note on pointless suffering, one of main subjects of an essay I am writing. That post will stand as the last and ultimate addendum to my Adventures In Flatland essays. That addendum will be finished when I get around to finishing it. That essay will contain a theory of the origins of religion, a subject I avoided for a long time because I didn't understand what was going on. At this point, I wouldn't call it a "theory" so much but rather an obvious truth, a truth so obvious that it only took me 35 years to figure it out
I was thinking about the pointlessness of writing a series of posts illustrating a "good enough" model of human behavior which few people have read and even fewer have understood. So I won't do it. I have a few other things to talk about which follow from the model (for example, religious behaviors), but that's about it. I'm done.
The flatland model implies that important human behaviors at their root are predictable and therefore meaningless in anything other than an evolutionary (Live & Grow) sense. That is literally the last thing humans want to be believe about themselves.
