Once in a while I check in to see how humans are progressing toward their own extinction. I did so yesterday, which was fortunate because we've gotten some climate data updates lately.
Humans are making excellent progress in this regard.
NOAA updated the global temperature record. July was the hottest month ever recorded on Earth (since 1880), coming in at +1.71°F with respect to the 20th century average. But what caught my eye was this illuminating data point—
The year-to-date globally averaged land surface temperature was 2.63°F above the 20th century average of 46.8°F. This value was the third highest for January–July on record, behind 2016 (+3.20°F) and 2017 (+2.74°F).
[Note — there was a large El Nino event which raised 2016 temperatures. 2017 was more in line with the current year. Last year did not reach this level (for the year +1.12°C (2.02°F).]
OK, those are land surface temperatures for January-July, taking away the moderating influence of the oceans.
In centigrade terms, 2.63°F = 1.46°C.
Got it? On land during the first half of the year, we are near the dreaded 1.5°C mark. The "ambitious" goal of the Paris conference in late 2015 was to keep global temperatures below that mark. Global temperatures including the oceans were the same as July (+1.71°F). But we don't live on the oceans. We live on the land. That's where the fresh water is. That's where most of the food is grown. And so on.
So as I said, excellent progress is being made. Naturally this progress is reflected in CO2 emissions as well. We now have the IEA emissions data for 2018, as reported by Reuters in March.
Global energy-related carbon emissions rose to a record high last year as energy demand and coal use increased, mainly in Asia, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said on Tuesday.
Energy-related CO2 emissions rose by 1.7 percent to 33.1 billion tonnes from the previous year, the highest rate of growth since 2013, with the power sector accounting for almost two-thirds of this growth, according to IEA estimates.
Well. My continuing prediction is that humans will be extinct or "functionally" extinct 200 years from now. And achieving this state of Nirvana will be so easy—all humans have to do is just be themselves and that future extinction event will take care of itself!
And by 2040, I'm predicting land surface temperatures will be ≥2°C every year. Smoke 'em if you got 'em!
This new data hasn't gotten much publicity, which is expected because from the normal anthropocentric point of view, all of this is really bad news. Still, one can find climate change discussed here and there. This has been a point of interest for me as time goes on—how will continuing human denial be expressed?
What observations show is that in the developed world climate change has become a political talking point for globalist elites, who wield this issue (among others) like a club. They want to beat up working people with it.
In short, climate change has become a class, power & status issue, just like nearly everything else humans do in the social realm.
Over the past 24 hours, you may have heard about Google Camp, a (formerly) top-secret event where some of the world's most influential people gathered in Sicily, Italy for a three-day private event to discuss important global issues. This year's topic was, naturally, climate change as we are in dire need of making concrete changes by 2030 before we are unable to repair irreversible catastrophic damages.
The problem? Celebrities and top global leaders—which reportedly included Katy Perry, Priyanka Chopra, Harry Styles, Leo DiCaprio, Prince Harry, and even former President Barack Obama—took yachts and private planes to get there, thus emitting an overwhelming amount of greenhouse gas into the air.
Attending "Google Camp" required 114 private jets to be exact. Elites use their alleged desire to address the climate problem to maintain their own power and status (i.e., this is their unconscious agenda). These elites do indeed want reductions in consumption—by the working class. This would not affect them of course because they already own most of the wealth. The "Yellow Vests" protests started in France when the globalist Macron raised fuel taxes, which mostly affected already-struggling working people. Macron's reason for doing this? Fighting climate change.
None of this has anything to do with solving the climate problem of course. Raising fuel taxes in France does nothing at all to fix the climate. But it does have the elite "virtue" of beating down the working class.
All of this despicable elite behavior (the moral hypocrisy, "Google Camp") amounts to class-based virtue signalling. It is also unfortunate that justified reactions to this appalling elite monkey business are equally clueless about the long-term climate threat (for example, watch here). In short, in all cases humans are behaving exactly as I've predicted they would.
Jesus wept.
Bonus Video — U.K. elites love Greta Thunberg, "a 16-year-old with multiple mental health issues campaigning to make the world a better place." The use of this girl as a shield for their hypocrisy is truly evil, if the word 'evil' still has a meaning in 2019. More virtue signalling. You can't make shit like this up.
Clueless idealists aside, all of those who support Tulsi Gabbard have known that the Democratic National Committee would find a way to fuck Tulsi over well before the first primary next year. And so the inevitable screwing will happen about 10 days from now.
As Kim Iverson explains in the video below, the DNC is desperately trying to keep Tulsi off the debate stage before she does any more damage to their corrupt plans.
After the first debate, in which Tulsi destroyed Tim Ryan, the most googled name in the country was ... Tulsi Gabbard.
After the second debate, in which Tulsi demolished Kamala Harris, the most googled name in the country was ... Tulsi Gabbard.
On Twitter, after the second debate, Tulsi was at the top of the trending list. So Twitter removed her from that list. And you do know that Tulsi is suing Google for $50 million, right? Follow the link to find out why.
I mean, she's a dangerous loose cannon, this Tulsi girl. Next time around, she might destroy Sleepy Joe Biden or even Pocahontas herself! Oh, sorry, I meant Elizabeth Warren there.
Well, the DNC can't have Tulsi doing that. And so Tulsi must be screwed because any bona fide member of the globalist pro-war elites, including those running the DNC, will tell you that democracy is never a good thing.
And if they were honest, these elite scumbags would also tell you "we have nearly all the money, so we're not finished, there's still work to do. We also want all the money we don't have."
You people think you're living on Earth, but actually you're living in Hell because, as in Tulsi's case, in Hell—
Independent journalist and youtuber Tim Pool is the first person I know of to wake up and smell the coffee.
In the video below, Tim explains that those in the authoritarian "woke left" are tools of globalist elites, including the Big Tech oligopoly and the corporate-owned mainstream media. For example, Vox editor Ezra Klein and his "woke" staff don't speak for "social justice" as they claim. They speak for their biggest investor NBC-Universal. Identity politics is merely a ruse enabling an ongoing war on the nationalist working class by globalist elites. That's the main reason Trump won—he appealed to working class people, whether he was actually going to help them or not.
Make no mistake—there is class warfare going on in the United States (and the EU). The appeal to "social justice" is utter bullshit, even if there are many confused young people who "believe" this nonsense. The Big Picture here in the U.S. will come into sharp focus if you interpret all political events and speech in terms of class warfare (i.e., it's basically our corporate/media/academic/neo-liberal political elites waging war against everybody else).
(I am framing this in "flatland" terms. In the Flatland model, identity politics is motivated and the unconscious instincts driving it are 1) naked self-interest and 2) the need for greater social status, power and control. For example, this analysis of the "woke religion" as a status system gets many things right—identity politics is actually well-off elite white people stomping on other powerless white people, i.e., all those morally inferior "racists" who voted for Donald Trump.)
Why do nearly all of the Democrat candidates for president (Tulsi and Yang excepted) show far more interest in the rights of illegal immigrants than the rights of ordinary working Americans? Why did two of them (Beto and Booker) actually do campaign stops in Mexico recently? Why did the NBC/MSNBC "journalists" moderating the first two Democratic debates keep asking questions about the rights of illegal immigrants? Why do all the candidates not named Tulsi and Yang (but including Bernie Sanders and Pocahontas Elizabeth Warren) implicitly want open borders in the United States? Because the Democratic Party represents the interests of pro-war neo-liberal globalist elites.
You know, despicable scumbags. Globalist business elites love cheap labor and therefore both political parties do too (watch the linked-in video and be sure to note the prominent role of Kamala Harris).
Some of this insanity is pandering and virtue signalling but most of it is not. Kamala Harris is the hand-picked candidate of big corporations (including Wall Street) and the Clintons, who have always represented globalist business interests. In terms of the typical American voter, the Democrats are committing suicide of course. But it seems they don't care. They will represent those who bought and paid for them regardless of the outcome in 2020.
Good job, Tim! You figured it out.
Addendum — Untrustworthy Media Sources
On political matters, you can not believe most (if not all) of what is published or broadcast on the "news" sources listed below. It's mostly elite propaganda. And do not use the selectively edited Google News as an aggregator. It's bad for your mental health. This list is incomplete. I added some notes. All of these sources routinely lie, distort, misrepresent and selectively edit all their political news.
The Washington Post
The New York Times
The Atlantic Magazine (what the elites want you to believe)
CNN (totally fake news)
NBC/MSNBC (Rachel Maddow, hopeless)
ABC
CBS
Fox News (it's unclear what's going on here)
Vox Media (includes Vox and The Verge)
Vice
Newsweek/The Daily Beast
The Huffington Post
Buzzfeed (home of various defamation hit jobs)
Salon
Media Matters (woker than woke)
Slate
USA Today
National Public Radio (clueless but woke)
The Guardian (embarrassingly woke)
The BBC (last but certainly not least, state-sponsored media, UK elites)
Fascist Antifa thugs beat up journalist Andy Ngo at a protest in Portland, Oregon, a city which is becoming a shithole due to the enlightened leadership of it's "woke" mayor.
Andy was hospitalized because of brain trauma (bleeding) after the attack. Our "woke" mainstream media didn't cover it much because the narrative isn't politically correct. But CBS did put a small report out.
Here is the paragraph discussing the attack on Ngo. I have annotated it to reflect reality (the italicized text between dashes).
Andy Ngo, who describes himself as—he is—an editor at the conservative website Quillette—the website is not woke, so it's conservative—and says he is "hated by antifa,"—well, they beat him up for no apparent reason— said on his Twitter feed that he was attacked by anti-fascist protesters—he was indeed attacked by antifa protesters—and [also said he] had to be taken to the hospital to treat injuries to his face and head—he was in fact taken to the hospital for face and head injuries. Ngo also said the attackers took his camera equipment—the antifa attackers did in fact take his camera equipment.
I assume you can see how the bias works here, for example—
Ngo also said the attackers took his camera equipment.
Well, Andy might have said anything, right? Who knows what really happened? According to CBS, Andy merely said some things. Humans bullshit and lie all the time. That's just Andy's side of the story, right?
Millions of years of hominid evolution and this despicable nonsense is what we got at the end of it.
You may not be aware of it because your evolved brain is so fucked up, but there actually is something out there we can call reality. That reality (with a small 'r') may not be the ultimate, cosmic Reality (with a big 'R'), but small 'r' reality is certainly good enough for human purposes, or would be if ... we didn't have this big insurmountable problem with story-telling animals.
Humans can't figure out what small-'r'-reality is and don't care about it anyway. That reality might as well not exist because anything which contradicts some sacred delusional narrative—humans always have one at hand, or several—must be filtered. These humans are doing some terrible shit to others, and always have some beautiful justification for it, but don't (can't) acknowledge what they're actually doing and don't (can't) know why they're doing it because their unconscious instinctual motivations are precisely that— unconscious.
Wow. What a deal. So now you understand how CBS reports the news.
I am sad to be living on a fucking nightmare planet populated by 7.7 billion clueless monkeys and surrounded by an unimaginably huge expanse of cosmic nothingness. At least I wasn't hospitalized for head trauma yesterday because the brains of some of those monkeys have gone completely haywire.
I suppose that's the good news.
Millions of years of hominid evolution ... it's beyond embarrassing
Update — Senator Josh Hawley will introduce legislation "requiring companies to prove they are politically "neutral" before they receive protections under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which largely gives internet platforms legal immunity over content posted on their sites by third parties."
If passed this legislation would end the repeal of our free speech rights on giant social media platforms. Of course billionaire fuckheads in Silicon Valley will fight this. Their evil representatives, like Michael Beckerman, president and CEO of the Internet Association, are distorting the facts and lying like crazy to prevent effective regulation of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. Fuck 'em.
Yes, the title of this post contains Google's original motto. Do you remember that? Well, it's gone now.
Unfortunately, with H. sapiens, there is a rule you can nearly always count on—Power Corrupts.
Google's subsidiary Alphabet runs YouTube. Alphabet's CEO is serial liar Susan Wojcicki.
Susan, along with her "woke" infantile minions, has declared war on all "wrong-think" content, where "wrong-think" is defined any way YouTube wants to define it. The definition of "wrong-think" changes week-to-week. Lately, their definition seems to change daily.
Videos are removed, users are banned, videos or entire channels are demonetized. No reason is given for the banning, removal or demonetization and there is no appeal. There is "shadow banning" (hiding) of videos, subscriptions to channels suddenly disappear, and notifications for new uploads don't seem to work whenever YouTube arbitrarily deems a video to be politically incorrect. YouTube has declared war on some of its best creators, the very people who made it a viable alternative to our hopelessly corrupt mainstream media (video below).
Elite control of mass media (aka., "gatekeeping") is incompatible with freedom of expression. The opinions of the hoi polloi must be suppressed, their thoughts controlled. It's for their own good of course. Just ask Susan or CNN or ABC or the BBC or the New York Times or any of the other elite gatekeeping scumbags.
Try hard to get your monkey brain to understand this—
This is what 21st century fascism looks like. At this point you are being lied to constantly. Watch what powerful members of the elite like Susan Wojcicki do. Disregard what they say.
The powerful few are completely out of touch with anything you low-rent common people might call day-to-day reality. The elites live inside a delusional bubble in which their own self-interest is indistinguishable from the Good, the Just and the Righteous. They are accountable to no one and incapable of meaningful self-reflection.
There is a independent free speech alternative called BitChute, and I suggest you start using it because there is a good chance that anyone worth watching on YouTube will disappear sometime before the 2020 election. Another newer alternative is lbry.com (short for Library, and discussed at the end of the video below).
If this video disappears from YouTube, and obviously that is a strong possibility, you can also find it here. The guy who published this video, which suits my own purposes, is a flat-earther! Seriously, he thinks the Earth is flat. So he's bat-shit crazy, as most humans are in one way or another. Evolution doesn't care much about reality. It only cares about getting your gene spellings into the next generation.
On the other hand, preserving freedom of speech means this wacko is allowed to express his views, however delusional they are. Period. This clear distinction between what a person is saying and their right to say it eludes most people. A speaker can get up on that soapbox and say almost anything he wants to. You the listener are also free to laugh at him or get disgusted and walk away.
If you are unfamiliar with the Salem witch trials, or the post-WW II McCarthy era, or the fatwah against Salmon Rushdie as well as with other subjects discussed in this interview, then this would be excellent time for you to fucking learn something instead of simply expressing your groundless but oh-so-sacred opinion about shit you nothing about.
Those familiar with these historical events and their significance can ignore the statement above.
Watch this hour-long interview with American ex-pat and writer Lionel Shriver. Consider watching this video a prerequisite for my next post. I recommend making the time to watch the whole thing.
Shriver is a highly aware human being. She's about as good as it gets. You might learn something.
I see that comments have not been posted due to internal Typepad settings I created but forgot about entirely.
Anyway, the last comment I got, about 3 hours ago, was this--
We need to defend the dark money and Saudi royal family backed Steven Crowder from the elites. Great work, Dave.
You see, this very-low-awareness human is confused and has got it completely backwards. We want to defend free speech because otherwise a totalitarian society, especially in the age of mass media, becomes so much easier to create. Powerful corporate elites are trying really hard to create such a society. The U.K. is a very long way down that road and the U.S. is not far behind.
Note the accusation in that comment against Crowder (and by implication, me) without documentation or proof of any kind. Note the implicit support for powerful elites in that comment. As I explained in the post, I do not endorse Steven Crowder outside of his right to free speech.
That's how fascists behave. They will distort reality beyond all recognition, or abandon it altogether, to get what they want. The massive damage done is merely a means to an unrealizable and therefore delusional end. Really, that's all there is to it except for the deeper question as to how such a pathology arises in the social brain in the first place.
The proto-fascist person who made that comment is in no sense an adult, is in no sense a true individual with at least some awareness of the human condition and the resulting deep suffering. He is simply a tribal (ideological) automaton, acting completely out of the lower-level unconscious. In 2019 there are a truly scary number of people like him in the United States. God help us.
Let me be clear. Take the guy who made the comment above. I don't like humans in the general case, including that guy. Really don't like them or him. Don't give a shit if that guy lives or dies. Don't want to be socially entangled with him in any way whatsoever. Don't think the human-created world is a better place for him being here. In fact, the opposite is very likely the case, that our miserable world will become worse as a result of him being here. Suffering, which we surely have enough of, will increase because of his sacred presence (ignorance).
Comments, even if they are friendly, will not appear on this blog. Whatever I write here I do for my own personal reasons. I am also trying to do you fuckheads a favor by warning you that you're about to get totally screwed by the elite Powers That Be. God only knows you will likely never figure that one out on your own.
Sometime ago I issued a Warning To Humanity about the absolute necessity of preserving free speech rights. Last year I abandoned all mainstream media and started getting all my political news from sources I came to trust on YouTube. I had to filter out various biases in each case of course.
All human sources of information on political matters are inherently biased in one way or another due to their loaded nature—social status, power and control are always in play, i.e., who will have it and who will not. Thus all of our baser social instincts are on display when it comes to politics, including the crucial role of powerful high-status elites who seek to determine political outcomes and the limits of what can and cant be talked about.
This week our globalist corporate elites began the process of purging YouTube of all "wrong-think" dissenting voices, an action that a few insightful people, and only a few, could see coming from a mile away. It got under way with this official YouTube blog post, which the New York Times and the Washington Post knew about well before targeted independent YouTube "creators" had any inkling that they were about to get shafted. That blog post starts out with this text—
Over the past few years, we’ve been investing in the policies, resources and products needed to live up to our responsibility and protect the YouTube community from harmful content. This work has focused on four pillars: removing violative content, raising up authoritative content, reducing the spread of borderline content and rewarding trusted creators. Thanks to these investments, videos that violate our policies are removed faster than ever and users are seeing less borderline content and harmful misinformation. As we do this, we’re partnering closely with lawmakers and civil society around the globe to limit the spread of violent extremist content online.
Why does the YouTube community require protection ... from itself? If you follow that "authoritative content" link (read it properly as "authoritarian content") you get another YouTube document with the Orwellian title Building a better news experience on YouTube, together. Together? Not so much. Scrolling down you find the following—
As part of the launch of GNI in March, we announced funding to support the future of news. Today we are committing $25M to a YouTube-specific investment:
Expertise. We’re establishing a working group with news organizations and experts from around the world to help us develop new product features, improve the news experience on YouTube, and tackle emerging challenges. News organizations including Vox Media, Jovem Pan, and India Today are early members of the working group. We’re looking forward to having more join as we convene the group in the coming weeks.
Ignore Jovem Pan and India Today. They are merely there to create the illusion of inclusivity and fairness. Focus instead on Vox Media because they are the ones calling the shots.
The YouTube purge began late last week when one Carlos Maza, an especially "woke" and gay representative of globalist corporate elite interests began a public campaign on Twitter to get conservative comedian Steven Crowder banned from YouTube. Carlos Maza works for Vox, which along with The Verge, is owned by Vox Media. In turn, Vox Media's biggest investor by far is NBC-Universal ($200 million), which is owned by the cable TV giant Comcast, which owns NBC, MSNBC, and so many other things that it would make your head spin were I to list them all.
Well, we are talking about globalist corporate elites here, right?
Anyway, Crowder's biggest crime was to ridicule Vox and Maza using various terms for gays which Maza had at various times used to describe himself. Watch this recent Crowder video, which itself was a response to this Vox/Maza video which claims—I'm not kidding—that Fox News controls all mainstream media narratives.
(I do not usually watch Crowder but had to in this case to see what was going on. For example, as with so many other people that I do watch, he denies that anthropogenic climate change exists. As I said at the top, you have to take everything that everyone says with a grain of salt. Here I am interested in free speech issues.)
Please note that Maza asserts without argument and apparently any self-awareness whatsoever that "gatekeeping" is one of the most important things journalist do. Got it? Maza states that a primary function of media is to control what narratives you can hear and suppress those you are not supposed to hear. Crowder was responding to that scary assertion among other things. In fact, Carlos Maza claims in a TED talk last month (May 9, 2019) that journalistic "neutrality" is making us dumber (emphasis added).
We're trained to believe that good journalism is "neutral" — it doesn't try to tell people what to think or who to believe. But what if this approach to journalism is making it harder for us to understand the difference between right and wrong, good and evil?
Media critic Carlos Maza explains how the "fair and balanced" approach to news makes it harder for audiences to differentiate between good and bad information, and may ultimately normalize extreme and even hateful political positions.
There you go. Unlike Carlos, who in his own estimation is perhaps the most insightful man who has ever walked the Earth, the vast majority of humans are way too dumb to differentiate between "good and bad information." Therefore these poorly informed and judgmentally-challenged humans clearly require the type of wise guidance that only Carlos and Vox.com can provide (see directly below and also see my Flatland essay quote below).
Maza draws on examples from media coverage of a range of recent controversies, including the debates over climate change, vaccines, and immigration, to argue that good journalism requires bias -- the editorial courage to say "no" to certain perspectives and viewpoints.
Maza's talk is a culmination of years of research and writing he's done creating his media literacy video series "Strikethrough," which he produces for Vox.com.
Long story short, YouTube did not outright ban Crowder and his 3.8 million subscribers. They simply de-monetized his entire channel and punished him in some other ways. This did not placate Twitter's @gaywonk—"Tucker Carlson is a white supremicist"— who no doubt will continue to pressure YouTube to get rid of all "wrong-think" creators. And now, the purge which started against Crowder is starting to hit lots and lots of others. This bloodbath is not over by a long-shot.
Basically, anyone on YouTube who takes free speech seriously is under imminent threat at this point. And now we go back to the question I raised above—why does the YouTube community require protection ... from itself?
The simple fact is that all large, complex societies have elites who make all the important decisions, "choices" which benefit them to the detriment of everyone else, a reality which becomes obscured in so-called "democratic" societies.
The inevitable existence of self-serving, powerful elites constitutes the observed social pattern requiring an explanation. The "blank slate" merely provides a post-hoc rationalization justifying the existence of these elites, those who serve them, or those who seek to join them.
And that is of course what we see historically and in the world today—social elites making self-interested "choices" for the rest of us. The history of social transformation (sometimes called "reform") demonstrates again and again the social disasters our human "elites" have wrought. Consider V.I. Lenin, Robespierre, or Alan Greenspan, to pick only three examples among the countless others history offers.
It is highly suspicious of course that elites, or those who serve them, always find a way to rationalize not only their own entitlement, but also why the rest of us can't possibly get along without them
The views of those running things are and have always been self-interested delusions. To borrow from Mark Twain, these beneficiaries of the status quo have corn-pone opinions — "you tell me whar a man gits his corn pone, en I'll tell you what his 'pinions is."
Those making up society's elite, or those seeking higher social status or those with an agenda for social change, are no wiser or better than anybody else. However, they are much worse in one crucial respect—they believe they can make wise "choices" for the rest of us.
In this context, this text from the YouTube blog post announcing the purge will make more sense. YouTube seeks to—
Reduce borderline content and raise up authoritative voices
In addition to removing videos that violate our policies, we also want to reduce the spread of content that comes right up to the line. In January, we piloted an update of our systems in the U.S. to limit recommendations of borderline content and harmful misinformation, such as videos promoting a phony miracle cure for a serious illness, or claiming the earth is flat.
Forget that "miracle cure/flat earth" bullshit. That text is there to provide cover for a purge of "wrong-think" political conservatives (i.e., anyone to the right of Mao Zedong at this point).
We’re looking to bring this updated system to more countries by the end of 2019. Thanks to this change, the number of views this type of content gets from recommendations has dropped by over 50% in the U.S.
I've added emphasis below.
Our systems are also getting smarter about what types of videos should get this treatment, and we’ll be able to apply it to even more borderline videos moving forward.
As we do this, we’ll also start raising up more authoritative content in recommendations, building on the changes we made to news last year. For example, if a user is watching a video that comes close to violating our policies, our systems may include more videos from authoritative sources (like top news channels) in the "watch next" panel.
[My note: they also promote "authoritative" sources (again, read "authoritarian" sources like NBC, CBS, MSNBC, Vox, the New York Times, etc.) in YouTube searches.]
And there you have it. We do not have to search far to find the hidden unconscious motivations underlying such behavior. The motivation here and in all similar cases throughout human history is to maintain or elevate one's own social status and power while reducing the status and power of others in what amounts to a zero-sum game.
Once we understand the real motivation behind the purge, the YouTube announcement makes perfect sense, as long as you remember that "those making up society's elite, or those seeking higher social status or those with an agenda for social change, are no wiser or better than anybody else [but are] much worse in one crucial respect—they believe they can make wise "choices" for the rest of us."
And that is why the"woke" people running YouTube believe without self-doubt that the YouTube community and all those watching YouTube videos require protection from themselves.
And now we must confront the big totalitarian lie—poor Carlos Maza portrays himself as the victim because Steven Crowder makes fun of him while Maza and his elite backers simultaneously try to destroy the lives or take away the livelihood of what will ultimately turn out to be many hundreds (if not thousands) of YouTube independent creators.
Remember, the rule of thumb for understanding Flatland says pay attention to what people do, not what they say. What people say in cases like this (e.g., those official YouTube statements above) are almost invariably post-hoc rationalizations disguising or justifying reprehensible unconscious motivations (like eliminating the competition in this case). That's simply the way Human Nature works.
Truly independent YouTubers speaking freely pose an existential threat to media elites who want exclusive control of the narratives the public get to hear. It follows from the elite point of view that these independent voices must be shut down, banned, demonetized, cast into a silent wilderness where no one can hear them. This is an instinctual actionable form of filtering which differs from the more reactive, defensive and self-protective strategies which I discussed in the 4th Flatland essay. In this form of filtering, you silence (or even kill) those whose message must be suppressed or whose existence is an affront. This is done via force majeure.
When in human history was it not the case that might makes right?
There is no such thing as moral progress as so many people would have you believe. Since the French Revolution, it has often been those who cling most to delusional utopian ideologies whose actions belie those same delusions. This is a case in point. Human evil raises its ugly head over and over again in entirely predictable ways. Here we go again.
