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.
