Censorship 101

[seeker 1,280]

6 minutes ago, deicer said:

So you are saying I'm posting the Canadian version of Fox News?

Sprawl Calgary using a CBC article that uses a Canadian Press article that quotes a UN Commissioner of Refugees is the definition of a house-of-cards.  And all of them criticize Rempel for criticizing the media. 

So - who's the more trustworthy, Rempel or the media?

[Jaydee 1,718]

2 hours ago, deicer said:

Elisabeth May was voted 'most knowledgeable' and Christia Freeland was 'parliamentarian of the year'.

So they're all good?

Elizabeth May should have been voted the most popular politician by the local LCBO. 

[deicer 816]

1 hour ago, seeker said:

Sprawl Calgary using a CBC article that uses a Canadian Press article that quotes a UN Commissioner of Refugees is the definition of a house-of-cards.  And all of them criticize Rempel for criticizing the media. 

So - who's the more trustworthy, Rempel or the media?

At least the CBC, Canadian Press, and UN Commissioner can and were fact checked.  

Rempel made allegations without basis.

Does that answer your question?

The way I see it is that it is facts vs. rhetoric.

 

[deicer 816]

12 minutes ago, Jaydee said:

Elizabeth May should have been voted the most popular politician by the local LCBO. 

So you are saying that the vote was improper, therefore Rempel isn't worthy of the honour as well?

 

[seeker 1,280]

21 minutes ago, deicer said:

At least the CBC, Canadian Press, and UN Commissioner can and were fact checked.  

Rempel made allegations without basis.

Does that answer your question?

The way I see it is that it is facts vs. rhetoric.

 

No, you're missing the point.  Both sides have the same facts.  Rempel (and Scheer) say what was happening was a crisis (provincial governments running out of money, no beds in shelters, refugees being housed in hotels), the UN Commissioner says it's not a crisis because other countries have it worse and the CP and CBC calling Rempel full of baloney and inaccurate.

The facts are not in dispute.  The rhetoric of characterizing the situation as a crisis makes more sense than saying it wasn't because some other country managed fine.

"I lost my job, can't pay my bills and am going to lose my house.  It's a crisis!" 

"It's not a crisis.  My brother lost his job and he did fine."

[Jaydee 1,718]

“This is a defining moment in American democracy. If we do not push back against Google and Twitter, we will lose our democratic ability to talk to each other.”

In an exclusive interview on "Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo," Sen. Lindsey Graham discussed big tech censorship, saying that "a private company has more power than the government and traditional media."

[deicer 816]

"At noon on January 20, Trump will be in desperate shape. His business is floundering, his partners are fleeing, his loans are delinquent, prosecutors will be coming after him, and the legal impunity he enjoyed through his office will be gone. He will be walking naked into a cold and friendless world. What appeared to be a brilliant strategy for escaping consequences was merely a tactic for putting them off. The bill is coming due."

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/01/donald-trump-after-presidency.html

[Jaydee 1,718]

 

[Jaydee 1,718]

The New Censors.

After the 1967 summer of riots, journalists, politicians, and sociologists spent many words and dollars trying to find and cure the “root cause” of the racial unrest. They failed, but eventually a solution did emerge. The root cause of riots turned out to be rioters. Peace returned to the streets once police adopted new crowd-control tactics and prosecutors cracked down on lawbreakers. Mob violence came to be recognized not as an indictment of American society but as a failure of policing.

That lesson was forgotten last year, when police were lambasted for trying to control violence at Black Lives Matter and Antifa protests. Journalists disdained tear gas and arrests in favor of addressing the “systemic racism” supposedly responsible for the disorder. After the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, some raised questions about police failure to stop the mayhem, but once again, progressive journalists are focusing elsewhere. They’ve identified a new root cause of mob violence: free speech.

They’ve cheered the social-media purge of conservatives and urged further censorship of “violent rhetoric” and “disinformation.” It’s a remarkably self-destructive move for a profession dependent on freedom of speech, but the journalists now dominating newsrooms aren’t thinking long-term—and can’t imagine being censored themselves. The traditional liberal devotion to the First Amendment seems hopelessly antiquated to young progressives convinced that they’re on the right side of history.

When I wrote in 2019 about journalists’ new antipathy to free speech, it seemed bad enough that they were targeting rivals in their own profession with advertising boycotts and smear campaigns that led to conservative journalists being fired and banished from social media. But since the Capitol riot, they’ve gone beyond “de-platforming” individual heretics. Now they want to eliminate the platforms, too.

It wasn’t enough to ban Donald Trump from Facebook and Twitter if he and his followers could move to Parler—so Parler had to be shut down, too. Big Tech obliged, succumbing to pressure from the media and their Democratic allies in Congress. (Google and Apple removed Parler from their app stores, and Amazon forced Parler offline by booting it off its web servers.) This unprecedented suppression was denounced by conservative and libertarian publications like the Wall Street Journal and Reason, and by a few independent journalists like Glenn Greenwald, but the usual solidarity among the press against censorship was missing.

The Washington Post headlined an editorial, “Parler deserved to be taken down.” The Guardian called for still-harsher censorship through federal regulation that would restrict “online harms” and promote “social values such as truth telling.” At MSNBC and CNN, commentators longed for more government action—a new equivalent of the 9/11 Commission to investigate the Capitol riot—and further corporate censorship.

CNN’s senior media reporter, Oliver Darcy, called for telecom companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast to stop providing platforms for the distribution of “lies” and “conspiracy theories” by conservative channels like Fox News, Newsmax, and One America News Network. On his CNN show Reliable Sources, Brian Stelter discussed further steps to “curb” the “information crisis,” and he offered no objection to the solution offered by a former Facebook executive: “We have to turn down the capability of these conservative influencers to reach these huge audiences.”

A few mainstream journalists expressed mild reservations about the Parler shutdown—the Los Angeles Times called it “troubling” though also “understandable”—but most didn’t even bother taking a position. Their attitude was nicely captured by the fictional Titania McGrath, the satirically woke character on Twitter created by British comic Andrew Doyle. “If you don’t like our rules, just build your own platform,” she tweeted. “Then when we delete that, just build another one. Then when we delete that, just build your own corporate oligopoly. I really can’t see the issue.”

In the short term, silencing conservative outlets benefits mainstream journalists in the same way that the Parler shutdown benefits Facebook and Twitter: by eliminating competition. But the zeal for censorship isn’t just cynical self-interest. Progressive journalists have been in an ideological bubble so long that they’ve come to believe their own hype about the right-wing menace—and they’re oblivious to their blatant double standards.

They pretended that riots across the United States last year were “mostly peaceful protests,” while the one at the Capitol was a historic “insurrection” and “attempted coup” that put “democracy in peril.” Its symbolism made the Capitol riot a singularly horrifying spectacle on television, but the actual toll in life and property was much smaller than that of last year’s mob violence, which claimed at least 15 lives and caused more than $2 billion in damage.

Yes, the mob at the Capitol had been fed lies and conspiracy theories about election fraud, and some of the organizers had used social media—including not just Parler but also Facebook and Twitter—to enrage the protesters. It’s no surprise that Joe Biden and other Democrats are denouncing this “Big Lie” and promising to fight “domestic terrorism” by imposing new restrictions on social-media platforms. Politicians are always eager for more power.

But why would any sensible journalist go along with them? Their own profession’s freedom rests on the First Amendment, which allows them to print information no matter how misguided it’s deemed by others, and on landmark Supreme Court decisions protecting even speakers who make generalized calls for violence. That freedom allowed journalists to spend two years promoting a conspiracy theory about Russia collusion, a falsehood that did far more far to cripple the federal government than the Capitol riot. They encouraged last year’s riots by convincing the public, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, that black men were being disproportionately killed by white police officers.

The promoters of those “Big Lies” assume that they won’t be censored as long as Democrats rule Washington and Silicon Valley, but the precedents being set will give Republicans weapons for payback when they return to power. The eventual result will be bipartisan censorship. Far better to let police and courts deal with rioters—and leave Americans free to say what they want.

https://www.city-journal.org/journalists-new-hostility-to-free-speech

[deicer 816]

It isn't about censorship, it's about truth.

https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/texas-supreme-court-silently-denies-alex-jones-all-forms-of-relief-sandy-hook-families-and-others-can-now-sue-conspiracy-theorist-and-infowars-into-the-ground/

Texas Supreme Court Silently Denies Alex Jones All Forms of Relief: Sandy Hook Families and Others Can Now Sue Conspiracy Theorist and InfoWars into the Ground

An empire built on conjecture, conspiracy and a series of fake homeopathic cures for various ailments stands to be sued into oblivion after a Friday ruling by the Supreme Court of Texas.

Without comment, the Lone Star State’s highest civil court found that America’s foremost conspiracy theorist, Alex Jones, and his flagship media outlet, InfoWars, are subject to liability in four separate defamation lawsuits filed over the past two-plus years. Those lawsuits were filed by parents of children who were killed during the Sandy Hook massacre and by a man Jones and his network falsely identified as the perpetrator of the Parkland massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

 

 

[st27 624]

And meanwhile ... on the home front, it appears our minority government is a little testy about pipelines:

Quote

The Speaker of the House of Commons – previously a Liberal MP – has ruled that Conservative MPs are not allowed to wear masks that feature a message supporting Canada’s oil & gas sector.

According to Erin O’Toole’s director of communications, the Liberals pushed for the Conservatives to be barred from wearing them:

“This is absurd! The Liberals just pushed to have Conservative MP’s stripped of their face masks because they support Canadian #oilandgas – come on!#KeystonePipeline #KeystoneXL #cdnpoli”

 

[Jaydee 1,718]

Doubts grow in freedom's last redoubt

 

Free speech as both a principle and an operational element of Western democracy is more threatened today than in living memory. News media, cardinal beneficiaries of the First Amendment, are among the most vociferous voices demanding that dissenters be gagged.

Left-wing publications such as CNN, the Washington Post, and Mother Jonescheered when the Twitter accounts of former President Donald Trump and thousands of others were nuked. Vengeful glee was the most obvious characteristic of supposed liberals when monopolistic Big Tech companies demolished Parler, a small competitor attracting right-wing users. Pundits pondered how best to put media companies they dislike out of business.

It is easy and right to be outraged by much of this. But since outrage is the cheapest commodity of our epoch, it is also good to remember that even some serious-minded people who seek the public good are inching toward this dangerous conclusion. Steve Coll, dean of Columbia's Graduate School of Journalism, for example, recently lamented, "Those of us in journalism have to come to terms with the fact that free speech, a principle we hold sacred, is being weaponized against the principles of journalism."

The fact that opposition to censorship is crumbling not just among charlatans and grifters makes the problem much more difficult and shows how far core American values have corroded. At the Washington Examiner, we realized several years ago that it was no longer sufficient in argument to point out that free speech would be impinged by a proposal or policy against which we were editorializing. A new era had dawned (if that's the right word) in which people were abandoning the most important defense against tyranny; tell them that such-and-such a proposal would restrict free speech and their response would sometimes be, 'Yes, that's the point.'

The germ of this poisonous attitude, which has lately blossomed in news media, was planted in the sub-Marxist soil of university campuses. It was necessary there to a small but growing coterie of left-wing militants who could not otherwise protect their ideological fictions about race, class, and gender. These have now become so self-contradictory that they can survive only if free speech is crushed, only if no one is allowed to point out that the emperor has no clothes.

And news media are, in general, so down with the left-wing program that they have lost their immunity to the worst, most dangerous idea of all. They no longer fully believe that free speech is indispensable to a free society. Indeed, they are not quite sure anymore what a free society is. 

Yes, free speech will be abused, as it always is, and many lies will be told. Claims that Trump colluded with Russia to win the 2016 election and that he won the 2020 election are examples. The past four years have demonstrated amply the danger of governments arrogating the people's right to decide what's true and what's false. 

But the solution to falsehood is not less free speech but more of it.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/doubts-grow-in-freedoms-last-redoubt