In the United States, about 20% identify as “nones.” The religious statistics in Europe and in East Asia the number is even much higher. Yet the most secularized societies on earth such as parts of Eastern Europe, PR of China, parts of Russia (big cities like Moscow) stick to extremely conservative family values.
Firstly, let me examine what the top atheist physicists had to say. Stephen Hawking’s quote:
“So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be.”
I have to comment on this: Beginning of the universe implies that we know what time actually is. However, all we have is Albert Einstein`s definition of time: “time is what a clock measures” and Einstein gave us a definition of “clock”, too. A clock is a device that counts regular events. However, due to the theories of Hawking and Einstein, at infinite high or low gravitation this concepts and definitions break down.
Think about it: Physicists can calculate with frightening precision, but they cannot really define what energy or mass really are. These are semantic questions, questions of the logic of language. In medicine it is similar: MDs cannot really define what health or sickness, what “normal” or “handicapped” mean, but they can help so many of us. Physics nobelist Stephen Weinberg told the NY Times in 1999:
“With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”
I disagree: There are/were non-religious ideologies (fascism, communism) that made atheists do extremely bad things, too.
Even if the physicists knew all laws of nature, they still would not know why they are the way they are. (Except it could be proven that only this single possibility exists.)
The big bang theory was created by a Belgian catholic priest and friend of Albert Einstein, Georges Edouard Lemaître (* July 17th 1894 in Charleroi, Belgium; † 20. Juni 1966 in Leuven, Belgium), and pope Pope Pius XII saw the Big Bang theory as a type of scientific proof for the existence of God, and did not see it as contradicting the Catholic faith.
“At the November 22, 1951, opening meeting of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, Pope Pius XII declared that the Big Bang theory does not conflict with the Catholic concept of creation.” (source: Wikipedia). The Papal Academy of Sciences accepts members of all faiths and convictions, Stephen Hawking and Rudolf Mößbauer, a physics nobelist from Munich, both outspoken atheists were members of the Papal Academy.
BIOLOGY
Primates and birds have four communalities: a good sense of sight, communication by sounds, most of them have complex brains and many of them have a tendency towards monogamy
Most birds and primates live high above – in the air or in trees – and those that don´t walk on two feet. They all need good eyes and vocal communication, travelling long distances and communication requires complex brains. Complex brains could favor evolution towards monogamy: Mating behavior (finding a partner and keeping him/her is a challenge – for all creatures). It could also be the other way round: Two parents can foster their offspring better, so there is evolutionary pressure towards higher intelligence.
That is convergent evolution of four traits in parallel between primates and birds.
“In evolutionary biology, convergent evolution is the process whereby organisms not closely related (not monophyletic), independently evolve similar traits as a result of having to adapt to similar environments or ecological niches.” (source: Science Daily website)
Alas, many monkey species, especially those of the Caribbean islands have become extinct because of human activity. We will never know their behavior. Let us take care of nature, animals can teach us something about human nature, if we are open-minded.
My message (what nature tells me) is that the family values of all traditional religions are the natural way for Homo sapiens to live, the path to maximum happiness.
By the way: Homo is Latin for “human being” the Ancient Greek word “homo” means “sameness”, this Greek word is the origin of the term homosexual. The Greek word for “human being” is Anthropos, and the Latin word for same is “simile”.
Merry Christmas!
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-12-16 16:51:182022-12-16 16:51:18Christmas Musings – Religion and the Natural Sciences (Physics and Biology)
U.S. prosecutors in New York charged Democrat super-donor and disgraced crypto CEO Sam Bankman-Fried with making “tens of millions of dollars in illegal campaign contributions.” A magistrate in the Bahamas denied bail on the grounds SBF, as he is known, is a flight risk. SBF plans to fight extradition from the Bahamas, but fighting extradition is generally a losing proposition. I know that from handling several extradition hearings myself as a criminal defense attorney. Expect SBF to be returned to the U.S. to face charges.
There is speculation SBF was arrested so he wouldn’t have to testify before Congress and face questions that would embarrass his political cronies. In any event, prosecutors say SBF stole billions of dollars from his FTX crypto customers and used it for his personal benefit, to finance his hedge fund, and to make illicit campaign donations.
Some of the donations, the indictment alleges, were made through other people to skirt campaign finance contribution limits for the 2022 midterms and other elections. These are called ‘straw donations’ and they’re illegal. “These contributions were disguised to look like they were coming from wealthy co-conspirators, when in fact the contributions were funded by [SBF’s hedge fund] with stolen customer money,” the lead prosecutor said.
The contributions totaled more than $70 million in the last 18 months, mostly going to Democrats and left-leaning groups, making SBF the second largest donor to Democrats after George Soros. Over $5 million went to the Big Guy, Joe Biden’s campaign. A Democrat superPAC called Protect Our Future got $27 million to help elect candidates focusing on pandemic prevention. That group poured $10 million into a Democrat congressional campaign in Oregon, but the candidate lost in the Democrat primary. Another $7 million went to other Democrat superPACs focusing on congressional races. SBF personally contributed the individual maximum of $5,800 to Democrat Senator Debbie Stabenow and Republican Senator John Boozman to influence the way they were writing a crypto regulation bill. Liberal Republicans in Name Only – RINOs – Senators Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine also received the individual maximum from SBF. My National RINO Hunt Team is especially interested in Collins and Murkowski because they stand in the way of returning the Republican Party to a party of principle again.
Some politicians are returning SBF’s donations – Kirsten Gillibrand, Dick Durbin, and others. So far, the Big Guy – Joe Biden – hasn’t and deflects questions when asked.
One interesting aside in all this is SBF’s support for something called ‘effective altruism’, a school of philanthropic thought that looks through data for the biggest bang for the buck and focuses on long-term threats to humanity. This is why SBF gave $27 million to Protect Our Future, mentioned earlier, which supports preparedness for the next pandemic. Sounds benign, but a big proponent of effective altruism is ethicist Peter Singer who thinks we should kill the elderly who have dementia to reduce their suffering and give parents who can’t take care of their newborns the right to kill them. Swell guy. SBF has been called naïve for dabbling in causes he doesn’t really understand. Learn from SBF’s mistakes and don’t let that happen to you. Oh, and don’t trust anybody under 30.
But back to the main point for today:
Politicians take money from sketchy people all the time. The question is what did the Democrats and RINOs who took money from SBF know about him stealing money from his customers and when did they know it – before or after accepting his campaign contributions. I hope we find out.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-12-16 16:51:142022-12-16 16:51:14SBF’s Political Donations: What Did Democrats and RINOs Know and When Did They Know It?
The abortion lobby is out there with a new claim: restrictions on abortions kill women. The claim is based on a study from the Commonwealth Fund, a pro-abortion group, that purportedly found, “Maternal death rates in 2020 were 62% higher in states that ban or restrict abortion than in states where the procedure is still accessible.” The study was widely publicized and led to headlines like Dobbs decision is “devastating” U.S. maternal health.
It’s all a crock. In the first place, the study looked at public health data from 2018 to 2020, long before the Dobbs decision. So any claim the study shows Dobbs, which was decided in 2022, has killed women is complete nonsense.
Second, this is a classic case of the intervening variable. The claim is made that A causes C but, in reality, A is associated with B and it’s B that is causing C. Let me put it to you this way: Ice cream cones cause death. That’s ridiculous, right? But eating ice cream is associated with hot weather which can lead to death. The Commonwealth Fund study creates the misimpression that abortion restrictions cause death. But abortion restrictions are more common in southern states which, due to lower income and education levels, have worse maternal health outcomes overall. It’s the lower income and education levels that are the problem, not restrictions on abortion.
This is borne out by data from around the world which shows some countries that are the most restrictive on abortion have some of the lowest maternal mortality rates. This is true in Poland and Chile, and was also true in Ireland before abortion was legalized in 2018. This fits with the fact that over a thousand OB-GYNs and other maternal health experts signed a declaration in 2019 that abortion is never necessary to save the life of the mother. Any supposed link between restrictions on abortion and high maternal mortality is further debunked by data showing twice as many women die in the two years after an abortion than after a live birth, with complications from abortion like sepsis and hemorrhaging contributing to the result.
The nail in the coffin, though, is the fact that the U.S. does not have complete maternal mortality statistics. Data collection is inconsistent and problematic, as the Washington Post has reported. As a result, there is no official annual count of pregnancy-related fatalities, and no official maternal mortality rate. Thus, anyone making claims about abortion restrictions and maternal mortality is just pulling numbers out of the air. This is not surprising. It’s happened many times before. Former CBS reporter Bernard Goldberg described in his books how pressure groups cook up phony numbers, feed them to the press, then sit back and watch as their willing accomplices in the media spread the lies everywhere. So here we have a pro-abortion group, the Commonwealth Fund, feeding incomplete data to their friends in the press which has publicized the incomplete numbers widely, no questions asked.
Finally, there’s a disconnect between the claim abortion restrictions kill women and the ‘ask’. You’d think the ‘ask’ would be to get rid of restrictions on abortion. But that’s not what they’re asking for. It’s a bait-and-switch. They’re asking for increased social spending on Medicaid and other government programs to address maternal health overall. The White House wants almost half a billion dollars extra to spend on maternal health. The true agenda is to grow the government and create full employment for leftists. They’ll ride any horse – including scaring people about abortion restrictions – to get there. The Commonwealth Fund has been lobbying for increased government health spending for a long time and, if truth be told, what it really wants is an all-encompassing government-run single-payer healthcare regime. But it will need more than a pack of lies about restrictions on abortion and maternal health outcomes to justify it.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-12-16 15:51:222022-12-16 15:51:22The Abortion Lobby’s Got a Brand New Lie
It has been announced that the New Cambridge Dictionary definition of a Woman is, “A person who lives and acts as a female.” Cambridge now defines “man” as “an adult who lives and identifies as male though they may have been said to have a different sex at birth.”
This is the dictionary commonly used in postsecondary education.
What WOKE LGBTQMxyz garbage — in case you aren’t familiar with the acronym; attached are some definitions.
Here’s some additional info for you.
Transgender’s have an underlying mental illness — see the book “Trans Life Survivor” by Walt Heyer
There is no such thing as gender change or sex change — neutering is what it really amounts to (unless you are a female transgender with male sex organs who continues to impregnate women).
There is no such thing as gender dysphoria which the Mayo clinic describes as the feeling of discomfort or distress that might occur in people whose gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth or sex related physical characteristics. There is only dysphoria or a state of unease or generalized dissatisfaction with life/ Is this a good reason for a person to change their sex either mentally by affirmation and/or with surgery ?
The goal of the LGBTQMxyz community is to feminize, emasculate and in some cases mutilate boys/men while pushing “toxic masculinity” and to masculate or in many cases mutilate girls/women.
The left’s and WOKE societies push for the LGBTQMxyz narrative has traction partially because they are disciples of the notion that if you own the language you own the narrative.
Here’s some of the language used that we should be aware of and dispute that feeds the LGBTQMxyz narrative:
Gender Identity Disorder
Gender Affirming
Gender Assignment at Birth
Transgender
Nonbinary person
Gender Neutral
LGBTQQIAAPP persons make up less than 3% of population yet the media & leftists in Congress have given them power & influence way beyond what they should have.
LGBTQQIAAP stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, Allies and Pansexual, with all laying under the umbrella of Queer.
Lesbian means women that are attracted to women.
Gay means men that are attracted to men.
Bisexual means men or women that are attracted to both men and women.
Transgender means anyone whose gender identity, expression or behavior differs from the sexual identity of their biological birth.
Questioning means anyone who is in question towards their gender identity.
Queer refers to a non-straight person, and is hence an umbrella term for the non-straights.
Intersex means a person that is born with both male and female biological features.
Asexual means a person that is not sexually attracted to others, but it doesn’t mean they do not fall in love with others, they can be attracted by someone, just that they do not have to need to act it out sexually. Some asexual people are happier on their own, others are happiest with a group of close friends. Other asexual people have a desire to form more intimate romantic relationships, and will date and seek long-term partnerships. Asexual people are just as likely to date sexual people as we are to date each other. Also, there are different kinds of asexuality such as grey-asexual, someone who has sexual attractions very rarely, and demi-sexual, which is someone who only feels sexual attractions for someone after already developing a strong bond with them. For some sexual arousal is a fairly regular occurrence, though it is not associated with a desire to find a sexual partner or partners. Some will occasionally masturbate, but feel no desire for partnered sexuality. Other asexual people experience little or no arousal. It is because they do not care about sex, asexual people generally do not see a lack of sexual arousal as a problem to be corrected, and focus their energy on enjoying other types of arousal and pleasure.
Allies (or Allied) means straight people that are supportive to the LGBT(QQIAAP) community.
Pansexual means people that are attracted to others with gender not a factor being considered.
Pansexual people are often mixed up with bisexual people as they both may date both men or women. Gender of another person is not important to pansexual people as they are attracted solely to the person himself/herself and the gender does not contribute to the attraction.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-12-15 15:51:382022-12-15 15:51:38Cambridge Dictionary’s New Definition of a ‘Woman’ and ‘Man’
If Elon Musk won’t suppress the news, CBS, ABC, and NBC News are more than happy to. While the Twitter files continue to drip out damning evidence of the company’s pre-Musk bias, three of America’s biggest outlets refuse to cover the story that’s riveting people the world over. In an ironic twist, the media is so beholden to Big Tech that it is suppressing a story about suppression. But don’t think the truth won’t get out, Congressman Pat Fallon (R-Texas) warns. The GOP is weeks away from House control, and no amount of coordinated media blackouts will protect Silicon Valley then.
“Get ready for Republican oversight” was the message of incoming soon-to-be committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.). Like the rest of his conservative colleagues, he’s ready to dive into the last two years of criminal mismanagement under Democratic rule — on everything from the border and COVID to Afghanistan, energy, and Hunter Biden. But this latest wrinkle, this proof of widescale, devastating, conservative censorship will be priority #1.
Rep. Pat Fallon (R-Texas) may have been unsurprised by the revelations at Twitter, but he’s outraged nonetheless. “…[O]ur worst fears and suspicions have been confirmed,” he told Family Research Council President Tony Perkins on “Washington Watch.” “Really. I mean, you had the head of their legal department, Vijaya Gadde, admitting that the FBI told him, ‘Hey, listen, you’re going to get probably a hack and leak story in October dealing with Hunter Biden. So just be aware of that and take action.’ That’s very troubling.” Add that to the suspicions that Google “magically” made 70% of GOP campaign emails redirect into spam, and Fallon warns that this is a much bigger, more sinister problem than people realize.
“Now we’ve confirmed that Twitter, I suspect Facebook, and other Big Tech firms are doing the same thing. We’ll get them under oath, because they claim that they’re not biased — which I find laughable, being that I’ve been… a victim of their shadow-banning for years. So let’s ask them… and see what they say. And if they want to commit perjury, well, then, they’re going to have to pay the consequences — and then they might do a perp walk after all.”
Perkins pointed out that while Twitter might be a private company, “they’ve become the public square. … They’re like a public utility… like a telephone company. And can you imagine the telephone company refusing to do service with one person because they don’t like their politics? But that’s essentially what we have with Big Tech.” And worse, he explained, since the Biden administration was colluding with these platforms to squelch “disinformation.”
“If you’re on the government clock,” Fallon argued, “… and using taxpayer resources to meddle in politics and campaigning — you’re breaking federal law. And it seems to us [from] what we’ve uncovered thus far, that’s exactly what went on. That’s why another [reason] we need to call some of these former executives and current executives of Big Tech [before Congress and ask], ‘Have government officials [been] pressuring you and telling you to edit political free speech?’”
Asked if Twitter violated election laws, the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky, who served on the Federal Election Commission (FEC) from 2006-2007, replied, “The answer to that is yes.” But, he told Perkins, “In September of last year, the Federal Election Commission, which has authority over investigating violations of our federal campaign finance laws, actually dismissed complaints that have been filed against Twitter — not only for shadow-banning Republican elected officials and candidates, but also for suppressing the Hunter Biden laptop story.”
Twitter executives claimed they hadn’t coordinated with the Biden campaign. But also, von Spakovsky, explained, Jack Dorsey’s team insisted they had “a bona fide commercial reason for suppressing the Hunter Biden story, which was their internal policy against publishing hacked materials.” But now that we know they were lying, the FEC needs “to reopen that file, reconsider the case, and potentially make criminal referrals to the Justice Department for any Twitter executives who committed perjury in their testimony to the FEC,” he insisted. After all, it’s “a potential violation of campaign finance law,” the former commissioner pointed out.
The lawyers who filed the original complaints need to go back to the FEC and say, “You might need to reconsider your decision to close the file based on this newly uncovered evidence,” von Spakovsky urged. At the end of the day, the FEC has civil authority, “so they can impose fines and … penalties on anyone violating campaign finance laws, including a corporation.”
In the meantime, expect an intense, in-depth investigation of Twitter and all of the social media platforms suspected of cracking down on conservative or politically inconvenient messaging. “This is the best $44 billion I’ve seen spent in my lifetime,” Fallon insisted. “I mean, thank you, Elon Musk. It’s like the Wizard of Oz, and he’s pulled back the curtain, and we find that all of our suspicions have been confirmed.”
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-12-15 14:51:282022-12-15 14:51:28Musk’s Twitter Buy ‘The Best $44 Billion I’ve Seen Spent in My Lifetime’: Congressman
It has been announced that the New Cambridge Dictionary definition of a Woman is, “A person who lives and acts as a female.”
This is the dictionary commonly used in postsecondary education.
What WOKE LGBTQMxyz garbage — in case you aren’t familiar with the acronym; attached are some definitions.
Here’s some additional info for you.
Transgender’s have an underlying mental illness — see the book “Trans Life Survivor” by Walt Heyer
There is no such thing as gender change or sex change — neutering is what it really amounts to (unless you are a female transgender with male sex organs who continues to impregnate women).
There is no such thing as gender dysphoria which the Mayo clinic describes as the feeling of discomfort or distress that might occur in people whose gender identity differs from their sex assigned at birth or sex related physical characteristics. There is only dysphoria or a state of unease or generalized dissatisfaction with life/ Is this a good reason for a person to change their sex either mentally by affirmation and/or with surgery ?
The goal of the LGBTQMxyz community is to feminize, emasculate and in some cases mutilate boys/men while pushing “toxic masculinity” and to masculate or in many cases mutilate girls/women.
The left’s and WOKE societies push for the LGBTQMxyz narrative has traction partially because they are disciples of the notion that if you own the language you own the narrative.
Here’s some of the language used that we should be aware of and dispute that feeds the LGBTQMxyz narrative:
Gender Identity Disorder
Gender Affirming
Gender Assignment at Birth
Transgender
Nonbinary person
Gender Neutral
LGBTQQIAAPP persons make up less than 3% of population yet the media & leftists in Congress have given them power & influence way beyond what they should have.
LGBTQQIAAP stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Questioning, Intersex, Asexual, Allies and Pansexual, with all laying under the umbrella of Queer.
Lesbian means women that are attracted to women.
Gay means men that are attracted to men.
Bisexual means men or women that are attracted to both men and women.
Transgender means anyone whose gender identity, expression or behavior differs from the sexual identity of their biological birth.
Questioning means anyone who is in question towards their gender identity.
Queer refers to a non-straight person, and is hence an umbrella term for the non-straights.
Intersex means a person that is born with both male and female biological features.
Asexual means a person that is not sexually attracted to others, but it doesn’t mean they do not fall in love with others, they can be attracted by someone, just that they do not have to need to act it out sexually. Some asexual people are happier on their own, others are happiest with a group of close friends. Other asexual people have a desire to form more intimate romantic relationships, and will date and seek long-term partnerships. Asexual people are just as likely to date sexual people as we are to date each other. Also, there are different kinds of asexuality such as grey-asexual, someone who has sexual attractions very rarely, and demi-sexual, which is someone who only feels sexual attractions for someone after already developing a strong bond with them. For some sexual arousal is a fairly regular occurrence, though it is not associated with a desire to find a sexual partner or partners. Some will occasionally masturbate, but feel no desire for partnered sexuality. Other asexual people experience little or no arousal. It is because they do not care about sex, asexual people generally do not see a lack of sexual arousal as a problem to be corrected, and focus their energy on enjoying other types of arousal and pleasure.
Allies (or Allied) means straight people that are supportive to the LGBT(QQIAAP) community.
Pansexual means people that are attracted to others with gender not a factor being considered.
Pansexual people are often mixed up with bisexual people as they both may date both men or women. Gender of another person is not important to pansexual people as they are attracted solely to the person himself/herself and the gender does not contribute to the attraction.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-12-15 01:51:282022-12-15 01:51:28Cambridge Dictionary’s New Definition of a ‘Woman’
Those who seek to streamline online discourse, according to “official standards”, end up impoverishing public debate.
Over the course of the past decade, numerous regulatory authorities, both public and private, have increasingly positioned themselves as guardians of the integrity of our public sphere, standing watch over the content of information, and flagging or suppressing information deemed to be harmful, misleading, or offensive.
The zeal with which these gatekeepers defend their power over the public sphere became evident when billionaire Elon Musk promised to undo Twitter’s policy of censoring anything that contradicted leftist ideology or questioned the safety of Covid vaccines. There was an uproar, a wringing of hands, and lamentations, as “experts worried” that Twitter would collapse into a den of “far right” extremists and misinformers.
Sound and fury
Threats by the EU Commission to fine Twitter or even completely ban the app in Europe, if it did not enforce EU regulations on hate speech and misinformation, show that the hand-wringing over Twitter’s potential embrace of free speech is much more than empty rhetoric: the European Commission has declared its intention to force Twitter to revert to its old censorship policies if it does not play ball. According to Euronews,
The European Commission has warned Elon Musk that Twitter must do much more to protect users from hate speech, misinformation and other harmful content, or risk a fine and even a ban under strict new EU content moderation rules.
Thierry Breton, the EU’s commissioner for digital policy, told the billionaire Tesla CEO that the social media platform will have to significantly increase efforts to comply with the new rules, known as the Digital Services Act, set to take effect next year.
Censorship has recently occurred principally on two fronts: Covid “misinformation” and “hate speech.” Some forms of censorship are applied by agencies of the State, such as courts and police officers; others by private companies, such as Twitter, LinkedIn and Google-YouTube. The net effect is the same in both cases: an increasingly controlled and filtered public sphere, and a shrinking of liberty of discussion around a range of topics deemed too sensitive or “dangerous” to be discussed openly and freely.
Censorship, whether public or private, has proliferated in recent years:
First, there was Canada’s bizarre claim that people had an enforceable human right to be referred to by their preferred pronouns
Next, UK police were investigating citizens for using language the police deemed “offensive”
Then, we saw Big Tech giants, in particular Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, censoring perspectives that dissented from their version of scientific and moral orthodoxy on issues such as transgender rights, vaccine safety, effective Covid treatment protocols, and the origins of SARS-CoV-2.
Now, advocates of censorship have argued that it is all to the good that vile, hateful and discriminatory opinions, as well as every conceivable form of medical and scientific “misinformation,” are shut out of our public sphere. After all, this makes the public sphere a “safe” place for citizens to exchange information and opinions. On this view, we need to purge the public sphere of voices that are toxic, hateful, harmful, and “misleading” on issues like electoral politics, public health policies, and minority rights.
Thin ice
While there is a strong case to be made for censorship of certain forms of manifestly dangerous speech, such as exhortations to suicide or direct incitement to violence, the hand of the censor must be firmly tied behind his back, so that he cannot easily decide for everyone else what is true or false, just or unjust, “accurate” or “misleading”, innocent or offensive.
For once you hand broad, discretionary powers to someone to decide which sorts of speech are offensive, erroneous, misleading, or hate-inducing, they will start to purge the public sphere of views they happen to find ideologically, philosophically, or theologically disagreeable. And there is certainly no reason to assume that their judgement calls on what counts as true or false, innocent or toxic speech will be correct.
The fundamental mistake behind the argument for aggressive censorship policies is the notion that there is a set of Truths out there on contested political and scientific questions that are crystal clear or can be validated by the “right experts”; and that anyone who contradicts these a priori Truths must be either malicious or ignorant. If this were true, the point of public discussion would just be to clarify and unpack what the “experts” agree are the Truths of science and morality.
But there is no such set of pristine Truths that can be validated by human beings independently of a free and open discussion, especially on difficult and complex matters such as infection control, justice, climate change, and economic policy. Rather, the truth must be discovered gradually, through the vibrant back-and-forth of dialogue, debate, refutation, and counter-refutation. In short, public deliberation is fundamentally a discovery process. The truth is not known in advance, but uncovered gradually, as an array of evidence is examined and put to the test, and as rival views clash and hold each other accountable.
If we empower a censor to quash opinions that are deemed by powerful actors to be offensive, false, or misleading, we are effectively short-circuiting that discovery process. When we put our faith in a censor to keep us on the straight and narrow, we are assuming that the censor can stand above the stream of conflicting arguments, and from a position of epistemic and/or moral superiority, pick out the winning positions in advance.
We are assuming that some people are so smart, or wise, or virtuous, that they do not actually need to get their hands dirty and participate in a messy argument with their adversaries, or get their views challenged in public. We are assuming that some people are more expert and well-informed than anyone else, including other recognised experts, and may therefore decide, for everyone else, which opinions are true and which are false, which are intrinsically offensive and which are “civil,” and which are “facts” and which are “fake news.”
Needless to say, this is an extraordinarly naïve and childish illusion, that no realistic grasp of human nature and cognition could possibly support. But it is a naive and childish illusion that has been enthusiastically embraced and propagated by Big Tech companies such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn in their rules of content moderation, and it is a view that is increasingly finding its way into the political discourse and legislative programmes of Western countries that were once champions of freedom of expression.
It is imperative that the advocates of heavy-handed censorship do not win the day, because if they do, then the public sphere will become a hall of mirrors, in which the lazy, self-serving mantras of a few powerful actors bounce, virtually unchallenged, from one platform to another, while dissenting voices are consigned to the shadows and dismissed as the rantings of crazy people.
In a heavily censored public sphere, scientifically weak and morally vacuous views of the world will gain public legitimacy, not because they have earned people’s trust in an open and honest exchange of arguments, but because they have been imposed by the arbitrary will of a few powerful actors.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-12-14 13:51:232022-12-14 13:51:23Political and Scientific Censorship Short-circuits the Quest for Truth
“Maybe because I am from China,” said one employee on January 7, “I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation.” pic.twitter.com/LtonK0gfS3
Elon Musk’s Twitter released another batch of internal discussions on Monday, which revealed that an employee from China tried to warn fellow Twitter employees that censorship is wrong. The employee was then shut down by a coworker who bizarrely retorted: “censorship by a government is very different than censorship of the government.”
“Maybe because I am from China, I deeply understand how censorship can destroy the public conversation,” a Chinese Twitter employee said to colleagues during an internal discussion about whether or not to ban then-President Donald Trump’s account.
A fellow Twitter employee responded to their Chinese coworker saying, “I understand this fear, but I also think it’s important to understand that censorship by a government is very different than censorship of the government.”
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Some of these techniques are playing out before our eyes.
We all know the cons of Twitter, but one of the pros is discovering new and interesting people.
One of my favorite new follows is Benjamin Carlson, a public relations guru and former editor at The Atlantic. Carlson’s tweets are among the best you’ll find on Twitter, and he clearly has a keen understanding of the intersections between media and government, power and propaganda (both current and historically).
Rights—financial, legal, and civil—are contingent on compliance
Mass conformity of beliefs and behaviors is demanded
Power is concentrated in inner ring of elite institutions and people
Semi-organized violence is permitted (in some cases)
Propaganda targets enemies of the state regime
Entire classes singled out for persecution
Extra-legal actions are condoned against internal regime opponents
Harsh legal enforcement against unfavored classes
Private and public levers of power are used to enforce adherence to state dogmas
The list is a bit troubling. At the very least, some of these techniques are playing out before our eyes. This is certainly not to say that the US is a totalitarian state, however.
There are many definitions of totalitarianism, and I don’t believe one can seriously argue that the United States has arrived there. But authoritarianism is certainly in the air, and it emanates most strongly from our nation’s capital.
While both the political Right and the political Left accuse each other of harboring tyrannical ambitions, the philosopher Karl Popper offered a clue as to when a legitimate government crosses the line and becomes a tyrannical one.
“You can choose whatever name you like for the two types of government,” Popper wrote. “I personally call the type of government which can be removed without violence ‘democracy,’ and the other ‘tyranny.’”
Popper’s quote is an important reminder: the people ultimately have the right to choose their government. In his seminal Two Treatises of Government, John Locke carved out what would become the foundation of America’s founding philosophy, as FEE’s Dan Sanchez recently explained.
Equality, in the original sense, not of equal abilities or equal wealth, but of non-subjugation;
Inalienable Rights, not to government entitlements, but to life, liberty, and property;
Democracy, in the original sense, not of mere majoritarian voting, but of popular sovereignty: the idea that governments should not be masters, but servants of the people;
Consent of the Governed: the idea that governments can only legitimately govern by the consent of the governed, i.e., the sovereign people;
Limited Government: the idea that the sole purpose and proper scope of legitimate government is only to secure the rights of the people;
Right of Revolution: the idea that any government that oversteps its limits and tramples the very rights it was charged with securing is a tyranny, and that the people have a right to resist, alter, and even abolish tyrannical governments.
As the state drifts further and further from its moral purpose, it becomes more and more important to understand the rights of man and the limits of government.
Jonathan Miltimore is the Managing Editor of FEE.org. His writing/reporting has been the subject of articles in TIME magazine, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, Forbes, Fox News, and the Star Tribune. Bylines: Newsweek, The Washington Times, MSN.com, The Washington Examiner, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, the Epoch Times.
This is still America, not Stalinist Russia, which means people who try to persecute their political enemies will eventually get their comeuppance. The fifth Twitter file release showed Twitter employees demanded former President Trump be banned from the platform even though the team assigned to evaluate his tweets didn’t believe he had violated any policies. Yesterday, Elon Musk disbanded the group of outside advisors formed to moderate content on the platform.
I have every faith that our corrupt Justice Department and FBI will eventually get their comeuppance, too. Lying to the FISA court to get Trump, really? They’re still after Trump, now with a special counsel assigned to investigate efforts by Trump and some of his supporters to contest the results of the 2020 election. The inquiry has all the hallmarks of a partisan witch hunt. The counsel’s name is Jack Smith and his mother-in-law was a George Soros senior fellow at the Soros-funded Open Society Foundation. It is not disputed George Soros is a far-left operative who has funded all manner of chaos and disruption in recent years, including the many Soros-funded progressive prosecutors across the country who refuse to follow the law.
Jack Smith’s wife is a high-dollar donor to Joe Biden’s campaign and other Democrat-related causes, like Rashida Tlaib. The wife also produced a fawning documentary on Michelle Obama – her life, hopes, and book tour – a documentary Michelle Obama said she was excited about.
When Jack Smith was chief of the Public Integrity Section at the Justice Department, he arranged a meeting with Lois Lerner at the IRS to discuss how they could charge Tea Parties and other groups on the Right with conspiracy to violate U.S. laws. Lois Lerner, you might recall, spearheaded the effort to block conservative nonprofits and criminalize political dissent. Who better than Jack Smith to head up current efforts to persecute the Biden administration’s political enemies? In appointing Smith as special counsel, Attorney General Merrick Garland made a point of saying Donald Trump had just declared his candidacy for the 2024 election.
This is the same Justice Department that issued a subpoena for five years of records from a conservative group in Alabama that opposes sex-change treatments for minors. The same Justice Department who intervened to get a light sentence of little more than a year for the left-wing terrorist lawyer who firebombed a police car in New York during a riot when sentencing guidelines called for ten years imprisonment. Reward your friends, punish your enemies. The Justice Department’s FBI is busy purging conservative agents from its ranks.
The desire to persecute political enemies extends beyond the old Twitter and the Justice Department, reaching into other corners of Democrat World. In September, it was reported the U.S. Postal Service was monitoring social media posts to gather intelligence about any plans to protest against Joe Biden. This is the same Postal Service whose unions endorsed Biden in the 2020 election and actually helped Hillary Clinton’s candidacy in 2016. Speaking of social media, Facebook has been spying on private messages and reporting people who question the legitimacy of the 2020 election to the FBI. The FBI used the information to try to gin up more phony domestic terrorism cases against people on the Right, but it didn’t work and ended up being a waste of time.
Democrat Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island wrote to the IRS insisting they use their 87,000 new IRS agents to investigate conservative groups and revoke their tax exemptions. In the correspondence, Whitehouse only mentioned groups on the Right, his political enemies, not the abundance of dark money groups and documented tax exemption abusers on the Left.
The open persecution of political enemies indicates the authoritarian Left thinks it has won and only needs to mop up. But I’m sitting here looking at former Twitter executives getting exposed daily and a robust media ecosphere on the Right that reported all the stories I told you about today. So, to the Left I say, you are completely delusional. You’re not even close to winning. Not only that, you are going to get exactly what you deserve for trying to silence people like me and criminalize the actions of people who oppose you.
“Why, after Trump was elected, did Twitter hire over a dozen ex FBI/CIA agents and place them in Senior Management roles?”
It gets more sinister by the day. We thought we knew, we knew nothing.
Not just the FBI, almost the entire intelligence community has been/still working from within social media platforms to keep tabs on users and suppress pieces of information from being accessed and shared. DIG DEEPER! #TwitterFiles2https://t.co/mlL7yxjYDypic.twitter.com/2CMpIHx3yp
Elon Musk, Your new company @Twitter has many ex FBI/CIA agents in high ranks. Should probably do a little housecleaning.
Kevin Michelena – current Twitter Sr. Corporate Security Analyst. Ex FBI Intelligence Analyst 12 years
Doug Hunt – current Twitter Senior Director. Ex FBI Special Agent 20 years.
Mark Jaroszewski – current Twitter Director Corporate Security/Risk. Ex FBI 20 years
Douglas Turner – current Twitter Senior Manager, Corporate and Executive Security Services. Ex FBI 14 years. Ex Secret Service 7 years.
Patrick G.– current Twitter Head of Corporate Security. Ex FBI Special Agent 23 years.
Karen Walsh – current Twitter Director – Corporate Resilience. Ex FBI Special Agent 21 years
Russell Handorf – current Twitter Senior Staff Technical Program Manager. Ex FBI 10 years.
Michael B. – current Twitter Senior Corporate Security Manager. Ex FBI 23 years.
Vincent Lucero – current Twitter Senior Security Manager. Ex FBI Special Agent 22 years.
Kevin L. – current Twitter Corporate Security Manager. Ex FBI Special Agent 25 years.
Matthew W. – current Twitter Senior Director of Product Trust, Revenue Policy, and Counsel Systems & Analytics. Ex FBI 15 years.
Claire O. – current Twitter Senior Corporate Security Analyst. Ex FBI 8 years.
Bruce A. – current Twitter Director, Corporate Security. Ex FBI 23 years.
Jeff Carlton – current Twitter Senior Manager. Ex FBI & CIA Intelligence Analyst 3 years.
What do all of these Twitter employees have in common? They were ALL hired since @realDonaldTrump was elected.
Why, after Trump was elected, did Twitter hire over a dozen ex FBI/CIA agents and place them in Senior Management roles?
@elonmusk – how many “Jim Bakers” are imbedded in Twitter, possibly working against you? or…..”watching” you. I’d advise you to do some investigating and clean house.
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‘Twitter is both a social media company and a crime scene,’ says Elon Musk, its new owner.
In October, following months of speculation and controversy, Elon Musk closed on his deal to acquire Twitter.
Among the most valuable assets Musk obtained in the US$43 billion purchase were reams of secret internal communications amongst Twitter executives.
Musk made those communications public over the weekend, and summed up their contents by tweeting: “Twitter is both a social media company and a crime scene.”
Musk has tasked three independent journalists with unpacking that crime scene to the public, providing they publish their findings on Twitter first: Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger, and Bari Weiss.
The Taibbi-Shellenberger-Weiss reports, since dubbed the Twitter Files, have set the internet on fire.
It is now without question that Twitter executives colluded with the FBI to systematically censor the speech of American citizens and a sitting American President. Their motives were political: a conclusion that is inescapable since Twitter’s leadership did their dark deeds in violation of the platform’s own policies.
Major figures at Twitter played their dystopian games while lying to the public. “We don’t shadow ban, and we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints,” former CEO Jack Dorsey claimed during the Trump presidency.
At Senate hearings, Dorsey repeatedly and explicitly told Congress that he and his employees did not let their political viewpoints interfere with Twitter’s commitment to free speech.
Dorsey and his underlings — like former Chief Legal Officer Vijaya Gadde, and Yoel Roth, former Head of Trust and Safety — insisted that any censorship they enacted flowed from safety concerns for users, not the political whims of Twitter staff.
They told users that they intended Twitter as a place to break and discuss news, a free megaphone available to all, a global town square.
Behind closed doors, Twitter executives were shadow banning users they did not like, hiding their tweets, and making their profiles unsearchable via Twitter’s search bar. Users were censored arbitrarily and in secret, with no way to know they were being censored, much less protest or appeal the vindictive bans.
What Twitter did was the equivalent of Telstra putting static on the phone lines of Greens voters, or AGL feeding remote townships intermittent power as a punishment for voting National — all the while claiming innocence. Twitter’s secretive measures were far more widespread than the many outright suspensions the public knew about at the time.
As Glenn Greenwald, another independent journalist, has since commented:
Yoel Roth, meeting with FBI weekly, and his little censorship minions absolutely degraded Twitter into little more than a full-on Democratic Party activist machine, all while lying to the public about its function. This was a massive public fraud and 2020 election interference.
Stanford University epidemiologist Dr Jay Bhattacharya was one of Twitter’s many victims. I had the pleasure of meeting Dr Bhattacharya earlier this year in Sydney. It would be hard to find a more polite, measured, and thoughtful academic.
One of the original drafters of the Great Barrington Declaration, Bhattacharya’s great sin was to speak out against Covid lockdowns and school closures from 2020 onwards.
“I spent the afternoon yesterday at Twitter HQ at the invitation of @elonmusk to find out more about the trend ‘blacklist’ that twitter placed on me,” Bhattacharya today tweeted. He continued:
Twitter 1.0 placed me on the blacklist on the first day I joined in August 2021. I think it was my pinned tweet linking to the @gbdeclaration that triggered the blacklist based on unspecified complaints Twitter received… Twitter 1.0 rejected requests for verification by me and @MartinKulldorff. Each time the reasoning (never conveyed to us) was that we were not notable enough.
The most high-profile personality to be censored and ultimately suspended by Twitter was of course President Donald Trump.
“In this specific case, we’re changing our public interest approach for his account…” was how Yoel Roth justified the decision. It was a case of making up new rules on the fly to censor conservatives, delivering verdicts first and updating Twitter policies later — all while in open communication with FBI officials.
As one critic puts it: “Twitter didn’t enforce their rules, they sat around and discussed how they could interpret their rules to silence their enemies.”
For years we were told that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the 2016 election. It appears that in reality, the FBI was colluding with Twitter with the aim of stealing the 2020 election from Trump.
A Big Tech insurrection? A digital January 6?
I began writing about social media censorship in mid-2019. At the time, I was laughed down by many followers and even friends. I was told not to be so paranoid, not to indulge in conspiracy theories.
Pre-Musk Twitter has now been caught with its hands in the proverbial cookie jar.
The wokerati can claim that the United States government colluding with Big Tech to tilt elections and censor conservative Americans is good, but they can no longer claim it didn’t happen.
And for all those upset with Elon’s takeover of the little blue bird, I have a message for you: Twitter is a private company. If you don’t like how it’s being run now, go build your own social media platform.
AUTHOR
Kurt Mahlburg is a writer and author, and an emerging Australian voice on culture and the Christian faith. He has a passion for both the philosophical and the personal, drawing on his background as a graduate… More by Kurt Mahlburg
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SAN FRANCISCO (ChurchMilitant.com) – Twitter systematically failed to remove child pornography from its platform for years, allowing accounts to operate with impunity.
The revelations came from Andrea Stroppa, who works on Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, who published a series of tweets about the council’s recent findings Friday night.
“We found several accounts that shared CSAM [child sexual abuse material], including videos of children and teens involved in sexual activities,” he wrote, explaining that “>95% of these accounts were created before Elon Musk bought Twitter. Some of these accounts have been active for years (even since 2017).”
“These accounts that shared CSAM acted with impunity for years,” he noted. “The contents of these accounts obtained over ten million views on Twitter. Yes, 10.000.000 views.”
“They won’t get any new views because Twitter has now taken down all these accounts,” he added.
Prior to Elon Musk’s takeover, Twitter refused to suspend most of the accounts posting criminal content, opting instead to delete the offending posts while allowing the accounts to remain active.
Stroppa co-authored a 17-page report in September titled “Child Porn on Twitter,” which accused prior Twitter executives of “doing next to nothing to fix” the problem of CSAM on its platform.
“Twitter is known to have very permissive policies regarding pornographic content and indeed such content is easy to find on the platform,” the report noted. “However, our research shows something much more troublesome: in the initial 20 days of September 2022, over 500 accounts shared, requested and/or publicly exchanged child pornography material.”
In a Twitter Space, @elonmusk shared the concerns he saw with Twitter that led to him wanting to purchase it. Gratitude towards @elizableu & @andst7, was voiced, for their help in exposing the child exploitation blight. Elon, since purchase, has made this #1 priority to purge. pic.twitter.com/Qw73K4dl5X
Eliza Bleu, a victim of human trafficking who now works as a child victims’ advocate, took part in a Twitter Spaces discussion Friday night discussing Twitter’s failure to prioritize child porn while spending resources on censoring voices that expressed political viewpoints Twitter did not approve of.
“I watched folks get banned over using words that aren’t even illegal to use,” Bleu said. “The child sexual abuse material had been on Twitter for four years, 10 million views, and yet if you said certain words, especially during the pandemic, especially during an election season, you were removed instantly.”
Her words echoed an earlier tweet that day: “Twitter prioritized the censorship of non-illegal speech over the removal of child sexual abuse material at scale. Let that sink in.”
It led to confirmation from Musk: “Exactly correct.”
Twitter prioritized the censorship of non-illegal speech over the removal of child sexual abuse material at scale.
Musk later joined the Twitter Spaces discussion, confirming that he is making the elimination of child porn his first priority.
“I was actually really shocked to learn about it,” he said, going on to say that “literally top priority in the whole company is that Twitter cannot be used for child exploitation.”
Bleu, who has been highly critical of Twitter’s failures to protect children on its platform, had high praise for Musk.
“I think this is a new day and time for Twitter,” said Bleu, later adding, “You’ve blown my mind. And I was Twitter’s biggest hater. … You will see children’s lives are saved as a result of these changes on Twitter.”
Trust and Safety Council
Friday’s revelations centered on Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council, tasked with removing child porn from the platform. The group plays such a key role at Twitter that Musk even tweeted, “The real CEO was the head of ‘Trust & Safety’.”
Musk and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey openly sparred over allegations Dorsey failed to do enough to remove child porn.
“It is a crime that they refused to take action on child exploitation for years!” tweeted Musk.
It led to a denial by Dorsey: “This is false.”
It is a crime that they refused to take action on child exploitation for years!
“No, it is not,” Musk retorted. “When Ella Irwin, who now runs Trust & Safety, joined Twitter earlier this year, almost no one was working on child safety. She raised this with Ned & Parag, but they rejected her staffing request. I made it top priority immediately.”
No, it is not.
When Ella Irwin, who now runs Trust & Safety, joined Twitter earlier this year, almost no one was working on child safety.
She raised this with Ned & Parag, but they rejected her staffing request.
Irwin confirmed this in a tweet: “I fought hard to get funding to replace the people working on this who left in early 2022 and was told no. At one point there were 0 engineers and very few employees working on CSE and still no funding.”
Joining the Twitter Spaces discussion, Irwin added that funding for the council had been slashed years ago, and when she joined “it was a skeleton crew.”
Bleu responded to the thread, “I like you Jack. I always did. It would be incredible if you just grew a pair and admitted that Twitter didn’t prioritize this issue and remove child sexual abuse material at scale. And you owe John Doe # 1 and # 2 a formal apology.”
I like you Jack. I always did.
It would be incredible if you just grew a pair and admitted that Twitter didn’t prioritize this issue and remove child sexual abuse material at scale.
And you owe John Doe # 1 and # 2 a formal apology.
Earlier that day, three members of Twitter’s Trust and Safety Council announced their resignations, complaining that under Musk, “the safety and wellbeing of Twitter’s users are on the decline.”
He posted a link to a New York Post article on a lawsuit accusing Twitter of leaving up child porn material after finding it did not violate the platform’s policies.
The plaintiff, John Doe, discovered explicit underage sexual videos of himself posted on Twitter in 2019. He and his mother filed complaints with Twitter asking that it be removed.
Twitter responded a week later, after the child pornography had been viewed more than 167,000 times and retweeted 2,223 times: “We’ve reviewed the content, and didn’t find a violation of our policies, so no action will be taken at this time.”
Doe wrote back in shock:
What do you mean you don’t see a problem? We both are minors right now and were minors at the time these videos were taken. We both were 13 years of age. We were baited, harassed, and threatened to take these videos that are now being posted without our permission. We did not authorize these videos AT ALL and they need to be taken down.
It was only after the Department of Homeland Security ordered Twitter to remove the illegal material that it complied.
“He was 13 years old and being extorted. What the hell is Twitter doing?” asked Professor Hany Farid, who helped develop PhotoDNA technology used to help stop the spread of child porn online.
A number of victims’ advocacy groups are backing the lawsuit, including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children; Child USA; the Canadian Centre for Child Protection; and the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, among others.
Access to DMs
The Child Porn report revealed, “Direct messages (DMs) are still the preferred communication choice” for those trading illegal content.
On Thursday it was revealed that Twitter staff have access to users’ direct messages, leading to criticism that the platform had ample opportunity to catch the offending material but failed to do so.
“If Twitter could see your DMs as detailed in the #TwitterFiles / #TwitterFiles2 drop, doesn’t this mean they had countless exchanges of Child Pornographic Materials through DMs on their radar and just sat on it despite having tools to stop, report, and suppress it?” asked political commentator Malcolm Flex.
If Twitter could see your DMs as detailed in the #TwitterFiles / #TwitterFiles2 drop, doesn’t this mean they had countless exchanges of Child Pornographic Materials through DMs on their radar and just sat on it despite having tools to stop, report, and suppress it?
— Malcolm Fle✘ – 🇺🇸Amoral Mercenary🇺🇸 (@Malcolm_fleX48) December 9, 2022
The evidence directly contradicts claims by Dorsey and former Twitter lawyer Vijaya Gadde, who insisted Twitter did not shadowban accounts based on political viewpoint. They also made these claims before Congress.
These are my views as a woman living in England, on how the culture and spirit of my country has changed over 50 years. Why the country does not feel protected or strong any more, how it has lost, and is losing it values and decency, and how we are daily losing our free speech.
Be alert and of sober mind. Your enemy the devil prowls around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour. 1 Peter 5:8
Quite some number of years ago whilst attending an interview for a job, the interviewer asked me a very unexpected question. It was a question, a statement, which has remained with me since, and for which I often think about:
“Can a Leopard, change its spots”?
My instinct in answering the question at the time, was to apply it to human nature, and to state that they can, no matter what their personality has been perceived to be. There is always the possibility that despite being a certain type of person, people can, and do indeed change for the better.
However, despite feeling quite satisfied and very considerate with my ‘on the spot’ answer, I do remember coming away pondering much more deeply upon it. There was possibly a lot more depth to that question, and it deserved much more consideration.
Life in the Jungle
In observing human nature, a British reality TV show entitled “I’m a Celebrity – Get me Out of Here” is an entertaining yet somewhat difficult show to watch. Set in the outback of Australia, the format consists of celebrities living in extreme conditions, with none of their creature comforts, undertaking various challenges to win food for the group and avoid being voted out by the viewers.
Living in those conditions as members of a team who have never mixed before, often highlights a side of the celebrities’ personality that the public may have been unaware of.
This year there has been an enormous amount of controversy in relation to a very well- known politician taking part. It has been a major topic of conversation and distraction to say the least.
Matt Hancock, the former Health Secretary of State for Health and Social Care from 2018 – 2021 for the UK, who strictly enforced Covid laws during that time and then broke them himself, announced he was entering the jungle to highlight ‘Dyslexia’ and to embrace popular culture and get more people interested in politics. He also stated he wanted to show the public that politicians were ‘normal’ in the three weeks he would hopefully spend in the jungle.
Karma Chameleon
In attempting to normalize a politician’s appearance he appeared to sail through every single challenge and also appeared to become popular with some of the viewers through acting very cordial and considerate to his camp mates. He was likeable.
On the questioning of some of his parliamentary decisions and actions, and the pain he had caused to the public from team members in the jungle, and his breaking of the covid rules himself that he had enforced on others, he attempted to weakly appeal to a forgiving side of their nature. The only time he became indignant was when he said he had not broken any Covid laws because those rules were purely ‘guidance’
Whilst watching small clips from the show, it was also interesting to hear him speak about his affair and how he simply fell in love with his aide, Gina Coladangelo, during Covid.
I wondered if he felt any consideration towards his wife and three children at home in the UK, and how they would react to that being broadcast, and if this was now the popular culture he was embracing, and for what reason?
There were of course other celebrities in the show with chequered pasts. One was the singer Boy George. Ironically, he is known for a famous song called ‘Karma Chameleon’. Here he was living amongst lizards and snakes. Together they all joined in singing the popular song.
The show became a strange and bizarre parody where the former Health Secretary who in the real world would often been seen running away from journalists at top speed, or dodging important questions with a basic arrogant ‘No’, now saw his redemption as answering some very basic questions with a softly spoken voice in a ‘reality show’.
One member of the team wanted Covid sweeping under the carpet now he had answered the basics. They were there in the jungle to have fun, in a once in a lifetime experience, and get on together. But, did they really got rid of the elephant in the room?
Is this the general attitude towards the ‘Amnesty’ that is now being manipulated and sought across the world, in regards to those who have committed very serious crimes against humanity?
Is it too painful and unforgiving of people to face the really serious consequences which were caused by the unmerited and inhumane actions of politicians against us?
The Snake
In a recent reading of a poem ‘The Snake’ penned by Oscar Brown, and recently read by Donald J Trump, once more I thought about the question once posed to me of a leopard changing its spots, and the inherent nature of a snake.
After a woman shows love and consideration to a dying snake, the recovered snake then bites and kills the one who has saved his life. On complaining, the poem ends with:
“O shut up silly woman, said the reptile with a grin
“You knew damn well I was a snake before you let me in”
The correlation between the nature of animals and reptiles in relation to human nature is often misunderstood, most especially as some animals have become domesticated. However, I do believe that the example of the leopard and the reptile can serve as an example to humans in that caution should always be sought in that some people have traits in them that can fool you, manipulate you, and even kill you without any conscience.
From a Christian perspective, a forgiveness towards others is usually coupled with also forgetting the perceived offence.
Manipulators, are very aware of this.
However, history, although divisive, and sometimes questionable, also tells us that millions, if not billions have been intentionally killed under cruel dictatorships. These are instances we should never forget.
Under one example only from the recent history of China, under a five-year plan from 1958 to 1962 it is claimed that in his Great Leap Forward policy, up to 45 million people were killed under the dictatorship of Mao Zedong through famine and murder. It is also claimed that between two and three million victims were tortured to death, for slight infractions under that regime.
The Great Leap Forward is a good study in how people can be divided and have all of their belongings taken from them.
Post Covid, it is quite alarming to find that such an historical event is now being quietly swept under the carpet and that many people do indeed have a wish to forget it and move on. This may be because they cannot see the bigger picture on what is being slowly implemented over a proposed 10-year world-wide plan by globalists, or they cannot believe that people can be so cruel, most especially as we have had the perception of being free people up until now. It may be that they have not been personally damaged or affected by the cruel and inhumane way they were treated. They may believe it is all over.
Matt Hancock – Leopard, Snake or Human?
My final observations about MP for West Suffolk, Matt Hancock are not definitive. His heart and his actions are known only to God, the Creator of mankind, who loves justice and righteousness. The parts we play in every aspect of life, most especially when we cause harm to others are ‘answerable’
Leaders are people we should be able to trust, but we no longer do. They should not consider themselves to be celebrities, but should be servants to the people.
Already, the launch of his new book ‘The Pandemic Diaries’ is becoming questionable in that he is being accused of re-writing history.
We cannot afford to forget or re-write history.
The Human Jungle
Whilst currently resting in our hammocks, it was recently alleged that plans were afoot to create ‘climate lockdowns’ in the city of Oxford for 2024, which would restrict residents who do not possess a ‘pass/permit’ from using cars on busy roads during peak periods.
Under the £6.5 million scheme, the council have stated these the allegations are false, and that the scheme is not a climate lockdown but a ‘trial’ and that they are creating filters to give priority to buses, taxis and cyclists to see if the traffic will flow more freely and ease congestion around Oxford.
That’s a very expensive experiment!
Residents will not be locked down from entering or leaving their area but automatic number plate recognition cameras will register if a driver without permission attempts to use a road they shouldn’t.
After claiming that staff and councillors have been abused from residents who have protested due to the ‘misinformation’, they have stated they are now working with Thames Valley Police to report the most extreme cases of abuse.
Bearing in mind that many leading councillors in governmental positions, together with some heads of police forces, can be ‘common purpose’ trained, meaning that they are trained in using behavioural modification (coercion for the greater good) to lead outside of authority to their own agenda, does indicate that the public are now not completely blind to lies which eventually can lead to the real reason why permits have to be gained in order to travel in the city where they already pay council tax.
Permits and passes to move freely, regardless of filters to ease traffic should not be on the agenda. Is this another microcosm experiment for use on a larger scale across the country and the world? Do permits and passes equate to ‘pass-ports’ and who are the people who will may be disqualified further down the line?
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There’s an old saying: Don’t do anything you wouldn’t want reported on the front page of the newspaper. So many stunning revelations have been reported in the last couple days from the release of the Twitter files and the Missouri versus Biden Big Tech censorship case, there’s no room on the front page left.
An FBI agent testified in a deposition in the censorship case that FBI headquarters put its “stamp of approval” on requests to social media companies to block specific information before the 2020 elections. Requests would get routed through FBI field offices around the country, federal prosecutors, FBI and Justice Department lawyers, and FBI headquarters before being sent to the agent’s “command post” in San Francisco for action. The agent further testified social media platforms frequently complied with FBI requests to take down posts.
A State Department official testified during his deposition that the State Department has been funding online fact checkers. He named the Poynter Institute which operates Politifact, a notoriously left-wing fact checker. You might recall Facebook admitted in a lawsuit these so-called ‘fact checkers’ are really just “opinion”, left-wing opinion your State Department is only too happy to pay for.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk released a first set of files showing how former Twitter executives decided to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story three weeks before the 2020 presidential election. Twitter suppressed the story under its policy against “hacked” information, but there was no evidence the information was hacked.
In a second set of files released just yesterday, it was revealed the platform used several means to silence conservatives, including blacklists and shadow-banning, techniques which former Twitter executives had denied using and dismissed as conspiracy theory. The targets included a well-known opponent of the Covid lockdowns and two conservative radio talk show hosts. As one Twitter engineer put it, “we control visibility quite a bit. And we control the amplification of your content quite a bit. And normal people do not know how much we do.” Twitter was taking down posts or limiting visibility as many as 200 times a day.
The head of the team was Jeff Carlton, a former U.S. Naval Intelligence officer who had previously worked for the FBI counterintelligence division and CIA. I told you earlier this week Twitter’s deputy general counsel who had advised the company to block the Hunter Biden laptop story had previously worked for the FBI. Elon Musk fired counsel James Baker this week for suppressing information and for giving an “unconvincing” explanation for why he reviewed the new Twitter files before they were published.
So we have more than just proof of concerted action between the Biden administration and Twitter executives to support the theory Twitter had become an extension of the government to suppress speech. We have a revolving door that placed former intelligence agency and FBI officials inside Twitter at critical junctures, adding weight to the case Twitter had become a state actor. Personnel is policy, as they say.
The Missouri Attorney General – now Senator-elect Eric Schmitt who brought the censorship case said:
This is a story of the federal government with all of its vast power and authority colluding with some of the biggest companies in the history of the world to censor Americans to put their thumb on the scale for what’s out there that people can actually read about before an election. It ought to scare the bejesus out of every American, I don’t care about your political stripe.
They suppressed speech and silenced conservatives, but they got caught. Moral of the Story: If you can’t do the time on the front page of the newspaper, don’t do the crime.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-12-10 08:51:262022-12-10 08:51:26Lawsuit Depositions and Twitter Files Tell the Tale
The year 1984 has a special significance for anyone studying totalitarian regimes, thanks to the work of that name by English author George Orwell. That’s certainly true for me, and it’s personal, too.
On the night of 8 August 1984, according to my secret police dossier, which I was able to get a copy of recently, a young lad and I were on this winding country road in the Börzsöny mountains in Hungary. We were on a camp organised by a ‘rebel’ Catholic priest, Father Miklós Blanckenstein, or just ”Miki”, as he preferred to be called. He had disobeyed the Catholic Hierarchy and the Pope (Paul VI and his weak successors), who urged Catholics to accept Communism and collaborate with them. (A bit like Pope Francis and the Chinese Christians today.)
Well, this young man and I had been having one of those deep talks you tend to when you’re young and seeking the meaning of life and that sort of thing. I was probably only five/six years older than him, but had travelled, been in the Army, and wrestled with the “big questions” for longer than he had. Also, I knew my Bible, which he evidently didn’t.
We’d reached a village and turned around, it was late, maybe 2 A.M., with us going down this narrow, forested mountain lane with ditches on either side (for the rainwater) and suddenly we heard this roar, as of a vehicle coming down the road at high speed. The vehicle turned out to be a four-door jeep-type light military transport, inspired by the US Jeep of WWII fame. It was a GAZ-69, if memory serves.
The youth urgently grabbed my arm and said we should hide in the forest! I pointed out to him that we had done nothing wrong and if we did go hide, it would appear we had something to hide, which we didn’t. He agreed. The Gaz went roaring past us, screeched to halt and came roaring back at us at high speed. If we were in any danger, it was from the crazy driver!
A couple of armed soldier-types came tumbling out of the vehicle and made straight for us. One shoved an AK-47 against the ribs on my right side, another against my left side. They ordered us to get in. I recall I managed to say something like, ”if you insist”! I ended up in the back with these two on either side. I suppose my friend must have been in the front.
Eventually, I said to one of the soldiers: ”You guys are not too bright! If you shoot me, you’ll kill him too!” They muttered something, but one moved his AK. I reckoned these were not elite soldiers, as their AKs were the old ones with the wooden stocks, and I had seen newer ones than that in the hands of African guerrillas.
It turned out they were part of the Border Guard and my friends on the camp (some 120 or so) told me they were not the cream of the crop within what was then the Hungarian People’s Army.
Actually, the Hungarian people had very little to do with it, it was the Hungarian Communist Party’s armed wing in actual fact.
We then roared along the narrow road and the Border Guards accused us of being terrorists and asked where our ”hideout” was. I informed them that we didn’t have a hideout, just a tent camp and many of our members were in a clearing to the right of the road playing a popular (and for the time, edgy) rock opera, István a Király (Stephen the King, which was about Saint Stephen of Hungary, the country’s first Christian king, crowned in 1000 A.D.) There were a lot of elements in the rock opera, including parts of the script that the Communist regime would not like, if it had paid attention. I recall there was a scene when a rebel against St. Stephen, Koppány, sings, purportedly against Christianity, saying ”we don’t want a God who can’t speak Hungarian”. Of course one could take this as railing against the Catholic Church of the day, which prayed in Latin, but everybody understood it was all about the Soviet Union, the ”god” who couldn’t speak Hungarian. And there were many other similar elements in the rock opera.
Of course, this was the summer of 1984, when the grip of János Kádár’s ’Hungarian Socialist Worker’s Party’ (Communist Party) was loosening, but nobody knew when the Soviets would roll in their vast numbers of tanks. Everybody also knew from bitter experience that the West – as always – be that at Yalta in 1945, Berlin in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968 or Vietnam in 1973 – would never intervene to save the victims of Communism. The West during the Cold War did not cover itself in glory, to put it mildly. So people in Communist countries lay low and watched what they said and did. But not everyone.
Miki, our priest, was one such. He organised ”illegal” camps where he held mass in the mornings, organised outings during the day, and then arranged Biblical plays and other fun things, which also included lots of singing and dancing around the campfire. On one of the days, we visited the nearby ruin of Drégely Castle, lost to the Turks in 1552, led by György Szondi, who fought to the death with his garrison. Unusually, the Turkish Pasha, Hadim Ali, allowed him a proper funeral. His two pages, or squires, would not submit to the wiles or threats of the Pasha and remain famous in song and poetry.
When we were there, it was hard to tell where there was a gate or where there was wall. It was all overgrown, but still fascinating because of its history.
But, let’s go back to the night of the Border Guard’s ”visit”. Once they spotted our friends playing the rock opera through a car sound system, they stopped and demanded that everyone go get their pass books, or ”work books”. This was a kind of pass, or I.D., that had every detail of the person in it and also where they were employed. As it was a criminal offence to be unemployed, some of my friends would be worried.
The paramilitary types then asked where our camp was, and as I was one of the older guys, I reckoned I’d lead them to the camp. It was on the other side of the road, past the ditch and through some trees. (Trees are very common on both sides of country roads in Hungary, for shade in summer.) At that point, one of the young Border Guard soldiers started swearing, as the saying goes, ”like a trooper”.
”Hush!’, said my previously-frightened friend. ”There are believers there!!” At this, the poor chap was filled with fear, and although he was holding the gun and we were unarmed, he sputtered that he was sorry and he would not go into the camp! While he was scared, we felt uplifted. Quite an experience!
The rest of us went through to our tents and got our ”pass books”, except me. I was lucky, I was a British citizen, so I got my passport. As we trooped back over the road to the clearing, I told all the younger ones, some of whom were really scared, to get behind me. I saw the guy whose car it was beckoning me (he was from an aristocratic family, hence he had to live by driving a taxi). He was standing with the officer of the Border Guards, so I got everyone to go line up behind me and walked up to this lieutenant. He took my passport, and laughed with my taxi driver friend, and said: ”British!
He must be a friend of James Bond. He’s a spy!” And they had a good laugh.
I then asked the lieutenant to come for a brief walk with me, which he did. We had a conversation that went something like this:
Me: “You realise I’m Hungarian, but I’m now a British journalist.” Him: “Interesting. But you do realise this is an illegal activity.” Me: “What’s illegal about it? We’re camping in the middle of nowhere.” Him: “True, but you are not registered.” Me: “What are you talking about?” Him: “The priest didn’t register the camp with the religious authorities.” Me: “And why should he?” Him: “It’s the law. All activities must first be registered with the legal authorities.”
By this time, we were both in good humour. He was saying what he had to say and I could tell he wasn’t into this. I pointed out to him that the People’s Republic of Hungary was advertising itself as a ”Reform Communist” country, and touting the good life people enjoyed as well as the freedoms it supposedly had. We understood each other. We went on like this:
Me: ”Look, I can’t stop you from locking me up, but there’s just one thing. Don’t ever let me out.” Him: ”Why wouldn’t I want to release you?” (As if he didn’t know! Unlike the others, he was a bright fellow.) Me: ”Because if you do let me go, I will tell the international media, from the BBC to The Times to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung about how religious freedom looks here in the People’s Republic.”
I could see that gave him a shock. He began to look really worried and pretty soon he was saying that the whole arrest was a “misunderstanding”. Then we began to talk about the rock opera and it looked like the whole thing was over. But it wasn’t.
In English Common Law, when a police officer or other authorised person takes someone into some sort of custody (using AK-47s, for instance), that is an arrest. In Hungarian law, it is not. It is called ’őrizetbevétel’ (”taking into custody”) but is not considered a formal arrest until the person is charged. Once they are taken to the police station with the intention of laying a charge, this is called ’letartóztatás’. This is a proper arrest. What happened to us was this ”pre-arrest”, then release.
But. The next day, all sorts of high-ranking police types showed up at our campsite. They demanded to see the priest, who – understandably – was very respectful but also stood his ground, and then they asked for ”that British citizen”. I went forward. Well, I was given a long lecture about how there are laws in the People’s Republic and I, as a foreigner, have to report my movements (within 24 hours every time I visit another town) to the police (which I had tried to obey, but no police had ever heard of it, so I gave up on that). I tried to be respectful, as the Good Book tells us, I tried to be reasonable, but the guy kept on at me, and eventually I got annoyed.
”Where do you want me to report, at the nearest tree?!” I said, with rather more annoyance in my voice than I had intended. Well, the ”little king” as we call people like that in Hungarian, really didn’t like that! ”This is not over,” he said. ”Wait till you get to the border!” (He kept his threat.)
So, after chewing the priest and me out, but not stamping my passport (I suppose he didn’t have the right stamps either), they left. We thought, ”now, it’s over.” It wasn’t, and it could have cost us our lives.
I don’t have the period of time that elapsed in my diary, but it was either the next day or the day after that the woodsmen came to our camp. They were looking very concerned and asked us if we were crazy. I remember one actually asked whether we wanted to die! We assured him that we were all for living and he explained that the valley had been evacuated because the Soviet Red Army was moving into the next valley for a live-fire anti-aircraft drill. He pointed out that our valley was in the fallout zone and the chance of being killed or injured by falling shrapnel or unexploded shells (which might still explode on contact with the ground) was pretty high!
So we packed up in a hurry and began looking for somewhere else to camp. And then came the irony! We reached one of the Communist Youth-type camps. It was either a ”Young Pioneer” or a Communist Youth camp, I’m not sure which. (And I certainly didn’t care.) In front of the camp across a road was a cable connected to a military field telephone, with a Soviet soldier manning it.
Somehow, one of our guys produced a bottle of vodka and went over to the soldier, and said something to him. The soldier then used his phone and apparently spoke to some big boss on the Soviet side, and then waved us in. So the Soviet Red Army gave us shelter from our beloved ”fellow Hungarians”, the local Communists, who conveniently forgot to tell us of the fallout danger. Lovely lot, they were!
The following evening we saw some really impressive ”fireworks”! This was the Soviet’s anti-aircraft drill, with missiles, cannon of all calibres exploding a few kilometres away in the night sky. We were thankful not to be under that lot. It did look impressive, once we knew we were safe. But I imagine if we hadn’t been warned, there might have been some ”accidents” with the requisite deaths or injuries.
Finally, we had a big fire and got meat and had a big farewell supper, with the usual relaxed talks, songs, promises to keep in touch and so on. Interestingly, not one of the people whose address I took down ever answered my letters. I strongly suspect they were intercepted by the state security apparatus.
As a final thought, I’d like to share something that one of the girls, whom I only knew by her nickname, ”Nyugi”, which means ”relax” said. She came up to me in the midst of all the feasting and said this: ”You know, I’m glad this happened.” Now unlike me, with my foreign passport and therefore my special status, where the worst they could do was deport me, she was a local citizen and knew they had taken her name down. This meant she would have a ”black mark” against her name, would not be allowed to study or have a good job, yet here she was, saying she’s happy about all this. I asked her why.
She simply said: ”I used to think I was a Christian, but now I know I am.”
AUTHOR
Christopher Szabo
Christopher Szabo is a freelance journalist in Pretoria, South Africa.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-12-09 20:51:412022-12-09 20:51:41George Orwell Got It Right: How I Experienced 1984 in Communist Hungary
“Don’t you think that users have a right to freedom of speech even if what they’re saying is wrong or offensive?” Fox Business correspondent Hillary Vaughn asked.
“I think that one human being should not be able to go into a dark room by himself and decide ‘Oh, that person gets heard from, that person doesn’t.’ That’s not how it should work,” Senator Elizabeth Warren retorted, referring to Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
The question is who should get to decide? On the heels of the Warren exchange, Senator Josh Hawley released damning evidence demonstrating that Biden’s “Disinformation Governance Board” had been interfacing with leftist eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar’s network.
Warren objects to one billionaire member of the PayPal mafia, but not another making those decisions because they share a common set of political views that include censorship. While Musk put billions on the line to buy Twitter to protect free speech, Omidyar committed $100 million to fight “disinformation”, “fake news” and “hate speech”. That includes funding for leftist “fact checkers” who have been used by Big Tech monopolies to censor opposing views.
Warren, despite her rhetoric, is quite happy to have one human being go into a dark room and decide who gets heard from and who doesn’t, as long as he’s running the censorship machine to suit her. The leftist politician and her political allies in the Senate and House repeatedly pressured tech companies, especially Facebook, to censor their political opponents.
And she’s not alone.
The release of the Twittergate files at Elon Musk’s behest revealed the process by which the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story was censored.
The general counsel for Netchoice, a Big Tech coalition that included Facebook, Google, Amazon, PayPal and Communist China’s TikTok and Alibaba, claimed to have polled congressional staffers about how tech companies were handling the Hunter Biden story.
“The Democrats were in agreement: social media needs to moderate more because they’re corrupting democracy.” And when “asked how the government might insist on that, consistent with the First Amendment, they demurred: “the First Amendment isn’t absolute.”
The First Amendment is constitutionally absolute. But the Democrats are moving to undo the Constitution and its protections of freedom of expression to protect “democracy.” Twittergate had revealed the long game behind Russiagate which was about manufacturing a crisis, in this case Trump, as a pretext for treating free speech as a national disinformation crisis requiring the suspension of civil rights and liberties in order to save democracy. That’s still the plan.
It’s why Warren wouldn’t answer the simple question, once considered the cornerstone of our freedoms, whether those she disagrees with still have the right to freedom of speech. She’s not complaining that Musk is deciding who can’t be heard from, but who can be heard from. Her issue, to paraphrase the old glib libertarian line, is that he took over and is leaving people alone.
Big Tech’s complicity made the culture of censorship revealed by Twittergate possible.
Unable to immediately impose direct government censorship, the Biden administration and figures loyal to the Obama and Clinton administrations in the Justice Department, worked with Big Tech, the media and fact checking nonprofits fighting “disinformation” to create a speech cartel to maintain a leftist monopoly on speech. The existence of the cartel depended on political cohesion and covert censorship among the corporate leadership in the tech industry.
That’s what Musk’s stewardship of Twitter and the release of the Twittergate files has exposed.
In the Obama era, the formerly libertarian tech industry morphed from renegade hackers into pathologically woke campuses. Renegade college kids turned billionaires followed the Bill Gates ethos of finding a life outside work through social justice. BLM logos, pride flags and assorted causes joined the litter of nerdy paraphernalia of Warhammer figurines and Star Wars X-wings along with inspirational “Move Fast and Break Things” mottos in Big Tech workspaces.
It would have been impossible to imagine Big Tech bosses holding workplace meetings and crying when Kerry lost to Bush, but by the time Hillary lost to Trump, that was the new normal. Google had fought Obama’s censorship push over ‘The Innocence of Muslims’ in court before becoming one of the most strident tech monopolies suppressing a wide variety of views.
The compliance of the tech industry made a speech cartel possible. Until Musk broke it.
The government side of the speech monopoly needed Big Tech to do its dirty work for it by coordinating with leftist nonprofits, like Facebook’s fact checkers, to do the censoring.
But what’s the government to do when a tech company stops suppressing dissent on its behalf?
Warren’s plaint is revealing. How dare one man take on the function that had been allotted to the government. Someone, she insists, has to decide what speech to suppress. It never occurs to her that maybe people should be deciding what they read, watch and think for themselves.
But socialists just don’t think that way.
The exposure of the Disinformation Governance Board documents shows that the government side of the arrangement was more developed and further along than the Biden administration had been willing to admit when it tried to dismiss its existence as a random stray thought.
“Sec Mayorkas told me under oath that the Disinfo Board hadn’t met yet back in May. But DHS emails reveal their Disinfo ‘Steering Group’ held weekly meetings starting as early as February. The Board was up and running,” Hawley tweeted.
Secretary of Homeland Security Mayorkas had claimed that the board would focus on foreign propaganda and would not monitor Americans. That also proved to be untrue.
Say what you will about Elon Musk, but his decision making remains quite transparent.
Asked about restoring the Twitter account of Alex Jones, Musk tweeted, “My firstborn child died in my arms. I felt his last heartbeat. I have no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics or fame.” Compare that clear and concise response to secret meetings by a government board, private decisions by fact checkers who are funded by dark money machines tied to billionaires who issue press releases, but don’t discuss individual decisions.
Given a choice between Musk’s transparent plutocracy and a complex oligarchy, one man in a room whose preferences are clear, or a secretive network of political and economic interests invisibly manipulating online narratives to maintain a monopoly on speech, the choice is simple.
The underlying challenges of the internet have not gone away with Musk’s purchase of Twitter. Even assuming he hangs on to it and maintains liberal policies, that’s not any kind of solution. Musk created an alternative to a speech cartel, but the cartel is far more powerful than any one man, one company or one platform. And as the internet has come to be concentrated in fewer hands, a bottleneck dominated by one search engine, one social media giant, one retail channel, and two mobile operating systems, a monopoly on speech is inevitable.
The old decentralized internet was inherently free, web 2.0 is inherently unfree. The fact that it took $44 billion just to create a temporary space of free speech shows the scale of the problem. With someone in a room somewhere always deciding who should be heard, the marketplace of ideas ls constantly in someone’s hands. And that’s the opposite of the promise of the internet.
Change in the form of web 3.0 might be coming. Some believe that the tech monopolies are the final stage of an ossifying dead internet whose giant companies will collapse to make way for new things. But for now there’s little sign of this optimistic ‘internet spring’ in the real world where companies that spent endless billions to fund data centers, hardware and free services, and the investment giants behind them, still control our internet as thoroughly as China’s Xi.
When the Constitution first protected freedom of speech, the nation’s cities were filled with printers, most of them crude amateurs by European standards, who published a welter of contradictory leaflets, pamphlets and papers. A century later, newspapers were becoming concentrated in a small number of chains, and with the addition of radio and television, later created the media that conservatives spent generations fighting until the internet liberated them.
Once the greatest blow to speech monopolies, the internet has become a stifling speech monopoly operated with greater control and precision than CBS or Hearst could have imagined. The complexity and centralization of the internet has made it possible to disguise how it is censored to a previously inconceivable degree. But Musk’s breach in the speech monopoly has also revealed how comprehensive the censorship was the breath of its sudden omission.
“That’s not how it should work,” Senator Elizabeth Warren insists. But information, as hackers used to say, wants to be free. It takes a lot of work and a lot of money to keep it penned up.
Warren and her leftist allies are worried about free speech. They should be.
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-12-09 19:51:412022-12-09 19:51:41Twittergate and the Plot Against Free Speech
Since I’m going to be criticizing a now widely accepted phenomenon, this piece may evoke eyerolls from some supporters. So be it, because certain things need to be said.
I must confess that with the way many of my fellow adults behave today, it can make me ashamed to be one. I almost sometimes feel as if I want to apologize to the children for the example the contemporary grown-up world now sets. We often lament, and rightly so, how disrespectful many modern youths are, yet a prerequisite for commanding respect is being respectable. There is little respectable about modern American culture.
Whether or not communist activist Willi Münzenberg (1889-1940) actually said “We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks,” he might as well have. It’s not just that adults now show children indecent images in sex education’s name, rubber stamp elementary school Satan clubs in deference to “religious freedom” and tell kids they can switch sexes just by willing it. It’s also what the “good” people fighting these abominations often do.
On November 14, the Keller Independent School District (KISD), in Texas, prohibited its school libraries from carrying books containing references to “gender fluidity”; of course, they never should’ve been there in the first place because people don’t have “gender” (words do) and sex isn’t fluid. But here’s what is permitted, among other things, under the KISD’s “more virtuous” revised policy:
“Minimal profanity is allowed in elementary and intermediate schools, middle schools are allowed some, while high schools are allowed…[common] profanity in its library material,” as the Daily Dot puts it.
Seriously? “Minimal profanity” for grade-school kids? How about minimal teacher groping, minimal dispensing of heroin needles, and minimal intra-school fight-club bouts with minimal eye gouging?
When I inveighed against profanity years ago, a reader complained, saying, “We’re not all Little Lord Fauntleroys out here.” Cute. (Actually, Little Lord Fauntleroy was a darn good role model). Well, let me say that growing up in the Bronx, I heard it all and used some of it, on occasion, back in my before-time. But more significant than my own appeals is something written by the quintessential American man’s man and Father of our Nation, George Washington. On August 3, 1776 he issued the following order to his troops:
The General is sorry to be informed that the foolish, and wicked practice, of profane cursing and swearing (a Vice heretofore little known in an American Army) is growing into fashion; he hopes the officers will, by example, as well as influence, endeavour to check it, and that both they, and the men will reflect, that we can have little hopes of the blessing of Heaven on our Arms, if we insult it by our impiety, and folly; added to this, it is a vice so mean and low, without any temptation, that every man of sense, and character, detests and despises it.
Studying Washington’s life, as I have, can make apparent that he was the closest thing we’ve had to a true American superhero; he was a giant of a man, in stature and character. Note, too, that he expected this virtue from his men even during war, the most horrible situation a fellow could find himself in.
Speaking of which, my father was a prisoner of war in Germany, captured in battle, during WWII and the toughest man I ever knew. I never, ever heard him curse except on one or two occasions when he lost his temper (one involved a prank caller who rang incessantly in the wee hours and who cursed at my dad). It was recognized when he was raised — young people take note — that being vulgar was contrary to virtue. As the late Professor Walter E. Williams once put it (I’m paraphrasing), in the 1940s, “the worst lowlife wouldn’t use the kind of language around women and children that’s regularly used today.”
Yet peppering statements with the f-word is now common even among conservatives, who ought to ask themselves what they’re actually conserving and who normalized it. The latter’s answer should give pause:
Profanity was mainstreamed by Hollywood degenerates, the worst people among us. It started off “minimal,” of course, but became an increasingly prominent feature of entertainment. In other words, conservatives today embrace a cultural habit encouraged and legitimized by the Left. Ironic? Actually, it’s typical. As G.K. Chesterton noted in 1924, “The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.”
And with profanity, many today are now so inured that they think it appropriate to have a minimal amount of it in children’s books and for it to be common for high-schoolers. Some will now say, “They’re just words,” ironic coming from many of the same people who want widespread suppression of so-called “hate speech,” which also is “just words.” These critics may say that youths have already heard profanity, which wholly misses the point. To wit: Teens and even sixth-graders know about sex, too — but that doesn’t mean it’s okay exposing them to porn. For there’s a difference between something being “known” and it being normalized in tender eyes. Repeated casual use and display of profanity accomplishes the latter.
Much more on this topic is in my 2017 magazine essay “Cussing & Cultural Decay,” which you’ll likely find unique. But what, really, is the good case for using profanity? If you’re a theist (and even if you’re not), note that the Bible itself warns against it. Examples:
“Nor should there be obscenity, foolish talk or coarse joking, which are out of place….”
“Do not let any unwholesome talk come out of your mouths….”
“But now you must rid yourselves of all such things as these: anger, rage, malice, slander, and filthy language from your lips.”
Then, if you’re at least middle age, ask yourself what your grandparents would’ve thought of today’s casual vulgarity use. Or imagine it disgorged from a child’s mouth (and, sadly, we don’t have to imagine). Sound nice?
Profanity matters because it coarsens society, acting as a gateway vice that paves the way for greater corruption. Moreover, “Manners are of more importance than laws,” observed Anglo-Irish philosopher Edmund Burke. “Manners are what vex or soothe, corrupt or purify, exalt or debase, barbarize or refine us, by a constant, steady, uniform, insensible operation, like that of the air we breathe.”
Today, the cultural air we breathe is toxic. And since culture shapes politics and morality shapes culture (Washington warned, “Human rights can only be assured among a virtuous people”), we should consider whether we’re surfeiting the substrate of tyranny with our tongues.
As for me, I know where I stand: with Washington and not Willi.
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The past cannot alter the present. Holocaust museums have not affected young Islamists who don’t believe it occurred. And the future?
The American television series was called “The Twilight Zone” written by and hosted by one Rod Serling. It was a long time ago but I remember it like it was yesterday.
The meaning of “Twilight Zone” according to Your Dictionary is “the mental state between reality and fantasy” or “An area of ambiguity between two distinct states or conditions” So, Serling’s dramas told stories of weird events and alternate worlds.
The episode in question, “No Time Like the Past” was shown on March 7, 1963; it was season 4, Episode 10, and it was one of several different episodes about the possibility of time travel, or the travel backwards or forwards in time. I was almost 12 years old, already a voracious reader, and fan of Twilight Zone – a much more intellectual drama than most on the television.
Serling was born to a Jewish family in Syracuse, New York. His father was a grocer who lost his business during the Great Depression, and later became a butcher. Query – what was the effect on the son as an 8 year old to see his father lose his business? . Would difficult events take him back to the financial catastrophe; would he be prone to a type of catastrophic thinking where small issues get linked to the larger catastrophes of the past and so blur the lines between fact and fiction?
He enlisted in the army right out of high school, during the Second World War, and was disappointed that he was not sent to Europe as he wanted to fight Hitler; instead he was sent to the Pacific theatre and while at first was undistinguished in his military service, he eventually showed acts of heroism Serling saw a lot of death and severe injuries among his fellow troops; he himself received only minor injuries but he witnessed much death in his unit leading to mental trauma.
After the war he began writing first for radio and then for the growing television industry, culminating in his work writing most of the episodes of The Twilight Zone..
Serling’s opening narration for this episode was as follows:
“Exit one Paul Driscoll, a creature of the twentieth century. He puts to a test a complicated theorem of space-time continuum, but he goes a step further, or tries to. Shortly, he will seek out three moments of the past in a desperate attempt to alter the present, one of the odd and fanciful functions in a shadowland known as the Twilight Zone.”
The plot for “No Time Like the Past” is summarized by Wikipedia partly as follows:
Disgusted with 20th century problems such as worldwars, atomic weapons and radioactive poisoning, the character Paul Driscoll solicits the help of his colleague Harvey and uses a time machine, intent to remake the present by altering past events.
Paul first travels to Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 and attempts to warn a Hiroshima police captain about the atomic bomb, but the captain dismisses him as insane. Paul then travels to a Berlin hotel room to assassinate Adolf Hitler in August 1939 (immediately before the outbreak of World War II the following month), but is interrupted when a housekeeper knocks on his door and later calls two SS guards to his room because she sees him with a rifle in front of a window looking out where Hitler will be speaking. On his third stop, Paul tries to change the course of the Lusitania on May 6, 1915 to avoid being torpedoed by a GermanU-boat, but the ship’s captain questions his credibility.
Paul accepts the hypothesis that the past cannot be changed. He then uses the time machine to go to a small town in Indiana in 1881, resolving not to make any changes, but just to live out his life free of the problems of the modern age. But despite this, he gets involved in events with catastrophic results. Accordingly, Paul understands that “the past is sacred” and belongs to those who are native to it. He knows too much of the future and fears that he will inevitably cause a lot of trouble. He returns to his own time and declares that instead of continuing to fixate upon the past, he will now try to do something to positively impact the future.
The unsuccessful attempts to prevent death by changing history made a big impression on me. I fantasized about being able to successfully assassinate Hitler. My father was a survivor of Auschwitz where his parents and then 8 year old sister were murdered in the gas chambers. My father in those years did not talk about his experiences and I felt it was wrong to try to ask him questions. The silence enveloping those with experience of the Shoah was quite universal so it was something I just accepted. My curiosity of what happened and why was channelled into my reading, but in those years, there was yet to be a proper history of the Shoah written and accessible to me. All I could find was Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich which was essentially a military history, and a book given to my father by his uncle who had escaped Poland to Canada in the ‘30s, a very sad book with many graphic photos of dead Jews, called The Black Book of Polish Jewry, assembled by a group of authors. The important books by Raul Hillberg and Lucy S. Dawidowicz were just being published while I was at university.
The show’s warning that instead of fixating on the past we try to positively impact the future, had a special meaning for me. In a sense I did become fixated on the history, on the basis of the admonition that those who do not learn from the past are compelled to relive it.
After high school, I therefore spent three years studying history at University of Toronto before switching to Law School there, which was my father’s suggestion. But in those three years, I was one of a handful of students studying the Holocaust through the lens of cultural history and the history of ideologies. I realized that understanding ideologies, such as antisemitism, nativism, racism, communism, etc. was the key to understanding why people could commit the most evil acts..
I eventually understood that I could go back in time, not to assassinate Hitler or otherwise change the course of history, but I could study history and write about history. But unlike the character in the show who says that the past is sacred, I did not think that it belonged only to those who are native to it. History belonged to those intelligent and learned enough to understand it.
The fantasy of the 11 year old about taking a time machine back in time to kill Hitler and prevent the Holocaust, became replaced with taking the knowledge gained in books and personal accounts of the victims to my task of warning about a Second Holocaust, this time in our historic homeland.
Was this audacious task just another turn at catastrophic thinking? Was it disrespectful to link one set of unique historical events to another? Would survivors or the family of survivors be offended? Would the Holocaust deniers and Islamists heap scorn on me for exaggerating current events by calling them, too, a Holocaust? Would I be accused of joining those who compare the Shoah with various current events for the purpose of downplaying those tragic events which should never be compared with other lesser events?
When Israel made the terrible mistake of trying to make peace through the ill-advised Oslo Process, with the resulting terrorism against its civilians and growing support for its genocidal enemies, I decided to write a book about a professor who starts to realize that a Second Holocaust was underway – this time by Arabs, islamists, and leftists who promoted alliances under the rubric of “intersectionality”. In The Second Catastrophe: A Novel about a Book and its Author, i wrote about a fictional professor of history, who aims to alert the world to a Second Holocaust and therefore impact a present and a future where Iran threatens to fire nuclear weapons at Israel Iran’s with its terrorist proxies, and Hezbollah, along with the genocidal Palestinian Authority, surrounding Israel and firing missiles and other weapons at Jewish civilians.
And so, I had a susceptibility to seeing the world somewhat negatively; in fact I too, like Serling, developed a kind of “catastrophic thinking” which came out in my novel, where I had the professor worried about a Second Shoah and writing a book to warn the world.
My cousin’s wife in Tel Aviv spent many years helping Holocaust survivors write their memoirs, which is another way to help preserve the facts of history by going back in time to record them all.
I remember one time that I was in Israel and I heard about a debate going on whether Yad Vashem and other historians should not rest until they can put a name on every victim, or whether it was a mis-use of finances and a task with diminishing returns.
People who live full time in Israel and daily face terror cannot afford the mental and emotional stress of catastrophic thinking, which would leave one with a tendency to the mental illness of depression.
In fact, contrary to my assumption,Israelis have done well on the annual survey of the happiest nations on earth, being the World Happiness Report with data from the Gallup organization.
Israel this year ranked as the 11th happiest nation, ahead of Australia, Ireland, the United States and Canada.
Why are Israelis so happy when Iran has promised to nuke them when it gets the nuclear bomb. Moreover, in the meantime Iran supplies weapons to Hamas and Hezbollah, who are pledged to destroy Israel. Then the Europeans and the United Nations take seriously the Palestinian Authority, as a “peace partner” and the recipient of financial aid when those nations should know better, because of what happened in Gaza when Israel gave up land for “peace”.
I posit that people are happier when they understand reality and understand that reality sometimes demands action, rather than repressing thoughts of fear and denying uncomfortable thoughts, and having their youth and intellectuals favor the terrorists, which is exactly what has happened in Belgium (17), United Kingdom (18) and France (20).
I think that France is now paying the price in terms of happiness for its appeasement of Islamist immigrants.
Is Israel on a dangerous path by having leftists and Islamists in the governing coalition? Will the Israelis react to this situation with a more catastrophic thinking and fall down the list of happiest nations?
We are all in a Twilight Zone if we think we can alter History, which cannot be done by a non-existent time travel machine, nor in Zuckerberg’s virtual meta world; It can only be done by realistically changing the present and future with a foundation of accurately depicting the past.
The history of our People is replete with catastrophic events, which like the character on television we cannot change. The time is near that Israel might have to attack Iran before Iran perfects nuclear weapons. Israel might have the terrible choice of whether to lose many thousands of people, after a pre-emptive attack or millions of people after Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas and the Palestinian Arabs act first with nuclear weapons. Israel must make the world aware that Israel is the past, present and future of the Jewish people; we can’t change the history of the Nazis and the Shoah, but we all learn from History. And, as Jews, we learn fromTorah the story of the Amalekites.
We can be happy as long as we are prepared to do what is necessary. We can’t rely on those who will be part of the future to change the present, in some kind of time travel. Every Jew, in Israel or the Diaspora, must understand his or her obligation to first publicize, and then modify, the real threats that exist and are emanating from the Islamists and their leftist “woke” friends.
We know that we are now in the Twilight Zone – the past cannot alter the present. All the Holocaust memorials and museums have not affected young Islamists who say they don’t believe the facts of the Holocaust.
Even in America, a nationwide survey in 2020 among Millenials and Generation Z’ers (under 40) showed a lack of knowledge including 1 int 10 who did not recall having heard the word “Holocaust” before, 63% did not know that 6 million Jews hadbeen murdered, and half of respondents could not name a single concentration camp or ghetto.
Just 90 percent of respondents said they believed that the Holocaust happened. Seven percent were not sure, and 3 percent denied that it happened. One of the most disturbing revelations, the survey noted, is that 11 percent of respondents believe Jews caused the Holocaust. The number climbs to 19 percent in New York, the state with the largest Jewish population.
A number of studies have disclosed the high prevalence of antisemitism among Muslims around the world. As Muslims flock to the West, the West must make certain that immigrants are vetted to ascertain that they do not see themselves as perpetrators of Jihadist tactics to achieve their “world-wide caliphate”.
I invite you all to contemplate and publicly discuss past, present and future. We can do so, without losing a place near the top of the happiness index; in fact that will be easier if we get out of the Twilight Zone and work with reality.
The popular sci fi film is more than a spectacular display of technology and artistry.
‘Avatar’, released in 2009, is the highest-grossing film in history. The sequel, ‘Avatar: The Way of Water’, will be released later this month. A third and fourth sequels are in production. Rudolph Lambert Fernandez takes a look at the values underlying the first film.
Avatar (2009) opens to a pitch-black screen. Before visuals, a voiceover.
You wonder. Is there life before life? Will there be life after death? As one life ends, does another begin? If you hear before you see, can you see beyond what you see too?
Many misread Avatar as another apocalyptic sci-fi flick, no more than an episode in James Cameron’s filmography that they can conveniently label techno-utopianism or environmentalism or both. Yet, for all his fascination with Nature and tech, Avatar is intensely spiritual: Store up wise treasures, let go of the rest. Life’s about second chances, giving them, taking them. To find yourself, lose yourself. Truth isn’t seeing, it’s seeing right. The stone that the builders reject may become the cornerstone.
After you’ve gone past plot and characters, Avatar stands majestic before you, a mountain of meaning.
Those complaining that Cameron places Nature above God (God as part of, not apart from Nature), or God on par with (rather than above) Nature, miss the point. And it’s this. Cameron keeps looking for and finding God (infinite goodness?) in man, in nature rather than in maglev trains, cryo-capsules, ampsuits and scorpion gunships.
Cameron’s positioning of humanity in the scheme of things is unmistakable. His humans remain superior to tech, shaping it, re-shaping it, demanding of it, bending it to their will, even when it threatens to overwhelm. At their best they’re part of Nature, complementing, not competing.
As far as Cameron’s concerned, for all Nature’s might, humans are unique in their capacity to protect, preserve, plunder or pollute Nature, on an oceanic scale. Ultimately, it’s enlightened humans who’ll convince the less enlightened and rally them against those who refuse to be enlightened. It’s enlightened humans who’ll place tech and Nature in proper order.
It isn’t just his mind, but his morality that sets man apart. He may be catastrophic when picking evil, but he’s salvific, on planetary scale, when choosing good.
Cameron’s no theologian or spiritual guide. He’s an entertainer with an eye on box-office spectacle. That he keeps dwelling on a super-natural power bigger than us, beyond us, and somehow inside us, should please both theologians and spiritual guides. No, Nature isn’t the final frontier. His Eywa “doesn’t take sides”, but his better humans always do, defending the defenceless, protecting the powerless.
Neytiri coaches Jake, “When you hear nothing, you will hear everything. When you see nothing, you will see everything.” She means nothing else! If you sense without distraction, you perceive more.
Jake rambles, “I started having these dreams of flying…sooner or later though, you always have to wake up.”
Cameron’s teasing. He’s conjuring a dream, a line-up of Avatar movies, from which you wish you didn’t have to wake. If all you dream of is flying up into the sky (Avatar, 2009) or diving down into the ocean (Avatar, The Way of Water, 2022), why not dream forever?
Cameron masterfully mixes it. You don’t know where dream ends and when reality begins.
As Pandora’s Na’vi become more real to him than earth’s humans, Jake sighs into his video-log, “Everything is backwards…out there is the true world, and in here is the dream…I can barely remember my old life, I’m not sure who I am anymore.”
Funnily, that’s just before he finds his calling as saviour, the new Toruk Macto, unifying the clans in a “time of great sorrow” as the first one did.
Many are called, but few are chosen
Cameron’s clear. Being biologically human isn’t enough.
Jake’s a reject, a paraplegic with little use in a battlefield, even less in a biolab. He betrays the Na’vi for his thirty pieces of silver, a bargain to get his legs back. Still wretched, he becomes the chosen one, a new Adam in a new Eden, a new David who’ll unite the tribes more profoundly than the old David did. It’s why Mo’at gives Jake a second chance. He’s a very human saviour, falling, then rising, by accepting responsibility, not passing the buck.
Rarely are second chances given their real name: forgiveness. Jake’s admission, of crime against the Na’vi, has a real name too: confession, a pathway to grace. Not because grace suddenly floods him, but because he’s now more open to its wetness — healing.
When Selfridge whines, “relations with the indigenous are only getting worse”, biologist Dr Grace snaps, “that tends to happen when you use machine guns on them!” Both know that the deliciously-titled precious mineral, unobtainium, is why anyone bothers with Pandora at all. Selfridge’s shareholders will tolerate bad press. They won’t stand for “a bad quarterly statement.”
They’re hoarding the wrong kind of treasure.
Like any self-respecting prophet, James Cameron delights in symbols.
Language can be a bridge connecting hearts and minds. Or a dam. “Hasta la vista, baby” is a bridge in Terminator. Here there are dams: human invaders call Na’vi “savages”, fearful Na’vi call invaders “demons”. But there are bridges too: humans learning Na’vi, Na’vi learning English.
Yet, for all his sweat over developing Pandora’s language, Cameron’s most profound moments are silent. A flowery Atokirina (seed of The Great Tree) silently stays Neytiri’s arrow aimed at bumbling intruder Jake. Wordless breath, shahalyu, a spiritual heartbeat, binds Na’vi with their creature-rides. Wordless blood reveals what skin hides; Mo’at pricks Jake with a thorn to divine his worth.
He who is last, shall be first
Cameron turns success (and failure) on its head.
Norm and Jake are a sort of Cain and Abel, or opposing sons to prodigal mother, Grace. Norm grumbles that he’s trained years for the mission and speaks fluent Na’vi, but Jake just falls off the “turnip truck and all of a sudden he’s cultural ambassador!?”
When Neytiri impatiently extinguishes his torch, an irritated Jake notices the forest come alive; he sees better without a flame. The Na’vi rely on inner light, especially in dark times.
Mo’at warns, “It is hard to fill a cup that is already full”, but compels Neytiri to coach the addled Jake; maybe his “insanity can be cured”. Not the insanity of not learning, but of not learning right.
Why’s the giant Hometree seemingly omnipresent?
You run a great distance, you’re still below its shade. You climb a great height; it still towers above you. To Na’vi, all energy is borrowed. One day you have to give it back. This network thrives on “flow”, the way of water. These connections tie person to person, in oneness. When jungle beasts hurt each other, Nature’s in harmony, when humans hurt each other, it’s out of tune.
Grace pretends to “like plants better than people” but, in fact, empathizes better than most.
You love Nature, but can’t stand people? Something’s off.
What are avatars? Superficially? They’re remote-controlled bodies you can take “for a spin” the way you’d test-ride a loaded Lamborghini. But as he mounts his sky-beast ikran for the first time, Jake’s clinging-conquering yell, “you’re mine!”, later turns to respect for his ride.
Avatars aren’t after-lives. They’re second chances here and now, offering futures, worlds, possibilities, Pandoras. Jake’s standing in for his dead twin brother, Tommy, just as Neytiri’s standing in for her dead sister, Silwanin.
We too can die to our old self every night that we sleep and come alive to a new self every morning that we wake, shed destructive ways, embrace life-giving habits. If, in our lifetimes, our bodies are mere avatar-suits, should their colours matter so much? Should our distinct dialects matter more than the fact that we can speak and be understood?
Norm exults in his avatar-suit’s hyper-muscularity, “I am a living god”. Back in her human body, Grace snaps, “Damn! Same old sack o’ bones.” That’s Cameron, thrilled — and terrified — by tech’s seductive “temptations in the desert” of human frailty. That’s tech’s fruity, but slithery, promise in Eden to make us superhuman “like God”, free of time-space limits that our bodies impose on us.
At a moral level, don’t saints and sages seem like nine-foot giants to us, free of the constraints of our paraplegic “suits”, our handicaps, our addictions, our cravings? Sure, but they got that way not by bench-pressing but by strengthening moral muscle.
Avatar may wear the sciences on its sleeve but it breathes the humanities. The avatar program’s compulsive documentation (of experiments and experiences) speaks of motivation beyond science, pure or applied. It’s less about the life “enhancing” potential of computers or machines, more about the bioethics of wielding that knowledge, those tools.
Losing his nature as mercenary “soldier”, Jake ends up finding his nature as “saviour” through painful learning and unlearning.
Some of Cameron’s most perceptive, courageous characters are women. Here, Mo’at (or Tsahik) interprets the will of The Great Mother Eywa. Neytiri suspects that there’s a saviour lurking behind two-timing Jake. Trudy won’t cross her red line when ordered to attack defenceless Na’vi. Grace high-fives good-hearted men, instead of shunning all men because they’re men.
Pandora’s ideal of love begins and ends with respect. It’s not enough that a man chooses a woman, she must choose him too. Jake desires Neytiri but refuses to possess her merely because he can. Once shahalyu is formed with a hunter, even an ikran flies with only that hunter. Na’vi too become (and stay) mates for life.
In treasured relationships, it’s not enough if “I see you”. I must see no one but you.
In betraying Pandora, Grace is as complicit as Jake is. She’s blinded by a zeal for science as he is by a lust for thrill.Cameron’s image of them tied by enraged Na’vi shows the brief, if cinematically inadequate, price they pay before Mo’at frees them, giving them a chance to atone.
No doubt some sculpt a religion out of ecology even at the expense of man, salivating at tech’s advance, hoping it’ll help man extinguish himself and leave Nature in peace. That’s nihilism, cleverly dressed as altruism. Since they can’t find meaning in flawed existence, they prefer destruction; the quicker the better.
Cameron’s humanism is refreshingly defiant, bursting with hope.
Remember The Abyss (1989)?
At the bottom (of the bottom) of the ocean, underwater drilling-rig foreman Bud finds otherwise peaceable aliens, brewing mountainous surface waves that threaten earth but freeze tantalizingly short of its shores. Their tech can manipulate water, but in galactic proportions. Relieved that earth’s been spared, Bud messages earth’s surface, “They’ve left us alone, but it bothers them to see us hurting each other. They want us to grow up a bit and put away childish things.”
Short of quoting Corinthians, Cameron’s saying that if we value each other, we’ll value the environment without being bullied into caring. The truest sign of caring is that you care for humans. Get that right and you’ll know exactly how to treat beings or objects, no matter how magnificent. He echoes that in Aliens, Terminator I, Terminator II, Titanic.
Of course, tech might one day prolong life, even revive it, but Cameron’s bothered with how we live. If anything he holds up the prospect of destruction (even self-destruction) as incentive to care more, not less. He’s saying that the choices we make while living and dying decide whether we deserve life at all, let alone life after death.
For all his worldliness, Cameron may be more of a spiritual humanist than the pretenders.
Rudolph Lambert Fernandez is an independent writer, writing on pop culture. Some of his writing on Hollywood movies, movie icons, women in film, feminism in film, women directors, Hollywood’s #MeToo has… More by Rudolph Lambert Fernandez
https://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.png00DrRichSwier.comhttps://libertyfirst.org/wp-content/uploads/logo_v6_225x110.pngDrRichSwier.com2022-12-09 06:51:352022-12-09 06:51:35The Hidden Spiritual Humanism in James Cameron’s ‘Avatar’
