RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/12/14/how-i-learned-to-love-free-speech/

Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover has exposed the liberal elites’ fear of free speech. His relaxation of its content-moderation policies has sent the blue-ticks into meltdown. Many are so horrified at the prospect of encountering views that differ from their own, they are now threatening to leave the platform altogether. So why have so many on the liberal-left given up on free speech? Why do they seem to have forgotten the dangers of censorship?

Meghan Murphy is a feminist journalist and podcaster. In 2018, her Twitter account was permanently suspended for ‘misgendering’ trans activist Jessica Yaniv. The ban was lifted by Musk last week. She joined Brendan O’Neill on the latest episode of his podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. Listen to the full episode here.

Brendan O’Neill: I wanted to get your view on Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover. You have already benefited directly – you recently had your account reinstated after being banned in 2018. But do you think there’s a danger in relying on a powerful billionaire to give us the right to speak freely?

Meghan Murphy: I was excited about the Musk takeover even before I got back on Twitter. I was thrilled at witnessing the meltdown online. I was enjoying the panicking and the flouncing. You had all these people trying to go off to Mastodon, or saying they’ll have to start a new social-media platform – good luck with that. There have been so many attempts to do this over the past four years and unfortunately none of them worked. I wish they had, because I think more platforms would be useful. But nothing has taken off.

I believe Elon Musk really does value free speech. I trust this billionaire more than others, perhaps. But one lesson I hope we have learnt – and something that I’ve certainly learnt – is to not put all of our money in one place, not to bank on only one platform for our speech.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/14/two-antithetical-billionaires/

Before the midterm November elections, Sam Bankman-Fried was a left-wing billionaire heartthrob. 

He properly grew up on the Stanford campus, where his parents were well-known left-wing activist law professors. He went to a tony prep school and on to MIT. 

Bankman-Fried mocked society’s bourgeois capitalist conventions by dressing and looking like a slob in cut-offs and T-shirts. 

Indeed, he bested the nose-ring, Charles Manson-esque appearance of former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. He outdid the all-black, Steve Jobs copy-cat get-up of another fallen leftist icon, the now-convicted felon Elizabeth Holmes of Theranos infamy.

The Left canonized Bankman-Fried for the hundreds of millions of dollars he created out of thin air and channeled to left-wing congressional and state candidates, Joe Biden, and a host of “progressive” causes under the cool slogan “effective altruism.” 

For decades hence—or so Bankman-Fried promised—his cryptocurrency company FTX would churn out billions. Its politically correct gifting won exemptions from the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and Democratic-controlled congressional oversight committees.

The loud-talking, left-wing slob promised billions of dollars more in gifts to come. He was knighted as the successor to the kindred financial market manipulator and progressive “philanthropist” George Soros. 

SBF may have been a sloppy, immature fool, but he was no dummy. 

He had learned early on that loud leftist talk, big promises of philanthropy, and huge cash infusions to the media and leftist candidates—all under the veneer of “effective altruism”— ensured de facto immunity for his Ponzi schemes from both bad press and government investigation. 

Then, suddenly, the midterms were over. Powerful financial interests were screaming their millions had vanished at the hands of SBF. 

The Republicans took the House. They promised embarrassing hearings, with Bankman-Fried the loose-talking star villain. And so—presto!—he was finally indicted by the Biden Department of Justice. 

Bankman-Fried, in desperation one last time, had turned to his old props of raggedy dress, nerd talk, and contrived naivete.

His schtick no longer worked. Too many leftists were embarrassed that they got too much money from him. Too many exposed “regulators” had known what this wannabe Madoff character was up to before the midterms. 

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2022/12/14/jack-dorsey-accepts-blame-for-twitter-scandals-n1653532

Jack Dorsey, the co-founder of Twitter, admits he “totally gave up” fighting back against prominent activists in the company and takes full responsibility for the social media platform’s many failures that have been exposed in the ongoing release of the Twitter Files.

“I’ll start with the principles I’ve come to believe…based on everything I’ve learned and experienced through my past actions as a Twitter co-founder and lead,” Dorsey began. “1. Social media must be resilient to corporate and government control. 2. Only the original author may remove content they produce. 3. Moderation is best implemented by algorithmic choice.”

“The Twitter when I led it and the Twitter of today do not meet any of these principles,” he conceded. “This is my fault alone, as I completely gave up pushing for them when an activist entered our stock in 2020. I no longer had hope of achieving any of it as a public company with no defense mechanisms (lack of dual-class shares being a key one). I planned my exit at that moment knowing I was no longer right for the company.”

Dorsey condemned the “dangerous” insults on his “former colleagues” in his screed.

https://pjmedia.com/culture/catherinesalgado/2022/12/14/the-real-life-matrix-ectolife-artificial-womb-facility-to-engineer-grow-babies-in-factory-n1653718

If you thought the millions of plastic pods artificially “growing” human babies in The Matrix were creepy, wait until you see the animation of “EctoLife,” set to be the world’s first artificial womb facility. A recent video posted online by its inventor, Hashem Al-Ghaili, enthusiastically described a facility where tens of thousands of babies could be engineered and gestated in artificial “wombs” with constant monitoring to check for biological defects and growth. EctoLife claims it will engineer the most “viable and genetically superior embryo” as it is “reinventing evolution,” producing up to “30,000 lab-grown babies per year.”

As EctoLife asserted, “Our goal is to provide you with an intelligent offspring that truly reflects your smart choices.” Because eugenics led to such wonderful results in the 20th century!

Remember how leftists have been telling us for years, and continue to tell us, that we’re overpopulating the earth? EctoLife’s ad explicitly said it is “designed to help countries that are suffering from severe population decline”—something that most of the world is suffering from, including America, by the way. Turns out that forgoing reproducing to pursue high-powered careers, luxury vacations, and an end to “climate change” was not such a bright idea. The solution is not being to have babies the way God intended, of course, but to engineer and grow them in fake wombs. That way, “artificial intelligence” (AI) can monitor your baby for “genetic abnormalities” (it’s unclear what would happen to babies who turn out to be supposedly imperfect).

https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-fusion-works-and-why-its-a-breakthrough-national-ignition-facility-laser-beam-laboratory-science-nuclear-weapon-11671052081?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

The Energy Department has announced the first gain in energy from fusion in a laboratory—the first time fusion reactions produced more energy than it took to induce them. Last week 192 laser beams at the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility heated and compressed a capsule of hydrogen to previously unattainable temperatures and pressures, igniting fusion reactions that produced 50% more energy than the laser beams had delivered.

Nuclear reactions can release the energy that binds together protons and neutrons in an atom’s nucleus. Nuclear power plants use fission, not fusion. Fission releases energy when a large uranium nucleus splits into two radioactive fragments, which carry the energy as they fly apart.

Fusion, by contrast, relies on the universe’s smallest atom, hydrogen. Energy is released when two hydrogen nuclei combine to produce a helium nucleus and a neutron. Unlike fission, fusion produces no radioactive fragments. Fusion is much harder to induce than fission, since the hydrogen nuclei must be heated to nearly 100 million degrees Celsius to overcome the electrical repulsion that hinders their reaction. Stars run on fusion energy, but on Earth it has previously been released only in thermonuclear explosions. This stunning new result in laboratory fusion opens doors for unprecedented studies in basic and applied science.

The concept of laser fusion had been pursued without success since the 1960s and it became a central part of a 1990s program to ensure continued confidence in the nuclear-weapons stockpile without underground testing. Although scientists knew that high-powered laser beams could probe the properties of matter relevant to the early stages of detonating a nuclear weapon, the goal of laser fusion would allow for studies in the later stages. It would also challenge and demonstrate the ability to understand and predict the dynamics of hot, dense matter more generally.

Construction of the ignition facility at the Livermore lab began in 1997, and experiments attempting ignition began soon after construction was completed in 2009. The design and construction of the world’s most powerful laser was an engineering triumph, but three years of failed attempts to achieve fusion ignition brought the program close to cancellation in 2012. But the program continued with a more deliberate approach that included outside peer review.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/12/13/the-wasteland-of-leftist-compassion/

Compassion is one of the greatest of human virtues. But effective compassion comes with an obligation to do more than what merely feels and sounds good. Public policies motivated by compassion must also consider the full complexity of the challenge—the unintended consequences and the reality of human nature—and strike a balance between what is desired and what is possible. Often the most beneficial expressions of compassion appear harsh and punitive, yet in offering more lasting and comprehensive solutions, do more to alleviate human suffering.

Without taking a balanced and holistic approach to compassion, special interests hijack public policy and reap perpetual profits working on problems that never go away. For them, ineffective compassion is good business. But it leaves behind a wasteland.

If envy and resentment are the currency of the Left—driving, as it does, their attacks on privilege and their demands for equity—then compassion is the gold that backs their currency. Emotional appeals to voters and politicians demanding displays of compassion are the means by which the Left claims the moral high ground. And in those appeals, and the misguided policies that result, entire industries are created—industries populated by individuals whose careers depend on perpetuating the fraud.

In many cases, the consequences of unbalanced compassion are obvious, as anyone can see if they visit the coastal cities of California. It was compassion that motivated state legislators to decriminalize hard drug addiction, now dubbed “substance use disorder.” Compassion was the moral justification to empty California’s prisons and downgrade property and drug crimes from felonies to misdemeanors. 

Compassion compelled politicians and judges to rewrite laws that kept mentally ill people safely off the streets.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/the-battle-of-brittney/

Bringing home Brittney Griner was an easy call for the Biden Junta, an “equity” demo, in the run-up to Christmas, that gives the Delaware Democrat the appearance of a victory. For all but the willfully blind, the trade of a basketball player for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout was an exceptionally bad deal.

Bout has sold sophisticated Russian weaponry to terrorist groups and Communist revolutionaries alike. Before his capture in a sting operation, Bout was poised to sell 100 surface-to-air missiles, 20,000 AK-47 rifles, and five tons of explosives to FARC the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia. “We are together in this,” Bout explained, the Americans “are my enemies also.”

This global arms dealer was traded straight across for a basketball player who brought marijuana products into Russia and pleaded guilty to charges.

“This is playing Putin’s game,” former CIA man John Sipher tweeted “Bout was an actual criminal charged through a credible legal process recognized around the world. Griner was a hostage taken in order to extort us.” This successful extortion traces back to the composite character David Garrow described in Rising Star: The Making of Barack Obama.

As Paul Kengor noted in The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story of Barack Obama’s Mentor,  Obama’s strongest influence was an African American Communist dedicated to an all-white Soviet dictatorship. American missile defense played a major role in taking down the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Russia also objected to American missile defense and Obama was hopeful for change.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/racist-mayor-jorge-elorza/

During the long hot summer of Black Lives Matter race riots, Providence’s Mayor Jorge Elorza announced a truth and reparations commission, accusing the city and all of Rhode Island of perpetrating “generations of pain and violence and systemic oppression”.

The leftist racist, who has been steadily sending the city down the drain, urged the 33% of white people still left in Providence to “heal by discussing and accepting these uncomfortable truths”.

The commission would not be looking into Elorza’s alleged systemic racism which resulted in a lawsuit by the city’s former Department of Public Works director claiming that he was fired over a principled refusal to hire unqualified people “because of their ethnic backgrounds” while being banned from hiring “qualified applicants of a different ethnic background”.

These “uncomfortable truths” were not on the truth and reconciliation menu.

Instead, Elorza pushed forward with a plan to offer $10 million in reparations even though Rhode Island had actually been the first state to ban slavery and was founded by Roger Williams: an opponent of slavery. The tiny state had mobilized 25,236 soldiers in the Civil War including the 11th United States Colored Heavy Artillery Regiment. 1,771 Rhode Islanders paid the ultimate price and twenty were awarded the Medal of Honor.

That, not Eloriza’s $10 million grift, is what actually fighting racism looks like.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/is-social-media-censorship-a-crime-section-241-us-code-government-private-conspiracy-civil-rights-speech-11670934266?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Amid growing revelations about government involvement in social-media censorship, it’s no longer enough to talk simply about tech censorship. The problem should be understood as gov-tech censorship. The Biden White House has threatened tech companies and federal agencies have pressed them to censor disfavored opinions and users. So it’s time to ask about accountability.

Will there be legal consequences for government officials, for the companies, or for their personnel who cooperate in the gov-tech censorship of dissent on Covid-19, election irregularities or other matters? Cooperation between government officials and private parties to suppress speech could be considered a criminal conspiracy to violate civil rights. The current administration won’t entertain such a theory, but a future one might.

Section 241 of Title 18 of the U.S. Code provides: “If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person . . . in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same, . . . they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.”