RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2022/12/acknowledge-the-good-limit-the-damage/

Excerpts:

The Calvinist urge to virtue-signal membership in the elect can make life nigh-unliveable for the independent thinker. Let me offer a quote:

In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, every one lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves … [people] do not ask themselves—what do I prefer? or, what would suit my character and disposition? or, what would allow the best and highest in me to have fair-play, and enable it to grow and thrive? They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? what is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine?

That was John Stuart Mill, writing in 1859, at the height of a previous wave of Calvinist revival remembered as the Great Awakening. Our present-day Great Awokening has nothing on that era, except perhaps an even greater speed of communication. The Big Three causes in the 1850s were the abolition of slavery, women’s suffrage and temperance. And the Calvinists of the Great Awakening did pretty well. I won’t preach temperance to the members of the Union, University & Schools Club, but two out of three ain’t bad. Like statue-tumblers today, the social Calvinists of the Great Awakening pursued their causes with a religious fervour, and like statue-tumblers today, they wanted someone else to foot the bill. The abolitionists wanted slave-owners to bear the costs of the unravelling of the slave economy; in the UK they failed, while in the US they succeeded. The suffragists wanted women to get the vote while the men went to war (and it might be remembered that, from ancient times, the prerogative of voting was tied to bearing mortal responsibility for the actions voted). The prohibitionists wanted an instantaneous end to alcohol, without making any provisions for the people whose businesses and jobs would be lost through its prohibition; it was perhaps this failure to plan any transition that doomed America’s fourteen-year experiment with temperance.

Abolition, suffrage, temperance, acknowledgment of country, LGBTQIA+ rights, climate catastrophism—obviously, these are not to be found in the theology of John Calvin. They are our society’s virtue signals; our society’s indications of membership in the elect, not his. They are the tenets of our specifically Anglo-American liberal religion.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/19261/big-tech-censorship

Republicans’ first order of business this coming 118th Congress must be to introduce a legislative firewall between the White House — and its offshoot federal law enforcement agencies such as the Department of Justice and its offshoot, the FBI — and private social media companies.

The dissemination of news and the facilitation of public discourse is central in any democracy that allows genuine participation on the part of its citizens. Open public dialogue is a “public good”, or something which, like clean air, benefits everyone equally and greatly.

Providers of public goods are generally regulated under common carriage laws. The Communications Act of 1934, for instance, allowed AT&T to enjoy monopolistic power over the public good it provided: the interconnecting of the American people by way of a unified, national standard for telephone communication.

In exchange for enjoying monopoly power, and to ensure that public goods truly remain beneficial to the public, special duties or restraints are generally imposed on such companies.

With companies such as Compuserve and AOL in mind, Congress sought to hand out special liability relief with the idea of promoting two public goods: an internet characterized by a wide dissemination and diversity of ideas; and an incentive system for platforms to create family-friendly environments.

Unfortunately, in the ensuing case law that has been built up in dealing with Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, two giant, related problems have emerged, both involving a misreading of a landmark court decision: Zeran v. AOL.

The first problem is that what Congress intended when it comes to protecting social media companies from liability tied to defamatory messages posted on their platforms has been greatly expanded and now encompasses virtually any and all decisions regarding “content moderation”, such as removing the accounts of epidemiologists with whom Dr. Anthony Fauci, the FBI, CIA, and possibly other federal agencies, might disagree.

The second problem is that the “good faith” condition Congress imposed on these companies to ensure against arbitrary or biased content-removal decisions has been completely erased. It is now never applied to social media companies at all.

Both problems can be traced to a misunderstanding and incomplete reading of Zeran v. AOL.

As a result, as Michigan State University law professor and former Commerce Department telecom official Adam Candeub writes, “social media platforms are now treated like they’re above the law.”

Thankfully, this can be easily changed, even at the regulatory level. Non-discrimination policies need not create a “wild west” scenario. To a large extent, people really do not need moderators to curate what they see on social media. They are free to do that themselves.

Removing the distortive “curators”, editors, “fact-checkers” and middlemen from the information process — and reaching people who previously have been sheltered from diverse opinions — will likely not tear people apart. It might even help to bridge misunderstandings and fill in a few gaps. That, perhaps, is the ultimate public good.

The ongoing ‘Twitter Files’ revelations show that Republicans’ first order of business this coming 118th Congress must be to introduce a legislative firewall between the White House — and its offshoot federal law enforcement agencies such as the Department of Justice and its offshoot, the FBI — and private social media companies. Last summer’s revelations of government pressuring social media executives into blocking users not toeing the official line on COVID was as clear an example of unconstitutional “state action” as any. Courts have long ruled the government cannot pressure private entities, as an “agent of government,” into censoring what itself cannot.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/a-foreign-billionaire-funds-dems-hunter-biden-defense/

“We are proud Americans speaking up against an extreme agenda that is putting money and power over everyday Americans,” Courage for America’s mission statement claims.

If you have any doubt whatsoever that CFA is an American organization, its home page is decorated with a flag draped over a barn. The ‘O’ in its logo even includes flag symbolism.

CFA has announced that it’s “forming a council of proud Americans” to fight Republican investigations into the foreign business dealings of Hunter Biden and the rest of the Biden clan.

Waving the flag to cover up the intimidation of elected officials investigating dirty deals with Chinese and Russian oligarchs is a new low even for Biden and his cronies.

Will Hansjörg Wyss, the Swiss billionaire allegedly backing CFA, be on the council of proud Americans? It would be awkward for the foreign tycoon to sit on a “council of proud Americans” since he is not, as far as even the media has been able to determine, an American citizen.

Instead, he appears to be living in America under an investor visa.

That hasn’t stopped the wealthy European from using his fortune to drastically influence American politics with the complicity of the IRS, the FEC and the rest of the government.

This wouldn’t be the first time that Wyss, who was accused of getting rich while killing patients, has broken the rules. And nothing says “proud Americans” fighting for “every American” like a secretive organization that doesn’t list its staff and appears to be funded by a foreign billionaire.

Wyss co-founded Synthes, a medical device manufacturer focused on repairing broken bones. In 2010, Synthes pled guilty to illegally experimenting on patients: its president, and its spine division president and two other executives were sentenced to prison. Even though a manager testified that Wyss had made the decision not to go through clinical trials, and owned half the company, he was not charged and has gone on funding the extreme causes of the Left.

https://www.city-journal.org/the-last-institutions

When Pennsylvania’s Department of Human Services announced in 2019 that Polk and White Haven Centers, two large state-operated institutions for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, would close by November 2022—claiming that moving residents to “community-based settings” would better honor their “inherent worth and dignity”—it spelled the end of two campuses that had housed the intellectually and developmentally disabled for more than 50 years. It also sparked a political fight between disability-rights activists, who hailed the closures as a step toward full inclusion for people with disabilities, and many residents and their families, who feared losing what they considered their and their loved ones’ homes.

Residents like Alma were caught in the middle. Alma has mild to moderate intellectual disabilities and had lived at Polk Center for nearly 50 years. She was a favorite of facility staff—talkative, kind, joyful—and one of the facility’s most senior residents, who saw the century-old campus transform from what critics called an overcrowded, understaffed warehouse into a federally licensed care facility for people with disabilities.

Alma loved the people at Polk. She made crafts for staff and her fellow residents, most of whom were more significantly disabled. When nonverbal residents tried and failed to signal their needs, Alma knew them well enough to translate their requests to staff. She also loved the place: the grounds, the campus, the community that had grown up around the maze of Chateauesque brick buildings in rural Venango County. She sorted letters in the facility’s mailroom, tended plants in its greenhouse, and hung around the Polk canteen in her wheelchair, greeting staff and residents as they passed through to grab coffee or candy.

When staff told Alma in 2019 that Polk Center would close, she wept. When legislators, government officials, and others toured the campus in the months after the announcement, she told them, “Polk needs to stay open. This is my home.” As the months passed, families and employees attended hearings in Harrisburg, begging the state to keep Polk and White Haven open. Disability-rights advocates and department officials countered with messages about the need to “move forward” and embrace “community-based services.”

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/12/forget_you_22.html

Doesn’t it seem as if the ignoble nobles running our country into the ground are working overtime to dump extra loads of misery before the year ends?  Now that they’ve plunged the country into an energy and heating crisis by tilting at “climate change” windmills, coal was too valuable to waste on these scrooges’ Christmas stockings.  Let them survive on frozen wind turbines and snowdrift-covered solar panels!

While I have done my best to celebrate the Christmas season and ignore the commie curmudgeons bah-humbug-ing all around, it has felt as if government-worshiping Krampus creatures have been let loose (or are they trans-Krampus, demon-worshiping leftists wearing antlers and spreading Marxist hate?).  Consider the parade of horribles unleashed during just the last few weeks:

Congress passed a two-trillion-dollar spending monstrosity that looks like little more than a long list of bribes and IOUs come due.  The same Uniparty Republicans that could never find spare change for President Trump’s border wall have seen fit to fund every leftist fever pitch imaginable.  Scrutinizing the 4,155 pages of omnibus filth and its 3,213 Democrat earmarks, writer Deroy Murdock bluntly concludes that “Mitch McConnell transformed the Senate GOP into a wishing well for Democrats.”

Handicapping incoming House Republicans’ budgetary powers for the next year, the exercise in printing and burning U.S. dollars (and exacerbating inflation) protects the borders of foreign countries all over the world, while going out of its way to make sure America’s are left wide open.  Manchurian McConnell defends sending another forty-five billion dollars to Ukraine as “morally right,” while Americans from coast to coast are struggling to survive unchecked inflation, unaffordable food and fuel prices, crumbling infrastructure (actual bridges and roads, not the “reparations” and “climate change” hooey leftists now define as “infrastructure”), unguarded borders, the further impoverishment of once-prosperous blue-collar towns, an emotionally-crippling rise in suicides and fentanyl-related overdoses, COVID-1984-initiated wealth destruction, and the prospect of a looming monster recession (which we entered months ago but must not acknowledge — silence, citizen!).