RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/07/why_big_tech_should_not_be_viewed_as_a_private_business.html

“Thus, there is no viable argument against redefining the censorious, viewpoint-discriminating Big Tech consortiums as public utilities. They may not be knitting networks, but they have the power and ability to unravel a nation. ”

Should First Amendment rights be extended to Big Tech corporations to publish and censor as they please?  This is a question that has agitated the discussion on whether antitrust legislation should be applied to infogiants such as Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Amazon, Pinterest and many others that have cornered the market on a public resource, information, and an essential human activity, the consumption of information. A solution to the problem of data sequestration and restricted access practiced by these companies is to rebadge them either as publishers or, alternatively, as public utilities.

These entities are protected by Section 230 of Title 47 of the United States Code, which allows them to “restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene…or otherwise objectionable” (italics mine). This provision has become, in effect, a license to censor expressions of opinion that run counter to the convictions and political views these companies promote. The First Amendment argument absolving Big Tech from complicity in monopolizing political discourse is succinctly summed up by a commenter to an article I recently posted in which I advocated antitrust legislation with respect to social media. He writes, in part:

“A private company…is exercising its First Amendment rights to do whatever the hell it wants short of libel and slander and incitement to violence…No private company has the obligation to carry content which it opposes ideologically. No private company has the legal obligation to be content-neutral… [T]hat would be a blatant violation of its free speech rights. The government can neither suppress nor compel speech nor demand ideological neutrality from private entities…Changing the rules to subvert the Constitution by defining companies you don’t like as “utilties” or “publishers” is the kind of fascist trick the left is always trying to get away with.”

 http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22900/the-humanitarian-hoax-of-leftism-killing-america

   http://goudsmit.pundicity.com

http://lindagoudsmit.com

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

War makes strange bedfellows, and the current Leftist/Islamist alliance against America-first President Donald Trump is worth examining.

Islamic sharia law with its misogyny, homophobia, antisemitism, pedophilia, female genital mutilation, and wife beating is diametrically opposed to leftist Democrats’ proclaimed principles of women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, children’s rights, and anti-bullying. How can Leftists partner with Islamists whose norms are diametrically opposed to their own stated principles?

The answer is that Leftists are staggeringly hypocritical when it comes to their principles. Leftist metrics of inclusion are myopic – they only consider what a person thinks and ignore what a person does. The left embraces every color, every sexual orientation, every religion, every deviant behavior as long as its members THINK alike. Leftist anti-American anti-Trump group think is completely intolerant of any individual divergence of thought.

The demand for conformity among Leftists is no different from any religious orthodoxy. Orthodoxy requires conformity for membership in the group. Leftist tenets of political correctness, moral relativity, and historical revisionism are incontrovertible.

Islamic tenets of misogyny, homophobia, antisemitism, pedophilia, female genital mutilation, and wife beating are ignored as long as these sharia-compliant Muslims are anti-American anti-Trumpers. Any anti-American anti-Trump Islamist is welcomed into the Leftist tribe because they are all warriors in the Culture War against America. America-first President Donald Trump is the existential enemy of the Culture War and the target of the Leftist/Islamist alliance.

Islamists unapologetically tell the world their goal is world domination and the establishment of a supremacist Islamist caliphate ruled by sharia law. There is nothing humanitarian about Islamists or their condescending attitude that insists they are doing the West a favor by freeing us from our freedoms, and settling America by imposing their savage medieval sharia law. Islamists do not recognize the authority of the United States Constitution.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/07/socialism__its_adherents_and_the_enduring_lies.html

Paraphrasing Mark Twain, there are lies, damned lies, and socialism.

The leader of the White opposition, the distinguished admiral Alexander Kolchak, was defeated on the battlefield, betrayed by the Allies and captured by the Bolsheviks.

During the interrogation, the Bolsheviks, astounded by their own victory, were trying to understand how they could defeat the well-supplied regular army, led by experienced military commanders.

“Admiral, why didn’t you promise land to peasants? You could have won this war,” the interrogators asked (Russia was an agrarian country and the ownership of land was one of the most compelling issues of the revolution). “I would not promise what I could not deliver” was the admiral’s response.   

The interrogators just smiled. They did promise the land and won.

Bolsheviks who had a propensity for fancy names called it “monopoly on the revolutionary truth.” In other words, the truth in the “decaying” world of capitalism does not mean what it does in the world of “triumphant” socialism. In practical terms, when Bolsheviks promised democracy, freedom, liberty, and inexorable “land to the peasants,” “bread to the hungry,” “peace to the people,” those zealous Bolshevik slogans sounded great but the Russian people found soon enough that “land to the peasants” meant forced collectivization; “bread to the hungry” – man-made famine; and “peace to the people” — civil war.

https://quadrant.org.au/magazine/2019/07

Milan Kundera observed in The Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

In times when history moved slowly, events were few and far between and easily committed to memory. They formed a commonly accepted backdrop for thrilling scenes of adventure in private life. Nowadays, history moves at a brisk clip … No longer a backdrop, it is now the adventure itself, an adventure enacted before the backdrop of the commonly accepted banality of private life.

The present time and the public realm have upended the past and the private. Give us this day our daily drama of the news cycle. Life on the iPad, Google, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter take up a good deal of each day, not to mention reading newspapers, watching television and answering the day’s emails, letters and recorded messages. Longer-term projects are postponed in the face of pressing, but passing, matter. (On the positive side, the internet provides an enormous library at our instant disposal.) You may get a lot of “likes”, but this merely reinforces your own views at the expense of more challenging inputs. T.S. Eliot said he didn’t read the newspapers because they were too exciting. We become vicarious actors, expert media sleuths in a continuing global drama, fulfilled by being in touch with vital contemporary currents. The spheres of our inner world and the world conversation happily align. The personal moves to the public sphere.

The ancients juggled carpe diem (living for the day) with vanitas vanitatum (the futility of human endeavour), but for us it’s a no-brainer. In the past, delayed gratification and instinctual renunciation were the ways to achieve long-term goals, but large swathes of our culture have settled for hedonism, stroking of the ego, and instant entertainment. The Bible taught the Jewish and Christian peoples there was nothing new under the sun, but since the 1960s we have been propelled by the shock of the new. This has come about because a unidirectional tendency has overtaken contemporary thought, moving discussion into ever narrower channels and towards the present. Unlikely notions, sometimes originating in the academies, filter down to the media where they are given wider credence by public opinion-formers who act as gatekeepers to the wider community. A sign of coming times was the fad of brainstorming which threw people with limited knowledge together in a room, and provided a wonderful impression that something was going to eventuate, but was futile, as the process lacked any shared pool of information and any criteria of judgment. Ideas don’t appear out of nothing.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274199/pandemic-false-knowledge-bruce-thornton

When I wrote Plagues of the Mind: The New Epidemic of False Knowledge twenty years ago, I focused on the bad ideas underlying many of our social, cultural, and political dysfunctions. I was particularly concerned with the universities, where most of these ideas had been born and nurtured. Though aware of the larger malign effects of the intellectual and political corruption of higher education, I never imagined that the “higher nonsense,” as one critic called it, produced in universities would so pervasively infect the larger culture and lead to policies, politics, and cultural mores so absurdly irrational.

At the heart of these bad ideas lay a strange hybrid of technocratic hubris and the therapeutic imperative. The former is a species of scientism founded on the category error of believing that human beings with minds, cultures, languages, and free will, can be understood and manipulated the way hard science understands and manipulates the material natural world.

The latter is the obsession with individual feelings and subjective perceptions of personal well-being and happiness, accompanied by demands that environmental, historical, or social impediments to both be corrected or eliminated with rational techniques developed by the “human sciences” like psychology, sociology, economics, and especially political science.

Moreover, this hybrid in its public guise uses the methodologies and quantification of science to give a spurious authority to its unscientific and politicized conclusions about human nature and behavior, while at the same time relying on ancient myths, cultural memes, and modern political programs. This incoherence is the essence of false knowledge. But these days, this debased Enlightenment idea joined with an equally debased Romantic one has burst out of its university nursery and become a culture-wide pandemic.

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/03/democratic-candidates-arent-on-a-winning-track/

Presidential candidates from both parties usually sound hard-core in the primaries to appeal to their progressive or conservative bases. But for the general election, the nominees move to the center to pick off swing voters and centrist independents.

Voters put up with the scripted tactic as long as a candidate had not gone too extreme in the primaries and endorsed positions too far out of the mainstream.

A good example of this successful ploy was Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. In the primary against Hillary Clinton, Obama ran to her left. But he was still careful not to get caught on the record going too far left. That way, he was still able to tack to the center against John McCain in the general election.

As a general election candidate, Obama rejected the idea of gay marriage. He blasted illegal immigration. He railed against deficit spending. And he went so far as to label then-President George W. Bush as “unpatriotic” for taking out “a credit card from the bank of China in the name of our children, driving up our national debt.”

The result was that Obama was elected. After taking office, in cynical fashion he endorsed gay marriage, ran up far more red ink than did Bush, offered blanket amnesties and relaxed immigration enforcement.

Yet the current crop of would-be Democratic nominees has forgotten the old script entirely. Nearly all of them are currently running so hard to the left that the successful nominee will never be able to appear moderate.

Bernie Sanders leads the charge for abolishing all student debt. Kamala Harris wants reparations for slavery. Joe Biden talks of jailing health insurance executives if they falsely advertise.

The entire field seems to agree that it should not be a criminal offense to enter the U.S. illegally. The consensus appears to be that no illegal entrant will be deported unless he or she has committed a serious crime.

http://goudsmit.pundicity.com/22893/the-humanitarian-hoax-of-the-united-nations

   http://goudsmit.pundicity.com http://lindagoudsmit.com

The Humanitarian Hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

The United Nations is an institutional humanitarian hoax promoting its destructive Agenda 2030 infrastructure for one world government as the altruistic advancement of world peace. This is how it works.

First, a little history. The United Nations began as a wartime alliance between the allies against Nazi Germany. President Franklin D. Roosevelt suggested using the name United Nations to refer to the allies of World War II. In 1942, the declaration of the allied United Nations articulated its purpose and was signed by twenty-six sovereign governments:

“A JOINT DECLARATION BY THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, THE UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND, THE UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS, CHINA, AUSTRALIA, BELGIUM, CANADA, COSTA RICA, CUBA, CZECHOSLOVAKIA, DOMINICAN REPUBLIC, EL SALVADOR, GREECE, GUATEMALA, HAITI, HONDURAS, INDIA, LUXEMBOURG, NETHERLANDS, NEW ZEALAND, NICARAGUA, NORWAY, PANAMA,POLAND, SOUTH AFRICA, YUGOSLAVIA

The Governments signatory hereto,

Having subscribed to a common program of purposes and principles embodied by the Joint Declaration of the President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister of Great Britain dated August 14, 1941, known as the Atlantic Charter,

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2019/07/the_lefts_endgame_is_not_chaos_its_worse.html#ixzz5sd4PSl51

On an episode of The Candace Owens Show that aired this past May, Owens had as her guest Dennis Prager.  While I agreed with most of the points made by both Ms. Owens and Mr. Prager, one item struck me as an example of superficial analysis.  They declared that the primary objective of the Left is “chaos.”  In an immediate sense, this seems true; the so-called “progressive left” does appear to be deliberately sowing chaos in America today.

However, I submit that the Left’s “chaos” is an intermediate objective, the means to an end.  They have a well defined endgame.  The Communist Bloc countries were a lot of things, but they were generally not chaotic.  They were highly regimented societies, and while they did not have the material standard of living or political freedoms enjoyed in the West, there were some agreeable aspects, as related by the wife of one Carlo Alcos in an online feature story on the Matador Network about her early childhood experiences growing up in East Germany:

It wasn’t all trying, though.  Everyone had a job, school lunches were free, after-school care was free, people were generally happy, necessities were extremely cheap, and there was more community spirit than there is nowadays.  In those times, there were no Joneses to keep up with.

Rigidly communist East Germany hardly sounded like “chaos.”  So what is the progressive left’s game in the Era of Trump? 

First, at present, leftists want to create a state of political cultural chaos in the U.S. for a specific reason.  They need chaos as a smokescreen to defend their current leaders — that is to say, Obama, Hillary & Co. — from prosecution.  Make no mistake: Obama, Hillary, and their cohorts committed some  serious crimes of an unprecedented nature for people at their level.  We executed Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for far less. Their degree of culpability is suggested in an October 2016 email from Hilary Clinton to then DNC Chair Donna Brazile, revealed by WikiLeaks, in which Hillary shrieked to the effect that “if that f‑‑‑‑‑‑ b‑‑‑‑‑‑ wins, we’re all going to hang from nooses.  You better fix this s‑‑‑!”

https://amgreatness.com/2019/07/01/is-chief-justice-roberts-the-jim-comey-of-the-supreme-court/

American Conservative Union chairman Matt Schlapp last week called for Chief Justice John Roberts’ impeachment over his vote with four liberal justices to deny the Trump Administration a total victory on whether the Census could include a question on citizenship.

Schlapp, whose wife Mercedes is the Trump White House communications director, goes too far—though he may have tapped into an understandable conservative sentiment. I don’t believe Roberts is quite the Jim Comey of the Supreme Court, yet he seems to be asking for the label. Comey’s troubles surfaced when he tried both to condemn and absolve Hillary Clinton of criminal security breaches. All the while, he self-righteously claimed to cleave to a higher loyalty. But that loyalty seems to have ensnared him in an even more insidious conspiracy, which the Justice Department is now investigating.

For his part—and the comparison with Comey goes only so far—Roberts in trying to depoliticize a case ended up protecting partisanship within the government, that is to say within the bureaucracy. He had done something similar in his 2012 opinion on the Affordable Care Act—finding its mandate a constitutional tax after declaring the law unconstitutional based on the main commerce clause arguments presented. In allegedly taking politics out of his opinion Roberts also removes the Constitution. (To be fair, he also enabled Republicans to gain majorities in Congress that should have repealed the ACA, but those majorities failed to it.)

As President Trump blasted the partisan actions of various judges, the chief justice shot back, claiming there are “not Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.” Trump replied, “Sorry Chief Justice John Roberts, but you do indeed have ‘Obama judges,’ and they have a much different point of view than the people who are charged with the safety of our country.” 

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/274172/straining-defend-rashida-tlaib-jewish-telegraphic-kenneth-levin

Attacks on Israel that distort the reality of the Jewish state’s past and present in the service of undermining its well-being and its very survival have become ever more widely disseminated in bastions of the Left in America. This is occurring most strikingly in academia, among both students and faculty, but also in prominent mainstream media and even within the Democrat party. At the same time, those Jews who align themselves with the Left often resort to the most contrived of contortions to mitigate the message of such attacks.

A representative example of this phenomenon was recently provided by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA)’s editor-in-chief, Andrew Silow-Carroll. The context was his contribution to the storm of comment in response to Rashida Tlaib’s remarks in a May interview on the podcast Skullduggery. Silow-Carroll’s article was entitled, “What did Rashida Tlaib say about the Holocaust? It’s probably not what you think.” What makes the piece particularly noteworthy is that the JTA is a news service whose stories are picked up by Jewish papers around the world and the rhetoric of its articles, not least that of pieces by its editor-in-chief, is shaped to have a desired impact on the service’s Jewish readership. In Silow-Carroll’s gloss on the Tlaib interview – as in many other articles put out by the JTA having to do with Israel and its critics on the Left – the rhetoric is clearly intended to reassure readers that attacks on Israel from the Left, in this case the Democrat Congresswoman’s statements, were not so problematic and that reactions to the contrary are overwrought.