RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/30/stop-pretending-big-tech

Our friends at Twitter have finally crossed the Rubicon.

For years social media executives have been telling the public that their platforms are neutral. They assure us they are not content creators or publishers or telecommunications companies. Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey told Congress that Twitter “does not use political ideology to make any decisions” going on to state “from a simple business perspective and to serve the public conversation, Twitter is incentivized to keep all voices on the platform.” The executives from Facebook and Google have said much the same after being questioned by Republican legislators.

Yet this last week has provided more evidence to the contrary, as Twitter banned prominent conservatives, ostensibly for holding conservative viewpoints. Jesse Kelly, a radio host, writer for The Federalist, and a veteran, was banned from Twitter on Monday, seemingly with no explanation. Kelly is certainly one who enjoys stirring the pot, but he’s far from an abusive or threatening Twitter user, and he certainly isn’t calling Jews “termites” as some leftists are. As of yet no justification has been provided for his ban from the platform.

Then magically, Twitter reversed this ban, doing so without providing any explanation for its actions. This frustrating exercise cuts to the core of Twitter’s issues; the company is flying by the seat of its pants, unsure what rules, actions, and principles should prevail, reacting instead to the leftist outrage machine that fuels their platform and likely drives the thinking of many of their employees.

But Kelly isn’t the only person silenced from the platform. Feminist Meghan Murphy was permanently banned from Twitter for arguing that “men are not women,” as she was discussing transgenderism. This might not be popular in the privileged halls of the Silicon Valley Twitter headquarters, but more than half of all Americans (54 percent) agree with Murphy that sex is determined at birth. The American public is totally divided on transgender issues, as is the Democrat Party. For example, 55 percent of black Democrats stated that sex is determined at birth. So are Dorsey and his cronies at Twitter ready to ban more than half of black Democrats?

https://pjmedia.com/trending/google-bias-against-conservative-news-is-much-more-dangerous-than-china-expert-says/
SEE THE DOCUMENTARY “THE CREEPY LINE” WHICH REVEALS THE OUTRAGEOUS MANIPULATION OF OPINION AND POLICY BY GOOGLE AND FACEBOOK…..RSK

On Thursday, the Daily Caller’s Peter Hasson reported leaked emails showing Google executives scheming to isolate conservative news sites in the wake of the 2016 election. Dr. Robert Epstein, a Ph.D. psychologist who focuses on search engine manipulation, warned that Google’s attempts to manipulate public opinion are more terrifying than the Chinese government’s attempts to control its citizens.

China’s government seems intent to implement George Orwell’s “1984” with facial recognition, data mining, a social credit system, and roving electronic “doves” to watch over citizens. Yet Epstein finds Google more terrifying, partially due to the recent leak.

“To me. [China’s manipulation] is scary, but people are aware of it. It’s done openly by the government. I think what is happening elsewhere in the world that’s being driven mostly by Google I think is much more dangerous, because it’s mostly invisible,” Epstein, whose research features prominently in the recent film “The Creepy Line,” told PJ Media Friday.

“There’s no transparency, there’s no accountability,” he added. “It’s a more ambitious kind of surveillance than that of the Chinese government.”

On Thursday, Hasson revealed a very damning post from Google engineer Scott Byer dated November 9, 2016. “This was an election of false equivalencies, and Google, sadly, had a hand in it,” Byer wrote. “How many times did you see the Election now card with items from opinion blogs (Breitbart, Daily Caller) elevated next to legitimate news organizations? That’s something that can and should be fixed.”

Byer went on to add, “Let’s make sure that we reverse things in four years – demographics will be on our side.”

Other Google employees disagreed and presented other alternatives to influence people.

Epstein, a Hillary Clinton supporter whose research suggested that Google’s pro-Clinton bias explained most of her vote lead in the popular vote, said the news confirmed his suspicions.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2018/12/democrats_find_the_secret_sauce_no_more_pandering_to_white_people.html

Chris Hayes never saw it coming: the MSNBC host was banished from the Democratic Party just because he is white. He even said that was OK.

News of his permanent suspension was delivered by Danielle Moodie-Mills, host of a blog called “Woke AF.” The AF does not stand for Air Force.

White people have to step aside, said Moodie-Mills, to ensure the future of the Democratic Party. She did not specifically say the dour Mr. Hayes had to commit media hara-kiri. She did not have to.

“What Democrats need to stop doing is pandering to the white working class,” said Moodie-Mills, to an increasingly and plainly uncomfortable Chris Hayes. Chris has to know that if there is no place for working-class white Democrats, then there is certainly no place for working-class heroes, like him.

And for anyone keeping score in this never-ending, ever deepening game of identity politics, that also means Chris is taking a job that rightfully should be filled by a black person. A black woman would be better. A gay black woman, like Moodie-Mills, better still.

Moodie-Mills rejects the conventional wisdom that Democrats played the race card too much, too often in 2016. And that is why Trump won.

Turns out, sayeth Moodie-Mills, Democrats lost 2016 because did not play the race card enough, and they have to double down between now and the 2020 elections if they want to win:

What lost us the elections is constantly pandering to a class that isn’t on your side. That isn’t the future of this country. That isn’t the future of the party. What black Americans have shown time and time again is that they are the backbone of the Democratic party, yet receive none of the investment from it.

By “investment” she means more free stuff. Or a high-paying gig on MSNBC.

Let us stop pretending that white women and white men are going to save us from ourselves. They are not going to. They are always going to vote with their whiteness. That’s reality.

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/23072

It appears that throughout this entire great country, we have but one proper news channel, Fox News, and even over there we can use a day without Juan Williams.

Or Geraldo Rivera.

There he was, saying that it is wrong to use the Holocaust to score political points, as Rep-elect Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) just did – which would have been a good place for him to stop.

For those who haven’t heard, Ocasio-Cortez, neither our best nor our brightest, compared the migrants crashing our borders to Jews fleeing Nazi Germany.

There is only one Holocaust, sweetheart. You might learn that when you grow up.

“At the same time,” Geraldo continued, these “poor people” have no choice but to come as they can because they have no legal system upon which to rely.

Plus…here it comes… Geraldo (as reported) went on to say, they have no friends, no rabbis, no fixers.

As if we did – the Jews. We had friends, rabbis and fixers. So where were they, you dumb klutz, for the Six Million who perished?

Personally, I was carried in a rucksack across the Pyrenees…and coming to America, through Canada, read this, there were no friends, rabbis or fixers.

http://thefederalist.com/2018/11/29/cnn-refuses-to-condemn-cnn-pundits-anti-semitism/

A few years ago, I was admonished by a prominent CNN anchor upset that The Federalist had published an article he claimed was anti-Semitic. The column in question, written by an Orthodox Jew, warned that his co-religionists had become fixated on the largely powerless alt-right while allowing left-wing anti-Semitism to go unchecked in American institutions.

It didn’t hit me at the time to mention that a perfect example of this trend could be found on CNN. Marc Lamont Hill, allegedly “one of the leading intellectual voices in the country,” according to the network, already boasted a long history of using anti-Semitic rhetoric, not only defending terrorists abroad but praising Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan here at home.

On Wednesday, Hill gave speech in front of the United Nations, advocating for violence against the Jewish State and dropping the well-known eliminationist phrase, “from the river to the sea,” a favorite of Hamas and other Islamic terror groups, to the applause of representatives from theocrats and tyrannies around the world.

No one uses this phrase accidentally — certainly not in this context. Certainly not someone smart enough to be considered one of the nation’s leading intellectuals. As Hill pointed out in his ham-fisted attempts to walk back these statements, “from the river to the sea” predates Hamas by 50 years. It also predates the idea of “occupied territories.” The expression, which has existed in various forms since the inception of Israel, was adopted by Yasser Arafat in 1964, before the West Bank came under Israel’s control after repelling an attempt to destroy it.

During the Oslo negotiations, when he finally dropped the idea, Arafat openly admitted that the phrase connoted complete Arab control of the lands between the Jordan River and Mediterranean Sea. It has nothing to do, as Hill laughably contends, with the emergence of a multi-ethnic liberal democratic state. Rather, it is about pushing Jews into the sea.

You’d think this kind of bigoted rhetoric would be highly upsetting to CNN’s sensitive journalists, who are able to ferret out anti-Semitic dog whistles, sometimes real and often imagined, all over the place.

Since Max Boot was reborn in the age of Trump, he’s decided that conservatism — pretty much all of it — was corrupt from the start.

Max Boot and I agree on quite a few things with regard to Donald Trump and even a couple of things about today’s GOP. So I understand — and empathize with — his account of how the rise of Trump could cause him to take a rigorous personal inventory and prompt him to embark on his “ideological journey.” But I find the spectacle of it quite ugly.

I have many problems with Max’s approach, but I will focus on two. First, he essentially admits — in his book and in interviews — that he didn’t do much firsthand analysis of conservatism and many conservative positions. The election of Donald Trump caused him to question the conservative movement he’d aligned himself with since he was a teenager, and:

Upon closer examination, it’s obvious that the history of modern conservatism is permeated with racism, extremism, conspiracy-mongering, isolationism and know-nothingism. I disagree with progressives who argue that these disfigurations define the totality of conservatism; conservatives have also espoused high-minded principles that I still believe in, and the bigotry on the right appeared to be ameliorating in recent decades. But there has always been a dark underside to conservatism that I chose for most of my life to ignore. It’s amazing how little you can see when your eyes are closed!

On most public controversies, he outsourced his convictions to those on the right he trusted or to conservative conventional wisdom and merely focused on his core issues. His adherence to a conservative party line was “a process of indoctrination — largely self-indoctrination, I should add — that took decades and that I am only now escaping.”

On one level, I don’t have a huge problem with Boot’s reliance on others. Every columnist, on both the right and the left, relies on experts, authorities, and colleagues they trust to do some of the heavy lifting for them. Whenever I write about guns, I always try to talk to someone like Charlie Cooke. When I write about North Korea, I make sure to talk to or read Nick Eberstadt. I don’t see this as “indoctrination” but education — and argumentation — because I will try to listen to the other side as well.

https://amgreatness.com/2018/11/28/no-aid-for-censors-

Last night I suspended Twitter indefinitely.

This had been building for some time for two primary reasons. First, Twitter, like Facebook (which I had given up a few months ago), is a hate machine. Second, Twitter’s ever-changing terms of service and curiously selective enforcement of said terms via shadow and outright bans made it increasingly obvious that Twitter is less interested in real conversation than it is in kabuki theater conversation—censored one-sided shadow-boxing—replacing freedom of speech with speech at the pleasure of one’s betters.

As such, Twitter has became a platform I can no longer support with my participation.

From my perspective, participation on a platform that actively censors political speech, even when that participation consists of criticism the platform, is a tacit approval. Remember how you felt when you saw those “Occupy Wall Street” folks using iPhones to bemoan capitalism? That’s how I began seeing giving Twitter my voice, a voice that they could choose to either allow or silence if it became pesky or popular enough.

Having your letter critical of state policies published in Pravda is not the same as speaking freely. You are still at the mercy of the state. Worse still, you are being used by the state to feign even handedness.

When you “join the conversation” on Twitter, you’re speaking at the discretion of Twitter’s censors, be they human or algorithms. Like Jonathan Edwards’ spider, you exist on Twitter at their pleasure. And per Jonathan Edwards, the Twitter gods “Abhor you and are dreadfully provoked.” With each new term of service added (the newest being the prohibition on “misgendering” and “deadnaming”) everyone is a potential violator. They’ve covered the floor with eggshells and then tell you that you’re free to jump around. A Twitter executive in 2012 quoted CEO Jack Dorsey proclaiming Twitter as “the Free Speech Wing of the Free Speech Party”. Hardly. Not Even Jack believes that bullshit anymore.

Being a conservative, free speech supporter, libertarian, or even the wrong kind of liberal on Twitter is engaging in speech that one hopes will pass muster with the company. It is speech reliant on approval from a system whose purposely opaque and broad rules shift with the winds. It is the acquiescing and providing power, reach and currency to the system one is criticising.

Any time I used Twitter to inveigh against Twitter unfairness, I felt as though I became another propaganda statistic that Twitter’s defenders can point to as demonstrable proof of how truly magnanimous Twitter is. “But we allow @FreeSpeechGuy557 to speak.” So there—shut up or we’ll ban you. The Soviets did, after all, hold public trials to show the world and convince themselves just how fair they could be.