It's either this or one of its competitors rises to take them on at some point and we get a bifurcated society where specific companies cater to specific politics. That may be unavoidable anyways.
I think people outside the SV bubble (I grew up there, don't live there anymore) don't realize how hated and despised their censorship policies really are. Musk has his pulse on that, so I'm happy to see him step in and shake up the group think.
Outside of the SV bubble people have actual lives that don't resolve around tech companies. Until someone shows actual evidence with real numbers behind it it's hard to take the whole "people don't realize how much people do or think X" seriously.
As someone who lives in the midwest, very disconnected from the SV bubble, this is spot on. I know several conservative-minded people that absolutely care about the censorship and policies SV companies push and despise them for it.
I also live in the midwest, and literally no one I know (family or friends) outside of the tech industry cares at all about this. I'm sure that means my bubble is a bubble- but again, until I see real numbers either way this just looks like people pushing a narrative and using imaginary people to do it.
And yet, they all have Facebook, Google, and Apple accounts. You can hate them all you want, but you're not going to change them by shoveling money into their pockets. They care enough to bitch, but not enough to do anything about it.
These people who hate Twitter probably don't even use Twitter. If you're not interesting or important, then nobody on Twitter cares what you have to say. It's not like Facebook, where you can argue politics with someone from high school. A nobody on Twitter is just screaming at the clouds.
Twitter is a monopoly. When the only way for government officials to relay messages to their constituents is through a private platform such as Twitter, it ceases to have the same privilege as a private corporation. It is a de facto public square. This is not up for debate.
> It is a de facto public square. This is not up for debate.
You provide no evidence and then try to shut down other opinions? This is certainly not a self-evident fact.
Maybe the public square is still the public square? Or the Internet itself?
Isn’t “public” in “public square” important? Twitter is a private company. The public square became important to free discussion because it was owned by the public. Twitter isn’t.
And between FB, YT, Reddit, podcasting, Google search, etc. we’ve actually never had this many different, non-siloed ways of communicating publicly. If Twitter went bankrupt tomorrow there would still be many ways for the public to broadcast their thoughts to a wide audience.
I don’t understand how a website that the majority of my friends and family don’t use, isn’t public and isn’t in the top 10 visited sites can be the “de facto public square”.
Sure, it’s a major communication channel, but one of many.
This is very much up for debate. Elected officials actually have free postage and can send letters if they need to. Not only that, they likely enjoy direct access to their local news networks and can broadcast messages through that avenue. Most have email lists, and can send interested constituents updates through that platform. Most also have websites on official .gov accounts where they could host press releases as well.
Not everyone has a Twitter account, and I think you need to seriously reframe your perspective if you think it is the cure-all for delivering news to constituents.
> Not everyone has a Twitter account, and I think you need to seriously reframe your perspective if you think it is the cure-all for delivering news to constituents.
NO! I am not saying that at all. I am saying that this is why Twitter is a de facto public square. I am not advocating that Twitter should be a public square. Frustrating to see a strawman of this sorts. You have completely and utterly misunderstood my points. Basically, 180 degrees opposite of what I was trying to say, may be a failure of mine to be less precise but jeez.
The observation that Twitter has become a public square is undenieable (this is different from advocating Twitter to be a public square. I actually wish it wasn't).
I thought it was very obvious. Just check your local firefigting department or police. From local Governments to the President, they use twitter to inform their citizens sometimes exclusively. Meaning there is no other place to go for this information.
Unrelated but - Doesn't it bother anyone that it has become a necessity to use Twitter and they demand your phone number to login simply to view the Tweet?
I'd like to see reasons why Twitter is not a public square.
> Just check your local firefigting department or police. From local Governments to the President, they use twitter to inform their citizens sometimes exclusively. Meaning there is no other place to go for this information.
I believe federal, state and local institutions have reporting requirements that ensure the information is also publicized on their website or available in paper form upon request. I don’t think it’s legal to put important government info exclusively on Twitter.
Twitter is 1 method of quickly dispensing information, but that information then gets more widely distributed through traditional news networks. For example, I use Twitter almost every day but I never once read Trump’s tweets. I heard about them by watching TV or reading a news article.
When anyone from police to the President need their message heard, they put it on TV.
Also, a town square is for the public to communicate to the public. People seem to use FB, Reddit, Instagram, etc. all for that purpose. I’ll grant that it’s one of many virtual town squares, but it’s not a monopoly, so I think “the de facto town square” is a bit of a stretch.
I don't think they're a monopoly. If Twitter vanished tomorrow, people would quickly move on to a host of other platforms. That's the sad truth about network effects: they can unravel shockingly quickly. My mayor tweets, but her office also uses email, text messages, postal mail, press conferences, and other tools to communicate.
Facebook, for better or for worse, is a really central piece of infrastructure for civic society all across the country nowdays — it's used to organize churches, meetup groups, neighborhood parties, restaurants, festivals, etc.
People care because censorship does affect how they build their real lives.
> Facebook, for better or for worse, is a really central piece of infrastructure for civic society all across the country nowdays — it's used to organize churches, meetup groups, neighborhood parties, restaurants, festivals, etc.
This may be true, but how many people in those church groups, meetup groups, etc are actually concerned about censorship? In my experience far more of them are worried about harassment- I know far more women who can't use social media because of their stalkers than I do people who were kicked out of social media for having bad opinions.
I think what you're missing is that most people don't want to run into vitriolic hate speech while they're going about trying to organize their neighborhood parties (and so on). We can talk about the idealism of free speech all we want; the problem is any platform that stakes a claim as caring about Free Speech almost immediately gets overrun by that sort of vitriolic hate that most people don't want to be around in their daily lives.
I went on one of the "free speech" video platforms about a year ago because I was curious, and on my first visit, right on the front page, were videos about how the Jews rule the world and Holocaust denial. I'm not remotely Jewish and I was immediately put off from ever revisiting.
This is a core problem that people who legitimately care about censorship and free speech need to address. It's extremely unfortunate, but "anti-censorship" has well and truly become a dog whistle in the modern era.
Remember that free speech is about the 'market of ideas.' In even totally free markets, not every product sells. An anti-censorship social network startup cratering because its platform immediately got overrun with hate is not censorship, it's the market at work. The vast majority of 'regular' people I know do not consider Facebook's rules prohibiting hate speech to be censorship. They're just grateful they aren't running into it every time they open their phones to scroll their feed.
This, honestly. It _feels_ more like the only people that care about SV censorship policies are the people affected by them: SV types that live almost entirely on the platforms they're scared of being censored from. Well, that and people who make their entire careers pushing other peoples' boundaries and, as a result, generate a big negative following.
He's not asking you to take him seriously. He's taking executive action while others wait infinitely for some kind of "real numbers" to come in. Analysts make terrible entrepreneurs.
That's what makes all of this so ironic to me. Social media platforms and their users (especially Facebook) are not left-leaning. That a vast majority of Twitter users feel he will improve it means that the bias is fictional.
I don't know how you got that sentiment from that graphic, which doesn't have jack shit to do with political affiliation.
I will put $100 down right now that if you did a statistically significant, unbiased, controlled, representative sample of verified Twitter users - as in people you can provably show are actual human beings - you'll find the majority are left-leaning.
Oh wait, I don't have to, Pew Research Group already did it...
Facebook is a different animal because more than half the planet uses it, and what we consider "left" or "right" as Americans is dramatically different than what other nations would consider "left" or "right" or "liberal" or "conservative".
> verified Twitter users - as in people you can provably show are actual human beings
Verified means the account is authentic and of public interest. It doesn't guarantee that you are a person and further, the vast, vast majority of real people on twitter aren't verified.
as for the pew survey, it isn't controlling for many of the things that we know correlate with political affiliation, it is just reporting them as isolated facts. Just education and age would likely explain the delta in political affiliations within that survey. [1]
Sure this doesn't change the fact that the slight majority is Dem-Leaning, but it should raise serious doubt that its because of bias on the part of twitter instead of just plain old demographics of the internet.
Precisely, liberals aren't leftists in the least—at least not according to leftists. That is, world-wide, liberals and fascists have constantly worked hand-in-hand to form coalitions to keep the left out of power since WW1.
The true dialogue in America is happening amongst center-left vs. far-right ideologies.
I think the framing you're proposing is off; what the right has done are things that are offensive to leftists and as a result they're banned. It's tautological. This is exactly the premise of the criticism levied in this thread and writ-large at Twitter censorship.
Nick Fuentez (well, racism and antisemitism), David Duke, I'm sure there are more but these are the only examples I know off the top of my head from being terminally online
“It's either this or one of its competitors rises to take them on at some point and we get a bifurcated society where specific companies cater to specific politics. That may be unavoidable anyways.”
one can dream. as of now all corporations follow the same ideology of neoconservative imperialism because they are all owned by the same people (blackrock, etc)
You mean like the news? As an experiment try this for two months. On month 1 - watch only CNN. On month 2 - watch only Fox. Maybe take a 1 week break between both and write down your thoughts on the world... very interesting how it evolves based on what you watch/listen too... From what I hear if you just watched Russian state media it'd be an even more extreme version. The great thing about our free society is you have the choice to do this experiment, as I understand it you can't do this in Russia today...
> as I understand it you can't do this in Russia today...
Or Ukraine or many other countries. Not sure why you singled out Russia specifically.
However, if you are just watching corporate media you're not getting the full picture either. CNN and Fox News have very similar opinions on non-culture war issues.
"It's either this or one of its competitors rises to take them on at some point and we get a bifurcated society where specific companies cater to specific politics."
Not ideal, but better than the status quo where there is 1 company catering to 1 group.
> don't realize how hated and despised their censorship policies really are.
Majority of Americans (and most people I'd imagine) do not really care about their policies. They don't give two figs about it, and just go about their life just fine without being affected by it one bit. I'm sure you can find some people on both sides of the spectrum regarding their policies, but the vast majority don't. As someone who isn't from SV or has ever worked for in or for an SV company, my bubble is surrounded by farmers.
Doesnt seem that way from my perspective. Do you grant this is simply your impression? I tend to distrust you because you just assert this general truth that is rather controversial and you dont cite any data.
The idea that an absolute majority of Americans have really spent any time even thinking about Twitter's censorship policies seems divorced from the reality I live in.
> Majority of Americans (and most people I'd imagine) do not really care about their policies. They don't give two figs about it, and just go about their life just fine without being affected by it one bit.
That's the problem with not giving a shit. When things finally do become bad enough that it affects you personally, it's too late. When it comes to standing up for what's right - and I define what's "right" as mostly what the Constitution of the United States lays forth as our inalienable rights, you better give a shit from the word "go" and you better oppose it stridently because once freedoms get stripped away from you, they're nearly impossible to recover.
I can't even imagine how the Founders would react to things like the PATRIOT Act.
And we can blather on all goddamn day about "muh private corporations!" but when these corporations are actively suppressing competitors and are working hand-in-hand with news outlets to label any new alterative as a Mos Eisley-esque shithole that no respectable person would frequent, the point is moot.
Facebook and Twitter are the modern day public square. Some people will want to claim it's "The Internet" itself; you can just go make your own public square and publish your own website, etc., but that's not actually how a public square works. Just because you hop on your tractor and box blade your front yard flat and pave it over with concrete and add some park benches to it, doesn't turn it into the public square. You actually have to have the public actively occupying it. The public square is where the people are. And the people are on Facebook and Twitter... at least in America.
I can't even imagine how the Founders would react to things like the PATRIOT Act.
I can't even take this seriously. These are the same folks that kept people as property. Didn't make sure everyone could vote (male land owners only). They founded the country on land stolen from folks already living here. It isn't like the founders were really beacons of freedom, at least not if you use today's standards and honestly, they'd not even have a grasp of the events leading up to it. Perhaps they'd back it up considering how glaringly the world has changed since then.
I'm sure it is supposed to make folks think the country is straying from its foundations, but look around: People that aren't straight, white land owners are walking around with all these rights and freedom and stuff. That's already happened long ago. Maybe straying is a really good thing.
Imagine being born into several flawed systems, risking everything, and many had a lot to risk to fix one aspect of a system and being judged because you didn't fix everything. You act like the founding fathers created slavery on their own. The freedom given to the world by the US and by extension Napoleon was not some inevitable thing and its not something that will necessarily persist either as we can easily judge from mankind's very limited written history.
Well said. Judging historical figures by modern standards isn't fair. We should look at each person as a flawed human being and take away lessons from what they did right and what they did wrong.
It is fair when folks are speculating what the people from the past would say about modern problems - which is what this started out as. If one is wrong but not the other, some folks aren't arguing in good faith.
"I can't even imagine how the Founders would react to things like the PATRIOT Act."
That might not be the best argument. Remember that the First Amendment passed only a few years before the awful Sedition Act, which would never pass modern judicial review.
> and we get a bifurcated society where specific companies cater to specific politics.
That's exactly where we are now? When twitter censors right of center ideas and de-platforms those who think them, we invariably seek refuge in alternatives that engender far more radical thinking than if we had stayed in a larger public discussion.
The furthest ~25% on the left and right have an increasingly extreme, partisan, borderline psychotic view of the world that you're either with us or against us. That polarization has become radically more aggressive over the past decade.
Just to use a simple example: someone might might say it's not enough to not oppose men becoming women and dominating female swimming/sports (neutrality), you must support it. Anything else and you're an "enemy" and not an "ally." The left in particular has created an increasingly large vocabulary designed to polarize and split the population and draw lines between people (either or lines).
This doesn’t really make sense what you described isn’t actually a neutral stance — hell just the framing alone betrays your feelings. You’re already using extremely polarizing vocabulary in your attempt to be neutral.
Someone in support of trans men and women being able to compete would take issue with:
* “men becoming women” — transitioning doesn’t change your gender, it only aligns your outward appearance to the gender you have always been.
* “dominating female sports” — the whole point of the opposing view is specifically that trans women don’t dominate sports.
You’ve twisted it in such a way that even accepting the premise of your “neutral” statement is already super political.
Here’s a real neutral stance that would be accepted by people on both sides of this particular issue.
“I’m not qualified to have an opinion on this matter, the decision is best left to the athletic clubs and people more knowledgeable about the effects of HRT.”
> transitioning doesn’t change your gender, it only aligns your outward appearance to the gender you have always been
Is that really true? There's a growing body of evidence that "the gender you have always been" doesn't really apply as a general case. For example: detransitioners, autogynephiles, abusive parents attempting to 'trans the gay away' in their kids, and so on.
Of course there are people who also report having felt like their dissonant gender identity for as long as they remember, and will for the rest of their lives. But this is not universal.
Seems there are many reasons why one may decide on transitioning, and not all of them are positive.
First, since you used a throwaway for this, kudos for asking this in a way that is respectful and seemingly genuinely curious.
I think at some point it becomes a little bit semantics. If you transition for reasons other than your dissonance or because you suffer from dysphoria then you’re probably gonna have a bad time. And if you’re forced to transition by abusive parents or government you’re gonna cause dissonance or dysphoria.
Detransitioners are an interesting case because while it’s absolutely possible for people to be wrong the majority of cases of people doing it are because of external factors like violence, discrimination, and unsupportive friends and family. However, there are lots of safeguards to keep people from making mistakes. You need the sign off from a doctor, two psychologists, and have to be living as your post-transition gender for at least a year to get reassignment surgery, HRT is broadly speaking reversible, nobody is giving HRT at all to kids, teens only get puberty blockers until they and their doctors are sure, and adults still have to go through an interview. This process is supposed to catch autogynephiliacs (although this terminology is really really dated) and I suppose someone could lie their way into getting reassignment but that’s on them then.
So yeah, I think we’re basically in agreement. I think a better way to say it so it’s universal is “transitioning doesn’t change your gender.” A gay woman forced to transition against her will is still a woman, a man who detransitions because it doesn’t alleviate problems misidentified as dysphoria is still a man, and a trans woman is and always has been a woman.
It does not seem like the solution to the problem would be change the mission of the mainstream platform. It would undoubtedly fall victim to whatever these mysterious forces are.
I haven't encountered a single person in my young, left-wing, NYC bubble that demands I actively support trans women in female sport leagues, as opposed to not opposing them. I don't even know what the difference is between these things (does active support mean lobbying or volunteering?).
I do, however, have some family members that demand I actively oppose this, and get very mad when I profess neutrality.
- Claim that Twitter is a private corporation and its their rules (Btw, you can check my history in 2020 where I did support purge of Trump from social media, but I am now comtemplating).
- But, anyone who starts a new platform (let's assume similar to r/conservative which is absolutely not neo-nazi or fascist), gets intense pushback from the existing incumbents not with market forces, but rather with censorship, algorithms, political and misinformation driven opposition.
So now we have public square that enjoys monopolistic powers (yes, government officials exclusively publishing on Twitter. Your tax money cannot buy a platform where you can listen to the constitutuents that you voted for), but also prevents incumbents from rising through political proxies that I mentioned earlier.
What scares me to no end is foreign interference by intelligence agencies in domestic affairs done via social media. That is the real danger here. We are seeing the destabilizing effects of that since 2015.
I also just don't see the widespread censorship of conservative opinions that you do. JK Rowling is still there with her TERF views (which I actually largely agree with). Jordan Peterson is still there denying the predominant view on human-caused climate change. r/conservative; nobody wants to censor this or anything like it. Bret Weinstein is still there spreading his Covid vaccine misinformation. Donald Trump got kicked off after repeated ToS violations. Far-leftists also get kicked off (I know they recently shut down a bunch of far-left subreddits) and you don't see that because of your echo chamber.
When someone says that _Twitter_ does heavy handed exercising of censorship or algorithmic manipulation just shows me that most people don't actually use Twitter and instead consume it view headlines. That wouldn't be surprising considering is the 15th largest social network by MAU globally. The Twitter product today is still largely the same as it was 10 years ago; Meta & friends do far more to stifle "free speech" but are never given the same sort of criticism because they do the "right" kind of amplification and moderating. Twitter is probably the least moderated of all the big social networks but it gets the most criticism for having too much moderation. What people actually want from Twitter is freedom from criticism from the mob, i.e "free speech for me, but not for thee".
>But, anyone who starts a new platform (let's assume similar to r/conservative which is absolutely not neo-nazi or fascist), gets intense pushback from the existing incumbents not with market forces,
Not with market forces? You mean to say that censorship is what is actually holding Gab back from mainstream adoption? This sentiment has always been incredibly myopic. I don't know why American conservatives are always surprised when their flavor of politics aren't popular. For some reason Europe and the rest of the West, who are farther left than Americans, cease to exist and the reasons why sites like Gab aren't huge is because of censorship.
There seems like there's a presumption that already successful companies are not subject to the same forces as other companies, despite all the evidence (including Twitter's experience) to the contrary.
Anyone surprised. Russia may look like a big scary country on the map, but keep in mind they have roughly the same GDP as the state of FLORIDA. Its why they were once described as a gas station with nukes. The nukes are the only thing really scary about Russia, otherwise they are a turning out to be a paper Tiger. In fact if they didnt have nukes I would think other border countries in the east coughChinacough wouldn't hesitate to take their land. If the reports that they tricked their own troops into thinking it was just going to be an exercise (cant tell if thats just propaganda) then ordered them into Ukraine, and the fact that their convoy outside Kiev is totally FUBAR as far as resupply, we are looking at a major blunder here. Why wouldn't you show strong airpower competence to scare the west. I think others are right, this whole thing was likely planned at the top, didnt involve all the competent people it should, and now Putin is looking visibly pissed in his state broadcasts. Authoritarianism doesn't breed competence, its breeds yes men and ass kissers and kelptos and thugs right up until the poopees hit the fan. I think behind the scenes Russia is having a huge crisis of competence.
What was the alternative play out? Don't expand NATO and wait for Russia to come roaring back to life with the same authoritarianism but more money?
If anything these recent aggression towards Ukraine should drive other countries on its border to seek out the alliance, or else be invaded if your government doesn't cow-tow to Russia.
A great alternative I once heard was to let these former eastern block counties form their own alliance to counter Russia, but that may have just had the same outcome plus other unintended consequences.
Anyone who is applauding this, just imagine the opposite political party in power using this against you or organizations you support. This is why no one should have been happy when executive orders became the norm in the US and congress did nothing. This is how you lose a senate and gain a Caesar, and look what happen to Rome eventually…
Debanking someone who can now no longer pay for thier own defense is crazy overreach. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
"imagine the opposite political party in power using this against you"
But that's just it, isn't it? We've stopped caring about improving the fairness and consistency of the process. We only care about the outcome of the most immediate issue today.
It's a lot easier to get people to agree on a fair process for choosing an outcome than to agree on a fair outcome. If you agree to a fair process and it results in an outcome you don't like, well, that's how it goes sometimes and maybe the next time it goes in your favor.
But people are too wound up and partisan right now. Even acknowledging that an unfavorable outcome was generated by correctly applying a process is enough to get you expelled from your tribe.
That's a bit misleading, considering it was replacing the War measures act that was even worse. Mulroney's government didn't "create" the law, they just toned down the original (which is also why we don't call it "martial law" anymore but it's in the same vein). And IIRC, the only two PMs in Canada's history that actually enacted the war/emergency measures act outside of an actual war are... the two Trudeaus.
Actually it's funny since Mulroney never used it either even when it could have been justified. He was the PM during the Oka crisis [0], which was a full on armed conflict between the army and first nations nations that also lead to closed bridges & deaths. I can't imagine what we would call that nowadays if we call the truckers insurrectionists, terrorists, etc. I guess they understood the monumental consequences of enacting federal emergency measures liberally back then
(It lasted 77 days, involved at least fully 100 armed militants, blocked 3-4 bridges around montreal for sometimes weeks, killed police officers, involved a literal 5km frontline between the 2 sides and yet Mulroney was very worried about involving the federal government and even more so playing with emergency measures. Even better: the government actually talked with the protestors and didn't treat them like untouchable non-citizen foreign agents. The crisis was solved with negotiations)
While this is technically true, it leaves out important contextual information and could lead people to get a very wrong picture of the situation. It almost feels like an attempted "gotcha".
It was legislated by the Conservative party to replace the War Measures Act (created in 1914 in response to WW1), which was deemed too easy to abuse if someone wished to suppress civil liberties.
Before the Emergencies Act, there was a broader Act. It was replaced with a stricter Act. It was not used by those replacing it. In combination, these two acts have now been used four times:
- WW1
- WW2
- The October Crisis (also known as the FLQ Crisis)
- The current convoy protest
Its use was also considered during the early stages of COVID-19, but was unanimously opposed.
While I agree with you that we shouldn't think in 'red vs. blue' terms, the Emergencies Act was actually written because Justin Trudeau's father had undertaken even more extreme measures in the 1970s, while leader of the same party that Trudeau currently leads. This is a situation where the Liberal party has consistently taken extreme anti-civil liberties positions.
Protesters blocked multiple international borders between Canada and the US, at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars per day ($300 million/day for the Windsor/Detroit crossing alone). There is no "civil liberty" that protects the right to blockade an international border, just as there is no civil liberty to park a convoy of trucks in someone's neighbourhood and then stay there indefinitely.
I have family who live in the Ottawa neighbourhood that went through this. They had tractor trailers parked outside their house that honked their horns all day and night for days on end. They literally had to leave and live elsewhere for almost three weeks.
I think we can agree that in a democratic society like Canada, we have civil liberties that allow us to protest, but those same liberties allow us to enjoy our homes in peace, not to mention cross international borders, subject to public health and whatever other restrictions have been put in place by our elected governments.
I'd agree that blocking traffic violates some laws and regulations. Freezing people's bank accounts with no trial or right to appeal still seems like a civil liberties violation to me.
Similarly, the FLQ had no right to kidnap or murder people, but Pierre Trudeau definitely infringed on civil liberties during the October crisis.
The correct solution to Illegal behavior in a healthy democracy is to arrest someone and try them in court. We shouldn't be denying that to to anybody no matter how wrong they are.
Banks were instructed to unfreeze accounts on Monday, Feb 21 (https://www.wsj.com/articles/canada-instructs-banks-to-unfre...). The Emergencies Act that kicked off the account freezes was enacted a week earlier, on Monday, Feb 15. If you were involved in an illegal blockade/occupation, would you honestly choose being arrested and charged with one or more crimes and run the risk of a prison sentence/criminal record, over having your bank account frozen for a week?
Yes, I think the truckers should be charged for their crimes. No, I don't think their assets should be frozen without an court process.
This is because don't support extra judicial asset seizure as a valid policing tool.
You posed your question as an either/or, but I haven't seen any pardon claim that the truckers will never be charged (not that it would Change my position)
Using a legal system to enforce laws is the line that separates legitimate governments from racketeers. I believe that it should not be crossed outside of active warzones.
Separating people from their money is an extremely powerful tool. People capitulate quickly if you threaten to starve their family and children. It should never be used simply because you don't want to go to the effort of charging someone with a crime and arresting them.
I'm pretty sure it won't. This act replaced the older war act on the books and we can look at history that includes governments on both sides to see evidence of its use.
I don't see a problem.
A democracy needs tools to protect itself from elements that wish to destroy it. This is one of those tools. Someone looking to overthrow democracy isn't going to not do it because they don't have this tool. We have plenty of historical examples.
Those that wish to destroy democracy don't get to whine about the tools that prevent them from destroying it. They get to be at the receiving end of these measures. The theoretical possibility of those people ever getting to use those tools for their purpose, we'll cross that bridge when we get there, hopefully never.
Funny enough, my wife and I are looking to downsize so we can buy a second house in another part of the US because of exactly this. Basically one small house on the coast, one small house in the mountains. When things get too mundane and boring in one place we hop the the other. This only works if you have a remote job in the tech sector, and a wife who works contract jobs. I'm hoping this breaks the "box" syndrome for me even just a little.
I do plan to add some meditation practice after reading this article, its been on my "to do" list for a while.
Does anyone else who is following the FLCCC/Ivermectin/Peter McCullough story find it ironic that they would use this as an example of something we can believe the "experts" on?
Japan, India, and a growing list of countries apparently never got that memo...
Just a reminder that Bret Weinstein and crew once again predicted the exact nature of the leak, including citing Peter Daszak involvement, a full 6 MONTHS before the lab leak theory started to go from conspiracy theory to mainstream :
That the mRNA vaccines have killed tens of thousands of people in the US, and that they'll render people infertile.
He's presented ivermectin as a miracle drug that is "something like 100% effective" at preventing CoVID-19, and said that people should take it instead of getting vaccinated.
In other words, he's an obvious crank who is giving extremely dangerous medical advice to a very large audience.
I really think these fusion people just need more money. MIT wants to build their SPARC reactor prototype, which will make ITER look stupidly large and expensive, but they need $40 Billion.
I dream of the future of SpaceX fusion powered star-ships with quantum computers and Alcubier warp drives are thing.
I don't think the "mainstream" has fully caught on yet, but all those disaffected men are getting nothing from these empty "we see there's a problem" articles and empty half-acknowledgements, because the entire political and academic system is now fully aligned against them.
Lots of men these days are all turning to Red Pill content online whether you agree or not because its the only counter to the "masculinity is toxic" narrative. You better hope that people like Jordan Peterson succeed because his message to men is way more centrist and reasonable (watered down some would say) then the Red Pill elites like Rollo Tomassi, Fresh and Fit, and anyone else in the Rule Zero crowd. I'm sure many of you will gasp in horror if you've never heard of or seen their content on youtube, but realize this IS the backlash and the pendulum swinging the other way. WP and outlets like it (I'm looking at you NYT) created this culture and now you have to live with the backlash. I actually think that the mainstream will catch on to this pretty soon and label it the new boogie man at some point but by then nobody will watch or read their content so it will be too little too late.
Pretty soon the "all masculinity is toxic" crowd are going to find themselves labeled as the "uncool" crowd just as the religious evangelicals who were trying to censor south park back in the 90's were. And the pendulum swings...
I'm homeschooling my own son to keep him sheltered from both sides crazyness and plan to teach him to be a reasonable centrist who doesn't get caught up in dogma.
Good god, after reading the comments here.
I'm debating having my son home-schooled now too.
I was thinking private school, but its clear there is some kind horror show going on in the US right about indoctrination of political ideologies gone insane.
Anecdotally, Jordan Peterson didn't fix my mental health, but I had a good dad and a sense of direction growing up. He's seriously helped my friends who have absent or abusive fathers. Teaching men about their duties in society and to themselves is crucial.
This. It kind of reminds me of this meme floating around: "And then one day, for not reason at all, people voted Hitler into power." Having young men who feel they have no future is rarely a good thing for a society...
Why not set this up like Klima DAO which is doing something similar with carbon credits? This gives people an actual monetary incentive to buy and hold earth: the massive APY:
I think people outside the SV bubble (I grew up there, don't live there anymore) don't realize how hated and despised their censorship policies really are. Musk has his pulse on that, so I'm happy to see him step in and shake up the group think.