Matt Taibbi asks: “Are Authorities Using the Internet to Sap Our Instinct for Freedom?”

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s what Taibbi has to say on the matter:

It wasn’t hard to understand why the FBI was organizing a censorship scheme, or why companies like Twitter and Facebook that lived off lucrative regulatory subsidies were going along with one. The motives of the powerful actors in all this were never mysterious. The part that didn’t compute was why so many in the general public were accepting of the situation. This included people I knew. Many people in America are not just accepting of digital censorship, they believe it to be vitally necessary.

Growing up I was very influenced by organizations like Nadine Strossen’s ACLU. Liberals I knew were as proud of having fought to let Nazis march in Skokie as they were ashamed of the FBI and police in cities like Memphis having spied on Martin Luther King.

Taibbi’s answer has to do with the internet and its ability to influence thought without the consumer necessarily know it’s happening:

First [Americans] became addicted to the Internet as a tool of convenience. Then it became a cheap substitute for real-life interaction. Finally they learned to submit to the wisdom of crowds, which on the Internet, as we also found out, is really an artificial representation of a crowd, generated by political and social engineers from the FBI, DHS, the Pentagon, Meta, Google, and other bureaucracies.

Yes, the internet shapes thought, in particular social media but also search engines. I first noticed many years ago that search engines – Google in particular – had changed, and the information to which the algorithm led users was not politically neutral. Simply put, it favored Democrats and the left. So I agree that this is huge.

But I think Taibbi misses something, which is the inherent bias. The artificial crowd being represented is a left-leaning crowd, and therein lies the key to why so many organizations and people who are liberal or on the left, who used to speak in favor of free speech, are now all in for censorship. It’s because it’s censorship on behalf of their side. Their people are the censors, so it’s all to the good.

Their devotion seemed to have been to free speech, but it never really was. It was contingent on their fear that they would become the censored ones. Now that the Gramscian march is nearly complete, they are no longer afraid of that, because they are in control. So censorship becomes a virtue when practiced by the virtuous – which they define as themselves.

Twas ever thus.

There are still some old-fashioned liberals or even a few on the left who champion free speech and are against censorship, and I admire them. I’m thinking of Dershowitz and Turley and yes, Taibbi. But there’s a blind spot there, at least in Taibbi. The devotion of many liberals and leftists to a neutral principle of free speech was never as neutral and principled as it seemed.

As for the American right, it is my impression that for the moment, many more people on the right are against censorship. But I’m not sure how neutral that stand is, and how it would change if the right was doing the censoring. I do think that, in general, the right is less “ends justifies the means” than the left, and that people to whom liberty is more important naturally tend to gravitate to the right these days. But people are people, and it’s my impression that a devotion to liberty must be taught and inculcated in order to really take hold.

As Reagan said:

Your friendly neighborhood DOJ and FBI, hard at work

The New Neo Posted on by

The DOJ and FBI versus the Republicans:

The House Judiciary Committee on Thursday opened a formal investigation into why the FBI snooped on two Republican House Intelligence Committee staffers during the height of the Russia collusion probe, suggesting the seizure of their private email and records may have been retaliation for the panel’s efforts to expose bureau misconduct.

If they want to target Republican members of Congress or their aides, they’ll do it, and no one will be the wiser until maybe five years later:

In an extraordinary intrusion on congressional oversight, the Justice Department used grand jury subpoenas to secretly obtain the personal email and phone data of at least two top House Intelligence Committee investigators back in November 2017 just as they and their boss, then-Chairman Devin Nunes, were assembling bombshell evidence of FBI abuses in the Russia collusion probe, Just the News has learned.

The subpoenas, obtained by Just the News, show the DOJ demanded that Google turn over personal email and phone data from the two senior staffers on Nov. 20, 2017 and that responsive materials were to be returned to DOJ by Dec. 5, 2017…

Nunes’ committee was locked at the time in a bitter struggle to force the FBI and DOJ to turn over records to the committee.

The DOJ subpoenas came to light in the last few days when the former committee staffers were informed by Google that their records had been taken, consistent with the Big Tech company’s policy of alerting customers five years after law enforcement takes such actions.

How can you fight back against a group with that much power?

The internet and our resultant dependence on electronic communications are by far the best tools the totalitarian state has ever had, far far better than Orwell’s telescreens. It used to be that authorities had to obtain the actual hard copies of communications in order to spy on people, or install recording devices in their offices and homes. Now it’s far easier and far more comprehensive, and far less detectable by the target.

Nunes said the subpoenas gave the DOJ and FBI unprecedented potential to learn in real-time what his investigation was learning about misconduct in the Russia probe. He called on the new Republican Congress to probe the subpoenas aggressively.

“The FBI and DOJ spied on a presidential campaign, and when Congress began exposing what they were doing, they spied on us to find out what we knew and how we knew it,” Nunes told Just the News. “It’s an egregious abuse of power that the next Congress must investigate so these agencies can be held accountable and reformed.”

Good luck with that.

And of course:

Spokesmen for the Justice Department and U.S. Attorney’s Office did not respond to requests Monday for comment.

Unhappy Bastille Day, but hooray for nougat

The New Neo Posted on by

France has got its troubles:

The western Paris suburb of Nanterre, where 17-year-old Nahel M. was killed by police, is one of many municipalities to call off their annual Bastille Day fireworks displays for fear of further unrest.

“We can’t celebrate our national day because of hooligans, I believe things are much worse than people think,” David Lisnard, the head of the French Mayors’ Association (AMF) told broadcaster France Inter on Wednesday.

Lisnard, a member of the opposition conservative Republicans (LR) party, said the cancellations were “a sign of a very deep unease in French society”.

President Emmanuel Macron will celebrate Bastille Day, which marks the fall of the Bastille prison in 1789, seen as igniting the French Revolution, with ally Indian President Narendra Modi at the traditional central Paris military parade under heavy security.

The two leaders are also set to watch the main Paris fireworks display at the Eiffel Tower, which has been maintained, after nightfall on Friday.

I realize that Bastille Day is basically a French national day rather than being only about the storming of the Bastille, which was a seminal part of the French Revolution. But it also occurs to me, and not for the first time, that the French Revolution is hardly something about which to be proud. And there’s something ironic about Bastille Day celebrations being disrupted by the threat of riots.

The French rallying cry “Liberté, égalité, fraternité” sounds something like our “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but in actuality it different. Although originally the “equality” meant equality under the law, things changed quite soon [emphasis mine]:

This identification of liberty and equality became problematic during the Jacobin period, when equality was redefined (for instance by Frané§ois-Noé«l Babeuf) as equality of results, and not only judicial equality of rights. Thus, Marc Antoine Baudott considered that French temperament inclined rather to equality than liberty, a theme which would be re-used by Pierre Louis Roederer and Alexis de Tocqueville, while Jacques Necker considered that an equal society could only be found on coercion.

The third term, Fraternité, was the most problematic to insert in the triad, as it belonged to another sphere, that of moral obligations rather than rights, links rather than statutes, harmony rather than contract, and community rather than individuality.

It is no coincidence that the French Revolution was marked by the Reign of Terror, and inspired both the Soviet and Chinese communist revolutions.

Nothing against the French people themselves. It’s a country I’ve visited many times and enjoyed greatly, especially the countryside.

And the pastry.

Speaking of which, here’s my reminiscence about Chez Nougat.

Don’t call me one of those terrible Republicans!

The New Neo Posted on by

As I’ve done a deep dive into the transgender phenomenon and its current abuses regarding the medical treatment of children, I’ve watched an enormous number of really informative videos. I’ve only linked to a couple here, but there are many many more. The podcasters at A Wider Lens are especially good. They’re very knowledgeable therapists themselves and they interview extremely well-informed and articulate people.

Here’s one of their videos I highly recommend. Most are about an hour long, but although I recommend watching the whole thing, you can still get something out of watching only part of it. Another trick I’ve mentioned before, if you tend to be impatient like me, is to click on settings and speed up the talk; usually it’s still very understandable. Here’s one from a whistleblower speaking about a gender clinic where she worked, run by Washington University in St. Louis:

That’s the main topic of the video, but that’s not really the main topic of this post. I was struck by this section that I’m about to highlight, which is about politics. I see this sort of thing in video after video from other people critiquing the current medicalization of children identifying as transgender, or from detransitioners themselves: the phenomenon of the person speaking being very adamant about the fact that he or she is not on the political right.

On the one hand, that’s quite heartening, because I have long thought that this is an issue that should transcend politics. The headlong rush to give troubled young people dangerous blockers, hormones, and surgery, without even taking time to explore their other problems that might be factors in the genesis of their dysphoria, is something that all people who care about children and parents, and who want to protect them, should be against. And yet, sadly, with politicians and legislators it breaks down rather cleanly along political lines, with Democrats being for and Republicans against.

And that is why people such as the ones in this podcast are at pains to describe themselves as liberals, and to say that their opponents who accuse them of being puppets of the right are incorrect. I would like to ask them two further questions: are you still a liberal, and why? And do you also think of the right as a bunch of mindless Neanderthals (nothing against Neaderthals, but one of the people in the podcast uses the expression), and if so, on what is that based?

Anyway, here’s the clip. It’s quite short (the woman with the headset is the whistleblower, and the woman to her right on the screen is her lawyer). And please don’t let this little bit put you off from watching the rest of it, which is truly excellent and very eye-opening:

I maintain that, even in many clear-thinking and intelligent people (including many I know), this idea of Republicans as troglodyte-ish haters is very strongly entrenched, and keeps them from seeing that most of their actual opinions and positions are in accord with the right rather than the left. The activist left – including the MSM – is highly aware that this perception is instrumental in keeping the left in power, and they take every advantage to fan the flames and keep that viewpoint going. It probably accounts for at least 20% of the Democrat vote, and maybe more.

Weird Grandpa Joe mistakes little girl for snack

The New Neo Posted on by

An error like that could happen to anyone, right? See this.

Joe has never been much of a respecter of boundaries, has he? Even back when he was supposedly of sound mind.

This latest episode reminds me of something I haven’t thought about in many many years: the phenomenon of political baby-kissing. But if that’s what Joe was trying to do here, he seems to have forgotten that it’s something the parent requests, it’s not a spontaneous act on the part of the candidate. Nor was Joe campaigning here, except in the sense that all politicians are always campaigning.

[NOTE: If you’ve never read this 1974 interview with the young and ambitious Joe Biden, it’s also an eye-opener about how creepy he was even back then.]

Internalized misogyny

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not sure that “internalized misogyny” is the correct term for the self-hatred of her own womanhood that Elliot Page, the former Ellen Page, reveals in her memoir. But whatever you call it, it’s something very toxic, and I think that this author is correct in saying the phenomenon has certain things in common with the body self-loathing exhibited by some of the olden-day religious fanatics. Here’s just a small sample of what Page says:

Like those women (who practiced mortification of the flesh for religious reasons), Elliot writes of her dread of womanhood. She speaks of female physiology with a contempt that would be damned as misogyny if it came from a man. Her first period horrifies her: ‘That smell of metallic blood, [like] a robot leaking.’ Puberty, and in particular the growth of her breasts, sickens her. ‘I’d forever feel this disgust, and I punished my body for it’, she writes.

There’s much much more at the link, and it is deeply disturbing. I probably wouldn’t be writing about it at all if these feelings were limited to Page, but they’re not. There is a deep strain in a not insignificant number of girls and young women who feel similar disgust and need for punishment, and it takes different forms in different times and cultures. I’m not equating religious motives with the motives of someone like Page, but the similarity of the form the impulse takes can’t be denied.

Back when I was in MFT graduate school many decades ago, the form it took was anorexia and cutting, or both. These activities have not gone away, but there is now considerable overlap with the trans phenomenon. Page, for example, did both (starving and cutting) in an effort to minimize and punish her flesh prior to deciding she was trans. I’ve seen video interviews with women who became trans who said they had also starved themselves and cut themselves in adolescence, in a similar effort. One of them mentioned that she first became aware of the trans “solution” as a young teenager on an online anorexia discussion board, when she mentioned that because her weight was so very low she was getting all-over body hair (something that is a well-known aspect of extreme anorexia; see this). And yet someone in the group told her that meant she actually was a trans man and that the hair was her body’s effort to let her know her that she was really a man. That was one of the things that propelled her along the trans route, which included several surgeries.

What is so very awful about female puberty, or female socialization, or whatever it is that leads to this sort of self-loathing? I confess that although I’m aware of the phenomenon I don’t understand it although I’m certainly a female. A personal note – I had two very good friends in childhood who became anorectic in early adolescence, and that was before I knew a term for it and before it was as common as it later became. I tried to talk both of them into eating – this was between the ages of ten and twelve. It was no go, even though they were wasting away before my very eyes. What did they have in common? They were both smart, perfectionistic, and somewhat tall, but that was all.

And in fact, looking at it objectively, I would have been a good candidate back then for the same anorexia, although I never succumbed. I had a very early puberty, way earlier than any of my peers. I was about nine years old when older boys at the ballfield started whistling at me and heckling as I walked by. I was so frightened by this that I turned around and ran home. I often dressed to hide my body during adolescence. I felt like an adult among children, and I towered over the boys. My parents were not especially aware or supportive. And yet – and yet – I clung to the idea that some day the others would catch up and things would be, if not alright, at least okay. I never hated my body or wished to mortify it; it certainly wasn’t my body’s fault and I didn’t blame it.

I wasn’t a “typical” girl or woman either. I was no tomboy, however, and I thought girls’ clothing to be far more interesting and fun than dressing like a boy. I was somewhat unusual in my interests, which were more philosophical and scientific, but I loved the arts, which I suppose is more traditionally feminine. More importantly, I didn’t think of these endeavors as being gendered, and this was back in a time when one would imagine that gender roles were more rigid. And yet it’s today’s young people who are being told that if boys like girls’ pursuits and girls like boys’ pursuits that that might mean they’re trans. We were allowed far more freedom.

Paradoxically, I think one of the things that has hurt women is the way feminism has hardened into something that has made them ashamed of their softer bodies and natural reproductive focus, and this has been an element in causing some women to reject those things or to even loathe them. And feminism plus the sexual revolution has helped to make women more afraid of men, who are now defined as predators out to exploit the female body. Most teenagers these days have been heavily exposed to online porn as well, and much of it is violent and frightening. What better way for a young woman to avoid that scene than to become a man herself, or at least to look more like one and muscle up with testosterone?

Why I don’t blame Trump all that much for Christopher Wray

The New Neo Posted on by

Wray is indeed a disaster. But have you noticed how often these heads of powerful government agencies are out of the same mold: arrogant, mendacious, secretive, elitist, and good with weasel words that say nothing and reveal nothing except their own character or lack thereof?

It’s a type, and it seems to be rampant in government. I’ve seen a lot of it in other fields, too, but government agencies seem to be among the worst offenders. So, whereas a president does often get to chose who will be the head of such an agency, the pool is probably very very homogeneous.

In other words, when you drain the swamp – if such a thing is even possible at this point – is anybody left?

Stephen Kruiser does make a good point in this piece, which is that at the very least Trump should have fired Wray before Trump left office:

As I have said and written many times, it’s stunning to me that Trump didn’t fire this guy as he was on his way out the door. That would have been one small bit of poetic comeuppance. It’s not as if Trump hadn’t grown weary of the FBI head long before that.

But then Kruiser adds this, which is what I’ve long been thinking:

The point can certainly be made that, had Trump fired Wray, his successor may have been equally bad.

I think the answer is not just “may have been” but rather “almost certainly would have been.” There’s probably something about the type of person who rises and get promoted in such agencies that’s baked in the cake. If you look at Wray’s Wiki page you’ll see a typical trajectory: prep schools, Yale Law, clerkship, and then government work mostly in the DOJ working under Mueller and Comey. Then he worked for a while in the private sector and was Chris Christie’s personal attorney; it was Christie who recommended him to Trump.

All these things might set off alarms now, but they didn’t back then. Should Trump have known? Probably. But I think he would have had to have gone way outside the government bureaucratic tangle to have found someone better to head the bureau, and that person would have had a steep learning curve in reforming the FBI. I’m not sure there’s a solution, but there certainly is a problem.

[NOTE: More of Wray’s self-serving, obfuscating testimony.]

The not-so-secure White House

The New Neo Posted on by

Well, we have two choices – either the Secret Service is lying and knows who brought the cocaine into the White House, or they are utterly incompetent at their job. I don’t see any other possibility as an explanation for this:

The Secret Service has concluded its investigation into the small bag of cocaine found at the White House and has been unable to identify a suspect, according to a statement from the US Secret Service.

Secret Service officials combed through “security systems” and indexed “several hundreds individuals” who entered the West Wing in the days preceding the discovery and were unable to identify a suspect, according to the USSS statement. The Secret Service said FBI lab results from the packaging found “insufficient DNA” and could not retrieve any fingerprints.

“Therefore, the Secret Service is not able to compare evidence against the known pool of individuals,” a statement from the USSS said.

Investigators were also unable to identify the particular moment or day when the baggie was left inside the West Wing cubby near the lower level entrance where it was discovered.

For a while, we couldn’t even get a straight story on where in the White House the cocaine was found.

I vote for “they know but aren’t telling,” but complete incompetence wouldn’t surprise me, either. Is there a government institution left in which we can have faith? I think the answer is “no.”

Will Joe Manchin run third party?

The New Neo Posted on by

Now, that would sure be interesting.

I don’t think it will happen, but who knows? Here’s the reason it’s being talked about:

Senator Joe Manchin is headed to New Hampshire next week for an event with No Labels as the group looks to run a third-party candidate in next year’s presidential election and frantic Democrats are trying to stop it out of fears it could siphon off votes from Joe Biden to hand Donald Trump a victory.

Manchin, a former honorary co-chair of the group, will be the headliner of the gathering along with former Republican Governor of Utah Jon Huntsman at the townhall meeting, which will take place Monday, July 17th, at Saint Anselm’s College in Manchester, No Labels told DailyMail.com.

The reason Democrats would fear this more than Republicans is obvious. I just don’t see that Manchin will gain much traction, however.

Long ago, I also would have said he’s too old (he’s 75 at present), but this time he would be one of the younger ones compared to the two frontrunners.