More on that Titanic survivor, Frank Prentice
I recently posted a video on an open thread that featured an elderly British gentleman named Frank Prentice who was a survivor of the Titanic. He’d been a crew member at the time, and he told his story. I find him very impressive:
I became curious about him and other survivors who were pulled from the water. It’s been difficult to document how many actually had that experience, because apparently some of the surviving men who got into lifeboats at the outset later claimed to have been in the water, because of the disapproval they might otherwise have faced. If you’re interested in this sort of thing, here’s a site that goes into the documentation in detail. There is no question, however, that Prentice was the real deal, and that his tale of being pulled from the water is true.
The rest of his life was pretty eventful, as well – for example, he was later in another shipwreck.
RIP Frank Prentice.
Daniel Shaver’s widow receives eight million dollars for his wrongful death at the hands of the police
…[T]he town of Mesa, Arizona, reached an $8 million settlement last week with the widow of Daniel Shaver. Shaver is the unarmed man who was fatally shot while crawling down a hallway on his hands and knees toward police officers, begging them not to shoot him.
In January 2016, Mesa police responded to a report of a man pointing a rifle out of a hotel window. It was in fact Shaver showing a pellet gun that he used at his exterminator job to a couple other hotel guests in his room.
Police ordered Shaver out of the hotel room and onto the ground, with his hands behind his head. But instead of handcuffing Shaver, officers—bizarrely—started barking confusing and contradictory orders at him to crawl toward them. As a clearly terrified and drunk Shaver tried to crawl toward the police, he appeared to reach toward his waistband to pull up his sagging shorts. A Mesa officer, Philip Mitchell Brailsford, shot Shaver five times with an AR-15, killing him.
Here is a link to the video. I warn you that it is extremely harrowing to watch.
I wrote a post about Shaver’s death back in 2017, and I’ve not wavered from the point of view I expressed there. One misunderstanding many people have about this horrific incident is the idea that it was the officer yelling the ridiculous and impossible-to-follow orders at Shaver who actually did the shooting. But that was not the case. It was another officer who shot Shaver when he thought he was reaching for a weapon.
The officer who shot Shaver was acquitted in the criminal case and given a pension for PTSD. The officer giving the bizarre instructions quit the police force after a few months and moved to the Phillipines; he was never tried for anything. If Shaver had been black, I think the riots that would have ensued would have been far worse than those following the death of George Floyd.
Shaver’s widow has some extra money now. But it’s small payment for what happened to him, which cannot be compensated for by an award of money.
Twitter power and Yoel Roth
The amount of coordination between federal agencies such as the FBI, DOJ, and DHS was vast, according to the latest analysis by Matt Taibbi, third in the series.
Here’s one small part of it:
17. During this time, executives were also clearly liaising with federal enforcement and intelligence agencies about moderation of election-related content. While we’re still at the start of reviewing the #TwitterFiles, we’re finding out more about these interactions every day.
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And there were plenty of requests for censorship coming from Democrats, but not from Republicans:
27. Examining the entire election enforcement Slack, we didn’t see one reference to moderation requests from the Trump campaign, the Trump White House, or Republicans generally. We looked. They may exist: we were told they do. However, they were absent here.
Twitter was especially intent on censoring Trump, and this was long before January 6th and before the election even occurred:
36. “VERY WELL DONE ON SPEED” Trump was being “visibility filtered” as late as a week before the election. Here, senior execs didn’t appear to have a particular violation, but still worked fast to make sure a fairly anodyne Trump tweet couldn’t be “replied to, shared, or liked”…
Not just Trump either, not by a longshot:
39. Here a label is applied to Georgia Republican congresswoman Jody Hice for saying, “Say NO to big tech censorship!” and, “Mailed ballots are more prone to fraud than in-person balloting… It’s just common sense.”
The difference between treatment of left and right was extreme:
41. Meanwhile, there are multiple instances of involving pro-Biden tweets warning Trump “may try to steal the election” that got surfaced, only to be approved by senior executives. This one, they decide, just “expresses concern that mailed ballots might not make it on time.”
You may find it easier to read the tweets at this thread reader site. There’s a ton more information from Taibbi there than I’m quoting here.
William Jacobson of Legal Insurrection has this observation, with which I concur:
…[T]he most interesting part…are the pre-election activities. The government in the form of the FBI and DHS were intimately involved in Twitter’s censorship regime BEFORE the 2020 election. That timing is critical. The government partnered with Twitter to censor political speech before the election — having nothing to do with post-election claims of election fraud, J6, or anything that allegedly was part of a criminal conspiracy.
At this point, none of this is surprising. Plus, they repeatedly lied about it and were also engaged in gaslighting conservatives who had already noticed the shadow-banning and all the other ways conservative voices had been diminished and/or blocked for quite some time. “Gaslighting” is a term used a lot these days (more often in connection with romantic/sexual relationships), but if you haven’t seen the movie that gave us the term, I’m going to post a little clip. In this scene, Joseph Cotton is very roughly akin to the Elon Musk figure, Charles Boyer is the “Trust and Safety” (so Orwellian!) Twitter head Yoel Roth (and the maid is perhaps the MSM), and poor beleaguered Ingrid Bergman is a shadow-banned conservative on Twitter who’s being told it’s all her fevered imagination:
One thing that impresses me about this entire story is what it says about the seductive power of power itself. Imagine, if you will, being a young person (Yoel Roth, for example, who is reportedly around 35 years old) whose main accomplishment prior to this was a fairly newly-hatched PhD in communications, then being plunked down in the middle of an operation like Twitter with a gazillion users. When Obama was president Twitter had no need to ban him; he was the right sort of highly-educated leftist, just like the folks running the establishment. But when Trump is elected, and you have your hands on the lever of power, slowly but surely you get bolder and bolder, feeling more and more virtuous and righteous as you do so and hamper the nefarious Trump. Plus, those weekly meeting with the FBI and DOJ and even sometimes DHS – just like a TV show, and a reminder that if you don’t do as they say you could face legal consequences.
What a heady heady mix. By time you get to the point of cutting off a US president’s mouthpiece, you’ve gotten there so gradually, and with so much help and positive reinforcement, that you must think you’re a hero saving the country.
Roth is no longer employed at Twitter, but here’s a recent interview he gave:
Months before the acquisition of Twitter by Elon Musk, I wrote down a series of red lines and limits. And my goal in doing this was to avoid emotional decision-making in the moments after the acquisition. Some of the limits that I wrote down were pretty obvious in retrospect. They were things like, I won’t break the law or I won’t lie publicly on anybody’s behalf. But one of the ones that ended up being the most important to me was that I’ll stay so long as decisions at Twitter are made in a procedurally just way.
Wow, wow, and wow. When you put that together with the Twitter files Musk has released, it’s staggering.
Here’s a longer version of Roth’s interview, and another quote that gives you more of the flavor [emphasis mine]:
One of the defining traits of Twitter was a culture of care and of empathy. And many of the people I spoke with were personally and professionally heartbroken about the fact that that culture might be going away. Above all else, I think the people who choose to work at Twitter generally didn’t choose to work at the company because it was the easiest job or the best-paid job. They chose to work there because they believed in the impact that Twitter could have in the world. Twitter is one of the most consequential communication platforms in existence. And what happens on Twitter can move markets, can change elections, and it can impact the safety of millions of people around the world. And more than anything else, people are worried about what will happen, given Twitter’s importance in the world, if there isn’t a team left to do that type of work.
He had a mission, a calling, all done with “care and empathy.” What might happen now if there’s no team to do “that kind of work”? Why, people might actually have access to the truth, and as a result a few more Republicans might get elected.
NOTE: Here’s Roth’s PhD dissertation, which he apparently got in 2016. It’s quite a woke piece of work. Perhaps it’s rather typical of the level of scholarship that goes on at the august University of Pennsylvania these days.
And from Roth’s LinkedIn profile [emphasis mine]:
Yoel [was] the Global Head of Trust & Safety at Twitter. He [led] Twitter’s policy and threat investigation teams responsible for a wide range of security, authenticity, and content issues, including platform manipulation, misinformation, election security, data privacy, and user identity. Before joining Twitter, Yoel received his PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. His research and teaching focused on understanding how policy, governance, and code influence the types of communities that are able to safely and securely form online — and how the choices of developers, designers, and policymakers can systematically push certain types of identities and communities to the digital margins.
That was what he did at Twitter, apparently: systematically push certain types of identities and communities to the digital margins. That identity and that community was the right.
Open thread 12/10/22
More Twitter files, this time from Matt Taibbi
I may write more later tonight about what’s revealed in this batch, but I’m more likely to do it tomorrow. If you’d like to read up, here’s the link.
Taibbi mentions that the next group of files will be dealt with by Michael Shellenberger. Such an interesting threesome Musk chose so far to write about these files! All of them are hard to pin down politically, and to some small degree one might call them changers in a somewhat left-to-right direction. In my opinion they fall into a category that is occupied by others such as lawyers Dershowitz and Turley – that is, people who try to apply fair and objective standards to left and right. They don’t always succeed – after all they’re only human – but they often manage to do a good job.
The Twitter files: leftism requires censorship
We on the right knew for years that it was happening. Twitter was not just blocking conservatives outright when they hadn’t actually violated terms of service, but it was also shadow-banning them and subjecting them to a host of other secret machinations – such as a “trends blacklist,” or a “search blacklist” – that inhibited their traffic and stifled their message.
It was widespread and utterly purposeful, and because Twitter has a huge audience and enormous political influence, it mattered. Of course it mattered, and the high-ups at Twitter denied it was happening for the most part.
Yesterday Bari Weiss wrote a series of revealing tweets about the entire process. You can read them more easily than on Twitter by going here, and you can read a discussion of them here.
Bloggers like me have a few thousand readers a day. Even a huge blog like Instapundit probably only reaches something like 220 thousand a day. The New York Times supposedly has close to 11 million subscribers, which is a lot – but nothing like Twitter’s reach, which has 206 million daily active users.
And Twitter administrators have not been shy about shaping the perceptions of those users to fit a leftist perspective, doing it in secret, and justifying it to themselves. Talk about elitist! And the only qualifications they have to do this is that they are employed by Twitter, and they can, and nobody stopped them. They are the arbiters of True and False, Love and Hate, Acceptable and Unacceptable, because it’s a private platform.
Yes, they collaborated with government, but it was voluntary collaboration – always to help the left, because the left is Virtuous – and also because the government might regulate them more if they didn’t. But plenty of their banning and the shaping and secret manipulating was done on their own – for our own good, of course.
One of the funny (although not “funny ha-ha”) things about all of this is that these same people bleat on about “democracy” and its great value and worth. And yet they think of the public as unable to sort out the wheat from the chaff, as children in need of control from – yes – Big Brother Twitter. And they’re not the least bit ashamed about it. They had to do it to save democracy.
Also see this:
I've seen enough. Long story short, Twitter was a fed-run operation. Feds were ultimately running the show, and making a mockery of our constitutional rights. https://t.co/DaL77ua8BW
— Jordan Schachtel @ dossier.substack.com (@JordanSchachtel) December 9, 2022
In the title of this post I wrote that leftism requires censorship. It cannot stand on its own and must stifle criticism or having its failures pointed out. Orwell knew that and made it the centerpiece of his masterpiece Nineteen Eighty-Four. Twitter is no telescreen; its work was much more clandestine and duplicitous. People were allowed to communicate what seemed to be freely in the marketplace of ideas, except for the most egregious statements. But it wasn’t free at all, and Big Brother Twitter was always watching you and ready to censor and/or suppress wrongthink.
Jordan versus Schenck: you don’t see this kind of Perry Mason stuff very often
First, some background on who Schenk is and why he was testifying in Congress yesterday:
Schenck was supposed to testify over his allegations that Justice Alito leaked court opinions in regard to the 2014 Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. case. The reverend claimed he’d gotten information about the majority opinion on the case after Alito had dinner with mutual friends of Schenck’s. Alito denied this leak, yet the New York Times reported on a letter Schenck had sent to Chief Justice Roberts earlier this year making the claim that he had.
The idea, of course, was to discredit Justice Alito. Schenck was the Democrats’ star witness.
Now, the video. Watch Schenck’s demeanor especially starting at 1:53:
And of course, the leftist MSM acts like this scene didn’t happen or minimizes it. Here’s NPR with a long article that even mentions Jim Jordan questioning Schenck, but only says this about what transpired:
Republican members of the Judiciary Committee, including ranking member Jim Jordan of Ohio, expressed skepticism about Schenck’s story, which Jordan described as “8-year-old second-hand hearsay.”
Jordan noted that both the donor, Gayle Wright, and Justice Alito have denied being involved in leaking the information, and questioned Schenck’s motives for coming forward with the story.
No special reason to doubt Schenck’s truth-telling capacity, right? It’s just Jordan’s skepticism.
Then there’s Reuters, which doesn’t even mention Jordan nor any reason to doubt Schenck’s story.
The NY Times has previously covered Schenck’s accusation against Alito many times in the past, but as of this moment the paper appears to have skipped reporting on Schenck’s testimony yesterday. At least, I can’t find anything in a quick search.
The WaPo actually does cover the exchange – very briefly, and with nothing indicating how very explosive and embarrassing it was for Schenck. Here’s the passage, which shows you how to minimize without lying:
Jordan sought to undermine Schenck’s credibility as a witness Thursday by getting him to admit that some details in a book Schenck wrote about his work connected to the court were inaccurate. “You got the key detail wrong and now you remember an additional detail,” Jordan said after displaying a poster with text from Schenck’s book. “We’re supposed to take your word over Justice Alito’s word, over Gayle Wright’s word?”
According to the article, Jordan merely “sought” to undermine Schenck’s credibility – he didn’t actually undermine it, or at least the WaPo has no opinion whatsoever to offer on that. The article says that Jordan got Schenck to admit that “some details in a book Schenck wrote were inaccurate,” but actually the admission concerned a story Schenck made up of the whole cloth, a complete fabrication complete with other details. The WaPo makes it sound as though it was a something minor such as Schenck getting the date wrong, or describing what he was wearing as blue instead of gray. The reader could easily read the article and continue to think that Schenck was basically telling the truth and Jordan just a nitpicking meanie.
That’s how the MSM works. But still, Jordan’s questioning and Schenck’s answers were a sight to behold. Unfortunately, most of the MSM’s readers will never behold it.
Sinema becomes an Independent
Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is changing her party affiliation to independent, delivering a jolt to Democrats’ narrow majority and Washington along with it.
In a 45-minute interview, the first-term senator told POLITICO that she will not caucus with Republicans and suggested that she intends to vote the same way she has for four years in the Senate. “Nothing will change about my values or my behavior,” she said.
So how is it that her defection delivers a “jolt” to the Democrats? Answer: it doesn’t.
She says:
“I don’t anticipate that anything will change about the Senate structure,” Sinema said, adding that some of the exact mechanics of how her switch affects the chamber is “a question for Chuck Schumer … I intend to show up to work, do the same work that I always do. I just intend to show up to work as an independent.”
It’s a labeling issue.
Notice that Sinema made this announcement after the Georgia runoff. I think that was a tactical move because she didn’t want Republicans to get more energized to vote for Walker. She denies it, although she said she was “delighted” by Warnock’s win.
Here’s another reason she may have done this:
Even before her party switch, she faced rumblings of a primary challenge in 2024 from Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.). Becoming an independent will avoid a head-to-head primary against Gallego or another progressive, should she seek reelection.
Sinema is definitely one of the better Democrats, but she’s a Democrat as long as she caucuses with them. What would really mean something is if Manchin became a Republican. But I see only a .000001% chance that he will.
Open thread 12/9/22
But why no mention of Mary Queen of Scots’ height? She was reportedly about six feet tall and Elizabeth I was at most 5’4″, so Mary would have towered over her had they actually met.
[BUMPED UP: SCROLL DOWN FOR NEW POSTS] It’s getting close to the holidays, so please use the neo Amazon portal for your Amazon purchases
Please use this blog as the portal for your Amazon holiday gift purchases if you prefer – as they used to say of the yellow pages long ago, before the internet took over – to let your fingers do the walking. Two things Amazon provides: convenience and variety.
Just click on the Amazon widget in the right sidebar on desktops/laptops or down at the bottom of the page for phones (or go here if for some reason the widget isn’t showing), and everything you buy during that visit will send a bit of money my way, and it won’t cost you one extra cent.
Thanks in advance!
Roundup
(1) The mystery of woke capitalism. I first really noticed the enormous extent of corporate leftism during the lockdowns, and then I noticed it even more after the Floyd riots and Black Lives Matter.
(2) There’s a lot of angst on the right about these amnesty bill talks between Tillis and Sinema. “Another terrible betrayal!” is the cry. At the moment, though, I think it’s all just theater. I don’t think there’s time to pass it nor do I think there’s the stomach to pass it in terms of Republican senators allowing it to not be subject to the filibuster. But conservative voters have PTSD – and rightly so – on this issue.
(3) But..but…I thought election fraud has never happened.
(4) Jordan Peterson certainly can pack a lot of thoughts into a fairly short statement. This segment that I’ve cued up is 33 seconds long. Have a listen:
(5) In Iran, Khamenei’s sister speaks out against him. I have no idea what influence if any she has, but the article says she has a very long history of criticizing the theocratic government of Iran. She is calling “on the widely-feared Revolutionary Guards to lay down their weapons,” and that highlights one truth of which all tyrants are aware: their power to enforce their iron rule rests on the willingness of rank-and-file police and/or military to enforce their policies. Once the enforcers refuse to do that, the jig is up.
(6) Musk has indicated that Twitter may have put its thumb on the scale in Brazil’s recent elections too.