On December 8, 2022, the Iranian regime hanged 23-year-old Mohsen Shekari (pictured, left), after a secret trial in Iran’s Revolutionary Court. Four days later, in defiance of international condemnation of Shekari’s execution, Iran publicly hanged 23-year-old Majidreza Rahnavard (pictured, right) in the Shiite holy city of Mashhad. Iranian authorities left Rahnavard’s bound body on public display, hanging by his neck on a construction crane…
Both Rahnavard and Shekari were convicted of “moharabeh,” or “waging war against God,” and after expedited legal proceedings, characterized by human rights groups as “sham trials,” were sentenced to death. Human rights advocates have highlighted the unlawfulness of the trials, lack of legal representation, and the prevalence of “coerced confessions” stemming from torture.
Medieval. But the Iranian regime has not hesitated to kill any citizen who would get in its way, right from the start. It is almost certain that more executions will follow, because thousands more protesters are reportedly imprisoned:
Iranian authorities have confirmed that another 12 individuals linked to the protests have been sentenced to death, while human rights groups have identified another 12 who have been indicted on charges carrying the death penalty.
The first man executed was accused of “blocking a street in Teheran and assaulting a member of the Basij militia, a pro-goverment paramilitary volunteer militia, with a knife.” The second supposedly “stabbed two members of the Basij militia to death.” Whether these accusations are true or not is impossible to know, but there is no reason to imagine the regime is telling the truth, and certainly no way to know the exact circumstances of anything that has happened, except the executions. Confessions were apparently gained through torture:
Mohammad Mehdi Karami says he was tortured into making a confession to security forces who were looking to pin the blame on him and 15 other protesters for the death of a member of the Basij paramilitary force during nationwide demonstrations…
Earlier, the opposition activist collective 1500tasvir reported that Mohammad Mehdi Karami said in a meeting with his family that officers beat him so badly during his arrest that they left his body in the street, thinking he was dead. They realized he wasn’t just as they were leaving…
Among the others sentenced to death in the case are Hamid Qarahasanlou, a doctor whose brother had previously revealed the severe torture that officers had inflicted on him and his wife.
The government of Iran has been roundly condemned by the usual human rights organizations and world leaders. Iran does not care in the least.
[NOTE: Our own January 6th political prisoners come to mind, of course. They have been treated harshly by US standards, but of course by Iranian standards they have gotten mere slaps on the wrist.]
“The Bahamas and the United States [are] holding accountable all individuals associated with FTX who may have betrayed the public trust and broken the law,” Prime Minister Philip Davis said in a statement.
“While the United States is pursuing criminal charges against SBF individually, The Bahamas will continue its own regulatory and criminal investigations into the collapse of FTX, with the continued cooperation of its law enforcement and regulatory partners in the United States and elsewhere.”
It doesn’t sound good for the disingenuous boy wonder of the crypto world. But he still has friends in high places, so who knows how this will end?
“I didn’t ever want to commit fraud on anyone,” he said during an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin at a conference put on by The New York Times in November. “I was shocked at what happened this month.”
I find it impossible to believe a word that he says. And yet its very preposterousness, combined with his air of jejune earnestness, almost pulls it off successfully.
SBJ exudes a very different air from the sophistication sported by another youthful entrepreneur who conned people into investing big bucks and later ran afoul of the law, Elizabeth Holmes. She founded her company Theranos in 2003, when she was 19 years old and a student at Stanford. It’s instructive to take a look back:
In 2003, Holmes founded the company Real-Time Cures in Palo Alto, California, to “democratize healthcare”. Holmes described her fear of needles as a motivation and sought to perform blood tests using only small amounts of blood. When Holmes pitched the idea to reap “vast amounts of data from a few droplets of blood derived from the tip of a finger” to her medicine professor Phyllis Gardner at Stanford, Gardner responded, “I don’t think your idea is going to work”, explaining it was impossible to do what Holmes was claiming could be done. Several other expert medical professors told Holmes the same thing. However, Holmes did not relent, and she succeeded in getting her advisor and dean at the School of Engineering, Channing Robertson, to back her idea.
In 2003, Holmes renamed the company Theranos (a portmanteau of “therapy” and “diagnosis”). Robertson became the company’s first board member and introduced Holmes to venture capitalists.
Holmes was an admirer of Apple founder Steve Jobs, and deliberately copied his style, frequently dressing in a black turtleneck sweater, as Jobs did.
I’ve long thought “Theranos” to be an odd name for such a company, because to me it conjures up the word “Thanatos.” The naysayers who said what Holmes was trying to do was impossible turned out to be right, of course, and Holmes is now in prison for fraud [CORRECTION: on her way to prison].
Perhaps SBF will end up the same way; perhaps not. I’m not even going to guess at this point.
But I have a gut feeling that for both SBF and Holmes – and maybe even for someone like Bernie Madoff, who knew exactly what he was doing and was not the least bit young – it helps to have an element of self-deception, if only a little. If the con artist believes the con even a tiny bit, it helps make the pitch seem more sincere, doesn’t it?
I had a busy day today and got a bit behind. I’ve put up one post (see below), but I have a few more things to do out there in the real rather than the virtual world at the moment. I plan to write another post or posts tonight.
I’ll add that, even though it gets dark so very early and the shortest day of the year has yet to arrive, we’ve passed the afternoon of earliest sunset and the sun has started to set a tiny bit later each day. Hooray!
[NOTE: The title of this post is a riff on a 1965 Ralph Nader book about auto safety.]
You’ve probably noticed the prominence of the words “unsafe” and “safety” in the working lexicon of the woke youngsters who now have gained outsize power in the world, through influential positions at Twitter and other media companies, government, education, and what passes for journalism these days. But when Yoel Roth, for example, speaks about it, what does he mean?
It seems that Roth’s entire working career has been involved with defining what words are “unsafe” to special interests groups, targeting those words, and censoring them. He seems to think that his personal opinions on this, forged in the atmosphere of the modern “woke” university and shared by so many of its denizens and graduates, are some sort of universal truth. Once given the power – and he was given a great great deal of power – he sought to put his virtue into operation.
Ban a president of the US? No problem. After all, on day one of that president’s term, Roth already knew he was an ACTUAL NAZI. There’s no way to read Roth’s old tweets and think he could maintain any type of objectivity or neutrality in making decisions; he was the most lefist of partisans. And yet he was hired to be the censor (head of “Trust and Safety”) for Twitter. It is truly mindboggling.
What happens at the university does not stay at the university. It goes on to deeply affect the rest of the world, as its graduates fan out into various jobs and apply their woke standards to the rest of us, sometimes clandestinely. To put someone as young as Roth in such a position of power is ridiculous, too, but it happens all the time these days. And make no mistake about it – Roth didn’t do this by himself at Twitter, either. He had plenty of willing help.
And what do Roth and the others mean by “unsafe”? Something is “unsafe” if it makes them or anyone in one of their favored groups feel bad. Note the elevation of mere words, another hallmark of the young and the left. And yes, of course words can led to violent actions on occasion. But it’s the actions that are the problem, not the words, and in a society concerned with preserving liberty – as ours used to be, but increasingly is not – the words are protected.
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.
…[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
