Think of Big Tech Censorship as an Opportunity

Everyone is worried and riled up about social media censorship and data harvesting. Not to be endured.

It's a problem. But not the one we think it is. For instance, I am coming to think that the mindless censorship of conservatives by Facebook and others is a strategic mistake for Facebook and its pals in the ruling class. It puts the question of free speech on the radar. And since, right now, it is hurting us deplorables, then it is likely to enrage more of us deplorables to the point that we might do something about it.

I was reading about the inclusion of Candace Owens on a mid-level Facebook "hate agents" list. The article shows her hate list entry on a secret screen image. Really, Facebook censors? Really? The anodyne center-right Candace Owens? She is a threat to our "community standards?" Hey, Facebook: I gotta bridge to sell you. And Owens was suspended for a message where she says that "White supremacy is not a threat. Liberal supremacy is." You think?

Look, I get that you Facebook censors are young millennials that have never read a book, and that, in the words of Ben Rhodes, "literally know nothing," But you really could do a better job of hiding it.

But in accordance with my maxim, that "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice," I say: Get it on. The more you dumb-as-posts SJW millennials censor and marginalize us the angrier we will get. And the more elections we will win.

I've been thinking about free speech, partly in response to reading Voltaire's Bastards, a flawed book that really doesn't get it. Author John Ralston Saul (a fan of IPCC founder Maurice Strong) knows that there is something wrong with the faith in reason bequeathed to us by the Age of Reason. But so far, he is flapping around at page 425 and counting and completely missing the point. Rather like his hero Maurice Strong, the real author of "we only have 10 years to live before the climate kills us all!"

The thing about free speech in the age of Voltaire was that the Enlightenment intellectuals needed free speech to get their message out and to cow the ruling class into letting middle-class scribblers acquire more status. They were a rising class and they thought that they didn't get no respect from the nobles and the courtiers in the ruling class of the age, that were as dumb as posts. Reason was a club with which to beat the nobles and the courtiers into admitting the scribblers to polite society.

Fast forward and what do we have? Ordinary middle-class deplorables that don't get no respect from the gentry liberals and the Democratic operatives with bylines in the media. We notice that the first reaction of today's educated ruling class is to censor our speech and marginalize us as the "far right."

Of course they do. The natives are restless and the first response of every colonial governor is a show of force to teach the natives who is boss.

But what our ruling-class pals have not done is think about their responsibility as rulers. Like most rulers down the ages they cannot think very far beyond the notion that, by golly, the purpose of society is identical to the class interest of us, the rulers. In our day this class interest of the rulers is the class interest of the educated class and their political clients. Back in the day, our evil slaveholder Founders recognized that the continuance of their rule involved accommodating people that didn't agree with them; there should be a public square in which all views could get heard. But they were slaveholders; what did they know?

A similar problem is the erosion of privacy due to big media data harvesting and government surveillance, discussed by the Zman.

Let's not think of privacy as a problem, but as an opportunity.

Think about privacy this way. Back in the day, when everyone lived in agricultural villages, there was no privacy. The women knew everything that was going on, and they used their knowledge to control things. But there was an out. If you got in trouble, you could always leave and disappear. Because there was no global online database of miscreants. If you were in New England back in the day, you could just disappear and head "out west."

Then came the industrial city and its anonymity. The telling point is that, in response to the social chaos, society invented the urban police force to control the uncontrollable youths and gangs that were terrorizing honest citizens. You can read Dickens to get a flavor of the colorful mixture of anti-social characters that urban anonymity set free.

Now we are returning to a society where everyone knows everything about you. OK, fine. That means that we are going to have to codify rules about privacy into law and into the unwritten law of the culture. I don't know how it will end up, but it is coming, and it is coming because various victims of the lack of privacy will get riled up and demand justice.

Of course, we won't get justice, but we might get a reduction of injustice.

And Now the Aussies

First Brexit, then Trump, now Oz. And every time the polls had it wrong. And every time the ruling class was insulted, outraged.

What is going on here?

I think it is the fundamental division between the ruling class -- any ruling class -- and the people it rules.

What the people want is to be protected. First of all, they want to be protected from enemies foreign and domestic. Second, they want the space to wive and thrive: to have a job; to have a home; to marry and raise those kids. And they expect a bit of free stuff in return for their votes. And you'd better not ever take that free stuff away. 'Cos we paid for those bennies with our taxes.

But the ruling class is different. It wants to imagine itself in a higher sphere than merely guarding the borders, or punishing the local ruffians. Actually, our pals Gilbert and Sullivan pointed out over a century ago that the policeman's lot is not a happy one.

So the policing classes like to cloak their constabulary duties in finer robes than you would think is strictly necessary. Kings like to think of themselves as descended from gods; nobles like to imagine their blood finer than the coarse blood of the common folk.

And the priests: they like us to think that their pronouncements come direct from God.

And when constabulary duty's to be done, the rulers also like to think that they are not just defending the border but saving the world from disaster.

And, really, if we are talking about saving the world -- usually within the next 10 years -- then the present emergency justifies the rulers accessing extraordinary powers for themselves and their supporters. Because we have only 10 years to save the world!

You can see that there tends to be a certain distance between the rulers' idea of government's role in the world and the notions that the ruled-over have about government.

In the case of Brexit we see the distance between the Euro elite's idea of their role, which was that the bloodbaths of the first half of the 20th century were caused by nationalism. Thus, according to the Zman, "The lesson learned by Western elites was that nationalism leads to competition, which then leads to war." -- unless wisely controlled and managed by themselves. But to the average Brit White Van Man, it looks like the toffs have created a nice little privileged world for themselves while the ordinary British bloke gets to touch his forelock and say "morning, squire," or "yes, master" like Igor.

Then with Trump we have the divide between the educated elite and the average US deplorable or bitter clinger. It's telling that the deplorable meme was launched by Hillary Clinton addressing a gay group and the bitter-clingers meme was launched by Barack Obama addressing a fundraiser in San Francisco. These two politicos exactly demonstrate the distance between the urban elites and the folks in flyover country.

The point to understand is that the deplorables and the bitter clingers are the white working class that Democrats looved back in the day and that Democrats promised to protect from the evil robber barons and employers and corporate honchos. The workers don't want airy-fairy notions of the good society or saving the world from racists, sexists, homophobes, and climate deniers. They just want a decent job and freedom from layoffs. And education for the kids.

Now the rot has spread to Australia where against all the predictions and polls the Liberal-National coalition has won the recent election against the Australian Labor Party. Just like our Democratic Party, the Oz Labor Party is an urban sophisticate's party, worrying about intersectionality and about saving the world from climate change. The homeland of the the Liberal-Nationals is in the natural-resource state of Queensland where coal mining is a big deal. The homelands of Labor are the gentry fiefdoms of Sydney and Melbourne.

Melbourne, when I visited a few years ago, is an urbanist's wet dream, complete with heavy rail, light rail, buses, and bike lanes. Used to be that Melbourne was a manufacturing city, making cars and such. Not any more.

Notice that the green energy revolution proposes to subsidize the places where the educated ruling-class lives in urban enclaves with subsidized electric cars and rooftop solar panels. Not to mention that the educated class also gets the well-paid careers in corporations and government and education. And the ordinary deplorable that lives in the cheaper areas on the edge of town gets to pay full price.

The final nail in the coffin is that the educated ruling-class represents its self-dealing politics as a moral crusade to save the marginalized of the world and the very planet itself.

But, of course. Rulers have always wrapped themselves in the robes of God.

But sometimes the rubes rebel and tell the kings and the priests to get lost.

Fighting Social Media Censorship

I understand why social media censors conservatives. It just makes life easier, because the left has activist groups up the ying-yang belaboring corporations for whatever. Activism is what lefties do. It's the modern equivalent of the medieval flagellants. So if social media wants to stay out of trouble, toadying to the left is good policy. Plus most of the youngsters working for social media are haters and fearers that have been carefully taught to hate and to fear anyone that does not agree with them.

But in the last couple of days we have seen Facebook censoring Trump 2020 advisory board member Jenna Ellis Rives for sharing a "pro-life post from blogger Matt Walsh, pointing out how transgender activism undermines key pro-choice arguments. Facebook flagged the post for 'hate speech.'"

And now it is Michelle Malkin's turn. What did she do? She protested the deplatforming of Gavin McInnes and Laura Loomer. So Facebook deleted her post.

UPDATE: And Blexit activist Candace Owens. Because you can't say that welfare state has screwed black families. And Heritage Foundation. Because you can't say that trans men in women's sports is ridiculous.

Therefore: Censored. Straight up. Because thou shalt not blaspheme the liberal narrative.

It's pretty obvious what is going on here. Anything that protests or disagrees with out ruling-class notions of right and wrong is vile extremism and is not to be endured.

So now the White House has launched "a website that asks people who think their viewpoints have been censored by social media platforms to share their stories" oh, and, the New York Times adds,
"their contact information." See? It's just a cynical fundraising play from the racist sexist homophobic Commander-in-Chief.

Funny how conservatives all think that the Southern Law Poverty Center is nothing more than a cynical fundraising operation and its hate-group map is nothing more than bubba bait for liberals.

Whereas the liberal watchmen at The New York Times see cynical fundraising operations in completely different places. I wonder why?

Hey, maybe The New York Times is right about this. Or maybe the Trump social-media censorship reporting website is part of a strategic plan to rile up the deplorables in advance of the 2020 election.

You know. Just like the Democrats have been riling up the base for the last two years over Trump Russia Collusion. Or is that different? Because Yellow Hair?

Christopher DeGroot has something to say about all of this today.

[I]t is extremely difficult, in the effectively post-Christian West, for people who have incompatible values to coexist without profound and intractable struggle. For where Christianity, through a common belief system, once provided social order and cohesion, today there is endless conflict and, in many cases, no rational solution is available.

The point is that, in Christian times, at least we all lived under the same God. But now in post-Christian times we have the ruling class believing in another God. And it is not surprising that the new believers are enthusiastic about their beliefs and believe that the old beliefs are superstitions and bigotry, trying to take us back to the bad old days of the Inquisition and witch hunts.

The obvious example of this is abortion. If you are pro-life you believe that children and posterity are the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. Thus abortion is a vile attack on everything you hold dear. But for the pro-choice people an unwanted pregnancy prevents a woman from reaching her true potential. Where is the common ground there, where the possibility for tolerance and compromise?

DeGroot quotes Chesterton: "Tolerance is the virtue of the man without convictions."

Notice that my reductive Three Peoples theory is a deep and wise understanding of the human condition, that there are at least three kinds of people: subordinates, responsibles, and creatives, and this is natural and physical. If you accept the world view of my theory then it is a simple step to understand that the moral framework for our society must comprehend the different moral universes of the three different peoples.

See, my theory is that there are a lot of People of the Subordinate Self around -- the helpless victimsn for whom the left advocates -- and they will find that a society that does not accommodate their need for social programs to support people like them is simply unjust. Similarly, there are a lot of People of the Responsible Self around -- deplorables we call them -- and they want a world of definite rules and roles, and will find a society without clear rules and roles that values the solid citizen a society that is simply unjust.

Then, of course, we have the People of the Creative Self -- mostly well-born scions of the ruling class. They expect a society that encourages them and congratulates them on living creative lives, extending to creative lifestyles. To them, any society that enforces rigid rules and roles is simply unjust.

So what do we do about it?

Well, I'd say that we need to start with the notion of true "diversity" shining out of my Three Peoples theory. Once you understand that people are different, and likely to remain so, then your values and your political agenda will naturally reflect that world view.

At least there is this. My Three Peoples world view can't be any worse than the lefty world view that wants a Great Reaction towards socialism or neo-slavery, the welfare state or neo-feudalism, and identity politics or neo-tribalism.

And one thing we have learned from our lefty friends is that they cannot even begin to understand why anyone would think differently than they.

Even President Xi Knows Rule One

Everyone knows Rule One in the good old US and A.

What is it? You know what it is:

Rule One: Blacks cannot be racist.

But then there is Rule Two:

Rule Two: Except for black conservatives.

But what about black conservative women?

Rule Three: Maybe not black conservative women.

Really? You serious?

Rule Four: No. Forget it. 

So when Trump State Dept. official Dr. Kiron Skinner talks about China, and the fact that we need to realize China is not a great power competitor like the USSR:

[Reagan] said I just don’t see the signs that it [the USSR] can survive a technology race with the West. So, in China, we have an economic competitor, we have an ideological competitor, one that really does seek a kind of global reach that many of us didn’t expect a couple of decades ago, and I think it’s also striking that it’s the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian.

What? "not Caucasian?" Are you kidding? Raacism, straight up! The Outrage! The Horror! Fire the Trumpian racist! Now!

Why even President-for-life Xi got into the act.

Which shows that that inscrutable Oriental ain't so inscrutable after all.

But wait! Dr. Skinner is an African American! So she can't be a raacist. Right?

Oh yeah. Rule Two. Black conservatives need not apply for Rule One.

Of course, Dr. Skinner makes an important point. We need to get into the minds of the Chinese Commies. I dare say such a notion goes all the way back to the World's First Strategist, Sun Tzu. A Chinese.

Now, I believe that the Chinese Commies under President Xi are making a big mistake, and are trying to re-imagine a Chinese empire under a Son of Heaven just like in the old days. It is their version of the Caucasian Left's Great Reaction against the modern era.

In other words, like the Caucasian Left, the Chinese Commies believe in a Return to Force, a powerful China that will dominate its tributary states with force, just like in the good old days. And the Belt and Road Initiative exactly symbolizes that mindset, imagining that the trade routes and power structures of the ancient world can be resuscitated.

But I think that the fundamental thing to understand about the modern world is that the old ways of conquest, of accumulating wealth by looting and plundering the neighboring state -- not to mention picking up a nice little Dis-e-ney princess like Briseis on the way -- is as dead as the Dodo. That's because a prosperous neighbor making stuff for us to buy is much more useful to us than plundering the neighbor.

Put it this way. If you plunder your neighbors, they are left poor and starving. No use to anyone. But if the neighbors are busy wiving and thriving, then they are contributing to the wealth and prosperity of the world.

The truth is that we humans prefer to learn our lessons the hard way. We always come up with some nostalgic notion like socialism that looks backward to the supposed good old days of the equality of the village community.

In China's case it is the nostalgia for the good old days when China was the No. 1 country in the world, the Middle Kingdom, and the axis of the world went north to south right through the middle of the line-up of Gates in the middle of the Forbidden City -- like the Gate of Supreme Harmony. And all the gates had a middle gate, through which only the Son of Heaven himself could go.

Think of Brit Nostalgia for the good old days of the British Empire, squared.

In other words, modern humans are never going to solve their problems with more political power. The way of the future is to walk away from political power and surrender only to the power of the market.

But everyone has to learn that the hard way, whether it is the workers, the feminists, the Black Lives Matter racists, and especially the lefty SJWs and woke-ists. Now it's the Chinese Commies learning the hard way, although you would think that they would have already learned enough from the incandescent Mao Zedong.

Still, I still don't appreciate them learning the hard lessons in the School of Life on my dime.

Trump Russia: Is It 9/15/1864 or 8/1/1944?

Know the significance of those dates?

September 15, 1864 is the start date of Gen. Sherman's march from Atlanta to the sea. It was the military action that told every loyal son of the South that the game was up, that the hated Yankees could drive through their homeland, loot and plunder, and there was nothing they could do about it.

August 1, 1944 is the date of the creation of Gen. Patton's Third Army that spearheaded the march to the Rhine. La Wik:

The Third Army simultaneously attacked west into Brittany, south, east toward the Seine, and north, assisting in trapping several hundred thousand German soldiers in the Falaise Pocket between Falaise and Argentan.

Now I am reading about the Trump march to re-election in November 2020. The battlespace preparation is over, according to Brian Cates. Because now that Rod Rosenstein has resigned from the Department of Justice both he and Jeff Sessions are available to serve as witnesses to the CIA/DOJ/FBI spying operation on the Trump campaign and administration.

See, for the last two years we rubes have been thinking that Rod Rosenstein was a snake in the grass that was part of the cabal to take Trump down. But suppose we were wrong? Suppose Rosenstein is our guy and has been metaphorically wired for the last two years to listen in on the plots and plans of the Obama administration appointees that were spying on the Trump campaign?

For the past two years, Rosenstein, far from being the snake in the garden, has actually been helping Trump prepare the battlefield for what’s going to unfold over the next few months. Two years of careful, stealth planning will begin to pay off.

So it could be that Gen. Trump is about to kick off his March Through the Swamp that will expose the deep staters and their willing accomplices in the media and their conspiracy to spy on and ctl-alt-del Trump and all who sail in her. It will show the deep staters that they are mere cannon fodder and they better make their peace with the new regime now while there is still time.

Or not.

Of course, for racist sexist homophobes like me, this is almost too good to be true. Really? Is the Barr John Durham John Huber team really going to drive its coach and horses through the deep state that conspired to spy on the Trump campaign? Will deep staters go on trial? And go to jail, do not pass Go? And is Rod Rosenstein "one of ours?"

It is a reminder that the Watergate investigation was not the heroic journalism of Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. They were just publishing leaks they got from W. Mark Felt, acting associate director of the FBI. And, of course, Felt was the Deep State in person, anxious to deep six a president that was threatening to disempower the worthy and valiant Deep State.

The Deep State won that one. And how.

Brian Cates' line is that

As Rosenstein makes his long-anticipated departure as deputy attorney general, the final pieces are moving into position on the battlefield that President Donald Trump has been carefully preparing for more than two years.

Is he right? Only time will tell. 

Tlaib: Playing the Blame Game

In a way, I think that our Democratic friends deserve the Terrible Twins, Congs. Omar and Tlaib (D-Ummah). As thoroughly modern Muslims they are anti-Jewish, and especially anti-Israel.

And I get it. It is humiliating and monstrous that the Jews returned to what Nassim Nicholas Taleb calls the Levant in the 20th century, in consequence of the Zionist movement, and have shouldered the Muslims aside.

I'd be mad as hell too if I were a Muslim from "Palestine."

But hey, you win some and you lose some. My dad was born in Russia and left in 1918 as a refugee (I actually never thought of him as a refugee until about a week ago, but hey...). And my parents had to leave India, the country of my birth, on account of the British Raj winding up business and handing the subcontinent over to the inhabitants thereof -- or at least the folks surviving after the various invasions and Mughal empires and British Rajs over the centuries.

Truth is: history is hell, and rape and pillage and slaughter of the innocents, and the Levant has seen more than its fair share of that down the millennia.

We all know about the monstrous Trail of Tears, native Americans forced from their homelands into the West. And the massacres of the Armenians and the Kurds. And the Ukraine famine. And the Great Purge. And the Holocaust. And the Great Leap Forward.

Hey, did you know that in France after the Liberation in 1944 there were probably more people massacred than in the monstrous Reign of Terror? Or that about 2 million German soldiers mysteriously never showed up after World War II. Or that maybe as many as 10 million Germans died of starvation in the Allied occupied areas after 1945? I didn't either, and it may all be revisionist conspiracy theory. You tell me.

The point is that the winners write history and the losers are lucky to be alive.

Which suggests that if the Left ever really takes over the US their current hegemonic narrative, the removals of statues and paintings, will be a walk in the park compared to what comes next.

But back to Tlaib and Omar, in the context of my belief that all identity politics, from globalism to nationalism to racism to Muslimism is "fake tribalism."

There are no tribes. Never were. It is all made up by political leaders and priests and government teachers and Mean Girls and criminal-gang homeboys to enlist the people into the rank-and-file of their power plans.

And in the modern era, we could say that fake tribalism started with the national idea. Totally fake. Before the nation state people were organized into smaller political and cultural units and knew that was the way of the world. Or, with Mohammed, they got organized into the Ummah, the worldwide community of believers. Except that the Muslim world is divided into Shia and Sunni, each of which is descended from the Prophet and the sole representative of Islam on Earth.

Now, our liberal masters want to de-emphasize the national idea in the US, because they experience themselves as the global educated elite that is going to create a global society that will end war and racism and sexism and homophobia and climate change.

But isn't it interesting that they way they are doing this is to sow discord and division in the US, between race and race, gender and gender, religion and religion? Well of course they are. Politics is division and to divide you have to order people into different fake tribes than the fake tribes of the old days. So if you want to break up the idea of America and Americans, you must set American against American and get people to identify with something other than America. Since most ordinary people aren't ready to identify as global humans, and our lefty friends have condemned the American nation out of hand, that means that some lesser group identity must be created to replace the American national identity: fake identity politics tribes to replace the old fake American tribe.

Really, this is not rocket science.

And you can understand the liberal rage at President Trump. He is out there reviving the old fake American national identity: Make America Great Again. How dare he! Why even Nietzsche, the "Nazis' favorite intellectual," knew that nationalism was a bad thing.

And your Congs. Tlaib and Omar are pushing the Muslim identity. There's a risk there, in that it might encourage millions of Americans who never thought about it to identify more strongly as Americans.

And it might even scotch Slow Joe Biden's cunning plan to paint Trump as a racist. Compared to what? Congs. Tlaib and Omar? How does that work exactly, Joe old chap?

Hey, Joe! Keep your arms off my wife, you creep!

Voltaire's Bastards: Blaming It All on the Staff

I'm still not quite sure what to make of John Ralston Saul's Voltaire's Bastards. A good way to illustrate this is his chapters on the military staff culture: "Learning How to Organize Death" and "Persistent Continuity at the Heart of Power." What began as an attempt to infuse a bit of reason and knowledge into military affairs, "marshaling reason to organize armies in order to remove mediocrity and allow the competent soldiers to command," has ended in the "transformation of reason into a bureaucratic sea."

And as we know, anything organized as a bureaucracy eventually becomes all about the interest of the bureaucracy and not the noble purpose for which it was founded. The original purpose of the administrative system is transformed, in the end, the continued existence of the bureaucracy.

The problem with the rationally organized army, Saul realizes, is that it creates just the instrument needed for a Napoleon to lay waste to the whole of Europe. So maybe it is better to have an army as "a bureaucratic sea designed to drown Heroes" rather than a shining sword ready to be wielded by a genius Hero.

So let me try to lay out Saul's argument. First, there were the young officers "disgusted by having to fight in unprofessional armies under the orders of unqualified aristocrats." So, under Guibert and others, they organized the profession of arms on a rational basis. But that led to Napoleon co-opting the shining new tool and destroying everything, and so there emerged the staff bureaucracy that was suspicious of genius -- from Marlborough to Guderian to Patton -- and substituted war by the book that did not need genius to succeed. Problem is war by the book led to gigantic bloodbaths, of which World Wars I and II are Exhibits A and B.

And the problem is that the disorganized guerrilla band can very often tie the organized army up in knots. So should not armies be organized on the guerrilla model, learning how to appear out of nowhere to land a nasty blow right in the solar plexus and then disappear into the hills?

Maybe, or maybe not.

Maybe the ponderous bureaucratic staff-led army is just what we want, and especially just what the politicians want, because the genius Hero is likely to become a threat to their power, as Gen. McArthur to President Truman. So what if millions get killed in the wars? As long as the state goes on, what's the problem, except for the mothers of the slain?

But Saul proposes to unleash genius:

Surely it would be wiser today to hand our defence to those able to defend us in the belief that we are capable of controlling them. Better the risk of honest genius than the impossibility of controlling manipulative and unresponsive mediocrity.

I wonder. If we apply my reductive Three Peoples theory, I'd say that most people approach defense as People of the Subordinate Self, and are happy to serve as serfs and let the bosses take care of things, reserving the right to criticize them when things go wrong. The People of the Responsible Self would step up to "do their bit," as the Brits say, but really would be uncertain about letting self-professed geniuses loose on the world. And as for the People of the Creative Self, I suspect that they would be all in favor of themselves being empowered to lead the nation to glorious victory, but not at all certain about the other so-called geniuses.

The thing is, we know all about the geniuses that actually got to be successful geniuses, the Pattons, the Maos, the Castros. But the guys that thought they were geniuses, and led their irregular band of guerrillas to ruin? We never hear about them.

And then there is the little problem that the successful guerrillas -- the Maos and Castros -- like to convert themselves into the boss of a great big beautiful non-functional bureaucracy, of which it might be said that the cure was worse than the disease.

The point is that when creative people are on the loose -- as in Schumpeter's creative destruction -- they disrupt an awful lot of lives with their creative endeavors. And average people don't like that.

But is the creative change "good for them" despite the negative aspects? Sure. Unless you happen to be one of the buggy-whip makers.