Showing posts with label Democratic_Party. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Democratic_Party. Show all posts

Elon Musk scandal timing suggests smear campaign

Popular billionaire tycoon Elon Musk has been the target of sexual harassment allegations reminiscent of those against Donald Trump, including the familiar claim of paying for an individual’s silence.

Such claims against Musk are carried by journalists, and occurred at a time when he was clashing with the very same journalistic community about freedom of speech. This indicates that what is happening is a smear campaign, likely by elements associated with the Democratic Party in the United States

Journalists lie

Journalists and mainstream media outlets cannot be trusted. They are able to lie, and then later retract their claims and apologise when the damage is done, thereby continuing to maintain their supposed reputation for journalistic integrity. This 'oops' model of disinformation means that none of the current headlines can be taken seriously, since every point they make may simply be retracted quietly later.

It is entirely possible that some months after all the damage is done, it will quietly emerge that Elon Musk didn't do anything. One could point to Musk's ability to sue for defamation, but this can neither undo the damage to him, nor necessarily cause damage to the business of the offending publication or network.

It could alternatively be the case that Elon Musk’s transgressions are true, but that they are true of virtually all celebrities of similar status in the US. It may be that journalists just use this as a way of attacking the person if they become a political enemy. There seems to be virtually no high-profile individual, especially a political target, in the United States. who doesn't eventually get accused of something grave.

Non sequitur in the free speech debate

Finally, people should bear in mind that Elon Musk’s personal character has little to do with his disputes with journalists and management at Twitter after securing a deal to buy the company. It does nothing to discredit his views of journalistic and online freedoms, any more than spurious and eventually withdrawn rape allegations discredited Julian Assange's journalistic work.

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Upgrading from moderation to state censorship?

Elon Musk reached a deal to buy Twitter, even as the businessman listened to grievances about the social network's cavalier suppression of information. Within 48 hours of that news, the Democrat administration was creating a new body dedicated to handling the “disinformation” it finds troubling online.

And what the Biden administration finds most troubling is not necessarily the things that may do harm to Americans, but conversations that may undermine the administration's legitimacy and future electoral prospects (say, questioning the 2020 election result). In other words, the first reaction of Biden's tinpot regime to any resurgence of First Amendment rights was to worry about itself.

Censorship by any other name

One can suppose the new censorship board is meant to replace the apparently imperilled corporate censorship that was carried out by Twitter under regime pressure. The very suggestion of any reduction of such censorship got the mainstream media hot and bothered.

The seeming willingness of Democrats to turn to state censorship, if that is what we are seeing, is significant. Twitter being a private company rather than a state agency has been a defence of the company’s heavy-handed actions in suppression of information for years (I never bought this argument, although certain anti-statists did). Right libertarians will never accept a government censorship body, nor will the anti-statist left.

Cold Civil War to grow more visible?

Individual US states may resist the authority of this federal body. As such, the stupid move of the people who seemingly resent the First Amendment more than anything else will contribute to the Cold Civil War. It may result in content being hidden in some US states (namely the Democrat-controlled states, which will be ever more fearful of the free circulation of information), while in other states all content will be available.

The events just further expose the fantastical lack of ability to maintain any principles at the Democrat-controlled White House. This failing is equally true of regime apologists, who believe everything it does is somehow automatically conducive to liberty and other American values even when it clearly is not.

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Trudeau's war on peaceful protesters

Seemingly violating the law in his own country and certainly violating his own pledge to support peaceful protesters, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a hypocrite.

Events in Canada reveal the despair of many people living under anti-populism and misanthropy. In such a regime, the energy and funding of the politically educated goes into denigrating normal people, discrediting popular pleas and local interests, and revolving instead around highbrow condescension.

Strangely, the anti-popular impulse of Trudeau, like the Democrats in the United States, is referred to usually under the lie of safeguarding democracy or democratic institutions, when in fact it is aimed at suppressing the will of an irritated and uncomfortable population.

Filtering out the lies

It should be noted that so-called journalists are equally involved in the state's misanthropy and crowd control, with their part in the tag team being to loyally defend the government, ridicule any kind of popular demands, and present themselves as pedantic teachers on what ideas and causes are permissible. They also conduct "fact-checks" whereby they miraculously find that every popular demand against the misanthropes is based on disinformation or linked somehow to Russia, because some tall forehead at an intelligence agency said so in a patronising voice.

You may not be aware of it, but if you rely on mainstream media, it probably means the approved agendas spelled out at gloomy board meetings and gatherings of dirty sponsors are the only political causes you recognise or tolerate. The passion and colour in the things the mainstream corporate media have to say and what dissident cause they show as trendy (for example, BLM) is as artificial and false as what gets injected into grey food matter in a factory. Fact-checkers are also appointed by the same dirty method and are equally useless and uninterested in facts, instead representing the interests of the sponsors.

That being said, plenty of non-mainstream media are also full of fakes and equally driven by profit. One needs to subject all big claims to the tools of scepticism: find expert consensus from opposing interest groups or undisputed video or other raw source material, to determine if a claim can be accepted.

A people trampled

Crowd control is a reasonable way to describe the anti-populism in places like Canada and the United States. Crowd control, of the misanthropic kind that recently occurred when Canadian mounted police trampled a crowd and were rumoured to have killed someone, although they deny it. The fatality is unlikely to be real at this moment, given that it cannot be verified, but one only need watch video of it to see that those who ordered this were deliberately endangering lives.

The perilous threshold I warned of in this very blog, at which government employees cease to be protective of the population and begin instead risk outright violence and chaos with lethal consequences on a scale potentially worse than the virus they hope to contain, could get close. In the Arab world, we have seen how widespread protests, when met by dismissive and condescending responses by the state, can reach boiling point.

Widespread protests can give rise to protracted crises with significant potential for violence, not to mention a substantial drain on the state's capability to provide for the population. Ultimately, the decision to fight the people rather than listen to them may eventually undermine the state's own ability to respond to the pandemic, making Trudeau himself a threat to health and wellbeing in Canada. Trudeau could waste the government's resources on quashing dissent, resulting in more deaths from the pandemic than would result from simply cancelling the vaccine mandate and opting for a more polite response.

Hypocrisy at many levels

Is it worth risking grievous injury and death to citizens, as shown in the horse incident, for the sake of health policy? Is such a heavy-handed response by a state indeed aimed at health, or at protecting the condescending political circles the state evidently represents?

While describing protests as illegal, Trudeau himself illegally invoked his country's Emergencies Act prematurely as an excuse to begin clobbering his people. If he had indeed waited for the event when protests might turn violent, rather than making a very highbrow and strange academic argument about the "inherent violence" of the racist symbols he falsely claims protesters are brandishing everywhere, his use of the measures could be defended. As it stands, his actions are unsupportable and extreme and suggest what Trudeau did was an outburst of personal hatred against the protesters.

Trudeau has made pledges never to support anything like this, even abroad, yet he supports this on the streets of his own country. When farmers rightly protested peacefully in India, Trudeau said “Canada will always be ready to defend the right to peaceful protest.” Now, he is evidently okay with taking the risk of even killing protesters, rather than so much as acknowledging the widely heard popular demands that he change course on Covid vaccine mandates.

What is worse than an authoritarian is someone who pretended to be something else and can't follow his own pronouncements. If Justin Trudeau can adhere neither to his own pledge of support for peaceful protesters, nor his pledges to health that are the very justification for his violence, there is no telling what he might do.

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Can the US military be purged of "patriots"?

Warnings about disproportionate numbers of conservatives and Trump voters manning the US military have resulted in calls for a kind of purge by the Democrat-run administration. How will the state replace these most stalwart believers in the cause of American supremacy?

A shift of the American state and establishment to a liberal persuasion in recent years is the perception of American conservatives. It goes beyond simply the Democrats winning the 2020 election. The perception of that "deep state" hostile to conservative impulses was even more prominent while Trump was in office, as everyone with governing experience even on his own team and in the Republican Party rejected his politics.

"Deep state" is a misnomer by Trump's supporters, of course. Trump was checked not by the deep state, but by the state, and in broad daylight. He is unknowledgeable about governing, but this fact in itself is more a failure of democracy in America. A complete outsider can be elected, yet faced with utter disdain from the regime he leads, which is often a guarantee of ineffective government.

National security state targets its own fans as enemies

The legions of the religious right, who became Trump's base, were the "divisions", relied upon to win elections by those political forces who believed in a strong and aggressive America - the neoconservatives. Now, they have parted ways with the government institutions, so much so that most Republicans could be considered terrorists and enemies of the state by the Democrat administration.

Today, conservative activists are the designated main enemies of America, perpetrators of some trifle in 2020 that is stupidly declared by the administration to be a new Pearl Harbor or 9/11 attack. Things have changed significantly from the past configuration when the state relied on conservatives to support its crusades against enemies foreign and domestic, as they are now designated enemies themselves.

As an example of how things have changed, consider that it would have previously been unheard of for the right-wing "America first" crowd to sympathise with thorns in the state's side like Julian Assange. Now, they in fact support Assange, despite the fact that his one biggest service to the world was exposing crimes of US troops in a war launched by conservative Republicans.

The former zealots of American "peace through strength", whose votes kept that agenda in power, will be cast as enemies of the state for as long as Trump or their preferred Trumpian candidate is out of power. While this resentment may be subdued in the short-term by new Republican electoral victories, such as in the midterms, no such victory could make any difference to the growing gap between a conservative movement out of touch with governing and a governing elite out of touch with conservative masses.

Purging pro-military attitudes from the military

Defenders of the US military are, technically, extremists. They are prone to like firearms. As per America's very founding, these militants believe in using violence to achieve political goals. Every one of them could be banned from social media for violating the terms and conditions there, as could every member of every military branch in the world if they merely posted anything consistent with what they are trained to think and do.

The American military is still overfilled with conservatives, making the administration and its ideologues twitchy about disloyalty. However, to try to purge them would be like trying to purge the police of pro-police activists, or ensuring that more of the police's resources go towards arresting those who shout pro-police slogans.

The reason America's military is filled with conservatives is because it is a conservative institution. The cause of American military power has always been owned by conservative Republicans. Liberals and "nice" people who follow community guidelines to the letter are not prone to join organisations that are all about killing people and giving justifications for it. That entire domain of human interaction is, in America, something owned by conservatives and a key reason why they are loathed by their opponents in the first place.

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