RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-pressure-campaign-on-spotify

All factions, at certain points, succumb to the impulse to censor. But for the Democratic Party’s liberal adherents, silencing their adversaries has become their primary project.

American liberals are obsessed with finding ways to silence and censor their adversaries. Every week, if not every day, they have new targets they want de-platformed, banned, silenced, and otherwise prevented from speaking or being heard (by “liberals,” I mean the term of self-description used by the dominant wing of the Democratic Party).

For years, their preferred censorship tactic was to expand and distort the concept of “hate speech” to mean “views that make us uncomfortable,” and then demand that such “hateful” views be prohibited on that basis. For that reason, it is now common to hear Democrats assert, falsely, that the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech does not protect “hate speech.” Their political culture has long inculcated them to believe that they can comfortably silence whatever views they arbitrarily place into this category without being guilty of censorship.

Constitutional illiteracy to the side, the “hate speech” framework for justifying censorship is now insufficient because liberals are eager to silence a much broader range of voices than those they can credibly accuse of being hateful. That is why the newest, and now most popular, censorship framework is to claim that their targets are guilty of spreading “misinformation” or “disinformation.” These terms, by design, have no clear or concise meaning. Like the term “terrorism,” it is their elasticity that makes them so useful.

https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2022/01/30/poll-large-majority-of-americans-not-into-affirmative-action-in-scotus-nominations-n445119

The Democrats are relishing the prospect of Joe Biden chalking up a win for his base this year when he gets the chance to nominate his first person to the Supreme Court. His supporters immediately moved to pressure him to keep his campaign promise to nominate a Black woman to the court and a quick glance at the shortlist of potential candidates shows that he has no intention of disappointing them. But how much of a “win” will this really be in the minds of the public? A new ABC News/Ipsos poll out this week suggests that Biden and his party are once again failing to read the room. On the one hand, many people are losing faith in the Supreme Court because they believe that it’s now driven by political ideology. But when it comes to the topic of presidential nominations, a surprisingly large majority want the President to consider all of the best-qualified candidates rather than immediately winnowing the field to a small list of people based on nothing more than the color of their skin and the lack of a Y chromosome.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-us-needs-more-nuclear-weapons-global-powers-china-russia-defense-modernization-11643567183?mod=opinion_lead_pos6

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the conclusion of the Washington Naval Conference, which brought together the great naval powers of the day—the U.S., U.K., Japan, France and Italy—for arms-limitation talks. Leaders hoped that limiting the weapons of war would reduce the risk of a second global conflagration. In one of the dark ironies of history, the naval arms-control treaties of the 1920s, which were supposed to bring peace, prohibited or limited the production of allied ships that were needed most to protect U.S. territories and eventually halt Japanese expansion in World War II.

Much like the allied countries that took a break from naval modernization during the interwar years, so too have the nuclear powers largely reduced their stockpiles during the current post-Cold War procurement “holiday.”

Since the early 1990s, the U.S. Defense Department spent only about 2% of its annual budget on sustaining and extending the life of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. In 1987 the U.S. had about 23,000 nuclear weapons in its stockpile. The U.S. has fewer than 4,000 today. World-wide, nuclear stockpiles haven’t been this small since the late 1950s.

China and Russia have embarked on rapid nuclear buildups, and the U.S. and U.K. are only now recognizing the danger. The Pentagon projects China will quadruple its nuclear arsenal to 1,000 weapons by 2030. U.S. officials dare not speculate publicly whether Beijing will stop there. Russia’s nuclear arsenal, according to the Defense Intelligence Agency, will “grow significantly” over this decade, driven by the expansion of nonstrategic nuclear weapons with a “warfighting role.”

https://www.city-journal.org/neil-young-v-joe-rogan-and-free-speech

Earlier this week, legendary Canadian-American musician Neil Young laid out an ultimatum to the streaming music service Spotify. “I want you to let Spotify know immediately TODAY that I want all my music off their platform,” he wrote in an open letter he posted on his website. “They can have [Joe] Rogan or Young. Not both.”

Young was furious at the “fake information about vaccines” on Rogan’s podcast, The Joe Rogan Experience, which gets an average of 11 million listeners per episode, according to some estimates. In recent months, Rogan has interviewed various medical experts and scientists, some of whom have voiced skepticism about the Covid-19 vaccines.

Though Young quickly scrubbed the letter from his website, it appears that his ultimatum was serious. The streaming service has begun taking down the singer’s music.

In a way, the market worked here. Young decided that he couldn’t share Spotify with Rogan; Spotify stood by Rogan. Each party in the dispute chose his own path: Rogan got to keep his independence, while Young can avoid the discomfort of sharing a platform with someone whose views he finds abhorrent. The censors didn’t win.

If you doubt that “censor” is an appropriate word to describe those pressuring Spotify to dump Rogan, consider this: the platform is the world’s largest streaming service, with a whopping 31 percent market share in the second quarter of 2021. When a private corporation controls such a large portion of an information ecosystem, its content decisions are more than mere acts of moderation; it is laying out the boundaries of the discourse itself. That’s precisely why Young believed that Rogan’s views shouldn’t have a platform.

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/29/unthinking-tools-of-unreason-itself/

“As good almost kill a man as kill a good book,” John Milton wrote in Areopagitica, his passionate and closely reasoned and historically buttressed attack on governmental licensing of books. “Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye.”

There are many ways, of course, to kill reason itself as manifest in the printed word. One of the most absurd, surely, is to judge the books not by what is in them, but by some characteristic that is not pertinent to the matter. Imagine someone combing through a library, marking for suspicion and for future elimination all books with purple covers, or all books whose total pages are divisible by 23, or all books beginning with the word “God.” No one would be so stupid, you say.

Tell it to the librarians at Bard College. Three students have taken up the assignment to evaluate the 400,000 books in its Stevenson Library not according to the content of the books, their inherent value, their beauty, their approach to the truth, but according to whether the authors were male or female, or of this race or that, had these or those sexual proclivities, or tooled around in a wheelchair rather than walking with two feet. 

https://amgreatness.com/2022/01/29/bad-portents-for-biden/

The ancient world was full of signs and portents that the high and mighty ignored at their peril. When, for example, Xerxes set out on his campaign against Greece in 480 B.C., Herodotus tells us that “a great portent” appeared. 

Xerxes paid no attention to it, however, although it was quite easy to interpret. A horse gave birth to a hare, which clearly symbolized the fact that Xerxes was about to lead an expedition against Hellas with the greatest pride and magnificence, but would return to the same place running for his life.

That was about the size of, too. At the Battle of Salamis later that year, the Greeks delivered a crushing blow to the Persian navy. Xerxes decided to retreat with the bulk of his army back to Persia. It was a disaster. He lost most of his men to disease, famine, and exhaustion. It was a pitiful remnant that arrived at the Hellespont nearly two months later, only to find the bridges they had built at the outset of their campaign utterly wrecked. Xerxes was rowed across the channel, enraged but broken. 

I thought of that episode the other day when I read of the dramatic collapse of a bridge in Pittsburgh just before Joe Biden was due to arrive to rally his troops for a further assault on American independence and prosperity. 

That wasn’t how the agenda was described, of course. No, it was supposed to be the “unofficial launch of a new strategy the President devised to shore up his political fortunes by changing how he spends his time.”

In particular, we are told, Biden will be spending less time wrangling with Senators Kyrsten Sinema (D- Ariz.) and Joe Manchin (D- W.Va.) over why they refuse to rubber-stamp his agenda and more time “jetting to places where he can highlight his achievements to ordinary Americans.” I do like to think about what “highlighting his achievements” might mean. I think this is where logicians start talking about “null sets.” Bridge collapse or no bridge collapse, however, I don’t think that was meant ironically. To quote Donald Trump, “Sad!” 

But this just underscores the uncomfortable possibility that, when it comes to Joe Biden, the signs and portents are addressed as much to us as to him. 

Biden talks about infrastructure. We’re the ones that have to drive over the crumbling bridges. 

We read the news. We know about Biden’s plummeting poll numbers. We know that inflation is out of control. We know that the stock market is skittish if not verging on panic. We look on, amazed, as the president of the United States all but invites Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine. Memo to the president: When it comes to armies violating the borders of sovereign nations a “minor incursion” is analogous to being “a little bit pregnant.”

“The White House quickly tried to walk back the remark,” but then is there a remark that Biden has made in his tenure as president that the White House has not “quickly tried to walk back”?