Friends, having seeded the mainstream media with stories about how Twitter is collapsing as a company, and how the Twitter-verse is overrun by fascists and white supremacists, Twitter's Big Tech rivals, Google and Apple, may smell blood in the water and decide to axe Twitter once and for all -- from their app stores. This would make it darn near impossible for many people to access Twitter, and, combined with a massive reduction in ad revenues from woke companies, could spell doom for Musk's latest venture, and for all semblance of free speech and pluralism in social media. I tend to agree with this commentator that the stakes in Musk's impending battles with Google, Apple, and in all likelihood the U.S. federal government, are enormous and weighty. After all, if the world's richest man can't carve out a place for free expression on the internet, what chance do you or I have? Arguably, these questions are fundamental to the survival of our democracy -- much more fundamental than, say, who won or lost in the midterm elections.
https://spectator.org/apple-china-delete-twitter-apps-phone/
In other news, there's no reason to think that Governor Ron DeSantis will announce a presidential bid anytime soon, but he is issuing an autobiography, and the timing is darn suspicious. It's almost like he's planning something big...
Dr.Wady from Jack: The well supported points you have made here and those in the Spectator article have stunned me! Once again, ad nauseum, the totalitarian intent of the far left is made clear in a manner which justifies the alarm you have expressed. Leftists of good will may think suppression of "hateful" expression to be necessary but they fail to see in it its incipient tyranny and they eschew the fear due the monstrous recent historical record of the left in the absolute power it seeks again. An existential threat to all we cherish is clearly manifested hereby.
ReplyDeleteDr.Waddy from Jack: Thanx for passing on and enhancing this VITAL tocsin!
ReplyDeleteYou're welcome, Jack! To us, the dangers of the rising crescendo of censorship and cancel culture are obvious. To the Left, the need for both is equally obvious, since they assume any purge that they direct can only lead to a better tomorrow.
ReplyDeleteDr.Waddy from Jack: The unrelenting enthusiasm and dedication of nazis and commies (eg SS murder of imates just before assured liberation) may well have derived from a terribly twisted conviction that they actually were doing good!I don't doubt that both Stalin and Hitler thought their fiendish measures justified by exected future widespread benefit for peoples they favored.
ReplyDeleteJack, I've no doubt that Hitler was a true believer in his ideology and thus in the "justice" of his cause, but part of me doubts whether Stalin had an ideology, as such. For him, the glory and the survival of Stalin the man may have been all that mattered, and communism may have been just a pretext...but then again I haven't been inside Stalin's head, and for that I'm grateful beyond measure!
ReplyDeleteDr.Waddy from Jack: I have read Robert Conquest's Stalin: Breaker of Nations and learned more on him in other sources. Apparently Churchill asked him what was the greatest difficulty he had experienced; he said that collectivization was it by far. He probably could have refrained from entering this ideologically motivated crucible and retained all the voluptuary perks of his august office. This might show that he thought his effort necessary for the good of his country. He did fear for his sorry ass; he went into a perhaps catatonic state at the thought of the nazis having their way with him when they invaded. He was tormented with self seeking intense anxiety which led him to murderous purges; in doing so he caused himself further anxiety from fear of retaliation. He probably was a diagnosable sadist imbued with enjoyment of the infliction of pain physical, mental and emotional, from the trivial to the unthinkable. So, I'm guessing that he did, in his way, think himself working good but that pursuit of amoral pleasure was at least as strong a suasion for him. Images of him conversing with human beings like FDR or Averill Harriman are close to fantastic.
ReplyDeleteAgreed, Jack -- a "conversation" with Stalin seems like an impossiblity... But I wouldn't necessarily concur that Stalin's pursuit of collectiviization was proof of his idelogical fervor. Collectivization was, at bottom, the seizure of the food supply from people Stalin didn't control, placing it in the hands of people he did. You do the math...
ReplyDeleteDr.Waddy from Jack: Very true: he saw urban workers as vital to his industrialization purpose and resolved to keep them well suppied with cabbage soup but I also think the widespread prosperity of Ukrainian farmers offended him by gainsaying Marxist doctrine. We know what happened to people who burned Stalin's ass. He needed to front a perhaps dishonest devotion to that cursed ideology to retain power and may even have derived sadistic pleasure fro m doing to death by starvation and its attendant horrors.
ReplyDeleteJack, as you've observed so often and so eloquently, all the finer points of Marxist ideology can be boiled down to one core principle: WE MARXISTS are the future and the salvation of mankind, and anyone who gets in our way is to be crushed underfoot BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY!!! It's this side of "Marxism", needless to say, that Stalin found so serviceable.
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