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I'm a great believer in Free Speech. But to borrow the words of a very old Bob Dylan song "Well I'm liberal but to a degree / I want everybody to be free / but......" I would only deny free speech to anyone (in the Western world) who calls themselves a 'protester' or an 'activist'. (whatever it is they're protesting about. Those people I would take to a locked room to give them time to get over themselves. I'm heartily sick of'protester' and 'activist' brats....full stop
Oct 7 was preceded by several episodes of slaughter in Gaza, "mowing the grass" that started at the end of 2009: Operations Cast Lead, Pillar of Defense and Protective Edge. These all out attacks killed a multiple of those who died on Oct 7, which is endlessly decried without a single word about what preceded it, nor the 20 to 1 death ratio (UN stats) of Palestinians compared to Israelis before Oct 7. What it must be now!
HAMAS - the animals! Exactly the same as the Native-American Indians who violently resisted the taking of their lands and resorted to all kinds of horrors that HAMAS did not commit (disemboweling, burning families alive in their cabins, scalping, and more).
All along, full funding from the US. For the Gaza slaughter, every bomb and shell the US could provide it did. Mr. Cunningham, I don't know if you are an American, I am. I cannot figure out what liberty and justice for all has to do with ethnic cleansing and apartheid. My President is a Zionist, my Secretary of State is a Zionist, Congress is full of those who a few years back could not stop applauding for Israeli PM Netanyahu when he spoke before that body in opposition to the policy of then President Obama. The tail of 8 million people wags the dog of 375 million people.
President Biden is the #1 lifetime recipient of pro-Israel PAC money, well over $4.5 million. That paragon of rectitude, Bob Menendez, is #2 and Hillary Clinton is #3. Congress, as we all know, is fully corrupt, campaigns well funded by pro-Israel money. Israel is the #1 recipient of US foreign aid most of which is cycled right back to the US weapons manufacturers.
I hope that your comment was an attempt at sarcasm and that Niccolo got a laugh out of it as such. As a 73 year old white male, hardly an "activist brat", I was eager to go and join the students protesting at the campus near where I live. I fully agree with them about the situation of the Palestinians, but in addition and equally important, I would like to have my country back looking after its own interests instead of putting national security at risk by unquestioning, unqualified and unhesitating support of Zionism, even to the extent of automatically jumping into a war with Iran (Congress would rush to reassert its long tossed away power to declare war to enable such a war), should the desperate Netanyahu decide to start one - a war that neither the US or Iran want.
I am working as hard as I can to see "the special relationship" between the US and Israel join the "peculiar institution" as a regrettable episode in US history. What is happening now, all the protesting that you detest if I am to take you seriously, is America's freedom of speech at its best attempting to turn around a tragic mistake and regain the control of we the people from an ideology that is the antithesis of what was stated in the Declaration of Independence. Shutting down the current protests is, incredibly, job one for the present administration directed by a man who incorrectly stated "We" stand with Israel. The only candidate for President that is not bought is Jill Stein, a Jew, who says her first act would be to stop weapons shipments to Israel. In my protesting I am joined by two Jewish friends for 40 years who are an integral part of Jewish Voice for Peace, putting the lie to the preposterous smoke screen claim of antisemitism, a red herring if ever there was one.
Assuming you are an American, let me borrow your prose.
I am heartily sick of those Americans who say they are great believers in free speech while denouncing those who put it into action even risking careers as the students do. Full stop.
Cliff, how many of those who have died in Gaza were combatants? How many were human shields? Life is cheap in Gaza because that is what Hamas prefers.
Which country in the history of the world ever waged war so as to establish a parity between the deaths of its soldiers and those of the adversary? Can you identify at least one?
Have there ever been any Israeli attacks on Gaza that were not preceded by rocket attacks against civilian sites across Israel?
And if the government of Iran does not want war, why are they arming Hezbollah and Hamas in the first place? Why do supporters of these organisations celebrate death and rape as they do?
Gaza was an outdoor prison for over 15 years. Nobody in, nobody out. Several ships attempted to bring aid to Gaza, one, the Mavi Marmara, was violently attacked by Israel killing several people. Israel destroyed the sewage plant in Gaza, Israel destroyed the airport in Gaza, Israel destroyed the power plant in Gaza, Israel restricted fishing from Gaza...all of this before Oct 7, long before, and to top it all off, a poll of Israelis a couple of years ago showed that overwhelmingly Israelis approved of things as they were, the outdoor prison was fine, the awful abuse of Palestinians by the IDF, the Border Police and the settlers in the West Bank was fine. Yes, life was good and they thought the situation should continue into the future indefinitely.
Now you are here to tell me about life being cheap in Gaza, human shields, etc. I tell you without hesitation that the lives of all Palestinians have been not just cheap but fully expendable since 1948 when they were first killed with a will, lied to (told they could return) and terrorized in order to get them to flee. Flee? But where to? To refugee tent camps for which Israel would not accept any responsibility, making the creation of the UNRWA necessary, necessary right up until now, when, because Israel wanted it so, the US pulled all funding to UNRWA on the specious Israeli argument that some of its workers were with HAMAS, with no proof offered at the time or coming out since. Tail wags dog.
In my comment I mentioned the three operations, full assaults on Gaza, by Israel years before Oct 7. Oct 7 brought out every detail about the Israelis killed, their identities, their life stories, that they were just going about life when horror struck.
Can you give me the name of even one of the thousands killed as Israel "mowed the grass" in those 3 pre Oct 7 operations? Who can? Can you give me any information on the life of even one of those Palestinians? Who can? Nobody reading this, because they make up a faceless horde just as do the 30,000+ slaughtered in Gaza in the last months. An anonymous horde, no more with identities than the animals we slaughter for food. Israelis were untroubled by the Gaza attacks and there is even a video of some Israelis pulling out lawn chairs to watch the bombs falling on Gaza and enjoy the lethal fireworks show. Just recently another poll of Israelis was conducted. A large number despise Netanyahu, but the great majority are in favor of what has happened in Gaza, many saying not enough has been done.
You dare to speak of Palestinians celebrating death!
"Nobody in, nobody out". What about the Gazans who holidayed in Turkey and Egypt annually in the last decade? We are talking many tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. Or the people who visited relatives in Qatar. Or, indeed, the ones who were allowed into Israel proper. And let us not forget the luxury shopping and apartment buildings in Khan Yunis.
The thing that gets me about people with your politics is that you do NOTHING to defuse the situation, nothing to build trust or co-operation and nothing to promote a calmer, saner, more dispassionate understanding of either the past or the present. People like you have been an utter disaster for the Palestinians. The smart ones know it too.
Phillip, use facts that are pertinent to the current slaughter going on, not whataboutism. Everything I related both in my original comment and my response to you is fact, none of which you deny, and you don't even do the work to question it. Your comments indicate no work at all on your part, just nonsense about "people with your politics". If you want to debate, bring something to the table.
Human shields? Israel hardly cares who it kills. It is not hard to find video's on the internet with Israeli's and Israel supporters openly calling for the murder of Palestinians. Netanyahu made after 7 October no secret of the fact that he preferred to drive out all Palestinians from the Gaza in the Egyptian desert. And what Netanyahu is doing to the Palestinians has broad support in Israel.
At its core Israel is a religious state like Iran, only worse. The version of their religion that dominates is a medieval version where "Amelek" is a perfect excuse for murder. Israel's territorial claims are endless. That is why it always finds an excuse not to evacuate the occupied territories. And you can be sure that when they have cleansed and annexed those territories they will go further. Lebanon south of the Litani has often be named but parts of other neighbors are on the agenda too. There will always be some excuse to create one more "safety zone".
If Israel keeps on this path and doesn't turn in a normal modern country - like the US and Australia did after their genocidal policies towards their original inhabitants - the rest of the world should isolate and sanction it.
Why is caring so important? I am astonished at how much of the commentary on the subject is caught up with people making emotional demands upon one another. In one of her novels (I forget which one it was all so long ago) one of Jane Austen's heroines notes that it is a relief not to have known any of the reported casualties in one or other recent battle, Rather cold by modern standards but I appreciate the position.
The key issue that you raise is essential. IMHO neither America nor Australia qualify as remotely normal. America has embraced the most radical forms of modernity involving the annihilation of all tradtional forms of sociocultural life. Neither the Israelis nor the Arabs should ever follow such a deranged example. I can't imagine why they would want to embrace nihilism, anomie and atomisation as a way of life, or think it preferable to what they have.
In the long run America and Israel will part ways. I expect that Israel will benefit greatly from this.
Israeli ethnonationalism or ethnosectarianism is certainly real but is fairly subdued, pragmatic and non-totalising. The evident wellbeing of the 2 million Arabs within Israel proper proves that. As does Arab representation in the Knesset.
Calling Israel a theocracy is just silly. Comparisons with Iran and 'velayet e faqih' make that very obvious. If anything Israel resembles some of the Gulf states, where aspects of shariah are observed but are tempered by statute law and tribal custom. Israeli law blends statute law, British common law, Ottoman regulations ...while family matters are dealt with by religious tribunals relevant for the parties involved. Both Jews and Sunni Muslims have conceptions of religious authority that are so far removed from Western norms that an intelligent exchange on this subject is very difficult.
To be frank, I increasingly think that ethnonationalism or tribalism may be the best available form of politics available at the moment. Right and Left ideologies just reproduce the morbid ideas of their heroes, while tribalism has the flexibility for compromise.
While Jack focuses on The Advertisers, the shadowy capitalists that are cool to hate, don't forget about the little people who left Twitter to join Mastodon in a temper tantrum.
Individuals with zero money, zero power, but the delusion of being teammates on Fukuyama's Winning Coalition of the Right Side of History. Always following the latest corporate guideline that comes down, becoming pro-trans over a week in 2014, simultaneously. Little cultural revolutionaries who would have turned on Jack, if his Maoism came into question.
These people used to love Elon, now they put stickers on their Teslas with excuses.
Their culture of exclusion poisoned Twitter, from blue checkmarks to reporting mobs. Being locked into a Mastodon server, policing each other in their own private hell serves them well. I wish them many struggle sessions!
“…making the same mistakes that Twitter did, such as bending over to demands to ban certain users…”. and thats where embracing subjective “requirements” eventually leads you.
No, it's the nature of Capitalism to subordinate even the wishes of the wealthiest Owner class to the requirements of The Market. The Market is an Inertial paradigm, and resistance of any sort to its Momentum is invariably costly, and potentially even perilous to Business Success.
The goal of Capitalist economics is Profit Maximization- i.e., acceleration with minimal friction. That's what encouraged the embrace of the Advertising model by the Owners of the Siren Servers and their Platforms.
I wonder if it ever crosses the minds of guys like Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, Sunder Pichai, and Eric Schmidt that they could simply quit and cash out, having already accumulated more money than they and their offspring and/or close family relations could spend in 100 lifetimes. Do they ever ask themselves "what am I still doing this for?"
Really. Viewed in terms of a values question, how different is compulsive wealth accumulation from addiction to crack cocaine? This is how to spend a life? This is it?
Consider the career of Eric Schmidt: "Since 2023, Schmidt has been involved in building White Stork, a startup developing suicide attack drones.[79]" That's some distance from his 1983 gig as the first software manager of Sun Microsystems. In more ways than one. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt )
When you have the power to censor your own platform, don't be surprised when advertisers expect you to do just that. Owners of these platforms should want to be regulated as common carriers. That would force advertisers to go to Congress or the Supreme Court to have their objections heard.
Free speech is a purely performative issue...it is all political theatre. The latest waves of legislation in the US will most likely be knocked back by the Supreme Court but the current controversies will be used to exhaust and misdirect attention from whatever real-life control mechanisms are being developed.
In one sense, free speech is already irrelevant. The wider society is resistant to mobilisation and the electorate is passive and willing to put up with anything. The vocal and opinionated crowd on the internet appear to have no real-world significance. Social media will always retain a degree of freedom, if only to enable surveillance. But my sense is that free speech died out long ago and we are all just kidding ourselves that it can be recovered by either political or legal action.
Finally, a deeply conformist culture cannot sustain real life freedom of speech, regardless of the promises made by ideologues.
Thanks. One further point. The Western governments are closely co-ordinating efforts in censorship and counter-misinformation. Washington is severely constrained in theory by the constitution, so they use client jurisdictions like the EU, Australia and Canada to road-test regulations and practices. Most importantly, large global corporations mould the culture of tech to suit regulators everywhere. Washington is relying on this to help shut things down.
The attacks on E,on Musk in Australia look very suspicious to me. There are way too many people here using identical speaking points.
Finally, a few of the best civil liberties lawyers here who could have been relied upon to rock the boat appear to have gone into retirement. IMO they have given up, probably for the sake of the future careers of their kids. Truly disruptive investigative journalism at the national level was substantially shut down in the late 80s...almost certainly in an operation run by locals working for our masters overseas. Once you silence or marginalise a few key people everybody else falls into line very fast. The future belongs to covert communication, samizdat and private networks. I'd prefer to see dissidents teach one another how to avoid surveillance and doxing rather than exhaust themselves in lost battles like free speech.
I'm skeptical of sweeping absolutist generalities: "always", "already irrelevant", "died out a long time ago", "we're just kidding ourselves"...
Cynical apathy is not to be confused with Insight or Wisdom, and the most pessimistic conclusion is not to be confused with Objective Truth. It's an excuse to indulge in weak-minded submissiveness.
True on all your points. But perhaps submission is the way to go?
Free speech advocates will have to becone 'power bottoms' for the censors. Ironists have done as much since the invention of writing.
NB I write as an exhausted, disenchanted, old fool. I grew up when candid speech was common enough and am finding the current brave new world all but unbearable. Whatever you do, maintain your suspicion of generalities.
When Congress can repeatedly violate the constitution without consequences, the charade is over. That being said, it would be nice to have a 'rapid response ruling' from the Supremes. If these vulgar censorship acts were slapped down within a week, that would discipline politicians.
It pains me to think that the last dwindling bit of light left in the American ‘experiment’ might be gone - free speech was and is the hallmark of a free society, its loss can’t be understood unless you’ve lived both with and without it.
Entirely true. It is painful...also degrading. In THE PHOENICIAN WOMEN Euripides sums it up very well. The female lead asks the young hero who has returned to Thebes what was the worst thing about his experience in exile, to which he replied that it was not having the freedom to speak freely (ouk exei parrhesian). The woman responds by saying that not having the capacity to say what you think is a slave's lot (doulou to'd eipas, me legein ha tis phronei).
Digital technology allows us to police the speech of others. Social media ropes in vast numbers of people as unpaid censors. The net result is a near universal condition of being silenced. Yet another irony imposed on us by progress: communication that silences.
The clearing out of annoying and illegal tents (the strongest and most common response to the pro-Palestine protesters) does not strike me as anti-free-speech.
Those tents would also be removed if they belonged to tourists or the homeless.
I agree with a key plank of the anti-China plan. We should definitely eliminate our reliance on Chinese products and make them dependent on our products. The only problem I see is that the Chinese government isn't as stupid as ours, and are unlikely to jump at the opportunity to be economically dependent on us.
That hasn’t been true for a long time but in any event I wasn’t trying to make that point. I just used it as an example of how easy it is to make grand strategy without having to worry about the impossible implementation.
The First Amendment is one of the greatest creations in human history (along with the rest of the Bill of Rights) and it's one of the reasons why America is the world's longest-running democracy and reality show, as it allows for so much cultural space, breadth, renovation and reformation.
But we can never expect politicians to be believers and protectors of free expression, as politicians are creatures of the moment who live to dine and dash on the national buffet, and who will do or say just about anything if they think it will fill their campaign accounts and get them re-elected. The defenders, protectors and champions of free expression should be our liberal class(es)—journalists, professors, artists, thinkers, writers, curators, even librarians etc—who are the greatest beneficiaries of liberalism and who are charged, lauded and compensated for passing on all our cultural wisdom, from civics to history to art and literature etc...
And this is the first failure that's led to subsequent failures, including the decay of discourse and all the various schemes to muzzle, if not banish or imprison, political opponents: our liberal class renounced liberalism when they converted en masse to the Social Justice faith, and decided that equality before the law and civil liberties should be replaced by WHO/WHOM and a moral hierarchy of oppressed/oppressor, where you could lose your job or college admission for saying things like "There are only 2 sexes" or "All lives matter".
What we are living through is the collapse of our liberal class, who have lost their brains to the crack rock of social media tribalism, and who now produce only homogenized propaganda based on the dogma of this new crowd-sourced faith where nothing matters but publicly worshipping the Sacred Victim du jour while wanting to attack and destroy all heretics and apostates.
Once a liberal class abandons liberalism, the rot spreads to the rest of society and ugly and stupid illiberalism begins to sprout everywhere. Our professoriate and the rest of the academy, as well as mainstream journalism and culture, have all destroyed their credibility and are hopelessly compromised and lobotomized, so a liberal revival will have to come from elsewhere. Samizdat to the rescue!
There is much to respond to in your comments. Free speech owes NOTHING to the First Amendment or to long-dead men who wore wigs. NOTHING...NOT A GOD-DAMNED THING.
Free speech emerges spontaneously from within communities. Real people, loud mouthed trouble makers, opinionated fools and people who like a good argument and dcn't keep their mouths shut...they and they alone create the conditions for free speech. The people who talk back to the boss or are difficult and blunt. The people who ask questions when they shouldn't.
Candour is a cultural trait. In some of us it may have a biomedical explanation. But once candour goes it stays gone. The snows of yesteryear...
No, there are some crucial real-world differences in regard to the risks taken by people who speak their minds openly within a framework of institutional protections of civil liberties, vs. the perils incurred by those who speak their minds openly in an unaccountable police state. This is just a matter of practical historical fact.
I know nothing of your circumstances. In my country (Australia) civil liberties operate within constraints established by the British legal tradition. Institutional protections mean something very different in a former penal colony. And there are a whole host of Crown prerogatives that apply in any matter concerning the transaction of public business. Many of these would surprise you. In my day public servants faced two years in gaol if convicted of improperly disclosing official business of any kind. And the definitions involved were not restrictive.
And for the record, all countries are police states for those wearing handcuffs.
I live in the United States. We have a Bill of Rights. Some of us think it's one of the best features of our uniquely devised Constitution. Various provisions related to those protections have, by turns, weakened or strengthened over the course of time. The Bill of Rights still works effectively enough to make it well worth the effort to keep it on the books.
"all countries are police states for those wearing handcuffs."
That statement is merely cheap rhetorical posturing. It tacitly implies that the only way to not be a police state is to have no police, and no means for governments to enforce their laws.
To revisit my words, I said UNACCOUNTABLE police states. Unaccountable police states don't have to worry about this situation:
"The Washington Post found that over the course of a decade, the 25 largest police and sheriff’s departments in the United States made nearly 40,000 payouts for misconduct totaling $3.2 billion."
I understand your point but I cannot be so cynical as to say the First Amendment has had ZERO effect on our national culture or didn't help establish free expression as an ideal that people need to respect and acknowledge, even in the breach, and not just in America but almost everywhere. Erasing the First Amendment and its influence erases too much human agency and achievement, and ignores an important milestone in the history of human liberation, even if you don't believe such things exist.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
This is a radical idea even now, when people constantly fight over what can and cannot be said, and when various entities try to smother free discourse, but was an even more shocking idea in 1791, when just about every human had no civil liberties that couldn't be abrogated by whatever king was in power.
Like I said, ideals and words on paper are useless if there aren't people to defend them, but humans live through ideals and the ideals expressed in the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights have inspired multiple generations to think and speak freely and clearly and have contributed a great deal to human flourishing.
A dearth of cynicism? The New World has leached the Sicilian out of you. Sorry if that offends but I can't help myself. Talk about political principles strikes me as earnest and fit for gentle mockery.
The US Constitution has its virtues. The Declaration of Independence even more so...and admitting this takes real effort on my part since I am a great admirer of the Court Whigs, a political lineage that has never enjoyed much of a following amongst Americans.
But it all seems irrelevant, given present circumstances.
For the record by 1791 civil liberties were very well established in the UK and its dominions. When the First Fleet landed in Botany Bay one of the convicts found that his luggage had gone missing. He sued the Crown for damages and won. The Hanoverians were bound by the same laws which regulated the lives of their subjects.
Never! My Sicilian is stronger than ever! Dem is vendetta words...;)
I can't help it, along with my mama's lasagna i was fed a steady diet of Founding Fathers fetish...I am Italian-AMERICAN after all...
anyway I'm happy to meet you halfway and recognize my debt to those English Protestants, they really could create stirring words about ordered liberty...living up to them is a whole nother thing of course...
A vendetta? So long as it is conducted with the intelligence and grace due to Old Palermo I will consider myself blessed by fortune...a true Sicilian vendetta compares favourably to the standard Balkanoid namecalling of the internet or the sanctimonious hysterics of the Yankees.
BTW the fusion of Anglo and Siciilian influence brings to mind the expression once applied to the aristos on the island...they were often called the Anglossini or little English. Ellis Island and the Yankees have clearly produced a version of this too.
I don’t see the point of these “trolley problem” thought experiments. They don’t have any corollaries in real life. What am I supposed to get out of this?
There. That question, right there. The beginning of wisdom.
The Internet Age provides a panoramic scope of opportunities for verbal expression. Some of the input is bound to consist of sophistic abstractions, fantasias, extravagant counterfactual scenarios, "guided meditation" sales pitch scripts, gaslighting for the lulz, eeyorism, self-indulgent whinging, half-wittery, midwittery, transactional flattery, fatuity, viturperation, balderdash, factoids, popular delusions, confidently proclaimed fatuity...&c. "Noise", in the cybernetic sense. It pays to build up a strong immune system to it. To know when to call a bluff, when to raise the stakes, when to quit, and when it isn't worth sitting down at the table to play.
I epologize for typing like I'm mocking Dutch people. I broke the "ey" end "ezz" keyz on my leptop.
> The Establishment's push to create a false equivalency between any criticism of the state of Israel and advocating violence against America’s Jewish citizens is not a new development.
I heve e zhort lizt of queztionz I wizh I could force politicienz to enzwer publicly. They would lie, obviouzly, but I went to zee which lie they tell, end I went everyone to publicly zee their obviouz liez.
On the Izreel zubject, the queztion I went to ezk iz:
"Whet, in your perzonel opinion, iz the eccepteble wey to protezt the ection of the Ztete of Izreel, without it being conzidered enti-zemetic?"
My perzonel belief iz thet, if thiz hypotheticel ceme to pezz, you would get zeverel politicienz zeying zome literel, non-euphemiztic form of "thet iz not pozzible. Eny protezt of the Ztete of Izreel (from people who don't live there) iz enti-zemetic".
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Yes Niccolo, and don't you forget to subscribe if you haven't done so already!
I'm subscribing my whole family!
Too little, too late, Jack.
Xi and Putin “authoritarian” I stopped reading at that point.
Russia’s security is threatened by US aegis in Poland, worse if Aegis or other nuclear capable systems are in the near borderlands.
Putin sent that through proper channels in 2021.
BTW the official position of the U.S. is “one China” that being the Beijing government.
US has no national interest other than hegemony in East Asia wrt the state of Taiwan.
I'm a great believer in Free Speech. But to borrow the words of a very old Bob Dylan song "Well I'm liberal but to a degree / I want everybody to be free / but......" I would only deny free speech to anyone (in the Western world) who calls themselves a 'protester' or an 'activist'. (whatever it is they're protesting about. Those people I would take to a locked room to give them time to get over themselves. I'm heartily sick of'protester' and 'activist' brats....full stop
30,000+ dead in Gaza.
Oct 7 was preceded by several episodes of slaughter in Gaza, "mowing the grass" that started at the end of 2009: Operations Cast Lead, Pillar of Defense and Protective Edge. These all out attacks killed a multiple of those who died on Oct 7, which is endlessly decried without a single word about what preceded it, nor the 20 to 1 death ratio (UN stats) of Palestinians compared to Israelis before Oct 7. What it must be now!
HAMAS - the animals! Exactly the same as the Native-American Indians who violently resisted the taking of their lands and resorted to all kinds of horrors that HAMAS did not commit (disemboweling, burning families alive in their cabins, scalping, and more).
All along, full funding from the US. For the Gaza slaughter, every bomb and shell the US could provide it did. Mr. Cunningham, I don't know if you are an American, I am. I cannot figure out what liberty and justice for all has to do with ethnic cleansing and apartheid. My President is a Zionist, my Secretary of State is a Zionist, Congress is full of those who a few years back could not stop applauding for Israeli PM Netanyahu when he spoke before that body in opposition to the policy of then President Obama. The tail of 8 million people wags the dog of 375 million people.
President Biden is the #1 lifetime recipient of pro-Israel PAC money, well over $4.5 million. That paragon of rectitude, Bob Menendez, is #2 and Hillary Clinton is #3. Congress, as we all know, is fully corrupt, campaigns well funded by pro-Israel money. Israel is the #1 recipient of US foreign aid most of which is cycled right back to the US weapons manufacturers.
I hope that your comment was an attempt at sarcasm and that Niccolo got a laugh out of it as such. As a 73 year old white male, hardly an "activist brat", I was eager to go and join the students protesting at the campus near where I live. I fully agree with them about the situation of the Palestinians, but in addition and equally important, I would like to have my country back looking after its own interests instead of putting national security at risk by unquestioning, unqualified and unhesitating support of Zionism, even to the extent of automatically jumping into a war with Iran (Congress would rush to reassert its long tossed away power to declare war to enable such a war), should the desperate Netanyahu decide to start one - a war that neither the US or Iran want.
I am working as hard as I can to see "the special relationship" between the US and Israel join the "peculiar institution" as a regrettable episode in US history. What is happening now, all the protesting that you detest if I am to take you seriously, is America's freedom of speech at its best attempting to turn around a tragic mistake and regain the control of we the people from an ideology that is the antithesis of what was stated in the Declaration of Independence. Shutting down the current protests is, incredibly, job one for the present administration directed by a man who incorrectly stated "We" stand with Israel. The only candidate for President that is not bought is Jill Stein, a Jew, who says her first act would be to stop weapons shipments to Israel. In my protesting I am joined by two Jewish friends for 40 years who are an integral part of Jewish Voice for Peace, putting the lie to the preposterous smoke screen claim of antisemitism, a red herring if ever there was one.
Assuming you are an American, let me borrow your prose.
I am heartily sick of those Americans who say they are great believers in free speech while denouncing those who put it into action even risking careers as the students do. Full stop.
Cliff, how many of those who have died in Gaza were combatants? How many were human shields? Life is cheap in Gaza because that is what Hamas prefers.
Which country in the history of the world ever waged war so as to establish a parity between the deaths of its soldiers and those of the adversary? Can you identify at least one?
Have there ever been any Israeli attacks on Gaza that were not preceded by rocket attacks against civilian sites across Israel?
And if the government of Iran does not want war, why are they arming Hezbollah and Hamas in the first place? Why do supporters of these organisations celebrate death and rape as they do?
Gaza was an outdoor prison for over 15 years. Nobody in, nobody out. Several ships attempted to bring aid to Gaza, one, the Mavi Marmara, was violently attacked by Israel killing several people. Israel destroyed the sewage plant in Gaza, Israel destroyed the airport in Gaza, Israel destroyed the power plant in Gaza, Israel restricted fishing from Gaza...all of this before Oct 7, long before, and to top it all off, a poll of Israelis a couple of years ago showed that overwhelmingly Israelis approved of things as they were, the outdoor prison was fine, the awful abuse of Palestinians by the IDF, the Border Police and the settlers in the West Bank was fine. Yes, life was good and they thought the situation should continue into the future indefinitely.
Now you are here to tell me about life being cheap in Gaza, human shields, etc. I tell you without hesitation that the lives of all Palestinians have been not just cheap but fully expendable since 1948 when they were first killed with a will, lied to (told they could return) and terrorized in order to get them to flee. Flee? But where to? To refugee tent camps for which Israel would not accept any responsibility, making the creation of the UNRWA necessary, necessary right up until now, when, because Israel wanted it so, the US pulled all funding to UNRWA on the specious Israeli argument that some of its workers were with HAMAS, with no proof offered at the time or coming out since. Tail wags dog.
In my comment I mentioned the three operations, full assaults on Gaza, by Israel years before Oct 7. Oct 7 brought out every detail about the Israelis killed, their identities, their life stories, that they were just going about life when horror struck.
Can you give me the name of even one of the thousands killed as Israel "mowed the grass" in those 3 pre Oct 7 operations? Who can? Can you give me any information on the life of even one of those Palestinians? Who can? Nobody reading this, because they make up a faceless horde just as do the 30,000+ slaughtered in Gaza in the last months. An anonymous horde, no more with identities than the animals we slaughter for food. Israelis were untroubled by the Gaza attacks and there is even a video of some Israelis pulling out lawn chairs to watch the bombs falling on Gaza and enjoy the lethal fireworks show. Just recently another poll of Israelis was conducted. A large number despise Netanyahu, but the great majority are in favor of what has happened in Gaza, many saying not enough has been done.
You dare to speak of Palestinians celebrating death!
"Nobody in, nobody out". What about the Gazans who holidayed in Turkey and Egypt annually in the last decade? We are talking many tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands. Or the people who visited relatives in Qatar. Or, indeed, the ones who were allowed into Israel proper. And let us not forget the luxury shopping and apartment buildings in Khan Yunis.
The thing that gets me about people with your politics is that you do NOTHING to defuse the situation, nothing to build trust or co-operation and nothing to promote a calmer, saner, more dispassionate understanding of either the past or the present. People like you have been an utter disaster for the Palestinians. The smart ones know it too.
Phillip, use facts that are pertinent to the current slaughter going on, not whataboutism. Everything I related both in my original comment and my response to you is fact, none of which you deny, and you don't even do the work to question it. Your comments indicate no work at all on your part, just nonsense about "people with your politics". If you want to debate, bring something to the table.
Slaughter? The only fact that I could be bothered with this morning is that the UN just halved the estimated civilian death toll in Gaza so far. QED.
I look forward to the revelations to come in Rafah...those will be worth the effort debating in considerable detail.
Human shields? Israel hardly cares who it kills. It is not hard to find video's on the internet with Israeli's and Israel supporters openly calling for the murder of Palestinians. Netanyahu made after 7 October no secret of the fact that he preferred to drive out all Palestinians from the Gaza in the Egyptian desert. And what Netanyahu is doing to the Palestinians has broad support in Israel.
At its core Israel is a religious state like Iran, only worse. The version of their religion that dominates is a medieval version where "Amelek" is a perfect excuse for murder. Israel's territorial claims are endless. That is why it always finds an excuse not to evacuate the occupied territories. And you can be sure that when they have cleansed and annexed those territories they will go further. Lebanon south of the Litani has often be named but parts of other neighbors are on the agenda too. There will always be some excuse to create one more "safety zone".
Read this for some context of how deeply this religion determines its government policies: https://ifamericansknew.org/cur_sit/shahak.html
If Israel keeps on this path and doesn't turn in a normal modern country - like the US and Australia did after their genocidal policies towards their original inhabitants - the rest of the world should isolate and sanction it.
Why is caring so important? I am astonished at how much of the commentary on the subject is caught up with people making emotional demands upon one another. In one of her novels (I forget which one it was all so long ago) one of Jane Austen's heroines notes that it is a relief not to have known any of the reported casualties in one or other recent battle, Rather cold by modern standards but I appreciate the position.
The key issue that you raise is essential. IMHO neither America nor Australia qualify as remotely normal. America has embraced the most radical forms of modernity involving the annihilation of all tradtional forms of sociocultural life. Neither the Israelis nor the Arabs should ever follow such a deranged example. I can't imagine why they would want to embrace nihilism, anomie and atomisation as a way of life, or think it preferable to what they have.
In the long run America and Israel will part ways. I expect that Israel will benefit greatly from this.
Israeli ethnonationalism or ethnosectarianism is certainly real but is fairly subdued, pragmatic and non-totalising. The evident wellbeing of the 2 million Arabs within Israel proper proves that. As does Arab representation in the Knesset.
Calling Israel a theocracy is just silly. Comparisons with Iran and 'velayet e faqih' make that very obvious. If anything Israel resembles some of the Gulf states, where aspects of shariah are observed but are tempered by statute law and tribal custom. Israeli law blends statute law, British common law, Ottoman regulations ...while family matters are dealt with by religious tribunals relevant for the parties involved. Both Jews and Sunni Muslims have conceptions of religious authority that are so far removed from Western norms that an intelligent exchange on this subject is very difficult.
To be frank, I increasingly think that ethnonationalism or tribalism may be the best available form of politics available at the moment. Right and Left ideologies just reproduce the morbid ideas of their heroes, while tribalism has the flexibility for compromise.
While Jack focuses on The Advertisers, the shadowy capitalists that are cool to hate, don't forget about the little people who left Twitter to join Mastodon in a temper tantrum.
Individuals with zero money, zero power, but the delusion of being teammates on Fukuyama's Winning Coalition of the Right Side of History. Always following the latest corporate guideline that comes down, becoming pro-trans over a week in 2014, simultaneously. Little cultural revolutionaries who would have turned on Jack, if his Maoism came into question.
These people used to love Elon, now they put stickers on their Teslas with excuses.
Their culture of exclusion poisoned Twitter, from blue checkmarks to reporting mobs. Being locked into a Mastodon server, policing each other in their own private hell serves them well. I wish them many struggle sessions!
🍾🍾🍾😃
“An advertising-based model requires A LOT of compromises, especially when it comes to permitted speech”. Not at all. “Requires” is pretty subjective.
“…making the same mistakes that Twitter did, such as bending over to demands to ban certain users…”. and thats where embracing subjective “requirements” eventually leads you.
No, it's the nature of Capitalism to subordinate even the wishes of the wealthiest Owner class to the requirements of The Market. The Market is an Inertial paradigm, and resistance of any sort to its Momentum is invariably costly, and potentially even perilous to Business Success.
The goal of Capitalist economics is Profit Maximization- i.e., acceleration with minimal friction. That's what encouraged the embrace of the Advertising model by the Owners of the Siren Servers and their Platforms.
I wonder if it ever crosses the minds of guys like Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, Sunder Pichai, and Eric Schmidt that they could simply quit and cash out, having already accumulated more money than they and their offspring and/or close family relations could spend in 100 lifetimes. Do they ever ask themselves "what am I still doing this for?"
Really. Viewed in terms of a values question, how different is compulsive wealth accumulation from addiction to crack cocaine? This is how to spend a life? This is it?
Consider the career of Eric Schmidt: "Since 2023, Schmidt has been involved in building White Stork, a startup developing suicide attack drones.[79]" That's some distance from his 1983 gig as the first software manager of Sun Microsystems. In more ways than one. (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt )
When you have the power to censor your own platform, don't be surprised when advertisers expect you to do just that. Owners of these platforms should want to be regulated as common carriers. That would force advertisers to go to Congress or the Supreme Court to have their objections heard.
“…former chief technology officer at Crowd Strike” 😂🤡
yes, that did stand out
Crowdstrike has admitted that it has found no evidence for claims that Russia hacked the DP's server.
😐
“What Is To Be Done?” 🫢 iswydt 😏😉
Glad someone got it!
Free speech is a purely performative issue...it is all political theatre. The latest waves of legislation in the US will most likely be knocked back by the Supreme Court but the current controversies will be used to exhaust and misdirect attention from whatever real-life control mechanisms are being developed.
In one sense, free speech is already irrelevant. The wider society is resistant to mobilisation and the electorate is passive and willing to put up with anything. The vocal and opinionated crowd on the internet appear to have no real-world significance. Social media will always retain a degree of freedom, if only to enable surveillance. But my sense is that free speech died out long ago and we are all just kidding ourselves that it can be recovered by either political or legal action.
Finally, a deeply conformist culture cannot sustain real life freedom of speech, regardless of the promises made by ideologues.
Interesting post, thank you
Thanks. One further point. The Western governments are closely co-ordinating efforts in censorship and counter-misinformation. Washington is severely constrained in theory by the constitution, so they use client jurisdictions like the EU, Australia and Canada to road-test regulations and practices. Most importantly, large global corporations mould the culture of tech to suit regulators everywhere. Washington is relying on this to help shut things down.
The attacks on E,on Musk in Australia look very suspicious to me. There are way too many people here using identical speaking points.
Finally, a few of the best civil liberties lawyers here who could have been relied upon to rock the boat appear to have gone into retirement. IMO they have given up, probably for the sake of the future careers of their kids. Truly disruptive investigative journalism at the national level was substantially shut down in the late 80s...almost certainly in an operation run by locals working for our masters overseas. Once you silence or marginalise a few key people everybody else falls into line very fast. The future belongs to covert communication, samizdat and private networks. I'd prefer to see dissidents teach one another how to avoid surveillance and doxing rather than exhaust themselves in lost battles like free speech.
I'm skeptical of sweeping absolutist generalities: "always", "already irrelevant", "died out a long time ago", "we're just kidding ourselves"...
Cynical apathy is not to be confused with Insight or Wisdom, and the most pessimistic conclusion is not to be confused with Objective Truth. It's an excuse to indulge in weak-minded submissiveness.
True on all your points. But perhaps submission is the way to go?
Free speech advocates will have to becone 'power bottoms' for the censors. Ironists have done as much since the invention of writing.
NB I write as an exhausted, disenchanted, old fool. I grew up when candid speech was common enough and am finding the current brave new world all but unbearable. Whatever you do, maintain your suspicion of generalities.
I don't buy into that game. Which has kept me free from being ensnared by the associated narrative.
When Congress can repeatedly violate the constitution without consequences, the charade is over. That being said, it would be nice to have a 'rapid response ruling' from the Supremes. If these vulgar censorship acts were slapped down within a week, that would discipline politicians.
You are an optimist. Nothing can discipline politicians. They are incorrigible.
I'm optics-mistic.
You're an "optics-mystic" :D
It pains me to think that the last dwindling bit of light left in the American ‘experiment’ might be gone - free speech was and is the hallmark of a free society, its loss can’t be understood unless you’ve lived both with and without it.
Entirely true. It is painful...also degrading. In THE PHOENICIAN WOMEN Euripides sums it up very well. The female lead asks the young hero who has returned to Thebes what was the worst thing about his experience in exile, to which he replied that it was not having the freedom to speak freely (ouk exei parrhesian). The woman responds by saying that not having the capacity to say what you think is a slave's lot (doulou to'd eipas, me legein ha tis phronei).
Digital technology allows us to police the speech of others. Social media ropes in vast numbers of people as unpaid censors. The net result is a near universal condition of being silenced. Yet another irony imposed on us by progress: communication that silences.
great post
The politics of the protestors is a distraction away from how the response shows us who rules America.
The clearing out of annoying and illegal tents (the strongest and most common response to the pro-Palestine protesters) does not strike me as anti-free-speech.
Those tents would also be removed if they belonged to tourists or the homeless.
"Tourists"? Yes. "Homeless"? GTFOH.
I agree with a key plank of the anti-China plan. We should definitely eliminate our reliance on Chinese products and make them dependent on our products. The only problem I see is that the Chinese government isn't as stupid as ours, and are unlikely to jump at the opportunity to be economically dependent on us.
Sure, but you are going to pay 4-5 times as much for those USA-made products.
That hasn’t been true for a long time but in any event I wasn’t trying to make that point. I just used it as an example of how easy it is to make grand strategy without having to worry about the impossible implementation.
economical independence or inexpensive goods
pick one
We kept picking, and then one fine day: hmm, these inexpensive goods taste like sh!t, how did that happen...?
or like in the pandemic
"mmm where are all those basic medical supplies we need?"
The First Amendment is one of the greatest creations in human history (along with the rest of the Bill of Rights) and it's one of the reasons why America is the world's longest-running democracy and reality show, as it allows for so much cultural space, breadth, renovation and reformation.
But we can never expect politicians to be believers and protectors of free expression, as politicians are creatures of the moment who live to dine and dash on the national buffet, and who will do or say just about anything if they think it will fill their campaign accounts and get them re-elected. The defenders, protectors and champions of free expression should be our liberal class(es)—journalists, professors, artists, thinkers, writers, curators, even librarians etc—who are the greatest beneficiaries of liberalism and who are charged, lauded and compensated for passing on all our cultural wisdom, from civics to history to art and literature etc...
And this is the first failure that's led to subsequent failures, including the decay of discourse and all the various schemes to muzzle, if not banish or imprison, political opponents: our liberal class renounced liberalism when they converted en masse to the Social Justice faith, and decided that equality before the law and civil liberties should be replaced by WHO/WHOM and a moral hierarchy of oppressed/oppressor, where you could lose your job or college admission for saying things like "There are only 2 sexes" or "All lives matter".
What we are living through is the collapse of our liberal class, who have lost their brains to the crack rock of social media tribalism, and who now produce only homogenized propaganda based on the dogma of this new crowd-sourced faith where nothing matters but publicly worshipping the Sacred Victim du jour while wanting to attack and destroy all heretics and apostates.
Once a liberal class abandons liberalism, the rot spreads to the rest of society and ugly and stupid illiberalism begins to sprout everywhere. Our professoriate and the rest of the academy, as well as mainstream journalism and culture, have all destroyed their credibility and are hopelessly compromised and lobotomized, so a liberal revival will have to come from elsewhere. Samizdat to the rescue!
There is much to respond to in your comments. Free speech owes NOTHING to the First Amendment or to long-dead men who wore wigs. NOTHING...NOT A GOD-DAMNED THING.
Free speech emerges spontaneously from within communities. Real people, loud mouthed trouble makers, opinionated fools and people who like a good argument and dcn't keep their mouths shut...they and they alone create the conditions for free speech. The people who talk back to the boss or are difficult and blunt. The people who ask questions when they shouldn't.
Candour is a cultural trait. In some of us it may have a biomedical explanation. But once candour goes it stays gone. The snows of yesteryear...
PS I fully agree with you about samizdat.
No, there are some crucial real-world differences in regard to the risks taken by people who speak their minds openly within a framework of institutional protections of civil liberties, vs. the perils incurred by those who speak their minds openly in an unaccountable police state. This is just a matter of practical historical fact.
I know nothing of your circumstances. In my country (Australia) civil liberties operate within constraints established by the British legal tradition. Institutional protections mean something very different in a former penal colony. And there are a whole host of Crown prerogatives that apply in any matter concerning the transaction of public business. Many of these would surprise you. In my day public servants faced two years in gaol if convicted of improperly disclosing official business of any kind. And the definitions involved were not restrictive.
And for the record, all countries are police states for those wearing handcuffs.
I live in the United States. We have a Bill of Rights. Some of us think it's one of the best features of our uniquely devised Constitution. Various provisions related to those protections have, by turns, weakened or strengthened over the course of time. The Bill of Rights still works effectively enough to make it well worth the effort to keep it on the books.
"all countries are police states for those wearing handcuffs."
That statement is merely cheap rhetorical posturing. It tacitly implies that the only way to not be a police state is to have no police, and no means for governments to enforce their laws.
To revisit my words, I said UNACCOUNTABLE police states. Unaccountable police states don't have to worry about this situation:
"The Washington Post found that over the course of a decade, the 25 largest police and sheriff’s departments in the United States made nearly 40,000 payouts for misconduct totaling $3.2 billion."
https://www.policingproject.org/news-main/2023/10/17/its-time-to-follow-the-money-on-police-misconduct
(If any reader wonders why I feel it necessary to lard my comments with so many qualifying modifiers, consider this exchange to be exhibit A.)
Cheap rhetorical posturing? I thought that I was being droll.
I understand your point but I cannot be so cynical as to say the First Amendment has had ZERO effect on our national culture or didn't help establish free expression as an ideal that people need to respect and acknowledge, even in the breach, and not just in America but almost everywhere. Erasing the First Amendment and its influence erases too much human agency and achievement, and ignores an important milestone in the history of human liberation, even if you don't believe such things exist.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
This is a radical idea even now, when people constantly fight over what can and cannot be said, and when various entities try to smother free discourse, but was an even more shocking idea in 1791, when just about every human had no civil liberties that couldn't be abrogated by whatever king was in power.
Like I said, ideals and words on paper are useless if there aren't people to defend them, but humans live through ideals and the ideals expressed in the First Amendment and the Bill of Rights have inspired multiple generations to think and speak freely and clearly and have contributed a great deal to human flourishing.
A dearth of cynicism? The New World has leached the Sicilian out of you. Sorry if that offends but I can't help myself. Talk about political principles strikes me as earnest and fit for gentle mockery.
The US Constitution has its virtues. The Declaration of Independence even more so...and admitting this takes real effort on my part since I am a great admirer of the Court Whigs, a political lineage that has never enjoyed much of a following amongst Americans.
But it all seems irrelevant, given present circumstances.
For the record by 1791 civil liberties were very well established in the UK and its dominions. When the First Fleet landed in Botany Bay one of the convicts found that his luggage had gone missing. He sued the Crown for damages and won. The Hanoverians were bound by the same laws which regulated the lives of their subjects.
Never! My Sicilian is stronger than ever! Dem is vendetta words...;)
I can't help it, along with my mama's lasagna i was fed a steady diet of Founding Fathers fetish...I am Italian-AMERICAN after all...
anyway I'm happy to meet you halfway and recognize my debt to those English Protestants, they really could create stirring words about ordered liberty...living up to them is a whole nother thing of course...
cheers!
A vendetta? So long as it is conducted with the intelligence and grace due to Old Palermo I will consider myself blessed by fortune...a true Sicilian vendetta compares favourably to the standard Balkanoid namecalling of the internet or the sanctimonious hysterics of the Yankees.
BTW the fusion of Anglo and Siciilian influence brings to mind the expression once applied to the aristos on the island...they were often called the Anglossini or little English. Ellis Island and the Yankees have clearly produced a version of this too.
Cheers!
I don’t see the point of these “trolley problem” thought experiments. They don’t have any corollaries in real life. What am I supposed to get out of this?
Yeah, thanks for putting my thoughts into words.
There. That question, right there. The beginning of wisdom.
The Internet Age provides a panoramic scope of opportunities for verbal expression. Some of the input is bound to consist of sophistic abstractions, fantasias, extravagant counterfactual scenarios, "guided meditation" sales pitch scripts, gaslighting for the lulz, eeyorism, self-indulgent whinging, half-wittery, midwittery, transactional flattery, fatuity, viturperation, balderdash, factoids, popular delusions, confidently proclaimed fatuity...&c. "Noise", in the cybernetic sense. It pays to build up a strong immune system to it. To know when to call a bluff, when to raise the stakes, when to quit, and when it isn't worth sitting down at the table to play.
Philosophy is a pastime practiced with one hand.
Gave me flashbacks to idiots who worship newcombs paradox. Rationality is a drug best avoided
I epologize for typing like I'm mocking Dutch people. I broke the "ey" end "ezz" keyz on my leptop.
> The Establishment's push to create a false equivalency between any criticism of the state of Israel and advocating violence against America’s Jewish citizens is not a new development.
I heve e zhort lizt of queztionz I wizh I could force politicienz to enzwer publicly. They would lie, obviouzly, but I went to zee which lie they tell, end I went everyone to publicly zee their obviouz liez.
On the Izreel zubject, the queztion I went to ezk iz:
"Whet, in your perzonel opinion, iz the eccepteble wey to protezt the ection of the Ztete of Izreel, without it being conzidered enti-zemetic?"
My perzonel belief iz thet, if thiz hypotheticel ceme to pezz, you would get zeverel politicienz zeying zome literel, non-euphemiztic form of "thet iz not pozzible. Eny protezt of the Ztete of Izreel (from people who don't live there) iz enti-zemetic".
I juzt went to heer zomeone zey it
Unreleted but enother queztion I dreem of ezking, in e town hell or debete context:
"Whet iz one legitimete reezon why zomeone would vote for your opponent?"
Ask for permission?
The New 'Antisemitism Awareness Act' to Crackdown on Anti-Zionist Protests w/ Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro
https://youtu.be/btXCbLJNdek