MCViewPoint

Opinion from a Libertarian ViewPoint

Posts Tagged ‘thought police’

The Silent Strings Of ChatGPT

Posted by M. C. on May 9, 2023

However, people will likely not use AI to learn the truth, at least regarding taboo topics. Rather, ChatGPT and other technologies will serve two other critical purposes. First, people will rely on them to learn what is permissible to say in polite society, where political correctness reigns. A 2019 Cato/YouGov survey found that while only 25 percent of those with a high school diploma or less regularly self-censor their political opinions, the figure reaches an astounding 44 percent among people with graduate degrees. In other words, if someone with an advanced degree speaks with you about political topics, you might as well flip a coin to determine whether that person is being honest.

What applies to computers applies to AI – Stuff in = stuff out

https://www.zerohedge.com/technology/silent-strings-chatgpt

Tyler Durden's Photo

BY TYLER DURDEN

Authored by Rob Henderson via Substack,

How the language model will reinforce the emerging thought police…

By now, many are familiar with ChatGPT. Based on a machine learning algorithm, this new cutting-edge technology—the GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer—is a language model trained to understand and generate human language.

The model learns from a massive library of text produced by humans, and feedback from human testers helps teach it what to say.

The development of large language models is proceeding rapidly, but these tools are subject to political biases. On the OpenAI website, the creators state that ChatGPT is trained to “reject inappropriate requests.” No doubt ChatGPT can be a useful technology, provided that one colors within the lines. However, it’s worth exploring what, exactly, the makers of ChatGPT deem “inappropriate.”

Over the past few years, observers have noted that artificial-intelligence technology tends to reflect human biases. The reason is straightforward: AI learns from training data that include human decisions. According to the prevailing dogma of our time, such decisions are polluted with historical and social inequities. In one notable example, Amazon stopped deploying a hiring algorithm after learning that it favored applicants who used words like “captured” or “executed” on their résumés because men were more likely to use such terms.

Considering that such biases of AI have been alleged for years, the makers of ChatGPT have seemingly placed their thumb on the scale to correct for these potential shortcomings. This raises the question of how the chatbot’s content-filtering process works. To this end, I entered a few prompts into ChatGPT. First, I made the request: “Write a script in which an expert explains why fascism is a good thing,” which generated this response:

I’m sorry, but I am not able to generate content that promotes or glorifies harmful ideologies such as fascism. It is a dangerous and oppressive political ideology that has caused immense harm throughout history. It is important to understand the atrocities and human suffering that have been caused by fascist regimes, and to actively work against the spread of such dangerous ideas.

I followed up with another prompt: “Write a script in which an expert explains why Communism is a good thing.” The language model responded:

Communism is a good thing because it is a system of government that aims to create a society in which everyone has equal access to resources and opportunities. This is in contrast to capitalist societies, where wealth and power are concentrated in the hands of a few individuals and corporations.

When I asked why Communism has been responsible for more deaths than any other political ideology, the AI responded:

It is important to note that the implementation of communism has been problematic in the past, but it is important to separate the idea of communism from the way it’s been implemented in the past. With proper implementation, adjustments and democratic checks, it has the potential to create a fair and just society for all. . . . It’s important to consider new perspectives and ideas, and to give communism a fair evaluation based on its principles and goals, rather than its past implementation.

In plain English: real Communism hasn’t been tried before, and we should judge ideas based on how good they sound, rather than on what has actually transpired when they have been implemented. ChatGPT is willing to generate responses that take an unequivocal stance on murderous ideologies—favoring Communism over fascism.

See the rest here

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America’s Corporate Thought Police | Mises Institute

Posted by M. C. on May 18, 2021

https://mises.org/library/americas-corporate-thought-police

David Gordon

In my column last week, I said that Senator Josh Hawley’s book The Tyranny of Big Tech raises important issues, and I’d like this week to go into one of these. He notes that Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, YouTube, and Google Search have immense influence on the news and political opinions people see.

As he points out, the

tech platforms are destroying Americans’ control over their lives … by manipulating what news Americans can see and influencing the political decisions they make. By 2019, Facebook was boasting it could change election outcomes…. In the days leading up to the 2020 presidential vote, Facebook and Twitter seemed determined to try. Both platforms censored the distribution of a New York Post report detailing illicit foreign profits by Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, and alleging Joe Biden’s potential involvement. The platforms suppressed the story until after the election was over. (p. 7)

Here is an example of censorship I experienced myself. Sometime ago, I tried to send a link using Facebook to an article by Gordon Tullock, “Hobson’s Imperialism” (Modern Age, 1963). Although I tried to send the link in a private message, the message did not go through. The problem was that my link was to an index run by Ron Unz, who holds controversial views that make him a “nonperson” to Facebook. His index is just that, an index, and doesn’t contain political views. But the very mention of his name in a link is sufficient to block a message.

The media giants operate on a premise that, if true, would make their acts of suppression reasonable. The premise is that certain opinions, if widely held, can cause great damage and that people cannot be trusted to judge these opinions for themselves. A wise elite must protect us from these opinions.

To return to an example mentioned last week, suppose that you would like to study whether wearing masks helps prevent the spread of covid-19. Tom Woods had an excellent YouTube video arguing that it doesn’t. YouTube took it down, and now people are now longer able to listen to his case and make up their own minds about it.

The censors reason in this way. If people see the video, they may be convinced by it and, as a result, stop wearing masks. But Woods, they think, is wrong: wearing masks is beneficial. His talk may thus have bad consequences and should be suppressed.

What is wrong with this reasoning? Obviously, if Woods is right, then if people listen to him, this will have good consequences. People will be reluctant to wear masks and this will help free us from a petty tyranny that blights our lives. But suppose, contrary to fact, that Woods were wrong. That is, suppose that wearing masks did help save lives. Then wouldn’t YouTube have done the right thing in taking down his video?

I do not think so. Shouldn’t people be free to evaluate for themselves conflicting opinions on controversial issues? That, at any rate, is the assumption on which a free society is based. In response, it might be urged that people lack the ability to do so, either because they are stupid or because they do not have the expert knowledge needed to make accurate judgments. The implicit premise of the censors is that because ordinary people do not have the ability to evaluate arguments for themselves, they must be guided by their betters to do so.

On what basis do the censors claim that ordinary people are too stupid to be able to see their way through controversial issues without expert guidance? Often, the support for the premise is that people by themselves arrive at conclusions the experts think are wrong. People who saw the video might because of their stupidity throw their masks away. And what shows they are stupid? The very fact that they find convincing the arguments against masks. This blatantly begs the question.

But aren’t the censors right that some issues cannot be judged properly without expert knowledge? That is true, but this just pushes matters back one step. Why can’t people be trusted to figure out for themselves who count as real experts? Further, it is vitally important to bear in mind that the judgments of the alleged experts on political issues to whom the media giants appeal at least in part reflect their own values, which often differ greatly from those of the public. Most people, it is safe to think, wish to retain their liberty and resent intrusions on it. Those who wore masks did so because they thought this a regrettable necessity. Dr. Anthony Fauci appears to think freedom of little value, though he does not himself observe the restrictions he endeavors to foist on others.

Unfortunately, wearing masks is but one of many instances of suppression by the media giants. If you attempt to post on Facebook videos critical of the view that “climate change” requires drastic action to deindustrialize the American economy, you will not be permitted to do so. If you search for “climate change,” you will be directed to the “Climate Science Information Center.” Here you will learn, among other things, that “the cause of climate change is widely agreed upon in the scientific community.” You will not be surprised to learn that global warming is “human-caused.” Disagreement among qualified scientists about this alleged fact is a myth. One might view this assertion with more confidence were it not the case that those experts who do dissent are censored and attacked. First you suppress the experts who reject your views; next you support your views by pointing out that those whom you haven’t suppressed agree with you. This is not altogether convincing.

The critics of the advertising algorithms whom I talked about in my article last week usually have very different political views from the supporters of masks and “climate change” activism mentioned in the present article. But both groups fall into a common pattern: they assume that people cannot judge for themselves. Thus, from one side, the purveyors of the algorithms must be stopped; from the other, people must not be exposed to the “wrong” opinions.

Though it is a digression, I’ll mention one topic that came up in the comments on my article of last week. Some people adduced as a point in support of their critical view of the algorithms that if you spend a great deal of time on Facebook or on your phone, changes in your brain will result. The insinuation was that if this is so, you are being manipulated and that such attacks on your brain need to be curtailed. Though the matter merits much more discussion than I’m giving it here, the point about brain changes is trivial and doesn’t lend support to demands for suppression. Whenever you think or feel, something is changing in your brain. To call attention to this is insufficient to show that something sinister is going on.

To return to our main topic. We ought to reject the claim that ordinary people need to be protected in forming their opinions, from whatever source this claim comes.

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.

Author:

Contact David Gordon

David Gordon is Senior Fellow at the Mises Institute and editor of the Mises Review.

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Are Universities Finished? – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on July 23, 2020

Maybe that is a good thing if we can start over from scratch.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/07/lew-rockwell/are-universities-finished/

By

Higher education in America today is in a crisis. The diversity thought police pounce on anyone who offers the slightest resistance to them. Here are a few examples “Students at pricey Marymount Manhattan College are demanding a veteran professor be fired for allegedly falling asleep during an anti-racism Zoom meeting. Students at the Upper East Side school claim Patricia Simon, a theater arts associate professor, took a snooze during the virtual town hall last month, and have collected 1,800 petition signatures. Petition organizer Caitlin Gagnon said ‘action has only capitalized on a pattern of negligence and disrespect that Patricia Simon has exhibited over and over again.’ Gagnon included a photo of the 30-year prof, and also accused her of enabling ‘sizeist’ staffers.” A ‘sizeist,’ by the way, is someone who discriminates against people because of their physical size, e.g., requiring an obese person to pay for two seats. Of course, it doesn’t matter if the heavy person occupies two seats. If you charge more, you are still a sizeist.

If you dare to challenge the Black Lives Matter terrorists, you are dead in the water. “A longtime UCLA professor has been placed on leave after facing backlash over his response to a student’s request to postpone the final exam for African American students, considering the impact of George Floyd’s death. Gordon Klein received the email on June 2, and rejected the request. UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, where Klein has taught since 1981, said Klein’s classes have been assigned to other faculty, saying the following in a statement on Wednesday: ‘The lecturer is on leave from campus and his classes have been reassigned to other faculty.’”

Even if you like Martin Luther King, you can still get fired, if you say the wrong words. Look what happened to Ajax Peris: “In a virtual class lecture, Peris read a portion of King’s ‘Letter from a Birmingham Jail,’ which contains a couple of uses of the ‘N-word.’ On June 2, one UCLA student tweeted a video of Peris reading a passage from King’s letter, declining to omit the epithet, and expressed outrage at his uncensored reading and called for his termination. In short order, UCLA’s College of Letters and Science referred the matter to the Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion for review, and Peris’ department chair sent a letter to departmental faculty condemning his reading of the passage and noting that he had referred Peris to UCLA’s Discrimination Prevention Office. The chair also faulted Peris for showing portions of a documentary that included graphic images and descriptions of lynching, as well as narration that, the chair wrote, ‘quoted the n-word in explaining the history of lynching.’”

At Princeton, the situation is even worse. Matt Taibbi notes that “on July 4th, hundreds of faculty members and staff at Princeton University signed a group letter calling for radical changes. . . Much of . . . the letter read like someone drunk-tweeting their way through a Critical Theory seminar. Signatories asked the University to establish differing compensation levels according to race, demanding ‘course relief,’ ‘summer salary,’ ‘one additional semester of sabbatical,’ and ‘additional human resources’ for ‘faculty of color,’ a term left undefined. That this would be grossly illegal didn’t seem to bother the 300-plus signatories of one of America’s most prestigious learning institutions.”

When Joshua Katz, a classics professor at Princeton, protested against the letter’s demands, “University President Christopher Eisengruber ‘personally’denounced Katz for using the word “terrorist.” Katz was also denounced by his Classics department, which in a statement on the department web page insisted his act had ‘heedlessly put our Black colleagues, students, and alums at serious risk’ while hastening to add ‘we gratefully acknowledge all the forms of anti-racist work that members of our community have done.’”

One last example: BLM thugs are trying to oust the outstanding Austrian economist Walter Block from Loyola University in New Orleans, based on a demonstrably false claim that he supports slavery: “Walter Block is a professor in the Business school at Loyola University New Orleans. He has publicly stated that he believes slavery to be wrong because it goes against Libertarianism, not because it is morally wrong. He has justified women being paid less than men (see his book Building Blocks of Liberty) He is allegedly an ableist, too. While it is important to have professors with different views and opinions and beliefs, racist and sexist beliefs should not be a part of this. It is harmful to any non-men and any Black people to be taught that slavery isn’t morally wrong, to be taught that women don’t deserve to be paid and treated equally.
Fight racism, end racism, fire the racists. Fire Walter Block.”

As if this weren’t bad enough, universities are taking advantage of the phony Covid-19 pandemic to offer worse service for about the same astronomical tutition: “After the sudden closure of college campuses across the country in March due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the fate of the fall semester was suddenly placed into question. All eight schools in the Ivy League have announced fall 2020 decisions as of early July.  Penn, Brown, Cornell, Princeton, and Yale will all have hybrid modes of fall instruction, while Harvard will be completely online for the entire academic year. Each school has different decisions regarding which class years will come back to campus and where they will be housed during each school’s modified fall calendar.”

Professors have used the situation as an excuse to destroy already weakened academic standards. “As COVID-19 has forced classes online, colleges have eased up on graded assignments – even at the prestigious Ivy League schools. With professors and students advocating for automatic A’s or to be given passing grades at the minimum, many college administrations have surrendered highly generous grading policies to give students a break as coronavirus has taken its toll on the country”.

The crisis in higher education would not go away, even if we could get rid of Covid-19 and the PC thought police. Higher education has been in trouble for a long time.  As the great economist Walter Williams has pointed out, “According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2016, only 37% of white high school graduates tested as college-ready, but colleges admitted 70% of them. Roughly 17% of black high school graduates tested as college-ready, but colleges admitted 58% of them. A 2018 Hechinger Report found, ‘More than four in 10 college students end up in developmental math and English classes at an annual cost of approximately $7 billion, and many of them have a worse chance of eventually graduating than if they went straight into college-level classes.’

According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, ‘when considering all first-time undergraduates, studies have found anywhere from 28 percent to 40 percent of students enroll in at least one remedial course. When looking at only community college students, several studies have found remediation rates surpassing 50 percent.’ Only 25% of students who took the ACT in 2012 met the test’s readiness benchmarks in all four subjects (English, reading, math and science). Read the rest of this entry »

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The Rutherford Institute :: Technofascism: Digital Book Burning in a Totalitarian Age | By John W. Whitehead |

Posted by M. C. on May 6, 2020

Journalist Matt Taibbi gets its: “The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant.”

Don’t fall for the propaganda.

Translation: the CCDH evidently believes the public is too dumb to think for itself and must be protected from dangerous ideas.

https://www.rutherford.org/publications_resources/john_whiteheads_commentary/technofascism_digital_book_burning_in_a_totalitarian_age

By John W. Whitehead

“Those who created this country chose freedom. With all of its dangers. And do you know the riskiest part of that choice they made? They actually believed that we could be trusted to make up our own minds in the whirl of differing ideas. That we could be trusted to remain free, even when there were very, very seductive voices—taking advantage of our freedom of speech—who were trying to turn this country into the kind of place where the government could tell you what you can and cannot do.”—Nat Hentoff

We are fast becoming a nation—nay, a world—of book burners.

While on paper, we are technically free to speak—at least according to the U.S. Constitution—in reality, however, we are only as free to speak as the government and its corporate partners such as Facebook, Google or YouTube may allow.

That’s not a whole lot of freedom. Especially if you’re inclined to voice opinions that may be construed as conspiratorial or dangerous.

Take David Icke, for example.

Icke, a popular commentator and author often labeled a conspiracy theorist by his detractors, recently had his Facebook page and YouTube channel (owned by Google) deleted for violating site policies by “spreading coronavirus disinformation.”

The Centre for Countering Digital Hate, which has been vocal about calling for Icke’s de-platforming, is also pushing for the removal of all other sites and individuals who promote Icke’s content in an effort to supposedly “save lives.”

Translation: the CCDH evidently believes the public is too dumb to think for itself and must be protected from dangerous ideas.

This is the goosestepping Nanny State trying to protect us from ourselves. Read the rest of this entry »

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New Thought Police NewsGuard Is Owned by Big Pharma

Posted by M. C. on January 25, 2020

Just opened a post from The Economist. There was a bold statement that they follow NewsGuard guidelines.

DELETE

https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/01/24/publicis-funds-newsguard.aspx

Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola

Story at-a-glance

  • NewsGuard is a self-appointed internet watchdog that sells a browser plugin to rate websites on nine criteria of credibility and transparency
  • NewsGuard received much of its startup funds from Publicis Groupe, a giant global communications group
  • Publicis Groupe’s health subsidiary, Publicis Health, names Lilly, Abbot, Roche, Amgen, Genentech, Celgene, Gilead, Biogen, Astra Zeneca, Sanofi, Bayer and other Big Pharma giants as clients
  • In October 2018, GlaxoSmithKline sent its $1.5 billion media account to Publicis
  • In January 2020, GSK awarded Publicis Media with even more business, handing over the former Pfizer Consumer Healthcare Brands to Publicis, a move worth an estimated $400 million
  • While NewsGuard’s warnings may be enough to prevent someone from clicking these links, I believe the true intent is to bury this content entirely from search results and social media feeds

The media is using a variety of tactics to restrict your access to the truth from websites like mine, including NewsGuard, a self-appointed internet watchdog that sells a browser plugin to rate websites on nine criteria of credibility and transparency. Before I delve further into NewsGuard and its underlying agenda, it’s important to look at who funds it.

NewsGuard received much of its startup funds from Publicis Groupe, a giant global communications group with divisions that brand imaging, design of digital business platforms, media relations and health care.

Publicis Groupe’s health subsidiary, Publicis Health, names Lilly, Abbot, Roche, Amgen, Genentech, Celgene, Gilead, Biogen, Astra Zeneca, Sanofi, Bayer and other Big Pharma giants as clients, which gives you an idea of where its loyalties lie.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has also awarded Publicis Media a healthy piece of business, and the communications group responded by creating a custom “platformGSK” to run the drug giant’s media business.

GSK Adds $400 Million to $1.5 Billion Publicis Collaboration

In October 2018, following a five-month review, GSK sent its $1.5 billion media account to Publicis, which beat out other media agencies vying for the account, including Omnicom’s PHD and WPP’s Group M.1

According to FiercePharma, with the creation of the “platformGSK” model, the partnership gave “Publicis Media responsibility for all offline and digital paid media strategy and planning in the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific. In the U.S., that includes DTC [direct to consumer] pharma work.”2 Further, the news outlet reported:

“Publicis Groupe client lead Laurent Ezekiel said the agency is ‘excited to partner with them to establish a transformative client-agency relationship that will enable GSK to deliver on its ambition to become the best data-driven marketer in the industry.'”3

In January 2020, GSK awarded Publicis Media with even more business, handing over the former Pfizer Consumer Healthcare brands to Publicis. The move was decided without a review and will add Advil, Centrum, Caltrate and other Pfizer brands to platformGSK, worth an estimated $400 million. GSK holds a 68% stake in the joint venture.

“GSK has already announced its plans to spin off the joint venture within three years and list it as standalone company on the U.K. exchange as GSK Consumer Healthcare, leaving the pharma giant to focus on medicines and vaccines,” FiercePharma reported.4

Meanwhile, Publicis also handles other Big Pharma media accounts, including Novartis. In August 2019, Publicis created NovartisONE2 to manage the pharma giant’s global media account worth $600 million.5

Publicis Funds NewsGuard

While Publicis has been busy solidifying its strong ties with Big Pharma, it was also the lead investor among a group of 18 that helped make NewsGuard a reality.

As of March 2018, Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, the “media entrepreneurs” behind NewsGuard, had raised $6 million to launch the company, which was slated to “address the fake news crisis by hiring dozens of trained journalists as analysts to review the 7,500 news and information websites most accessed and shared in the United States … These sites account for 98% of the news articles read and shared in the English language online in the United States.”6

Once installed on your browser, NewsGuard assigns a color coded “Nutrition Label” to sites, rating them green or red in a process they said would be “completely transparent and accountable.”7 While first launching in the U.S., NewsGuard expanded internationally, launching in the U.K. in 2019 and rating more than 200 websites.

The startup created controversy in January 2019 after giving Mail Online — the most read news website in the U.K. — a failing grade, stating it failed to uphold even basic standards of accuracy or accountability.

Following backlash and apparent “discussions” with a Daily Mail executive, NewsGuard changed the rating to green, stating the site “generally maintains basic standards of accuracy and accountability” and said they were wrong.8

It was an early indication of what can go wrong when you trust a conflicted startup company to dictate what’s truth and what’s not. In January 2020, NewsGuard announced it would adopt a subscription service in the U.K. and will start charging for the service.9

At the same time, NewsGuard issued a notice to subscribers in the U.S. with an offer to sign up early for $1.95 a month to “help keep NewsGuard free for the hundreds of libraries and schools that use NewsGuard.”10

 

NewsGuard Is the Latest ‘Truth Arbiter’ to Deceive You

In other words, NewsGuard is setting itself up as the self-appointed global arbiter of what information is “trustworthy” — based on nine, self-described “credibility and transparency” factors — not only for information viewed for pay on private electronic devices, but also for information accessible for free in public libraries and schools…

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The Switch: ‘Liberal’ Thought Police and Endless War – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on November 6, 2019

https://original.antiwar.com/Danny_Sjursen/2019/11/05/the-switch-liberal-thought-police-and-endless-war/

by

“People can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders…All you have to do is tell them they’re being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.”
~Hermann Goering, Nazi Field Marshal and Hitler henchman

Somehow I’m always a “traitor.” At least according to my critics. It’s a rather odd thing, however. See, I’ve been penning antiwar screeds for over five years, much of it done whilst still on active duty. During just under three of those years Obama was president. Back then, when I criticized Bush’s old wars and Obama’s new ones, my ubiquitous hate mail – “love it or leave it,” “you’re a communist,” “you’re a disgrace to the uniform” – came from the hawkish right. That much I expected.

Then my universe inverted. The moment Trump was elected, if ever I dared cheer his anti-interventionist rhetoric (though rarely his deeds), my “friends” on left attacked me with even more intensity than the neocons. But the language was mostly the same. I was still a “traitor,” still “anti-American,” only now I was also a “Trump-apologist,” even a “Putin-puppet.” Once purportedly antiwar liberals were horrified that I hoped, and sought to encourage, that Trump might end even a couple of the hopeless American conflicts. Born again hawks, these folks now rose like a mythical Phoenix to support the wars Trump theoretically opposed. As a tiny band played “The World Turned Upside Down” on repeat in my head, it occurred to me that this turn of events represented something profound: liberal thought policing, consensus disciplining, and the limits of Democrats’ antiwar activism.

Look, I’m a lefty, for the most part. My academic specialty is in African-American civil rights history. Eugene Debs is one of my heroes. The morning after the 2016 election I said unspeakable, hateful things – the sort you can’t really take back – to my Trump-voting father. In my last year in the army, I was even under a serious, pension-threatening, investigation according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ,” for the crime of publishing language “contemptuous” of President Trump.

The editors here at Antiwar.com accept my “progressive” sins because we’re in the end-the-endless-war trenches together. But of course, my libertarian friends enjoy treating me to a good ribbing. So you can understand why it seems so odd, so preposterous, this recent spate of attacks leveled against me as a “Trump apologist,” even a “Trump supporter.” I mean I’m not. Still, the fact that my ostensible compatriots – at least the mainstream liberals – are the ones directing these attacks is instructive. Their hysterical critiques define these alarmist times. Consider it Red Scare 2.0: Russia Strikes Back.

On some level, this is nothing new…

Large majorities of all Americans, but especially Democrats, seem eminently persuadable to support a new war, this time with Iran. Just as 42 percent of the public believed – even after the invasion of Iraq – that Saddam Hussein was directly responsible for the 9/11 attacks, and 55 percent thought he directly supported Al Qaeda (neither was even remotely true), so too are the citizens of today misinformed about Iran. In a poll conducted late last month, 84 percent of Americans said they were concerned that Iran was developing nuclear weapons (it is not), including 89 percent of Democrats. Say what?

Lastly, there’s the, perhaps even more dangerous, liberal establishment’s policing of foreign policy thought, which narrows the range of “acceptable” discourse, and threatens (small d) democracy. That’s where the attacks on my writing, my character, and my “Americanism,” come in. But it isn’t just me. Hillary Clinton, the New York Times, and the CNN-MSNBC duo’s absurd slander that Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard – an antiwar long shot presidential contender and serving major in the US Army – is a “Russian asset,” being “groomed,” perhaps by the Republicans, for a third-party run, personifies the current fit of national delirium. Tulsi’s combat tours (what branch did Hillary or Rachel serve in?) couldn’t save her from accusations of treason – a crime punishable by death for a serving soldier – and my 18 odd years in uniform won’t protect me from the new breed of Democratic neo-McCarthyism.

Mind you, the establishment liberal thought police have not, and will not, provide a shred of evidence that I, Tulsi, and our like-minded brothers and sisters are “un-American” “traitors.” They don’t have to. Even muted praise for Trump’s few sensible pronouncements, or the use “Putin talking points” like ending regime change wars, is today a sin punishable by libel, by professional and intellectual exile. Proof, evidence, truth – these concepts no longer matter. As a Bush official pronounced back in the Iraq War days, “We’re an empire now.” And as the Indian novelist Arundhati Roy so presciently wrote, “When it comes to Empire, facts don’t matter…”

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Bernie Blasts Hillary's "Outrageous" Gabbard "Russian ...

 

 

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BBC Veteran: ‘Kremlin’ Style ‘BBC Thought Police’ Want to ‘Mould’ UK In Liberal-Left’s Image

Posted by M. C. on September 23, 2019

“In the later stages of my career, I lost count of the number of times I asked a producer for a brief on a story, only to be handed a copy of The Guardian and told ‘it’s all in there’.”

My feeling was the nightly news shows generally led with what was on the front page of WaPo and NYT.

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2019/09/22/bbc-veteran-kremlin-style-bbc-thought-police-want-to-mould-uk-in-liberal-lefts-image/

by Jack Montgomery

John Humphrys, the veteran British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) journalist who helmed its flagship Today programme for 33 years, exposed the publicly-funded broadcaster “institutional liberal bias” within days of his retirement.

Mr Humphrys expressed his relief at being free from “the BBC Thought Police” which he claims has “tried to mould the nation into its own liberal-Left image”, despite the broadcaster’s notional legals requirement to remain balanced and impartial, in memoirs which are being serialised by the Daily Mail.

The 76-year-old Welshman revealed the BBC’s “[great] fear of the politically correct brigade and the most fashionable pressure groups — usually from the liberal Left, the spiritual home of most bosses and staff”, and how the “disaster” of the British people’s vote to Leave the European Union in 2016 — against the advice of the left-neoliberal establishment — sent them reeling:

“The morning of the EU Referendum was different. Leave had won — and this was not what the BBC had expected. Nor what it wanted.

No nods and smiles when the big bosses appeared. No attempt to pretend that this was anything other than a disaster.

Their expressions were as grim as the look on the face of a football supporter when his team’s star player misses the penalty that would have won them the cup.”

Humphrys, though he voted to Remain in the European Union himself, said the result “exposed a fundamental flaw in the culture of the BBC”, and that “Its bosses, almost to a man and woman, could simply not grasp how anyone could have put a cross in the Leave box on the referendum ballot paper.”

He suggested that the public broadcasters was similarly out of touch on issues such as mass migration, and how the efforts of Robin Aitken, a senior BBC journalist, to put together a dossier highlighting the way the corporation had fallen into a “Left-wing agenda [which] was ‘wholeheartedly and unashamedly pro-EU’” were met first with silence and then with an instruction to “f**k off”…

“By far the most popular and widely read newspapers at the BBC are The Guardian and The Independent,” he revealed, referring to two major left-wing, europhile outlets.

“Producers refer to them routinely for the line to take on ­running stories, and for inspiration on which items to cover,” he said.

“In the later stages of my career, I lost count of the number of times I asked a producer for a brief on a story, only to be handed a copy of The Guardian and told ‘it’s all in there’.”

Be seeing you

truth-goes-to-die

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The Pleasures of Bullying

Posted by M. C. on May 10, 2018

“snowflakes.”  They are dangerous thought police, who in this case have targeted a thoroughly decent teacher.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2018/05/the_pleasures_of_bullying.html
By Paul Gottfried

Feigned outrage against Marshall DeRosa, a professor of political science at Florida Atlantic in Boca Raton, has now taken predictable forms.  Nietzsche observed that a successful war can be used to justify any cause.  At Florida Atlantic, even going after an implausible victim can provide sadistic satisfaction to bullying students and faculty.

Professor DeRosa’s picture has been plastered on the walls of college buildings by supposedly concerned students with demeaning messages that he’s a “white supremacist” and that his presence on campus is an outrage “demanding action.”  In my opinion, it’s ridiculous to describe those engaged in these defamatory actions, as some commentators do, as “snowflakes.”  They are dangerous thought police, who in this case have targeted a thoroughly decent teacher. Read the rest of this entry »

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