Posted Here as a Public Service

 

It is important to ensure that this gets more views than Fox News. 

Tucker is also fun to listen to.

Poor Scrappy Little Independent CBC

 

Elon Musk has labelled the CBC “government funded media” on Twitter. 

Justin Trudeau has publicly protested. He seems enraged. The CBC has threatened to leave Twitter.

Remarkably, everything Justin Trudeau says about the matter is not only a lie, but the opposite of the truth. It is illustrative of narcissistic gaslighting generally. When you are a convinced liar, it is generally not enough in your own mind to lie. You fear the truth, you generally feel safest getting as far away from it as possible.

You can see such fear in Trudeau’s eyes. Granted, it looks like anger—narcissistic rage—but narcissistic rage is a “fight or flight” response. Narcissists are haunted by their own conscience. It makes them dangerous.

To begin with, of course, the CBC is indeed government funded. This is simply the literal truth, and this is what Trudeau is furious about, and calls an “attack.”

Trudeau blames Pierre Poilievre, leader of the official opposition, for the label. Poilievre did indeed write to Musk requesting this; but Twitter is simultaneously so labelling NPR, PBS, the BBC, New Zealand state TV, Al Jazeera, and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. It would be odd to expect special treatment for the CBC no matter what Poilievre said.

In the same sentence, Trudeau describes the CBC as an “independent media organization.” Which is exactly what it is not. By insisting that it is, and objecting to the factual statement that it is government funded as an “attack,” Trudeau is admitting in a backhanded way, as narcissists do, that he knows he is in the wrong: he knows there is something deeply wrong with the way the Canadian government is funding and trying to control the media.

He stresses that the CBC delivers “local news and local content,” as if it were some small local operation up against a big impersonal business. But the CBC is the big national operation; and Trudeau is doing everything he can, with Bill C-11, to suppress independent local media and content—the YouTubers.

Trudeau then says that in criticizing the CBC Poilievre is attacking Canadian culture. One common criticisms of the CBC is that it does not promote Canadian culture. Instead, it is all in for multiculturalism, which is to say, foreign culture, and full of “woke” criticism of Canadian culture as racist. Trudeau has actually claimed that Canada has no mainstream culture. 

He accuses Poilievre of, in his supposed campaign against Canadians, “running to American billionaires; the tech giants.” That would presumably be Elon Musk, one billionaire, the chief actual opposition to the “tech giants.” And Musk is a Canadian citizen.

Nice try at fomenting anti-American hatred, by the way.

Trudeau ends with accusing the Conservatives of “always defending the tech giants.” It has been the left in the US that has been colluding to an almost Fascist degree with the tech giants. In Canada, the Liberals just gave the green light to a hi-tech merger of Rogers and Shaw. They tend to be in corporate pockets generally. SNC Lavelin? Power Corporation? The Tories, by contrast, are mostly the party of small business.

This is not an honest or a decent man. And he holds the Canadian people in contempt.

Trudeau Must Go

 

I am a retired college professor, father of two biracial kids. I have lived in the Far East and in the Persian Gulf for two dozen years. I married a Muslim woman. I am published on Buddhism in Korea, and on Hinduism in India. I am triple vaxxed. I have never worn blackface....

I believe in human rights, including the right to control one's own body. This makes me, I am told, xenophobic, Islamophobic, and a racist. I may not even have a right to occupy space. #TrudeauMustGo

Trump's Fight to Tweet Freely

The Democratic Party and the legacy media seem determined to commit suicide by tantrum. The Communist Party of China seems determined to do the same. And now it looks as though it’s Twitter and Jack Dorsey.

By labelling a tweet by the President fake news, they seemed to be daring him to go after them and the rest of social media, and end their practice of censoring political views. Many on the right have been demanding this for some time. Now Trump can no longer ignore these demands.

Now he has signed an executive order demanding that the matter be investigated. And what is Twitter’s immediate response? To immediately flag another of his tweets.

It seems reckless enough to pick a fight with the president of the US, and seem to claim the right to tell him what to do. But it is worse than that. Trump is entirely responsible for the profitability of Twitter. It was on its way to die a natural death when he came along, and made it his main platform. Since he began, everyone had to have a Twitter account, in order to follow Trump.

Never mind Trump’s legal powers as president. All he would have to do is move off Twitter onto another platform, and Twitter is dead.

And it is exactly the kind of controversial tweets that Twitter is flagging that make him a must-read.

Has Jack Dorsey gone mad? Surely he is a smart enough businessman to realize that he is destroying his business.

Here is what I think must be behind it: Dorsey wants to force Trump to promote legislation requiring Twitter, and everyone else, to stop censoring and publish everything. He might even be in collusion with Trump on this, and be giving him cover.

The fact that Trump doesn't simply move off Twitter and kill it suggests that this is so.

Dorsey’s main interest, presumably, is in making money. So too with the other tech barons. It is in their financial interests to run everything, to promote higher levels of readership. Even if that were not so, policing what is posted costs money.

They have been censoring not because they want to, but because advertisers demand it. And advertisers demand it because people on the left have been complaining to them, and threatening boycotts if they are associated with political content the left does not like.

If they ignore this pressure and fail to censor, the advertisers can simply move their money to another platform that does. So none of the big companies dares to be the one not to censor.

It is a classic situation in which legislation can benefit everyone. Make it illegal to censor, and the advertisers will have nowhere else to go. And the advertisers are happy too—they reach more people, and can no longer be threatened with boycotts or bad PR by left-wing activists over where they advertise.

Roseanne Cancelled

Roseanne Barr.

The issue of free speech raised by the Kelly Pocha incident in Lethbridge has now been magnified by the Roseanne Barr incident. Barr’s personal culpability is greater—she was not just videoed by someone else in a moment of anger; she sent out the tweet herself. But the consequences, and the consequences to many innocent parties, have been disproportionate.

To recap, Roseanne is the title character in a runaway hit TV show. She tweeted, one night at 2 AM, that Valerie Jarrett, a former advisor to President Obama, looked like the child of the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes. She tweeted: “Muslim brotherhood & planet of the apes had a baby=vj,” For this, ABC immediately cancelled her show.

Those punished for these ten short words include all her co-stars, who just lost their livelihood and the professional opportunity of several dozen actor lifetimes; everyone else involved in the show; ABC’s stockholders; and the millions of viewers who were obviously greatly enjoying the series. All for ten words sent by one soul in the middle of one night. Obviously, an injustice has been done here to all of them.

And it seems quite likely that an injustice has also been done to Roseanne Barr. No doubt you should never call anyone a child of the Muslim Brotherhood and Planet of the Apes; but mere insults actually injure no one. Roseanne was only guilty of being coarse. We knew Roseanne was coarse; it is her persona. It is what we pay her for. How did Don Rickles ever have a career, then?

Roseanne’s tweet has been accused of racism. If it were so, it would not justify the cancellation. People have the right to be racist, off the job, famous or not, or we have no freedom of thought or freedom of speech. But it is not even clear she was being racist. She claims that she had no idea Valerie Jarrett was of a different race than herself. If you look at a photo of Jarrett, this is plausible. She self-identifies as black, or “African American,” but she was born in Iran, and does not look African American. And if there is some spontaneous connection in the reader’s mind between apes and African Americans, then the reader is the racist, not Barr. 

Valerie Jarrett.

Is the problem, then, the reference to the Muslim Brotherhood? Does not work. Being Muslim is not a race, and the Muslim Brotherhood does not represent Islam. It is a political party, not a religion. Criticism of it is as fair game as criticism of the Christian Democrats or the IRA. Nor is Jarrett a Muslim.

This seems to me another argument for the law I propose, prohibiting the firing of anyone for what they say off the job, unless it is intentionally and publicly slagging their own employer or their industry. Were this law in place, ABC would not have felt obliged to fire Barr, which I expect they did not want to do. They would still have their hit series, as would the actors and the viewers, and no harm would have been done.

If, of course, people stopped watching the series because of this comment, or advertisers stopped advertising, fine. Then the series could and would be cancelled; on the objective grounds that it was not making money.

Personal Identity and Peace

That little dickens Pope Francis is at it again, twittering and tweeting.

It occurs to me that Francis, unlike Trump, probably does not write his own tweets. Certainly not in English. Still, I wish someone would confiscate the smartphone.

Here’s the latest:

So what does it mean? How do you “violate” someone in their “personal identity”? By forgetting their name?
Given the pronouns “his” and “her,” I hope he means not calling women women, or men, men. Would that be too much to hope?

But there are a lot of other possibilities, and just about all of them are problems for Catholic theology.

More fundamentally, it is bad practice to stress the notion of “personal identity.” It ought not to be all about me. Nor about the silly roles society assigns us. There is, after all, no man or woman, no Jew nor Greek, nor Samaritan, in Christ.

We are children of God, brothers and sisters, and it is our unity which ought to be emphasized.

Whatever he meant, it is unhelpful to sow woodland herrings in this way.