If for any reason you cannot find the paperback version of Playing the Indian Card at your favourite bookstore or online retailer, please ask them to carry it. Protest and picket the store entrance if necessary.
Richard Fernandez writes, for PJ Media, that the MSM are missing the big story while they fixate on Trump’s impeachment. The world is on fire: rioting in the streets of Hong Kong, Lebanon, Chile, Spain, France, Iraq, Sudan, Russia, Uganda, Peru, Zimbabwe, Venezuela, and Iran. Something is going on.
Fernandez does not say what it is, other than the people being fed up with the establishment. What I say is going on is the democratization of information flow thanks to the Internet. The ability of folks to organize through social media, and to access information online, makes the traditional establishment largely redundant. We have gone, for example, from the rigid organization of the traditional taxi company to the free form flow of Uber.
Structures are now more often than not getting in the way. Accordingly, people are less inclined to listen to their authority, to defer to them, and to pay for them.
The initial reaction of the establishment has been to try to batten down the hatches, and expand the role of government in order to squelch this perceived disorder. This, I think, is suicide.
The future is for less government. Whatever jurisdictions first realize this shall inherit the earth.
Suddenly I understand why the social media companies are seemingly going insane and acting in their own worst interests—aggressively “deplatforming” their most successful content providers.
As suggested last post, this is a sign that someone thinks their current position of power is doomed. They are going to get their licks in while they can. Because they understand there is no tomorrow.
First, notice that the one company most aggressively deplatforming seems to have been Twitter. The one who has been most financially shaky at the same time. Cause and effect might be murky, but this confirms that the behaviour is suicidal.
So what bright headlights do these guys see coming towards them?
Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web, has long been dissatisfied with the direction it has taken. Specifically, the Internet was born and bred to be decentralized. Lee laments how it has drifted from a liberating orgy of creativity to these corporate content silos. So he has been working on Solid; last fall, he released Inrupt (sounds like Disrupt) a first app based on it.
I do not have a solid grip myself on Solid and its significance, but the men of Silicon Crevice surely do. I gather that with Solid, the user maintains control over both all their personal details, and all the content they produce and put up on the web. They hold it locally, and it can be pulled or moved at will.
There goes the underpinnings of all the web barons’ wealth: on the one hand, selling personal details to advertisers, on the other selling users and advertisers content created by other users, and on the other other, locking in users and advertisers with the strength of their established user base. They have always only been a middleman. And, like other middlemen, easily replaceable by computerization. Any pirate programmer now might supercede a Facebook or a Twitter or a PayPal within months.
The current reaction in Silicon Gulch suggests they know the Berners-Lee initiative is going to work. The Internet is soon going to go back to being the nervous system of freedom everywhere. And Sir Berners-Lee is about to become a culture hero of humanity for a second time.
Many on the right are upset, as am I, by the rising tide of blacklisting and censorship. Most recently, just yesterday, Facebook has banned Paul Joseph Watson and Laura Loomer, among others. This blacklisting has gotten so obviously out of hand that even Donald Trump has weighed in with a protest.
But I think those who are blaming Mark Zuckerberg, and Twitter, and Google, and Patreon, and so on, for these bans are missing the forest for the trees. I think perhaps these businesses deserve some sympathy. They are probably not guilty as often charged with seeking to impose their own opinions on the world-- but of moral cowardice. A far more common moral failing.
It seems most likely to me that people like Zuckerberg, who have spent their lives accumulating extreme wealth, are really, in the first place, far more interested in making money than in politics. This is, moreover, their fiduciary duty as employees and proprietors. On that basis, they would surely really much prefer to continue hosting wildly popular content contributors like Watson, or Yiannopolis. Each makes them a lot of money.
But what if other people are threatening to boycott for hosting them? That sounds like a money-losing proposition. Bad PR. Angry customers.
The natural knee-jerk of a businessman is to keep the customers satisfied. He or she hears a complaint, and they figure they need to respond.
People on the left are of course going to be enraged at and want to shut down precisely the voices that are most effective, to which they cannot adequately respond. And so the process quickly gets draconian.
What Facebook and Twitter and the rest are doing now is still short-sighted and foolish. But it is understandable. They are businessmen. Politics is not their game. They just want to steer clear of it, they are not interested in it, and so they are blind to the dangers they are walking into here. Poor fools.
All he wanted was peace in our time.
So long as they stayed neutral and just let anyone post, they could plausibly deny any responsibility for what is posted. They would have had to stand tough and be principled, though, and they were not, in fact, principled. They just wanted to make money. But the instant they started policing things, as they have emphatically now, they actually and foolishly accepted legal and political responsibility for anything that appears on their platform. By anyone. Including posted comments by every lunatic capable of breathing through his mouth. That is going to become political and legal suicide going forward. There can be no end to it. Everyone is going to be furious at everything, and expect them to do something about it. And as soon as they do anything, another group is going to be at least as furious at the censorship.
Worse, as more and more legitimate opinions, and content people want to see, gets thrown off their platforms, they are almost forcing some competition to emerge and take over their market niche. And be able to compete by featuring established big names like MacInnis, Milo, Watson, Loomer; bigger names and more interesting content than are available on YouTube or Twitter. Because by the logic of the outrage boycotts, it will be the most compelling content and the biggest names that are targeted for boycott. Witness what happened with Fox News in the television marketplace. Witness the newspapers dying. Witness even how much less interesting Rebel Media has become since they bent to pressure by dumping Faith Goldy, Lauren Southern, Gavin MacInnis—all their stars. For an easier ride at the next shareholder’s meeting, these social media companies are signing their own death warrant.
Government intervention in the market is generally a bad idea. This is the classic situation in which it is a good idea. Government intervention can sometimes help everyone. The classic example is drugs in sports. Probably few athletes want to risk their health by resorting to performance-enhancing injections. But if a few do, everyone else must, or be left out of the playoffs. Their career is ruined. So it helps everyone if they are banned, and a regimen of testing imposed.
This situation is not the same, but similar. As a business proposition, probably no business wants to start censoring. But they feel forced to by the current market pressure. If, on the other hand, government passed a law positively requiring them to host all comers without politics being a factor—the rule could be that nobody could be denied a platform for any speech that is legal—then Facebook or Twitter could proceed with their business, the making of money hand over fist, without needing to soil themselves with politics. Everybody wins.
Except, of course, the scoundrels who want to silence opinions they cannot refute. But they will lose in any case.
Remember that famous quote, commonly misattributed to Mahatma Gandhi, but nevertheless eternally true: “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
I never said it. I just lived it.
What we are seeing currently, nasty as it has gotten, is stage three. The left is no longer able to ignore opinions they disagree with. They are no longer able to ridicule them. Now they are fighting them openly and aggressively. In doing so, as Gandhi realized, they visibly surrender the moral high ground in the eyes of the general public.
Very soon after this, they become pariahs. They become as respected as, say, European imperialism is now, as a result of Gandhi’s campaigns, or discrimination against blacks is now, as a result of Martin Luther King’s. This is the road down which the modern left is frogmarching. People are starting to pop red pills literally left and right.
We seem to be at an inflection point in world history, a moment of general change.
In Canada, the government is collapsing. I said after Jody Wilson-Raybould’s initial testimony to the Commons Justice Committee that this was likely to be the end of Justin Trudeau. It put him in the position of fighting his own constituency, who are going to believe Wilson-Raybould before they believe him. That seems now to be playing out.
Raymond Bourque reported Ottawa insider gossip at the time as envisioning two ways forward for the Liberals: either everyone but the PM resigns, or the PM resigns. They have tried option one now, and it is not working. It has not been enough. The scandal continues to build. That leaves option two: Trudeau resigns. Or, if they do nothing, simply sound defeat at the next election, coming soon. There is, at the same time, no guarantee that a new leader would satisfy the public mind. For what has been exposed seems to be a culture of corruption at the top. Unless, that is, they chose Wilson-Raybould or Jane Philpott as new leader—but then that might look cynical.
In Britain, the government is also collapsing. Brexit is itself a major inflection point. But now the government is apparently disintegrating over their incomprehension of how to go about it. Theresa May is resigning, but it cannot end there. Surely nobody really believes the problem is Theresa May. Her resignation will change nothing. The entire managing elite, commons and bureaucracy, is looking incompetent, panicked, and like a laughing stock.
In France, rioting in the streets continues every weekend. They are at least calling for Macron to resign. Merkel has forestalled similar protests in Germany by already announcing her resignation.
This must all be connected. There is too much happening all at once for it not to be connected.
But then there is the US, where the opposite thing seems to be happening. Elsewhere, the government is collapsing, and the leader is being pressured to resign. In the US, it is the opposition that is collapsing. The Russia collusion bust, the Jussie Smollett case, the Covington smear, the #Metoo hits on Hollywood, the Warren aboriginal fraud, all seem to expose the opposition rather than the government as venal, self-serving, and incompetent. The demands are instead for prominent members of the media to resign.
It seems to me that it is just this American exception that demonstrates that it is indeed all interconnected. It has nothing to do with any one particular leader, and it has nothing to do with leaders in general. The demands for leaders to resign are only because the leader is in each case the public face of the ruling elite. Except in the US. In each case, it is the ruling elite that is being exposed as venal, incompetent, and self-serving. Hence Trump is the significant exception, because he positions himself as in opposition to the ruling elite.
In Canada, many if not everyone probably realizes that Trudeau is a naif in way over his head, that he has always only been the regime’s mascot. It is his “handlers” who have engineered this fiasco, including the upper reaches of the bureaucracy, who have always been the backbone of the Liberal party. And surely it is evident that the confused mess of Brexit is not really Theresa May’s fault. Does anyone seriously believe that her resignation is going to change much and suddenly make it all work? The policies the French demonstrators are protesting are not Macron’s policies in particular, but the same policies they hated under Hollande, or Sarkozy. And so forth and on. It is the ruling elite in general that is in trouble here. We are, frankly, watching a revolution unfold.
This is perhaps caused by the convergence of two factors. First, the general collapse of morality in the upper classes of the developed world. It began in its present form with the “sexual revolution” of the Sixties, albeit building on amoral intellectual currents that go at least as far back as Nietzsche, Darwin, and Marx. With noble but increasingly rare exceptions, the educated classes threw out any commitment to morality as a check on their actions. Hence they have indeed generally grown venal and self-serving.
The second factor is improved communications. The elite maintained their position on the basis of a supposed monopoly of expertise, on special access to protected bodies of knowledge. Thanks to social media and instant web search, they are being revealed in many cases to actually know little or nothing, and to be on average no brighter than average.
No more than a parasitical class.
These two waves have now met and merged, and the revolution is upon us.
As either fate or providence would have it, it looks as though the United States is best positioned to make this transition in relative peace. And even there, things look rocky.
There is a campaign afoot, with petitions flying, to ban an app popular with teenagers called Sarahah. The problem is that it is reportedly being used for “cyberbullying.”
I cannot go along with the call to ban. It seems to misdirect from the basic problem: which is bullying, not Sarahah. It seems rather like banning fire because bullies can use it to burn someone.
There is a very simple and obvious way to avoid being bullied by anyone on Sarahah: don’t install the app. What could be easier? Indeed, according to a review I read online, to get comments, you not only have to download the app, then create an account, but it is then up to you to share the link with those you yourself choose, and ask for their comments. If, after this, anyone starts sending nasty comments, individual senders can be blocked at any time. If you want to be shot with this gun, you have to buy it, load it, and cock it yourself, before handing it to the bully. Then you have to pose for them in plain sight.
Nor are comments on Sarahah really anonymous. I checked for “Sarahah” in the Google play store, and that search term produced not just the app itself, but a variety of other apps promising to reveal the names and email addresses of anyone who sends comments. Anyone offering to allow others to comment anonymously is really simply on their honour not to check. Conversely, if you want to bully someone anonymously, it is simple enough to do that by email. Just create a dummy email account. Or, for that matter, just start a rumour at the corner or the water cooler.
Sarahah, on the other hand, clearly has valid uses. Like the one it was designed for. It could be a blessing for a conscientious boss.
Accordingly it seems to me that the only value to anyone of a campaign against Sarahah is to distract attention from the real problem of bullying, and deflect blame from the bullies.
The best way to prevent bullying is to raise general social awareness of morality and personal responsibility. This campaign goes in the opposite direction. It blames things for the acts of people.
And I think that has to be the deliberate point; otherwise complaining about Sarahah is utterly illogical. People want to avoid the concept of personal responsibility. The idea of the campaign is to have everyone accept the idea that individual humans are not responsible for their acts. Lets the bad people off the hook; they can then feel free to do as they like. And this general social tendency is what is making things like bullying more common.
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