Elon Musk has been accused of hypocrisy for publicly defying the EU’s demands that he comply with the Digital Safety Act, while also flagging or removing posts that fall foul of the new DSA rules. Nevertheless, says Thomas Fazi in UnHerd, at least Musk is drawing attention to the EU’s censorship programme.
Complying with these requests is often the only way that the company can continue to operate — and at least Musk, unlike the other major platform owners, has brought online censorship into the open. The publication of the groundbreaking Twitter Files, remember, revealed the shocking level of collusion between the US administration and social media companies.
More to the point, though, X, despite the censorship, remains the only platform where information is allowed to flow relatively freely. Indeed, it remains the single biggest threat to the establishment’s desire for full-spectrum information control — and that is why they are coming down on it so hard. But one man, no matter how rich or powerful, cannot be expected to single-handedly stand up to some of the most powerful governments in the world — let alone to the European Union, the world’s most influential supranational institution.
There’s also another factor to consider. The global attack on free speech isn’t just the whim of out-of-control, power-hungry politicians and bureaucrats. It’s a systemic problem that relates to the structural decay of liberal-democratic institutions, particularly in the West. As our societies degenerate into de facto oligarchies controlled by increasingly delegitimised political-economic elites, this manipulation of public opinion — not only through propaganda delivered via traditional mass media channels but also, increasingly, by policing and micromanaging the public conversation taking place on social media platforms — has come to be seen as an imperative for keeping the status quo safe from the threat of democracy. This is compounded by the growing militarisation of the geopolitical context, which requires an even more compliant populace given its political and economic consequences.
It’s no coincidence that the censorship-industrial complex started emerging in the second half of the 2010s. This was the time when the West was rocked by an unprecedented “populist” backlash against globalisation and the neoliberal order — Trump, Brexit, the Yellow Vests, and the rise of Eurosceptic parties and movements across Europe.
It was also when the path of future confrontation with Russia was being laid in Ukraine — and when Nato started developing the hybrid or cognitive warfare doctrine, which conceptualises the management of Western public opinion as an integral part of warfare. As Jens Stoltenberg, Nato’s former Secretary General, put it in 2019: “Nato must remain prepared for both conventional and hybrid threats: from tanks to tweets.”
The Covid-19 pandemic, which saw the first mass deployment of online censorship, bought Western elites some time. But not for long. Today, a “populist” backlash is once again engulfing the West: Right-populist parties are surging across Europe, and Trump is on course to winning the next US election. Meanwhile, escalating tensions in Ukraine have detonated into a no-longer-so-proxy war between Nato and Russia. From the perspective of Western elites, this all calls for a doubling down on the censorship regime, with a major difference: online censorship used to occur behind closed doors, extra-legally and in a context of plausible deniability of behalf of governments; today it is being institutionalised and constitutionalised through tools such as the Digital Services.
Worth reading in full.
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No, they were NOT “well-intentioned”. They were egotistical, authoritarian, morons who conspired to commit some of the most totalitarian acts against the people in history. This includes knowingly harming children and have left a legacy of destruction, emotional damage and death that will never be repaired. Never. These people are all either evil or stupid beyond belief – either way, they deserve no place in a civilised society.
“Well-intentioned, my arse!”
J Royle.
Ditto!
Evil, definitely evil.
That insane head of the Northern Territories was a full blown Nazi.
Morriston? A complete dictator drunk on all the power he wielded.
The police that broke into people’s homes to arrest them violently for speaking out, speaking for gods sakes, against lockdowns? A bit too overzealous…
The crooked house has gone! Fire
Ah! The Crooked House, where you could believe you were drunk before you were actually drunk.
So true.
“Lockdown Zealots Were Well-Intentioned“
Sorry, I had to stop reading at that point
I don’t think that they were “well intentioned”, simply too gullible and stupid to be in positions of power.
Some were/are gullible and stupid, many knew and know exactly what they were doing and how wrong it was, but carried on anyway. Even Hancock, who does a good impression of Tim Nice But Dim, said “is it time to deploy the new variant?” – does that sound well intentioned? Whitty and Vallance knew Covid was not a serious threat -they bloody well said so, publicly and privately- mild for most, not dangerous enough to justify an emergency vaccine.
Those in positions to do so and had read the Rockefeller document Lockstep certainly weren’t “well intentioned”.. it was the plan..
2010: Rockefeller’s ‘Operation Lockstep’ Predicted 2020 ‘Lockdown’
https://principia-scientific.com/2010-rockefellers-operation-lockstep-predicted-2020-lockdown/
2010: Rockefeller’s ‘Operation Lockstep’ Predicted 2020 ‘Lockdown’
I found this very early on, certainly close to the start of the Scamdemic and it absolutely opened my eyes to the evil we were facing. Written in 2010 and yet we are expected to believe “Lockstep” was nothing more than coincidences. Worldwide coincidences, but coincidences nevertheless. That is how they view us – thick, stupid, disposable.
Plus, which so-called “free and democratic” civilised country looks to somewhere like authoritarian China, where not only human rights are not recognised but active abuse and killing of minorities and those who oppose the regime is carried out routinely ( forced organ harvesting, for example ) and thinks, “Yeah, locking millions down and depriving them of their civil liberties and inalienable human rights looks like a good idea and would definitely work”. No sane person would ever say such a thing and even if someone did, they’d be in a tiny minority because everyone else would sit them down and explain all the negative ways in which that’s a bad idea and to stop being an alarmist, Chicken Licken mentalist. But none of that happened because there appeared to be a consensus and everyone agreed to behave like they were a tyrannical communist regime in North Korea, but only *for a few weeks, to flatten the curve*. And the rest, as they say, is history.
”We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more, we had no awareness of the situation…We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”. A. Solzhenitsyn.
Surely to goodness people cannot be duped or bullied into submission by such tactics ever again, now they’ve lived through it…?
Thanks Mogs. A fine post.
As the behavioural scientists understood, politicians can be manipulated. I think this has been posted before but should not be forgotten as politicians are merely front-of-house (no less responsible).
https://www.bi.team/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/BIT-Behavioural-Government-Report-2018.pdf
A genuine question: would truly well-intentioned people respond in the same way?
Thank you Dr. Tomlinson for your thorough and well-articulated contribution.
If there was no conspiracy, kindly explain to us how Moderna was granted a US patent on a key part of SARS-COV-2 in 2016:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fviro.2022.834808/full
-3 already.. bullseye Castorp..
”Three is the magic number. Yes it is, that’s the magic number.”
”The road to hell is paved with good intentions”
However, I do feel what this thread’s lacking is a vegan horse-riding interlude. Down-vote if you agree. Oh OK then, hold your horses, here you go….
https://twitter.com/OliLondonTV/status/1688232251128258560
Personality changes as a result of the injections! FFS.
Are you accusing me of having a personality?
certainly not an injection! Well 1 out of 2 isn’t bad.
Actually I am prone to being a bit manic from time to time…and over-sharing..
Not you Mogs – the bloody “horse riders” in the video.
Apologies for not making myself clear.
Looks like the 77th are out in force with the red marker pen this Sunday.. must be a touchy subject..
Well people with good intentions don’t say:
“Mask don’t work but you will be fined heavily if you don’t wear one.
Well intentioned = saviour complex.
See Matt Hancock as a classic example of the complex.
Midazolam Mat is a psychopath – end of.
Indeed
After further reflection and a stiff ginger mojito I am disappointed to say this article is well intentioned but a bit of an insult to the intelligence of DS readers
About as ”well intentioned” as bloody Xi Jinping! It’s cutting the criminals some slack which is downright insulting because they were playing with peoples lives, health and futures. To my mind ‘well intentioned’ is how Sweden played it.
So true. Just like Neil “Professor Pantsdown” Ferguson.
Report 9 was wrong from start to finish.
In it the authors made the following predictions for GB:
+ That the peak would occur in late May. Wrong. The peak occurred on 8 April.
+ That the peak would reach about 22 deaths per day per 100,000 population. With a GB population in 2020 of about 65.86m people, that’s 14,340 deaths per day. Wrong. The peak was 1,450 deaths (Covid mentioned on the death certificate) on 8 April.
+ An epidemic curve can be tall and narrow or wide and flat or something in between. By defining the peak daily deaths of 14,340 (height) and overall number of deaths at 510,000 (area) and the date of the peak on 22 May 2020 they’ve defined the shape of the modelled epidemic curve – the yellow curve in the chart below. This model predicts the first day with multiple deaths on 18 April 2020. Wrong. The first day with multiple deaths was 5 March 2020.
+ That the death rates would not follow a classic epidemic curve. Their figures suggest a logistic curve. Wrong. The Covid mentioned on the death certificate rates could hardly have been a better match to a classic epidemic curve.
If we slide the Report 9 model curve to the left (earlier) so that the first day with multiple deaths matches reality (5 March) and then compare the first few days of the GB epidemic with the model we see just how wrong Report 9 is. By the end of day on the date of publication of Report 9 (16 March) their model predicted a cumulative death toll of 5,938. Wrong. The cumulative death toll by the end of 16 March was actually 153. Report 9 was demonstrably wildly wrong on the day it was published. By the time UK lockdown was announced on 23 March their model was predicting over 7,000 deaths per day but reality was 202 deaths.
If our lockdown zealous politicians had good intentions their incompetence is breathtaking. School-level maths should have shown them that Report 9 should have been flushed down the toilet.
But there were all those people repeating ad nauseam that it was growing exponentially never mind the laws of Maths (realizability, aka common sense) or the prior art (models dating back to 1927).
I agree. It was never exponential. Saying or implying it could be or was exponential was foolish fear-mongering. The chart below shows what exponential means.
Indeed. It was always sub-exponential, except for an extremely brief time.
Please do all this in a submission to the Hallett Inquiry- Every Story Matters to support responses of Hart Group, who so far have got limited rights to file evidence, and my own attempts to say that there never was a pandemic as shown by the Diamond Princess and a whole lot against lockdowns, the jab roll out and trashing of civil liberties. I was unsure about doing anything, as many think the report has already been written, but experts on our side have confirmed if it would be helpful if as many of us as can do a submission to oppose the official narrative
I’ll look into it today.
For a comparison of a well mixed population to a social network of voles the latter takes 4 times as long to finish and results in 89% never infected whereas the former leaves only 32% never infected. So fairly basic qualitative modelling doesn’t need all these Professors.
“Well-intentioned”
The foot soldiers maybe, they usually are oblivious to what’s actually going on, they’re too busy at the coal face. But their managers and everyone above? Not a chance in hell. They were not “well-intentioned”. At best, they were going along to get along. At worst, evil.
So all things considered, the least-worst realistic scenario in the long run was probably within the envelope of “do nothing”, or more accurately, “adopt the flu strategy”. Or as the now disgraced BoJo originally said, “let it wash over us” before he panicked. As for ICUs being overwhelmed, which turned out to be a gross exaggeration in any case, the best way to look at the curves is to ask, if you were working as an ICU nurse, would you rather have a few really bad *weeks* and then it’s over, or a few slightly less bad *months* followed by the risk of it happening all over again later? Ergo, the idea of “flatten the curve” falls flat on its face.
Bojo panicked alright.. when someone had a quiet word in his ear and mentioned a state funeral for the sitting PM..
We all know what the road to hell is paved with.
A few observation:
Extraordinary measures require extraordinary evidence.
Scientific debate should never be stifled.
Even if you think the first lockdown was panic and trying to do the best, there is no way the subsequent measures were anything but negligent.
it is important the truth will out as without the two principles as stated above we will rinse and repeat. And not only on infectious diseases, also on climate.
“Indeed, perhaps if we want a population to get to herd immunity as quickly as possible, we should herd them all together, not keep them apart!”
Indeed, indeed ever heard of “Chicken Pox parties”?!
I know, right? Hindsight is indeed 2020, quite literally in this case.
Daniel Ortega of Nicaragua actually encouraged mass gatherings. Or to paraphrase the Wu-Tang Clan, we should have had a gathering of the masses that came to pay respects to the Wuhan Flu.
” My working hypothesis is that everyone concerned thought they were doing the right thing. ”
If that really was the case, they would not have suppressed the opinions of high-profile, eminent experts, who were presenting evidence that what they were doing was dangerous and would be counter-productive.
People who “thought they were doing the right thing” with no evidence to support their actions would be extremely grateful to receive advice that their actions were in fact the wrong thing to be doing.
How many times. There was no pandemic.
There is nothing well intention about zealots – they are entirely self-absorbed, self-righteous, uncompromising and dangerous.
Of course they thought they were doing the ‘right thing’, every tyrant and terrorist down history has believed so. The worst of all evil is that done in the name of good by those who think they are doing the right thing.
We need to put them on trial for their numerous crimes against Humanity along with the misanthropic climate change lunatics.
Here’s where the term originated: Zealot – a member of a radical, warlike, ardently patriotic group of Jews in Judea, advocating the violent overthrow of Roman rule.
And both jealousy and zealotry come from the same Latin root word, interestingly enough. Because they tend to go together, it seems.
To all the lockdown zealots, how does it feel to be on the wrong side of history? Because we wouldn’t know anything about that.