Matt Taibbi speech on the state of the US, Catastrophic explosion, Enemy propaganda worth knowing about, powerful people want to end the 1st amendment: Links 1 for October 1, 2024

1. Matt Taibbi article on Alex Berenson’s Substack is worth the read.

Remember that Taibbi was one of the few journalists who did the initial Twitter Files busting the US elites for violations of every aspect of American law, culture and constitutional rights and obligations.

Matt Taibbi speaks the truth

To power, and everyone else

Our government has moved past censorship to the larger project of changing the American personality. They want a more obedient, timorous, fearful citizen. Their tool is the Internet, a vast machine for doling out reward and punishment through likes and views, shaming or deamplification. The mechanics are complicated but the core concept is simple: you’re upranked for accepting authority, downranked for questioning it, with questions of any kind increasingly viewed as a form of disinformation.

The whole speech is here.

One reference point is below, which we had planned to post and write up anyway. So this is great cause Matt did it better above.

Here is Matt Taibbi’s full speech from Rescue the Republic

Here’s a fantastic, and accurate, quote: “America has the most useless aristocrats in history. Even the French dandies marched to the razor by the Jacobins were towering specimens of humanity compared to the Michael Haydens, John Brennans, James Clappers, Mike McFauls and Rick Stengels who make up America’s self-appointed speech police.”

He got that right.

2. Two days ago there was a catastrophic explosion at some kind of chemical facility in Georgia, The following Tweets show the smoke, some of the comments, and where it is at today. Our approach is to look at all the materials that come to us about this event, what it was, who it was, and why and how it happened, and consider all of it to be potential disinformation no matter who it is from. Hopefully we may get to know some truth behind it. Probably not though. But at least not believing the lie is better protection for the self and the psyche, even if human beings have a very very difficult time not knowing about a thing. So difficult that the entire history, or at minimum, a staggeringly large part of all human development, philosophy and religion could be argued to be a consequence of the horrible fear of just saying ‘I don’t know.’. As a rule, we make up replacement words for things we don’t understand in order to sound like we do, and even feel like we do. Like the word, “Instinct”. Although I have heard a definition for this which is operational, that actually makes sense, I have never heard the word used in conversation that wasn’t a place-holder for actual meaning and knowledge.

If the claim is true, it is very serious on both counts.

A verifiable claim about the nature of the plant that blew up

3. One of the important things to do if one is to be a conscious observer of geopolitical events, is to watch enemy propaganda meant for us, and enemy propaganda meant for their own people’s consumption. At this horrible juncture, that would include all the MSM and most internet materials intended to look like the products of a Republic style government for the benefit of our own peoples in the West.

This is clearly Russian. It is clearly propaganda, and is it was made in English, it was meant for a foreign audience. Specifically NATO countries. It is probably all factually correct. It is also a thinly veiled threat. So thin, that if a woman wore one this thin in Iran or Afghanistan she would likely be beaten, jailed or stoned for it.

We most certainly should see it but the understanding above might offer a chance to extract more meaning from it. Although frankly, its pretty straightforward.

4. There are too many totalitarian and frankly, simply communist bills to keep up with in Canada. And they are usually, let’s say dialectically named. More simply, named something which doesn’t ring alarms and usually means the opposite of its actual intention. Each one of these bills in reality is another set of bricks for the Panopticon being built around us. This is another one.

Bill S-210 Threatens Canadians’ Access to the Internet 

On Monday, 21 May, a Canadian Parliamentary Committee debated Bill S-210, which is meant to restrict young persons’ online access to sexually explicit material. While the Bill was intended to prevent children from seeing pornography online, Canadian politicians and government ministers noted with concern that, in its current form, Bill S-210 would require sites like Netflix to introduce age verification and make it illegal for Canadians under the age of 18 to watch shows like Bridgerton—due to the legal definition of sexually explicit material. As a Bridgerton fan myself, it’s unsurprising that this revelation was met with great concern!  

However, what the Members of Parliament failed to mention is that the broad scope of the legislation would have even more serious consequences for Internet users. As written, Bill S-210 wouldn’t just force Netflix to potentially scan its users’ faces to determine their age before watching Bridgerton Season 3; it could stop Canadians from being able to access Netflix at all!  

The Bill covers Internet intermediaries, like network operators, and gives them the impossible task of verifying the age of their users against the data flowing across their networks. As the majority of Internet traffic is encrypted, including Netflix, these Internet intermediaries cannot gain access to the contents of the data flowing across their networks.

I could get caught up in the churn and talk about how as an experiment, I used a photo of Kieth Richards that I downloaded from the internet and printed and held up to a building security camera to get entrance (there is more to the story but that isn’t the point here) so the claim is ludicrous. But that would be getting caught up in the churn. This means arguing the thing we are supposed to argue in order to miss the point altogether.

The point in this case is that the same government who punishes people who do not want their children, not just not seeing hard core pornography in school libraries and grade school curriculums,  but that the state insists on books that are actual how-to manuals for hard core pornographic behaviour for very young children. Books and materials for which a couple of decades ago, would have been an imprisonable offence to show children, possibly even one’s own. So the stated reason for bill S-210 is clearly something far darker and unrelated. Much like bill C-4 is not really about “conversion therapy” but about giving the state total control over children, right to the point of sterilizing and mutilating them for life.

5. Let’s see these clips again

Alex Berenson on these clips.