Archive for the ‘internet/free speech’ Category

Britain throws The Two Greatest Gifts to Mankind Away

Posted: August 10, 2024 by datechguy in culture, internet/free speech
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The nations, not so blest as thee,
Must, in their turns, to tyrants fall;
While thou shalt flourish great and free,
The dread and envy of them all

."Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:
"Britons never will be slaves."

Rule Britannia! 1740

I have often argued that the two greatest social developments in the history of mankind for the cause of good are

  1. Christianity
  2. British Common Law

The first Christianity establishes the idea that all people are equal in the sight of God:

Men, women, slaves, freemen, Jews, Greeks, rich, poor (to use the phrases of scripture) all are God children and thus due the respect of such.

Even if you don’t believe in Christ, that idea was about as radical as you can get in the 1st century. And it is from that idea that the rights of man evolved.

The second British common law built on both the concepts of Christianity and the rights granted by Magna Carta. Again this was revolutionary.

From this grew the concept that if men were equal before God they should also be equal before the law. It was the idea that the law applied to the great as well as the common, the powerful as well as the powerless and that judgement would not come in a summary manner.

It was this idea spread by the Brits going around the world that made possible those in the world who would eventually leave the empire they would build, because they would be educated in this law and then insist that said ideas be applied where they were.

Now I don’t claim for a moment that these concepts were always applied by imperfect humans nor to I claim that there were not those who tried to use them for their own advantages. If you want perfection you’ll have to wait for heaven. Suffice to say that those who would use such things for advantage would have had no problem using other systems the same way, systems that didn’t provide legal or social restraint to their goals.

These things changed the world for the better.

That’s what makes Britain’s situation today really sad and completely predictable.

Once the British started rejecting Christianity, equality before God, it became easy to reject equality before the law. The seeds laid by Henry VIII finally bloomed at the 1930 Lambeth Conference and have now spread and taken solid root to the point where Englishmen don’t have confidence in their own culture and are now ironically being colonized by a people who DO have confidence in both their laws and religion which proclaim them superior.

Thus if all men are not equal in the eyes of God why would they be equal before the law so why should British police or members of the British government risk their single life and limb with no reward to follow to enforce the laws of those who might harm them if they do or protect the rights of those who can not?

And of course nobody can be allowed to speak aloud this shameful change, they must all be silent less their true state be known and the newly minted slaves become aware of their chains.

So much for “Britons never never never shall be slaves”

How foolish, how sad and how utterly predictable.

Russia, Britain and the Left: “Institutional lying”

Posted: August 9, 2024 by datechguy in culture, internet/free speech, Uncomfortable Truths
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Consider too what undesirable deaths occur in wartime. Men are killed in places where they knew they might be killed and to which they go, if they are at all of the Enemy’s party, prepared. How much better for us if all humans died in costly nursing homes amid doctors who lie, nurses who lie, friends who lie, as we have trained them, promising life to the dying, encouraging the belief that sickness excuses every indulgence, and even, if our workers know their job, withholding all suggestion of a priest lest it should betray to the sick man his true condition! 

C. S. Lewis The Screwtape Letters #5 1941

The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself

St. Augustine of Hippo

I noted yesterday that there was very little reporting on the Ukrainian incursion into Russia but Redstate has a pretty informative article:

The Two big developments:

That means troops to the south don’t get resupplied and in a war of attrition that’s deadly. Think of it as if Jubal Early’s Force had taken the rail hub at Harrisburg PA in 1864. If I’m Ukraine I’m destroying this ASAP

This however is even bigger:

That means that Ukraine can hold or destroy this state which would cripple Russian exports of gas (and not do any favors to Europe that needs it) at any time. In fact when the Russian Counter attack comes this will likely be the first place blown up.

I’ll let Redstate tell that story but there was a bit of info that I think goes beyond the bounds of the war into something fundamental:

Those are the key words: “institutional lying”.

For Russia this institutional lying has two purposes. For those doing it in peacetime it allows the diversion of funds that are necessary for anything from training to equipment to the person committing the graft, people below either are intimidated or get their share and the people above are told all is well as are the people. This of course leads to disaster when you actually needed troops or equipment to work.

The second of course is the classic problem of delivering bad news. When dealing with a leader who makes people disappear or whose enemies have interesting “accidents” this can really hurt your life span so you do not tell the truth, particularly an uncomfortable truth and have to spin a lie to cover when disaster strikes, to wit:

This by an odd coincidence was both the same problem that the Arabs had in their various wars with Israel reporting “glorious victories” to their people while Israeli was routing their armies, in fact the “Britain did it” was the same line that both Nasser and King Hussain used in the Six Day War because it obviously couldn’t have been the Jews who destroyed their jets on the ground and neutralized their air forces in a single day.

Because it CAN’T be the mere Ukrainians successfully pulling off this attack, it HAS to be a major power like Britain attacking them, which is of course ridiculous as the government of Britain right now is too busy attacking their own citizens who tweet or retweet the wrong things.

In fact the Labour party who are all in for radical Islamists in their nation are also using “institutional lying” to deny the Two Tiered Justice system that has arisen there

And of course such visuals can not be spread, upsets the people you know.

This is also why control of the internet is so important to the left in general and anyone wanting to sell a big lie in particular because you can’t sell the “big lie” if anyone can look on twitter and see the reality happening before their eyes

Meanwhile if Croydon:

Well we can’t have news of that spread can we?

This “institutional lying” is one of the basic MO of the left/media making it a point of telling an untruth that they either want to advance over and over and accusing others of “disinformation” if they contradict it.

Consider less that 50 days ago if you suggested to anybody that Joe Biden was not able to function you were called the spreader of disinformation and assured by everyone from Joe Scarborough to Kamala Harris that Joe was as sharp as a tack. It was only when this was publicly revealed in the Debate to be a life that this fell apart, sort of like the Russian defenses and the big push to get Biden out began.

The media was shocked SHOCKED that they had fallen for the “institutional lying” that they at best had enabled and at worst had committed.

And then once Joe Biden was forced out the institutional lying pivoted stating that old Joe had dropped his campaign of his own free will and that Kamala who just a few weeks earlies people were wondering aloud how to get rid of was suddenly portrayed as the most competent person on the planet.

Nobody wants to say the reality, well ALMOST nobody:

“I don’t know if [Biden is] happy about that decision [to quit]. The presidency was taken away from Joe Biden. And I’m no Biden fan. But I’ll tell you what, from a constitutional standpoint, from any standpoint, you’re looking at they took the presidency away.”

That’s Donald Trump saying the truth out loud and publicly which is why the left has spent so much effort trying to shut him up over the last few years.

Bottom line Institutional Lying is the primary tool of any group trying to oppress you, you can either pretend it isn’t happening or fight, your choice.

I’ll give the last word to Christ:

you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.

John 9:32

Update: Glenn Reynolds makes a true historical point about the Russians that I forgot about:

Of course, the Russians have a history of carrying on when their logistics are shot. But that’s what they’ll have to do, if they are to carry on at all.

The last three weeks have shown us that taxpayer-funded media is a terrible idea

Posted: July 14, 2024 by John Ruberry in internet/free speech, media, News/opinion, opinion/news, politics
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By John Ruberry

Newspapers have been folding fairly regularly for decades. Unable to adapt to the rise of television in the 1950s and the rise of the internet in the 1990s, the marketplace has spoken. 

And it’s still speaking

Despite the rapid evolution of news consumption, the one finite resource is still time. If someone is scrolling X (Twitter), or worse, Facebook, then they’re not reading a newspaper, whether it’s an online edition or print. Sure, newspapers, magazines, broadcast and cable networks, and local TV stations utilize social media to attract visitors, but most users only casually scan the headlines. 

As for the dead tree media, Chicago still has two major daily newspapers, the Tribune and the Sun-Times, and both are bat sh*t crazy woke. Even in a deep blue city like Chicago, my guess is at best 30-percent of the population are members of the far-left. Once you include the suburbs, again it’s my guess, there’s a center-right majority. 

Even if I’m wrong, the greatest athlete ever to put on a Chicago professional sports uniform, Michael Jordan, proved he had more common sense than most left-wing Chicago journalists and publishers. “Republicans buy sneakers too,” he said decades ago.

Since the June 27 Joe Biden debate wipeout, the media, both nationally and here in the Chicago area, have been exposed as collection of liars and propagandists. Conservatives have known that for years, only now everyone else is aware, with possible exception of the dumbest person on the internet, pro-Biden brat Harry Sisson.

During the spring session of the Illinois General Assembly, the gerrymandered empowered Democratic supermajorities passed a series of bills–all first of its kind–that will offer taxpayer funded subsidies to dying newspapers and other media outlets. I covered this subject five months ago in this Da Tech Guy post: Journalism’s “extinction event” will lead to new and better choices for news.

Forbes offered a summary of this awful-offal bills in May:

Several of the new provisions [according to that legislation] aimed at shoring up local news outlets are written into the Illinois state budget as employment tax credits. They provide $25 million to newsrooms that hire or retain local reporters over five years. Specifically, newsrooms will receive $15,000 for each current reporter they employ and $25,000 for each new hire. The incentives are available to nonprofit and for-profit organizations alike, though there are limits on how much individual newsrooms and media companies can receive.

Separately, the Strengthening Community Media legislation, which passed both Illinois legislative chambers at the end of May and is awaiting signature by the governor, dedicates 50% of state advertising to local news outlets. It also requires that any newspaper in Illinois that intends to sell itself to an out-of-state company notify the public and its own employees 120 days before a sale occurs. The goal of this measure is to give in-state businesses and nonprofits the chance to bid on the outlet and increase the likelihood that ownership stays in state.

Terrible, terrible, terrible.

I’d like to say that it’s not up to Illinois to pick winners and losers, but the situation is worse than that. Illinois will be picking the losers.

For example, the headline of Sunday’s e-edition of the Chicago Tribune reads, “Trump ‘safe’ after gunfire.” A more accurate headline would be “Trump survives assassination attempt.” The Trib refuses to portray Trump sympathetically–it needs to placate its fellow wokesters.

After the very bloody July 4th weekend, Chicago’s far-left mayor and former Defund the Police advocate, Brandon Johnson, in a rambling press conference, blamed Richard M. Nixon, who resigned the president 50 years ago next month, for the carnage.

Okay, he didn’t flat out say, “Over 100 people were shot in Chicago last weekend–and it’s because of Nixon.” Again, Johnson didn’t utter those words.

Here’s what the mayor said:

Black death has been unfortunately been accepted in this country for a very long time. We had a chance 60 years ago to get at the root causes. And people mocked President Johnson, and we ended up with Richard Nixon.

So yes, Brandon Johnson blamed Nixon.

But the Chicago Sun-Times, in a laughably wretched fact-check, claimed he didn’t blame Nixon. As with the Tribune e-edition X post, the comments on X accompanying the Sun-Times fact-check are quite entertaining.

As Dan Bongino says so often, “The media wants to tell a story, not THE story.”

Understandably Chicago area readers, except for those wokesters, tune out the Tribune and the Sun-Times.

The rest of Illinois has other legacy newspapers that are equally rotten. Gannett’s Rockford Register Star, it’s deriders know it as “the Red Star,” immediately comes to mind.

The bills to offer taxpayer subsidies to these propaganda outlets are awaiting Governor J.B. Pritzker’s signature. I suspect Pritzker, a billionaire heir to the Hyatt Hotel fortune and a Chicago Democrat, will sign them.

Pritzker is a likely presidential candidate in 2028–if not sooner. He’ll want his story, not the story, to get out. He’ll want the Democrats’ story–subsidized by taxpayers– to be told, not the real story.

Again, I have to tell Illinois’ legacy media that it makes more business sense to reach out to a majority of people as opposed to a few. But ideologues don’t cope well with common sense.

One more thing: Both nationally and in Illinois, the media has been claiming that Trump is a threat to democracy. If that was true, of course, then why didn’t 45 set up a dictatorship after the 2016 election?

John Ruberry regularly blogs from the Chicago area at Marathon Pundit.

Five Fast Thoughts Under the Fedora AOC out and about, Narrative Narrative Narrative, Unpeople, “Wolf” in the CPAC fold and the countdown to the end continues

Posted: March 5, 2024 by datechguy in internet/free speech, media, politics, the courts, under the fedora
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Saw the article about AOC out with her guy and protesters bugging her about Gaza.

It’s rather ironic as she’s generally on their side but what really struck me is the photo of her out with her guy seemed so …. normal.

I’m partial to the sight of a young lady out with her man and frankly I’d like folks to leave her alone to enjoy those moment which are some of the most important in life.

I don’t watch a lot of the MSM but I made it a point of watching the reactions to the SCOTUS ruling on the attempts to kick Trump off the ballots in various blue states.

I found it hilarious that all of the stressed that the court didn’t acquit him of being an insurrectionist.

They didn’t have to, nobody has filed a charge of insurrection against him in federal court, in fact none of the J6 prisoners or defendants have in fact been charged with insurrection.

Their desperation to keep this narrative intact is very interesting and shows how far they’ve fallen, but it’s amazing how far a person will willingly let themselves fall if their paycheck is attached to it.

Have you noticed that in the minds of the media nothing delegitimizes an institution more than no longer following the narrative of the left.

Elon Musk, Ben Carson, The Supreme Court, Donald Trump, Naomi Wolf and yes J. K. Rowling were all feted and celebrated by the left for a very long time right up until the moment that they were perceived as a threat to the power of the left and the narrative they were selling.

Once they did as far as all those folks who loved and celebrated them were concerned they were now unpersons that needed to be destroyed.

Hey commies gotta commie.

There is an excellent substack by Naomi Wolf about visiting CPAC titled “Letter from CPAC” that you should read. There is one bit that jumped out at me:

We entered the Gaylord at the peak of CPAC, to an atrium thronged with happy visitors. My first, ignominious reaction to the scene, for which Brian rightly chided me, was: “This is not my culture.”

There was a buzz, from the moment we entered: a joyful vibe. After we checked in, changed, and ran down to join the festivities, we were struck by how pleasant and positive almost everyone was to us, and to each other. As someone reported to me the desk clerk had said, “I know they won’t approve of me saying this back in Southeast DC, where I come from, but you all are nice.”

Nice is a good and accurate word, a better description is “normal”

She goes though a list of folks she met and spoke to, many that she might disagree with on some issues and notes how different they are from how the media paints them.

It’s been six years years since I’ve been to CPAC the last time I went was with my sons and them seeing the MSM in action as they actually are taught them plenty.

Finally there are two reasons why you don’t see me at CPAC anymore. The first is as a full time employees where I work I only get so much vacation time and it won’t be till 2028 that I have the additional week that attending CPAC would require.

But the other is frankly that DaTipJar has dwindled to almost nothing, my last fundraiser only managed 25% of my goal and last month between subscriptions and tip jar hits I had exactly $2 left over after paying my writers.

I suspect the blog as a business will not survive long after the election and with money tight it will be an effort to survive to the election. It’s nothing about $5000 wouldn’t solve but that money simply isn’t there and in the end I don’t have a divine right to a single person’s dollar, I can only earn it by producing content that people think is worth it.

It’s disappointing to fail in business I’ve done so many times I’m just sorry I couldn’t provide better for my wife who deserves better. If I had followed my brothers into the civil service I might even now be retired or close to it with a pension, but I’m not ashamed of trying to make it as a writer/pundit and this blog has done good work, sometimes even important work. I’ve showed things and told things as they are which is why both Youtube now and pre-Musk twitter censored me. Best of all I’m proud to say I never sold out to push any narrative I didn’t believe in.

Hey in the end 16 years isn’t a bad run

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