Glenn Greenwald is the model of an excellent journalist.
He’s doing an awesome job - because he’s honest, unlike the “smug, pompous, self-righteous”, and contemptible liars of corporate media he exposes.
You can either ruthlessly silence everyone who deviates from the official party line, or you can allow freedom of speech. It seems to me that big tech censorship will ultimately fail because these corporations are not nearly ruthless enough, what they are attempting to implement is a half way house between Western freedom of speech and CCP style censorship.
This was one of my main points in my recent post on Dr John Campbell, he only partially deviates from the official line and so he was not censored, but gradually he is starting to ask all the same questions that sceptics and so-called “anti-vaxxers” have been asking for some time. Both Campbell and Greenwald have well over a million followers as well, this is not an insignificant problem for the powers that be.
His “tread”?
I meant Twitter tread, I’ll change it.
“Not nearly ruthless enough” - well, just give them a little time - they’ll get there!
I’m sure they’ll achieve full “Ministry of Truth” status sooner than later, at the rate they’re going.
Or should it be “thread”? (I don’t know.)
Yes, thread!
That may be the direction of travel but we are a million miles away from CCP levels of censorship today.
Are we? Aren’t people being arrested in Britain for criticizing Islam? Aren’t there speeches being made by politicians recommending that unvaccinated people be put on no-fly lists? How far is that from the Chinese “social credit” system (or whatever they call it)? Okay we don’t yet have concentration camps for the unvaccinated, but is the difference “a million miles”? Can we not all too easily visualize the forced separation of the unvaccinated but healthy person from society? Indeed, has it not happened! You yourself, Chauncey, have been a strong, outspoken and reliable source of information about all this. Please explain why you think we are so far from the sort of control the CCP has over the people of China.
Speaking of, I just read about this.
And the Left that made such a thing (unnecessarily) of promoting “women’s rights”, have nothing to say against the Muslim custom of killing women and girls who, their male murderers say, “dishonor” them.
Fact is, women are slaves in Islam. And the Left pretends that it is against slavery.
But we all know that hypocrisy is one of the chief characteristics of the Left.
Exactly right. Too bad their useful idiots are too stupid to notice this.
Nice to see the Guardian doing something useful for a change!
Thinking about it the US is somewhat ahead of the UK in the medical arena, not least with the jab mandates (our govt. has only got as far as trying to force care home workers to be jabbed and it seems now NHS workers as well according to the latest news). However that said nobody is getting arrested for merely criticizing the govt. in either of our nations as happens in China all the time, that was what I was driving at, and we’re still a very long way away from that degree of authoritarianism.
Of course we are on a bad trajectory and the demonisation of the unjabbed is very troubling, but personally I suspect there are just too many resisting the jabs for our govt.s to succeed in forcing everyone to get jabbed. I’m increasingly also hearing people who have been jabbed even twice saying there’s no way they are getting jabbed a THIRD time, I think resistance is building, although that’s not to say I’m certain that the vast majority won’t eventually succumb to the pressure, I think an awful lot hinges on whether they do in fact.
Although to call it a million miles away is also an exaggeration, I just fear if we exaggerate how far gone we are we are in danger of demoralizing ourselves, I certainly do get somewhat demoralized myself from time to time. One or two people have been suggesting that regardless of everything we should just continue to speak the truth as we see it without any expectation of success or failure, that’s certainly a very noble attitude that would get us a long way if everybody adhered to it.
If the mere act of criticizing Islam was a crime in the UK today then Richard Dawkins and many others (possibly even including myself) would certainly have been arrested yet we have not been, the reality is more complicated than that. Case in point:
I am not living in Saudi Arabia today although again obviously the trajectory we’re on is very bad, and Johnson and co. are doing their utmost to accelerate our decline unfortunately. I did repeatedly try to warn people specifically about Johnson’s attitude to immigration but I got criiticized by fellow conservatives and even got accused of being a lefty for my trouble by one individual, now look:
Most of these are Muslims I believe and so yes no doubt it’s going to become even more dangerous to criticize Islam. Again I still just don’t think we should exaggerate exactly how bad things are today though, as we risk demoralizing ourselves and others if we do that.
No one arrested for criticizing Islam?
Paul Weston? Matthew Doyle? …
Weston was merely reading aloud in public a quotation form Winston Churchill which criticized Islam when he was arrested.
Dawkins is protected by his celebrity.
You are in jeopardy.
Yes, and here we’ve had many arrested simply for walking through the Capitol building on Jan.6.
We’re arguing different points here, these arrests were not for the crime of criticizing Islam, Paul Weston was arrested for a public order offence (if I remember correctly it was later escalated to one aggravated by racial and religious hatred) and Matthew Doyle was arrested under the law on inciting racial and religious hatred (a completely unreasonable arrest of course and I can’t find any news on whether he was ever convicted).
Yes we are all in jeopardy because the laws that do exist have been seriously abused by the authorities, there’s no question about that, but the point remains that the likelihood of anyone being arrested SIMPLY for criticizing Islam is still low in the UK. I am not living in Saudi Arabia today, although hold on there’s a knock at the door …
(I’m joking there wasn’t really a knock at the door). 