This by Yoel Roth sounds very sad and sympathetic until you recognize that "moderation" and "trust and safety" mean censorship, and often government censorship. Then suddenly the whole story takes on a new cast. nytimes.com/2023/09/18/opi…
Amazing that even after a federal judge ruled that Roth engaged in govt censorship, and with that case almost certainly going to the Supreme Court, the New York Times lets him write an entire op-ed that doesn't even *acknowledge* that that's the basis of the criticism of him.
Roth would have you believe that the Twitter Files was a 4chan-style harassment campaign against him personally, instead of a journalistic revelation that helped create the evidentiary basis of what may become one of the most consequential free speech cases in US history.
Academic researchers who *directly engage in govt censorship.* "Lawsuits" and "congressional hearings" aren't harassment, they're the legal process by which those who are censored have recourse. "Vicious online attacks" is of course free speech, which Roth disapproves of.
And in the most obnoxiously disingenuous part, Roth equates govt coercion of Twitter in India and Russia with what his critics are doing in the US — when his critics are *explicitly demanding that the US government stop coercing Twitter.*
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This is just a jaw-dropping example of how city governments transfer wealth from working residents to staffers of non-profit groups that do nothing but shuffle money while spouting activist rhetoric. Malcom Kyeyune calls this NGO racket "make-work for the PMC."
This San Francisco program was funded with $110M in taxes, in part diverted from SFPD, to funnel money to non-profits, consultants, and to the very city agency tasked with disbursing the funds in the first place.
One grantee is a YouTube creator whose videos tend to get between a half dozen and ~75 views apiece. That grant was $200,000. Another produces podcasts whose episodes tend to garner less than 100 downloads each. That grant was $300,000. Both do racial equity/reparations content.
The homeless encampment problem in Sacramento makes San Francisco look like Mayberry.
When neighbors who have been threatened, harassed and vandalized call the city to complain, they get lectured about their privilege.
This woman was the victim of an attempted rape. She was so traumatized she had to move in with her mother. But now she's constantly re-traumatized because they now see homeless people roaming around the backyard of her mother's home.
Oakland NAACP calls on local elected officials to declare a state of emergency around crime. Almost too many noteworthy lines to choose from:
"Failed leadership, including the movement to defund the police, our District Attorney's unwillingness to charge and prosecute people who… https://t.co/PvJZgnwM3btwitter.com/i/web/status/1…
"We are 500 police officers short of the number that experts say Oakland needs. Our 911 system does not work. Residents now know that help will not come when danger confronts them. Worse, criminals know that too."
"Unfortunately, progressive policies and failed leadership have chased away or delayed significant blue collar job development in the city, the Port of Oakland, and the former Army Base. That must change!"
Nature Medicine's complicity in suppressing scientific inquiry into the lab leak hypothesis is getting well-deserved attention. But there's another case of a science journal engaging in even more flagrant deception, this time directly at Fauci's behest.
After the advocacy group White Coat Waste Project revealed in 2021 that Fauci's NIAID had funded barbaric experiments on beagles, a chorus of media outlets and factcheckers, led by WaPo's Dana Milbank, "debunked" the story.
Milbank was told by the lead researcher on the beagle experiment and by the NIH that the scientists had made a mistake by attributing the study's funding to Fauci's NIAID. At the researcher's request, the journal, Plos Neglected Tropical Diseases, issued a "correction."
Social justice is an industry. But to say it's just about raking in cash is to miss the whole picture. Many of these non-profits have paltry budgets and pay their staffers poverty wages. The benefits are psychic, not monetary.
But the role they play serves the elite all the same: they paint the broad public as a horde of dangerous reactionaries — racists, transphobes, misogynists, etc. And it's that rationale that paves the way for censorship, thought policing, and disciplining workers for wrongthink.
This is quickly becoming another Vietnam for the US government, with the obvious difference of not having US soldiers on the ground, which means Americans don’t see the brutality and don’t experience the pain, keeping domestic opposition almost nonexistent.
I find it surreal that in my ultra-liberal town, there are still Ukraine flags flying in people’s lawns as the US considers flooding the war zone with cluster bombs.
At what point does the Blob start urging Biden to send tactical nuclear weapons to Zelensky? The idea is both utterly insane and also totally conceivable given the trajectory we’re on.