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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I’ve gone to Texas to interview lifelong Latino Democrats who switched to GOP, and I’ve interviewed black voters in Oakland who voted Trump or very reluctantly voted for Harris. Obama came up again and again as one of the major reasons they became disillusioned with the Dems.
Here's how two black voters in Oakland experienced the Obama years. One specifically pointed to his failure to support cramdown during the financial collapse as key to her falling out with him. If this doesn't directly bear out what Sirota is saying then I don't know what would.
Here's a Latino former Democrat in South Texas. In this case, it wasn't Obama's betrayal of his populist promises that turned him off, but it obviously was also not Dems' "failure to emulate" the shining example of Barack Obama that cost them this voter.
When I first learned of the Ninth Circuit banning homeless encampment sweeps as a violation of the 8th amendment, I assumed that there was some legal complexity to "cruel and unusual punishment" that I didn't understand. I'm reading the SCOTUS ruling, and that is not the case.
The court notes that "In the 18th century, English law still 'formally tolerated' certain barbaric punishments like 'disemboweling, quartering, public dissection, and burning alive.'" The 8th amendment was written to guarantee they would never emerge in America.
Grants Pass and Martin v. Boise literally put handing out citations for public camping in the same category. It's flabbergasting that these rulings were ever made in the first place, even by the Ninth Circuit.
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."