This doesn't violate Twitter's standards against violence because shut up

 Once again for the morning crowd: Hawley deserves to be skinned alive and rolled in salt. https://t.co/zrQG8oNCaA

— Jonathan Gitlin (@drgitlin) January 7, 2021

What he said

 

 (h/t: AoS)

A matter of principle

Larry Correia aptly summarizes the cost of sticking to the principle of letting businesses do their own thing in the face of Big Tech's current censorship spree:

"In principle, I'm usually in favor of letting businesses do whatever they want. You know what else I'm usually against in principle? Bombing Japan. Yet strangely, after Pearl Harbor, circumstances changed, and things which were previously disagreeable became necessary. Go figure."

RTWT.

Dear Professor Turley: It's not a bug, it's a feature

 Law professor Jonathan Turley, no fan of the January 6 invasion of Congress, published an op-ed in The Hill yesterday warning Democrats of the danger of trying Impeachment 2.0 over Trump's remarks on Wednesday. 

Turley writes:

"With seeking his removal for incitement, Democrats would gut not only the impeachment standard but also free speech, all in a mad rush to remove Trump just days before his term ends."

You may or may not agree with Turley's view that Trump's address does not meet the definition for incitement under the criminal code. You might want to read his argument, linked above. (In support of this view, another liberal lawyer, Ann Althouse, has gone over the entire speech in detail and finds little that could be considered incitement to violence.) But my question is on a slightly different matter:

What makes Professor Turley think that Democrats have any objection to destroying free speech? After the putsches of the last few days to shut down any speech they disagree with, this seems wilfully naive.

He goes on to predict: "In this new system, guilt is not doubted and innocence is not deliberated. This would do to the Constitution what the violent rioters did to the Capitol and leave it in tatters."

Yes. They've been shredding the Constitution for some time. If Impeachment 2.0 is the coup de grace, why wouldn't they be all for it?

It took 36 years for them to turn into their own nightmare

 Consider the transformation of Apple in just under two generations.

1984:

Apple smashes Big Brother

2021:

Apple, Amazon and Google ban Parler

Losing our freedom: gradually, then suddenly

 I've been watching the gradual part for many years, only occasionally poking my head up to scream, "Stop! This is insane!" at the people who wanted to force us all to mouth their politically correct platitudes. 

The pace has accelerated over the past year, as we've seen how many petty tyrants leapt on the "public health emergency" of a virus that was hardly more than a bad flu, as an excuse for arbitrary and confusing orders banning all that they did not understand or approve while ignoring the rules for themselves. 

It went into freefall this week with the sudden and arbitrary deplatforming of so many conservative sites and voices. I'm not going to repeat the list of suspensions, from Trump's banning from Twitter, to the disappearance of the #WalkAway Facebook page, to the mysterious loss of followers from many conservative Twitter accounts, to Google's and Apple's attacks on the Twitter alternative Parler. For those who want more details, and especially for those who may deny this is happening, I recommend Scott Johnson's excellent summary for Powerline, Shapes of Things.

For most of the last year I haven't been posting because I wasn't writing much, wasn't doing any art work, and had an outlet at Liberty's Torch for my occasional political thoughts. But this latest move, combined with threats to redefine "domestic terrorism" as "saying anything we the masters don't like" has roused me to shout into the wind once more. I don't use Twitter or Facebook, so I can't register my disapproval by canceling my nonexistent accounts. And I doubt anybody is bothering to read this blog after it's been quiescent so long. But it's all the platform I have, and I'm going to use it. 

I plan to post one short article each day about the ongoing loss of freedom. 

I'll know somebody's reading it when I get banned. 

To adapt a meme that's been going around: Dear censors, just so you know, I am typing this with my two middle fingers.

Closing down the country

This is probably going to annoy a lot of people, but I’ve just read a couple of persuasive articles urging people to speak out about the general lockdown imposed on us in order to “bend the curve” of serious cases and deaths. And it’s probably too late to change anything, because I also read articles saying that more and more people are ignoring their state-imposed rules; consider the crowded beaches In California this weekend.

Small businesses and their employees are still suffering, though. So are the health care workers who are being sent home because their hospitals are all but empty. It’s mainly on their behalf that I’m speaking out.

First, full disclosure: my family is not seriously affected - yet - by the lockdown as implemented here in Texas. Both my husband and I are over seventy and hence, I am given to understand, in the high-risk group. We are both working at jobs that don’t require us to leave home. Furthermore, the local market has resumed grocery deliveries.

One of our daughters and her husband live in Brooklyn and I do worry about them. So far, though, they haven’t left their apartment in weeks, and they too can get things delivered; they too can work from home; and they work for large companies that haven’t yet made any noises about shutting down or laying people off. The other daughter is a stay-at-home mom with two children. I’m mildly worried about her because her husband is a grocery store manager and considered essential. However, the safety precautions at his store are intense. And he hasn’t missed a paycheck yet.

So it’s on behalf of others that I’m speaking. The owners of the small restaurants we used to frequent. The nurses who have been sent home because our hospitals are virtually empty. The waiters, cooks and bartenders who can ill afford to miss a paycheck and tips. The owners and employees of the nail salon where my daughter gets her nails painted in unnatural colors. The hairdresser who used to put streaks of even more amazing colors in her hair. How are these people managing?

Now, about this lockdown. The models we’ve been shown have vastly overestimated deaths. Furthermore, the people and institutions waving the curve we’re supposed to worry about don’t show us the data and algorithms they’ve using, and most of them lump all the states in with New York City, which skews the hell out of their models. I don’t give any more credence to the models than I give to models of global warming (which are known to use worst-case scenarios and tend to rely heavily on many nonlinear equations (mathematicians, you may tear your hair out now.))

It appears to me that most of the country is in for terrible economic suffering on the basis of what’s happening in nursing homes and one extremely overcrowded city. Speaking for myself, I’m perfectly willing to take reasonable precautions until a vaccine or a universally valid treatment is developed. But what about the people who are young, healthy, and staring at serious financial problems? Why should they suffer for the minority of people like me?

Maybe they’ll survive economically, given that more and more people are ignoring state-imposed restrictions.

But I can’t help noticing that these restrictions are mostly put in place by people who have the luxury of staying home without missing a paycheck. And many of them think ordinary working people aren’t worth paying attention to, and voice death wishes on those who complain. Anyway, those protestors mostly deplorables, aren’t they?

And I find that attitude, well, deplorable.

(crossposted at https://bastionofliberty.blogspot.com/)