Heinrich Heine’s Poem “The German Censors”

————————————–.”

Banned!

Western Journal:

The Washington Post has taken down a political cartoon after readers wrote it to the paper to complain the cartoon was “racist.”

David Shipley, editor of the opinion section of the Post, wrote in a rather confusingly worded “Editor’s note”… that the paper would “continue to make the section home to a range of views and perspectives, including ones that challenge readers,” as part of the explanation of why it was doing the opposite of that. …

The cartoon showed a man, presumably a Hamas spokesman, saying “How dare Israel attack civilians …” while tied to him as human shields were a woman in Muslim garb, two young children, and two infants, one of which was crying.

The cartoon has apparently also been removed from the cartoonist’s website, as well as his X feed. Other cartoons, many of which depict Hamas in less than favorable images, remain in both places.

Those of us of the Baby Boom generation can remember the old regime in which bad language and risque images and words were commonly banned.

When I was young, people still gasped when Rhett Butler told Scarlett O’Hara, right out loud, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” And everyone still marveled that Hollywood actually got away with that one.

It was just a little ways in the past that Ulysses needed to be smuggled into the United States.

All that was swept away by the 1960s and the Sexual Revolution, and those of us who were young in that time of rebellion could never possibly have imagined that we’d live to see another new Age of Victorianism taking a different form.

Today’s scowling Puritan judge is not down on sex or nudity. If anything, he’s violently protective of the privileged status of Sodomy. What he objects to, and is eager to forcibly eradicate, is political incorrectness and any slight upon or failure to accord due reverence and regard to the privileged status of any of the left’s sacred cow victim identity groups. When today’s leper rings his bell, you are not supposed to flee, you are expected to bow down.

Old age is bad enough, but this particular historical development, in my view, ranks with prostate problems at the tippy top of the Universe’s Sick Jokes scale.

Daily Mail:

The latest ‘Twitter Files’ drop on Thursday night revealed that partisan extremists at one of America’s most influential social media platforms wrapped a torniquet around the vein of free thought and wrenched it tight.

And to add insult to injury, the whole time, Twitter was lying about it.

Then-CEO Jack Dorsey told Congress that he had no idea why conservatives were moaning about being silenced – a.k.a. ‘shadow banned.’

Well, guess what? Conservatives were right.

We learned that in addition to shutting down bombshell reporting, like the New York Post’s exclusive on Hunter Biden’s laptop, Twitter executives were also suppressing individual Americans who didn’t blindly parrot liberal orthodoxy.

The account of Stanford professor, Dr. Jay Battachyara’s was muffled for sharing thoughtful criticism of COVID lockdowns.

America’s kids were kept out of school and in masks. Businesses were destroyed and churches shuttered, and our dying were kept from seeing family, but Twitter pronounced these ideas verboten.

No wonder famously unprofitable, woke Twitter had trouble making money.
If free speech is a pillar of democracy, then Twitter should be charged with sabotage, because they’ve taken sledgehammer to it. And every American has the right to be absolutely outraged.

They censored anything that was even remotely interesting.

RTWT

Read Matt Taibbi for the latest revelations.

Just testing the new Twitter out: People who want porn in school libraries are groomers. Pedophiles should face the death penalty in court. Men are born with a penis and Women are born with vaginas. Only narcissists demand their own pronouns. There was fraud in 2020.

— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck) October 28, 2022

Listening to Twitter Lead Client Partner Alex Martinez, one is astonished that anyone simultaneously so effeminate and so inept at articulate speech could possibly have been hired for a policy-making position at a significant corporation.

This is an example of just who gets to decide what is good or bad and true or false?

Gerard van der Leun either knows or suspects that Project Veritas tricked Martinez into speaking freely by establishing a relationship via Grinder.

HT: Vanderleun.

Buffalo Shooter Peyton Gendron.

The Mainstream Media and the Blogosphere quoted the teenage Buffalo shooter’s lengthy manifesto, but they were consistently careful to refrain from making it available to the rest of us by linking it.

I was mildly curious, and I found this deliberate censorship frustrating. It seems to me that an argument could be made that nation-wide coverage of these unfortunate instances of insanely malevolent behavior ought to be avoided in order to prevent inspiring other crazies seeking attention from emulation. There can be no doubt that the publicity received by the first madman creates followers.

But if you’re going to devote massive coverage and lengthy analysis and opinion to a murder case of this kind, it should be treated objectively, and members of the public should have the same access to the facts of the killer’s thinking (and fantasies and delusions) as members of the media.

I found it fairly time consuming to locate the link(s), but I went to all the trouble, and here they are.

Link 1

Link 2

You’ll find reading all this a slog.

A pretty good summary is here.

He is obviously talented but warped and very deeply disturbed. He is perversely motivated in the direction of extreme, unpopular positions to the point of actually implementing fantasies of murderous violence. His animus against (most) blacks and Jews is clearly in a xenophobic tradition associated with the reactionary Right. However, he is also outspokenly hostile toward Capitalism and the rich. He obviously finds left-wing extremist opinions similarly attractive. Ideologically, he seems to resemble Goebbels, Streicher, and other left-wing Nazis, combining hostility toward Capitalism and Economic Freedom with pathological resentment of the Jews and Racism.

His crimes will fuel more demands for Gun Control, but looking at all this, you have to wonder how anybody this obviously crazy was never identified as dangerous and in need of help before he started shooting people.

David Sexton, in the World edition Spectator:

For many years, Michel Houellebecq was patronized by the French literary establishment as an upstart, what with his background in agronomy rather than literature, his miserable demeanor, his predilection for science fiction and his gift for unyieldingly saying the unsayable, especially about relations between the sexes.

That’s all changed now. He won the Prix Goncourt in 2010 for The Map and the Territory and in 2019 was elevated to the Légion d’Honneur. The Nobel cannot be long delayed, the committee after all having honored the equally ornery V.S. Naipaul and J.M. Coetzee.

Houellebecq’s new novel Anéantir, published in January in a luxury edition of 300,000 copies, was a quasi-official event in France, heralded by a reverential two-part interview in Le Monde in which he confided that he was a bit of an alcoholic and quite the tart, since he wrote not for money or applause but to be loved.

Some 736 pages long, Anéantir begins as almost a spy thriller, set around the upcoming election, but then morphs into a study of the treatment of the old and helpless, followed by a harrowing account of fatal illness, alleviated only by the return of conjugal love to a couple long estranged. Houellebecq being Houellebecq, it is specified that the dying man enjoys a dreamy blowjob lasting three hours — but the novel is otherwise chaste and grave, Houellebecq signing off by saying it is time

Yet although widely translated in Europe already, no English version seems yet to be scheduled. That’s a pity, not only because it will appear after the period in which it is set, but it was the enthusiasm of English-language readers that did much to compel French critics to acknowledge that Houellebecq was, whether they liked it or not, their writer with most impact internationally. …

Dozy publishers we have.

RTWT

They aren’t dozy. They are obviously cancelling Houellebecq because though he’s a great writer, he’s reactionary.

Dan O’Donnell explains.

Of all the hysterical leftist reactions to Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter on Monday, MSNBC host Ari Melber’s was easily the most revealing.

“If you own all of Twitter or Facebook or what have you, you don’t have to explain yourself,” he gravely intoned during his show Monday evening. “You don’t even have to be transparent. You could secretly ban one party’s candidate or all of its candidates, all of its nominees, or you could just secretly turn down the reach of their stuff and turn up the reach of something else, and the rest of us might not even find out about it ‘til after the election.”

You don’t say. This was in fact the way the left used social media to win the 2020 presidential election. They even admitted it openly in a stunning yet largely forgotten February 2021 article in Time magazine entitled “The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign that Saved the 2020 Election.”

“For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President,” wrote reporter Molly Ball. “Their work touched every aspect of the election.” Read the rest of this entry »

Amazon leadership held a session for employees dealing with the “trauma” of Matt Walsh’s book becoming a best seller and dealing with his trolling. They strategize on how to demote it on their site and claim he will get people killed. @MattWalshBlog broke them. pic.twitter.com/AKH8ihO0iV

— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) April 26, 2022

If only Musk could buy Amazon, too.

Yesterday was a flagship day in corporate media. It was the day they were forced to explicitly state what has long been clear: they not only favor censorship but desperately crave and depend on it.

Even if Musk doesn't buy Twitter, never forget what yesterday revealed.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 15, 2022

Abigail Schrier, famed for having her book on the impact of the fashion for Transgenderism on children, Irreversible Damage, banned by Amazon, recently delivered a brave and inspiring talk to the undergraduates at Priceton.

Every dating app pushes us toward the same few attractive mate choices; Spotify presses us to like the same music; Amazon pushes us to purchase specific books and away from others. If you’re under the impression that the books Amazon recommends to you are based solely on a content-neutral algorithm, I can disabuse you of that fiction right now. I once asked one of my sources at Amazon, who was concerned about the ways the search results were being manipulated, whether he’d ever seen a book deliberately boosted. Yes, he said. Becoming by Michelle Obama. When that book came out – he told me – virtually every search you did led to the recommendation to buy the former First Lady’s book. And the opposite is also true. There are books that are never recommended by the Amazon algorithm, irrespective of how well they’ve sold or how likely a specific shopper is to buy them. Or, at least, there’s one such book. I’ll let you try and guess what it is.

But the larger point is, your will is being toyed with, subverted, manipulated. And in a fairly insidious manner. None of you will be shocked to hear that Google promotes certain search results in order to lead us to a certain perspective. But did you know that, for contested entries, Wikipedia assigns editors, some of whom are ideologically committed activists, many of whom have very particular views they want you to walk away with.

If you form views based on those Wikipedia articles or reports by corrupt fact-checkers, if you act based on them, are you exercising freedom of will? Given that you’ve been spun and prodded along to a pre-determined conclusion by hidden persuaders, perhaps you aren’t. Perhaps you’re left in the same sorry state as the Moor of Venice: toyed with, subverted, manipulated. Acting out someone else’s plan, pointed in the direction that he wants you to walk.

We’ve spent a lot of time in the past few years debating whether this kind of manipulation is at the root of our political divisions, but I don’t think we’ve paid enough attention to an even more basic question: how it has interfered with freedom of conscience and ultimately free will.

When polled, nearly two out of three Americans (62%) say they are afraid to express an unpopular opinion. That doesn’t sound like a free people in a free country. We are, each day, force-fed falsehoods we are all expected to take seriously, on pain of forfeiting esteem and professional opportunity:

“Some men have periods and get pregnant.” “Hard work and objectivity are hallmarks of whiteness.” “Only a child knows her own true gender.” “Transwomen don’t have an unfair advantage when playing girls’ sports.”

…

I know why students keep their heads down. They are hoping for that Goldman or New York Times internship, which they don’t want to put in jeopardy. Well, any institution that takes our brightest, most capable young people—Princeton graduates!—and tells you can only work here if you think like we tell you to and keep your mouth shut, that isn’t really Goldman Sachs and it isn’t the paper of record. It’s the husk of a once-great institution, and it’s not worth grasping for. Talk to alums at these institutions: they sound like those living under communist regimes. That’s the America that awaits you if you will not speak up.

You who are studying at one of the greatest academic institutions in the country only to be told that after graduation, you must think as we tell you and recite from this script—why were you born? What’s the point of being alive? Computers are vastly better at number crunching. They’ll soon be better at all kinds of more complex tasks. What they cannot do is stand on principle. What a computer cannot do is refuse to lend credibility to a rigged competition—to refuse to strengthen its coercion—making it that much harder for the next female athlete to speak up. What the computer cannot know is the glorious exertion of the human will when it refuses to truckle in the face of lies and instead publicly speaks the truth.

RTWT