Muh Muh Muh My Corona (virus)

Because. They’re. White.

 

No, that's why they're not dead.

 

Quite a piece from Taibbi. Not exactly what I expected:

The Inevitable Coronavirus Censorship Crisis is Here

In the Trump years the sector of society we used to describe as liberal America became a giant finger-wagging machine. The news media, academia, the Democratic Party, show-business celebrities and masses of blue-checked Twitter virtuosos became a kind of umbrella agreement society, united by loathing of Trump and fury toward anyone who dissented with their preoccupations.

Because Conventional Wisdom viewed itself as being solely concerned with the Only Important Thing, i.e. removing Trump, there was no longer any legitimate excuse for disagreeing with Conventional Wisdom’s takes on Russia, Julian Assange, Jill Stein, Joe Rogan, the 25th amendment, Ukraine, the use of the word “treason,” the removal of Alex Jones, the movie Joker, or whatever else happened to be the #Resistance scolding fixation of the day.

and:

The people who want to add a censorship regime to a health crisis are more dangerous and more stupid by leaps and bounds than a president who tells people to inject disinfectant. It’s astonishing that they don’t see this.

and:

From everything I’ve heard, talking to doctors and reading the background material, the Bakersfield doctors are probably not to be trusted. But the functional impact of removing their videos (in addition to giving them press they wouldn’t otherwise have had) is to stamp out discussion of things that do actually need to be discussed, like when the damage to the economy and the effects of other crisis-related problems – domestic abuse, substance abuse, suicide, stroke, abuse of children, etc. – become as significant a threat to the public as the pandemic. We do actually have to talk about this. We can’t not talk about it out of fear of being censored, or because we’re confusing real harm with political harm.

 

tl/dr

the problem isn't trump
the problem is the criticism of trump

 

Taibbi's not a Trump guy. But he's definitely soured on liberal media.

I do think folks struggle to see the difference there. It's a blind spot.

 

Matt is a professional libertarian. Like Rogan or Shermer or Peterson, he's a well-paid skeptic.

Trump is a malignant singularity in the history of the presidency. That's why people criticize him. Not some blue-check condescension on the part of the "elites."

Trying to situate Trump on a continuum of normal political behavior is itself a false premise to write from.

And these two quacks weren't denied their 1st Amendments rights in any way I can see. You Tube has the absolute right to publish - or not publish, or unpublish - whatever content it wants.

It's not really 'censorship' when the New York Times refuses to publish my arguments in favor of tinfoil tabletop cold-fusion, either.

 

The piece isn't really about Trump. Much at all. It's in part about a piece that read in The Atlantic that suggested the US has to be more like China in policing speech, and also how the media has a bad habit of parroting whatever narrative "experts" have even if the narratives change all the time.

And to some degree he's suggesting the liberal media engages in finger-wagging and virtue-signaling on social media, which, it does. We live in a narcissistic age, where we constantly have to tell others (more to the point, ourselves) how good and thoughtful people we are. It's what people do. Conservatives do it, too, with their populist nonsense and feigned grievances.

 

Trump - and Brexit - are where Taibbi starts.

This interesting take on the First Amendment was the latest in a line of “Let’s rethink that whole democracy thing” that began sprouting up in earnest four years ago. Articles with headlines like “Democracies end when they become too democratic” and “Too much of a good thing: why we need less democracy” became common after two events in particular: Donald Trump’s victory in the the Republican primary race, and the decision by British voters to opt out of the EU, i.e. “Brexit.”

And the press is always chasing updated expert information, especially in a situation like this.

The anti-expert, anti-intellectual nature of the electorate precedes the founding of the republic by four or five thousand years.

And stuff like this is just lazy and wrong:

Instead of asking calmly if hydroxychloroquine works, or if the less restrictive Swedish crisis response has merit, or questioning why certain statistical assumptions about the seriousness of the crisis might have been off, we’re denouncing the questions themselves as infamous.

 

No, he starts with the piece in The Atlantic, and suggests, over the last 4 years or so, such arguments have become more prevalent because voters aren't making decisions that the media thinks they should.

I didn't vote for Trump. I don't think he's been a good president. I look forward to him not being president. But the lusty, feel-good hatred for the America who voted him into office? I don't have that.

 

I stopped reading Taibbi when he went full Greenwald. One Glem in this world is too many already.

 

The phenomenon Taibbi describes begins with Trump and Brexit, Taibbi says.

This "interesting take" being the piece in the Atlantic.,

This interesting take on the First Amendment was the latest in a line of “Let’s rethink that whole democracy thing” that began sprouting up in earnest four years ago. Articles with headlines like “Democracies end when they become too democratic” and “Too much of a good thing: why we need less democracy” became common after two events in particular: Donald Trump’s victory in the the Republican primary race, and the decision by British voters to opt out of the EU, i.e. “Brexit.”