Oh how we peasants love a story about ‘a super-rich man’! At least, that’s what Auntie Beeb thinks. They lead their news page (link, at the time of writing in the early hours of this morning) with a report that Elon Musk has bought Twitter. Elon Musk is known for the Tesla e-sports cars, communication satellites and bitcoin manipulations. Unsurprisingly, this Musk buy-out of twitter is also the headline for the BBC’s compilation of the morning’s paper editions (link), with a bow to the female readers, mentioning ‘HRT’.
A quick delve into that particular collection shows that only ‘Metro’ and the Guardian are headlining that story, the rest have other ‘news’, none of which are about the Ukrainian war or covid. The MSM editors seem to realise that we plebs have had enough of biased fear porn and propaganda, so those who still buy their morning paper in print can choose between an outbreak of hepatitis in children, thanks to lockdown, or that GPs will vote today for a further cut-back on their working hours.
There’s still Partygate, there’s a Bank Holiday proposed to celebrate the Queen’s jubilee, there’s the ‘passport shambles’ incommodating all those intrepid travellers who read The Times. There’s been a ‘bloodbath, reports the Mirror, and the Star warns of an invasion of toxic caterpillars. Just another day in Blighty, with ‘problems’ for every taste and social group. Any mention of inflation and the rising cost of living is absent.
So – Musk then. There are the odd articles in the online broadsheets, and they are quite interesting. We read in the DT:
“Elon Musk has won his $44bn (£35bn) takeover battle for Twitter after the social network dropped its opposition to the Tesla billionaire’s bid. Mr Musk, the world’s richest person, promised to “make Twitter better than ever” and protect Twitter as the “digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated” […] “I also want to make Twitter better than ever by enhancing the product with new features, making the algorithms open source to increase trust, defeating the spam bots, and authenticating all humans. Twitter has tremendous potential – I look forward to working with the company and the community of users to unlock it.”(paywalled link)
Isn’t that nice of him! The comment posters are already jubilating that “we” will now have Free Speech, hurrah. They believe that Musk will now get rid of ‘all spam bots’ and thus all will be well. Of course they’ve not grasped what this means: ‘authenticating all humans’. Whichever hi-tech way this is going to be done it means that Mr Musk will get to possess the personal data of all who want to use Twitter – 217 million daily active users, according to the Times. Clearly, that’s peanuts compared to other social media. Look at the numbers for monthly users:
“Monthly Active Users – TikTok officially has over 1 billion monthly active users. For reference – active users of other social platforms: Facebook – 2.9B, YouTube – 2.2B, Instagram – 1.4B, TikTok – 1.0B, Snapchat – 500M, Pinterest – 480M, Twitter – 397M.” (link)
Left out of this list is ‘telegram’, with 550M monthly users. It’s the app developed by two Russians, mostly used in Russia but stationed officially in Dubai (link), so it’s not clobbered officially by the ‘info sanctions’ which western states have imposed on all things Russian, especially their MSM.
We know that our ‘statesmen’ and politicians, that our institutions such as the various police forces in the UK, all use twitter to announce their earth-shattering thoughts. We know that our dearly beloved MSM have used twitter for years as ‘source’ for their stories and reports. It’s now come to this: if it ain’t on twitter, it didn’t happen. So believing that Musk owning this platform will change anything: in yer dreams, peasants, in yer dreams!
Moreover, Twitter has now taken to blocking tweets because the content might be unsuitable for people under 18, or too harrowing, like reports from the Ukrainian war. One can no longer follow links which ‘reporters’ or indeed alt media provide unless one has a twitter account. Checking out those links, reading those tweets has become near impossible.
Furthermore, since Musk wants to ‘authenticate all human beings’ this means to me that one cannot read what is said in this ‘digital town square’ unless one has proven that one is a human being, i.e. opened an account and handed over one’s personal data.
Over the last few years it has become increasingly difficult to access information unless one is prepared to pay for it – not per use, but by monthly subscriptions or by handing over all one’s personal data to the likes of Zuckerberg who also owns Instagram, to the Chinese who own TikTok or to Russia in the case of telegram.
Yes, we knew this already – the point though is that we’re told that Free Speech exists when there’s nothing ‘free’ about it because one has to pay to play, either by subscriptions or by handing over personal data.
Let’s also not forget that the famed algorithms which decide what we are allowed to say or not say still exist. Musk declaring that he’ll make them ‘open source’ doesn’t change a thing.
Moreover it doesn’t change a thing when governments decide that anything to do with Russia must be blocked. That applies not just to Russian MSM, that applies to other Russian sources on e.g. Twitter whose algorithms – or moderators – have cancelled Russian twitter accounts right left and centre. Trying to read ‘telegram’ is difficult because the browsers are blocking links to any Russian site, e.g. a telegram account, never mind that one needs to know the Russian language to read and watch.
Free Access to information is the other side of the coin that is Free Speech. No amount of warbling about Free Speech can disguise the fact that we no longer have that free access. Why would we want to chat and tweet in that Muskian ‘digital town square’ when we can only talk about what everybody is permitted to know?
‘Knowledge is power’, the sages in ancient Rome said. Modern totalitarian states knew this full well and restricted their citizens from accessing news sources outside their jurisdiction. Listeners to the BBC in Nazi Germany were sent to their KZs. In Soviet Russia, only Party officials with ‘need to know’ were permitted access to international newspapers or scientific publications. The higher one was in that hierarchy, the more one was permitted to see.
Are we on the way back to a society aiming to keep the citizens ignorant and unable to inform themselves beyond the official propaganda line? It worked somewhat for covid – it’s working much better now in regard to Russia. Who knows if these weren’t the preliminary exercises, to be fully implemented once “we” need to accept Net Zero? How will Musk’s ‘digital town square’ work then?
Have we still not learned that the super-rich, Gates and Bezos, Zuckerberg and now Musk, do not have the wellbeing of mankind at heart? So why praise Musk now for buying Twitter? Didn’t granny say something about the proof of the pudding …?
Lets get this straight. Ukraine is a farm. Fattened by americas and money. When the inevitable occurs and values plummet they Invest. I have no idea how much has been invested..But the returns will be staggerin…Every time always preceded by corruption of leading politicians.
Think about it.
How many industries, countries, industries, ?
They wanr us soon. And they’ve only just started on China.
Think about it. Where does the threat to peace come from.?
And they’ll advise us on how to find our own way to the abbatoire. Fattened and compliant.
Went to a talk last night – a dozen or so of us in a room over a pub – with a parliamentary researcher for the ERG group (the one time ‘spartans’). I was expecting a self-congratulatory history, but he was more humble than that. He said the real hero of Brexit was Jeremy Corbyn and recounted how meaning full vote 3 was based on May’s delusion that the the ERG had been squeezed enough to encourage Labour rebels to come over the top and support her and so she pushed on with MV3. In fact, the Labour whips had been privately briefing the ERG that there were no Labour rebels who would be supporting May – and come the vote there indeed none.
I mention this snippet because mention of Jeremy Corbyn leads into his friend – actual friend – Jean-Luc Mélenchon. Analysis of the Mélenchon surge in Sunday’s vote shows the same pattern as support for Corbyn. The surge came from graduates. The ‘long march through the institutions’, education in particular, appears to be bearing fruit. I went to a talk by Frank Lundz, the Amercian pollster, back in 2017, who was on a mission to alert the right of a phenomenon in the US that was reaching, and clearly has reached, Europe: people no longer become conservative when they grow up. This bodes badly for the right. He even warned back then that Biden was the threat to Trump’s re-election.
Reversing the long march clearly matters. I have expressed my despair over ever changing the capture of the media, education, the civil service and Conservative Central Office by the woke, but on Saturday hope returned at the New Culture Forum’s conference. Mrs Yeoman and I went as the line up included David Starkey and Eric Kaufmann. Increasingly I am less and less interested in these sort of events, of preaching to the converted with not practical recommendations about what to do. A sort of “ain’t it awful” (in the Eric Berne sense of going nowhere). But I was pleasantly surprised, and politically re-engaged, by two of the speeches. They were recorded and should be available on YouTube before long. I will let everyone know once they appear as they aer well worth watching.
Kaufmann produced a program, an actual sequence of steps, to reverse the long march through our institutions. A long shot perhaps but he set out a way, a path, something to fight for. (Intriguingly, Marion Maréchal has already set up her own academy France – very smart lady with an IQ several multiples higher than her aunt’s).
A second talk on integration, or rather the problems when you don’t have it, gave an account of what is happening in Denmark. The speaker was the curiously named Rafe Heydel-Mankoo. This is significant in that it shows somehting can be doen and emphasises where Le Pen and Zemmout went wrong. They need to put a credible program for how integration can be achieved. It is not about asserting one’s culture in speeches as you will see when Mankoo’s speech is online.
I’m still mulling over what I heard on Saturday and will not summarise it here. Better to listen to the speakers youselves once it is online. Well, here’s a quick hint. Kaufamm denonstrated how pushing back on woke issues was actually to accentuate wedge issues for the left. For example, Youngkin and DeSantis in the US. Dividing the left is the ony way the right can re-assert itself (see Lundz above). Accordingly, the culturee wars need to become number 1 on the list of things to do. Espousing free-market economics is not cutting through. The left – BBC and Guardian – try to represent culture wars as a right wing manufacture precisely to try and avoid the wedge issues. It is why we must all make them number 1. His programme for ereversing the ling march will take years. Culture wars can intensify right now.
Stout, thank you for sharing this. Very inspiring. Perhaps both those talks need uploading here when available. Viv?
Links in the comment section usually work fine.
Thanks SY. Boy do we need every scrap of hope on multiple fronts.
It is not just the Russians who use the ‘cauldron’; many people refer to society being slowly boiled like the frog, but it feels more like we are being encircled and shrunk, as every facet of life succumbs to malign doctrine and whichever way one looks the familiar view has been occupied by squatters and made ugly.
I think the country, by which I mean people, within which I grew up and began work has been driven from visibility. I think it is largely still there; it bursts out very occasionally, as does a periodic volcano, the next eruption being the Queen’s Jubillee, overwhelming the establishment, who grit their teeth and smile patiently, then subsides into minding its own business and getting on with its life and leaving the children pretending to be grown-ups, the greasers and the sociopaths to play.
Apologies for all the spelling mistakes. Bit rushed this morning. I will post links when videos of Kaufmann and Mankoo are available.
This is very interesting Stout, thank you.
Stout, as you travelled to France recently I wonder if you could tell me whether extra “passports” we’re needed as I am trying to make sense of the Covid Green Pass which appears to be required in Europe? However they say unvaccinated people cannot be discriminated against but individual countries can impose their own requirements such as testing and quarantine but they don’t accept the NHS tests. We were hoping to travel to the Netherlands for family and a concert but I can’t make head or tail of it which I think is the point. Would appreciate your insight thank you.
For France you need to be vaccinated – the NHS letter is sufficient – except no-one asked me to prove my status, not even British Airways. You are also supposed to fill out a declaration ‘sur l’honneur’ (that you do not have any symptoms) which no-one has ever asked to see even when I went to France last year.
Last April was direct to lawless Marseille. The BA cabin crew insisted we would need masks in the airport. The first gendarme we saw said we didn’t ‘if we didn’t want to’. Even last December, when you needed to prove vax status to get on a TGV, only in Paris was there a check. I could have used a councuil tax form for all the scrutiny I got. In Marseille there were no checks at all.
A friend recently returned from Italy where the green pass really is in use just for buying a coffee. I don’t know about the Netherlands I’m afraid. It’s lawless Marseille for me everytime now.
Viv is spot on that Musk’s motive for taking over Twitter is to make money not the promotion of free speech. Is there a glint that we may be reaching peak ‘wokeness’ and in effect, there is money to be made from the promotion of free speech?
In fact there are one or two signs that business people are now openly expressing concern that leaders of many global corporations are, to the detriment of the companies profitability, engaging far too deeply into political activism in the form of ‘wokeness’ and ‘cancel culture’. With increasing evidence that an economic downturn is already with us how long will shareholders and bond holders put up with corporate global leaders current obsession with political activism at the expense of profitability?
On the other side of the fence there are one or two politicians scenting a change of mood on the issue of ‘wokeness’. One notable champion has been our friend Republican Gov Ron DeSantis of Florida who is currently seeking to remove tax concessions from Disney because of its political activism.
‘The whirlwind legislative action could have major consequences for Disney, which has been in a heated dispute with DeSantis, a potential 2024 Republican presidential candidate, after the company criticized a law he backed that limits school instruction about gender identity and sexual orientation’
https://www.dailynews.com/2022/04/21/disney-set-to-lose-tax-perks-as-florida-lawmakers-back-desantis-in-dont-say-gay-clash/
Of course, our political leaders here are still in hoc to ‘wokeness’ but there may be some hope at least if De Santis get’s his way and along with few notable excutives of global corporations being removed by their shareholders for political activism. Davos man will not be happy at this development!!
https://www.standard.co.uk/business/unilever-terry-smith-esg-ey-ceo-survey-b982050.html
Anybody older then 65 will understand when I say ” The apalling weight of bullsh*t in the NHS deters all but the healthiest ”
Bureaucrat heaven.
When you observe ( as The article points out ) how many can and do interfere and avail themselves of,. . You realise that the problem lies with the users and their basic beliefs and warped dreams. Not the computers or internet etc themselves, but with the Internet info transmitted too freely or etc…. . Anyway all that is gone and buried and only entertainment.will be left.
So there is a pattern. No laws about drugs, monopolies in communications, no laws in information, no policing of laws, No policing of finance beyond Companys Act. et al……. Industry used to provide a ladder to elitism. Was this destruction deliberate, We know in fact that it was, so will never come back.. Britains paths are important for many small countries to follow..
Shambles below a certain level of elitism. Organised above ?
d oil and gas pipilines… Drug production in afganistan, Like mowing the lawn.
Sorry about this but. I should have written ” Industry provided a ladder to eliteism for anybody “
I had to laugh when, after an intro that utterly misrepresented the situation in Mariupol, a character on GBN, a Colonel I think, began: “Well there is an information war going on…’
There sure is.
The indomitable Eva Bartlett, for one, is actually there: watch this.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/syhsYetRRGDw/
And I don’t think we will see these people in the Daily Mail or any MSM.
But they are not crisis actors of course.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/NQ0gHySOiFHv/
https://www.bitchute.com/video/haiqRv2eS6Fj/
https://www.bitchute.com/video/Ts4u1H50Iwzt/
Or this guy: “[locals] fear the Russians will leave.”
https://www.bitchute.com/video/kucrLFUxNVjC/
PO’S- Two things
– I gave up on GBN not long after the eight year Ukraine battle blew up into a stop that now. After hearing from this impartial ‘news’ organisation, a couple of months ago they transmitted a couple of party political broadcasts. These were on the behalf of the actor aka Rumpled Zeltskin – who can only afford to buy army tee-shirts. And as to the rest of the unbiased punters on gbn, . . .well. You may as well watch the bbc. Thankfully I dont have a tv. I do watch rt.com – for balance you understand.
– I have never yet managed to view a bitchute video. Could be it wants too much personal data, which my system does not permit.
Well done Viv, once again ahead of the curve. Musk is dangerous. He has winged it through life on the back of his family’s fortune from emeralds. Fact checkers bother to say this is a myth; Google promotes this misinformation to the top of any search on him, so it must be true. He used the money to take over a succession of other people’s work and turn a profit. Agreed that takes something (like, er, money) but he is not an original thinker and doer, like, say, Dyson. He is also developing his neural-link idea; minds linked to the cloud; which is the WEF wet dream. And, as you say, digital authentication will play into this perfectly. The excitement over his deal sounds to me very like the twittering [!!] of turkeys voting for Christmas.
And whilst people are distracted with Ukraine, Partygate, The Sussexes, trans madness, etc. we, the people, turkeys all and not even voting, are having our cage built around us; the government’s Orwellianly named (as it does the opposite) online harms and safety bill quietly slips through parliament, and the EU makes it’s Covid Green Pass (yes it’s an embryo digital identity) mandatory for all 27 countries by July 1st. Why would something they sell as beneficial need to be mandated?
I am off for a walk in the fields, the cool air and the sunshine; it’ll make me feel better… temporarily.
Thank you Phil O’S. I actually understood your comment and I agree about the legislation you have mentioned.
There are no local elections this year where I live but I still have some hope that those taking place across our country just might trigger some sort of common sense reaction in the H.o.C..