The Trans-National Pollution of Anti-Free-Speech Policies

The WSJ for 8/1 has a front-page headline: ‘US Tech Scrambles to Abide by New EU Rules.”   What kind of rules?

The new EU laws aim to push big tech companies to better police online content and to open them to more competition–with regular oversight from regulators empowered to issue fines.   The article refers to “hundreds” of provisions in the new regulations.

Note that word better, referring to the policing of online content. The implication I would draw from this is that the article’s author regards top-down content control as a good thing.   Maybe that’s unfair, perhaps just a matter of phrasing that doesn’t have to be as implying approval–do you think?

In any case, I’m reminded of a passage from an old science fiction story:

The intellectuals had been fretful about the Americanization of Europe, the crumbling of old culture before the mechanized barbarism of soft drinks, hard sells, enormous chrome-plated automobiles (dollar grins, the Danes had called them), chewing gum, plastics…None of them had protested the simultaneous Europeanization of America: bloated government, unlimited armament, official nosiness, censors, secret police, chauvinism…

Disturbing

Victor Davis Hanson remembers Leo Amery:

A lonely Winston Churchill had only a few courageous partners to oppose the appeasement and incompetence of his conservative colleague Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.   One of the most stalwart truth-tellers was a now little remembered politico and public servant Leo Amery, a polymath and conservative member of Parliament.   Yet in two iconic moments of outrage against the Chamberlain government’s temporizing, Amery galvanized Britain and helped end the government’s disastrous policies.

When Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939, there was real doubt whether Chamberlain would honor its treaty and declare war on Germany. General Edward Spears, then a member of Parliament, described the scene in the House of Commons. Arthur Greenwood was a member of the Labour Party, Leo Amery was a Conservative.

Arthur Greenwood got up, tall, lanky, his dank, fair hair hanging to either side of his forehead. He swayed a little as he clutched at the box in front of him and gazed through his glasses at Chamberlain sitting opposite him, bolt-upright as usual. There was a moment’s silence, then something very astonishing happened.

Leo Amery, sitting in the corner seat of the third bench below the gangway on the government side, voiced in three words his own pent-up anguish and fury, as well as the repudiation by the whole House of a policy of surrender. Standing up he shouted across to Greenwood: “Speak for England!” It was clear that this great patriot sought at this crucial moment to proclaim that no loyalty had any meaning if it was in conflict with the country’s honour. What in effect he said was: “The Prime Minister has not spoken for Britain, then let the socialists do so. Let the lead go to anyone who will.” That shout was a cry of defiance. It meant that the house and the country would neither surrender nor accept a leader who might be prepared to trifle with the nation’s pledged word.

Greenwood then made a speech which I noted that night as certain to be the greatest of his life; a speech that would illuminate a career and justify a whole existence. It was remarkable neither for eloquence nor for dramatic effect, but the drama was there, we were all living it, we and millions more whose fate depended on the decisions taken in that small Chamber.

Hanson also cites a later speech by Amery, following the loss of the Norway campaign to Germany.   Amery responded with a blistering attack on the incompetence of the conservative Chamberlain administration by quoting Oliver Cromwell’s hallmark 1653 order to the Long Parliament:

“You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.”

And go they did, very shortly thereafter, to be replaced by Churchill.

Hanson:

We need a voice like Amery’s. Like Britain from 1939 to 1940, America is in existential danger.

The Biden administration has utterly destroyed the southern border—and immigration law with it.

Biden green lighted 7 million illegal aliens swarming into the U.S. without legal sanction or rudimentary audit.

China spies inside and over the U.S. with impunity. Beijing has never admitted to its responsibility for the gain-of-function Covid virus that killed a million Americans.

President Biden printed $4 trillion at exactly the wrong time of soaring post-COVID consumer demand and supply shortages. No wonder he birthed the worst inflation in 40 years.

In response, interest rates tripled, gas prices doubled.

Our military is thousands of recruits short. It lacks sufficient munitions.

There’s much more–read the whole thing.

Most of what Hanson says is true, and needs to be communicated very clearly to the American people.   The question of how this is best done, and how many people are really persuadable, is a difficult one.   But that’s not primarily what I want to discuss in this post.

The Hanson post also appears at Zero Hedge.   Take a look at the comments–but only if you have a strong stomach–and think about what the opinions expressed there suggest about our current political situation in America.

Discuss.

Worthwhile (recurring) Reading

If you are interested in investing, music, art, or practical philosophy, you might want to follow Vitaliy Katsenelson. Originally from Russia, he came to the US with his family in 1991 and is now CEO of the investment management firm IMA.   Here are some of his posts that I like.

Life is a Walk – Santa Fe

Why Value Investing Requires Thoughtful Arrogance

A Story About a Story

How Not to Lose a Job That’s Yours

Libertarian’s (Unexpected) View on the Bailout of the Banking System

The Real Country of Contrasts: Our Unforgettable Trip to India

Hidden Costs of Living in Switzerland

Me, My Boy and Warren Buffett

The False Sophistication of Sophists

30 Years in America

Worth Pondering

CS Lewis, describing his protagonist, a sociologist, in That Hideous Strength:

..his education had had the curious effect of making things that he read and wrote more real to him than the things he saw. Statistics about agricultural labourers were the substance: any real ditcher, ploughman, or farmer’s boy, was the shadow…he had a great reluctance, in his work, to ever use such words as “man” or “woman.” He preferred to write about “vocational groups,” “elements,” “classes,” and “populations”: for, in his own way, he believed as firmly as any mystic in the superior reality of the things that are not seen.

This phenomenon is a plague of our present era, and is by no means limited to sociologists.

Previous Worth Pondering post.

Book Review: Year of Consent–Rerun with Additional Commentary

I reviewed this book in 2021.  Published in 1954, it is set in the then-future year of 1990–a time when though the United States is still nominally a democracy, the real power lies with the social engineers…sophisticated advertising & PR men…who use psychological methods to persuade people that they really want what they are supposed to want.  Events in the two years since I posted that review have even more strongly demonstrated the almost overwhelming political power that is exercised by the communications industry–traditional media, social media, also academia–and I think the review is about due for a rerun.  I’ll add some additional thoughts at the end.

The social engineers who are the true masters of the country are aided in their tasks by a giant computer called Sociac (500,000 vacuum tubes! 860,000 relays!) and colloquially known as ‘Herbie.’   The political system now in place is called Democratic Rule by Consent.   While the US still has a President, he is a figurehead and the administration of the country is actually done by the General Manager of the United States, who himself serves at the pleasure of the social engineers.  The social engineers work in a department called  ‘Communications’, which most people believe is limited to such benign tasks as keeping the telephones and the television stations in operation.  Actually, its main function is conducting influence operations.

One approach involves the publishing of novels which are fictional, but carry implicit social and/or political messages, via, for example, the beliefs and affiliations of the bad guys versus the good guys. Even the structure of novels is managed for messaging reasons: romance-story plots should not be boy gets girl loses girl gets girl back, but rather boy gets girl, loses girl, gets different girl who is really right for him.

Some methods are more direct, although their real objectives are not stated. One such objective is population control: If the fertility rate is running a little low, advertising is ramped up for a pill called Glamorenes, which are said to create the ’rounded, glamorous figure of a TV star…remember–it’s Glamorenes for glamor. Actually, the real function of Glamorenes, which is top secret, is to increase a woman’s sex drive and expand the fertility window.  On the other hand, if the birth rate is running too high, the ad emphasis switches to Slimettes for women and Vigorone for men, both of which have a contraceptive effect.  The book’s protagonist, Gerald Leeds, is one of the few who is in on the secret, and when he hears a Glamorenes ad, he realizes that this is the real reason why his girlfriend, Nancy, has been acting especially affectionate lately.

Few people, even at the highest levels of government, realize just how powerful the Communications Department really is.  “Even the biggest wheels only know part of it.  They think the Communications Administrative Department exists to help them–and not the other way around.”

The computer known as Sociac (‘Herbie’) accumulates vast amounts of data on individuals, including such things as shopping, dining, and vacation preferences. Thus, when the administration wanted to make a new move, they knew exactly how to condition the people so that it would be backed. Or they knew exactly what sort of man to put up to win a popular election.  Telephone calls are tapped, but are rarely listened to directly by government agents; rather, they are fed directly to a ‘calculator’ (perhaps a front-end to Herbie) and added to the huge stock of intimate knowledge about the people.