Are Content Providers Free to DePlatform?

In the last few years, we have heard many stories of alternative viewpoints -- including Libertarian ones -- being "deplatformed" and "unpublished".

Some Libertarians are excusing this behavior by claiming those content providers are private property, and they can decide for themselves what they provide a platform for.

I fully understand the argument.  However...

That position is, at best, naive, and at worst, willfully ignorant.

It has become abundantly clear: Content providers are not really private companies any longer.

1) They get a huge government subsidy in the form of "artificial personhood".

2) All of the major platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Youtube are subscribers to the "services" of a spook-run "non-government organization" called the "Atlantic Council". 

3) Most of the spooks "advising" the oligarchs as to who to deplatform and what to censor are Obama-era players.

4) Dragging Zuck before congress wasn't meant to elicit information. It was a horse's head in the beds of the content oligarchs.

5) All of the content providers claim to be platforms and thus not liable for their content -- in public. However, in court, they claim the opposite.  Content carriers need to decide if they are publishers or platforms, and duck the hell out of gaming the system.


6) There have been multiple instances of spookish government bureaucrats visiting the C suites of all of the tech titans. Of course the records of what these spooks say to the execs is not made public, but here's a guess: "My, Mr Chairman, that's a beautiful twelve year old daughter you have there. It would be a shame if someone from our office visited her tonight."

7) The takedown of Backpage.com and the bankrupting of its principals in order to prevent them from hiring sufficient legal counsel was another horse's head.

No. The oligarchic providers have been captured by Leviathan. They are now functioning as management arms of the police state.  Almost all of the internet content providers are now deeply compromised.No corporation should be regulating political speech; and certainly no corporation -- which gets the government subsidy of artificial personhood -- should attempt to meddle in American elections in this manner.

It isn't the Russians who are interfering in our elections.

It's tech oligarchs, the mainstream media, and the military-industrial-spook complex.

The fix for this is to reduce government employment at all levels by 99% across-the-board, and shut down government agencies -- including the national-security-spy-state complex.

Hopefully the few thousand remaining government bureaucrats will be able to concentrate on activities that actually protect the individual rights of Americans. rather than violating them.

The elimination of corporate personhood and requiring businesses to bear the full cost and responsibility for their own actions that violate individual rights is also required.

Vote Libertarian.

Additional reading:

1.  Your taxpayer dollars are funding the Atlantic Council -- the organization "advising" Facebook on which viewpoints to censor.

2.  Facebook submits various content to an Atlantic Council lab that "detects" unacceptable opinions.





3.  More to come!

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Vote Libertarian * 800-ELECT-US * http://www.LP.org
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Written by Marc Montoni <AMCAmbassador@gmail.com>, November, 2019.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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For more information about the Radical Caucus, see www.LPRadicalCaucus.org or see the Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/2497146127/  .
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Blue Wave?

What "Blue wave"?

I am no Trumpkin, but the Left needs to up its game.

Obama lost SIXTY-THREE House seats and SIX Senate seats in his first midterms in 2010.

Clinton lost FIFTY-FOUR House seats and NINE Senate seats in his first midterm in 1994.

And THEY had an adoring press.

[Bush actually bucked the long trend and gained 2 Senate seats and 8 House seats in 2002.]

Trump has been under unrelenting, vicious attacks by most of the press, yet he is going to GAIN at least 2 seats in the Senate and will lose only between thirty and forty seats in the House.

Y'all are in trouble. Because the 2020 elections just started today, and what you thought was going to be a rout, really wasn't.

In addition, you squandered your opportunity to work with Republicans to get a more balanced Supreme Court by your underhanded treatment of the Kavanaugh nomination.  Your handling of that nomination assured that you will be run over if there are any more vacancies -- two more may well be in the cards within the next year.

Playing the "If you aren't a leftist, you're a creepy racist woman-hating redneck ignorant nazi gun nut homophobic bigot" card is probably too yesterday to work anymore.

What might work better for the left is working on actually solving problems.

Like, repealing the Prohibitions on drugs, gambling, and prostitution that drag the poor and minorities into the justice system disproportionately, ending all the wars, and working towards accountability and transparency for government workers -- including the police, who inflict such a horrendous toll on minorities through policing for profit and revenue farming in general.

And fixing those absolutely corrupt, murderous, bankrupt, and broken Left-led major cities all over the United States.

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Vote Libertarian * 800-ELECT-US * http://www.LP.org
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Written by Marc Montoni <AMCAmbassador@gmail.com>, October, 2018.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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For more information about the Radical Caucus, see www.LPRadicalCaucus.org or see the Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/2497146127/  .
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The Left's National Forest Reichstag Fires

Regarding the big wildfires in the American West this year:

A number of them are attributed to "pyroterrorism".  It's actually a real thing: USFS and other federal agencies have been holding training sessions and meetings about pyroterrorism at a more & more feverish pace the past few years...

Why?

Because jihadi groups have discovered that American forests have become supremely vulnerable -- and as a consequence, they can cost the US lives and billions -- for the price of a cellphone, a few ounces of gasoline, and a few matches.
 
The idea is not new: Hamas has been torching Israeli farm fields and nature reserves for many years in similar ways; and there is mounting evidence that the disastrous fires in Greece this year were largely a result of Turk and Muslim pyroterrorists who snuck into Greece alongside refugees & immigrants.

What's new, though, is that these extremists in America have begun training in remote-activated incendiary devices designed to ignite fires in fire-prone areas (think IED's for Smokey Bear).

Plus, stupid people are always around.

So why are American forest and grasslands are increasingly vulnerable?

One reason is that federal land policy has gotten trapped by lawsuits (many of which are funded by the forced "investment" by American taxpayers via the EAJA -- in other words a wholesale wealth transfer from taxpayers to the lawyer-industrial complex) which have done much to shut down logging on forests “managed” by the federal government, together with environmental activist political pressure to stop forest "management".   Land managers are increasingly restricted from setting up prescribed / controlled burns to eliminate fuel.  Nor can they contract out to resource (eg logging) companies to clear overgrown areas.

Besides the external pressure towards ignoring management, there is internal inertia trending in the same direction: older forest managers who understood that American forests and open land were supposed to be for a balance of uses, including recreation, wild areas, logging, mining, and drilling, and so on, are gradually being replaced by a newer generation of land managers who are increasingly opposed to any uses other than recreation -- or, better yet: human-prohibited wild space.

So a perfect storm is building bigger and bigger every year -- with increasingly devastating wildland fires as the predictable result.

Common sense says global warming isn't global if it's local.  However, environmentalists and their leftist brethren are now peddling the idea that global warming can occur in one small region, which is absurd.  Nevertheless it is the "logic" behind claims that local heat records are evidence of global warming.  This is how environmentalists play their game.

Suppose those of us who are not alarmists do the same?  Let's try it:

"Arsonist forest fires are definitely a sign that Man’s activities has increased local temperatures – as much as 800-1000 degrees C. If environmentalists' opposition to sensible forest management contributes to this 800 degree rise in the local temperature, they should pay for the damages they've caused."

That’s the way, right?

If, by your actions, you create conditions that result in the destruction of property, which includes causing "local" ... er... "global" warming by 800 degrees, then you can expect to bear the consequences in law and liberty:

Pay up, y'all.

But the real solution is to get politics out of the environment (and insurance), and thenceforth to protect property rights.

The fed should sell off the millions of acres it owns to the highest bidder, and from that point on, allow property owners to provide for the protection and management of their property.  How they do so will be managed by their insurers.  Such a regime will encourage proper management of forest resources and the mitigation of harmful practices.

Libertarians have called for the abolition of the BLM, USFS, NPS, and other alphabet-soup bureaucracies, and the wholesale privatization of government property.  We also call for the abolition of welfare for lawyers and political activists who profit endlessly by suing government.  If governments didn't own property, taxpayers wouldn't be left holding the bag on both sides of every argument over the environment.

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Written by Marc Montoni <AMCAmbassador@gmail.com>, August, 2018.  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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For more information about the Radical Caucus, see www.LPRadicalCaucus.org or see the Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/2497146127/  .
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Anarchophobia

Anarchophobia: The ignorant fear of anarchists.

Anarchophobia is normally used as an excuse to paper over the fact that almost all Libertarian candidates fail to seek adequate volunteer and donor support for their campaigns, to explain away the reason more Libertarians are not being elected to office.

Most anarchophobes are clueless about:

- ballot access censorship and judicial bias favoring the D/R monopoly of the ballots in all states.

- the many extensive contributions anarchists have made to the modern Libertarian Party.

- the fact that anarchists were among the founding members of the Libertarian Party, and,

- the fact that anarchists comprise a large fraction of the current donating membership of the Libertarian Party.

[paraphrasing D. Frank Robinson]

FACT: Until ballot bias is eradicated, the votes cannot come.

FACT: When the votes come, the money will follow.

FACT: When the money arrives, oaths of office will administered.


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For more information about the Radical Caucus, see www.LPRadicalCaucus.org or see the Facebook group https://www.facebook.com/groups/2497146127/  .
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Originally written April 2018, by Marc Montoni, for the Libertarian Party Radical Caucus.  This version released 2018.

 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
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The Bamiyan Moment for America's Bigoted Social Justice Warriors

This is the Bamiyan Moment of America's intolerant social justice warriors and the perpetually offended: Vandalizing monuments.

OK.

Let's destroy them all. Every monument, any flag. We should even turn all the museums with any of that offensive garbage into rubble. Erase everything.

And let's slaughter those who still "cling to their flags and guns".

Screencap of a CNN video of Afghan Taliban doing to
the Buddhas at Bamiyan what the American Taliban
want to do to statues and monuments in America

After all, we have to model our cultural cleansing after what the Taliban did to all of those offensive statues of Buddha at Bamiyan and elsewhere.

But let's not stop there.

George Washington was a slave holder. So was Jefferson. Let's shove their monuments into the Potomac.

Maybe the William Ellisson historical marker in Sumter SC should be taken down, also?

We could spend years figuring out how to get our society completely rid of all symbols that offend someone.

In fact, we could make a "War on Offensiveness", that will last us for generations, like the War on Poverty or the War on Drugs.

Or -- as a much quicker alternative -- we could take all the American Taliban Social Justice Warriors and dump them over Niagra Falls.

Those willfully and stupidly ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it. And the worst thing is everyone else pays for their folly. The way Obama and the rest of the idiocracy is poking at Russia and China, one day it will be the USA that will be overrun, demonized and erased from history.

But I guess that will be just fine with the American Taliban leftist swills who will be sucking at the breast of the state in that era.

Assassin Kills 9-year-old Christina Taylor Green, Five Others

Here we go again.

So a lone nutcase shoots several individuals in Arizona, and the media -- within minutes of the shooting -- begin parroting the "it's all the fault of the Tea Party, gun nuts, Libertarians, conservatives..." line. Yadda, yadda, yadda... Haven't we heard this story before?

It's no wonder the lamestream media is losing eyeballs in droves. Increasing numbers of Americans are aware of the fraud and manipulation the government and its media lapdog engages in, which is why most people now get their news from the Internet. Of course, that can't be allowed to continue: predictably, it is the left (and the government) that wants the Internet regulated.

Think about it. The left's mantra for years has been that thousands of terrorists killing thousands of innocents in the name of Islam has nothing to do with Islam. Yet one loon -- who we know nothing about -- attempts to kill a Democrat Congresswoman, and somehow we're supposed to immediately agree the blame lies with adherents of the Tea Party?

Politically-motivated shooting rampages like this needn't happen at all. Were government small and irrelevant enough that no one really cared about politicians and other government bureaucrats, those politicians and bureaucrats would be very safe. In essence, power-hungry fat-government wannabes creat a self-fulfilling AND self sustaining prophecy: create a crisis that provokes unrest, knowing full well that some statistically insignificant remnant will regard that crisis as the "last straw" and go nuts. Then, use the results of whatever mayhem the statistically insignificant extremist has managed to do, to further your government-fattening, victim disarming, Constitution-busting, power-grabbing childish agenda.

Six people were killed. But it was interesting to note that as of 6:00 p.m. Saturday evening, January 8, 2011, out of 1,800 Google News search results for news of the shootings, almost none of the news stories mentioned the name of the little girl who was killed, much less said anything about her ended-too-soon, innocent life. Nor have the names of four of the other five citizens killed. The only dead victim named in the stories was another government employee -- a federal judge.

The victims the media forgot are:

-Gabriel Zimmerman, 30, Giffords' director of community outreach

-Dorwin Stoddard, 76, a pastor at Mountain Ave. Church of Christ.

-Christina Greene, 9, a student at Mesa Verde Elementary

-Dorthy Murray, 76

-Phyllis Scheck, 79

To the left, life is only important if that life is that of the nobles of government.

To hell with us Mundanes.

Can War Ever Be Justifiable?

A recent article by EJ Dionne noted the upcoming 150th anniversary of the beginning of the Civil War, and it urged the widespread adoption of the leftist view of that war: that it was all about slavery. Unfortunately, the article ignores the fact that, as in all things politic, "it ain't so simple".

There is no such thing as a "good war".

Ever.

The desire to go to war is all about one thing, and one thing only: Money. The slavery issue was just a way for Lincoln to make war into a “moral imperative”. In our time, “terrorism” is similarly used to justify government aggression.

Conquest is little more than a means for the elites -- who profit from the endless financial rape of mass numbers of people -- to either gain or retain "tax territory".

Tax territory simply translates into "wealth" -- money. Control more territory, and you control more people and the wealth they create. The more tax territory a government seizes, the more powerful an army and spoils system it can support. A powerful army makes possible further conquests of additional tax territory. Of course, if anything comes along that threatens a government's tax territory, expect a brutal response.

Which brings us back to the Civil War.

To believe the North's fight was motivated by an altruistic purpose, such as abolishing slavery, is to believe in fairy tales and Santa Claus. It, like every other fight in history, was about tax territory. The United States government didn't want to lose a large chunk of its tax territory, and so a fight was inevitable when the southern states decided they didn't want to continue being the cash cow for the Northern-dominated congress and its decades-long transfer of billions in southern wealth to the North.

Had Lincoln allowed the South to secede, slavery as an institution would have collapsed on its own. Besides the fact that it had become a huge political liability, there were pricey related expenses (enforcement, social, uprisings, mistreatment) which were rapidly overtaking any profitability. One can look at modern examples of subsidized industries that collapsed even after decades of government protection and subsidization -- steel, autos, textiles, etc.

The Fugitive Slave Act was in effect a direct subsidy to slaveowners at the expense of federal taxpayers. It worked to an extent, socializing the costs of capturing runaway slaves. But even with it, slaves still escaped. Had individual owners been required to pay their own enforcement costs for chasing down runaways, the entire institution would have collapsed before the War. Fugitive slave laws were subsidies that skewed the actual costs of the chattel slavery system, thereby helping it compete in the market against free labor.

Economic reality would have caught up with slavery in very short order under an independent south. Private slavery was subsidized by the public treasury and in that respect it functioned only as well as any other implementation of socialism: it externalized the costs of its activities on others. But eventually, all socialized industries collapse on their own.

"Two wrongs don't make a right". The principle applies to governments as much as it applies to children on a playground. While the slaves were freed from private owners as a result of the Civil War, the entire population of the country became enslaved to overbearing government bureaucracy that intruded into daily life with surveillance, subsidies, taxes, the draft, speech prohibitions, and regulation. That government has only continued to grow to the point where it now steals half of all wealth individuals create every year. Americans to this day are enslaved to the colossus that emerged from the Civil War.

Can one justify freeing slaves by enslaving free men? Can altruistic motives be ascribed to northern politicians who dragged 168,649 young men off the streets to fight for the freedom of others? Lincoln’s draft caused the death of about a fifth of them. One must not deny the fundamental injustice done to those young men. An instructive read on this subject is Jeffrey Rogers Hummel’s 'Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving Free Men'.

Can one justify freeing slaves at the price of subjecting non-slave-owning women and children to rape and murder? Unleash an army and rape and plunder will always travel with it. The Civil War was no exception. In her treatise “Rape in the American Civil War: Race, Class, and Gender in the Case of Harriet McKinley and Perry Pierson”, Maureen Stutzman found few rapes (335) prosecuted by the Union army. Most of the recorded instances were limited to 1863 and 1864 . One wonders why there were no rape prosecutions recorded earlier in the war, or in 1865. Lack of records does not equate to a lack of rapes. Southern legal records were often destroyed – so civilian reports of rapes and other crimes by invading troops are hard to come by. In addition, in an environment of subjugation of the southern citizenry, there was considerable reluctance to report rapes committed by conquering troops.

Can one justify freeing slaves at the price of slaughtering non-slaveowners? Various estimates suggest over 50,000 southern civilians were killed as ‘collateral damage’ due to the indiscriminate shelling of towns and cities – many of which were occupied mostly by women and children.

Slavery could have been ended the same way it was done within the limits of Washington, D.C., as well as in many other places in the world, and without bloodshed: simply by compensating slaveowners for the change in national rules. But apparently, that was too much to ask of the northern states, which had been transferring southern riches in a northerly direction since 1783.

Another bloodless alternative could have been simply an official declaration of an end to all enforcement of fugitive slave laws. The resulting uncontrollable exodus of slaves would also have brought collapse.

The slavery issue was a great propaganda tool for Lincoln – a white supremacist and separatist who cared little for the black race. John Wilkes Booth’ bullet elevated the man into a myth; otherwise Lincoln’s blathering about shipping blacks back to Africa would have ruined his legacy.

Lincoln, in his first year of office, rapidly implemented an unreconstructed Whig agenda of a centralized sultanate of government meddling and subsidization of the railroads, tripled protectionist tariffs, and federalization (and debasement) of the money supply.

A few years ago, liberals were criticizing George Bush for imprisoning people without charges, access to counsel, the right to confront accusers, or even a trial. Of course, now that Obama is doing the same thing, they are silent – but the point is that it was Abraham Lincoln who showed Bush & Obama that a president can get away with it.

Far from encouraging peace and compromise, Lincoln’s actions fanned embers into flames.

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Addditional reading:

Are you aware of the extent to which free blacks held slaves?  Then check out "Did Black People Own Slaves?" by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.


This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Breathless Media Treatment For One; Yawn for Another

OK, let's see.

Scenario 1:

A guy (with two full carloads of very large friends, as well as a BB gun that looks like a pistol and a bunch of baseball bats loaded in the cars) chases down two very small guys and one girl. One of the small guys shoots at one of the following cars, killing one of the occupants. Despite the chase, the deceased becomes an "innocent victim", and outrage and protest follow. The jurors remain awake and alert during the trial and deliver a guilty verdict for the shooter and his cousin. They are sentenced to long prison terms -- terms which don't satisfy the family and friends of the deceased.

No charges are ever leveled against any of the other individuals in the two following cars for their role in the situation. Every one of the reporters covering the trial itself mention the racial composition of the jury, as well as the race of those involved -- repeatedly.

Scenario 2:

A business man steps out of his truck one morning, is immediately accosted, shot to death, and robbed by three crackheads. The initial shooting was reduced to a footnote and hidden on inside pages of the local daily, and not reported at all by most other papers and radio/tv stations in the area.

Two years later, the police at last arrest three suspects, with what would be considered pretty solid evidence in other cases. At the trial of the first one of the three, several jury members -- all but one of whom is the same race as the defendant -- fall asleep during the trial. Eventually they return a "not guilty" verdict, and set the defendant free. Outrage and protest follow, but again not on the front page. None of the reporters covering the trial itself mention the racial composition (or the sleep habits) of the jury; that's left to the victim's wife to say.

What's the main difference between the cases?

The first story was reported almost as thoroughly and endlessly as Michael Jackson's death; with almost daily updates on the progress of the case. Every reporter managed to play the race card in every story.

The second story was almost completely ignored; with only two major articles in the regional daily during and after the first trial. The reporters leave out the race of the victims and perps; except when the reporter on the second story mentioned that the march by family and friends of the victim was "all white" -- even though a black man is clearly seen in the accompanying photo of the march.

http://www.timesdispatch.com/rtd/news/local/crime/article/PBUR22_20090621-221803/275243/

So why the breathless coverage of one case, while the other, where there was a clear criminal (actually three) and an entirely innocent victim, elicits a media yawn? And speaking of yawns, what judge in his right mind fails to declare a mistrial when the jury falls asleep?

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Marc Montoni is a network technician and a frequent columnist on the issue of individual liberty, Drug Prohibition, gun laws, and land-use regulation. He currently serves as the Secretary of the Libertarian Party of Virginia and publishes a commentary blog at FreeVirginia.blogspot.com.


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