Editor Paul Collier

SOCIAL MEDIA SHOWDOWN WITH SCOTUS OVER SECTION 230 IS FINALLY HERE – SCOTUS has granted a “writ of certiorari” in the Gonzalez v Google case.  The case tests Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act.  The constitutional question is if Social Media loses its liability protections when it becomes an editor of content through political censorship.

The showdown has been anticipated, dreaded, and hoped for since at least just after 2016, but even more after 2020, the year of the mass mailer election, the election that never was.

The news comes just after an announcement that Elon Musk appears ready to finalize the Twitter deal after promising to make Twitter more amenable to the American spirit of freedom of speech, which means, essentially, freedom from consequences for more than speech alone.

What happens next at SCOTUS, I would suggest, is more about the reality of power at the highest levels of corporate power in America today than it is about the legal reality of the case to be adjudicated.

This handful of the most powerful families in America has been mostly betting on the China model, hoping to create in America something like China’s version of “capitalism,” one which allowed for the existence of billionaires while eliminating most future competition from impeding on that market power in any way.

For the American billionaire families, they’ve bet, I theorize, that they could create a China model that blended the state and the corporation so that the billionaires in their China could not be disappeared by the party leader.  They only have to look at the fate of Jack Ma and other billionaires in China that were recently purged by Chairman Xi to understand the fire they might be playing with by going down this path.

They’ve utilized the emerging market of China (along with other world emerging markets, but none which come close to China in size and potential) to fund a lot of their China-transformation conditioning back home.

By “China” I mean the China model of Socialism that emerged after the reforms of the 90s starting with Jiang Zemin, who ushered in China’s “glasnost” with a new contrivance called “socialist market economy.”

These former Americans (AINOS, Americans in Name Only) aren’t pro-China, they’re not seeking to become a vassal of the Chinese Empire.  They seek to use China, as China seeks to use them, for their own party’s advantage.

They are ultimately enemies, and both sides know it.  They both have data the other side wants.  They both have markets the other side needs.  They both see humans the same, as non-individuals meant to be fitted into a social oneness these billionaires create for their own self-empowering ends.

I believe the kids are using the phrase “frenemies” to describe what the party of the corporate-American state, the DNC, and the party of Xi, the CCP, have been since their initial entanglement, which may have begun with Nixon, but certainly was well on its way by Bush I.  They’ve made a pact on Survival Island to assure they’re the last two standing, and they can then settle this between themselves at that moment.

Yes, I call this a DNC-CCP frenemy alliance, but I started off with two Republican Presidents being the catalyst of this union.  DNC is a catch-all phrase that represents all the real servants of the DNC, be they “Republicans” (DNC operatives that infiltrate other parties) or so-called Anarcho-Leftists who don’t understand how they’re nothing but brown-shirt pawns of the DNC (who will suffer the same fate of the brown shirts when the DNC no longer needs them).

Something has changed recently that, I believe, has caused some billionaire families that bet the farm on the China model of socialism, the socialist market economy, to question the soundness of that decision for a number of reasons (including Xi’s authoritarian crackdown on inhouse billionaires and his tightening of the access to the glorious Chines market).

The Elon Musk buyout of Twitter (should it be finally finalized, for real this time, no takebacks) is a leading indicator that the coalition of AINOS among the billionaire families is cracking.

The number one protector of the DNC narrative, the number destroyer of DNC opposition, is social media.  The big platforms, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, Chinese-owned TikTok, have all developed algorithms to censor and ban dissent while elevating pro-party-line agit-prop Molotov-cocktail-throwers (like Vaush).

All the other DNC-favoring institutions, including our own banking system, follow the lead set by social media and market-kill the DNC opposition for good (or so they believed).

They’ve done this non-capitalist, non-free-market action because they had the Section 230 protection which no powers that be were interested in seeing come to the light of day anywhere near SCOTUS.  They also had the mega billions of dollars they were raking in from foreign markets and foreign contracts (including with China).

They could afford to offer an un-American product to an American market because they were no longer dependent on it financially, fellow AINO market conspirators protected them from rival platforms, and they oppose the American republican social contract founded on the principle that every individual is sacred in and of themselves.  That model creates way more competition, and what billionaire families want most, it would seem, is less competition.

Now, some powers that be allowed this issue to get to the Supreme Court.  What’s happening behind closed doors can only be speculated, but the decisions that will be made, I support, will be reflective of the reality of power behind those closed doors.

Maybe, perhaps, some AINOS have lost their nerve and want to walk back from the abyss of trashing America’s sacred individual social contract once and for all.  If so, the court will end the coalition of AINOS’ power to continue to seek to create a product, a DNC acolyte, rather than deliver a product AMERICANS want, a social media experience that allows for a level playing field for all political, religious, philosophical, etc. views, and community governance that reflects American values, not Communist, Marxist, or even Socialist ones.

We are individuals, and even dangerous ideas, even misinformation, must remain free to be expressed if we are to restore and then preserve of our American ideals of the sacredness of the individual in and of themselves.

KYRGYZSTAN AND TAJIKISTAN CONFLICT REVEAL POWER OF FREEDOM IN WINNING ONLINE PR WARS

Throughout human history, leaders of nations (even leaders that wished to form nations, such as Aelfred the Great of England) have recognized, mostly, two outcomes their social, cultural, and civic institutions must produce; they MUST CREATE a warrior class and an expert class.  The people and their land must have institutions that can create humans that kill well and humans that can create and support the tools these killing humans need to do their jobs.

In addition to these two results of civilization (we’ll call it that from here on out), and almost as equally important, we need the bodies that are needed for wars.  We need the bodies that are needed for the work that supports war-making.

Our civilization has neighbors who have the same thing in mind in the formation of their own civilization.  These civilizations are overwhelmingly led by individuals who treat these civilizations as their personal toolbox to be used to assure they and their future DNA can continue to control the lives of the vast majority of their subjects.

Of course, for the sake of time, I am being a bit simplistic in my language, but the spirit is rightly applied to the reality I am describing, the underlying reliance on the art of killing (and all the institutions needed to produce the highest forms of killing) to assure the continued existence of the civilization you and everyone throughout human history has ever been part of.

Throughout most of human history, the sinew trumped the machine in terms of killing value, but more and more the machine is replacing the sinew, creating new institutional demands to support new types of killing arts emerging from this new shift in the potential for the human to manipulate material for the purpose of bringing death and destruction to others.

This brings us to our story:

Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan’s 545-mile-long shared border erupted September 16, leaving more than 100 people dead and over 100,000 people displaced.  A cease-fire was signed September 25, 2022.  There were no real winners, however, Kyrgyzstan won the online PR war thanks to having more freedom of expression than Tajikistan does.

As press freedom goes, Kyrgyzstan ranks rather low, coming in at 72 in world country rankings.  However, their counterpart, Tajikistan, ranks 150^th, near the bottom (there are 195 recognized countries in the world).

Relative to Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan is a thriving hotbed of free expression producing high-quality content that makes Tajikistan look like a tone-deaf cringe-lord begging the public to listen to their carefully crafted press releases.

The PR war online was decisively won by Kyrgyzstan despite appearing to be the military “loser” in this affair.  It could well be, though, that the Kyrgyzstanis were better at highlighting the damage done to their areas as opposed to the damage they did to the Tajikistani areas.

From hrw.org

Kyrgyz Ministry of Education reports that 26 schools and 30 kindergartens in the Batken region closed as nearly 137,000 people evacuated since the fighting started. Of these, ten schools and seven kindergartens were damaged either by shrapnel or direct attacks. Currently, most schools have resumed full or partial functioning, except the two that were heavily damaged. One of these schools, located in Ak-Sai, was taken over by Tajik-affiliated forces on September 16 and used as a base for two days.

In Tajikistan, at least one school educating 450 children was damaged by fire on September 16. In another school in Khojai A’lo, Tajikistan, a teacher, 51-year-old Bakhrom Khakimov, was reportedly killed while trying to protect his students. The Tajik authorities have confirmed that 200 civilians have been harmed in the hostilities.

Regardless, this conflict results in another cease-fire, with neither side gaining or losing much on the ground.  However, as far as the world is concerned, the Kyrgyzstanis gained tremendous ground, which might lead to more support from the outside world than the Tajikistanis can hope to gain.

Kyrgyzstan is very friendly to crypto as well, making itself somewhat of an emigree target for wanna-be expats in the west looking to go on a new adventure.  No such opportunities lie on the other side of the border.

It should be noted that Kyrgyzstan has been making anti-free-press moves as of late, moves that might be second-guessed after seeing what a free press culture can do in the digital information wars compared to one that lacks it.

There are many factors that go into producing an effective killing and anti-killing strategy, including access to the raw resources needed to make the machines themselves, but none of them, I would support, will be as significant as the freedom of expression factor in the wars of the near future.

If your civilization lacks free expression, then it will soon become threatened by those that do not, unless you are a satellite of a free expression nation willing to shower you with military tools and expertise.

These two nations are in perpetual geopolitical tension due to the non-emergent nature of the border imposed on them by the then-Soviet Union.  The boundaries are not reflected of geopolitical realities in terms of the purely physical as well as ethnic history.  This is a reality that is shared around the world, especially among former Soviet satellites.

For the nations that exist in similar conditions to the ones in this story, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, the key lesson to be learned here, one that even the Belarusian President should heed, is that free expression cultivates the institutions needed to produce an effective killing and anti-killing strategy when dealing with threats from competing civilizations outside your borders, ESPECIALLY if you cannot hope for real aid from any of the major powers.

There is a technical parity happening around the world, for a number of reasons, including the proliferation of open-source augmented intelligence programs (AI, but I call it augmented instead of artificial).  This technical parity, in addition to the shrinking nature of warfare (as drones become more and more dominant, as I predict they will), will mean that the advantage in warfare will come in inspiring support and intelligently utilizing killing tools that are mostly comparable to the ones they’ll be facing.

The sinew has given way to the machine, but now the machine is giving way to the mind.  When the mind becomes the number one factor in war, the civilization that impedes dangerous free expression, for hate speech, for misinformation, for blasphemy, for security, etc., is sure to be a past civilization in the course of near time.

As the machine gives way to the mind, even as it is the very facilitator of it, the people who can think in the most dynamic, responsive way, in the most semi-autonomous way, without needing central commands, are the people that will win Empires in the decades, perhaps centuries, to come.