Nothing has such power to broaden the mind as the ability to investigate systematically and truly all that comes under thy observation in life.
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Marcus Aurelius
Author: Redactor
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Hidden Dissuader
“It’s one thing to let people post UFO content about crop circles in Arkansas,” Ciaran O’Connor was quoted in a recent Washington Post article, talking about YouTube competitor Rumble. “It’s another to allow your platform to be used by someone claiming vaccines are actively harmful and that people should not take them based on conspiracies and misinformation.”
As a cited expert for the Post’s hit piece, O’Connor is the big gun, whom reporter Drew Harwell uses to conclude his vivisection of the upstart video platform: “There’s a duty of care and responsibility as your platform grows and scales up.”
After a year and a half of government lies and flip flops about the novel coronavirus and its treatments, coupled with Big Tech censorship, we must not allow O’Connor’s bald “vaccine” assertions to go unnoticed, but we have other fish to fry.
Sizzling on the platter? Ciaran The Expert.
Who is he?
Well, writes Harwell, O’Connor’s “an analyst with the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a counter-extremism think tank in London that has worked with Google on a European fund targeting online hate speech.”
Rumble, claims O’Connor, has “become one of the main platforms for conspiracy communities and far-right communities in the U.S. and around the world.”
But let us consult one of those right-wingers, Rumble investor and online commentator Dan Bongino, to learn something more about this “Institute for Strategic Dialogue.”
Bongino points out that the institute gets its funding from various governments, including our own, as well as from Rumble’s competitors Facebook and YouTube.
And several more subdivisions of YouTube’s parent company also support this critic of Rumble.
The Post, of course, disclosed none of that.
You know, cuz Journalism.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Watch: A Helluva Lesson
Paul Jacob’s vlog version of the weekend podcast is up on YouTube:
Both oligarch and tyrant mistrust the people, and therefore deprive them of their arms.
Aristotle, Politics, Book V, 1311a.11.
All teems with symbol; the wise man is the man who in any one thing can read another.
Plotinus, First Ennead, II.3.7.
Paul Jacob’s your teacher:
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Done to the Dogs
It shouldn’t have happened.
Shire councils should not be killing dogs “to prevent volunteers at a Cobar-based animal shelter from travelling to pick up the animals.”
But that’s what happened. The Bourke Shire Council in the New South Wales region of Australia shot and killed several dogs, including a new mother, that were about to be picked up and taken to an animal shelter.
An Office of Local Government reported that the council did this “to protect its employees and community, including vulnerable Aboriginal populations, from the risk of COVID-19 transmission.”
We all know that shelters sometimes put down animals when the shelter cannot find a home for them.
This wasn’t that. The council’s action wasn’t a reluctant last resort. It was a first resort.
It was, the argument runs, about preventing volunteers from going from here to there in the ordinary course of their work, work that has not been discontinued for the duration of the pandemic.
The council’s action is an example of what happens when fear displaces common sense. The thwarted shelter volunteers, who love animals and volunteer precisely to prevent needless killing, are distressed. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that they had safety measures in place to deal with the pandemic while getting the dogs.
This isn’t the worst kind of thing going on in this world, obviously.
But you don’t have to be an animal rights activist to be appalled by the viciousness of the conduct.
And it does serve as a marker for the callousness and crazed panic of politicians in the current crisis. What else might they do?
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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Marcus Aurelius
A man should be upright, not kept upright.
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Charles Baudelaire
La plus belle des ruses du diable est
de vous persuader qu’il n’existe pas.
The finest trick of the devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.
Charles Baudelaire, Le Spleen de Paris (1869; posthumous).
Paraphrased in The Usual Suspects as “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Sketch of the author is by Édouard Manet.
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David Hume
Nothing appears more surprising to those who consider human affairs with a philosophical eye than the easiness with which the many are governed by the few.
David Hume, “Of the First Principles of Government,” in Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (London: A. Millar, 1764), vol. I, essay IV.