The liberty and mobility granted to average people by cheap gasoline and home energy is absolutely infuriating to socialist central planners. They need you people to stop moving around so much. You keep scuttling their glorious five-year plans.

More from John Hayward

Every modern effort to crush free speech begins as a crusade against "disinformation." China's massive Internet censorship apparatus was initially justified as an effort to control the spread of false information, and the Chinese state still describes it that way.

Censors begin by claiming that they only want to control the spread of deliberate falsehoods and push back against propaganda campaigns. They always begin by saying their primary concern is disinformation spread by hostile foreign powers. China constantly says that to this day.

The definition of "disinformation" begins to expand as the censors seek more power. Soon they aren't just going after DELIBERATE falsehoods pushed by malevolent conspiracies - they're suppressing everything from honest mistakes to predictions and "wrong" opinions.

It soon becomes clear that the censorship rules - like all other rules in totalitarian societies - are not applied evenly. The ruling party and its friends are judged much less harshly than dissidents. They get far more latitude to make unfounded statements or outright lies.

The censors move on, suppressing not just "disinformation" or demonstrably false statements, but even completely true statements that lack some vital "context." The censors declare that even pure truth is deceptive when it's not packaged and delivered "correctly."

John Hayward
@Doc_0

Every crisis becomes a religion if it lasts long enough.

One factor in that transformation is the Beautiful Theory phenomenon: the power elite insists its remedies are logical and politically correct so they MUST work, even if the actual evidence shows they obviously don't.

John Hayward
@Doc_0

It's entirely reasonable to say Trump's election lawyers need to produce hard evidence to back up their sweeping allegations, PDQ.

It's absurd to expect them to do it live on a talk show, as if they were carrying Marsellus Wallace's magic glowing briefcase from Pulp Fiction.

Host: You say thousands of votes were switched by corrupt computer software. You need to prove it.

Sidney Powell: Of course. I have the proof right here.

[opens briefcase, golden light spills out]

Host: Is that...?

Powell: Yes.

Host: Wow. OK, you win. I'm sold.

There is no way the "evidence" of the most serious claims is something that can be dangled in front of cameras. There is no way that attempting to do so would convince anyone, nor should it. The evidence will be extensively evaluated by experts and presented to judges.

It's perfectly appropriate to say the clock is ticking and this evidence needs to be correctly presented in the proper venue very quickly. Treating it like prop comedy on a talk-show set or at a press conference isn't exactly going to make it look more serious and credible.

It's possible Trump's team sincerely believes they have ironclad evidence, but it doesn't pass muster with court analysts. In other words, they're not trying to scam anyone, but they're mistaken about the value of what they have. Their reputations would survive in that case.

John Hayward
@Doc_0

I thought often during the latter Trump years about the contrast with Barack Obama's "stray voltage" strategy, which involved saying provocative and often flatly untrue things to prompt discussion of Obama's preferred topics for political gain.

John Hayward
@Doc_0

Panic has always been a valuable political resource, but 2020 was the year our ruling class perfected the art of harvesting it, renewing it, and refining it to weapons-grade purity.

The bitter irony is that one reason panic became so easy for politicians and grifters to sow and reap is the great collapse in confidence caused by their own incompetence and greed over the past few decades. The political class found a way to profit from its own ineptitude.

If public confidence in government and major institutions had not been so thoroughly shaken by years of rampant corruption and incredibly expensive failures, perhaps the public would not have been panicked so easily - and profitably! - when the coronavirus struck.

Even as public confidence collapsed and paranoia grew, social media came along to make our society more twitchy and neurotic. We argue constantly about the spread of "disinformation," but not enough about how social media rewards irrationality and performative emotionalism.

Panic and social media both nourish the human herd instinct, and herds respond to loud noises, not reasonable arguments. Our society was panicking over far less important and dangerous things before Covid-19 arrived. We were panicking over some bizarre social issue every week.

More from Society

Mike Romano
@MikeRomanoNTCA

The numbers on their face for the @FCC RDOF auction are exciting - lots of Gigabit winners. But it’s important to remember the job is just starting. These rural areas don’t magically get Gig today or tomorrow. 1/

The job is only done and the celebration can really only begin once we see that rural Americans are actually going to get the broadband they’ve been promised. 2/

And that’s the rub here - at least from preliminary indications, there are LOTS of question marks clearly hanging out there once you look past the gloss and proclamations. And since we won’t know for maybe 5 years if it worked, due diligence is essential now. 3/

A number of big winners have offered some service but never done Gig. This would be like giving hundreds of millions of $ to firms that have repaved residential streets to now design & build our interstate highway bridges. 4/

A number of big winners are using tech that has done Gig (maybe) only in tightly controlled applications that don’t look anything like rural America. This would be like giving interstate highway $ to firms who’ve built lots of scale models but never actually built a bridge. 5/

David Neiwert
@DavidNeiwert

1) “Eliminationism” is a term you need not just to become familiar with, especially in today’s American rush toward authoritarianism. This will be a long, illustrated thread explaining what it means, how it works, and why Donald Trump is now our Eliminationist in Chief.

Warning: Some images contain violence and are disturbing.

Also warning: This thread is ridiculously long. 75 tweets is insane. I apologize. But this stuff is important. I hope you find it compelling anyway. If not, I understand.

2) So, what exactly do we mean by “eliminationism”? Here’s the academic definition:

3) It was largely coined by Holocaust scholar Daniel Jonah Goldhagen in his 1996 book Hitler’s Willing Executioners, about the role ordinary Germans played in the Holocaust, which he described as fueled by “eliminationist antisemitism.”

4) The book describes how in reality the largest numbers of Jews and other victims killed by Nazi directive were rounded up and gunned down or immolated en masse and buried in mass graves by ordinary Germans and non-Jewish residents of German-occupied territories.

Kirsti Miller
@KirstiMiller30

@LaurenMurphyMMA @_Miatonin @AOC There is no no differences in strength between men and women are seen when normalized for muscle cross-sectional

@_Miatonin @AOC It is reductionist (and wrong) to suggest the performance gap is all about biology (e.g. testosterone).

@_Miatonin @AOC Based on the present evidence, it is reasonable to suggest that biological, psychological, and sociocultural factors contribute to the range of gender gaps observed across sports.

@_Miatonin @AOC Men and women exhibit similar relative responses to resistance training, with no gender-specific responses noted after 10-weeks of resistance

@_Miatonin @AOC A number of other gender-‘independent’ factors contribute to the regulation of adult muscle mass, including genetics, race, adiposity, training, diet, and birth

Celeste Williams
@CelesteforAR

As a mom of 4 I have spent a significant amount of my time discussing the virtues of truth telling and the consequences of telling a lie, at this moment one of the kids is writing me an essay on using self-control to ensure her words are true.

On Monday @TuckerCarlson said, “The Green New Deal has come, believe it or not, to the state of Texas. How’s it working out so far?”

First GND is a resolution, second it hasn’t even been past, 3rd, we’re talking about TX. This is objectively false.

He went on to say, “Not a single major American city is prettier or more functional than it was in 1950. The parks that previous generations so lovingly built are filled with vagrants and junkies."

"The monuments they constructed are covered with spray paint. Public transportation is a disgrace. It’s filthy, the streets are dangerous. Are you really surprised that Cory Booker was once the mayor of Newark, New Jersey? You shouldn’t be.”

Wow, that’s a lot to unpack and has little to do with the lack of power in TX. For myself I believe the best is yet to come. I see the dog whistles there, and it’s an excellent example of racist demagoguery and a sure path towards the destruction of our democracy.

Deepti Gurdasani
@dgurdasani1

Brief thread to debunk the repeated claims we hear about transmission not happening 'within school walls', infection in school children being 'a reflection of infection from the community', and 'primary school children less likely to get infected and contribute to transmission'.

I've heard a lot of scientists claim these three - including most recently the chief advisor to the CDC, where the claim that most transmission doesn't happen within the walls of schools. There is strong evidence to rebut this claim. Let's look at

The science shows us that most disease transmission does not happen in the walls of the school, but it comes in from the community. So, CDC is advocating to get our K-5 students back in school at least in a hybrid mode with universal mask wearing and 6 ft of distancing. https://t.co/dfvJ2nl2s4
— Rochelle Walensky, MD, MPH (@CDCDirector) February 14, 2021

Let's look at the trends of infection in different age groups in England first- as reported by the ONS. Being a random survey of infection in the community, this doesn't suffer from the biases of symptom-based testing, particularly important in children who are often asymptomatic

A few things to note:
1. The infection rates among primary & secondary school children closely follow school openings, closures & levels of attendance. E.g. We see a dip in infections following Oct half-term, followed by a rise after school reopening.

We see steep drops in both primary & secondary school groups after end of term (18th December), but these drops plateau out in primary school children, where attendance has been >20% after re-opening in January (by contrast with 2ndary schools where this is ~5%).