August 30, 2014
Source: Shutterstock
The Week’s Most Bureaucratic, Problematic, and Symptomatic Headlines
FEDS TO MONITOR ONLINE “HATE SPEECH”
If you ever doubted that the concept of “hate speech” was designed primarily to prevent any criticism of the government, cast your doubts into the ocean.
The federal government has allocated nearly $1 million to Indiana University to track “misinformation” and “false and misleading ideas” on twitter.com, which is currently the world’s seventh most heavily trafficked site.
The database is named “Truthy””a reference to liberal comedian Stephen Colbert’s routine about Republican fact-mangling.
According to the Truthy website:
We also plan to use Truthy to detect political smears, astroturfing, misinformation, and other social pollution…we rely on users like you to flag injections of forged grass-roots activity. Therefore, click on the Truthy button when you see a suspicious meme!
“Social pollution.” Why, that sounds downright Soviet! According to the university’s grant:
This service could mitigate the diffusion of false and misleading ideas, detect hate speech and subversive propaganda, and assist in the preservation of open debate.
OK, so it’s going to encourage “open debate” while urging users to snitch on anything they deem to be “hate speech” and/or “subversive propaganda”? Got it. Doublethink mode is on full blast here. Why not simply call it the Ministry of Truth?
Despite claims of non-partisanship, Truthy’s lead investigator is Filippo Menczer, whose personal webpage reveals that he supports only progressive political groups such as Move On, Greenpeace, True Majority, Amnesty International, the Sierra Club, and Barack Obama’s Organizing for Action. Obviously moveon.org, which is financed by billionaire George Soros, does not qualify as “forged grass-roots activity” in Menczer’s view.
In addition to Truthy’s chilling rollout, this week yielded ample evidence suggesting that the self-contradictory mental tapeworm “free speech does not include hate speech” has firmly taken root inside gullible minds both nationally and internationally.
Protesting an upcoming event by a satanic group, Oklahoma City’s Archbishop Paul Coakley said, “Not all speech is protected if there is hate speech and it is intended to ridicule another religion. I don”t believe it is a free speech matter.”
The United Nations, aided by “ethnic Koreans living in Japan,” is prodding Japan to enact “hate-speech laws“ that would criminalize the activities of nationalist group Uyoka Dantai.
African journalists have convened to “turn the tide against the rise of hate speech on the continent” and are urging one another not to report facts as objectively as is humanly possible, but rather to become partisan political advocates in a quest to draw “the public’s attention to the devastating effects of hate speech.” Forget about the concomitant devastating effects on public discourse.
BURGER KING ABDICATES HIS AMERICAN THRONE
Despite the company mascot’s name, Burger King has been perennially thwarted by Ronald McDonald as America’s fast-food alpha dog. But on Tuesday the chain announced it is buying out Canadian coffee-and-donuts giant Tim Hortons in a move that would make Burger King the world’s third-largest fast-food conglomerate. (McDonald’s remains at #1, while Yum! Brands”which handles Pizza Hut and Taco Bell”is #2.) Although Burger King officials deny it, many are viewing this move as an “inversion transaction” in which an American corporation merges with a smaller foreign company and relocates to avert America’s nominal corporate tax rates, which are the highest of all OECD countries. Barack Obama has dubbed such companies “corporate deserters” because within their sinister sociopathic hearts, they wish to avert paying monstrous taxes to fund an inept and corrupt governmental leviathan. Ironically, Warren Buffett“a huge Obama cheerleader who has urged higher taxes on the rich”is funding Burger King’s inversion transaction.
