Why does Twitter make thoughtcriminals delete their own thoughtcrimes?

by philg

“Twitter suspends Babylon Bee for naming Rachel Levine ‘Man of the Year’” (New York Post):

Twitter locked the account of a right-leaning parody site, The Babylon Bee, after it awarded Rachel Levine, the transgender Biden administration official, the title of “man of the year.”

The Babylon Bee story was a reaction to USA Today’s naming of Levine, who is US assistant secretary for health for the US Department of Health and Human Services, as one of its “women of the year” last week.

Twitter says it will restore the account, which has more than 1.3 million followers, if the Bee deletes the tweet, but CEO Seth Dillon says he has no intention of doing so.

Apparently, Mr. Dillon was not unpersoned and could still tweet:

My question concerns the requirement that the Babylon Bee heretics delete their own tweet. Why didn’t Twitter’s orthodoxy enforcers delete it once they noticed the thoughtcrime?

A Facebook friend’s take on the original story:

it’s a meta-joke. The joke isn’t that he’s a man, the joke is that saying so is such a transgression of the orthodoxy that everyone immediately reacts, “omg, I can’t believe they said that” and bans them from social media

Is it an important part of the healing process for a thoughtcriminal to delete his/her/zir/their own tweet?

Related:

  • “Facebook and Twitter restrict controversial New York Post story on Joe Biden” (Guardian, October 14, 2020): Twitter said it was limiting the article’s spread due to questions about “the origins of the materials” included in the article, which contained material supposedly pulled from a computer that had been left by Hunter Biden at a Delaware computer repair shop in April 2019. … Facebook, meanwhile, placed restrictions on linking to the article, saying there were questions about its validity. “This is part of our standard process to reduce the spread of misinformation,” said a Facebook spokesperson, Andy Stone.
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Public health expert predictions vs. The Curve

by philg

Here’s an annotated chart from a tweet:

The CNN article cited seems to be “The Omicron surge hasn’t peaked nationwide, and ‘the next few weeks will be tough,’ US surgeon general says” (updated Jan 18). The February 23 interview with Dr. Biden’s colleague Dr. Fauci can be found on MSN.

(I’m not convinced that the above chart proves Dr. Fauci wrong, at least in the eyes of those who Follow Science. The masks won’t come off in Los Angeles until March 23 (ABC). For the Mask Believers (against the evidence), if there is another case surge this summer they could easily attribute it to the late March Unmasking.)

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Department of Poor Timing: Flying Across Russia cover story

by philg

Cover story in the March 2022 issue of a printed-and-mailed magazine for Cirrus pilots: “Flying Across Russia”.

Here’s the route that John R. Bone, a Florida-based pilot retired from Delta Airlines, took in July 2021:

(the trip from Florida to Iqaluit and Iceland was a mere prelude) The SR22 has enough range that there was no need to install ferry tanks for the over-water legs.

Captain Bone describes a Russian general aviation community that is well-integrated with the rest of the world and where everyone is friendly to Americans.

At press time, the author/editor added “given the current situation in the Ukraine, you should consult with the U.S. State Department for any trip in the region.”

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Asset price inflation + inflation = demotivation for successful people?

by philg

Although quite a few people of modest means enjoy aviation as a hobby, those of us who fly small aircraft often encounter the financially comfortable ($10-100 million in savings; when a house in Palm Beach costs $210 million, a centimillionaire can’t be considered “rich”). U.S. government coronapanic policies made these folks quite a bit wealthier, sometimes doubling their net worth in nominal dollars. At the same time, what they’re able to charge for working hasn’t changed too much and the Trump tax law changes caused their marginal tax rate to go up (state income tax no longer deductible from federal).

All of these people have enough savings to retire, but many continued to work when a year of hard work could increase their net worth by 5 percent. Quite a few of them have said that they’ve scaled back their efforts ever since asset prices took off. A year of hard work will now bump the net worth by only 2 percent and the typical person I’m writing about is in his 50s or early 60s. He might have only 10 more years of reliably good health. Why spend that final decade of vigor at a desk and starting at a computer if it won’t move the wealth needle significantly? These people already own a house, a vacation house, and a reasonably new fleet of vehicles. They don’t have a landlord demanding a 40 percent rent increase. Why not play tennis, kiteboard, hit the golf course, ski every day, or travel?

Does it matter to an economy when more of the most successful people retire younger? If we assume that their financial success can be attributed to luck, then it might be good. More positions will be open at the top of various enterprises, which will motivate people in their 40s to work harder. If, on the other hand, we assume that hard work, skill, and intelligence were primarily responsible for success, the American workforce is losing a lot of its best people.

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Refugees from Justin Trudeau’s Canada staying in Florida

by philg

We’ve been seeing cars with Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick license plates here in Florida. A surprising number say that they won’t be going back to Canada unless forced to. They cite the Canadian government’s lockdowns, mask orders, vaccine coercion, and dissent suppression as reasons for staying in the Florida Free State. As with the Science-following states of the Northeast, Canada made it easy for taxpayers to leave. It was illegal to work or study in person, for example, and every possible activity that could be moved to Zoom was moved to Zoom. This allowed a Canadian we met to enroll in an athletic training program here in Florida while simultaneously continuing his Canadian college education via Zoom. His parents followed him to Florida so now they’ll all here, paying Florida’s 6 percent sales tax instead of Canada’s 15 percent and, indirectly (via rent), paying Florida property tax.

This is straight out of Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970):

The basic concept is as follows: members of an organization, whether a business, a nation or any other form of human grouping, have essentially two possible responses when they perceive that the organization is demonstrating a decrease in quality or benefit to the member: they can exit (withdraw from the relationship); or, they can voice (attempt to repair or improve the relationship through communication of the complaint, grievance or proposal for change). For example, the citizens of a country may respond to increasing political repression in two ways: emigrate or protest.

If the northern border were as open as the southern border and Canadians could therefore migrate freely, I wonder how many would choose the comparative freedom of the U.S. states that remained mostly free during coronapanic (ranking).

Loosely related, some beachgoers on Sanibel Island who are as free as birds…

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Porn for Californians

by philg

From Lost River Road in Stuart, Florida:

(the “lost river” runs right along Interstate 95 and features a Marriott as well as a Cracker Barrel)

The $4.20 price for gasoline is actually not the lowest that we’ve recently seen in Florida. One station had it for $3.98. By contrast, the Google shows that the Chevron gas station where I used to fill up near HP Labs in Palo Alto is at $6.16.

Related:

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Waiting 18+ months to get 15 mpg in a Ford Bronco

by philg

From what I have observed, there is no better way to tackle the perfectly smooth roads between a suburban Florida house and the perfectly smooth paved parking lot next to the beach than in an off-road vehicle equipped with monster mud-tread tires. The neighborhood elite seem to have been acquiring Ford Broncos for this purpose. I talked to a Ford dealer about what would be entailed in getting an Everglades edition Bronco. No orders can be placed currently. There is no waiting list. When ordering is restarted at some unknown future date, the wait to buy one at MSRP will be approximately 18 months.

Here are the steel tube doors “for off-road use only” that the neighbors are using on the street:

In typical driving, I think this machine would be lucky to get 15 mpg and it is on target for delivery at the same time that gasoline reaches $10 per gallon. How can that be justified? Friends on Facebook who are passionate Democrats have been posting the following meme:

I think that the idea is that nobody should be upset with Presidents Biden and Harris regarding the high price of gasoline ($2.30/gallon in January 2021, at the end of the hated dictator’s rule). But we could also use the above meme to toss aside all concerns regarding climate change. As long as we have the money to buy a pavement-melting Bronco and fill it with dinosaur blood we should be “thankful” and not worry about what is happening to Mother Earth, to those who don’t have the money, etc.

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Update children’s cartoons to meet today’s propaganda challenges?

by philg

While visiting the new Peppa Pig Theme Park, I researched the glorious history of this cartoon. Wikipedia:

Peppa Pig is a British preschool animated television series by Astley Baker Davies. The show revolves around Peppa, an anthropomorphic female piglet and her family and her peers are other animals. The show first aired on 31 May 2004. The seventh season began broadcasting on 5 March 2021. Peppa Pig has been broadcast in over 180 countries.

Peppa and her family did not wear seat belts in cars in the first two series. After receiving several complaints, Astley Baker Davies announced that all future animation would include characters wearing seat belts, and that the relevant scenes in the first two series would be re-animated to include them. Similar changes were also made to add cycle helmets to early episodes with characters riding bicycles.

The main propaganda challenge of the past couple of years has been getting children to worry about a disease that kills 82-year-olds. Depending on the whims of Science at any given moment, we need to convince children to wear masks, give up school and social life, meekly accept injections of emergency use authorized vaccines, etc.

There has been some original propaganda produced in this genre, e.g., Disney’s Goofy series that includes “How to Wear a Mask”:

(Directed by Whoopi Goldberg‘s cousin Eric Goldberg?)

But why not go back and rewrite history, as the New York Times did with the history of mRNA vaccines? Break into the cryptomines and steal enough GPUs to digitally update all of the beloved animated movies and TV shows going back to the 1930s.

Snow White, kissed without consent (because she was as unconscious as a typical American college student on a Friday night), could be approached by a prince in an N95 mask. WALL-E could vaccinate EVE as soon as she arrives on a poisoned-by-SARS-CoV-2 Earth. Timothy Q. Mouse could cooperate with a TSA search and wear a mask at all times, except when eating and drinking, while flying on Dumbo:

Depending on the current CDC guidance and community transmission levels, the masked or unmasked versions of cartoons could be shown/streamed to kids depending on their physical location.

Readers: What do you think about the idea of content that adapts to the latest advice regarding mask-wearing?

Separately, you might ask how the Peppa Pig Park is. The rides are not too exciting, so it isn’t worth going on a crowded day.

As long as we’re talking about COVID-19, it is tough to understand how so many Americans were killed by a virus that attacks the obese:

(Thank you, Apple, for the 13mm-equivalent lens that enables everyone to fit into the frame.)

There is an air-conditioned TV-watching room:

The line to get lunch at the sole in-park restaurant was epic, but this was a Sunday just a week after the park opened and, in fact, they were turning away anyone without pre-purchased tickets or annual passes. Children 2-4 can probably be entertained for hours in the playground, splash park, etc. Our kids wanted to walk across the street to Legoland after about 1.5 hours and said that they wouldn’t go back unless there were no lines.

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The special challenge of being a Jewish wartime leader

by philg

Tucker Carlson took a break today from spreading Russian disinformation and Covid misinformation to interview Rymma Zelenska, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s mother.

Fox News: Mrs. Zaxby’s, the whole world admires your son Voldemort for his
personal courage, determination, and brave leadership. You must be very proud.

Rymma Zelenska: My other son is a doctor.

(The above makes me wish that there was a web page that would generate a Facebook fact check PNG to add to non-Facebook pages. The kinds of images that we see in “Facebook versus the BMJ: when fact checking goes wrong” for example (note that folks at the 180-year-old medical journal claim to know more about medicine than Facebook’s independent fact checkers). Fact checking myself, I can’t find any Internet source suggesting that Volodymyr Zelenskyy has a brother.)

Meanwhile… Shabbat Shalom! (and I hope this is not too soon)

Related:

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Philip’s Book Club: Bubble in the Sun (about the Florida real estate boom 1895-1926ish)

by philg

The latest book… Bubble in the Sun: The Florida Boom of the 1920s and How It Brought on the Great Depression (Christopher Knowlton). I’m enjoying it so far (listening via Audible). Timely, considering that home prices in the decent neighborhoods of Florida have roughly doubled since the lockdowns began in the Northeast and California.

The author notes that at some point in the 1920s, Florida had 60 million single-family house lots mapped out and ready to sell.

Chart of Florida population growth from 1900-1930 (source):

For context, here’s Maskachusetts v. Florida over 120 years:

Note that 1947 is highlighted as an important year for window air conditioners and the 1960s as when home central A/C become standard (energy.gov).

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