Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

Facebook’s Top Censorship Board Is Filled With Elite, Power-Loving Bureaucrats

Facebook Oversight Board co-chair and Helle Thorning-Schmidt made it very clear that she does not believe free speech is a human right.

“How do you moderate content and how do you find that balance between human rights and free speech, which is a human right, but also other human rights because free speech is not an absolute human right,” the censorship head asked during a live stream this week.

“It has to be balanced with all the human rights and that is what the oversight is there to do,” she added.

Thorning-Schmidt is one of the 20 people who sit on Facebook’s newest attempt to create a mass censorship campaign, which the White House just recently publicly endorsed. The board masquerades as a means of providing support to “people’s right to free expression and ensure those rights are being adequately respected.”

The board’s actions, however, contradict that mission. Their decisions about former President Donald Trump’s ban from the platform and their continued efforts to subdue alternative opinions about COVID-19 have shown, they give anything but an accurate and fair look at content moderation.

“Freedom of expression is a fundamental human right,” the website clearly states, despite employing the efforts of people such as Thorning-Schmidt who spew anti-free speech rhetoric.

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French judge fired for trying to offer 12-year-old daughter up for sex

Olivier Bailly was in charge of the family law division of the Dijon court system. But he has been removed after a debacle involving his 12-year-old daughter for sex online became known.

A rundown of the basics was described by The Times. Bailly is a 55-year-old French judge who was the vice-president of the law courts in the capital of Burgundy. He was removed from his position for “conduct causing serious damage” to the judiciary’s image.

It was last month that Olivier Bailly told the courts that “post-traumatic stress” caused him to engage in these sorts of behaviors. Of course in doing so he admitted to the deed itself.

According to the Daily Mail, Bailly presented this argument in a bid to keep his job. “I do not feel really unworthy of this profession, which I love. I think I have been useful and that I can still be useful one day.”

Outlets cite the 2007 trial of murder and rapist Pierre Bodein (which Bailly was lead prosecutor on) as the reason for the French Judge’s mental health trauma.

Olivier’s wife, Sophie Véjux-Bailly, is also a judge, and the pair of them were “active in partner-swapping circles,” according to France 3 television. She was cleared by police as not posting an image of their youngest child in a swimsuit onto the “partner swapping” website.

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The Increasing Aggressiveness Of Petty Tyrants

Somewhere along the way, we seem to have come to the point here in the United States where it’s all politics all of the time. That’s not literally true, of course, but it seems as if political tensions and conflicts obtrude on daily life with increasing frequency. It’s hard to get away from it.

Having written in the past about Americans’ traditional love for the simple joy of being left alone, today we’re overrun with zealots who aggressively push their agenda every chance they get. They relish getting into our faces and going out of their way to exceed the normal boundaries of the offices and positions they occupy.

Who’s to blame? That’s largely a matter of one’s political perspective.

Conservatives like myself see in progressives an overwhelming sense of self-righteousness that breeds a sense that they’re justified, even entitled, to try to compel the rest of us to think like they do and support the same policy objectives. From sweeping messianic goals like saving the world from an (imaginary) imminent climate catastrophe down through every lesser goal of progressive utopia and conformity, the left’s actions are nothing, if not heavy-handed.

Progressives, on the other hand, view Americans who don’t share their world view and aren’t on board with their agenda as some combination of ignorant, unenlightened, retrograde, immoral, selfish creeps who need to be bludgeoned into cooperation since they so pathetically lack the good sense to conform to progressive orthodoxy.

Following are some of the ways in which progressives are going overboard to steamroll their opponents. Let’s start with several cases in which progressive office-holders are so eager to assert their rightness and the other side’s wrongness that they egregiously exceed the proper limits of their official powers.

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Mysterious skull fossils expand human family tree — but questions remain

Fossils found in China and Israel dating from around 140,000 years ago are adding to the ranks of hominins that mixed and mingled with early modern humans.

The fossils from Israel hint that a previously unknown group of hominins, proposed to be the direct ancestors of Neanderthals, might have dominated life in the Levant and lived alongside Homo sapiens1,2. Meanwhile, researchers studying an extremely well-preserved ancient human skull found in China in the 1930s have controversially classified it as a new species — dubbed Dragon Man — which might be an even closer relative to modern humans than are Neanderthals3,4.

But both findings have sparked debate among scientists. The studies are based on analyses of the size, shape and structure of fossilized bones — methods that are subject to individual judgement and interpretation. As is often the case for fossil finds, there is no DNA evidence.

Separating early hominin specimens into unique species, working out if and how they interacted with others, and tracing their evolution are all difficult and contentious: “It’s very messy,” says Jeffrey Schwartz, an anthropologist and evolutionary biologist at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.

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