Irish Media Minister Supports Govt Defining What Speech Can Be Permitted Online
Discussing the implementation of the Digital Services Act (DSA), Ireland’s Media Minister defends the decision that a government appointed entity will ultimately decide what speech is permitted by citizens
This is the next phase in the control of opposition to the expansion of government controls. We are all traveling at the front of one long continuum toward tyranny.
Are the people of Ireland so weak and pathetic they cannot make decisions or formulate opinions for themselves? Of course not.
This is not what government control of information is about. Government control of information is about control of the people. WATCH:
CTH has encountered criticism for our position on information. Perhaps it is important to step back and explain exactly why we should not be playing by rules established to control us while engaged in the battle of ideas.
First, my position:
…”There is no such thing as “disinformation” or “misinformation”. There is only information you accept and information you do not accept.
You were not born with a requirement to believe everything you are told; rather, you were born with a brain that allows you to process the information you receive and make independent decisions.”…
There are only two elements within the public discussion of information, truth and not truth.
In an era filled with “fact-checkers” and institutional guardians at the gates of Big Tech, let me explain exactly why it is important not to accept the speech rules of the guards.
When you accept the terms “disinformation”, “misinformation” or the newest lingo, “malinformation,” you are beginning to categorize truth and lies in various shades. You are merging black and white, right and wrong, into various shades of grey.
When your mind works in the grey zone, you are, by direct and factual consequence, saying there is a problem. You are correct; however, this is where people may make a mistake. The problem is supposed to be there.
It is not a solution to the problem to try and remove the grey simply because it takes too much work to separate the white pixels from the black ones. You were born with a gift, the greatest gift a loving God could provide.
You were born with a brain and set of natural instincts that are tools to do this pixel separation, use them.
If you define the grey work as a problem you cannot solve on your own, you open the door for others to solve that problem for you. You begin to abdicate the work, and that’s when trouble can enter.
The sliding scale of Pinocchios is one of the most familiar yet goofy outcomes.
Put more clearly, when you accept the terminology “disinformation”, you accept a problem.
The problem is then the tool by which authorities will step in to make judgements.
Speech, in its most consequential form, is then qualified by others to whom you have sub-contracted your thinking.
When you willingly sub-contract information filters to others, you have lost connection with the raw information.
CTH was founded upon the belief that truth has no agenda, nor does it care about you, your feelings, or your opinion of it. It just sits there, empirically existing as evidence of information in its most pure form.
The search for truth, in all things, is the mission objective of this assembly. Often, we don’t like the truth; often, the truth is bitter, cold, challenging and even painful to accept. However, the truth doesn’t care.
Information in its most raw form is ambivalent to your opinion. If you struggle to accept these things, that’s when you need grey. The New York Times is not called the “grey lady” accidentally.
Personally, I am an absorber of information – perhaps on a scale that is unusual. But I do not discount information from any form until I can put context to it and see if the information makes sense given all the variables present.
When something doesn’t feel right, it’s almost always because it isn’t right.
Often, I find myself struggling in the grey and complex. It is not unusual to spend days researching, digging, clarifying a situation, only to discover the path to finding the truth is in another direction entirely.
Erasing everything and starting over is frustrating, but it is genuinely the only approach that works; and often finding truth is supposed to be difficult, that’s why it is rewarding.
In the digital information age, we are bombarded with information. It is easy to be overwhelmed and need to find something or someone who has better skills at separating the black grains from the white ones.
All opinions in this quest should be considered; thus, it is important to allow the free flow of information.
There is some language that needs to be constrained if we are to participate in a respectful society, with grandma’s rules and knowing the audience. CTH has guidelines for comments for this exact reason.
However, those constraints need to be based on a set of inherent values. When it comes to information, it is important to draw a distinction from speech.
There needs to be an open venue for all information. Unfortunately, when we begin to apply labels or categorization to information, there’s an opportunity for information to be manipulated – even weaponized.
Saul Alinsky spent decades pondering the best techniques to weaponize information and speech. Alinsky’s intentions, in the endeavor to change society by changing how language and information was used, were not good.
Be careful about anyone saying we need to label or categorize information in order to control or remove speech from the discussion.
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Header image: The Conversation
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Censorship is already out of control. There’s an internet wall between countries and states, and the crap people post doesn’t get seen by anyone outside of their sliver.
The bulk of censorship is of the “shadow” variety, and people are not able to post freely.
For example, you cannot make posts and images pointing out how the “shootings” are all fake, but they are. They’re FAKE FAKE FAKE, but I got banned from multiple websites for pointing out the truth.
The internet is virtually useless as it is; any additional censorship of it will make it entirely unusable.
Hell, you can’t even get relevant results for most of what you search for, and the results you do get are all filtered to controlled sources. I often get results that are 20 years old, which is obsolete in a programming search, and if I search for only the last year, the results disappear altogether. There was a time when Google would return 27+ pages of relevant information; now, your lucky to get 4.
If you want to buy something, you get directed to their sellers instead of the multitude of small businesses that keep your country alive.
The internet is quickly becoming a poison pill just like the medical industry.
And, on top of all that, there is the newly revealed ability of wifi routers to map a room. The router emits certain wavelengths and then receives them back when they reflect off of objects. Software is then used to paint a picture of the room interior and people. The results aren’t the best obviously, but there is a surprising amount of detail.
Mobile phones are no different. You can save battery by blocking the microphone, speakers and cameras, because they’re always spying on you. They take screenshots at regular intervals without telling phone owners and the cameras emit some kind of waves. I put tape over mine, and my rear camera has dried and bubbled the tape in 3 places. There happens to be 3 lenses beneath the bubbling, so they are probably emitting something that I’m unaware of.
Other devices, such as TVs, are no different either. They use 2 way speakers that double as microphones.
Its strange that their future dystopian bullshit centers on using a technology that is virtually unusable. It will be wiser to stay away from their technology, instead of being enslaved on it.
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