"But his themes are part of the inheritance of modernity, ones that he merely adapted with a peculiar, self-pitying edge and then took to their nightmarish conclusion..."

"... the glory of war over peace; disgust with the messy bargaining and limited successes of reformist, parliamentary democracy and, with that disgust, contempt for the political class as permanently compromised; the certainty that all military setbacks are the results of civilian sabotage and a lack of will; the faith in a strong man; the love of the exceptional character of one nation above all others; the selection of a helpless group to be hated, who can be blamed for feelings of national humiliation. He didn’t invent these arguments. He adapted them, and then later showed where in the real world they led, if taken to their logical outcome by someone possessed, for a time, of absolute power. Resisting those arguments is still our struggle, and so they are, however unsettling, still worth reading, even in their creepiest form."

From "Does 'Mein Kampf' Remain a Dangerous Book?" by Adam Gopnik (The New Yorker).

In this short article, Gopnik uses variations on the word "creepy" 5 times: "not so much diabolical or sinister as creepy.... The creepiness extends toward his fanatical fear of impurity.... Creepy and miserable and uninspiring as the book seems to readers now.... Putting aside the book’s singularly creepy tone.... it contains little argumentation that wasn’t already commonplace still worth reading, even in their creepiest form."

That suggests that, if we readi the book, we will feel an instinctive revulsion against the writer, even as the writer was endeavoring to inspire revulsion against designated others. Is it good to rely on this instinct to deliver us from evil?

"Until this fall, the National School Boards Association was a noncontroversial, bipartisan lobby group. Then its leaders wrote President Biden a letter."

"It alleged that the threatening and aggressive acts against school board members across the country might be a form of 'domestic terrorism' and asked for federal law enforcement intervention. Now, the association is at risk of total collapse....  If the school board association’s goal was to tamp down conservative parent protests, it had the exact opposite effect, galvanizing a movement that coalesced last fall around the idea of parental rights.... In one email, an NSBA board member wrote that [its interim director Chip] Slaven had said the letter had been requested by Education Secretary Miguel Cardona for use by the White House. In another, Slaven wrote that the letter included 'additional information on some of the specific threats,' as requested by the White House.... Five days after the NSBA letter, Attorney General Merrick Garland responded. He directed the FBI to work with U.S. attorneys across the country to convene meetings within 30 days with federal, state and local leaders to discuss strategies for addressing threats to school personnel...."

From "National School Boards Association stumbles into politics and is blasted apart/Its leaders compared aggressive school protests to ‘domestic terrorism.’ The backlash was fast and severe" (WaPo).

"The ability of companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Google to control what people see online is so potent, it is the subject of antitrust hearings...."

"But the decision by Amazon to push Parler off its dominant cloud-computing service illustrates just how powerful its content-moderation capabilities are as well.... [T]he companies that provide the technical infrastructure that powers websites and services where people express opinions have vast power as well, though they rarely use it. They include little-known companies that register website domains for customers; so-called content delivery networks, which can boost the speed at which webpages load; and Internet service providers, which connect homes and businesses to the Web.... [Amazon's] Amazon Web Services is the dominant provider of cloud infrastructure services, which let customers rent data storage and processing capabilities over the Web instead of running their own data centers.... [AWS's] Trust & Safety team, which has fewer than 100 workers, acts only on complaints received. In its reply to Parler’s suit, Amazon said it received reports in mid-November that the social network was 'hosting content threatening violence.'... It accused Amazon of conspiring with Twitter to take the smaller competitor offline just as it was significantly gaining users in the wake of Twitter permanently banning Trump.... 'Without AWS, Parler is finished as it has no way to get online.'" 

WaPo reports.

Here's the top-rated comment at WaPo: "If you support a baker choosing to not selling a wedding cake to a same-sex couple, then it follows you must support a company choosing not to do business with a customer that behaves in a manner contrary to the company's known parameters. As the same-sex couple was told, go find someone else to bake your cake. Parler should do the same. If they can't, perhaps it's the 'cake' they are trying to bake."

IN THE COMMENTS: MayBee takes on the cake analogy:

Parler was already on AWS. 

So the baker (aside from scale, monopoly considerations, and anti trust issues) situation would have to be more like: 

The gay couple hired the baker, paid the baker, and then on the day of the wedding the baker refused to deliver the cake. The baker, however, delivered a lot of cakes to your ex-boyfriends wedding on the same day. And then the baker announced you were dangerous.

Why I put AdSense ads back on the blog — self-defense.

Last October, after years of taking offense at Google for sending me email telling me I had offensive material on this blog, I discontinued my participation in Google Adsense. That is, I opted out of using advertising to monetize this blog. At the time, I wrote: 

I'm tired of checking to see what's supposedly a violation. I get so many of these and they're often posts that are nothing but a quote from a commentator in the NYT. But to see that the review didn't okay these pages... it's just mind-bending. I can't waste my energy dealing with this bullshit. In every case, I'm told that I've violated their policy with "Dangerous or derogatory content," which I find insulting. Here are recent posts that have been found in violation of that policy — even after review... 

Click through to see what I'd written, but suffice it to say that there was nothing that could possibly be considered "dangerous" or "derogatory." I said:

How did these articles get flagged? By robots or by opponents of this blog? What kind of review does Google have that would reinforce the idea that this is "Dangerous or derogatory content"?! Review by robots or by opponents of this blog? I can't imagine an unbiased human being finding all — or any — of these posts to have "Dangerous or derogatory content." It could be that I'm getting flagged for crap in the comments.... 

I'm not dealing with it any more. So enjoy ad-free Althouse.

Well, I am going to deal with it now and in the future.  I just turned AdSense ads back on. At least, Google was nice enough to offer me cake....

... yeah, Google, your AI did a nice job of knowing what I like. Cake. I like cake. But it's not yummy cake that has me coming back. And it's not the income from the ads. I realized I can use AdSense in self-defense. Google has the power to delete this blog. Whatever force caused those exasperating notifications is still out there, exerting pressure, whether I'm getting notifications or not.

As I noted in that October post, "It could be that I'm getting flagged for crap in the comments." In the comments there, Yancey Ward said: 

It isn't your content that is getting flagged, Ms. Althouse, it is what we commenters are saying - they are flagging the separate blog post which contains all of the comments at the end. You just have too many of us deplorables.

I'm pretty sure that's what happened, and I gave up ads because it seemed like too much work to go searching for what might be the problem in the comments. But the mechanism for reporting abuse to Google remains. This presents a risk to me, and I think the risk has increased in the past week. So I want those notifications. I'm worried not only that Google will overdo its censorship but also that haters of this blog — of the comments section of this blog — will come in here with pseudonyms and write violent threats and racist crap for the purpose of drawing censorship down upon me. 

There are various ways to deal with the problem of commenters who are here to hurt me, and some of them are too labor intensive. Some of them would diminish (or destroy) the flow of the comments. The comments at their best are phenomenal, and I'm very happy with the good commenters and have greatly appreciated their company these last 17 years. (Bloggiversary #17 is tomorrow.) But one thing I can do is to put the ads back up and then use the notifications to identify the comment threads that have something Google sees as a problem. Then it's a limited task to look for what needs to be deleted.

I delete comments without prodding from Google when I see threats of violence. I delete comments with the "n-word." I probably have a standard that's close to what Google is identifying, so I'm going to accept the help from Google now. I can't read every comment on every post — there are close to 4 million comments on this blog — but I can comb through the comments sections on posts where I get a Google notification. Google is getting vigilant about material that I don't want either — and, of course, I don't want a festering problem that I cannot see and that is undermining the existence of this blog. 

And that's why there are ads on this blog.

"Trump’s Twitter feed... was a window into his deranged and disordered mind. The insults, grandiosity, lies, threats, bigotry and incitement..."

"He was a menace to the world, but he was a genius of the genre: nasty, irreverent, oddly addictive. It will be strange to revert to humdrum, cautious political platitudes after drinking the wine of uninhibited, free-association populism. Here are some recent tweets by President-Elect Joe Biden. 'In 10 days, we move forward and rebuild — together.' 'In 2020 we’re going to build a brighter future.' 'I’m filled with fresh hope about the possibilities of better days to come.'"

Writes Nicholas Goldberg (LA Times via Yahoo News).

Maybe people will drift away from social media. How did we get so caught up in it in the first place? Trump was part of a wave of excitement over Twitter, and with him banished — along with other vivid voices of the right — it might not have any energy at all. Why look? What's there? An old man babbles about his fresh hope of a brighter future?! If you don't have people to bounce off of, what will you tweet about? 

I remember when Twitter first got started. I already had a successful blog, but I thought this "microblogging" should work for me. But almost immediately, I saw how much it depended on going back and forth with other people who were right there next to you on the platform. I was used to sole possession of my blog's front page, and I could chose to interact with commenters on the comments page or link to other blogs, but I had a sense of this being my own place. I liked that. I'll embed a tweet here if I want to go after something I see over there. 

But I've watched Twitter develop. It's so full of journalists and politicos who snap back and forth, and Trump fit right in and amped everything up. It's so fast and vicious and crazy. Now, he's going to be extracted? Who will the lefties — the people who are left (in 2 senses) — engage with? Each other?

Do I hope the whole place falls flat? I hate the censorship. And if it falls flat as a consequence, that's poetic justice. 

"We began preparing for Inauguration Day last year."

Write Guy Rosen, VP Integrity, and Monika Bickert, VP Global Policy Management of Facebook, setting off my bullshit detector. Last year was 12 days ago. I'll keep going. I want to read the original document, not the NBC News summary — "Facebook bans all 'stop the steal' content" — that I can see is getting lots of links. 

I don't believe Facebook would ban everything with the 3-word phrase. That would include all sorts of people who are just talking about what is the biggest news story going. It must be that "stop the steal" is a search term, and there's some additional judgment going on. 

Back to Rosen and Bickert:

But our planning took on new urgency after last week’s violence in Washington, D.C., and we are treating the next two weeks as a major civic event. We’re taking additional steps and using the same teams and technologies we used during the general election to stop misinformation and content that could incite further violence during these next few weeks. 

We are now removing content containing the phrase “stop the steal” under our Coordinating Harm policy from Facebook and Instagram.

It doesn't say  "We are now removing all content...."

We removed the original Stop the Steal group in November and have continued to remove Pages, groups and events that violate any of our policies, including calls for violence.

So "stop the steal" is a search term, and it's being used to quickly get to things that might violate anti-violence policies. There's still analysis of whether those policies — which apply to everything on the site —  are violated.

We’ve been allowing robust conversations related to the election outcome and that will continue.

Okay. Robust. We can still have robust conversations. Facebook has "been allowing" them. We can be robust — but not violent — because Facebook has, thus far, allowed it. We have freedom at the sufferance of Facebook. 

But with continued attempts to organize events against the outcome of the US presidential election that can lead to violence, and use of the term by those involved in Wednesday’s violence in DC, we’re taking this additional step in the lead up to the inauguration....

As always, we will continue to remove content, disable accounts and work with law enforcement when there is a risk of physical harm or direct threats to public safety.... 

Facebook should take steps to keep people from using it to plan acts of violence, but it should not obstruct the planning of rallies and protests. What should it do when there's a category of rally that has had an element of violence? I think it should work at achieving viewpoint neutrality. But the Inauguration this year is a unique situation, and special focus is justified. 

After the inauguration, our label on posts that attempt to delegitimize the election results will reflect that Joe Biden is the sitting president.

Hey, remember "Not My President Day," February 20th, 2017? From the Wikipedia article on the topic:

"Not My Presidents Day"... was a series of rallies against the president of the United States, Donald Trump, held on Washington's Birthday... Protests were held in dozens of cities throughout the United States.... The marches were mostly coordinated through Facebook.... 

The downfall-of-Trump conspiracy theories will go on for 100 years. They will never end in my lifetime. I have accepted this reality.

Americans love our great conspiracy subjects. The JFK assassination.... Area 51... We were talking about that last night, and I happened to say, "Truthers. Remember Truthers. What were the Truthers?" 

I had to stop and think which conspiracy subject had the people called "Truthers." I remembered: 9/11.

Now, 2 hours before sunrise, I'm seeing the headline "Some members of Congress fear the Capitol mob attack was an inside job" (Axios). Oh no. It's like the 9/11 Truther theory: inside job!

It will never end. We're just getting started. 

Do I need to worry that this is the conspiracy theory that gets you ousted from social media? Is it a left-wing conspiracy theory or a right-wing conspiracy theory? If I say it looks like a left-wing conspiracy theory because it's Axios so I'm probably safe writing about this, am I wafting a right-wing conspiracy theory and therefore vulnerable?

First sentence of the Axios article: "An information gap following the Capitol assault has fueled fears among members of Congress that it was an inside job involving the Capitol Police." So, in the absence of evidence — an "information gap" — you can speculate about anything and feel afraid. Then the gap itself can be said to "fuel fears." 

There's only one member of Congress identified in the article, Tim Ryan, "a lone Democratic congressman from Ohio": 

The mass resignations by the Capitol Police chief and Senate and House sergeant-at-arms, coupled with few briefings by federal officials like the FBI, have left important questions unanswered and a lone Democratic congressman from Ohio trying to fill in the gaps. Rep. Tim Ryan, chairman of a House Appropriations subcommittee overseeing the Capitol Police, has held three virtual briefings to update reporters. 

On Monday, he shared the shocking news that two Capitol Police officers had been suspended and 10–15 were under investigation for their behavior during the riot. "One was the selfie officer, and another was an officer who put a MAGA hat on and started directing people around,” Ryan said....

It's one thing to point to individual officers who, surrounded by a mob, behaved in a manner that could be construed as friendly. But why wasn't there far better security overall? If you're going to hypothesize that the Capitol Police supported the mob, don't limit yourself to one hypothesis. Why did the mob get into the building in the first place? But don't be a Truther. Actually find out what is true.

But you can see how there's a left-wing hypothesis here and a right-wing hypothesis. I presume, under current conditions of censorship, that the left-wing hypothesis will get air. That fuel will catch fire. The right-wing hypothesis... well, where will it go? 

"For a half-century, the trend in political culture has been inexorably in one direction: toward the steady loosening and eventually the near-obliteration of media filters...."

"The erosion of traditional establishment filters — first by such mediums as direct mail, talk radio and cable, later and most powerfully by social media — has been a primary factor in the rise of potent ideological movements on right and left alike.... [T]he decision Friday night by Twitter to permanently ban Trump from its platform... represents an effort to reassert the notion that filters have a place in political communication.... Twitter’s announcement was made with a righteous air, as the company said it was acting 'due to the risk of further incitement of violence'.... The moves comes [sic] at precisely the moment that his movement looked like it had been fatally punctured, due to the cumulative effects of Trump losing the 2020 presidential election, Democrats winning the Senate in Georgia special elections and even once-loyal Trump Republicans expressing disgust with his culpability in Wednesday’s insurrection.... If there is any unifying thread of the conservative movement from Nixon to Rush Limbaugh to Matt Drudge to Newt Gingrich to Trump, it is its resentment of the establishment news media and determination to make its filters obsolete.... "

From "Hey, Twitter, Are You Sure About This?/Trump’s ban from the platform is the latest battle in a 50-year war over media filters" by Politico founding editor John F. Harris.

Those who think they like this new censorship really need to step back and take the long view. Conspiracy theories about taking down Donald Trump will go on for 100 years. All of these efforts at suppression will be woven and rewoven into these theories. Driving the theories off the front pages of social media will make them wilder and crazier, and we won't be able to see them or argue with them. How many millions of serious devotees does Trump have? What will they do now? Why is depriving them of their Twitter connection a wholesome curative? 

"I’ve seen lots of Trump supporters asking why the Chinese Embassy’s account hasn’t been banned for this tweet..."

I’ve seen lots of Trump supporters asking why the Chinese Embassy’s account hasn’t been banned for this tweet.

This is how much conservatives hate people of colour, *especially* when they promote women’s rights. pic.twitter.com/2gPRLYICZG

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) January 9, 2021

How far will the anti-Trump forces go in crushing their opposition?

‘You’re not entitled your book contract,’ can quickly become ‘United doesn’t have to let you onto its planes’ ‘Marriott doesn’t have to let you stay at its hotels,’ or ‘Visa doesn’t have to let you use its cards.’

And maybe that’s the point.

— Abigail Shrier (@AbigailShrier) January 8, 2021

That tweet is a response to the news: "Simon & Schuster Cancels Plans for Senator Hawley’s Book/The publisher faced calls to drop the Missouri Republican’s upcoming book, 'The Tyranny of Big Tech,' following criticism of his efforts to overturn the presidential election" (NYT). 

“We did not come to this decision lightly,” Simon & Schuster said in a statement. “As a publisher it will always be our mission to amplify a variety of voices and viewpoints: At the same time we take seriously our larger public responsibility as citizens, and cannot support Senator Hawley after his role in what became a dangerous threat.”... 

“This could not be more Orwellian,” he said. “Simon & Schuster is canceling my contract because I was representing my constituents, leading a debate on the Senate floor on voter integrity, which they have now decided to redefine as sedition... We’ll see you in court."... 

The subject of Mr. Hawley’s book... is not about the election or Mr. Trump, but about technology corporations like Google, Facebook and Amazon. Its cancellation was remarkably swift and raised questions about how publishers will approach future books by conservatives who have supported Mr. Trump’s efforts to invalidate the election....

ADDED: Here's Hawley's full statement:

My statement on the woke mob at @simonschuster pic.twitter.com/pDxtZvz5J0

— Josh Hawley (@HawleyMO) January 7, 2021

I'm not sure what his "First Amendment" theory is, but I'd love to see his explanation. There's a folk meaning of "First Amendment" that simply means "freedom of speech," but Hawley is a Yale Law School graduate who had a clerkship with Chief Justice John Roberts, so we must attribute the highest level of constitutional law understanding to him. I await the explication!

ALSO: Hawley's book about the "tyranny" of Google, Facebook, and Amazon ought to discuss the problem of the repression of freedom of speech, and for all I know, he's got some sophisticated First Amendment theory in there. Send me a PDF of your book, Josh — or just the pages with the First Amendment material. I will give it a sympathetic read!

"'Gone with the Wind' was pulled from HBO Max while the long-running TV show 'Cops' was outright canceled..."

"... a sign that entertainment companies are re-examining the content they offer in the wake of nationwide protests for racial justice and against police brutality.... In a statement, HBO Max said 'Gone With the Wind' is a 'product of its time and depicts some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that have, unfortunately, been commonplace in American society.' When the movie returns to the platform it will be 'with a discussion of its historical context and a denouncement of those very depictions, but will be presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed. If we are to create a more just, equitable and inclusive future, we must first acknowledge and understand our history.'... On Monday, John Ridley, who won an Oscar for the adapted screenplay for the movie '12 Years a Slave'... call[ed] for 'Gone With the Wind' to be taken off HBO Max.... 'Cops,' once considered a groundbreaking look at the day-to-day life of police on the beat is now also out of fashion. Featuring the song 'Bad Boys'—with the lyrics 'Bad boys, bad boys whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do when they come for you?'— ...  'Cops' presented a very positive look at policing, showcasing officers handling everything from domestic disturbances and drunken driving to robberies and sex crimes...."

The Wall Street Journal reports (and this was not behind a paywall for me).

Sign posted in my neighborhood tells white people we "don't get to criticize" the choice of protesters to resort to rioting.

It's "white privilege," we are told, to express a desire for order and security:



A second sign attempts to convince us to abolish the police because they "uphold an inherently racist system" and "protect whiteness and capitalism":



ADDED: I anticipate that my post title will be criticized on the ground that there were a lot of peaceful protesters and we don't know whether any of them participated in anything that can properly be called "rioting." I want to keep the facts straight, and I want to know the facts. I agree that that those who broke windows and looted shops may have been an entirely different set of people from the people who were there to protest police brutality. I await the news reports and investigations that can bring these facts to light. I keep looking!

But that post title is just telling you what the sign says! It's one of the many problems with the sign. Whoever wrote that sign made no effort to separate the peaceful protesters from the rioters. It tells me to shut up about any objection I might have to the rioting because those in the oppressed group get to choose how to fight their oppression. This implies that the form of protest chosen was, in fact, theft and vandalism, and white people are not even allowed to criticize this expression.

Censored. Me. Really.

Shuttered. Closed down. Censored. Moi? Really?

My duo show with Stu Chait, Intersections of Form, Color, Time and Space was closed on July 18 by RIT-NTID’s Dyer Gallery because the nude figure paintings might be offensive to young campus visitors. It seems like just yesterday that I was saying issues of censorship didn’t raise their ugly heads here in Rochester.

At our first meeting with the gallery, I specifically asked whether nude figure paintings would be a problem. I pointed out that the primary work dealt with difficult themes of how women are marginalized in the 21st century. I am a feminist, and my figure work deals with things like religious submission, bondage, slavery, prostitution, obesity, exploitation, etc.

The Laborer Resting, 36X48, oil on canvas. Available.

These paintings were reviewed, accepted and hung by the gallery with no problems. The opening was well-attended, and there were children present. (For that matter, my son regularly schleps paintings for me, and his biggest complaint is that he’d rather be using his computer.) The show was featured in RIT’s University News  and mentionedin City newspaper. It was not until administrators saw the work that it was deemed unacceptable.

The cynic in me thinks that if I painted coy, sexy Odalisques there would have been no objection to the show. Young people are exposed to sexually-charged but non-intellectual images every day; in fact, this is part of the problem I am painting about.

Meanwhile, kids who go to malls are exposed to images like this on an everyday basis. And this really is obscene, because it uses sex to sell clothing.

If difficult issues of women’s rights can’t be examined in a college gallery, where can they be examined?

I have occasionally pulled individual pieces that were too challenging. Last month I had a show at AVIV Café and Gallery at Bethel Church on East Avenue. The director pulled one work because its depiction of starving Africa frightened children. But since he left the bulk of the work intact, this was no problem.

Aviva Sleeping, 36X24, challenges the notion that an obese woman cannot be a beautiful one.

Of course, I’m in Maine, so Stu Chait and Sandy Quang had to deal with the work of pulling, wrapping and moving around 60 large paintings. And visitors to the show will find the gallery empty. What a pity.

Sorry, folks. My workshop in Belfast, ME is sold out. Message me if you want a spot on my waitlist, or information about next year’s programs. Information is available here.