Daily Shaarli
December 4, 2021
Last November, Twitter’s CEO, Jack Dorsey, testified before Congress that: “Content moderation rules and their potential effects, as well as the process used to enforce those rules, should be simply explained and understandable by everyone. We believe that companies like Twitter should publish their moderation process. We should be transparent about how cases are reported and reviewed, how decisions are made, and what tools are used to enforce.”
Dorsey’s claims are far from Twitter’s actual conduct. Upon appealing, I received a notification minutes later that “Twitter Support” verified I broke the rules, without any kind of reference to the text of my appeal.
As it wasn’t clear they had actually read it, I submitted it again. Then after not hearing back, I submitted another appeal. Over the course of two weeks, I submitted at least three appeals; the only reply I received throughout was the apparent auto-reply indicating Twitter Support verified I violated the “Twitter Rules.”
Dorsey also testified, “We have worked to build better in-app notices where we have removed Tweets for breaking our Rules. We also communicate with both the account that reports a Tweet and the account that posted it with additional detail on our actions.”
Again, I can vouch that none of this happens. I’ve explained in precise detail how my tweet fell well within the bounds of Twitter’s rules. Twitter refuses to explain why they believe otherwise. Worse, after forcing me offline, I had followers tell me Twitter had “unfollowed” them from my account.
In preventing people like me from accessing Twitter despite plainly qualifying under their own terms of service — and in failing to provide the kind of communication Dorsey testified under oath occurs in situations like mine — Twitter is arguably engaging in fraud, telling the public one thing while engaging in the opposite.
Much like the corporate news media, social media companies now operate as the communications wing of the Democratic Party, while continuing to be regulated like a public utility. This indemnifies them against content-related litigation even as they invest ever greater energy into carefully curating what appears on their platforms.
Ultimately this enables them to create a false sense of what’s “trending” or “viral” and what the “consensus” thinks, and protect notable personalities from criticism. It’s information warfare in service of progressive politics. Or, as Matt Taibbi recently put it, “What was supposed to be a historically democratizing technological tool [has] transformed into a dystopian force for censorship and control.”
Twitter’s demarcations around what’s allowed and what’s not are intentionally fuzzy, so that its faceless censors are empowered to decide for themselves. As conservatives like me know, that’s simply a pretext for carrying out shadow banning, frequent censorship, and permanent bans.
Recall that these enforcement actions come at the request of the Biden administration, which has made clear it wants social media companies to erase information they deem unhelpful. This enables the state to curtail our rights without amending the Constitution. It’s a disease rotting our republic, and it’s only getting worse.
Peripherals were part of system that launched Minuteman III missiles in the '80s.
Vaccination reduces the risk of delta variant infection and accelerates viral clearance. Nonetheless, fully vaccinated individuals with breakthrough infections have peak viral load similar to unvaccinated cases and can efficiently transmit infection in household settings, including to fully vaccinated contacts. Host–virus interactions early in infection may shape the entire viral trajectory.
At the end of the day, senators care more about protecting themselves and their colleagues from unpredictable, inconvenient floor votes than they do about passing legislation. //
Official Washington’s conventional wisdom about the Senate filibuster is a fairy tale. It is utterly unmoored from the choices being made by individual senators, party caucuses, and the body as a whole. Every person who has ever told you that the mean, nasty, outdated legislative filibuster is the source of Senate gridlock and the obstacle to common-sense legislating in Congress has either swallowed, or is peddling, a lie. //
The mistake everyone makes is looking at Senate inaction and asking, “How can we change Senate rules so it can start legislating again?” The better question is, “Why did the Senate stop legislating in the first place?”
The answer isn’t “gridlock,” any more than “a car” drove through that parade in Wisconsin. Somewhere along the way, senators’ behavior changed. It’s not a coincidence this happened along the same timeline as the polarization of the parties over the last 30 years. Partisan filibusters were harder, and bipartisan legislating easier when the Senate had dozens of conservative-leaning Democrats and liberal-leaning Republicans.
Before moving inside the chamber, let’s take stock of an important but easily overlooked point: Senate Democrats as a group are much farther left than they were in, say, 1990, and Senate Republicans are more uniformly conservative.
Because pundits and people who read them tend to be consistent ideologues themselves, this kind of polarization seems normal, even enlightened. But all it really means is that both parties in the Senate have drifted away from—abandoned, even—the middle of the country.
The public didn’t lurch left or right. Senate rules didn’t change. Congress is simply less representative of the American people than it used to be. Pew’s well-worn ideological scatter chart from the 2016 election exit polls illustrates the point below. //
Nuking the filibuster to establish a majoritarian Senate, in the context of our actual country, would only empower out-of-touch, unpopular, ideological extremists to unilaterally impose their outré elite values on a public that dislikes them. Constitutionally speaking, in the morality play of congressional politics today, the filibuster is the good guy. It’s not the hero we deserve, but the one we need, stopping Republicans from gutting social programs and Democrats from banning guns or red meat. //
Contrary to beltway shorthand, passing bills through the Senate doesn’t require bipartisan compromise. It just requires compromise, full stop. There’s a difference. Sixty-vote majorities could be found on almost any issue, any week of any year, through an open amendment process on the Senate floor. Heck, they could call up a blank bill for floor consideration, and let every Senator offer whatever amendment he or she wanted, and before too long, a final bill that could get 60 votes would emerge.
Both parties know this, and refuse to do it. Why? Because an open amendment process—“the wild west,” they call it—would force senators to take amendment votes that would, quelle horreur, lay bare their actual beliefs and policy priorities to their constituents.
That’s it. That’s the whole story of Senate “gridlock.” Not the filibuster, not cloture, not grandstanding, not Donald Trump or “norms,” or “obstruction” or any other nonsense you’ve been told.
At the end of the day, senators care more about protecting themselves and their colleagues from unpredictable, inconvenient floor votes than they do about passing legislation. This, and no other reason, is why both parties now legislate via secret negotiations, followed by an obnoxious, rigged floor process (“filling the tree”) that blocks all amendments except the ones mutually agreed to by the party leaders.
Remember, the amendments this process blocks are not the ones that wouldn’t pass, but the ones that would. Most Democratic senators don’t want to have to vote on popular Republican amendments to, say, curb immigration or protect gun rights. Likewise, most GOP senators don’t want to have to defend a vote against a higher minimum wage or increased spending for children’s health care.
All kinds of bills and amendments could get 60 votes in the Senate today. The problem is, they would be the wrong 60 votes—majorities representing the public as such instead of their party. When the dust settled, lots of incumbents on both sides would invite dangerous primary or general election challengers next time they faced the voters. //
Ultimately, Senate majorities do not see gridlock as a frustrating, inferior alternative to passing legislation. They see it as a superior alternative to the transparency and accountability that comes with discharging their constitutional responsibilities.
Not convinced? When was the last time you saw a Senate majority of either party really put their shoulder to the wheel to break a partisan filibuster? I don’t mean whining to cable news or talk radio. I mean work: staying in session all night, for days on end, forcing late night attendance, including the sick old men, the cancellation of weekend plans, missing piano recitals and family weddings? Never.
If Senate majorities really want to pass legislation, they could, anytime, through a combination of compromise, transparency, and the exertion of physical energy. This approach has not been tried and found wanting, but found inconvenient and left untried. //
The vast majority of federal policies today rendered untouchable by the Senate’s 60-vote cloture threshold was written between the 1930s and 1960s when even Republicans were proud liberals. Are three years of Roe-lite or some half-baked Green New Deal ramp-up really worth giving President Ron DeSantis, House Speaker Jim Jordan, and Senate Majority Leader Ted Cruz free-rein to rewrite the Great Society and New Deal, the APA, the NLRB, NEPA, civil service, education, and immigration law in one swing?
They would decentralize and defund dozens of power centers within the progressive movement. The left has unimaginably more to lose from a majoritarian Senate than the right. //
At any given moment, both parties are advancing, on different issues, popular and unpopular ideas. The way the Senate is designed to work is, the popular ideas get creatively cobbled together and passed as consensus compromises. And the unpopular ideas are discarded as slogans for the performance artists in the House.
The only reason this doesn’t happen today is that senators’ real, if unstated, top priorities are personal convenience and partisan positioning. Passing major legislation is a distant second or third. What we see on C-Span2 every day is the majority applying minimal-to-modest effort to pass legislation, and maximal effort to protect their seats and undermine the other side.
The Senate’s rules do not stop it from legislating. It’s the senators themselves, entitled and vain, cowering in the shadows behind the one thing in Washington with the courage to stand up for all of us, simultaneously against the mob and the elite. The filibuster isn’t our hero. It’s a silent guardian, a watchful protector. A dark knight.
People inoculated against Covid-19 are just as likely to spread the delta variant of the virus to contacts in their household as those who haven’t had shots, according to new research.
In a yearlong study of 621 people in the U.K. with mild Covid-19, scientists found that their peak viral load was similar regardless of vaccination status, according to a paper published Thursday in The Lancet Infectious Diseases medical journal. The analysis also found that 25% of vaccinated household contacts still contracted the disease from an index case, while 38% of those who hadn’t had shots became infected.
The results go some way toward explaining why the delta variant is so infectious even in nations with successful vaccine rollouts, and why the unvaccinated can’t assume they are protected because others have had shots. Those who were inoculated cleared the virus more quickly and had milder cases, while unvaccinated household members were more likely to suffer from severe disease and hospitalization. //
“Our findings show that vaccination alone is not enough to prevent people from being infected with the delta variant and spreading it in household settings,” said Ajit Lalvani, a professor of infectious diseases at Imperial College London who co-led the study. “The ongoing transmission we are seeing between vaccinated people makes it essential for unvaccinated people to get vaccinated to protect themselves.”
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