This just makes me sad.

This is from Glenn Greenwald’s substack account. It makes me sad because I remember when Glenn Greenwald was a voice of reason on the Left. Now he carps at “liberals” for “censorship” at a time when the Right is campaigning to remove books from school libraries and prevent schools from teaching actual American history. Apparently that’s okay. But if people are refusing to do business with Spotify because Joe Rogan’s podcasts about covid could be getting people killed, this means all of liberalism is about censorship. I can’t even.

Florida school district cancels professor’s civil rights lecture over critical race theory concerns

Republicans Are Trying to Suppress More Than Votes

Conservatives Are Banning Books From Schools While Whining About ‘Cancel Culture’

Art Spiegelman sees the new ban of his book ‘Maus’ as a ‘red alert’

Greenwald pooh-poohs “the vastly overstated claim that vaccines prevent transmission of COVID” which in fact have been supported by solid evidence. But notice that he skips the more critical issue of hospitalizations, now that Omicron has changed the transmission calculations (although “breakthrough” cases of the fully vaccinated are still much, much lower than the rate of cases among the unvaccinated).

As of January 12, data show the unvaccinated are 20 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than fully vaccinated people. Note that since the fully vaccinated population tends to be older, and with more health problems, than the unvaccinated, the actual protective benefits of vaccination for an individual would probably be a lot higher. See also.

https://time.com/6138566/pandemic-of-unvaccinated/

I’m really tired of having to explain this.

Further, let’s consider that the protests of Joe Rogan on Spotify are not coming from government or a political party or dark-money funded organizations, but just people. People voting with their pocketbooks by canceling subscriptions or boycotting businesses is a time-honored way of expressing approval or disapproval of public speech or action. The book and information banning going on right now in public school classrooms and public and school libraries is being organized and funded by conservative donors and enabled by high-level Republican officer holders. This  comes closer to any definition of censorship than people canceling their Spotify accounts.

And the moral is, no matter how smart you are, there still could be a rabbit hole out there somewhere with your name on it. Take care.