Facebook users in Romania see content related to street protests reviewed
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On the other hand, folks, this is a little reminder that censorship is a doubly edged knife ;-) So next time you call for censoring "fake news", think again, because it's not you who will benefit from it.
A couple of years back I was enthusiastic about the rise of social media for informing and coordinating citizens to fight injustice. Now that I'm older and wiser, I can tell you that no evolution or revolution can happen because of Facebook, only regression. Facebook is poison.
Censoring modern propaganda greatly limits the damage it can cause, while protestors have more traditional ways of organizing their protests.
I am not a fan of censorship but it appears some fraction of credulous humanity requires it to maintain at least a tenuous grasp of reality.
Millions of Americans weren't instantly converted from open-border advocates to wanting to build a Wall and limit immigration, thus supporting Trump, because of a few Facebook ads.
Propaganda doesn't work in a vacuum. You already need an actual issue to be its catalyst. And censoring anyone who speaks of it, even if it is in an exaggerated way, is probably better in the long run than letting it fester until it really blows up with much more force.
I would same thing for this new idea of hate speech that some people prefer to ban.
I'm guessing that this was mangled in an edit and some essential word was left out. Or are you saying censorship is the opposite of "letting it fester", and that if we can prevent issues from being spoken about we can prevent them from ever exploding?
I think censoring ideas will lead to groups moving to echo chambers where whatever issue they have, is magnified into something far more absurd than the original issue probably is. And that inevitably leads to violence.
It's better for society to allow open debate, even if its uncomfortable, than to just ban users or groups, make ad-hominem attacks, and hope it goes away.
I'm also willing to bet that these people as a vast majority weren't voters for the party currently in power.
And the Romanian government is far from having NSA's IT prowess (yes, I know that they botched up quite a few things, but you have to keep in mind that the NSA & US government are playing at an entirely different level than most countries in the world except for maybe China, Russia and 3-4 others). At least on the IT front things the blow back could an order of magnitude bigger than what they're trying to do, clumsily.
Interesting, would you like share some more information on that?
https://www.romania-insider.com/romania-expands-tax-incentiv...
Micro-enterprise tax
It is no longer possible for any company to opt for a profit tax payer status (16% profit tax rate applied to its taxable profits) instead of a micro-enterprise tax payer (1% or 3% tax rate applied to its revenue), even if the company has share capital of more than RON 45,000.
I’m not sure ‘developing country’ is the right term here, however I agree compared to Western European countries, most Eastern European countries aren’t quiet as ‘developed’ (disclaimer: I live in one) which I assume is what you meant to imply. Heck even Western/Eastern is bad, because Finland definitely isn’t in the west of Europe... So is there a better term to describe this type of country?
And to everyone else, Facebook had tremendous oportunity to stand their/our ground and pissed the FTC off with some sort of minute/minutes/hour blackout in terms of net neutrality. Where was Zuckerberg then??? I know when you read it online its just a news; masses won't care. Instead of your profile, if Zuck would put a black page with number to your local representative and inform it will stay for 10 minutes, imagine the outbreak - FTC president would be out of door by then. Instead Zuck did nothing. Truly despicable that was a moment to create history in the name of freedom that Zuck praise his record on. As bad user said -- Facebook IS poison.
I'll add to that. The internet is a great tool for coordinating citizens, spreading information, and fighting injustice. Having facebook, or any similar monolithic capitalist behemoth, in charge of controlling the flow of that information, is a BIG regression.
The internet was going to be great. How did it come to this :(
In application just because a piece of information exists on the internet doesn't mean folks will be exposed to it. Folks values are reflected, but are also molded by the information that is made readily available to them through there internet habits and social network. If entities censor or place greater emphasis on certain streams of information they can attempt to mold the resulting values of users.
Humans online polarize themselves and split into sub groups. (Amazingly the sub groups can end up polarizing themselves.)
Facebook has never dodged the issues forums has faced.
The core issue is human behavior and nature.
I've seen polarization appear where none used to be before.
My view is that the web often results in a worst case scenario.
1) Text like books, are permanent - once written, you can always revisit them and they don't get erased
2) Voice is very good for real time expression of emotions you feel. But its never permanent, or easy to revisit. That momentary flash of emotion was never bottled and dissipated.
The net combines the worst of it.
Have an angry thread? You get triggered and write an angry response - and then go away.
Meanwhile, people keep coming to the thread, and it feels like an ongoing conversation - and now they start getting triggered - over and over again.
Its like having people exposed to an anger stimulus, randomly and at mass scale.
So its not just more apparent: It's not just tribe/group discovery - its straight up tribe/splitting and creation.
The Internet (social media to be more specific) has helped people with fringe ideas to connect with each other on a global basis, regardless of how fringe these ideas might be. Pre social-media these "fringe believers" used to be so fractured and compartmentalized, limiting their influence and general visibility quite much.
Social media has allowed for these fringe believers to find each other, not just allowed, it's pretty much motivated it by personalizing what content and users get surfaced to them. To put it in not so nice terms: Facebook has facilitated a situation where individual town-idiots unite on a global scale, this allows them to shape the public discourse in ways they haven't been able to before.
Case in point: People throwing around the term "cultural Marxism" these days like it's the most normal thing in the world. When "cultural Marxism" is basically just a reframing of the age-old Nazi conspiracy theory about the "International Jews controlling everything".
Not too long ago you could easily disregard people spreading such memes, as they were rare and single individuals. This doesn't work anymore because the idea of "cultural Marxism" being an actual thing has now been legitimized through massive social media echo chambers.
The sad part is that many of these people often don't even know what they are regurgitating because they get all their information just from their social media feeds. A quick google search of "cultural Marxism" should be able to educate anybody in a matter of minutes, but that would involve effort while "+like" and "share" barely requires any effort and is the far more appealing course of action when users see something that reinforces their beliefs.
Moral panics are never productive, but this won't be the time we learn this either.
So what is the non capitalist alternative? State controlled social media services? Really? That would be a better option in Romania right now?
Facebook is far from perfect, I barely use it at all because it winds me up, but it’s a fantastic Communications platform. And of course they shouldn’t be interfering like this, but it looks like they’ve been manipulated by people flagging content rather than deliberately taking a political stance. I’m sorry but this anti capitalism whining, without offering even a hint of what you think might work better, really winds me up. It’s just populist posturing.
Here they are:
They very much do control the flow by "personalizing" the content people see and don't see based on how likely somebody is to click something for ad-revenue. That's the direct result of the "capitalist nature" of these platforms; If they can't monetize it, it's of no interest to them, so they try to capitalize on everything, even on users biases.
Surfacing news about how refugees are not raping everything in sight won't do much for a user who has a very clear anti-refugee bias, such a user won't be very likely to click such news as such they won't be surfaced to the user. But if you surface news about how Germany is supposedly on the brink of collapse because refugees are roaming free as raping herds, to that very same user, then you will most likely just have generated ad-revenue.
This doesn't just extend to what kind of news get surfaced, but through the whole system: Suggestions for friends, groups, and whatnot all take into account the individual users known "leanings", in essence creating echo chambers where only people of similar views interact with each other. While at the same time blending out any alternative/controversial view (for that group) by not even surfacing them to in the very first place, as they won't be very likely to click on them and as such less chance for ad-revenue.
That's why so many people are so utterly convinced of their positions: Their social media feeds give them constant reinforcement for their position by only surfacing news, people, and organization who share these position.
Eli Pariser's book "The Filter Bubble" has some very good (and scary) insights into this dynamic.
It's strange how you - out of all possible kinds of stories that might go viral on social media - choose to evoke a charicature of the mass influx of "refugees" into Germany and its consequences on public order and on the safety of women in public places. This is strange because your view seems to be that a benevolent govenment can protect hapless citizens from fake news stories by censoring social media. However, in the aftermath of New Year's Eve 2015-2016 exactly the opposite happened.
When more than 1200 women got sexually assaulted during one night, on one city square in Cologne [1], not a single newpaper or TV channel dared to break the news in the following 4 days. It was only very reluctantly - when the outrage on social media became too big to ignore - that they started covering it.
Thanks to this coverage it became gradually clear that similar incidents had happened all over Germany that night, and also in other European countries.
It also became clear that the Cologne police was understaffed at that time as many officers were diverted to Bavaria [2] to help manage the influx of a million [3] largely undocumented foreigners into the country. This created a de facto lawlessness in the streets of Cologne that allowed groups of muslim males on New Year's Eve to subject Western women to the same Quran/Hadith-inspired misogyny and violence [4] [5] [6] as women in Muslim countries [7].
Without the unregulated social media (and in spite of its many well-known flaws) the German general public would never have been made aware of these events and of the initial cover-up by the government. On June 30 2017, slyly planned on the same day as the gay marriage bill (which got all the attention that day) [8], the German parliament approved a bill to censor "hate speech" and "fake news" on the internet. [9]
So today it is very well possible that news about another "Cologne-scale" event would never bubble up into public knowledge because now social media are censored just as thoroughly as regular media.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Year%27s_Eve_sexual_assaul...
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/06/tensions-rise-...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/05/04...
[4] https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/quran/women-worth-l...
[5] https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/quran/rape-adultery...
[6] https://www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/muhammad/rape.aspx
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_sexual_assault_in_Egypt
[8] http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2017/06/world/germany-sam...
[9] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/jun/30/germany-approv...
How is that "strange"? I chose that example on purpose because it's as relevant as it's ever gonna be and it's exactly with that topic where these dynamics have become especially bad if not straight up dangerous. At this point, some people are living pretty much in alternative realities.
> This is strange because your view seems to be that a benevolent govenment can protect hapless citizens from fake news stories by censoring social media.
I didn't make any statements along those lines, at all. So please don't try to strawman me just for the sake of derailing this discussion into "Germany is actually on the brink of collapse!". Just taking a look at one of your "sources" (religionofpeace.com, really?) speaks bounds and volumes where you are coming from and what you are trying to do here.
I could now spend time and effort trying to explain to you what actually happened New Year`s Eve in Cologne, how foreign outlets mistranslated the numbers of attendees at the Domplatte with the number of perpetrators. How New Years Eve is pretty much always chaos on the brink of anarchy (the combination of alcohol and fireworks tends to do that), how the term "Taharrush" didn`t even exist prior to 2016, as it`s a made-up term resulting from a word-to-word translation from German to Arabic of the term "Gruppenvergewaltigung" by the BND, and not some "cultural thing that every Arab speaker knows because group raping is just a normal thing over there".
If you'd actually read your own sources, like number 7 about the Mass sexual assaults in Egypt, you'd realize this was a tactic employed by the Egyptian state/government to intimidate protesters and not something that's "just a cultural thing of Muslims".
How the vast majority of these "sexual assaults" had actually been cases of petty theft, where the "sexual advances" are only used to mask the perp stealing the victim's belongings and not actual rapes.
I could explain to you how it`s always the "bad headlines" that spread around, but never reports when it turns out that said headlines had been completely made up, as those never penetrate into the echo chambers as they'd contradict the established narrative of said echo chamber. Like it happened in Frankfurt last New Years Eve [0].
This goes on and on, to "community maps" [1] supposedly listing crimes by refugee but when actually looking through the pins you realize quickly: Many pins are duplicates, many cases don't have anything to do with refugees at all, it's all just there to create and support a narrative in a "shoveling bullshit" way.
By now it's become literally impossible to Google any unbiased news about any of this as the searches are dominated by the same few headlines spread across hundreds of blogs repeating the same tired narratives.
But you made up your mind about the situation already, it won't matter what I say or link here, nothing is gonna change your mind because disregarding me is as easy as claiming that every MSM has "bias" or how the "benevolent Governments" are in on it and now censor all the social media everywhere, hiding all these refugee crimes for their secret agenda of "replacing white people" or whatever.
Tbh I'm simply tired of it all, the hate, the lies, the lies for the sake of creating hate and violence. I wish there'd be an easy solution to any of this, but contrary to some populist claims, there ain't.
[0] https://www.thelocal.de/20170214/mass-sexual-assaults-by-ref...
[1] https://www.google.com/maps/d/viewer?mid=1_rNT3k2ZXB-f9z-2nS...
So true.
> So please don't try to strawman me just for the sake of derailing this discussion into "Germany is actually on the brink of collapse!".
The phrase you put in quotes are your literal words in your post. I never claimed such a thing. It's the strawman you make of legitimate criticism on indiscriminate mass immigration.
> Just taking a look at one of your "sources" (religionofpeace.com, really?) speaks bounds and volumes where you are coming from and what you are trying to do here.
What's wrong with that source? And I'm asking this honestly. You are shooting the messenger here, because thereligionofpeace.com does nothing but quoting the Quran & the Hadith extensively. You can look up these quotes in the islamic scriptures themselves, they are all very real. The only thing the website does is calling out the lies of political leaders, journalists and academics that keep on claiming the Quran is about love & peace.
In northern Uganda there was a guy called Joseph Kony who started his own religion [1]. He gathered a militia and they went off raiding villages, killing the parents in every household and brainwashing the boys into becoming child soldiers. The girls were held as sex slaves. Exactly the same method was used by the prophet Muhammed and his men. This is not some secret double life of his, but is extensively described and glorified in the Quran & the Hadith. [2]
You will not find one Western intellectual who will vow for the peaceful nature of Konyism. Islam on the other hand is seen as some kind of cultural enrichment for the West. The reasons for this form of mass delusion are complicated, and are sometimes grouped under the unwieldy umbrella term "cultural marxism" [3]. Many defenders of Islam have also painted themselves into a corner, entangled as they are in the failed narratives of their initial optimism.
> I could now spend time and effort trying to explain to you what actually happened New Year`s Eve in Cologne, how foreign outlets mistranslated the numbers of attendees at the Domplatte with the number of perpetrators.
Of course some media outlets will misrepresent the events. It has always been like that. But it is also completely besides the point. I like to stay with the Wikipedia account of the events, which is partly based on the findings of an NRW parliamentary enquiry.
> How New Years Eve is pretty much always chaos on the brink of anarchy (the combination of alcohol and fireworks tends to do that),
This is a very ostrich way of downplaying what actually happened. No, alcohol and fireworks don't tend to trigger groups of European men into mobbing women stepping off a train and sexually assaulting them. That has never been the normal way to deal with each other over here. Not on New Year's Eve nor during any other time of the year. This is the kind of behaviour we see during war. And now we see it again in our cities and on music festivals where mobs of muslim men display this behaviour [4] [5] . But most journalists and most politicians are too strung-up with political correctness to be able to face that reality.
> If you'd actually read your own sources, like number 7 about the Mass sexual assaults in Egypt,
I did, actually.
> you'd realize this was a tactic employed by the Egyptian state/government to intimidate protesters
That wild claim is nowhere supported by the source ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_sexual_assault_in_Egypt ). You seem to make this up on the spot. Can you give a citation?
> and not something that's "just a cultural thing of Muslims".
In the West we live in a time of #metoo outrage and manspreading anxiety [6], but at the same time it's still fashionable to look away from the misogyny of the Islam ideology. This is tragically delusional, and reached a climax of absurdity during the Woman's March in Washington [7], when half a million of America's progressives and feminists marched behind a woman who went several times on record in favour of introducing Sharia law into their country. [8]
> How the vast majority of these "sexual assaults" had actually been cases of petty theft, where the "sexual advances" are only used to mask the perp stealing the victim's belongings and not actual rapes.
So if the woman gets robbed in the process we should ignore the sexual assault?
> I could explain to you how it`s always the "bad headlines" that spread around, but never reports when it turns out that said headlines had been completely made up, as those never penetrate into the echo chambers as they'd contradict the established narrative of said echo chamber. Like it happened in Frankfurt last New Years Eve [0].
> This goes on and on, to "community maps" [1] supposedly listing crimes by refugee but when actually looking through the pins you realize quickly: Many pins are duplicates, many cases don't have anything to do with refugees at all, it's all just there to create and support a narrative in a "shoveling bullshit" way.
The existence of fake news doesn't invalidate the fact there's a real problem here.
> But you made up your mind about the situation already, it won't matter what I say or link here, nothing is gonna change your mind because disregarding me is as easy as claiming that every MSM has "bias" or how the "benevolent Governments" are in on it and now censor all the social media everywhere, hiding all these refugee crimes for their secret agenda of "replacing white people" or whatever.
Lots of strawmen about my supposed thinking process. The truth is that I don't try to look at snapshots of the current situation, but at data that is indicative of long-term trends. Such as the data of the Dutch bureau of statistics, that show that crime rates among muslim immigrants actually increase from the first to the second generation [9]. Or the research of Ruud Koopmans, indicating that a large percentage of muslims in Europe hold beliefs that are so radical and backwards it would make neonazis blush [10]. A survey of the British Channel 4 came to similar conclusions [11].
There is no "melting pot" trend in Europe when it comes to Muslim immigration. To the contrary, every younger generation of Muslims in Europe is on average more radical than their parents, and withdraws still further away from society at large. This is already a problem when it's about ghettos within cities. Entire cities however, like e.g. Brussels and Antwerp are now already demographically doomed to have a Muslim majority within a couple of decades. The majority of schoolchildren there are Muslim as of now. There are probably many other cities in Western Europe where this is the case.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Kony
[2] http://www.answering-islam.org/Silas/femalecaptives.htm
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankfurt_School#Cultural_Marx...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Are_Sthlm_sexual_assaults
[5] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/03/swedens-braval...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manspreading
[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Women%27s_March
[8] https://www.quora.com/Is-Linda-Sarsour-a-sharia-law-advocate
[9] https://www.cbs.nl/-/media/_pdf/2016/47/ji2016s_web.pdf, paragraph 1.7, "Proportion of crime suspects by background and background characteristics, 2015*"
[10] https://www.wzb.eu/en/press-release/islamic-fundamentalism-i...
I was referring to your statement about what "my view seems to be" in regards to governments censoring social media. I tried to make that especially clear by seperately quoting said sentence.
> What's wrong with that source?
For one that it clearly has an agenda [0], the other one being that I'm very skeptical of any outlet that goes through quite an effort to hide who's behind it.
> You are shooting the messenger here, because thereligionofpeace.com does nothing but quoting the Quran & the Hadith extensively.
"Does nothing but quote the Quran", sure. Amazing how we seem to be looking at two totally different websites because over here it most certainly does not look like the site is only "quoting the Quran and Hadiths". Maybe it's my censored German Internet?
> In northern Uganda there was a guy called Joseph Kony who started his own religion.
I don't even know where to start with this. But sure, I'll go with "Kony invented his own religion" and none of his acts had anything to do with abusing the Christian faith. Do you realize it's exactly that kind of narrative framing which says a lot about your own position? When Kony goes around with his "Lord's Resistance Army" that's a completely "made up religion" and has no relation at all to Christianity, but when ISIS goes around beheading people "that's Islam!".
> The reasons for this form of mass delusion are complicated, and are sometimes grouped under the unwieldy umbrella term "cultural marxism".
You are, once again, not reading your own sources: "'Cultural Marxism" in modern political parlance refers to a conspiracy theory which sees the Frankfurt School as part of an ongoing movement to take over and destroy Western society."
If that's not good enough you then you might want to check out the RationalWiki on that particular topic, they have a dedicated article about "cultural Marxism" that goes into more details [1].
> This is a very ostrich way of downplaying what actually happened.
As opposed to dramatizing the situation by claiming that Muslims go on drunken raping sprees in the thousands because "that's just the thing they do"? A vast number of incidents from that evening, which have been dramatized as "outrageous", are common occurrences during New Year's Eve, like all that outrage over "Refugees shooting people with fireworks". Stuff like that has been happening for as long as New Year's Eve and fireworks have been around, but when "brown people" shoot others with fireworks that's suddenly especially bad and a whole new level of danger.
Which does not mean that I approve of shooting people with fireworks, I'm merely pointing out the obvious double standard at play here for the sole purpose of painting a narrative.
> That wild claim is nowhere supported by the source ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_sexual_assault_in_Egypt ). You seem to make this up on the spot. Can you give a citation?
That "wild claim" is literally the second paragraph of the article...
> So if the woman gets robbed in the process we should ignore the sexual assault?
Where did I say anything like that? I merely pointed out how these large number of "sexual assault" cases come about because in the vast majority of cases they involved petty theft with the "sexual assault" serving merely as a distraction and not rapes. This isn't anything new, in German, there's even a term for it "Antanztrick" [2]. I'm pretty sure there's also an English term for this kind of tactic because it's rather widespread and has been happening long before refugees from Syria arrived in Europe.
> The existence of fake news doesn't invalidate the fact there's a real problem here.
And what might that "problem" be? How Muslims are just "culturally incompatible with Western Values" even tho we literally have millions upon millions of peaceful and productive counterexamples?
Btw: Even tho that was in your previous comment, I still feel the need to point out that Germany's "censoring social media law" didn't do anything new. The laws for that had already been in place, and plenty of use, before they introduced massive fines for Facebook. But even prior to that you could get into a lot of trouble for "sharing" questionable views on any website you run, this would even involve comments made by complete strangers. By German law, it's the one who's running the website who's liable for any and all content there.
Facebook, for whatever reason, circumvented that law, while every private person and business has to moderate their comment sections to keep them clean from defamations and incitement of the people, thanks to a German legal specialty called "Störerhaftung" which has been around for as long as telephones have existed in Germany.
And before you go there: No, that does not mean I support such practices, I'm merely giving context to your narrative of "Now, that the German government censors Facebook, nobody will know about all these refugee crimes anymore!" because it's just that: Another narrative to support conspiracy theories by misrepresenting the facts about the situation at hand.
Is it important to have a discussion about how to properly integrate, or not integrate, refugees from war-torn countries? Sure enough, it is, but that discussion most certainly shouldn't involve sentiments along the lines of "They are all raping cave-men who hate our western Values!" because that's just utter bigotry and it's oozing out of every second sentence you write.
I'm out of this "discussion", didn't even want to be in it in the first place, but thanks for making this comment chain an illustrative example for the dynamics I addressed in my original comment.
[0] http://www.loonwatch.com/2012/07/thereligionofpeace-com-work...
There's nothing wrong with that.
> the other one being that I'm very skeptical of any outlet that goes through quite an effort to hide who's behind it.
You and I use an anonymous account here on this forum too. This doesn't prevent the things we're saying from being judged on their own merit.
> "Does nothing but quote the Quran", sure. Amazing how we seem to be looking at two totally different websites because over here it most certainly does not look like the site is only "quoting the Quran and Hadiths". Maybe it's my censored German Internet?
Are you referring to their claim that islamic terrorism is overrepresented in the terror statistics? There are other sources that corrobate that. [1]
> I don't even know where to start with this. But sure, I'll go with "Kony invented his own religion" and none of his acts had anything to do with abusing the Christian faith. Do you realize it's exactly that kind of narrative framing which says a lot about your own position? When Kony goes around with his "Lord's Resistance Army" that's a completely "made up religion" and has no relation at all to Christianity,
Agreed, there is nothing in the Christian gospel justifying any kind of violence, let alone Kony's war crimes. The founder of Christianity, Jesus of Nazareth, was all about radical non-violence.
> but when ISIS goes around beheading people "that's Islam!".
True. The Quran and the Hadith are full of calls to slaughter "infidels". Dying during jihad is one of the only two things that guarantees access to Paradise after death [2]. The other one is migrating in the name of Allah [3].
> You are, once again, not reading your own sources:
Yes I did.
> "'Cultural Marxism" in modern political parlance refers to a conspiracy theory which sees the Frankfurt School as part of an ongoing movement to take over and destroy Western society."
I think I indicated already that I'm not too happy with the term "cultural marxism". Then again, I don't buy the epithet of "conspiracy theory" neither. I'm OK with quoting sources that I disagree with, BTW.
I think there is a totalitarian trend going on where people get into professional trouble for freely discussing ideas in a scientific manner. James Damore [4] and Lindsay Shepherd [5] are two recent examples of this.
> If that's not good enough you then you might want to check out the RationalWiki on that particular topic, they have a dedicated article about "cultural Marxism" that goes into more details [1].
RationalWiki is anything but rational and the page you cite is a perfect example. By quoting thedailystormer.com and then making fun of it you can make just about any point.
> As opposed to dramatizing the situation
Well the thing is, the events were not dramatized at all during the first 4 days of January 2016. They were kept silent. Without the (at that time) uncensored social media we would still be in the dark about it today. That's an important thing to keep in mind the next time you rail against all the fake news that keeps popping into your view.
> by claiming that Muslims go on drunken raping sprees in the thousands because "that's just the thing they do"?
Again, you're making a strawman of my argument. My point is that sexual slavery of non-muslim women is described as justified in the Quran and the Hadith. In many muslim countries these scriptures are the foundation of all morality since 1400 years, so this mentality is deeply ingrained.
> A vast number of incidents from that evening, which have been dramatized as "outrageous", are common occurrences during New Year's Eve, like all that outrage over "Refugees shooting people with fireworks". Stuff like that has been happening for as long as New Year's Eve and fireworks have been around, but when "brown people" shoot others with fireworks that's suddenly especially bad and a whole new level of danger.
I'm not the one talking about fireworks. You keep bringing up that subject. Which is strange because it is a quaint topic in the face of the mass sexual assault that was happening at the same time.
> That "wild claim" is literally the second paragraph of the article...
Sure, there is a footnote to a NYT account from 2005, where supporters of one political party were mobbing and assaulting women. But to conclude that this must be a government tactic to intimidate women is beyound me. And it's - if you think of it - a ridiculous idea. Does the Egyptian government really have that many secret agents to pull off such a thing? What about the other men that see it happening? And why do they only intimidate women? Why don't they intimidate the male political opponents too? And do they ask the women about their political views first before they sexually assault them? Questions ... questions ...
> And what might that "problem" be? How Muslims are just "culturally incompatible with Western Values"
No the problem is that Islam is incompatible with Western values. The ideology of the Quran violates just about any human right imaginable.
You seem to confuse criticism of Islam with racism towards Muslims. They are not the same thing. Just as criticism of National Socialism isn't the same as racism towards Germans. Or criticism of Maoism is not being racist towards the Chinese.
> even tho we literally have millions upon millions of peaceful and productive counterexamples?
It's a good thing that millions of European Muslims are peaceful and productive. This will make the de-islamisation of Europe all the more attainable. After all, the de-nazification of Germany after WWII was a resounding success too. And the end of communism in the Soviet Union went largely peacefully too. As was the transition away from Maoism in China.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_in...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google%27s_Ideological_Echo_Ch...
[5] https://www.therecord.com/news-story/7923200-wlu-censures-gr...
I don't disagree the rhetoric by people who use the term is often overblown, but the basic fact of the critique - that Intersectional Feminism is similar to Marxism - not only seems fair but would probably elicit no disagreement from the people so characterized.
That's what it's often used for, but why not simply use intersectional feminism/identity politics? That would be far more fitting and wouldn't carry the same baggage as using an idea the Nazis made up. Imho some people use this term very consciously and others simply pick it up without even realizing that there's quite a history to the idea behind it. Instead, it gets thrown at everything people disagree with:
Education too liberal -> cultural Marxism
Third wave feminism -> cultural Marxism
Government supposedly being "leftist" -> cultural Marxism
Said government not turning away refugees -> cultural Marxism
At this point, it's pretty much become the new "The communists are behind it!", which was always a common theme for Nazis, and certain US conservative circles.
Does everybody who uses it believe in the actual conspiracy theory behind it? Doubtful, but by marginalizing and normalizing the term the Overton window shifts and suddenly the cultural Marxism version, which involves an international conspiracy, becomes that much more "debatable".
It's especially troublesome to see it being used by people who so thoughtfully identify as "Christian", just like a certain Norwegian terrorist [0] who killed 77 people.
Disclaimer: I'm not attempting to silence people for their speech, I'm just questioning the terminology used because if people keep on using terminology like that, after having been made aware of its actual connotations/history, then they really shouldn't be surprised/act outraged when others locate them in a certain political camp. If I'd be ranting about class warfare and how the proletariat needs to free themselves, then people would also very quickly paint me with a certain brush, probably rightfully so.
[0] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/anders-breivi...
Add to that the fact that many Facebook users don't even realize they are using the Internet, as to them Facebook is pretty much the whole Internet [2] and I fear the future might be somewhat dystopian.
[0] https://zephoria.com/top-15-valuable-facebook-statistics/
[1] http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
[2] https://qz.com/333313/milliions-of-facebook-users-have-no-id...
The alternative is not state controlled media, but rather anything other than an oligopoly. For several reasons it overtook IRC, personal websites, etc, but alternatives are not unthinkable.
Accept capital the same, yet shareholders only have x% instead of x+f*users%.
Make revenue via advertisement, hosting, SaaS; aggregate, anonymize and make available the data. Cloud computing, independent instances + economies of scale for the cohort.
AI assisted web-rings for social media/hypermedia. It would profit-share the popular content creators AND open source contributors.
Right here you ask for an alternative, then suggest it is one particular alternative, then argue against that as if it's the only answer. Do you think that's an honest way of debating?
So it's useless as a social network. Not an alternative.
I wonder when will the anti-centralization people realize that their solutions are not for everyone, and that's why so many people don't care about them.
I don't think you can describe it as capitalist since it's neither privately owned, nor for profit.
From my understanding, 100% worker owned and operated co-ops that give the average worker more democratic control in the work place.
Second , Facebook is able to make compromise about free speech because is just a bussiness . If in a country , the usage of facebook is conditionated by the power ,the company will accept the rules of the power because its interest is to make money in that country. You can see china.
Capitalism requires free markets. Freedom, the opposite of dictatorship.
Capitalism doesn't require a free market. As evidenced by American ISP's, all you need is capital and the will to have more of it plus the cooperation of the government.
Freedom is not involved in Capitalism nor is it an evident feature of it.
If we redefine it so that Maoism, Leninism and even Marxism are all forms of capitalism then it really loses it's usefulness as a term and makes it impossible to understand what most people have ever said or written about it.
Nah, those are madeup freedoms for humans. Freedom isn't something real you can touch, smell or measure. And it should be mentioned that the entire first paragraph on Wikipedia about Capitalism doesn't mention freedom at all. The only instance of the word "free" in the opening section is in relation to "free market capitalism", a version of capitalism.
>If we redefine it so that Maoism, Leninism and even Marxism are all forms of capitalism then it really loses it's usefulness as a term and makes it impossible to understand what most people have ever said or written about it.
Not really nor did I do these things. Leninism as for example experienced in East Germany was decidedly different to the Social Market Capitalism in West Germany, one is a Capitalistic Market and the other is not. However, there is nothing about the East that makes a Capitalistic Market or even Free Market impossible.
Also, free movement of capital and 'Freedom' are not at all the same thing, and don't always exist in the same places at the same time. Capitalism can totally exist where there isn't a democracy. China. Russia. Sure, it looks different from western capitalism, but it sure as hell isn't socialism.
I always found it funny they call it far right.
> Our adopted term 'Socialist' has nothing to do with Marxist Socialism. Marxism is anti-property; true Socialism is not
> The Nazis claimed that communism was dangerous to the well-being of nations because of its intention to dissolve private property, its support of class conflict, its aggression against the middle class, its hostility towards small business and its atheism.[205] Nazism rejected class conflict-based socialism and economic egalitarianism, favouring instead a stratified economy with social classes based on merit and talent, retaining private property and the creation of national solidarity that transcends class distinction.
So they did have their own definition of "socialism" that they met, but that definition had virtually nothing in common with the way that the rest of the world defines it.
>Capitalism requires freedom, the opposite of dictatorship.
You clearly have some amount of misunderstanding or an active bias/axe to grind. Suffice to say, that's not what any of those terms mean.
I don't think that's true. Under the Nazis plenty of businesses did well despite not having free markets. In the end capitalists want to make money first
The more regulated and less free a market, the less capitalist and more socialist it is.
https://www.google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theguardian.com/business/...
Come on. More like decentralized, optionally self hosted istances of open source social networks.
Given the amount of politics meddling that Facebook,Twitter Google and Amazon do especially out of the US, i would consider THEM the actual state-controlled service.
>"Having facebook, or any similar monolithic capitalist behemoth ..."
All three words together "monolithic" + "capitalist" + "behemoth" need to be taken together, it is not the same thing as the same as just saying "capitalist."
>"These services don’t control ‘the’ flow of information, they are entirely additive to what we had before."
Except they are not additive for groups that never consumed the older mediums in the first place:
http://www.journalism.org/2015/06/01/facebook-top-source-for...
So, like, three gifts at once?
Though, citation needed. The web was created by public funds, in a European public institution. The internet by army funds, in a US public institution.
What we call capitalism is just a way of organizing the economy that emerged circa 14-15th century (people have almost always bought and sold things, but not in a capitalist context).
Historically capitalism has never been the only game in town (and I'm not talking about communism either).
Whole societies and empires rose and flourished without it -- and they could have just as well created social media too, if they had the technology at the time. They have created tons of great stuff we now build upon anyway.
>These services don’t control ‘the’ flow of information, they are entirely additive to what we had before. Arguing that we have worse options for communication now is bizarre.
Of course they control the flow of information, that's how they make money.
That they don't control "the whole flow" or that they don't hold people at gunpoint to dictate their own flow is irrelevant for what we're discussing.
It's enough that they control a large enough flow, for enough people, to be hugely (and negatively) influential in the flow of overall information.
And of course, they're not neutral to the flows they allow.
That's on top of the cultural, religious, civic and other restrictions on trade in the past.
Methinks public discourse is overdue for a revival of good old fashioned Aristotelian Virtue Ethics.
EVERY zombie contact of mine contaminated by Facebook is forcing me to use it. This argument is a fallacy as FB is everywhere. The rest of the internet IS NOT still here as almost all content creators are hooked or moving to facebook, youtube and instagram. The only "opt out" available is to tear it down.
The printing press sparked many revolutions in the past, newspapers and radio continued the trend. The internet is just part of a long line of technology that exposes society's discontent.
Here is an example of the unfortunate side effects of manipulation: One month ago a dear friend of mine posted an obit for her mother. Facebook did not include it in my "feed." I only found out because yesterday I thought "hey, I haven't heard from K for a while..." and typed her name in the search box.
When revolutions shall come, facebook may hide them from you.
Seems like there's a lot of possible explanations, it doesn't seem obvious to me that it's Facebook's fault/
"Our algorithm did it." does not absolve anyone of their responsibility in choosing to use that algorithm.
Something like this happened to me too (though it was about a newborn baby). FB simply decided that some of my contacts are not worth showing up in my feed. Some other instead keep popping up, despite me clicking "Hide post - See fewer posts like this" like mad.
[0] I am aware of appending /?sk=h_chr to the URL. It does not work 100%.
_A company controlling what you can say_
and
_Missing what someone wrote_
then it will not be worthwhile for you to follow this subject.
Facebook is awesome for chatting with friends, organizing events and sometimes even for posting updates about yourself, for those who want to see them. You don't need the news feed for any of that.
Facebook is a social media. Social Medias are not limited to Facebook.
Example : https://riseup.net/en
Just call things as they are. News, lies, propaganda...
No, it came into popular usage to refer to propaganda supporting Trump which closely followed what RAND Corp. labelled the “firehose of falsehoods” propaganda strategy used by Russia.
It was subsequently co-opted by Trump in the way you describe, but that's not how it came into popular usage.
Here's an article from 2014 discussing fake news: https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/2014/08/30/large-the-intern...
Here's an article from 2011 discussing the measures taken against fake news (to little effect) since 2006: https://www.freepress.net/blog/11/12/21/truth-about-fake-new...
My memory is the same as the comment you are replying to. "Fake news" was a left attack on the media supporting Donald Trump (think Breitbart). Trump and friends then coopted the term to describe the mainstream media and repeated it enough for the term to become associated more as Trump-thing than anything else.
1 - https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&q=...
No, "fake news" was used to label news that was quite literally fake. As in: false. Not true. It was not used to describe simply biased reporting.
As others have said, Trump co-opted the term and uses it to describe news that he doesn't like, regardless of truth. Thus, he has muddied the meaning of the term and created a new dog whistle. Brilliant move on his part.
Fake news was generated to appeal to all sides of the political spectrum, but the pro-right literally untrue news was much more popular than the pro-left literally untrue news.
This is a good article on the subject: "Inside the Macedonian Fake-News Complex" https://www.wired.com/2017/02/veles-macedonia-fake-news/
It's opens:
"The first article about Donald Trump that Boris ever published described how, during a campaign rally in North Carolina, the candidate slapped a man in the audience for disagreeing with him. This never happened, of course."
https://gizmodo.com/facebooks-fight-against-fake-news-was-un...
> So next time you call for censoring "fake news", think again, because it's not you who will benefit from it.
This line of thinking doesn't lead to a society that tries to make things better than they were before. Personally I prefer reminding people that democracy is a 365 day/ year job. Don't avoid doing things because bad people exist in the world: instead, commit to lifelong stewardship of your community along with your fellow community members such that there will always be a conscientious group of people to try to keep bad things from happening.
this has been known since a while, giving power to censor is giving out power to control the population thinking - it always come in the name of the greater good and it always get abused half generation later.
So when you write something at facebook you ask a company to host your story under their domain. And as the company is held responsible for what they host, they have to review everything before publishing it.
When we wrote forum posts back in the day, it was no different. If the forum operator didn't like what you wrote, he just deleted your post. So if you wanted to post something nobody wanted on his website you just made your own website.
And so it is today. Unless you want to periodically write hate posts you should be able to find a web hoster or ISP to share your opinion with the world. The only misconception is that because facebook is such a large 'forum', everybody thinks it cuts his right of free speech when facebook does not want to host his opinion.
Yes, I know that many people use facebook as their primary means of communication and that therefore their channel to the world is 'censored'. And Actually I have no simple solution to this problem, as my solution would involve to not use facebook in the first place.
So I think there is a difference between a moderated facebook 'forum' and a censored internet, which some countries have and which is a real danger to the freedom of speech.
Once, I had a debate online with someone. I linked them an external (non-facebook) link. Their reply was "sorry, my data-plan only covers Facebook".
That to me is very scary. This means that a lot of people like that individual are getting their online content from Facebook's trending news and nothing else.
The Internet is whatever people will engage with. That is something the creators and early adopters (30-50 year olds) will have to come to grips with, as we did when Gopher and other protocols were ignored.
I just submitted an issue to Mastodon: https://github.com/tootsuite/mastodon/issues/5843
While I agree, knowing exactly where to put your weight is more than half the problem.
Be wary of jumping out of the frying pan and into another frying pan.
Or learn how to actually make an alternative. No, Mastodon is not even close to it.
I think that voting rings should in fact be legitimate (because they show that a piece of content is popular within a certain group of people, which is exactly the purpose of upvoting functionality), while reporting rings that obstruct some individuals liberties should be actively banned.
Any kind of "mass reporting" should be blocked, regardless of the motivation. The only question when evaluating a report should be is it of a valid guideline violation or not.
The core problem here seems to be that Facebook doesn't have a human in the loop to filter the bad reports from good. Maybe they do have a human in the loop, but that human isn't trustworthy. In any case, their system clearly needs more work.
How the hell is this not a thing already at Facebook? Are you freaking serious, Facebook? And you want to impress us with your lame "AI"?!
Reddit has had ring voting protection for years, and it only has 1/10 of Facebook's userbase.
I sure hope Facebook isn't planning on developing a self-driving car software platform.
Taking an isolated incident of community reporting taking down some posts and accounts doesn't show in any way that they don't have protections against bot rings. What if it's legitimate users who have a vendetta against the protesters? Obviously, that doesn't make the end result OK, but that wouldn't be some weird evidence of technical neglect by Facebook.
When you are trying to appeal, it obviously goes to somebody who should know the language post was written and it happens to be some Russian, who also flags it.
It does? Is that why reddit is inundated with political propaganda everyday?
Some would perhaps end up in spam, but if you're receiving the "same" message from multiple people, the information itself would eventually came through.
I will add that I think it isn't even in their right. "Private enterprise" or not, you still need to abide by rules, and just as a newspaper has to follow certain laws of press (and being a private company does not excuse them nor give them the right to do as they please), so does facebook, as the controller of a great deal of information, have to follow laws of neutrality and anti-censorship.
What makes you think this was "in the name of 'fake news'"? It's entirely possible -- and, in fact, much more likely -- that the posts were reported as spam, violent, pornographic, or otherwise abusive. Unless you're arguing that Facebook should throw up their hands and let any content at all on their web site?
If I wanted to make someone shut up on Facebook; I'd write a bot that uses hundreds of fake Facebook accounts to report certain users. This would cause Facebook's automated systems to temporarily disable posting rights till they've had a chance to review the user in question. Eventually, Facebook's review teams would review the user and lift the block. But, usually there's a delay between reporting a user and Facebook 's review teams looking into it. Which is enough to shut up a user for a couple of hours.
This should take around 100 years, given that they were not able to host a propaganda website without publicly linking to their office's address.
I don't like the censorship approach to combat miss information, I think the problem is digitising social interactions without including the social safeguard dynamics.
What I mean is, the problem is not the malicious information but the lack of accountability for those who introduce the fake information. In a real life, if someone starts a false rumour, although the virility can still happen, when the rumour gets debunked it usually brings punishment to the person who started it.
On the social media, there's no accountability as creating an account and run it programatically is much easier than growing an adult and interact with it in multiple social circles.
My two cents
edit: On the other hand, he just commented and apparently that wasn't the case :)
my mother in law escaped from Romania under communism and has quite an incredible story. I also had a great opportunity to visit and drive those most of the northern (mostly Hungarian) areas this past spring and thoroughly enjoyed the area, the only time I was able to communicate with a local was in Toroczko (far outside of 'city' areas -- might be butchering spelling) where I heard some sad observations about the state of affairs. absolutely loved my time there though.
I think that, coincidentally, Nicolae would be Romanian for Claus?
The hypocrisy of the pro-censorship propagandists is disappointing. But then again, they are only interested in spreading propaganda themselves. They just want everyone to see their own fake news and ban their opponents' fake news.
But even so, this shows how utterly unprepared facebook is for its role as a de facto news business. A bunch of engineers thinking they are smarter than they actually are unwillingly facilitate the election of Trump, Brexit, genocide in Myanmar, and apparently the suppression of opposition in Romania. And who knows what.
At the end of the day, relying on a social network run by a bunch of college kids, with absolutely no editorial board, no knowledge of any of the news they show, no local presence anywhere, no income except what they generate on advertisement, and worst of all, an incentive and an ability to show every individual exactly the news he wants to read in order to keep his eyeballs for another ad, is a really bad for civilization.
But that's what we have.
Change the headline.
All of our "respectable" news sources fell into clickbait journalism. You can thank the NYT and NPR for doing their part to elect Trump. Reporting on the latest Trump scandal during the campaign drove far more clicks than "oh, Bernie cares about income inequality. Still. Yay"
They chose not to cover Bernie and while I could only speculate why, I agree with you that they helped elevate Trump’s candidacy.
Facebook has failed at news, but traditional journalism is still in the dog house and is not the default credible alternative. I'll admit they don't do the whole "fake news" thing which is nice, but even without outright lying the bias in what the choose to cover and what public figures they ally with is disappointing. They can grandstand all they want about "editorial independence" and "separation of church and state" but for the most part their bills get paid the same way facebook's bills do.
I would go a step further. Mainstream media outright lies. You're willingly covering your eyes if you think otherwise.
We have our own false truths that we tell ourselves--you probably look at other counties or back in history and think we are somehow different from all of those people in this respect.
The problem they have is that Facebook did not control the narrative as well as mainstream media--as your examples of Bernie and Trump illustrate. However, the "Fake News" campaign will change that and get them in the club with other media outlets.
You can already see media's attitudes towards FB start to change. Today, this article in the NYT seems to tack on a high five to FB at the end--even though FB was not even really (primarily) what this activist was blogging with[1].
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/27/world/asia/vietnam-ngu...?
Yes, and they have a set of checks and balances to deal with that fact. I'm completely stumped why you would discount those checks and balances. Media outlets are all biased in different ways, and I share your disdain for some of those biases. That said, if they are a legitimate news outlet, those biases have little to do with their advertisers, so not sure what your point is.
Care to expand on your complaint?
I don't believe this to be true. Or at least under that definition I think that there are few if any "legitimate news outlets". I'm not trying to be edgy. I just have zero faith that all of these businesses that make money by advertising have internally created a system of checks and balances such that they write whatever they want even if that will directly lead to layoffs of journalists because they've pissed off advertisers who will no longer fund them.
Maybe a simpler analogy is that newspapers are junkies shooting up heroin (advertising dollars) and telling us "don't worry, we got this under control, it won't affect our decisions".
When Facebook does that, people need to call them out on their bullshit. "The algorithm" and Facebook are exactly the same thing.
But maybe it wasn't a joke after all...
It is simply too tempting to not do it. They have information which the Stasis and KGBs of the past would kill for.
One thing Romanian government should be careful with is not listening to protesters. That is at least one country where they have learned to not piss off the people. In 1989 they rose up, caught and killed their corrupt dictator. All in the matter of days.
Nobody forgot that. In early 2017 I remember they passed some decree to weaken some corruption laws. People came out to protest and within days decision was reversed. It was quick and short. Everyone wiped hands on pants and went home.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/world/europe/romania-prot...
Occupy and anti-Trump protestors should study and learn how that works. You see to have effective peaceful protests, there has to be a credible threat of extreme and overwhelming violence that will follow unless the government listens. Government should be afraid of the people.
The interesting development is that with Facebook and large centralized social media companies, the strategy seems to silence and prevent these protests from forming to begin with.
This is why the Civil Rights movement was successful (To a point). On the one hand, you had MLK preaching peace, and on the other hand, you had folks like Malcolm X, and the Black Panthers, who made it very clear that they will defend their rights.
White America was scared to death of the latter - to the point where they made concessions to the former.
Likewise with Gandhi in India. The British didn't leave because he made them feel bad - they left because if a revolt took place, they knew wouldn't be able to repress it.
That's not a valid reason to downvote, unless you're sure they did it purpose as an insult. You could have just pointed out the error.
You don't have to be killing anyone, there are many ways to stop the machine, but peaceful protest alone has never changed anything.
Please don't encourage violence.
The anti-Trumpers aren't fighting corruption, they're fighting democracy and their fellow citizens.
Note that I'm anti-Trump myself - I voted against him and find him to be an embarrassment. But that's no justification for putting on masks and beating up random people. Nor is it an excuse for encouraging others to do the same.
It’s certainly difficult to see how anti-trump people are anti-democracy: the mechanism with which trump won is distinctly NOT democratic.
To some extent, democracy (and a republic to a far greater extent) only works because of fear of violence. This was discussed heavily in the early days of the republic (well, both the us and rome).
https://www.vox.com/2015/4/30/8518681/protests-riots-work
Many Americans like to whine about their gun rights because they need the guns to fight an oppressive government! But it seems the U.S. government has gotten away with quite a lot lately in terms of how corrupt they've become and the fact that so many Americans own guns doesn't seem to have deterred them too much.
In fact, every protest seems to be met with increasingly more violence from the government. Something tells me they aren't too scared at all about people's guns. I can only imagine how they will act when they start allowing police departments to launch drones against protesters in the future (taser-armed, pepper spray-armed, whatever).
At least, that's a theory. It might turn into a bloodbath.
And more importantly, law enforcement responds much differently to guns possessed by black people and guns possessed by whites. An African-American only has to put their hand in their pocket or reach for something, and they are shot. White Americans are encouraged by some in law enforcement to own guns and to use them to prevent crime. People talk about gun owners stopping criminals; you would have to be insane to be black and draw a firearm anywhere around police officers or white gun owners, and especially at the scene of a crime.
Right wing protesters/militias regularly parade around with clearly visible guns. Now, perhaps there is a double standard w.r.t. how police deal with them, as opposed to left-wing protesters... But perhaps there isn't.
I am thinking during the Vietnam War protests or Civil Right Movement. I have heard that one reason MLK's protests worked is because there was a credible threat from Malcom X and Nation of Islam, which encouraged gun ownership and self defense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ballot_or_the_Bullet
Yielding and accepting MLK's ideas was only possible as a compromise to preventing a more violent outcome from other groups.
Quite possibly, I only remember stuff I read a while back and don't know the details.
> he was always a marginal figure across the whole society
I don't disagree that he wasn't marginal, he was. But he wasn't unknown. He advocated violence for self defense. Read "The Ballot or the Bullet" speech
http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/speeches/malcolm_x_bal...
He doesn't say that people should go and commit indiscriminate violence but there is warning that violence might happen if violence against blacks continues. He mentions someone throwing a Molotov cocktail and how unheard of it was for black people to do that. The implication is, this stuff will start spreading fast and quick if the current course continues. There is also an interesting parallel made how the US Army was defeated by guerrilla fighters in Asia, that was a very pertinent remark and appeals to what was on many people's minds at that time.
I think those who were in power certainly knew and were aware of Black Nationalism, Black Panthers, them buying and training to use firearms.
> MLK "won" because he and his allies got the federal government, the establishment media and many liberal Republicans (the convention then) in Congress on his side.
I posit that it happened because there was threat of something like Malcom X was saying happening. I am probably wrong as am only am amateur, you seem to know a bit more about it. So I'd like to hear more on this if you have time or patience.
Those groups cannot begin to challenge the government with violence. What you are suggesting is much more likely to end up in an orgy of bloodshed with innocent people being the victims. It's time we evolve.
Thus the implication seems quite clear - rise up and murder a leader if you want to be heard (then and now).
(OP here). The other implication is use the rules of the system first. Yeah the system is rigged, there are lobbyists and special interests, and propaganda at work. But that is preferable to violence in the streets.
> rise up and murder a leader if you want to be heard (then and now).
The point about the violence is that large protests as an effective tool to make the government listen or do anything are not effective in US, but are effective in Romania, for example, and the reason is that there is a collective memory of relatively recent past of what had happened there.
Another point is that the threat of violence has to be implied or imminent. There might be another way to create that belief than killing a leader.
People were literally bombed for wanting better worker's rights a century ago, apparently it's time for that again?
When I say evolve, we're not the apes in 2001 anymore are we?
We still are and we're getting worse these days.
Notwithstanding the conclusion, the argument is a bit naïve. It's not like we have third party candidates winning left and right. There are established players who crush outside competition, regardless of the quality of the candidates. And there's no guarantee that even if you have any influence, you'll see the benefit in your lifetime. The idea that every problem can be solved peacefully isn't a bad one, but it's just something you have to accept in faith, not something you can ground in truth. Pretending that simply being dedicated to a good cause is all it takes to fix a problem entirely misses why people are proposing other paths in the first place.
No claim about the future can be grounded in "truth", but I can give a very strong factual basis to peaceful change: Centuries of history, in all the democracies in the world. No other means, including violent revolution, has achieved more positive change for humanity.
Isn't there just as much (if not more) history for e.g. autocracies? Couldn't you make the same argument for autocracies a few centuries ago? How is the mere existence of democratic history convincing of anything?
> No other means, including violent revolution, has achieved more positive change for humanity.
Wasn't it violent revolution that led to many of these democracies in the first place?
And how in the world am I supposed to argue with abstract claims like that? If you'll claim no other means has achieved better, I'll just claim that, actually, other means have achieved better. I'm sure you're convinced now, right?
playing by the rules of the game one can play varying game sessions, yet the chess will stay chess and Go will stay Go. Rules define the game. The set of available scenarios under given rules either covers the target outcome or not. In case of the latter the rules change is needed, and the given rules may not allow for the necessary rules change.
>Violence is the lazy and cowardly way out.
if only somebody of that group of lazy cowards applied for the Colonies tea tax collector position 244 years ago... though even if a one applied and was accepted, then what? I'd be really interested to learn your thoughts on that matter.
Btw, interesting that after that violence, a pretty successful rules were written by many the same people - those rules have been working for those 2+ centuries since then allowing for the society to successfully adjust to and frequently lead the changes in our civilization during that time with only one major violence outbreak related to the rules.
Voting is obviously better. I was just explaining why those protests in Romania were so effective in contrast to the protests here. I remember the science march, the women's march, occupy, which lasted for a long while. Good things came up from those sure. But there were just not an effective way to make the government listen or do anything, at this point in time, in this particular country because the precondition where not there for it.
Organizing and planning for next elections, having a desirable platform that resonates with voters (in all states, not just on the coasts) is the way to go. Without that things, and focusing on how many scoops of ice-cream Trump had, or how long he shook Macron's hand is also not a valid strategy, and it just sets the stage for a re-election.
The 2017 protests were peaceful.
The ones in 1989 were violent all over Eastern Europe with the exception of Czech Republic. The killing of Romania's late dictator and the mock trial was the doing of former secret police, who's corrupt offspring and relatives are the politicians in power today. They only took advantage of the protests to picture themselves as heroes and sieze power for themselves.
Anti Trump protesters that destroyed private property are just vandals who can't accept the outcome of a democratic election.
That's the point. Because the 1989 were violent, allowed for 2017 to be effective. Peaceful protests are easy, but peaceful and effective is hard.
> Anti Trump protesters that destroyed private property are just vandals who can't accept the outcome of a democratic election.
I can agree with that. They\ ones that came to DC burned a few trashcans, broken windows and set a car on fire. What they perhaps didn't realize is that DC has pretty steep penalties for that kind of stuff, and now many of them have felonies on their record (in US those are the more serious charges that stay with you for a life and often prevent people from getting a good job in the future).
Also Chomsky has pointed out that Antifa is a great gift to the right.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/noam-chomsk...
That's an interesting way to think about it, but perhaps correct as I think in aggregate their action alienate more people than it inspires and in general fail to make the government afraid so their demands are just not heard and paid attention to.
This is BLATANTLY false, please get your facts straight! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutions_of_1989
http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/exhibits/unique-experience-of-roman...
The NSF (PDSR/PSDR after that, currently PSD) mentioned in the introduction is the continuator of the Romanian Communist Party. They're the ones who siezed power and split into or infiltrated most if not all mainstream political parties. They're also the ones currenly in power. The current protests are also against them.
Sorry buddy but Ceausescu was not killed by the people. His trial was a disgrace, was rushed, staged and was brutal by any democratic standard. Ceausescu was killed by those that were already working under his direct command at that time (here's the main actor sitting next to Ceausescu which also became president a few weeks later: http://static3.evz.ro/image-original-605-388/cache/2016-10/c...).
The whole thing was merely a shift in power by cutting the head of the beast and re-growing a new one from the same body. During those days, all the "revolutionaries" that we saw on TV killing Ceausescu and torturing his children LIVE (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNpca3Mh7as), formed a "mafia" group that would rule the country for the next decade; a period in which every industry was sold by these people.
> People came out to protest and within days decision was reversed.
That's more than a month of protests (18 Jan - 26 Feb). We eventually won but we left those protests knowing that this government will try to do its own ways sometimes later. What we are fighting here is the same party that was formed after the revolution in 1989.
Yeah people on the street didn't get to fire at him and his wife, someone else who already had some authority did. There was nothing democratic about it, but there was also not much protesting and rioting following it. People in large supported the capture and execution, no?
Do you feel that if there was a prolonged trial that it would have been a fair trial and it would have somehow ended up better for the country? I am asking honestly as an outsider, I don't know much about it.
> That's more than a month of protests (18 Jan - 26 Feb).
Sorry, I was going by the NYT article which I linked to which said " After five straight days of spirited mass protests..."
> People in large supported the capture and execution, no?
Yeah they did, with the information they had at that time - mainly the nation television which was also seized and controlled by this mafia that is still in power today.
You cannot kill people because it's a popular demand. I don't regret those days at all, I'm just saying - the general population was fouled into believing all sorts of crazy stuff that weren't true.
In short no, the people didn't ask for Ceausescu to be killed. It just "happened". After a longer trial he would have been killed probably...who knows.
> there was also not much protesting and rioting following it
There wasn't, the "terrorists" threat lasted even after they were executed. We were afraid to go on the streets during this time. People had other things to worry about.
No protests were made regarding the killings of the Ceausescu's but, in 1990, people started a new riot against the new "faces" that were trying to put themselves in power. It was called the mineriada: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_1990_Mineriad
This is what happened to those who tried to protest against the new government at that time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xNiGSE0ybQ
There's a big article (the only interview given by his son Nicu) in which he explains how everything took place and how the population were led to believe there's terrorists killing people: https://www.historia.ro/sectiune/general/articol/singurul-in...
Let’s information to spread in internet graph.
At this point I think we can be entirely cynical about their motives. To the extent that there is any semblance of a moral dimension to their actions (perhaps someone can point to those occasions if they exist) it is probably still just a business decision in that they don't want to harm their brand.
Facebook here is very "trigger happy" about removing posts that have even slight nationalistic flavor or cast just a shed of bad light on any minority - and most of middle eastern countries seemingly fall under that umbrella.
Have seen numerous screenshots of deleted posts and user accounts suspended for days or weeks, circulated on social media as examples of Facebook's overly eager execution.
A particularly egregious example was posts by one refugee from certain middle eastern country who simply documented the abuses she was subjected to, as a woman, and as a religious minority. She is a notable speaker at conferences and universities, telling her story. One of the post that got removed and had her penalized was screencaps of threats she received. Yes, posting screencaps of threats sent to her over Facebook by a third party got her penalized. All in all, many of her posts removed, her account subject to multiple suspensions, as far as I recall.
She apparently re-posted threats she got on FaceBook from unidentified Muslim signed as 'Osama J'. Then Facebook took that down because it was reported as not appropriate content. Then the whole thing was spun through Polish right-wing internet to provoke outrage in its readers by showing that even half-Syrian is silenced when she tries to show how bad the Muslim (immigrants) really are.
She never followed through with raising criminal charges against the person supposedly making threats, he also wasn't identified other than the initials "Osama J".
The whole thing looked like a fabricated ploy to provoke outrage in the right wing internet.
Polish internet is sadly rife with anti-muslim propaganda, that's been spun to position the society against the EU and broadly speaking western values. You can see that for yourself if you use Google Translate and go to the frontpage of Polish version of Digg/Reddit called Wykop.pl
One guy from the center sends the profiles to report through channels like mailing lists or chat groups and the reporters mail back the screenshots with the report (so it can be verified by the president that his subordinates are actually following his orders).
On the contrary, all facebook does is connect people.
What we're seeing here is the result of rising political influence on social media. Every major website is being abused by governments because that's how you get your 'message' (i.e. propoganda) across. Like the major sites of yesterday figuring out how to deal with astroturfing, the major sites of today are figuring it out too. The real problem is that there is no solution yet. For all we know, facebook is correctly dealing with this and this post and article are propoganda.
If a communication mechanism is unavailable during anything major, the logical thing to do is to use a fallback method of communication. If facebook won't let you post video, upload it somewhere else and post a link. How hard is that to figure out?
The INTERNET is an INTERCONNECTED NETWORK of computers. There are free services all over the place. If you can't use one, use a different one. That's how this works.