Edit: Oh no it's Lindsey Graham, so probably more grandstanding.
Edit 2: Editorializing here, they're threatening to take away section 230 safe harbor protections as a punishment for "censoring" right wing content using the pretext of youth health.
Of course it doesn't help that many of the questions are ill-informed in their own right.
On the other hand, the meetings of the government should be open and transparent by default.
Don't rely on politicians to do direct questioning of witnesses. Politicians have the wrong incentives, and generally lack the skills, to do anything other than grandstand in public meetings.
Legal fact-finding, including the questioning of witnesses, should be done by lawyers and subject matter experts.
I agree with you.
They need to get the cameras out of congress. Everyone involved in these hearings is mining them for clips for their campaign ads and it's sickening.
It is the cameras you have to thank for finding out that they are posturing and grandstanding.
Really I would expect standing up to the fringes in their wings would be a popularity boosting move but party poltical machine alienating one as .
In the presence of cameras, politicians become instagram celebrities.
Or we could save ourselves the trouble and ask ourselves why it is that we don't allow cameras in those places to begin with. And then we could extend that reasoning to Congress. Turns out treating your government like a reality tv show is a bad idea.
Removing the cameras isn't going to fix everything...but it will be a positive change.
The system operates as it is designed to.
Removing cameras from these hearings could make them more productive. But I don't know how useful these types of hearings could be.
The goal is to get statements into public record and pin down the answers to be used later. Ideally congress would delegate this job to top lawyers who would go list of questions very methodologically.
Making these hearings public and televised has made them into a show. Congressmen make questions that are more like statements in order to please their voters and lots of value is lost.
We are talking about people who are testifying in the Senate hearings. Those people who raise their hand and then sit face towards congressmen.
I tend to agree that their primary function is public shaming, though.
https://twitter.com/HawleyMO/status/1328461277971288067?s=20
Josh Hawley is a US Senator for Missouri.
I have an extremely difficult time taking people like him seriously in a world where Facebook refuses to ban Steve Bannon when he calls for Dr. Fauci to be beheaded, yet twitter does so without issue. But then again, Twitter refuses to address covid-19 misinformation, and allows politicians to generally say whatever they want, conservative or no. All while youtube does nothing about qanon conspiracy videos flooding the platform.
It's just a shame that american politicians now have to be hardline partisans to the point where they will lie right into the microphone to toe the party line.
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"I'd actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I'd put the heads on pikes, right, I'd put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats. You either get with the program or you're gone — time to stop playing games. Blow it all up, put [Trump aide] Ric Grenell today as the interim head of the FBI, that'll light them up, right."
Jack Maxey, the podcast's co-host, responded: "Just yesterday there was the anniversary of the hanging of two Tories in Philadelphia. These were Quaker businessmen who had cohabitated, if you will, with the British while they were occupying Philadelphia. These people were hung. This is what we used to do to traitors."
To this Bannon replied: "That's how you won the revolution. No one wants to talk about it. The revolution wasn't some sort of garden party, right? It was a civil war. It was a civil war."
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I think it's pretty fair to characterize this as "literal". It's hard to read this (or listen to it, it was originally in audio form) and not think they're legitimately mulling over the possibility of executions.
However, we've seen plenty of instances where this kind of rhetoric can enable the less stable elements of the population. Pizzagate resulting in a guy holding up a pizza shop he was convinced had child sex slaves in the basement immediately comes to mind. A plot to kidnap a governor comes to mind. Fantasizing about running over protesters, and then James Alex Fields Jr. doing just that and murdering Heather Heyer comes to mind.
It's hard to know where to draw the line. Twitter and Facebook will find it very difficult to detect hyperbole, sarcasm, etc. And neither platform seems interested in spending their billions to hire the type and number of people required for proper monitoring.
"Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci. Now I actually want to go a step farther, but I realize the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man. I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I’d put the heads on pikes".
I'd be inclined to believe your interpretation but he himself has already ruled out the figurative meaning of the phrase "pikes on head" with the first sentence in that quote, by saying he wants to "go farther" than that. Beyond firing, how exactly can you "make an example" of an employee?
It could be a non-plausible death threat though. And it's probably glorification of violence. I'd hate to be an arbiter of policies like this though. There's a line here between legally sanctionable speech (which I don't think this quote is), and what Twitter allows on its site.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2018/10/31/whitey...
There's certainly some interpretation there, but the bar for legal sanctions on a death threat in the US is pretty high, and I don't think this meets it. It's not too far off though, a couple of different word choices, and it might be.
"Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci. Now I actually want to go a step farther...I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I’d put the heads on pikes".
So please explain to me. What does "heads on pikes" mean if the person who said it has discounted the "fire in disgrace" interpretation of the saying? This is a serious question. What do you think it really means, taking the entire quote into context?
(funnily this is a rare instance where a quote that sounds fine out of context takes on a sinister note when surrounding quotes are included)
EDIT: I see downvotes, but no answers to what I thought was a very simple question.
"Second term kicks off with firing Wray, firing Fauci. Now I actually want to go a step farther, but I realize the president is a kind-hearted man and a good man. I’d actually like to go back to the old times of Tudor England, I’d put the heads on pikes, right, I’d put them at the two corners of the White House as a warning to federal bureaucrats."
You're saying "pikes on heads" is a figure of speech, meaning firing and making an example of them. But he's saying "let's go beyond just firing". So what does "heads on pikes" mean in the context of the quote? Seriously, I'm trying to understand. How does one make an example of an employee you're displeased with, beyond firing them? Write really mean tweets about them? Fuck with their pensions? What?
Considering that they are not even under oath, precisely zero. They can lie to the lawmakers' faces with no recourse.
I very distinctly remember Jack telling congress the time before last that they "do not shadowban", and then screenshots of their admin dashboard were leaked[1] that show they explicitly did have multiple kinds of shadowbans.
[1]: https://www.vice.com/en/article/jgxd3d/twitter-insider-acces...
Disregard that first sentence, apparently they are all sworn in by default. It's just that perjury is barely ever pursued.
Interestingly the questioners, in this case the Senators, are not under oath and they can say whatever they’d like. Regardless of how false or nonsensical.
At the last hearing, for instance, Jack Dorsey said that they do not shadow ban, but later pictures appeared of their administrative interface and certainly that capacity was there. An outright lie and yet he isn't even interrogated on this. Wouldn't there be arrests and trials if it truly was a federal crime?
Look at the prosecution of Roger Clemens. Why the hell was Congress holding hearings about steroid use in baseball?
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/5-people-who-lied-...
That parallels to attorneys in a trial. Although in a trial there are some limits to questions that can be asked. In a Congressional hearing, the witnesses don't have anyone who can specifically raise an objection on their behalf, they just have to wind down the clock.
Honestly, most of these hearings would be better conducted via letters. Then you wouldn't get nearly so many "I would have to get back to you" answers, often without serious followup.
If no answer is given, have the next questioner ask the same question again.
At some point, that's going to get under even Zuckerberg's skin.
If a CEO can't answer a question posed by Congress, running out the clock shouldn't be a viable strategy.
"Mr. Zuckerberg, I don't feel you answered my colleague's point. Let me ask again..."
Why do the American people care about the next question, if the previous question wasn't answered? Which is more important, more questions or answers?
That quote is exactly what I mean by passive aggressive cloaking actually. You won't get the answers you want if the questioning process is adversarial as it turns into "Don't talk to the police." or deposition style of being unhelpful as possible instead of trying to actually inform because of incentives.
Zuckerberg isn't dumb. If he's repeating rote memorized passages, it's specifically to run the clock down.
I want to hear from conservatives why they think most of (if not all) of big tech is "in the pockets of the Democrats". Why do all of these software engineers/IT field workers typically end up as left-leaning? Is it a matter of education/intelligence? Empathy? I feel like the split has to be at least 85% Democrat / 15% Republican in IT.
I do think the prevailing educational system K-12 and the universities have a strong tilt to the left - generally ahead of the country. I also suspect most people simply inherit these default settings as their view points.
Why do New York and California vote so heavily blue?
1. "Actually you under-estimate the number of conservatives in tech, they just keep quiet about it because conservative opinions are being oppressed"
2. "For example, a great many twitter posts by Donald Trump have been flagged as false or inciting violence. This shows tech companies won't let you say the things half the population thinks!"
3. "Larry Ellison and Elon Musk love Trump's policies!"
4. "Tech workers often support conservative policies like freedom, opposing government waste and avoiding needless over-regulation. Many tech companies like Uber embody conservative ideals, as do Silicon Valley voters through Prop 13 and Prop 22"
5. "Tech workers often oppose liberal policies like rent control, mandatory hiring diversity, and inheritance taxes on multi-million-dollar homes"
6. "Claims the party is anti-intellectual and anti-science are fake news, how could so many republicans run successful campaigns if they weren't smart? Anyone who seems stupid is actually a genius making a 2000-IQ five-dimensional-chess move. Sadly a lot of tech workers have fallen for the lies of the fake news media."
1. The candidate pool is biased - in terms of demographics, under-30, college-educated, coastal-city individuals are dramatically skewed to the left. I think as IT workers get older, have families, and high paying jobs and education become more accessible to rural areas, we'll see a shift to the center.
2. Tech companies are in the spotlight of the "culture wars" - if your platform is an echo chamber for the narratives of the media, those narratives will eventually become descriptive of your company's identity.
3. H1-B visas and outsourcing is great economics for tech companies. This also reinforces the imperative for domestic workers and company culture to be highly inclusive.
4. More of a soft-factor, I think since most of tech's growth happened under Obama, there was an incentive for companies that were still finding their culture to align themselves with the administration and ruling powers at the time.
5. I think all of the above has pushed tech culture to a critical mass where those in the consensus will actively purge non-conformists.
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A side-note, but another strange feature of tech culture is how the industry started off as more libertarian/anarchist, and I don't think my answers above explain the catalyst of this cultural 180. Curious what others think the reason behind this might be?
Other than decreasing taxes and anti-abortion position, I can't think of anything else that conservatives support which wouldn't be unreasonable by their own system.