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Comment by kossTKR | Hacker News Reader

Talk about the military industry, crime financial complex, pretexts to war or history of US foreign policy - anything with actual weight that isn't just "culture wars" - and see yourself get delisted from Google, smeared in the media, then get harassed by various agencies until you either flee the country or end up like Hastings or car bombed like Daphne.

There is only freedom of speech until you actually go against those in power.

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Voltaire said something like "to know who your masters are, look at who you can't criticize".

And the popular reply to that is "orphans with leukemia"

https://montreal.ctvnews.ca/comedian-mike-ward-seeks-permiss...

That meets the "can't criticize" criteria, but not the "are your masters" criteria, unless there's some sort of secret cabal of disabled boys ruling over us.

right, which means that Voltaire's quip, although clever as everything he said, did not happen to actually cover all the possibilities of censorship in every possible society.

In his time, certainly, the people you couldn't criticize were the rulers, in our time there is a wider range of people you can't criticize.

The statement makes much more sense for today's world if the "who" in the question "Who you can't criticize" is specific instead of broadly targeting a demographic. You won't get hunted down for saying "rich people are bad and should die", but if you start spewing facts with names and pointing fingers ("CIA is a terrorist organization, and this is why"), or e.g. in Greece you say "Marinakis is a drug dealer" publicly, you should start worrying for yourself.

I'm not sure joking about drowning someone meets the usual definition of criticism.

You don't go in court nor in jail for that. So you can indeed criticize them even if it probably will cost you socially.

I think you could make a good case that orphans with leukaemia are a stereotypical example of a utility monster, where the moral halo around them leads our society to waste tons of resources that would go much further doing something unglamorous like, say, free mass vitamin D supplementation. Would this rise to the level of criticism? Because I wouldn't be particularly worried about making that statement and signing it with my real name. Sure, the Society for Saving Orphans with Leukaemia and the ten people who read their tweets may be very upset at me, but I doubt that my employment or social situation would be seriously threatened, I'd find my phone calls mysteriously redirected, be rejected at the US border or barred from flights altogether.

I think any public figure would be eviscerated for such a suggestion. It would certainly cost you tech jobs if it were known to the hiring committee. Perhaps the ‘masters’ statement would apply to the people profiting from public funding of such causes.

And in a totally different response, the vitamin D comment reminded me of the ad council messages of the 80s and 90s, which would tell people things that were unambiguously good for them, like “go play outside”, in a mitigation effort for their negative effects. The Mormon church also ran a lot of these type of ads. This was intended to be the opposite form of social good, one with high leverage through a small positive effect on everybody. This sort of thing seems unrecognizable today in the corporate media.

That quote seems to be coming from nazist and convict Kevin Alfred Strom, not Voltaire. According to Wikipedia, the full quote is "To determine the true rulers of any society, all you must do is ask yourself this question: Who is it that I am not permitted to criticize?" and Strom first published "All America Must Know the Terror that is Upon Us" in 1993.

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/nov/27/cory-...

I'm pretty sure Voltaire didn't say it in English, meaning the full quote above it like the one that parent comment said was like something Voltaire said - a translation of something that Voltaire actually said.

In that case I think the two translations convey the meaning about equally well, and I don't think that because one translation comes from a bad person makes it any worse a translation of what Voltaire intended.

> I'm pretty sure Voltaire didn't say it in English, meaning the full quote above it like the one that parent comment said was like something Voltaire said - a translation of something that Voltaire actually said.

Dr Paul Gibbard, of the University of Western Australia, one of the world’s leading experts in Voltaire who worked as a researcher at the Voltaire Foundation in Oxford, disagrees with you and says that Voltaire never said anything like that, in English or what I presume could also be French. Source for that: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/nov/27/cory-...

And I never meant to say that the quote is good/bad/wrong/correct, simply that it was mis-attributed to Voltaire, when in reality doesn't seem to come from him.

ah ok, sorry I misunderstood your comment as saying that the quote was wrong and that voltaire had actually said the quote you gave.

That quote is often attributed to Voltaire, but, sadly, it actually belongs to Kevin Alfred Strom, a white nationalist.[0]

Doesn't make the quote less true though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Alfred_Strom#%22True_Rul...

Yeah, the dying orphans with leukemia are holding all the reigns.

Well whether or not you think the quote is true, the only point I was trying to make is that the truth of the quote doesn't depend on who said it.

>Talk about the military industry, crime financial complex, pretexts to war or history of US foreign policy [...] and see yourself get delisted from Google, smeared in the media, then get harassed by various agencies

uhh, what? You frequently see posts critical of all of those on reddit and hn, and to my knowledge the things you've listed didn't happen to them.

I don't know what to think here. If you get harassed by US agencies, you might stop posting on the internet, so we wouldn't see anything from them. Simply impossible for us to guess what happens to strangers on the internet, after they post US critical thinking publicly.

That might be true, but these posts have been on reddit/hn for years. You'd think that if there was some sort of effort to harass people making these posts that we'd stop seeing them and/or hear more people speaking out about government harassment.

You mean harassment like calling them, "Russian agents" (soon to be "Chinese agents" as our geopolitical focus shifts)? Or harassing them by having their websites deranked and hidden on Google, like what happened to WSWS (among many other "dissident" sites)? Or simply disappearing them on Facebook and Twitter with unexplained and unappealable shadowbans and account suspensions? Do you think the widespread establishment push for censorship because of "disinformation" is coming out of the deep concern for people who are being misled? Its about tightening the screws of narrative control, which used to be near absolute when 99%+ of Americans got all of their information from the 3 major networks and was lost with the uncontrolled spread of information on the internet and social networks. The powers-that-be want that narrative control back and they will stop at nothing to get it.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/11/04/goog-n04.html

>You mean harassment like calling them, "Russian agents" ?

Strange, I'm not seeing any of that for the topics mentioned:

"military industry": https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/e0b1ui/dwight_d_eis...

"crime financial complex": https://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3r93j0/til_t...

"pretexts to war": https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1aiszn/new_eviden...

These have all received high amount of upvotes, and I'm not seeing any evidence of smearing/harassment happening in the comment threads.

>Or harassing them by having their websites deranked and hidden on Google, like what happened to WSWS (among many other "dissident" sites)?

The problem here is that you're lumping fringe/extremist anti-establishment content with mainstream anti-establishment content, and assuming that if the fringe/extremist content is being taken down, it's because it's anti-establishment rather than being fringe/extremist. I've shown counter-examples of anti-establishment content being left up (there's plenty more if you search around), so the original claim of

>Talk about [anti-establishment] and see yourself get delisted from Google, smeared in the media, then get harassed by various agencies until you either flee the country or end up like Hastings or car bombed like Daphne.

is demonstrably false.

>>You mean harassment like calling them, "Russian agents" ?

>Strange, I'm not seeing any of that for the topics mentioned

You've been living in a cave for the last several years if you haven't watched everyone who questioned the narrative about the intelligence agencies and US global military empire smeared as Russian assets, from sitting Congresswomen to Pulitzer Prize winning journalists.

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/c...

>The problem here is that you're lumping fringe/extremist anti-establishment content with mainstream anti-establishment content,

Who decides what is fringe, you? The CIA? Apparently Youtube though that the video in question was "fringe". Who sets the standard for what information people are allowed to see and hear? For decades it has been the CIA.

https://www.nytimes.com/1976/01/28/archives/cia-ties-to-jour...

>>Talk about [anti-establishment] and see yourself get delisted from Google, smeared in the media, then get harassed by various agencies until you either flee the country or end up like Hastings or car bombed like Daphne.

>is demonstrably false.

A false and predictable assertion from someone who forms their opinions based on an echo chamber of children on reddit. Some of us don't want the rest of the media and the discourse to turn into the same.

>You've been living in a cave for the last several years if you haven't watched everyone who questioned the narrative about the intelligence agencies and US global military empire smeared as Russian assets, from sitting Congresswomen

Is being a congresswomen supposed to be some sort of credential? All it means is you won a popularity contest. Keep in mind there are a few representatives that believe in qanon, so the bar is very low.

>Who decides what is fringe, you? The CIA? Apparently Youtube though that the video in question was "fringe". Who sets the standard for what information people are allowed to see and hear? For decades it has been the CIA.

Why is that question relevant? The initial claim was that espousing anti-establishment views will get you censored and/or receive retaliation, but my examples clearly show that's not the case.

At best, being anti-establishment is a necessary but not sufficient condition for retribution.

>A false and predictable assertion from someone who forms their opinions based on an echo chamber of children on reddit. Some of us don't want the rest of the media and the discourse to turn into the same.

I don't get it, do the threads I've linked not anti- "military industry", "crime financial complex", or "pretexts to war"? Reddit might be biased, but I fail to see how this matters in the context of this arguments.

If a congresswoman was provably a Russian asset, I would think that would be grounds for her immediate, urgent dismissal. The set of congresswomen would then only include women for whom there is no known compelling evidence of the accusation. And I believe they're talking about Tulsi Gabbard, who holds additional relevant credentials.

Also, there are two representatives who believe in Q. One won by coincidence, and the other has publically expressed that they don't believe in Q, having never said they do. They aren't really indicative of congress as a whole.

The ones that delve into the really juicy parts have it harder: Julian Assange fights extradition after being holed up in an embassy for years, Edward Snowden had to claim asylum in Russia, Reality Winner got locked up, Chelsea Manning got jailed for a year for refusing to testify against Assange, ABC and a journalist got raided by police in Australia, Indymedia Linksunten got dissolved as a "criminal enterprise" by the German state, Daphne Caruana Galizia got carbombed for going against the highest elites of Maltese society...

But just about all of those people listed are alleged to have committed actual crimes. They may have done so for noble reasons, and a large group of people may not agree that they should be crimes, but they are currently still crimes.

You can't just kill dissidents (if they are known), you have to discredit them first, otherwise you create mortars

I think you mean “martyrs” - but the typo is fitting and illustrative.

What you see is those few that actually make it through, what you don't see are the numerous voices that never manage to break trough the noise because they are actively being suppressed.

Take for example the case of Facebook censoring posts with the Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of Phan Thi Kim Phuc aka "Napalm Girl".

Facebook used to censor those with the excuse of "depiction of child nudity", nobody knows how many Facebook posts were deleted over this, as it only came to light after the editor of the largest Norwegian newspaper did use his access and position at the newspaper to draw attention to the issue [0].

It's easy to hand-wave something like that away as "moderation error", but it's really not. American social media companies also censored and deleted photos depicting US torture in Iraqi prisons, like Abu Ghraib. The reasoning? It's apparently "terrorist propaganda/extremist content" [1].

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-37318031

[1] https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/327887/pbs-th...

I really recommend tracking down the actual documentary, even to this 20+ years web user that whole thing was like a punch to the guts, quite a warning call about the state of the web and the kind of influence and power that particularly social media companies are wielding these day.

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