“The free Internet” has value, but it’s not the only thing that has value. When it conflicts with other values, then there has to be a nuanced resolution.
This year I have barely spoken more than 30 minutes to someone in real life, per day. If my interactions over the internet were to be as they say curated, I would effectively be silenced.
I was a frequent reader of r/dt a few years back, as the top poster was. There was nothing in particular there, no trend, that was any more terrible than what I could find in my bookshelf. Deal with it.
Your bookshelf doesn’t allow you to instantly connect with thousands of likeminded people to incubate terrorist plots.
This is what banning /r/the_donald and now /r/donaldtrump did. It doesn't stop the users from believing what they believe, it just further isolates them in an echo changer while simultaneously reinforcing the belief that the liberal media is "out to get them".
Given the heavy left leaning media bias it leads to free speech being free as long as it doesn't disagree with the 'party line'.
I.e. the same dynamics as in communist Soviet Union where 'enemies of the people' were ostracized and persecuted by totalitarian regime.
This is not a new or exciting phenomenon. Censorship and “cancel culture” have rich histories on all sides of the American political spectrum.
I think 1) is what's driving the "media is left" feeling. It is left compared to the median of society. To many people (not just on the far right), that feels like the media pushing leftist views/narratives/agendas.
Note that Fox News remains the most-watched cable news network - though online, it ranks after CNN and NYT (and possibly others, depending on the metric).
If, say, Newsmax rose to prominence and we'd see more fragmentation on the 'right', or CNN and MSNBC were to merge, and we'd see less fragmentation on the 'left', what would that change?
There is an enormous difference between an outlet like the New Yorker, which is definitely liberal but also fiercely committed to fact checking, and outlets like Newsmax or The American Conservative which are proudly movement conservatives first and journalists second, if at all.
This desire to present a false equivalence is understandable - it makes it easier to avoid acknowledging a major schism in the country - but the misrepresentations requires are a disservice to their readers. Just the fact that The Economist is listed as leftist to the same degree that The Post Millenial or NY Post are listed as right wing tells you how interested they are in accuracy!
Can you explain? On the site:
> The AllSides Media Bias Chart is more comprehensive in its methodology than any other media bias chart on the Web. While other media bias charts show you the subjective opinion of the one person who made it, our ratings are based based on multipartisan, scientific analysis.
> and by their own admission doesn’t even try to compare for honesty or credibility
I don't think this matters in the context of the point I was making.
> Most of the two R columns routinely run fake or highly selective coverage
Hmm, so this further reduces the number of quality right-leaning sources. Seems to further prove my point. Remember, the chart shows sites with the most traffic.
> There is an enormous difference between an outlet like the New Yorker, which is definitely liberal but also fiercely committed to fact checking, and outlets like Newsmax or The American Conservative which are proudly movement conservatives first and journalists second, if at all.
Maybe, but it doesn't matter in the context of my point. Also, if they are clear about their biases it shouldn't matter, unless presenting outright lies. Many left-leaning sources try to come off like they are objective. Also:
> A leading New Yorker writer omits crucial facts to run interference for Joe Biden against serious allegations of corruption in Ukraine, writes Joe Lauria. [0]
Many left-leaning sources were also guilty of this (twitter going so far as take down the tweet from the NY Post as "hacked information" even though there was zero evidence this was the case, and Facebook de-prioritizing shared link of the same).
This is my opinion and based around some examples I've seen, but I believe that conservative sources have a tougher time making money, because people will attack their ad-partners for supporting those companies. I'd like to see where this happens to left-leaning sources.
[0] https://consortiumnews.com/2019/10/08/the-new-yorkers-partis...
But traffic is decided by the market. There's nothing wrong with left-leaning media being more popular.
The obvious question in this analogy is if there's anything akin to a vaccine. Well, when it comes to bigotry, I think having people you care about in your life that are in tribes or groups being demonized by bigots is just that. And a society of liberal norms of the free exchange of ideas and democracies acts similar to a culture of hand washing and cleanliness in a society where people are free to interact with the sick.
As they have every right not to do.
These people are brainwashed. No concrete action normies take can convince them. They have to decide to get better and ask for help. And we must help them, without judgment or scolding, when that happens. But at some point, you have to stop a policy of appeasement because it doesn't work. They'll just keep pushing and taking more and more.
In principal, are they different technologies? Or is all information, regardless of medium equal?
Tell me I'm wrong.
edit: I should add here the thought exercise is that you are participating in speech that is legal and ethical but are overruled by SSL cert providers and are unable to get a root signed cert from anyone (or whatever other means of preventing SSL.) In that case, even if you are not hard blocked, having your speech be passed around the internet in cleartext also seems like it affects your ability to communicate in a negative way.
2) Is this practically any different than saying newsgroups, or even bbs(?), still exist, so those avenues for free speech are viable remedies for being otherwise suppressed.
*Although it's mostly been chrome. I did at least see it on Firefox while att tried to MitM errors during a recent outage.
I believe the recent att router bit-flipping issue resulted in the same.
You should also watch it for damaging lies, and have a judiciary system that makes them fix any damage those lies create.
What you don't create is a paraestatal censor authority empowered to cut any information it wants out of the internet. (You don't create an estatal one either, but that's not what we are talking about here.)
The terrorists who stormed the capital on Wednesday have a history of violence and connections to various far right extremist and terrorist groups. They came carrying weapons, zip ties and bombs. Don’t pretend there’s no difference between the two groups.
The terrorist attack yesterday exceeded a quarter of that death toll in a matter of hours.
I don't know how to explain that invading our nation's capitol with the intent of capturing and murdering politicians is different than breaking into a Target.
[1] https://time.com/5886348/report-peaceful-protests/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Violence_and_controversies_dur...
Let me know when I can't get my wife's medication again because right wing ""terrorists"" smashed up my pharmacy, or when parts of my city are completely off limits for violence, or when one the teachers in my school district gets arrested for assaulting somebody filming them burning a car. I'm not losing sleep over congress getting delayed for a couple of hours. I'll keep my perspective that all political violence is bad, and that I want little to do with politics in general, but one side of extremists in particular has caused more problems for me than another.
It’s founded on the presumption of bad faith, which is bad faith in itself.
The fact is that the only people who died during the 1/6/21 event were part of the protestors.
Just because two groups have opposing political aims doesn't mean they're equivalent. One attempted to take our nation's capital by force, the other attempted a sit in.
Show me literally one single source that indicates the Women's March people were out for blood. Were there any casualties? Injuries? Was there even any fighting?
Your fact is false, by the way. The terrorists murdered a Capitol Police officer. https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/08/politics/capitol-police-offic...
The point of the protest was not to “take the capital by force.” That’s cartoonish and unrealistic. The point was to express disapproval of the election results. Where do you get your information from?
Sicknick died as a result of a blood clot in his brain. His death was not the direct result of any protestors actions.
Not literally everyone was there to take the capitol, obviously. But that was the point for many people. This was entirely predictable. See [1] [2] or especially [3], wherein someone back in December describes exactly what ended up happening.
Why bring guns and zip ties if you're not there for violence?
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2021-01-08/us-capitol-st...
[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/extremists-made-little...
[3] https://twitter.com/ariehkovler/status/1341016471795843080?s...
Got it, so you have no evidence they were out for blood. It’s just a bad faith assumption on your part, ignoring that people often carry weapons for good faith reasons. Ignoring that no one was attacked with said guns except for the protestors.
It has not been proven that Sicknick was murdered. He died due to a blood clot that happened while he was on duty.
What is a good faith explanation for forcing your way into the capitol with guns and zip ties?
What is the good faith explanation for e.g. this video? https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2021/01/08/ash...
Again, show me literally one single source indicating that the Women’s March sit in was remotely like this.
Ashli Babbitt was killed by law enforcement. If law enforcement was not deployed it’s not clear there would have been any deaths. If law enforcement were deployed on the women’s March Storming of the capital, maybe they would have injured or killed protestors as well.
But regardless, the actions of the maga protestors did not directly cause the death of anyone. Doesn’t matter what you want to assume about their guns, you can’t deny that.
We haven’t even mentioned that many of the invaders came bearing Nazi symbols and/or were members of known violent groups like the Proud Boys. I suppose that it’s unfair to presume that someone wearing a 6MWE shirt isn’t coming to be peaceful?
Obviously it’s impossible to prove conclusively whether or not there would have been deaths without law enforcement. But there are multiple accounts of them assaulting journalists. What do you think they would have done had they made it to the floor of the Senate without police there?
What, exactly, do you think the zip ties were for?
I will concede that a medical examiner has not confirmed the officer’s cause of death. But signs point to him being killed by one of the terrorists, so I’ll continue to describe it as murder until evidence arises to the contrary.
Yes the point of the question was to tease out what concrete differences there were between the two to justify fear of murder in the second case. It seems like his fear is more based on narrative and assumption of bad faith than any direct evidence of intent to “take the capital” violently. The violence was perpetrated against the protestors, not by them.
> But signs point to him being killed by one of the terrorists, so I’ll continue to describe it as murder until evidence arises to the contrary.
You should assume innocence until proof of wrongdoing. Anything else is illiberal.
No I was not.
There is a fundamental difference between storming the house with the intent of stopping a democratic process (the confirming of the next president) and marching to it to deliver a message.
You and I both know that if all the folks did yesterday was go into the Capitol and march and chant in the halls, they'd be framed as deranged lunatics who might've gone a bit too far - not domestic terrorists. Show me the video evidence from the women's march where they coordinated a group to push into the police while yelling for "fresh patriots" to come to the front line and push back.
The left was basically allowed to freely enter the Senate building, in an attempt to sway the ongoing confirmation vote of a scotus justice, and met little to no police resistance, and it was celebrated by the media.
Replace "confirmation" with "certification", and "scotus justice" with "president," and what's the difference, politically?
I think it's a mistake to argue the specifics. The parent comment here is arguing in bad faith.
To anyone not invested emotionally in this conversation, it's clear that your point isn't making a valid point. They are not equivalent actions.
You're pretending they are to try to lend cover to the truly harmful action that just took place.
We can call a spade a spade without pretending that everything else is also a spade.
To be clear, I am directly saying that you are arguing in bad faith.
I hope it is clear that this is not an attack on you as a person. I am attacking your idea directly, not you.
The only difference that in can see is that during the 1/6/21 event, the police were called in. They attacked and killed 4 protestors.
Maybe you don't know that of the 4 rioters that died, one had a heart attack (unconfirmed), one was shot and the others were trampled (by the mob).
Maybe you didn't know that congresspeople from both sides of the isle hid in closets and under desks, terrified and afraid for their lives.
Maybe you just didn't know these things, and got them wrong. But when confronted with them, you aren't going to say "oh sorry I was mistaken." You will respond with whataboutism and other deflection, to preserve your worldview that this wasn't a mob and Trump didn't do anything wrong, etc.
Which was OP's point. This isn't a good faith discussion. You are either ignorant of the truth (and will respond poorly when confronted with it), or you know the truth and are cynically lying about reality to win a rhetorical game.
This is the nature of all bad faith political discussion, which is why I (try to) avoid it all together.
Maybe you don’t know that the police officer who died, died as a result of a blood clot. Not as a direct result of any action by the protestors.
Those police were doing crowd control. If they were not deployed there would have been no on-duty injuries. Was law enforcement deployed on the women’s March protestors?
"The Bank security guard would have never been hurt if they just let people steal the money and take hostages."
> Maybe you don’t know that the police officer who died, died as a result of a blood clot.
This is beyond bad faith, this is insulting. And i'm not going to participate anymore. I just hope people like you die out before this country is irrevocably harmed, and your children don't carry your sickness to a new generation.
can you explain this analogy? What are you assuming the protestors would have done if the police weren’t deployed?
> I just hope people like you die out before this country is irrevocably harmed, and your children don't carry your sickness to a new generation.
This is a pretty radical statement. I’m actually a center left liberal and you’re wishing that I die simply because of a fact I brought up that refutes your narrative. Can you substantiate your claims that I’m causing harm to this country by citing facts? How did you get this radicalized?
You're pretending that your "rational" arguments are anything other than bad faith.
It's difficult to take anything you say seriously when you can't admit that the actions this week are not the same as the women's march.
This is game that the rest of us are tired of being subjected to. The results of this style of thinking has just borne fruit thanks to the continued lying and obfuscating of the President and his gaggle of sycophants. The world is not confused about the dangerous actions that just transpired.
You are purposefully and willingly beyond reach.
So when you say that the protestors caused a truly harmful action to take place, what exactly are you referring to?
I don’t think breaking into Congress is always bad. I support people’s right to peaceful protest. The Trump supporters by and large did not initiate violence, the violence was initiated on them by the police. If there was evidence that the trump supporters actually were initiating mass violence against people in the capitol that would be a different story, but with 4 unarmed protestors dead, they were the only ones who suffered casualties. That’s simply a fact.
You’re drawing a line that any protest which occupies the capitol is immoral. I disagree with that but if you really believe that, was it immoral when the women’s March protesters took the capitol? https://twitter.com/EgSophie/status/1048634940169048064?s=20
I’m not arguing that at all, I’m just telling you what the rest of the society is doing; that pressure you feel to change your opinion is coming entirely from within yourself.
> was it immoral when the women’s March protesters took the capitol?
I’m not sure, let me check: did they break windows and doors to gain entry into the capitol building? Did they break into representatives’ offices? Were there weapons and detaining tools found on their persons?
So now your position is that it’s okay to occupy a capitol building as long as you don’t break windows, break into representatives offices, and/or some small percentage of them have weapons on them? Even if they directly cause no one harm. Okay. Was it immoral when BLM occupied and damaged the Ohio capitol? https://www.cleveland.com/open/2020/05/state-officials-asses...
> Damage included 28 broken windows along the west and south sides of the building, as well as damage to the wooden window frames, five pole lamps and two doors, including the West Rotunda entrance, according to the Capitol Square Review and Advisory Board, the agency responsible for keeping the Statehouse grounds. Flags planted in flower beds were burned.
No, but it’s the bare essentials to stick to if you don’t want to be taken for an insurrectionist.
> Was it immoral when BLM occupied and damaged the Ohio capitol?
Yes! Whoever thought that was a good idea is a goddamn punk. Although, they weren’t trying to change the outcome of an election; that’s a pretty significant difference. There’s few things in a democracy worse than interfering with its election, I’m sure you agree, except maybe literally blowing it up.
You’re not a child, I think, so I can’t scare you with made up stories about what happens when you lie. But seriously, it’s not good for you, or those around you.
But this is the point I tried to make at the top of this thread.
These people are playing a game. They aren't interested in talking about this honestly.
Seriously, where is the legitimate debate about the events of this week?
Is anyone compelled by the idea that this seditious event was comparable to the women's march?
I don't know what tools we have to bring these people back. I wish I could point to something and say "here", this is how we can find common ground. But they are proving every day that they are more interested in this dishonest babble than engaging in serious discussion.
Again, for anyone whose made it this far. The fact that they are pretending that there is no difference between the women's march and the events this week are all you need to see to dismiss the rest of the justifications they put forth.
Don't fall for the trap. They wont argue "the point". They will deflect, lie and twist every issue to fit their narrative.
Of course, if you’re fair and reasonable in your judgments you’d see that both were legitimate protests, and the only innocent victims of violence in the maga protest were the unarmed protestors themselves.
What the heck are you talking about?
It's the natural last step in any fascist movement. The question remains, how many Americans remain this radicalized. If the number is low enough , the country survives.
Capitol Police said this...
Or are we only allowed to provide partial facts?
Maybe all of those gun shot victims I keep reading about are simply dying from loss of blood? My mistake...
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/08/us/brian-sicknick-police-...
https://googlethatforyou.com?q=stroke%20after%20blunt%20forc...
https://www.thedailybeast.com/benjamin-philips-kevin-greeson...
Just in case we need more...
More footage: https://twitter.com/mickeydelo/status/1348312979129905155
"While authorities haven’t provided details on the medical emergencies, Greeson’s son said his father died from a heart attack mid-protest. Boyland died after being crushed by the crowd, according to one report, while Philips had a stroke, fellow protesters said."
https://www.thedailybeast.com/benjamin-philips-kevin-greeson...
This is why I don't talk politics, ever. You simply cannot attack a person's idea in politics, because their ideas are their identity. They will respond with the ferocity in which they would if someone were to physically attack them. While noble of you to try, it will fail. Every time.
The Paradox of Tolerance is a great game theory exercise, just like Mutually Assured Destruction, but I'd prefer to live in a society where we don't lean into these strategies with our foot on the gas.
The nuanced resolution is our laws and court system.
If something is illegal, then our justice system can handled it. Otherwise, it should be allowed to exist on the free internet.
Speech is speech, when that speech begets action then we have a problem.
But, burning and looting is in a different category to the Capitol stuff, I think.
If it was done for some other cause, there would be no end of celebratory articles on the same outlets that now condemn it...
I think it would be condemned equally no matter who tried it. It’s the beginning of an end game scenario of democracy... so it makes sense it is viewed so harshly
The vast majority of participants in the protests following the Floyd murder did not take part in any violence. It is all but certain that the fraction who did is much smaller than the fraction of 1/6/21 protestors who illegally entered the Capitol.
Comparing the one to the other is not justified.
That's neither here nor there. I didn't say "burning for months" (e.g. the same fires keep burning for months), I said "burning and looting for months", that is incidents of burnings and lootings occuring for months. There have been dozens, if not hundreds, and have lasted (not each individual, the case of them popping has lasted) for months...
>The vast majority of participants in the protests following the Floyd murder did not take part in any violence. It is all but certain that the fraction who did is much smaller than the fraction of 1/6/21 protestors who illegally entered the Capitol.
That's not certain at all. The videos show a totally different story.
>Looting is not well-documented but my friends in Portland didn't seem very concerned.
Many of those in favor aren't, especially if they live outside of the affected radius.
Weasel words, then. The continuous presence of fire for months was of course not implied.
>Many of those in favor aren't, especially if they live outside of the affected radius.
In favor of what, precisely?
Use of violent tactics is not particlarly novel on either side
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/us/politics/homeland-secu...
Unfortunately that would probably put me in the "radical leftist" bracket according to current US discourse.
Come to think of it I can't think of any policies on which the (mainstream) Democrats are to the left of the Conservatives, but maybe I'm not thinking hard enough.
Tankie leftists that support violence have the political weight as furry enthusiasts afaik.
Chris Cuomo on CNN "And please, show me where it says that protests have to be polite, or peaceful"
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Twitter "The whole point of protesting is to make ppl uncomfortable."
I would also say that there are leftist politicians who are encouraging and inciting criminal acts. See this recent tweet from AOC (https://twitter.com/AOC/status/1334184644707758080), where she excuses activists acting illegally because the "polite language policy game" (her words) didn't work for them. This is no less an act of incitement than Trump, since Trump never called for violence or encouraged acts of violence.
I also think there is a great deal of hypocrisy from the left on this point given the events of this last year. There have been numerous riots, arrests, deaths, and illegal occupation of public places recorded. All the politicians, activists, organizations involved in those criminal acts have been given a pass and have faced very little accountability and virtually no censorship from big tech.
Even before George Floyd, we have incidents from left-leaning activists where they literally invade federal buildings. Here's an example documented by the Associated Press (https://youtu.be/B_kxyacaAF4). What was the response from the far left elements? Rashida Tlaib and AOC actually joined some of their events and encouraged them (https://theintercept.com/2018/11/13/alexandria-ocasio-cortez...). And yet, these two continue to be allowed their platforms.
Let's be honest, the tech platforms are using this ridiculously inept protest at the Capitol as an enabling excuse to further censorship and erode free speech, aligning with the interests of their left-biased employee bases. The precedent it sets is dark, as it will be employed to discriminate against viewpoints that disagree with the progressive agenda.
Did they break into the offices and steal things?